Context should go away for Go 2 - <AUTHOR> https://faiface.github.io/post/context-should-go-away-go2/ <comment><USER2> I agree with the author wholeheartedly. I see the solution that contexts solve, but it seems like a hacky bolt on that made an otherwise beautiful language cumbersome.

A solution? Well, I'd had a few passing thoughts but never really vetted them much or thought of implementation, just throwing things at the wall. I'll share anyways.

A) A supervisor type system. the 'go' command would return some id, eg

      x := go runthis()

where x is the id. This could then be used to identify, kill, etc things at a supervisor level.

B) Maybe more esoteric, but treating go routines as implicit channels. There's a few ways this could go, but it would be similar to the above, except the return would be an channel. This could allow passing signals to the goroutine, and also, retrieving values from the goroutine. Eg

      x := go run()
      y := <-x  // y is the return value of x
      or
      x := go run()
      x <- 1 // terminates the x goroutine

<comment><USER3> I don't think A would work because the Go team has been opposed to goroutine id's, the main detractor being it would be used to create thread local storage.

I like B, but a major use case for Go is http servers, and I can see that being awkward when most frameworks don't expose the creation of the gorountine.

<comment><USER4> > I don't think A would work because the Go team has been opposed to goroutine > id's, the main detractor being it would be used to create thread local > storage.

I find this a weird stance. Idiomatic Go already has pervasive mutable globals, and life before main. Aside from cancelation the other thing that `context.Context` poorly abstracts is goroutine local storage. Having go routine ids and the new sync.Map seem like a backwards compatible way to add these features to go now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I thought Context was also used to partially solve the "middleware" problem in http servers. Ex. I have an authorization middleware that takes the http request parameters and returns an authorization object that is available to request handlers.

Way back when, Martini solved this problem using reflection (which was met with vitriol). Other packages solved this with their own handrolled context object (which was always a map[string]interface{}). I personally always liked how Martini handled it (you got to "keep" your types), but understandably it included way too much magic.

<comment><USER5> The response to Martini always confused me. The language and community (at first, anyway) was all about terse identifiers, type inference, interface inference, etc. But then, e.g. with the continual repetition of `if err != nil {}`, or the "just use stdlib" approach to HTTP, it injects a lot of ceremonial verbosity back into the ecosystem.

It's not the verbosity that bothers me. It's the arbitrary "verbosity is bad/verbosity is good" choices that have emerged over time.

<comment><USER6> Go is consistently anti-magic, but not particularly terse (although the last time I wrote a Go program next to an equivalent C++ program, it was about 20% shorter). Instead its syntax strives for whatever the hell Rob Pike means by "lightness".

Roughly, languages like Java add length by long identifiers and numerous modifiers to convey that something belongs to particular semantic category that behaves in a particular way.

Go adds length by having fewers such categories and forcing you to explicitly code up the behaviour. Short identifiers (and proper use of scoping!) are orthognal to this, except insofar as they reduce the pain.

<comment><USER5> I guess I'm thinking mostly about the talk Rob Pike gave called "public static void" [1], where he probably describes pretty well what "lightness" means to him, or at least what it meant to him 7 years ago. It seems largely about verbosity.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kj5ApnhPAE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kj5ApnhPAE)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The post is right about the problems with the context object, but is flat wrong when it claims that the only problem it solves is cancelation.

Cancelation is just one aspect of a generic concern: that a tree of function calls (and more importantly, RPCs) is a causal chain of events that external systems (including humans) will want to monitor and control. Trace IDs, auth tokens and other things need to be propagated somehow, but the code that they propagate through shouldn't care about them.

So its nice to have context.Context in the standard library so that we don't have a proliferation of per-library hand-rolled solutions which then have to be virally propagated.

</comment><comment><USER7> I find it interesting that one of the reasons GO refuses to provide a way of identifying a routine's unique context is to prevent abusing that as a way of having a session key attached to it... and then the standard libraries go and make a ctx variable to do EXACTLY that.

I think a solution would probably relate to looking at client connections.

<comment><USER8> well, the ctx can be passed between goroutines and still give the ability to cancel the logical operation, no matter in which goroutine it happens to live

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I really appreciate the argument in this post. That being said, I wish the author provided a suggestion of what the cancellation mechanic would be

</comment><comment><USER10> I like the idea of a standard signaling + param passing struct{}. I don't like the idea of context.Context slowly taking over the whole golang stdlib.

Then again, I'm positive I'm not as smart as numerous google (and golang) engineers that have already thrown around ideas so maybe this isn't as big a deal as it seems.

Not sure I have a solution, but I'd love to see someone come up with one before context "infects" every function related to I/O.

</comment><comment><USER11> > Go is a general purpose programming language, just like C, C++, Java or > Python. For example, I've been using Go for about 2 years and I've never > written a single server in it.

This made me twitch because ultimately no argument should start with, "I use it this way and not that way, so change what you're doing." This was followed by:

> For this reason, when designing the Go language and it's standard library, > we need to approach it from a general purpose language perspective.

My understanding of what's being said here is simply: "I code in Go in this particular way, so it should be made to suit those requirements." Just because you don't write servers in Go it doesn't mean others don't. I personally enjoy the production ready HTTPS server and client on a daily basis. I'm constantly writing APIs in Go.

All I'm saying here is don't start by saying something doesn't suit your needs so it needs to change.

The rest of the article was great and gave me more insights into how Go works, so I thank you for that. And it's possible there is a better solution for context that should be considered for v2.

Thanks for the good read.

<comment><USER6> I think it is fair enough for the author to say that since Go is a general purpose language, its APIs should not end up infected by a viral pattern needed for servers.

So far, I think Go does a good job of using context.Context where it is needed and not letting it leak into things like io.Reader. But it is a tricky balance to strike, because the the author is right that the context pattern is viral by nature.

<comment><USER11> To a degree I can understand his, and your, view point here. However my understanding, which could be wrong, is that Go was designed to solve problems specific to Google. In my opinion that doesn't make it a general purpose language, that makes it a purpose driven language.

It's general in nature in that you can ignore certain features and use it as a general language, but ultimately it has a built in HTTPS web server for a reason, right? And a programmer and an SRE, Context is an excellent idea for tracing requests through the whole stack -- again, there was a purpose to this design.

<comment><USER6> Well I can't speak for Google about why it funds Go. My own observations are that Rob probably made Go just to be a language that he likes and that it is also a good fit for the way things are done at Google.

I'm in the odd position that when I go to work as an SRE at Google, I hardly use Go, but at home I like to use it for hobby projects which are rarely servers. When I do use Go at work, it is for tools that I run on my workstation.

So (a) even at Google there is more to life than servers, and (b) Go benefits from being attractive to people who are not at Google and/or not writing servers.

<comment><USER11> They fund it because they wanted a language to suit specific goals and be purpose built to address certain problems. Why does anyone make anything? To solve a specific set of problems -- positive side effects are a bonus, such as the solution being general purpose enough that it can be used for other tasks/problems too.

Ansible has one goal in mind: configuration management. It can also talk to my toaster and send a Tweet when I pop some bread in there. I guess Ansible is a "general purpose" configuration management tool, except it's not :-)

Terraform can be used to run a PowerShell script on a Windows box it never provisioned. I guess it's a scripting framework now.

I think Go can be used as a general purpose language, but that's not how I see its design ethos. It caters to that crowd, but does have an underlaying goal I believe.

As long as people are happy and things are working for them then all is well, I guess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> previous discussion here :

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14955456](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14955456)

doesn't HN detect dupes?

<comment><USER13> It does, but they allow something to be reposted since it's hard to get to the front. Sometimes it was bad timing, but it's still good.</comment></comment>


Audi CEO Stadler Taken Into Custody in Diesel-Cheating Probe - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-18/audi-ceo-stadler-taken-into-custody-in-diesel-probe <comment><USER2> The European auto-manufacterer test cheating is really, really pernicuous. It is mistake to view this as simple test cheating. These tests are a greater part of the "green/carbon reduction" policies that is europe's primary industrial policy of the last decade.

Domestic auto manufacturers have been primary authors of these policies. The bootlegger and baptist dynamic has been very strong here. The "baptist" objective has been carbon/pollution reduction. The "bootleggers" wanted to sell more European cars by (A) giving them an advantage over imports and (B) shortening the lifespan of older cars. They have had an extremely favourable regulatory environment, EU & locally. Pollution-centric tax bands favouring local manufacturers (based on these tests) are just a piece of that. To cheat the tests on top of all this is beyond the pale.

All that said, I think we have no way of holding corporations accountable. Prosecuting individuals is important (and effective), but it also semi- absolves the company. It makes it seem like individual bad actors acted against the law, and against the company. There aren't really ways of holding the company accountable, and limited liability becomes no liability in this sense.

I don't even know what should be done. "Justice" (IMO) would be fairly harsh. Volkswagon Group have annual Revenue & Gross Profit of 230bn & 40bn respectively. Trillions and hundreds of millions over the life of this scam. Some nontrivial portion of these sales were unearned in the sense that they would not have happened without fraud. €1bn-€2bn isn't even meaningful.

I think that shareholders should get a haircut, with a meanigful portion of the company's current value being turned over as a fine. Of course, this would only encourage a restructuring from equity to debt. IDK....

An individual business owner acting under full liability would have (in addition to jail time) almost certainly lost her entire business over something like this. To Volkswagen Group, it's a bump in the road. This is not fair.

