China's 1 Percent Flock to Canada - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/13/world/americas/canada-vancouver-chinese-immigrant-wealth.html <comment><USER2> Big cities always have rich kids.

There is an undercurrent of racism in this article and in Vancouverites' attitudes towards rich kids from asia.

We tend to think of these kids through a lens where we think of our own childhoods and imagine adding enormous wealth. "Just like my childhood except add a $150,000 car allowance".

This is often not the case though. These kids can experience very difficult childhoods. Sent to a foreign country to attend boarding school, or live with a nanny in a big empty house. Hostile, often racist citizens all around them, and people constantly critical of their wealth. (how can you blame a 17 year old for having rich parents?)

I grew up in Vancouver with many kids like these around me. The vast majority of them are good, decent, friendly people who frankly have a tough time in their circumstance.

There is also a certain self-fulfulling prophecy in the whole dynamic, where hostile (often racist) Vancouverites immediately throw scorn all over these kids and their families... and then when they graduate and leave people say "see, they just came here to get an education and make a quick buck from the housing market". Well perhaps if we were less hostile and more welcoming, it would be a different story, and better for everyone including the local economy.

<comment> UVB-76 Perhaps, if an individual doesn't want to be a victim of resentment and stereotyping, they shouldn't drive a $150,000 car?

Especially at an age where it's extremely unlikely for that individual to have accrued the necessary wealth themselves.

<comment><USER3> I think it's more appropriate to say that if the individual can have a $150,000 car at no cost, why on Earth would he/she give a shit what you think of him? I'd take the car and wouldn't hear your opinions of me or it over the engine.

<comment> UVB-76 It can be more nuanced than that. Some of these "rich kids" are brought up in an environment, or culture, where they simply don't expect ostenentatious displays of wealth (even by those who have apparently not earned the wealth themselves) to be met with these responses.

In any case, I think it's important to emphasize the individual has a choice.

No one is forcing these people to flaunt their wealth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article is part of a worrying acceptance in the popular media of xenophoboia and hatred of the wealthy.

> China's rapid economic rise has turned peasants into billionaires. Many > wealthy Chinese are increasingly eager to stow their families, and their > riches, in the West, where rule of law, clean air and good schools offer > peace of mind, especially for those looking to escape scrutiny from the > Communist Party and an anti-corruption campaign that has sent hundreds of > the rich and powerful to jail.

This whole article breeds condescension. Peasants? "Stow away their families"? Not to mention the the fact that Canada is one of the least corrupt countries in the world. Perhaps they are fortunate enough to seek a better life for themselves and their families free of political oppression.

<comment><USER5> There are two kinds of chinese immigrants these days. The ones looking for a better life in a more fair setting (they are going to work). The other ones have been incredibly successful in China, but much of their money is grey, and it is only a matter of time until they are made an example of by some anti corruption crackdown. The latter ones are China's one percent, they got rich by playing the system and going abroad is their escape/retirement plan. Not only that, but they aren't going to be paying income taxes (they have plenty of money already) and are just going to keep pumping money into housing, exporting China's insane property bubble.

No one here I think has a problem with working immigrants. In fact, it kind of sucks more for them because this is some of the fu'er'dai/red family unfairness that they were trying to get away from in the first place.

<comment><USER4> Denizens provide more to a country than just paying income taxes. I believe in immigration not as an attempt to maximize tax revenue and minimize by tax burden. But because an open accepting society and mobility is in the best interest of all humans.

<comment><USER5> These people have a massive amount of money that they basically stole from the rest of the country (and its environment) and now are trying to get it out while they can. China's GDP growth looks great until you realize how unevenly that growth occurred, and what the real cost was. And now they will basically use the west to protect those gains from being reclaimed when everyone realizes how bad the damage is. That sucks.

I have no problem with immigration. I'm almost an immigrant (ironically enough, in China). But I see the things that make life here so hard (unfairness, corruption) exported back to my home, you are damn right I'm not going to be happy about it.

<comment><USER4> China's poverty has fallen rather drastically over time, as it has throughout the rest of the world[0]. The ill begotten gains of the ultra wealthy are only so because of the state control. Perhaps you're getting upset at the symptoms rather than the cause.

[0] [http://povertydata.worldbank.org/poverty/country/CHN](http://povertydata.worldbank.org/poverty/country/CHN)

<comment><USER5> China's poverty has fallen, but there are still plenty of people living in dirt filled basements (there is an ant tribe even in my apartment building). The red families control around 40%+ of the economy, the air is unbreathable, the water is toxic, a crappy 90sqm apartment goes for $1 million.

China has a lot of wealth, if it was evenly divided, if more attention was paid to the environment, if laws were actually enforced consistently....it would already be a first world country. That it isn't is basically because of these people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Most of the hate comes from people who got left out of the real estate price appreciation over the past 10 years in Vancouver.

There are _a lot_ of Canadians, however, who benefited from a disproportionate increase in wealth over this period of time as well.

In fact, many people who have bought multiple homes in Vancouver have now amassed a fortune which would make any startup founder who just got bought out by Google blush.

It's sort of like being in the right place at the right time. Like if you just so happened to have owned a hardware shop and sold shovels when the gold rush happened.

Toronto will probably be the next to experience the insane price increases we've seen in Vancouver as the housing inventory there becomes more scarce.

<comment><USER7> I lived and worked in Vancouver for a couple of years at an engineering firm. Our IT guy was a consultant who worked for a few companies. He was Asian, but I believe he had been in Canada for a long time. Anyway, we were always amazed by the different fancy car he would arrive in each time he came to our office (Ferrari, Lambo, you name it). I know IT guys can make decent money, but you wouldn't have expected this kind of wealth. Based on what we knew about he him, we concluded that he must have made his wealth as you said, right place, right time, in the Vancouver real estate bull market. While I was there he "retired" while he looked to be in his late 40s.

<comment><USER6> I think a lot of pundits and observers don't quite realize that there are only a few places in the world where the top 1% rich immigrants from China and other countries can actually feel comfortable moving to.

Speaking only of Canada, Vancouver is one such place. Toronto is another.

The relative housing price increase in places like -- say, Halifax -- although has gone up, will not be like that of Vancouver's or Toronto's.

You need to follow the flow of money and the _reason_ why there's the flow of money there. In this case, 1% of a very large population simply means there's going to be a lot of demand for flight to safety into Canadian real estate in Vancouver and Toronto -- two places where a lot of immigrants have already moved to.

It's sort of like trying to start a new social networking app... you need a network effect for the app to even reach critical mass. Vancouver/Toronto -- that's what happened there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> News flash: the rich are mobile, always have been.

Chinese are singled out by media because it plays on American whites' insecurity.

<comment><USER9> It's not quite that - 富二代 bring their own particular problems.

1) The methods in which their parents attained their money. Most that I've met have been reticent to talk about the source of their parents wealth (as mentioned in the article).

A lot are speculated to have been involved in widescale corruption and theft of the country's wealth - this should really irritate you (I'm making the assumption that you're an overseas Chinese here, apologies if not)

2) Their spending behaviour is seen as nouveau-riche and trashy. Furthermore, they don't conform to the west's idea of "civilized" behaviour. This can be seen in the thousands of videos of mainland chinese tourists available on youtube. Whether the west is right or wrong, this sort of cultural difference is undoubtedly something worth talking about in the media, wouldn't you say?

3) Most of these kids never had any siblings or decent caregivers growing up to help them develop any kind of emotional intelligence, so they develop into "little emperors".

Often, their parents enable these kind of behaviours, like in the example of Xu Yichun - the kid who caused a death and several serious injuries with reckless driving - his parents immediately paid his $2 million bail and tried to get him out of the country.

4) A lot of them make absolutely no attempt to integrate. Whether you consider this a negative depends on your perspective, but it definitely does irritate a lot of people. I've met Chinese masters' students at top 3 universities who can't string together a coherent written or spoken sentence.

I'm aware some of these things are not specifically Chinese, but suggesting they're actively singled out is untrue. Anyone who's spent a lot of time among chinese international students in the US or UK must see at least some aspect of these issues.

<comment><USER3> 1) Wealth cannot be "stolen", it doesn't belong to the country, it belongs to the individual. Unless it's the Government's money that's just called "spending."

Edit: I'm referring to the idea frequently spoken by Trump supporters, that somehow wealth created in a given country must be kept in that country. It's nonsense. Wealth (tied to individuals anyway) should be as free to move as those individuals. It isn't tied to any given country or state therefore they have no sway in what happens to it or what it's used for beyond the obvious legalities such as importing contraband, smuggling, that sort of thing.

2) Relativistic standards in different places. This is Xenophobia at it's finest. "You didn't spend your money like I would, therefore you are dumb/scary/silly/stupid."

3) As if any parent in the West wouldn't try to do the same damn thing for their kid if they got in trouble in a foreign country. Hell I've seen parents defending their children in courtrooms in the same country. It's a lot harder to condemn your own offspring to jail time than most people think.

4) Who cares? It's not your money, they're paying stupid tax to send their children to universities they can't complete and possibly spending enough of it to get some stupid piece of paper telling them how smart their kids are. Not going to help them when mom and dad are gone.

This whole article and topic reeks of people who haven't heard the phrase "mind your own business" enough.

