The Silicon Valley paradox: one in four people are at risk of hunger - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/12/the-silicon-valley-paradox-one-in-four-people-are-at-risk-of-hunger <comment><USER3> Why pay $2000 a month when you have the whole country you could live in for much less? Why should I have to pay increased taxes for your ignorance/provincialism? Is living in San Francisco a fundamental right?

I grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska. I'd suggest that these people move there, for the low cost of living combined with the vibrant-enough economy. Unemployment was at 5% _through the great recession_. However, I find whenever I suggest that, people act like if they move there they will be lynched - as if the place is a primitive wasteland inhabited by backwards rednecks carrying pitchforks. In reality, it is a modestly wealthy area filled with dentists, insurance providers, accountants, and other mid-level white collar workers. You're more likely to die of boredom, but isn't that better than food stamps, and isn't boredom good if you want to raise a family? The people that read and write these articles don't seem to consider things like this.

<comment><USER4> There is a solution. At the moment successful EU countries such as Germany, Sweden, Finland, Denmark are struggling with aging population and not enough people to fill blue colar jobs.

I think EU should make it easier for US citizens who get any job here to move over. Americans in general are super hard working. Europe needs hard working people, while we can provide them with free universal healthcare, free university education, and way more upward mobility than they could ever dream of.

The deal could be so that you can move to Europe for any job, and if you work for 5 years then you are eligible for permanent residence. If you loose your work, and become unemployed for more than 6 months you have to move back to US.

Yes, there would be risks, but at the same time, it could also be a win win - hard working folk from USA would get a chance to raise their kids in a society that would allow them to put their kids through college without selling a kidney.

<comment><USER5> > way more upward mobility than they could ever dream of

It's worth keeping in mind that it's _relative_ upwards mobility - <USER2> mobility in the US conjures up some slightly different mental images. Top 10% in Denmark is absolutely unremarkable middle class in the US.

If you enjoy being relatively equal to your neighbours, then it's great, if you enjoy objective material wealth, less so.

<comment><USER6> You probably already know this, but of course it's useless to compare absolute material wealth between european and US citizens.

Again, you might already be aware of that, but I'd say it's much more important to consider the benefits that come with a european wage that might seem unremarkable in the US: Healthcare, education, social security are the most obvious aspects, but in general I'm sure your money, even if it's less in absolute terms, will buy you a lot more in europe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> aaron-lebo This seems to explain at least some of the UBI-love tech founders have. They live as billionaires in a community, that despite all their money and highfalutin ideas doesn't actually take care of its own, unless you have millions if not billions of dollars.

Of course to them the only solution is more money, that's the only solution they seem to know. They'd be more believable if they fixed their own literal and metaphorical neighborhoods first before continuing their personal campaigns of empire.

Sorry if it's whiny, it's just that the contrast between words and actions is stark.

<comment><USER7> I've never been to the US, so forgive me if I'm ignorant, but if the problem is poverty, surely the solution _is_ more money? What's wrong with a UBI or some other mechanism to deliver that?

<comment><USER8> As a US citizen, I see just handing out cash as a terrible way to fix this poverty. With the way our society operates, I'd put my money that whatever UBI is distributed, most of it will be leveraged upwards in creative and manipulative ways without very many productive gains.

Poverty is a complex issue because there are so many different causes behind it and they are often intertwined. A few reasons off the top of my head: systemic oppression and social prejudices, mental health, desperation, poor self-perception, lack of opportunity, irresponsible handling of money, ineffective upbringing, bad set of cards, medical problems (and the often accompanying debt), terrible education, malnutrition, a system that largely blames the impoverished for being so, rich people who get to set their own definition of charity for financial gain, and the list goes on and on ...

It'll never happen, but I think a much better solution would be defining a set of basic needs where more money != better quality: healthcare, food, education, housing.

Sounds crazy, doesn't it? Especially that last one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Housing problem. There's not enough of it, and the people that moved here in the 1960s have fought tooth and nail from more people being able to move here.

It's a completely artificial construct that drives up the cost of living and robs the poor with rent seeking.

All of California's inequality problems go back to that. High salaries for some people help make it stronger, but the greed of the NIMBY homeowners is a far greater cause of putting people at risk for going hungry, because they have been trying so hard to keep them out of housing.

<comment><USER10> _people that moved here in the 1960s have fought tooth and nail from more people being able to move here_

Well that cuts to the very heart of democracy doesn't it? Why would the government of territory X not answer to the taxpayer-voter of X, over people who merely want to live there?

There are reasons why they might of course, enumerate those reasons and the real dynamic will come to light.

<comment><USER11> There is a fine line between democracy and mob rule.

The Nash equilibrium for any sufficiently stable democratic system is for 49.9% of the electorate to be treated as subhuman. Democracy inevitably becomes tyrannical if civil institutions fail to defend the interests of the minority against the interests of the majority.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> d--b It's a culture problem: with so many people being so rich in the valley, you need to be ruthless to be part of the rich people's club. It means that if you're at the helm of a successful company, you'd rather become a billionaire yourself than letting the poorer people you employ become wealthy.

Another factor is that a good chunk of the tech's business was about making things cheaper rather than making new stuff. Amazon is cheaper than bookstores, Uber is cheaper than regular taxi, and so on. Even if the tech helps make the costs lowers, it also often translates into lower worker wages, and doesn't create more value overall that what existed before.

</comment><comment><USER12> Why is this called a paradox? It's a greed and winner-takes-it-all culture. What are the mechanism in place which would guarantee at least a mild version of wealth redistribution?

<comment><USER13> The paradox is that Silicon Valley is one of he wealthiest parts of the country and yet >25% of the population is food insecure.

<comment><USER14> That's the 'paradox' of capitalism. But it's only a paradox if you take bourgeois conceptions of wealth and prosperity at face value.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is so so incredibly sad. I see people on this thread saying stuff like "this is how life is" and "suck it up and move" but the core of the problem is that we have literally institutionalized slavery by calling it a market force. This woman isn't a market operator, shes basically a modern day slave. Crucial to the functioning of the system (or Facebook doesn't have food) but somehow also expendable. This is not just a American but a worldwide issue. Whatever the market forces are it just doesn't make any sense that a cook is unable to make a living.

</comment><comment><USER16> Most of SW jobs in Silicon Valley can be done remotely. Frankly, it's about time our industry embraces this instead of reversing the trend and adding insane "open office" spaces everywhere, killing productivity and happiness.

</comment><comment><USER17> Why is this a surprise? California is the #1 poverty state[1], spends almost the least on education etc etc. State tax receipts mostly just rewards CalPERs members.

1 [http://www.politifact.com/california/statements/2017/jan/20/...](http://www.politifact.com/california/statements/2017/jan/20/chad- mayes/true-california-has-nations-highest-poverty-rate-w/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Its kind of ironic and interesting to juxtapose this article with the post where Chamath Palihapitiya the former Facebook exec says "I want the fucking money" to increase his influence.

The economic output in sheer profit terms of Silicon Valley companies is probably enough to feed the continent. There are probably scores of individuals living there that could create a food program with 1/4 of their net worth that could prevent all hunger.

This kind of makes the point to me that the skillset to get somebody a lot of money is the exact opposite skillset necessary to care for their neighbors.

</comment><comment><USER19> "Food insecure" is a very strange way of describing this situation. The people described are spending far more money on rent than they are on food. The real problem is that the rent is too damn high.

</comment><comment><USER20> There's a book from 2002 called "The Silicon Valley of Dreams" that seems never to have been mentioned on HN. [https://nyupress.org/books/9780814767092/](https://nyupress.org/books/9780814767092/)

It's about the environmental conditions around electronics manufacturing, and their disproportionate impact on immigrants and minorities. Maybe a bit too hardcore for the optimists here (I'd include myself), but it covers similar issues to this Guardian article and is worth being aware of.

</comment><comment><USER21> Hyper local meritocratic neoliberalism</comment>


Find your music in the computational universe - <AUTHOR> http://tones.wolfram.com/generate/advanced.html?pitch

<comment><USER2> I am a musician and I've used generative/aleatoric techniques many times.

Carefully crafting sounds, defining my own generative rules and keeping adjusting each subtle parameter until I've achieved the desired results is the farthest I've been in this territory.

Even Mozart played with chance (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musikalisches_Würfelspiel>).

On the other hand, I've always despised experiments like this. And I hope there will always be more in what we perceive as art than just selecting a genre, a scale, some sampled instruments and pressing a button.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. The "melodies" all suck. But, I do find the scales feature useful.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The generated melodies do not have any emotion.</comment>


Proof daylight saving time is dumb, dangerous, and costly - <AUTHOR> https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2017/03/10/proof-daylight-saving-time-dumb-dangerous-and-costly/kOqQs7T33rYHMEnCraQSJO/story.html <comment><USER2> _As Hawaii and Arizona show, the US government gives states a choice as to whether to adopt daylight saving time. But states aren't currently allowed to switch to daylight saving time year-round._

I didn't know that states couldn't choose permanent daylight savings time. That might explain the hesitation to get rid of time changes...if it means being stuck with dark evenings all year round, I wouldn't want to change either. I want daylight savings all year round.

<comment><USER3> > A bill signed by Governor Charlie Baker in August included a provision > establishing a task force to study if Massachusetts should leave Eastern > Standard Time behind. The commission would analyze putting the state on > Atlantic Standard Time throughout the year, rather than springing forward > every March and falling back every November.