<comment><USER3> > _Prosecuting individuals is important (and effective), but it also semi- > absolves the company. It makes it seem like individual bad actors acted > against the law, and against the company._

I'm struggling to see how prosecutors can win when the public has this attitude. Bring criminal charges against an executive? "You're semi-absolving the company." Bring record fines against the company? "Nobody jails the executives." Do both? People forget whichever happened first and recycle the above.

> _I think that shareholders should get a haircut_

This is what it means to fine a company. Takata Corporation had to file for bankruptcy as a result of its defective airbag inflators [1]. Shareholders lost and creditors lost (as did employees and those down the supply chain).

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

<comment><USER2> I don't think it's a bad thing. I think it's an important thing, and I think it will be effective for preventing bad behaviour. If it seems otherwise, I'm sorry for being unclear.

But.. I am fuming at what a case like this exposes. We have no real way of holding corporations accountable as corporations. If an individual "sole trader" (or even just a small company) did this, they would almost certainly pay with the loss of their entire business. In this case, shareholders are barely affected. I'm angry (hence the ranting) about this, not at the prosecutor. I'm also don't have a solution.

<comment><USER3> > _they would almost certainly pay with the loss of their entire business_

As the Takata example shows (and Enron and Arthur Andersen), a big enough fine will wipe out a business.

<comment><USER4> At the risk of sounding too pedantic: wasn't it the reputational damage that did Enron and Arther Andersen in, eventually?

I'm hairsplitting this because in certain industries, reputational risk is a much stronger deterrent that legal consequences (severe as they may be).

<comment><USER5> Enron's and Arther Anderson's accounting fraud did them in. Reputation, while certainly diminished, did not play a role in their bankruptcy.

Absolutely worth a watch if you have a chance: [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1016268/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1016268/)

<comment><USER4> Fraud itself, by definition, is a gain, so that cannot be what did them in.

It's the consequences of getting caught that do you in. The consequences can be fines, the consequences may be legal liabilities, etc. But in some industries, the consequence of losing your reputation effectively means losing your business -- eventually resulting in bankruptcy.

Quoting the Wikipedia page on Arthur Andersen [1]:

> _Since the ruling vacated Andersen 's felony conviction, it theoretically > left Andersen free to resume operations. The damage to the Andersen name was > so severe, however, that it has not returned as a viable business even on a > limited scale._

Perhaps a better example would be Mossack Fonseca [2], the main firm behind the Panama Papers, who shut themselves down recently because what client wants to be associated with _that_ hot mess?

Your clients running away will kill you a lot faster than any authority (short of industries where an authority can revoke your license to do business, eg: banking).

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Andersen#Demise](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Andersen#Demise)

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good. More ceos should be arrested and jailed if companies ignore the law under their watch. Their "rogue engineer" excuse was laughable.

<comment><USER7> Yet shareholders who pushed executives over the edge with inflated performance expectations get to keep all their gains, if they sold before scandal hit. There are no sanctions in the arsenal of rule of law that could ever touch them.

<comment><USER3> > _There are no sanctions in the arsenal of rule of law that could ever touch > them_

Prosecutors can and do pierce the corporate veil [1]. Otherwise, losing money on their investment seems like fitting punishment for disinterested shareholders.

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

<comment><USER8> I agree. Eventually, the market should figure out that excessive goals lead to bad actors reducing long term value. So losing money on investments is as good of a feedback mechanism as any I can think of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > _Until now, backing of the Porsche and Piech families, who control the > world's biggest carmaker, ensured him continuing in the role he's held since > 2007._

It's healthy to step back and consider how rare, in our world today and across human history, such an expression of the rule of law is. As fashionable as political cynicism may be, patience has a place before one reacts to every scandal with presuming the powerful and guilty will walk free. (It's an unfortunate way inattentiveness produces a self-fulfilling prophesy.)

<comment><USER9> >presuming the powerful and guilty will walk free

By and large, they do. The fact that this incident makes to the top of the "news" is testament. If things were different, an exec going to jail would be as commonplace as a convicted felon going to jail, and it would hardly be newsworthy.

<comment><USER3> > _The fact that this incident makes to the top of the "news" is testament_

Volkwagen is one of the world's largest companies. That's why it's headline news.

A billionaire drug company's ex-CEO was arrested last year [1]. Nobody outside the Arizona, pharmaceutical or opioid crisis circles noticed. Nobody outside those circles _needs_ to notice.

[1] [https://abcnews.go.com/US/drug-companys-billionaire-ceo- arre...](https://abcnews.go.com/US/drug-companys-billionaire-ceo-arrested- nationwide-bribery-scam/story?id=50737965)

<comment><USER9> That was in fact a bribery case - they were convicted for bribing docs to prescribe their meds where it wasn't necessary. But you're right that phrama company execs are slightly more liable to be actually convicted (Martin Shkrelli is a very good case in point).

While many in pharma still get off scot free thanks to solid lawyers, one can only hope for similar results in other industries.

<comment><USER10> A sentence of X is a sentence of X regardless of what charge you're convicted on.

Dig up a massive amount of dirt and sift through it until you find something that has the kind of sentence you're looking for and you can easily make a conviction on (regardless of whether or not it has anything to do with the crime at hand) is prosecuting crimes 101.

Martha Stewart, Bill Clinton, Al Capone, etc, etc.

Now, this is a crappy solution because it basically relies on the proliferation of criminal law and catch-all laws (both of which are bad IMO) and the fact that given any random thirteen people you can convince twelve of them that the thirteenth is a criminal if you have enough information about the 13th. Ideally charges would be related to the crime but that's not a practical strategy for prosecuting well connected defendants at present.

<comment><USER9> True… a scumbag in one area wouldn't hesitate extending their scumbaggery skills to other areas if they stand to gain something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder if the fallout of this will be VW/Audi/Porsche investing more seriously into electric cars.

Their major bet on fleetwide emissions reductions has been clean diesel, but clearly that's been all smoke and mirrors. There's been articles suggesting that _all_ the diesel OEMs are 'optimizing' their emissions testing (another poster pointed out this leads to an unrealistic ratcheting effect that furthers unrealistic expectations... regulators think their goal was achieved, so we set even tighter ones).

In the 2000's, BMW bet big on hydrogen fuel cells. That one hasn't panned out either... electric is what's left.

<comment><USER12> They have announced there will be electric editions of every model in their range, even including Seat/Skoda.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is what happens when management mandates crazy requirements. Same sort of rubbish happens in tech. Manager comes in and demands "100% code coverage of unit tests" Or every developer to write at least 100 lines of code each day. Push enough and you will get what you ask for, but lift the veil and you will find out that the participants are gaming the system.

</comment><comment><USER14> Warning: autoplaying audio.

<comment><USER15> I thought Chrome fixed this? Websites are getting around it somehow?

[https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-p...](https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay- policy-changes)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If only American CEOs saw justice beyond priced-in "fines." Good for Germany

<comment><USER17> What cases are you thinking of, in particular?

Most of what comes to my mind (e.g. Equifax) would be claims falling under civil law, for which we don't arrest people.

<comment><USER16> Fraud around MBS and CDOs coupled with institutionalized policies of selling mortgages to unqualified lenders, in the period before the recession

Quantitative hedge funds like Renaissance not paying their fair share of taxes (this effectively means they used unpaid taxes as arbitrage)

Wells Fargo executives institutionalizing fraud regarding fake accounts to pump up numbers, both an SEC violation and considered consumer fraud

And in general we as a country need more punishments when you defraud consumers other than "oops we'll just pay you back after a class action lawsuit :)". That's not at all a reasonable deterrent - and as I alluded if a firm's perceived chances of getting caught/ what they'll have to pay are low enough and the rewards are sufficiently high, they may consciously find it more profitable to break the law. The same goes for fines.

<comment><USER18> How have "quantitative hedge funds" not paid their "fair share" of taxes? Are you suggesting that they evade taxes?

<comment><USER3> I think they're referring to basket options. TL; DR It's a non-story for all but financial engineering geeks.

"Deutsche Bank and Barclays used the options structure to open accounts for their clients in their own names, creating the illusion that they owned the assets. But in fact, the hedge funds exercised complete control over the assets, executed all the trades and raked in all of the trading profits, according to the report.

The hedge funds exercised the options soon after the one-year mark and claimed that the trading profits were eligible for the 20 percent (previously 15 percent) tax rate that applies to long-term capital gains on assets held for at least a year. The report contends that those options were actually short- term trades that should have been taxed at the ordinary income rate of 39 percent, which would otherwise apply to investors in hedge funds engaged in daily trading" [1].

Market makers are taxed differently from other investors. Certain market makers tried to "rent" their low-tax status to hedge funds. All this resulted from a weird 1999 law trying to fix a loophole in some other arcane law [2].

Last I heard, the IRS charged the market makers for the investors' short-term gains [3], and did so retroactively.

[1] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/senate- repor...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/senate-report- barclays-and-deutsche-bank-helped-hedge-funds-skirt-6-billion-in- taxes/2014/07/21/d732664a-10e5-11e4-8936-26932bcfd6ed_story.html?utm_term=.9f4a75361b4b)

[2] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-07-03/the- irs-c...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-07-03/the-irs- challenges-a-hedge-fund-tax-trick)

[3] [https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/09/business/dealbook/irs- cra...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/09/business/dealbook/irs-cracks-down- on-hedge-fund-tax-strategy.html)

<comment><USER18> I had a feeling that was what they were referring to but I don't see why someone operating under current (at the time) tax law should go to jail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> In a recent thread about the Daimler diesel recall, a poster claims the issue is more systemic than just cheating at individual companies.

