Samoa to jump forward in time by one day - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-13330592

<comment><AUTHOR> For some historical context, losing one day is minor (as long as your birthday isn't 28 December) as compared to the 11 days that were 'lost' in the transition from Julian to Gregorian calendars.

And lest you think that's an historical artifact (to be fair, they didn't worry about sysadmins in Renaissance Rome circa 1582) many Orthodox / Eastern European countries like Russia, Greece, and Turkey made that change in the 1920s [1].

And yes, that's why Russia's October Revolution took place in November, 1917.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar#Timeline>

<comment><USER2> I was on a recent trans-Pacific flight where they announced after landing that one of the flight attendants had completely skipped over her birthday (we crossed the IDL at about midnight) so we gave her a round of applause for sacrificing her birthday in the name of duty.

I cross the IDL semi-frequently and it always depresses me. It depresses me when I completely skip a day going west, and it depresses me when I fly back the other way and have to live through the same day twice.

<comment><USER3> You just have to time your trips right, so you can, for example, trade a Wednesday for an extra Saturday.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, usually I travel on weekends so I wind up losing a Saturday and gaining an additional Monday.

<comment><USER4> Holy crap! Who in their right mind wants an extra Monday?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's a question that's purely hypothetical, and is _so_ unlikely to ever need answering that is basically isn't worth asking, but I'm intrigued none- the-less.

Let's say there is <something> that requires a certain length of time, whether it is a 3 day waiting period to buy a gun (totally made up law, I have no idea about Samoan laws), or some prize given to any Samoan who turns 100 years old. Would it go by number of _actual_ days, i.e. how many 24 hour periods have passed, or would it go by date?

Yeah, two terrible examples, and like I said, I doubt the answer would ever have any practical use. And for that reason, perhaps there is no definitive answer. Is there?

<comment><USER6> IANAL but I would have thought this is really no big deal.

If the stipulation is in days (eg 3 days cooling off) then 3 days is 3 days - the date doesn't matter.

If the stipulation is months or years, then the missing day is simply ignored.

I mean, we have a February 29 every 4 years. We already have "months" being an indeterminate number of days (28, 29, 30, 31). So December will have 30 days instead of 31. Big deal. Lots of countries have a time change twice a year, and it doesn't cause any major issues.

For the sake of computer "elapsed time" (interest calculations and so on) it's equally a non-event. The easiest way to handle interest for example is just to treat the missing day as if it had occurred. So it was a really short day, a holiday, which you slept through. Folks will still get paid for the "whole month" of December and so on.

I'm not sure what they'll do, but as long as it's trivially simple I suspect people will adapt very easily.

The worst that'll happen is that everyone will miss out on a whole Wednesday worth of TV. Bummer!

<comment><USER5>
      Folks will still get paid for the "whole month" of December and so on.

Well, one example of how it could be problematic, is if someone is paid hourly (say a freelancer with a non-expiring fulltime-equivilent contract to a company). They would lose out on a day's pay, while their rent/other bills would still charge for one month, not for one month pro-rated down by one day.

As you said, different months have different lengths anyway, so it's not like an end-of-the-world problem, but for someone in that situation, they will none-the-less be losing money as a result of the change.

And as to your judgements on days vs months, it's fine to say "it doesn't have to be a problem if we do it like this", but when it comes to any sort of law or contract, that would rely on both parties agreeing, and it's not impossible that they would take opposite views to both try and improve the situation for themselves.

On a side note, if I were in Samoa, I would have great fun buying a 2011 calendar from as many shops as I could, then go round on December 29th complaining that it was factually incorrect and wanting a refund. Well, I say "I would...", in actual fact I wouldn't be quite that bored. But I like the idea of doing that.

<comment><USER6> >> As you said, different months have different lengths anyway, so it's not like an end-of-the-world problem, but for someone in that situation, they will none-the-less be losing money as a result of the change.

No, they're not really losing money, it's more like they're losing the opportunity to make money on that missing day. So a freelancer can, for example work in an extra day that week if they choose.

Public Holidays have the same effect every year, especially in countries where the actual day of the holiday follows the date, and thus in some years falls on a weekend.

Actually they've chosen to shorten a month which has 31 days to 30 days, which is no different than say April, June, September or November. So, by your measure they're being shorted for at least 5 months of every year anyway.

Plus, they've done it between Christmas and New Years, which in the Southern Hemisphere is the middle of the summer holidays. So pretty much no-one is working anyway.

The opposite way of looking at the same data is that they get a "free day" in every 31-day-month. And one of these "free days" is being discarded.

In other words, only us programmer types would try and nit-pick the thing apart. People on the ground haven't "lost" anything really.

My point about the contracts is that nothing is affected. Contracts that say "days" mean days, contracts that say months mean "months". This is built into contracts already because months aren't the same length. a 30 day December is no different to a 30 day April.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here's a picture of the date line in that area: [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Internati...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/International_Date_Line.png)

There's one spot where you can cross the date line 3 times traveling strictly west to east and not changing your latitude!

<comment><USER8> This could easily be a xkcd comic. What a mess...

<comment><USER2> It could have easily been a lot worse. It's a quirk of geography that the part of the world exactly 180 degrees from London, which just happened to be the capital of the world when the human race got around to setting up sensible time zones, happens to be a north-so-south slice of mostly unpopulated ocean, where only a few minor islands need to worry about this kind of thing.

Heck, there are a lot of possible globes where there's no sensible place to put an international date line at all... every north-south slice goes through a populated landmass.

<comment><USER9> And some of those are just our globe, rotated. (I'd give an example, but it's hard to come up with one because I don't have an actual globe that I can play around with.)

<comment><USER2> Put a pole bang in the middle of the largest landmass, Eurasia-Africa, and every line of longitude will cut through some temperate-zone habitable land.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Two years ago Samoa switched from driving on the right to driving on the left, to fit in with Aus/NZ <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8243110.stm>

This continues the broad change in foreign policy.

</comment><comment><USER11> How long are we going to continue sharing this hallucination of "time zones"? Long live UTC, the one true time. Death to all the pretenders!

<comment><USER5> Until you can pursuade the majority of the world that they should have dark days and sunlit nights.

<comment><USER12> People would still get up when the sun shines and go to bed soon after it gets dark. You may be having lunch at 2200 but it'd still be near to when the sun was at its highest. The biggest problem I see would be elevenses would have to be changed in most places.

<comment><USER5> It would just make it even more confusing. Right now if I want to speak to a business contact in, say, America, I have to find out their time zone, work out what time it is, and call them up. Under the new system, I would know that my contact in Los Angeles has the same time as me, but I wouldn't know what that actually means. It's currently 1pm here in the UK, but at 1pm in LA will they be in the office? Will they be on their way home from work? Will they be fast asleep?

Obviously, it would be possible to learn these things, but it's much harder to look up. Imagine a table of different countries, how do you define this stuff? Much easier to define what time the 24 hour day starts based on the sun than to define people's behaviour, as not everyone will have the exact same schedule for when they start work, when they wake up, etc.

<comment><USER13> Even now, you need to be aware of cultural differences, as well as timezones.

Examples: (for some definitions of here and there) It's 1300 here which means that it's 1700 there - do people tend to go home at 1700 or 1800?

Lunchtime in France is typically 1200-1400 (local), whereas in Israel it is 1400-1600. If I'm in France, and I need to call up my Israeli colleagues after lunch, simply adjusting for timezone won't do. If I call at 1430 Israeli time, they will have just gone out.

In these situations you currently have to know two things: what time it is over there, and what the cultural norms for work and mealtimes are. If time were internationally uniform, you'd only need the latter.

<comment><USER5> But it's certainly easier to guess right now. If I called and they were at lunch I would try again after the next hour clicks by, for example. And, in my experience, guessing at a 9-5 day has nearly always worked out for me, with just a few exceptions where I've learned of their slightly odd hours (and in my personal experience, all the people with odd hours are due to those people/companies, not the country they are in).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _...a great disturbance in the Net, as if millions of Samoan sysadmins cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened._

<comment><USER15> But this is the _easy_ one. Imagine the pain if they had to go backwards, repeating the same day twice!

(of course, we do that on a smaller scale in the USA once a year, when we set the clocks back from DST)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The comment about why they moved the calandar 119 years ago to be closer to the USA had me perplexed. I guessed it would have been too early for Samoa to get a telegraph station and therefore I couldn't understand the need to move the date. But looking at this <http://goo.gl/wIaTb> it seems to me that they got the telegraph in 1880 or there abouts...which precipitated the need for first change.

</comment><comment><USER17> Similar problems are for people doing business in Europe and the Middle East. Some countries have Thursdays and Fridays off, others have Fridays and Saturdays. In Israel, Friday is a half working day.

<comment><USER18> I went to university in the West Bank for a year - we had Friday off, Saturday class, Sunday off. It was crazy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> If this interests you, and/or if you need to properly handle these kind of things in your code, it's good to keep up with the ZoneInfo/TZ Database and the associated mailing lists.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database> <http://cs.ucla.edu/~eggert/tz/tz- link.htm>

Luckily for most people the ZoneInfo DB is part of the OS and gets updated with your system updates, but if you care about time in your app, you need to be aware of these.

Governments dictatorial and democratic alike love to screw with the engineers of the world by changing this stuff around all the damn time.