I don't understand how the statement you quoted works with the statement I quoted. Is the task force to analyze the impact of doing something that the state isn't even allowed to do?

<comment><USER4> What I don't get about this idea is that it would put Massachusetts in a very strange place - if you left the state in any direction in the winter you'd drop back an hour. Is the idea that Massachusetts is powerful enough in New England that the rest of the New England states would go along? (Just under half the population of New England lives in Massachusetts, so this isn't entirely far-fetched.)

I can't imagine all of Connecticut would go along, though. It wouldn't surprise me if eastern CT went with Boston time while western CT went with New York time, following roughly the Red Sox - Yankees border.

<comment><USER5> I've seen reports of other states on the Eastern Seaboard considering the same thing (I remember Maine specifically, but I think there were more.)

<comment><USER4> This article reports on a New Hampshire proposal: w[http://www.concordmonitor.com/time-zone-Atlantic- bill-754516...](http://www.concordmonitor.com/time-zone-Atlantic-bill-7545169)

And this one on a Rhode Island proposal: [https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/03/11/will-new- englan...](https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/03/11/will-new-england- secede-from-eastern-standard-time/4T9tNuLYXX3rz3SKWMpkZI/story.html)

Both explicitly require Massachusetts to go first.

Maine has been considering it for longer (which makes sense, as it's further east), since 2005, according to this story: [https://bangordailynews.com/2017/01/19/politics/state- house/...](https://bangordailynews.com/2017/01/19/politics/state-house/maine- lawmakers-take-another-stab-at-changing-states-time- zone/?ref=topStories3Thumb) . The proposals there don't seem to be contingent on Massachusetts making the first move.

I couldn't find any references to proposals in Vermont or Connecticut.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Those people in the comments that want permanent daylight saving: it's easy - leave you clocks on standard time and just get up an hour earlier every day!

(One day I'm going to move to the country and set my clocks to local mean time, and rise at dawn, go to bed soon after sunset, and adopt a biphasic sleep pattern where I get up in the middle of the night to watch the stars.)

</comment><comment><USER7> Sheesh! This is nothing more than a rant. Does the Boston Globe always present opinion pieces like this as news?</comment>


Did You Say Passwords? - <AUTHOR> https://www.novainfosec.com/2012/11/18/did-you-say-passwords/ <comment><USER2> I think I'm going to have to watch SpaceBalls again!</comment>


Is it hard to build a web app that makes at least $1000 a month? - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Is-it-hard-to-build-market-and-maintain-a-web-app-that-makes-at-least-1000-a-month? <comment><USER3> Define "hard." It is an eminently achievable goal to build a business which makes $1,000 a month. That isn't a "get into the NFL then win the Superbowl" goal, that is a "get into college" goal on the relative-risk-of-total-failure continuum. The process of doing it is fairly well understood and focused application of effort towards it makes it quite likely that you will succeed.

It does require a bit of a mindset change. You have to stop thinking of yourself as a "skilled developer", for one, since development skill leads to success in software businesses like the ability to cook amazing waffles leads to successfully running a bed and breakfast.

<comment><USER4> _since development skill leads to success in software businesses like the ability to cook amazing waffles leads to successfully running a bed and breakfast._

Well put.

<comment><USER5> Yes, a very important point. This is the central idea of The E-Myth (i.e. doing a thing and running a business that does that thing require very different skill sets).

ref: [http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses- About/...](http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses- About/dp/0887307280)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Applying your startup skills to projects in the adult space will certainly help you wing your way to $1000/m v easily.

Big data/machine learning of all the meta data associated on tube sites, repurposing content for tablets, recommendation engines, social layers that are delineated/firewalled from the mainstream social graph, hosting/live streaming services for adult content -- are all opportunity spaces that come to mind.

Many of these projects can be kept on "life-support" and still bring in a healthy profit if set up correctly.

 _Please don't down-vote because it's porn - it's a legal and legitimate space_

<comment><USER7> I've been wanting to build a niche video/picture site for a while (to deal with all the CDN/scaling issues involved myself), and I've also been looking for a project I can use this _Programming Collective Intelligence_ book on.

Adult seems to be a good next project for me. The only initial unknown I can think of would be where content would come from unless it's user-supplied. Any other links/info/thoughts?

<comment><USER8> Several years ago I thought about building something in the adult market (never got to it). Your best bet is to go to the adult webmaster's board: <http://gfy.com> If you're looking for affiliate programs, if I recall correctly, they gave you tons of content for free.

Anyway... hope this helps - good luck!

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the link and suggestions!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Questions like this, "what should I build", and "which language should I use", and etc make me cringe when I read them. Asking questions is awesome, but these just don't seem to be productive. His question isn't related to building a web app at all, he just wants to know _if_ he built that app, _could_ it make $1k+ per month. Plus, any answer(s) given will likely just fuel his planning, and not execution.

<comment><USER10> In his defense I know lots of developers doing small webapps they intend to keep on life support and not actively work at growing in an attempt to hit their magic mark for what their monthly budget / expenses are. This may not be the attitude of the majority of HNers but lots of people would be happy with a way to make 2500$ a month for themselves... Just enough to maintain a modest quality of life in the midwest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Both the question and the answer are all kinds of silly. You can't start a project with the end goal of making $1000 a month, or you will surely fail. Instead, you've gotta motivated to solve a problem you've identified and then you need to execute on it.

Coding isn't everything either. You may be a fine developer, but you're forgetting about design, marketing, customer support, dealing with crisis when your project does good, dealing when depression when it doesn't…

Don't make a plan to get to $1000. Rather, build something cool, and when $1000 does or does not show up at the door, be thankful and learn from the experience. And try again. Iterate.

</comment><comment><USER12> I have an eBook for sale for $39.00 that will show you how in ten easy steps, it includes: 1) how to market yourself and use the power of social networking to do the marketing for you 2) how to unlock the power of referrals 3) how you can grow from making $1000 a month, to over $10,000 a month in three more months of work.

"I never thought I could own my own business, but it is just so easy" - <USER2> customer

</satire>

<comment><USER13> How much do those ebooks make? How hard is it to make $1000/month selling ebooks?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have many products that make more than $1000 a month. Tip - use the app stores to cut away the pain of having to market to users through vague means. App stores are a godsend if you are a good developer but bad marketer.

<comment><USER8> But that wouldn't be a web app. How about a web app? Anything else other than AppSumo?

<comment><USER14> Why must it be a web app? To me web apps are only useful for a specific sort of software, not for all types of software. People who want everything to be web apps are just mentally inflexible.

The app store for web apps is twitter and facebook.

<comment><USER15> > Why must it be a web app?

Because that was the original question asked, as well as the topic here. Stay on topic, stay on topic.

<comment><USER16> I might be wrong but you might be splitting hair here. What I read was:

"Is it hard to write a small piece of software and sell it over the web so I can make 1k per month to pay my bills"

<comment><USER15> I don't know where you read that. Here is the question:

"Is it hard to build, market and maintain a web app that makes at least $1000 a month? For a single, skilled web developer."

You might consider that splitting hairs, but I think the question was quite clear, and very precise. Basically, he's interested in capitalizing on an existing skill set and wondering about the business side of things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Its hard, but not THAT hard!"

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY>

6 years into building web-apps and finally I am just now seeing a few bucks rolling in (still <$1000 month).

I wasted lots of time, primarily pursuing the wrong kinds of business models (free!!!) or putting effort into the wrong areas of a business, ultimately burning out because things weren't working.

But, even if you've picked a good product with a good market, for the un- initiated engineer there's this mysterious delta between being able to build something (anything!), and making that something successful. My recommendation (because its working for me), is to find a co-founder who is a business guy employed at a successful small software company. Painting with broad strokes here, but try to pick a sales or marketing guy over a biz dev guy, I think they are connected better with the product.

You've heard this advice before. Its true. Engineers think of the world as meritocratic. But good product != success. You need someone to help you get past this way of thinking.

</comment><comment><USER18> I would not take business advice from anyone attributing all of Apple's success to their image and none to their products.

<comment><USER19> Indeed. How does the poster figure Apple _got_ their image? It was pretty bad, their image I mean, in the 90s. It surely couldn't be something crazy like _they make great products_ :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It can't be _that_ easy otherwise everyone would build 10 or 20 of them and retire.

<comment><USER21> If it takes you one year to get that product to $1K/month, then you'll need 20 years... But you have to consider that in 20 years, some of your apps will die and also managing 20 apps and customers is a headache.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Yes, yes; it's very easy! Now, just step this way and let me show you my excellent range of pick axes and mining equipment ;)

</comment><comment><USER23> I think saying, however sarcastically, that if it was that easy, everyone would be doing it is kinda pointless. The most important step is to _get started in the first place_.

Even if you don't make huge amounts of money (disclaimer: that's my blog post linked at the bottom of the answer), there's a huge gulf between those that spend their days thinking about possibilities, and those that get up and start their projects. If you're in the latter group, you stand a much greater chance :)

</comment><comment><USER24> Confirmation bias overload: this is Quora.

</comment><comment><USER25> "The first 3 years of any startup is very hard. After 3 years you just get used to it".

</comment><comment><USER26> I think it is harder to go from zero to $1000/month than from $1000/month to 100,000$/month.

What is sad is that instead to create a spam engine, adsense powered, doing $1000/month is pretty straightforward.

