A UK ISP which is fighting against censorship - <AUTHOR> http://aa.net.uk/kb-broadband-realinternet.html <comment><USER2> They're also XKCD/806 compliant!

[http://xkcd.com/806/](http://xkcd.com/806/) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrews_%26_Arnold](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrews_%26_Arnold)

<comment><USER3> If they weren't so pricey I'd get their service for this alone

<comment><USER4> They're really not all that pricey, I think - you're paying for an upgraded service and bandwidth off-peak is cheap. If you don't want to pay for that upgraded service (£10-20 per month?), it's probably not all that important to you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A&A are great, they've also fought tooth and nail against lame "Great Firewall" projects and the three-strikes p2p aberration.

I really wanted to give them money, but they can't use the Virgin cable network. My BT copper line goes over a far-west-style pole, because XIX- century northern terraces weren't exactly built for telecom geeks, so ADSL is no match for the underground early-1990s coax laid by NTL (now Virgin). When I'll move somewhere with a decent copper link, I'll probably go with A&A straight away; yes they are expensive, but it's not always about the bottom line.

<comment><USER6> You can ask them for an L2TP connection, using Virgin as a pure bearer to the AA network and breaking out from there. Clearly any usage caps from Virgin will still apply, but the IP provision will be from people who know what they're doing.

<comment><USER7> A variation of this that they could pick up and run with is to offer a VPN solution so you can terminate your traffic at A&A regardless of who is the better broadband provider in your area.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am a customer of this ISP, and I can recommend them.

They are much better set up for dealing with the technically-inclined customer than mainstream providers.

<comment><USER6> I know of no other ISP that designs routers from scratch - electronics & software, including OS.

<comment><USER9> They don't. They bought them all in.

<comment><USER6> The Firebrick range is all custom dev. They'll sell you a commodity router quite happily, but they're 50% responsible for Firebrick.

A presentation by their MD on the backstory: [http://online.ipexpo.co.uk/Videos/Adrian-Kennard-presents- Br...](http://online.ipexpo.co.uk/Videos/Adrian-Kennard-presents-Bricking-It)

<comment><USER9> Ok didn't know that - thanks for the info!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Um could have this wrong, but as far as I am aware, most ISP are against this filtering. This came up a few weeks ago, and they basically said no. This is why now Camoron is banging on about threatening legislation to make them do it.

That said, the ISPs objections are likely cost, rather than protecting freedom. Much like Camoron, this is pandering and nanny stare, rather than really caring about children. To him this is a tick box ticked which costs the treasury nothing, he gets the ISPs to pay for his votes.

All quite seedy.

<comment><USER11> Mobile providers already provide this filtering. I have to keep asking for "Content Lock" (or somesuch) to be removed when I renew my 3g mobile broadband dongle.

If that's all he wants it seems trivially easy to supply it. I'm gently surprised the ISPs haven't already done so. That way they'd have a simple example to point to when the government asks for more stuff. "Look, we already did the filter, and it's hopeless, but it's what you asked for. Trust us on this - what you're asking for can be done, but should not be done."

It's the classic example of clueless people asking the wrong question. "How can I do $THIS?" "Well, you can do $THIS, but no-one in their right minds would do this because it's stupid. You could do $THAT, and $OTHER, which is better and covers most of what you want without so much stupid." Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be working with UK Gov.

<comment><USER12> Giffgaff likewise default to "delicate sensibilities" mode. Of course, when I tried to access a grown-up site, I assumed it was broken, raised it on the forum. Trivial to resolve but IMO a bug not a feature.

<comment><USER13> Vodafone does that too. I found out when I was trying to look up a wine at tesco.com and it was blocked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> They have already added the 'active choice' option:

Tell us which you would like:

* Unfiltered Internet access - no filtering of any content within the A&A network - you are responsible for any filtering in your own network

* Censored Internet access - restricted access to unpublished government mandated filter list - still cannot guarantee kids don't access porn

With the latter choice informing the user:

Sorry, for a censored internet you will have to pick a different ISP. Our services are all unfiltered.

[http://revk.www.me.uk/2013/07/active- choice.html](http://revk.www.me.uk/2013/07/active-choice.html)

[https://order.aa.net.uk/h1order.cgi](https://order.aa.net.uk/h1order.cgi)

</comment><comment><USER15> This is about right. The only ISPs in Britain which _do not fuck with your connection_ are A&A and Zen. I'm with Zen, if I wasn't I'd be with A&A.

<comment><USER16> That's definitely incorrect. ADSL24 don't apply filtering, and I imagine that many of the small ISPs don't. There's no legal obligation for any ISP to apply filtering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Definitely an interesting service. A bit of a shame that after repeatedly encouraging the use of encryption, their site doesn't support HTTPS.

<comment><USER9> Their content pages don't (they are entirely static) but their order form stuff does, obviously.

HTTPS end to end isn't really worth it for some things.

<comment><USER18> Not that it's particularly expensive either. A single domain cert can be found for a few bucks, a wildcard for under 100.

<comment><USER19> Most of the cost for a high-traffic website is processing requests over SSL, not the price of the cert.

<comment><USER18> Really? SSL is dirt cheap to compute these days. Google saw a 1% increase in CPU usage when they made SSL mandatory for Gmail.

[http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/2/10/dispelling-the- new...](http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/2/10/dispelling-the-new-ssl- myth.html)

[https://www.imperialviolet.org/2010/06/25/overclocking- ssl.h...](https://www.imperialviolet.org/2010/06/25/overclocking-ssl.html)

<comment><USER20> it depends on the cipher and your software, I had tremendous trouble with some free php forum stuff recently when it curled things with PFS.

<comment><USER18> AES is implemented in hardware now. RSA is cheap to compute; SHA1 is not even a factor. If you want forward secrecy, DON'T use DHE, use ECDHE; plain DHE is expensive.

To be fair nearly all PHP forum software is crap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> They are also hideously expensive. I looked at them when I moved house a while ago - but their pricing, for the transfer-capped service you get, is extortionate.

And if all ISPs are to be legally obliged to "provide" this filtering, A&A will not be an exception. So what are you paying the extra for - a few platitudes on a web page?

<comment><USER22> they're only expensive if you're at home 9-5 during weekdays.

I never am so it's £20/month for about 100GB (and effectively unlimited transfer in the early hours of the morning).

they now also offer a flat 50GB at anytime for £25/month.

you're paying extra for for native IPv6, beyond excellent service, an excellent control panel with options most ISPs don't have, as many IP addresses as you want (optionally PI), custom routing (want an AS for your house?), ability to dual bond across different providers, ability to add 3g as backup link, and much more...

they're truly excellent, here's an example of their customer service on IRC:

        1417.59| [bootc] ok, really long shot, but any staff tech around who fancy allocating me some more IPs?
        1418.27| [bootc] I already feel rather greedy but I'm using most of my IPs already :-/
        1423.30| [@AA-Paul] bootc: What login, and what size block?
        1424.14| [bootc] AA-Paul: abc1@a, and a /28 of legacy if possible?
        1424.21| [bootc] for @a.1
        1425.31| [bootc] I then need to re-number internally and expand my /27 sub-division of my /26 to the full /26 :-/
        1426.31| [@AA-Paul] bootc: Done. 18.104.22.168/28 will be routed to you when your router next logs in
        1426.57| [bootc] AA-Paul: many thanks, you're a star! have a great rest of your weekend
        1427.10| [@AA-Paul] No problem. You too :)

(no I don't work for them, but am an extremely happy customer)

<comment><USER9> +1 for this. Another customer here.

Every time I call, the person on the other end knows their shit straight away.

They managed to un-screw-up my LLU phone service and broadband as well (screw you Telefonica and OpenReach!!!)

They're really cheap for what you get. I pay £45/month for Home::1 which is for me 150Gb + line rental.

O2 for the same was £37.50 dynamic IP and their support staff were fucking muppets.

<comment> UVB-76 150GB/month usage?

I often push 150GB in a single night!

<comment><USER9> That's just greed!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Wish there wore more ISPs like this in UK. Also I wish their offerings were more in step with the times. :( Right now I get FTTC (80/20) from BT for £40, unlimited and unthrottled[1]. I'd be willing to pay a bit more for a similar service from AA.

[1] - whatever that means nowadays

</comment><comment><USER24> I would love to go with them! But sadly I live in a rural area that barely gets 3mbps from the major companies so I doubt an independent would be able to get even that :-(

<comment><USER6> A&A uses lines from BT Openreach and TalkTalk Wholesale. They're great at getting the most from a line - if you're getting 3mbps from a major, you're likely to get as good or better with A&A.

<comment><USER25> How do they do that?

<comment><USER6> By not accepting poor performance from their suppliers, and by taking advantage of the control available for things like the SNR margin: [http://aaisp.net.uk/broadband-trial.html](http://aaisp.net.uk/broadband- trial.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Shut up and take my money!

<comment><USER27> Nice set of comments on this - scarily I think I have to say that someone is not wrong on the internet ( [http://xkcd.com/386/](http://xkcd.com/386/) ) as I think people have replied sensibly to concerns. We do try to do things right at A&A. I know it costs a tad more, but I don't think it unreasonable for what we office and we try to fit what people want (hence new Home::1 tariff, and so on). See www.me.uk for more views.</comment></comment>


Couch.IO hiring  - <AUTHOR> http://www.couch.io/jobs

<comment><USER2> I love how many positions there are and how varied they are. It's like "hey, we're hiring a whole company".

<comment><USER3> The nice thing about working for us now is that you can make your place in the company. We're hoping to find people who can fill more than one role. And of course, there are a lot of things that aren't on that list, like speaking at conferences and helping us review open-source CouchDB / CouchApp patches.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How firm are you on the open source work? I've spent more time on the closed source side of the world due to the nature of mobile and financial system development.

