Can Oregon's tiny houses be part of the solution to homelessness? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/apr/01/oregon-tiny-houses-solution-homelessness <comment><USER2> Probably not. Most homelessness is due to either mental illness and substance abuse or due to a shortage of affordable housing in places where jobs are available - typically dense cities where the only way to add housing within reasonable commute distance of the jobs is to build upwards, not building inexpensive 1-story buildings on vacant land.

Furthermore, both types of homeless tend to congregate in places where there's a density of social services available because they rely on those services for food, clothing, health care, or assistance seeking employment, in addition to shelter. Those areas tend not to be within walking distance (for the vast majority who also lack cars) of anywhere that has space to build dozens or hundreds of these tiny houses.

There are plenty of places in this country that have a ton of vacant housing stock, and even some of those have a homelessness problem (see also: Detroit). The problems underlying homelessness are far more complicated than the size of the houses we build.

<comment><USER3> Agreed that homelessness has complex underlying issues, but homelessness can ALSO be a temporary condition triggered by any number of problems (loss of a job, insurmountable debt, etc). The people are still technically "homeless" though rarely classified as such. Anything that provides more options for housing will help people who are homeless or on the verge of becoming homeless.

<comment><USER2> But moving them to the area 3 hours drive away from the city where there's actually space to build some of these things doesn't help them deal with joblessness (or needing a second job to pay down debt, when you lose 6 hours/day to your commute) since employment is generally easier to find in a city. In most of these cases, what's needed is not to expand low-density areas with marginally higher density, but to increase density in higher density areas so that housing there becomes affordable, or to offer temporary free/subsidized housing in those high-density areas until people are back on their feet.

<comment><USER4> Which is essentially the underlying plot of City of God. And which was based on a true story in the Brazilian favelas.

It's just hipster hubris. If someone suggested building apartment blocks with the same square footage as those twee little houses, they would be accused of trying to warehouse the homeless, but it's actually a much better idea.

<comment><USER5> Don't underestimate the power of green space. Having small homes in the middle of lawn, trees, and plants is _much_ better than having small apartments in a dense apartment building.

There's still the problem of services / jobs, of course. But that's a bit separate.

<comment><USER6> What preserves greenspace more: 1000 people living in a tower block, or 1000 people, each with their own homes and lawns, sprawling across an entire suburban neighborhood?

Of course, it's not as simple as that. Greenspace is important, which is why cities have parks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would love to live in a tiny house village...but, the zoning laws in my home city (Austin) make it literally impossible.

It is also illegal to be homeless here, with fines for illegal camping costing several hundred dollars. It's sickening to see all the new construction, often with enthusiastic support of much of city council and the mayor, that is targeted at people who can afford $3000/month rents, when there are so many families being pushed out of their neighborhoods.

I've kind of idley been shopping for houses or land in New Orleans and its fascinating how tiny some of the old houses are. There was a time when it was not considered crazy or illegal to construct a two room, 250 square foot, house for one or two people to live in. It don't understand how we've gone so far in the McMansion direction. It's entirely possible to live happily in a tiny space (I did it for four years, living and traveling full-time in a motorhome).

<comment><USER8> I'm curious, what is a specific zoning ordinance which prohibits small houses? In my county, the building code does not mandate a minimum size, but many HOA covenants do. Or is it just the grouped houses that are outlawed, like minimum parcel size of 0.25 acre or something?

<comment><USER9> The IRC and IBC do specify minimum sizes, so if your county adopted either of those then there is a built in minimum.

> Every dwelling unit shall have at least one habitable room that shall have > not less than 120 square feet (11 m2) of gross floor area. Other habitable > rooms shall have a floor area of not less than 70 square feet (6.5 m2). > Habitable rooms shall not be less than 7 feet (2134 mm) in any horizontal > dimension.

The 2015 revision removes or modifies this.

<comment><USER8> Interesting, I did not know international building codes existed. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Building_Code](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Building_Code)

<comment><USER10> It's not an internationally enforced document or anything, more of a "base code" that jurisdictions can choose to adopt (often with local modifications) to avoid writing their own from scratch.

Similar codes exist for electrical (NEC, which I guess is national because of voltage differences internationally?) and fire safety (IFC).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Salt Lake City's approach seems to be going pretty well [1]. On another note, naming these places 'Dignity' and 'Opportunity' seems, at least to my ear, to sap the residents of both. Why not give them more innocuous names?

[1] [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/22/home- free](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/22/home-free)

<comment><USER12> Sounds like something out of _Anthem_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> At points in my life my apartment has been pretty much a place to sleep for 8 hours, and little more. It was always maddening that the options were still expensive (even studios are cavernous when you're a 22 year old with almost no belongings, no car, and no family).

</comment><comment><USER14> Here in Florida mobile home parks used to be common, to the point of being 50% of housing in some counties. My entire life they've been tearing them down, sometimes to build expensive stuff, whether residential or commercial, oftentimes because the community politicians want to eliminate any low-cost housing to upscale "their" community. Poor people aren't represented by the government at any level; the economic top third is precisely represented.

<comment><USER15> Are you sure the stupidity of flimsy housing in a hurricane hotspot wasn't a huge part of it? Shots of decimated trailer parks are usually the first things to hit the national news when a big hurricane hits you all.

<comment><USER14> That does get airplay but it's not accurate. Millions of people live in mobile homes, a few get damaged by storms, as do regular stick-built homes. Tornadoes trash a few every now and then. But none of that is why they're being cleaned out; it's arrogance. Pricing the poor out of housing altogether isn't improving their safety. Modern tie-down codes had already solved that problem years ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think there will be a point where some people at an early stage of their life opt for a small mobile house.. that is actually a car, perhaps even self driving. If hourly jobs and limited urban real estate make home (e.g. land)-ownership an unrealistic expectation, why not live out of your car?

Would really turn the heads of people who expected their plot of land to be worth something because younger generations would aspire to it and have no other option.

</comment><comment><USER17> To the argument that homelessness is because of mental illness / substance abuse. I think there's probably another (as yet unproven) side of this. And that is substance abuse / mental illness can and probably to a large extent is derived from the environment you're in. How many people would not fall into a funk if all they were ever worrying about were their bills, and never capable of making a dent in them. Let's face it. Some people get themselves into situations where they're never going to accumulate the skills necessary to make it out of borderline poverty. Most of the times it probably takes several generations to get into that situation. How many generations (in today's economic environment) could it possibly take to get out? It's sad to see that most of them feel such small amount of hope they put all their "money" on getting their kids to the NFL / NBA / etc. The system has failed them and it's not taking any steps to help them get out of those situations.

</comment><comment><USER18> Didn't the previous occupants already solve this problem?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipi](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipi)

For something more hardy, you could steal an idea from the central asian people and build yurts. They're more homely, portable, easier to construct, and surely cheaper.

[http://www.rontravel.com/Web_Photos_Happy_Cannibal/X_Siberia...](http://www.rontravel.com/Web_Photos_Happy_Cannibal/X_Siberia/Mongolia_Ulan_Bataar_Suburb_Yurts_View.jpg)

[http://www.rontravel.com/Web_Photos_Happy_Cannibal/X_Siberia...](http://www.rontravel.com/Web_Photos_Happy_Cannibal/X_Siberia/Mongolia_Yurt_Group_Interior.jpg)

<comment><USER19> Not really, half the problem is land. A portable structure that is illegal to set up is not really a solution. Where are you going to set up your tipi in Portland when doing so on public land is illegal[1]?

[1] [http://www.portlandonline.com/auditor/index.cfm?a=15427&c=28...](http://www.portlandonline.com/auditor/index.cfm?a=15427&c=28513)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> > A top-of-the-line tiny house with RV-like conveniences can set you back > $60,000 or more. The 30 dwellings at Opportunity Village, made of prefab > donated materials, cost "around $3,300 a unit". The savings come from the > fact that they are basically detached bedrooms, with no utilities or running > water.

Why do these things cost $3,300? They look like garbage and have no electric, plumbing, HVAC, etc. They also look like they are either on blocks or a large, shared, concrete slab, so you don't need to pour a slab for each one. You could put one of these things together with a few hundred dollars of material. These can't be much more than the shed kits at big box stores like Home Depot that run a couple hundred dollars.

<comment><USER21> Let's have a look:

      Cheapest Home Depot Shed[1]: $800 ($649 +$250 delivery)
      Windows[2]: $210 (3x$70)
      Wall Insulation (shed walls are ~10x10): $113.50 ($11.35 for a 40 ft^2 roll of minimum R13 batt)
      Ceiling Insulation (approximating @100ft^2)[3]: $118.28 (2x$59.14)
      Actual Door[4]: $99
      Drywall[5]: $84.80 (approx. 10 peices)

Total: $1524.58

Looks like you're correct, it could be cheaper. Wait a minute, we just have a pile of materials now. Let's put it together. Judging by [6], it's about $1500 of labor to hire a professional to build you a shed. Let's assume that you can negotiate installation of the insulation, drywall, and windows for free (it's for a good cause!). You are now at $3,024.58 final cost. Hmm.