<comment><USER27> OK I've done the first part, but I've been a bit stuck on the easier second part for a long time. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Is it hard to write a story or make a film that people will watch? Same thing, just a bit different. "Everyone" seems to know the answer, but the truth is nobody knows. Because everyone would do it then.

<comment><USER29> I agree in part with your cimment but even if everybody knew how to do it, not everybody would. Compare: basic healthy habits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> What does a "recurring billing system" do? I'm new to this, but all I did for now was to store PayPal's (actually the clone that exists in my country) transactions in my database, and bump the "good_until" timestamp when a new payment is received (via POST in my case).

</comment><comment><USER31> it's so simpo' why not everyone does it?

and I mean it in the most sarcastic way.

<comment><USER32> Because $1000 a month is less than a developer's salary?

<comment><USER33> Need I point out that (your salary + $1000/month) > your salary?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> A mobile web app mashup having a social layer+LBS on top could be quite good to earn revenue which you are looking for.

</comment><comment><USER35> It's not hard at all. Here's what you need to do:

1\. Pick a tool you can build which will make money for people.

2\. Build it for people who will pay.

3\. Market to them.

4\. Build it.

5\. Ship it.

6\. Market to them. (Over and over. It's not a one-time thing.)

I've done it, and I teach other people to do it. (But the thing is - once you reach $1000, you might as well go further since the first $100 is the hardest, once you get that, you have proof and you begin to have leverage for word of mouth and client success stories and yadda yadda yadda.)

<comment><USER36> Easy to describe is not the same as easy to do.

You should hack off 2-6 and describe step 1 in 7 steps.

<comment><USER35> This is Hacker News, not "Write A Business Book For Me For Free Then Hold My Hand" News. There's a lot out there on how to do each one of those steps, in books mostly and some of the better software-biz blogs. The fact that I didn't write a 30,000-word essay doesn't make what I'm saying any less true.

So few people even say that the first step exists, or that it should come first, that alone is worth stating. Then go look for resources for how-to.

<comment><USER37> I'm not asking you to do it, but honestly, I really haven't ever found any of these places that contain much more info about step 1 than was contained in your rough outline (but I have found lots of places that contain roughly the same amount of actionable info in longer form).

If a piece of writing does go further, it typically just advises the reader to do something like "Talk to people and find out," which is frustratingly circular. Talking to people is something most of us do every day without any profit, and "find out" just restates the problem.

It may be that this has been written about well somewhere, but I have never seen it. I figure it must be one of those things where you just have to figure it out for yourself, and for those who have figured it out, these vague platitudes look like actionable advice because they're able to mentally fill in the blanks.

<comment><USER35> There are plenty of books on market research, customer development, and internet marketing (real books and serious ebooks/classes) that go much deeper into the topic. Have you been reading those, or just blog posts?

Blog posts are by nature superficial, and more importantly, if you're reading blog posts by people in the tech world about marketing, you're probably picking the wrong teachers to learn from.

As a biz book nerd, who reads probably 30 biz books a year (for the last 12 years), I've never found one or even two resources that are end-to-end adequate. What I've learned, I've pieced together from hundreds of sources, including some meant for enterprise (and adapted for my needs), like _Pricing with Confidence_, and taking vague hand-wavy inspiration (_Purple Cow_) and looking for specific, real-world actions to make it concrete.

That's why I created my "30x500" course: to be a super-concise, super-specific crash course for nerd types (like me) who want to create their first product and want to do it with as little risk of failure as possible. I teach systems. I'm not gonna really pitch it here, cuz it's neither the time nor the place, but to say that I know what you're talking about -- and the stuff IS out there.

It either takes digging and work to piece it together into a strategy, or a willingness to shell out for something accelerated. My course is not the only one where you can learn how to do market research -- but you're going to be hard pressed to find it in one book, or two books, or 10 books, because the strategies and techniques to reduce risk are very valuable. And they take a LOT of work to create… I've spent hundreds of hours on building my course, doing research, tweaking the teaching methods & order, the metaphors, the workbooks, the homework, the supporting materials.

You'll rarely find that level of energy and diligence put into a business book, unless it's a byproduct of "workshopping" (like the GTD system was a workshop long before it was a book). Teaching workshops is vastly more profitable, and in a lot of ways more emotionally rewarding, than selling a book. So as blog posts are to books, books are to live classes & workshops. There's no equivalent reward for selling a $20 - $30 book with that kind of information in it... unless you can turn around and sell something more expensive, and leverage fame, like David Allen did.

That aside, there are courses & workshops where you can learn a lot more about step #1 -- other than mine! I've found these two to be excellent at the "figuring out what to sell" side of things: Presell Formula by Clay Collins, and Product Launch Formula by Jeff Walker.

Laugh if you must, yep it's internet marketer slumming, but they're really good at what they do. A person who wants to succeed won't sneer at any source of workable knowledge.

<comment><USER38> Can you list some of your favorite books?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> the building not so. the marketing and pr needed to reach that goal on the other hand is a little more work :)

</comment><comment><USER40> >"Is it hard to build a web app that makes at least $1000 a month?"

Yes.

</comment><comment><USER41> A person asking such a question shouldnt be building stuff for profit in the first place.

<comment><USER42> What are better questions to be asking?

(Serious question. I suck at asking questions that get me useful answers. I have some websites that have been around a while and make next to nothing in spite of having something of value to offer. I want to make $2000-$3000/mo. How on earth do I get there from here?)

<comment><USER43> You can start by being specific. There's no generic answer here. You can't really try to understand "succeeding at businesses" in the abstract. You have to do things on a case-by-case basis. So if you ask about one of your _specific_ sites, people can help you.

<comment><USER42> Okay. How would one get more quality traffic with this specific challenge: It's a health site where I talk about getting myself well when doctors claim it cannot be done. The rest of the world thinks it cannot be done either so it's a hard sell.

So far, I have been working on building an audience painfully slowly. Since I am also working on getting myself well, content does not go up as regularly as I would like. My feeling has been this is probably a good thing for now because the first thing I have to do is win over my audience and the world just does not believe this can be done. Maybe I am completely wrong (about needing to build the audience this way)? But without participating in email lists and hearing what other people are asking, I also don't really know what to talk about -- I don't just psychically know what is different about what I am doing compared to other people. So for me that relationship to the audience is important and there has been a huge barrier for a long time. It is gradually coming down. Maybe I do know exactly what I am doing and it just takes time. Or maybe I am an idiot and someone else would have no problem slapping some content onto the site and generating an income.

Thoughts?

<comment><USER44> Some thoughts:

 _It's a health site where I talk about getting myself well when doctors claim it cannot be done._

Besides your Mom, no one cares about getting _you_ well.

 _Since I am also working on getting myself well..._

Supposing I were sick, I'd care mainly about getting _myself_ well. It sounds like you don't have the answers, so why am I bothering?

It sounds like you aren't selling solutions. So your best bet is to sell sympathy and motivation. My suggestion: make it more of a forum, allow other people to tell their stories as well. Focus on sharing emotions as much as sharing solutions.

Monetization will probably come from ads selling snake oil. Near as I can tell, that's the primary method of monetization in health related sites - selling homeopathy and herbs to desperate people.

<comment><USER42> _Besides your Mom, no one cares about getting you well._

As noted elsewhere: The site exists because there are people who are interested in what I did to get well, not because I had any plans to create such a site. It gives them clues as to how to get themselves healthier when all else has failed. I talk about what worked for me in large part because I have zero interest in giving advice per se. I think that is part of what is wrong with conventional medicine: Doctors routinely prescribe treatments with short term benefits and long term costs, which is not so bad if you are basically healthy and can take the hit for an acute problem. But it's deadly if you have a chronic health issue. And the fact that they take this basic approach is no secret. It's done quite openly: We all know about the huge fold-outs detailing the negative side effects that come with most prescription drugs and the waivers that have to be signed before they will perform surgery. Since getting myself healthier relied heavily on trading short term costs for long term gains, I have zero interest in replicating a system that I am convinced is part of the problem.

 _So your best bet is to sell sympathy and motivation. My suggestion: make it more of a forum, allow other people to tell their stories as well. Focus on sharing emotions as much as sharing solutions._

I own several email lists. I cannot for the life of me get conversations going on them. I also briefly had a forum for the site. It was overrun with spam and had maybe three members (myself included). So I've tried that route and failed, quite consistently and miserably. It works better for me to try to get people sharing info when someone else owns/runs the discussion space. And that is a piece I am working on elsewhere, for the purpose of helping people help themselves. I'm also not interested in selling sympathy or motivation per se. There is a saying that "an example is the best lecture" and I have found that to be true. So I do offer myself as an example in hopes that it inspires people to feel "If she can do it, I can do it". But I have zero interest in being some cheerleader.

Again, I was not asking about monetizing the site. Only about getting traffic, a question you have not addressed. As stated earlier: I have several websites. I really don't expect this site to be where the money is. But it is the most mature/developed of the sites I own and it basically serves as a proving ground for me to learn stuff.

<comment><USER44> You didn't ask about getting traffic, you asked about getting " _quality_ traffic". Since you didn't define "quality", I assumed you were going with the standard definition of quality - traffic that earns you money. Hence, a discussion of monetization.

Anyway, I was going to list the ways your site is an SEO and navigation disaster.

But then I saw that your content is a deceptive mix of good advice, snake oil, and stuff I don't know enough to evaluate. It would be unethical of me to give you any tips on directing more people to it. You should take your site down. You are clearly unable to evaluate scientific evidence, and your anecdotes of how the placebo effect helped you are not providing any benefit to others.