</comment><comment><USER5> I just wanted to chime in and say how much I adore your slogan (or catch phrase, whatever they call it these days).

"Connoisseurs of Fine Database Products"

Awesome!

</comment><comment><USER6> What does it mean to "drop down to C when needed" (under Mobile Engineer)?

If you're on iPhone aren't you always in [Objective] C? Are they talking about the NDK for Android? Embedded devices?

<comment><USER4> An example would be Brew and Rim devices. The mobile world does not begin and end at the iPhone.

<comment><USER6> I don't think I implied that anywhere.</comment></comment></comment>


Tell HN: Some data about submission times, etc. - <AUTHOR>

Just some anecdata.  Here are a few recent submissions:

    Charge your phone/laptop or your wont be allowed to fly!
      (techcrunch.com)
        2 points by brmunk 11 hours ago | discuss

    Passengers flying to US may have to switch on mobile phones
      for security (theguardian.com)
        1 point by d99kris 12 hours ago | discuss

    TSA: don't bring uncharged devices from oversea (tsa.gov)
        61 points by alternize 17 hours ago | 62 comments

    TSA: Some on US-bound flights must turn on phones (ap.org)
        53 points by juliann 17 hours ago | 49 comments

    TSA won't allow uncharged devices on flights (mashable.com)
        4 points by adityab 18 hours ago | discuss

    US bans uncharged cell phones, laptops from some flights (cnet.com)
        4 points by ColinWright 19 hours ago | discuss

    Uncharged phones, laptops to be banned on US-bound
      flights (nzherald.co.nz)
        52 points by ferno 22 hours ago | 82 comments
 Note how one early submission got traction, then two didn't, then another two later submissions did.  Note also that the conversation/discussion has been split almost equally between the three submissions that did get traction.
I draw no conclusions, but people often ask "when is the best time to submit."  This example provides a starting point for any investigation you may be considering.
Time now - 18:46 BST, 17:46 Zulu, 2014/07/07.
Edited to add the one found by gus_massa - thank you. <comment><AUTHOR> Clickables:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7997403](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7997403)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7997213](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7997213)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7996380](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7996380)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7996339](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7996339)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7996268](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7996268)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7996055](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7996055)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7995512](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7995512)

</comment><comment><USER2> Nice result! You can't run a formal experiment were you post the same new at regular intervals to measure the importance of the submission time. But you can wait until many people submit a rehash of the same TSA statement!

I think it's important in this case to concentrate the discussion in only one place, but I don't know how to solve it.

Also, I think you missed: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7995512](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7995512) (52 points, 22 hours ago, 83 comments)

<comment><AUTHOR> Now added - thanks!</comment></comment>


Serverless WSGI with AWS Lambda and API Gateway - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Miserlou/Zappa <comment><USER2> This was already posted 7 days ago. Link to the last thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11058138](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11058138)

</comment><comment><USER3> Just remember it's not serverless. It's just someone else's server.

<comment><USER4> It's shared hosting all over again!

<comment><USER5> Similar to the value that shared hosting provided in the 90s I think this is a natural evolution to provide similar value 2 decades later.

The benefits here are that it is pay per use, scalable, and opens up more possibilities than traditional shared hosting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Come to the Django Users Meetup tonight in Berlin to learn more!

</comment><comment><USER7> The closer we get to systems like this being easy to build and commonplace, the closer we get to being able to do dynamic sites/apps on decentralized IPFS-like architectures [0].

[0]: [https://ipfs.io/](https://ipfs.io/)

</comment><comment><USER8> This seems very cool. Is it possible to develop locally offline? Or do you always need a connection?

<comment><USER6> You don't need to modify your Django projects in anyway to use it! Super easy to come, super easy to go.

<comment><USER9> How does this abstract local file (write) access away? Does it redirect it automatically to S3 somehow?

<comment><USER10> It doesn't. You need to put objects into S3 yourself. You currently have 512Mb temp space for staging files, if necessary. [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/limits.html](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/limits.html)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Heroku down - <AUTHOR> https://status.heroku.com/

<comment><USER3> Lets hope the simplicity of 'git push heroku' hasn't distracted most developers (and customers of Heroku) from Werner Vogels' core tenet of administration:

Everything fails all the time. ([http://technocation.org/files/videos/original/mysqlconf2008/...](http://technocation.org/files/videos/original/mysqlconf2008/2008_04_15_amazonKeynote.wmv))

This might separate the men from the boys (excuse the idiom) to see who has adequately prepared a DR/redundancy plan for when the cloud fails.

Edit: Improved link to Vogels' MySQL keynote from which the quote originated.

<comment><USER4> Personally I don't think it makes sense to build in redundancy if you're using Heroku, maybe a fallback to a simple offsite "we're down page" but that's it.

My reasoning is that if you are on Heroku you should be small and leveraging Heroku's management to the fullest. If you are big you are paying an incredible premium to be on Heroku (thought experiment: when does the premium start costing more than a full-time systems engineer). There is no Heroku equivalent from another company, at least nothing that's really turnkey in the same way, so if you build redundancy you're throwing away the benefit of Heroku's PaaS.

So in my mind if you need redundancy you need to be building your own system stack. Whether it's co-located, dedicated, or cloud-based is a separate issue because it's more or less commoditized. You build your system on a portable platform and then redundancy is just a proportional amount of extra work.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I think that you raise some valid points here.

Regarding "If you are big you are paying an incredible premium to be on Heroku": Sure, Heroku is great (or cheap) for development and small-time deployment, however it is likely true that people get locked into it and (hopefully) grow quickly before they can scale away from a PaaS solution. In these cases, it is imperative to consider the marginal cost of alternative/off-site failover vs. the cost of downtime. This is what I meant by "separate the men from the boys". Those guys who are paying the incredible premium to continue to host on Heroku likely -know- that they are doing so, and have made that decision consciously.

While the situation is different, I am reminded of when AWS went down awhile back and the sites that had automated failover to alternative clouds really stood out.

The bottom line is that no one solution is ever enough. Tiny apps can likely get away with unexpected//unplanned downtime, however it ultimately delegitimizes them in the eyes of their users (read: customers), and that is universally bad.

<comment><USER4> Sure, but my point is that if you determine you need 100% uptime and you are currently on Heroku, you are going to need to build a complete non-Heroku system to fail over to. At that point should you A) pick another high level PaaS provider and maintain two very different stacks, each of which is commanding a high premium, or B) build on a standard Linux stack that can be deployed to multiple completely separate clouds?

<comment><USER5> Or C) Heroku should develop and deploy fully independent availability zones and regions. Amazon hasn't yet done a great job of keeping AZ and even regions independent but better connected than separate providers, but maybe Heroku could do better (even if built on EC2).

<comment><USER4> That would be a valuable service for Heroku to provide, but being better connected also implies more likely for joint failure, even if Heroku does everything right, there is stampede failure risk (which is what happened in the last major EC2 cross-zone outage). In any case, I think if you are seriously pursuing 100% uptime, you can't outsource your redundancy.

<comment><USER5> "better connected" could just be a billing thing; they make sure there is great transport (their own, transit providers, whatever) between AZs running in separate ASes, and don't bill for inter-AZ traffic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If a Heroku application's DNS is setup correctly then you can usually avoid problems like this on the new Heroku stack (CEDAR). It's important to reread the documentation on using custom domains but also be _VERY_ aware of using naked domains (mysite.com) in your application. This isn't just a Heroku problem, it's a DNS problem. Heroku have recently had a spate of routing issues (usually DDoS attacks) which would have been largely negated by correct DNS setup and either avoiding naked domains or using a DNS host that lets you cname a naked domain to a host.

<comment><USER7> Could you please elaborate on why exactly using (non-CNAMEd) "naked domains" is a problem? What do "naked domains" and DDoS attacks have to do with each other?

<comment><USER8> DNS only allows you to put an IP addresses on the apex (read: bare/naked/etc) domain A record. That means in the case of a DDoS or other problem affecting one of those IPs you run the risk of having degraded redundancy. Some people unfortunately only put one IP in, which means you're only one machine away from going offline. A long way from what you'd want from the cloud.

DNSimple have created an ALIAS record type which gets around this problem nicely, and Route 53 from Amazon takes a similar approach.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting. I was just considering them over AWS for hosting. Current users, how reliable is Heroku? While I appreciate openess, looking over that status page does not inspire a lot of confidence.

<comment><USER10> Just checked: 99.94% for our main site, 99.93% for a promo site.

<comment><USER9> That's great. Better than our current provider. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Excuse me, but why is this top of Hacker News?

Services go down sometimes, especially cloud ones. No need to make it harder for them by voting it to the top of a major tech news site...

 _edit - <USER2>

<comment><USER5> 10-20% of apps developed by people on Hacker News probably use Heroku. It's not just a random service people use; if there is an outage, service operators will need to field end user inquiries, restore service, etc.

hn is probably not a replacement for a good offsite monitoring service, but for me, I was browsing "why does my friend's new app not work; is he updating it live?", switched tabs to hn, saw "heroku down", and all was clear.

<comment><USER12> I think 90% of statistics are made up on the spot.

<comment><USER13> Around 18% of the people responded to the poll said they are hosting on a PasS, which I assume is mostly on Heroku.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3466168>

<comment><USER12> I did not respond but I use GAE. I think I felt better when I knew the number was just made up.

<comment><USER5> I was going by other private surveys of specific subsets of the hn population. Number of companies, it's 10-20%. Lots of smaller companies or earlier stage; basically everyone who does Rails deployments (since that was originally Heroku's strength).