[1] [http://www.homedepot.com/p/Handy-Home-Products- Princeton-10-...](http://www.homedepot.com/p/Handy-Home-Products- Princeton-10-ft-x-10-ft-Wood-Storage-Shed-18250-1/100350323?N=5yc1vZbu93)

[2] [http://www.homedepot.com/p/Handy-Home-Products- Princeton-10-...](http://www.homedepot.com/p/Handy-Home-Products- Princeton-10-ft-x-10-ft-Wood-Storage-Shed-18250-1/100350323?N=5yc1vZbu93)

[3] [http://www.homedepot.com/p/Owens-Corning-R-38-Kraft-Faced- In...](http://www.homedepot.com/p/Owens-Corning-R-38-Kraft-Faced-Insulation- Batts-24-in-x-48-in-BF81/202585891?N=5yc1vZbay7Z1z0uu2vZ1z0zyay)

[4] [http://www.homedepot.com/p/Unbranded-Premium-6-Panel- Primed-...](http://www.homedepot.com/p/Unbranded-Premium-6-Panel-Primed-Steel- Front-Door-Slab-THDJW166100317/202036386)

[5] [http://www.homedepot.com/p/SHEETROCK- UltraLight-1-2-in-x-4-f...](http://www.homedepot.com/p/SHEETROCK- UltraLight-1-2-in-x-4-ft-x-8-ft-Gypsum-Board-14113411708/202530243)

[6] [http://www.diyornot.com/Project.aspx?ndx2=10&Rcd=332](http://www.diyornot.com/Project.aspx?ndx2=10&Rcd=332)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This probably wouldn't do much to solve the homeless problem in NYC. In a neighborhood like the East Village or Williamsburg, I could see it being rented for $1,000/month.

</comment><comment><USER23> I was hoping there would be some pictures of the interior.

</comment><comment><USER24> When I hear homeless ... I always think of Carlin - they are not homeless, they are houseless. People need cheap affordable housing - that's it.

<comment><USER25> > People need cheap affordable housing

That's not going to get rid of homelessness. People with severe and enduring mental illness, or addiction, might need support to stay in their cheap affordable housing.

<comment><USER26> That ship sailed, badly. Democrats don't like mental institutions (evil, scary, and corrupt) and Republicans don't like in community projects (bringing the insane to our homes), so both solutions got trampled. To be fair, both sides have their points, but the problem is a spectrum. We really do need top flight institutions that are safe, healthy, clean, and well monitored. We also really need community outreach and assisted living. Our current policy of drugging people to the key of G is not really solving the problem (looking at you VA).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The only solution to homelessness is to abolish the class structure that is fundamental to capitalism. Our current model of private ownership has encouraged the ruling class to grab enormous amounts of land, because of it's speculative value on the realestate market. Look at a place like New York, homelessness has in recent years reached the highest levels since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Still plenty of aparments are empty _. Does this seem rational to anyone?

_ [http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/07/nyregion/more- apartments-a...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/07/nyregion/more-apartments- are-empty-yet-rented-or-owned-census-finds.html)</comment>


The space matters - <AUTHOR> http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/02/the-space-matters.html <comment><USER2> Totally agree. The place where you work is important, everything has his part - the light, the smell, the way you've arranged the furniture.

I hate the concept of workspace without windows, unfortunately this seems to be the norm in North America, at least here in Canada this is what we usually get.</comment>


Ask HN: How does a service like CloudFlare work? - <AUTHOR> So I am curious as to how a service like CloudFlare works?
So it seems like:
1. You have to change your DNS.
2. The traffic intended for your site now funnels through CloudFlare servers
3. They then direct the traffic to your hardware/where your site lives.
But they advertise things like increasing availability, protection, distributed content, etc.
How is this working? <comment><USER2> You just answered your own question, it works just the way you explained.

Are you asking how is the benefit created? Speed of light latency is a real issue. A metro area round trip is a few milliseconds, a coast to coast packet round trip is 75 to 100ms, and across continents can be 400ms. It takes many many round trips to serve a web page.

If they have servers located all over the globe, those servers can cache all the static elements on your pages (most of the elements like gifs and CSS) and serve those very quickly to end users, while only the dynamic components need to come down the long path from your server

Further, they can tweak window sizes when they fetch the dynamic elements from your server and therefore use fewer of the slow round trips when fetching those elements.

<comment><AUTHOR> can you explain a bit about caching of the static items around the globe?

So a user in France tries to hit my site they get to CloudFlare.

CloudFlare says here is part of the site to serve.

The dynamic elements then get passed through to my server for what needs to be displayed.

So do they then have a virtual host type setup for my domain (and all of their customers) so they then answer on it and run something like Varnish Cache?

<comment><USER2> The way it probably works is that they have servers around the world, and either use a geographic DNS or IP anycast.

So the user in France contacts their nearest server and requsts the url for the resource. If the file has already been cached there at that server, they serve it. Otherwise, that server requests it from your origin server, and serves it that end user in France.

They wouldnt set up any specific virtual host for you. They just have an http server that receives all the requests, and dispatches internally based on the domain name in the url.

I get the impression that I'm going into more detail than you want.

What is it that you're concerned about?

<comment><AUTHOR> No this is the details I really want. I really like to understand technically what is going on before I use a service. So far Cloud Flare has not returned my requests for a "Sales" talk. I am just not going to turn over my NPO stuff to them without understanding!

Can you explain how they would dispatch the traffic internally without a Virtual host? a rewrite rule, perhaps?

How do they get my static content? Do they just wget or curl it? Do I provide it? I assume it has expiration so if I change my CSS users dont get served the old stuff for very long?

We could e-mail privately if you dont mind too. My e-mail is in my profile.

<comment><USER2> I suggest learning about HTTP and DNS first. The easiest starting point might be to install firebug so that you can see what's really happening between a browser and a web server.

In short, when the server receives the raw request, the targeted domain name and path are included in the headers. With that raw request its pretty easy to do whatever they need.

Honestly, I dont really know what virtual hosts or rewrite rules are. These sound like specific features of web frameworks rather than anything inherent about the internet.

Feel free to ask me questions by email. Also don't be afraid to say if you want to implement something similar. It isn't hard to do.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Oatmeal Fights Legal Threat, Raises $20,000 in an Hour - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2012/06/11/the-oatmeal-funnyjunk/ <comment><USER3> Matt Iman (guy behind TheOatmeal), was co-founder & original CTO of SEOMoz and left after his side project (Mingle2) blew up in popularity and was acquired.

He mentions in his departing SEOMoz blog post that the company that acquired Mingle2 wanted "to leverage my viral marketing and linkbait abilities" - <USER2> in 2007.

Fun to look at this through understanding that he's a SEO guru and viral- marketing genius.

Perfect David vs. Goliath headline, tons raised for charity so he comes out looking flawless, 3220 new inbound links for theoatmeal, etc.

Wow.

via <http://www.seomoz.org/blog/my-departure-from-seomoz>

[https://www.google.com/search?sugexp=chrome,mod=15&sourc...](https://www.google.com/search?sugexp=chrome,mod=15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=theoatmeal+#q=theoatmeal&hl=en&safe=off&tbo=1&output=search&source=lnt&tbs=qdr:d&sa=X&ei=babWT7neCIOw2wWMmcy0Dw&ved=0CAUQpwUoAg&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=c302becae0d93110&biw=1163&bih=593)

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure I'm seeing any issue here. OK, so he was good at SEO. The fact is that he has always been very happy to have his comics republished, so long as they link back to the original site. Can't be fairer than that.

Funnyjunk didn't do that. However, he didn't take legal action. He wrote a blog, and exercized his right to free expression. Nothing about the blog was factually incorrect. The links are dead because the images have been taken down.

To be honest, he _does_ come out looking flawless! If someone can point out what he's done wrong, I'm very curious. Certainly the letter he recieved from the lawyer is absurd... Starting from the top:

1\. "FunnyJunk, LLC. ("FunnyJunk"), a competitor of TheOatmeal.com in the field of online humor". Where can you go with this? TheOatmeal isn't competing with them.

2\. He took an old blog post from last year, then stated that the screenshot was "taken long ago". As is pointed out in the annotated letter, this means nothing.

3\. Google cache shows that they had hundreds of images, many of them with the attribution removed.

... more points, but is it necessary?

<comment><USER5> Funnyjunk appears to be a comedy site with no sense of humour. Next thing you know someone might start a rolling TV news channel with no knowledge of current affairs, named after some kind of wild dog, and then where would we be? Although, to be fair, that could never happen, as nobody would be stupid enough to watch it.

