The Science of Wi-Fi on Airplanes - <AUTHOR> https://onezero.medium.com/what-makes-it-possible-to-browse-the-internet-at-35-000-feet-1afaea83eb5 <comment><USER2> > Surfing the internet at 35,000 feet is now something that we expect on > flights.

Not only do I _not_ expect this, I actually dread the time when it is ubiquitous and free. Flying is really a unique experience in that it forces you to sit still, disconnect and entertain yourself for a substantial period. This has a meditative element for me: I have time to not be updated, to gaze, to talk to strangers, to be bored... All the things people used to do in the long long ago. It gives flying a kind of sublime quality because it prepares me mentally for arriving at a completely different place than the one I left. It's not just a continuous Instagram fueled frenzy like any other day. Of course I can choose to not use my phone/internet at any time, but it's so much harder that it loses its entire allure: Instead of just disengaging I'm constantly fighting the urge and telling myself "No!". Once it's available on board I won't be able to resist.

<comment><USER3> If you want this go on a cruise for a week and disconnect yourself. Don't buy the WiFi package, tell everyone you're in the middle of an ocean, gone.

I don't get why people treat flying so ceremoniously; it's a glorified bus ride. I still got shit to do, and I need access to resources. It is a waste of time to burn 6 hours when flying cross country for nothing. I could get a lot done in that time.

<comment><USER4> I travel for work 20 years, 6-7 internationals per year (or more) and I can tell you 1) its not always cross country and 2) sleep is possibly the most important thing you can do, if you need to move timezones and be alert and working when you get there.

I do work in the air. I've had other passengers complain about my keyboard volume. I also now pace it, police it and don't try to over-do it: The spam- can is not condusive to good work outcomes always. Its ok for reading and reflection, and oftentimes they don't depend on connectivity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Most of why WiFi on aircraft sucks is because airlines went too early. To be fair, they had to guess. The better Ka band satellite experience wasn't ready when most airlines made their initial choice, so most of them went with either Ku band satellite or air to ground cellular. Both have either technical or cost barriers to deliver enough bandwidth.

And, the cost for the hardware, FAA certification, and long aircraft downtimes to get it all installed and working was really high. So they have to recoup all that before upgrading.

JetBlue guessed better with the timing, waiting until it was ready, so their experience is better, and pricing isn't terrible as compared to others.

I feel like Southwest made a decent compromise. They went Ku, but use a separate transponder to give away TV and movies at no charge, and a small slice of bandwidth to give iMessage and whatsApp for free. The paid wifi is slow, but comparitively cheap.

The airlines that went with AirCell/GoGo are the worst of the lot. Nothing for free, and the pricing is outrageous given the experience. Most airlines should be about ready to upgrade all the old stuff soon, so the experience should improve. Low orbit tech would help even more.

<comment><USER6> Alaska uses GoGo and they also give away iMessage for free. A weird side effect is that sometimes you get more than just free messaging. Every time I've used it, I get full Internet access (though it sure is slow). My wife's phone only ever gets iMessage. No idea why I get the accidental free upgrade.

<comment> o-__-o do you have tmobile? I think the service provider is related. on a side note, I've always gotten iMessage to work on southwest flights without paying. and on united you can get to certain google hosts without a paywall. I think that's all I'll share on here for now

<comment><USER7> As someone who practically lives on airliners equipped with GoGo I'm curious what else you have...

What Google hosts work? Would creating a tunnel to something on GCE work?

<comment><USER8> Yes. Or at least, it did for awhile. I set up a small server as a SOCKS proxy and it worked great.

<comment> o-__-o I used to do OpenVPN on port 53 (DNS) when all the various airplane wifi first launched. suuuuper limiting (that 230 MTU tho) and eventually blockaded. then there was the google XSS-proxy-redirect that I abused for awhile until google removed it (also hella limiting). then i decided all future jobs must pay for my airplane wifi habit, and my experience has gotten so much better (though there are some other tricks I find when i've got nothing to do.. like the redboot bug that gave me free IFE on a long haul flight :)

<comment><USER7> I used both of those as well. They were good while they lasted. Nowadays I find its best to board a GoGo equipped aircraft with a list of T-Mobile numbers. When you find one with a T-Mobile One plan you've hit gold.

<comment> o-__-o LOL well first of all, I don't think a TMO plan is required just an unlimited plan (I have a grandfathered unlimited plan without the throttling that lets me GoGo) but second, and most importantly, I'm going to tell EVERYONE about this because you sir are a genius.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> At one point connexion by boeing was doing some fearsome BGP re-steering to try and get traffic efficient ground station routing. I don't know how they did it (by hand?) or how well it worked, it was anecdata.

I was also told the FAA at one point demanded all aircraft have the same IP and ASN. I suspect thats magnified bullshit but it is an interesting question, what FAA compliance in data services means for certifying a configuration which has to be mutable as you move, as aircraft change lease, as ISPs come and go.

<comment><USER5> I doubt the FAA got involved with IP addresses and BGP. They do care about airgapping , heat, grounding, electrical, antenna radomes and hull integrity, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Just flew from LA to Boston on JetBlue. Woo free WiFi. Boo everyone is on it, literally unusable.

Then I flew NY to LA on Alaska. Woo WiFi that isn't free so there's bandwidth. Boo it's $40 for the flight.

How's 20 bucks sound?

</comment><comment><USER10> I wonder how SpaceX Starlink will disrupt the current players in this market.

<comment><USER4> lowering RTT significantly would immediately alter the equation between ground facing and sat facing comms.

<comment><USER5> The lower bandwidth cost is a big deal as well. Though actively tracking and often swinging to new satellites while going 500mph, with the aircraft tilting and yawing is probably not easy.

<comment><USER11> Starlink receivers will use solid-state phased array beamforming antennae, so nothing has to physically "swing" to a new satellite. With a reasonably accurate accelerometer and inertial sensor, it's easy to compensate for aircraft movement.

<comment><USER4> I thought even the current GEO orbit antenna were phased array. If not, there might also be the point that the aerodynamics for a phased array shell may be less expensive on fuel burden (less air resistance, less turbulence) and lighter, so cheaper overall. (at a refit cost)

<comment><USER5> The Connexion antenna was all phased array with no tilt/yaw, but it was huge. The ones on aircraft now do track the satellite, tilt, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The problem with public Wi-Fi (not just on airplanes) is that there's no guarantee about what you're gonna get in terms of bandwidth or if there are any limitations or restrictions.

Most public Wi-Fi for example blocks video websites such as YouTube and Netflix - if the network is paid you only find out _after_ you've paid with no easy way to get a refund.

I get why they're blocking them, but I feel like a better solution would just be to split the bandwidth evenly and give every user a guaranteed bandwidth on which they're allowed to do _anything_ they want (since it won't disrupt other users as they can't use more than their allocated bandwidth).

The bandwidth should be advertised upfront along with the price so any potential customers know what they're getting and whether it'll work for their application (if it's advertising 1Mbps I know I wouldn't be able to watch Netflix in HD, but it'll still be fine for e-mails and casual browsing).

Authentication should also be improved; currently it's all captive portals which are hacks and inefficient for frequent users. If I'm commuting every day and happy to pay for your Wi-Fi just give me my own WPA2 Enterprise credentials (unique username/password) so my devices can connect seamlessly without any further action on my part.

<comment><USER13> AirFrance gave me the option to get "Stream speed" in a flight from Paris to Sao Paulo a few days ago. By "stream speed" I assume it allows netflix. I didn't test it tough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I was reading up on this article the other day and was wondering if Li-Fi can be utilized for ATG or Satellite to Plane transmission. Will this increase stability of internet connection on the plane?

[https://www.eenewseurope.com/news/lifi-trialed-commercial- ai...](https://www.eenewseurope.com/news/lifi-trialed-commercial-airplanes-0)

I have personally experienced very slow and unstable connection even on the premium WiFi plan of American Airlines, Alaska, Etihad and Qatar Airways.

</comment><comment> m-p-3 It's nice that airlines are offering this and I'm sure there is a lot of people who benefit from this, but I guess I'm used to be prepared and have all the data I need cached on my system before I leave. And with FileVault/Bitlocker, I'm not too concerned in case of a theft.

Google makes it quite easy these days with File Stream, Gmail offline mode, etc. And for multimedia, I just download / sync content I'm likely to watch beforehand on Netflix or Plex.

</comment><comment><USER15> 3\. Starlink

<comment><USER16> Thank you. Was very disappointed to not find that in the discussion.

Looks like it's already being trialed for military C-12 planes.

[https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-satellite-internet- ser...](https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-satellite-internet- service-2020.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Pumped for the day when Roko's basilisk comes _this_ close to taking over the world's financial system, but is thwarted by crappy airplane wifi.

RB's up there excited, all ready to press the big red button after departing JFK in Air Force One, but can't because it forgot to download the mandatory app before take-off.

Foiled again!

<comment><USER18> The term "basilisk" is referring to the thought experiment itself, not the AI, by the way. A basilisk is something where perceiving it damages you, more or less.

The AI is nameless or might be referred to as Omega.

<comment><USER17> ah my bad. guess that's why no one liked the joke. gotta be accurate with your Omega jokes on HN or people will shred you.</comment></comment></comment>


Extend Twitter Bootstrap with these Bootstrap Form Helpers - <AUTHOR> http://vlamanna.github.com/BootstrapFormHelpers/

<comment><USER2> I use select2 with bootstrap <http://ivaynberg.github.com/select2/>

works impressively well for using inside forms.

<comment><USER3> I saw this on HN at some point but forgot to bookmark/save it in some way, I think it's really awesome. As a Swede I always have to select the box and type "S" a lot of times to get to "Sweden", I'd rather just type in "Swe" like you can do with this. :)

<comment><USER4> T and scroll up a couple ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The phone one is poor usability. Why is the text indicator half way through the input when it inserts text at the beginning?