<comment><USER42> I am curious what you view as good advice, what you view as snake oil, and what you don't know enough about to evaluate.

Thanks for the feedback.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Australian Gas Industry Wants to Curb Pay as Cooks Earn $325k - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-06/australian-gas-industry-wants-to-curb-pay-as-cooks-earn-325-000.html

<comment><USER2> It makes perfect sense that you'd need to pay somebody lots of money to get them to work on an offshore drilling platform:

\- You're stuck there with basically nothing to do but work for long periods of time. Can't go visit your girlfriend, etc.

\- The work is dangerous, and you could get injured or killed.

\- There are probably not too many people who have the necessary skills and experience to do the work safely, which puts the employees at a market advantage. Also, you can't outsource the work by sending the offshore rig to a country where labor is cheaper. It's got to be located on top of the gas field that you own.

I'd guess that whoever posted this article wanted to draw a parallel with Silicon Valley, where CEOs were colluding to drive down costs via an anti- poaching cartel because they thought the cost of labor was "too high".

For reference, A$400,000 is equivalent to US$371,600. There's no inherent reason why average developer salaries couldn't get that high if the combination of supply and demand were right. As long as employees' work brings in more revenue to the company than the cost of the employees, employing them would be profitable for the company (although maybe the poor CEOs might have to downsize to smaller yachts and aircraft since there would be less left over for them).

<comment><USER3> By that logic there are tons of other careers that should involve very high salaries: long haul trucker, anything on a cruise ship, Antarctic researcher, stationed on a military submarine, forest firefighter, commercial fisherman, etc etc etc. By and large oil platform gigs pay a lot because oil companies have an enormous amount of resources and no one wants to do the work because they're passionate or patriotic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Highlighting a so-called skills shortage and making the case for government intervention on behalf of the corporations to help reduce "costs" (how much they pay their employees).

Of course the great irony is that the same corporations calling for government intervention to help restrict pay would be screaming bloody murder if the government acted to curtail their profit margins in any way.

<comment><USER5> Or, perhaps, the wages of the companies C.E.O.

<comment><USER4> indeed

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You used to hear this sort of thing about UAW employees all the time, but it was always exaggerated. The corporate PR people would extrapolate a week of exceptional overtime pay to a whole year, and/or they'd include benefits and payroll taxes in the dollar figures, for example.

So I have no facts to add but I'm skeptical anyway.

I mean, sign me up, I'll do your laundry for A$324,000, OK? No? Yeah, didn't think so.</comment>


I can no longer solve ReCAPTHCA captchas - <AUTHOR> For a time there were lots of number based captchas on ReCAPTCHA using sites - presumably for Google Maps - but now they all appear to be a random mixture of letters. I can not solve them.
They're things like "rnmnnihmr" which is barely legible in plain text but when obfuscated - grunged, blurred and waved - I find it's taking about 8 tries before I guess the answer correctly.
Reportedly there are bots getting 90% correct.
Mainly this is just a statement of frustration but in part it's a question of "doesn't this mean we've largely solved OCR now?".
[I think the last time ReCAPTCHA was discussed was this - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6615326.] <comment><USER2> Supposedly reCAPTCHA is _easier_ if google thinks you're human.

[http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2013/10/recaptcha-j...](http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2013/10/recaptcha- just-got-easier-but-only-if.html)

I guess google thinks you are a robot.

I dunno, in my experience I usually don't second-guess google. Sorry to break it to you.

<comment><USER2> To add a bit of seriousness back into this: Google is being coy about how they guess at humanness/robotness, but IP address is a likely factor. Maybe the OP is coming from an IP address or block that has a lot of robot activity on it.

<comment><USER3> I am fairly certain that one of the factors is whether or not you are signed into a Google account.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I felt like I was alone with this problem. I have been unable to solve some reCAPTCHA generated puzzles for about 6 months now. There was one particular site, I badly wanted to complete the registration form, but after about the 7th or 8th attempt at solving the captcha, I just decided it wasn't worth it. Now I don't even bother? reCAPTCHA? Bye.

<comment><USER5> Yep.

And for the love of all that's holy I wish they'd stop using characters that are impossible to distinguish in the mangled font. Is that 0? O? 1? I? l?.

Also, if they're going to make it case-sensitive, they shouldn't use ANY characters that look almost the same in upper and lower-case (especially when there's no baseline). Is that p? P? w? W?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've found a combination of posting frequency (if more than x posts in x time) + hidden form honeypots + time-to-submit timer + nofollow links + some simple filtering rules/checks on text and links, all but eradicates spam without the need for captchas (with or without user accounts). Common bots still can't make it through that gauntlet, and it's very easy to refine it, even if you're being aggressive, such that humans make it through without a problem.

</comment><comment><USER7> Did you know only one of the two pieces of text is really there to determine if you're a human?

The other is so you translate for them digital photography into text. Those assholes make us waste time so they make money.

<comment><USER8> You realize the same exact thing could be said about video game designers, right?

<comment><USER9> Video game designers aren't forcing me to play their game in order to submit necessary forms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _Winning Tic Tac Toe_ is my favourite:

[http://www.getelastic.com/6-captcha-alternatives-to- improve-...](http://www.getelastic.com/6-captcha-alternatives-to-improve- conversion/)

<comment><USER11> 100% success rate for bots. How is that a useful CAPTCHA?

<comment><USER12> Well, the really smart ones know not to play.

<comment><USER13> "General, you are listening to a machine. Do the world a favor and don't act like one." \-- Dr. Stephen Falken, "WarGames" (1983)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I too noticed this, particularly while on proxies during testing.

My biggest frustration with captchas isn't even having to try multiple times, it's having to enter most or sometimes all my info again and again.

I know this is not really reCAPTCHAs fault but the font-end guys, still what I would love to see is an independent reCAPTCHA-submit, meaning I don't have to submit the complete form and hope I guessed correctly, instead I only submit after I know I nailed the challenge. Similar to email-verification or password-strengh-checks it could report this to me on-the-fly.

</comment><comment><USER15> I hate CAPTCHA. If I go to your site to sign up or anything and get a CAPTCHA, I will try it twice. After that I move on.

It's not hard to combat spam without forcing such nefarious acts onto your users.

</comment><comment><USER16> CAPTCHAs have always suffered from keming.

I hate CAPTCHA, and avoid using sites that require me to use them every time I post a comment even though I'm a registered user of the site.

<comment><USER17> I figured keming was a joke about kerning. Never heard it before, so thanks! Posting to save other people time: [http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Keming&defid=...](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Keming&defid=2872417)

<comment><USER18> You know, the fact that it's in urban dictionary doesn't mean it's not a joke about kerning.

<comment><USER19> The Urban Dictionary entry was about bad kerning...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'll ask the obvious question: are you a human? :)

<comment><USER21> I kind of like the idea of spambot creators programming their spambots to post to HN and complain about ReCaptcha, in an effort to get people to stop using it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I also can no longer read reCaptcha. So I did the smart thing and got rid of it. Instead, I've been using this:

[http://www.nucaptcha.com/](http://www.nucaptcha.com/)

A MILLION times better. It's actually a pleasure to use. I've had no problems with it at all. Go to my website websmithing.com if you want to see it in action.

Death to reCaptcha. Your usefulness as a product is diminishing.

</comment><comment><USER9> Captcha is dying as computer vision improves. However similar technologies also make automated spam filtering much easier. There are tons of available datapoints to figure out what accounts are bots. IP, how they behave, the times they log in, browser details, etc, and mainly the contents of the text they post.

</comment><comment><USER23> I totally absolve myself from captchas. If its required, I don't go there. Its demeaning, I hate it. I'm not going to struggle with some frickin game to help your website do whatever those are supposed to do, so get over it, web designers.

<comment><USER24> What they are supposed to do is help prevent a website that accepts and presents user-supplied content from being overwhelmed with automated spam.

<comment><USER23> Which is nothing to me - it has no direct user-benefit at all. And I'm paying the cost. So its really easy to be annoyed.

<comment><USER25> With respect, no. If you're on a domain with any kind of google juice, your comments will be absolutely over-run with viagra spam, fake designed purse spam, fake investment scams, etc, etc, etc. So, there is user benefit, if you consider having a site not vandalized to be of user benefit.

<comment><USER23> That's a straw man(?). There are other ways. Use them. It isn't 'captcha or nothing'.

<comment><USER25> They work even worse. Been there, done that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> We need reReCaptcha. When you solve your captcha request on a website with reReCaptcha, you're not just proving you're human; You're also helping to provide OCR to some spam bot to allow it to solve reCaptcha.

</comment><comment><USER27> On some sites I see numeric ReCAPTCHAS, which are easy to solve. Others, though, have the sometimes-impossible alphabetical ones. Does the site developer have any control over which type shows up?

<comment><USER28> Unfortunately no. Recaptcha implemented a new feature recently that uses some sort of data to determine whether you are a bot or not. Unless it can know you are a human, you will get the hard alphabetical ones.

There is some sort of control though, going to the Google Account creation page will only give you easy captchas. Possibly an undocumented API or a custom build, we can't know for sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This could be a pretty damn good captcha replacement:

[http://areyouahuman.com/demo-playthru/](http://areyouahuman.com/demo- playthru/)

EDIT: I found their demo page.