<comment><USER20> > Luckily for most people the ZoneInfo DB is part of the OS and gets updated > with your system updates

Actually, that's NOT true, because most people use Windows, whose TimeZoneDB is horribly implemented, and only cares about the present (and only if you updated recently). If you ask it about 2003, it will answer with _today's_ rules, not with the rules that were in effect in 2003.

While this is just a little bad for the US (rules changed only twice in the last 50 years), in some countries they have changed every other year, or they cannot be expressed with the rules that Windows has.

Windows date and time handling is a joke.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> "Never trust Australians. They live a whole day in the future and they never tell us what's going to happen."

(I bet Samoa will join this conspiracy of silence when they make the jump.)

</comment><comment><USER22> "In doing business with New Zealand and Australia, we're losing out on two working days a week."

Are not they gaining two days in the 5 day week. Just like US-India, there is always somebody from the company working and available due to the 12-13 hour gap.

<comment><USER5> Your example is talking about a company having longer working hours because half of it's staff are working at any one time (maybe with some overlap).

This change is because Simoa does business with people/companies in Australasia, so they want as much time when both time zones are working as possible, not to get the longest combined amount of work time between the two zones.

That said, because they are on the International Date Line, they are moving their calendar by exactly 24 hours, so their day/night (i.e. working hours) will still have the same relationship with those in Australasia. The difference is that, after this change, they will have five weekdays that overlap with Australasia's five weekdays, whereas right now they only have three, as demonstrated in the BBC story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It doesn't say which day they'll skip.

I'd pick a Monday.

<comment><USER24> Sounds like somebody has a case of the Mondays :(

<comment><USER25> I believe you'll get your ass kicked, sayin' som'n like that, man.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Umberto Eco's "Island of the day before" is a funny novel built mostly around all the paradoxes and misunderstandings made possible by the existence of the IDL.

Not a chef d'oeuvre like "Foucault's pendulum" but well worth a read.

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

</comment><comment><USER27> I wonder if this would cause problems for daily cron scripts that run tasks by checking the date against == rather than than <. Not to mention monthly scripts that happen to run on that particular lost day.

Anyway, I love the passionate discussion programmers have when it comes to dates. Remember, it's only 86400 seconds that they are losing.

</comment><comment><USER28> Anyone fancy going to a some websites, setting your time-zone to Samoa and putting 28 dec 2011 into some date fields (birthday, shipping date etc.) to see which ones crash?

</comment><comment><USER29> Why not wait until the next leap day and skip that?

<comment><USER30> Maybe because time == money?

<comment><USER2> Well, the change is scheduled for December 28 this year, and the next leap day is February 29 of next year, so we're only talking two months here.

I assume the actual reason they chose that date is that they want to stick it in the xmas/NYE dead period which is mostly holidays anyway to minimise disruption.

Also, "time == money" is probably on the list of "things you're least likely to hear anyone say in Samoa".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Shouldn't the onus fall on the commercial sector to conduct business at the time that makes the most sense? If this means shifting the work week by a day for your employees so that you can do more business with your largest customers, then so be it.

This would yield flexibility, what about all the Samoan companies that still do most of their business with the US?

<comment><USER32> The Samoan companies that do business mainly with the USA are in a minority. They're also a heavily religious and family-oriented culture and aren't about to start working on Sunday. It sounds like you might be confusing Samoa with a more business-oriented culture.

<comment><USER31> So they just change the definition of when Sunday is to accomodate?

<comment><USER33> Yes. To quote Jesus Christ (in translation, of course :) "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath." Or to put it another way, you're only hurting yourself.

To be specific, the Sabbath is the last day of the week, so all the Christians who use Sunday both as the first day of the week and as their day of rest are already ignoring the Sabbath.

If you're interested in how that happened, it's to celebrate the resurrection of Christ, which was on the day after the Sabbath (because Jesus was crucified the day before the Sabbath and rose on the third day, the day after the Sabbath). So no matter where you put the Sabbath, Christians will still observe their day of worship on the day after.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Smart move - I was thinking whether this might act as a model of how other trading blocs to be more closely temporally clustered, but I think this is a special situation, facilitated by the date line and the geographical proximity of Samoa to Australia.

IOW - probably wouldn't work if eg India and Brazil wanted to get cosy.

</comment><comment><USER35> im sorry samoa but, thats ridiculous. Whats going to be the date? are they also gonna skip a day like that? and a day isnt just some thing. its a pattern that dates back thousands of years just for them to disrupt that pattern

<comment><USER36> For quite some years every other Sunday I'd leave home1 early evening and arrive at home2 early Tuesday morning, having travelled on average about 21 hours (all those mandatory inspections of my underpants, you see), thereby skipping an awful lot of Mondays.

A day really is just a thing: I'm not any younger.

<comment><USER5> While you're right that crossing the IDL doesn't make you a day older or younger... there is a slight flaw in your logic. In order for you to have gone forward a day every two weeks, you must have come back a day in between, as well.

After all, it's possible to fly around the world in less than 24 hours, but you can't use that to travel forward or backwards in time, you can only ever get to a maximum of 24 hours ahead or behind of another place.

<comment><USER36> Perhaps I was too dry: everything you say is true, but you kinda missed the point ;)

Edit: In retrospect realise that wasn't particularly helpful. I skipped an awful lot of Mondays for which the only consequence was utter joy at the two cocktail hours every other Saturday. Contrary to the great grandparent, a day really is just a thing.

<comment><USER5> Sorry, I wasn't clear enough - I didn't miss the point you were making, and I completely agree with it (one of my other comments somewhere on this page makes that same point), I was just pointing out the flaw in your example that travelling forward through time zones many times won't make more of a difference than doing it just once.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Letter From Human Rights Leaders Asking President Obama To Pardon Edward Snowden - <AUTHOR> https://pardonsnowden.org/news/delivery-letter <comment><USER3> Obama is clearly pro-mass-surveillance [0] and certainly has been all the time.

So there is no way he will pardon Snowden (even if it's The Right Thing to do).

[0] _Barely a week before he leaves office, U.S. President Barack Obama's administration has authorized controversial new legislation that grants America's 16 intelligence organizations access to raw communications data from the NSA's surveillance efforts.

[...]

So information that was collected without a warrant—or indeed any involvement by a court at all—for foreign intelligence purposes with little to no privacy protections, can be accessed raw and unfiltered by domestic law enforcement agencies to prosecute Americans with no involvement in threats to national security. _

Source: [https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/13/the-nsa-can-now-share- unfi...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/13/the-nsa-can-now-share-unfiltered- surveillance-data-with-other-intelligence-agencies/)

<comment><USER4> Definitely the worst of his "legacy". Although some could argue it's the fact that he brought U.S. into 8 active wars, while bombing Iraq, the war the U.S. supposedly "won", as much as ever.

<comment><USER5> What are the 8 active wars? Genuinely curious. That seems like a lot.

<comment><USER6> Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Philippines, Somalia, Syria, Yemen

Source: [http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/sep/25/...](http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/sep/25/ryan- lizza/lizza-says-obama-has-bombed-more-nations-bush/)

<comment><USER5> Thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> These petitions are silly. If you want to do something, commit to annoying your representatives. Every few months write or call in and remind them that you care about net neutrality, encryption and Edward Snowden as a symbol. Before elections ask them if they share your views on these issues. Write a letter to the editor or op ed in your local, hometown paper.

Political change takes work. If you can't be bothered more than than clicking a button online, you're sending a message to our elected representatives on how you prioritise issues.

<comment><USER3> > These petitions are silly.

Yes, because they probably don't result in the desired decisions.

No, because they send a signal, letting everybody know "no, you're not the only one thinking things need to change urgently now".

If we feel alone, we tend to not take any action. If we are part of a group, we feel empowered and take action, sooner or later.

This is what such petitions may achieve.

<comment><USER7> Petitions don't encourage organisation nor repetition, the two elements of successful political mobilisation. They're one offs by disjointed individuals of dubious commitment.

Worse, they promote complacency. ("I sure showed them by signing that petition!") Getting rid of disgruntled constituents by having them press an Internet button is a politician's dream.

Petitions--particularly written ones--brought forth by an organised body, or used to organise one, can be powerful. Internet petitions aren't those.

<comment><USER8> Slacktivism at its finest.

And then the Administration picks and chooses what they respond to. They'll ignore this one but since they responded to the Death Star one, they must be cool!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I discussed this with a few friends. And it's really best if nothing is done with Snowden from the governments perspective.

If they pardon him, they say it's alright to release national secrets based on "feelings" (even if it's morally correct to do so, they can't have that). If they try to get him to the US for a public trial, who knows what will happen. If they bring him home for a secret trial, the risk rioting or a martyr. Similarly, if they kill him with a direct assassination he will be a martyr, and they'll be dramatically ruining their image. Finally, if they kill him in a covert way, no one will believe it and in all likelihood it will be widely believed it is the governments doing.

By leaving him in this limbo, the government can claim what ever they want about him without proving it. At the same time, Snowden has no more info to disclose, although he has a solid and growing cult following.

For the record, I signed this as soon as I heard about it and shared it with everyone I knew. I think it's important to be counted and try to share and convince others if your beliefs, if you believe it'll dramatically impact your future.

