Parents Give Up Custody of Their Kids to Get Need-Based College Financial Aid - <AUTHOR> https://www.propublica.org/article/university-of-illinois-financial-aid-fafsa-parents-guardianship-children-students <comment><USER2> > Borst said the university told the three students midway through last school > year that their university-based financial aid would be reduced. "We didn't > hear any complaint, and that is also a big red flag," Borst said. "If they > were needy, they would have come in to talk with us."

That's reminiscent of what gave away Louis Colavecchio, who was ripping off Atlantic City casinos with counterfeit tokens. The casinos knew they were being ripped off, because their token inventory was higher than they could account for, and the discrepancy was increasing.

The counterfeit tokens were good enough that the casinos had no way to detect them, and when they sent a batch of tokens back to the manufacturer that they were sure include at least some counterfeits and asked if the manufacturer could come up with some way to fight this, the manufacturer said all the tokens were genuine.

What finally happened is that Colavecchio was using his counterfeit tokens at a slot machine that took high value tokens, like $50, and the token mechanism jammed. Colavecchio just moved over to the next machine, and continued playing.

The security people saw this, and found it very suspicious. When a machine jams and eats someone's $50 token, they don't just move over and continue gambling, even if they are a gambling addict. They go find casino staff to retrieve the jammed token or get reimbursed.

They detained him and searched his car and room, and found a large collections of tokens for several casinos, and knew they had finally found the counterfeiter.

<comment><USER3> How are private hotel security able to search someone's car? That seems sketchy.

<comment><USER4> Would it have to be private security? They could have called the police.

<comment><USER5> Unless he cracked it seems like throwing away $50 in a casino shouldn't be enough grounds for the police to search your car.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It seems much fairer to universally fund zero or low cost tuition for public university (or trade school, etc) irrespective of wealth and people wanting the prestige or networking or whatever of private university institutions can then pay for that perceived added value.

Instead, we have squabbles over the scraps of funding over current access and the enforcement costs of trying to keep one group from "getting ahead" of another while wealth is being drained from most labor classes - even the upper middle classes where current college aids generally falls away completely.

<comment><USER7> This is more or less how things worked where I lived in Italy, but I'm not totally convinced. There's still an 'opportunity cost' to going to college; for that and other reasons, it's still more an institution for middle/upper class kids. So they're taking advantage of a subsidized benefit more than those who aren't so well off, which is a bit perverse.

Also, while I think kids in US schools are treated way too much like paying customers, it seemed that in Italian schools students were seen in some cases as more of a burden to be dealt with.

I don't know what the best answer is. I'd happily take Italy's health care system, because _everyone_ either uses it or has the potential to.

<comment><USER8> > _Also, while I think kids in US schools are treated way too much like paying > customers, it seemed that in Italian schools students were seen in some > cases as more of a burden to be dealt with._

In America you tend to get both. Administration treats you like a customer (in the sense that they see a wallet with legs when they look at you) while the professors frequently seem to view teaching courses as a chore that gets in the way of their research.

Of course there are plenty of exceptions to go around, but all-in-all it's generally pretty crap.

<comment><USER6> Name any other industry that gets a detailed map of your finances and savings before issuing a price for their services. It's a recipe for maximal extraction.

<comment><USER9> The government. I pay more in taxes not because I use more roads, need more protection from our military, or send more kids to the local school. I pay more because the government knows I can afford it. That is how the system was designed and it is completely appropriate in my opinion. College is just a continuation of that since it is in part funded by the government. Except in recent decades we have shifted the burden from the overall taxpayer to the students themselves (and their parents). However the basic idea that the people who have more money should pay more for the service has stuck around. I can't say I disagree with that approach even if it does incentivize weird loopholes like the one discussed in the article.

<comment><USER6> I agree with people with more paying more into the general fund of the government. But when major parts of the US budget get deficit funded, why does higher education get individually loaded cost wise? It makes no sense, there's no real need to discourage people from getting too much education. And long term loans, are just as inflationary to issue to the economy - and when you collect the interest back long term, you're just causing a drag on economic expansion.

<comment><USER9> I completely agree with you that this approach to education isn't ideal and that we collectively would be better off if the onus for funding education was shifted back to the general tax payer again. That said, if you have a system in which the education dollars are limits, like we currently do, the best approach in my opinion is to charge people based on their ability to pay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's odd to me that folks are calling this a scam. I'd describe it more as unintended consequences of a poorly thought out governance system. These "scammers" are using the letter of the law just the same way that accountants figure out how to use every possible loophole to minimize tax burden. Every role-playing gamer in the world is already familiar with the concept.

The solution is to fix the system, ideally by fixing the incentives. If we craft a system that lets someone legally fill out a form and get cash, don't be offended when people use it. Solutions that expect parents to put the "greater good" ahead of the interests of their children are doomed to failure.

<comment><USER11> The student is intentionally misleading the colleges about their financial status and the financial support they receive. They're literally declaring themselves financially independent while not being financial independent. That's outright fraud:

> In law, fraud is intentional deception to secure unfair or unlawful gain

This isn't clever maneuvering. It is unlawful deception.

<comment><USER12> > misleading the colleges about their financial status and the financial > support they receive.

I think colleges don't care if students actually receive support from parents, they only check parents income/assets, and if parents refuse to provide support then student is in trouble. So giving up custody is a legal way to express this situation in legal terms.

<comment><USER11> > So giving up custody is a legal way to express this situation in legal > terms.

That's a different situation than the situation the article discusses. These kids are still receiving support while pretending not to (for financial gain).

The colleges are now asking if the student is still on their parent's health insurance and or getting their bills paid by their parents to combat the abuse they've been seeing.

<comment><USER12> > That's a different situation than the situation the article discusses. These > kids are still receiving support while pretending not to (for financial > gain).

could you provide citation?

I think article says exactly that some students want to separate from parents through guardianship concept and try to push this through court, but colleges investigate and flag such cases internally.

<comment><USER13> The article.

<comment><USER12> As I said: article doesn't state there is any actual finding of such things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I considered doing something like this when I entered college. My parents make enough money that I didn't qualify for any aid at all, but they also wouldn't give me a penny under any circumstance. One of my dads favorite sayings was "I have to clothe your butt, not decorate it." Which is how he justified us never having clothes that fit.

Anyways, I didn't end up doing this and just went without food sometimes to make ends meet, ended up dropping out when I ran out of the money I'd saved at my minimum wage job in high school.

I'm writing this out to show that while on paper I came from a wealthy family, a loophole like this would have really helped me.

<comment><USER15> I honestly think your situation is probably more common than the one in the article.

I knew a few people in a similar situation to yours, where they could not rely on parental support after turning 18, but they were not considered legally emancipated before that point so FAFSA wasn't giving them any grants. The one kid I knew who has actually homeless due to parents kicking him out in high school, did get legally emancipated and was able to qualify for FAFSA, but it was a huge pain.

The people I knew in this situation mostly ended up working some job, going to community college and transferring into a state school or getting a cert for a different career path from community college.

<comment><USER16> This is a common situation, I've known several people that ended up in it, myself included. Most of them ended up dropping out of college because working 40-50 hours per week at the same time as taking a full course load at university is a surefire recipe for burnout. It also makes for a pretty poor college experience generally. You can spread it out over more years by going part-time but that has its own costs.

It really is a very disadvantageous position to be in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This addresses a real public policy failure: students with no financial means are denied all financial aid because eligibility is dependent on a third-party with no legal obligations. Imputing that a person has assets to which they have no legal title or right is indefensible policy. Imagine if receiving welfare assistance was contingent on your neighbor's income being sufficiently low and the kind of incentives that would create.

The policy assumption that parents will financially support their adult children is false for a non-trivial percentage of the population, and leads to bad outcomes for those people. People that fall into this crack are often left with no recourse when it comes to public assistance, which leads to loophole hacks like the one in the article.

</comment><comment><USER17> Getting married is another way to get financial independence for the purposes of financial aid in the US: [https://budgeting.thenest.com/can-married- students-financial...](https://budgeting.thenest.com/can-married-students- financial-aid-money-28065.html)

Some have fake marriages for this purpose: [https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/4wbeqg/how-some- students-...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/4wbeqg/how-some-students-are- using-fake-marriages-to-get-financial-aid)

</comment><comment><USER18> FASFA requiring a parental contribution has always seemed weird. You are 18, an adult, why is there an expectation on parents to pay for anything?

<comment><USER19> Because in practice, parents of sufficient wealth usually do contribute towards 18 year olds' education (or their living costs where the education is government funded), and every subsidy a university gives to a multimillionaire's offspring means less subsidy available for the genuinely poor.