<comment><USER11> Moving random objects to the right will let through about 10% of bots. Useless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> A lot of captcha systems have audio fallbacks (for the legally blind). If I can't figure out the obfuscated letters on the first try or two, I switch to the audio.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've tried but the audio never seems to work (with ReCAPTCHA in particular).

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Are you based in the US? I use proxies every once in a while to do some testing and notice that the captcha difficulty does vary depending where I am "from".

</comment><comment><USER32> Totally agree, I never get it right first time around.

</comment><comment><USER28> Recaptcha is just poor, full stop.

I'm a big fan of Funcaptcha, it's much easier to solve.

[http://funcaptcha.co](http://funcaptcha.co)

<comment><USER11> Simply randomly rotating the objects will let through a fair number of naive bots.

<comment><USER33> I played around with it for a while. It seems invalid attempts add another required item to the captcha queue. So if you are trying to solve the first one, and fail, it adds another one that the bot must attempt. I am not sure if this helps much, but it was noteworthy.

<comment><USER11> Botnetters have thousands of IP addresses to attack from. They can also use successful attempts to build a database of images used by this CAPTCHA

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> not sure regarding the security of the "alternative captchas" listed here.

but that aside, I have the same problem you have, can't solve them :S which is retarded, because they are meant to tell humans and robots apart, but apparently "everyone is a robot" is good enough.

</comment><comment><USER35> Admins: Why punish all your users because of the actions of a few? Drop your reCAPTCHA today.</comment>


What was the first photo ever on the Internet? Les Horribles Cernettes - <AUTHOR> http://m.nydailynews.com/1.1111769 <comment><USER2> "The web, back in '92 and '93, was exclusively used by physicists."

Kind of misleading without qualification, if you ask me. Web, perhaps. But images were flying around all over online communities by this time.

There were plenty of non-physicists on Usenet, Compuserv BBS etc., university systems, The Well and ECHO and MUDs for a number of years before the web launched in 1992.

Many of these folks were quite familiar with telnet-ing in and transferring images via gopher etc (or even CompuServ etc software) before the web itself launched.

</comment><comment><USER3> I knew it had to be either kittens or women proffering their cleavage. I guess the second photo on the Internet was the kittens.</comment>


"DataGlyph" Embedded Digital Data - <AUTHOR> http://www.tauzero.com/Rob_Tow/DataGlyph.html <comment><USER2> It's been in widespread use for decades. Back in the 90s there was Digimarc who inserted copyright details into photos and video by changing the shading of pixels in an unnoticeable pattern, and they even said the method could be applied to car paint. All you need is a high resolution scanner, and given that the cameras on your typical game console are high enough to see skin temperature variances and determine one's emotional state (best in combination with galvanic skin response), the scanners are everywhere. Think about that the next time someone complains about data tracking.

</comment><comment><USER3> The glyph pattern in the link looks similar to the location grid that the Neo Smartpen [1] uses to encode page ID and location.

[1] [https://www.neosmartpen.com/](https://www.neosmartpen.com/)

</comment><comment><USER4> The dots idea is already implemented in most printers to track documents for forensic purposes.

<comment><USER5> The yellow dot patterns that you're thinking of are different from the slanted halftone dots that DataGlyphs use. Two interesting approaches, though DataGlyphs have a much higher density than the yellow tracking dots that most color printers use.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you regret having a public email address on GitHub? - <AUTHOR> The conventional wisdom of ten years ago was that if you published an email address on the web, you would soon be driven crazy by a flood of spam. It was also thought to be clever to list your address in the form "name at example dot com."
Is that still the case? Spam filtering seems better now, and I doubt bots are fooled by simple obfuscation any more.
Has anyone published a new email address in plain text on github, a blog, or a web site and concluded either 1) that wasn't so bad - and now people can reach me easily, or 2) that was a terrible mistake, and now I need to toss that address and start over? <comment><USER2> Spam filters are indeed better, but I'm receiving some unsolicited messages.

However I use an address only for github and other similar services that then is forwarded to my main one, so it's not a real damage.</comment>


If A Driverless Car Crashes, Who's Liable? - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/03/08/173766352/if-a-driverless-car-crashes-whos-liable?ft=1&f=1001 <comment><USER2> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5343512>

</comment><comment><USER3> I'll take "whoever is legally responsible" as my answer.

Did the car crash because of faulty programming? Then I imagine the car manufacturer is liable.

Did the car crash because it was hit by a drunken idiot? Then the drunken idiot would be my guess.

Some combination of the above? Then some combination of responsibility is assigned.

And so on.

It will vary on a case by case basis while the law discovers the common permutations of facts in automated car crash cases. Or until legislatures decide as a matter of policy to introduce a common scheme.

I'm assuming we're not talking about "no fault" jurisdictions. Because in no fault schemes you just skip the civil question of fault altogether and go directly to the question of fixing things up. (There might still be criminal charges). No fault isn't without problems but it certainly saves a lot of court time and money.

(IANAL, TINLA)

<comment><USER4> #2 and similar situations will be _well_ mitigated by the plethora of data collected before and during the accident. It's no longer a question of who- said-what, where the impact was on the car, and estimates based on skid marks.

Between recorded lidar imaging, video imaging, and all the telemetrics needed to automatically drive the car:

Driverless car impacting other driverless car; probably a software error.

Driverless car impacting / being impacted by a piloted car, and it will be fairly easy to see which driver made the error which led to the crash.

Car / AI manufacturers will have more of a liability for making certain their vehicle is safe, no doubt. This is a win/win situation for the automobile owner. Safety is now an economic force not dictated by regulation.</comment></comment>


Automatic braking to be standard by 2022 - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/03/17/automatic-braking-to-be-standard-by-2022/ <comment><USER2> _" What's new is that the technology will be standard, not an option that can cost $1000 or more to add onto your new car."_

They're not going to give electronics away for free, so the base price of the car will be higher, to include the price of the safety systems. However, the price will probably come down to something closer to the manufacturing cost once they can't treat it as a "premium" add-on, so maybe the cars will cost $500 more instead of $1000 more.

Does anyone know how mature this technology is, or have first-hand experience with it? I'm thinking of getting it on a new Honda Civic, but I'm concerned about the usual bugs that come with any new technology.</comment>


Not just Flint: Poor communities across the country live with extreme polluters - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/01/27/its-not-just-flint-poor-communities-across-the-country-live-with-extreme-polluters/ <comment><USER2> > what was particularly striking was... the highest polluting facilities were > also more likely to be located in proximity to poor and minority > neighborhoods.

This is what's "particularly striking"? There's only one substantial class of people who would knowingly live near extreme pollution: people who can't afford to move away. The most trivial of logic dictates that if anyone is living near extreme pollution, there's a substantial probability they're poor.

Now, that said, news about this new study saying that the problem is bad that quantifies the problem, tells us why it's worse than these EJ scholars suspected, or even just a reminder that this is bad and these peoples' lives should be improved, sure, go ahead... but the above statement of shock detracts from that, I should think.

<comment><USER3> Beijing came to mind as a counter example, but I'm not sure what conclusions we can draw from it.

<comment><USER4> Beijing's smog is just the tip of the iceberg. China has the same problem:

[https://www.vice.com/read/photographs-of-chinas-cancer- villa...](https://www.vice.com/read/photographs-of-chinas-cancer-villages)

"These are entire villages where every other house contains someone dying of cancer or some sort of respiratory problem."

Free trade sure is great.

<comment><USER5> Like it or not, people prefer wealth with a risk of cancer to rural poverty. If they didn't, they would remain in their remote rural villages instead of flocking _into_ the highly polluted factory areas.

Delhi is another example of this (it's 3x worse than Beijing right now). I hate the place; this month it was so polluted that I couldn't see across my office complex. But if you use violence to force the Biharis to stay home (i.e., give up free trade) you'll have a riot on your hands.

Yeah, free trade is in fact better than dire poverty, which is the alternative.

<comment><USER6> You're assuming people have perfect foresight into their risks moving to such an area - they don't. Your also ignoring that sometimes the pollution moves to where people already live. The reasonable choice is to work towards advancing standards for everyone worldwide. Sometimes the advances will come organically delivered by free markets, and sometimes they'll have to be regulatory (closing down externalities ignored/un-priced by markets). The choice certainly isn't free trade or dire poverty in the long run.

<comment><USER5> Anyone with eyes has a pretty good idea that they are walking into a toxic soup. I left Delhi on the 22nd - this picture is pretty accurate:

[http://i.huffpost.com/gen/2343988/images/o-DELHI-AIR- POLLUTI...](http://i.huffpost.com/gen/2343988/images/o-DELHI-AIR-POLLUTION- facebook.jpg)

Or, back in July (before things got bad) I could do maybe 10 suicide sprints in NY. Then I flew into Delhi and was down to 4 - breathing was just that hard.

I know there are lots of jokes about Biharis, but they aren't as stupid as you are making them out to be. They move to Delhi with good but imperfect information about both the pollution and the economic opportunity.

I'm all in favor of pollution taxes and internalizing externalities. I'm just saying that even in spite of that, the economic gains seem to drastically outweigh the health penalties as evidenced by millions of people moving _towards_ the pollution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The problem in Flint is not that the river is polluted it is that the pH of the river water is causing lead from old pipes and fittings to leach into the water. It's not really a good example of the general subject of the story.

