38 People are looking at this post right now - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/OphirHarpaz/status/1184486445039411201 <comment><USER2> The Twitter thread pointed to a BBC article [1] that certainly suggests that the UK's regulators don't think this is okay. I've found that Booking.com legitimately treats independent rooms as "only one left" (e.g., the B&B has named rooms, so there's _always_ just one of a kind for each) but I suspect any investigation into most of these sites leads to "this is full of misleading dark patterns".

[1] [https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49740143](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49740143)

<comment><USER3> Booking.com is horrible to use in my opinion. It is handy but you need to ignore the dark patterns on every. Single. Page.

Honestly it makes me want to use the website less, and does not urge me to buy.

<comment><USER4> Last time I had a phone screening with the, I learned their entire codebase was in Perl, with no plans on migration to anything else. There were almost no unit tests anywhere. Most developers could push directly to production.

Everything the girl on the phone said was horrifying and I decided not to continue. Their recruiter kept trying to call me over Skype though, and they offer more than most other companies of that size in the EU, so I suspect they're pretty desperate.

This was back in 2015 so maybe it's changed, but it sounds like a terrible place as far as technology and tech debt goes.

<comment><USER5> > their entire codebase was in Perl, with no plans on migration to anything > else. There were almost no unit tests anywhere. Most developers could push > directly to production.

One of these things is not like the others. Not liking Perl is a valid personal choice, but doesn't say much about the codebase. The others are telling though. More so if it's true given that Perl has a very heavy culture of testing (the TAP protocol comes from Perl, and Perl is known for being very test heavy in its module ecossytem), which means they would be going against that culture to have no unit tests.

That said, I'm not sure if we should consider "the girl on the phone" doing the screening as knowledgeable about the process. That description doesn't convey that you thought very highly of her, so I'm not sure why we should take her word as authoritative...

<comment><USER6> The third hand knowledge I have of booking.com was that lack of unit tests was an explicit choice. I.e. they felt it was more efficient to just catch bugs in production and be quick to fix them than spend time in unit tests that got obsolete fast and add friction.

I didn't buy in the narrative, but it was an interesting perspective.

<comment><USER5> I agree, that sounds like management being afraid to deal with the technical debt they've accrued.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A while back I was working at a web startup (since folded), and management decided they wanted to inflate the usage numbers reported on the home page.

I was asked to write the code for it. I refused, telling my boss that I didn't want to lie to our users. He said, "it's not for them, it's for the board." "So we're lying to the board, then?" I asked. He dropped it, and the task fell to another engineer.

The first version was deployed, with one slight oversight: he forgot to round the number the algorithm generated, so the home page displayed something like "157,311.18461947940563848871625 active users this month!" The bug was quickly rectified.

<comment><USER8> I'd pitch that to the board like the algorithm was just smart enough to detect the partial activity coefficient ranging in [0, 1].

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> So some manager came up with this, tasked a PO, who tasked a team, and a frontend developer implemented it - and in this chain, in the end, everyone complied. I know it's not like murder, but especially in a field where it's so easy to hop into another job/project, one should have greater integrity.

<comment><USER10> Can't assume they don't have integrity. They might just have different moral values.

I would gladly implement this any day. Its not illegal.

<comment><USER11> > They might just have different moral values.

This is why "values" is a terrible word to use to describe morals.

Values are subjective things like modesty or frugality. Those are values, because how you dress or spend your money generally have consequences only to yourself.

Something becomes immoral when it deprives another person of their inalienable rights; it causes them harm. Others' rights aren't subject to negotiation, that's what "inalienable" means.

That one can often get away with bullying or lying might make it _seem_ like it's just a personal choice. That is, until people get fed up with it and hold that person to account for their actions.

<comment><USER10> Same thing with morality, its subjective.

There are no such thing as inalienable rights. Every right has to be earned and fight for.

<comment><USER12> One of the ways you earn and fight for those rights is by not claiming they don't exist. There are already enough people in the world who think you don't deserve those rights. Best to keep the goal posts far away and convince as many others as you can that that's where they belong.

<comment><USER10> Yes, any rights exist because someone earn it or fight for it.

Its not just given from god or something.

<comment><USER11> And yet tribes and nations that recognize and protect inalienable rights are consistently able to defeat those that assume the strong should have power over the weak.

The reason being that individuals living in societies with inalienable rights feel they have more worth fighting for, and they are more industrious and able to build robust trust networks.

None of that is subjective, it's all how the universe works, so, yes, you could plausibly attribute it to God or any kind of creator.

<comment><USER10> The strong does always have power over the weak. The right that exist right now is because someone powerful enough to fight for it and maintain it, otherwise those right doesn't exist.

Rights are subjective, meaning it depends on the particular society, even it may have different meaning to everyone. Example: The rights for woman in Afghanistan and USA are different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A dark pattern implies something that is intentionally misleading. This is just lying. This is not a dark pattern because it's Worse.

<comment><USER14> I mean, you can't be sure they're lying. Odds are nonzero that 38 ppl _were_ looking at that flight

<comment><USER15> >I mean, you can't be sure they're lying. Odds are nonzero that 38 ppl were looking at that flight

I suggest you click on the link, they absolutely are lying. They're using JS to generate a random number between 28 and 45. If there happens to be 38 people looking at that flight it's entirely coincidental.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> 5- Here's the twitter thread in the screenshot: [https://twitter.com/OphirHarpaz/status/1184486445039411201](https://twitter.com/OphirHarpaz/status/1184486445039411201)

<comment><USER16> Someone else in that thread asks:

> I wonder if they report a lower price to Google as well.

Presumably for the little boxes which show up below certain Google ads with price points []. I know that's against Google Ads' policies, but has anyone heard of it happening nonetheless?

[] [https://support.google.com/google- ads/answer/2497706](https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2497706)

<comment><USER17> Yes it happened to me, a hotel was priced significantly cheaper on Google and on their site initially. When the price went up I just called the hotel and the higher rate was their standard and only rate that they offered. The initial advertised price was never an actual option.

<comment><USER18> I work for Google.

You can report fraudulent ads with the form here: [https://support.google.com/google- ads/contact/vio_other_aw_p...](https://support.google.com/google- ads/contact/vio_other_aw_policy)

<comment><USER19> Google should do a better job at fraudulent ads instead of waiting for a consumer to complain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Yes, I think it is false advertising, so should be illegal.

<comment><USER16> The only way out of it I can think of would be: if the site could prove that some number of people, greater than 45, were hitting that specific query on that specific page, then vacuously, they could say that any number of people between 1 and 45 were also looking at the offer.

But then, why wouldn't they just display "at least 45 people" or the exact number? I'm struggling to find some way of doing this which could be any stupider (`view_notification_random` ??) than what we see.

<comment><USER21> The source code literally calls Math.random. I hope that defence wouldn't fly in court, even if accidentally true.

<comment><USER22> Always get in the seat of the defense.

I would absolutely have made a few headless browsing bots masquarading as users just incase this scenario occurred

Look your honor the logs say other users, "people", were looking regardless of our random function

<comment><USER21> Would admitting to gaming those numbers make your defence somehow stronger? Or would you withhold that information, and perjure yourself?

<comment><USER22> Depends on the charge and the consequences of those charges

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Incredible that they would implement such a dark pattern using easily discoverable client-side code.

I've seen these kind of messages before on several travel sites, and always immediately figured they were bogus, but I obviously can't be 100% certain they didn't influence me in some way - but how can it possibly be legal to deliberately lie like this to try to trick people into giving you money?

<comment><USER24> It's not legal (false advertising) but it's not something anyone will sue over because of how hard it is to show damages

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Lately, I found that booking directly with the companies was often the same price or cheaper that all site I could try. It might be different in US (I book flights from Europe, because, well, I live there). Lufthansa often has the best price directly on their site.

Same thing for hotels, you can get a better price if you book directly with the hotel, but of course you don't get all the booking.com (or similar site) niceties like free cancellation.

<comment><USER26> Same thing in Australia. I use sites like lastminute and trivago as search engines then contact the hotels directly.

If I stay in an AirBnB that is good I'll make sure I get the hosts contact details so can bypass AirBnB next time I stay there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Before anyone has any interest in replicating this - keep in mind that:

Trust is earned. Credibility is built.

Go long - don't create fake social proofs and ruin your own reputation. I can say with assurance that nobody in this thread will buy anything from OneTravel or their founders again.

<comment><USER28> Counterpoint: I had never heard of OneTravel and now in a little while I will have forgotten about this incident, but the name recognition will still exist for me, and therefore I'm more likely to trust them.

<comment><USER29> I don't think this lines up with memory research. It's true that people commonly make source monitoring errors, but generally feeling negative affect toward something enhances memory. People might forget the specific company, but I doubt they would feel more trust toward travel companies in general.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source- monitoring_error](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-monitoring_error)

[https://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2011/10/positive- negat...](https://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2011/10/positive-negative)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> There's a product I've bought regularly at Amazon, it perpetually has 3 or less left in stock, but never goes out of stock.