What Snowden did and what he stands for is the last chance to have any form of democracy or privacy. Unfortunately, it appears to have failed, but that doesn't mean you stop trying to improve things. Perhaps, the younger generation (millennials and below) will recognize what he did, as opposed to what the government is trying to spin.

<comment><USER10> This may be hard to believe on Hacker News, and you and I might think it's wrong, but most Americans do not like Snowden. They've done opinion polls and more than 60% of Americans have a negative opinion of Snowden. Very very few think he's a hero.

Politicians want him home for a public trial. But if there's a secret trial or he's assassinated, there will be outrage in certain circles (ACLU/journalists), but he won't be a huge martyr.

[http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/04/21/edward- snowde...](http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/04/21/edward-snowden- unpopular-at-home-a-hero-abroad-poll-finds)

[http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/edward-snowden-rasmussen- po...](http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/edward-snowden-rasmussen-poll-hero- russia/2016/09/23/id/749866/)

<comment><USER9> You only need a small minority to believe something. If they believe it loud enough they will create a ruckus.

Then the government will have to actually prove all the character assassination attempts. Even though there is no evidence they really have against him at this point. I mean, in terms of being a Russian spy, or an alcoholic or something.

Also, remember these are the same pollsters who had Hillary winning the election...

<comment><USER10> No, they don't have to prove any of the character assasination attempts. They just have to prove Snowden committed a crime, which even Snowden has admitted to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There seem to be a lot of comments here saying that if Snowden is pardoned, it will set a precedent that it's okay to leak government secrets. This is actually a straw man because that's not addressing what Snowden did. Snowden tried to responsibility report the issues and he hit a wall. He realized that the option to handle it internally didn't exist, so he did not have any other choice. Pardoning Snowden is perfectly acceptable since reform is and was needed in those areas.

<comment><USER12> > Snowden tried to responsibility report the issues and he hit a wall. He > realized that the option to handle it internally didn't exist, so he did not > have any other choice.

I uh... no that is just not even a little bit true.

<comment><USER13> Vice published emails via FOIA that suggest he had made concerns known before leaking: [https://news.vice.com/story/exclusive-snowden-tried-to- tell-...](https://news.vice.com/story/exclusive-snowden-tried-to-tell-nsa- about-his-concerns) This suggests it is at least a little bit true

<comment><USER14> It might well be true, but the details of the VICE story (one email from Snowden asking a question about whether a training programme was correct in asserting that executive orders were equivalent to acts of congress, and a belatedly acknowledged meeting with a compliance trainer which the compliance trainer says consisted of Snowden complaining about "trick questions" ) don't really back up the clickbaity headline...

(my clickbaity headline would be "NSA appears to lack competence at searching _its own_ email")

<comment><USER13> Yeah, the title (and contents) of the story are total clickbait, but they did helpfully attach the full contents of the FOIA dump. As you point out, there is ambiguity (which is why I used a lot of qualifiers :), but seeing the internal communications around the issue is interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Obama is a massive disappointment. His clearly pro surveillance actions, support for the Syria war and needless belligerance towards Russia are a complete mystery coming from a democrat and given his public posturing as a 'reasonable person'.

Everytime you intervene and rock a boat there are severe consequences for tens of millions of people. It cannot be the kind of casual action we have been taking for decades. Basic human stuff. When it comes to refugees the 'empathy' dissipates quickly and we cannot even absorb hundreds. If these kind of actions was about sincerely caring about other people why would this be?

Given the kind of aggressive civic activism seen for Jan 20 one would conclude people just don't care about surveillance enough or we would see similar levels of activism. But it's also interesting to consider the levels of propaganda at play and the need to 'organize' and fund certain actions. There are enough special interests to do the former but not enough for the latter. For a average citizen even before you start organizing you will end up on dozens of lists and the security state will make your life difficult.

</comment><comment><USER16> Here's my previous comment on an Ask HN wondering why the U.S. didn't get Snowden:

> _They could if they wanted to. Do they want to? If they get him to the U.S., > they 'd have to deal with him. I don't think they want to get him because > it'd dramatically limit their options and possibly set a precedent with far- > reaching consequences (is he a traitor? is he a hero? what does it mean to > be either? is the public ready? how well would a pardon be received? if they > pardon him, who else would they have to pardon? what does it mean to leak > sensitive information? what does that mean for cases of espionage?) Why > address the elephant in the room when you shouldn't have brought an elephant > in the room in the first place? Just let the elephant where he is. _

There are examples of lenient sentencing, though. Former U.S. Chief of Staff to the Vice President, "Scooter" Libby, was not pardoned after he had blown the cover of an intelligence officer (classified information) to a news outlet. He was disbarred, but not forced to exile. He was reinstated a few months ago, ten years after the events.

I think Snowden being in the spotlight cuts both ways: on the one hand he stays relevant, people don't forget about him, and it'd be a complication if anything were to happen to him..

On the other hand, it makes it much, much, harder to pardon him and to regain his former life. (It would be easier if it were done discreetly, but discretion is out of the question now.

Finally: this could also be one hell of an intelligence operation, placing Snowden just right inside a country that is clearly on the rise and representing a challenge for the U.S..

Heads: China. Tails: Russia. Of all the countries in the world. This would be an operation for the books.

</comment><comment><USER17> Obama is the worst president for whistleblowers and leakers in american history, by far, having prosecuted more of them for espionage than all presidents before him combined. So this would be quite a surprise.

</comment><comment><USER18> I know nothing about American law, but why has the constant plea been for a pardon and not amnesty?

It seems like in the former case one would need to be convicted of something before one could be pardoned. Snowden hasn't been convicted of anything yet...

Although there is the caveat that amnesty at federal level would not provide immunity from prosecution by state courts, as far as I understand it.

IANAL.

<comment><USER19> Ford pardoned Nixon without him being convicted. Amnesty is a pardon given to a group of people, rather than an individual.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Never going to happen, Obama administration does not like people like Snowden or Manning.

<comment><USER21> Yeah, never going to happen, he would never pardon Manning .... oh wait ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The sad thruth is that Obama is more likely to issue a pardon for Hillary Clinton than for Edward Snowden.

</comment><comment><USER23> Besides, I need to confess not being a big believer in clicktivism (just a personal opinion) and I would love to hear alternative suggestions to support Mr Snowden in a similarly lazy, albeit possibly a bit more useful way -> financially.

Google took me here: [https://edwardsnowden.com/donate/](https://edwardsnowden.com/donate/)

I'm sure helping his lawyers will help him indirectly but suggestions would be appreciated!

</comment><comment><USER24> WTF? The main image is 4.4MBytes?!! Who did that? It slows down Chrome making the website lag until it is loaded...

</comment><comment><USER25> Perhaps its just pessimism but there likely never be a pardon for Snowden. Once and if Snowden is pardoned, the military has now made it "acceptable" to comprimise secrets. Though Snowden is arguably in the moral right, if someone does this sort of thing for poor/naive reasons and if the knowledge is more sensitive (such as Hiraldo Rivera explaining exact locations and plans on a broadcast) there may be a much bigger problem.

I think the closest Snowden will likely get is an honorable burial in US or have a bill named after him. But I highly doubt either party will pardon him.

<comment><USER26> Snowden was not in the military and the secrets he lifted were from a civilian organization.

<comment><USER27> This is a very important distinction.

<comment><USER28> Really? official secrets acts (or the equivelents) apply to every one - <USER2> may be additional punishments for military and those who have signed the act.

<comment><USER26> He wasn't in the military, didn't take secrets from the military so if he were pardoned, it can't possibly suggest the military considers such things acceptable. The military doesn't come into it. The poster is maybe confusing him with Chelsea Manning who was in the military and was tried and sentenced by a military court.

<comment><USER28> not sure what your getting at ? a secret is a secret doesn't mater if you work for a civilian organisation or a military and arguably the CIA is a para military organisation as it has its own shooters

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Obama has decided he would rather lie about the pardon power than actually own any decision around pardons - both around Snowden ("I can't pardon before trial") and around DACA ("I can't pardon en masse"). There is clear precedent for both, historic and recent. I can't imagine he's unaware of this, I don't understand why he'd choose to lie so flagrantly, and as someone who has supported him a bit more than not it really makes me wonder what else he's been lying about.

</comment><comment><USER30> I think Snowden would be a fool to come back to the US, under any circumstances (and he's obviously no fool). Even if he is pardoned, they will find some other charge to make his life hell to set an example for others. He can never come back. I admire him for his convictions and thank him for his sacrifice so that we would have the truth.

</comment><comment><USER31> Whether or not he gets pardoned, the fact is that you now officially have an American _exiled_ for reasons of conscience, something that only _non- democratic regimes_ have.

<comment><USER26> He left voluntarily.

<comment><USER32> His passport was invalidated involuntary.

<comment><USER26> He wasn't exiled. He left the country, was charged with a crime, chose not to return. This is not how exile happens to people persecuted by authoritarian regimes. They leave under duress.

<comment><USER33> It's also what happens to actual criminals, so it's not that useful as a differentiator.

<comment><USER26> What state commonly exiles its own citizens that are actual criminals?

<comment><USER33> I don't know what you mean by expels. He ran before anyone knew that data was missing.

<comment><USER26> I didn't say expels. You started talking about criminals, apropos of I don't actually know what. Snowden wasn't 'exiled' from the US. His situation is not analogous to that of people who are. That's all I'm saying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I think it's bizarre he's supposedly considering pardoning Manning but not Snowden when only one of them was acting in a highly-contemplated civic-minded way.