<comment><USER8> I too was confused why they tried to tie the two events together. The lead pipes had formed a coating (and this is true in other locations too) that made them nontoxic but when they were flushed with acidic water (as the water treatment plant did) they shed that lining and it began washing through the lead and putting it into the lines. The lines had operated fine with water from a different location that had different pH levels, but pH variation is common without pollution, so blaming this on pollution is a bit nonsensical.

When it comes to the article, it makes sense that pollution would be in poorer areas. Pollution lowers property value, which allows poorer individuals to live there. Or the area could have already been poor and they are unable to afford to leave.

I'm not sure who is to blame for the Flint crisis tbh, there seems to be a lot of finger pointing and politicizing. I have yet to find a source that wasn't biased one way or the other, which is sad. People just want answers and for it to be fixed.

<comment><USER9> _The lines had operated fine with water from a different location that had different pH levels_

Actually one of the talking points is that no one will talk about lead levels before they switched the water from Detroit to Flint river. But its not as bad as it is now obviously. . . Does building this 'coat' back up work? How long does that take?

<comment><USER8> I'm no expert, but I assume it takes long enough to where they are just going to have to replace all the lead pipes and fittings.

That talking point you mention could be true, or it could be a way for the state level government to dish it back to the local government. Who knows. To me it seems like the municipality screwed this up more than the state, but like I said it's virtually impossible to find an unbiased news source with the whole story; they both no doubt have a role. Even this very story is politically driven, it could be misleading in its urgency to drive clicks/narrative. Happens all the time with various things in the news (like the claim of x drug use among teens, etc.)

Hopefully there is a non-partisan investigation from the Federal level on the Flint fiasco.

<comment><USER9> I agree. In one sense, there is no way this was an intended consequence. On the other hand, it would be tough to convince me to drink treated flint river water, and I thought that long before they switched the water. (I'm from the area). My gut feeling is the state, the local, and everyone in between is to blame. You are spot on with the politicizing too, its out of control.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> But is Flint a pollution problem? From what I've been reading the real failure in Flint was that they are still using lead pipes. It was a series of decisions that sent corrosive water down old pipes, water that may have been safe in non-lead pipes. That seems more a management and/or infrastructure problem: Bad, but without the monty burns villain dumping stuff into lakes. So I'm not sure there is a direct comparison to be made between Flint and something like love canal.

</comment><comment><USER11> Don't worry, the free market will solve it. Keep cutting taxes and remove regulations.

<comment><USER12> Actually, the failure of a government monopoly left all of these people without a viable alternative. The Flint water crisis was a failure of government, not the free market. It's actually what happens when the government argues that basic necessities are so important, the government needs to handle the provision of them to guarantee everyone has access, until they can't handle it anymore.

<comment><USER4> Water provision is a natural monopoly. If you hand over natural monopolies to the private sector they raise prices and cut costs as much as the regulators will allow them to and pocket the difference as profit.

State monopolies are often intentionally neglected or damaged by bought out politicians as a way to make privatization and the subsequent profit extraction more palatable to a suspicious public. That's also where all this "free markets sure are great" propaganda comes from.

This is a similar process to what Russia went through in the 90s. They were encouraged to embrace the free market by Harvard "economists" (free market priests) like Larry Summers. They were told that this process would lead to a new age of prosperity for Russia. It didn't.

The net result was to haemorrhage their economy and enabled the oligarchs to walk off with billions of dollars in state assets at knock down prices.

<comment><USER12> Actually, it's not. The idea of a natural monopoly is something that was made up to justify state takeovers of certain key services. If a natural monopoly actually existed, we wouldn't have Google Fiber expanding across the country, because it wouldn't be cost effective to do so. In fact, Google Fiber's biggest impediment to expansion has been government regulators. The same goes with water provision - if it was a natural monopoly, we wouldn't have alternatives such as bottled water available on the market (which thank goodness we do to provide to the citizens of Flint right now). Using Russia as an example of free market failures is like using Communist China as an example of what the free market will do to wages if we don't implement a minimum wage here in the States.

<comment><USER4> >If a natural monopoly actually existed, we wouldn't have Google Fiber expanding across the country

Internet access isn't a natural monopoly, it just has very, very, very, very high barriers to entry. You actually can run multiple cables down the same pipe easily enough (unlike water).

It still approximates a monopoly, as can be seen by the fact that the barriers to entry have prevented even a company like Google with exceptionally deep pockets from muscling in.

>In fact, Google Fiber's biggest impediment to expansion has been government regulators.

Did you really think Verizon and Comcast were going to let their duopoly go without a fight?

>The same goes with water provision - if it was a natural monopoly, we wouldn't have alternatives such as bottled water available on the market

Bottled water is an entirely different market with a very limited level of substitution with tap water.

>Using Russia as an example of free market failures

Is entirely appropriate since they were advised by elite "free market economists" (the kind whom you would cite as justification for your opinions) to follow the policy course that they did.

Unlike China, which followed the advice of its own (rather smarter) economists.

<comment><USER12> Fiber internet was installed in my parent's neighborhood a few months ago. It involved multiple crews digging trenches through EVERYONE's backyard, taking more than a month to complete. I don't know where they run multiple cables down the same pipe, but it certainly isn't where my parents live.

Back to the original point, somehow or another, people managed to get water before the City of Flint decided it was something they needed to control. The City did not come into being because the City Government had started providing water.

Furthermore, the citizens of Flint right now are being forced to pay for water that they can't use, because it is part of their city utility bills. They can't refuse service, unlike a natural monopoly where the customer could still refuse to purchase the product if it wasn't sufficient to meet his or her needs. This is the worst part of a government monopoly, and the risk we all face when the government fails to provide a service it has promised us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I am in Sunnyvale and my tap water is testing positive for pesticides.

</comment><comment><USER14> As a non-american, this is so strange. Doesn't the US have pollution laws that say you cannot pollute near where people live? That seems to me like a very fundamental responsibility of the state.

<comment><USER15> Your posting history suggests to me that you know the answer already. At the very least, you have a much more intimate knowledge of US laws and politics than your question, which is posed as a complete outsider, implies.

For example, you post about political "ponerology (study of evil in politics)" ( [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10548272](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10548272) ), and bring up economics often. You also have a non-trivial knowledge of US political history, as with this comment at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10404379](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10404379) :

> That's false, because the Democratic party today encapsulates both the old > Republican and the old Democratic party. Hillary Clinton is essentially an > Eisenhower Republican (if you place her into any European country she's in > their conservative party), and Warren/Sanders are the left wing group.

> The republican party of today is essentially a business lobby masquerading > as a party. Place it into any European country, and it will be a far right > extremist group.

Did you learn American political history from going to school at Dartmouth? I think it's odd you didn't learn about any of the pollution laws during that time.

You also have pretty firm ideas on the topic already, based on your comments at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10142290](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10142290):

> The US is a dystopia, no surprises there. What a shame that all humans are > anymore are an outpost of corporate greed.

and at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10440304](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10440304) :

> The more I think about it, the more I believe that the United States is the > worst place to live if you are poor.

> There are places that are poorer, hell I'm from a third world country. But > I've never seen anyone in the third world show utter contempt for the poor. > No one keeps reminding the poor that it's their fault. We call them > "unfortunate", Americans call them "losers".

(I'll note that two people, one with experience from India - where you are from - and Bangladesh, and the other with experience from Islamabad, disagree.)

I see you are familiar with being downvoted, such as like [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10411502](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10411502) where you propose "We should engage in a culling of humans." Then again, perhaps I am simply part of the "political-myopia of tech culture" that you bemoaned about at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10516056](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10516056) .

<comment><USER14> Well, no. I do not know anything about US laws. I do know stuff about US politics and history, however. I also know stuff about British history, but not British laws. What's the point of this long list you've compiled?

<comment><USER15> I don't think it takes an Ivy League education to understand the point.

I start with the observation that your question here expresses an outsider naïveté which does not match your historical comments. I give evidence. I demonstrate that you have close knowledge of American culture - enough to have made firm statements on the topic. Indeed, you have made statements which already answer the question you've asked. I also commented that others have disagreed with your views, including through downvotes and personal experience.

I also gave details so that others might be able to answer your question while taking your views in mind.

<comment><USER14> You're being ridiculous. My question was about US laws, which is non-general information and also constantly changing.

I claimed I have no knowledge about it, and asked if someone else did. What is your problem with that? You aren't even contributing to the conversation. Do you honestly have nothing better to do than to attack random people on the internet? Please get a life.

<comment><USER15> I cannot seriously believe that you think the US doesn't "have pollution laws that say you cannot pollute near where people live." The existence of those laws is general information, including [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_environmental_la...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_environmental_law) , and relatively constant.

Your comment history shows that you think the US is a distopia, and "the worst place to live if you are poor." If you really believe that, then why are you asking the question when you know the answer? The WaPo article title even includes "Poor communities across the country live with 'extreme' polluters", which is in line with your understanding of the US.

I do not see how I can contribute to the conversation when there appears to be a strong dichotomy between your question and your background understanding. But another way to contribute is to help other commenters understand where you're coming from. And of course, some conversations are not worth pursing.

Why would I think you are attacking random people? I never said that, nor is it something I believe. Though telling me to "Please get a life" does come close to being an attack, no?

<comment><USER14> Dude, you have an inordinate amount of time on your hands and you're obsessed with me. I don't want a stalker. I'm out.

<comment><USER15> Again with the personal attacks? And egocentric to boot.

