A man accused of cheating at video games may lose his Guinness World Record - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/early-lead/wp/2018/01/29/a-man-accused-of-cheating-at-video-games-may-lose-his-decades-old-guinness-world-record/ <comment><USER2> TwinGalaxies had quite the extensive writeup on Todd's various cheating [1].

There was a staggering amount of evidence, including TAS (Tool Assisted Speedruns) proving that Todd's time is _physically impossible_. That blew up in a 274-page thread, but ultimately I believe it took Robert T Mruczek's writeup to finally ban Todd.[1] Not surprising as Mcruzek is part of the "old guard".

I think this reflected very poorly on TG and I have no intention of using them in the future.

[1]: [http://www.twingalaxies.com/showthread.php/175364-Dispute- Di...](http://www.twingalaxies.com/showthread.php/175364-Dispute-Dick- Moreland-Atari-2600-VCS-Dragster-NTSC-Game-1-Difficulty-B-Fastest-Time-Player- Todd-Rogers-Score-05-51?p=945909&viewfull=1#post945909)

<comment><USER3> Wait what? I was with you until the last line and now I'm confused. Why does this reflect poorly on TG if they removed it when there was good evidence it was false?

<comment><USER4> The evidence had existed for games like centipede many years, and the dragster game had been taken apart and proven fake via the actual machine code for 6+ months. TG didn't act on it until one of the inner circle got involved, that is the shameful bit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >Rogers's record on the classic Atari arcade game Centipede, for example, had been listed on the Twin Galaxies site as being 65,000,000. The second-highest score, 58,078, barely comes close

Wow and nobody thought that was a bit suspicious?

<comment><USER6> I don't follow this stuff, but Twin Galaxies deserves zero respect after this.

To be considered a reputable organization and not even question scores like this is laughable. And there were multiple this absurd.

<comment><USER7> Yet try to submit legitimate high scores as an _unknown_ and you'll find them repeatedly dismissed on "technicalities".

Many of their arcade "high scores" for lesser known titles are easily broken by someone practicing for less than a week, but happen to be long held by TG regulars, with hundreds of "high scores".

<comment><USER8> To be fair, many of those games are rather uncommon and may just not accessible for public play by anyone. TG arcade scores must be done on original hardware. So some scores are a testament to rarity more than anything.

Particularly on the MAME (emulator) side of arcade scoring - on a previous incarnation of the TG website, the rules for submission to a game were not public until a score had been submitted for that game. Some folks with many high scores were simply submitting any score at all so that others could even play along.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Beyond the software analysis evidence, which speaks directly to Todd > Rogers's Dragster 5.51 score time

I didn't understand this sentence: it means that, looking at the code and calculating all possibilities of gear changing moments, it would be impossible to achieve 5.51 ? If so, why would any other evidence be necessary ? Or, if it wasn't such analysis (and I think that this one would be definitive), why wasn't this one done ?

<comment><USER10> Yes, the analysis proves 5.51 is impossible, and it's been confirmed that 5.57 is the best possible time through the use of an emulator with preprogrammed inputs, meaning that it plays the game perfectly. Todd Roger's response is that the analysis failed to consider the "human element" and how the console would respond to that.

<comment><USER11> > Yes, the analysis proves 5.51 is impossible, and it's been confirmed that > 5.57 is the best possible time through the use of an emulator with > preprogrammed inputs, meaning that it plays the game perfectly.

An emulator with preprogrammed inputs doesn't mean it plays perfectly. It just means that it plays reproducibly. Whether or not it plays perfectly depends on the preprogrammed inputs.

How did they choose the inputs?

Looking at the game manual, it comes down to deciding when to shift, and deciding how to use the gas pedal.

Shifting looks like it is easy to deal with in emulated testing. You have neutral, 1, 2, 3, and 4. You start in neutral. So, an optimal run will start with you shifting once at t=0. You cannot down shift, so your only choice when shifting is up, and once you reach 4 you can no longer shift.