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, I will rework this part. The main challenge was support for IE on this one.

<comment><USER6> It also allows you to paste any text in, and it will no longer match the mask.

<comment><AUTHOR> Will fix it. <https://github.com/vlamanna/BootstrapFormHelpers/issues/8>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Awesome. I took the effort and found all timezones across the world and put them into a select for <http://commando.io>. Would be cool to have a Bootstrap plugin for this. Here is the select HTML markup.

<https://gist.github.com/3919205>

<comment><USER8> I appreciate the effort but your list is just plain wrong.

1\. It's not "all timezones across the world" but rather Windows time zones from a particular version of Windows. Most people use the much more accurate Olson database that actually gives you correct time offsets, daylight savings rules, etc.

2\. Your option values, i.e. offsets, are either meaningless, or if someone actually uses them, erroneous. For example, current UTC is 17:40 but current Central is 12:40 not 11:40. Again, use the Olson database if you want better time conversions - Windows offset numbers are just a part of the timezone name, not an actual offset.

3\. Timezone names differ depending on the language settings on your PC, and your list is only a small EN subset of the time zones, which, given the international nature of the list, is not very useful. If your users are in a non-American time zone, it is very likely that their time zone name is not on your list.

4\. Timezone names differ from version to version, and are not backward compatible. Your list is only correct for whatever version you collected it on so it should be identified as such. Even better, _if_ someone actually needs Windows timezones - like I said above, most likely you need the Olson timezones - they should take them from the source, by running the tzutil utility, or from microsoft.com.

Your list should be identified as what it is, a list of Windows time zones, (?) OS version. Even then, it's dangerous that whoever stumbles upon it will use the offsets for time conversions.

<comment><USER7> Actually, I got the timezones from WikiPedia (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_zone>) not Windows. I manually went through the WikiPedia list and built up the list. Then I have a checkbox; is daylight savings [ ].

The name list is just one or two major cities. The assumption is users know their offset.

I appreciate your comments thought.

<comment><USER8> I just did a search on that page on a couple specific time zones included in your list, and couldn't hit any results for: Caracas or Brussels. It doesn't seem you linked the right page?

As far as separate checkbox for daylight savings: (1) there are more rules than just daylight savings, and moreover some timezones have daylight savings other than 1 hour (this is rare but still); (2) most languages have libraries that will calculate the timezone for you, and it's both easier and more accurate, both for the user and the developer, to use these libraries to do all the heavy lifting for you.

<comment><USER7> Caracas is `-4:30 hours` which is the same as 'Venezuela` in WikiPedia. Just wanted to stick with cities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The country / state linked selects is very nice, but the phone masking feature seems still work in progress, I use this one for input masks in general: <http://digitalbush.com/projects/masked-input-plugin/>

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm impressed with how responsive the author has been in the comments here. It seems like each concern is met with a reply and even some times he creates an issue item for it in Github. Nice work!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I hope this open source project will help people build better forms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This might be a good place to remind you that if you are dealing with international customers, don't make "state" a required field.

<comment><USER12> Or make that much assumptions about their phone numbers

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Phone number input doesn't work with num keys.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it will be fixed. <https://github.com/vlamanna/BootstrapFormHelpers/issues/1>

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> A couple of issues in Chrome (stable): I can't type in or move the cursor between sub-fields on the phone controls.

Where does your country-state data comes from? I've never seen a list so complete for countries outside the US!

<comment><AUTHOR> The issues with the phone controls will be fixed. <https://github.com/vlamanna/BootstrapFormHelpers/issues/2>

As for the data, I've worked hard to build this and I will also soon release it in other languages.

<comment><USER15> Btw if you're interested in a complementing piece of code, I have a small library [1] would give you the country for a given phone number (e164), so it could be used to prefill a default country value. It's not returning ISO code but I was planning on adding such feature.

[1]: <https://github.com/pdeschen/e164.js>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Posted a couple issues regarding the phone field on github. Would like to use this on a current project. It's a great start and look forward to it just getting a little further down the road.

</comment><comment><USER17> Free Twitter bootstrap magento template <http://webkul.com/blog/twitter- bootstrap-magento-template/>

</comment><comment><USER18> It's really pretty cool that bootstrap has spawned such a tertiary market for addons. I knew it was the real deal when I actually paid for a theme rather than writing the css myself!

</comment><comment><USER19> How does states work? Does it support territories outside the US?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it has the states/provinces/territories of all countries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Add address validation using google maps api. I will love you.

</comment><comment><USER21> I like it.. good job

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I'll add more stuff very soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Arrow keys don't allow moving the cursor

<comment><AUTHOR> Will fix it. <https://github.com/vlamanna/BootstrapFormHelpers/issues/3>

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> a good candidate for <http://bootsnipp.com></comment>


13-year-old scientist may have designed a better version of Hyperloop - <AUTHOR> https://lite.cnn.io/en/article/h_730eb9b9c9717b44b5561dfa1a4394e7 <comment><USER2> Good, because hyperloop was more of a fantasy than good engineering.

Wait - it's still a giant vacuum tunnel? Well, there's the fantasy</comment>


The Stony Brook Algorithm Repository - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~algorith/

<comment><USER2> Duplicate <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1614609>

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh :(

I thought HN catches duplicate posts by the URL? Well can somebody delete this post perhaps?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The algorithm design manual is a great book. The only downside is that the CD that comes with the book is full of media in 1995 realmedia format.</comment>


More Colorado kids reported to have eaten pot after medical use legalized - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/28/us-pot-medical-use-idUSBRE94R0XH20130528

<comment><USER2> Original title:

"More Colorado kids ate pot after medical use legalized"

</comment><comment><USER3> This headline is misleading. The article writes that "After the [Colorado marijuana legalization] law changed, 14 out of 588 were found to have eaten or otherwise ingested the drug." This implies correlation, but not causation; it definitely doesn't justify that "because" in the title.

</comment><comment><USER4> Allowing THC in baked goods just seems like a Bad Idea for this exact reason.

<comment><USER5> By that same argument we should outlaw alcohol -> <http://www.bluelight.ru/vb/threads/613617-Plugging-Alcohol>

<comment><USER6> Alcohol vaporizes very quickly in these cases. Meaning it is VERY hard to bake a cake a significant amount of alcohol in it.

But having alcohol in there at all does change the taste. So it's a great tool for bakers to make more varied goods.</comment></comment></comment>


Intelligent machines: Making AI work in the real world - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-34143171 <comment> rm_-rf_slash >In order for AI to fulfil its long-term potential for society, we need to direct research even more toward real-world messiness: how do you help someone plan a last-minute great vacation when they've got limited budget, two picky kids, and only a few days to squeeze it into?

Maybe instead of better vacation planning, people simply want a longer vacation?

>Can we reduce the noise of modern life by giving you smarter filters on your emails, your social media feeds, your schedule - can we give you less spam and more time?

Why does every new "innovation" seem to be a stronger set of staples squeezing us to our work? Could a complex comprehension of desirable life even be understood by a Google billionaire? Could it be understood by a Google A.I.?

Or my favorite:

>Today, you're much better off building a smart system that can learn from the real world - what actual listeners are most likely to like next - and help you predict who and where the next Adele might be. As a bonus, it's a much less elitist taste-making process - much more democratic - allowing everyone to discover the next big star through our own collective tastes and not through the individual preferences of a select few.

If the algorithm that runs predictive preferences is owned, operated, and maintained by a single corporation, I'm not sure how it can be any _more_ elitist.

This is the danger with treating the human species as an engineering problem, and the blind faith we put into the words of people who will never again have to work a day in ten lifetimes.

<comment><USER2> >Why does every new "innovation" seem to be a stronger set of staples squeezing us to our work?

Because that is the goal of the system which charters the companies which employ the people which do the algorithms research, and there has been quite a lot of propaganda to imbue the people with loyalty to the system.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you prepare for a technical interview. - <AUTHOR>

Theres so much ground to cover prior to an interview, design patterns, algorithms, data structures, language specifics, techniques & technologies, database, etc.. what do you guys do to prepare? for approximately how long? good resources in general ? language specific resources ? <comment><USER2> I make a list of the kinds of things I expect to be asked based on the company, position and role and then review those things.

If I think I'll be writing C then I spend a little time re-reading "The Dictionary of Standard C" by Rex Jaeschke and "Hacker's Delight" by Henry Warren so I'll be able to immediately explain what SIG_ATOMIC_MAX means or what (x & (x-1)) accomplishes.

If there's a likelihood that I'll be doing any network programming then I'll spend a little quality time reviewing the BSD sources and perhaps re-read my Richard Stevens books so that I'll be able to clearly explain stuff like Nagel's Algorithm (and when it's not a good idea).

If I think I'll be looking at a database then I'll review Gray and Reuter's "Transaction Processing" so that I'll keep my SERIALIZABLE, READ COMMITTED, REPEATABLE READ and CURSOR STABILITY straight. If I think they'll want me to do something on the back of an envelope then I'll re-read Jon Bentley's "Programming Pearls" and there's any chance I'll need to actually think about an algorithm (!) then I'll review Skiena's "Algorithm Design Manual".

I like to also do a few of Raymond Smullyan's puzzles, just in case I end up in an interview with one guy who always tells the truth and one guy who always lies...

</comment><comment><USER3> Google "programming interview questions" or the like. There is lots of useful information. Design pattern questions are common. If you know MVC, Factory, and a couple of others, you are probably OK. Algorithm questions are surprisingly rare, but you should know big O notation and be able to state it for a couple kinds of sorts or searches. Language specifics: yes. Know OO, abstract classes, concrete classes, interfaces and instances. Otherwise know what you claim. If all you know about databases is what you learned in a CS class, you dont know databases.