<comment><USER6> To be pedantic, it is not named for a wild dog. Wild dogs would be of the _Canis_ genus, specifically _C. lupus_.

<comment><USER7> I got the impression he meant CNN? Pronouncing CNN as C(a)n(i)n(e)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Having a rival is pure press (and SEO) mastery. Seriously.

It reminds me of the genius rap rivalries of the 90s and 00s which left both rivals better off in every way (press, album sales, fame). <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hip_hop_rivalry>

<comment><USER9> > which left both rivals better off in every way

yeah, tupac is rolling in money right now

<comment><USER10> his estate is

<comment><USER11> sorta beside the point. the whole "being dead" part sort of precludes him from spending any of that rap beef money.

<comment><USER12> > One is reminded of what Big Mama Thornton once said about Elvis Presley. Big > Mama had created the song "Hound Dog" and earned $50, but Elvis got the hit > and countless millions. Asked how she felt about that, Big Mama replied, > "Honey, I'm still here to spend my fifty dollars!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder if you can complain to the bar. Seems like a number of lawyers have taken up the "shakedown" model and been penalized for it. You should be able to complain to. The bar that this lawyer reflects badly on the profession for not doing his research.

<comment><USER14> One thing which I remember seeing once was that Lawyer A had emailed site B with some threat of a lawsuit, and B's lawyer immediately filed in court for a declaration that A's threat was frivolous and harrassing, so that B should get some sort of automatic damages if A ever sends another communication on the same topic again.

I wasn't sure what legal principles were involved, or whether that declaration was granted, but the whole idea was pretty kickass; "this is so obviously something which you can't sue me for that I'm going to have a court shove that fact up your rear end."

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Mirror of The Oatmeal's post (annotated letter from the lawyer), since the site is down or slow right now:

[http://rorr.im/reddit.com/r/funny/comments/uwp0d/8d937aaedad...](http://rorr.im/reddit.com/r/funny/comments/uwp0d/8d937aaedad38e133310e4672a0c4291.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> I'd love to take that $20-40k and put it towards a company that does nothing but monitor websites like Funny Junk and issue takedown notices on the behalf of the content owners.

Companies like this probably exist, but I'm sure they don't come cheap and are used primarily by the big players (eg music labels, movie studios).

I think it is great that Matt is donating the money to charity. However, the idea of putting the money towards some kind of community focused content monitor struck me as an interesting alternative.

I also wonder to what degree something like this could be automated. I know sites like YouTube monitor their own content, but what if Matt could upload all his images, verify his ownership in a legally meaningful way, and then automatically monitor Funny Junk and issue takedown notices in real time.

<comment><USER17> Consider the offsetting financial incentives here.

Sites like FunnyJunk can be created by a small team, allow the upload of a ton of copyrighted content by users, and then run ads next to copyrighted content. Boom, instant money, and if they do well, maybe an acquisition (see: YouTube). All they have to do is keep up with DMCA takedowns, which are few and far between from small content producers like The Oatmeal.

Meanwhile, if you want to build a company to automate content protection, you have to go find deep-pocketed content creators from day one. I don't know of any way to run ads against the _creation_ of DMCA takedowns.

So the financial incentives are totally asymmetric. It's way easier and more lucrative to create a platform for infringing content, than for protecting it. Until that changes, small creators like The Oatmeal will get victimized.

<comment><USER18> If this changes small creators like The Oatmeal won't stand a chance. He bootstrapped the success of his website in large part through Reddit, which is of course a commercial site based around user-submitted content that allows and profits from a ton of copyright infringement. Stopping people from infringing your copyright is no good if no-one ever finds out about your content.

Obviously this doesn't matter to The Oatmeal anymore - everyone's heard of The Oatmeal by now, and preventing competitors from becoming well-known is probably good for profits - but it's not great for the internet in general. Probably wouldn't be good for YCombinator either.

<comment><USER17> I don't think you've thought this through.

The difference between Reddit and FunnyJunk is that FunnyJunk actually hosts the image files on the FunnyJunk server, keeping visitors there.

Reddit does not host anything but text--when you post an "image" to Reddit, you're really just posting a link. This drives the traffic to The Oatmeal (or whoever), who can then monetize it.

Reddit is an example of a web startup doing it right. They drive tons of traffic around the web. Techmeme is another, and so is Hacker News.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> For a guy with 90s clip-art on his letterhead, he's had more experience than I expected <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Carreon>

<comment><USER20> Having 90s clip-art on your letterhead means you've been at it since the 90s. :-D

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The legal herd definitely is in need of thinning. (I mean, career changes, of course -- to flipping Kodiak burgers.)

I'm glad parody and appropriately sharp (in more than one way) commentary have not been wiped off the Internet, yet. Hopefully, not ever.

</comment><comment><USER22> Is there any chance that FunnyJunk has played the Oatmeal for promotional purposes here?

<comment><USER23> There's always a chance, but if so they're very poor marketers. This is the modern world - there IS such a thing as bad publicity. They just got a mountain of it, and The Oatmeal came out smelling like roses.

And raised what, $40k for charity in a few hours?

<comment><USER24> No. $50k.

AND RISING.

<comment><USER25> $60k :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Ironically The Oatmeal is down. Presumably because so many people want to give him money that they've DDOSed his website.

</comment><comment><USER27> My guess is FJ and Oatmeal are both getting massive traffic thanks to this little battle.

</comment><comment><USER28> Pot meet kettle

<http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones>

<comment><USER29> Looking for legal options ... getting duped by iTunes descriptions ... forced to look for pirate options.

Hosting somebody else's images without arbitration. Then fall to name-calling when the owner asks for them to be taken down.

I fail to see the connection here. Care to explain?

<comment><USER28> Theft is theft is theft.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> They can't be serious with this legal "threat". They don't have a leg to stand on.

<comment><USER30> The guy is a lawyer and seems to think that they do.

If you read his letter it's very specific, he's not saying that the material isn't there, he's taking issue with the suggestion that funnyjunk is willfully violating the Oatmeal's copyright (as opposed to just not responding fast enough in pulling it down). That's the complaint - the suggestion that it's intentional.

Just because you've been wronged, it doesn't give you carte blanc to say what you want about the person doing it. You're safest sticking to the absolute barest facts with no editorialising or commentary.

I have no problem in seeing that there might be a valid case here. I don't like it and it sucks, but in the eyes of the law there might be something.

(Obviously all this ignores the possibility that he's just rattling the cage and seeing if there's $20,000 of easy money there based on Inman running scared. It might be significant that neither the requests being made in terms of removing the material nor the amount (compared to potential legal fees in fighting the case) are that onerous).

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> FunnyJunk is apparently responding quietly on their site, as just searching for the word 'oatmeal' results in no search results (that wasn't the case when this blog post went up). According to people I know that use the site, you cannot add comments with the word 'oatmeal', either. They also deleted every single linked image he exhaustively listed.

I have a hard time resolving litigation like this with the fact that the truth can change in minutes, as Web sites are fairly easy to edit. It's just scary.

<comment><USER32> How does this bode in the terms of destroying evidence? Is there any legal ramifications of doing this after you've engaged in legal action?

<comment><USER15> The alleged libel is based, in part, upon Funnyjunk's claim that they are acting legally within the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA by only hosting UGC and taking it down upon notice of infringement.

The Oatmeal's response to the claim included a list of content infringing his copyright. Funnyjunk is going to want to remove that content to retain its safe harbor from liability for the infringement. It may or may not be a properly worded notice under the DMCA, but a lot of notices UGC hosts get aren't, and they still take down the content -- because the intent of the parties and whether they acted in good faith matters when it's time to face a judge.

That the pages are no longer accessible does not mean the evidence has been destroyed, either. The DMCA requires only that you "block access to" the content, not physically remove it from a server.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Y'see, this is why The Oatmeal guy is a comic genius. He understands that while

 _"drawing of your mom seducing a bear"_

is funny,

 _"drawing of your mom seducing a kodiak bear"_

is hilarious.

<comment><USER34> He's not a comic genius, he's a marketing genius. His comics are actually quite banal; everyone hates their printers, a list of reasons why makes us feel good but isn't actually funny.

<comment><USER35> um. i guess you have not read "Why Captain Higgins is my favorite parasitic worm"

<http://theoatmeal.com/comics/captain_higgins>

Still think its banal and not funny? does everyone hate parasites that can turn ants into zombies?

<comment><USER36> I'm sure 15 year old girls talk about zombie-creating parasites all the time. _Everyone_ is bored of it ;)

<comment><USER37> The zombie thing is very cultural and limited in time, it may not be funny after the fashion is gone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> While this is a great story likely to go down in Internet history, it seems a risky strategy. Sure he raised $20k but seems like this will just fuel the fire of the FunnyJunk lawyers. There have been more trivial legal cases than this one - that could go on for a long time.