</comment><comment><USER35> Even Snowden says to pardon Chelsea Manning… :/

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm reminded of this article (posted here a few months ago)

[https://www.lawfareblog.com/why-president-obama-wont-and- sho...](https://www.lawfareblog.com/why-president-obama-wont-and-shouldnt- pardon-snowden)

I found it to make a compelling case, if only because it offers less emotion and more citations than I've seen elsewhere on this topic.

<comment><USER37> > if only because it offers less emotion and more citations

This is such a weird metric. "More citations" sounds like "more lines of code", and the problem with an emotional plea is not that it is emotional but that it often replaces logical ones.

> the smidgen of his revelations about possibly unlawful domestic surveillance > or collection against U.S. persons

If you think that's an accurate characterization then you really didn't need this article to push you over the edge.

<comment><USER26> In what ways do you feel this characterization is inaccurate?

<comment><USER37> smidgen, possibly, conflation of legality and morality

<comment><USER26> All of these are perfectly defensible - the info in question was a 'smidgen' compared to the total amount of data taken, there is no universal agreement about the constitutionality of the program. There's no mention of morality in the bit you quoted. The author is a lawyer.

<comment><USER37> they may be defensible, but if you agree with them as stated, then you weren't ever on the fence about Snowden.

in other words, the article preaches to a choir and articulates a position for them. it doesn't aim to persuade an opposition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Snowden, Assange, Manning, Schwartz (RIP) ... Maybe Peltier.

</comment><comment><USER39> I signed it. Proud to be counted publicly. The oath of office that President Obama took demands that he pardon a whistleblower responsible for revealing massive violations of the Constition

The very concept of "setting an example" by not pardoning him is evil. Every case should be judged on its on merits and Snowden's case will be judged by history quite favorably.

Obama should have pardoned him and appointed him the NSA's Director of Compliance

Instead we have continued and increased violations of our rights as Americans.

Of course, the real problem is that Americans don't learn about principles, history, or civic duty in any serious way.

Most Americans don't really care if the government violates their rights because they don't really know what they are or why they're important. This can change quickly though, thanks to technology. I think the tide will turn soon.

<comment><USER40> Obama's administration was "setting an example" a bit too much, don't you think?! They got blood of many people on their hands. ( Like Aaron Swartz':( )

<comment><USER41> Swartz killed himself though. Unpopular opinion, but people need to stop acting like anybody but Swartz himself was responsible for his death. He wasn't even mistreated that bad, and he _did_ knowingly break the law

<comment><USER42> If this report[1] of him being threatened with 50 years of jail in correct, I would say he was treated quite badly.

[1] [https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120917/17393320412/us- go...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120917/17393320412/us-government- ups-felony-count-jstoraaron-swartz-case-four-to-thirteen.shtml)

<comment><USER43> >Depending on how many of the counts Swartz is found guilty of, the sentence could conceivably total 50+ years and fine in the area of $4 million.

The author is American so it's somewhat depressing he misunderstands the legal process so badly.

There is no conceivable scenario where Swartz could have been sentenced to 50 years in prison. Swartz's legal situation wasn't particularly grim and his lawyers would most certainly have informed him of this fact.

[http://volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-against- aa...](http://volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-against-aaron-swartz- part-2-prosecutorial-discretion/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Obama isn't going to pardon Snowden, of course he isn't. Maybe Putin will though.

<comment><USER45> I firmly believe he already has—does anyone believe that he would be alive today if not for the meticulous and persistent efforts of the FSB?

It's a strange sensation indeed, rooting for the success of the "other guys".

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Seems somewhat naive in that you can only pardon those who have been convicted. More of a statement of how the common US American public understands how the US government works.

<comment><USER47> Not remotely true. [http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2008/07/preemptive_presidential_pardons.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> At first I was anti-Snowdon, (he's a traitor and deserter). Then I was pro- Snowdon (so much stuff he's opened our eyes to). And now once again, I am anti-Snowdon (there's just too much circumstantial evidence that he's assisting the Russians/Putin).

<comment><USER49> do you have any links?

<comment><USER48> this took about 30 seconds:

[http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/edward-snowden- russian...](http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/edward-snowden-russian- agents-house-report-232917)

[https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/22/edward- snowd...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/22/edward-snowden- russia-spy-agency-contact-us-house-report)

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact- checker/wp/2014/01/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact- checker/wp/2014/01/22/is-snowden-working-for-the-russians/)

<comment><USER50> NSA trying to poison the well. Meh, keep trying, shill

[https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig- manipulation/](https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How can I convince my friend not to buy that new car? - <AUTHOR> So my good friend is mid-20s, recently got a full time gig as a SWE. He is usually a rational guy, but somehow convinced himself an SLK will improve his quality of life.
He just got out of debt too, and is getting a personal loan @ 15% p.a to finance said car - no savings.
How do I prevent him from making a terrible mistake? <comment><USER2> I also know a SWE who bought SLK despite all rational inputs from friends and relatives. Then in 3 years he changed it into VW Passat after he married and his wife was expecting a kid. That cost him some money as he needed to sell the car relatively quickly.

If your friend cannot be stopped getting a fast car, try to convince him at least to get Tesla which is faster than SLK and can be used as family car.

<comment><USER3> A Mercedes will mostly be more impressive than than a mere Tesla.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You probably can't.

The bottom line is that he appears to be an impulsive type of person.

You could try rational, logical arguments and they probably won't work. You need to understand his motivations about who he wants to impress. "Quality of life" might refer to who he wants to impress and what he thinks the new car will reflect upon his image. You might try to make him see that this is not the best path towards that goal.

Is it really going to be a "terrible mistake" or a learning experience that he will look back upon as another adventure in folly.

As a SWE he might pay it off quickly and having scratched that itch. It might be the motivation he needs to excel down the track or a passing fad. As a good friend you probably will be there to help him pick up the pieces if it comes to that.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nothing short of excessive and counterproductive measures can stop him per day. Best I can see is trying to find a good enough car for far cheaper if things like the margins on autoloans and the absurd "times the same car sticker price would be paid for new in the pay off period".

</comment><comment><USER5> Paying things with credit instead of savings is a /terrible/ mistake?

<comment><USER6> Paying 15% interest is a terrible mistake, yes. Especially for a depreciating asset like a car.

<comment><USER5> Depreciation is a concern if you are intent on selling said asset. If the credit deadline is one year, said friend will only pay 15% more and get to actually drive the car. That doesn't sound much like a terrible mistake, I've seen much worse.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How does one find a research avenue? (retry) - <AUTHOR> Hi all. I am considering getting into research, and I'm trying to figure out how one goes about finding a problem to solve.
Backstory: I completed my bachelors in '16 with some significant side/hobby projects (kernel/systems) and I'm now working as an engineer at one of the Major Ones. Although it pays well for now, I am slowly losing motivation and creativity and it is replacing my 'engineering for the fun of it' mindset with 'do what you're told to'. I'll need to adapt heavily to be able to thrive in this environment as a generic software engineer. I'm not learning, I'm not specializing, and I start to realize that I want to put in concentrated effort and work towards something for myself. Hence the idea of pursuing research. Or working for/on a startup.
My reason for going into academia to pursue a PhD would be, to be able to focus X years of independent research towards an idea I think can turn into a product later. But that depends on the idea/domain, the supervisors I work with and how success is measured (number of publications v/s real-world outcome, which may have a gap). Of course if I can't turn it into a product later, I have specialized and can come back to the industry.
Please correct me if my perspective is horribly wrong : ).
Thanks. <comment><USER2> My opinion, exaggerated a little, take it with a grain of salt:

The opportunities (scale, compute power, funding, how close you are to the edge of the state of the art) for research in industry are currently uniformly better than the opportunities for research in academia, and industry pays an order of magnitude or so more too.

If you followed ten "famous" CS profs five years ago, I'd guess that at least eight of them quit academia (despite having tenure) and now work at Google or Facebook.

So I think it's clear, at least to me, that if you want to do research it would be better to do it at a Major One. But I understand that it's hard to pull that off early in your career. Still, I would keep trying before taking the second-best option of academia.

</comment><comment><USER3> Firstly, getting a PhD is hard work, even when you think you've taken in account everyone telling you it's hard work, it's still harder than you think.

Secondly, it's extremely unlikely that research in academia aimed at getting a PhD will be suited to being turned into a business. The purposes of "research for degree" and "research for product" are totally different. If you try to achieve one by doing the other you'll likely succeed at neither.

To answer the question you started with, the problems you work on in getting a degree are ones agreed between you and your supervisor during your preliminary work. For a PhD you need something sufficiently mainstream as not to be dismissed as a toy problem, obscure enough that no one else is likely to be working on it, hard enough that results are worth the degree, and easy enough that you can make progress in a severely limited time. As I say, finding a problem that suits those criteria and then also asking that it's research that can be turned into a product is all a bit much.

There are avenues to explore other than taking a PhD. Spare time projects, contributing to Open Source, reduce your hours at BigCo and start a consultancy on the side, go freelance.