GAE is the one very few people are using or want to continue using, especially after the Google price hike.

I still prefer colo/managed hosting at scale, with EC2 for trials or surge capacity, myself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The status page (<https://status.heroku.com/>) is also really slow now.

<comment><USER15> Probably not designed for the HN effect.

<comment><USER16> It's probably not running on Heroku (imagine the irony).

<comment><USER15> It's generally good practice to run your monitoring website from a different datacenter (or at least a different server).

<comment><USER16> I meant "the irony of running a status page that's reporting when a platform is down on the platform itself", not the irony that heroku isn't running its status page on itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> > ISSUE: We're experiencing a widespread outage affecting our HTTP routing

doesn't sound good

</comment><comment><USER17> I was wondering why <http://intercom.io> was down and now I come here and see this at the top. Must be it. Update, they seem back now, but their site was throwing errors a minute ago.

</comment><comment><USER18> They're up again?

<comment><USER19> We're running as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> some services are accessable now , but some not

</comment><comment><USER21> It's up for me</comment>


Ask HN: What's the killer feature that will make you switch to a new phone? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> The killer features are listed here: [https://neo900.org](https://neo900.org).

</comment><comment><USER3> Runs Linux/variant. Unlocked. No vendor bloat.

</comment><comment><USER4> Modular construction.</comment>


Building a subsea cable to better connect Africa - <AUTHOR> https://engineering.fb.com/connectivity/2africa/ <comment><USER2> This doesn't directly have to do with this article, but in case some people have not seen it before:

[https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/](https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/) "Mother Earth Mother Board"

This is a good hour-long read, one of the most interesting descriptions I ever read of all that goes into funding, building, operating subsea fiber optic cables that connect us around the world. It's a couple years out of date, but very entertaining. Goes from the physics of transmission all the way to the ships and people who lay the cable.

<comment><USER3> Note to other readers: It requires 2 hours to read.

This is a timeless classic from Wired, written by Neal Stephenson in 1996. I love this article not only because of the article itself, but its enthusiasm and energy from the age it was written in. It was an age with a bright future where everything seems possible. Back at that time, Wired represented the avant-garde of Silicon Valley (including the fact that Neal Stephenson being the author) that was going to revolutionize everything through computing and the Internet, the free and fast flow of information enables decentralization, and would liberate us from all the old forms of political control.

In particular, this article had a clear techno-libertarian overtone, about how authoritarianism and monopoly would be defeated through disruptive innovation. One goal of constructing FLAG (the cable) was explicitly to reduce the reliance of the infrastructure of the United States and to challenge the role played by traditional ISP over the control. The article even mentioned the early cypherpunk movement (in the mid of the first Crypto War), and acknowledged "Virtually all communications between countries take place through a very small number of bottlenecks, and the available bandwidth simply isn't that great. Even outfits like FLAG don't really grok the Internet." But FLAG was still seen as a step moving towards the correct direction and the beginning of the new network order.

The dream eventually came to an end. Wired-inspired DotCom bubble busted. Although FLAG was the first move to break U.S. and traditional ISP's monopoly, future projects in the next 10 years didn't quite accomplish this goal. Silicon Valley became the new giant establishment and monopoly (the critics say massive deregulation was partially responsible). Authoritarian regimes have done a good job preventing the information flowing online to bring liberal political changes. And the Internet has been seized as the means of mass surveillance.

Nevertheless, the late 90s was a great age to be alive with that dream.

<comment><USER4> Off topic.

>Nevertheless, the late 90s was a great age to be alive with that dream.

Music, Art, Tech, everything seems to be better in the 80-90s. An era, just like the article shown and described where people put heart and soul into it.

I have been thinking a lot about this, still not entirely sure why. And this isn't nostalgia, I have seen many not born in the era thinking they missed the "golden age".

Live is definitely better in post 00s, but something is different. Something is missing.

<comment><USER5> Everything was always better in the past

Many people say the golden age was the 60s. Or the 20s. Or the 70s. Or the 00s. Or the 50s.

Probably not the 30s and 40s.

There was certainly a change in the 90s, the fall of the Berlin Wall, but pre-9/11, was a major change in western culture, and that feeling of American superiority having "won" the cold war

<comment><USER6> I know 12 year olds who "miss" the 80s. So I think there is more to the 80s than pure nostalgia from those who were there.

<comment><USER5> When I was a kid there were 12 year olds that missed the 60s. Nothing to do with their parents waxing lyrical about how great the 60s were.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is tremendous news, I've been waiting for this kind of investment in Africa from big tech for years. I remember talking to an engineer from AWS that helps builds their data centers about the challenges of building data centers in Africa and why none of the big tech companies have barely made any investments inside the continent outside of SA. He mentioned that a much bigger problem than the lack of energy infrastructure that everyone assumes is the biggest hurdle is the lack of connectivity, both to Africa and between countries. I hope this project paves the way for next phase which is interconnectivity between countries, which could finally lead to the digital economic revolution really take place in the continent. You can't have a 'digital economy' with no data centers.

<comment><USER8> There are several challenges with building a cloud type service in such locations. Connecting it to the rest of the world is one (backbone links, etc.). The other is a very local problem: incumbent telcos who generally have the support of the government. These entities know you are playing in their territory and they will make you pay more when you're in their backyard. They'll be happy to peer with you out of their market, but they want you to pay up locally. It helps when there is competition for broadband and enterprise connectivity and those players work well, but it's the incumbents who want to get their beaks wet that result in having to pass a high cost to customers. This is super common in South America, Middle East and Asia. South Africa is a bit better now but before it used to be worse. Also this can extend to getting local/metro fiber if you want to launch multiple datacenters. Several countries won't even permit you to contract out building dark fiber in the metropolitan environment - they'll force you to buy much more expensive lit/wavelength transport so that you have to pay them to scale up at every 10G or 100G increment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I live in Africa. Say what you want, but we need this. Our internet prices are too high and the quality too low, you can't even start a youtube channel and upload a decent short video without it taking a day.

Yes there is always a concern about commercial profiteering getting in the way of the quality of this, but that's to be said for every form of making profit. We can solve that problem on a systemic level, for now let's take what we can get.

</comment><comment><USER10> Some more technical details @ [https://www.2africacable.com/](https://www.2africacable.com/):

> go live in 2023/4

> design capacity of up to 180Tbps on key parts of the system

> 16 fibre pairs

> Cable burial depth has also been increased by 50%

Patners: * China Mobile * Facebook * Orange * STC * telecomegypt * Vodafone * WIOCC

<comment><USER11> Interesting in terms of scale. That's only about twice the capacity of the fiber connecting California and the almost negligibly-populated nation of Chile. On a per-capita basis Africa needs a lot of cables to Asia and Europe to gain parity.

<comment><USER12> For comparison the main internet cable connecting my country, New Zealand, to the USA as 10 tb capacity and the cable connecting us to Australia has around 20 tb, so we have a theoretical maximum of 30 tb of overseas capacity for 4.8 million people (in practice Australian traffic will also be routed over our USA cable). We should have an additional 70+ tb by the end of 2022 after cable upgrades (again, shared with Australia).

Africa has 253x the population of NZ.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If you want to find out more about other subsea cables there's always: [https://www.submarinecablemap.com](https://www.submarinecablemap.com)

<comment><USER14> There are already a bunch along the coast of Africa. Not to say they shouldn't have more.

<comment><USER15> They should get as many as they can. It's not good to have only the west, or only china, or only russia controlling their internet access points. If they play this right, I'm sure china and the west will literally drown them in bandwidth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have a dream that the world will stop using "Africa" as a catch-all phrase for "some African countries".

<comment><USER17> Do you have reason to believe that the coastal countries with uplinks will not provide connectivity to their neighbouring countries?

<comment><USER18> They will surely have _connections_ , but why would they provide _transit_? Is this a trickle-down theory of connectivity?

<comment><USER19> I believe many inland countries get their transit through neighbors. For example, I believe Rwanda gets ~99% of their data through Uganda/Kenya and Tanzania, and only a tiny bit goes through Satellite. I can't say for sure nothing goes out through the DRC or Uganda/South Sudan, but I'm pretty sure it's quite, quite small.

<comment><USER20> That is correct. Plus limited satellite uplinks. The undersea cable connectivity especially in East Aftica sucks. I have the feeling the primary reason why these cables exist is because they connect South Africa to the huge cables between Europe and East Asia.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm confused by why they are calling this cable system "transformative" as the periphery of Africa is already well served by existing submarine cable:

[https://manypossibilities.net/african-undersea- cables/](https://manypossibilities.net/african-undersea-cables/)

It seems like getting terrestrial fiber into the interior of the continent would be much more impactful. For instance SEACOM was completed in 2008 with landing stations in Tanzania and Kenya but it took 2 years to lay the terrestrial cable to get places like Rwanda and Uganda connected to it:

[https://www.reuters.com/article/ozabs-rwanda-telecoms- idAFJO...](https://www.reuters.com/article/ozabs-rwanda-telecoms- idAFJOE72F07D20110316)

<comment><USER22> I haven't had problems with EASSy from Kenya to Europe, but my virtuous run over epic from mobassa to nairobi on 3 separate cables including one overhead on electricity pylons. I've had no end of problems with those recently, when all 3 are out at the same time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The website is light on details.

What are those dots in front of the coast of Sierra Leone and Liberia? Why are there two dots at Senegal?

What islands in the Atlantic will be connected? It looks as if the Capverdes are left out but the Canaries might have a connection to this cable (but there is no white dot there). I wonder if St. Helena will get lucky. Details please!