From another comment, it seems the game works in ticks of 3/100th second. That means that for a 6 second race, there are around 1.3 million possible shifting timings, assuming that you cannot skip gears.

For using the gas pedal, it looks like if you are not red lined, there are no circumstances where it would be better to not give it the gas. When red lined but at a time when your shifting plan calls for staying in the current gear, I can't tell from the manual what you should do. It says if you go past that you risk blowing the engine. What it doesn't say is if you get more power when going past the red line, so that it may be worth it.

Assuming that red line is max power, then when at red line but not shifting optimum would be to modulated the gas so as to keep it right at the red line.

For each shift pattern, it should be relatively easy to figure out when the gas has to switch between steady and modulated. Putting it all together that would give 1.3 million candidate inputs, one of which should be optimum.

If going past the red line does give more speed (at increased risk of engine blow out), it is more difficult. If engine blow out is probabilistic, you have to worry about the possibility that someone could get insanely lucky.

At that point, you probably need to analyze how the random number generator works, and how it is used, and how user inputs affect it. One particularly worrisome possibility would be that the timing of user input affects it. For example, if whenever the user presses or releases the gas it uses a random number to pick from several sounds associated with that action, that could be bad news. It would mean that the earlier analysis that the gas would optimally in each gear start out as constant and then switch modulated at the red line is no longer applicable. It could be that there is a run where if someone releases briefly the gas during the "constant" phase, that happens to get the random number generator to a position where they will get very lucky on the engine blow out rolls later.

If that meant we had to try every possible gas pattern, instead of just "constant followed by modulated", we'd have a combinatorial explosion.

Probably the best to do in this case (the "past the red line gives more speed, and the random number generator has a lot of user provided entropy" case) would be to tweak the emulator so that the engine cannot blow out, change the gas pedal input to simply be full gas all the time, and see what the results are. That would at least give us a lower bound on what the luckiest person in the universe could conceivably achieve.

<comment><USER12> They analyzed the actual code of the game to determine what the optimum inputs would be...

Based on that code, the alleged record was not possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "It's unethical!" cried the group so obsessed with protecting those in their inner circle that they regularly find loopholes to keep from recognizing legit records.

There are some good mods at TG, but I find that many, if not most of them, treat it like an elite social club instead of the supposed impartial record authority that they promote themselves as.

</comment><comment><USER13> Here's a good video summary about Todd Rogers: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e-H4sEHB54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e-H4sEHB54)

<comment><USER14> For those who can't watch. Some games were scored in increments of 5 and he somehow got a score finishing with an 8. Many scores were ridiculous like 650000 for a game that goes in increments of 100 and the second highest video verified score was in the 90k range. Then the fact that all his records were referee verified instead of video verified. The referee is serving a sentence for child rape. Then there is the lie about the videos being taken by the police department and never returned which was proven false by a call to the police department. Then the fact that the record holder had direct access to the Twin Galaxies database and ent3ered his own records though he says he only did it once.

<comment><USER15> > Then the fact that all his records were referee verified instead of video > verified. The referee is serving a sentence for child rape.

While that's deplorable, it does not logically follow that a child molester is necessarily an unreliable referee.

<comment><USER16> It's a pretty safe bet, though.

<comment><USER17> People commit horrible crimes. That's one of those things that happen. It doesn't actually mean that everything they did was a lie or a crime, even if they are a horrible, detestable human in many senses of the word.

I'd nearly argue that it would be in his worst interest to participate in defrauding something since it might have revealed his horrible offenses.

<comment><USER18> > doesn't actually mean that everything they did was a lie or a crime

Nobody said that

> they are a horrible, detestable human

Nobody said that either

All that's being said is that it's more likely he would do something nefarious, given his background.

<comment><USER19> The issue is that "child rapist" implies "poor judgment of character". This implication cannot be made because there are plenty of accounts where "non- child rapist" have "poor judgement of character".

No one is arguing a child rapist is okay; the issue other posters are having is that it is a incorrect argument.

Any further "but what if's..." are simply assumptions that do not have proof.