<comment><USER20> Funny, that missed me. I FAFSA'd out of support due to my parents income and didn't get a dime from my parents. I suppose they supported me with the clothes on my back, but that is about it. I'm pretty sure I sit with a majority of my generation, and I find the only people placating this abusive pillaging to be those who simply do not perceive it is happening. In practice sufficient wealth to contribute doesn't mean the motivation nor incentive. I truly hope this corrects itself in time, but it is far far too late for me. If I achieve moderate financial success I'd most likely philanthropize in the form of a scholarship dedicated to exactly this gap, and/or lobby for change.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> So it is ok for companies to do things like this with the tax laws, but not OK for individuals?

There is no law against giving up custody of your child. Additionally, FAFSA says you must include parents wealth, so if you have no "parents", then you don't have to include them.

<comment><USER22> People who didn't circumvent the obvious spirit of the rules while complying with the letter of the rules are pissed off that there exist people who did just that, saved a bunch of money doing so and have an presumably clear conscience.

While I understand why these people are annoyed I don't have much sympathy. Always read and understand the fine print. Always read and understand the rules. If X is allowed and doing X would benefit you then you are shooting yourself in the foot by not doing X. If the people writing the rules don't like it then they have the power to change it. And no, I didn't take advantage of this but I knew of the loophole at the time, wish I did and I'm paying for my laziness every month.

<comment><USER21> Yes, but once you replace "People" with "Corporation" everyone is more or less ok with it.

I'm willing to bet 90%+ of the people in the article complaining about this own, use or like Apple products. Yet Apple does this exact same thing!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is why regulations in general are so messy. You come up with a "common sense" regulation to address a problem. You end up creating a new problem as people attempt to skirt the rules and get around it.

It's a good reason why healthcare is so messed up in the US. A ton of rules that create really bizarre incentives to get around them.

</comment><comment><USER24> It's ridiculous to call this a "scam". I don't understand why people would be denied aid because of their wealthy parents. Wealthy parents have no legal obligation to pay for their kids education.

</comment><comment><USER25> My favourite idea for fixing the cost of tertiary education, is for universities to "buy a stake in you".

i.e. You apply for Course X and the university quotes you Y% of your income for the next Z many years. Say 15% for 15 years over say a £20k floor.

Better students get a lower percentage. Courses with poor prospects get punished with having to publish higher percentages before you get in the door. You as the student decide whether the quality of a university and their facilities, outweighs say an extra percentage etc etc.

Aligning the goals of the university and the student is beneficial in other ways as well. If 7 years down the line the field your course pointed you towards implodes and you're laid off - well the university could offer a free course/masters to retrain in a subject that'll get you back earning for them.

<comment><USER26> This would basically make art degrees and history degrees unattainable except for the rich. Not that I mind, but that is the complaint you'll get with this system.

<comment><USER25> I'd disagree.

The cost of delivering an arts and history course should be cheaper than say a course requiring a medical-teaching-hospital, a super-computer, wind-tunnel - whatever.

If all you need are some great lecturers, you can poach them and set up a department somewhere with a low cost of living for staff and students.

These subjects are also a fine fit for distance-learning, part-time etc.

Basically, I'd hope that universities would be forced to consider how they could reduce the cost of these courses in a sensible way. Current system of "all of you get on this expensive campus and pay your share" is unfair, as a lot of the benefits of this are skewed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> A few of my friends figured out that they can avoid having "expected family contribution" being so high to due to parental income is to get married, because then parental income no longer counts. Some did this and it worked

</comment><comment><USER27> I have 529 plans for both my kids. Lets say I save up enough for them to pay for their entire college. If an alternate family, making the same as us, saves nothing, could they qualify for aid, while we wouldn't?

<comment><USER28> It's hard to say without knowing how much you make, or what schools your kids might go to, but it is certainly possible. Many schools use FAFSA not just for federal aid but for determining how much "need" your kids have for other assistance beyond what the federal government might offer. They look at how much they think you can afford, assume willingness to take on some amount of debt, and weigh how much they actually want your kid in their school. If you make so much that the schools are going to consider you able to pay full tuition no matter what, a 529 will only help you. If you might qualify for some aid based solely on your income, it could make a difference: [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-column- feldman-529/dont-l...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-column- feldman-529/dont-let-that-529-college-plan-hurt-your-financial-aid- idUSBRE93S0LZ20130429)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> this is an excellent scam and like ten levels higher than moving your kid into a crappy high school senior year to qualify for similar assistance.

<comment><USER30> I went to a crappy high school all four years, I don't remember any particular assistance I got for the pleasure.

<comment><USER29> according to the people who told me about moving to a worse school, transcripts coming from "urban underserved schools" (there was an actual technical term they used but i forgot it) are more appealing to ivy league schools. They had about five tricks to make their kids more appealing to ivy's that included moving houses, changing schools, specific sports, certain extra curricular, etc. -- to clarify we were chatting at a 4 y/o's birthday party.

See this thread for young marriage to hide parental income as another tactic.

You probably went to a crappy school because your parents were poor and they wouldn't know any tricks to give you advantages.

You (having poor parents) wouldn't _need_ an entire class of these scams designed to hide your wealthy upbringing.

Alternatively watch king of the hill episode "The Redneck on Rainey Street" :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Hang on, are they actually giving up custody?

What happens if the child is hit by a car, is unconscious, and needs medical attention?

<comment><USER22> If nobody has custody then those decisions are made by next of kin which would be parents/siblings/children. I forget the specific order (maybe varies based on state law and context?) but it doesn't really matter for functional families since parents and siblings will generally be in agreement about those sorts of things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> the best case scenario for means testing is always perverse incentives like this. Just give it away, man. K-16, ezpz. If you want to find efficiencies go after the sub provost to the assistant registrar for the vice dean; bureaucracies have ballooned inside of colleges compared to instructor salaries.

</comment><comment><USER33> More like money saving tricks to me, doesn't seem illegal.

<comment><USER34> Yeah, I'm having a definition problem with this one too. It appears that what they did was not prohibited by the system. Maybe not the most ethical way to go about things, but not explicitly prohibited.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> You can go to a community college for much less money and all kids aren't required to go to College to earn a good living.

This is just silly.

<comment><USER36> > You can go to a community college for much less money and all kids aren't > required to go to College to earn a good living

Do you hear that sound? It is the sound of ten million wealthy upper middle class parents simultaneously recoiling in horror.

But seriously, parents that do these sorts of things have spent the last 20 years of their life ensuring their kids stay on the maximum-privilege track, and they're not going to quit now.

<comment><USER37> My daughter decided to defer going to 'real' college for a year to figure out what she wanted to do: why spend all the money when you haven't figured out things anyway?

She enrolled at a highly rated local community college and signed up for some difficult classes and she was very much not impressed: the pace of instruction was very slow, the students unmotivated (not doing homework, not participating during class), and the overall level of instruction often easier than what she had in high school.

It's an excellent way to get some garden variety general courses off you plate at low cost and low effort, but, in her case, it was not a substitution of the real thing.

<comment><USER38> Having attended both types of college, I actually had the opposite experience. At the community college, I was taught entry level classes by PHds who taught purely for enjoyment. The students were largely very motivated and professional. The university I attended was decent (top 60s), but all my direct interactions were with graduate TAs, many of whom struggled with the English language. The students mostly just wanted to party and constantly needed their hands held.

Most likely I just got lucky. My main point is that anecdata isn't very good data.

<comment><USER39> >by PHds who taught purely for enjoyment

Yeeeeeah, right.

Signed, PhD working in the industry.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A $442B Money Manager Says Tech's Glory Days Are Over - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-05/a-442-billion-money-manager-says-tech-s-glory-days-are-over <comment><USER2> What is the difference between her and an astrologer? If she is so sure, they should return all their clients money(invested in tech) or put them in defensive stocks. I kinda envy her for making a lot of money and being on TV for i don't know what! no one can predict what's going to happen. Golden state winning yesterday was a sure thing. But then didn't! and now i finally realize that i or nobody has any idea what's going to happen.

Looking at the past we can say with certainty(if we assume it will repeat) that stocks will crash someday. When that happens some money that can be risked should be used to buy a well diversified ETF. Till then if you can't hold on to cash then keeping buying every month.

<comment><USER3> >What is the difference between her and an astrologer?

To be fair, they don't let random astrologians on the curb manage $442 billion.

That said, this is likely just PR for her personal/firm's position against tech and likely bullshit. If a recession happens tomorrow, tech would be affected and she'll win even though the underlying cause probably wasn't tech. I think the DOJ investigations will make tech more interesting at least, so I really doubt the "glory days are over" when more glory opportunity comes along (whatever the fuck glory means in tech).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Within sectors, Shah recommends utilities or real estate. Since the start of May, the two classic bond proxies are the only S&P 500 sectors in the green. Globally, she prefers U.S. stocks over emerging markets."