Also I was buying airline tickets and Delta told me there were just 2 left at this price for ... a plane nearly 70% empty.

<comment><USER31> In delta's case that is correct. There are two left at that price (in that fare bucket). After they sell those seats, they will be selling from a higher fare bucket and the price will go up

<comment><USER30> Maybe but the pricing charts I've seen show fairs rising and falling.

That may be the case at the moment but if they shift those buckets I think it is also untrue unless it says 2 left.... unless we just change the price later.

<comment><USER32> buckets (a.k.a. fare classes) can change in price. Also, some airlines will not sell certain fare classes on certain days or release all of the fare class seats at once.

The airline definitely isn't lying when they say there are a certain amount left at that price. I've seen the price change at those exact amounts when booking tickets for groups of people individually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I love imagining the Jira ticket for these.

"As a desperate guy trying to save his marriage with a last-minute holiday, I want to know just how many other lost souls I am competing with, so I loose what little dignity I have left"

<comment><USER34> "As an evil corporation, we need to make money, so we'll lie to the customer."

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> FWIW: I got pissed some time ago about Booking.com and Easyjet doing this, so I created an adblocker filter list to filter out those messages.

I haven't really checked lately if it still works, but feel free to use and contribute if you want. It should work with ABP and uBlock Origin.

[https://github.com/jakub-g/no-urgency/blob/master/no- urgency...](https://github.com/jakub-g/no-urgency/blob/master/no-urgency- blocklist.txt)

All you need to know to contribute is basic CSS.

<comment><USER36> Related: Chrome extension specifically for this

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/no-stress- booking/...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/no-stress- booking/kkfmoaflbacidmgmkddkhjfdepckmggg)

<comment><USER35> ah good, thx for the link!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> And I always assumed they use some sockets to sync that count from server. How dumb to just fake on the client side.

<comment><USER38> %99.999 of people aren't going to look up the legitimacy of this. Why spend development effort where the likelihood of getting caught is so low. And even when "getting caught" isn't that big a deal.

<comment><USER39> Because the FTC only needs to look at it once for them to give you a big fine or put you out of business. They take time but they do get around to these things. I was watching an old taped documentary on YouTube, and when I looked up the products in the commercials a good number of them were taken down by the FTC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Funny thing is that it works. 15% CR uplift in the last website where I tested it

<comment><USER41> Of course it works, because lying to people to instill a sense of urgency plays on our base emotions and gets us to do things we might not rationally do.

Sellers of snake-oil and other fake "remedies" have been using this sales tactic--"your friends and neighbors have already tried it, look here, see this line of people ready to buy!" that are all plants--since the days of the horse-and-buggy.

Doesn't mean we should still keep lying to our friends and neighbors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Happens all the time. Here's another good one: [https://www.nbim.no/](https://www.nbim.no/) (the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund)

Is a <1s live ticking number implausibly high frequency? Of course, it's just spooling out numbers on a timer.

<comment><USER43> I'm OK with those, it's likely a semi-accurate interpolation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> If you work long enough on web-based software for a wide enough variety of companies, you too will get a chance to refuse to write that feature.

</comment><comment><USER45> I'm noticing that even Etsy does this by saying that "n people have this their baskets right now."

That might be so, but it's not like most of the items are scarce. For example, I ordered a t-shirt and the seller just used a local t-shirt company to produce the shirt and mail it to me since it was cheaper than mailing a shirt through international delivery lol

</comment><comment><USER46> The responses in the redit thread are interesting: So many people claim they have experienced legitimate versions while making a purchase, although provide questionable evidence to support that it was valid. Is this some psychological bias for buyers?

<comment><USER47> You can look at practically any popular Reddit thread complaining about X, and find dozens of anecdotes about how they also had problems with X. Once you see these threads enough times, you start to wonder how many people are discussing an actual personal experience, vs. parroting what they've read or heard from someone.

I'd be interested to know if there was some type of scientific or trade name for this kind of behavior.

In any case, bear in mind that the plural of anecdote is not data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> one of my friends used to work for Agoda as a software engineer who said similar things about his company using dark patterns to fake urgency. This is very common in the travel industry and i've seen many companies employing similar tactics.

<comment><USER49> Agoda seems to be owned by Booking Holdings which I think implements these kind of dark patterns most aggressively.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> When booking hotels, I prefer to call them up directly. Many times just being nice to the staff you can get a much better deal than elsewhere online. And also better cancellation policies.

</comment><comment><USER51> another dark pattern these kinds of aggregator sites do is up the price on flights/hotels that you've recently viewed. so if you are looking at a flight, then continue to browse for a bit to see other options, when you come back to that flight the price will have increased, as though it were no longer available. if you clear your cookies or open in another browser though, you'll find the original lower price again.

</comment><comment><USER52> Is this legal?

<comment><USER53> I can only speak for Germany, where it's definitely not.

<comment><USER54> Can you cite a law?

For future reference.

<comment><USER55> E.g. §5 UWG [1], the law against unfair business practices ("unlauterer Wettbewerb"). See also [2].

[1] [https://www.gesetze-im- internet.de/uwg_2004/__5.html](https://www.gesetze-im- internet.de/uwg_2004/__5.html)

[2] [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unlauterer_Wettbewerb](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unlauterer_Wettbewerb)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I like that these things are being revealed and I previously read stories that these techniques were getting less effective since more people are aware of them. That's at least half the battle. Legal punishment of this behavior is not something I think I would support since I would be worried about it being impossible or at least very hard to enforce properly.

<comment><USER57> Governments the last few decades seem to insist on the power to seize the electronic money of just about anyone. Not sure that's a happy development, but as the capability's there anyway, couldn't one just serve the advertiser an order to defend their false claim in court and take the fine out of their bank accounts if they don't show?

I'm being facetious here, but not entirely.

<comment><USER56> > Governments the last few decades seem to insist on the power to seize the > electronic money of just about anyone.

Going tangential here but that is why Bitcoin is so powerful. Because it takes that power away from government.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Wow, if you are going to do this, at least have the JS call some endpoint like "/check-how-many-people-also-want-this/some-id" and name the element "how- many-people-also-want-this". As a dev tasked with implementing this dark pattern that is the least you could do.

</comment><comment><USER59> Related, faking notification counts to get clicks is a dark UX pattern:

[https://www.remarkbox.com/finally-a-disqus- alternative.html](https://www.remarkbox.com/finally-a-disqus-alternative.html)

</comment><comment><USER60> In a mobile app one wouldn't even have a way to investigate this.

<comment><USER61> Why is that? You can easily look at the requests and see where the numbers are coming from. It's not as easy as right clicking in the browser but if it would be a normal Desktop app it would also not work like that.

<comment><USER62> Because they are being generated locally using Math.random.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> cheapoair.com did a similar trick on me few years back.

I searched flights and after finding my flight, I clicked book. waiting for few seconds with a spinning thing , I got error message that the airline increased flight price, and I have to pay the new price.

So, I went straight to airline website to check their price, and it was lower than the first low price cheapoair showed me.

since then, I always check direct pricing before booking

<comment><USER64> I've experienced the opposite case, got a flight suggestion by a booking agency, checked prices for the same flights directly at the airline, and they were higher.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> I have two reactions:

1) lol

2) This should be illegal.

<comment><USER44> Might be unlawful anyway, if you could argue that you were sold "a plane ticket being considered by 38 people" rather than just "a plane ticket".

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Heh. I bet there will be legal issues with this approach at some point.

They should use the thing I made, watch.ly :) No lies that way! Shameful plug.

</comment><comment><USER67> I want to add Hanlon's razor to this.

Some are pointing straight to malice and intentional misleading.

It wouldn't surprise me if they wanted to make it genuinely work originally, but realised they could save a lot of money, resources and sprints just faking it in js.

More laziness and "oh shit this project was bigger than we thought let's find a shortcut" than outright malice.

<comment><USER68> That's not Hanlon's razor: they had a moment where they commit an act of fraud by intent, not by incompetent behaviour.

<comment><USER67> The point is, rather than setting out to maliciously deceive people it could have just been laziness.

There's multiple angles to what could have happened.

<comment><USER69> "I'm going to commit fraud out of laziness" is plenty malicious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I imagine sometime in 2030 when a 60 yo uncle/aunty sees this "38 people are looking at it", calmly right clicks on the HTML elements and sees the use of math.random and says "Nope, bye bye stupid website".

I think these tricks are closing on their end of life as percentage of internet-native people are increasing.

<comment><USER70> I think it's natural to feel like the populace is heading to a more competent place as the elderly age out, but anecdotally I think the opposite might be true. I've met kids in middle/high school who didn't understand how to do rudimentary OS operations, resolve email disconnections, update apps that didn't come from a store etc. The worst was when I taught a semester as an adjunct. Most of my students simply were unable to zip files together and send them as an attachment... Internet native in the iOS era is seemingly much worse than the XP era

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> ~45 must be an okay approximation of concurrent visitors they get per popular search.