> _The actual programmer & designer of the software is the supplier of the > engine control units (ECUs), in most cases Bosch. The software that they > supply actually already contains these cheating routines. These routines are > delivered as a part of the software packages, and can be turned on/off with > some flags.

It is up to the auto company how to set these flags._ [0]

Is it legal for Bosch to sell ECUs that can cheat? Should it remain legal?

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17286697](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17286697)

<comment><USER10> Cheating and adjustable for compliance in a particular locale are the same thing. Being able to fine tune how the engine runs to comply with the law and to "cheat" the law requires the same functionality. Any keyboard that you use to quote Shakespeare can be employed just as effectively to type dirty words.

<comment><USER20> A routine to detect the exact circumstances of the government emissions test, including the amount of times the steering wheel was moved was needed to fine tune the engine?

Its just not credible.

<comment><USER21> Isn't what happens after that condition is detected the critical point? That's the part that I'd imagine needs to be modified/tweaked as emission standards change.

<comment><USER20> What legal basis is there for a car to behave differently during an emissions test?

Its not like it has to machine learn which jurisdiction its in to tune its emissions, they know which region its going to be sold in and can make the appropriate settings. Even if some sort of detection were needed the emissions test isn't your key as not every car undergoes it, only a sample.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If corporations are considered people in the USA, will this corporation be punished for spewing thousands or more of tons of pollution onto our streets and lying about it? Oh no, corporations can't be tried like people, they just get to use their money ("free speech") to be people, but when it comes to accountability, only one man is responsible?

</comment><comment><USER23> If the culture in the automotive industry is to change, then many more executives will have to face the consequences of supporting current common practice.

<comment><USER24> To generalize this, 'If the culture in the <insert> industry is to change, then many more executives will have to face the consequences of supporting current common practice.'

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> it's funny looking at cars from 2013 extolling the virtues and greatness of diesel engines vs gasoline ones

</comment><comment><USER26> He has not been charged so far, no criminal charges. This is just to keep him from interfering with witnesses.

<comment><USER27> Is this usual in Germany? To me it seems to be a fairly extraordinary step, almost theatrical.

<comment><USER28> I would say it's at least not uncommon. Danger of collusion / "Verdunkelungsgefahr" ist an often cited reason for that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> people have died and will continue to die because of excessive emissions and this program of evasion conducted by audi and volvo was willful and malicious.</comment>


Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names - <AUTHOR> http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ <comment><USER3> This is almost as bad as the address question.

I go by my middle name (my parents thoughtfully gave me my father's first name and even _middle initial_ , which has caused no end of confusion for many a credit bureau over the years). Unfortunately, the State of Indiana's birth certificate system assumes beyond any possibility of override that (1) everybody with children has a first name, (2) that first name has no spaces in it, and (3) the middle name is insignificant. So my kids' birth certificates have my dad's names on them as the father.

But hey, who am I, a mere parent, to say what my name is?

The real world is full of organic detail that is difficult or perhaps impossible to capture in full in a software system. A name should be just a string. If there are business requirements for sorting or name-of-address (e.g. "Dear Mr. Jones") they should be done with heuristics, with human intervention invoked in sticky situations if necessary. Sure, it's difficult, but you know, a hundred years ago that stuff was _all_ done on an individual case-by-case basis by human beings; if your business assumption is that it can't be done cheaply enough without eliminating human intervention, perhaps you should rethink your assumptions.

Otherwise, _let me assure you_ you're irritating every customer whose name doesn't meet your arbitrary rules - in exactly the same way that Google pisses off everybody who needs human support. Everybody thinks _that_ sucks. So at least you should get people's names right, using human intervention if you have to. (And addresses, too, but we just had an extended thread about that, like last month.)

<comment><USER4> On the topic of address questions, I went through a form on Fidelity that disallowed post office boxes from being supplied as an address. At the time, I lived on Newport Way, and the "po" in Newport qualified as a PO box.

So, for a while, I lived on Newp0rt Way.

<comment><USER5> In many countries in Africa, the postal service doesn't do delieveries to people's houses. Every address is a "PO BOX ...."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Falsehoods users believe about my programs/service.

1) A simple, ascii A-Za-z0-9_ identifier unique to program/service is not required to use my program/service.

1a) My program/service cares deeply about your real world name and all it's nuances and variations. It requires full and complete understanding of your name rather than just a simple authentication mechanism.

2) My program/service will correctly handle the worlds naming conventions past, present, and future to the exclusion of other features / actually shipping some day.

3) Instead of following 80/20 "rule", my program/service will names 100% perfect!

4) My program/service will cater to all languages/cultures/subcultures/niches past, present, and future rather than any sort of target audience.

<comment><USER7> What about when your program/service is something where identity matters, like for a credit bureau, a government agency or even a retailer?

Just read the complaints here about airliners screwing up people's names by assuming that everything is ASCII/LATIN1/MISC_CHARSET. That makes a difference when you get to the airport and they won't let you on the plane because your ticket and your id don't match.

It's also an easily solvable problem. Just include a 'name' field. Make sure that it's sanitized correctly and supports UTF-8 (make sure that your database is properly set up to use UTF-8 as well, or else all manner of problems can happen, least of all queries will get bogged down as the database does charset conversions for string comparisons). If you care so little about the user's name, then why bother to have separate firstname/lastname fields?

{edit} With respect to the 'other complaints,' I was referring to the comments on this story: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1438355> (The story which is what Patrick's post was in response to).

<comment><USER8> _Just read the complaints here about airliners screwing up people's names by assuming that everything is ASCII/LATIN1/MISC_CHARSET._

Having worked in the airline industry, I can tell you, this is not a case of airlines making a poor assumption. Airline systems are generally incapable of dealing with ASCII, let alone Unicode text. They typically use EBCDIC. That's why you never see lower case characters in your name on a boarding pass.

 _That makes a difference when you get to the airport and they won't let you on the plane because your ticket and your id don't match._

Does this actually happen? Because given the fact that airlines have been incapable of printing names that don't can't be described by EBCDIC since, well, forever, I'd assume that they're willing to ignore cases where the name on your ID contains characters that their computer system literally cannot represent.

<comment><USER7> > _Does this actually happen? Because given the fact that airlines have been > incapable of printing names that don't can't be described by EBCDIC since, > well, forever, I'd assume that they're willing to ignore cases where the > name on your ID contains characters that their computer system literally > cannot represent._

Do the screeners know to this? I'm willing to bet that a screener would deny you based on a name mis-match. What do the screeners know of EBCDIC?

<comment><USER8> There are two classes of people who can deny you access to aircraft: (1) airline employees (gate agents, check in agents) and (2) TSA inspectors. No one at an airport will know anything about EBCDIC, but every single airline employee will know about the fact that they're crappy mainframe system isn't smart enough to handle uppercase characters, let alone spaces, hyphens, umlauts, accents, etc.

As for TSA staff, it is important to realize that this EBCDIC issue is not a problem that only affects one airline: it affects almost every single airline, including all flag carriers that I know of. The airlines have a pretty tight working relationship with TSA; note that they send electronic messages to the TSA describing their customers when people book tickets and just before departure so as to give the TSA the opportunity to prevent them from flying. Given that tight relationship, I'm pretty sure that the TSA knows a great deal about the limitations of EBCDIC and has informed their staff about the limits of what a boarding pass name field can possibly represent.

Keep in mind that screeners will let you fly even if you have no ID on you.

<comment><USER9> Well said.

Anecdotally, I've never had issues with tickets that had my partial name on them in the past either ("Matt" vs. "Matthew") although this may have changed now that TSA requires full names and birthdays (I always use my full name now).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Oh Patrick, as usual you got me to thinking. Then it hit me: the "Name" issue isn't that much different from the "SKU" issue. (SKU is short for Stock Keeping Unit, aka Part Number or Product Number). I have had to deal with this everywhere that has SKUs. No one does it well, but by slowing down and thinking about it, there's almost always a decent solution.

There are 2 ways to assign SKUs, sequentially (start with "1" and increment 1 for every new SKU) or not sequentially. I have never seen anyone do it sequentially. (Although some excellent systems keep 2 SKUs, one of which _is_ sequential and is used as the primary key and for all indexing. This is the best way I've ever seen to handle SKUs that change, but that's another story.)

Almost everyone wants a smart or semi-smart SKU. So that by simply looking at the SKU, anyone can tell what it is without reading the description. You know, the first digit is Commodity Code, 1 for shoes, 2 for pants, etc. Then another digit for color, another for size, etc. This works well until you have ten colors; then you need 2 digits or alphas.

But wait, there's more. Let's put hyphens (or some other delimitter) between the product descriptors and the vendor data, manufacturer data, and customer data.

So now you've covered any possible product with your super slick smart SKU naming system.

Until something comes along that isn't covered. (Now we have military items with 14 other considerations.) So we come up we a second totally different scheme. Then a third. Then a 4th, etc. So now you can tell anything about an item _if you know which scheme_ it falls under.

But wait, there's more. You should be able to enter any SKU into a form field _regardless of Smart SKU scheme_. (If the first digit is "9", then use Smart Scheme 3. If there's a hyphen in position 3, then use Smart Scheme 8, etc.) Your form logic should be able to intelligently guide the user based on the rules of the template or scheme.