<comment><USER5> Wealth can totally be stolen, by taking tax money, by pooping on the environment, by pumpin and dumping in stocks or real estate. Then there are scams, prostitution, all sorts of illegal ways of making money, but most of it is like: government sells X to connected family member really cheap. Corruption reeks.

<comment><USER3> You're citing actual crimes to make your case. Taking your wealth to another country and buying things is not a crime, it's commerce. The origin of said wealth is irrelevant to the Lamborghini dealer, if that person writing the check is polluting or insider trading or whatever then that is a separate issue.

<comment><USER5> Uhm, no, money laundering laws are quite clear that taking I'll gotten wealth is a crime, but fancy getting any of that information from China. We could just stop with greedy immigration policies that are oriented around milking money from other countries, and focus on human capital instead. After all, those ill gotten slips of paper are just going to feed into asset bubbles, whereas scientist and engineers can actually create real value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is an excellent article on the subject: [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/22/chinas-rich- kid...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/22/chinas-rich-kids-head- west)

</comment><comment><USER11> The article mentioned that the immigrant investor program is defunct, that's not entirely true. Québec still has it but they never stay in Montreal just move to Vancouver.

<comment><USER12> Vancouver is a better city in terms of weather and the scenery.

<comment><USER13> If by better you mean "less cold", sure. Not everyone is afraid of cold.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There's a huge population of Chinese and descendants of American-Chinese from the US rail road and gold digging days in Vancouver, so it kinda makes sense for them to concentrate there. But is it Canada only and not also San Francisco and similar locations of Chinese population on that continent?

</comment><comment><USER15> 1% of 1.357 billion people is about thirteen and a half million people.

Time for me to stop reading headlines literally.

</comment><comment><USER14> As long as they pay their taxes, what's the problem?

<comment><USER16> Isn't there a lot more more to being a citizen of a country than paying one's taxes? Nothing about integrating into a community? A country is not an economy.

Let's put it this way... if I were a (white) billionaire, and a few hundred of my richest friends and I moved to China and started buying up real estate in a major city and flaunting our wealth all over the place, how do you think the locals would receive us?

<comment><USER17> Um, that is essentially what happened about 100 years ago. A few differences though... The europeans brought along lots of armed guards and demanded China's laws didn't apply to them. Obviously, there was some friction.

<comment><USER18> Are you describing Hong Kong?

<comment><USER17> Yes, among other locations (Hong Kong, Canton, Amoy, Shanghai, etc.). I was describing the various "treaty ports" that were established following the Opium Wars, which were essentially a series of wars fought by the west to allow the import of illegal drugs into China. The major western powers forced China into providing land and extra-territorial rights to westerners in China.

The Chinese still remember this era quite vividly and describe it as the "Century of Humiliation".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> They could cap the numbers at so many thousand and then have the state build that many new homes. Stop the accommodation problems and make some money for the government from the property development.

</comment><comment><USER20> from peasants to billionaires.. new money with some of the worst tastes.. that's why the tackiest luxury brands are selling like hot cakes in China..

Buying a BMW is not sufficient, it has to be a BMW not made in China, otherwise, it's considered a step down..

<comment><USER5> Don't forget the pink matte sticker paint job to go with new new BMW or Mercedes. The worst is one someone goes for a gold or chrome paint job on a Ferrari, they are always parked outside of Gongti night clubs in Beijing.

<comment><USER20> Oh so now they've started to compete the Emiratis for the tackiest in the world?

<comment><USER5> No idea, I only no Beijing tackiness. Though given the license plate lottery EV preference, I've been seeing a few more Teslas on the road lately, without the tacky paint jobs.

<comment><USER20> beijing traffic is like the worst nightmare one can imagine, and this was me visiting in 2011...

it's such a bad place to live.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to get started in Computer Security? - <AUTHOR>

I've been in software development for a while now. News on HBGary, Anonymous, Wikileaks etc shows there's a lot going on in the Computer Security field. For those already in the field, are there some good online resources or books that you would recommend for one getting started, or particular skillsets one should have? <comment><USER2> I generally look for people that have a background in either systems administration or coding. Depending on what area of security interests you (there's a lot of difference between malware analysis and, say, compliance pen testing), different specialties may come in handy. For web application testers, it makes sense to have some experience with web programming.

Although this certainly doesn't ring true everywhere, at my company we use Linux and BSD almost exclusively for our tools. Although I would never reject a candidate based on their distro of choice, being intimately familiar with linux and command line tools is a must. You'd be surprised how many people are confused by even simple tasks in other operating systems.

The most important thing you can do, however, is show that you're passionate about the subject. Do security related projects, stay current on news in the field, publish your work if you can. Attend conferences like DEFCON if you can, and if not at least try to catch videos of some of the talks.

The field is growing and loves to find new, bright, interested talent. It's hard to separate people with a real, keen interest in security and a background to support it from the kids that try to bullshit their way through, though. Be honest about your skillset, your interest level and your background, and it will all fall into place.

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://www.amazon.com/Web-Application-Hackers-Handbook- Disco...](http://www.amazon.com/Web-Application-Hackers-Handbook- Discovering/dp/0470170778)

Awesome book covers EVERYTHING with practical instructions + a comprehensive checklist.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks guys, guess i better get to work</comment>


The Coming Suburban Welfare State - <AUTHOR> http://davetroy.com/posts/the-coming-suburban-welfare-state

<comment><USER2> The future he predicts is pretty much the way life already is in large portions of (at least) central & northern Europe.

<comment><USER3> Yep, I'm aware of that, having spent a lot of time in Berlin. However, to convince Americans of anything, you have to first let them think it happened here first. :)</comment></comment>


Two Ways to Update Embedded Devices Over-the-Air - <AUTHOR> https://mender.io/blog/the-two-main-ways-to-update-embedded-devices-over-the-air <comment> Lex-2008 Interesting, this is rather a counterintuitive thought:

> For users who seek a "brick-free" and redundant update process, system > update is the most robust and safe updating method.

Especially for those coming from desktops where "apt-get" updates kernels same way as applications.</comment>


Broken Links - <AUTHOR> http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2011/02/09/Hash-Blecch

<comment><USER2> Despite all the FUD around hashbangs, the genuine problem I see with them is that they optimise for internal page loads, not the entry into a website. For example with hashbangs, requests to twitter when logged in go like;

1) HTTP GET <http://twitter.com/some_account> [~500ms for me]

2) 302 redirect -> HTTP GET <http://twitter.com/> [~600ms for me]

3) HTML tells browser to download some JS -> HTTP GET bundle.js [~500ms for me] (concurrently here we start getting CSS)

4) JS reads hashbang & request actual data -> HTTP GET data.json [~500ms for me]

... only after about 2 seconds can we start(!) rendering data. Now there's about another 2 seconds for all json data & CSS calls to complete. It takes upwards of 4 seconds for a twitter page to render for me (the Load event lies as it fires well before actual data shows. Try it yourself with your favourite browser inspector).

When not using hashbangs, a single HTTP request can get all the data for the page and start rendering it. One blocking CSS call (possibly cached) is all that's needed for styling.

Hence when I see an external link with a hashbang it frustrates me (barely perceptively) because I know that when I load the page it's going to take a longer than a normal HTTP request. Significantly longer. While subsequent page loads are faster, it's not these you want to optimise for if you care about bounce rates. This issue affects every new link you click into a website, so it affects an even larger number of requests than normal bounces.

Hashbangs are a good solution to an important problem, but I don't see them as a tool to build entire websites upon. Fortunately I see the performance issue as one which will result in people voting with their browsers and choosing sites which only use hashbangs when they genuinely improve the user experience - especially since they're easily visible in the url.

<comment><USER3> Basically, NewTwitter isn't a Web site, it's an app and you have to "launch" it before you can do anything.

<comment><USER4> But once you do launch it, everything is faster than it would have been if you were performing full page loads at each step. For sites you "live" in, the application route makes a lot of sense. This is the way GMail works and people seem to like it a lot.

Unfortunately, web applications and web pages are growing increasingly divergent. It is simply not feasible to take the performance of web apps to the next level without doing away with full page loads. This is why Facebeook, Twitter et al are going the #! route. That's the cold hard truth.

<comment><USER5> Wouldn't js click handlers work just as well?

You follow a canonical link to the resource, get a real page back, with real links, but js click handlers to enable AJAX-goosed speed for those with javascript enabled? And given that they imply a fallback for those times when javascript fails, aren't they actually _better_?

And GMail is a bit different than Twitter. It handles inward-facing data; content that no-one particularly _wants_ crawled and wouldn't benefit much from caching.

<comment><USER6> Unless you want your URLs to look like twitter.com/someone#!someone_else, you're going to have to take the multi-step page load at some point when you transition from the HTML version to the AJAXy one.

<comment><USER7> Not if you use the HTML history API: <http://html5demos.com/history>

Admittedly, you need a modern browser for that. But you can always present full-page-load HTML to users with older browsers and then provide AJAXy history-ified goodness to everyone else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> With pushState not widely implemented, you have three choices:

1) don't use AJAX in response to actions that alter the page content in a significant way. This of course forces page reloads and prevents the cool emerging pattern that is to not serve dynamic HTML but just have a REST API and do the rendering client side.

2) you do the ajaxy stuff but you don't touch the URL. This leads to a nonworking back button and prevents users from bookmarking or sharing links to specific views. You can work around this google maps style with some explicit "link to this page" functionality, but I would guess, people just don't get that.