<comment><USER20> I don't follow your logic, I could see either

1\. The issue is that "child rapist" implies "poor judgment of character". This implication cannot be made because there are plenty of accounts where "child rapist" have _" good judgement of character"_.

or

2\. The issue is that _" poor judgment of character"_ implies _" child rapist"_. This implication cannot be made because there are plenty of accounts where "non-child rapist" have "poor judgement of character".

being at least a logical (regardless of correctness) statement

<comment><USER19> My apologies, you are correct. I suppose what I was attempting to say was that the connection between video game referee and child rapist was a weak connection due to the relation of "judgement of character".

The statements "child rapist" implies "poor judgement of character" and "poor judgement of character" implies "poor ability to be a referee" can be negated if the person turned out to be a qualified referee. The gray area is what people agree to be what constitutes good/poor "judgement of character". This is where I believe what AdmiralAsshat is attempting to argue in his post "While that's deplorable, it does not logically follow that a child molester is necessarily an unreliable referee."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> One thing that has maybe not been considered is that the Atari 2600 is susceptible to what's known in the online Atari community as 'frying', whereby cycling the power off and then back on very quickly while the console is running can lead to weird changes in the program state.

Not saying this is what occurred, but it could be a possibility, depending on the code...

<comment><USER22> Reminds me of a controversial technique discovered in the TAS community. Start saving your savefile, then cut the power mid-write. Usually creates a savefile with a bad checksum, but with certain timing on certain games, can result in playable corrupt savefiles which can be used for a faster win.

One of the reasons this idea is so controversial is the TAS community always assumes games should be played frame by frame, but this technique would open sub-frame "gameplay" (timing when you cut the power with much higher precision)

<comment><USER23> I used to do something similar as a kid, cloning Pokemon in Pokemon Gold by turning off the Game Boy mid-save.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> So, is the opinion that he just fabricated the photo, or that he had a knack for figuring these glitches out? Because as far as I know, glitching things is considered all well and good with speed runners, and lots of his other high scores imply some kind of glitching or another.

<comment><USER25> Twin Galaxies is notorious for banning glitches completely and it's one of the many reasons the speedrunning community abandoned TG. If he glitched, his runs would be invalid by TG's own rules.

As far as glitching in speedruns nowadays, it depends. You play by the rules of the category you choose to run, which may allow no glitches, some specific glitches or all glitches. To give an example, let's take a look at a popular speedgame, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time[1]. The "Any%" record, meaning beating the game with all glitches allowed, is 17m09s. The "Glitchless" completion record is 3hr48m38s. Categories like "No IM/WW" and "MST" are glitch limit categories where specific glitches are banned and the times are intermediate between any% and glitchless. Less-popular games will have fewer categories, but if there's interesting glitches, there'll usually be at least "no/few glitches" and "more/all glitches" categories.

[1]: [https://www.speedrun.com/oot](https://www.speedrun.com/oot)

<comment><USER22> >banning glitches

How can you even define glitches?

In the original Super Mario Brothers, you could dash and then crouch and then slide through narrow tunnels while crouching. It wasn't documented in any official manual or anything, but everyone did it. Is that a glitch?

<comment><USER26> Speedrunslive defines a glitch as an "unintentional mistake in games code."

In your example, the dash-crouch in SMB is a glitch.

<comment><USER27> Unless we're talking about something different than I'm imagining (like sliding through a wall or something), that seems obviously _not_ a glitch. Mario has momentum that continues to apply when he changes to a crouching state and it would look really weird if it didn't. (I recognize that this is just proving the point that "glitch or not" is hard to define... and probably harder to define than one would expect.)

<comment><USER28> Ultimately the definition of what is or isn't a glitch isn't the most important question because it's often such a fuzzy question.

Like how some competitive gaming communities often have informal rules to keep competitive play interesting by banning specific overpowered mechanics, the more important reason for allowing/banning specific glitches or types of glitches is to keep the competition interesting for speedrunners and viewers.