I have built apps where users can design and build their own Smart SKU templates, which are then used to enforce compliance and guide operators. These have generally worked pretty well.

Is there some way to do the same thing for human names? I dunno, but now you got me to thinking about it. A combination of standard templates and custom templates oughta cover most possibilities. Some basic logic with optional pop- up forms which uses the templates as parameters should work. Something to think about...

<comment><USER11> Actually, this sounds like more of a problem. It's a name... Just give the user a free text field.

<comment><USER12> Which does you no good if you need the specific components of that person's name. That is the issue with using a free text field for addresses.

<comment><USER11> The whole point of the article is that there is no such thing as the specific components of the person's name... that is the assumption that is wrong. A person's name is whatever they or their parents chose. You cannot reliably derive meaning from any part of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A question mark can be part of your name -

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8206280.stm>

Certain characters like the defunct yogh have had issues in Unicode -

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogh>

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4595228.stm>

Some names can be changed if they're cruel or too unconventional -

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7522952.stm>

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6939112.stm>

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/6937327.stm>

<comment><USER14> For those confused what an article about zombies (first link) has to do with questions marks in one's name, here's the relevant quote:

"Professor Robert Smith? (the question mark is part of his surname and not a typographical mistake)"

<comment><USER14> And, of course, his name looks funny when someone is asking a question:

"Is that you Professor Robert Smith??"

And I wonder if he introduces himself as "Robert Smith Question Mark" ;-)

<comment><USER15> I wonder how you pronounce ?. Is it a click like Zulu or do you just have a rising intonation?

<comment><USER16> Rising intonation gets my vote. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTbrIo1p-So> (Tim? the Enchanter)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I have an uncle that has one name on his birth certificate, one on his passport and uses a third - all different spellings of his first name.

Particularly confusing to people when his passport has the name spelled one way and signed another.

Nobody has been able to get a straight story from him about _why_.

<comment><USER18> Then there's William Shakespeare, who spelled his name about 8 (IIRC) different ways. I guess it was a mark of pride for a literary man to be able to write his name however he wanted to, while less educated folk would have to write their names from memory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> For a good illustration of the possible weirdness of names, see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso>

<comment><USER20> A contemporary example: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl- Theodor_zu_Guttenberg>

<comment><USER19> Even more contemporary is young Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116 (pronounced Albin): <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_law_in_Sweden>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is all very interesting (and even humorous), but I'd appreciate something more constructive. How do we implement a name field on a website in spite of all this weirdness?

<comment><USER22> Huh, isn't it obvious? Accept anything as a name.

<comment><USER23> And then when you get a business requirement to sort by last name, tell them "there is no such thing as last names."

Then when they finish laughing, hack up some system to split the single name field that doesn't work very well.

(It gets even worse when you have unusual sorting rules that really only apply to Western names, like treating Mc and Mac the same.)

<comment><USER24> True story: I once told a customer that their requirement to "sort by last name" was likely impossible to satisfy without reworking the system, given what I knew about their user base. It turned out that I was right: the majority of their staff was Japanese, who expect Japanese lexicographic sort. However, they also had visiting professors from overseas, who largely could not understand Japanese lexicographic sort. (There are actually two common lexicographic sorts in Japanese, based on two ways to order the sounds of Japanese. We use the "table of fifty sounds" method, under which Tanaka comes after Aki but before Sato.)

My customers said "Fine, alright, _two_ sort features. One for Japanese, one for foreigners."

They were less than happy when I told them that foreigners haven't agreed on lexicographic sort, either. (To use one example I'm familiar with, in Spanish, "ch" is one letter, so Chisako comes after Consuela.)

Oh, there is a separate right way to order prefectures. (Which I learned about in an email from a coworker saying "Patrick, come on, use some _common sense_ next time. Have you ever seen prefectures listed lexicographically before?!")

<comment><USER25> In Spanish, at least, the ch is no longer considered as a separate letter for sorting. It is still a separate letter in lists.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch_(digraph)#Collation>

<comment><USER26> Yeah, that was an interesting adaptation from the Spanish language academy to the use of computers. At the time there was some public debate similar to the "pluto is no longer a planet".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> And the hated "Its ok to hash names into a 32-bit table, and then tell the user "Stieg Eugene Janakowski is already in use"

</comment><comment><USER28> Can anyone explain some of the more esoteric points on this list? Like "People's names are all mapped in Unicode code points", for instance.

<comment><USER29> I think he meant the musician formerly known as Prince for this one.

<comment><USER30> Well, once again known as Prince, anyways.

<comment><USER31> The artist formerly known as the artist formerly known as Prince.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Some countries, like mine (Uruguay), have a unique identifier for people - <USER2> Uruguay it's called "Cédula de Identidad" which would translate to Identity Card.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_document>

It even has a nice check digit.

But even that breaks in some cases :) so Patio's point applies.

Still, it makes building local-only apps easier.

<comment><USER33> Some case #46c: The person is a citizen of a country with a national identity card, yet resides in another country wherein he or she has lost that identity card, cannot return to the country of citizenship to replace said identity card, and country of citizenship will not replace the identity card outside of that country.

:)

(Hello, fellow Uruguayan)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> For the admiration of your peers, identify the subset of this set of assumptions embodied in the "Leave a Reply" form at the bottom of the article.

<comment><USER24> Yeah, I concede, Wordpress has buggy name validation logic for the SQL injection boxes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Miss Manners says "People's names are spelled and pronounced exactly as they say they are"

<comment><USER35> Yeah, but if it can't be expressed as unicode you are not going to be able to use it on my system.

And I am not even going to say sorry.

<comment><USER7> Does this mean that you view Unicode as perfect and encompassing of all the characters currently in use in the world?

<comment><USER36> Makes no difference. You have to work with what you have. It's not like the programmer can do anything about it.

<comment><USER7> There's a difference between working with what you have, and blaming people for using the 'wrong' characters in their name. From the post I was replying to:

      > And I am not even going to say sorry.

With comments like this, one comes off as a douche, which isn't exactly going to engender trust with potential customers/clients. Whether it's 'your' fault or not, how you deal with your potential customers/clients is what really matters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> ++ People's last name is their "family name".

++ People's first name is their "family name".

++ People have first names and last names.

<comment><USER12> >>People's first name is their "family name".

I may be mistaken but I believe this is true in Vietnam (and probably other countries as well).

<comment><USER37> The point he is making is that people make one assumption or the other, deepending on the culture in which they live, when actually it varies.

In the western world, we assume that someone's family name is their last name. In countries such as Korea, people assume that someone's family name is their first name.

Either assumption can be wrong if you're dealing with international customers. Some people might not even _have_ a family name.

<comment><USER12> Just so it's clear, I'm not refuting what he said but rather supporting it with a tidbit from my memory, as you have done as well. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> No, these are falsehoods people who define the requirements believe about names. That's very often not the same as the programmer, especially at large organizations.

<comment><USER39> If the programmers actually adding the constraint to their systems didn't also believe the falsehoods, they would have written better error messages than, in essence, "You typed your name wrong!".

<comment><USER40> User-facing error messages are frequently dictated by the requirements as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I think the real lesson here is to to identify those assumptions that may be incorrect _for the culture your app is targeted towards_ and make reasonable accommodations for those cases.

The most common ones are probably the easiest to deal with...long names, only one name, punctuation in names. Just relax your validation requirements. We just took care of 99% of names not common to western culture. But I don't think if you are designing an application for, say, the Olathe, KS youth rec sports registration website that you need to be too concerned with folks who have names that have characters not mapped in Unicode. If a person's name is so unusual that it doesn't fit even culturally relaxed input requirements, then they've probably already dealt with that problem before.

<comment><USER24> I heartily agree that "think what you're assuming" is a good take away here, but can't support "think what culture your app is targeting", because I've seen that virtually _invariably_ blow up straight in the teams' faces.

Many Japanese people think racial/cultural homogeneity is practically a national trademark, and this issue has bitten nearly every Big Freaking Enterprise system I've ever seen in Japan. Do you think your global-facing web app or small American town is going to be less culturally diverse than Japan is? That strikes me as _highly improbable_.

<comment><USER42> Japanese people living in the US are no doubt perfectly comfortable writing their name out in Latin characters for the benefit of the barbarians they live with.

<comment><USER24> Many Japanese professionals who have call to be in the United States -- but not all of them! -- will write their name something like YAMASHITA Taro, which is your clue that you should be calling him Mr. Yamashita rather than Mr. Taro. Or Dr. Yamashita, in the case of my client who was not actually named that.

Some of them, including at least one prominent politician and several people I represented in a professional capacity, are adamant that reversing the order is incorrect.

(Unsurprisingly, many Americans are unaware of this convention. Sadly, many of them persist in being unaware of it even when it is written on the meeting briefing and explained verbally right before the meeting starts. _sigh_ Twelve corrections in 3 days -- my client was _not_ happy for that trip.)

Does your hotel, car rental service, university, etc, handle this case correctly? We blazed a path of frustration through Chicago and Michigan last time.

Further fun: a Taro Yamashita born and raised in the United States (or any other Taro, for that matter), and present at the same university for the same conference, might request the exact opposite treatment! And if you spell his name as YAMASHITA Taro on the meeting agenda in defiance of his preference, you're doing it wrong!

<comment><USER43> But who's really doing it wrong? If someone expects another culture to conform to _their own_ culture's preferences when a guest there, perhaps they're the ones making the error. I actually attended a conference in Japan that wrote all names, including mine, as "FAMILYNAME Givenname" on the program. I personally write and prefer "Givenname Familyname", but I don't see it as a cause for offense. As a guest in their country, I consider it their prerogative to go by their local conventions.