A PhD is probably not the best option, but in the end all I can do is provide an opinion for you to take as grist to the mill.</comment>


Ask HN: What sites should I have in my RSS feed? - <AUTHOR> I recently switched to RSS and I'm really enjoying how distraction-free reading is. (For anyone looking to do the same, I highly recommend NextCloud News if you have a server for cross-platform syncing). However, my RSS feeds are a little thin. Turns out finding RSS feeds is difficult, and finding ones that work well with the entire article and not just a header is next to impossible. What are some good websites with in-depth thoughtful articles that I can get via RSS? I honestly don't care about the content, just looking for material I can read and feel like I've learned, or expanded my own thoughts, distraction free. <comment><USER2> Aside from HN,

Julia Evans

Math ∩ Programming

NASA Image of the Day

Until Latini - retired?

Quanta Magazine

a few select departments from NYT and other big papers.

Then there are comics - but that's another story.

Team RSS!

</comment><comment><USER3> popurls is an aggregator of aggregators, you will find content to suit your taste there.

[http://popurls.com/](http://popurls.com/)

Some of my fav science and culture sites are:

[http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/feed/](http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/feed/) [http://nautil.us/rss/all](http://nautil.us/rss/all) [http://feeds.feedburner.com/IeeeSpectrumFullText](http://feeds.feedburner.com/IeeeSpectrumFullText) [http://www.quantamagazine.org/feed/](http://www.quantamagazine.org/feed/) [https://www.sapiens.org/feed/](https://www.sapiens.org/feed/) [https://medium.com/feed/deep-code](https://medium.com/feed/deep-code) [http://quillette.com/feed/](http://quillette.com/feed/) [http://feedproxy.google.com/brainpickings/rss](http://feedproxy.google.com/brainpickings/rss) [https://www.thisiscolossal.com/feed/](https://www.thisiscolossal.com/feed/) [http://slatestarcodex.com/feed/](http://slatestarcodex.com/feed/) [https://lithub.com/feed/](https://lithub.com/feed/)

</comment><comment><USER4> I write this diesel generator blog. I find it interesting, you may as well. [https://swiftequipment.com/articles-white- papers/](https://swiftequipment.com/articles-white-papers/)</comment>


The Lucrative Business of Fake Social Media Accounts - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/28/the-lucrative-business-of-fake-social-media-accounts.html <comment><USER2> I used to work for a law firm that did this. They first did it in the late 1990s on Yahoo Clubs and some Internet forums. It was a do it or get fired sort of thing, they used a clause in my contract to make me "do other things not described in the contract, as dictated by management"</comment>


Death of the Nile - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/death_of_the_nile <comment><USER2> This is very sad and sickening. I wonder where we are headed with this. I hope that these countries will somehow start treating this stream as scarce resource, but I believe western style environmentalism is quite a stretch. If the Nile collapses Europe will see refugees streams of unimaginable magnitude.

<comment><USER3> > If the Nile collapses

When, really.

> western style environmentalism is quite a stretch

Africa's natural resources have been raped and pillaged by the west for many decades. Even today, most people in the west simply don't realize how the effects of that era are still felt strongly. Millions living under extreme poverty do not have the luxury of thinking about the environment when the price of that thought is not putting food on the table. Same can be said for the massive population growth. Birth control requires education, which requires prosperity, which Africa lacks almost completely.

> If the Nile collapses Europe will see refugees streams of unimaginable > magnitude.

As someone in Western Europe who definitely believes this day will come, _soon_ , I can only say we reap what we sow. The crimes of past European powers (think Belgian Congo for a single example) are slowly but surely catching up with the current generation and I think it's way too late to avoid the consequences.

<comment><USER4> "We reap what we sow" assumes an old testament concept of multi generational collective guilt and picturing your migration scenario penance, or divine(?) punishment sounds a little weird.

Also, give Africa a little credit, literacy rates are up, maybe the problems can be tackled right over there?

[https://ourworldindata.org/wp- content/uploads/2013/03/ourwor...](https://ourworldindata.org/wp- content/uploads/2013/03/ourworldindata_literacy-rate-by-age-in-middle-east- and-northern-africa.png)

<comment><USER5> How about "Our children reap what we sow"?

<comment><USER4> How about trying to correctly attribute guilt to specific persons, committing specific crimes instead?

Geopolitics is complicated and neither of us can take very little credit/guilt for the actions of any political entity that I happen to be part of.

<comment><USER6> The economic if-thens are not moral (well, they are, but not in this sense). The idea that they have a bearing on guilt is projective.

To be fair, you should feel guilty, and so do I, and I work to push back on my own country's historical indecencies.

<comment><USER7> He should feel proud of vaccines and antibiotics too then, the greatest boon mankind ever had. _Very_ proud indeed. The populations in Africa would be a tiny fraction of what they currently are were it not for Western innovations. Likewise, the West has utterly crushed global absolute poverty, and is the leading pressure that is trying to end the ancient practice of slavery.

By every objective metric (child mortality, lifespan, literacy, starvation, absolute poverty), the world is a better place today than ever before. By a _huge_ margin. Entirely thanks to the West.

I only mention this because there seems to be this narrative that we in the West should feel bad for the past, yet the West has been a firm net positive in the world. Probably the greatest net positive there ever was... provided we survive global warming, that is.

So if we're going to guilt-trip people today for the actions of some historical Westerners, we should adulate people too for the actions of some historical Westerners. But somehow that never happens.

The West is objectively the best thing that ever happened to mankind.

<comment><USER8> _> Entirely thanks to the West._

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

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

Imho, the West shouldn't feel bad for the actions of historical Westerns.

But it should absolutely feel bad for the (not insignificant) portion of its prosperity that was a result of that history.

To put it another way, say I run an illegal sweatshop in Africa, bury my profits, leave a note to my daughter telling her where to find the money, then die.

She doesn't get to ethically say "My dad was a terrible person and wrong" _AND_ keep that money.

Even if she didn't know where the money came from, started a business with it, became successful through her hard work, and only finds out later, she still bears guilt.

You don't get to rig the game in your favor, then even things out after you've collected winnings from crooked hands and say "Okay, everything's fair now."

<comment><USER7> _> But it should absolutely feel bad for the (not insignificant) portion of its prosperity that was a result of that history._

And it should feel _great_ for the amazing things it has done for the world as well, as any graph of poverty and disease since the 1700s shows.

And therein lies the rub: when was the last time you heard someone thank the West? It is likely 4 out of 5 people alive today wouldn't be if it weren't for the West. Of the remainder, 94% would live in absolute poverty, instead of the current 10%. They'd live at most 40 years, instead of 70+. They'd be anywhere from 300-1200x more likely to be starving. Instead of almost everyone reaching old age, 1/3 - 1/2 of all children would die of various causes. And so on, and so on, and so on.

 _And so on._ The list just doesn't end. The past was hellish to the modern eye. I wonder why!

Focussing only on the bad, and completely ignoring the good, is intellectually dishonest and betrays a complete lack of perspective.

 _> "Okay, everything's fair now."_

Except the world would be objectively far worse off if it wasn't for those crooked hands. See above.

<comment><USER8> You're supposing an alternative where it was only possible for the West to have created these inventions you allude to.

While there have been thesises that only Great Britain possessed the necessary ingredients for steam power and industrialization, that argument isn't universally held. And I refuse to believe that this applies to every invention, especially as world population increased.

<comment><USER7> You're right, but in the current timeframe? That's one hell of a stretch.

I'll go Bayesian on this one. And so: thanks West!

<comment><USER9> Eh? If time frame was the criteria we could Just start wars again. Remove all the people except the victors and chattel.

And there's billions who never got a chance to ever get medicine. Billions more never born or able to live with a fighting chance because the entire social structure was yanked out, root and branch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > From the controversial construction of Africa's largest dam in the rugged > hinterland just shy of the Sudanese border, to Addis Ababa's alleged > displacement of tens of thousands of villagers in order to lease their prime > Nile-side land to foreign agribusinesses, an uneasy pall hangs over the > entire area.

Who are these "foreign agribusinesses"? Is it western corporations like "gourmet coffee" producers and such, or something more elementary / basic like wheat, rice, grain producers?

And who is leading the prime Nile-side land to them? The government (which might be corrupt) or is it greedy individuals who are destroying their ecosystem at the cost of their fellow dwellers?

> Just reporting there means navigating a complicated minefield of > checkpoints, informants, and terrified interviewees.

Why?

<comment><USER11> If you care to look, it's by and large South Asian and East Asian "from India, Turkey, Pakistan, China and Sudan as well as Saudi Arabia, have leased Ethiopian land."[1]

[1][https://ig.ft.com/sites/land-rush- investment/ethiopia/?mhq5j...](https://ig.ft.com/sites/land-rush- investment/ethiopia/?mhq5j=e6)

<comment><USER10> Wow. I did not know that. India and China alone account for nearly 1/2 the world population. Don't think this leasing of land can be 'undone' any time soon...

<comment><USER12> And yet, India and China produce all the food they need (even if India has a horrible record of distributing that food to those who need it).

I'm not sure why the Ethiopian govt. has allowed this to happen. Smells a lot like corruption.

<comment><USER13> There were horrible famines in India, under British rule. Ever since independence there hasn't been one major famine in India.

<comment><USER12> The horrible famines during British times were also caused by distribution problems and not solely due to lack of grains/foodstuffs. Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize for showing that.