<comment><USER4> The 2 best resources for this are:

1\. Programming Interviews Exposed 2\. Career Cup interview Guide by Gayle Laakman (www.careercup.com)

I had to prepare for interviews and didn't have much time. I spent a few days going through each one of them--marathon studying did really well as a result. I remember beingasked questions several times and I almost felt like telling the interviewer, do you want to blindfold me and tie my hands behind my back to make this a little more challenging? :)

<comment><AUTHOR> which is the better purchase if you had to chose, career cup or programming interviews exposed

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It rather depends on all the information you know about before the interview(what do they use, what kind of questions did they ask in the phone screen, what do you know about the company). If it is for a specific language position I typically read the books I have for the lang. Practice problem solving techniques (something along the lines of prag. prog.'s code katas.)</comment>


O'Reilly books launched on Inkling (iPad, iPhone & Web)  - <AUTHOR> https://www.inkling.com/store/brand/oreilly/

<comment><USER2> This seems like an interesting attempt on O'Reilly's part to justify an electronic price greater than the print price (as of today at Amazon). I will fully acknowledge that the potential utility of an electronic edition of this style of book is superior to that of the dead-tree version. But I can't really accept the price.

I see that Campbell's Biology is still outrageously expensive as well. Can I even resell my Inkling books? If the answer is "no" then students should just buy the used dead-tree version of texts on amazon and resell them. Especially Campbell.

Also, I want to middle-click the tiles to open the book in a new page. Shame on you Inkling for breaking that.

<comment><USER3> Tyler,

I wouldn't read into the O'Reilly prices too much. They must balance a lot of pre-existing agreements with other distribution channels, and as you probably know, Amazon often sells print titles at a loss.

Campbell is a similar situation, but it's available by the chapter for $4, and that's how most students are buying it -- getting just the pieces their profs assign.

As to the middle-click / option-click problem, we're aware, and we consider it a bug. We'll fix it. We are ashamed!

<comment><USER2> I probably came across a little too harsh. I think Inkling is awesome, I'm just still grumpy at publishers.

In the case of Campbell the _a la carte_ Inkling prices are such that a student can get 60% of the book at the point they reach the full price of the book. I know at many universities Campbell is the primary text used for first year biology students so going through 60-80% is not unheard of. At that consumption rate I would be better off buying the book used from Amazon, using it, and then reselling it at a loss of $20-$30. If a student doesn't want to deal with reselling his or her book they can even rent Campbell for ~$70. As it's a, first year, general biology book keeping it for reference doesn't make a huge amount of sense for non-pre-med biology students.

I really don't blame Inkling for this, I just think that Campbell would be a reasonable text at a quarter to half the current price (with individual chapters similarly reduced) which would compete nicely and directly with the rental text market.

All that said, per-chapter certainly benefits students who tend to not buy the texts, but would like access to particular chapters.

Additionally, buying an Inkling text with half a dozen other students and sharing becomes an enticing proposition (that probably terrifies publishers and probably violates the EULA and TOS).

Anyway, I'm excited about Inkling, and hope that authors and publishers fully embrace it and similar platforms. I'm not excited about future students still being gouged for a medium that is dirt cheap to reproduce.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks like an interesting idea. I particularly like the in-line discussions.

Is there a list of books which feature the coding widget? I imagine this only applies to the interpreted languages like Python and Ruby?

<comment><USER3> Coding widgets are in the JavaScript titles to start. More to come.

<comment><USER4> No worries, thanks for that.

I have bought a book or two, and noticed that the site remembers both my CC details (this is alright) and also my 3 digit CVV. Isn't there a law against storing both for the purpose of future purchases?

I'd feel a little more comfortable if I was asked to enter the CVV every time. This is not inconvenient for the user as far as I can see.

<comment><USER3> We do not store your CVV, actually. We just don't use it. Interesting that this leads one to an uncomfortable conclusion -- thanks for the feedback.

<comment><USER4> No worries at all, I was trying not to swinge accusations at your company :)

I don't use my CC that much online, but I can't remember the last time (if ever) that I wasn't asked for a CVV on a future purchase after saving my details. Amazon still requires it for transactions even though my details are saved.

It makes me a bit more uncomfortable, because it removes that extra security layer between someone breaking into my account, and someone buying something. In another situation they would have to have my account details and my CVV (which may in fact, not be that hard to obtain, but it's a little more peace of mind).

Just some food for thought. I do like your site!

<comment><USER5> Amazon certainly doesn't require it for 1-click purchases, and I don't think they require it for shopping cart purchases either if your CC is saved.

Typically sites that save the CC do not save the CVV, but they only require it on the first purchase.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This looks lovely.

I'm a fan of Inkling, disappointed at its absence from Android and hopeful for the day that textbooks - printed, interactive or otherwise don't cost $160+.

</comment><comment><USER7> Very cool. Does anyone know if humans manually reformatted all of these to include special Inkling features, or whether they automatically generated them from ePUB files?

<comment><USER3> (Matt, CEO of Inkling here.)

Humans did not manually reformat these titles. The source was EPUB, and there was some clever automation to start. The semantic structure, internal content links, remarks and glossary entries were done essentially algorithmically. Enhancements and the ability to see code in the book were done systematically, and sometimes manually.

All of this was done using Inkling Habitat, our (as-yet unreleased) integrated content development environment. It makes this stuff much more scalable, and as we continue to roll out cool brands like O'Reilly, you'll see increasing amounts of media and interactivity where stuff like that makes sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've been following Inkling pretty closely for the last year or so, and have been incredibly impressed with the work they are doing. I'm excited to see O'Reilly on the Inkling platform, and can't wait to see what they do next!

</comment><comment><USER9> Surely a coincidence, but with a variety of titles shown, not a single Ruby or Rails title.

<comment><USER3> Indeed, nothing against Ruby or Rails. Actually, I think we used Ruby in the process of building these titles with the following library: <http://nokogiri.org>

Sometimes editioning and other considerations prevent us from doing a certain title immediately, but we do plan to bring the whole O'Reilly library to the platform over the next few months, including Ruby and Rails content.

(In the meantime, maybe you can learn a real language? Tee hee. Kidding. omg.)

(p.s., we're hiring. Just not Ruby engineers.) <http://www.inkling.com/careers>

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Awesome job, Inkling (& O'Reilly). Wish all programming books are like that.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is amazing! How can I create a book like this myself?

<comment><USER12> By using Inkling Habitat!</comment></comment>


How to Learn Algorithmic Trading - <AUTHOR> http://quantivity.wordpress.com/2010/01/10/how-to-learn-algorithmic-trading/

<comment><USER2> Great post! I've been interested in algo trading for quite some time now. It's one of the few ways that actually seem to make trading inherently fun!

</comment><comment><USER3> Start with an Excel sheet.</comment>


Facebook wanted journalists to sign non-disclosures before news conference - <AUTHOR> http://www.kplu.org/post/facebook-wanted-journalists-sign-non-disclosures-news-conference <comment><USER2> It seems to me like these sorts of P.R. blunders are common among most major big co's with regards to overzealous privacy protections. I don't find this particularly newsworthy myself. I think the only reason it grabs headlines is because Facebook is built on sharing and people seem to be more attracted to the irony rather than the substance.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice one Facebook. I don't know if you knew this or not, but news conferences are meant as a channel to share information, not ask journalists to say nothing. I think I'm going to share a link on facebook, but I don't want anyone who sees it to pass it on.

<comment><USER4> The flipside of living in the information age is that people will try to control information, which is tough, and makes them look bad (and anachronistic) when they fail. Information is a weapon to them, and can only harm. Not only that, but today's PR and legal people (not the most internet- savvy by and large) were trained on the basis of press releases and other controlled-source information dissemination techniques.

This error points to who FB wants to be (old-school bureaucracy where stupidity is swept under the rug), rather than what it has the potential to be (e.g. open). This is how they dig in for the long haul, by making themselves look as clueless as the big boys, rather than as smart as the little guys.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Read the article please - quote: "Facebook asked me to pass this on to you. They require it of all visitors to their facilities. It only applies to things that you might accidentally stumble upon while you are there and covers nothing discussed during our news conference. Please either bring a signed copy or be ready to sign upon arrival."

Which makes sense, imo, given the open work environment at Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER6> Title is a little misleading. Sounds like an overzealous legal team wanted to have them sign an NDA to cover things the press conference wasn't about. (IE if they accidently had access to internal confidential information)

Granted, still agree it's a bad move. If you can't trust the security of your facility, then don't have the press conference there.

</comment><comment><USER7> The title is very misleading. It asked them to NDA for things they see about facebook, if they stumble upon their code/IP, etc, and does not cover what's discussed at news conference, the journalists are free to discuss about the conference.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think the buried lede here is that FB is cracking down on some clickjack-y crimes. I have to wonder if this is the first salvo from their recent partnership with the FTC.</comment>


Living in China's Expanding Deserts - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/10/24/world/asia/living-in-chinas-expanding-deserts.html <comment><USER2> _But farming is also becoming more difficult. Huang Chunmei, who grew up in the town of Tonggunao'er and now farms there, said the water table was two meters, or about six feet, below ground during her childhood, and "now, you have to dig four or five meters."_

This is the bottom line; you can plant trees all you like, but this is not a matter of simple erosion due to overuse or clear-cutting. Rather, the climate systems of the region are changing, and presumably they suffer from the same overuse of subterranean water that everyone else does in the developed/developing world.

I feel terribly for these people, desperately slapping band-aids on a sucking chest wound, especially since the story of this century seems to be that the people on the front lines of climate change are the people who contributed least to the creation of the problem in the first place. It's also hard to see a happy outcome for them, since they're first on the metaphorical chopping block; even if the world suddenly woke up and took notice, it would be too late for them.

