Ask HN - Is it worth joining Mensa? - <AUTHOR> I was discussing this with a friend of mine, he is in favor of it, and I am not sure (assuming of course, we qualify).  Any MENSA members here?  How would you describe the experience? <comment><USER3> I joined MENSA for the card. When I went to Kinko's to laminate it, I didn't read the instructions on the wall, and the laminate melted to the machine. I had to get the Kinko's guy to open the machine for me, but by then the card was bubbling. When he scraped it out and saw what it was, he laughed. He laughed so hard.

Is it worth joining MENSA? If you want to belong to a club that would have me as a member.

<comment><USER4> Is this a true story? Either way, it's one of the biggest laughs I have in a while.

<comment><USER3> Yes. It's so in character that I'm not even able to be ashamed of it anymore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You may find this information helpful in deciding; it's an article called "A Short (and Bloody) History of the High I.Q. Societies"

<http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/history.html>

An excerpt (Dr. Ware is one of the cofounders of Mensa):

At a 1996 convention celebrating the 50th anniversary of Mensa's founding, Dr. Ware (now 81 years old) voiced hope "that Mensa will have a role in society when it gets through the ages of infancy and adolescence ... but at least it has satisfied its members." Dr. Ware seemed disheartened by the Mensans' seeming inability to focus beyond self-gratifying pursuits and apply their collective brain-power to problems facing the world today. "I do get disappointed that so many members spend so much time solving puzzles," Ware said. "It's a form of mental masturbation. Nothing comes of it."

</comment><comment><USER6> It seems to me the only reason to join MENSA is to brag about the fact that you got in.

<comment><USER7> I think it's kind of gone the other way now too. If someone "brags" about having joined MENSA I'd pretty much roll my eyes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> No. My sister is a member (in the UK, but it's likely much the same) and I thought about joining too, until I saw their magazine, which is basically a heap of self-congratulatory wank... 'will asteroids hit earth, and what should Mensans do about it?' 'why the world would be better if it was run by Mensans', 'Why we are special' ...and so on. These were 1000 word articles at most, not even as interesting or challenging as something in Scientific American ( _after_ it went into the toilet).

It has as little content as any other kind of social club newsletter, but is vastly more pretentious. They do hold events and so forth, and they are much the same as the magazine with the addition of beer or tea, depending on what time of day they are held. Maybe it's like scientology, where the outer members talk about how great it is and promote it to everyone else, and the inner core enjoy a privileged lifestyle awash with drugs, sex and money, but I wasn't very interested in finding out the rest. Frankly, I was depressed by how petty and parochial it turned out to be, but perhaps that's because I had retained my childish impression of how fabulous a special club for only smart people would be.

<comment><USER9> The drugs, sex and money part sounds quite good though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I would recommend getting in contact with your local group and trying to meet a few members. What you get out of it could depend largely on how active your local group is and whether or not it's one you fit into. My local group is made up primarily of a much older crowd so I don't get much out of it besides a subscription to the Mensa magazine and local newsletter. There's a very active GenX/GenY Yahoo group, but it tends to be dominated by a handful of right-wing trolls. No thanks.

You need to coordinate a time to take the admission test through a local member anyway, assuming you haven't taken another test that could qualify you. There are quite a few that can be accepted so you'll want to look into it. It's possible you've already scored high enough on one of their accepted tests and you only need to submit the results.

If you don't anticipate being active in your local group you could go ahead and join anyway just to put it on a resume, although there are mixed opinions on how that's perceived by potential employers. I mention on my resume that I'm a member and I don't think it's ever been a problem, but I've heard about managers who toss resumes in the trash for it. As I write this I see that another commenter has said that they roll their eyes when someone mentions being a member. The reality probably is that very few people will be impressed by it.

The admission test itself is surprisingly simple. There are actually two of them and you only need to pass one. The first test is the Wonderlic and the second is a test designed by Mensa. If you fail both you don't get to reapply. You never learn your score. You're only told whether you passed or failed.

The tests contain nothing like those ridiculous Mensa brain teaser books. They're the types of questions that most reasonably intelligent people can answer fairly easily. They're not unlike the questions you see on the online Mensa practice test or one of those tickle.com IQ tests. What makes it difficult is that you've got insane time constraints. You end up with about 12-15 seconds per question. One test is fill in the blank and the other is multiple guess scantron. You basically have to be writing your answer while reading and solving the next problem. The person who proctored my exam said that there's about a 60% failure rate. It probably says more about the people applying than the actual test, but I thought it was interesting.

Is it worth it? I don't know. I don't get much out of the membership. I was interested in meeting up with similar minded people to have discussions, etc., but I think more than anything it was a personal challenge. I wanted to know if I could do it. As for the interaction with smart people, I think I get more out of HN than I could ever get out of Mensa.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much for the detailed reply. The topic just popped up while talking; its definitely not for bragging, or adding it to the resume.

12-15 seconds is insane. Would need some practice, if the time constraint is going to be that hard.

<comment><USER10> The time constraints are doable. Like I said, the questions aren't terribly difficult. The most important thing is that you bring your A game. You could be more than qualified, but if you get up in the morning and don't feel 110% ready there's a good chance you won't pass. I felt great the day I took my test. There are plenty of other days that I don't think I'd pass.

The best advice I can give for the test is if you don't feel like you're ready to kick some ass you're best off rescheduling. Once you show up and see the test you can't take it again.

The Wonderlic is probably the harder test because the questions get progressively more difficult. The first few are a joke, but the ones at the end are pretty tough. You won't finish. Almost no one does. I think I answered 43 questions and there's no way I got them all correct.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> That's kinda interesting, crazy and funny at the same time: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_IQ_society>. To me it mostly looks like this is to make the members feel somewhat outstanding, making up for their own social deficiencies.

# Top 5% (95th percentile; 1/20; IQ 124 sd15, IQ 126 sd16): International High IQ Society

# Top 2% (98th percentile; 1/50; IQ 130 sd15, IQ 132 sd16): Encefálica Society, High Potentials Society, Mensa International, Mysterium Society

# Top 1% (99th percentile; 1/100; IQ 135 sd15, IQ 137 sd16): Intertel, Top One Percent Society

# Top 0.5% (99.5th percentile; 1/200; IQ 139 sd15, IQ 141 sd16): Colloquy (Society), Poetic Genius Society[2]

# Top 0.37% (99.63rd percentile; 1/270; IQ 140 sd15): Infinity International Society, HispanIQ International Society

# Top 0.3% (99.7th percentile; 3/1,000; IQ 141 sd15, IQ 144 sd16): Cerebrals Society

# Top 0.2% (99.8th percentile; 1/500; IQ 143 sd15, IQ 146 sd16): Exactiq High IQ Society, ePiq

# Top 0.13% (99.87th percentile; 13/10,000; IQ 145 sd15, IQ 148 sd16): CIVIQ Society

# Top 0.1% (99.9th percentile; 1/1,000; IQ 146 sd15, IQ 149 sd16): Glia Society, International High IQ Society Milenija, International Society for Philosophical Enquiry, Iquadrivium Society[2], One-in-a-Thousand Society[2], Triple Nine Society

# Top 0.07% (99.93th percentile; IQ 148 sd15, IQ 151 sd16): ISI-Society

# Top 0.003% (99.997th percentile; 3/100,000; IQ 160 sd15, IQ 164 sd16): Prometheus Society, Tetra Society,Homo Universalis Society

# Top 0.001% (99.999th percentile, 1/100,000; IQ 164 sd15, IQ 168 sd16): Eximia High IQ Society, GenerIQ Society, The Ultranet

# Top 0.00001% (99.9999th percentile,1/1,000,000; IQ 172 sd15, IQ 176 sd16): The Mega Society, The Omega Society

# Top 0.000003% (99.99997th percentile; IQ 175 sd15, IQ 180 sd16): OLYMPIQ Society, PARS Society

Oh, and <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination>

<comment><USER12> Interesting. With the most restrictive category, only 200 people in the world could be admitted. Most people are somewhat skeptical of IQ tests, but does anyone actually think that any test could be accurate enough to pick the 200 most intelligent humans in the world?

<comment><USER13> _does anyone actually think that any test could be accurate enough to pick the 200 most intelligent humans in the world?_

Not a chance. None of the tests used for admission to such high-IQ societies have ever been properly validated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> An ex co-worker was partially obsessed with the topic of joining mensa. He used to bring it up in conversation all the time, mostly about how close he was to getting in and how much he wanted to get in.

One day, the director of the company for whom we worked heard us talking about it. She said, "You know what mensa means, right?" She's a native Spanish speaker.

My co-worker never brought it up again after that.

EDIT: Aw, c'mon...googling the definition is half the fun. ;)

<comment><USER15> For those who don't know Spanish: <http://www.merriam- webster.com/spanish/mensa>

<comment><USER16> BTW, that's Mexican slang. For most Spanish speakers outside of Mexico mensa has no meaning.

<comment><USER17> At least here in Chile, when somebody calls you 'menso' it is understood that you are being called dumb. But it's connotation isn't too negative, it's rather familiar and cutesy, probably because we got it from El Chavo del ocho :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A developer I worked a lot with is a member, and he has lots of fun trolling their forums. Apparently a lot of mensa members are easy prey because they think they have to come up with a clever answer when in fact they're being pwned.

That's the only thing he uses it for though.

</comment><comment><USER18> I once had a girlfriend that had joined MENSA to meet smart guys, but gave up dating them because they were all such geeks.

She ended up with me. Talk about irony.

</comment><comment><USER19> the people here seem so self-motivated that i would be surprised if many of them would want to pay yearly fees to be told they are smart, as opposed to simply telling themselves they're smart or, better yet, not really worrying about it at all.

those looking for a new, ultra-stimulating social circle may think mensa offers more than their local universities or alumni associations, but i'm not so sure. i would also worry that mensa might select for a unique type of person who is highly invested in his perceived intelligence (which is often to the detriment of friendship and productive conversation). i wonder if anyone can tell us more about the organization...

</comment><comment><USER20> No. Mensa is about the intellectual level of a small regional SF convention.