I mean, wouldn't it be pretty chauvinist for me to get offended at it or demand that they follow Western name ordering? It feels like it'd be in the same category as complaining that they don't serve my favorite American food at the conference, or that the cars are driving on the wrong side of the road.

<comment><USER5> > But who's really doing it wrong?

You are.

The canonical source for the correct way to spell/write someone's name is that person. You should never tell someone "No, you're writing your name wrong".

<comment><USER43> I disagree. People's preferences should get some deference, but not ultimate deference. I don't have to accommodate Prince's claim that his name is properly written as a graphical symbol, for example. It's perfectly fine to tell him to pick a name that isn't a graphical symbol.

Between countries, I think generally the right approach is to use the country's naming customs, and adapt foreign names to them, to the extent reasonably possible. In Greece, for example, it's customary to transliterate people's names into the Greek alphabet, especially if the source is going to be read by Greeks (newspapers, etc.). The person known as "George Bush" in the United States is more commonly referred to in Greece as "Τζωρτζ Μπους", for example--- despite it being a rather ugly transliteration in this case, due to a bunch of the consonants not existing in Greek.

Are you really arguing that this Dr. Yamashita (or Mr. Bush) can tell them they can't use their own alphabet in their own country, because that's not how he likes his name written?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> My first name is spelled with a $10 bill. It's pronounced "Gavin." My last name is a picture of a flower. If you represent it at less than 1000x1000 pixels or with washed out colors, you are insulting my heritage.

My middle name is a musk ox.

How far does politeness dictate that you have to go to accommodate me?

<comment><USER7> I think that the bar should _at least_ be set higher than:

      "Your name does not fit into a Western firstname/lastname
      format with only ASCII characters, please choose another
      name."

This is on par with _expecting_ everyone to speak English just because you speak English. By the very setup of the form, you are implying that your way is the 'one true way' or at least that you don't care about people that don't fit into your pre-defined set of expectations (i.e. "Don't have a firstname/lastname? I don't care about your business! Your money is no good here!").

How hard is it to just have a 'Name' field that supports UTF8? Sure it's not a 100% solution, but it's a _lot_ better than the 20% (or less) solutions that we have out there right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Most of the items on that list are pretty realistic, but there are a few you can safely ignore. For example image the response you'd get trying to sign up for a bank account (in person), if you told them you didn't have a name.

<comment><USER24> Define "safely". If you write code for a hospital that handles this case poorly, when a premature infant is found abandoned in a toilet, you might end up debugging from the ER.

<comment><USER31> John/Jane Doe

<comment><USER36> No, they call them Baby Boy, and Baby Girl - it even goes on the birth certificate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Calling a statement a "falsehood" implies there's some truth that can and should replace it. The statements he lists aren't "falsehoods" or "truths", they are approximations - operating assumptions.

If your operating assumptions are true enough for a given purpose, there's no reason to change them. If they deviate enough from to generate problems, they will need to be replaced ... with other approximations (not with "the truth").

\-- This is why apparently simple and "finished" programs alway need "maintenance" - even the most seemingly simple assumption need tweaking as the world's conditions change.

</comment><comment><USER47> The puritans had "religious slogan names" like

Nicholas If-Jesus-Christ-Had-Not-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned Barbon

( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Barbon> )

</comment><comment><USER48> I'm sorry, but if your name doesn't fit into Unicode, you need a new name. You do not have the right to your own character encoding and font (on someone else's website).

<comment><USER49> Is this supposed to be a modern version of "I'm sorry but if your name doesn't fit into 7-bit ASCII, you need a new name"?

<comment><USER50> Similar, except that there are a lot fewer people whose names can't be written in Unicode. Hell, the vast majority of names fit in the Basic Multilingual Plane; you could probably get away with using a fixed 16 bits per character.

If your name doesn't fit into Unicode, get a nickname. Bonus points if your nickname fits into 7-bit ASCII.

<comment><USER49> Right, but what's the point of Unicode then? What it's supposed to be: "Unicode provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language." What it is: The above, plus "Well, almost every character. Sorry we couldn't fit your name there, perhaps you should consider a nickname."

Say you want to order a package from somewhere. How does getting a nickname help? How do you explain it to the post office? I know it sounds like nitpicking, and it probably is, until it affects you personally. I've had my share of "name-mangling" and my name _does_ fit into Unicode (not into ASCII though).

<comment><USER50> You have a point, but what I'm most concerned with is balancing these two things:

1\. I don't want to inconvenience people with "weird" names.

2\. I don't want to burden application programmers too much.

Requiring everybody to have a simple ASCII name would be convenient for programmers, but would be a big hassle for people whose names don't meet those requirements. "Be in the Basic Multilingual Plane or get a nickname" is a policy that, I think, provides a reasonable balance. Of course, supporting all of unicode isn't really that much harder, so I think that's a better balance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Obligatory: <http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/09/you-suck.html>

</comment><comment><USER52> This problem isn't handling names, its validating them and trying to do clever things with them, which is rarely, truly, necessary - especially if its a customer's name that they see on mail, bills etc and that they have the ability to correct... they will validate it for you.

I think the real bad assumption is that validation is necessary or even desirable - applying the technique brainlessly to names is the root cause of this problem - you don't really need to make any assumptions.

</comment><comment><USER53> Also, FYI, place names contain all sorts of archaic spellings and characters, for the same reason: they are identifiers, and identifiers cannot and should not be normalized.

</comment><comment><USER54> Incidentally my friend RJ just experienced a related problem on Facebook. After he got married his name (which includes a hyphenated family name) has 4 capital letters on it. Facebook complains that his name has too many capital letters and will not let him use it. He tried all-lowercase but Facebook automatically capitalizes each word making it look even worse.

<comment><USER55> It gets annoying for handles too. I usually just use "vsync" but certain systems smash the first character upcase and it looks ugly as "Vsync". So I try "VSync" and it smashes all characters but the first downcase.

Not to mention systems that require usernames to have 6 characters or more, sigh...

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> The HL7 V3 standard has a fairly good data model for dealing with names. [http://www.hl7.org/v3ballot/html/infrastructure/datatypes_r2...](http://www.hl7.org/v3ballot/html/infrastructure/datatypes_r2/datatypes_r2.htm#dt- EN) Combine that with Unicode and you can solve the majority of problems.

</comment><comment><USER57> Only somewhat related, but first thing that came to mind:

<http://xkcd.com/327/>

</comment><comment><USER58> It doesn't matter what programmers believe, it matters what programmers can do with the computers available.

</comment><comment><USER59> what about a number, can't we all just be a number... I'll start things off, call me 1

<comment><USER60> This is a reference to a short story? Or was it a New Yorker cartoon?

<comment><USER61> Or "The Prisoner" TV series.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Lets just tattoo a bar code to everyone's forehead and be done.

</comment><comment><USER63> Wow, so recording people's names is an absolutely miserable affair with no likelihood of success.

Okay, from now on, all humans will not have names, they will be numbered in ascending order, starting from 1.

Boosh. If you want a 'handle' or 'username', you've gotta type it in whatever the encoding system supports.

Glad that problem has been solved.

<comment><USER64> "We want information, information, information."

"Who are you?"

"The new number two."

"Who is number one?"

"You are number six."

"I am not a number, I am a free man."

"HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA."

Btw, why not use encoded pictures?</comment></comment>


Bomb disposal robot used to kill suspected Dallas assassin - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/7/8/12129348/dallas-shooting-bomb-robot <comment><USER2> Ongoing discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12055492](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12055492)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12057421](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12057421)</comment>


Why do so many people dislike TechCrunch? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Probably because they write sensationalist headlines and often spread rumors just for pageviews.</comment>


Ask HN: What are some cheap idyllic places with lots of nature? - <AUTHOR> I am getting tired of city life and want to try spending some time in rural area with mountains, lakes, forests, etc. What are  some places you can recommend? It could be anywhere, doesn't need to be in the U.S.<p>The only other requirement is fast internet. <comment><USER2> The High coast of Sweden, I'm biased since I live here, but the place have for 42 years never ceased to amaze me with its nature and people. The name comes from the fact that the land rises about 10 mm out of the sea each year, this is because of the pressure of the ice during the last ice age

[http://www.visitsweden.com/sweden/Regions-- Cities/Northern-S...](http://www.visitsweden.com/sweden/Regions-- Cities/Northern-Sweden/The-High-Coast/)

[https://vimeo.com/79557856](https://vimeo.com/79557856)

PS. The internet connection is very good, I have currently 100/100 fiber connection and live in a very small village DS.

PSS. I live here, but I work (remote) for a Boston based software company DSS.

<comment><USER3> Can an English speaking tourist manage in these parts of Sweden?

<comment><USER4> > _Can an English speaking tourist manage in these parts of Sweden?_

Absolutely.