<comment><USER3> Sidenote, while a band-aid won't help a sucking chest wound, an occlusive dressing to halt the progress of the pneumothorax can be improvised with a piece of plastic laid over the wound and tape on three sides.

<comment><USER4> In next week's episode of "HN or WFA", we'll either show you how to setup a new bootstrap site or how to take spine precautions when dealing with the victim of a fall in the backcountry.

<comment><USER5> WFA?

I ask, because if there's a site that routinely discusses stuff like this (advanced yet practical medical stuff) i'd be very interested in reading it.

<comment><USER3> WFA, I assume he's talking about Wilderness First Aid, a medical certification.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The background video clips were done incredibly well in the post. The clips added to the setting of what was going on in the text without being distracting. Kudos to the NYTimes for that.

<comment><USER7> Really? On my five-year old Mac Mini scrolling was erratic and the text that was supposed to come up for a bit just flashed and went away before it could be read.

Having the videos be in clearly defined regions instead of wanking about with the scroll function would have been much more sensible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> while land in Russia, in particular East, is becoming more usable/livable with no population growth :) Through the history empires have risen and fallen in sync with climate changes, and climate change has already initiated redrawing of the maps in the Middle East and North Africa and looks like it is just the beginning of the new round of maps redrawing around the world.

<comment><USER9> Do you have more information on how Russia's Eastern regions are becoming more habitable? I know they have a development fund to incentive people from other regions to move and develop small businesses (especially in agriculture).

<comment><USER10> They're much better for agriculture than they used to be (though still pretty poor in Siberia). The change in productivity is wholly due to climate change. Warmer weather leads to a longer growing season, rain instead of snow, etc.

A lot of this land is nutrient packed as well. Siberia could be prime growing land if it gets warm enough. Similar to Ukraine today.

Saying that, there are a number of concerns about soil resilience in Siberia. If soil resilience doesn't improve, Siberia will remain very poor for agriculture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Guess climate change isn't a Chinese conspiracy after all*

*[https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/26589529219124838...](https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/265895292191248385?lang=en)

<comment><USER12> I would like to see research of which nations stand to gain the most due to climate change. My guesses are Russia and Canada. Perhaps in the future, Canadians will want to build a wall to keep out Americans, assuming they don't want that already. ;)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Rate my startup, Gradifi.com - <AUTHOR> http://www.gradifi.com/

<comment><USER2> I think the biggest barrier to entry is that the front page doesn't tell you anything about the product. I can't even tell what the product IS. Is it a website? A desktop app? A smartphone app? A Facebook app? What does it do? How does it work? What does it look like? Where are the answers to these questions?

<comment><AUTHOR> You make some great points.

Here's a shot: Gradifi is a web application that recommends courses to students based on courses that they've already taken. In addition, students can share notes with one another and can sell them to people who they don't know. Books that you list are advertised for free alongside course descriptions on the website.

I'm afraid of putting too much text on the front page and perhaps scaring people away. Maybe that's an unfounded fear. Maybe screenshots may be helpful as well?

<comment><USER2> I understand you don't want to scare people away, but why would anyone sign up for a service if they didn't know what it was? Screenshots would _definitely_ be helpful. Consider a screencast too.

Also, why not show publicly shared content? At least give some indication of what's inside if you sign up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The purpose of the site as expressed on the about page ("We think choosing courses is hard, and we're here to do something about that.") seems to bear no relation to the purpose expressed on the homepage ("Share your notes. Sell your books. Make money. Get better grades. Dominate."). Of the two, I think the about page MVP sounds more interesting, although probably less profitable.

Out of curiosity, why do you have that RackspaceCloud logo in your footer? Are you affiliated with Rackspace somehow? Are you getting a referral bonus or something? Just big fans?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I realize that most of you won't actually be able to create an account, so forgive me in advance for that. The service revolves around college students at a few select schools, and if you don't have an alumni or current email address for any of those schools, you're out of luck.

So, my biggest worry is conversions. How do I get people who visit the front page to actually make an account? Are there too many "barriers" to entry (i.e. graduation year, first name, last name, etc)?

Also, I'm concerned that people who visit the site don't actually know what it's about, or what it's used for. How would you recommend I make this a little more clear?

<comment><USER4> I'm glad you are at least aware of how ridiculously obtuse your homepage is. The signup form (in this case) seems very very unwelcoming.

To answer your question, why don't you just list the schools? I assume you are only marketing to them anyway so you can even have school specific landing pages. It's a much easier sell when you are talking _directly_ to your niche audience. "Hey Ucla student, 500 of your peers are sharing their notes from __ucla_class___ wanna take a look?"

Next, doesn't the value of your site depend on how many active users you have? Hence, chicken/egg. In this case, depending on your resources, my advice would be to cut every single school except for one, and prove it there. Do this literally at only one school , the school you can market directly to the most. If you have concerns that you need a lot of users from multiple schools, I don't see how that makes sense because your site, as it stands, is a very unattractive (to outsiders like me) walled-garden. So if it's a walled garden, make it a walled garden (one school only) if not, open it up, pick one!

This is definitely a space where many have failed, I'm not saying you will, but I think something novel is needed. And since I've done some brainstorming in the space once upon a time, I have reasoned it would be most effective to dominate one and only one school, prove it, and then leapfrog. Hey "it worked for facebook" =]

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the awesome reply. I'll go through one by one.

* Listing the schools is a great idea. I'll do this immediately.

* Yes, the site's value does depend on the number of active users. We launched at Yale and right now half of the student body is actively using it to choose courses...but other schools haven't seen the same success. I'm a horrible designer (and I'm kicking myself constantly because of it) and I'm aware of the unattractive landing. I'll try to make it less of a walled garden, because no one likes walled gardens.

* Something novel is definitely needed. Whether or not Gradifi succeeds, that remains to be seen.

BTW, could I shoot you an email?</comment></comment></comment>


SimpleGeo And Urban Airship Partner Up For Location Notifications - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/27/simplegeo-urban-airship-partnership/

<comment><USER2> Xtify (<http://xtify.com>) has been doing this for quite sometime already.</comment>


How We Built a Scalable Malware Detector - <AUTHOR> http://www.scalescale.com/how-we-built-an-infinitely-scalable-malware-detector <comment><USER2> >At first, we looked at services like VirusTotal and a few other open source options. But there was nothing that would run independent and download the file and scan quickly.

VirusTotal is actually downloading the file from a URL independently and (from my experience) near - instantly scanning it. So why reinvent the wheel? (Plus, VirusTotal uses many scan engines to determine a result...)

<comment><USER3> Also I'm sceptical as to how good ClamAV is, I can't find any hard numbers (which isn't a good sign).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah. One interesting thing could be for us to run some numbers and post them. It would be relatively trivial with this setup.

Can you recommend or point out other engines? Thanks for the response.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> does anyone recommend any other clamav signature packs or different tools that could also be run (either free or commercial) that you'd recommend?

A simple google search brings up some random stuff and I'm wondering if anyone's used anything they really like.

</comment><comment><USER4> yeah, but it's an awesome name. It can be used to eliminate STDs in women.

<comment><USER5> Please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html)

We detached this comment from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10280685](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10280685) and marked it off-topic.</comment></comment>


Evidence That Computer Science Grades Are Not Bimodal [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~sme/papers/2016/icer_2016_bimodal.pdf <comment><USER3> Having worked with many of my fellow graduate students to try to teach CS concepts to incoming students without any CS background my conclusion here is that we simply don't know how to teach computer science. My suspicion is that many people who learn CS usually do it inspite of attempts to teach them, not because of instruction. Think about how long it took humans to figure out how to teach reading to _everyone_. We had to break the old whole reading method and switch over to phonics, and that was decades after we had the hard scientific evidence that phonics was the missing perspective needed to get that last percentage of students to read. We are probably decades away from understanding how to teach CS to everyone, let alone getting those techniques implemented.

<comment><USER4> >We had to break the old whole reading method and switch over to phonics, and that was decades after we had the hard scientific evidence that phonics was the missing perspective needed to get that last percentage of students to read.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet#Spread_of_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet#Spread_of_the_alphabet_and_its_social_effects)

<comment><USER5> I'm not clear on what the link is supposed to be getting me. Phonetics and Phoenician are two different things. Right?

<comment><USER6> I agree that the post is severely underspecified. I think the point is the last paragraph of the linked section:

> Phoenician had long-term effects on the social structures of the > civilizations which came in contact with it. As mentioned above, the script > was the first widespread phonetic script. Its simplicity not only allowed it > to be used in multiple languages, but it also allowed the common people to > learn how to write. This upset the long-standing status of writing systems > only being learned and employed by members of the royal and religious > hierarchies of society, who used writing as an instrument of power to > control access to information by the larger population.[11] The appearance > of Phoenician disintegrated many of these class divisions, although many > Middle Eastern kingdoms such as Assyria, Babylonia and Adiabene would > continue to use cuneiform for legal and liturgical matters well into the > Common Era.

That is, Phoenician was the first wide-spread phonetic script. That, in turn, had major effects on civilizations as it was simple enough for commoners to learn. _That_ being the rather tenuous link back to the original idea of teaching reading based on phonetics.

Of course, there is a bit of a gap here, in that English phonetics are notoriously unstandardized across the lexicon.

<comment><USER7> > Phoenician was the first wide-spread phonetic script. That, in turn, had > major effects on civilizations as it was simple enough for commoners to > learn.

The cuneiform of the time was, at heart, a syllabic script; while a phonetic script is arguably simpler, it's not much simpler. The real problem with cuneiform is not that it was syllabic instead of alphabetic, it's that you had plenty of options other than syllabic representation, as well.