<comment><USER21> what is SF an acronym for? Science Fiction, San Francisco ?

<comment><USER22> Science Fiction.

Though a San Francisco convention is a surprisingly interesting idea. Where would you hold it? Oh, right...

<comment><USER23> Well, he said it would be "regional", so I guess it could just as easily be in New Jersey.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> My opinion is that MENSA is for people whose main accomplishment in life is doing well on an IQ test. And who are insecure enough about it to pay someone else to validate that accomplishment. This opinion is shared by a number of people that I respect.

If you actually do something that requires using your brain, you should meet plenty of other people who have good brains and have done something with them. The "have done something" bit makes them into more interesting people to be around. Plus you don't have to pay for that privilege.

Random disclaimer. I am not a MENSA member. However my GRE scores qualify me for membership in most high IQ organizations, including MENSA.

</comment><comment><USER25> My dad signed me up for MENSA and Triple 9 when I was seven years old (doubt I'd get into Triple 9 today). Never really participated in anything, so I don't have much concrete experience, but part of why I've never bothered is because I'd rather spend my time using my intelligence than sitting congratulating myself for it.

If you want to meet bright people, I guess it could be worth it, but keep in mind that they're drawn from the subset of bright people who are terribly fixated on how bright they are.

</comment><comment><USER26> No.

Groups within a community are generally good ways to meet new people and make connections, but I haven't seen any benefit in Mensa specifically. Go join a *UG or some group oriented toward finishing projects, not self-celebration.

</comment><comment><USER27> I have no experience with Mensa myself, but generally, you don't want to hang around people who _have_ a lot (money, intelligence, looks), what you want to do is to hang around people who _do_ a lot (entrepreneurs, hackers, writers, artists, physically active people).

And, for the inevitable objection: yes, you could be a do-er who also ended up having a lot. But the reverse is not necessarily true.

</comment><comment><USER28> Obligatory Dilbert: <http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/1992-02-03/>

</comment><comment><USER29> Not in my experience - in Australia, Mensa is a sort of lonely-hearts club for single, middle-aged programmers. The few meetings I went to were as tedious, awkward and onanistically self-congratulatory as you would expect, and I let my membership lapse soon after.

I've heard that in other parts of the world membership can be very worth- while, as long as there are active SIGs within your field of interest.

Oh, and whatever you do, please don't put Mensa membership on your CV, unless you want to look like a prat. Joining Mensa is not an accomplishment - <USER2> you're applying for a job in the upper tiers of any white-collar profession, being in the 98th percentile is pretty much a given.

</comment><comment><USER23> As Stephen Hawking said, people who boast about their IQ are losers.

<comment><USER13> Yes. Primary source for the quotation:

<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/magazine/12QUESTIONS.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I would say it depends on your reasons for joining. I have a much older cousin who belonged at one time. We haven't kept in touch, so I don't know if he stayed. He apparently got a lot out of it socially, but I think that was back before the Internet became such a convenient hookup for like-minded individuals. He once suggested I try to get in because I wanted to go back to college and they apparently have a small scholarship program. I never got around to it.

But if you are looking primarily for a social experience, I think it's best to participate in something which happens to be "intellectual" in nature but is a genuine personal interest -- an astronomy club, an online forum with a topic of interest, etc. Although close friends and married couples (supposedly) tend to be within about 10 IQ points of each other, just being roughly equally smart doesn't guarantee you will have similar interests or compatible personalities. I have found that certain topics online tend to attract bright people. If you are genuinely interested in the topic and are there for that reason, it is one of the better means to find folks you have a good shot at hitting it off with socially. I even know of people who met that way and ended up married.

</comment><comment><USER31> I joined when I was around 14, and left (if you can ever leave?) when I was 17. One of those precocious-gifted-child things; and the child subscriptions are fairly low. It was worth it to get the validated IQ score, and bizarrely, the child-MENSA magazine that circulated at the time led to my first real job.

So it can pay off, both if you've ever been curious about your IQ (not that anyone believes such things, but it's still great fun trumping an arrogant arse at a party) and because it's yet another way of networking. But the sort of people who join MENSA might not really be the sort of people you want to network with.

The job story:

An advert had a programming puzzle and an address to send solutions to. I solved the puzzle and realised it was a fiendish form of recruitment for a summer job at a fairly boring, run-of-the-mill web development company (oh, the glory days of 1999).

I also made a few 'friends' through it at the time, but I thought they were all up themselves. (They were. One later turned up to Cambridge, a year after me; can you spell 'socially awkward'? I bet he could.)

<comment><USER11> > but it's still great fun trumping an arrogant arse at a party

lol. to 'trump' with the score on an IQ test... i think i'd laugh so hard i'd shit my pants if someone says "hey, i have 150 IQ, i'm right dammit"

<comment><USER32> Thing is, IQ matters to the arrogant arses that you might want to trump. So for a normal person, the response to "hey, I have 150 IQ, I'm right damnit" is "Oh my god, I can't believe he just said that. Or thinks it matters." But to the person with the 150 IQ who's sure he's right because of it, it may be somewhat more effective to say "Yeah, I have 170, can we talk about something else now?"

<comment><USER31> Yeah, this is the context I mean, though more so on IQ scores themselves, rather than "I'm right because my IQ is x". In some wannabe-intellectual circles, the "My IQ is.." dicksize contest _does_ come up, and it's fun being able to quietly speak up and shut them all up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> If you are looking for seeds for a social life in a strange city, then yes. But remember that membership in Mensa is not an achievement, it signifies nothing other than that you scored well on a standardised test.

</comment><comment><USER34> I was a member of Mensa till I found that it was totally useless. Your mileage may vary so it is worthwhile understanding what you want to get out of it. Here are some things that I have found:

* a benefit to put it on your resume: NO

* a place to meet like minded people: MAYBE but you may have better luck at your local pub/bar/gym/grocery store

* a group that sends out an interesting newsletter: MAYBE but it depends on your local chapter

* a valuable recognition similar to "Won Nobel Prize", "Went to the Moon", "Climbed Mt. Everest": NO

* an indication of "superior intellect": NO, Mensa is the 98 percentile group, in theory the membership could be 2% of over 5 billion. Not really superior. If you want that, try for TNS (Triple Nine Society)

* a good way to get a credit card: NO, the people at Mensa International and the people you have to talk to when you get this card are not members of Mensa :(

</comment><comment><USER35> What's the point of being a Mensa member?

<comment><USER36> The first rule of Mensa is you have to talk about Mensa.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Not unless you need to be a member to get the puzzle books and magazines. I don't know what the materials are like these days but growing up we had a few MENSA books around the house full of brain teases and logic problems, I used to love going through them and trying to solve (or rarely, actually solving) the problems.

I don't know what the point of actually being a member is though, unless you're going to get a T-shirt, an "I'm with MENSA" truckers hat or something along those lines...

</comment><comment><USER38> I qualified with my GRE scores in the last batch of GRE scores what was accepted by MENSA... I hear it lets you get car insurance discounts from some places? Logically, it seems like one more small trinket to enable in the equipment of Keefe (sorry for the dorky WoW analogy) but I have always been resistant to doing it.... maybe it's a good way to meet like minded people though?

</comment><comment><USER39> Almost nobody knows I'm a member.

While my accomplishments are respectable from an objective standpoint, I joined to talk about my relative underachievement. Probably anyone outside of mensa thinks that's crazy.

The people at local meetings seem nice enough to me. Even if the local groups suck where you are, there are online SIGs which might be worthwhile. The online SIGs cover a very wide range of topics.

</comment><comment><USER40> I once thought I wanted to join Mensa, then when I hit about 14 I decided, "nawwwwww".

I came to this decision partly because I discovered that it's often easier to hate intelligent people, something which has only been reinforced in my years at college.

</comment><comment><USER41> Maybe you'll meet Asia Carrera.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I found this one, similar to MENSA <http://www.triplenine.org/>

Haven't heard of it before, just found it while looking for MENSA related info.

</comment><comment><USER42> I am a MENSA member. I've been to a few meetings and regularly enjoy reading the Intelligencer. Other than that, nothing much, life as usual.

</comment><comment><USER43> Why not join a hackerspace instead?

</comment><comment><USER44> is it useful on resumes considering that college degrees are already a stand in for IQ?

<comment><USER45> > considering that college degrees are already a stand in for IQ?

 _What?_

<comment><USER13> Economists of education think much of the purported value of a college degree comes not from what college study adds to the value of a job-seeker, but from what a college degree signals about characteristics the job-seeker had to have to be admitted to college. One thing a college degree signals is a THRESHOLD level of scholastic ability (the better term for what IQ scores estimate). In the United States, there are severe legal difficulties related to using mental test scores to screen job applicants--the same difficulties don't relate to requiring all job applicants to have a college degree.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> It's a fraternity.. don't waste your time.

(disclaimer: never had anything to do with it nor do I know anyone who has)

<comment><USER47> I joined to get laid. Worked well for me, YMMV :)</comment></comment>


Why has the quality of brick buildings declined steeply in the last 100 years? - <AUTHOR> http://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/articles/dept/musings/quality-issues-brick-buildings <comment><USER2> Seriously? A niche site with a paywall?

<comment><USER3> I'm running Firefox with NoScript (set to default deny). I get the full article with no paywall when I click the link.

<comment><USER2> It just changed to that for me, with Firefox as well. A few minutes ago there was a paywall blocker popup.</comment></comment></comment>


Ever wanted to programmatically file a lawsuit? In Poland, you can. - <AUTHOR> http://blog.danieljanus.pl/ever-wanted-to-programmatically-file-a-lawsui <comment><USER2> Excellent, soon computer-controlled companies can automatically sue each other.

 _"The president of agalmic.holdings.root.184.97.AB5 is agalmic.holdings.root.184.97.201. The secretary is agalmic.holdings.root.184.D5, and the chair is agalmic.holdings.root.184.E8.FF. All the shares are owned by those companies in equal measure, and I can tell you that their regulations are written in Python. Have a nice day, now!"_ ([http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/fiction/accelera...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando.html))

<comment><USER3> It's almost as if Douglas Adams had written Dickens' Bleak House.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This court is in my city, I even worked for a while with people that manage the system :)

This is only for very repetative cases about debt collection enforcement - courts were overwhelmed by these before, and now this specialised court handles them.