FWIW, nearly every HN commenter, or at least those who post as often as you or I, has an inordinate amount of spare time.

Also, I see you've used "I'm out" before. As I mentioned earlier, you derided the 'political-myopia of tech culture' here on HN. Later in that thread, maxerickson at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10519360](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10519360) wrote:

> I was pointing out that what you said about value was not an argument > against economics (because economics doesn't care about what form value > takes).

> You keep looking for a word other than value to describe this thing that you > think should happen because then I can't point out that you can analyze it > economically, but this is not a way to argue that education should not be > analyzed economically, it is a misunderstanding of economics (it was really > clear when stated as "Value" is not only monetary, but "we should do it just > because" is still an imputation of value...).

You decided, incorrectly IMO, to describe it as "a last-word-mine argument", and ended the thread with "I'm out".

My interpretation of both exchanges is that you don't like it when people point out apparent inconsistencies in what you wrote.

(BTW, for those in the future who, like I, sometimes review someone's back history before commenting - hi!)

<comment><USER14> You got the last word in, congrats! Hope your life is more meaningful now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Not surprised. I was reading about a town in Kentucky where they polluted the local air by having all these old facotries that were still being in use</comment>


A brief XML rant - <AUTHOR> http://atl.me/2013/posterous-xml

<comment><USER2> > do not use template languages to generate XML.

Small correction: do not use _text_ template languages (Jinja, moustache, erb — which seems to be the one used here considering `%= display_date %>`, raw PHP, smarty, freemarker, what have you) to generate XML. There are templating languages whose _primary_ use case is to generate markup (including XML)[0] and (unless they're broken to uselessness) they should guarantee the output is valid XML.

> Schema-design-wise, the content:encoded and excerpt:encoded element names > are deeply suspect, as if someone looked at RSS 2.0, squinted, shrugged, and > invented their own ad hoc analogous namespace prefix, rather than > understanding the role of elements in XML.

They seem to be using Wordpress's WXR import/export format, hence the wp- namespaced elements. The "content" and "excerpt" namespace garbage comes straight from there according to [http://ipggi.wordpress.com/2011/03/16/the- wordpress-extended...](http://ipggi.wordpress.com/2011/03/16/the-wordpress- extended-rss-wxr-exportimport-xml-document-format-decoded-and-explained/)

> <content:encoded> Is the replacement for the restrictive Rss <description> > element. Enclosed within a character data enclosure is the complete > WordPress formatted blog post, HTML tags and all.

> <excerpt:encoded> This is an unknown elementThis is a summary or description > of the post often used by RSS/Atom feeds..

Considering the cottage industry of wordpress interaction, it was probably a good move to shoot for interop (should allow posterous exports to be directly imported into wordpress?). Not sure they succeeded though.

[0] genshi for instance <http://genshi.edgewall.org/>

<comment><USER3>
       There are templating languages whose primary use case is to generate markup
       (including XML)[0] and (unless they're broken to uselessness) they should
       guarantee the output is valid XML.

Since they are using Rails, they should be using Builder for this: [http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Base.html#labe...](http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Base.html#label- Builder) <https://github.com/jimweirich/builder>

<comment><USER2> > Since they are using Rails, they should be using Builder for this

Indeed. It's really odd that they munged together an XML export in ERB when builder exist. Does it have some sort of breaking issue with namespaces or something which could explain the choice?

<comment><USER4> Builder can be a bit of a pain if you want to do things that are...let us say "questionable" (e.g. output a tag with inner content which is _not_ XML escaped).

<comment><USER2> There's no such thing in this case though, there's a single layer of tags with escaped content inside (the example document uses CDATA, but as others have noted automated generation is _not_ a good use case for CDATA)

<comment><USER4> Agreed; just saying in general. Also, I would guess the reason they used ERB here is simply familiarity, not any type of reasoned decision.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One thing that bugs me about this is the use of CDATA. CDATA sections are just-about ok in hand-crafted xml, but in machine generated xml, they are absolutely pointless, and usually hint that the coder doesn't know what they're doing.

For example, the author thinks that the content inside the CDATA is escaped, but in fact, it isn't necessarily - eg in this case they're including chunks of html which may contain _more_ CDATA sections, and of course they don't nest (you need to terminate and restart the CDATA section). I've also seen examples where the enclosing encoding and the encoding of the CDATA section were incompatible.

The worst thing is specs with CDATA sections in examples. Junior devs bend over backwards to use things like xsl's disable-output-escaping to get a character-for-character match in test results, and then wonder why their code breaks in production.

<comment><USER6> Outside of a few special cases (such as wanting to make embedded content in XML human editable) CDATA should be treated as a big warning flag that the author of the code that generated the XML doesn't really understand what they are doing.

There's always the issue that one day ']]>' will somehow sneak in and everything will break.

The key is using a tool to generate the XML that will transparently handle things like escaping correctly instead of using templating tools designed for text or HTML output.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure making "XML human editable" should really be considered a special case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> To be fair to the Posterous Team they are doing a good job of fixing the bugs in the export as they are reported to them.

Hopefully they will get all of them fixed before the final close down.

If you want an easy way to get your Posterous Export file cleaned up and into a more Valid XML file then feel free to use the Import from Posterous option over at WordPress.com - [http://en.support.wordpress.com/import/import-from- posterous...](http://en.support.wordpress.com/import/import-from-posterous/)

We've spent some time on writing code which cleans up the XML file so that it can be imported into WordPress successfully.

You can then export a clean WXR file and import elsewhere much easier - <http://en.support.wordpress.com/export/>

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't see any problem with this XML that can't be easily overcome.

The comment about GMT-offsetting the date is particularly pithy, Assuming the blog in question isn't about ephemerides. By and large, blog posts have dates. If you desperately need an hour-offset from GMT, one might suggest this is your edge-case because, by and large, it doesn't matter.

Count me among those who would argue that the omission of a schema is a blessing.

I've wasted whole f*cking days of my life wrangling with so-called "non- amateur" XML. Invariably this was over-bloated XML with schemas that did nothing to help the discoverability and the processing of the data. Plain and simple, XML is over-spec'd and many data publishers, aided by their inflexible toolsets, pushed their XML beyond reason.

Be careful what you wish for.

I would take this XML, map-it, iterate it, done! End of story. I don't think there's much to complain about here.

<comment><USER2> > Count me among those who would argue that the omission of a schema is a > blessing.

TFA didn't ask for a schema, TFA asked for namespace declarations. Because they're kind-of necessary to parse namespaces with a namespace-aware XML parser. That's got 0 relation with a Schema. He only mentioned in passing because `content:encoded` and `excerpt:encoded` make very little sense... schema-wise (not "in an XML-Schema document").

> I would take this XML

You can't "take this XML" because it's not XML. Once you know it's not XML you can "take this tag soup", shove it into a tagsoup library (maybe with some encoding-guessing beforehand) and hope things come out about right at the other end — with no insurance that this is the case, you're deep in GIGO land at this point — but you can't "take it and map it"

<comment><USER9> As someone who has used BeautifulSoup very happily without considering its etymology... is "tag soup" an actual term or just a very apt description you're using?

[edit: A quick search, which I should have conducted instead of posting this, shows this has at least been used before, and enough not to be deleted by Wikipedia editors for lack of notability. That's pretty funny.]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> He has a few valid complaints (by a few I mean one), but this is really not that bad compared to a lot of the XML floating around. No reason to be _shocked_

 _"There are no namespace declarations. No self-respecting XML parser will have anything to do with this XML data."_

I don't get this comment. I have never seen an XML parser that would refuse to parse XML without a namespace..

Am i missing something? Or is that just mindless hyperbole?

<comment><USER11> You can't process XML that uses namespaces without a namespace declaration. A namespace prefix is just a shorthand for the namespace itself.

prefix:name-of-element doesn't mean anything by itself, you need to know what 'prefix' stands for.

As it is, this XML is not parsable; it's not well-formed and therefore it shouldn't even be called XML; it's just text with random tags thrown in.

It is, indeed, quite shocking.

<comment><USER12> Maybe it's just me, and it's probably wrong, but more than once I pre- processed XML data by replacing all the "namespace:tag" by "namespace-tag" so that I can easily parse the XML without having to care about namespaces. I've never been convinced that this feature has much use anyway.

<comment><USER13> You never understood what they were actually for, then. The namespace will have a schema, and the schema can be used to validate the elements of that namespace. Not used in a "just import the data!" scenario, sure, but a lot of people who use XML do care about that kind of validation.

<comment><USER2> > The namespace will have a schema, and the schema can be used to validate the > elements of that namespace.

That's one option. But a Schema (or DTD) is not mandatory, and not all schemas can easily be linked (few tools handle relaxng or schematron for namespace spec).

The core purpose of XML namespaces, and that of any namespace really, is better modularity and compositionability by preventing name collisions. This is useful when manipulating XML via XML (e.g. XSL, Genshi, ...) or when using multiple XML dialects in the same file (either because they're orthogonal or because they complement one another) for instance. You could do it by explicit prefixing à la C or Objective-C, but it tends to get dreary, requires everybody's cooperation and generally looks bad (not that xml namespaces look overly sexy).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Get off my lawn, you kids.

Isn't that what they were doing?

<comment><USER15> Upped for giving me a chuckle in the midst of some _very_ heated XML discussion :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> There's nothing wrong with invalid XML - why is everyone complaining? C compilers should similarly take a stab in the dark about what the programmer meant if they encounter invalid syntax as well. And those linking errors always annoy me - it should just pick the closest matching symbol if the specified one can't be found.