Obviously some games are more interesting than others to speedrun, but like in the example of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, by ruling out specific glitches you can make sure that speedrunners continue to explore the surface area of the game rather than only trying to optimize a specific glitch with outsized impact on run-time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Interesting article. For as long as I've been playing games there have been people claiming they did things which seemed unlikely if not impossible. However, given today's cycle accurate simulators and computation power it seems like you could certainly answer the question of whether or not the software would ever get to a certain point.

</comment><comment><USER30> i've never played the game, but if it's on mame, wouldn't a simple evolutionary search yield good results?

<comment><USER31> With only 5.1 seconds of input, you could brute force it if you really wanted.

<comment><USER32> Could you?

The game runs at NTSC rates, which we'll round up to 60Hz. We'll also say that 6s of inputs need to be considered, and scores which are above 6s will be discarded. We'll finally say that the possible input states consist of the joystick in either left ("shifting") or neutral ("popping") position, and the gas button either up or down. This generates four possible input states.

The number of possible input states in total will be 60 * 6 = 360, and so the total input space is 4 * * 360 = 2 * * 720, which is a little big for brute- force exploration. Many of these states suck; after all, the total number of shifts is not ~300, but ~5. So a guided search is likelier to pay off.

Edit: Thanks HN for eating asterisks and having no math mode.

<comment><USER33> There's brute force and then there's brute force. You know that the joystick inputs have to be applied in a certain order, and you basically want the throttle on unless you're above a certain RPM, so the search space is more like 60^4 with a couple of parameters, which is plenty tractable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The referee that decided most of the scores in prison for 30 years, he was a very close friend to the cheater [1]

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e-H4sEHB54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e-H4sEHB54)

</comment><comment><USER35> Alternate link for people who can't be bothered defeating WAPO paywalls: [https://kotaku.com/infamous-atari-player-gets-world- record-r...](https://kotaku.com/infamous-atari-player-gets-world-record- removed-after-3-1822511777)

<comment><USER36> I find that if you right-click on the link, then open it in a private tab or incognito. It will allow you you to read the article.

<comment><USER37> I find that viewing the article with JavaScript turned off works too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This reminds me of the slimy feel I get about Billy Mitchell every time I see a video of him.

<comment><USER39> Reportedly, that's just a persona and he amped it up for the King of Kong film. But I definitely get where you're coming from.

<comment><USER40> The King of Kong film makes him look bad. He clearly fills a kind villain role.

In the movie extras he's seen delivering a Q-Bert machine to a excited senior citizen so she can practice for a tournament. Seemed oddly out of character from the way he was portrayed in the movie.

I don't know him personally, but he keeps showing up at video game events and clearly is enthusiastic about them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Good!</comment>


How to build a great demo - <AUTHOR> http://david.weebly.com/1/post/2008/04/how-to-build-a-great-demo.html

<comment><USER2> Another suggestion - make sure that the person giving the demo knows the product inside and out. There's nothing that sabotages a demo like a question about the demo that can't be answered because the demonstrator doesn't know the intricacies of the product. This typically happens when the president/CEO is doing the demo, but wasn't on the team that built the product. At the very least, make sure that a product expert is in the room during the demo to answer any questions that might come up.

</comment><comment><USER3> "It has to be short. It should take 5 minutes or less in person. An online video should be no more than one and a half minutes long."

That is so true, i have attended some demos that went over 20 minutes, at the end I felt like punching the demo-er in the face.. some people literally walked out of the place.

Remember, if you are not Steve jobs do not talk more than 5 minutes.

</comment><comment><USER4> thanks for the tips! I think it will really help this weekend, I especially like the "It has to look really really cool" tip. I really think that having really fancy looking demo is key to getting people excited about your product, even though that's not how it will be when you finally launch.

Question to those who have interviewed for YC before: Is it structured so that we can present from beginning to end, or should we expect to be fired with questions and possibly get a little sidetracked before finishing?