</comment><comment><USER5> Import this into the USA, and the RIAA/MPAA will integrate the API into their torrent detection tools before you can say dmca. Then there will be an automated interface to subpoena ISPs for subscriber information (GET /subscriber/info?ip=22.214.171.124&time=1234567890&judge_signature=b76c8a23), and the only thing missing will be an automated interface for customers to be notified, view, and quash subpoenas for their information. The last one is crucial when the lawsuit is being filed thousands of miles away, but I doubt that the MAFIAA will allow that to happen.

</comment><comment><USER6> This short piece of fiction seemed so far off before. Now it seems closer: <http://www.ftrain.com/nanolaw.html>

<comment><USER7> Dang, I've been mistakenly attributing this to Stross in my head this whole time.

<comment><USER8> Not mistakenly: it's in Accelerando - see the first comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Once lawsuits can be filed by algorithm, any court system would be completely overwhelmed unless it had a) some system for limiting the number of lawsuits and/or b) some system for settling lawsuits that would involve an algorithm.

Some system for limiting the number of lawsuits could be as simple as charging filing fees. Ones that scale in proportion to the number of lawsuits you file would be ideal (first case: free; 1,000th case: 10 million euros).

Some system for settling lawsuits sounds scary, but I actually kind like the idea of an algorithm that checks the number of lawsuits you have filed, and automatically returns a case dismissal if it is above a certain threshold. I'm sure there are some grave implications for having such a cavalier approach to dismissing lawsuits, but for some reason none are occurring to me at the moment.

<comment><USER7> _Some system for limiting the number of lawsuits could be as simple as charging filing fees._

It seems that there is already a fee:

 _To give you an example, the FileLawsuits method returns a structure that consists of, inter alia, the amount of court fee to pay, the value of the matter of dispute (both broken down into individual lawsuits), and a status code with a description._

I assume that you can't actually settle the suit programmatically, though - otherwise, you could probably gamble on winning some percentage of lawsuits in order to pay for the fees of the losing ones.

Stock markets are so 2000's.

(As an aside, can we please get some sort of sane mechanism for quoting text?)

<comment><USER10> > (As an aside, can we please get some sort of sane mechanism for quoting > text?)

I've always done it like email.

Or you can be a journalist, and put quote marks around what you are quoting.

<comment><USER7> That gets messy for multi-line quotations, and paragraphs. :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Given the precedent of the DocX foreclosure signature fraud, the DirecTV smart card lawsuits, and the RIAA lawsuits, I think bulk lawsuits are a ripe territory for a combination of fraud and lawsuits with poorly thought-out evidence that only win because settling is cheaper. With the current system, there is an assumption that a human at least looked over the lawsuit before filing, but if programmatic lawsuits are made possible, we may see the first lawsuit that literally was not thought out at all before filing. In this case, I think it's best to retain a human element to the filing process, much like we have dead man's switches on trains.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is "payments claims court" - presumably it's a fairly deterministic bureaucratic process that's required to go through to deal with debtors in default, perhaps before you can start chasing them properly.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's correct. Combined with a high barrier of entry (you need to create an account of the appropriate type AND pay a fee -- 1,25% of the value of the matter of dispute -- for the case to be processed) this is what makes it viable in the first place.

<comment><USER13> Yup, that fees quickly add up. I work for a company which builds interfaces between clients' systems and e-court ([http://www.infisolus.pl/oferta/elektroniczne-postepowanie- up...](http://www.infisolus.pl/oferta/elektroniczne-postepowanie-upominawcze- esad/) \- sorry, polish only) and I can attest that they couldn't actually "spam" e-court with lawsuits - their budgets for this part of collections process traditionally are not so big.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This actually looks like - let's build an api "because we can". Not "because it's reasonable". I presume, that process of suing still requires some kind of human approval and post-processing. An idea of e-court is great, if restricted to small and simple claims, though.

Edit: I am astonished by these numbers. I don't believe that this is court per se. Can somebody elaborate? 1.6 million issued payment orders is huge number even for Poland :)

 _The adjudicating personnel of the e-court comprises four judges and 96 court officials (referendarze-officials adjudicating independently in certain categories of cases) who are supported by 70 clerks. As of October the 1st 2011, 2 000 000 lawsuits have been lodged in the e-court, and in some 1 600 000 cases payment orders have been issued._

<comment><USER15> API serves as a way to file lawsuit. It is humans who process them. This court deals with standard claims like businesses not paying for the service/goods but also consumers not paying their bills.

API is useful for companies like mobile operators or utility providers who have thousands of subscribers who do not pay.

1.6M payment orders, 21 months, 200 staff = ~17 cases per day per person (no holidays and vacations). Sounds doable given it is likely to be batches of claims as described above.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have mixed feelings about this: "The methods include FileLawsuits, FileComplaints, SupplyDocuments, GetCaseHistory and so on (the actual names are in Polish)." I'd never even think of creating an API that doesn't use English method names (even though it's not my first language). It doesn't matter whether this is used only internally at the moment. At some point you'll need to integrate with others in one way or another.

Then again... it was created for Polish people and it probably contains some law-related vocabulary which not everyone will be familiar with if it's translated.

But if they ever make it stable enough to license the system to other countries, it would be a hard thing to change. Can't decide what I think of this idea.

<comment><USER17> I'm Polish and I have worked on a project with a very specific locally oriented domain (politics and administration) a few years ago, and I must say that we tried to do it in English and abandoned the idea after a few hours during the design phase. It was just counter-intuitive to translate every institution name and process to English, even though we all were fluent with the language. Not all of the terminology can be translated 1:1, and we'd have to look up not only the words, but even definitions of the respective English term to make sure it's applicable, constantly check how various related entities' names translate, etc. And all of this for nothing, it would be useless abroad anyway! Huge waste of time and brain resources. We ended up coding in Polish. One serious downside: after working on such a project for months, you get to the next one and start coding it in Polish - ugh.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> We should just write the laws in Prolog and call it Prolaw. Then we no longer would have to call the web site optimization peoples by the disparaging term "spammers" but could instead call them by the marginally less disparaging term "lawyers," and they could command much higher salaries.

</comment><comment><USER19> Is there anything good about this? (serious question)

<comment><USER4> Lots of adventages. The most improtant is - one small institution serves big amount of traffic, freeing rest courts in Poland to judge regular cases. This makes long wating time for each case shorter, and this is very important in many cases.

It's the difference between functional law system, that people treat as one of the options to solve problems, and dysfunctional one, where nobody bothers suing anybody, because it will take 5 years and cost fortune.

I don't think we in Poland have good law system, because waiting time is still too long. But it's step in the right direction.

<comment><USER20> As far as I know, you cannot defend yourself in the same way the person or institution attacks you. That is, if you want to respond, to defend yourself in court, you have to fight using normal court procedures, not e-court procedures. Proceeding in normal (pen and paper) way is more expensive than proceeding in electronic form, though the former is the only way to cancel the decision of e-court.

Moreover, the vast amount of cases solved by such small number of workers suggests that processes in such e-courts are short and irrelevant. The sentence is automaticaly set to 'guilty'.

EDIT: clarification

<comment><USER4> Yes, but that's exactly the idea - to speed up the irrelevant obvious cases where sued person don't even try to defen himself - there's many such cases, and before they were solved in normal procedure, with tons of buerocracy, and that used up judges and other workers time, making more complicated cases longer as well.

<comment><USER20> Sorry, but this is not the level where whole case should be solved. The court is by definition a place where both sides speak, and e-court is a place where only one side speaks, and she doesn't even has to prove she's right.

<comment><USER4> [http://www.dziennikwschodni.pl/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20...](http://www.dziennikwschodni.pl/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100622/PRZEGLADPRASY/587171411)

"Elektroniczna procedura przeznaczona jest dla tzw. spraw upominawczych, które wytaczają głównie dostawcy masowych usług, np. zakłady energetyczne czy operatorzy komórkowi. Chodzi w tych sprawach o należności dobrze udokumentowane, a dłużnikami są zwykle osoby fizyczne, które zazwyczaj nie kwestionują sądowego nakazu. Gdy nie ma odwołania, nabiera on skutku prawomocnego wyroku."

It means e-court is for cases where there is good documentation, and persons that were judged can appeal, but if they don't (and they usually don't), these cases are processed automatically.

"Tylko w 4 tys. spraw e-sąd nie wydał nakazów i np. oddalił pozew, umarzając postępowanie. Sprzeciwów złożono zaledwie 3229, a więc w nieco ponad 2 proc. spraw. W takich sytuacjach sprawy przekazywane są do zwykłych sądów."

Only in 4 tousand cases e-court changed default decision, there were also 3229 appeals (2% of cases - this artcle is old a few months so this won't add to 2 000 000 cases). In such cases the matter is transferred to regular court.

What's wrong with that?

<comment><USER20> Appeal should be possible in e-form too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> yet another way to log jam the justice system

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/opinion/sunday/go-to- trial...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/opinion/sunday/go-to-trial-crash- the-justice-system.html)</comment>


Ask HN: How can I help during the Covid-19 crisis as an open source developer? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> [https://helpwithcovid.com/](https://helpwithcovid.com/) tries to bring project and developers together. (not affiliated, just the question comes up a lot lately I keep posting the same URL)</comment>


History of Fidonet (1993) - <AUTHOR> http://www.olografix.org/gubi/estate/archivio/fido/fido.htm <comment><USER2> It was chilling to read the last section (starting "This was pretty cool ... for a while ..."). The network got big enough that people who "had nothing to do with the design, creation or maintenance of the FidoNet software" started asserting control over how the project was run, and forming committees. Shortly after, it sounds like political struggles led to forks and disillusioned members.

When I think about all the code-of-conduct/governance/etc advocacy that comes from outside the core of today's big projects, it's hard not to worry about the similarities.