</comment><comment><USER23> What are the economics of private investment in subsea cables? Maybe Facebook traffic gets prioritized?

<comment><USER24> Facebook can't gain market traction in Africa if there's no decent internet, so regardless of whether FB will have a direct financial benefit in the connection, they will have an indirect one.

Assuming FB wins over either Chinese social networks or African-developed and operated ones of course.

<comment><USER25> FB is the only social media in town in most of Africa's countries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I would be curious to know how many networks use macsec/.1ae for their transocean fiber. It makes a big difference in detering surveillance.

<comment><USER27> Zero. MACSec is for LANs.

Corporations like Google and Facebook leasing wavelengths are doing E2E encryption in their own upstream gear, but your random ISP hauling cat videos isn't.

<comment><USER28> Facebook and Google aren't leasing wavelengths and haven't for years. Sometimes they lease strands, sometimes they own the fiber in the ground and lease excess to traditional carriers. They own the longhaul equipment that puts waves on the strands. They own the transponders that takes normal 100GigE and converts it to waves.

Random ISP may not be running MACSec, but a significant portion of subsea cable traffic does run over MACSec as it goes between datacenters and from datacenters to POPs where those cat videos get handed off to ISPs in the same region.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I love how they make their mission sound so humanitarian when it's really about monthly active user growth and data profiles for everyone in the world... that they can sell. This whole movement of masking profiteering as social justice is sickening.

<comment><USER30> Did you miss the part about Africa getting a 37000km subsea cable that quadruples their network capacity? What does the motive matter if the end result is the same?

<comment><USER31> Wait a goddamn minute. FB had a chance to do something positive for the world with internet.org but they actually backed out when they were forced to obey net neutrality laws. Make no mistake about it- this is a profit seeking motive with a potential side effect of increased connectivity. You are a product to Facebook, something they sell and once consumed your privacy and rights are left fissured and broken. Don't misconstrue your relationship to them.

<comment><USER32> A "potential side effect"? Don't be ridiculous. The primary purpose is increased connectivity. Will they profit off that increased connectivity? Yes. But so will a lot of others. Including many Africans who will be able to take advantage of new opportunities unlocked by connecting the continent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does anyone have any idea how much would such project cost?

I am wondering on the break down of the cost and which part is the most expensive. Because if "layering" cable is expensive wouldn't be make more sense to layer more cable in on go? 180Tbps doesn't seems a lot for a continent as big as Africa.

</comment><comment><USER33> >We are committed to bringing more people online to a faster internet — and with 3.5 billion people globally unconnected, there is still a lot to do.

Yea, that's 3.5 billion people whose lives haven't been datamined yet by these scumbags.

<comment><USER34> Interpreting this wrong at first made me realize the colonial-esque, modern day exploitation parallels between China and Facebook, especially wrt Africa.

China building ports and rail (with predatory, sovereignty-usurping lending terms); Facebook building fiber (with ROI measured not in bandwith-revenue, but captive audience eyeballs). Military bases vs data centers. Power projected as global military presence vs global advertising market. The usefulness to each "colonizer" is nothing to do with benevolent investment at a modest interest rate, but exploitative access, while slinging PR about providing basic needs to humanity.

Maybe I'm being overly cynical. I generally would be inclined to view this type of deal as win-win, everyone benefits.

On the other hand, between Facebook and China, I honestly don't know who I would trust _less_ with _my_ data. Or who to be more suspicious of, being subject to _their_ algorithms, social engineering, propaganda, agenda, global ambition, etc.

Of course I say this having multiple vectors of internet access and the benefit of not being subject to Chinese sovereignty.

<comment><USER35> So a company creating a digital profile on you to sell targeted advertising vs a country, which is effectively a dictatorship, who has a history of murdering and imprisoning dissenters without trial, are here lumped into the same evil? Can we please take down the Facebook hate back to earth?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> But Starlink.

<comment><USER37> Initial versions of Starlink will not have laser links and will require ground stations to operate.

<comment><USER17> What does that have to do with it?

<comment><USER37> It such a form, it doesn't replace undersea cables.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Launch HN: Meetingbird (YC S17) – A Calendar for Teams - <AUTHOR> Hi HN! We're Henry and Paul, cofounders of Meetingbird (https://www.meetingbird.com) in the current YC batch. We're building a calendar for teams.
Calendars have traditionally been built for individuals, not teams. As teams grow, calendars become so busy that optimal scheduling and time management is nearly impossible without software. Meetingbird analyzes participants' availability, meeting rooms, and other constraints to quickly find the best meeting time and location. When team members' calendars are completely booked, Meetingbird understands which meetings can more easily be rescheduled than others, and inputs that to the scheduler. The scheduler improves as it better understands everyone's calendar preferences. Our goal is a calendar that makes scheduling easy, allowing everyone to spend less time scheduling and more time getting things done.
For individuals, Meetingbird serves as a beautiful (we hope!) calendar that makes scheduling as easy as sending a link or picking a time from within Gmail with our Chrome extension (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/meetingbird/joheck...).
We first became interested in this problem because we experienced first-hand the pain of scheduling working at companies in a variety of industries, from tech to finance. The process of building Meetingbird and talking with hundreds of employees at mid-to-large-sized companies has confirmed how time-consuming and frustrating scheduling is for everyone.
We'd love to hear your feedback and your ideas about calendars and any frustrations of using them as teams! <comment><USER2> One of the challenges I've always had with scheduling systems is travel across timezones. If I'm in NYC this week and London next week my calendar has to shift to that timezone and then back. How do you envision this working? Is it something you guys are thinking about?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi there -- timezones are something we've thought a lot about. We allow you to save a few favorite timezones like NYC and London, and then quickly toggle between those timezones from the Meetingbird calendar. By default, Meetingbird adjusts to the current timezone you're logging in from. For sharing availability through our Meet links, you can specify which timezone you are so that meeting requestors are notified if their timezones differs. Let me know if there are other timezone specific features you'd like to see!

<comment><USER2> The following scenario typical happens to me:

I'm in NYC and I send out a calendly link to someone to schedule a meeting A day goes by and I end up buying a ticket to London for next week. Person schedules a time on my calendar for next week based on my availability I've set up in NYC time. I don't realize this until next week when I'm in London and there's a call scheduled at 9pm London time / 4pm New York time.

Ideally I'd be able to drag across my calendar and tell you I'll be in London from Monday-Friday. During that period I want my availability to stay the same relative to London's timezone. So if I usually have slots from 2-4pm available for recruiting calls I want that same schedule to apply in London at the same time. Does that make sense?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that makes sense. Totally understand the use case - something we'll be working on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Been using it for my company. Some good things, some things to improve.

\- Even if I accept a meeting from my meetingbird(MB) email notificiation, the notification on the actual MB platform still remains.

\- text is truncated. would be nice to see the full thing "on hover"

\- when meeting request is pending, the invite shows "(pending)..". but even on accepting, it does not change.

\- Meet was a great feature from Sunrise. Good you guys are trying to get a similar feeling here.

\- noticed delays in event sync (nothing that is too distracting)

\- using machine learning to suggest for best times for "coffee" meetings (based on user's previous calendar coffee events) will be awesome for Meet/Scheduler.

all the best! its tough to make something good.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback - these are each good points that we are working on addressing soon. Glad you're enjoying the share availability feature!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Glad to see someone tackling this issue. I too have been frustrated with this and many times thought about building a solution...

I have 10-12 recurring team meetings a week (10-15 minute calls to sync with different teams) and a challenge is there is only one meeting owner making managing them a nightmare. I've longed for a "Team Meeting" interface that would allow multiple people to manage a meeting - rescheduling, adding/removing participants, etc. A similar concept to a Email listserv where the email comes from firstname.lastname@example.com and there is an web interface and/or understand the standard calendar email commands that could 'Accept/Subscribe', 'Decline/Unsubscribe', 'Propose New Time', etc. Each Meeting could have properties to show who is invited, subscribed (accepted), unsubscribed (declined). When a meeting invite is forwarded, the new invitee would subscribe to the original invite to ensure updates and changes to the meeting are broadcasted to all attendees. This would work for both one time meetings and recurring meetings and with external attendees.

Also, I'm frequently scheduling meetings with people outside my organization and sending my free/busy time isn't the greatest solution. Use Case: I need to schedule a meeting with email@example.com, email@example.com, firstname.lastname@example.com and email@example.com along with email@example.com and email@example.com.

Google Hangouts are great but not everyone is comfortable with them (yet). An integration with WebEx would be fantastic to handle creating & updating the meeting within WebEx to keep them in sync.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great feedback. Adding editing permissions for other meeting participants outside the owner is definitely something we can do. We're also working on integrations with conferencing tools like Zoom, UberConference etc. We know how important it is to work well with the tools you're already using.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Currently trialing Meetingbird, mostly for scheduling interviews across two offices and finding time slots that work for all involved.

Aside from an invite snafu I've been impressed with the scheduler.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great to hear it, thanks Matt!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Will this come to the phone?

Something like sunrise.am's scheduling keyboard is SORELY needed. Was the easiest way to schedule anything and then Microsoft bought it & killed it.

So disappointing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Joel - yes we'll be coming to mobile eventually although we don't have a set date for that yet. That scheduling feature that Sunrise had in which you select a few blocks and send them over is something we allow you to do in the web app, but no mobile app yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wish it can support Exchange servers one day as it's a lot of corp are using, not fun, but $$ there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've been using Meetingbird as my personal calendar for a while now. Definitely check it out if you haven't used it!