3) you do the fragment change thing which allows for ajaxy page content changes but also makes the back button work and keeps links inherently shareable and bookmarkable at the cost of that one redirect, at the cost of screen-scrapability and maybe confusing to techies (normal people probably don't care either way)

pushState can look like a salvation, but keep one thing in mind: to keep the page working for browsers without JS (and screen scrapers), you will have to do your work twice and STILL render dynamic content on the server which is something people are now beginning to try to avoid.

Finally, as pushState is yet another not widely deployed thing, for the next five to ten years, you would have to do all of this three times: dynamic HTML generation for the purists. pushState for the new browsers and fragment change for IE.

Personally, I really feel that fragment change is a good compromise as it works with browsers and even in IE while still allowing the nice pattern of not rendering anything on the server and keeping the URLs shareable.

Maybe this current uproar is based on a) techies not used to this (normal people don't notice) and b) badly broken JS that sometimes prevents views from rendering AT ALL, but this is not caused by an inherent problem with the technology: if I screw up the server side rendering the page will be as empty as it is if I screw up on the client side.

<comment><USER9> pushState with non-hash URLs doesn't require you to do server-side HTML generation. You can just send a stub page which looks at the URL and loads the right data, just as with hash URLs. To deploy it incrementally, you only really need one code path with a slight fork depending on whether the current URL contains a #! and whether the current browser supports pushState.

<comment><USER8> I know, but browsers without JS need the server side generated content for that URL or the original complaints just arise again (empty page, albeit with a different URL now)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> HTML5 "AJAX History", also known as History.pushState, can solve this problem. It allows a website to update its contents with AJAX, but change the URL to a real URL that will actually retrieve the proper resource direct from the server, while maintaining proper back-forward navigation.

See <[http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#dom-history- pushs...](http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#dom-history-pushstate>); for spec details.

It's in Safari, Chrome and Firefox. While Opera and IE don't have it yet, it would be easy to use conditionally on browsers that support it. I'm a little surprised that more sites don't use it.

EDIT: This chart shows what browsers it will work in: <http://caniuse.com/history>

<comment><USER10> It's really great that in a few years, browsers will support a new AJAX technology that solves this problem that we wouldn't even have with sane, traditional URL schemes.

<comment><USER9> Maybe you're trying to be snarky, but I'll choose to take your comment seriously.

The AJAX approach to Web apps does provide a genuine user interface benefit. A full page load is very disruptive to application flow, and being able to have new data appear without incurring that penalty is great. Most of the time you only need to load a little bit of data anyway, and it's wasteful to reload all the markup that wraps it.

AJAX solves that problem, but it creates the new problem that your address field no longer properly reflects the navigation you do inside a web app. #! URLs are one approach to fixing it, and pushState will do even better. At that point, the user won't even have to notice that the Web app they use is built in an AJAXy style, other than the navigation being smoother and faster.

<comment><USER10> "Most of the time you only need to load a little bit of data anyway" - that's highly questionable as a general statement. In a rich UI like GMail, yes. But in examples like the new Lifehacker, you load a whole story, yet its locator is behind the hashbang.

Not every website is a web app. Just show one article or item or whatever the site is about under one URI.

<comment><USER11> Lifehacker kind of looks nicer only loading reloading the story and not the whole page. I gives things an application feel rather than a collection of pages and saves a heap of extra processing, why run the code again to generate a header and footer and side bars constantly when the version the user is seeing is perfectly up to date.

<comment><USER12> The experience is slicker - if you run a search on lifeHacker, you can click through and browse the results without affecting the rest of the page (including the list of results). With traditional page refreshes this would not be possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Isn't the underlying problem that web applications are often displaying combinations of content that doesn't have a natural URL?

Take New Twitter, for example. If I click on a tweet in my stream, it shows related tweets. If a drill down a few of those, at some point it becomes impossible to represent the address of the current state in a sane manner.

I think URLs are particular to the web (desktop apps don't have them) because the web is traditionally about content. Web applications are increasingly breaking that. Perhaps web applications and URLs don't go together all that well.

Don't get me wrong--I love URLs, and it's crazy for content sites like Lifehacker to break them for so little benefit. But maybe the reason for this hashbang trend is that URLs aren't expressive enough for some of these sites.

<comment><USER14> In that case "web application" is a misnomer. If the current state has no natural URL, it's not a legitimate part of the World-Wide Web. Instead the authors are tunneling a proprietary protocol over AJAX to carry opaque content to a single-purpose GUI app, just like all the terrible client/server apps from the 90s only slower.

<comment><USER15> _If the current state has no natural URL, it's not a legitimate part of the World-Wide Web._

But most of the popular content accessible via the web now fits this description. Look at Google's own homepage, it's a complex Javascript application that's completely opaque. @bruceboughton is right, the problem isn't that people aren't respecting the WWW specification, it's that the specification is no longer adequate to describe what the Web has become.

<comment><USER14> Google has competent web developers who practice progressive enhancement. Their search form and results have stable (even sensible) URLs and are perfectly usable without trusting their js.

<comment><USER15> Sure the application has a URL. But once I load it, it constructs what I see on the page on the fly. I can turn Javascript off and load an alternate page, but if I leave it on I'm loading an application that's every bit as opaque as Flash.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Ran into another interesting shortcoming of hash-bang URLs last night looking through my referrer log. Loads of referring URLs of <http://gawker.com/> and <http://kotaku.com/> to my blogpost. But no mention at all of my blog-post or a link to it on the homepage.

First I thought they were referrer log spamming, then it dawned on me that fragment identifiers get stripped out of HTTP referers, so making hash-bangs useless as a means of joining up distributed conversations on the web.

Somewhere on those two Gawker media sites there's a conversation going on about the use of hash-bangs. But nobody outside knows about it. It's a big black hole.

</comment><comment><USER17> Can't it work both ways? Serve the #! links and provide canonical content located at the (almost) same uri sans #!.

If you visit <http://mysicksite.com/article/1> javascript changes all the links to the #! format. Then when the user clicks the links they enter #! land.

Now the user copies a link from their address bar and puts it into the wild. Someone gets that link, <http://mysicksite.com/#!/article/1>, and visits it. Rewrite with htaccess or whatever method you employ to serve the content at <http://mysicksite.com/article/1>, using javascript to change all the links to the #! format.

I posted this in the reddit thread about the Gawker/lifehacker problems recently, but was too late for anyone to really give me a response. For those of you that have worked with these kind of systems before, would this solve the problem the original link was describing?

EDIT: Ahh I think I get the problem now, of course after I post it. Server doesn't get the data from the uri trailing the #! I think?

<comment><USER18> That is, indeed, the crux of the problem. Anything after the hash is client- only.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> [EDIT: never mind, missed this response, similar in style but 2h earlier ... <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2197064>]

May be I'm missing something, but it seems to me that there is a way to have your cake and eat it too in this case.

Say we have a site with a page /contacts/ which lists various contacts.

On this page there are completely normal links like '/contacts/john/', each link preceded by/wrapped by an anchor tag - <a href="john"> in this case.

If you visit this site without javascript enabled (e.g. you happen to be a web crawler), you just follow the links and you get just regular pages as always.

If however you've javascript enabled, onclick events on each url intercept a click on a link and fetch just the information about the contact you clicked on (using an alternate url, for example /contacts/john.json), cancels the default action and (re)renders the page.

Then it does one of two things: \- if pushState is supported it just updates the url \- if pushState is not supported it adds '#john' to the url

If someone visits '/contacts/#john' with javascript enabled, /contacts/ is retrieved and then john's data is loaded and displayed.

If someone visits '/contacts/#john' without javascript enabled, he gets the full contact list, with the focus on the link to john's page, which he can then click.

By using this scheme: \- search engine and other non-javascript users can fully use the site and see completely normal urls \- XHR page loads are supported \- XHR loaded pages don't break the backbutton \- XHR loaded pages are bookmarkable \- Bookmarks to XHR loaded pages are fully shareable if the recipient has javascript enabled or pushState is supported, and at least not totally broken if not.

The only drawback I can see is the 'sharing bookmarks with someone who has no javascript support' issue - is that a real biggie? In addition of course to the 'made error in javascript, now all stops working' issue - but that is something that has not so much do with the #! debate as well as with the 'is loading primary content via XHR a good idea' debate.

To me it seems that current users of the #! technique have just gone overboard a bit by relying _only_ on the #! technique instead of combining it in a progressively enhancing way with regular HTTP requests.

</comment><comment><USER20> The problem in this situation is that you have a smart technical person arguing for technical purity, while at the same time (seemingly) ignoring the mostly non-technical considerations of user-experience and economics.

Yes, the old, conservative model of HTML is very simple, but when people use AJAX well, the user experience is enormously and materially improved. We're still early in the development of this medium, and many people will do it wrong. But even the people who do it right will probably seem inelegant and kludgey _by the standards of the old model._

And yes, you can get both AJAX and clean URLs via (still poorly-supported) HTML5 History API and/or other progressive enhancement methods, but these may require a significant amount of additional effort. Maybe worth it, maybe not.

This topic reminds me of when sound was added to movies. "Tight coupling" and "hideous kludge" sound a lot like the arguments that were made against that too. The conventional wisdom was to make your talkie such that the story worked even without sound; one can still sometimes hear that, but it isn't, I think, a standard that we associate with the best movies being made today.