<comment><USER3> Reminds me of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy:

> In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy > itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the > bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and > sometimes are eliminated entirely.

<comment><USER4> Sounds a lot like US government politics today, sadly.

<comment><USER5> Funny you say that. When I was sending compressed FidoNet Trafic (Looking like encryption) to Soviet block countries I got a knock on my door from men in black suits (FBI) asking me what I was doing?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> BBS: The Documentary Part 4 ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cm6EFYktRQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cm6EFYktRQ)) has some great interviews with Tom Jennings & co. on the beginnings, growth and decline of Fidonet.

"It just runs in spite of the idiots." (Tom Jennings)

<comment><USER7> Highly recommend this documentary and, especially, the entire episode devoted to Fidonet.

For those that don't know, the BBS Documentary is something like 6 DVDs and has _hours_ of well produced and documented material and interviews.

<comment><USER8> Yes. A lot of pretty rare information. BBSing existed as a relatively niche mostly hobbyist community that was largely both decentralized and disjoint from the early, pre-mainstream Internet.

As a result, with a few exceptions like Jason Scott's textfiles, there was relatively little archived documentation/stories/archives about BBSs at the time and very little of that has survived. (BBSs pretty much all got shutdown at some point and there's very saved from discussions, especially outside of the relays.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It does me no credit but I feel I must admit throughout the eighties and nineties many of my fellow sysadmins and I were not kind about Fido and like BBS, from our extremely privileged and funded dialup inter-uni UUCP and subsequently TCP/IP world view, it was already dead. These kinds of cultural snobbery do us no credit, and it's clear that nicer and wiser heads than mine ran cross connects and it became what John Quartermain called "the matrix" long before the movie.

I was an upstream of one or two BBS for a few years, gatewaying Usenet news and email. We treated them exactly like the UUCP and ACSnet feeds, and the military over x.25 and OSI x.400 mail, but we didn't always feel very charitable towards them.

I now respect this kind of self organised bootstrapping behaviour much more.

</comment><comment><USER10> This brings back so many good memories. Getting a message from someone on the other side of the world and thinking "are you kidding me?". This was back in '94 and this document about Fidonet's beginnings was written in '85\. It just goes to show how far behind my country was.

<comment><USER11> Cheers to that. I suspect that you may still be particularly fond of Zyxel modems too :)

<comment><USER12> Courier HST or death

<comment><USER13> Couriers were great, but not as good as Hayes. Of course the Hayes modems cost twice as much so everyone bought the USR modems instead.

<comment><USER14> Pshaw - I still have my Supra 14.4, 28.8 and 56 modems. Use 'em to feed fax servers since that's about the only real use for modems still. Stacked on top of each other with their displays rotating... the memories!

<comment><USER4> Don't forget US Robotics we're really the kings, always faster with their not- yet-standards.

Meanwhile I was doing pretty well with my Spectrum Peripherals 14.4k before I got my fancy Zoom 56k...

<comment><USER15> I'll be buried next to my PSION Gold Card :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Running a FidoNet-connected BBS meant I had direct access to read every EchoMail group I could subscribe my BBS to. At the time it was a great source of real, insightful written conversation. Because the readers were text-based, and it was all on my hard drive, I could consume postings at such great speed. (spacebar, spacebar, spacebar...)

The memories.

<comment><USER17> > _Because the readers were text-based, and it was all on my hard drive, I > could consume postings at such great speed._

You didn't have to run a BBS to do this. Using an offline mail reader like Blue Wave [1] and downloading QWK files [2] allowed anyone to do it—and helped keep the lines, as downloading was (relatively) quick compared to reading 'online'.

I initially got "on" Usenet by downloading SOUP files from a local free-net [3].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Wave_(mail_reader)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Wave_\(mail_reader\))

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWK_(file_format)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWK_\(file_format\))

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free- net](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-net)

<comment><USER18> Those offline mail readers were awesome - I preferred OLX.

In fact, when I finally got email, I wrote a QB program to convert my inbox to QWK format. I would then use OLX to read/reply to emails. I don't recall, but I probably used OLX's Save As to store my replies to text files which I then uploaded to my online mail server.

I used OLX for emails until at least 1999.

<comment><USER17> > _I used OLX for emails until at least 1999._

Seems you can still get it:

* [http://www.santronics.com/products/olx/index.php](http://www.santronics.com/products/olx/index.php)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> After FidoNet Tom Jennings has gone on to have a long and fascinating career mixing art and technology, with a good side dose of car hacking and queer activism. His current website is at [http://sr-ix.com/](http://sr-ix.com/)

<comment><USER20> Indeed! It's hard to describe how influential and wide-ranging his career has been, but I'll try:

Besides pioneering FidoNet, Tom Jennings also started another early ISP in 1992 originally running out of John Gilmore's basement in San Francisco called TLG: The Little Garden, named after a Chinese food restaurant in Palo Alto that was popular with techies:

[https://ask.metafilter.com/266181/Ill-take-Palo-Alto-in- the-...](https://ask.metafilter.com/266181/Ill-take-Palo-Alto-in-the- early-90s-Alex)

John Gilmore had a T1 line to his house in the Haight, and TLG customers (I mean the ISP, not the restaurant) would pay for their modem and a phone line to be installed, and for their monthly phone bill and share of the T1 line. Tom did all the wiring in the basement, which was a work of art that really impressed the technician from the phone company when he came over to install more lines. John said they charged the minimum amount necessary in order to set a baseline that other ISPs would eventually have to compete with, at a time when nobody else would sell you a cheap fast connection to the internet.

[http://www.worldpowersystems.com/ARCHIVE/TLG/index.html](http://www.worldpowersystems.com/ARCHIVE/TLG/index.html)

[http://www.worldpowersystems.com/ARCHIVE/TLG/TLG.html](http://www.worldpowersystems.com/ARCHIVE/TLG/TLG.html)

[https://www.wired.com/1996/04/jennings/](https://www.wired.com/1996/04/jennings/)

>There's a kind of cheap theatric irony in the fact that Jennings first took control of The Little Garden (TLG), a San Francisco provider of Internet access, when he was on food stamps; yet now that TLG has more success than he and his staff can keep up with, he's looking for an exit play, to sell out. He wants to stop working the entrepreneur's 90-hour weeks and is talking about buying a piece of safe, income-generating commercial real estate.

[http://www.toad.com/gnu/](http://www.toad.com/gnu/)

>The Little Garden (with John Romkey, David Henkel-Wallace, and Steve Crocker)

>A medium-sized Internet Service Provider in the San Francisco Bay Area. now merged into Verio. We mostly sold T1 and 56K Internet connections to businesses. We were distinguished from many other early commercial providers by our common-carrier attitude: "You are free to resell the service that we provide to you, and we will not censor it." This enabled a whole crop of smaller resellers in various locales to buy from us and offer other services to the public (like modem-based Internet connections). These resellers contributed to our volume of Internet traffic, and enabled us to provide higher quality service at lower prices. TLGnet was sold to Best Internet Communications in July, 1996, and my active involvement in it ended. (Best was then bought by Hiway Technologies, which was then bought by Verio.)

You can see more of Tom's elegant technological artwork on his site here:

[http://www.worldpowersystems.com/PROJECTS/index.html](http://www.worldpowersystems.com/PROJECTS/index.html)

[http://www.worldpowersystems.com/OBJECTS/index.html](http://www.worldpowersystems.com/OBJECTS/index.html)

He co-founded a skateboarder's rights group called Shred of Dignity, which fought against San Francisco city hall and won.

[http://gimmesomethingbetter.com/excerpts/shred-of- dignity](http://gimmesomethingbetter.com/excerpts/shred-of-dignity)

>Tom Jennings: Shred of Dignity started out life as Duke Crestfield and Shawn Ford flyering to get support to stop a city-wide ban of skateboarding in San Francisco.

>Shawn Ford: I found this article about the proposed skateboarding ban. I was probably 17 or 18 and I had never been politically active. I talked to my skate friends, but they were kind of apathetic. Fucking hippies, you know? For me, the skateboard was a necessity.

>Tom Jennings: Duke made up the name, as a triple-entendre/pun, originally to be a gay skateboarders group. No, I won't explain it.

>Shawn Ford: Duke was in his 20s and had already been politically active, so he set it up and we started collecting signatures. We met all these kids who had never been politically active, and Duke showed everybody what to do. Tom Jennings put down some money for photocopying, and within a week or two, we were taking ramps to the park and having BBQs and meetings, all with the intention of fighting this thing at City Hall.

>Tom Jennings: We overturned the ban with some of Duke's political/theatrical maneuvers.

Tom Jennings also published a gay queer anarchist skater zine called "Homocore", which spawned a punk subculture offshoot called "Queercore", and led to Riot Grrrl.

[http://www.worldpowersystems.com/ARCHIVE/HOMOCORE/index.html](http://www.worldpowersystems.com/ARCHIVE/HOMOCORE/index.html)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homocore_(zine)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homocore_\(zine\))

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

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

<comment><USER21> I saw a somewhat recent interview with Jennings where he called Silicon Valley a "cult of money" now. This struck me as such a succinct label that captures the essence of the current state of things on so many levels.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Turkey had its own FidoNet-style network called HitNet (with the prefix "8:" instead of "1:") back in the 90's. It had about 400 active users nationwide. I had even written an offline mail reader software compatible with QWK and BlueWave: [https://github.com/ssg/wolverine](https://github.com/ssg/wolverine)

<comment><USER17> > _Turkey had its own FidoNet-style network called HitNet (with the prefix > "8:" instead of "1:") back in the 90's._

Given that FidoNet only went up to Zone 6, they could just leverage the same technical standards:

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet#Geographical_structure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet#Geographical_structure)

I remember there being other "nets", but cannot for the life of me remember their names.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> FidoNet (and similars, like WWIVnet) directly led to my career today which is largely centered around distributed data systems (and how the data flows around them.)

If I hadn't been fascinated with projects like reimplementing WWIV's network protocol to bridge it to my FIDONet supporting BBS, or implementing IEMSI and other things surrounding echomail/etc. I don't think I'd have developed the necessary interest to become a career software engineer, especially not in this space.