<comment><USER9> Sure you did. And because you are a well known person (great posts) on here I will start using it now, too. Guys focus on your product instead of flaunting yourselves using fake Accounts.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know who this person is, have never used fake accounts , and never asked for upvotes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Love this idea...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Pranav. We do too :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is brilliant and actually very useful, great work guys! In addition to GMail & the Chrome extension, I'd like to suggest a Meetingbird Slackbot, so teams can schedule meetings right from Slack. This would also help remote teams who use Slack, alot.</comment>


UVa tells Latina sorority studying 25 hours a week is hazing, lawsuit says - <AUTHOR> https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/uva-told-latina-sorority-studying-25-hours-week-hazing-lawsuit-n954776 <comment><USER2> The university's position is absolutely ridiculous and has everything to do with what's wrong with higher education at large. I think the only reason that other frats/sororities/organizations with a similar rule weren't dinged is because nobody probably pushed it like the girl who got this sorority in trouble.

I taught in a college setting for a few years, and the pressure to kowtow to students, pass almost everyone, and hand out a's and b's is intense. Giving assignments that resulted in 4-6 hours of homework per week was frowned upon in a 3 credit class. Absurd.</comment>


Show HN: All Hacker News RSS feed readable online as plain text - <AUTHOR> https://m.simplepie.org/?feed=http%3A%2F%2Ffeed.informer.com%2Fdigests%2FWCPITNOQHQ%2Ffeeder.rss <comment><AUTHOR> Includes Front Page, Ask, Show and Polls.

Thanks to Hacker News RSS [1], Feed Informer [2] and SimplePie [3].

[1] [https://edavis.github.io/hnrss](https://edavis.github.io/hnrss) [2] [http://feed.informer.com/](http://feed.informer.com/) [3] [http://simplepie.org](http://simplepie.org)</comment>


Charles River Ventures Puts F*CK Trump on Their Website - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/charles-river-ventures-puts-fck-trump-on-website-2016-8 <comment><USER2> That's rather stupid. Alienating half your potential partners, clients, and customers isn't good business.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think it will impact their business. If a founder wants their money they will take it regardless of CRVs political views.</comment></comment>


Dolphins stay awake for 15 days by sleeping with one half of brain - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/9616671/Dolphins-stay-awake-for-15-days-by-sleeping-with-one-half-of-brain.html

<comment><USER2> Unihemispheric slow-wave sleep <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unihemispheric_slow-wave_sleep></comment>


Starting a Cane Sugar Biz and Landing Our Product in Whole Foods - <AUTHOR> https://starterstory.com/stories/how-we-started-a-1-5m-cane-sugar-biz-landing-our-product-in-whole-foods <comment><USER2> So, basically expensive jaggery?</comment>


IPad 2 JailBreakMe (3.0) now available - <AUTHOR> http://www.jailbreakme.com/#moreinfo <comment><USER2> After all the trouble Apple went to to secure the boot loader, I expected this to be a really complicated procedure. I saw the Tweet today and I went on the site, clicked on "install" and Cydia started installing.

I was blown away. How is this even possible? Did they find another userland exploit that allows you to write to the boot loader? I am very, very impressed.

<comment><AUTHOR> From [http://blog.iphone-dev.org/post/7295551750/jailbreakme- times...](http://blog.iphone-dev.org/post/7295551750/jailbreakme-times-3)

"Q: Do the holes discovered by @comex put my device at risk? A: Yes. We recommend installing _PDF Patcher 2_ in Cydia once you're jailbroken to eliminate this risk (any firmware version)."

<comment><USER3> PDF really is the most dangerous file format around today.

Did you know the PDF spec includes its own LISP-like language? As well as basically anything else you can imagine. It is surely impossible to write a secure, conformant PDF reader.

If I ran any kind of super-sensitive organisation I'd include an outright ban on PDF renderers in my security policy. If anyone _really_ needed to look at PDFs, I'd require them to be rendered down to TIFs or something on a "cleanroom" machine, preferably running some sort of locked-down linux build.

This talk has all the shocking details: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54XYqsf4JEY>

<comment><USER4> How about the Mozilla project to do PDF in js? [http://blog.mozilla.com/cjones/2011/07/03/pdf-js-first- miles...](http://blog.mozilla.com/cjones/2011/07/03/pdf-js-first-milestone/)

<comment><USER3> That one wins by not bothering to conform to the PDF spec at all.

The spec is _huge,_ and the insecurity comes from having to faithfully implement all its utterly insane features, like embedding flash files, executing javascript, rendering external assets, and so on.

The challenge is to decide which subset of those features you want to deliberately ignore.

Most of the esoteric ones are likely critical to obscure, in-house business applications created years ago by corporate coders lacking in sense. Adobe Reader obviously implements everything, and its the reference implementation, so it is installed in most businesses.

Unfortunately, business is the area most in need of security.

In summary: OMGWTFPDF!

<comment><USER5> Some rich clients deliberately ignore parts of the format. For example, the Windows-based Sumatra client did. It seems to have been acquiring more features in the last few releases, and I'm not sure of its current state. But in the past it has been useful for example in that it simply doesn't run embedded Javascript. Or Flash.

That's been my personal approach, such as it is, to the need to deal with some PDF files from third parties. I look for the environment that does no more than render the static page content.

Somewhat akin to using NoScript in the browser. I only execute when I need to, and then from a source for whom I have some trust.

I recently had to clean up some business systems belonging to a relative whose employee ran an infected PDF. By avoiding execution, I was able to examine the PDF and show them how it was indeed the source of their problems.

Unfortunately, these "business users" still have limited will to learn the techniques to avoid such problems. I've made some impression, but the Adobe PDF format is still a time bomb ticking away in the midst of their organization.

I'll mention that, for casual browsing, I use an extension that redirects PDF URL's to Google's Document Viewer (while not signed in to Google). Again, I get (usually) the static view without having to trust or execute the file on my own system. Thanks, Goog!

(Note that I don't do the latter with documents containing sensitive/personal information.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I never bothered with any Jailbreaks before. I have a 3GS since 2 years back.

Visited the site with my iPhone. Pressed Install. No confirmation or anything.

Now I have a Cydia app on my phone that I can move but not delete. Was that all it took to jailbreak my phone? (It took like 10 seconds)

<comment><USER7> You should probably change your root password at this point since the default root password is the same for all devices.

<comment><USER6> Even if I don't install OpenSSH from Cydia?

<comment><USER8> No real need if you don't: there's no additional vector added by the jailbreak to even try entering a password if you don't have sshd installed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I used Fiddler to sniff traffic between iPad 2 and Jailbreakme during jailbreaking but I did not found where the PDF files are located. Could you help me find out where are PDFs that contains the exploits?

<comment><USER3> There is no PDF file, the pdf is a base64 encoded data-uri in the javascript, in the page itself, not even in a separate asset.

For those who fancy doing some analysis, here's the curl command with the required ipad UA string:

        curl -A "Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 4_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8F190 Safari/6533.18.5" http://www.jailbreakme.com

EDIT: here's the b64 pdf: <http://pastebin.com/69tnPMdV>

the PDF is _very_ invalid, because it never needs to masquerade as a real document, it doesn't have to pretend to implement the PDF spec correctly. This makes it somewhat resistant to analysis, it doesn't even have the required '%%EOF' marker so many tools choke on it immediately.

EDIT: There's an unterminated stream object in there which doesn't have a type, and it also has a declared length of 61 bytes and an actual length of well over 400. I think we have a winner... Unfortunately iOS shellcode analysis is _waaaay_ over my head so I'll have to do something useful instead.

<comment><USER10> I decoded base64 & got this: <https://gist.github.com/1067129>

bunch of random gibberish?

<comment><USER11> When decoding to ASCII instead of UTF-8 (like you've done) I got this. It makes a little bit more sense at least, but not much.

<http://pastebin.com/YuPrMhiE>

<comment><USER10> I guess the actual shell code starts from line 40 ">>stream..."

It must be using some other encoding, only if we knew which!

<comment><USER3> It's presumably just a lump of binary ARM opcodes.

<comment><USER9> We need a debugger or a disassmbler like IDA Pro to make reverse engineering of that code

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The release of this is probably related to the leak [1]. My guess is that they intended to save this for iOS5, but had to release it now due to the beta leak.

[1] [http://www.iphonedownloadblog.com/2011/07/02/jailbreakme- ipa...](http://www.iphonedownloadblog.com/2011/07/02/jailbreakme- ipad-2-jailbreak-leaked/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed, his twitter stream has him complaining about people asking him to hurry up :P (<http://twitter.com/#!/comex/status/84126363598065664>)

The leak prompted quick action, lest Apple close the bus sized hole.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It doesn't work on my iPhone on 4.3.3 with that 4.10.01 baseband. The cydia icon comes up, but when the icon changes to "Installing..." it just disappears.

</comment><comment><USER13> If Apple made an official jailbreak they'd stop getting all this free penetration testing.

<comment><USER14> Would they? Windows still seems to get lots of free penetration testing...

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> So I've installed Cydia for the first time on my 3GS, and am wanting to use the 'PDF Patcher 2' fix to stop other sites doing driveby exploits.

Seems that results for the bigboss repository aren't being returned in Cydia, and the repo backend isn't responding to requests. <http://apt.thebigboss.org/onepackage.php?bundleid=pdfpatch2>

Anyone else thinking the bigboss repo (only source of the pdf patcher 2, as far as I can tell) is being kept down on purpose?

<comment><USER16> Does anyone know how Cydia licensing actually works? I jailbroke just to install RetinaPad, and I managed to buy it and install it. Cydia says "Package Officially Purchased". RetinaPad says "RetinaPad license missing!" and doesn't work. I guess the license download failed or something (due to high load?) but I don't see how to fix it.