</comment><comment><USER17> This isn't really criticism of XML, though. You can do a good job of screwing up in any language or format.

<comment><USER18> It was not intended as a criticism of XML at all. XML is a perfectly cromulent standard. It is a criticism of amateurish use of XML.

<comment><USER19> Which is everywhere (xhtml, anyone?)

<comment><USER20> The "X" is for "extreme", right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "There are no namespace declarations. No self-respecting XML parser will have anything to do with this XML data."

I would argue that any self respecting xml parser should parser it just find and shouldn't demand the namespaces to be defined at all.

"...invented their own ad hoc analogous namespace prefix, rather than understanding the role of elements in XML"

I don't think you understand the base concept of XML much. It is meant to be a generic container to hold whatever you want. XML in and of itself doesn't enforce node naming. Sure if you are talking about the official spec it does, but people pretty much globally use whatever node names they want. Don't have a cow.

"I haven't been able to determine the intended encoding of the files"

Well maybe you should look into a parser that just parses as is without attempting to use some specific encoding.

Check out XML::Bare on cpan for perl. It will parse pretty much anything you throw at it, in any encoding. It leaves it up to you, the user, to decide what to do with the data after parsing.

<comment><USER2> > I would argue that any self respecting xml parser should parser it just find > and shouldn't demand the namespaces to be defined at all.

The XML Namespaces specification unambiguously _requires_ that a namespace be declared:

> The namespace prefix, unless it is xml or xmlns, MUST have been declared in > a namespace declaration attribute in either the start-tag of the element > where the prefix is used or in an ancestor element (i.e., an element in > whose content the prefixed markup occurs).

A self-respecting XML parser would follow the spec. A namespace-aware XML parser _must_ fault on undeclared namespaces.

Most XML parsers are namespace-aware.

> I don't think you understand the base concept of XML much.

Pot, meet kettle.

> XML in and of itself doesn't enforce node naming. Sure if you are talking > about the official spec it does

Don't you feel like you're contradicting yourself a bit there?

> Well maybe you should look into a parser that just parses as is without > attempting to use some specific encoding.

So he should look into parsers which do not parse XML and have no issue mangling the content? What are they going to do, assume the encoding is ascii- compatible anyway and go to town? How wonderfully anglo-centric.

> Check out XML::Bare on cpan for perl.

XML::Bare is an XML parser in the same sense that xhtml interpreted as text/html is an XML document: not in any way, shape or form. And if that's what you're shooting for, don't pretend to suggest an XML parser and suggest a recovering "soup" parser instead, something like html5lib or BeautifulSoup.

But herein remains the issue: I expect Posterous advertised their export as XML files, not as "encoding-deficient tag soup" (which it apparently is). I'm sure TFA would have had no expectations if he'd been told he got garbage in, and would have relied on tagsoup-parsing and encoding-guessing (using whatever libraries for doing so are available in his language of choice).

As it stands, he did have the pretty basic and undemanding expectation that he could shove supposedly-XML files into an XML parser and get data.

<comment><USER22> You seem to know a lot about the XML specification. More than your parent and certainly more than me. That's great, and following specifications is good and all, but citing the spec as requiring that "a namespace-aware XML parser _must_ fault on undeclared namespaces" does not give me any sense for why I would _want_ it to. Put another way - what does the namespace declaration and halting error due to its omission accomplish for me?

Failing to define a content type is obviously dumb, but I can't seem to get riled up about leaving off namespace declarations.

<comment><USER2> > That's great, and following specifications is good and all, but citing the > spec as requiring that "a namespace-aware XML parser must fault on > undeclared namespaces" does not give me any sense for why I would want it > to.

That's not really relevant though. XML is bondage and discipline.

> Put another way - what does the namespace declaration and halting error due > to its omission accomplish for me?

Depends. You could think "nothing" which is basically the same mindset as using a tagsoup-parser for "xml" documents: as long as you can get stuff out of it do you really care?

The other way to think about it, and the way espoused by most XML specs (and really most serialization specs at all) is that if something goes wrong, what guarantee is it _anything_ is right? If a namespace prefix is undefined, is it because nobody cares, because there's a typo or because the unsafe transport flipped some bytes? The parser can't know, and as is generally done in the XML world the spec says to just stop and not risk fucking things up (as it does when nesting is invalid, attributes are unquoted or decoding blows up).

What that accomplishes is the assurance that the document was correct as far as an XML parser is concerned, I guess?

If you don't care, you're free to use a tagsoup parser in the first place, after all.

> I can't seem to get riled up about leaving off namespace declarations.

I see it more from a "canary in a coal mine" point of view: namespace declarations not being there hints that either they're using a non-namespace- aware serializer (unlikely) or they're not using an XML serializer at all, and here dragons lurk. In this case it's confirmed that they're pretty certainly using ERB text templates to generate their XML, and that means the document could be all kinds of fucked up with improper escaping, invalid characters and the like.

Meaning maybe the export can't be trusted to have exported my data without fucking it up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> So it seems that we prefer XML which is easy to read. I have seen those files way often. Like: <xml><item><key>1</key><value>Something</value></item><item....></xml>

Then you have to combine what ever keys and values are in item tags. I found out these to be very annoying files to handle. Especially when key is X3 and value is 83d, you have to look for every combination from some kind of mapping, because non of those tells you absolutely nothing directly. At least its easy to create files that full fill the schema, because the complexity is pushed out of XML level. Often these files are created by "upgrading" CSV to XML. Let's just call column key # and then put what ever is in that column to the value tag. Yes attributes could be used, but often aren't.

Then you have to know that if key X contains value Y then you also need to look for key Z and hopefully it does contain value N or what ever.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'd just like to take a moment to mention Nested Comments.

Oh if I had a £1 for every time I'd had to sift through lines and lines of code, because I can't just comment an element. I just can't comprehend why they'd need to reserve -- inside a comment.

<comment><USER2> > I just can't comprehend why they'd need to reserve -- inside a comment.

It's because the feature was inherited from SGML, first for commenting in element declarations (e.g. <!ELEMENT -- this is an element>) and then generalized to the whole document: in SGML, the grammar for a comment is

        comment declaration =
            MDO ("<!"), (comment, ( s | comment )* )?, MDC (">")
        comment =
            COM ("--"), SGML character*, COM ("--")

HTML — as an SGML application — theoretically inherited this feature (most UA don't really implement it correctly so it's not exactly safe to use sequences of dashes inside a comment, browsers may or may not toggle commenting). See <http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/SGMLComments.html> for a more extensive explanation especially in relation to browsers (SGML-compliant comments handling used to be part of early ACID2, before being removed because it was a stupid idea)

Meanwhile XML took half of it, threw the rest away, and called it a day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's ironic how many problems (large and irritating enough to justify blog posts or public spates) could have been avoided if someone bothered to test beforehand.

If someone did a trial export he would immediately see the missing dates.

</comment><comment><USER26> Who uses XML in 2013 anyways?

<comment><USER27> What would you recommend to replace XML that handles arbitrary trees, namespaces, attributes, and tools that are built on this, e.g. XSLT?

I don't think XML is amazing, but it still has its place.

<comment><USER26> Put your torches out, it's just a joke :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Probably they used regexes to parse it. :)

<comment><USER29> <http://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/827263> for those who haven't seen it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Yes, it's crap, but it would take a few minutes to clean this up with a couple of sed scripts to turn ns:tag into ns_tag or something to make it parseable.

Or you could prepend some fake namespace declarations.

</comment><comment><USER31> Am I the only one bothered by the extremely oversized xml snippets? Or is it just me?

Chrome 25.0.1364.97 m

<comment><USER18> It's a pretty new redesign. I use Chrome myself, but shoot me a screenshot? hello _at_ article_domain

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> It would take 0.5 days work to get that into any format you desire so I don't think it fails its purpose.

<comment><USER33> No. Once you screw up encoding, the information is generally _gone_. It's not just a matter of munging, it's often a matter of having to grovel over the entire file, by hand, correcting things.

Programmers seem to love to think that encoding errors are a joke, but they aren't. The data is _gone_. That's a big deal. Why are you even writing a program in the first place if it's just going to output unrecoverable gibberish? So you can throw the onus on the user to figure it out?

And that's to say nothing of trying to recover the date.

<comment><USER34> It drives me bonkers. Use UTF-8. Use other encodings _only_ when talking to systems that require it, and use those other encodings _only_ when actually reading or writing the data. Translate to UTF-8 at the earliest opportunity, and translate from UTF-8 at the last possible moment, and only if you must.

This isn't the 90s. This stuff is basically solved now, except people can't be bothered to use the solution.</comment></comment></comment>


I Was There. Just Ask Photoshop. - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/fashion/17photo.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss <comment><USER2> Er. What is the point? Now instead of looking at the picture and saying "Oh look, there's person X", you can say "Oh look, there's where I know person X was". This is like a primitive version of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

<comment><USER3> Yes. But just think about the propaganda potential of deliberate reality- misrepresentation!</comment></comment>


Nephrology nursing and the wearable artificial kidney - <AUTHOR> http://www.nephrologynews.com/nephrology-nursing-and-the-wearable-artificial-kidney/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is an interesting development to follow. If they can make it really lightweight it could make a huge improvement in quality of life for renal failure patients.</comment>