I really miss that moment in tech. The social connections were still somewhat on a "natural" scale and showed hope for improving the world instead of clearly damning it. I appreciate many other improvements that have happened, don't think I truly pine for those times overall. But the mass open social networks of now are truly ruining society and being involved in progressing this kind of communication makes me feel at fault, if even only for an infinitesimally small amount.

</comment><comment><USER24> in 1992..1996 FidoNet was almost the only means of connecting with the world in Russia. I think I can still determine the baud rate of the connection by how it sounds.

<comment><USER25> I was able to whistle dialtone and handshake precisely enough for nearby modem to report CONNECT 300/NONE .

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> My BBS was up from about 1991 to 1995 or so. I still have all of my data. It lasted until I graduated high school, which was at about the same time that I got a dail-up shell account from a friend, which allowed me to directly access the Internet. That changed everything.

Eventually, that Spring, I installed Windows 3.1 specifically so that I could use Netscape, which was at version 1.1 at the time.

FidoNet was a big part of why I ran that board, and it was my gateway to the world in the early 90s. I met so many people that way.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nostalgia dialed to 11 for me (pun intended). I missed these "simpler times," where the technology world was filled with those who built and cared about it, filled with blind optimism. I grew up in SF and started attending 2600 meetings with Adrian Lamo at age 12 (RIP). It's unbelievable looking back on all of this how accepting adults were of my youth and were so willing to chat with me and give me equipment, etc despite my young age. I first was on BBSes about age 7!

Now the same people who used to make fun of me for my computer interests are working for Twitter. How the world changes once there's money and mainstream success in something. I can't help but feel slightly bitter about it, especially as I see all of the negativity now spreading across technology what with the great firewall, misinformation, and all.

</comment><comment><USER14> Net209 - those were the days. Of course having a local call to the Western Star didn't hurt either ;-)

Sysop meetings at Shakey's Pizza - nothing beats in person meet ups!

EDIT: It just dawned on me - how amazing is it that now that long distance calls are generally free (at least here in the US) that lots of people don't get the significance of "local call". What at time.

<comment><USER17> (Zone 1) Net250, Toronto, Canada, checking in.

> _Net209_

Las Vegas?

* [https://stuff.mit.edu/afs/athena/reference/net-directory/hos...](https://stuff.mit.edu/afs/athena/reference/net-directory/host-tables/FIDONet-Hosts.txt)

<comment><USER14> >Las Vegas?

Yup! I wonder what happened to Dave James and some of the other heavyweights from the local sysops. A few still have boards that are Internet accessible. I hadn't thought about it for years now but my first Intel PC was a cast off from Dave's bbs - a 33 MHz 386DX that had DIP and SIMM memory - 4MB of each. A beast back in those days. Was in a AT case - I still miss the big red on/off switch in the back right corner of the AT cases. Such a satisfying thunk when you turned the machine on or off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Brings back memories.

My first ever email was sent via a local BBS and relayed via Fidonet to the authors of WinZIP, asking them if they plan to support creating multispan arj archives on disk first so I can copy them and FDDs and be able to copy again a single failed archive and not restart the whole process from scratch if for some reason one of the drives had an error.

</comment><comment><USER28> What I remember of my '94 sysop kit: 486/dx2-66, OS/2 (3.1?), Synchronicty, MailGate and XeniaMailer (I ran a fido <=> uucp node) and something I'm forgetting I'm sure.

<comment><USER17> > _OS /2 (3.1?)_

DESQview and QEMM on DOS was also popular. It wasn't fully multi-taking, but it worked quite well.

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

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

You also had to have a COM port that was connected to a 16550A UART, often done via a serial add-in card, because it had a whopping 16 byte buffer:

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16550_UART#The_16550_FIFO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16550_UART#The_16550_FIFO)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you like this document you should watch the documentary. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBS:_The_Documentary](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBS:_The_Documentary)

During this time I was the REGION 9 cordionar for Fidonet and latter to become the president of IFNA.

I agree Fidonet suffered from politics from the first meeting in Coloradio Springs. As a software development project and public resource it was fasinating to see it work. Even the side stories should be told. SeaDog and ARC data compression (Later to become ZIP). Xmodem and SLIP are also tied into these stories.

I don't miss the $800 dolar phone bills I plaid for myself or the politics. I do miss the people.

My personal contribution was "The Communicator" modem program (Freeware AKA Open Source) and the inspration for ProComm.

</comment><comment><USER24> What I miss most from those days is strict quoting code:

АN>> this was the original message

SG> first reply, text _below_ the quotation

With more levels, original initials were preserved, quotes we're kept at necessary minimum, and email correspondence was very organized. Not the mess we have now with replies at the top and the rest of all thread below

<comment><USER29> I spent over a decade on usenet and only saw that convention used a handful of times. Most of the time, clients would just use multiple > or | symbols to indicate quoting level without any initials.

<comment><USER24> Just opened a random echo conference archive [1], and thistype of quoting is everywhere. Maybe it's the regional thing, of course, or just because everyone used GoldEd editor, which supported such quotes very well.

[1] [http://www.fandom.ru/fido/ru_fantasy/text/303.htm](http://www.fandom.ru/fido/ru_fantasy/text/303.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Fidonet and many of the other message networks based on another standard, QWK, were awesome. One of the better things was to be part of the collective you had to prove you set up your BBS to handle the proper packet transfers:

"This is why node numbers aren't given out "word of mouth", or at other sysops request. It has to be done directly, as a test."

I remember struggling getting the old WWIV software to handle the message transfers of Fido, but when it finally worked it felt like I cracked the world.

Of course, there were elitists on the Fido side that sneered at WWIV BBSes, but that is another story. lol

</comment><comment><USER31> Fidonet still operates, along with many other FTN networks, on BBS's still run by sysops.

Check out the Telnet BBS Guide:

Https://www.telnetbbsguide.com

</comment><comment><USER32> > Fido 51 is an extremely busy system; they receive 125 messages a week > through FidoNet alone, so please be patient.

Holy crap how the times have changed.

</comment><comment><USER33> Man talk about flash from the past. My MajorBBS based BBS was on Fidonet from 1993-1994 before I switched over to being a dialup ISP.

The guy who co-ran the BBS with me leaked our serial number after we had a falling out. Was "fun" trying to get support from Galacticomm after that, despite having the original manuals with the serial number printed on it as proof I really owned it.

<comment><USER7> nwgeegd9j ?

<comment><USER33> Nope, that's another one that started showing up online a few years later.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> For the people like myself who do not know what Fidonet is, and just want to read the comments.

FidoNet is a worldwide computer network that is used for communication between bulletin board systems (BBSes). It uses a store-and-forward system to exchange private (email) and public (forum) messages between the BBSes in the network, as well as other files and protocols in some cases.

\- Wikipedia

</comment><comment><USER35> I remember connecting to Fidonet back in 1994ish in Ottawa and asking somebody why we don't have Fiber optic cables in my city. I was still in high school and had no idea what I was doing. I did have a neighbourhood friend though that ran a "Renegade" BBS. Our list of BBSs were in the back of MONiTOR magazine. Wow. So many memories!

<comment><USER36> Renegade as in the bbs software?

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renegade_(BBS)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renegade_\(BBS\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I have lots of good memories of FidoNet. I was a teenager with a modem, computer, and lots of curiosity. I had been using BBSes for a few years, but they were all local to me, dialing up to various numbers where I lived (Long Island, New York).

The idea that I could connect not just to people on a local system, but with others around the world, was just amazing.

I wasn't a part of the technical infrastructure, and I clearly missed out on a lot of the politics and discussion... but I had lots of good discussions with others, and even contributed a few articles to FidoNews back in the day. The fact that they were willing to let a teenager write for them was extremely encouraging for me.

Thanks to all of the FidoNet folks for the amazing stuff that they did, and for giving me a taste of an online community before using the Internet when I started college.

</comment><comment><USER38> I used Fidonet in Belarus just before the sunset, so to say, from 2004 to 2009 or so. It was very interesting experience.

</comment><comment><USER39> I started on Wildcat BBS from Mustang and bumped into FidoNet in the early 90's. This was all very decentralized perhaps the crypto-kiddies can glean some intel from the up/downs from this FidoNet story.

</comment><comment><USER40> I've always struggled to understand how Fidonet (and BBSes) was different to Usenet.

From what I gathered, Usenet was a decentralised network from the start, whereas BBSes were distinct communities and Fidonet was a solution to connect these communities together. I believe Usenet also runs on TCP/IP, unlike BBSes which you dialed into.

Can anyone shed some light on the above?

<comment><USER29> This was posted on HN several days ago:

[https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/2019-11/2019-11-14.htm...](https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/2019-11/2019-11-14.html)

Usenet didn't start out by running over TCP/IP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> [https://breakintochat.com/collections/messages/fidonet/index...](https://breakintochat.com/collections/messages/fidonet/index.html) some of Fidonet messages collection

</comment><comment><USER42> Surprisingly, the only previous thread seems to be this one from 2016, which laments its own lack of responses:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12216932](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12216932)

Hopefully the current one is making up for it.

</comment><comment><USER43> Good times. I operated a Renegade BBS in OKC, specializing in AI, but still consuming everything I could from FidoNet. Didn't the first versions of Linux (before it was called Linux) distribute over FidoNet?

</comment><comment><USER44> > Fido 51 is an extremely busy system; they receive 125 messages a week > through FidoNet alone, so please be patient.

cute.