<comment><USER5> You will definitely get interrupted and sidetracked, so don't expect to get through your entire demo.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> hopefully this arrives in time to help some people out this weekend :)

my #1 piece of advice to anybody that asked me about interviews: have a demo! even if it's something that you whipped up in 2 days, let them know that, but have a demo!

<comment><USER6> Generally this is true, but keep in mind that a non-technical audience will often have strong negative reaction to a demo based on what seem to hackers as the silliest, most trivial things: a rough-around-the-edges design, links that don't work yet, minor UI glitches, etc. Bear in mind that this audience can't distinguish between your application and your application's UI, so the most important part of the linked article is probably "It has to look really, really cool."

Of course, it sounds like you're giving advice on one event specifically, so the above may not apply. What's happening this weekend, anyway?

<comment><USER7> > ... links that don't work yet ...

Personally, I've found that clients react fine to broken links when there's something at the other end like a message that says "this doesn't work yet." But this is in the case where they're trying out their software halfway through on their own... not a demo up on stage or them trying out the complete project.

The basic idea to take away is that non-technical types don't like to be surprised. If they know something isn't going to work, and they click on it and it says "this isn't quite ready yet", everyone will be OK with that :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Thanks for this list. Very cool of you to get it out in time for interviews.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is great advice.

I especially like "Adapt your demo for the audience" and "Use real data".

Your audience doesn't have time to think - Just inject something into their reptialian brains immediately. Anything they already know works faster.</comment>


Ask HN: Why can't you fully block a Facebook page? - <AUTHOR> If you block a profile on Facebook, it is like that person never existed. You may occasionally come across an old comment from them on a photo or something but for all intents and purposes, it's like they never existed.
However, when you block a page, you can still see that page everywhere. You see their comments on news articles and across Facebook. You can even visit the page, but you can't like or interact with it much.
I've noticed lately trolls are creating Facebook pages and commenting across the social network that way because you effectively can't silence them.
Is this intended on purpose or is it a technical limitation with their infrastructure and the big blue app?
Why can't you fully block a Facebook page? <comment><USER2> One option is the [http://www.fbpurity.com/](http://www.fbpurity.com/) browser extension.

If a friend likes or shares a Page, try this: "On your Newsfeed, below the "(friend) liked this" line, hover over the page area's dropdown box and click "Hide all from (source)"

"If its not a direct status update or share from a friend, but the result of a friend posting a comment directly to the page itself, then you can block it from your news feed. Hover over the name of the Page when it appears in your Newsfeed (it will be in bold type). A down arrow will appear. Click on it and select "Hide". You will then be given the option to hide all comments made on that Page."

</comment><comment><USER3> im gonna guess WHY, is to keep tracking pixels and other web bugs valid to follow your webviewing habits.

HOW is an other matter. FB plays ring around the rosie with thier page source so randomized labels and variables point to page elements so you would have to block each one [of millions ?] individually.

so then the difference between FB's inhouse block, and Ublock origin + noscript comes up. FB uses thier tools for thier own interests kinda goes without saying. when you have FB scripts in your browser its open to FB for thier purposes.</comment>


Thursday = Thor's day - <AUTHOR> http://sivers.org/thor <comment><USER3> The logic here doesn't hold with respect to monothestic religions such as Judaism or Christianity.

The Ten Commandments, which are common to these two religions, have two "tables," the first of which (commandments 1 - 5) defines the relations between God and man and the second of which defines the relations between men (6 - 10). The very first commandment is "thou shalt have no other gods before me. The next proscription is against idolatry, which basically amounts to a worship of things that are seen, or the creation itself, which in KJV language is as follows: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth." In other words, belief in God is everything while belief (in the sense of worship) in anything else is all idolatry.

Thus, the logic of a monothestic religion of this type is that there is one true God and every other purported deity is a mere figment of man's imagination, hence an idol (the very word "idol" derives from a Greek root from which the Greek word "to see" comes from - even the word "idea" comes from a Greek word originally meaning "to see with the mind") and hence not real.