<comment><USER39> The total is now $57K with 15 days left. Matthew is in the position of being able to use the internet as a money spigot if FunnyJunk really wants to escalate.

<comment><USER40> That kind of money isn't consistent, though - raising that much money from one case where people clearly want to side with him, even if he _wasn't_ donating the money to two charities, is much easier than doing it every week to pay off legal expenses.

<comment><USER41> I don't you have an understanding of how deep his fanbase is ... he raised that money in one day ... seriously think about that for a second.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I'm surprised that people haven't started contacting funnyjunk and telling them how much of a tool they are.

Here are some good links, if you are want to do more.

<http://www.funnyjunk.com/contact/>

<http://www.funnyjunk.com/abuse/>

<http://www.funnyjunk.com/copyright/>

<comment><USER43> Why prolong the conflict? The Oatmeal wants to move past all this. Emailing FJ is just going to cause them to be agitated and therefore continue to pursue their action, prolonging the headache. It might even be counterproductive if they can use the mass of emails as "proof" that their reputation has been damaged.

Let's not take a funny/clever retort by TheOatmeal and ruin it by being jackasses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Although the lawsuit is bullshit, I would probably be really happy if the oatmeal were to get sued out of existence.

I try to stay away from it as much as possible, but of the handful of things I've seen there, they were all trollish and entirely incorrect.

The site is just more Internet scum and it going away would probably be for the best.

<comment><USER45> Unresolved anger issues much? Hint: the internet is big. If you don't like something, ignore it.

<comment><USER46> A Thomas Edison fan enraged? Maybe this is how it manifests?</comment></comment></comment>


React Static Boilerplate Helps Building SPAs with React, Redux and Firebase - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kriasoft/react-static-boilerplate <comment><AUTHOR> The goal of this project is to provide a simple yet powerful template and tooling for building React-based web apps optimized for CDN hosting in Firebase. This boilerplate is built around modern front-end dev tools such as Babel, Webpack, Hot Module Replacement (HMR), React Hot Loader, CSS Modules, featuring component-based UI architecture with code splitting and async chunk loading.</comment>


ATL startup aims to be LinkedIn for sports - <AUTHOR> http://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/blog/atlantech/2011/06/atl-startup-aims-to-be-linkedin-for.html

<comment><USER2> They are an ATDC company with 2 co-founders and Eckoff.</comment>


Google launches Person Finder to Help Japan Victims - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologydrive.info/2011/03/google-released-person-finder-service.html

<comment><USER2> (RE)launches.

iirc, this was done for Hurricane Katrina and also the 2004 Tsunami in the Indian Ocean.</comment>


Google is giving up some control of the AMP format - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/18/17871666/google-amp-open-source-committee-governance-instant-article <comment><USER2> Blogspam (and also from Vox media, who you may not wish to give advertising dollars to).

Original source:

[https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2018/09/18/governance/](https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2018/09/18/governance/)

HN discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18017224](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18017224)

</comment><comment><USER3> Don't fall for it. This is centralization of the internet, no matter how they claim decisions will be made. Google is doing this not for some benevolent idea of the mobile web "experience," but to try to control traffic and advertising revenue. That's their business. It's a return to portals and walled gardens of old. This is Compuserve reincarnated. This is AOL. Kill it with fire.

<comment><USER4> Even if someone were to believe AMP is a walled garden, so what? You spend so many words expressing your passion that controlling ad revenue is bad, but why is it bad? Who cares?

Facebook is the biggest walled garden out there, but you never see this passion against Facebook ads. It's only AMP. I don't think this has anything to do with walled gardens. I think it's just generic hate against Google. Google has plenty of things to be upset at, but I don't really buy AMP being the most evil thing in the world.

<comment><USER3> You've ascribed a position to me regarding Facebook ads which I haven't expressed, alongside pretty obvious whataboutism. First you say you don't think it's a big deal, but then say Facebook is just as bad or worse. I think it's a big deal in both cases and think they're both attacks on the internet. The posted (now removed) link was about Google AMP, so I'm obviously responding to the posted article, not other topics.

Edit: Also, thanks a lot to the mod who didn't merge the threads.</comment></comment></comment>


EBay Patents 10-Click Checkout - <AUTHOR> http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2011/07/ebay-patents-10-click-checkout.html <comment><USER2> " _The newly-patented buying system guides users through an intuitive, step- by-step process of clicking 'Buy It Now', entering your password, logging in because they signed your sorry ass out again, getting upsold shit you don't want, continuing to your original destination_ "

If that _were_ a real patent, GoDaddy would owe Ebay millions.

<comment><USER3> And monster.com.

<comment><USER4> and VistaPrint.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What I find most depressing is that you hear such moronic examples of patents that on reading this title a tiny part of me was thinking "well.. maybe..".

Not sure if that says more about the patents system or my awakeness, I hope the former.

<comment><USER6> I was hoping they really did it just to show how rediculous the patent situation has gotten.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Yeah, but what if someone comes up with a 9-click checkout?

<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0129387/quotes?qt=qt0410938>

<comment><USER8> With an IMDB reference, this could go the other way.

"Our checkout process goes to eleven!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Oh he's so good. I hope he's back.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ebay is frustrating. They haven't changed the functionality or even the fit and finish of their site substantially for about a decade. They're still the de facto leader in online auctions but I feel as if they're slowly being bled by a lot of more specialized sites (amazon, craigslist, etsy, etc.)

<comment><USER10> Actually eBay have made changes through the years - it is just that all of them are bad. The move to favour large corporate sellers, and to only give feedback as a buyer completely broke the "swap meet" feel that eBay had. Buying and selling on eBay is just not fun anymore.

The problem is that there is no real online replacement - the auction space is hard to disrupt because in auctions the largest marketplace is, at face value, the best marketplace.

I know I have gotten to the stage where I will Freecycle something before I sell it on eBay, and from reading the forums out there, I am not the only one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Fantastic! I used to do lot via the eBay platform as a "Power Seller", and I always thought they were a most bizarre company: one part incredibly innovative, one part money-grabbing corporate and one (big) part terrible UI/UX designers. Glad to hear nothing has changed....

<comment><USER12> > _one (big) part terrible UI/UX designers_

I had always assumed that eBay couldn't/wouldn't change their UI because their users are not techies and would be more confused by change than the terrible UI they've already learned. Users have learned _how_ to do what they want, even if they don't understand _why_.

For example, my parents know that to watch DVDs, they need to press button X on remote #1 and then button Y on remote #2. They just don't know _why_.

<comment><USER13> A bit like MYOB, for anyone who's been unfortunate enough to have used that program.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I bid on something on Ebay for the first time in years this week and although I didn't win and make it to the infuriating checkout process, I was still amazed at how frequently I had resupply my user name and password. When you go back to a site like Ebay you realize how far some other parts of the web have come in promoting user-friendliness and how much some sites are being left behind.

<comment><USER15> It must be kept in mind that some parts of the web are subject to much more fraud than other parts.

<comment><USER16> But I actually think it's the volume by which eBay asks for your username and password, that opens them up to fraud.

It should be a security gateway that prompts the user to get ready for some secure transactions. But it is asked for so many times that it becomes an afterthought, "Oh, eBay is asking for my password again." It asks when you want to view My eBay. It asks when you want to save an item for later. It asks when you place a bid. It asks again when you check out after winning.

Then you get a phishing email, you click a link, it asks for your password. Users give it up without a second thought because they're so used to providing it.

Conversely, Amazon, another site which is very good at separating you from your money, only asks when money is on the line. I can add to Wish Lists without logging in again. I can rate things without logging in again. I can write reviews without logging in again. The only time Amazon asks for my password is when I'm placing an order, or making changes under My Account. And they even have an express lane setup for making orders with PayPhrase, that doesn't ask for my login again, just a PIN.

<comment><USER17> On eBay, a bid is considered a contract to purchase, so it's probably a good idea to verify your identity before bidding.

<comment><USER16> As they should.

But not when I just want to watch an item, or see the items I'm watching.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Man, this space is ripe for disruption.

<comment><USER19> You can see this is happening through self-organizing communities on Facebook and other social networks. Search for the "for sale or swap in ..." Facebook groups and you'll see people engaging in a much more social and local based bartering system. Extrapolating from the single data point of my wife's experience, it's much quicker and easier than eBay to buy and sell stuff locally.

<comment><USER20> That's a craiglists disruption, not eBay.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I honestly couldn't tell if this was satire or real for a while. It looks like satire, smells like it, tastes like it but it really isn't. EDIT: It really is satire. Some damn good satire, had me fooled.

<comment><USER22> "..its collections and incarceration arm PayPal.." didn't give it away?