I keep reading on here that no real estate safeguards were put in place after the 2008 crash. Why would anyone feel safe investing heavily in real estate knowing that?

<comment><USER5> So late in the debt cycle, I'd avoid RE like the plague (although it appears interest rate increases are off the table for the foreseeable future). And utilities? With renewables being deployed and still coming down in cost? No no no.

<comment><USER6> Why is progress in renewables a bad thing for utilities? Just in the past 10 years or so, coal prices have increased by ~50% while natural gas prices have dropped at an even greater rate. Churn in the prices of underlying energy generation technologies seems both inevitable and 100% normal for the industry. I don't see any reason why this can't be profitable just because the churn might be renewable during the next cycle.

<comment><USER5> Stranded assets, distributed solar, that sort of thing. Investor utilities are no longer the gatekeepers they once were to electrons. You can put solar on your roof, and depending where you are, payback period is low single digit years.

<comment><USER6> I'm a fan of rooftop solar for quite a few reasons. One of those is that it is effectively the only competitive choice that a consumer has for cases where the utility charges excessive rates.

But lets not kid ourselves here. Utility rates in much of the country hover around ~.12/KWh (less in many places, much more in some places). The levelized cost of solar, inclusive of its initial outlay is often very close to this in the best of circumstances.

For example, with a well placed (facing south) 5KW system in the southeast, I can expect to produce ~7000 Kwh per year. At an initial system cost of $7000 (assuming a tax incentive of 50% and unincentivized cost of $3/KW), that system will pay for itself in about 8 years.

If your rates are exhorbitant or your incentives are much higher then this all changes. But higher rates also mean that the utility has a lot of room to lower rates economically.

<comment><USER5> We're not kidding ourselves. California now mandates solar for new construction on residential roofs. The cost of solar will continue its decline. It's even easier if you wrap your system cost into a mortgage or finance with home equity on a long amortization schedule at historically low rates.

I don't think utilities are going away, but I also don't think they'll be so profitable as to invest in them as a retail investor (which was the initial discussion above).

<comment><USER6> I mean, in a sense they really haven't been a big money-maker as an investment in the past either, barring some exceptions. They are stable dividend stocks and I don't really see that changing.

<comment><USER5> Keep in mind GE used to be a reliable dividend stock until they bet incorrectly on natural gas instead of renewables (and lost hundreds of millions of dollars in the process).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> People talk a lot about what will be the trigger for the next recession. I could see it being tech. Not the blow up of 2001, but rather a capping out of growth by the big tech companies as they turn into giant, stable to slightly contracting behemoths.

<comment><USER8> Also possible tech trigger: extremely unprofitable tech companies going public. Slack, Uber, Lyft, etc. In fact,

"In 2018, 81 percent of US companies were unprofitable in the year leading up to their public offerings... That's a statistical dead heat with the rate in 2000, the year the dot-com bubble burst"[1]

[1] [https://www.vox.com/2019/3/6/18249997/lyft-uber-ipo- public-p...](https://www.vox.com/2019/3/6/18249997/lyft-uber-ipo-public- profit)

<comment><USER7> Yup! It's still a big unknown if those companies can actually live up to their expectations with regards to profitability.

I have a sense as soon as the first one fails, the others will be under a lot of pressure combined with negative sentiment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "All Companies Are in the Tech Business Now"

[https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-05-08/all- co...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-05-08/all-companies- are-in-the-tech-business-now)

"Every Company Is Now a Tech Company"

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/every-company-is-now-a-tech- com...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/every-company-is-now-a-tech- company-1543901207)

It's amazing how the story changes just within a few months or years. Tech is the future of everything one day. The next, its glory days are behind it.

</comment><comment><USER10> Tech's growth has been riding on monopolies (FAANG) and useless, manipulative apps (a large portion of SV startups) for the past decade. It's no surprise that a correction is coming. Useful software will never stop being important, but there's a whole lot of fat right now that's just waiting to be trimmed from the industry.

</comment><comment><USER11> It's really about the top of the US tech sector. I'm not sure I buy the thesis, but the problems that she highlights are real. The US is finally beginning to lose its historic dominance in the market.

</comment><comment><USER12> Or maybe she just does not know which tech to invest into.

</comment><comment><USER13> I always say that the gap between now and the future will be filled with technology. So I don't know what she's referring to as the only path towards the future is through technology.

<comment><USER14> Maybe try and read the article first. It's a she and it's about the US market.</comment></comment>


Fir: A Friendly, Interactive Ruby REPL - <AUTHOR> https://www.nasseri.io/posts/2.html <comment><USER2> The best interactive environment I've ever used (and still use) is an Emacs buffer with an associated inferior process. The default keybindings for Ruby mode interaction with inferior-ruby are a bit lacking, I have made a couple customisations for myself that can be helpful: [https://www.gkayaalp.com/gk.html#orgf0bce87](https://www.gkayaalp.com/gk.html#orgf0bce87) .

<comment><USER3> Very neat. Do your maintain this by hand or generate it with something? (Unrelated but computer program is 'program' even in British spelling).

<comment><USER4> If you enjoy this style of literate documentation, then you might enjoy my personal Emacs configuration too (it is smaller). The following should be placed in ~/.emacs/init.el:

[https://github.com/skx/dotfiles/blob/master/.emacs.d/init.el](https://github.com/skx/dotfiles/blob/master/.emacs.d/init.el)

That reads and parses the following Markdown file, which contains documentation for humans and indented code-blocks which are executed by Emacs:

[https://github.com/skx/dotfiles/blob/master/.emacs.d/init.md](https://github.com/skx/dotfiles/blob/master/.emacs.d/init.md)

<comment><USER3> Thanks! I'm probably more interested in just reading the documented .emacs-en of people who've had the good sense to write down what they were doing. Sadly, no amount of clever automation is going to travel back in time and document and explain the half-zillion lines of inscrutable poop I have put in my c-mode config over the years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Really cool, you don't really need to list all the emacs commands in the Readme. Even if is where most of the work went.

I would love to help. I can try to implement some of the pry features into Fir or work on a Rails integration ala pry-rails.

</comment><comment><USER6> I tried to use it in Windows and looked like this:

[https://imgur.com/a/ete0V](https://imgur.com/a/ete0V)

<comment><USER5> You probably better using Bash for Win 10. It's native now.

<comment><USER7> Or downgrade a few versions and run ANSI.SYS.</comment></comment></comment>


Twitter Starts Rolling Out Option To Download Your Twitter Archive In One File - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/16/twitter-starts-rolling-out-option-to-download-your-twitter-archive-request-every-tweet-youve-ever-made-in-one-file/

<comment><USER2> I got mine this weekend. It's a solid implementation, a great 1.0 and something Twitter and the engineers who worked on it should be proud of.

When you click the "get my tweets" button, it kicks off a process in Twitter land somewhere. A few minutes later, you get an email with a link to a zip file.

The file contains a full archive of every one of your public tweets, including @replies you've made, but not DM's or replies to you or follower/following information, etc. It's just _your_ public tweets. The tweets themselves are stored as CSV _and_ JSON. Which is actually pretty cool because it means you can build your own apps, or archive apps like Thinkup can ingest your tweets, if you're so inclined.

As the article states, you can explore your archive via a web app that all works client side in a browser, based on Bootstrap, natch. The app works quite well. You can search your archive quickly and easily. It points to the canonical URL of the tweet on twitter.com. There's some pretty basic visualization of your tweet archive.

The javascript that runs the app is all minified so it's kind of hard to explore. The application is named "Grailbird" which I thought was kinda clever ( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivory-billed_Woodpecker> ).

On a personal note, it was pretty great (though often cringeworthy) to be able to roll back through 6 years of tweets. I found the very first tweet that the woman I'd end up marrying every replied to. The tweets that led to friendships and career changes.

It's a solid first step. Nice work, Twitter.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for this, I was immediately curious what's included and how it works.

Would you be willing to share an example of the JSON structure for a tweet?

<comment><USER2> Here's my first ever tweet. There's a separate JS file for every month of tweets. The JSON object itself is named according to the month.

      Grailbird.data.tweets_2006_12 =
      [{
        "source" : "web",
        "entities" : {
          "user_mentions" : [ ],
          "media" : [ ],
          "hashtags" : [ ],
         "urls" : [ ]
        },
        "geo" : {
        },
        "id_str" : "547413",
        "text" : "counting down the seconds until 5",
        "id" : 547413,
        "created_at" : "Sat Dec 02 00:57:17 +0000 2006",
        "user" : {
          "name" : "Jim Ray",
          "screen_name" : "jimray",
          "protected" : false,
          "id_str" : "35623",
          "profile_image_url_https" :   "https://si0.twimg.com/profile_images/1234214846/avatar_normal.jpg,
          "id" : 35623,
          "verified" : false
        } ]

The CSV data is much more basic

      547413,2006-12-02 00:57:17 +0000,counting down the seconds until 5,

<comment><USER4> Does anyone know the purpose of having both the "id" and "id_str" attributes?