</comment><comment><USER45> I wasn't net-aware with Fidonet but I grasped some late Usenet in ~2001-2003. I liked it a lot.</comment>


I'm Thinking of Releasing a TCP-Accelerated NGINX AMI on AWS. Thoughts? - <AUTHOR>

Background: I'm one of the developers for SuperTCP (http://www.supertcp.com), a simple driver-based TCP accelerator. We've found it performs pretty well on AWS so we're thinking about releasing a base AMI that has NGINX + SuperTCP so you can get TCP-accelerated load balancing without buying an F5 or something like it.
Thoughts? Would that be useful? How about experience with other TCP accelerators?
Here is a blog post with more information about how we "accelerate" TCP: http://supertcp.com/the-fundamentals-of-a-killer-reliable-transport-protocol-for-the-internet/ <comment><USER2> Sure, you could even release a preview version of the AMI that makes it only available on a micro instance or something to allow people to test it. As I am assuming you would want to charge for the AMI. I think your barrier to entry is getting people to try it if you don't already have a following of people asking/wanting it and wanting it in AWS. However it is a perfectly easy thing to try and see what happens.

farawayea's comment is just not worth considering, not all software must be open source to provide value or have people use it. If it works, it does what you team says it does and there is a market for it people will pay for it, regardless of whether it is open or closed.

A question for you, I didn't see anything on your site (maybe because I skimmed it) but does using SuperTCP increase security at all, do nothing for security or ?

<comment><USER3> (Hi, I'm one of ryno2019's colleagues)

That's a great idea, we're thinking about following the AWS AMI way, where free trial periods are available - and why not make the trial available on any instance type.

I've decided that we're just going to build it out and let people tell us whether they want the product or not.

If you're interested in trying it prior to public availability, feel free to drop us a line at email@example.com - we'll make sure you're the first to try it.

In terms of security, SuperTCP doesn't add any benefits. It's only job is to optimize TCP transmission (e.g. whether you're sending from the cloud to a mobile device, or moving data between regions). Is there a particular problem you're wanting to solve that we might be able to help you with?

<comment><USER2> Cool, yea the trial periods are nice for an AMI and that sounds like an ideal way to go for you. I don't have any particular need at this time, just was curious. Thanks for taking the time to answer me back.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Your solution isn't open source. Why would anyone trust your software? How do I know it's not just a binary nginx with some extra performance tweaks?

I'm sorry, but your product seems to be fake and doesn't seem trustworthy at all.

I'll stick to open source.

</comment><comment><USER4> I would pay for your software, but only if it's actually open source to even be able to check that it's actually doing what you're claiming it does.</comment>


Ask HN: Have you ever heard of Virtual Sit-in? - <AUTHOR>

there seems to be one coming up next week. Has anyone on HN ever heard of these? What have you heard? Should we participate? http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2010/10/01/18660447.php <comment><USER2> As a UC employee I had to laugh at this bit:

 _The UC continues to make efforts to expand the prison-military-university- industrial complex_

You know you've gone off the deep end when you've lumped UC Fricking Berkeley in as part of the military-industrial complex.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's unclear what they mean; they seem to be implying a distributed denial-of- service attack. (In a sense, a real-world sit-in is a denial-of-service attack on physical offices and workplaces, so this interpretation is not a stretch.)

Is portraying the UC managers as villains, disrupting normal campus work, and increasing security/administration costs likely to reverse the state budget cuts? Or make them worse? Choose wisely.</comment>


Show HN: Django REST Framework Boilerplate with JWT and Swagger - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/bnisevic/drf_boilerplate_v2 <comment><USER2> Nice.

Does Django provide an ACL/RBAC - how does that fit in with JWT based auth.

For a Django equivalent in node.js : Check out Xgene Cloud[1].

It automatically generates node.js API source code over new/existing SQL database with auth, acl & GUI schema design tool.

Here is simple demo of it : [https://youtu.be/8LGJKUW9hhU](https://youtu.be/8LGJKUW9hhU)

[1] : [https://github.com/xgenecloud/xgenecloud](https://github.com/xgenecloud/xgenecloud)</comment>


Bethesda admits they can't get Skyrim Dawnguard running on PS3 - <AUTHOR> http://www.geek.com/articles/games/bethesda-admits-skyrim-players-may-never-get-dawnguard-on-ps3-20120831/ <comment><USER2> It sounds like the article is implying that the PS3 itself is too difficult to release DLC on... which I find to be a load of crap. There's plenty of good DLC coming out for other games. It just sounds like Bethesda developed the PS3 version as an afterthought and now can't manage the crappy code they wrote.

<comment><USER3> While I don't rule out that the PS3 port of Skyrim is a crap translation done as an afterthought, there are some technical constraints to the PS3 hardware that would make it very difficult to get a large open-world game such as Skyrim to work, and be able to extend it with DLC. The most important one being the memory model, where you can only access 256 of the 512 MB RAM directly from the CPU.

Most other games 'solve' the memory limitations of the PS3 by chopping up the game world and introducing lots of load screens, or by streaming as much of the content as possible. My guess would be that the Skyrim engine does the latter, which doesn't fit the PS3 memory model very well. The Blu-Ray drive is very slow for random-access, and I don't think you can stream textures and geometry directly to the 256 MB RAM segment accessible to the GPU, which means you would have to allocate part of the already-scarce 256 MB RAM in the other segment, and DMA it to the GPU-segment.

I'm not a PS3 developer and I don't know anything about the Skyrim engine, but it's well-known that the PS3 memory model can be a real PITA, and I can imagine this makes it very hard to get certain optimizations that work well on other systems to work on the PS3.

<comment><USER4> The RAM constraints are the reason I'm eagerly looking forward to the next generation of consoles. When you're trying to cram fancier and flashier graphics into the same hardware every year, there are severe limitations in what else is possible in the game.

Give developers 4GB of RAM and better CPUs to play with, and we're going to see some more interesting cross-platform games.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Some data points:

Dawnguard on the Xbox is ~600MB, while Skyrim itself is ~4GB.

> _releasing sizeable DLC is a complex issue_

By comparison, Mass Effect 3 Extended Cut DLC is ~2GB.

There may be some weird technical limitation, but it's not just size.

<comment><USER6> By the sound of it the problem isn't the size of the DLC download, but the size of the game state they're trying to keep in memory. The Xbox and PC architecture makes it easier to large game states in memory.

<comment><AUTHOR> If I remember correctly, doesn't the PS3 split the available memory in half? Therefore limiting the options you have. Where as on Xbox it's up to the developer how they use all of the available memory.

EDIT: See w0utert's comment in this thread for more info: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4459260>

<comment><USER7> Half of the 512 MB is dedicated to video, IIRC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This sounds more like political manoeuvring to me. If they've got the game running on the PS3 then there is no reason that the DLC wouldn't 'work' it's just a patch.

<comment><USER9> No, this sounds like typical Bethesda. Their games have been the epitome of everything that's wrong in software development. I've yet to play a Bethesda game that wasn't a technical and bug-ridden nightmare, so much so that I've stopped supporting them entirely.

Their dev teams can't code themselves out of a paper bag. I'm not at all surprised that the PS3 is giving them serious troubles, given how it requires concurrent software to use all of the hardware (8 smaller cores over the Xbox's 3 larger ones, iirc).

<comment><USER10> Their dev teams can't code themselves out of a paper bag? Really?!

Given the complexity of the world simulations they are building and that they basically are successful at creating, I don't think I'd use such strong language. It takes a lot of talent and hard work to ship something like Skyrim.

Bug ridden technical nightmare? I don't think I'd go that far either. Skyrim was very playable on the Xbox 360. Not too many bugs that I noticed, but I'm sure they are there if you look for them.

<comment><USER11> Not sure I would have put it that harshly, but Bethesda does seem to be a content company not a tech company. They tend to license their engines, and the tech parts they do build tend to be buggy(i.e. their homegrown AI system, cool as heck but pretty buggy).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is startup school award possible for abroad startups? - <AUTHOR> I just got an email contains a list of awarded startups.
To be awarded in the startup school, you have to attend startup school meetups; something not possible for most of Egyptians who can't even get a U.S. visa.
Is there a way to attend the startup school meetups online?
If it's not possible, then this whole process is unfair... just like everything else in life. :) <comment><USER2> All the meetings (group sessions) are conducted online over video conferencing, as long as you have a working internet connection you'll be able to compete for the grant.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't know that. Thanks.</comment></comment>


More Than Half of Americans Have Less Than $1,000 to Their Name - <AUTHOR> http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a41147/half-of-americans-less-than-1000/ <comment><USER2> This has no real merit. The numbers were Conducted Online by Google Consumer Surveys where 518 people responded. Likely an inaccurate representation of Half the population of America.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd be curious to compare that number to the rest of the world.</comment>


HTTP Status Code Cocktails - Pull Requests Accepted - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/3scale/httpstatus_cocktails/blob/master/readme.md

<comment><USER2>
        505 Internal Server Error

should be:

        500 Internal Server Error

<comment><USER3> Whichever it is, the drink named for this error sounds absolutely disgusting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Also see the programers cocktail guide - [https://github.com/the- teacher/cocktails_for_programmers/blo...](https://github.com/the- teacher/cocktails_for_programmers/blob/master/cocktails_for_programers.md).

</comment><comment><USER5> Looking forward to cocktail 418 :)

</comment><comment><USER6> Looking forward to 502</comment>


Changed by #MeToo - <AUTHOR> https://www.nbcnews.com/specials/changed-by-me-too?cid=eml_nbn_20180530#slide-1 <comment><USER2> Fascinating quotes, but the design of that page is almost a war crime.

I've pretty much been taking a name, rank, and serial number-only approach. My family is my priority, and taking unnecessary risks (as I used to) to help someone who might file a complaint now seems foolish.</comment>


Powerline-go: beautiful, useful and fast prompt for your shell - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/justjanne/powerline-go#a-powerline-style-prompt-for-your-shell <comment><USER2> Hi, author here!

My motivation for this was mostly that I was using powerline-shell, and after reading the recent discussions on HN on shell and prompt-latency, I realized, hmm, I am actually unhappy with the performance.

So, over the course of one night, I decided to port it to go, and the first version's performance is in a simple test (just holding down enter) quite good: [https://s3.kuschku.de/public/2017-08-21_16-43-41.mp4](https://s3.kuschku.de/public/2017-08-21_16-43-41.mp4)

Since then I added a few features (Docker Segment), fixed a few bugs that existed already in the python version (depending on the shell, it might interpret folders that are named like /tmp/$HOME/$(uptime)/`uname`/$CWD.txt), and am generally quite happy with it.