<comment><USER23> I've had money both forcefully collected and incarcerated by paypal. Seems reasonable to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Has anyone tried to patent the 1-touch checkout for touchscreen devices?

</comment><comment><USER25> For a minute there I though this was going to be a real attempt at challenging amazon's 1-click buying patent by patenting the non-1-click approach. This was funnier though.

</comment><comment><USER26> End patents.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'd much rather use Amazon's 1 click instead.

One click and the item is at my house the next day.

<comment><USER28> This is one of the least interesting comments I have ever read. Please explain your thought process for future generations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> When I saw this in my RSS feed, I thought it was spam, the text being so strange.

<comment><AUTHOR> His last three posts have been satire. I'm hoping he gets back to content as good as [http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/10/universal-design- pat...](http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/10/universal-design- pattern.html).

<comment><USER30> Dead link

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> ... ?

</comment><comment><USER32> Didn't amazon did something similar? All of this patents are so closely linked if someone sues, it will start a war..

Look at the Apple vs HTC case..</comment>


Ask HN: How do you go about finding charitable causes to contribute to? - <AUTHOR> I would like to allocate a portion of my time to charitable causes but I'm not sure where to start. Ideally, I would leverage my skills as a programmer to help a good cause and the work would be interesting. <comment><USER2> First You are Awesome for wanting to help out!

Second I'll let you know that this is actually incredibly difficult. Generally speaking NPO (503Cs)aren't set up for technical volunteering. so you will have to search a little. They generally default to paying consultants mainly due to just a complete lack of familiarity.

Here's a couple of strategies:

\- find a charity that you are interested in volunteering to. Charity Navigator keeps tabs on them and you can find a charity that fits what you are looking for. Email them and hopefully they will contact you about helping.

\- Reach out to whatever University is in the area. The computer science department will often get requests for help with pro-bono projects... they can probably put you in touch with the right person/ project.

\- [https://www.donatecode.com/](https://www.donatecode.com/)

\- Open source! Don't forget about open source projects. they need love too

\- Organize Charity hackathons and get people together (Here's one we ran that was enjoyably successful: [https://www.meetup.com/IPAs-and- APIs/events/249340851/](https://www.meetup.com/IPAs-and- APIs/events/249340851/))

and lastly if you want to give us a hand we'd love some help ([https://github.com/jppope/academic- intervention](https://github.com/jppope/academic-intervention) ). We're working on a project to help reproducibility and open access in science. We work on the project every Thursday night after work. We have a couple of PhD candidates advising and a small team of coders working on the build.

Hopefully these suggestions help! I've had similar problems trying to give my time and technical skills away for a good cause, so I feel your challenge.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much! This is great advice and I'm excited to look into the links you posted. Appreciate you taking the time :-).</comment></comment>


Truly immutable builds - <AUTHOR> https://blog.frankel.ch/truly-immutable-builds/#gsc.tab=0 <comment><USER2> I believe "reproducible build" is a more appropriate term.

Unfortunately its quite difficult to get a fully reproducible build with Maven as the post points out. Even if you manage to replicate the build environment and settings, Maven produced binaries will be slightly different on each run. File timestamps are saved in jar files so they change on every build.

</comment><comment><USER3> FYI, the typical phrase here is "hermetic" (sealed, air-tight).

Several build systems stress this aspect, include Google's Bazel, in beta.

</comment><comment><USER4> Missing: all of the other software on the host (including maven) and the OS itself.

<comment><USER5> Yes, maybe it doesn't apply to Java but I've been unable to setup projects on a new machine because library versions changed, external programs became hard to build themselves, some sw is impossible to find anymore (I remember a customer with a prehistoric MySQL, we had to find the oldest available bug compatible version and hope - they had no tests), etc.

A Vagrantfile or a Dockerfile are not enough. You need the actual images.

<comment><USER6> Or in your docker file you specify versions of things to install, check in repos to use, etc etc.

It's versions all the way down

<comment><USER7> You're assuming that all those repos are still around 5 years later.

<comment><USER8> They are if you mirror the Docker registry. We use Sonatype Nexus and get the added benefit of having our own private Docker, NPM, Maven, etc. repositories on top of automatically caching dependencies we use.

So now we don't have to worry about them disappearing AND we don't have to leave the network to get them... assuming we don't screw up our server.

<comment><USER5> We own our registry. That's why we have the images for one project. We install from there.

What we don't do yet is storing a pristine a VirtualBox image for another project. We should start doing that because sometimes building those images requires a surprising amount of work. Bitrot, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Truly immutable" story: at Cygnus we had a phone switch company (DSC) as a customer. They paid us a LOT of money to support a frozen version of the tools (gcc etc). When they found a compiler bug and asked for a fix they would then diff the binaries and use the debugging data to make sure that every delta in the binary was solely a result of the lines of code in the bug fix.

They were so hard core about immutability: they had an old code base (Z800? I can no longer remember) that they didn't want to migrate away from even though the hardware was no longer available, so they build an emulator and ran the old code on that on their newer, PPC-based hardware. Newer code ran natively on the PPC).

Their concern: they had SLAs with their customers (not SAAS customers, customers who bought the hardware) of no more than two minutes of downtime per decade.

Never heard of DSC? Yes, famously their hardware brought part of AT&T's network down for 10 hours or so in the late 90s or early 00s. That was the end of DSC.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm not too convinced by this trend of hiding complexity - in this case we should expose the complexity and KISS instead? What good is an immutable/hermetic build going to do if it's broken and you don't know here or how?

</comment><comment><USER11> Just out of curiosity as I've never personally experienced any bugs of the sort, but what is an example of a really nasty bug that someone has experienced that this sort of thing prevents?

<comment><USER12> Inherited project running in production, sources in git did not build. Project depended on packages which were present when it was built, but never added to package.json. Code in production was minified. Had to track down a ton of missing npm dependencies.

Another example is someone depends on a library, then that library's author deletes it.

This is why it may be worth committing your dependency's sources, despite "best practices" dictating otherwise. When someone needs to add a feature 10yrs from now and they only have an incomplete package.json & a copy of minified code, they're in for a world of hell.

I even had to recover a project which built non deterministically. Sometimes it would build, sometimes it would error. Running the build several times, it would eventually succeed. The project's author had written their build system against an unstable version of Webpack & Typescript, before they were popular (both of which are now perfectly stable).

<comment><USER13> > This is why it may be worth committing your dependency's sources, despite > "best practices" dictating otherwise

I think you may have misunderstood the best practice here. That best practice is you shouldn't just copy the dep code into your repo. The maintenance/release best practice however is that you should always have a copy of all your dependencies available locally and permanently store them. They're two completely separate rules.

<comment><USER12> So are you saying you store them, but not in your version control? What do you mean, like backups of production? What about when production only contains minified / compiled artifacts from the build? Where should I be storing my dependencies? Got any articles to share that elaborate? Or links to open source projects on GitHub that employ the "best practice"? Everyone seems to be just committing bower.json package.json composer.json etc.. & calling it a day.

<comment><USER13> Basically don't rely on the external sources. Keep your own repository with the packages you need. Whether that's controlled with git, backups, prepared S3 bucket or other ways is less relevant.

The reason stuffing the dependencies with the normal source is bad is you have a huge repo after a while, where most of the size comes from old dep versions you're unlikely to ever use. (But have to clone anyway)

<comment><USER12> I guess it's a tradeoff. A bloated history sucks for sure. So does maintaining brittle legacy code that has to change often. It's a tradeoff between a bloated repo and being able to easily bisect issues from arbitrary points in the projects history. I was hoping you knew of some tool that maintains the dependencies separately while correlating them with specific commits in the main repo. It's nice being able to just checkout arbitrary commits and have it just work. In one project there was dozens of package.json files. I committed the node_modules as a short term hack to get a one step build. It makes git very slow but it was worth the tradeoff for this particular project. Another issue is node gyp since its platform specific, you don't want to be committing mac specific stuff when some team members use Linux. Managing dependencies can really suck sometimes. Another consideration is deployment. In my experience deploying using Capistrano and git is often faster than rsyncing a bunch of files or copying from s3 or wherever. My conclusion for this project is yes it sucks that our repo is now bloated. But maybe that should suck. Maybe it makes us more cognizant of our dependency issues. Maybe having tons of deps should cause you pain, as motivation to more carefully consider your dependencies</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Students get class-wide As by boycotting test, "solving Prisoner's Dilemma" - <AUTHOR> http://boingboing.net/2013/02/19/students-get-class-wide-as-by.html

<comment><USER2> Actually I don't think it passes as an instance of Prisoner's Dilemma". Post clearly says "The students waited outside the rooms to make sure that others honored the boycott, and were poised to go in if someone had." It would be, if they couldn't control each other - for example they could have been made to give non-blank sheet of paper after exam.

<comment><USER3> Also, there wasn't an incentive to defect, since they get maximum value by cooperating.