According to Wikipedia, 86% of people in Sweden know English. The percentage will of course be smaller in countryside and among older people, but I don't think you can find a small town where at least 50% of people wouldn't know English.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Trivandrum, India is a good place. It is a seaside city and has it's share of jungles and small hillocks. Besides monthly libing comes to about $30. It has a 'technopark' which is essentially offices cut into a jungle. I study here. For reference [http://technopark.org/](http://technopark.org/)

<comment><USER6> Stoked to see Trivandrum on the list, but you are way off the mark (by~10-15x) re: cost of living, arent you? Technopark has decent infrastructure but attracts mostly BPO/IT Services. Kazhakkoottam/Sreekaryam are rapidly getting gentrified too :(

(Source: Born in Tvm, studied there till undergrad, friends and family there)

<comment><USER5> My current rent is 1100 and food is 1120. ~$30 I think. Cost is ok I guess, coming from north India.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Western Pennsylvania has pretty much everything you're asking for. I live near Pittsburgh, but I'm honestly less than an hour drive away from all of this.

The only caveat (to living directly in the mountains) is that in any place where you're engulfed in nature, your Internet connection is going to be slower. It's too costly for the ISP to install or upgrade infrastructure to an area with less than say 400 homes per square mile. Past a certain number, it's just not a viable investment.

Satellite ISPs have been getting better though and DSL technology has shown at least a theoretical 800Mbps (in labs). Maybe someday it'll be possible to get great broadband in the mountains.

<comment><USER8> I just vacationed in Park Rapids, Minnesota. A couple thousand people live there, with much fewer than 400 homes per square mile. Mostly just farms, lakes and undeveloped land. The local ISP, "Paul Bunyan Communications", offers gigabit fiber. My lakeside cabin in the woods for the week had better internet than I have at home outside Philadelphia, and for less money.

Turns out most of the fiber-to-the-door deployed in the US is in the middle of the country, where population densities are low. These assumptions about rural availability and cost don't hold as often as some would think

[http://www.broadbandmap.gov/technology](http://www.broadbandmap.gov/technology)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Lots of foreign tourists have been coming here to Portugal - we have plenty of cheap rural homes in the middle of forests, large and small rivers with good walkable trails and bathing areas, and during these summer vacations, I had a nice 30mbps connection in a village so small it didn't even any shops.

A small example: [http://www.vortexmag.net/wp- content/uploads/2015/03/Dornes1....](http://www.vortexmag.net/wp- content/uploads/2015/03/Dornes1.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER10> No love for India so far!!! if you can tolerate the spicy food here are two places I wud recommend -

1) Kerela (called gods own country) - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala)

2) Arunachal Pradesh - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arunachal_Pradesh](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arunachal_Pradesh)

</comment><comment><USER11> Swansea, Wales, UK

I moved back (in from there originally) and we have

\- the UK's first area of outstanding natural beauty \- mountains, loads of mountains \- world class beaches \- low cost of living \- a TechHub with easy access to TechHub Shoredich in London \- pretty good internet, with 300mb consumer connections being rolled out \- great surfing

And soon to be built, a £1.5bn tidal lagoon and £0.5bn to be spent on regenerating the city centre.

Desk space in Techhub is currently £150p/m

Average monthly rent is £500 p/m for a studio/1den in a pretty new shoreside development SA1

We have a few London based businesses looking to relocate because of the low cost of living and great lifesytle.

Two Google engineers were here last week and were massive impressed, needless to say they are coming back here on holiday.

<comment><USER12> I have quite fond memories of Swansea, I use to walk down to the beach on mornings in the summer and read there for a few hours before starting my day.

I think everyone would win if it became a tech-hub.

The city center is a bit ugly (probably due to rapid post-war reconstruction after being bombed, combined with the general horrors of UK 1960s architecture) :D but cost of living is definitely cheap.

Because of general UK drinking culture and Swansea being a University town the town center is pretty raucous most nights and especially at the weekend. At least that was the case when I was there about 10 years ago!

There's a lot of beautiful scenery - like the Gower [http://www.visitswanseabay.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/01/Rh...](http://www.visitswanseabay.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/01/Rhossili-bay_gower-peninsula.jpg)

And away from the city center it's much quiter and rural. People are super friendly and warm in my experience, definitely more so than average for the UK!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Asheville, North Carolina, or -- "The Paris of the South."

</comment><comment><USER14> Pacific Northwest is nice. I like the Olympic Peninsula. I don't know the state of internet there; when I was last there, "Are you on email" was still a common question. Probably drops off as you get farther from the various towns. You could probably base yourself in Port Angeles, they have a ferry terminal to Canada and close access to the Olympic Mountains and the coastal rainforest.

[https://www.bing.com/mapspreview?q=Olympic%20Peninsula&obox=...](https://www.bing.com/mapspreview?q=Olympic%20Peninsula&obox=1&signedup=1#)

Lots of good daytrips, weekend and week trips available from there.

</comment><comment><USER15> You can always buy a (very) cheap old house in a village in Transylvania / Romania, and maybe spend some time to restore it, if you're into that. I don't know about the internet connection far from the city, though. See, for example:

[http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/827b9c84-69d5-11e1-8996-00144...](http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/827b9c84-69d5-11e1-8996-00144feabdc0.html)

[http://www.transylvania-guide.com/](http://www.transylvania-guide.com/)

</comment><comment><USER16> Trentino in Italy: beautiful scenery, lakes, alpine mountains (unesco), forests. It is near some other beautiful countries like Austria and Slovenian (which is another beautiful place for nature and mountains and even cheaper than Trentino).

And you are near to the city i live in (bergamo) which is small, with a medieval buildings and in the Orobie area which is full of mountains where you can do trekking or climbing!

I suggested Trentino because even if it is in Italy, it doesn't suffer from common italy "problems" (burocracy, criminality, etc...)

</comment><comment><USER17> Perhaps Ithaca, New York? It's a smallish college town (Cornell, Ithaca College), but with lots of great scenery nearby, including forest, lakes, and gorges.

</comment><comment><USER18> Krabi, Thailand. Avoid Phuket or Ao Nang, Krabi town is a bit off to the side but extremely peaceful and rural and tons of nature and unguided exploration to be had nearby.

Also outer Taiwan, Jeju Island (S.Korea), Okinawa, Fukuoka (Japan).

Parts of south India might be tempting, but the quality of internet can be very frustrating and can offset the quality of the nature.

source: all places I've passed through or by as a nomad in the last 2 years.

<comment><USER19> Sounds interesting! I was considering Taiwan recently. How is the infrastructure/livability/internet in those regions you mention? Any places you can be specific about?

<comment><USER18> Internet was my prime consideration as well, and all of those places have excellent internet. 20+mbps 3G/4G mobile internet at reasonable prices on top of solid connections at most hostels and airbnbs you could stay at there.

Rural Taiwan is especially nice because you're just a high speed rail ride away from Taipei, most likely. The others would probably involve a cheap and very short flight to the nearest metropolis, in case you miss the city life.

Okinawa can feel a bit touristy, but you can get away from it if you do some groundwork.

I spent a month out of an airbnb in Krabi town. Lived for about $200/mo, spending weekends doing touristy things and eating out most of the time. I got familiar with just about every shopkeep and restaurant owner in the hood. Random streams and gardens to hang around in and pass time and ponder the universe. I enjoyed it, and miss it sometimes, but the place helped me discover that personally I am a city-junkie and needed to get out of there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Try the heart of Switzerland, you might even get a job that pays like crazy. If you prefer to pay less for rent, move to south Bavaria in Germany's beautiful south. Munich might provide enough work, if you are willing to drive an hour every day. Working from home gets more common here, so you might not have to do the trip 5 days a week.

</comment><comment><USER21> Idaho has a few places that fit the bill. Sandpoint in the North and McCall in the south are both small towns with immediate lake and mountain access. Ketchum (Sun Valley) is another option, but has probably the highest cost of living in the state. Boise is situated in a valley, but the mountains are only an hour away.

</comment><comment><USER22> Are you a US citizen?

At $0.76 per CAD the whole of Canada is pretty much the definition of "cheap".

<comment><USER23> If you're considering Canada on the exchange rate, try out Banff or Jasper in Alberta; they're national parks and wonderfully maintained.

Enough beautiful hikes to keep me entertained for the last decade. I've found going over a mountain and back quite a boom for productivity if only because I don't want to walk afterwards.

The internet is fairly not terrible.

<comment><USER24> Banff, Canmore, Lake Loiuse, Jasper. Just spent the day at Lake Louise (from Calgary). The most beautiful place on earth. Hiked to lake Agnes (7000ft elevation) with family. We were soaked but enjoyed it immensely.

There are reasonably priced accommodation with the current CAD/USD rate.

Winter is another story but has its charm (& winter sports).

<comment><USER23> Perhaps off topic, but I have to ask: did you make it to the teahouse on Lake Agnes? It's absolutely fantastic to take the hike then relax at the top with a nice cup of tea!

<comment><USER24> Definitely. And absolutely beautiful place, atmosphere & history. Wished it wasn't raining as bad but enjoyed it nonetheless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Thailand, if you can handle the heat. Some great national parks, amazing hills in the north, huge amounts of greenery, and of course, the beaches. Coming up to the cool season too, and it's all wonderfully cheap.

<comment><USER26> Concur. I spent some time working from Koh Lanta earlier this year. Beautiful island with good infrastructure but it's not been overrun by giant resorts. There's a nice coworking space on Long Beach called Kohub.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Dilijan, Armenia [http://www.renco.it/media/immagini/477_z_img_4753_rid.jpg](http://www.renco.it/media/immagini/477_z_img_4753_rid.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER28> Pakistan's Northern areas:

[https://www.google.com.pk/search?q=pakistan+northern+areas+t...](https://www.google.com.pk/search?q=pakistan+northern+areas+tour&espv=2&biw=1280&bih=637&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0CAYQ_AUoAWoVChMI4sndk6XQxwIVw7kUCh2hlQe8)

This might help you to plan tour:

[http://pakistantourntravel.com/northern-pakistan- tour/](http://pakistantourntravel.com/northern-pakistan-tour/)

</comment><comment><USER29> There's Lake Placid or the 1000 islands. Once upon a time (1870's to WWI-ish), presidents and influential people used to come to the 1000 islands for the summer. If you like fall leaves, October here is like no other. Do not stay past halloween; it gets cold fast. You don't want to be here in the winter, unless you like snowmobiling. There's better skiing in places with less extreme weather (or so I'm told).