<comment><USER5> It's probably because modern tweet IDs are larger than a 32-bit integer. Presumably some JSON parsers aren't too hot on parsing bigints, so they give you the option of having a string instead.

<comment><USER4> Ahh, that makes sense. Thanks! (And thanks to andrewf as well!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been using TweetNest (<http://pongsocket.com/tweetnest/>) for a while to get an archive of my own tweets and will continue to do so, but it's nice that they're providing an official way. TweetNest, as well as all other tweet archivers, are limited by the 3200 (IIRC) tweet limit in the API, I wonder if they'll be adding support to import from the backup that will presumably have everything.

</comment><comment><USER7> When will there be an option to upload the archive to App.net?

<comment><USER8> Why would you want to do that? Then the timeline of everyone that follows you would be spammed with updates.

<comment><USER9> Ideally (not that this would ever happen) the third party service (e.g. App.net) would be able to query Twitter as to the veracity of each user's archive (verify an md5 hash or whatever kids use these days) then allow the tweets to be backdated into their system.

<comment><USER10> I imagine that dealing with the t.co URLs, and mentions by/conversations with Twitter users who aren't on App.net, or use a different name, would be a problem too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > By the end of the year I've already promised this, so the engineers – when I > promised it publicly they're already mad at me so they can keep being mad at > me.

Wow I would hate to work at Twitter.

<comment><USER12> I'd be really curious to know more about Twitter's database setup. There's clearly something that they've done for scale that makes this a difficult thing. Otherwise, implementing a button that SELECT * FROM tweets WHERE user_id = 1; wouldn't take long to implement.

<comment><USER13> I can only guess the format for archived tweets is very different from newer one, maybe just a compressed text file, which the engineers have to automate extracting and parsing at scale. Doesn't seem that hard, but the format was probably a hack job back in the day and there are probably a lot of considerations, e.g. metadata like RTs and favorites.

Plus, CEO's comments sound like it's been set up as a side project. The kind of management style books like Mythical Man Month and Peopleware warned us about.

<comment><USER9> Indeed, this would also explain why the search function only allows one to view tweets going back seven days.

<comment><USER14> I interviewed with a Twitter search engineer and he told me that that's because their in-memory search index is not big enough hold all tweets ever posted. On top of that, their efforts to scale up the index are counteracted by the ever-increasing volume of tweets posted per day.

<comment><USER15> And the reason it's not big enough is because they don't want to invest in it. They found out search is not as monetizable as they thought it would be, and at the same time they cannot take away the functionality. The compromise is to keep what they have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I was pretty impressed with Facebook's data export option as well (click "Download a copy" on <https://www.facebook.com/settings>).

</comment><comment><USER17> I want my DM archive.

</comment><comment><USER18> How far does it go back?

<comment><USER19> First sentence from the article:

"It looks like Twitter has started rolling out the option to let users download all their tweets"</comment></comment>


Subcontract my work out legal and ethical? - <AUTHOR> I have two main clients that give me enough work to keep me busy year round (50/hrs a week). There is no defined date, and looks like there is tonnes of work for years to come.
Is it legal and ethical for me to sub-contract out my work to other devs? I have a junior dev friend looking to break into the market (he's better than me at dev, I work as a senior).
I imagine that if I told the companies I contract for about it, then they might not like it, but I think I'm not under any legal obligations to do so? As long as the work gets done under satisfactory terms then I think it should be ok. <comment><USER2> There is always the risk of a slave revolution - I assume your friend will not get all the money and you live on the markup - Marx was right... So in any situatation like this, where the worker will almost certainly get to know the company name, there is the inevitable risk of that person wanting it all.

That said, hiring a worker to share the work, with you on the complex stuff and he learning is amenable to various wage divisions. Watch out for laws on workers compensation and employee tax/pension deductions etc

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not possible to split off all 50hrs and I just sit back and collect cheques, because I've been working with these companies for years now and I understand their business and what they want.

I would be subcontracting out small tasks, like various bug fixes I'm stuck on, refactoring, changes to external libraries we use etc. The core of the work I would be doing myself.

In terms of pay, he's working elance type sites for minimal pay, so I'd be doing him a favor.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Cloud hosts with web socket support? - <AUTHOR>

I started working on an app that requires web sockets. I'm wondering if HN knows of any cloud platforms that support web sockets. Language doesn't really matter to me. I've heard that no.de will support web sockets but that service is currently in private beta. <comment><USER2> I strongly recommend against implementing your own WS layer and instead, let <http://pusherapp.com/> do the heavy lifting — they are amazing.

At BuzzData, we have dozens of resque workers sending messages into Pusher and we've moved beyond using it for messages and notifications to using it for UI functionality like our file upload progress widget.

</comment><comment><USER3> You can get NodeJS running on a free (until Nov.) AWS micro instance up in no time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, great idea, I don't know why I didn't think of that.</comment></comment>


Breitbart news site blocked by ad exchange - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-38076579 <comment><USER3> This U.S. election has been an important inflection point in displaying the bias and application of bias by "apparently" disinterested entities like Twitter, reddit and the like - places that claim to advocate diversity and openness, yet struggle to do so in the face of conflict. I hope this spawns a renewed push for education into why things like freedom of speech and tolerance are so important.

It all goes back to people being people. For us humans it's too easy to break the rules because we think we know what's best, etc. As the saying goes, history too easily repeats itself. Castro's passing is perhaps ironic in the timing.

<comment><USER4> As an immigrant from the (once) Soviet Union, the current inability among my Silicon Valley/tech friends to say anything but pro-left views scares me. Even hinting that I may want something other than NYT-like viewpoints seems to cause people to bring out the pitchforks.

<comment><USER5> Are you suggesting that Breitbart is the mirror image of NYT on the right? Because that's what you seem to be implying here, and it is ridiculous. Breitbart is a cesspool. Perhaps you are claiming the NYT is, too?

<comment><USER6> No, he's suggesting that any time he suggests that the NYT might be anything other than the gospel truth, he's attacked (like this)

<comment><USER4> Correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >"I'm not going to put the examples out there because I'm not going to engage in a tit-for-tat on what is compliant."

Well surely that's a great idea that will discourage the accusations of bias.

<comment><USER8> There's 4 examples of headlines that might just display the kind of speech that a company really doesn't want to be associated with.

To wit: the free speech clause of the first amendment is designed to forbid the government from passing laws that abridge free speech. It's human nature and literally unenforcable for that to mean that people must be tolerable of all forms of speech, and that companies must provide equal footing to all forms of speech. Even if this ad network was "biased", it's a function of the downpressure on crazy speech that people be allowed to not associate themselves with speech that's unrepresentative of their views

<comment><USER9> It is sad so many people cry First Amendment right free speech but have zero idea what it is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Which is the ad network that keeps serving the full-screen popup "your computer may be infected with a virus! call this number" ads?

Show me you can tell the difference between real and fake ads first. Then I'll trust you to tell me the difference between real and fake news.

</comment><comment><USER11> Previous discussion (two days ago): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13023954](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13023954)

<comment><USER12> Looks like the automated dupe-catcher missed it because of bbc.com vs. bbc.co.uk; maybe needs to be aliased.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Obviously this ad network can do what they want. They can work with or not work with any website they desire. But I do worry about companies who control money becoming vigilantes attempting to support points of view they agree with and squash points of view they disagree with.

I would be more interested in these networks dropping clickbait and known fake news websites (maybe they do, I just haven't seen the equivalent news story on that).

</comment><comment><USER14> ad exchange is owned by NewsCorp

<comment><USER15> Ad exchange is a generic term for a bunch of different products from different companies.

If you mean AppNexus specifically took an investment from News Corp, then sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If real news can't make money then how long will fake news be able to? Fabricating stories are easier than investigative reporting so I predict the race to the bottom will be even faster.

<comment><USER17> The type of people reading fake news are the kind of people who click random banner ads, who install toolbars, etc. I imagine fake news is a lot more lucrative than real news because you're market is generally a less sophisticated internet user.

<comment><USER16> Right, but the barrier to entry is lower. I bet I can start a popular fake news site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I am frankly shocked by the reaction to this on HN. It seems like I am in the Breitbart forums.

If you think Breitbart is a news organisation, then you have either never read any of their articles or are kidding yourself. It is a propaganda organisation. It doesn't report news, it serves opinions. Here is an extract from a recent article[0] about Justin Trudeau mourning the death of Fidel Castro.