</comment><comment><USER72> is there any plugin/website to find out the "normal" price of a hotel / flight at a given time?

<comment><USER73> Hopper is an app that will do it got flights, and I think Google Flights will also tell you if the price of a flight is good or not.

Dunno about hotels.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> How is this legal?

</comment><comment><USER75> finally, a use for Math.random()

<comment><USER76> What's wrong with Math.random()? I use it all the time (graphics) and it works like a charm.

<comment><USER77> Read these articles to know what is wrong with Math.random()

• [https://medium.com/@betable/tifu-by-using-math- random-f1c308...](https://medium.com/@betable/tifu-by-using-math- random-f1c308c4fd9d)

• [https://hackernoon.com/how-does-javascripts-math-random- gene...](https://hackernoon.com/how-does-javascripts-math-random-generate- random-numbers-ef0de6a20131)

• [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10751396](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10751396)

• [https://v8.dev/blog/math-random](https://v8.dev/blog/math-random)

> _Many random number generators in use today are not very good. There is a > tendency for people to avoid learning anything about such subroutines; quite > often we find that some old method that is comparatively unsatisfactory has > blindly been passed down from one programmer to another, and today's users > have no understanding of its limitations. — The Art of Computer Programming, > Volume 2, by Donald Knuth_

<comment><USER78> That hackernoon post is... unimpressive. Its main argument seems to be that Math.random() uses a PRNG instead of a source of true randomness. That is not compelling. It becomes less compelling accompanied by claims like this:

> So now the question is: what PRNG does JavaScript use?

> The answer: none.

There is zero discussion of why xorshift128+ might be suitable or unsuitable for any given purpose, or of what its characteristics are. The whole thing is just the observation that, if you can understand the _raw mechanics_ of the PRNG, you can have a good laugh at the idea that deterministic bitwise operations are "random".

It does mention that browsers standardized on xorshift128+ in the nearly- forgotten days of 2015, which would seem to make your Knuth quote inapt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> Love this: HN link to Reddit screenshot of a Twitter thread. Welcome to the modern web.</comment>


Why software patents are a joke, literally - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/blog/burnette/why-software-patents-are-a-joke-literally/2039

<comment><USER2> So the claim is the Oracle is sue Google with patents that were issued as jokes? It's funny I guess, but I wonder who will be laughing when and if Oracle wins the suit?</comment>


Show HN: A tool to compare news from liberal and conservative sources - <AUTHOR> http://unitethesefuckers.com/ <comment><USER3> Looked at this to realize I only read Reuters nowadays and ignore other news sources because Reuters is pretty financial-report-talk bland and thats how I think news should be.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. I couldn't care less about Fox or CNN's editorializing. I prefer to formulate my own opinions based on documented, boring facts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> An interesting project, but one that seems to suffer from a (presumably unintended and unknown) conservative bias itself, as evidenced by opening the page and seeing conservative opinion outlets like Breitbart and Drudge displayed literally next to reputable sources like the New York Times and Politico

<comment><USER6> FWIW I don't think the point is to compare reputable v non-reputable -- after all, perception is truth in politics. I think the goal of the tool is to highlight the perceptions but not to sort through the realities. There are great tools that do that (i.e.: Snopes/Politifact) but people 'in a camp' aren't generally interested in a truth that doesn't fulfill their prophecy.

<comment><AUTHOR> You nailed it. I dont agree with most of the stuff on the conservative side but I think it is a bad idea to shut ourselves off and not listen to ANYTHING they say. This site simply shows you what the other side is listening to and hopefully it will soften everyone's views in the long run.

<comment><USER7> Is the goal of softening everyone's views something you plan to keep working on? If so, are you discussing it anywhere?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not really discussing it. I just got fed up yesterday and I made this in a few hours out of disgust. The idea was born out of softening my own views I guess

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting. A few remarks:

* So many headlines are truncated. This is distracting.

* The "What they both should probably read" section should be motivated. For example, what makes WSJ or BBC better? They are both known to occasionally publish dreadful articles.

* You are missing "left-wing Breitbart" The Guardian, I believe they have a fairly large readership.

<comment><USER9> > You are missing "left-wing Breitbart" The Guardian

Breitbart had a section up until a few weeks ago titled "BLACK CRIME". Can you show me a "left-equivalent" section in The Guardian?

If anything, Breitbart is a "right-wing" NaturalNews.com.

<comment><USER8> (Replying to both you and gefh)

You won't find a direct equivalent to "Black Crime" on The Guardian, because left-wing and right-wing rabble-rousers have a different M.O. Rightwingers write prejudiced headlines under the guise of being anti-PC, and often with the goal of riling up their perceived enemies. Leftwingers put out victimized and/or sanctimonious headlines talking down to their readers. In terms of biased content, they often both favour the same tactic: lying by omission, although I have to say I only see rightwingers opting for "bold faced fabrication". The "black/minorities/immigrants crime" thing is a good example of lying by omission, where the omission is other demographics and/or other context. But if you think only the right does that you are not paying attention.

The Guardian itself has both facepalm-inducing articles ("Men rarely catcall me any more. I hate that our culture makes me miss it" <\- Yes, this is a real article. That title was so roundly mocked they had to change it, but you can still Google it), and editors dedicated to slapping the most obnoxious title possible on otherwise decent articles. An example that comes to mind was a fairly long article by an American-Iranian who had left Iran as a child due to religious persecution, and felt trapped into a life-long "refugee" role in the US, which she thought she should be able to grow out of. Or as The Guardian titled it: "The ungrateful refugee -- We have no debt to repay" (it's only missing the all-caps to be in full Daily Mail mode); this sure helped the perception of that article or the point its author was trying to make. On the other hand it probably generated a lot of clicks and outrage.

I have been reading The Guardian on and off since the 1990s, I remember a time where it was an opiniated, left-wing, and no-nonsense newspaper. For a while now it has slowly drifted into click-baiting tabloid realm and tribalistic political allegiance (cynically, I believe: based on their comment sections a lot of people are hate-reading The Guardian). It has used the lowest common denominators of US media dicourse as templates, and applied them to its own output in an effort to widen its appeal, at the cost of its integrity. I don't think this should be excused.

To be fair, on the left something like salon.com is more desserving of being compared to Breitbart (in the "foaming at the mouth" department), however I think The Guardian's treatment of news is, if anything, _more_ insidious and damaging. As opposed to Salon/Breitbart, they still have real journalists that may investigate major stories (Snowden files, Panama papers), and that veneer of real journalism is then used to prop up bonker articles telling us how "erasers teach children to be ashamed of failure", or ask if "you are too white, rich, able-bodied to be a feminist". Still on their front page today, this gem: "For Trump and the US right, breaking the nuclear taboo has always been thinkable". "The US right" was in charge when the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq 1 & 2, and Afghanistan were taking place, if they were nuke-mongers I think we would know by now -- but hey let's accuse half of the political spectrum of wishing for nuclear holocaust, what's the problem? Anyway. So. Maybe I should have compared them to Fox News instead.

<comment><USER10> You wrote quite a long text, but none of it supports the equivalence of Breitbart and the Guardian you're trying to defend.

The two examples given are somewhat strange in that they seem to skew to the right. Sure, they're examples of bad journalism, but it's not comparable to the campaign style propaganda operation of Breitbart.

<comment><USER8> Huh. I actually gave, like, five examples, argued why it's not possible to have a clear equivalence, and concluded that Fox News would have been a somewhat more apt comparison?

It's interesting that you view some of the examples as right-wing though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Red Feed, Blue Feed comes to mind: [http://graphics.wsj.com/blue-feed-red- feed/](http://graphics.wsj.com/blue-feed-red-feed/)

<comment><USER12> This is fascinating! I love the duality presented side by side, how they react in a completely different manner to the same topic. It's also a bit sad, because it reminds me of the pressure to colour news with more opinions, take stances, etc - very rarely will you see the style of dry, "just the facts" reporting.

It appears they build the feeds based on a simple keyword filter - <USER2> example, under "guns" and "liberal outlets" we have a post about a guns and roses concert... :)

<comment><USER13> "Just the facts" is a weaker play than a "hot take" when you're competing for attention. And if you're not driving some people away with your reporting, then you're probably not strongly attracting their opponents, so it pays to take sides. However, I think news organisations could be opinionated without necessarily presenting opinion as fact.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Great idea! It would be even more interesting to compare the headlines or a summary of the same topic between the two sources.

<comment><USER15> <shame>

Truly shameless plug for a personal project that does exactly what you suggest by clustering news articles from multiple (reputable) news sites; prioritizes highest quality articles, and shows the headlines. It's really interesting to see headlines on the same story side-by-side and see the bias that comes with it. Helps me stay just a bit more centered and see multiple sides of often complex stories.

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

</shame>

<comment><USER16> Shouldn't you end the open shame tag with </shame> and then reopen with <shame> after your shameless plug? Right now it looks like a shameful plug.