(And written Egyptian, the parent system of the Phoenician alphabet, was already genuinely phonetic! It didn't have vowels, but neither did the Phoenician script.)

All that said, that sort of shortcut-encrustation seems to develop naturally within all writing systems. If I send someone "have a good day" and get back "u 2", that's exactly the kind of shortcut that we blast ancient writing systems for using. But that shortcut, in modern English, actually represents a very high literacy rate, and use of the writing system by someone who can't be bothered to observe its formal conventions. Under low-literacy conditions, educated people tend to scrupulously observe whatever weird conventions their writing system might have. That's how you know they're educated.

<comment><USER6> I'm assuming by Egyptian you mean Hieroglyphics. (They also used Hieratic and later Demotic.) Hieroglyphics are a mixed phonetic-logographic system. Even on the phonetic side, there are many ways to spell the same set of consonants, thanks to the existence of digraphs and trigraphs and repetition. The vowels probably differed, but those aren't written. The spelling for a particular word was usually fixed, though.

Wikipedia has an excellent example using _nfr_ in its determinatives section:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_hieroglyphs#Determina...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_hieroglyphs#Determinatives)

So, Hieroglyphics had phonetic components, but it was far from being a phonetic abjad like Phoenician. (An abjad is an alphabet without vowel markers.)

<comment><USER7> Hieroglyphics are a mixed phonetic-logographic system in the same way that English is a mixed phonetic-logographic system, where the second person pronoun can be represented by "you" or by the logograph u. How much is that hurting our literacy rate?

<comment><USER6> "u" and "you" have exactly the same pronunciation /ju/. "2" and "two" and "to" and "too" all have exactly the same pronunciation /tu/. That is, phonetically there is no difference -- again, English has terribly inconsistent phonetics. These shortcuts arose due to texting applying negative pressure to the length of words, both in maximum message size and ease of input.

Compare this to Hieroglyphics, where the glyph representive of a loaf of bread could mean either an actual loaf of bread or the abstract phoneme /t/. Specifically, a logogram represents an idea regardless of its pronunciation. This is not what we see in "text-speak", where words were replaced with shorter methods of achieving the same phonetics. Or, in other words, reading the text "u 2" is /ju tu/, which is exactly the same as what you would read with "you too". The matched phonetics are an integral part of this replacement.

<comment><USER7> > Compare this to Hieroglyphics, where the glyph representive of a loaf of > bread could mean either an actual loaf of bread or the abstract phoneme /t/. > Specifically, a logogram represents an idea regardless of its pronunciation. > This is not what we see in "text-speak"

"u" does not have the pronunciation /ju/, it has the _name_ /ju/.

And we specifically _don 't_ see that egyptian glyphs "represent an idea regardless of its pronunciation". Look at the story of the decipherment:

> Champollion focussed on a cartouche containing just four hieroglyphs: the > first two symbols were unknown, but the repeated pair at the end signified > 's-s'. This meant that the cartouche represented ('?-?-s-s').

> Champollion wondered if the first hieroglyph in the cartouche, the disc, > might represent the sun, and then he assumed its sound value to be that of > the Coptic word for sun, 'ra'. This gave him the sequence ('ra-?-s-s'). Only > one pharaonic name seemed to fit. Allowing for the omission of vowels and > the unknown letter, surely this was Rameses.

( [http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/egyptians/decipherment_...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/egyptians/decipherment_01.shtml) )

That's the glyph "sun" being used because of the phonetic value of the word "sun" coinciding with part of a name. The idea goes unused (at least, the glyph is not marked with the logograph mark). That's precisely what we see in text-speak.

(Side note: while the vowel of Coptic "sun" might be /a/, this is a rare case where the ancient Egyptian vowel is known, and it is /i/. Fortunately, the general omission of vowels makes this mistake irrelevant.)

> "2" and "two" and "to" and "too" all have exactly the same pronunciation > /tu/

This is not correct. "to" is a clitic; its pronunciation differs from the others, which means in particular that "to" and "2" have different pronunciations. That doesn't stop "2" from substituting for "to" on occasion.

<comment><USER6> When you see an isolated letter "u" in English, you say /ju/. When you see the word "you", you also say /ju/. This fact is what allows "u" to be shorthand or abbreviation for "you". Perhaps for you there is no distinction between a shorthand and a logogram. But, in that case, I don't see how you also couldn't argue that "you" is a logogram for the abstract idea of the second person.

In reality, we separate between logograms and alphabets by the use of symbols representing ideas or sounds. In the English example, "u" is being used as a non-traditional phonetic digram /ju/. Your example from the Rosetta Stone was a phonetic use of the symbol. There are also non-phonetic uses, where the symbol represents the sun, regardless of its phonetics. This is why it's a mixed system.

The Egyptians marked semivowels /j~i/ and /w~u/. Egyptologists use them as vowels, because they have to use _something_ and that's as good a thing as any. We have no idea how any ancient Egyptian word was realized.

Everyone I know produces all the variations of "to" the same. Maybe there is a dialectic difference.

EDIT: I just had a thought. Let's use an English example where the shorthand is not isolated. Let's look at "r8" for "rate". This is obviously _not_ a logographic use of "8", as the "r" is still necessary for the meaning. Instead, "8" is again being used as a non-traditional phonetic gram, the trigram /eɪt/. The use of "u" and "2" is exactly the same; their use is as phonetic grams and not logograms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is mostly unrelated to the main topic of the article, but this paragraph caught my eye:

> For example, Padavic et al. [20] found that the "work-family" narrative in > business is an example of a social defense: people will say that women leave > the workplace because of "family", despite the large amount of evidence that > women leave their jobs because of inadequate pay or opportunities for > advancement [20], particularly when they see male co-workers promoted ahead > of them. The "work-family" narrative is a more palatable explanation rather > than to confront sexual discrimination in the workplace, and so the > narrative continues. > > [20] I. Padavic and R. J. Ely. The work-family > narrative as a social defense, 2013.

I tried to track down the work by Padavic et al. that Patitsas et al. are citing, and found this:

[http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/conferences/2013-w50-research- sym...](http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/conferences/2013-w50-research- symposium/Documents/Gender_and_work_web_update2015.pdf)

However, this article by Padavic et al. is actually saying something different from the way that Patitsas et al. summarized it. Padavic et al. appear to actually be arguing that the work-family narrative is a social defense against the uncomfortable truth of excessively long working hours for both genders at the corporation, not against any uncomfortable truth about sexual discrimination. Also, Padavic et al. don't seem to discuss sexual discrimination in wages or promotions at all.

Did Patitsas et al. make an error in citing their sources? Am I missing something?

<comment><USER9> Mis-citation occurs all the time. When I was a professional scientist I could only find the source for a claim I was interested in less than 25% of the time. I would find some claim and about 50% of the time the reference cited another reference and so on until the chain broke. The other 25% of the time the reference cited said something completely different to what was being claimed. Very frustrating.

<comment><USER10> During my Ph.D. I tried tracking down the reasoning behind a couple sets of assumptions made in non-uniform torsion of beams (e.g., twisting a beam with one end fixed). It turns out that they just kept the same assumptions from uniform torsion (just twisting the beam but with no ends fixed) without checking if they still held (they don't). All because nobody thought to check if the assumptions might be in conflict. The uniform torsion models go back to the mid 1800s, while the non-uniform torsion models are from the early to mid 20th century. So, it's been over 60 years people have been working with wrong assumptions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> " _Are CS grades bimodal, or unimodal? To test this, we ac- quired the final grades distributions for every undergraduate CS class at the University of British Columbia (UBC), from 1996 to 2013. This represents 778 different lecture sections, containing a total of 30,214 final grades (average class size: 75)._ "

My understanding of the bimodal situation, if it exists, is that it primarily applies to earlier classes---later classes only include those who did well, or at least passed, the previous classes.

Ah, yes...

" _Of the 45 classes which were multimodal, 16 were 100- level classes (35%), 5 were 200-level (11%), 12 were 300-level (27%), and 12 were 400-level (27%). For comparison, in the full set of 778 classes, 171 were 100-level (22%), 165 were 200-level (21%), 243 were 300-level (31%), and 199 were 400-level (26%)._ "

How about we take a closer look at those 100 level classes, hmmm?

<comment><USER12> I remember my real analysis professor explicitly telling us that he ran the numbers on one of our exams and found bimodality. Real analysis is not what I would call an earlier class. I'm not sure if we were an outlier or a representative data point, however.

<comment><USER13> If there are two major topics in a test (say Topic 1 and Topic 2), then bimodality could arise simply because

* some people studied both Topic 1 and Topic 2

* some people studied Topic 1 more than Topic 2

* some people studied Topic 2 more than Topic 1

This would cause bimodality even when inherent "genetic" skill is the same.

<comment><USER14> If this were be turned into a more rigorous MCMC style simulation and fed basic societal trends of high school and early stage college on courses taken, interest, aptitude, etc you might be able to get an estimate on the size of effect of these factors. Hmmm...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The whole premise of the survey part of this paper strikes me as very flawed. The idea was "show some professors histograms we know are normal, and see if they see bimodality that isn't there". The problem is, they didn't show them 6 random histograms of the normal distribution. For one, they didn't actually show them normal distributions at all; they showed them normal distributions capped at 100. That's going to give you a point mass at 100... making it a bimodal distribution! Second, they didn't give 6 random examples of a capped normal histogram; they gave them 6 examples chosen from a random set of histograms chosen in such a way that 4 of the 6 look bimodal. The survey participants didn't see bimodality that wasn't there, they saw bimodality that was purposefully generated by the histogram selection methodology!

</comment><comment><USER12> Aren't final grades often "curved", i.e. re-graded according to rank? That would explicitly destroy bimodality, making the final grade distribution consist of non-iid order statistics.