<comment><USER2> Absolutely, but not relatively. It's as-good-as-everyone vs better-than- everyone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoners_dilemma>

The prisoner's dilemma is a canonical example of a game analyzed in game theory that shows why two individuals might not cooperate, even if it appears that it is in their best interests to do so. It was originally framed by Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher working at RAND in 1950. Albert W. Tucker formalized the game with prison sentence rewards and gave it the name "prisoner's dilemma" (Poundstone, 1992), presenting it as follows:

Two members of a criminal gang are arrested and imprisoned. Each prisoner is in solitary confinement with no means of speaking to or exchanging messages with the other. The police admit they don't have enough evidence to convict the pair on the principal charge. They plan to sentence both to a year in prison on a lesser charge. Simultaneously, the police offer each prisoner a Faustian bargain. If he testifies against his partner, he will go free while the partner will get three years in prison on the main charge. Oh, yes, there is a catch ... If both prisoners testify against each other, both will be sentenced to two years in jail.

In this classic version of the game, collaboration is dominated by betrayal; if the other prisoner chooses to stay silent, then betraying them gives a better reward (no sentence instead of one year), and if the other prisoner chooses to betray then betraying them also gives a better reward (two years instead of three). Because betrayal always rewards more than cooperation, all purely rational self-interested prisoners would betray the other, and so the only possible outcome for two purely rational prisoners is for them both to betray each other. The interesting part of this result is that pursuing individual reward logically leads the prisoners to both betray, but they would get a better reward if they both cooperated. In reality, humans display a systematic bias towards cooperative behavior in this and similar games, much more so than predicted by simple models of "rational" self-interested action.[1][2][3][4]

</comment><comment><USER5> Previous HN discussion on this: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229076></comment>


The Biggest Saudi Oil Field Is Fading Faster Than Anyone Guessed - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-02/saudi-aramco-reveals-sharp-output-drop-at-super-giant-oil-field <comment><USER2> So 52 years worth of reserves assuming maximum capacity of 12mm barrels harvested a day. Now I am no mathematician but given a 1-2mm per day average and what will likely become a declining demand for oil over next 20-30 years, they have half a millennia worth of oil lying around. This well seems like a non issue to me.

<comment><USER3> 52 years is a blip in human civilization. I'd be curious to see how in the grand scheme the depletion of oil looks. Will our tech/development boom grind to a halt all of a sudden? Do we switch to nuclear?

<comment><USER4> I wouldn't be too concerned as renewables and nuclear technology should be at the point where it would be able to pick up the slack - we know the end is coming and we can prepare for it.

An interesting thought experiment is whether or not humans (or some future species) would be able to reproduce the technological advancements that oil enabled given some sort of apocalypse scenario that resets us to year zero.

<comment><USER5> Oil isn't somehow magical in any manner - everything that oil does today can be boiled down to supplying kinetic energy. We don't use its chemical properties in any special way, it just happens to be among the most efficient in terms of calories per kg. With advances in battery tech, and large-scale shift to renewables, I think running out of oil is largely a non-issue in the long run (of course we'll have pains in shifting, but there will not be any long term drawbacks)

<comment><USER6> The biggest issue is actually food - most of the seeds grown today are engineered to depend upon fossil-fuel based chemical fertilizers, and cannot actually survive on their own without both the chemical fertilizers and a large helping of herbicides/pesticides/fungicides (many of which are also produced by the chemical industry). Break that dependency and you have to undo the Green Revolution that multiplied agricultural output by 10x. Do _that_ and instead of the world's current food production being able to support a population of 9B if they were all willing to eat a vegetarian diet, you'd be looking at 900M, i.e. about 85% of people on earth would have to die.

I suspect that if you took away all the demand for oil from powering cars, though, there'd be plenty left at reasonable prices for growing food and maybe even flying planes. So you do need _some_ fossil fuel production, but get rid of its use in automobiles, heating, and electricity and the remaining reserves can be allocated much more efficiently.

<comment><USER7> Oil is not used in the production of fertilizers.

Here's a quote I found in [1]

"The macronutrients required by plants are N (Nitrogen), K (Potassium) and P (Phosphorus). Oil is hydrocarbon, made from H (Hydrogen) and C (Carbon). There are no plant nutrients in oil.

Nitrogen fertilizer (N) is made from ammonia, which in turn is manufactured from natural gas, not oil"

[1] [http://peakoildebunked.blogspot.com/2005/08/28-isnt- fertiliz...](http://peakoildebunked.blogspot.com/2005/08/28-isnt-fertilizer- made-from-crude-oil.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Less CO2 released into the atmosphere I guess?

I always wonder about news like this. Is it wrong to assume that the company knew about this years ago already and made the rational decision not to tell everyone until the last minute? And how long have they known?

<comment><USER9> When I started studying economics the most baffling thing I learned was that the total amount of Oil we had was increasing and not decreasing. That weird fact kind of made me learn the basic concepts better and I think I have learned not to read too much into these sort of news items. Journalist often lack this outlook.

The world is not going to run out of Oil ever. The world is more likely to run out of "need for oil" sooner than the oil running our scenario. A particular oil field is fading means really nothing because Saudi has far too many unproven oil fields which it has not even bothered to explore yet. Now that this field might be running out very soon they will explore that oil and soon their production will grow up. The capital investment of discovery would reflect in slightly higher oil prices may be.

Coming back to the CO2 emissions point you raised, even if the Oil in that Oil field goes to zero in 1 year, it wont matter. There will be more supply available soon enough. CO2 emissions will probably go down unrelated to Oil production as developed countries move to electric cars and better power plants fired by nuclear, solar and wind energy.

<comment><USER10> > The world is not going to run out of Oil ever

This is technically true but not really a great way to look at the issue. We will always have oil; it will just get progressively more difficult to extract it. The point where we "run out" is when it is no longer economical to extract it from whatever deposit it's in.

<comment><USER9> > The point where we "run out" is when it is no longer economical to extract > it from whatever deposit it's in.

It is actually getting easier and easier to extract oil an not difficult. Fracking is a great example. Earlier you needed thousands of wells working round the clock these days you only need an area as big as a football field to trap into a large reserve.

Your meta-point however is correct, it is not that Oil is going to run out but better options and cheaper options will come into existence. Also this probably will happen as a step change function and not something that can be extrapolated.

Very likely fusion cells, battery cells etc. would become ridiculously cheaper to the extent that many oil fields will stop being profitable and hence will be closed down. That will be the time where "oil runs out" and in general a great day for humanity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't get it.

The article states that the Ghawar is "the world's largest conventional oil field", and "can produce a lot less than almost anyone believed", and is in fact "able to pump a maximum of 3.8 million barrels a day -- well below the more than 5 million that had become conventional wisdom in the market"

The saudi "12 million b/d capacity" was known from before, I assume, so isn't the surprise that other fields make up a larger percentage than "guessed"?

Then how can it be "fading faster than almost anyone believed"?

And, isn't slower fading of their biggest reserve a good thing?

<comment><USER12> Maybe the issue is the production fading, rather than the reserves? Any amount of oil in the ground doesn't do much for you if you can only extract it very slowly.

<comment><USER13> Generally extracting oil slowly is a good thing, it increases the total amount you're able to pull out of the ground. Increasing immediate flow means having to do things like pumping water into the field to increase pressure, and getting an increasingly watered-down mixture back out. Things that involve a pretty huge increase in complexity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Good. The quicker it fades, the quicker the US can stop supporting this brutal, vile regime and its disgusting human rights practices and culture. Also, the more pressure there will be to switch to a non fossile fuel energy source. It can't happen quickly enough.

<comment><USER15> Well the US supports another vile regime and its disgusting human rights practices and culture, namely Israel. The U.S. House of Representatives passed a measure that would codify into law a $38 billion _aid package_ to Israel. Clearly the US is about many things but ethics and human rights are only fringe concerns, let's not pretend that Saudi Arabia is their only shady ally.

<comment><USER16> > Well the US supports another vile regime and its disgusting human rights > practices and culture, namely Israel.

This is an incredibly stupid thing to say

edit:

This seems to be your only comment ???

<comment><USER17> Why is it stupid to say Israel is guilty of human rights abuses?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Interesting to consider the politics of this.

On the one hand Saudi Arabia and others want to give the illusion of the wealth lasting for ever.

On the other hand, lower reserves would lead to higher prices, which is something they'd want to maximise.

<comment><USER19> No, they want to maximize the amount of money they get out of their oil, with money they get now being worth more than money they will get next year, with that being worth more than money they get a decade from now, etc.

Also, the house of Saud isn't playing only that game. They also want to stay in power. They're not universally popular in the region, so that means listening to their faraway supporters, who want to keep oil prices low.

<comment><USER18> I don't get what you're disagreeing with me about?