It really makes me appreciate the Apple App Store, to be honest.

<comment><USER17> All Cydia Store purchases go through SaurikIT's centralized payment processing server. When the user attempts installing a store package, the repo that hosts it queries the central licensing server to see if the device is authorized before returning the package. Some packages make additional calls after the package has been installed on the device to download a license.

It is this final step that was failing intermittently on my servers due to the insane load (~300x usual sales on this package, ~125x traffic load overall). Please give it a try now, I have verified that it is up.

<comment><USER16> Thanks! Interesting. It still isn't working, after uninstalling / reinstalling in Cydia, but I guess I'll give it a day or too. Is the Authorize button in RetinaPad supposed to actually do something?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I know it's obvious enough and not really scary - but that page is tracking every jailbreak and failed jailbreak:

        // track jailbreaks!
        _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'jailbreak', 'jailbreak']);
        timeout = setTimeout(function() {
            _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'failed', 'failure']);
            goto('failure');
        }, 5000);

<comment><USER19> It's just Google Analytics, with custom events so we can get statistics about failure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Works fine on my 3GS running 4.3.3

<comment><USER21> +1. flawless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It works on the iPhone 4 as well (or at least: it did on mine). Was amazed by how fast and easy that was.

</comment><comment><USER23> I hope they fix this fast, this is a _huge_ security risk.

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed, and Comex gave them a heads up ~3.5 weeks ago that something was amiss in PDF. Let's hope they found it and are just going through the last testing cycles for the new patch?!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm intrigued how OTA OS updates will affect Apple's response time to exploits like this.

<comment><USER25> Given that they are delta updates, they will probably be able to push a patch within a few days. Let's hope they take advantage of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wrote this when the original Jailbreak for iOS came out. Think mitigations still apply but not implemented by Apple

[http://www.rakkhis.com/2010/08/can-chrome-learn-from- iphone-...](http://www.rakkhis.com/2010/08/can-chrome-learn-from-iphone- jailbreak.html)

</comment><comment><USER26> Meh, didn't work for me. iPad.

<comment><USER11> Sure you're on 4.3.3 and not 4.3.2/4.3.1?

<comment><USER26> i think its 4.3.2

Ive not bothered to update yet. iPad 1

<comment><USER27> 4.3.2 worked for me (iPad 1). Perhaps you have a previous version?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Video: Railgun Blasts Aerodynamic Round 7km Through Steel Plate - <AUTHOR> http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-04/video-railgun-blasts-aerodynamic-round-seven-kilometers-through-steel-plate

<comment><USER2> Short but wow that's cool. It would be interesting to see how it does against a heavier gauge steel.</comment>


Random Points on a Sphere - <AUTHOR> https://www.jasondavies.com/maps/random-points/ <comment><USER3> The easiest way to generate random points on a (hyper)sphere, at least with respect to most sampling APIs, is to sample from an isotropic normal distribution of the appropriate dimension (for a three-dimensional sphere, just call randn() three times), then normalize the result to be on the surface of the sphere.

This works because the normal distribution is rotationally symmetric, so each sample is essentially a random unit vector scaled by a random (normally distributed) radius. Once you remove the variation in radius you just get back the random unit vector, i.e. a point on the unit sphere.

<comment><USER4> This is not quite correct. Generating a random vector using three calls to rand() is the equivalent of picking a random point inside a cube. If you normalize the points, you're effectively squishing the corners of the cube in toward the center to make a sphere. Points near the corners of the containing cube will appear more frequently than the top, bottom and 'sides'.

@ginko's comment is correct - you can fix the algorithm by throwing out any points that lie outside the sphere before normalizing.

<comment><USER3> As others have pointed out, the distinction between randn() and rand() is crucial here - the former gives you points from a (spherically symmetric) normal distribution, the latter gives you uniform points from the unit cube.

One of the advantages of the normal-sampling route over @ginko's rejection- based method is that in high dimensions _almost all_ of the volume of the unit cube is situated outside of the unit sphere (the volume of the unit cube is always 1, whereas the volume of the unit sphere decreases exponentially with dimension). So the rejection method becomes exponentially slow in high dimensions, while the Gaussian method still works just fine.

<comment><USER5> Surely there would still be a bias towards the corners?

<comment><USER6> Interestingly, there isn't for Gaussians (see my comment below).

Other simple distributions tend to give biases towards the corners or axis. Perhaps the Gaussian is unique in this regard? I'm not sure.

<comment><USER7> Yes, the fact that i.i.d. Gaussians give a rotationally symmetric joint distribution is a defining property of the Gaussian.

<comment><USER6> Ah I suspected as much. Can you provide proof?

I think I found one, but I'm not sure:

Without loss of generality, take f(xi) = k1 * exp(-g(xi)) [1], for some g. Then we need the joint pdf to satisfy f(x1,...,xn) = k2 * exp(-h(R^2)), R=sum(xi^2)^1/2 (the R^2 and h(.) is w.l.g. too). So we get g(x1)+g(x2)=h(x1^2+x2^2). Then assuming the functions g and h analytic we end up needing g(x)= k * x^2, otherwise we get cross terms in the Taylor expansion that can't be cancelled out for all xi. Sounds good?

[1] The function f trivially needs to be symmetric, justifying no loss of generality.

<comment><USER8> Perhaps coincidentally, someone just asked about this at math.stackexchange: [http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1255637/joint-pdf- of...](http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1255637/joint-pdf-of-n-1-i-i-d- random-variables-isotropic-if-and-only-if-they-are-cen)

<comment><USER6> Yes, that was me :)

I wanted to make sure I got a proof, since I didn't really find this elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Note that the points are no longer independent of each other, hence they are > no longer uniformly distributed.

This is false. Random variables can be uniform even if they are not independent.

For example, let X be uniform(0, 1), and let Y = X + 0.1 mod 1. Clearly they are not independent. Clearly X is uniform. When you realize that you could redefine the variables as Y = uniform(0, 1) and X = Y - 0.1 mod 1, then it becomes obvious that Y is also uniform.

It is a common problem to know a variable's distribution without knowing whether it is independent.

<comment><USER3> Good catch. Probably what the article meant to say is that the lack of independence means the points are not _conditionally_ uniform. That is, although X and Y follow uniform distributions individually, the dependence between them means that once you observe X, your resulting belief about Y is _no longer_ a uniform distribution. Compare this to the independent case where knowing X would tell you nothing about Y, so your belief about Y conditioned on X would still just be uniform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> >Although we've successfully generated uniformly distributed points on a sphere, it feels messy. Some points seem too close together, and some seem too far apart.

This is how randomness _should_ look. If you randomly generate (using a high- quality random engine) uniformly distributed points on a square plane or even a line, you'll see the same apparent clustering.

Put another way, if you plot every point on a coordinate grid with integer coordinates, you'll have a uniform distribution, but it will hardly be "random."

</comment><comment><USER11> FTA:

> One solution is to pick λ ∈ [-180°, 180°) as before and then set φ = > cos^(-1)(2x - 1), where x is uniformly distributed and x ∈ [0, 1).

There is a fascinating fact hidden in the above sentence: if a point (x,y,z) is uniformly distributed on the surface of a sphere -- say, of radius 1, centered at (0,0,0) -- then each of x, y, and z is uniformly distributed over the interval [-1, 1].

Honestly, that's amazing.

<comment><USER12> Are you sure? If z is distributed over the surface of the sphere there is far less surface at the extremums -1 and 1. Doesn't z being uniform in the range (-1,1) lead to points being actually more densly concentrated near the poles? Or did I misunderstand what you meant?

<comment><USER13> Near the poles the surface becomes very flat and therefore there is as much surface area in a slice of constant height than anywhere else. Archimedes was a clever fella :-)

<comment><USER12> Oh, I was totally confused, of course the numbers in every dimension are evenly distributed, silly me - I was thinking of great circles. Thanks :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A very simple solution is to generate a 3D point in [-1,1]^3, regenerate if it's length is >1 and project it on to the sphere otherwise.

<comment><USER15> Why would you regenerate it if the length exceeds 1? Can't you just normalize the vector regardless of its length (excluding 0)?

<comment><USER9> That would lead to the distribution being non-uniform: there would be more points in the corners of the cube.

<comment><USER15> Ah, of course. To visualize it, the distance between the center and the surface of the shape would be proportional to the probability of that vector being selected after normalization. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The best and simplest results can be obtained by using a Hammersley Point Set[1].

[1] [https://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~ttwong/papers/udpoint/udpoint.p...](https://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~ttwong/papers/udpoint/udpoint.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER17> related: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_paradox_%28probability...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_paradox_%28probability%29)

("choose a random chord intersecting a circle")

If someone is familiar with this kind of thing, I'd like to know a little more about the Jaynes solution described. It seems to me that if the circle were translated off to some distant portion of the plane, it would be very unlikely that any method of choosing chords would have the same distributional properties on the original circle and on the translated circle, because the chords are all originally restricted to intersect the first circle and, given two circles in a plane, there are many lines that intersect one but not both circles. Will Jaynes' method really shade the translated circle the same way it will shade the original? My intuition says the translated one should be shaded more heavily in a sort of "band" parallel to the line connecting the origins of the two circles, or possibly in a crescent pattern with more shading closer to the original.

<comment><USER18> It's easy to see that the second method can be applied so it works independently of the position and size of the circle. Let's start by reformulating it slightly: instead of a "random radius" we will use a "random diameter".

> Choose a diameter of the circle, choose a point on the diameter and > construct the chord through this point and perpendicular to the diameter.

In the general case, choose a line going through the origin.

=> In the circle, there is a diameter parallel to this line.