Also, it's commendable that they point out that they expect 5% false positives, but frustrating that they don't go further and explicitly plan for a multiple testing correction procedure. It seems that they don't need it to fail to reject the null "meta-hypothesis", but still.

<comment><USER11> The curving process should be linear, I think.

<comment><USER16> The curving process shouldn't exist.

If you make an exam that is difficult enough to need curving, you're getting a poor measure of ability. This is because exams ask only a few questions, and unreasonably _difficult_ exams result in low scores even from high achieving students. Low scores are very susceptible to noise (the delta between 50% and 60% is greater than between 85% and 95%).

If that doesn't convince you, take my argument to the obvious extreme. The Putnam Competition in mathematics is tough. Sometimes over half of the people score 0. Getting 1 question correct (out of 12) at times puts you in the top 20%.

Imagine I gave this as an exam to a math class of 20 students. One person scores a 1. The rest score 0. Is it meaningful to curve this? I could correct by giving partial credit: Some people get 0.25, others 0.5, and others 0.75, so we now have 5 different grades. Should I just give A, B, C, D and F?

The lower the scores, the higher the effect of noise. It's a bad idea.

<comment><USER17> > Low scores are very susceptible to noise (the delta between 50% and 60% is > greater than between 85% and 95%)

This seems untrue from information theory.

The entropy of a question is maximized when its probability of being answered correctly is exactly 50% [1]. If your only goal is to have the _least_ amount of measurement noise given a fixed number of questions, then you'll want each question to be hard enough to filter 50% of the class out, and to minimize the correlation between questions.

For example, 10 independent 50% questions reveals as much information as 16 independent 85% questions.

> Imagine I gave this as an exam to a math class of 20 students. One person > scores a 1. The rest score 0. Is it meaningful to curve this?

You're looking at only 1 tail but ignoring the other. By symmetry, a question that only 1 person gets correct tells you exactly as much as a question that 19 get correct. An exam with a 90% pass rate (before curving) is no better than a 10% exam.

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

<comment><USER16> First, while you may have a point, you misunderstood my percentages. I did not mean them to be the _pass_ rate, but rather the _score_.

> An exam with a 90% pass rate (before curving) is no better than a 10% exam.

I do not encourage a 90% pass rate. I do not endorse exams where most of the students score 90%. I'm saying an exam which allows for a large variation in scores (anywhere from 10 to 100) yields more information, whereas an exam where a really brilliant student will get 50, with the next highest score being a 30 by someone who is _only_ very smart, tends to be less likely to yield useful information about most of the students who will get 20 or less. A fairly bright student and a fairly average student may both score a 20 on such a test - yet the test failed to distinguish between them.

(BTW, I had an instructor whose exams were like this - I think I once had the highest score at around 25-30 out of 100).

A less demanding, but not trivial test, will separate out the average from the brighter.

Regardless, why the need for a curve? Your grading system should not depend on which students are present. It can lead to poor students getting a good grade and smarter students getting a poorer grade - in different semesters, for the very same tests.

<comment><USER18> > Regardless, why the need for a curve? Your grading system should not depend > on which students are present. It can lead to poor students getting a good > grade and smarter students getting a poorer grade - in different semesters, > for the very same tests.

The distribution of skill between one 300-person calc class and the next is going to vary much less than the difference in teaching styles and exam difficulties. This is exactly why a curve is required -- so that your grade reflects how well you perform relative to others doing the same thing instead of some absolute level of competence that would vary from school to school, prof to prof, semester to semester.

Consider an employer or graduate school admissions committee that needs to decide who to interview. Looking at curved grades makes it easy to pick the top X% of students, whereas looking at uncurved grades leaves a lot more to chance (maybe a C was the highest grade in your section, but there was an easier prof the following year where the highest grade was an A).

<comment><USER16> That works fine when you have classes with 100+ students. In the ones I attended, it would range from 15 to 40 (the latter being considered high). Lower numbers tend to be impacted more by noise.

>Consider an employer or graduate school admissions committee that needs to decide who to interview. Looking at curved grades makes it easy to pick the top X% of students

As an employer, I'm not interested in the candidate's ranking in the class. I'm interested in their skills. While one is often used as a proxy for the other, I do not.

As a student, I want feedback on how much knowledge I learned, not how I did in comparison with the class. This was the original purpose of scoring tests.

Having gone through the PhD route, I know that "A" grade students who were always focused on the metric of relative ranking rather than knowledge acquired eventually were more likely to do a poor thesis or drop out, compared to "A" grade students who were focused on acquiring knowledge.

This was more acute from students who came from top undergrad schools: Very competitive background with heavy curving - and they would take their A as a faulty indicator that they were "doing well". In grad school, even though the courses are more challenging, most professors give A's and B's. Only rarely were C's given. The professors want to focus on learning and theses - <USER2> are a distraction. Suddenly these students were getting A's, thinking they were doing well and not learning much. Their internal barometers were measuring the wrong thing, so their research suffered.

<comment><USER18> > As a student, I want feedback on how much knowledge I learned, not how I did > in comparison with the class. This was the original purpose of scoring > tests.

My university automatically attached our grades to all internship applications. It's pretty clear the purpose of grades (other than pass/fail) is employer or grad school evaluation, not for student feedback. For better or for worse.

<comment><USER16> Which is why in grad school, many professors subvert this by never giving C, and only giving B's if you're fairly poor. They lost the battle for undergrad, but grad school (at least in science/engineering) is still their domain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "We theorized that the perception of bimodal grades in CS is a social defense. It is easier for the CS education community to believe that some students "have it" and others do not than it is for the community to come to terms with the shortfalls of our pedagogical approaches and assessment tools."

I didn't read the whole article, but I'm not sure I agree with the conclusion. Even with a standard gaussian distribution, one may still believe that some students have it and some don't. Let say there is consistently 25% of students that are unable to pass their exams (for various reasons: lack of interest, motivation, intelligence, discipline...), why would a "social defense" be needed?

While I agree that we always should try to improve our pedagogical tools, I don't believe that anyone can learn anything provided they have a good teacher.

<comment><USER20> Read section 4 of the paper.

They fix some data that _as a matter of mathematical fact_ is/is not bimodal, and then ask people who do/don't believe in the "geek gene" hypotehsis to interpret the data.

Conclusion of the section: "We found a statistically significant relationship between seeing-bimodality and participants' responses to the questions relating to the Geek Gene hypothesis"

So the "social defense mechanism" theory is definitely debatable, but apparently people who believe in the "Geek Gene hypothesis" are more likely to see bimodality where there is none.

 _> I don't believe that anyone can learn anything provided they have a good teacher._

The point isn't that _everyone_ can learn _anything_. The point is just that the distribution isn't as bimodal as people seem to think it is. Also worth noting that the researchers posit _normal_ distrbutions, not _uniform_ distributions, as the alternative to bimodality.

<comment><USER21> I'm less impressed by "wrong about rigged data" results than most people seem to be. Yes, it implies that people bring assumptions to their answer, but is that really shocking?

People with a high prior for a thing assume that new data is most likely to conform to that prior. If you handed me a questionably-bimodal data set, my judgement of its distribution would absolutely depend on what you told me the data represented. Hopefully I'd answer right if I sat down and analyzed the thing in depth, but if you simply go "what kind of distribution does this look like?" then I'm going to include my outside expectations.

Yeah, there's a risk of bias here, largely from people not conserving expectations (if you already assume Geek Gene is true, unfavorable data should count more than favorable data). But saying "people used experience to interpret new data!" doesn't seem like it's proving much.

<comment><USER22> There's a "risk" of bias here? The point seems to be that the professors don't have a good prior -- they have a bias and are confusing it for a prior, and that's what was demonstrated by the experiment.

(that, and perhaps CS professors aren't particularly good at statistics)

<comment><USER21> I disagree with the "bias not prior" claim.

The professors were shown constructed data, and primed to apply a prior to it about grades. Prompting someone to use a prior inappropriately isn't the same as revealing a bias.

I see what you're getting at (if they wrongly assessed these curves, why would they be right about real data?), but there's a connective step that seems missing. If you show me a histogram and ask if it's bimodal, I can't tell you with certainty, so I have to guess. That's partly by shape, and partly by my knowledge of what the data is. Misjudging an actively-misleading histogram doesn't prove that I'm bad at assessing real data. (Since they just said 'yes' or 'no', I wouldn't accuse them of being bad at statistics - they didn't computer an answer.)

So _even if_ real CS grades are bimodal, I would have expected the 'priming' result they found here. The professors were wrong, but this doesn't seem to have much predictive value.

More importantly, though, this __whole study __is bad. Section 3 is based off a single university 's final grades, with no discussion of whether assignment grades were being curved before going into the final score (they are in at least some universities). So it's entirely possible that they took _normalized data_ and found that it had normal distributions. Section 4 is unconvincing in several ways. "Assess this constructed data, maybe we lied about the origin" isn't a direct analogue to "are your actual grades bimodal?". "Assess this data _for bimodality_ " threatens a priming effect that's incomparable to unprompted observations about grades. Priming effects are struggling to replicate, and may simply not work the way these researchers expected at all.

The study does an admirable job of _acknowledging_ a lot of this, like the researcher-priming risk, but it doesn't actually _remedy_ any of them. So I'm not sure what to say except "any of these methods could be meaningless".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Programming tests amplify modality because they require success on multiple items to succeed.

Consider teaching N skills. Success is binary, uncorrelated and everyone randomly succeeds some high percentage P on each skill. Scoring is the number of binary successes. You'll get a Gaussian distribution. That's most of education.

Now suppose scoring is 1 if all N skills are learned. You'll get a bimodal distribution. That's programming tested on whether the program runs.