</comment><comment><USER30> Chattanooga, TN checks the boxes. Fiber internet, affordable, tons of outdoor activities. Outside magazine rated it best place to live in the US 2015 [0]. You can live just outside the city and be surrounded by nature, and the tech scene is growing.

[0] [http://www.outsideonline.com/2006426/americas-best- towns-201...](http://www.outsideonline.com/2006426/americas-best-towns-2015)

</comment><comment><USER31> Alps, France. Chiang Mai, Thailand. Koh Phanghan, Thailand. Bergen, Norway. Lofoten islands, Norway. Pyrenees, France. Jura, France. Lago maggiore, Italy. North of North California, USA. Oregon, USA. All Pacific northwest, USA. Boulder, Colorado, USA. Blue ridge, Georgia (?), USA. Area between Czech and Slovakia. Parks West of Zagreb, Croatia. Mountains, coast and parks in Serbia.

</comment><comment><USER32> I have a relative who lived in Montana for several years. I'm told its a world-class hiking state and is much cheaper than Colorado. I went once to go fly fishing and it was gorgeous. Only the winters are supposed to be terrible, so you'll want to time your stay well.

If you're more inclined towards Europe then I'd recommend Hungary, a very cost-effective place to live.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER33> Ithaca, you know Ulysses island. I am not sure about thr fast Internet. I assume you could get some lousy ADSL.

The sea and nature are marvelous though. The people are very good too. There at least another 50 places in Greece that fit the description, but Ithaca is my favorite. You can check out Nomads list, for cities that are better fit for tech nomads.

</comment><comment><USER34> I live in Cancun, Mexico right now. There are some areas where it's nice and not so expensive. Other places are around here because of tourism. However, Chiapas has mountains and rivers and is the cheapest state in Mexico from what I've heard.

</comment><comment><USER35> Lots of places in Sweden with great internet, great nature and ok prices. If super cheap is your focus, maybe not, but it is quite affordable outside cities. The North for mountains, the west or north for forests and lakes.

</comment><comment><USER36> Ozarks. Northwest Arkansas. Eureka Springs if you are super blue. Fayetteville area for college life.

Very cheap and infinite nature. Not as backwards as you'd expect.

Source: I grew up in Carroll County Arkansas.

</comment><comment><USER37> Croatia, both coast including islands (there is 1k of them, many uninhabitted) and in land. I recommend Velebit, Papuk, Brac and of course Dubrovnik archipelag.

</comment><comment><USER38> Go to McLeodganj in Himachal Pradesh, India.

</comment><comment><USER39> If the cost of living is cheap enough, you can run your own fiber with the saved money (and share with the neighbors.)

</comment><comment><USER40> Have been in Cambodia the past 2 weeks and loving it. Very cheap even in touristy areas, dirt cheap otherwise

</comment><comment><USER41> Boulder Creek, California. Less than an hour to the heart of the Silicon Valley, but worlds away.

<comment><USER42> heh, cheap?

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Ubud, Bali, Indonesia

Quebec City, Quebec, Canada

</comment><comment><USER43> Galicia, north west spanish and camino de santiago it's awesome ;-)

</comment><comment><USER44> Paradise, CA is fantastic and meets your requirements.

</comment><comment><USER45> Durango, Co

</comment><comment><USER46> I know quite a few idyllic places with lots of nature. None of them have fast internet.

</comment><comment><USER47> Bali, Thailand, Greece

</comment><comment><USER48> Cyprus, in Europe</comment>


Cryptographically Secure PHP Development - <AUTHOR> https://paragonie.com/blog/2017/02/cryptographically-secure-php-development <comment><USER2> This Paragon shop is the only group I ever see putting out any quality code/docs in the PHP ecosystem. They're simultaneously proof that it's possible to develop good software in PHP, and that PHP is otherwise a mess, insecure, and should be pretty much avoided.

<comment><USER3> > PHP is otherwise a mess, insecure, and should be pretty much avoided

That doesn't ring true to me. Personally, I think a lot of the perception is just that PHP appeals to a broad audience, so there's a lot of unskilled people producing code.

There are some language inconsistencies so "messy" might be justified. I don't see it, though, as inherently less secure than other popular languages.

If you mean, for example, SQL injection, php does provide the correct path, and it's in their documentation. Sure, it's possible to use aribtrary strings in SQL, but it's also possible in Python, Ruby, Perl, and so forth. Similar for traps like eval().

<comment><AUTHOR> They might be alluding to some of the specific examples in our blog post. Like, mbstring.func_overload, or chr() being a great way to leak crypto keys via cache-timing.

These sort of things aren't obvious and can very easily (and justifiably) be blamed on the language itself.

A lot of PHP crypto libraries are very cavalier about using functions without understanding their implementation details.

[https://github.com/devi/Salt/blob/fde775cf52402013efce812759...](https://github.com/devi/Salt/blob/fde775cf52402013efce81275919dcfd9f381fba/FieldElement.php#L19)

[https://github.com/phpseclib/phpseclib/blob/ab1da5ac1f2fa60b...](https://github.com/phpseclib/phpseclib/blob/ab1da5ac1f2fa60ba97d6f6f6909b0123704bc36/phpseclib/Crypt/RC4.php#L327)

[https://github.com/zendframework/zend- crypt/blob/9b7da4a6d4d...](https://github.com/zendframework/zend- crypt/blob/9b7da4a6d4db0bfc5c1cd0910d08b3e4af6d9cc5/src/Symmetric/Padding/Pkcs7.php#L28)

Fortunately, most cryptography libraries these days just wrap OpenSSL and rarely implement their own ciphers or hash functions.

<comment><USER3> Hmm. Most languages have some equivalent to chr() and ord(). And clunky unicode support isn't exclusive to php.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Its a well known fact PHP powers a ridiculous number of very high traffic sites. It's also a well known fact that HN favourites like ruby struggle.

PHP is extremely easy to set up and use. Ruby is a quagmire of dependencies and build environments.

This makes php bashing on HN tedious and disconnected from reality. There is a clear preference here for tech that pays more and but let's not try to pass it off as a technical preference.

<comment><USER5> Agreed, I've pentested php apps and some are very hardened and difficult to breach and I've tested Python django apps where I completely compromised the server. Language has only a weak correlation to security for web applications.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice to see this work being shared with others.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is there an analysis out there which evaluate some of the largest PGP projects regarding these cryptographically best practices?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm assuming that's a typo (s/PGP/PHP/).

There isn't such an analysis yet, but I intend to do one in the near future. We have a similar analysis for out-of-box security features of popular open source CMS: [https://paragonie.com/blog/2016/08/on-insecurity-popular- ope...](https://paragonie.com/blog/2016/08/on-insecurity-popular-open-source- php-cms-platforms)

Our security page has some of the audits we've done (at least, the ones we were permitted to publish) as well as our security advisories. [https://paragonie.com/security](https://paragonie.com/security)

I'm pretty active in the PHP community and get looped into a lot of pull request discussions (e.g. [https://github.com/facebook/php-graph- sdk/pull/552#issuecomm...](https://github.com/facebook/php-graph- sdk/pull/552#issuecomment-182123879) for Facebook's SDK), but it's possible I've missed a few.

<comment><USER8> I'm curious why you submit CVEs for development repositories of code that is not supposed to be run in production?

SMF 2.1 for instance is purely development releases that are _not_ supposed to be used in production.

[http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=5354...](http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=535446.0)

> As always, keep in mind that Beta Releases are NOT recommended for > production sites.

It is just the first time I've ever seen someone create a CVE for what is essentially a do-not-run-this-in-production code branch for an open source project. I'm used to people waiting until at least a Release Candidate version before doing that.

<comment><AUTHOR> In the case of SMF, the same vulnerabilities were present in the production versions.

Do you have any other instances you'd like to inquire about?

<comment><USER8> > In the case of SMF, the same vulnerabilities were present in the production > versions.

I'm just curious which production version you are talking about now since 2.1.X has 0 of those?

It doesn't really impact me one way or the other, so feel free to ignore me if you prefer. Its just odd.

<comment><AUTHOR> The vulnerability is also present in the v2.0.x branch.

The development 2.1.x branch (which is what was on Github) had the vulnerability, and that's where I reported it, but it's not only in the new code.

I think maybe you're confused somewhere?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Question: How'd you get into development? - <AUTHOR> I've always been curious how people have gotten into development so I thought I might as well ask. <comment><USER2> I loved video games as a child and I said I wanted to make video games. In HS I took the only 2 Programming classes but somehow didn't study it in college...? 4-5 years after graduating I started self learning with Codecademy and others. 4-5 years after that I took an online full stack boot camp with General Assembly and got a job 2 months later.

Of course throughout my life I've been very interested in tech, used Linux for many years, and was unknowingly practicing a lot of the foundational skills needed to be a good dev.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've actually been wanting the get into development. Any recommendations?