<comment><USER15> You're right of course. Though I could also just change "shameless" to "shameful" as you rightly did and we'd be all set. Thanks for making the comment too - made me stop to think about another strange English idiom.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> RealClearPolitics [https://www.realclearpolitics.com/](https://www.realclearpolitics.com/) has done this sort of thing for years. Every other headline is sourced from conservative or liberal news source.

<comment><USER18> The RealClearXXX sites are my main entry point for news; the format is ideal and I don't know anything as well curated. However they definitely have a slight conservative bias, evidenced by their selection of articles and op-eds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is incredible, you can get an accurate sense of the news bubble that both sides are in by looking at the headlines alone!

<comment><AUTHOR> yes. That was the idea of building this. Dont know how much it will help though. I remain pessimistic

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is really nice! I was similarly bothered by biases in new sources so I built [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bias- tracker/mhijk...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bias- tracker/mhijknbhplbhpmemohbldppgnbohopjh)

</comment><comment><USER6> Thanks for taking a stab at helping us fix discourse, every stab is needed! Are these RSS feeds from different websites or is the tool doing some manipulation of the data (i.e.: attempting to line up coverage of a single topic to do a one-to-one comparison of how the left v right covers it).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Thats all I am trying to do. Listing how different sides cover the same topic is a most tempting idea. I am beginning to work on it

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It'd be better if it showed the same topic, presented by left and right.

As done by 'RealClearPolitics'. One topic, two articles, one pro and one con.

</comment><comment><USER22> Why no Fox News?

<comment><AUTHOR> Adding it... it just dropped out by mistake

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> A similar site: [https://www.allsides.com](https://www.allsides.com)

</comment><comment><USER7> This concept is cool (the specific matchups may need refinement).

Is there a way to show the diff?

</comment><comment><USER23> WSJ, BBC, New Yorker and NPR should be under what liberals read. Other than that, good list.

<comment><USER18> Is WSJ really liberal? I think it's very neocon.</comment></comment>


Ask YC:  How do you transfer input to and output from a widget in an iframe? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> IFrame (Wikipedia): an HTML element which makes it possible to embed another HTML document inside the main document.

Widget (Wikipedia): a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate HTML-based web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation.

What exactly are you trying to ask? You can certainly exchange data via a database and 'make it feel interactive' between the frames using JavaScript/AJAX.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have a Facebook page with an iframe containing a gwt widget. How do I transfer data to the gwt widget? I know what this data is when I am generating the Facebook page, so I was hoping there's an easy way to do this without having the gwt widget contact the server to get its input.

I also need to get data back from the gwt widget. How should it send this data back to the server?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> XMLHttpRequest?

<comment><AUTHOR> Is there a way to avoid the request for input since you can include it in the web page so that the widget can pick it up?

<comment><USER3> Sorry, I don't quite understand what you mean. What exactly is the "input"?

<comment><AUTHOR> The widget takes some input that the server knows. Instead of having the widget make a request to the server to get it, can the server somehow include this input in the web page so that the widget can take it directly from the web page?

<comment><USER3> Sure, but I still don't really know what you're talking about. You're talking about a GWT widget?

<comment><AUTHOR> yes</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


German officials confirm 18 million emails and passwords stolen - <AUTHOR> http://www.dw.de/german-officials-confirm-18-million-emails-and-passwords-stolen/a-17542815

<comment><USER2> You non-Germans don't know how mind-boggeling insane this whole story is. There is a governmental agency, the BSI, whose job is to be on top of everything regarding security in information systems.

They tell us that millions of email accounts are compromised.

What they don't tell us is _which_ accounts are compromised or even what service provider these accounts are with. Maybe the key information here is that the info was leaked in a database hack at a big consumer software company.

Who knows?

Nobody! That's who. Because they refuse to give any details that would actually be useful to end-users. Now _everybody_ who has an email account is scared that their account is compromised.

Do you know what the punchline here is?

They said they would give more details, but not before Monday. It might not be obvious to non-Germans, but this little detail reeks of a kind of bureaucratic weirdness that is as German as Beer: I bet they will only release more info on Monday because the person in charge doesen't come into the office before Monday.

Sorry if this was a bit ranty, but the whole thing is just so stupid.

<comment><USER3> I saw a news show on ZDF yesterday and they actually recommended using an email provider that has 2 factor auth with "some code on you mobile". I guess no non-geek understood it but I was still shocked. Usually they just say you should have different passwords for different sites.

<comment><USER4> Germany is quite good it seems. I don't really understand where it comes from, but the last time I randomly turned on the TV in Berlin, there was an educational program about PGP. At around 20:30, on a standard TV channel, one of the first ones on the list at the hotel, so it wasn't something obscure either. It seemed to describe the whole idea of asymmetric encryption too (inferred from the animated presentation).

I was really impressed.

<comment><USER5> Well, the part of the population that cares about information security is very well informed

But the rest seems to live in a luddite world. If you had watched TV more you would have seen that there are a lot of ads for: web games, PayPal and other websites trying to drag the average consumer into, you know, using the stuff.

Paying with a Debit Card is rare in Berlin, Credit Cards are barely non- existent (but they have some other ways of paying stuff online and on stores)

Security of bank accounts is usually done through a list of one-use code numbers (still, they - and several other countries - have payee initiated money transfers between accounts/banks, something that is rare in US/Canada)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder why internet companies don't have contingency plans in place for data theft. I would be glad to be able to check whether my account is affected and to receive an email with instructions immediately. Instead it's always a big surprise and it takes weeks until details are published…

<comment><USER7> I wonder why internet companies don't just do the right thing and use good hashes (or better methods like SRP, but that requires client updates) so that none of this would even mater

<comment><USER8> Because they don't start out with well-designed systems (that costs money), and they don't want to upgrade their systems to be good (that costs money).

It's very simple, but it's only obvious after you've seen it happen too many times.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> is there an alternative source for this story like from Spiegel or something other than dw.de?

<comment><USER10> For what it's worth, DW is Germany's "International public broadcaster" so it is a reputable news source.

If you want it on SPON ("blood, tits and murica"), here you go: [http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpolitik/e-mail- passwoerte...](http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpolitik/e-mail-passwoerter- gestohlen-18-millionen-datensaetze-a-962419.html)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, I meant to submit the new data theft in Germany which happens only 3 months after the one posted:

[http://www.dw.de/german-officials-confirm-18-million- emails-...](http://www.dw.de/german-officials-confirm-18-million-emails-and- passwords-stolen/a-17542815)</comment>


Minimal Perfect Hashing - <AUTHOR> http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php?id=119

<comment><USER2> The article takes a very weird turn:

 _If we need extra information about the words, we can use an additional data structure along with the MA-FSA. We can store it in a hash table._

This is not necessary at all, since an acyclic finite state automaton can be used as a perfect hash function. If you sum the right language cardinalities of the transitions followed, you get a unique hash code (1..n, where n is the number of strings in the automaton). For efficiency, you can precompute the cardinalities in the transitions or states. You can then use a normal array for whatever data you want to associate with a word.

With respect to parts 1 & 2 of the series, one can construct a Levenshtein automaton for a given word in linear time[1]. Such an automaton matches any string within the given edit distance of the word. You can then compute the intersection (language) of the Levenshtein automaton and the dictionary automaton to get all words within the given edit distance.

(Another approach would be to make the dictionary a transducer that returns the words within the given edit distance. I tried this once, but the resulting automaton would be too large for realistic dictionaries.)

I wrote a Java library for dictionary automata, perfect hash automata, and Levenshtein automata. It also provides immutable Map containers for String keys, that store strings in an automaton and uses a flat array to store values:

[https://github.com/danieldk/dictomaton](https://github.com/danieldk/dictomaton)

[1] [http://csi.ufs.ac.za/resres/files/Schultz.pdf](http://csi.ufs.ac.za/resres/files/Schultz.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a great solution!

What would be the reason to do it this way if you don't already have the FSA?

If you just need to hash a small-ish set of known items and keep memory usage low, I'd think starting with the table would make more sense. Wouldn't the FSA approach require more memory than the table, since it has to maintain all the intermediate nodes?

<comment><USER2> _Wouldn 't the FSA approach require more memory than the table, since it has to maintain all the intermediate nodes?_

What do you mean by 'a table'? If you want a set without false positives/negatives or a perfect hash function, you have to represent the possible elements in some way. FSAs are compact when you store a set of sequences where there is a certain amount of redundancy in the form of subsequences that occur in multiple strings. In such cases, FSAs are far more compact that a flat table of strings.

Of course, in an actual compact implementation, you would not implement states and transitions using classes. E.g. Dictomaton stores states as an array of transitions (which are unboxed), which is far more compact (see the numbers on the Github page for some comparisons with comparable data structures).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> For what its worth, I have a quite fast MPHF implementation that uses an average of 3.2 bits per key.

[https://github.com/ahmetaa/zemberek- nlp/blob/master/core/src...](https://github.com/ahmetaa/zemberek- nlp/blob/master/core/src/main/java/zemberek/core/hash/MultiLevelMphf.java)

it is used for language model compression. Also there is a Dart implementation as part of a small library.