<comment><USER24> There are two links discussing that in a blog post by the author of this article[1] (second to last paragraph)

1: [http://patitsas.blogspot.ca/2016/01/cs-grades-probably- more-...](http://patitsas.blogspot.ca/2016/01/cs-grades-probably-more-normal- than-you.html)

<comment><USER23> Sadly, they're both paywalled.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I get especially mad when people suggest that there are some ideas that are just special, that only special people can get. Pointers and recursion are at the top of this list.

Take Joel Spolsky, a person whose ideas I read and respect: [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing...](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing3.html)

> For some reason most people seem to be born without the part of the brain > that understands pointers. Pointers require a complex form of doubly- > indirected thinking that some people just can't do

Really? Here's my 20 dollar challenge: give me a person and I can teach them pointers. Pointers, referencing and dereferencing, null pointers, pointers to pointers, the whole deal.

The problem is the pedagogy. Learning a new abstraction and a new way of thinking takes _time_. It's easy to get it but really not /get/ it. You have to do a lot of examples. One on one with a person, with real time feedback. Until they internalize it. Many many many simple examples at first, and then examples of using it in a real world context. Then more. If you already know this abstraction, consciously or unconsciously, it's impossible to un-know it, and the reaction when someone is struggling is "I explained it as simply as I can and I don't know why they still don't get it". It's not like that. It's like basketball: you can explain how to shoot, but really the student needs to do it, and you comment while they're doing it.

<comment><USER26> Absolutely - I'm sure that a bit of innate talent can improve one's rate of learning, but 90% of the willing can do it. The best programmers that I've met just loved the art and science of computing, had respect for their craft and very high standards of quality, were undaunted or even motivated by new challenges, but most importantly, put in the necessary time.

I doubt things have changed much since I went to college in the 90s, but back then, the ones that did well at CS either had been hacking computers since the Apple II or spending enormous amounts of time at the lab (or both). Also, when at the Microsoft campus in the 90s, it was not a coincidence that the most expensive cars were the ones that were in the parking garage the latest.

<comment><USER27> > The best programmers that I've met just loved the art and science of > computing, had respect for their craft and very high standards of quality, > were undaunted or even motivated by new challenges, but most importantly, > put in the necessary time.

This description doesn't conjure the image of a person unable to understand pointers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> A class (30?) students is too small to produce a curve which is unambiguously either normal or bimodal. Its always noisy. So if the CS profs, with their thousands of hours of experience with students, chose the bimodal interpretation I for one tend to believe it.

</comment><comment><USER29> I don't know much about this, but I wasn't good at studying.

I'm totally living for development and everything to do with it, but most of the formal stuff completely eluded me.

I failed every math lecture at least once.

Because of my projects and thesis I still finished with a 2,7 which isn't good but also not really bad. Maybe I would have been one of those "college- dropouts who followed their dream" if companies in Germany didn't look so much on your degrees.

Also I never had the impression our grades were bimodal.

Yes about 40% dopped out and yes there were a few "eager beavers", but most were simply okay enough to finish their degrees.

<comment><USER30> I'm about the opposite of you. Not a good programmer, but I excelled at the 'formal stuff.' Automata theory, regular expressions, compilers, operating systems, discrete math... these are all areas where I did well. Labs and programming assignments held me back. Although I will say that I feel infinitely more comfortable working with memory allocation in C than I do with anything involving JavaScript.

I also don't think the overall grades were bimodal. I guess I was in the second mode in programming intense courses and the first mode in theory heavy courses. I also feel that most of my peers were either the same as me or the reverse, like you. Wouldn't that create a single mode bell curve?

Of course, this is all purely anecdotal

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Oh, useful anecdote time!

I was talking to a professor a while back about this, and he reckoned that when the University of Canterbury (in NZ) switched from Java to Python for their 100 level papers, the grades went from bimodal to single-modal. Not sure why that is, and I don't remember him giving me a reason, but I guess it's fair to assume that a lot of students were really struggling with the initial learning curve of Java (boilerplate, static typing, more difficult array and string manipulation) compared to Python, and either just not getting it, or getting frustrated and giving up.

Now I didn't see any numbers to back up his claims, as it was a casual conversation, but I'd be inclined to believe him that they were bimodal.

Anyway, the point I'm making is that the study here references only one university, different universities have different curriculum and different teaching styles, which could affect whether the distribution is bimodal or not.

</comment><comment><USER32> I am not sure we should assume bimodality in programming means we are all special snowflakes. That's a dangerous and self serving interpretation

It seems bimodality is correlated with "does it even compile" \- the first hump is those who can't get it to compile and the second is those who can but then spread out normally on ability.

I would conjecture that the first hump would be seen in any educational environment where, for example we took illiterates and made them write essays. Those who had tried reading and writing in high school would have a better chance of putting ink on paper.

We just are seeing an artifact of software not being taught early enough in everyone.

Edit - how does my spelling corrector turn bimodality into bumps skirt...

</comment><comment><USER33> They don't consider participation or hours spent studying as explanations for bimodality. This makes their method of determining belief in the "geek gene" questionable, and could invert the moral story of their results: Perhaps lecturers seeing low lecture attendance would like to believe their grade distributions are bimodal, but the data shows the lecturers' impact is at best a tiny factor among many, and grades are determined by factors out of the lecturers' control, such as students' ability.

</comment><comment><USER34> I've never heard that computer science grades are bimodal, I thought it was that performance in programming is bimodal?

It's always been relatively obvious to me that grades were not bimodal since I could just click and see the grade distribution, which didn't appear to be bimodal.

</comment><comment><USER35> "Your scores are bimodal!!!!" trying to get the "so what?"

Does that say something (e.g ,bad instructor _) or does it support something ( idea that 50% of students should not even be taking course, for example)

_ Organic Chem class was bimodal which led to dismissal of instructor. Different instructor meant better learning and a different distribution.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Folks may also be interested in the accompanying blog post by the first author:

[http://patitsas.blogspot.ca/2016/01/cs-grades-probably- more-...](http://patitsas.blogspot.ca/2016/01/cs-grades-probably-more-normal- than-you.html)

</comment><comment><USER21> So... This is a _bad_ study, top to bottom.

Section 3 is based off a single university's final grades.

\- There's no discussion of whether assignment grades were being curved before going into the final score (they are in at least some universities). So it's entirely possible that they took normalized data and found that it had normal distributions.

\- Even if it's raw data, bimodality would appear per-assignment. Averaging problem sets with papers with tests, and assignments of varying difficulty, threatens to obscure any task-level bimodality.

\- Finally, the paper acknowledges the risk of university-specific effects, but can't actually adjust for them. So Section 3 may not generalize at all.

Section 4 is unconvincing in several ways.

\- The participant selection was open solicitation from multiple forums, with a high dropout rate after providing tests. That screams selection bias, but isn't acknowledged.

\- "Assess this constructed data based on an inaccurate origin" threatens to carry over a prior of "all my real grades are actually bimodal" to the sample data. This would produce the observed results regardless of whether professors are misjudging normal data. This risk would be irrelevant if grades aren't bimodal, but Section 3 didn't sell me on that.

\- "Assess this data for bimodality" threatens to prime seeing bimodality for any set of data. This renders it incomparable to unprompted observations about grades.

Supporting Literature is a disaster. It's a hit parade of papers and topics which have or may yet fail to replicate. The male/female candidates paper has a sibling which found the _inverse_ result. The weapon bias study hasn't been found predictive outside the original study. The "brilliance-requiring disciplines" literature is such a disaster that there are multi-thousand-word essays breaking down why it's unconvincing.

I'd say that's not the author's fault, but this is dated September 2016. The male/female candidates result _at least_ should have come with an acknowledgement that other studies have found complete different outcomes.

 _In summary:_ The data analysis here is fragile and unconvincing. The human studies misuse unproven effects to draw unsupported conclusions. The supporting literature grounds the preceding mess on other studies which were suspect by the time the paper was written.

</comment><comment><USER36> I hated trying to read about pointers in c when I was about 15, a few years later a different book put it more clear and it all snapped into place for me.

</comment><comment><USER30> So the assumption being made here is that students either get it or they don't based on genetic predisposition? I, for one, don't particularly subscribe to the notion that every CS student needs to score an INTP on the Meyers-Briggs to be successful.

<comment><USER37> ENTP makes a better developer anyway. :D

(In case anybody doesn't get the joke, ENTP is the "debater" type, so I am picking a fight about personality type, since that is what the ENTP is supposed to do, so self-referential humor: [https://www.16personalities.com/entp- personality](https://www.16personalities.com/entp-personality))</comment></comment>


False Positives - <AUTHOR> https://blog.reprime.io/false-positives-fed910f9f5cb#.szi4s47un <comment><AUTHOR> > Being right confirms our own self-worth. As students, we learn to avoid as > best we can the embarrassment of being wrong. Getting the right answer > becomes the primary purpose of our education. Can you imagine the generative > and exciting learning environment that would result from a class that > rewarded asking the best questions? If you think about it, the most > intriguing questions are those that don't offer simple answers. Even more, > they drive our thinking into greater complexity and curiosity.</comment>


What is a good book for learning math from the ground up? - <AUTHOR> http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/69060/what-is-a-good-book-for-learning-math-from-the-ground-up

<comment><USER2> A school book, like holtz, or something, i have a few books from highschool, like math books</comment>


Ask HN: Tooling for Improving Java Codebase - <AUTHOR> What are some of your favourite projects that you rely on to improve the quality of your codebases? I'm thinking along the lines of Lombok and equalsverifier. And, ostensibly, linters such as checking that utility classes don't contain any non-static methods etcetera. I'm not thinking Sonar, but if anyone wants to share any resources on how to make Sonar a better tool (signal/noise) please share. <comment><USER2> Checkstyle is a must for any project with more than 1 developer (or even with 1).