"Castro's Cuban regime was notorious for imprisoning dissenters, including homosexuals, journalists, and political opponents, and nearly brought nuclear war to the United States, one of Canada's closest allies."

The problem with that statement is that it is written like either of those things were against the US ideology. US has still not completely accepted homosexuality and it brought nuclear war upon itself by taking its weapons to Russia's neighbourhood.

Here's another absolute rubbish article[1] about why there should be a cap on the number of women who are allowed to take up STEM majors.

Breitbart's whole history is like this. In 2009, Andrew Breitbart heavily pushed the ACORN Video Scandal[2] which later turned out to be a series of heavily edited and misleading videos which lead to the closure of ACORN, an NGO which helped people from low to middle income groups.

Another one was the "Friends of Hamas" story that turned out to be a case of complete and utter bullshit but Breitbart couldn't own up to it.[3]

Breitbart has never been a media organisation and I for one am extremely happy to see it being boycotted like this. The headlines I have outlined are not even the more horrific ones they post. Go have a look yourself if you want.

They purposefully spread misinformation and decline to accept their fault when proven wrong while always being on their toes to point out the slip ups in the more liberal media coverage of events. In my part of the world, we call it hypocrisy.

[0] [http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/11/26/canadian-pm- trude...](http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/11/26/canadian-pm-trudeau- praises-dictator-castro/)

[1] [http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/06/15/heres- why...](http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/06/15/heres-why-there- ought-to-be-a-cap-on-women-studying-science-and-maths/)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACORN_2009_undercover_videos_c...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACORN_2009_undercover_videos_controversy)

[3] [http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/friends-of-hamas- and...](http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/friends-of-hamas-and-andrew- breitbarts-legacy)

<comment><USER19> dude, you're a critical thinker - I liked the text classifier post, I'll have a proper read when I'm next on a train - Milo is a first class troll - Breibart has perspective on some current topics - there are no longterm gains from censoring that

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> They may be on the wrong side of history on this. Fake news and hate speech are on the rise, and by 'on the rise' I mean now popular amongst double-digit percentages of the population. Networks can try to step above, but that will only cede ground to other ad networks. The people want to see this stuff and advertisers want enthusiastic young eyeballs.

<comment><USER19> who defines 'fake news' and 'hate speech' when it comes to mass-media? - <USER2> don't invoke Orwell lightly - but there seems to be no consideration of how such concepts could be (mis)used in 4 or 14 years time - against the very people who think they are on the side rightfulness today

<comment><USER21> We're talking about someone pulling ads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is outrageous.

<comment><USER23> this is awesome. geeks are humans only chance against hopelessness & despair. fixing global warming, improving democracy, transportation, space travel... are all here because of us geeks. Rise up & be proud. We have a voice. A strong voice. (& in america unfortunately we must overstate our voice due to the non-representation of congress, the electoral college and hence the supreme court)

<comment><USER24> Pretty sure the one who decided wasn't a geek/programmer/etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Totalitarians cannot tolerate any dissenting information or ideas. They can't just run an ad business, they also have to use their business to squelch ideas they disagree with.

The accusations of racism, etc, are just a cover for what they've wanted to do for a while. It doesn't matter that there's no evidence of such racism.

I can't help but think that this just points to the fact that they must not have much confidence in their ideas that they feel they must muzzle others.

Edit: yep - bots are definitely out in force

<comment><AUTHOR> You think AppNexus ceasing to do business with Breitbart is a sign of a totalitarian society? And you're not being hyperbolic? Genuine question, not trying be clever.

Arguably it's a sign of a free society, free association and all that. What would a society where people and firms weren't free to boycott and disassociate from firms they didn't like be like?

<comment><USER25> They're not just ceasing to do business. They're making baseless accusations.

A totalitarian world view is one in which someone no longer feels obliged to just offer their services or goods in free exchange, but to also insist that those they do business with also subscribe to their way of thinking.

These things are rarely related.

<comment><USER26> So now you want to force businesses to associate with businesses they don't want to associate with and you're calling them totalitarian?

<comment><USER25> Of course not. But cutting ties and making baseless accusations?

This is false shaming and participating in a false narrative.

This is exactly how totalitarianism takes hold.

<comment><USER26> No totalitarianism tends to happen when you have a state run media apparatus which is run by a media mogul with a position close to a demagogue leader who has floated the idea of not giving press credentials to other media organizations. Starting to sound a little familiar?

<comment><USER25> Yes.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-how-hillary-clinton- res...](http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-how-hillary-clinton-restricts- the-press-2014-7)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What Are the Dangers of Using an Untrusted USB Drive? - <AUTHOR> http://lifehacker.com/what-are-the-dangers-of-using-an-untrusted-usb-drive-1533523741

<comment><USER2> Direct link instead of the lifehacker "aggregation": [http://superuser.com/questions/709275/what-is-the-danger- of-...](http://superuser.com/questions/709275/what-is-the-danger-of-inserting- and-browsing-an-untrusted-usb-drive)

<comment><USER3> Thank you for posting this. When Google (ie, Matt Cutts) states that they are looking for "scraper" sites, I wonder if they include blogspam "news" publications like this.

For example, when someone searches my name, currently the #2 hit is a Gawker repost of a blog post I wrote. What's worse is that Gawker actually goes out of their way to make it seem like they spoke with me (ie, added additional "content" to my post), when in fact they didn't; all they did was provide a tl;dr[0].

I don't have a problem with news publications that seek to be secondary sources that add value (analysis, more in-depth reporting) to stories that others break, but it kills me to see publications not even bothering to do that.

[0] I can't remember if they even linked back to my post or not; I'd check, but I actually have all Gawker media sites blocked in /etc/hosts and I don't really feel like undoing that.

<comment><USER4> You should reach out to him directly and make a new thread with the results. You have a legitimate claim.

<comment><USER3> Hm, didn't think about that. Do you have an idea of how to get in contact with him? The form link he tweeted doesn't seem to apply 100% to this case[0], but digging around it seems you may be right; there's precedent for this kind of action elsewhere.

[0] I took a second at the Gawker "article"; they combined content with my blog post with some quotations from an interview with a (non-Gawker) publication, so it's recycling content from primary + secondary source, not just primary.

<comment><USER4> If it bothers you enough, get the ball rolling with contact forms, then start looking for email addresses via HN and linkedin. No harm in asking for your identity ranking back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> They're missing the possibility that the drive might decide to simulate being an USB hub at some point. It can then be both a USB storage drive and a simulated keyboard, and use the second to install something from the first.

<comment><USER6> Mouse, keyboard, network device, etc etc. You forfeit as soon as you plug in an untrusted USB device.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> T think there's a whoe new(ish) class of answers to this question if you ask it as :"What Are the Dangers of Using an Untrusted USB Drive from Travis Goodspeed?"?

[http://travisgoodspeed.blogspot.com.au/2012/07/emulating- usb...](http://travisgoodspeed.blogspot.com.au/2012/07/emulating-usb-devices- with-python.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> Interesting stuff! (Curious, why not just link to the SuperUser question instead of the LifeHacker link, though?)

I rarely use USB drives these days, and I don't remember the last time I used one that didn't belong to me. Probably for the best.

</comment><comment><USER9> At least under Linux, you could -theoretically- verify the type of a connected device and only load and bind drivers you are actually considering to use on that device.

[https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/usb/authorization.t...](https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/usb/authorization.txt)

As far as I understand this, I think it still reads the USB descriptors (which itself has been shown to be problematic in the past), but postpone binding the drivers (thereby locking out an enourmous amount of potentially buggy code from automatically starting to work on your USB device's maliciously crafted data).

</comment><comment><USER10> What does trust even mean? Flash storage devices come with little cpus/controllers which run code the moment you plug in the device (note: nothing to do with mounting). If you can find a way to program them (many already have), you can exploit all kinds of OS bugs without even having a file-system on the device. There are just too many places to stash code in modern electronic devices for them to ever be considered 'trusted'.

<comment><USER11> That's entirely irrelevant. It doesn't matter how the USB device gets its data; you could have a mainframe connected via USB OTG, and it wouldn't make one iota of a difference _because USB does not have DMA_.

<comment><USER12> While the USB _devices_ don't have DMA, the _controller_ indeed has.

And as the USB controllers are mostly the same anyways... find a bug in a common family and PROFIT.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Try using libguestfs to isolate you from the drive:

        guestfish -a /dev/sdX
        ><fs> run
        ><fs> list-filesystems
        /dev/sda1
        ><fs> mount /dev/sda1 /

Libguestfs runs a tiny appliance containing a separate kernel and (if your host supports it) protects that in an LXC container and with SELinux. In any case it would be extremely difficult for a malformed filesystem to exploit the guest kernel, and escape from virtualization, SELinux and LXC to attack the host.

Note this doesn't help if your OS "helpfully" mounts the disk when you plug it in.