[https://github.com/ahmetaa/poppy](https://github.com/ahmetaa/poppy)

</comment><comment><USER4> I had the luck to have Fabiano Botelho — the person behind the Minimal Perfect Hash thesis — as an Algorithms and Data Structures professor back when I was studying Computer Engineering at CEFET-MG. He is absolutely brilliant, and has some incredible knowledge on both the theoretical and practical aspects of using hash tables.

IIRC, he had just finished publishing his thesis, and had each of us write our own implementations of minimal perfect hashing for extra credit. The data structure is really useful for indexing large, immutable data sets.

</comment><comment><USER5> For what it's worth, if you have in the order of N things to store, and you hash them to a space of size N^3, the possibility for a collision is less than N^(-1). Basically nonexistent. Hence, if you want to save space, just use a normal hash table implementation, but use a more precise hash instead of the keys. This is very useful when your keys are document sized.

<comment><USER6> I don't understand what you mean?

10 things to store, 1000 buckets to store in, less than 0.1 probability of a collision? That seams both not very impressive or even correct?

<comment><USER5> It's just a rough (but certain for all n) upper bound. The precise probability for your case seems to be slightly greater than 0.01. The point is that you can replace a precise, expensive equality test with a second hash with greater range.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Change that dang font!

<comment><USER8> Feel free to.</comment></comment>


Dotcom veterans in Twitter 'brains trust' - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/67aa965a-247b-11de-9a01-00144feabdc0.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I can't decide whether I'm more amazed or amused at the brazenness of the company's use of the Twitter name & branding.

Kudos to TipJoy for their mention right at the end!</comment>


What an Inauguration does to your traffic (Last.FM) - <AUTHOR> http://www.flickr.com/photos/lozzd/3212523793/in/pool-webopsviz/ <comment><USER2> Meanwhile, the messages per minute on twitter were 5x the average according to [http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/20/did-twitter-just- pass-d...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/20/did-twitter-just-pass-digg/) and assuming the graph starts at 0.

</comment><comment><USER3> It'd be interesting to know what type of music people around the world were listening to after the inauguration in comparison to before.

<comment><USER4> [http://hypem.com/track/733478/Jay-Z- My+President+Is+Black+%2...](http://hypem.com/track/733478/Jay-Z- My+President+Is+Black+%28Remix%29)

<comment><USER5> the original.

[http://www.thesixtyone.com/YoungJeezy/song/My+President+%28f...](http://www.thesixtyone.com/YoungJeezy/song/My+President+%28feat.+Nas%29/28761/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The Web Ops visualizations photostream that this is a member of is really useful for ideas.

<comment><USER7> Ideas for what?

<comment><USER6> I'm an engineer/sysadmin and we're responsible for providing instrumentation for operations people. I'm always on the look out for functional and attractive displays, whether it's a color scheme for a cacti graph we already have or something completely different like: [http://www.boingboing.net/2007/06/21/steampunk-problem- li.ht...](http://www.boingboing.net/2007/06/21/steampunk-problem-li.html)</comment></comment></comment>


It's Still About the Applications - <AUTHOR> https://freethoughtblogs.com/stderr/2019/12/28/its-still-about-the-applications/ <comment><USER2> > the very fact that The Pentagon thinks that all its cloud apps are going to > work under either AWS or Azure shows how ignorant they are

I'm not sure why that is the case. I worked at a place that mandated minimum two cloud support and we were going down that road when I left. I didn't see any complete show-stoppers from a technical perspective although there were a few annoying issues. Maybe the author is just hammering home the incompetence angle, where the IT managers he lampoons are incapable of managing such a project. But at it's face, holding an expectation that systems be redundant across cloud providers seems reasonable.

<comment><USER3> I didn't read it as cloud applications should be interoperable between providers but that a given application should be able to pick which platform they build on. I've had a similar argument with a previous employer who wanted to select just one provider. I was baffled at the time as provisioning an account on any of them takes seconds. So there's no reason to pick one other than politi---and right about then is when I understood the whole motivation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As one of the "Federal IT managers" actually doing this, there are too many broad statements here that the overall message ends up being misleading.

If you were completely cynical, then you could find enough examples to make anything in here seem true.

For example, this entire paragraph is wrong:

 _Here's something that will surprise you a lot: when it comes to government, cloud computing represents a huge shift of money from the public sector to the private sector. It's the privatization of of government data. Lock-in is completely ignored: how will government departments ever get their data back out of the cloud? "Not my problem," says the federal IT manager, "besides, there's nothing about lock-in in these Powerpoint slides."_

There is realistically too much here to unpack in a comment, but I would say that the overall thesis of the article is pointing in the right direction.

However it's not like failure is a forgone conclusion, if competent people (like a lot of you reading this are) join the government to actually help fix these things then we can actually do things correctly. I posted in the Who's Hiring Thread last month so we're ready whenever you are.

<comment><USER5> I've never actually looked into government tech jobs, but my assumption is that they would pay much less than a competent person could make in the private sector. Other than pay or patriotism, what would motivate a competent person to want to work for the government?

<comment><USER4> Patriotism is the wrong word.

If you think that your government should be doing things a different way, and you feel you know how to do it better then you have a couple of avenues to participate. One of them is joining the government in a capacity that allows you to affect change directly.

It's true, you aren't going to get paid $500,000 a year for being a software engineer. However, the USG does not pay subsistence wages. For entry level Data Science jobs in Boston we pay better than the market, and with better benefits, a union, matching investment accounts, low cost health insurance, stability and many other things you don't have elsewhere.

We also have opportunities to work on things that you just can't elsewhere.

<comment><USER6> Let's be honest - working for the government is a very poor way to affect change in it. The decision makers are also very far removed compared to private corporations and certainly so compared to smaller more agile companies like startups.

<comment><USER4> I am sitting here, as a government employee, telling you that you can actually make change. And at least for this problem set, you can make it in an extremely impactful way.

Whether you believe me or not is up to you.

<comment><USER7> In what way have you effected change in the government? In what ways have you seen those around you do so (you must have witnessed this, by your stated claims)? I was in the military, which is a different beast entirely, but worked constantly with fairly high level government employees. They always seemed powerless, and to have accepted that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I guess this article counts as therapy, what with the whole line of "The goddamn vaunted databases of the government are NOT the stuff of conspiracy theories. In fact, they're just as shitty as you would expect."

</comment><comment><USER9> Honestly this entire system is a mess. But it's working so nobody is going to change it, plus going "over the top" and building a better, more idealistic solution will have the same set of problems. Assuming you end up building something dramatically better or easier, getting market share means addressing more and more use cases, and you more or less end up as the n+1th protocol or standard.

To me the only long term in dealing with this mess is going to be some shift in how we actually do computing on data. Leave the data at rest / in-situ and move more and more compute capacity to where it sits, then merge results together later. We're getting to the point where containers are common place, and FaaS is becoming comfortable.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is all rings so true.

Why do I have to swipe an access card and display a name badge in my building, when all the important data is outside the building?

Why do we factor GDPR into our designs if we don't know where we store the data, and we'll never meet (nor be able to trust) the people who hold onto it for us. Can't we just encrypt it on our side then? I don't think we're getting homomorphically-encrypted relational databases anytime soon.

My last month has been an effort of 'migrating' a service from another team to ours. The service stayed right where it was - the cloud - but we sank weeks into editing IAM files and deploy scrips to try to make it 'belong' to our team.

We're programmers; we don't know about AWS's policies model, security groups or software-defined networking. Whenever I'm forced to interact with AWS I always feel like I'm doing significantly more work than the "managed" selling point of AWS would imply.

I know my way around ssh, docker, iptables etc. But I miss having someone in the team whose actual job it is to be good at these things.

<comment><USER11>
        Why do I have to swipe an access card and display a name badge in my building, when all the important data is outside the building?

So that angry customers can't walk in the front door, take the elevator up to the fifth floor, and hang out in the CEO's office.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The best part is the elasticity of cloud storage. When the projects fail, they'll just keep all the data in the failed project achive. The next go will have it's own multiple copies of the same data and so on. They'll just keep paying incremental storage charges. Meanwhile, behind the scenes in the cloud - automatic, transparent deduplication....

</comment><comment><USER13> Non-native English speaker here. Could someone write an easier summary, please?

<comment><USER14> Sure: "The cloud doesn't solve common IT problems, only shifts them around, and makes some problems worse, such as more vendor-dependency. If you hire amateurs, you get amateurish results. Renting cloud-based amateurs has all the same problems as in-house (internal) amateurs."

<comment><USER15> And this "vendor dependence" is somehow different than government depending on Microsoft or even older systems that still depend on IBM mainframes.

<comment><USER6> You're going a step further in the case of cloud though.

Before you'd at least hire the sysadmins. Now you rely on probably dirt cheap offshore consulting.

It's just more outsourcing. It comes with scale and as cancer it is just a reality. Eventually it will have to be burned down.