While its true that there hasn't been a catastrophic famine in India, it still suffers from widespread hunger and undernourishment of its children.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Around a decade ago, chickens were infected (I don't remember with what) and were making people sick in Cairo. So most people slaughtered them and threw them in the nile.

The nile is also the source of Bilharziasis. The nile is where a vast number of people throw their trash.

</comment><comment><USER15> 8 years ago on a felucca in the middle of the Nile in Luxor I saw a dead horse float by

</comment><comment><USER16> _A lot of this appears to be due to climate change, and it is happening up and down the Nile valley._

Yes, and the ensuing political and social instability is driving mass migration; this is an accelerating process. What will happen when tens of millions of desperate Africans flee to Europe? The first, small, pulse of immigration is changing the political landscape of Europe!

I really don't know the answers to these questions, but holy shit they worry me!

<comment><USER17> Should questions like these already influence whether/where we buy property or whether to have children? It's hard to find anyone who's optimistic about Europe 30-50 years into the future.

<comment><USER16> I honestly don't know. I struggle with a somewhat depressive outlook, but horrifically reality and that outlook have been slowly converging. I hope that I'm wrong, just a cranky guy, because the alternatives are genuinely terrifying me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> A side point but these BBC articles are essentially unreadable, with huge pictures, weird scrolling that only works with a mouse (no space-for-next- page) etc. No text-only link. Could they get a warning similar to the [video] title amendment?

<comment><USER19> I'm reading those stories on my Android phone with Firefox and they work very well. I'll try them on my laptop and remember to use the space bar to scroll (touchpad is more natural to me.)

<comment><USER20> It is a bit weird but (to me) works well once I got used to it. I can see what they are trying to do and in some parts it is quite a clever form of presentation.

On my laptop (Linux, Chromium) it works fine with a two finger scroll on the touchpad - ie "mouse". I also tried space bar and that does work but most of the "roller blinds" stop halfway until the next press. All the content was readable.

To me, the mechanism does work but I'm not sure it actually improves the medium. I really am in two minds as to whether the effort is really worth it. The transitions and so on _do_ have an impact but I'm not sure it lends itself to everyone's reading style.

It feels more like a presentation and less like an article, and that could be the nagging feeling at the back of my mind. Maybe I need to read more of these things to get a proper perspective on this form of presentation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> >"We've always treated the river badly, we've always assumed it was big enough," said Youssef Abugroun, an engineer and part-time fisherman, whose regular evening sessions now net him around 10% of his catch a decade ago. "But maybe we're just too many for that now."

And further down, mentions that the water is just "too filthy". Sounds like a large part of this is due to people shitting into the river they drink from. Makes it hard to have much sympathy.

<comment><USER22> Oh no, people shit and threw thrash in a river their neighbors down the river drink from. Why should they worry?</comment></comment>


Show HN : 7 Minutes Workout app for iOS (weekend project) - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/app/7-minutes-workout/id650627810?l=en&ls=1&mt=8

<comment><USER2> Great job, even more for a weekend project! Will definitely try it tonight!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! You can find out a little more about how I built it on my blog : [http://kirualex.github.io/#!/scribble/4](http://kirualex.github.io/#!/scribble/4)

<comment><USER3> very cool. will try it out tonight.</comment></comment></comment>


Google Docs users hit with sophisticated phishing attack - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/3/15534768/google-docs-phishing-attack-share-this-document-with-you-spam <comment> et-al Existing discussion on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14258918](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14258918)</comment>


Ask HN: Experience with netbooks - <AUTHOR>

I just bought a netbook (LG X130) with around $500, but it's nice and not slow.
It has two buttons: one to start the Windows OS and the other to start a weired platform that LG made (a browser + Skype + things like that).
It's not bad to use Windows (XP right now); but I'm using this little device just to browse the internet (sites like HN, read emails, watch videos and chat).
I read about Android but I don't know it; can it work in netbooks? Also what's your experience with netbooks? What platform, apps.. do you use? and why?
Thanks for your replies! <comment><USER2> Netbooks are the Nintendo Wiis of the laptop world.

I fell for the netbook hype and bought a Mini 9. What I wanted was a convenient way to quickly get on the web to get movie times or weather or check my email. What I got was a laptop that boots up slower than my Macbook, with a screen that is too small, a processor too slow, and a keyboard prone to typos. It's infinitely easier to just open the lid on the sleeping Macbook instead.

At this point, the Mini 9 basically only sees use as a streaming media player for the kids. It's actually usable for that.

That said, I hold out hope for Chromium OS netbooks. I played around Dell's build of Chromium OS on the Mini 9 and it shows great potential. It booted up and was ready to browse the web in about 15 seconds.

So my advice - wait until Chromium OS netbooks start popping up this fall.

</comment><comment><USER3> I bought an Eeepc 701sd on Ebay for $170. The screen and keyboard were hell to get used to, but it's actually one of the best purchases I've made in a long time. I'm currently travelling Asia with nothing but a small backpack, and if I had brought a larger laptop, I probably would have needed to buy a bigger backpack.

I'm currently running Ubuntu Karmic, (normal, not UNR). The screen feels cramped at times (800x480), but it hasn't been a huge issue. One problem I had was dialog boxes' confirmation buttons running off the bottom of the screen, but then I found that alt+click&drag moves the window.

The 701sd comes with a 8gb ssd, and an internal SD card reader. I got a 8gb SDHC card, but 16gb is still restrictive at times, so I have to run at absolute minimum and clean stuff up regularly.

Webapps can be a bit slow, and flash is a bitch. I can watch most flash videos, but not in fullscreen. Non-flash videos work fine up to about 780p. Above that and the videos start to stutter.

Battery life was nice when I bought it (3hrs+), but now I'm down to about 1.5 hrs on a full charge. Annoying but not crippling.

The biggest issue I've had is with the charger. My Eeepc is about 6 months old, and the charger gave out yesterday. My friend's charger also gave out recently, and he bought his Eeepc about the same time as me.

In summary, I miss the big screen and full-size keyboard of my old laptop, but this Eeepc is pretty much perfect for my needs right now.

Edit: it helps that the girls think it's "cute"

</comment><comment><USER4> I bought the original netbook, ASUS eeepc 701 surf, and I hated it. The 7in screen was too small, and a keyboard at 92% normal size just wasn't working for me. However something around the 10in might be handy from time to time.

I used ubuntu netbook remix and windows xp. Found both to work moderately well performance wise.

<comment><USER5> The keyboard situation was the same for me and it turned out to be the deal breaker.

I had the Asus 1000HE (a 10.1") with the same 92% of normal size keyboard and I just never got used to it. I have an easier time typing on my Blackberry (which is such a different experience that my normal keyboard reaching instincts don't apply)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I got an Acer Aspire One for $270. I upgraded the RAM and got a 9 cell battery. I installed Windows 7 Ultimate, and I haven't looked back. It's a little slow opening apps, and the sleep/suspend is a little wonky. But, I now have a laptop that lasts an entire day of traveling from San Francisco to Barcelona without being plugged in.

</comment><comment><USER7> I bought the Dell Mini-10 a year ago, and I love it.

The keyboard on the Dell is laid out slightly better than the Eeepc (IMO), and it runs Windows 7 fast enough for the majority of what I do. I went with the 6 cell battery, so start up time isn't an issue (just put it to sleep).

My only issues with it are that the screen resolution is too small to do any real coding on (but big enough in a pinch) and flash video can get a little choppy.

No other issues, and I use it constantly, either by itself, or as a secondary machine when working on my desktop.

<comment><USER8> Another nod for the Dell Mini-10. I bought it with Ubuntu preinstalled, but wound up swapping Netbook Remix for a plain install of Karmic. With Google Chrome running fullscreen, it's a very usable and capable web browsing machine, but I echo Steve's comments about trying to do any real coding on it.

6-Cell battery is worth it, the keyboard is well laid-out and decently large, and I went with the 32 Gig SSD so I don't have to worry about bumping it during operation. It's a bit unnerving hitting the power button waiting for the comforting hum of starting up, as the whole system is passively cooled and makes zero noise.

My main gripe is that it's near impossible to click and drag on the small touchpad with the integrated button.

<comment><USER7> Thank you. I forgot to add that the touch pad stinks. Putting a strip of scotch tape along the bottom where the "buttons" are helps things considerably.

Wireless mouse helps more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> i've had an asus eeepc 1000HE for about 6 months now, and its great, mostly because it has been, so far, exactly what i expected. i bought it because it has a bigger screen (10-ish in), wider chicklet keyboard, and 9.5 hr battery.

i use it pretty much exclusively as a web browser, accessing web apps, and as an ssh terminal to do web dev work on my slice. no high powered apps to make it seem sluggish.

</comment><comment><USER10> I have an Asus eeepc 901. It is my main development machine. It's fast enough for the stuff I'm doing on it (python web app development). I don't have any way to connect to the internet when I'm on the go, but that's actually a benefit; it forces me to just be working without distractions whenever I'm on a train trip which lasts more than 20 minutes.

I never turn it off, I goes to sleep when I close it. It's a bit slower to wake up from standby compared to my macbook, but that's ok because I intend to be working on it for atleast 30 minutes. I use emacs inside a GNU Screen, so when I get home I can just ssh into it and continue working where I left off -- but with a proper screen+keyboard.

The machine is horribly slow when using Windows XP, completely unusable. Don't get a budget machine like this unless you run linux with a light-weight window manager, etc..