[http://libguestfs.org/](http://libguestfs.org/)

<comment><USER12> Does not help against malformed USB descriptors, which were used to pwn the PlayStation 3.

<comment><USER13> True enough, but look at the amount of code in parsing USB descriptors versus parsing filesystems:

        $ wc -l usb/core/*.c
         21465 total
        $ wc -l `find fs -name '*.c'`
         1016460 total

Two orders of magnitude more. Now I'm not saying that USB descriptor parsing is free from problems, but there are an awful lot of obscure filesystem drivers in there ... Econet ADFS anyone?

Another place where libguestfs can help is in parsing files from the filesystem. We provide trusted parsing libraries that run inside the VM, so parsing (say) Unix /etc configuration or Windows Registry files is much safer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I once gave a presentation at a USAF base overseas.

IIRC almost anything I wanted to bring for the presentation was allowed (I wasn't searched - no TSA), but USB drives were forbidden.

The disk burner on my MBP failed (weird foreign current issues), so I ended up using Dropbox and my iPhone.

</comment><comment><USER15> "...the only true way to be safe is to boot up a live Linux distribution..."

The only true way? Are you sure about that?

There are other OS's besides Linux and Windows.

And there is something called rump(3).

</comment><comment><USER16> USB3 is an entire different can of worms. Plug one into Windows today to see all the juicy details.</comment>


Show HN: How we built our interactive demo walk-through - <AUTHOR> https://trevor.io/public/blog/demo <comment><USER2> This is a good article but unfortunately there's evidence of voting collusion and, worse, booster comments in the thread. We ban accounts and sites that do these things, so please make sure not to do them. It's not in your interest anyhow, since if the article gets attention, HN readers are good at sniffing out the collusion and then they go mad with ire.

<comment><USER3> Hi dang. Truly appreciate your feedback on this.

We have certainly been overwhelmed by the supportive comments of friends in this case, but it was only our intention to start the conversation - not to collude on votes (I don't have enough friends for that :-) ).

We spent a lot of time on this article, and were particularly excited to get feedback on it from the HN community. Sorry if it has come across as anything different.

<comment><USER2> At our end, we have no way of distinguishing between people soliciting votes and comments to manipulate HN vs. friends and fans just feeling supportive and trying to help out. From an HN point of view, the distinction doesn't much matter. We want people to vote for a story because they ran across it and personally found it intellectually interesting, not because they or their friends have content to promote. This is in the FAQ: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).

The larger issue, though, is the booster comments. Promotional votes at least don't do much visible damage, but promotional comments do, and after a few of them, the thread becomes unsalvageable. When friends or coworkers post booster comments, trying to sound like ordinary users who just happened to love the article, they mean well but are hurting both you and HN. They're hurting you because HN readers are highly sensitive to this, usually pick up on it, and then switch into attack mode. They'll make that the issue ("spamming", "manipulating", etc.) rather than your work. And it's bad for HN, obviously, because it degrades quality. Discussions here are supposed to be for intellectual curiosity, and booster comments are not interesting. And for this community to function, users need to be able to trust each other.

That said, if you genuinely want to participate in the community here, you're welcome! All of you are. This isn't the bannable spam kind of thing, it's a case of people doing interesting work but trying to plug it into HN the wrong way.

In terms of your article: (1) you should introduce yourself and your company at the beginning so readers can tell who you are and what you do. The discourse here is largely stateless, so each 'packet' has to come with identifying info. (2) We've learned over the years that the tutorial format ('step 1 do this, step 2 do that') is not a good fit for Hacker News. A good HN story gratifies the curiosity of a random smart reader; a good tutorial makes a task simple, but probably won't interest anyone who isn't trying to do that task. These are two different audiences, so the two formats work differently. A recipe is useful when you want to cook that dish, but not so good for general interest, so for HN, don't frame your material as a recipe, frame it as a story: "we needed to do X so we tried Y, had trouble because of Z, solved it with W, and oh by the way have some surprising details A, B, and C".

If you want to rework the article a bit and repost it, you'd be welcome to. It would be good to wait a week or two before doing that. You can email us at email@example.com and we might be able to give you a bit more feedback, and also make sure that the repost doesn't get flagged.

Edit: Two more thoughts for you popped into my head.

(1) You need to movitate the problem more. When I skim your article, it's about how to build a kind of widget; but what is this widget and what's its value? You hint at this with the term "interactive demo", but that's not enough to attract the reader. By jumping too quickly to _how_ you did it, without first establishing _what_ and _why_ , you make the article's appeal smaller than it should be. Readers have an early warning radar system called "why should I care" and your article's success depends on registering some signal on that radar. You have perhaps two seconds to do that, i.e. two seconds after they click and before they close the tab. Don't resort to flashy design tricks or urgent language to get attention in those two seconds—readers are inured to all that and it backfires. You have to do it with something genuinely interesting.

What we tell YC startups all the time is: when addressing HN, you need to appeal to intellectual curiosity. It's easy to assume that people know what your widget or product or idea or company is, because you know what it is. But almost no one else does. That's the hugest mistake people make and the easiest to fall into. Instead, draw the reader in by talking about the problem you're solving and why that problem is important. Alternatively, you can draw them in with the 'just for fun' approach: "I wanted to do weird-thing- X. Why? Just because. And it turns out if you want to do weird-thing-X the first issue you encounter is Y." etc. But your article shouldn't take the just-for-fun approach because it targets an important problem... even though most people wouldn't notice, which is the next point:

(2) Your article buries the lead [1], i.e. it drops a mention of the Most Important Thing in an obscure place and never comes back to it. What you ought to do, of course, is put the Most Important Thing in first position. Here it is:

> a hugely positive impact on our conversion rate

Thousands of HN readers, the ones who are trying to increase their own conversion rates as well as others who are just interested in the question, perk up when they hear a claim like that. Of course they will also perk up their skepticism—but that's good if you can back it up. So if that's what your widget has gotten you, you can 10x your article's appeal by leading with that and working your way backward from there. Eventually you can get into the _how_ part, and by then, readers will be drawn in enough to want those interesting technical details. But don't present them in recipe format (1, 2, 3). Frame it as a story, as explained above.

1\. [https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/bury-the- lede-...](https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/bury-the-lede-versus- lead)

<comment><AUTHOR> Just to jump in, this is really great information (not just for posting on HN, but for writing articles / sharing lessons learned, in general) - many thanks for taking the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Love this. Totes getting bored using a gazillion tools to help onboard my users. Before you've even started a new venture, you'll find yourself hunting for the right tool for a job you didn't even expect would exist.

Which support tool. Which analytics tool. Which AB testing tool. Which wizard tool. bla bla bla.

Back to basics. I'll get my coding hat on and actually make an effort. Nice work. Will try this one myself next time I need a wizard.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm interested to hear what the opinion on jQuery are like these days. Even if it's a little unglamorous, this is the perfect use case - a one-off project where you have needs for cross-browser animation, resizing, DOM manip, and where something like React might be overkill, even if feasible. CSS animations might be an alternative but it depends on audience browser breakdown.

<comment><USER3> Have to admit - we were a bit nervous about telling the world we used jQuery for this. ;) But it still has its place IMHO.

<comment><USER6> I will admit something too then, I am not a JQuery fan but I can't fault your use of it here. Right tool, right job. I would still prefer to use my favourite 'only the bits I need' MooTools - but alas, fashion wins ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice – what a simple, elegant solution. Like the others are saying, sometimes there's no need to reach for the heavy toolbox...

How did you measure the effectiveness of having the walkthrough on the front- page? Did you (or did you think about) hooking this up to some analytics? Perhaps see where people tend to drop-off?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeh we have it hooked up to Mixpanel so we know exactly where people drop off.

As for its effectiveness, this is always a bit tricky for SaaS, not least because the consideration stage tends to be quite long and people flick between devices, which makes attribution a bit of a nightmare. We've done some pretty obvious stuff, like comparing our sign up rates before and after adding the demo / recording whether people who sign up have done it etc, which is useful to know - though not always accurate.

More anecdotally, we spend a lot of time speaking with users and visitors and the demo comes up surprisingly frequently (including how we made it, which is why we wrote the post!) - it's been a pretty quick, straight forward way of showcase Trevor's interface.

Shortly, we'll be adding several new steps that demo features that are commonly used by our existing customers.

Any thoughts about what else we might do / how others measure success?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very interesting. I think it's nice to see an account of building something from scratch instead of using a library. Sometimes I spend more time searching for a suitable library than it would take to build it from scratch :D

<comment><USER9> Yeah, we need more articles like this on HN. I see lots of libraries promoted, instead of clean vanilla solutions like this one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Thanks for your generosity in sharing this, I can see this being incredibly useful for creating user onboarding, walkthroughs and demos. The timing of this is perfect for me - thanks again!