<comment><USER19> _"higher prices, which is something they 'd want to maximise."_

<comment><USER18> Yes... You maximise money, by maximising prices (for some value of maximise).

I'm not saying they should be aiming for $1 million / barrel. But clearly $60 is better than $50, assuming that doesn't lower volume.

We seem to agree on that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> So this is the bond prospectus that's replacing the planned float of Aramco?

Wasn't the plan basically to divest/diversify away from oil. This doesn't seem to be doing that, so what's the point?

</comment><comment><USER20> wow this is quite shocking! this means that we have reached peak oil quite possibly some time ago....OR for the cynical, the Saudi might be trying to pull a fast one by inflating the prices through scarcity...but that seems unlikely here.

What's more curious is that the US reported it as 5.7million barrels in 2004!

</comment><comment><USER21> so when the Saudi start realising their spigot of unlimited money is starting to run out, i wonder how they'll behave.

My bet is, invasion forces. I can hope though that they'll push for space industry

<comment><USER22> They might IPO their oil industry and diversify.

<comment><USER23> They are doing this, but using private investments. From solar to wave they're investing in energy, but also in lots of other investments.</comment></comment></comment>


Clearview AI. Facial recognition as used by US law enforcement - <AUTHOR> https://clearview.ai/ <comment><AUTHOR> More detailed from New York Times daily podcast: [https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the- daily/id1200361736...](https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the- daily/id1200361736?i=1000465143460)</comment>


Known Wikipedia Hoaxes - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_hoaxes_on_Wikipedia

<comment><USER2> Some of these are hilarious.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_hoaxes_on_Wik...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_hoaxes_on_Wikipedia/Parfact)</comment>


Microsoft's New Social Network, So.cl: It's Like Google+ For Wonks - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microsofts-new-social-network-socl-its-like-google-for-wonks.php <comment><USER2> Before people jump on the "M$ Sucks" Bandwagon, please read the About page [1] and note that this is a _Research Project_. It is not intended to be a competitor to Facebook, Twitter, and such, but an experiment as to how social search can be used to enhance learning and education.

[1] <http://www.so.cl/about/faq>

<comment><USER3> Perhaps, but you have to admit that it's a bit convenient to wrap oneself in the shroud of "research experiment" when launching a public-facing service or application. If the service takes off, MS can drop the "experiment" description. If it falls flat, they can rally behind it and claim plausible deniability over the fact that so.cl was ever truly in the social networking arms race.

It may indeed _be_ an experiment, or at least have begun in the lab. But consider that it's got the consumer-facing web presence of a full product/service rollout. There are plenty of ways to get a true experiment, or learning tool, widely disseminated without making it appear to be a full- fledged product launch. At our most charitable, we could probably describe the insistence on the experimental nature of so.cl as bet hedging.

[I say all this as just about the last person who wants to hop onto an anti-MS bandwagon. I bear no ill will toward Microsoft in general, or so.cl specifically. In fact, I wish them both the best of luck in this endeavor. I think the world could use more options in social networking.]

<comment><USER4> _Perhaps, but you have to admit that it's a bit convenient to wrap oneself in the shroud of "research experiment" when launching a public-facing service or application._

Sure. But I don't think it's that rare- Apple has wrapped Siri in a "beta" tag to basically excuse any and all failures of the product. Nothing wrong with that in and of itself, but making a beta product the key feature in a new product (and advertising on TV accordingly) seemed like a slightly dishonest move to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a beta product which is based on a joint piece of work that Microsoft did with New York University. NYU recently opened a campus in UAE and wanted to build a social network to facilitate collaboration across researchers from different campuses. More here: [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/news/features/socl-12151...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/news/features/socl-121511.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER6> This whole discussion, excluding a few posts, is a display of how HN is such a shitty place right now.

<comment><USER7> And you're not really helping. Perhaps if you'd posted an actually useful, thought-through comment, people would be inspired to follow the tone and standard you set forth.

Further, if you're going to to complain, please do it with arguments and maybe even solutions.

<comment><USER6> I agree.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The snarky article was so dismissive that it actively failed in its stated mission of we-try-it-out-so-you-don't-have-to. I was particularly put off by the way the author described video parties. "Facebook or Google+ could easily replicate it, if they wanted to." Well that's the entire Internet dismissed in one sentence.

</comment><comment><USER9> "But that doesn't change the fact that any social network launching in 2012 that isn't mobile-based, is most likely doomed to fail if it wants to reach a mainstream audience."

I disagree. If I were to make a social network now, I would still go web first.

</comment><comment><USER10> I like the idea of aggressive research by MS. I've been following quite a lot of their projects, and am kind of sad when most of them die a quiet, slow and painful death.

I still remember Singularity, which still sounds like a great idea. I'm pretty sure today we have the hardware to run things like that.

</comment><comment><USER11> This actually seems quite useful to me. You can curate your search result, and when you search you get search result others curated if that is available.

</comment><comment><USER12> Their copywriters didn't allow then to write _lolcats_ so they said _cute cats_ instead?

I would cite the text, but it's not copy&paste-able because Microsoft: [http://az94986.vo.msecnd.net/2.0/ftux/content/slide-1.png?_=...](http://az94986.vo.msecnd.net/2.0/ftux/content/slide-1.png?_=1.0.4520.24851)

<comment><USER13> It's possible they're not talking about lolcats but instead about the Reddit habit of up-voting pictures of cute cats (and other animals), calling them "karma magnets", and so on... see for example <http://www.reddit.com/r/aww>

<comment><USER12> I stand corrected.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think developers forgot to get rid of all the javascript alerts from home page

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm surprised they didn't call it Microsoft+. Wow, just when you thought Microsoft were heading in the right direction and climbing back to the top of the ladder, they go and build a social network nobody will use.

<comment><USER16> I thought the same until I saw that it was a research product/experiment. I think that makes it interesting and harmless rather than sad and misguided.

<comment><USER15> All Google products are released as experiments as well. It's just another buzzword oriented way of launching products and invalidating any negative or positive criticism of said product. Experiment = Beta.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> what's next, microsoft's google wave clone?

<comment><USER18> From what I read, it partly _is_ a google wave clone...

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> hahahahahaha

</comment><comment><USER20> What is this about?

I mean seriously you need a Facebook account to long into this? To do what? Discover information you easily can on Facebook?

Doesn't that sort of totally defeat the purpose of this? And don't tell me about 'sharing information'. Because twitter solves this problem already by letting you follow people you are interested in.

I'm on Facebook because most of my friends and family share pictures, stories and jokes online on Facebook. And not being on Facebook means missing out on many things. I am on Facebook because everybody else is on Facebook.

Please don't invite people to Ghost towns, to do what you are already doing else where.

If this is radically different idea, its a different story. But a "me too" social network is the last thing I need now.

<comment><USER2> > What is this about?

A research project from MSR, not a competitor to Twitter, Facebook et al. How the press seems to have ignored this is beyond me.

<comment><USER21> Either they overlooked it, like many people here seem to have done, or they realised that a story on how Microsoft is in a fight to the death with Google and Facebook is much more interesting and much more likely to draw tons of readers than a description of a fairly harmless Microsoft research project.

Even if it's not true.</comment></comment></comment>


A Comprehensive Overview of Windows 8 Metro App Development - <AUTHOR> http://ashfurrow.com/2011/12/overview-of-metro-apps/

<comment><USER2> > _Microsoft's Push Notification Service (WNS) is a HTTP-based, which is > awesome. Apple introduce a TCP-based approach to push notifications that > basically requires you to write a dedicated sever (again, somehow, Apple > didn't specify how to do) to send your push notifications through their > APNS. No one rolls their own APNS server because it's too hard and there's > Urban Airship._

This is ostensibly a professional engineer, and this position drives me bonkers ("not HTTP, too hard")!

Apple provided protocol documentation and a very, very simple TCP+SSL protocol. Rolling your own client should be a matter of a day or two of work, at the absolute maximum.

Apple even provides sample code: [http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Networ...](http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/NetworkingInternet/Conceptual/RemoteNotificationsPG/CommunicatingWIthAPS/CommunicatingWIthAPS.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40008194-CH101-SW1)

The fact that people are frightened of TCP and a simple binary protocol is a mind-boggling indictment of the ineptitude and inexperience of the engineers that have been placed in a position of responsibility.

I dealt with a server team recently that refused to consider a push-based feature because it would "cost too much to send that many pushes through Urban Airship". Implementing their own local client for the protocol never occurred to them, and our doing so for them dismissed out of hand ("too complicated").

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm aware of Apple's sample code, I attended the WWDC talk on integrating Push Notifications. I'm just not aware of many Ruby developers interested in taking Apple's C example and implementing it in Ruby.

HTTP POST is simpler for the developer. TCP is better for Apple. Apple has the resources to scale, so "TCP is faster" isn't really an excuse, in my ostensibly professional opinion.