The keyboard is tiny, but good enough. And I love the form factor, the macbook I used before this was too big and heavy to carry around all the time, but this netbook is coming with me on almost every trip.

</comment><comment><USER11> Acer Aspire 1 with 2gig ram. Running XP Home SP3.

My usual app mix: firefox with 3-10 tabs and 1 or 2 windows cygwin x server with 0-2 remote x apps 2-5 ssh terminals (local urxvt clients) notepad++ with 1-4 tabs open openoffice writer and calc

Throughout the day I sometimes run: a native windows web server, a hosted virtual linux install, pdfs, torrent clients, rdp clients, cygwin or native java tools, and several oldish video games (diablo2, morrowind, warcraft3, galciv2, angband)

My primary problem is the screen size, many games are unplayable without connecting to a desktop monitor since the max native resolution on the screen is something goofy like 1024x600. This also means that some web apps have layout issues - they can usually be worked around with some combination of browser and plugin configuration.

The dual core 1.6ghz processor is surprisingly capable - opening spreadsheets and pdfs sometimes open in 2.5 seconds rather than 2 seconds, but I somehow manage to get by :D

</comment><comment><USER12> I have an Acer Aspire One, the biggest problem for me is the small keyboard, I have big hands and is a touch typist. I've tried a couple of linux distros on it, but the by far best, and that I am running now is moblin. Boots really fast, looks nice, the hardware works well and most tools I need are installed by default.

I have, however given it to my 3 year old to play with. It's better that she has a real computer instead of a play computer, perhaps she'll have a sense of ownership of something fully working (maybe future career as programmer father thinks :). I liked _real_ tools when I was a kid. She likes to type letters on it, listen to music, videos and play with the interface.

</comment><comment><USER13> I bought a netbook ([http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002DYIXMS/ref=ox_ya_oh_pro...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002DYIXMS/ref=ox_ya_oh_product)) for my wife and installed OSX on it. Had to replace the wifi card, but otherwise everything was completely compatible. It's pretty fast and gets the job done. Battery life is phenomenal.

Could I use it for work? Probably not. The screen is too small, and the keyboard is uncomfortable to type on. It's great for just fooling around on the internet and playing the occasional game of nethack ;)

</comment><comment><USER14> I love my netbook for surfing the web. It's a low-fuss way to have some mobile computing power on the go or on the couch.

I run Firefox and have it setup to launch in full screen mode so the screen real estate actually feels fairly decent for what it is.

I tend to use it for watching itunes movies or netflix before bed as well. The only complaint I have is that the wifi is slow when you aren't plugged in to an AC outlet.

</comment><comment><USER15> I got a Lenovo S10, and after replacing the stock Linux with Ubuntu, it worked. But it wasn't a nice computing experience, they hadn't even bothered to make the trackpad work sensibly.

Eventually I gave up and got a discounted previous generation MacBook Air. Same weight, but a usable computer running the same OS as my desktop. Much better!

</comment><comment><USER16> Sadly, Matlab (my main tool) is damn slow on my asus eee pc 901. I thought of buying another netbook but came to conclusion that none of netbooks currently available at the market has resources to run matlab smoothly enough.

</comment><comment><USER17> I bought an Aspire 1410 recently; it's more of an ultraportable than a netbook, though.

I have to say I love it. Just the right size, capable, and decent Ubuntu support.</comment>


Ask HN: How can I make my career change a reality? - <AUTHOR>

I work for a start-up in a smaller city. I was lucky to find this job when I did and now we've been acquired by a very large company which will remain anonymous. With the acquisition, things have changed we have to use the technologies listed in their corporate policy.Any enjoyment I had working here is now gone.
My family and I have made the decision that we want to move to San Francisco. I want to find a job there and work on a new challenge. My real passion is for Rails and other open source technologies. I've been a speaker at a couple of conferences and I have contributed some to open source. My work experience for the past few years is mostly .Net which I no longer want to have much involvement with.
My plan is to puts loads of code up on github and and possibly travel there to network.Is there something else I can be doing? Are the odds stacked against me? <comment><USER2> You're jumping into a pretty darn good area for development. Given that you probably have some really good experience behind you it's hard to say it'll take you long before you snag something up here. Hell, I moved out to Cali, from the Midwest, with < $1000 and little programming experience in the deepest part of this economic downturn...

Set your mind and go. The odds are not against you.

As for things to do. Fix up the LinkedIN profile and fire up a digital portfolio real quick (nothing crazy fancy). Hit up craigslist, monster, and startuply and let the games begin.

Good luck

</comment><comment><USER3> Posting here is a great start, what's your email address? Several companies that I know well are complaining about their inability to find good Rails developers here in SF. A good company will value passion and the ability to learn over X years experience in Y, as long as you can convince them that you can deliver.

<comment><AUTHOR> sae.spare [at] gmail is my email address for contacting me.

Thanks for the input. This is becoming an adventure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The odds are certainly not stacked against you. It would appear the best way to make your career change a reality is to quit your job.

Connect with your network and see what jobs are available.

With several speaking engagements and an acquisition under your belt -- I am sure you will add value to another company!</comment>


Show HN: Deploy an API Gateway HTTP API Today with AWS CDK - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cdk-patterns/serverless/tree/master/the-simple-webservice <comment><USER2> For people who want to try using this stack, please be aware of the cost running this stack isn't cheap.

I recommend to watch this session in ServerlessDays Virtual April 2020 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4WoQd2yVJQ&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4WoQd2yVJQ&feature=youtu.be&t=3407)

<comment><AUTHOR> These are learning patterns, not for putting straight into production. So they should mostly all fit within the free tier for learning

Sheen is brilliant so i'm not disputing his presentation but the costs linked were worst case scenario v1 API Gateway with an expensive cache. Http APIs are 70% cheaper and there is no cache in this example.</comment></comment>


An Artificial Biological Leaf [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hU-T0ht2OdQ <comment><USER2> I believe this project is intended to be more of a 'design fiction' than a functioning photosynthetic material (RCA is well known for this type of work). Of course free organelles that aren't maintained by the cellular machinery will rapidly cease to function. They will maintain their green color but won't be able to perform membrane/macromolecule repair, gradient regulation, signaling, foreign body defense, etc.

This is still a useful project however as it may serve to catalyze future research into robust photosynthetic materials.

<comment><USER3> Do you know anyone working on this 'for real'? Synthetic biologists so to speak. I've looked into this before to no avail.

<comment><USER2> Not familiar with the lab personally but this is probably close to the state of the art right now. [http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl903141j](http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl903141j)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Did someone in the video squeeze leafs in order to extract chlorophyll or something? It sounds crazy to destroy leaves in order to build artificial leaves..

<comment><USER5> Next artificial meat. Simply grind some beef and mold into a patty.

<comment><USER6> There were a few projects on this, from the same school. For one, James King's artificial meat: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmqHnBp8odg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmqHnBp8odg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sounds like a very cool project. Any idea where we can find more info on it? Specifically, it would be interesting to learn where does the freed Carbon go: this topic is not covered in images and the little text that is available on the site. Also (or perhaps related to it) what's the longevity of the leaf and what does it require for photosynthesis to run (regular leafs require at least water and removal or generated organic material)

</comment><comment><USER8> Url changed from [http://www.sciencedump.com/content/first-man-made- biological...](http://www.sciencedump.com/content/first-man-made-biological- leaf), which points to this.</comment>


Ask HN: How do I meet startup founders in SF? - <AUTHOR>

I am visiting SF next week and will be there for a few days. During my stay, I would like to meet founders and developers and have interesting chat.
I have fairly good experience with cloud ops and scaling apps and stacks across datacenters. So I might be able to bring something to the table as well.
If any of you awesome people are available next week, coffee is on me :) <comment><USER2> I'd suggest looking for an industry related meetup and attending. Another suggestion would be to contact the startups in the city you know and love directly. Send me an email, it's on my hn profile (as should yours)</comment>


Show HN: Space Age Hand Tools in the Maker Age - <AUTHOR> https://justinmiller.io/posts/2019/03/14/vw681/ <comment><USER2> The chamfer in the detail is wrong in your model.

Section A-A is what you would see if you sliced the part along the dotted line and see it from the direction indicated by the arrows.

If you cut your part along A-A you would see a rectangle, not a trapezoid.

[https://imgur.com/moJzOiw](https://imgur.com/moJzOiw)

edit: did my own model and added a picture for reference :)

<comment><USER3> You're correct. The shape of the tool is the way it is so it doesn't get wedged at the bottom of the seal groove.

The part in contact with the old seal is about as wide as the seal, the part in contact with the seal groove is narrower, as it should be.

The tool as shaped by the OP would get wedged between grime and fragments of the old seal or might cut the old seal because of the too narrow point that only contacts the old seal in the middle or on either edge.

<comment><USER2> ebay listing of the original part with closeup pictures. :)

[https://www.ebay.de/itm/1x-Spezial-Werkzeug-VW-Hebel-fuer- Di...](https://www.ebay.de/itm/1x-Spezial-Werkzeug-VW-Hebel-fuer-Dichtung- VW-681-Original-ex-BW-Bundeswehr-VW1-/362219167704)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very nice write up, and it seems like you had a lot of fun.