The logic of this piece holds if we proceed from an atheistic baseline, which takes the opposite view that only that which is material is real and all purported deities are only figments of man's imagination. If you assume that premise, then it is true that my belief in one deity and rejection of the 529 that others have believed in is not materially different from your rejection of all 530 of them (or whatever the number).

But this logic falls apart if one assumes there is one true deity (infinite creator and providential overseer of a creation from which the deity is above and apart) and all the rest of the purported deities are simply products of the mind and hence not real or true. In that case, the person who believes in the true deity can consistently say that he as a theist believes in the true one while rejecting all the false ones while the person who denies all of them includes in that denial the one true deity and hence is an atheist.

I know this is not the forum to get into religious debates but, if my summary of the logic is wrong, I invite others to explain why. Note that I am not assuming here that any religious point of view is true. I am merely taking that view on its own logic and explaining why it makes perfect sense for someone with that belief to say that he is a theist while one who is not a believer is an atheist. If the premise of one true God is true, it is utterly irrelevant to say that man has concocted a billion fake ones such that we are all atheists in denying them.

In other words, from the theistic perspective, the question is whether there is indeed a true deity of whatever type. If so, that is pretty important. If not, then obviously it is not. (Disclaimer: I am a believer and, indeed, a deacon in my church - but I am not making my points from a religious perspective, merely a logical one).

Edit (concerning the several replies): I invited you to engage the logic of my argument and you certainly did! My post _is_ probably beside the point if all the original piece did was depict a way of steering away from a religious discussion that begins "How can you not believe in God?" or if it was merely a technique for getting a believer to understand the viewpoint of one who does not believe in a particular deity or in any at all. I don't think I was trying to exalt the theistic point of view or to denigrate those who don't accept it - merely trying to say what follows from accepting its premises. Got to rush now because I have to prepare to teach a Bible study tonight (really). Thanks for the fine comments - very stimulating.

<comment><USER4> I think the argument is fairly sound and is great at concisely explaining why religion is a product of humanity's imagination and current culture. (With all due respect, don't take this as an affront on your beliefs.)

I like the argument for a number of reasons:

\- It beg's the question "Why do I reject those other 529 gods?" Generally there is no good answer for this other than being indoctrinated at a young age. You realize that you believe what you believe because of the circumstances in which you were born. This leads to the conclusion that the religion you follow has more to do with where you live than what is "correct". (Noting that there are plenty of exceptions to this).

\- It drives home the point that humanity has been creating gods for thousands of years. Most of those gods have likely been created before your god had even first been mentioned. Any rational person would ask why did humanity move past those gods? You can never disprove the existence of a god, so what happened? Ideally, you realize that religion is much like any trend, just with longer than average turn around.

\- If you follow the trend of gods, you realize that humanity has been generally moving away from polytheism towards monotheism. This makes you wonder why and conclude that it is tightly correlated to (and arguably directly caused by) humanity's understanding of the universe. As we understand more about everything, we don't need gods to fill in these gaps of knowledge. For instance, we understand why the Sun rises or lightning strikes. As humanity has progressed, one by one we killed the need for Roman and Greek gods. This leads you to wonder what role a monotheistic god fills and realize that the god is generally used to bring understanding to things we don't understand and reason to things we can't control. This is hardly a rational reason for a figment that "solves" all unsolved problems.

In short, I like the "(n-1) vs n gods" argument because when you think through everything implied by it, a rational being has no choice but to conclude that in all likelihood the religion they follow is not correct. Unfortunately, emotion plays a huge role in religion, making rational thought difficult. On a personal note, I was a theist for 20 years, backed by 12 years of formal study in my religion. Making the mental shift to realizing everything I'd believed was wrong was difficult to say the least, but years later my life is all the better for it.

<comment><USER5> > It beg's the question "Why do I reject those other 529 gods?" Generally > there is no good answer for this other than being indoctrinated at a young > age.

But that does not explain people who switch religions later in life.