</comment><comment><USER11> Looks very elegant! Great it does not require loading the app itself and is easily embeddable in a web page. Calling the implementation a "vanilla" jQuery made me smile )

</comment><comment><USER12> This is really useful - have been looking for flexible way to demo WIP versions of apps to clients. Thanks for sharing

</comment><comment><USER13> I like idea of using images for this and not trying to wrangle the actual app, much cleaner!

<comment><USER3> Thanks! Yeah, we played with the idea of making a demo version of the app, for a long time. But it would have been a mega-project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wonder how this would look like if it was vanilla JS? More performant to boot.

<comment><USER15> Yes, might be a bit faster, as you don't have to load all of jquery and the animations add-on. Also: one could save a bit of code by using CSS animations (i.e. for the pulsing circle).

However, as others already wrote: Although I'm all for VanillaJS (if JS is even needed in the first place), I dig the simplicity of how it's coded. Very minimal and extremely easy to adapt and set up. Most work is probably figuring out what the optimal flow through an app is to showcase the most important features to convert users. That's why we have marketing people - they do wonders explaining our ideas to others :)

I'm currently working on a project with seven of my students and saved it as a bookmark for later (we have to present our result to lots of people at the end)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is really cool! I've been looking for something like this to give an app walkthrough without needing test data or a demo environment -- thanks guys!

</comment><comment><USER6> Loads have commented rightly on the simplicity (nay elegance) of the solution. I can't fault the use of JQuery even if I have never been a fan. I also agree that sometimes just building something as opposed to searching for someone else's solution is the right choice. Especially when you look at some of the foolish 'kata' time people spend when they could practice on something business-useful like this.

Most of all, to see the thought process played out is really important. This article would make great reading for juniors to help see how more experienced people solve problems. Particularly as it is not a patronising 'tutorial' (draw three circles, then draw an owl) but working through a clear scenario.</comment>


PayPal password change – word of warning - <AUTHOR> I have just had a very unpleasant experience with changing my PayPal account password. After copying my new 32-character password from my password generator/manager and pasting into PayPal's password box, it was truncated to maximum (20) number of characters. Of course, no message about that fact was displayed so I unknowingly set my new password to the 20-character one.
After several unsuccessful attempts to log in trying my brand new 32-character password (yes, login password entry box doesn't limit the password length!), I had to go through the password recovery process.
Not fun at all. <comment><USER2> The paypal (desktop) website has a 'feedback' link in the bottom right corner. It might be worth sending them the same feedback.</comment>


Operator Algebra - <AUTHOR> https://www.josephkirwin.com/2016/07/23/operator-algebra/ <comment><USER2> Really crap code, but here's my 5 minute solution:

        #!/usr/bin/python

        from itertools import permutations

        vs = [ 1, 3, 4, 6 ]

        def run_tests( rtn, vs ):

            if len(vs) == 1:
                print rtn, ':', vs[0]
                return
            run_tests( rtn+' +', [ vs[0]+vs[1] ] + vs[2:] )
            run_tests( rtn+' -', [ vs[0]-vs[1] ] + vs[2:] )
            run_tests( rtn+' r', [-vs[0]+vs[1] ] + vs[2:] )
            run_tests( rtn+' *', [ vs[0]*vs[1] ] + vs[2:] )
            if vs[1] != 0:
                run_tests( rtn+' /', [ float(vs[0])/vs[1] ] + vs[2:] )
            if vs[0] != 0:
                run_tests( rtn+' v', [ float(vs[1])/vs[0] ] + vs[2:] )

        for p in permutations( vs ):
            rtn = `p`
            run_tests( rtn, list(p) )

Run this looking for the desired answer:

        ./SolverHack.py | grep " 24"

It produces:

        (3, 4, 1, 6) / r v : 24.0
        (4, 3, 1, 6) v r v : 24.0

As I say:

* crappy code,

* complete hack,

* done in 5 minutes,

* solves the problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> Neat! Looks pretty compact. My code was pretty bad too.

This is going to probably sound like a dumb question, but what are r and v here? Is that how you're conveying you parentheses?

The other extensions of this I was thinking of are:

* Can your code identify correct solutions when more numbers are added to the array?

* What modifications need to be made to allow it to handle other operators, such as exponents (Right-To-Left associative unlike the LTR associative operators in the first example)

I suspect that the cleanest solution would utilize the shunting-yard algorithm ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shunting- yard_algorithm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shunting-yard_algorithm)).

<comment><USER2>
      > ... what are r and v here?

The program works by preloading a stack and then applying each permitted operator to the top two recursively until only a single value remains. The operators are, obviously, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, but we also have to allow reverse subtraction and reverse division to recognise that naive subtraction and division are non-commutative.

      > Can your code identify correct
      > solutions when more numbers are
      > added to the array

Yes - easiest for you just to try it.

      > What modifications need to be
      > made to allow it to handle other
      > operators, such as exponents ...

Just an extra line for each operator, two if the operator is non-commutative.

      > ... exponents (Right-To-Left
      > associative unlike the LTR
      > associative operators in the
      > first example)

The issue of associativity is already covered as a fundamental part of algorithm.

      > ... suspect that the cleanest
      > solution would utilize the
      > shunting-yard algorithm

This effectively is a cut-down version of that. Interleaving the operators into the stack of values has many problems, always having to have enough values above each operator, _etc._ Instead this externalises the operators from the stack, which is what makes it work.</comment></comment></comment>


Yahoo Appoints Marissa Mayer Chief Executive Officer - <AUTHOR> http://investor.yahoo.net/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=692230

<comment><AUTHOR> Couldn't help noticing the line "Mayer received her B.S. in Symbolic Systems and her M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University, specializing in artificial intelligence for both degrees. She is credited as an inventor on several patents in artificial intelligence and interface design." and thinking about the uproar such an innocuous statement caused the last time round.

<comment><USER2> Because it was not true.</comment></comment>


Getting out of the cloud… - <AUTHOR> http://blog.koehntopp.info/index.php/228-getting-out-of-the-cloud/ <comment><USER2> Dear HN, please scale down the panic.

>President Trump's Executive Order calls for federal agencies in the U.S. to ensure that their privacy notices make clear that Privacy Act protections extend only to citizens and permanent residents of the U.S. Importantly, Article 14 of the Order explicitly states that the federal agencies must do so in a manner that is "consistent with applicable law." In the context of EU-U.S. data transfers for law enforcement purposes, the Judicial Redress Act constitutes applicable law, and thus President Trump's Executive Order, as written, should not impact the Judicial Redress Act's extension of the Privacy Act's protections to citizens of the EU. As a result, absent further action from the U.S. government, we do not expect this Executive Order to impact the legal viability of the Privacy Shield Framework.

[https://www.huntonprivacyblog.com/2017/01/28/privacy- shield-...](https://www.huntonprivacyblog.com/2017/01/28/privacy-shield- impact-of-trumps-executive-order/)

<comment><USER2> Here is a good summary from Techcrunch. TLDR: the EO shouldn't invalidate Privacy Shield protections, but the whole framework is flawed and does not guarantee privacy of EU citizens. The relevant parts:

> The spokeswoman has now sent us a statement in which the EC asserts that > Privacy Shield "does not rely on the protections under the U.S. Privacy > Act".

> Critics of Privacy Shield –– including the lawyer who brought the original > challenge against Safe Harbor — have consistently argued the arrangement > contains the same fundamental flaws as its invalidated predecessor, given > ongoing U.S. government agency surveillance programs accessing European > citizens' data.

[https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/26/trump-order-strips- privacy...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/26/trump-order-strips-privacy- rights-from-non-u-s-citizens-could-nix-eu-us-data-flows/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Starting to think the Trump presidency will be great for Europe, by making it politically unfeasible for European politicians to continue pretending the US is a good ally, leader of the free world, champion of liberal values, etc...

The US fifth column voluntarily leaving the EU will surely expedite the process.

<comment> shaki-dora By any objective standard, the last 70 years were the best ever for Europe, and the world as a whole. There are certainly differences of opinion and interests between Europe and the US, but they are far from negating the overlaps. The ideas that the US has propagated are fundamentally sound, and any US hypocrisy may undermine the effort to spread them, but not the value they offer.

If you are an average citizen anywhere in Europe, throwing the dice in either the time or spatial dimensions is a losing proposition: there is almost no time nor place of higher prosperity, lower physical danger, better chances regardless of class/gender/race/etc, higher life expectancy, more vibrant cultural life, more freedom to explore your interest/kinks/obsessions etc. And the shift of the US under Trump is a throw of the dice in the best case. In reality, it is unlikely that a new world order build by an orange buffoon could in any way rival the current one, which was build by people who had the foresight and moral compass to invest trillions into a continent, and even the very country that had just plunged the world into the darkest crevice of history.