<comment><USER15> They won't admit it, but many companies move to the cloud not only because they don't want to deal with administering servers but also because they don't want to deal with server administrators.

It's not like on prem server administrators have a great track record when it comes to security.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Making macros in CoffeeScript - <AUTHOR> http://blog.davidpadbury.com/2010/12/09/making-macros-in-coffeescript/

<comment><USER2> >Code is like poetry. Some is beautiful, the rest of it isn't very good…

Didn't read the article but appreciated the tag-line.

<comment><USER3> Yep - that's probably the best bit.</comment></comment>


Avoiding Disaster for Low-Income Students  - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052748703583404576079781835777552-lMyQjAxMTAxMDEwNjExNDYyWj.html

<comment><USER2> Wow, I love the blatant agenda he has there...

While he does have a point the problem is that private for profits advertise based on a potential future of employment while typically ignoring the amount of work required to complete a program.

Beyond that, degrees from for profits are likely to be less valuable to individuals due to preconceptions about students from such institutions.</comment>


Splashup reviewd by a User Interface blog. - It's pretty rough - <AUTHOR> http://humanized.com/weblog/2007/12/03/user-interface-of-the-day-splashupcom/ Not trying to pick on anyone. It's just good to hear honest feedback, especially about an interface. <comment><USER2> This sounds like a review of Fireworks:

"...The first is a modal dialog that covers most of your work and must manually dississed [sic]; the second is a non-modal panel that appears below the menu-bar and doesn't interrupt your work. The first method is horrible, the second is decent."

"For instance, with the text tool, text format options appear, and seem to work when you click on them, but they don't have any effect unless you already have text selected."

"Each click with the text tool created a new layer, so very soon I had accidentally created 10 extra layers containing nothing but empty text objects." (Excepting the fact that empty (sub-)layers in Fireworks are destroyed when you exit them.)

"...there are "Apply" and "Cancel" buttons at the top of the screen, and nothing else will work until you have clicked one of those two buttons" and "you can only rotate the image by clicking and dragging a small unmarked region in the extreme corner."

</comment><comment><USER3> When you want a really powerful tool, you usually have to accept a tougher learning curve. Yes, most web apps should be immediately understandable, their features laid plain to the first-time user. The problem is, advanced image editing involves a ton of UI moving parts. I think most of what those guys complain about are things where Splashup carefully follows the Photoshop UI. I think these web UI guys aren't approaching Splashup in the right way.

</comment><comment><USER4> I wonder if a retargeted GTK library would allow you to run The Gimp as an AJAX application; either that or perhaps a Flash FreeNX client.

Ulteo made OpenOffice work online: [http://lifehacker.com/software/online- documents/use-openoffi...](http://lifehacker.com/software/online- documents/use-openoffice-online-with-ulteo-332841.php)

<comment><USER5> Gimp as AJAX application? Jesus... not only this sentence makes no sense ("AJAX" is just one stupid function call), but the idea of running everything "online" is just silly.

WHY would I want to screw myself in the butt by using "online apps" for editing my digital camera photos? Why would I want to wait hours for 2GB of photos to get uploaded at 35kb/sec and then limit myself to a pathetic subset of perfectly functioning desktop application?

Because there are many techies out there who are greedy and fail to innovate, preferring to re-implement tiny fractions of existing software instead. And burning someone else's millions in the process.

I will not be surprised if we'll see hard drive formatting utilities, backed by VC millions, running inside of the browser, so you can "Format your Drive from Anywhere!!!"

A lot of Valley people need to stop drinking kool-aid and read uncov.com more often.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, because nobody wants to upload and store their photos on the web--so they certainly don't want to be able to edit them once stored there.

You're just missing the point by a mile. Online photo editing is a great feature for people who have already committed their entire photo collection to flickr (or one of the other several dozen competitors). There will come a time when photos are mostly taken by cell phone cameras, uploaded on the spot, and never dealt with except in an online form. An online editor is the only sane solution.

But, I agree that porting GIMP to forward its UI out to a browser is madness. Writing a GTK to JavaScript layer is probably significantly harder than writing an image editor from scratch in pure JavaScript or Flash (at least the 20% solution that'll satisfy 80% of users).

<comment><USER5> Wow, I am surprised I did not get downvoted into oblivion for my previous post. However, I am convinced that you're missing a point by a mile.

 _Nobody_ has committed their photo collections to flickr, because it is insane: people generate gigabytes of images with their cameras and upload only a tiny fraction of what they have, most of the time downsampled to a manageable size. Moreover, the sizes of image files (JPEGs) keep growing, while uploading speeds have stuck at 20-60kb/sec for 95% users.

This pattern is true not only for images, it's true for everything: the speed at which people generate data is only accelerating - from simple text documents we've moved to music, images, video and god knows what else. Sticking everything into the "cloud" will not work. Even today an average PC has tens of gigabytes of data. Soon that number will reach terabytes. Think about X-megapixel cameras, recorded TV shows, HD-movies, etc. The size of the backup drives will keep growing, while the speeds of internet connections will not.

Internet is a distributed computing platform with very powerful computing nodes (your computers). The opportunities of exploiting this are fascinating. SETI is a great example of using Internet right. Skype and torrents are another ones.

What these cloud companies are doing, however, is plain stupid in comparison: they're sucking in the computational complexity from "powerful nodes" only to re-distribute the load on their end onto their own nodes without any hope to keep up. What for?

I know that Microsoft is out of fashion today, but Ray Ozzie is absolutely right when he is talking about maintaining a reasonable (sane!) balance between client machines and "clouds". This point of view is not terribly popular among some YC readers, who are too fascinated and tempted by a slight chance of getting rich by re-implementing 2% of some perfectly fine desktop software in 2 months with a handful of python scripts running on cheap Amazon servers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Are these reviews by the same team that tried to clone Quicksilver for Windows and wound up with nothing more than Launchy set in Garamond?

<comment><USER8> First, this is a silly ad hominem criticism; their arguments have little to do with their Enso application. But either way, these humanized guys are in general on top of things, and their thoughts about interface design are usually quite insightful. Implementing good interfaces, and insightfully criticizing interfaces, are two very different skills.

Second, while I personally love Quicksilver, it has a significant learning curve. Enso's model is, for better or worse, rather simpler. And beyond that, experimentation is good. A direct clone of Quicksilver would be both out of place on windows, and also much less interesting to create than a new application, with its own ideas.

Third, what the hell is Launchy?

<comment><USER7> It's not an ad-hominem when someone publishes a critique of X, and you allege that they haven't demonstrated that they are qualified to critique X.

In this case, it might be WRONG to allege that. But it's not an ad-hominem.

<comment><USER9> Arguments about the topic matter. Qualifications of the people don't.

<comment><USER7> Ok, let's all have a debate about neurosurgery!

<comment><USER9> If what you have to say about neurosurgery makes sense, what's the problem?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


MUH: The Universe is a Mathematical Structure - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/0704.0646

<comment><USER2> arxiv is not a peer-reviewed "publication" and it's prone to being cooky at times.</comment>


How To Crash A Party - <AUTHOR> http://www.nevblog.com/how-to-crash-a-party/ <comment><USER2> So you were dishonest and bragged about it in a blog post with your name and picture. Some of the very people you tricked may even be reading it now that it made the front page of Hacker News.

You'd think that you would have learned something after spending so much time with so many successful people. Apparently not.

<comment><USER3> I have to disagree, kindly of course. Since I don't know the gentleman, anything I say has to be taken with that in mind.

Most of us come here to laud and admire our fellows that are tenacious and ingenious enough to invent, create, market, sell, or hack their way to success. This fellow has done no different.

As he says near the beginning of the article, he knew where he wanted to be but didn't have the resources or connections to get there. So he figured out a way to achieve those goals. This is the epitome of what I love about hackers.

I also don't see a problem with his talking about it publicly. His intention wasn't to spend his entire life sneaking into parties. It was to make connections with people that would let him do things he'd be unable to otherwise. Assuming that he's done that, then talking about how he got to where he is now is perfectly fine.

I'll say that his style of writing does come off with a certain tone of braggadocio, but otherwise its an interesting and well written account.

<comment><USER4> I don't think this party crashing has brought him significantly closer to his success goals. Not once did he give an example of a time he was able to successfully leverage a new connection to his benefit. He basically name dropped a handful of famous people that he met one time, but that's it.

The only benefit I see is that he's actively stepping out of his comfort zone. This is valuable, however, it's at the cost of charity. There are better ways to go about exercising this character trait.

<comment><USER5> I've seen it work for him in person in Austin about 7 years ago. I think (some) local entrepreneurs value his gusto. His reasons seem different than party crashers from DC, he just does extraordinary things to be able to talk to successful people.

That said, most people will not be able to replicate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This guy is definitely a hustler... but something doesn't sit right with me about crashing events for charity. Every drink or meal he consumes is money taken directly out of the charity's pocket. He tries to justify his unethical actions by saying that crashing these events will make him much more likely to become successful (rich), and therefore he'll be able to buy lots of charity tickets in the future.