I play with OpenSCAD for fun, but because I use Inventor and Rhino at work, and FreeCAD at home, I don't use OpenSCAD to actually design stuff.

If I want to do generative, creative and coded design I use Racket with the Rosetta package [1] with Rhino or AutoCAD as my backend. I am trying to port Rosetta to FreeCAD [2], so it is all free. Racket with Rosetta is a lot more free or open to creating generative designs than OpenSCAD. I really get a kick out of Grasshopper [3] with Rhino too.

[1] [http://web.ist.utl.pt/antonio.menezes.leitao/Rosetta/tutoria...](http://web.ist.utl.pt/antonio.menezes.leitao/Rosetta/tutorials/introduction.html)

[2] [https://www.freecadweb.org](https://www.freecadweb.org)

[3] [https://www.rhino3d.com/6/new/grasshopper](https://www.rhino3d.com/6/new/grasshopper)

<comment><USER5> > I am trying to port Rosetta to FreeCAD ... so it is all free.

This sounds really interesting. I've been wanting to work with Rosetta but with a backend other than AutoCAD, hopefully something that could run in Debian. I'd be interested to follow any progress you make on this front if there's a code repo / link you could point to, or maybe message me (contact info is in my profile).

<comment><USER4> Rosetta already has an OpenGL backend. My job is not coding, so getting Rosetta to work with FreeCAD is a personal project that I have not gone too far with. If I do, I will create a code repo. I sometimes code in Python for FreeCAD and Blender3D in the meantime. I like Rosetta, since it is striving to be a general purpose geometry-scripting language like Processing did for multimedia arts. Processing has been ported to, and is key to Rosetta.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is cool but I was left at the end wanting to know, did it work?

<comment><USER3> About as good as a screwdriver would have ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> hilarious! This is like the Malcolm in the Middle episode where Hal fixes a burned out light bulb. Search "Hal fixes a lightbulb" and you'll see what I mean.

<comment><AUTHOR> I do. There is a great GIF of that sequence floating around somewhere.

edit: [https://xo.tc/images/yackshaving- lightbulb.gif](https://xo.tc/images/yackshaving-lightbulb.gif)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There seems to be a lot of ... "not invented here" going on? It seems there's a determination to reinvent or discover stuff that could instead be learned. Like not having familiarity with technical drawing conventions.

Doing it all by trig seems like a lot of work too, a good parametric CAD system would have higher level primitives for curves, chamfer, fillet etc.

<comment><USER9> Isn't NIH essentially how humans learn? While this particular thing could've been made easier in a mouse-driven CAD tool, and a more pragmatic approach still would be to buy an off-the-shelf tool, this looks like a perfect project for someone who wants to get better at using OpenSCAD.</comment></comment>


The 2008 Google Founders' Letter (by Sergey Brin) - <AUTHOR> http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/MKuf/~3/4qGT0YLi1tQ/2008-founders-letter.html

<comment><USER2> Nice overview of everything Google does today.</comment>


First Kinect sex game tech demo arrived (NSFW)  - <AUTHOR> http://steamunpowered.eu/first-kinect-sex-game-tech-demo-arrived-nsfw/

<comment><USER2> Penny Arcade summed up nicely why I'll never play such a game:

<http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/11/29/>

<comment><USER3> Fuck Fuck Revolution :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Newsflash: my hands are busy when I'm watching porn.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm pretty sure if I ever fondled someone like that they would just get annoyed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Did you misunderstand the "demo" part of the title, bro?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> And so it begins, the destruction of human society.

<comment><USER7> Not just humans. This is what Frank Drake forgot in his equation. The percentage of civilizations that invent completely immersive sexual reproduction simulators and subsequently go extinct.

<comment><USER8> I'd rather it be like that then nuclear war.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have a feeling the TSA will soon be ordering Xboxes and Kinects for their um, training department.

</comment><comment><USER3> Coming soon: the "XBox Fit" doll/accessory for tactile feedback.

</comment><comment><USER9> I couldn't help but laugh uncontrollably while watching the demo.

I couldn't help but think we're dumb as a species if we think that'd be fun.

</comment><comment><USER10> Don't date robots!

</comment><comment><USER11> I was annoyed by all the previous Kinect games that would make me get up or do things. This on the other hand is a physical activity that I wouldnt mind performing.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think then the next step will be

Group centered...

</comment><comment><USER13> At least they've done enough testing to realise that interaction should be done with the left hand.

</comment><comment><USER14> Reminds me of the "Do The Evolution" video by Pearl Jam

</comment><comment><USER15> Finally, a practical use for the Kinect!

</comment><comment><USER16> This is disgusting, not because it is porn, but because someone felt the need to take a cutting edge piece of consumer technology and put the time and brain cycles into developing something like this.

Are people really that desperate, are their elements of society that actually have a need for this. The beginning of the end no doubt if this is the future of entertainment and sexual gratification.

<comment><USER17> Versus say taking cutting edge robotics technology and making stuff that kills people.

<comment><USER16> Weapons research is equally vile, it is also a differnt discussion. This is about sexual gratification.

<comment><USER17> Can you more clearly articulate why you think this (the sex thing) is vile?

What ill effect do you see it having on society? If none, then your argument basically comes down to "ick!", which is not a good argument.

<comment><USER16> I think lonely people crave companionship more than sex - given the choice. Society has formed in a way where "beautiful people" tend to get the breaks, get the sex and generally have a better quality of life. I understand a big part of this is also down to evolution and reproduction, but we have entire industries built on sexual aspiration such as fashion, advertising and porn.

I understand people crave sexual gratification, that's human nature, but I think products like this will only serve to compound the problem, make more people who feel this way look inward and ultimately more unfulfilled and lonely.

Would research and technology not be better served if it was used to help break these barriers and bring people together - rather than isolate them in their own lonely existences.

I am aware a lot of this is my own opnion, I just think it's pretty disgusting that this could be a possible future.

<comment><USER18> Technology tends to reflect its creators, but it's not as dystopian as you're making it out to be. For example, demand for broadband internet access was largely driven by a desire for access to porn.

I'm certain when photography was invented, some of the first photographs were of naked people. Undoubtedly someone was concerned about the future of humanity then, as well.

In the end, people still like sex with other people more than they like sex with imaginary people. I doubt that will ever change en masse.

<comment><USER16> Absolutely. My opnion is personal and definetly at the extreme end of the scale. I think debate on this is healthy and I'm open to having my opnion changed. I think blind acceptance however would be irresponsible.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Fourier visualised - <AUTHOR> https://84c67cd8f568acc648fb74bc321df20db70c2600.googledrive.com/host/0B3p9nx7jwyf9MjFtY3d1aXVBMjA/fourier.gif <comment><USER2> I'm only seeing an image, with no explanation, and it took me a while to realise what it was showing; so, in case anyone else is puzzled by it, each image is the sum of the previous one with a new factor (indicated by the "wheels upon wheels").

I think that the reconstruction of Homer Simpson's face (which I think I originally saw thanks to OP ColinWright!) may be a more convincing demonstration of the power of Fourier transforms: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVuU2YCwHjw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVuU2YCwHjw) . There's a Nautilus article about it, too: [http://nautil.us/blog/the-math- trick-behind-mp3s-jpegs-and-h...](http://nautil.us/blog/the-math-trick-behind- mp3s-jpegs-and-homer-simpsons-face) (EDIT: and an HN post discussing that: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6683866](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6683866) ).</comment>


AmoebaOS, a new "webos" with mail clients, ftp, proxying, etc - <AUTHOR> http://amoebaos.org/

<comment><USER2> For a few fractions of a second I had hopes that someone was reviving and opening up the Amoeba project. <http://www.cs.vu.nl/pub/amoeba/amoeba.html>

Fun facts about the Amoeba project, started by Andrew Tanenbaum, worked on by several graduate students including one named Guido Van Rossum who used it as a test bed for a programming language he was developing.

<comment><USER3> You do realize there will be a point in time we will run out of attractive names for operating systems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> so you need an os and a browser to run this webos ..

kinda defeats the purpose if you ask me ...

<comment><USER5> I actually quite amused by the following statement: "Imagine being able to boot up your Operating System in 3 seconds"

That is, after you booted up your real operating system.

<comment><USER4> I think they can do better! They should push it and go where no man has been and load their webos under a second .. (like most of the websites .... grin )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Clicking on Create Account gives the message:

"Hi! amoebaOS opens for Beta registration soon."</comment>


Ask HN: do you know of any sites similar to pythonchallenge.com? - <AUTHOR>

I am interested in solving puzzles using python and would like to know if there are any other sites similar to pythonchallenge.com <comment><USER2> Programming Praxis has a ton of interesting problems, many from fundamental Computer Science and often with a functional bent.

<http://programmingpraxis.com/>

</comment><comment><USER3> Have you come across Project Euler? <http://projecteuler.net/>

</comment><comment><USER4> You can try Marathon Matches at <http://topcoder.com/tc> (SRMs which are, almost, weekly competitions don't allow Python)

</comment><comment><USER5> You might consider checking out <http://notpron.org/notpron/levelone.htm>. It doesn't give programming puzzles, but from what I remember it was part of the inspiration behind the python site you mentioned.

</comment><comment><USER6> <http://www.codingbat.com/> has good python challenges. Simple but good.

</comment><comment><USER7> this one: <http://challenge.greplin.com/></comment>