I'm not saying that all is well, just that we are, historically, closer to the best than the worst, or even to average. But any assertion that the system was fundamentally broken is obviously not supported by the outcomes it produced, and the way to optimise a system running at it's historical best involves carefully planned tuning, not destroying it with a sledgehammer and asking a reality TV character to build a new one.

<comment><USER4> Not at all. There is many a lost generation in European countries.

<comment><USER5> Best for the entire group on average != best for some subset of that group. But it seems to me that some people believe they'll be happier if they pull the world back to year 1940.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> [https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/userdatarequests/c...](https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/userdatarequests/countries/) [https://govtrequests.facebook.com/country/United%20States/20...](https://govtrequests.facebook.com/country/United%20States/2016-H1/)

~60,000 google user accounts(not just email, but all your web browsing data) were handed over to the government in 2016. And this was under the Obama administration.

<comment><USER7> Those aren't requests to hand over all a user's data to the government. Half of those are subpoenas, and half of the remaining are search warrants. You're probably thinking of NSLs, which you can find ranges for [https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/userdatarequests/U...](https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/userdatarequests/US/), but those don't contain content. Also, it's unclear why you're talking about the number of Americans when the executive order is a change in the handling of foreigners' data.

<comment><USER6> FISA Content requests: July to December 2015 21000–21499. Note - FISA requests includes all personal information, NSL does not. And sure - this particular order is about foreigners' data, but they might require citizens' data in future. Also is data privacy only a US citizen's right? Googlers claimed to have strong views when non-citizen googlers were being treated unfairly on immigration. But no statement when non-citizens' privacy is being snatched away.

<comment><USER7> FISA is for non-Americans' data, and you were talking about Americans previously.

You can't write an executive order that says you can get access to something you previously needed a warrant for without a warrant.

<comment><USER6> Seems it does include US citizens.

Per "[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveilla...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Act") : "and "agents of foreign powers" (which may include American citizens and permanent residents suspected of espionage or terrorism)."

<comment><USER7> You can look at the definition here: [https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/1801](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/1801). Suspicion of espionage or terrorism isn't enough to be considered an agent of a foreign power. A US citizen must be known to have aided a foreign power in espionage or sabotage and done so knowingly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In fairness, this has been a long time coming - legal-aware geeks have been warning us since 2001 about the infamous PATRIOT Act. SafeHaven and PrivacyShield were both disingenuous attempts at persuading people that "actually we don't really mean that for you, friends". In a way, I'm glad the hypocrisy is over.

This might actually help the European market.

</comment><comment><USER9> It's things like these that push me so hard in the direction of decentralized cloud applications. Centralized institutions should not be able to see your data, and foreign powers should not be able to command them to drop your data (or otherwise hold it hostage).

<comment><USER10> But what if I specifically _want_ to store my own personal data in a different country? I want privacy from _my_ government, not from foreign ones!

<comment><USER9> I'm the case of Sia at least you will have the ability to whitelist and/or blacklist hosts on the network. Which makes it really easy to control which countries do or don't end up with your data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can any one please explain in layman terms what this means a bit more clearly?

I think I understood the part where the US no longer a good place to store data, and that there are no proper privacy laws protecting foreign citizens' data that is stored on US soil. So basically, if you still want to have a proper privacy policy, GTFO your data to non-US servers ASAP.

Anything else? Something I've gotten wrong?

<comment><USER12> There's also the chance that USDoJ vs. Microsoft will land in USDoJ's favour. If so, then if your cloud provider is US-based (e.g. Amazon), then your data can be procured by the US government with a NSL or similar secret court mechanisms without you even being notified. I don't think that people frequenting HN need to have it explained to them why this is bad for US-based cloud providers. Amazon needs to segregate Frankfurt, fast.

<comment><USER13> Ireland's in the EU too (eu-west-1)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> For the tech industry, this is gonna be harder to navigate than the upcoming regulations on visas and h1bs. I don't even want to think about all the refactoring and rearchitecting to provide data segregation on multi-region. What a mess.

</comment><comment><USER15> It's hilarious that Obama expanded the powers, scope, and capabilities of domestic spying more than any previous administration, but people thought he was a good dude and gave him a pass. Now Trump is in office less than a week and all of a sudden people are hair-on-fire worried about keeping their data on the same servers that have been essentially pwnd by the feds for years. Spoiler alert: nothing's changed except your level of interest in the issue.

</comment><comment><USER16> Can anyone recommend a European alternative for Amazon AWS?

<comment><USER17> Aren't the data centers technically owned by Amazon Ireland for compliance (cough tax) reasons? Amazon clearly state that data never moves out of the region.

<comment><USER18> As long as Amazon has a US presence, it, and the data is hosts, is within legal reach of US judges and government.

<comment><USER19> This isn't yet decided. Microsoft and the DoJ are still arguing about this in the court system, which so far has ruled that the US government _cannot_ compel Microsoft to release data it holds in Ireland. It's currently waiting for the DoJ to decide whether to take it to the Supreme Court: [http://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the- radar/2017/01/micros...](http://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the- radar/2017/01/microsoft-data-broad-appeals-court-234098)

<comment><USER17> Even if the DoJ did make it law, it would surely conflict with law that the Irish domiciled entity is subject to.

<comment><USER20> Penalties for the US-based domestic entity to compel compliance of the off- shore entity would fall onto the domestic entity. The off-shore entity ALSO has to comply with whatever local regulatory regime they fall under.

Unlinking the two companies completely might satisfy what you appear to be angling for, but it would be, in essence, a potential competitor to Amazon at that point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Don't want to sound like I sound, but this might be the end of the Internet as we know it.

<comment><USER6> more like the internet will finally be fixed. There is no reason gmail cannot encrypt my email and remove pii data, except that it will eat into advertising revenues. Its easy for companies like Google to take a stand on an easy thing like the government making it a bit harder to get visas, but when it comes to saying no to government requests for your email - they happily comply.

<comment><USER7> The number one benefit that Gmail touted when it launched was searchable email. That will break.

You're perfectly free to use E2E encryption on Gmail, and they are even trying to make it easy for you, though that project is evidently not as well staffed as the advertising org.

<comment><USER6> search-ability is not a constraint for encryption. Eq see [https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~dawnsong/papers/se.pdf](https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~dawnsong/papers/se.pdf)

<comment><USER7> Performant search is. Gmail wouldn't work with O(n) search times.

<comment><USER6> The inverted index could simply be built/live on client side. The cloud is then just a backup data storage. Encrypted email is downloaded, unencrypted and indexed on your laptop/phone etc.

<comment><USER7> To be clear, you're proposing that users download their entire email storage to their phones and browsers before they can search or spam filter their email? And you think that this would be a compelling product for the average email user? I'm having a hard time figuring out if you're trolling.

<comment><USER22> Isn't this how pretty much any mail client does it? Thunderbird does a decent job at spam filtering my mail. You know, I can even search folders in Outlook! Saying that scanning your 1M mails with 1kb each _requires_ the use of a cloud service seems a bit over the top.

<comment><USER7> And how long does that search take? How long does it take to download that mail to a new device? How long would that have been on 2006 Internet? I've never said that it's impossible. I've only said that it takes away the main advantage claimed at launch — fast, working search.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's easier to move our own company's apps, I feel. What's harder is all the SaaS products that we use most of which are in the US :/ I have to look more closely into selfhosting solutions.

</comment><comment><USER24> "A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty." ― Winston S. Churchill</comment>


Former Reddit co-owner arrested for excessive JSTOR downloads  - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/07/reddit-founder-arrested-for-excessive-jstor-downloads.ars

<comment><USER2> This is from 4 months ago, and therefore isn't really news.

</comment><comment><USER3> Old, but it got me to think - wtf did he try to do something like this at MIT of all places? I doubt BU or xyz state U has nearly as much security...

<comment><USER4> Jstor detected the suspicious activity on their end: [http://about.jstor.org/news-events/news/jstor-statement- misu...](http://about.jstor.org/news-events/news/jstor-statement-misuse- incident-and-criminal-case)</comment></comment>


Introducing Seedcamp Tel Aviv Teams - <AUTHOR> http://www.seedcamp.com/2012/03/introducing-seedcamp-tel-aviv-teams.html

<comment><USER2> Was a quality event with good projects lined-up. Keep going!</comment>


Leading futurists, thinkers to launch Silicon Valley university - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-10155303-76.html

<comment><USER2> Big deal -- if you are not a CEO or a CTO who can afford a $25K fee, or a graduate student who wins a scholarship, but instead work as an entrepreneur or self-employed, you can't go.

</comment><comment><USER3> Already posted: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=463600></comment>