Sorry dude, crashing parties and ripping off charities is not going to make you successful.

<comment><USER6> I hardly see how he's hurting the charity by doing this.

It's not as if he's depriving the charities of money because he would have paid the large admission fees if he wasn't doing this; he just wouldn't go. And his presence there is not causing the charity to spend any more money by hiring more staff. There is the real cost of the food and drink he consumes, but depending on how the event is catered, if there is food left over, then he's not effecting anything, and if there isn't food left over, he's taking money out of the other attendees' pockets, not the charity's.

In fact, maybe he contributed to an enjoyable experience for the other attendees, which will make them more likely to support that charity in the future.

Utilitarianism FTW!

<comment><USER7> This is the same fallacy that some people use about planes: "Traveling by plane doesn't result in more fossil fuels burnt because the plane would have flown anyway".

The way these things work is that after such an event the organizers assess whether there was enough food, and based on this they order food for the next event.

<comment><USER6> I guess you're right, it's a flawed argument. In fact, considering that I use exactly your argument to support/demand not eating meat, I guess it shows that I might just be going for a post hoc rationalization of actions that emotionally appeal to me in this case.

But just to play devil's advocate, might the charity decide that they want to take in a certain amount of money from an event and set ticket prices accordingly, thus passing the cost on to attendees? (The implication being that it's less ethically dubious to leech off of rich people than charities.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's funny. These kind of guys think they're badasses, while in reality, to an attentive eye, they're the opposite: people with an attention seeking disorder.

Aside that the attention seeking is very obvious from the formatting of the text, the interesting thing is that he did really nothing special. Naturally, credits for getting the right attitude that let him enter, but for the rest, what he's describing is not different from a socially comfortable (skilled, for the nerds) person.

<comment><USER9> I agree with your last sentence. The post has a vibe that I've noticed from some more socially awkward/not-totally-self-aware people, where they'll go to an event that pushes their comfort zone (usually a party or a club), talk to some strangers, get in some mild antics, then later they'll report on it like it was this totally crazy, daring adventure they had.

To them it was totally out there. A more socially comfortable person may do the same kind of thing, but it feels normal to them and they don't see it as any kind of big deal or accomplishment.

Actually, what this blog post really reminds me of is a breathless 'Field Report' by a clueless but eager beginner in that whole Pick Up Artist subculture. I wouldn't be surprised one bit if the guy was into that stuff.

<comment><USER10> As a socially awkward person myself, that's what I liked from the article.

Also, the author is of Indian origin, being from Uruguay myself, I'd guess we might have more class/social status awareness; most wouldn't dare crash an Elton John party.

I also agree that he found out for himself some things that other subcultures had already found out, for example I think Kevin Mitnick says something about suits and the right attire in his book The Art of Deception, the Pick Up Artists probably say something of the sort, and many books and movies about scamsters also highlight it (Catch Me If You Can comes to mind).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I assume the author realizes that the term 'conman' is short for 'Confidence Man' which is a very, very, old gambit. One conman I knew told me that being a conman was the second oldest profession, because as soon as there were hookers there were guys who worked to convince the hookers that they didn't need to pay.

Of course these days we call them con-artists since the sex of the person is irrelevant. The motivation for being a con artist is the adrenaline thrill of knowing at any moment you can be 'caught out.' Sure that makes you feel alive, but when you are 'caught' you may not have broken any laws but you have really pissed someone off. When you shoplift from a store they call the cops to charge you, when you make someone feel stupid for having believed you, they call their friends to come over and beat the shit out of you.

<comment><USER12> The conman hustle is _not_ "the second oldest profession."

This is the second-oldest profession: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveying>

<comment><USER13> I think it pretty obvious ChuckMcM was telling a humorous anecdote to support a point, rather than objectively evaluating the ages of various professions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Besides being entertaining, some of these tactics could also be ethically and practically useful. How many times have you been made to feel uncomfortable being somewhere you had a right to be?

Maybe you really are meeting friends at an exclusive restaurant, but the host is eyeing you suspiciously as you walk in.

Maybe you left your conference badge at the hotel, but didn't realize it was required for the afterparty.

Maybe you were asked to speak at a meetup, but the doorperson is asking for $10 in pizza money even though you already ate.

Learning how to look and act like you own the place can save you confrontation, keep things running smoothly, and lead to the same kinds of awesome as in the article - without swindling any charities.

<comment><USER10> That's a good takeaway.

One of my mentors is the organizer of an invite-only meetup which I really wanted to go to, and while he did add me at the last second to the invite list, I didn't get a badge. I simply acted as if I belonged (which I did), and I got by security, into the afterparty, etc.

I do believe the blog author crossed the line, but I also feel it's forgiveable/acceptable as an experiment, but not as something repeatable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This article is a bit dramatic. It's really easy to crash a party. You just walk in. Unless you are causing a problem, or you really don't look like you belong there, nobody will notice. As party crashing is sort of a pointless activity, not many people actually do it. Thus, parties aren't really prepared for it, and it's pretty easy.

<comment><USER16> I think a lot of time people do notice; they just don't care.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Regardless of whether or not these practices were ethical (I don't think they were) or had a point (I don't think they did), the article was a fun enough read. If that's how this guy wants to get his kicks and meet new and interesting people (who seem to be interesting to him only because they have money), then that's fine by me. But if I ever see him at an event I host, he's getting kicked out whether he deserves to be there or not.

</comment><comment><USER18> In my experience the best events to crash are art exhibit openings. You can do it with any attire (so long as you _are_ the attire) and it's not hard at all to fake an appreciation for whatever art they may be showing.

Furthermore, the faster you drink the less people care about how you act. People at exhibit openings tend to get positively sloshed.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is written with the rhythmic style and aggressively varied typography of ad copy.

<comment><USER20> Agreed, I honestly don't understand how it could be so well received on HN. Do you really need to use boldface <b>at the end of every sentence?</b> This article just seems like money-worshiping, social-climbing drivel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Here it is in Google's cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:CiuHx3i...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:CiuHx3i_sooJ:www.nevblog.com/how- to-crash-a-party/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

</comment><comment><USER22> Though I might not like what he did, I admire the skill itself, and more honest applications of it. Anyone who finds the article interesting should watch "Catch Me if You Can" a movie about a criminal who uses these techniques to steal money.

<comment><USER10> The book is also really good (didn't actually watch the movie)

<http://www.amazon.com/Catch-Me-If-You-Can/dp/0767905385>

I also enjoyed Kevin Mitnick's book The Art of Deception, also on "Social Engineering"/con artists.

[http://www.amazon.com/Art-Deception-Controlling-Element- Secu...](http://www.amazon.com/Art-Deception-Controlling-Element- Security/dp/076454280X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1329393790&sr=1-1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> i used to work in a movie theater in high school, same theory applies. you can actually walk right in without a ticket and no tricks, just confidence and a sense of entitlement. my coworkers would never stop people with the balls to do it and it happened many times.

walk close behind a group of at least 2 other customers. as their tickets are being ripped just keep walking past them at a normal pace, head facing forward, and without making eye contact. they will notice you but do nothing.

go ahead and try it with a legit ticket in your pocket you can show them if they do stop you.

</comment><comment><USER3> I may not ever have the gumption to actually do something like this, but I'll say its admirable. At a base level, he's really mastered social engineering.

<comment><USER24> That is true. But social engineering is mostly about not caring about the consequences and looking exactly like you belong there.

<comment><USER25> Don't forget that you have to look the part as well. If you are dressed correctly, you can crash a party at the White House. [http://articles.cnn.com/2009-11-25/politics/state.dinner.cra...](http://articles.cnn.com/2009-11-25/politics/state.dinner.crashers_1_secret- service-white-house-dinner?_s=PM:POLITICS)

also:

Lemon: Carol, what are you doing here? How did you get past security?

Carol: You walk briskly in a pilot's uniform, you can go pretty much anywhere. I've been upstairs at the White House while the Obamas were sleeping.

[http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com/show/30-rock/i-do- do-1....](http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com/show/30-rock/i-do- do-1.php?page=9)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Love this sentence: Think about it, every event likes press coverage….and I was a quote on quote…"member of the press"!

Cheesy formatting, total misunderstanding of "quote unquote" - the use of quotation marks afterwards is priceless, and an attitude of having discovered and revealed some great secret which is in actuality a ploy so tired it has been in bad movies for decades. This guy is passing, right. Definitely a dancing monkey.

</comment><comment><USER27> Come back when you've made and used your own grappling hook, dodged barbed wire using carpet samplers, hidden in a ditch for two hours and blended into a samba procession in order to save £180 to get into a music festival.

NB: Not all of the above were necessarily my exploits.

</comment><comment><USER28> The funny thing is, if James Bond would do something similar in a movie, everybody would fall in love with the technique. But if somebody really breaks this down for you, it's wrong and "attention-seeking". As he says in the last part of the post, this is just another tactic of being scrappy and wanting to learn from other people. Why not use it for your advantage?