<comment><USER3> _Apple has the resources to scale, so "TCP is faster" isn't really an excuse_

Really? HTTP is just sending lines of text over TCP- what's so hard about a binary format instead? In many ways it's easier. You shouldn't need an excuse to remove unnecessary layers of translation.

<comment><AUTHOR> For a hobby developer or small business where time is precious, using built-in HTTP libraries is far easier and faster than implementing this: [http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Network...](http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/NetworkingInternet/Conceptual/RemoteNotificationsPG/Art/aps_provider_binary.jpg)

Sorry, but you're not going to convince me that rolling your own implementation of Apple's APNS is better than an HTTP-based APNS would have been.

<comment><USER2> > _For a hobby developer or small business where time is precious, using > built-in HTTP libraries is far easier and faster ... Sorry, but you're not > going to convince me that rolling your own implementation of Apple's APNS is > better than an HTTP-based APNS would have been._

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark; if this can be done in 20 lines of Python (see comment above), then why do so many _ostensibly_ capable engineers find it so difficult?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, you may have just not heard me before:

> I'm just not aware of many Ruby developers interested in taking Apple's C > example and implementing it in Ruby.

I don't find it difficult; I find it more difficult than a simple POST.

<comment><USER2> In which case the failure to communicate is mutual; In OP, I said:

 _... this position drives me bonkers ("not HTTP, too hard")!_

As professional engineers, it's my hope that opening up a persistent TCP socket and sending a small, stateless binary message should be _easier_ , _faster to implement_ , and _better performing_ than marshaling everything into HTTP (for no other reason than HTTP is more familiar to you!).

If that's not the case, then I would strongly recommend that any engineers that are uncomfortable with this simple task should review UNIX Network Programming Vol 1, and Network Security with OpenSSL, rather than complain that an HTTP interface isn't available.

At the very least, such a study would provide a necessary understanding of what HTTP is doing. With that in place, opening up a connection to APNS should be a walk in the park.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Okay he isn't at all fair to XAML. Yes it is XML, but it is also what HTML (which is very, very close to XML, remember?) should have been. A great way to define the user interface and make it easy to dynamically bind to stuff in your source code so that you can easily split code and UI and test all your code.

Also the idea was to have something your designer can make beautiful without having to trouble the programmers every time they want to make a simple change. That is why you define animations in XAML and not C#.

Don't let your hate for MS lead you to disregard this framework. It really is genuently great.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Don't let your hate for MS lead you to disregard this framework. It really > is genuently great.

I think I was pretty fair in my treatment of XAML as something I didn't care for but admittedly had no experience in.

<comment><USER4> The trouble is that when you have no experience with it, it tends to be dismissed because it is something you are not familiar with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone know about the future of Visual Studio? The current Express editions are pretty crippled and Pro was pretty expensive the last time I looked. Comparing e.g. a Mac Mini and a Win7+VS bundle, entering iOS/Mac development actually came cheaper.

<comment><USER6> If you join BizSpark [1], you get free MSDN subscription (i.e., Visual Studio and a load of other software). It's a pretty good deal if you're going after the MS stack.

[1] <http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/>

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The key takeaway is this: Personally, I'm too entrenched in the Obj-C/iOS ways to develop my own, personal Metro app. But based on what I've seen about Metro, I can see a lot of Enterprise ASP.Net corporate developers going home at night to tinker on their Metro apps, and who can argue against that?

<comment><USER7> The end of the conclusion really doesn't relate to the article. It starts with "Let's face it: Metro will be a success.", but they he talks about how he has no plans to develop for it.... which is not success in my opinion. Three days of them showing you everything (probably with free food too and access to devs) and it isn't impressive enough for you to make an app what makes you think other devs in mass numbers will develop for it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's the thing: I'm a long-term mac user and a developer for iOS. The training didn't include any XAML training; any interface design was copy-and- paste because writing the XAML wasn't the point of the training. If I was a .Net developer in my day job, I would be writing a Metro app right now.

<comment><USER8> The C#/Xaml stuff is for WPF and Silverlight developers. HTML5/JS is the obvious choice for everyone else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice Overview. It seems like Microsoft is actively trying to cope with Apple and I think they are succeeding. A lot of their concepts are well thought. Does anyone have more overviews/guides to the new concepts and technologies introduced in Windows 8?

<comment><AUTHOR> This one is linked to by a commenter at the end of my article: [http://blog.nparashuram.com/2011/10/developing-apps-for- wind...](http://blog.nparashuram.com/2011/10/developing-apps-for- windows-8-my.html)

<comment><USER10> Developing with HTML, CSS and JS makes it cooler. This way, more people could simply use what they know and start writing applications. This is no different from writing a web page, but has more capabilities too. Unfortunately, there sure are some issues ... :)

\- Parashuram

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Drops APIs from .Net ? What is dropped?

<comment><USER12> Synchronous versions of APIs that are now async. Like the HttpRequest object only has async methods instead of both sync and async. Silverlight did this as well.</comment></comment>


Internet Thieves Using Manchester Terrorism Tragedy to Steal Your Money - <AUTHOR> http://bitsonline.com/thieves-manchester-terrorism-steal-money/ <comment><AUTHOR> Stuff like this makes me sad</comment>


Apple's Wager - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/staff/fatbits/2010/04/apples-wager.ars

<comment><USER2> I've actually been thinking about this whole 3.3.1 situation in spite of myself and in spite of the silliness of the whole situation. It seems to me that Apple would have been much better of not having made the change to the developer agreement, while at the same time heavily scrutinizing apps written with Adobe's tools.

There's (probably -- I haven't actually seen it) enough leeway in the old agreement that Apple can basically reject any app for any old reason they feel like, anyway, so there's no real value in adding another explicit reason to reject apps written with tools they don't like. If they're just plain lousy apps, reject them for being lousy. If tey call verboten APIs, reject them for that reason. If they load flash files, reject them for having an unapproved interpreter.

My point is simply this: I think Apple could have avoided 90% of the current controversy by simply keeping it an internal matter. Unless there's something here I'm just fundamentally misunderstanding, this seems to be one of the rare occasions where Steve Jobs has completely flubbed the PR situation.</comment>


Matchpool Cofounder Quits on Claims of Misuse of Funds - <AUTHOR> physes [3:16 PM]
@channel I regret to announce as cofounder of Matchpool that I am leaving this project. I was involved in architecting Matchpool, writing the white paper and writing the first draft of the smart contracts. I was not involved in the implementation of the ICO. I have asked internally what is going on with the funds you sent to Matchpool, but have not received a satisfactory answer.
Over the last two days 37500 ETH has been withdrawn from the multisig wallet by the CEO, Yonatan Ben Shimon without any explanation or announcement due to the need for "hedging". Yonatan keeps claiming he's working with Bitcoin Suisse and it's all okay, but so far I haven't seen any evidence of this. I suggest you all demand an explanation and keep a close watch. In all likelihood your guppies are worthless- the terms and conditions seem deliberately designed to prevent contributors having legal recourse in the case of misuse of your money. In either event, I believe the standards of transparency and integrity in this organization are well below what is needed for a blockchain project, which is why I can no longer a part of it.
https://etherchain.org/account/0x72a7197bbccbe6ee1e9c688645436ed06017768a <comment><AUTHOR> The discussion is happening on their slack community channel. Sign up and see answers from the CEO here: [https://matchpool.slack.com](https://matchpool.slack.com)</comment>


What do you use spaced repetition to learn, and what have the benefits been? - <AUTHOR> In this thread multiple answers say Anki/spaced repetition.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20920635
Spaced repetition users, what are you using it to learn and what have the benefits been?
Especially interested in people using it for things other than school/studying/grades. <comment><USER2> Mainly for learning the letters of the greek alphabet. I have an Anki deck for that. Why? Because those symbols are so frequently used in math, and I instinctively try to subvocalize mathematical symbols in my head when I see them, and if I see a symbol I can't "pronounce" something in my brain puts an "ABORT! ABORT!!!" message in the queue. So even if I don't know what, say, "xi" means in a given context, if I can at least have the pronunciation as a placeholder, parsing can continue, and I can look up the details after I've read the passage I'm working on.

</comment><comment><USER3> I used it for quickly acquiring vocabulary in multiple languages when I was living in Europe, and later when I was learning enough Japanese to get by during my vacation in Japan. It makes acquiring five to ten new words a day sustainable.</comment>


Ask HN: Who is hiring for interns? (Summer 2019) - <AUTHOR> I am thinking to start just a separate thread to hire the interns. You can post you company name, location and type of intern you are looking for over here. <comment><USER2> You should email YC Mods and have them start a thread with their script for the appropriate months.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a really good idea (speaking as someone who is searching for one right now). Hopefully, we get some posts soon!</comment>