</comment><comment><USER21> It's not really that bad. The people using hash-bangs are following a spec proposed by Google to make AJAX webpages crawlable:

[http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/docs/specification.h...](http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/docs/specification.html)

So when you see the lifehacker URL in the article, you know that there's an equivalent non-AJAX URL available with the same content at:

[http://lifehacker.com/?_escaped_fragment_=5753509/hello- worl...](http://lifehacker.com/?_escaped_fragment_=5753509/hello-world-this- is-the-new-lifehacker)

There's no need to execute all the JavaScript that comes back from the server - if they're following the spec, all you have to do is escape the fragment and toss it over to a CGI arg.

Another option is progressive enhancement, where you make every link point to a valid page and then add onclick event handlers that override the click event to do whatever JavaScript you want it to. I think this is a far superior option in general, but it has various issues in latency and coding complexity, so a good portion of web developers didn't do it anyway.

<comment> brown9-2 But as Tim says, the spec proposed by Google is only meant to fix some problems (can't be searched by search engines) caused by using this URL scheme. It isn't meant to be a one-guide-fits-all approach making AJAX content addressable.

In other words the spec treats one of the symptoms, not the original problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I posted more as a comment on the original story, but I have covered this issue in depth (from when Google initially proposed it, to when it was launched) here:

[http://searchengineland.com/google-proposes-to-make-ajax- cra...](http://searchengineland.com/google-proposes-to-make-ajax- crawlable-27408)

[http://searchengineland.com/googles-proposal-for-crawling- aj...](http://searchengineland.com/googles-proposal-for-crawling-ajax-may-be- live-34411)

[http://searchengineland.com/its-official-googles-proposal- fo...](http://searchengineland.com/its-official-googles-proposal-for-crawling- ajax-urls-is-live-37298)

Of course, a better solution is some type of progressive enhancement that ensures both that search engines can crawl the URLs and anyone using device without JavaScript support can view all of the content and navigate the site.

</comment><comment><USER23> I can't understand how hard would it be for someone writing a crawler to replace a hashbang (#!) with _escaped_fragment_

For developers of AJAX apps it: 1\. Improves productivity 2\. Improves user experience 3\. Is more efficient on the server as it prevents a lot of initializing code.

I think the old school needs to wake-up a bit!

</comment><comment><USER24> Facebook had an outage some time back (I think this one - <http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=431441338919>), and when everything got back to normal, the hash-banged URLs were gone. Was it related?

<comment><USER11> They are still there in IE, so I guess they have started using push state where available.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Yet another annoying pontificating article about hashbangs. Why can't people accept that there are more than one way of doing things on the web.

Just because you don't like using hashbangs does not mean no-one else can.

Sure, use of hashbangs might make seo of your site harder. Yes, it might make it harder for hackers who want to do curls of your site's pages. But maybe this is not your aim with your site.

Maybe you want to give your users a slicker experience by not loading whole new pages but instead grabs bits of new content.

The web is a place for experimentation and we as hackers should encourage such experimentation, rather than condemning it because it does not fit with how we think things should be done.

<comment><USER26> A while back, there was this pie-in-the-sky idea which was really interesting but not too practical, called Semantic Web. It didn't really pan out because it turns out that annotating your sites with metadata is boring and tedious and nobody really liked to do it, and anyway, search and Bayesian statistics simulated the big ideas of Semantic Web well enough for most people.

The ideas behind it still stand, though, in the idea of microformats. These are just standardized ways of using existing HTML to structure particular kinds of data, so any program (browser plug-in, web crawler, &c) can scrape through my data and parse it as metadata, more precisely and with greater semantic content than raw text search, but without the tedium that comes with ontologies and RDF.

Now, these ideas are about the _structured exchange_ of information _between arbitrary nodes on the internet_. If every recipe site used the hRecipe microformat, for example, I could write a recipe search engine which automatically parses the given recipes and supply them in various formats (recipe card, full-page instructions, &c) because I have a recipe schema and arbitrary recipes I've never seen before on sites my crawler just found conform to this. I could write a local client that does the same thing, or a web app which consolidates the recipes from other sites into my own personal recipe book. It turns the internet into _much_ more of a _net_ , and makes pulling together this information in new and interesting ways tenable. In its grandest incarnation, using the whole internet would be like using Wolfram Alpha.

The #! has precisely the opposite effect. If you offer #! urls and nothing else, then you are making your site harder to process except by human beings sitting at full-stack, JS-enabled, HTML5-ready web browsers; you are _actively hindering_ any other kind of data exchange. Using #!-only is a valid choice, I'm not saying it's always the wrong one—web apps definitely benefit from #! much more than they do from awkward backwards compatibility. But using #! _without graceful degradation_ of your pages turns the internet from interconnected-realms-of-information to what amounts to a distribution channel for your webapps. It actively hinders communication between anybody but the server and the client, and closes off lots of ideas about what the internet _could be_ , and those ideas are not just "SEO is harder and people can't use curl anymore."

I don't want to condemn experimentation, either, and I'm as excited as anyone to see what JS can do when it's really unleashed. But framing this debate as an argument between crotchety graybeards and The Daring Future Of The Internet misses a lot of the subtleties involved.

<comment><USER20> Very interesting points, but there are couple of errors which undermine part of your point: 1. If the application follows the Google proposed-convention or similar, the crawler doesn't need a full-stack JS implementation; it just needs to do the (trivial) URL remapping. 2. Nothing in this hash-bang approach requires a HTML5-ready browser.

<comment><USER16> I tried both curl and wget last night (neither of these are HTML5-ready browsers), and neither of them could get content using the hash-bang URL. They both came back with an empty page skeleton.

Also, how do you reassemble the hash-bang URL from HTTP Referrer header?

<comment><USER27> Neither curl nor wget follow the Google convention for handling hashbangs as suggested by the parent, so I'm not sure what you're getting at with this reply.

<comment><USER16> Hash-bang URLs are not reliable references to content - that's what I am getting at. Curl and WGet are perhaps the most used non-browser user-agents on the web. And both of them are unable to retrieve content at a URL specified by a hash-bang URL.

In this context hash-bang urls are broken.

<comment><USER20> I'm sorry if I implied that curl/wget handle this already. However, they could handle this with a very small wrapper script, maybe 3 lines of code, or a very short patch if the convention becomes a standard. That's not nothing, but it's maybe 7 orders of magnitude lighter than a full JS engine, and it's small anyway compared to the number of cases that a reasonable crawler needs to handle.

Also, with that wrapper or patch, curl & wget will still not be remotely HTML5 ready, which I hope demonstrates that HTML5 is not a requirement in any way. A single HTML5-non-ready browser that can't handle this doesn't mean therefore that HTML5 is a requirement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The point of mainstream sites indicating that the page has ajax with the URL path is to tell search engines. I have a feeling that what the author doesn't get is that it is very hard for search engines to tell the difference between ajax pages, static pages, and spammy keyword stuffed pages.

To me, it seems that Google recommends indicating ajax content in the path in the same way that our government issues concealed weapon permits. Yes it okay to have concealed content that can loads on the fly as long as you are very clear of your intentions. Once again this is a usability issue that wouldn't be an issue if it weren't for spammers.

</comment><comment><USER29> This rant would be more effective and persuasive if also directed at the Google engineers who made this hashbang style pervasive in Google Groups. I didn't think it would be possible to get deep links to old articles even _worse_ than before, but they managed it.

</comment><comment><USER30> It's interesting how many upvotes this is getting in a very short time. However, I don't think the average Twitter user cares about performance and URL elegance, so I doubt Twitter will change anything.

<comment><USER31> I have seen performance issues and outright broken behavior with Twitter's hashbang ajax loading scheme. In that respect, regular users will care (they just won't necessarily know what is causing the issue).

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I think people are missing a huge benefit of the hashbang syntax: readable and copy/paste-able URLs. Without them, it's impossible to have an ajax application with a decent URL scheme.

<comment><USER33> You don't need the hashbang for that. You never did. Hashbang only tells google "munge around this shit to get an actual page".

<comment><USER32> I'm curious what the other solutions are then. The only one I can think of is the History.pushState, and that's only supported in newer browsers.

Let's say I'm writing a web based word processor, and a user clicks on a document. I want the URL to be a reference to that specific document. The only way to change the URL to be specific without requiring a whole-page refresh is to use the hashbang syntax.

<comment><USER33> > I'm curious what the other solutions are then.

The hash without the bang. It's only been done for about 10 years. You can put whatever you want after the hash. It's up to your application to decide the meaning of it.

For an example, see the OSX SDK documentations: [http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/...](http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/Reference/Foundation/Classes/NSString_Class/Reference/NSString.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Just a thought - but could a lot of people complaining about hashbangs still be browsing the web with lynx?

</comment><comment><USER35> Hi, HTML/HTTP are the second worse application delivery platform available. Try not to be shocked.