Then choose a point on the line, and construct the perpendicular line at that point. (To be able to choose a point uniformly, you have to consider a finite segment but this is not a problem as long as the location/size of the circle is bounded).

=> This perpendicular line might not intersect the circle, but when it does it determines a chord that goes through a point chosen uniformly on the diameter.

This generalized method can be used to cover uniformly multiple circles at the same time, but obviously not every line will intersect every circle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> If you have random N points and you want to distribute them uniformly on a sphere, this method won't work. I needed this in two different side projects and used this[1] which worked well.

[http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jocs.2011.06.007](http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jocs.2011.06.007)

</comment><comment><USER20> I stumbled upon an attractive & simple to implement non-random method that uses the golden angle (an angle commonly observed in plant phyllotaxy) -- drawing a fibonacci spiral on the sphere while maintaining a constant surface area. It is demonstrated here, on the open processing website.

[http://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/41142](http://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/41142)

      n = number of points
      phi = (sqrt(5)+1)/2 - <USER2>
      ga = phi * 2 * PI

      for each point i (1..n)
        longitude = ga*i
        latitude = asin(-1 + 2*i/n)

</comment><comment><USER21> am I the only one who thought the points on the second sphere look _way_ more randomly distributed than the points on the third sphere?

<comment><USER22> They are not random on the third sphere.

<comment><USER21> so what's the point? WHo wants a "random" sequence like 0100101101011011011001001001010110111010010101010 - that's not random at all!

<comment><USER18> Sometimes you want "quasi-random" sequences:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low- discrepancy_sequence](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-discrepancy_sequence)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The statistical way of approaching this problem is to sample from a Von-Mises Fisher distribution with k=0:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Mises%E2%80%93Fisher_distr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Mises%E2%80%93Fisher_distribution)

</comment><comment><USER24> The div.sphere div.wrap elements on this page are lovely, and they are created by the client as well!

</comment><comment><USER25> This post seems to barely scratch the surface of the problem. First you really need to specify by what metric you want the distribution to be uniform. Euclidean 3d distance? Arcs? The way I would do it would be to generate a lot of random points by some easy scheme, like long/lat, then feed them into a kdtree (k=3), find all neighbors for every point with an overestimating metric, then check them against the real metric and remove the too close ones.

<comment><USER26> It should be clear that the obvious notion of uniformity is the intended one. I.e., it should be uniform with respect to the usual Lebesgue measure on the sphere.

And your method is extremely complicated. You can solve this problem with 5 lines of code and no data structures.</comment></comment>


The Eligible Bachelor Paradox - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2188684/pagenum/all/ <comment><USER2> The author is actually indireclty referring to the stable marriage problem ( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_marriage_problem> , don't bother reading the paper the slate writer links to, it has no substantive content), in which you have two sets of agents which we label the "men" and the "women". Each agent has a preference ordering of the members of the other gender. It is really easy to prove that you can then find an equilibrium arrangement by iterating the following procedure i = 1..n:

have each man propose to the i'th woman on his list (if he's not currently matched, otherwise he does nothing). the woman accepts if she's not matched yet or if the man ranks higher on her list than the previous guy she accepted.

if you think for a moment you can see (and prove) that this equilibria favors the men.

Also curiously enough, this exact algorithm is used to match med students with residency programs

<comment><USER3> Steven Rudich has a good lecture on this: [http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/academic/class/15251/di...](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/academic/class/15251/discretemath/Lectures/dating.ppt)

<http://www.discretemath.com>

<comment><USER4> Good slides; He mentions that the "largest, most successful dating service in the world" uses a computer to run the Traditional Marriage Algorithm. But which dating service is the "largest, most successful dating service in the world"?

<comment><USER3> the medical residency program

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think additional part of the problem is that men are starting to realize that they really don't have anything to gain by being married. And they are so afraid of having to go through a divorce that can wipe them out, that they don't feel like trying. I mean a 50% divorce rate in this country, is pretty much a coin toss on whether or not you lose everything.

Seriously the only thing to gain by being married is saving a few bucks on taxes.

And you lose pretty much everything else. Every single married guy I know is MISERABLE. The sex pretty much stops within the first couple of years. And the woman gains mega weight, because now that they "got" you, they don't need to keep in shape. And then the whole bitchy wife comes out treating the guy as a second class citizen.

Marrying an American woman is pretty much the worst decision you can make. If you really want to get married, go find a nice European girl to marry, unlike American women, at least they know that marriage is not a one way street.

<comment><USER6> I'm always surprised to see the extreme bitterness that comes out on these threads.

>>Every single married guy I know is MISERABLE. The sex pretty much stops within the first couple of years. And the woman gains mega weight, because now that they "got" you, they don't need to keep in shape. And then the whole bitchy wife comes out treating the guy as a second class citizen.

You do seem to know an awful lot of extremely unhappy couples. That's not my experience at all. For example, my parents are in their fifties and still have sex 3+ times a week, a fact I wish I didn't know. I know many other very happily married couples.

Obviously, my anecdotal evidence is just as useless as yours...I don't see how we can generalize that there is nothing to gain by being married.

The divorce rate is 50%...but the failure rate of startups is even higher. Starting a startup and failing can also ruin you financially and burn you out -- should we then assume that it is a stupid idea to start one?

>>Marrying an American woman is pretty much the worst decision you can make.

I am not an American girl, though I recently moved to the states. I am European myself -- and I have met just as many cultured, intelligent, kind American women as European ones. Why do you hate American women so much? Perhaps by "nice European girl" you are imagining an especially submissive woman? Perhaps your experience with American women only extends to suburban princesses and soccer moms?

Either way, I can assure you that your explicit hatred of American women ensures that you will never meet one that you will like.

<comment><USER5> See thats the thing, your anecdotal evidence doesn't disprove my assertion, it reinforces it. 40 years ago the women knew that for a successful marriage you needed a mutual effort. I'm talking about modern women, who know that divorce is a viable option, and that it is not worth trying when you have a big pay day in front of you.

I know a lot of unhappy men, not couples. In those relationships women seem to be fine. Why not? They sit on their asses doing nothing, while the man works his ass off trying to get the relationship humming again. Do I know some happy couples? Sure,but most of those have the european wife who wasn't raised on sex and the city.

Except the startup thing is your own doing and you know what you are getting into. With divorce, it can come out of nowhere, when you least expect it. And do you think taking a risk at 25 to do a startup is the same as losing everything you worked for at 30, 40, 50? At least with a startup there is a payoff at the end of the tunnel, with marriage you either gain nothing or lose everything.

Well maybe its just my personal experience, but the European girls seem to bring a lot more to relationships than the American girls. And its not a submissive thing, its more of a willingness to work things out.

The thing you need to realize is that the way the woman behaves when she is single or dating, is COMPLETELY different from the way she behaves when she is married. She doesn't need to hide who she truly is, because with the divorce option on the table she hit the jackpot. You think any of my friends would have married their wives if they acted the same way they act now? Hell no....hell one of them married his wife for the sole reason that she supposedly enjoyed having sex and couldn't get enough. That lasted exactly until they had their first kid, at which point she completely cut him off. The other, married his wife because she was supposedly the nicest girl he ever met, with that one she acted like bridezilla before the wedding, and seemed to have forgotten to turn that off afterwords.

Its not a hatred, its realism. I'll date American women, no problem. Because during the dating phase, they act just fine. The problem is, that for most of them its just an act until they tie the matrimonial knot, at which point the real them comes out, who you are stuck with.

<comment><USER6> Are American women so adept at hiding their "true" selves for so long? Perhaps your friends are poor judges of character, or simply didn't date them long enough to properly assess how they would function as a married couple.

Where I come from, it is taken as common knowledge that you should live together for a significant amount of time before getting married (2+ years is usual). Also, big extravagant weddings are not the norm -- most of my immediate and extended family got married by signing papers in a courthouse, or in a small ceremony at the most.

>>She doesn't need to hide who she truly is, because with the divorce option on the table she hit the jackpot.

I find this surprising also. From what I hear, divorce is terrible for everyone. I can't imagine that so many women marry into a relationship they don't expect to maintain (emotionally and sexually), especially with the way love and marriage are so glorified in the US.

<comment><USER5> its not really being adept, they just hide who they truly are. They may hate sex, but they do it, because they know that if they don't put out the guy will leave. They go to the gym, because they know if they become a fat slob the guy will leave. They act nice, because they know that if they are a bitch the guy will leave. When they get married on the other hand, they know that the guy can't leave anymore, so they can act how they want...and if the guy leaves, they'll get a huge payday.

I'm not sure about judges of character, but most of the guys dated their wives for 3-5 years and lived together for at least 2 years.

Divorce being terrible, mostly goes to the idea that the 2 people will end up hating each other. But its much more terrible for guys, who end up losing everything they worked for.

Yes, most women don't marry with idea of a divorce in mind. But its too juicy of a consolation prize, not to keep in mind when the relationship hits the rocks. Yes the idea of marriage is glorified in the U.S. and its part of the problem. It convinces people that all you need to do is get married, and the relationship will prosper all by itself

<comment><USER6> It is possible that the women in these scenarios are entirely at fault, but unlikely. Relationship problems usually stem from both of the people involved.

>>They may hate sex, but they do it

I don't know ANY women who hate sex itself. Perhaps the man has gotten lazier as well, in regards to sex?

>>They go to the gym...if they become a fat slob the guy will leave

Women's bodies are not the only ones that deteriorate. Are all of the men of your acquaintance perfectly fit as well? Furthermore, many women's bodies change in unexpected ways after childbirth...it is entirely normal to take up to a year post-breast feeding to recover, and that is provided that the women has time away from the child to exercise.