I'm always open for suggestions, though :)

</comment><comment> random-nick Related discussions on HN:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15059795](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15059795)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14798211](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14798211)</comment>


Ask HN: How authentication works at HN? - <AUTHOR> Whenever I upvote a story, HN sends a request of type: `vote?id=12390292&how=up&auth=XXX` `XXX` is different for each story in the page.
I checked the cookies using dev tools. There is a cookie called user whose value is <myusername>&[YYYY]
Here `YYYY` is a different token. Can anyone explain what is going on with all these tokens and why are they all different?
PS: Inspired by http://blog.watchandcode.com/2016/03/17/the-single-piece-of-javascript-on-hacker-news/ <comment><USER2> For a voting URL, you want some value that the server can calculate based on info it has, and that's sufficiently large to not be brute-forceable, and sufficiently unpredictable to not be enumerable. They are 'capability URLs' [1] like a private Google Docs link, or a 'click here to reset your password' token. So 'auth' parameter in the URL is likely the output of a deterministic function of the user and a server-side secret, and possibly a time factor; you can accomplish this with an HMAC.

HOTP [2] and TOTP [3] are two concrete schemes that use this method and truncate to a human-friendly size at the end to use it as part of a challenge- response, but you don't want to truncate this here because then the range of values would be brute-forceable. So it's likely just the output of a LARGE- HMAC(secret-key, MixingFunction(user, timewindow)). Or, if time isn't present, then LARGE-HMAC(secret-key, user).

Since the voting URLs are server-generated, the Cookie value must be unrelated. Logging in with a web browser, copying the cookie, and mimicking the same cookies with curl, I'm logged in with curl, but changing either my username or my token I'm not logged in. The opaque value in the cookie is consistent with what you'd expect from a Session ID, which is not surprising. I'm speculating, but the addition of the username may serve as a countermeasure against session guessing attacks (like, being able to quickly distinguish a tampered Session ID from a good one, like these other apps try to [4][5]), or may simply be an implementation detail.

[1] [https://www.w3.org/TR/capability-urls/](https://www.w3.org/TR/capability- urls/)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMAC-based_One- time_Password_A...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMAC-based_One- time_Password_Algorithm)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-based_One- time_Password_A...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-based_One- time_Password_Algorithm)

[4] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18751565/detecting- rails-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18751565/detecting- rails-4-session-cookie-tampering)

[5] [https://github.com/expressjs/session/issues/176](https://github.com/expressjs/session/issues/176)

<comment><USER2> After more testing, I was incorrect about the voting URLs being capability URLs, because you need to be logged-in to vote. True capability URLs don't this, because merely having the URL entitles you to all the access.

This makes the 'auth' parameter in the voting link a CSRF token [1]. A different site wouldn't be aware of the token, but might be aware of the rest of the URL (Post ID, vote direction). By requiring a large, unguessable token to also be provided along with a vote, a third-party site cannot naively issue CSRF to vote on a particular story on a user's behalf.

[1] [https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Cross- Site_Request_Forgery_(...](https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Cross- Site_Request_Forgery_\(CSRF\)_Prevention_Cheat_Sheet#Synchronizer_.28CSRF.29_Tokens)</comment></comment>


Prospecting for Hash Functions (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://nullprogram.com/blog/2018/07/31/ <comment><AUTHOR> Found it in this comment and thought it was interesting enough to warrant a submission: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21737951](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21737951)</comment>


New Device Turns Heat into Light Could Boost Solar Cell Efficiency to 80% - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencealert.com/device-that-channels-heat-into-light-could-boost-solar-efficiency-to-80-percent <comment><USER2> This could be really good for electric cars. Toyota's current solar panel experiment is supposed to be capable of delivering 56 kilometres a day in ideal conditions: [https://newatlas.com/toyota-prius-solar- roof/60461/](https://newatlas.com/toyota-prius-solar-roof/60461/)

Sono Motors Sion can do up to 34 km per day from solar: [https://sonomotors.com/en/sion/](https://sonomotors.com/en/sion/)

The Lightyear One is predicted to do up to 72 km per day from solar: [https://lightyear.one](https://lightyear.one)

Doubling that efficiency would be huge, especially if it's also possible to use the system to capture waste heat from the motor or the battery.</comment>


The Poor Reviews of Apple Watch Now Probably Means It Will Be a Major Success - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/23/technology/personaltech/in-apple-watch-debut-signs-of-a-familiar-path-to-success.html?ref=technology <comment><USER2> I have an Apple Watch and haven't worn it in weeks. There are a few reasons:

1\. It's too fancy. I work a lot with my hands, and am afraid of beating the watch up with daily use. So far it's been fairly scratch and damage proof, but it's only a matter of time before it makes contact with a surface that will scratch it.

2\. The gesture doesn't work very well. I have to over exaggerate my viewing gesture in order to see the watch's updates/alerts. I also can't wear it on the inside of my wrist for the same reasons.

3\. It's rude. If I get an alert on my phone, while in the pocket, during the middle of conversation, I can check when the conversation is over. Not so with the watch. It's thumping and alerting me with every alert, which is a distraction. Furthermore, there's nothing worse than talking with someone and seeing them check their watch. Are they too bored? Are they in a hurry? No, they're checking their phone/watch.

Overall, I didn't feel like it added any value, and felt like it made interactions with people even more awkward.

<comment><USER3> Honestly, if you bought a fancy watch and don't want to wear it because you do manual work, that's a poor choice on your part and zero to do with the product.

<comment><USER4> I think you may have missed the point. Apple isn't trying to position this as just a "fancy watch", they're trying to position it as the next must-have consumer item.

<comment><USER3> Watches designed for heavy manual labor are a niche, not a consumer item.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The whole "first generation" argument is flawed. Proponents of the Apple Watch claim that the hardware and software of the Apple Watch will get better over time. Fine. But the underlying form factor (a health tracker that makes it easier to read notifications from your phone) will not change.

While the first gen iPhone started out buggy and feature-sparse, the form factor was completely revolutionary: a phone with a touch screen and internet capabilities. A mini-computer in your pocket, rather than just a phone. It set itself up for future success as wifi, 3g + 4g networks, and the app ecosystem, developed over the next decade.

People will argue that there will be a different ecosystem of apps for the Apple Watch. The only input that it gets that is different from a smartphone is from the user's wrist. Otherwise, apps will be even more restricted by the small form factor of the watch. Who wants to play a game, read a book, or surf the web on a watch? Nobody. It's a glorified fitness tracker (do I really care about my pulse/heart rate? I just strap my iPhone to my arm and then I can listen to music while I run too!) that obviates the need to take your phone out of your pocket to check notifications. Which is simply awkward and rude in social situations.

The smartwatch form factor is not revolutionary and does not enable a large potential market for uses.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think a lot of this has to do with flawed expectations. I've owned the first iPhone right after it was released, same with the iPad, and now with the watch. iPhone and iPad had initial issues, software flaws, lacking features, but all of them were still a pleasure to use and worked as advertised.

I feel that many people see today's iPhone and compare it to the watch, but the original iPhone with iPhone OS 1.0 had only 2G, no GPS, no app store, a miserable camera, couldn't record videos, no copy & paste, and a lot of flaws that I'm probably forgetting right now.

But just like the other devices, the watch will start small and expand from here. You could say the current incarnation is only the shape of things to come.

I use the watch for three core features: As a remote for phone apps and functionality in the phone, as a time keeping device, and for fitness measurement (where it replaced my fitbit). The watch is a great device for these three features, but it's not a phone replacement, and it won't be for a long time I suppose.

<comment><USER7> >I feel that many people see today's iPhone and compare it to the watch, but the original iPhone with iPhone OS 1.0 had only 2G, no GPS, no app store, a miserable camera, couldn't record videos, no copy & paste, and a lot of flaws that I'm probably forgetting right now.

I'm still scratching my head today how they managed to turn that into a success. I thought for sure with all of those issues it was going to be a flop. I still don't understand why it wasn't.

<comment><USER8> It had a working web browser.

I had two smart devices at the time. A Windows Mobile iPaq or whatever it called and a BlackBerry. The BlackBerry was the ultimate two-way pager, but the browser experience was MISERABLE. Given that Citibank and JP Morgan owned like 150,000 of the things, you'd think that the browser would render CNBC. Not so!

The Windows Mobile Device was sort of better, but the browser was some sort of scaled IE 5 derivative. It still had a stylus, and a Windows 95 style UI, complete with checkboxes and other awkward UI elements. The only third party app of any use was Google Maps.

The iPhone broke free of the carrier nickle/dime racket, had a good web browser and offered a user experience 10x better than anything else. EDGE was a bummer, but a slow network that would work was better than 3G without anything to do. The touch interface, pinch to zoom, etc was a game changer.

<comment><USER9> I also had some earlier smartphones (Palm Treo, a couple of HTC PocketPCs running Windows Mobile) and agree that the browser experience was tolerable at best. I think I used Opera Mini and Opera Mobile depending on which ran best on a given device.

Still, there were just so many things I had gotten used to (and not just Google Maps and other nav programs like TomTom). I could still buy those phones without carrier junk if I wanted to pay full price. The main issue was that there weren't as many decent options for prepaid or MVNO deals and my $45/mo Sprint plan came with unlimited 3G so it was as good as any $80+ plan from ATT that I'd have had to get with an iPhone.

Even stuff we take for granted now like listening to streaming radio was missing. I was (and still am) a huge fan of several Shoutcast stations that I used via headphones or plugged into the car when everyone else was paying for XM. I had a tuner card in my home PC with my cable connection hooked up and a server app running so I could skim through my home media library or any live cable station and have it piped to my old Windows Mobile phone.

Hell, you could even make video calls at whatever low resolution the front camera had at the time and there were the precursors to services like Periscope like Qik. The iPhone didn't even let you change the wallpaper or ringtone for eff's sake.

That's not to rag on the stuff they did right. The iPhone wasn't targeted at me. It was targeted at people who used their phones for texting, calls, and maybe email or the early mobile web. Compared to those RAZRs and lower-end Blackberrys, the iPhone didn't really take anything away. It added a much better interface that was smoother and more responsive than anything on those featurephones or my beloved PPC. And yeah, the web browser was the killer feature. Passable web browsing was fine on my WinMo but the iPhone's browser was so much nicer to use.