Sorry, your other choice was #1.</comment>


Ask YC: What should I be doing at age 19? - <AUTHOR>

I'm just about finished with my first year here at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and I'm coming to the realization that this is not the place for a software entrepreneur who grew up on the west coast. I've got a few summers of experience working for startups under my belt, and I'm trying my best to live vicariously through YC News and other sites as I slog through high school and college. It gets old.<p>My question is this: Where should I go from here? I've been unable to find cofounders I can mesh with here, but I've got the experience and competency to be a productive member of a startup. Should I transfer? If so, where? Should I even be in college? What's the cost/benefit being in college in the first place? I'm fairly committed to leaving RPI, but I don't know what direction to take from here. <comment><USER2> Start or become a key contributor to at least one open-source project. For one, this gives you experience and a good base for answering interview questions. Two, this makes you more "Googleable" (I have my current job because my employer found _me_ , through a site that wouldn't have existed if not for my open-source project!).

College is important, not just for tuition. For example, I was able to teach myself HTML and aspects of Unix about 10 years ago while I was a student, primarily because I had a student Unix account with 'net access (still not that common off-campus). This turned out to be at least as important for landing the job "meant for my degree" (computer engineering), even though I'd taken no courses for the extra skills I'd acquired.

</comment><comment><USER3> >I've got a few summers of experience working for startups under my belt

You can always go back to school...

Have you considered working for a startup in Europe? (broaden your worldview - old cliche: if the world is a book and you don't travel, you've only read a couple pages..)

Read the "4-hour Work Week". It might give you some good ideas.

Kolbe personality test - Slightly expensive and comprehensive - may give you insight into yourself (<http://www.kolbe.com>)

<comment><AUTHOR> >You can always go back to school...

Yeah, I've been thinking that. However, a lot of schools I've looked at are looking for Junior-year transfer students. If I take a break now, I'm basically looking at a full 4 years. Granted, I've only lost one, but it seems like a bit of a waste.

>Have you considered working for a startup in Europe? (broaden your worldview - old cliche: if the world is a book and you don't travel, you've only read a couple pages..)

Absolutely! I fully intend to spend some of my earlier years in Europe, and I've already visited Amsterdam twice. I'm actually in the process of talking to a small robotics company there, but how else do you make the connections to get the VISA and stuff?

>Read the "4-hour Work Week". It might give you some good ideas.

Will do!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This advice might sound a bit "old-school". I would recommend you stick with college for at least another year or two. Being a recent graduate myself, I can understand how the stuff you learn in college seems pointless and may not be applicable to what you really want to do/accomplish. However, college really helped me learn how to learn things fast. And that, is a valuable skill to have.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, learning is most definitely a critical skill! Fortunately, my early education (pre-high school) placed a huge emphasis on learning to love learning, and I spent a great deal of my free time learning from textbooks etc. I've actually realized that Comp Sci isn't as unrelated to industry as I thought, but CS at RPI is worse than a joke. So I might actually want to stay in college specifically _for_ the curriculum.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This PG essay should help:

<http://www.paulgraham.com/mit.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow...I really don't remember reading that, but I swear I've read all of PG's essays, at least for the past five years or so. I feel like the biggest thing missing here at RPI is cofounders. There are plenty of smart people, but the mentality here is all wrong for starting companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> want a job at a cool startup?

<comment><USER7> If you are offering the chance to work at a startup, I would have to answer yes. If you could bear with someone who learns quickly, but is not quite up to full coding power yet, I would be a great candidate.</comment></comment>


Sweden will not ban Pirate Bay - <AUTHOR> https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.idg.se%2F2.1085%2F1.643828%2Fpirate-bay-blockering&edit-text= <comment><USER2> Article in English, posted earlier:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10637139](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10637139)</comment>


Third World America  - <AUTHOR> http://aidwatchers.com/2011/02/third-world-america/

<comment><USER2> It is sad to see some areas where people on average are doing significantly worse than the richest parts of the United States.

However, I find the choice of the term 'Third World America' to be particularly deceiving. Let's take Louisiana, for example, marked as amongst the worst regions according to the infographic. Median earnings are 28,000 and about 75% with at least high school education.

Now let's compare against Mexico's average. Mexico is not nearly as bad as other third world countries. Average earnings are about 7,000 USD/year [1] (and median earning is probably worse). Roughly have of Mexicans haven't completed their junior high school education (6th to 9th). These are national averages, though, which --unlike the infographic -- do not focus only on the poorest areas. The poorest areas are, of course, much worse.

I'm not trying to say with this that you shouldn't complain if others have it worse. I am just saying that this particular choice of wording is not realistic and, in my mind, took away from the credibility of the rest of the site .

[1] [http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2010/12/07/index.php?section=econ...](http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2010/12/07/index.php?section=economia&article=028o1eco) [2] <http://simposio.asu.edu/2004/docs/mesas/2/suarez.pdf>

<comment><USER3> I don't get it either. Why the ongoing comparisons with countries that are even worse off? Wouldn't it be better to look at countries in which there is less poverty, and see what they do better? (For example: many North European countries hardly have poverty as in "can't pay for food/housing" at all)

<comment><USER4> Because that angle has been tried repeatedly and is usually shrugged off by conservatives as 'too European, too socialist'. So, this is an attempt to point out that we're not in great shape and shame politicians into doing better for the people.

<comment><USER5> Conservatives will find it even easier to shrug off comparisons between the indebted, undereducated and underemployed in the US and the extreme poverty of the "Third World".

Whilst there is a significant amount of evidence to suggest that _relative_ poverty is actually more detrimental to people's happiness than absolute poverty, comparisons like this which conflate the issues and don't provide any stats to back their claims up are counterproductive.

I'm not saying extreme rhetoric doesn't work (see for instance effective campaigns which characterise a lifestyle more than half the world would consider well-off as a "living wage"), but I don't think it helps in this instance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Without scales or legends, one cannot tell if the range is from "great to good" or "good to bad".

I would be interested in seeing the same information normalized to other countries or at least given some solid numbers.

</comment><comment><USER7> Third World was a Cold War era term meaning countries not aligned with NATO or the Soviet Block. I wonder how all those countries feel about the term being used as a pejorative.

That aside, the biggest failing I see is that the average earnings don't seem to be adjusted for the cost of living.

<comment><USER8> No, those were "nonaligned". Third World used to describe what's left if you remove the developed capitalist countries and the European socialist countries.

<comment><USER7> Scratching my head. What is the difference between not aligned and nonaligned in this context?

<comment><USER9> "Nonaligned" is an actual name used by a group of countries: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-aligned_movement>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why is Nevada so particularly bad?

<comment><USER11> Some of it is that roughly 15% of the total population are in rural areas where the primary jobs available are in mining, or agriculture. Illegal immigrants make up a significant portion of the total population according to the latest numbers released by ICE. The number one industry in Nevada is tourism followed by mining. You don't need a highly skilled labor pool to fill a significant percentage of those jobs. The education budget has historically been dependent on revenues from the gaming (gambling) industry. You can guess where Nevada falls on education spending, graduation rates etc. Nevada ranks poorly in every social spending category so it's not just education that suffers. Poverty is also a huge issue, over 50% of the students in Washoe County live at or below the poverty line for example.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do I find my ideal role? - <AUTHOR> I've been working professionally for over 11 years with a varied career. I've been in capital market (investment advisory/corporate finance), fp&a (manufacturing), product owner (media), strategy (transport) and finance partnering (payments).
I've never really been able to find a role/company which has been my ideal fit. I want to be somewhere where people want to push the envelope and try new things. Typically I find most places are only interested in doing the 9-5.
What I really love doing is commercialising ideas (concept, to strategy, development and execution). But I haven't found a company who's interested in wanting cross-functional people or a recruiter who understands what I'm after.
If I could do anything, I would be running my own start up (which I'm working on, on the side). But unfortunately I'm lacking the funds so I still need an income till I can properly develop it and I'm also hoping my next role can help me establish some networks. <comment><USER3> "I want to be somewhere where people want to push the envelope and try new things"

That is too generic even though I hear you as a founder of a company who does many things. Unless you are the founder, most companies are looking for specific/specialized roles and not generalists. That doesn't mean generalists are not needed but you have to do a lot more convincing.

You said "haven't found a company who's interested in wanting cross-functional people". The problem with this is that there is nothing specific here. What are you really good at ? Sales ? marketing ? Technology ? Client Management ? You cannot do a little bit of everything unless again, you are the founder.

"What I really love doing is commercializing ideas".

Ok good. Now define this further. What type of ideas ? Again, in what domain/area ? For example, can you help setting up Sales Strategy ? Or Marketing strategy ? Or building a team strategy ? Get specific and you may find the ideal role.

<comment><AUTHOR> What I think I'm good at (ie experienced in):

\- Capital Markets (understanding raising capital/ir - <USER2> technical/analytical side, not the sales side)

\- Accounting / Finance - (forecasting, reporting, ad-hoc analysis)

\- Data Analytics (SQL, Excel, Get & Transform) \- General Technology (I'm a lot nerdier than the average finance person) e.g. I'm currently teaching myself Python, worked in a agile, CI/CD dev team

\- Project work (data mapping, process mapping, drafting contracts, reviewing)

\- General Commercial Understanding (Developing business strategy, writing up business cases)

\- Implementing processes (e.g. getting non-dev teams to use Confluence, source control, dev environments, 'agile' project flow)

\- Commercial Problem solving (I know it this sounds highly generic, but I really like having a difficult commercial problem and coming up with a solution. Oddly I only enjoy this ins a business situation, I haven't found puzzles interesting)

So the description for this kind of role would look something like:

Applicant required to help us move into a new market/commercialise a new product. Applicant needs to be able to help us raise capital and manage investor expectations. Being comfortable with working with large data sets is a must as the applicant will need to use it to identify markets, product gaps and also develop reporting tools. This is a new role so the applicant must be willing to setup new procedures and processes for the organisation and have an emphasis on creating the right kind of culture. The applicant needs to be experienced in developing and presenting business cases at an executive level, in doing so the applicant will need extensive experience in building financial models and reporting. The applicant will also need experience executing the business plan so this can includes general project management, process flow, working with sales, legal and marketing. The applicant should also be looking to automate as much as possible and likely come from an agile workplace. Applicant must be happy to work in a small team and doesn't believe that there are any tasks out of their remit (i.e. a 'can-do' attitude).