>>They act nice

As another woman on the thread mentioned, it is not only women who can be petty in relationships. Her "bitchy" behavior is almost certainly at least partially the husband's fault.

Perhaps the husband began working more hours, which combined with childcare, left the couple no time to be together?

It cannot be denied that marriage is hard. But it is far from impossible, and far from unsatisfactory when done properly. However, it takes work on both sides to maintain and adapt. I am not denying that the woman causes problems of her own, but relationships are rarely broken just by the fault of one person. You are probably getting a biased account because you are hearing it from the husband's perspective. Their wives may have things to say that would surprise you.

<comment><USER5> Yes its a two way street, but from what I'm seeing, the guys are the ones who are trying and the women are the ones who gave up.

No idea, but I do know that one guy hasn't gotten laid in 5 years, and the other only gets sex on big occasions like his birthday. The rest just bitch that they don't get as much as they used to.

The main ones: One I know is in the shame shape that he was in when they got married. The other one has actually gotten better since he hides from the wife at the gym. The other ones aren't as close friends so I don't really know what they looked like when they got married but most of them are in decent shape. Recovery thing also doesn't apply, since those are the older friends so they had their kids 3-4 years ago.

Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but I'd side with the guys in this situation since I know for a fact that they've been the ones trying in the relationship.

Nope still same 40 hour work weeks.

I disagree, if one person tries to fix things, while the other does nothing, its the one who does nothing that is at fault for relationship deteriorating.

And yeah I may be biased towards my friends, but I met the wives too and honestly I haven't seen an ounce of contradicting evidence in how they act towards their husbands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's been a while since I read his explanation, but an economist -- I believe it was Tim Harford in _The Undercover Economist_, but it may have been Tyler Cowan -- has already solved this, and with a very different answer.

Several factors are operating. First, due to a higher death rate among males, the number of women begins to exceed the number of men (of a given age) starting at age 23. Next, there are about 10 times as many men in prison as women. Also, there seem to be rather more gay men than lesbian women. There are far more women in large US cities, where articles like this are written, than men (who are disproportionately rural). then, women like to "marry up", whereas men are willing to marry down.

Now comes the key point. Even a rather small discrepancy between supply and demand in an auction market can quickly drive prices thru the roof, or the floor. Great example: recent oil prices. Back when the economy was going well prices could shoot up rapidly as oil fields became exhausted and development of new ones was blocked. When the economy talked and demand dropped just a few percent, prices collapsed from $147 to $39, or some such. I read his account too quickly to fully follow it, and I'm sorry I can't remember it, but small- supply-imbalances-can-produce-huge-price-swings was the gist of it. Sorry, I don't have the book available to check it.

>> This is how you come to the Eligible-Bachelor Paradox, which is no longer so paradoxical. The pool of appealing men shrinks as many are married off and taken out of the game, leaving a disproportionate number of men who are notably imperfect (perhaps they are short, socially awkward, underemployed).

<comment><USER8> I think the author has never been Silicon Valley. It is a huge sausage fest in here, everywhere. San Jose is called Man Jose for a good reason. Smart and educated girls, that are also cute are rarely single.

I have so many great male friends that are single, and yet I don't know a good looking/smart girl that is single.

This is my major disappointment with the SF Bay Area.

<comment><USER7> How things change. Not so many years ago SF was a nightmare for single women, thanks to the city's disproportionate number of gay men. I'm guessing things have evened up a lot.

<comment><USER9> Not so many years ago must mean 20 years ago. It's still a sausage fest and has been since 1997.

It's probably still a nightmare for single women. I can't imagine that a dive bar with a mid-range computer programmer is on the list of a woman's dream dates.

On the other hand, SF is better than the rest of Silicon Valley.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There's a simpler explanation than appealing to math the author admits not understanding: male attractiveness ages better.

A 40 year old man can be attractive to 20 year old women, but a 40 year old woman is rarely attractive to 20 year old men.

In other words, women past their prime who restrict themselves to mates their own age will may be in relatively low demand.

<comment><USER11> I agree. The thing to keep in mind is that this works against men as well as women, it just hits them at different points in their lives.

If women between the ages of 21 and 25 are interested in (and pursued by) men between the ages of 21 and 35+, while men between 21 and 25 are limited to women who are roughly the same age, then men will face a very difficult dating "market" in their early 20s, and women will experience a favorable one. As men and women age, the inevitable symmetry switches the situation - women between 35 and 40 are now competing for men who are pursuing women between the ages of, say, 25 and 40.

This is something to keep in mind when you hear that the dating world is unfair to women over 35. It's "unfair" to men too, just earlier in life.

<comment> old-gregg You're right, life gets tougher for women after 30 but I am not following you in where does this benefit men?

According to your analysis a larger pool of men 21-40 are _always_ competing for a smaller pool of attractive women 21-30, so if you're a single male, the ratio is always against you no matter how old you are.

And that's what I'm observing in real life. Perhaps I'm too young, but every public gathering I go to features a disproportional number of guys. And if you subtract overweight people from the picture, the ratio gets downright scary.

<comment><USER11> Some guys are like that. But in my example (or I guess you could call it my model), I had guys interested in women at or below their age, and women interested in men at or above their age. In reality, it differs for each person, but average age preference is probably a right or left skewed bell curve for women and men.

And of course, women probably aren't attracted to older men simply because they are older, they're probably attracted to the life and professional accomplishment, maturity, financial resources, and so forth - sorry bruddas, but merely aging is not going to help things here.

On the flip side, the numbers really do start to look grim for single women as they approach 40. A lot of women enjoy the dating scene when they are in their early 20s, get married around 30, and stay happily married their whole lives - and never really feel any of the frustration of being on the wrong side of the dating equation. However, this means that most of the disadvantage gets concentrated onto a fairly small number of women, who basically get the full brunt of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Where have all the most appealing men gone? Married young, most of them—and > sometimes to women whose most salient characteristic was not their beauty, > or passion, or intellect, but _their_ _decisiveness_.

I think this one quote from the article is important.

> What they understood is this: as your priorities change from romance to > family, the so-called "deal breakers" change. Some guys aren't worldly, but > they'd make great dads.

2nd quote from linked article in original piece - an interesting Lori Gottlieb article entitled "Marry Him!" which I'm considering forwarding to a few of my 30-ish single and still serial-dating female friends (considering the negative repercussions).

<http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/single-marry>

<comment><USER13> Good read.

"What I long for in a marriage is that sense of having a partner in crime."

I smiled as I read this because that's my exact choice of words when describing what I'm interested in.

<comment><USER14> hmm is it romantic or pragmatic if you think of your spouse as a good friend/cofounder you can split work with and help each other out?

I'm beginning to see no point in love - only solid, mutually beneficial friendships.

<comment><USER15> I think Alexander Smith put the "point of love" quite well: "Love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition."

You can love a friend in that sense to a point, and that may be enough for many people. Obviously romantic love is an entirely different story: irrational and perhaps less efficient than a work partner, but the sort of thing that contrasts and enhances the purely logical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> A better explanation is that older men date younger women more often than older women date younger men. So there are extra old women and young men. No need for combinatorial game theory, just supply and demand.

</comment><comment><USER17> the Gale-Shapley algorithm requires an authority (like the medical school establishment) to make it work. in real life, if you want to get married, you face a much more amorphous situation: a series of prospects, and with each a decision, "are they good enough"? i can't find it anymore, but iirc the answer was, to estimate the length of the game (say 20 years on the marriage market) and then just date for the first 1/e fraction of this time. and then say "yes" to the next person as good or better than the best you could have had during your trial/dating period. can anyone name the theorem or is this apocryphal?

<comment><USER12> 37% rule

> Estimate how many people you're likely to date in your life, dump the first > 37% but keep a photo of your favourite on your bedside table. Then, marry > the first one after that who beats your sweetheart! Of course, every rule > has exceptions and sometimes you get an offer that's too good to refuse, 37% > or not. Sometimes, mathematics doesn't have all the answers!

> Using this process, we find that we can be successful in selecting the best > from a group of N by letting approximately 37% of the available positions go > by, then selecting the first choice better than any seen before about 37% of > the time. And this is true no matter how large N is! This is a strikingly > high probability.

<http://www.illuminatingscience.org/moving-house-part-i/>

<http://courses.ncssm.edu/math/Talks/PDFS/spouse.pdf>

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm a bit bothered than there is no objective evidence - just a claim that "everybody knows" followed by a loose application of game theory.

But, if he is right, then as a man you should be holding out.

<comment><USER19> That doesn't follow - presumably the desirable men are also getting what they want, less desirable but more devoted women. After all, the idea of the linked article is that a woman who does marry a desirable man would be likely to get a less desirable mate if she were to compete directly with other women.

<comment><USER18> I don't know if you can assume early bidders are more devoted.

<comment><USER19> I'm assuming that early bidding isn't what's working for the less desirable women. It's a self evaluation that they can't compete directly, so they don't. Instead, they concentrate their resources on one mostly-desirable man. Bidding early is one part of the equation, but bidding _more_ is another, probably more important part. If the article is supposed to reflect real life, the timing isn't likely to yield a real advantage, since society discourages women from getting married until relatively late anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why is it not the case that attractive men postpone their decision too, just as attractive women do?

<comment><USER21> In isolated cases perhaps attractive men also postpone their decision, but I believe that the idealization given in the article is pretty close to reality: women decide and men settle for what they can get.

I recall reading about some research showing that overweight women actually have sex more often than their peers, which seems to support this theory. ([http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2008/10/31/Overweight_women_h...](http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2008/10/31/Overweight_women_have_more_sex/UPI-68841225431194/))</comment></comment>