In the end I just couldn't give up my unlimited 3G, GPS, multitasking, third party apps, or customization options in order to double my bill and pick up an iPhone. Still, I am thankful to this day that they hit everyone else where they were lacking (interface and responsiveness) so those later competitors were forced to address that even as Apple slowly added in the features they were missing from other smart phones.

Nowadays it's almost moot as the insane growth in mobile development has made even $150 contract-free phones capable of all those fancy features.

<comment><USER8> I think the key is, Apple rev' their product in a year. Had iOS not existed, a Treo would probably still be a thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > The Poor Reviews of Apple Watch Now Probably Means It Will Be a Major > Success

It's good to look at the water in the glass, even when it's not even half full. I guess.

The iphone made computing ultra portable, the iPad reinvented the couch, and both of them revolutionized the toilet experience.

The iWatch doesn't quite revolutionize or transform anything. There is no inherent advantage to having half-a-computer on your wrist at all times.

The iWatch is a fashion item at the moment - hackers don't seem to be impressed with it as much (judging by the very few articles about iWatch on HN :)). And if you don't impress the hackers, your days are numbered.

<comment><USER11> _> And if you don't impress the hackers, your days are numbered._

I don't know if the Watch will be successful in the long run, and I don't want to post the slashdot quote for the millionth time, but that's exactly what people said about the iPod, iPhone, and iPad.

On the other hand, hackers were extremely excited about Maemo and Openmoko.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, you're right I guess. Hackers are very poor predictors of commercial success, if not the opposite.

Although, I meant 'developers' when I used the term 'hackers'.. The watch is very limited in the amount of freedom that it gives developers, and if you can't attract them, then it's not taking off.

I'm sure Apple knows that a lot better than I do, so let's see how they attack that problem in the future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This title gives me a headache for so many reasons.

</comment><comment><USER13> So the first version of the Apple watch has failed, but the author hopes for a better second version, which may even be cheaper. Meanwhile he's happy about the software updates.

I guess the "sold more units than the ipod" argument refers to the first generation ipods, too?

<comment><USER14> "$1b+ in sales" == "has failed"? Christ, I hope everything I do fails so well.

<comment><USER15> Margins matter, remember of PS3 which was sold at cost and even with losses since Sony was looking at profits from game sales.

<comment><USER16> And according to tear downs margins are considered pretty high. Not as high as their other products, but they are certainly not selling at a loss.

I too find it funny talking about a failure of a product that had ~1B in revenue (more than the MS Surface tablets in the same quarter), and where Tim Cook said the sales were back loaded, i.e. accelerating.

Anecdotally I'm seeing more and more Apple Watches around.

 _EDIT_

I guess the Apple haters like down voting facts. Here are some sources from yesterdays earnings call:

From the earnings call transcript ([http://www.imore.com/this-is-tim- transcript-q3-2015](http://www.imore.com/this-is-tim-transcript-q3-2015)): _On the Watch, our June sales were higher than April or May. I realize that's very different than some of what's being written, but June sales were the highest. The Watch had a more of a back-ended kind of skewing._

From the CFO ([http://www.sanluisobispo.com/2015/07/21/3730284_apple- strong...](http://www.sanluisobispo.com/2015/07/21/3730284_apple-strong- iphone-sales-few.html?rh=1#storylink=cpy)): _But Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri told The Associated Press that revenue from the watch amounted to "well over" that $952 million increase. He said the watch sales were offset by declining revenue from iPods and accessories, which are also lumped into that segment._

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > If E is a binary event and P(H|E) > P(H), "seeing E increases the > probability of H"; then P(H|~E) < P(H)

[http://lesswrong.com/lw/ih/absence_of_evidence_is_evidence_o...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/ih/absence_of_evidence_is_evidence_of_absence/)

</comment><comment><USER18> I think theres an argument we are missing when only talking about the technical aspects of the Apple Watch. To be honest, I think it's to expensive for regular people. Even if it could bake you croissants and turn you a soup bowl, most people already burnt their tech budget on a phone that used to cost $200 and last three years, but now costs four times as much and is expected to last for two.

</comment><comment><USER3> The reviews are not poor, and the Apple Watch has outsold the iPhone and iPad over the same period in its lifecycle.

This is just a failure of journalism, or possibly an angle that pleases a major advertiser.</comment>


Ask HN:  What are you using to build new web apps? - <AUTHOR>

I have an idea for a web app.  It's been a couple of years since I've written anything from the ground up and I'd like to scratch my learning itch.  Ideally, the framework/tools would have support for persistence, users, and REST.  I don't care about language, but I'd prefer something easy to learn and maintain.  I'm not worried about scalability (yet?). What are you guys using today?  Any sharp weapons that aren't getting the spotlight they deserve?  Have things advanced much in the last couple of years? <comment><USER2> Python and Flask framework. You could try Django as well but I personally found Django to be too bloated for me (not trying to start flame war here). The beauty of Flask is that it comes with just about enough core functionality to get you started and you can always use their extensions to add on top as needed.

<comment><AUTHOR> For you Flask proponents, do these extensions solve my reqs? Users: Flask- Login, REST: Flask-Restless. Have people voted with their feet on these?

<comment><USER2> In general, Flask extensions are written very smartly that you can couple/de- couple with your core Flask app. Personally, They go through a rigorous process of getting approved by the Flask team before they officially become flask extensions. I have used Flask-login which is very good for basic session management. I also like Flask-SQLAlchemy, Flask-WTF for ORM and forms. So in general, some are pretty good but cannot say for every flask extension.

Overall, to create a web app as beginner, Flask is definitely recommended by me. I built a User Management app using Flask recently (registration,auth etc.) within 8-10 hours of coding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Backend : Python/Flask

Database : MongoDB/MySQL

Front-End : HTML5/CSS3/LESS/JavaScript/jQuery/Bootstrap/Angular.js

<comment><AUTHOR> Aside from ExtJS, most of the dev I've done has used js conservatively alongside server-side templates. Showing my old-school bias, I still instinctively hold js at arm's length.

With all the options available, what drew you to Angular?

<comment><USER3> I only use angular.js in projects in which I need fast web based rich user interface, similar to Gmail. In such projects not using javascript doesn't make sense as full page refresh will result in slow unpleasant UX. Also such projects need heavy use of javascript and using jQuery make things unorganized and complicated as code size grows. This is the reason why frameworks like angular.js/backbone.js/ember.js exists.

However, for most web apps, I don't use much javascript other than some lines of jquery or 3rd party jquery plugins.

There are no hard and fast rules for technology selection. At the end of day what matters is choosing technology that provides best possible user experience, easy development workflow and maintainable code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have a couple of libraries

a library for mapping http requests to domain objects (see 'naked objects' pattern), with convention based runtime form generation. no more writing controllers, most views are generated, full feature REST API out of the box. A bit like Django admin template, but more powerful.

an in memory 'db', persisted using an event log of user inputs to the domain model (see 'prevalence' pattern). no more worrying about network latency, no more mapping objects to database columns, no more writing update scripts (or at least not much)

I don't think either of these approaches have much love in the mainstream, but I think they make me way more productive than the standard MVC/(SQL/NOSQL) approaches.

</comment><comment><USER5> python on google app engine

<https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/overview>

Easy to use, can support what you want to do, easy to maintain, easy to scale.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you worry about lock-in with regards to persistence? How hard would it be to get the data out and switch over to controlling the back end yourself?

<comment><USER5> It would take some work to get the data out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> At work: C# MVC4/SQL Server

At home: Rails/Postgres/Heroku

C# is a lot more rigid, and I find it a lot harder to find quick answers to the obscure errors I inevitably generate (as opposed to Rails, where Google has the answer every time).

</comment><comment><USER7> Recently, I'm all about Python and Flask (or Web2Py for simpler things).

</comment><comment><USER8> Django-- it's popular (easy to get support questions answered) and a lot of fun to learn. Although Flask and Bottle look interesting too.

<comment><USER5> consider webapp2 if you are looking for something lightweight

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> backbone.js+jQuery+ROR+Mongo I find this selection easy to use an powerful. backbone.js+jQuery has a lot of adoption and strong community, so it's easy to find answers and additional components.

ROR got strong community and language. Almost every functionality is available as a gem with code published on github.

</comment><comment><USER10> Google Web Toolkit + AppEngine (I grew up on Java Swing so this is like the good old days... but not REST)

</comment><comment><USER11> Flask and Angular.js with Solr/MySQL. Elegant and powerful.

</comment><comment><USER12> Tornado(py) + Redis (queue)

</comment><comment><USER13> padrino and whatever backend i need for the job at hand.</comment>


Maker's Mark Uses Their Community To Perfection - <AUTHOR> http://josephsunga.com/2013/02/makers-mark-uses-their-community-to-perfection/

<comment><USER2> _You can't get any better than that. This was an absolutely brilliant chain of events, which I believe was all planned. They were able to literally make a huge splash out of a non-event. Don't be surprised if you see your next bottle of Maker's Mark a couple bucks more than you're used to._

Don't be surprised if a lot of us customers take our business elsewhere. We don't know what's in that bottle anymore, aren't sure about MM's stance on quality re: a luxury product, and see a lot of other bottles on those upper shelves.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. They must have known the response from Jack Daniels going to 80 proof, and were probably informed by the New Coke reaction in the 1980s.

The stated goal was to deal with a supply shortage. They were willing to dilute their product in order to increase supply, on the premise that the taste didn't change from 90 to 84.

JD's justification for going from 90 to first 86 then 80 was that customers preferred the lower proof. JD drinkers could tell the difference but MM drinkers can't?

They had three choices: raise the price, lower the proof, or create a new line for the cheaper proof. They chose the one with the most free marketing.

I don't like being a marketing toy, and as you say, there are plenty of other bottles. When my bottle, with its pretty red wax, is finished, I won't be replacing it.</comment></comment>