Roles which cover this: \- CFO (I'm not at a CFO level, but likely to be missing the more data/tech side anyway)

\- Head of Strategy (likely to be missing the execution/process setup side/reporting)

\- Head of Commercial Development (likely to be missing the execution/process setup side/data, side/capital raising)

\- Consulting (not from a consulting background, but yes consulting could cover all of them but I don't want to be a consultant, I'd much rather get my hands dirty).

Very broadly you could say that the domain/area is 'commercial development' (i.e. setting up the company's strategy), but this would still be missing out on the day-to-day things. But I don't mean I want to be doing BAU tasks (e.g. I don't like doing reporting, but I'm happy to setup the reporting - because I believe it's a task which you should just try to automate rather than have someone do).

I'm pretty industry agnostic (though might be good to stay in payments given its hot at the moment). I don't want to be a large company though (I want to feel like I'm making an impact on the company).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Tell us more about your startup. There are always people here interested in what others are doing.

</comment><comment><USER5> > unfortunately I'm lacking the funds so I still need an income till I can > properly develop it and I'm also hoping my next role can help me

"God helps those who help themselves"

Not sure what you are complaining about. Funds shouldn't be a problem if you already have an income. Should be able to start and figure it out.

Are you not comfortable working on your own start up after 5PM (after you are done with your main job duties)? Sounds like you DO want comfortable 9-5. In this case "I want to be somewhere where people want to push the envelope " sounds hypocritical.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not meant to sound like a complaint - just an explanation that I'm trying to use my next role as a spring board to my ultimate path. I generally enjoy working.

By properly develop I mean actually make a commercial version, I'm currently building a functional prototype on my own, but I don't have the expertise to release a proper-public version without help. I've tried getting freelancers in before, but it hasn't worked (due to the nature of the project). I really need people who are able to work on it full time.

I'm saying I don't have enough capital to go out and rent office space/hire full time people etc. I'm trying to bootstrap my startup and not use external capital.

Yes, I currently work on my startup in my spare time.</comment></comment>


Lambda School is operating illegally - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/sandofsky/status/1211717254712135680 <comment><USER2> Based on Allred's Twitter activity and online interactions I don't have a lot of hope, but I really would like to see all students come away from this without losing money.

<comment><USER3> They knew they weren't in compliance. This level of arrogance when dealing with students lives/careers is immoral.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Where does a motivated 22 year old SWE student find freelance work? - <AUTHOR> I'm a 22 year old Software Engineering student based in Scandinavia who started writing code at the age of 15. I'm currently looking for freelance work, and aside from the typical websites such as Upwork, I really have no idea where to find any. Upwork and the similar freelancing sites are crowded with low-wage coders from India and other developing countries, and ime it's not easy to compete with them. I truly enjoy writing code and everything that comes with it, and I'd love to make some money as poor student.<p>I'm very comfortable with C, C++, Python, JavaScript (node.js, express.js,) MySQL and PostgreSQL. Fairly comfortable with C# and Shell. Where do I find freelancing work, HN? <comment><USER2> If you want to avoid having to compete with literally everyone Upwork, you have to think like a consultant instead of an employee. If you can take responsibility for the success of the project, that's noteworthy and you'll stand out. This can be how you get your referral system going.

To jumpstart that, you have to build your network. If you are still in university, that's a great position to be in, since you don't have to make money immediately (which is the best negotiation position).

Do things in public that demonstrate competence. For a dev this could include speaking at meetups, contributing to open source, answering questions in tech Slacks or on Hacker News, etc. Meet people and talk to them. Universities have all sorts of ways to do this. Do whatever you are most comfortable doing to meet people.

Stay in touch with the people you meet over email and make known your services without being obnoxious. This will all increase your "luck surface area" \- participating in Hacker News has made you known to, for example, me, and anyone else who reads this. The more you do in public, the more people you meet, the more likely you are to find good gigs.

Happy to chat about this more if you have any more specific questions, as it's a topic I've had great interest in as a freelancer myself. Cheers, and best of luck in your freelance quest!

<comment><USER3> Absolutely agree. Pretty much all the freelance Python coding work I've got has been through mining my existing network. I wouldn't touch UpWork with a bargepole frankly.

Also, you need to be able to offer something unique if you don't want to have to compete on price - so demonstrating competence in a niche is important.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Update your profile here on HN with some contact info, you might get a lead from this post alone.

</comment><comment><USER5> You could look at zerochaos.</comment>


Can I see your body of work? - <AUTHOR> http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2012/02/can-i-see-your-body-of-work.html <comment><USER2> Simple advice, but important. The resume is an important piece simply for consideration, but beyond that, I'm much more interested in a candidate with less impressive education or experience and a stellar portfolio of projects.</comment>


Announcing real IEs for Browserling - <AUTHOR> http://www.catonmat.net/blog/announcing-real-internet-explorers-for-browserling/ <comment><USER2> Hey Peteris,

I just want to let you know that what you're doing is awesome and I've been following it since the beginning. Browserling, from one dev to another, is a terrific implementation, and to speak to its benefits, I have used it a bunch of times because it is faster than booting up a VM for quick smoke tests. Everything has worked really well and I recommend it to everyone that mentions browser testing.

I'd love to give you money - and it sounds like you'll be offering a prepaid plan - so I'll do that as soon as it's released. If there's a mailing list please add me to it, email in profile.

<comment><USER3> Hey!

We do have paid plans already, and we have over 100 customers already!

Go to <https://browserling.com/> and scroll down to "pricing". The cheapest developer plan is $20, which includes real IEs, ssh tunnels, and a developer testling plan (www.testling.com - our other product).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wanted to try, was bored to death by the queuing time. Annoying.

<comment><USER5> Sorry about that. We booted up a ton more free servers but the queues are still rather large. On days when we're not getting a traffic spike you can usually use the service right away.

<comment><USER6> hey man awesome the world is seeing all the work and love you guys have put into this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> waited in the queue, went for a coffee, came back, 'your browsing time is up', and back in the queue again...

</comment><comment><USER8> I find virtual machines with specific versions of IE installed on each to be sufficient. Why pay for something that is relatively easy to setup? Especially easy if you are running Windows 7 Pro with XP mode, but you can download the VHDs Microsoft provides for other versions/OSes.

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't think Browserlink works very well if you have flashblock installed, and it's very hard to tell (note the telltale F in the upper-right: <http://i.imgur.com/Sc3Kq.png>)

<comment><USER3> We don't use flash anywhere on the site. Surprising that you have the "F" in the upper-right. I think it's coming from socket.io's flash-sockets but we don't use those.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> im rather disappointed they removed the option for older IEs from the free plan. That is what 95% of my work is.

<comment><USER10> What's keeping you from paying for Browserling?

<comment><AUTHOR> A combination of things. First - I have IEs in a virtual machine. The things I use browserling for are for either testing when im on someone else's computer, or when I am in a rush and want to get a do a quick 'it didn't break' sort of look. Second, this troubleshooting amounts to roughly 10 minutes a month on average. The lowest plan is $20 a month. At $2 a minute, id rather open up the VM. If I could have a prepaid option, I may be more likely.

One thing I actually just discovered is the API access. If they could highlight this feature and give a few tutorials on how you could write tests for websites (specifically IE breakage), I would be much more likely to pay for access to these browsers.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the feedback!

We've been getting a lot of requests for prepaid plans, and we'll now go ahead and add them.

I'll ping you on Twitter when we've added them!

Also take a look at our other product - Testling: www.testling.com - It's automated browser testing. It won't detect visual bugs but it's good for automated js testing in all the browsers.

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah, thats the api access I mentioned. It looks phenomenal, but isn't 100% clear. A couple of practical examples would be suppppper helpful.

thanks again man

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> IE9 within the IE8 window chrome? Is that normal?

I know you can load mshtml.dll or wherever Trident is kept nowadays into any IE shell, but the point of a service like this should be for accuracy to the original (there are a number of minor compatibility issues reported for tools which use similar workarounds, like IETester, Utilu, ...)

<comment><USER12> What IE8 window chrome?

<comment><USER11> It is indeed the IE9 window chrome, my mistake - those back/forward buttons threw me for a second.</comment></comment></comment>


Fitness Calculator - <AUTHOR> https://www.ntnu.edu/cerg/vo2max <comment><USER2> Where the heck is the link to the calculator?