For myself, I decided that I could not be atheist after encountering spirits. My encounters with spirits disproved atheism for me, instead I am currently a Christian because that is the only religion that is able to accurately describe my spiritual encounters. Atheism as a worldview denies that spirits exist, therefore in my mind it can not possibly be accurate.

<comment><USER6> This is interesting. I wouldn't say that atheism "denies" that spirits exist anymore than it denies that Russell's teapot exists. Besides, atheism still provides plenty of room for spirits should there be any evidence for them (subjective or objective). Since you have subjective evidence for spirits (which I'm not discounting), I wonder why you would make the leap from that to the validation of the entire Christian story, or why that leap has to involve a currently organized religion at all?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _I love that we're living in a time where it's so easy to learn._

Well put, Derek. Me too.

<comment><USER8> I agree with that statement, but it does pain me that this was his big takeaway. There is no decision that is more life-impacting than belief/disbelief in a God. To see someone so quickly silenced/swayed by such simple rhetoric really illustrates how many important subjects are not getting nearly as much thought as they deserve.

We will spend months stressing about a job or a start-up, which might affect our lives for the subsequent year or two or three, and no more than a few hours here and there really digging into what evidence exists to support an atheist or religious perspective. It's a cycle that sadly continues - <USER2> years ago everyone was Christian so people defaulted to it. Now, the trendy thing for "intellectuals" is atheism, and so many jump in without a thought (this continues to hold for both sides, as exemplified in the article).

When deciding which direction to take with a start-up we do hours and hours of customer interviews, site visits, market research, brainstorming, reading, and even self-reflection. The same, and more, should be done for religion (e.g., check out a church, speak in a truly unbiased fashion with ardent believers and non-believers alike, grab 20 minutes of a pastors time who has probably dedicated his life to talking to people like us, etc).

There is no topic that gets less thought relative to its importance.

<comment><USER9> That depends entirely on who you are, and I'd say your view is a bit prejudiced.

I'm from one of the most atheist countries in the world, and to tell you the truth I don't think I've ever had a serious conversation with friends or family discussing whether God (or _a_ god) exists. To us it would be like having a serious discussion about whether or not the tooth fairy existed. We just don't really care, and think the whole discussion would be kind of silly if it wasn't for all the wars fought in the name of various religions.

<comment><USER10> This interested me actually. In the UK we have a general baseline of Christianity but I generally thought that the beliefs were mostly agnostic to atheist. But when I happened to mention I was an atheist to my parents (who show no other interest in religion) they were outwardly surprised.

<comment><USER9> That _is_ interesting. I've never discussed religion with my parents or other family - just assumed them to be agnostic. Maybe I'm wrong...

<comment><USER10> Am I right in thinking (from your domain) you are Danish? I'd be interested in whether you're right or not in that assumption. Because It's common thought to me that northern European countries are generally more agnostic anyway (I suspect because the Roman Empire/Holy Roman Empire never really touched it)

<comment><USER9> Spot on. According to this site: <http://www.adherents.com/largecom/com_atheist.html> it's the third most atheist country in the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This argument is fun but not much more.

"Why don't you have any children?. This seems strange to me."

"Well, there are billions of children in the world that are not yours, I just have one less than you. We're basically the same."

The difference between having no children and one child is big. So is the difference between believing in no gods, and one God.

I think the original argument is useful to point out that there are billions of people who don't believe in your particular God, and that it isn't that strange to not believe.

<comment><USER12> I disagree. The point of the argument is that the same reasoning used to rule out all the gods you don't believe in can be used to rule out the god(s) you do.

Your analogy isn't equivalent in that way. Thinking through why you don't believe in Thor might help you reveal a double-standard or inconsistency. Thinking through why you didn't -- what? -- give birth to all the other children in the world is nonsensical.

<comment><USER11> I think there are two points. The conventional use of this argument is the one you are talking about, and that is why I said at the end of my post that it IS useful for that.