Findbugs/spotbugs maven/gradle plugins are nice, but require a little bit of tuning to eliminate false positives. Nothing near the amount of tuning or upkeep a Sonar instance requires though.

Use @Nullable, @Nonnull, @ParametersAreNonNullByDefault annotations. I prefer "non-null by default" via a package-level annotation from @ParametersAreNonNullByDefault and using @Nullable where appropriate.

Use the Error Prone compiler/build plugin.

</comment><comment><USER3> Shift+Delete

<comment><USER4> wow! aren't you edgy?</comment></comment>


Julian Assange's stay in London embassy untenable, says Ecuador - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/jan/09/julian-assange-stay-in-london-embassy-untenable-says-ecuador <comment><USER2> I've no idea of the truth of the original allegations, or his claims that he was set up, but since then it's quite impressive how he's managed to change my perception of him and wikileaks from 'champions of freedom-of-information / free speech' to 'russian government stooge' over the last few years.

<comment><USER3> > It's quite impressive how he's managed to change my perception of him and > wikileaks from 'champions of freedom-of-information / free speech' to > 'russian government stooge' over the last few years.

I think it's impressive that the media made you think he was the one responsible for that narrative, instead of them.

He had information that was seriously damaging to very powerful people, and an audience that was ready for proof of their suspicions of political/corporate/media corruption.

This makes him a massive target.

<comment><USER4> I published my own list on reddit a while ago of the reasons.

And not a single media mention, the entire change in perception was either through Wikileaks' actions and words, entirely through reading mostly their own Twitter.

Edit, found it:

Some of the reasons why I don't like WikiLeaks:

1\. Their cooperation with Roger Stone: "Well, it could be any number of things. I actually have communicated with Assange. I believe the next tranche of his documents pertain to the Clinton Foundation but there's no telling what the October surprise may be."

2\. "Most of Wikileaks' critics have 3 (((brackets around their names))) & have black-rim glasses. Bizarre. Tribalist symbol for establishment climbers?"

3\. Fueling the whole utterly bizarre 'spirit cooking' thing. The world's most pre-eminent performance artist invites the brother of the campaign manager of a presidential candidate for dinner? I'm sure that the degrees of separation to fucking Trump are shorter than that, but no, Hillary is literally the devil. And the whole 'election is rigged' thing with "Trump won't be allowed to win the election"

4\. Calling out the Clinton Foundation for receiving money from Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is one of the world's wealthiest countries, and the Clinton Foundation is one of the world's more pre-eminent charities. They have many other donors and Saudi money goes many other places. And the Saudi royal family numbers in the tens of thousands. Sure, some of them will be involved with ISIS. But seriously.

5\. "WikiLeaks offers award for #LabourLeaks. Wikileaks offers £20,000 reward for #LabourLeaks with information on how the Labour Party's top officials have attempted to stop Jeremy Corbyn becoming and staying on as leader." Any chance of a reward for information pertaining to Trump or Russia? I didn't think so.

6\. The RT/WikiLeaks connection

7\. Leaking Clinton library records. The chilling effect here is insane.

8\. Hitchens, back in 2010: "The WikiLeaks founder is an unscrupulous megalomaniac with a political agenda."

Almost entirely WikiLeaks themselves, posted before the election of Trump even, no colouring in of my opinion by the lamestream media.

<comment><USER5> Something showing Labour undermining Corbyn would be more supportive of Corbyn / hard left.

<comment><USER6> Since Russia's relevant interests are in destablising the Atlantic alliance and undermining the European Union, elevating the US- and EU-critical Corbyn over more reasonable elements in Labour is exactly what one would expect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The reasons why Ecuador took Assange in in the first place no longer make much sense. Under Correa, there were a number of tensions with the US that were looming large in Ecuadorian political landscape following a default in 08. By taking in Assange, Correa could both shore up anti-US sentiments at home that were mounting in criticism over an oil export deal, and get a bargaining chip to boot if he needed it. With Correa out of the picture and China stepping in and propping up exports, this makes little sense, and Assange's value as a bargaining chip is dubious to a Trump admin.

Back when Wikileaks had a better reputation, it also helped affray Correa's attacks on free speech at home. Now that Assange's reputation is in the gutter, he's only a liability to Ecuador.

<comment><USER7> It is a shame to see Assange's welfare reduced to being a bargaining chip like this, but one imagines that he has upset too many powerful people and it is only a matter of time for him until he is back in the justice system and shuffled into a cell somewhere. I'll be counting him lucky if he avoids something like Guantanamo.

It really amazes me how many people claim there are no conspiracies against Assange though - the number of things that went from 'conspiracy theory' to 'uncomfortable fact' because of Wikileaks is obviously no evidence of anything.

I remember what it was like watching discussion of the 5 Eyes before Wikileaks; people were written off as cranks for opinions that turned out to be very well rooted in fact. If Wikileaks' leadership gets shut down, we are going to lose a very comforting level of insight into how decisions are actually being made by people in power; and what the moral realities of government actually are.

<comment><USER6> Nah, most substantial leaks in recent years have avoided wikileaks and gone straight to reputable publishers, such as the panama papers team, so as not to be tarnished by perceptions of bias or recklessness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why on earth haven't they removed him in a diplomatic bag or handcuffed to their ambassador?

<comment><USER9> The cuffs could be removed as being attached to an ambassador doesn't give one diplomatic immunity. Putting him in a GIANT diplomatic bag is actually an interesting idea.

<comment><USER10> >Putting him in a GIANT diplomatic bag...

Wikipedia mentions a previous time this may have happened.

"In 1964, a Moroccan-born Israeli double agent named Mordechai Ben Masoud Louk (also known as Josef Dahan) was drugged, bound, and placed in a diplomatic mailing crate at the Egyptian Embassy in Rome, but was rescued by Italian authorities.[4] The box that he had been sealed into "had almost certainly been used before for human cargo,"[5] including possibly for an Egyptian military official who had defected to Italy several years before but then disappeared without a trace before reappearing under Egyptian custody and facing trial."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's getting a little hard to see what he's hiding from -- his asylum claim had been based on fears that after being extradited to Sweden he would then be sent to the US; but (according to the article) he's only facing UK charges of breaching bail conditions, and he was in the UK, seemingly unafraid of being whisked off to America, before all this erupted.

To my (perhaps naive) eyes, it looked like that was the "final settlement" to defuse the situation -- the Swedish charges have been dropped but he has to face charges for the comparatively lesser offence he plainly and publicly committed (breaching UK bail conditions)?

I'm not sure there is much the UK can mediate on -- they plainly can't do or say anything about whether a third country (the US) has prepared charges they are waiting to file as it's not under their control, and in any case that wouldn't have any bearing on the UK bail-skipping charges (as a suddenly-filed extradition request if anything would be _more likely_ to succeed if he wasn't facing charges in the UK)

<comment><USER12> There's very little to meditate on.

The details are largely irrelevant. We'll kill him the second we get the chance. If US INTEL doesn't get him mossad will.

He knows he's not long for this world, and it's frankly very sad that this is happening at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Or you know, he could let the justice system run its course.

<comment><USER14> While I think Assange has a good case against an extradition to the US, the chances of him successfully fighting it are not 100% and if I were in his shoes I would not risk it.

<comment><USER15> The extradition request that the US never filed?

(That's the part I never understood... why would there be a need to spirit Assange from a Five Eyes country and very close ally of the US to one that is not before springing a surprise extradition?)

<comment><USER16> As a bonus, under EU law, once Assange was extradited from Sweden to the UK, he couldn't then be re-extradited to the US without the permission of both Sweden _and_ the UK (as per Article 28 of the 2002 EU Council Framework Decision (2002/584/JHA). So the options are:

1\. The UK will not assent to to Assange's extradition to the US, so extraditing him to Sweden will protect him from extradition.

2\. The UK will assent to Assange's extradition, but for mysterious reasons, they didn't just hand him over, when he was _in their custody_. Despite their status as a close ally of the US, and their long standing history of handing over anyone the US asks for, no questions asked (Gary McKinnon, Richard O'Dwyer, the NatWest Three, and many more).

Plus, neither the UK nor Sweden can legally extradite him to the US without a binding assurance that the death penalty will not be sought, so...yeah. The more you think about it, the less sense extradition makes as an explanation for the Swedish problems.

If extradition was going to happen, it would have happened when Assange was in British custody (and it didn't) _or_ it would happen after Assange left the EU and was in a more pliant jurisdiction (ie, not Sweden).

<comment><USER17> > he couldn't then be re-extradited to the US without the permission of both > Sweden and the UK (as per Article 28 of the 2002 EU Council Framework > Decision (2002/584/JHA).

That's a very good point that I hadn't seen made before.

> neither the UK nor Sweden can legally extradite him to the US without a > binding assurance that the death penalty will not be sought

I'm not sure that "life in jail" (particularly an american jail) is much preferable... The US has been known to give those assurances.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Time to introduce Assange to Muller.</comment>


Ask HN: How would you monetize $100k of cloud CPU credits in three months? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Make an image host (e.g. imgur.com) and tell reddit you are trying to spend $100k in cloud credits.

(Assuming bandwidth is included)

</comment><comment><USER3> Are you part of that "fast" startup accelerator for "busy founders"?

<comment><AUTHOR> hahahahaha - no, just pivoting before these credits expire.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm guessing its probably prohibited, but maybe you can sell the credits.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interested in buying some? :-) It would be a risk also that whoever buys them violates the T&C by running a DDOS on the NSA or something...

<comment><USER4> Ha, good point. I'd love to buys some ... I think I have a dollar or two...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Turns out crypto mining is banned under the terms of service

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I was thinking mining some CPU-mined alt coin, maybe....</comment>