<comment><USER3> It's not obvious but it's the huge black blotch your eye probably skipped over thinking it was an ad (that's what mine did). It goes to [https://www.worldfitnesslevel.org/#/start](https://www.worldfitnesslevel.org/#/start)</comment></comment>


Map of CPAN - The Movie - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.perl.org/users/grant_mclean/2012/10/map-of-cpan-the-movie.html

<comment><USER2> I'd enjoy a week with some tools to make visualizations like this. Looks cool, but what is it telling me?

\- Why is there blue space between segments?

\- Why do the colored (non-blue) segments crawl around instead of growing/shrinking?

\- If any segment actually changes size, I can't tell because of the crawl

\- If the crawling is due to "continental drift," there's not an obvious path that the flow takes. I can see that it starts in the upper left corner, but when I notice that the path squiggles around, I have to study it for far too long to figure out where the bits are headed.

<comment><USER3> To address questions 2-4, it's a space-filling curve [1], or basically an easy way to take a line and fill a 2D space. So when a single name is added to a namespace at the beginning of the curve, that blob gets bigger, and every other blob moves 'right'. Once you stare at it a while, you can see that every blob moves along the same path, and it's slightly easier to see which blobs are growing and which are getting shoved. But I agree that it isn't easy, and I think it's because the CPAN Map wasn't meant to be time-lapsed like this.

Edit: if you go to the mapofcpan.org site and click on pixels, I think you'll figure out what the blue areas are.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-filling_curve>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great movie!

For reference here's the HN discussion about mapofcpan.org from last year: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3355859>

</comment><comment><USER5> Yikes. This doesn't help me visualise anything. Something that could work: a tree view with bars for absolute size and size delta.

</comment><comment><USER6> Look Mom I'm Famous i'm part of cpan the movie :) yes the tiny crawling snake called DBI/DBD i guess

</comment><comment><USER7> Beautiful data visualization :)</comment>


How important is it to have an "About Us" page for a 1 person startup? - <AUTHOR> Hello,<p>I will be launching my ecommerce startup in a about a week or so and was wondering how important it is to have an "About Us" page and what should I include in the page? I don't want to come off as being a 1 person startup because I feel like people won't take me serious. My target audience are millennials so I do know the kind of tone and culture I would like to have as a company. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. <comment><USER2> I tend to look at the information about a company if I'm considering signing up for a (paid) service.

I like to see the type of staff that are promoted: are they technical? Or just the business folks? Does it show the whole company? Or just the C suite? What did they do before? Did they all work at the same place? Are there any women? Are the women all designers or assistants? What's the cultural mix? Is the company distributed, supportive of remote work? Are there any kids in the shots of the last company picnic?

I like to see something of the character of the company too. It's dumb, but when you see the company dog listed with the staff photos, it suggests a certain non-starchy attitude (even if it's manufactured).

So ... my suggestion would be: be open, be honest, and show your a little of ethos. Celebrate being a one-person endeavour! Most people won't care, but it might make for a better relationship with some of your potential customers.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have like less than 1% of my users go to my about us page(not a product company). I would say put up a bs about us page and if you start getting alot of people clicking on it optimize it. if you get a lot of people that go to bounce then fix it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your reply. I've been reading mixed reviews about what should be put on the about us page so I figured I would ask a startup community their thoughts. I think I may be over thinking it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Some web services I use have zero information about who provides the service. It's not necessary to have. The site needs to have only enough pages and no clutter.

</comment><comment><USER5> You can have an "About Us" page that is about the company, without mentioning that it's only you. I don't see the problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice. I asked the question because I've been reading mixed reviews about how important the about us page is and what should be written so I just wanted to see what others have done.</comment></comment>


What are your pain points in your professional and personal lives - <AUTHOR> https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/2DMVXTH <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone, doing a research to understand paint points in professional and personal lives and relationships. Would love to hear your thoughts. Thank you!</comment>


Google's PDF search incorrectly processes text in a multi-column layout - <AUTHOR> Search for the following terms: Assessment_of_C-band_synthetic_aperture.pdf "Delta-T radar"
The only PDF result is found because the content processor reads two columns as a single line.
Now, search for: Assessment_of_C-band_synthetic_aperture.pdf "Delta-T Devices Ltd."
No results are found. While it's possible you might not mind the false positive reading across columns, users of Google's search expect it to be capable of differentiating between text in two columns of a PDF.
@Google is this something that can be fixed? I'm assuming it cannot, as it's been like this as far back as I can remember. Note that I rely on you everyday, and thank you immensely for your work. <comment><USER2> What in the actual hell makes you think anyone at Google will read this or give a single shit?</comment>


The Matrix homeserver Conduit just got support for cross-signing - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPAAxyg2UD4 <comment><AUTHOR> Matrix is a secure, private, decentralized, open source messaging platform ([https://matrix.org](https://matrix.org))

Conduit ([https://conduit.rs](https://conduit.rs)) implements the Matrix specification in Rust, which makes it very lightweight and performant.

Cross-signing is mostly happens client-side, but I thought it might still be worth sharing.</comment>


Soap dispenser cannot detect brown skin [video] - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/nke_ise/status/897756900753891328 <comment><USER2> Well there's some sloppy engineering for you.</comment>


Wozniak: Apple May Decline, But Not Because It Lost Steve Jobs - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2012/10/02/woz-apple-without-jobs/

<comment><AUTHOR> My main concern with Apple is not that it will lose the ability to release revolutionary products, but that it may lose the confidence to eliminate all superfluous features and make them "just work". There were tablets before the iPad, and smart(ish) phones before the iPhone, but the Apple products were the first that were not only useful, but a pleasure to use. Jobs was well known for his stubbornness and knack for saying "no". I'm concerned that without his almost dictator-like control over product direction, Apple may begin to release compromised products that don't deliver on their values of creating a simplified and effortless user experience.</comment>


HN comments bookmarklet: sort comments, marks new comments on reload... - <AUTHOR> http://defcraft.blogspot.com/2009/09/hacker-news-bookmarklet.html

<comment><USER2> Looks cool, but you should make it a greasemonkey script, so I don't have to press it on every page.

Also, give the bookmarklet link on the page a better name than hn.js - to make a bookmarklet, the easiest is to drag that link to your toolbar, but that gives it a title of hn.js.

<comment><USER3> I like that its a bookmarklet and not a greasemonkey script: that means I can use it as well in Safari.

Yes, there is CreamMonkey. However, CreamMonkey is an inputmanager. Which means: A. it doesn't work in 64bit Safari and B. gets loaded into every (32bit) app on the system. That's something that I don't want to deal with.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Did this over the weekend. Hope it doesn't break things too badly!

</comment><comment><USER4> Looks cool...the font is a bit hard to read though. Perhaps you could add a bit of code in that checks the header link styles and uses those same background and link colors for the little popup.</comment>


Java lock-free concurrent dictionary in 13 lines - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/29826787/is-this-dictionary-function-thread-safe-concurrenthashmapatomicinteger

<comment><AUTHOR> Trying to get this simple lock-free dictionary to appear in Show HN.</comment>


How Aaron Barr revealed himself to Anonymous - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/virtually-face-to-face-when-aaron-barr-met-anonymous.ars <comment><USER3> I am sympathetic to the side of 'Anonymous' because the only way to stop them is to destroy the freedom of the internet.

To me the statement 'Information wants to be free' isn't the statement it appears to be. It is a statement of policy and intent, not of literal fact.

It is not a true statement because I actually believe that every piece of data in the world literally should be available in the public domain, it is a true statement because the only way to achieve the alternative is to lock down and destroy a world of freedom and information that I have come to love with an abiding passion.

Successfully solving the problem of securing private government data from anonymous release over the internet requires that the internet as it exists now be destroyed.

Stopping me from freely copying music that exists on my computer requires that full control of my computer be unavailable to me.

Successfully solving the problem of ensuring centralised and secure online identification of individuals to stop online libel destroys the freedom of anonymous political dissent and organization.

I am deeply sympathetic to the political ideals of 'Anonymous' not because they are always right but because the nobody else in any position of authority or power appears to even recognise the problem.

Effectively, I am sympathetic to 'Anonymous' because there is no way for me not to be without also being against the freedoms that make them possible.

</comment><comment><USER4> "The next day, February 6, the attacks turned serious, and Barr realized the extent of what Anonymous had done to him and to his company, which was currently in negotiations to sell itself to a pair of interested buyers."

Oops.

<comment><USER5> My guess is (and I haven't read the emails, or any non-public information), Barr was hoping for a massive amount of (positive) publicity, followed by the inevitable rich rewards of a much higher buying price. What better way to get this publicity than to take on the current Public CyberEnemy #1, aka Anonymous?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Makes you wonder what kind of security company has such a sophomoric SQL exploit on their website + someone in a power position who claims to be able to locate and identify the actual owners of a social network profile solely by guess.

<comment><USER7> The only thing that irks me is: If his methods were so off, then how did he have the Facebook profile of 'CommanderX' to be able to have the conversation in the logs? Did he determine that through his methods, or was that a proxy profile that CommanderX uses that is not hidden (i.e. freely given)? Just something that doesn't seem to fit with the idea that his methods were not able to identify anyone associated w/ Anonymous.

<comment><USER8> His methods were flawed in that he thought he had pinned CommanderX as a leader of Anonymous, not that he couldn't figure out who these people were. He was trying to make Anonymous this centralized group when it isn't.