<comment><USER29> > _The funny thing is, if James Bond would do something similar in a movie, > everybody would fall in love with the technique._

Well, James Bond saves the world and doing something like sneaking into a party is probably a 2/10 on his list of skills. All this guy does is desperately seek attention, religiously look up to money and then he seeks more approval and attention about it online.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I found his characterization of the people getting paid to check tickets -- "I'm scared of Mr. Rich person" -- a bit naive.

</comment><comment><USER31> Sometimes, doing things like this can get "blown way out of proportion": <http://www.wtae.com/r/23653787/detail.html> (The blog writer was arrested along with 2 others for breaking into Pittsburgh Steelers' stadium in 2010.)

</comment><comment><USER32> If you found his party hacking admirable or maybe just entertaining, you'd probably like the movie, "Wedding Crashers":

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BchoV-6UHI8>

</comment><comment><USER33> This is the guy: <http://www.nevblog.com/images/prime-minister-of- malaysia.jpg>

</comment><comment><USER34> So has anyone here crashed a conference or convention? I've wanted to but haven't for fear of someone recognizing me.

<comment><USER35> And why would you do that?

<comment><USER36> Presumably for the same reason that one would normally attend a conference or convention, except with the added benefit of being a few hundred dollars richer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > _HEY. Hey you. Studies show if you don't read NevBlog.com everyday, you > might die_

Really? Excellent! Because after reading that post, I will definitely never ever read that blog again on purpose, it makes me feel like dieing.

This so reeks of the same annoying "openess" and impertinence I have only come to experience from typically Indian and Pakistani hagglers on the street trying to lure you into their clothes store.

Congratulations, you played the monkey for an educated business crowd and they gave you attention. How surprising, educated and intelligent people are actually friendlier and forgiving than you thought! But still you were a dancing monkey, nothing more. You really feel proud of yourself?

Here is a hint: these people are getting approached by the likes of you ever single day, you really think they didn't see through your "genius" charade you came up with in 2 seconds? I think rich people can't stand anything less than people who talk to them just because they "admire" their wealth.

Your demeanor and actions very clearly show... you wouldn't stop at anything just to get some money and attention. You are the last person on earth I want to see coming into money because your borderline-religious fascination with it is dangerous and worrying.

> _Often out of the ghettoness and scrappiness, emerges something more > refined._

You are not ghetto nor do you accomplish anything actually pretty cool or worthwhile through shady means... you are just cheap and greedy. And you wrote a whole blog entry full of proof for that.

And all those "genius" methods of being a cheap, greedy wannabe and what do you have to show for it? You talked to a couple of people... congratulations.

</comment><comment><USER37> you got to admit, the recording makes it like a fairy tale, i've done crashing parties (just for the free booze) and will do it in the future!

</comment><comment><USER38> How to crash a blog.

</comment><comment><USER39> How to crash a blog.

[link doesn't work]

</comment><comment><USER40> Getting HTTP500. How to crash a webserver?</comment>


The Case of the Missing Human Ancestor - <AUTHOR> http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/07/125-missing-human-ancestor/shreeve-text

<comment><USER2> Left-out of this article is that the Denisovans seem to be one of the ancestors of the Melanesian peoples living in and near Papua New Guinea: [http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/neandertals/neandertal_d...](http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/neandertals/neandertal_dna/denisova- nuclear-genome-reich-2010.html).

More about the Melanesians: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanesians](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanesians)

<comment><USER3> He mentioned it briefly, along with Australian Aborigines as well as a population from the Philippines who displays a notable share of Denisovan DNA (around 2.5%, versus ~5% in the Melanesians).

<comment><USER2> I must have missed that. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> When articles like this talk about interbreeding, I can't help but wonder how that happened. At the time, were we close enough to them in appearance that it would have happened willingly, or are we talking about rape scenarios?

<comment><USER5> I don't think appearance has a lot to do about that...

<comment><USER4> If they looked really different, or were really different in some other way, than I could see them being ostracized. Of course, it is also possible that primitive man couldn't tell the difference between themselves and the others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I hope for the day when a bone or whatever is found that contains something like 25-50% human and 25-50% Denisovan or Neanderthal... The frozen expanses of Siberia seem to be a good place to look for them...

</comment><comment><USER7> I wonder when we'll be able to simulate an organism out of a given sequenced DNA. It may be a little too much to recreate a real living thing, but I think it would be OK to simulate.

<comment><USER8> Well, the DNA itself probably wouldn't be enough because it doesn't really encode an algorithm or recipe describing how a (multicellular in this context) living organism is constructed from it's genetic information. Instead, the DNA is more like a huge collection of building blocks. But how and what will be constructed from this pile (meaning what will be included in the final system and what won't) that's a completely different matter.

A few links for the interested: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developmental_biology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developmental_biology) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics)

That said, there has been quite an exciting paper published around a year ago describing the first simulation of one life cycle of an _in silico_ Mycoplasma genitalium (the smallest known bacteria). Here's a link to relevant HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4272039](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4272039)

<comment><USER9> For simple organisms, we could probably consider what would happen if we put their DNA in the nucleas, letting it be transcribed by the 'standard' process. This is exactly what viruses do when they inject their DNA/RNA into a foreign cell so they will be cloned.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The article is inconsistent. There is one morphological clue from the Denisovans that could be used to match the Chinese skulls - the huge size of the tooth.

</comment><comment><USER11> I hope it's the pig-chimp!

<comment><USER12> Nosy</comment></comment>


Crypto as in Crypto - <AUTHOR> https://benlog.com/2018/01/07/crypto-as-in-crypto/ <comment><USER2> When I first heard "crypto" for "cryptocurrency" I was saddened because it seemed like the meaning was being coopted away from the "real" meaning of "cryptography". But now, I think we're stuck with it. Words sometimes just have multiple related-but-different meanings. Like how a chemist's "organic" is different from a farmer's "organic". Or, perhaps more saliently to this community, Y Combinator's "hacker" is different from CNN's "hacker".

</comment><comment><USER3> I think the problem is that blockcain fans mostly don't care about real crypto :) and use "crypto" as a synonym for digital currency. To me, saying "crypto" means blockchain seems like saying "paper" means book. Sure it is needed, but it is not really the most relevant thing to its function. We surely wouldn't call a pdf "paper" but I think some might call Ripple or even a simple sql database "crypto", and cryptography probably still is used in there to some degree but I think it is very far from the core.

<comment><USER4> I dunno, I seem to have many papers in pdf form on my hard drive.

<comment><USER5> And your "hard drive" is presumably an SSD, now.

<comment><USER6> And by "SSD" you mean the storage on the phone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Radical proposal: Abbreviations can mean more than one thing depending on context.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, but the real question is how do we pronounce GIF?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This reminds me of those insisting that drones are not drones, but quad- copters (what about those with 6 propellers?)

Language is defined by it's usage.

Taken to extreme, I've seen serious linguists argue that if a lot of different background non-native speakers make the same mistake when speaking English, maybe they are right and the native speakers are wrong.

<comment><USER3> Maybe it's just me, but I really don't like this view in this case.

Crypto in cryptocurrency still stands for cryptographic and by using crypto for cryptocurrency we are making things harder to understand for eveyone.

Of course language evolves, but I think, given the chance, we should make it easier to understand and not harder.

Edit: spelling

<comment><USER9> How do we make it harder exactly?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Whatever we call it, we still need a use case for full trustless crypto. The > reason you find many cryptographers skeptical of Blockchain as a major new > technological framework (Internet 3.0!) is that many of us have tried to > pitch and develop trustless business models before. And all of the use cases > we had in mind have consistently been better served by more centralized, > higher-trust alternatives. So we look at Blockchain with a feeling of "we've > tried this before, and it's not clear there's anything sufficiently new to > make users want this."

Is there a reason this argument isn't getting wider airplay? Always felt the same way. Interesting to have it validated by someone who sounds like he's been around the block (pun intended).

</comment><comment><USER11> The loss of the word 'meme' was unfortunate imho. For cryptography, we can always say simply 'cryptography,' instead of 'crypto.'

<comment><USER6> Was the 'meme' word ever used before?

The first time I remember seeing it ten years ago was exactly to describe the modern internet phenomenon.

<comment><USER11> It was coined in 1976 as a term meaning "information virus" (akin to gene) something that manages to get itself copied by using its hosts, humans. It still sort of has shades of that meaning in its modern usage, but the original usage was more serious... useful for discussing things like how religions evolve self defense mechanisms.

Nice to see Wikipedia still talks about the old meaning, and uses "internet meme" for the newer meaning.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Idk I've always said encryption when talking about cryptography. Also context would matter when discerning the intended meaning of crypto as a coin or crypto as in cryptography.

<comment><USER13> Cryptography is a broader subject that encryption, including for example message authentication, not just message encryption.

<comment><USER12> Fair enough, it's not my area of expertise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't understand why there has to be a battle at all. What is this, a grammar nazi club?</comment>