<comment><USER2> Teach yourself what you can, which is primarily limited by your ability/motivation to self-teach, using free sources like Codecademy, team treehouse, etc.</comment></comment>


I interviewed 60 people less than 24 hours after they attempted suicide. AMA - <AUTHOR> http://anyasq.com/41-i-interviewed-people-less-than-24-hours-after-they-attempted-suicide <comment><USER2> I stopped reading after the first question, where the interviewee states that people are "rarely" forced into inpatient treatment against their will. Maybe it's an insurance thing and they kick out the indigents by rationalizing their "commitment to outpatient treatment", but I have multiple friends who sought psychiatric help proactively, got talked into conceding suicidal ideation, and ended up stuck in worthless inpatient prisons for days and days.

This is real, serious problem with how we handle mental illness; anybody savvy enough to know what emergency help is available should unfortunately be savvy enough to know to avoid showing up anywhere in person.

<comment><USER3> I think there's a more practical reason behind it. In the United States, it's actually pretty hard to get someone committed against their will, and plenty of psychiatrists have argued that it should be easier to do so (and not completely without merit). I mean, how many people on the streets are there because they're incapable of taking care of themselves? How many people have committed crimes that could have been prevented with a mental hospital stay?

<comment><USER4> >>> How many people have committed crimes that could have been prevented with a mental hospital stay? <<<

Isn't this essentially equivalent to pre-emptive punishment? If you abstract it you could say, how many murders will stop if we lock up anyone who has ever been in a violent altercation? It is compelling in some ways, but this list also includes anyone in a very stupid bar fight. The real problem isn't even the haziness of the line, it's _where_ do you draw the line.

Is being gay evil? Not too long ago it was viewed as that, and feminine boys were quite often put through hell. I really don't want to live in a world like that. This led to atrocities like these; [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aversion_therapy#In_homosexuali...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aversion_therapy#In_homosexuality)

The problem with a lot of psychiatry is the game of vested interests. For example, people making the DSM have a vested interest to categorise deviations from the social norm into disorders which require their own unique brand of "therapy". If you add in the fact that most of psychology research lacks proper scientific methodology, and its often used as a platform to prove a point, which somehow always agrees with the researchers prejudices, you get people juggling grenades on a glass slop, while balancing on a wet soap bar.

<comment><USER5> Also, it is far from a given that a mentally ill person is especially inclined towards crime. My mother worked as a psychiatric social worker for an extended period and her opinion was that schizophrenics were less dangerous than just average people.

Certainly, many mentally ill people could use some help and will engage in behaviors "disturbing to the public" (talking loudly to themselves etc). But it seems to me that serious criminality requires a certain confidence and competence maybe not a lot but more than, say

<comment><USER6> Actually, it has been shown that in the absence of substance abuse, schizophrenics are no more violent than the general population.

I have a family member with mental health problems. It annoys me to know end when I see yet another episode of Criminal Minds where the killer has paranoid schizophrenia. People with mental health issues need support not alienation from society.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I attempted to sign in to ask a question, and got the following message:

This application will be able to:

        Read Tweets from your timeline.
        See who you follow, and follow new people.
        Update your profile.
        Post Tweets for you.
        Access your direct messages until June 30th, 2011.

Who the in their right mind would sign into this ???

<comment><USER8> I couldn't find a way to ask for fewer permissions. All we need is ability to post tweets since there's a checkbox to post to your followers when you ask a question or start an AMA.

We don't use any of the other permissions and won't do anything unexpected.

For what it's worth, we've run the Graffiti app on Facebook since the launch of the platform, and have never spammed anyone or their friends, or misused any data or permissions.

<comment><USER7> Hi Tim

I wasn't actually expecting a personalised response from the AnyAsq creator.

It was more a general comment, and the question still stands I think - read my DM's?, no frickin' way!! - that's a serious invasion of privacy ...

I understand that you have to do what you can to spread your product, but there's a trade-off between being able to tweet, and asking someone to basically give up their twitter accounts to you ... you're going to lose more potential customers than gain with this method IMHO ...

How about: asking someone to sign in twitter, and asking their permission to just tweet their questions? - could you limit it to that ?

<comment><USER8> I appreciate the feedback, and we're still thinking about how best to do it. I'm hoping at some point twitter will implement a more granular way to ask for permissions.

As for direct messages, I believe twitter will stop asking for that either today or tomorrow.

<comment><USER7> I'm super surprised they haven't implemented it already, i mean, it's not that difficult to build a granular permission system, what they have in place right now is a disaster ...

<comment><USER8> I'm wondering if they might be planning to transition to a more granular permission system like Facebook, since they recently started displaying the permissions more granularly and it would make a lot of sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was looking for the transcripts of the interviews she did with the suicide victims. I was a bit disappointed.

<comment><USER10> She wouldn't be able to release those without consent or major editing / censorship due to patient privacy laws.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Rarely do people without a serious mental illness attempt to take their own lives."

I wonder if she considers voluntary euthanasia to be a form of suicide, or whether these simply were not part of her study (maybe due to their success).

</comment><comment><USER12> Check out her blog, interesting stuff there, too: <http://taradeliberto.blogspot.com/>

</comment><comment><USER13> Where I am from when someone says _I am tired, I am going to commit suicide_ (and they could sound a bit serious), the most likely answer you get is _Sure. Go ahead. We'll only cry for one day and eat well at your funerals_. I have never known anyone who went through with it.

<comment><USER14> The problem is that you never know when someone is just talking, just seeking attention, or is serious. Often, the most serious don't talk about it. They just do it. But even attempting it is bad enough and while many might make light of someone's threats about it as nothing more than lame attempts at milking attention, that alone denotes a fairly serious concern. There are several levels before the point of actually attempting or committing the act which are deserving of serious notice.

I haven't known anyone who went through with it, either (though I know many who know those who have). I'll tell you, however, that I'd sure rather know someone that made threats that I took serious and tried to get help for than know someone I didn't take serious and will regret not taking serious for the rest of my life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> From the site: _Where interesting people say: "Ask me anything."_

You know the author is interesting, because there's a giant photo of them in a dress cut down to their navel, right above the questions about interviewing dozens of attempted suicides.

<comment><USER15> Please do enlighten us: what is the correct clothing to wear on a website when you discuss attempted suicides? Should we make sure to stick to earth tones so that we respect the solemnity of the topic, or do we want to add some bright colors in to make sure no gets even sadder? This is one area where I sure wouldn't want to make a misstep. What's your opinion vis a vis a pipe for added gravitas? I think it might go too far. Maybe when you're done with suicide-related topics, you could compose a manual for other scenarios, so that we can be sure to never again offend your sense of fashion.

tl;dr, cut the fucking body policing, jackass.

<comment><USER16> I think the "serious answer" would be "you don't put a photo of yourself, or, in fact, anything related to yourself that could be misconstrued as egocentric or status-serving, in an article related to suicide; you just let it speak for itself." However, that sort of goes against the whole point of the site's format, which is, basically, to status-affiliate [through social learning] with people who have done things that have made them high-status in one way or another.

I think the "serious answer" to _that_ would be "then they shouldn't have done the interview" (or "they should have made some special exception to their normal site formatting," which through interview prioritization basically amounts to the same thing) which has interesting implications for the ethics of free speech.

<comment><USER14> I could understand if it were just a little user icon off in the corner, but to have a huge 200x300 photo in the article is a little obnoxious, though probably not intentionally crude. If it's an automated function of the site that puts it there for, then maybe a more tasteful choice of photo is called for when one posts several articles about working with suicide patients.

I should edit this to add that the author being an attractive young women is irrelevant and that a similar photo with a male author would be as unfortunately distasteful. And as the other poster mentioned, they thoughtfully changed their photo. Maybe it's just a cruddy way the site automates the use of people's photos in a sort of template?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


01000111 01100101 01100101 01101011 00100000 01010111 01100001 01110100 01100011 01101000 - <AUTHOR> http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/watches/6a17/

<comment><USER2> I had that for a while, but stopped wearing it because a) I can't wear watches, and b) it takes just a little too long to convert in your head. It would work much better if all our amounts of time (minutes in an hour, hours in a day) were powers of 2.

</comment><comment><USER3> I find the coolest geek stuff to be where it's more subtle. If the average person I run into can tell I'm geeking out, it's not worth wearing.

</comment><comment><USER4> No error correction? Not even a parity bit? Big-endian only? I'll pass.

</comment><comment><USER5> By the way, the headline reads "Geek Watch" if you convert it to ASCII.

</comment><comment><USER6> For the lazy, headline translates to "Geek Watch"

</comment><comment><USER7> I like the idea, but what an ugly face!

</comment><comment><USER8> can you imagine trying to get through US customs with what looks like a hollywood bomb on your wrist!</comment>


Show HN: Measuring Karma Inflation on HN - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@zitterbewegung/measuring-point-inflation-c88c325bf090#.9720niqai <comment><USER2> Firstly, congratulation on resisting the urge to entitle the post "Karma Police"

Secondly, consider one mechanism for why stories might get more likes: do they linger for longer on the home page? If HN population is increasing, then getting to the front page might increase the momentum more now than it used to. And then it collects more likes once it is there.

</comment><comment><USER3> You may want to recheck the time horizons of those two charts.

The BigQuery data is way out of date, and even if you updated it to current metrics, new "rescue" mechanics make calculating inflation of stories have several caveats, and comment scores are no longer accessible.</comment>