For a parallel example, look at Al Qaeda. People keep trying to make all of these Al Qaeda in X groups as one giant organization when in fact the only thing they have in common is the name and idea. 50 years ago there'd almost always have to be a personal connection for a group's idea to spread to another group. Now with the internet and other means of cheap and easy communication, it's easy for these ideas to spread anonymously. Anyone who identifies with these groups can take the ideas and run with them without the original group even knowing.

Law enforcement and governments are going to have a hard time figuring out how to deal with this, as their old tactics of decapitating the group's head doesn't work when there is no head.

<comment><USER9> Bin Laden doesn't have anything to do with leading AQ?

At any rate, none of these new decentralized systems are actually leaderless. The leaders are just hidden. Wikipedia is a good example.

<comment><USER10> I think it depends on what you mean by "leading". As I understand it, Bin Laden is a kind of "thought leader" to the AQ movement - sort of how you could say Mick Jagger leads the rock n roll movement (terrible example!). No doubt BL has a lot of influence over AQ and used to be very active, but I very much doubt that he's still involved in deciding who gets hit and how. I suspect he could be removed with no noticeable impact on the movement.

CommanderX may or may not be in a similar position.

<comment><USER11> I would say Bin Laden is more in the position of giving out "grant money", so to speak, if I understand it correctly. He is more of a financial backer than a "thought leader", and I am certain he is not alone in that position.

<comment><USER7> IIRC, the Afghans see/saw him as a hero from the war with the Russians. Apparently there are stories of him bravely manning the front lines, etc. Whether those things are true or not, being a folk hero brings something to the table when one of the major factors to success is recruitment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> [23:56:51] <n0pants> Moral of the Story: Don't drum up business by banging on a hornet's nest.

..especially if you're not above them in the food chain.

</comment><comment><USER13> "When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty."

\- Thomas Jefferson

<comment><USER14> "There can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob" - Ayn Rand

<comment><USER15> "the opposite of anything ayn rand says" -me

<comment><USER14> Which specific thing should be permitted to only mobs that is not permitted of individuals?

Or is that a vacuous snark?

<comment><USER16> Taxing, ownership of life fundamentals (land, air, water), rearing/teaching of young, use of electromagnetic spectrum, governing.

But, I'm a socialist. Would also use the terms family, tribe, society, etc. instead of the purposefully biased "mob".

<comment><USER14> To be honest, I'm a bit surprised at the number of people who had a difficult time identifying who I mean. I'm actually a little-l libertarian and no great lover of government, so I understand the knee-jerk inclination, but why would I be _stretching_ for the definition of a mob when there is another thing that can be called a "mob" in the story with no stretch at all?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Anonymous could provide a lot of red meat for Wikileaks if they tried, I think. Or would that not be a leak anymore but a theft? Anonbreaks - <USER2> in overdrive.

<comment><USER18> There's a lot of misunderstanding of what Anonymous is.

adrianwaj is Anonymous if you so chose. You could release a Word Document with "Aaron Barr" in the author field declaring a war on Egg McMuffins and sign it Anonymous. You probably would get no traction and be ignored...

Or a week later you might read about a bunch of 16 year olds throwing Egg McMuffins to the Elephant at the Bronx Zoo wearing woody wood pecker masks while singing Christina Aguilera's version of the national anthem.

There is no "Anonymous" in the sense of a coherent group. There are only specific acts that received enough interest to garner outside attention.

When you say "If they tried" you are missing the point. You could try.

<comment><USER17> Sort of like Jihad? Except here only for otherwise clearly unsavory responses to perceived threats against freedom vs otherwise clearly unsavory responses to perceived threats against Islam?

The argument lies whether the acts are actually unsavory, otherwise unsavory, if the perception of being a threat is correct and whether that threat is valid enough to justify a response. So when if ever does Jihadism/Anonymous go to far?

So Anonymous is really just a mask that can be put on. There is nothing that can keep either group in check except for how aligned each one is with the core values that it seeks to defend, and how that tension resolves. Why doesn't Anonymous rail against Jihad? Where people that might otherwise be labelled racist, however accurately or not, could then proceed with their actions without having that inhibition.

<comment><USER19> Anonymous is not an organization. It is just a bunch of people without a leader who hear someone suggest something, hear someone else give instructions, and then do it because they think it sounds smart. It's just like any other bunch of people doing that for any other thing, it doesn't have to be a DDOS or harassment. It could be religion. Some guys hear Muhammad or Buddha speak, think they're pretty smart, and decide to start doing what they say for a while; the group is not the taste-testers, but the devoted followers. Anonymous is the undefined mass; people with leaders in IRC rooms are the individual organizations plucked from an undefined, unorganized mass.

Treating Anonymous as a coherent group with a coherent leader is the same thing as saying "Humanity today DDOSes MasterCard", "I'm publishing a list of humanity's leaders", etc. It's a completely meaningless misnomer; there is no cohesion to humanity whereby one could direct any significant portion of the entirety of humanity, just as there is no cohesion to Anonymous -- it's just a group of people without definition or mission statement, and it is too broad to mean anything.

Heretofore most participants in "Anonymous" raids, etc., have been users of 4chan or similar message boards, but again, that's a very expansive and large group, there is no significant percentage of its users involved in any one attack or following any one leader or chain of command. It, like our previous example of the entirety of humanity, is too broad of a definition to have meaning.

An organization is not an organization until you have leaders and subordinates with definable positions. Before that, it is just a bunch of guys talking about ideas, some liking some, others liking others, and coming and going as they please, some involved in one event under the one marshal and then going to one held by another. That is not an organization, but a bunch of drifting, undecided people. And that's what Anonymous is, too.

You do not have a terrorist or criminal organization just because someone can drop in to a common forum and get a bunch of script kiddies to act as his personal botnet for a single event. The participants are not initiated into his group and they have no obligation, affiliation, responsibility, or position in it, they are just guys who heard an idea, thought it was cool, tried for a while, and moved on.

<comment><USER17> Not unlike setting up a news.arc forum called Anonymous and letting people upvote ideas to do certain things and anyone can join, and anyone can upvote. A forum like this doesn't exist per se, but that's the archetype. There'd be no (or optional) usernames either.

Things that involve scientology, wikileaks, involve lulz (uploading porn into YouTube), censorship or counteracting actions against the board get the most upvotes and galvanize the most people into action. There is no leader, but on certain items, there is someone that posts, and there are a few key contributors to the outcome of the item.

On that note, does an anonymous (not Anonymous) news.arc exist? Say an anonymous HN? (IE in effect randomizing usernames for each posting ...maybe public randomizing, but privately tied to the one user, that way users can have some degree of vested-ego, ie regarding karma, but publically be without inhibition-- maybe downvoting on the front page too, and more than -10 downvotes per comment)?

Is the cloak and principle that is called Anonymous an outcome of 4Chan?

<comment><USER20> A lot of what makes 4chan work is the _lack_ of karma. There's no way to keep score on who said something popular or unpopular in the past, so each post or comment is necessarily evaluated on its own terms. I don't see a way to add karma to that without destroying that flatness.

<comment><USER17> "each post or comment is necessarily evaluated on its own terms" there is some extra overhead in doing that, and makes the user experience discontiguous for posters and readers.

Maybe it'd work whereby instead of just randomizing usernames, you'd just give the karma score of that user, (or rather their average comment score, or average comment score per day.)

I am definitely interested in going to a more anonymous forum, but which still has in-built controls against trolling. Given the age of this forum and my time on it, I want to start fresh with a new username (or username system) for some reason, but feel this is not the place to do it, and neither is 4Chan.

So the karma score on a comment would look like:

+/-xx | +/-xx.x | xx.x

comment score / avg comment score per day at time of posting / hours ago since comment posted capped at 24: items shut down after 24 hours.

You'd see if a person has excelled themselves in any one of their comments -- or it may be a troll comment from a smart user, which can also be funny or interesting. So when a comment is first posted, you look at the second number to see it's worth reading, after a while you can look at the first (or the second, or, one's own evaluation of the differences between the first two, or the three.)

There'd be no username tied with a comment, but you could see an extensive comment history privately, and you'd get a self-replying randomized daily email address that you give to someone if they want to see your metrics. Or instead, each comment has a user link to show the profile page without (or without, not sure) comments, and has a customizable field.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I know some commenters support Anonymous because they would rather have that kind of chaos than government clamping down even further on the internet, and I agree.

But I think it's a false choice. Certainly we can acknowledge the mob that's Anonymous is a phenomenon that is not in our best interests. Surely we can acknowledge that having to choose between censorship and crime is a false choice, right? I don't have to choose between supporting the government in buying a new fire truck and letting my house burn down, do I?

<comment><USER3> Im very sorry, I have no idea what you are trying to say.

<comment><USER22> He's opposing a viewpoint that assumes that you can only have extremes which strengthens the belief that there are only two choices (two-valued orientation). Perhaps take a read of <http://www.edge.org/q2011/q11_1.html> ("The Edge of the Circle")? Do we really need to have complete anarchy or for the government to have complete authority? Seems like a bit of a slippery- slope fallacy to me.

<comment><USER23> aka a "false dichotomy"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The interesting bit is that these "security" companies actually work with various government agencies and get tons of taxpayer money. Most politicians are clueless about what computer security means and have even less of a clue about cyber terrorism so companies like HBGary continue to proliferate even though they offer absolutely nothing for public well being.</comment>