However, the article specifically says "So, I guess we're not compatible, huh?", meaning that we can't get along because we are different. And the response to that is "Of course we are! I like you a lot. And we do agree on 519 of the gods, so we'll just not mention that last one." My response is that zero to one is a big jump. Darek seems to be a "lets all get along" kind of guy, and that is great, but this quote doesn't justify that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Interesting. Knowing a little bit of English/Spanish you can guess the origin of most of the days of the week.

* Sunday/Domingo - Sun/?

* Monday/Lunes - Moon/Luna

* Tuesday/Martes - ?/Mars

* Wednesday/Miercoles - ?/Mercurio

* Thursday/Jueves - Thor/Jupiter

* Friday/Viernes - ?/Venus

* Saturday/Sabado - Saturn/?

<comment><USER14> Interestingly, Bulgarian (and by extension probably all Slavic languages) don't follow this model.

(translations based on word roots)

Monday - ponedelnik - "after no work"

Tuesday - vtornik - "second"

Wednesday - sryada - "middle"

Thursday - chetvurtuk - "fourth"

Friday - petuk - "fifth"

Saturday - subota - from Sabath

Sunday - Nedelia - "no work"

<comment><USER15> Russian is very very similar save for Sunday, which is "voskresenya", which roughly translates to (i think) "the resurrection." "Nedelia" translates to "week," but I've never thought about it as meaning "no work" which it almost also does in Russian.

<comment><USER16> Knowing Polish and learning Russian had me do a couple of double-takes on days of the week. We call Sunday "niedziela" and the week "tydzień". I guess identifying Sunday with the week makes some sense, and one of the languages just switched it around at some point.

I always thought of "niedziela" as coming from "nie dzielić" / "не делить" / "no dividing/separating", though it doesn't really make sense as name for the day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This just makes me sad to be honest with you.

The idea that "we believe in 519 out of 520 Gods" means anything shows a fundamental misunderstanding of religion. You may not like the beliefs of some religious people but the point of religion is the beliefs. It's not that a God created the world it's that a benevolent God created the world and left teachings which lead to benevolence.

On that note I'd point out that he's wrong about learning something too. The web is a wonderful place and you can go out and learn things but the problem with the Web as opposed to a person is the web doesn't challenge your beliefs. He took the most superficial point imaginable out of a serious conversation and pursued it. So while he learned something useless he missed the much deeper contradiction in the statement he was so enamored with.

<comment><USER10> I think the point is very simple and very elegant. It's not about God, it's about the fact that humanity (and our history) is a lot more subtle than most people really compute (I came to that realisation myself not very long ago).

The beauty of it is that the religious conversation didn't matter too much - it was just that the clever rhetoric device (the Norse gods) was the avenue to a wealth of information. It is there for the taking but never actively taught.

So, the point is that you can pick up any passing point of interest and satisfy your craving for it like never before. Then half an hour later move on to something else.

And you will still have those Norse gods/weekdays lined up as a party trick...

<comment><USER10> No? So Sivers' message was just about religion then? ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Posted on a Friday? Madness!

<comment><USER19> They were on a date -> Love god -> Friday!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> "You and I are almost identical in our beliefs! If history has named, say, 520 gods, you don't believe in 519 of them, I don't believe in 520 of them."

This argument comes from Dawkins book The God Delusion. It's clever, but also kind of dumb. Trying to discredit contemporary religion based on what people believed 2,500 years ago is like trying to discredit science based on alchemy.

<comment><USER21> That would imply that the current view of god(s) is more advanced (in a provable way) that the old view of them. To an atheist, this is nitpicking.

<comment><USER8> Many major religions are monotheistic by definition. The entire premise is that only 1 true god exists.

Saying we "agree on 519 of 520 and disagree on 1" is a non-statement. The first person's belief in that 1 by definition precludes his belief in the other 519.

<comment><USER22> I think many people may be missing the point.

The point of the argument is to challenge people to question whether the existence of their god is any more plausible than any of the other thousands of deities whose existence has been postulated.

It works well against Christians or anyone else whose god has specific and well-defined properties. It doesn't work against deists since their "god" is sufficiently poorly-defined to be more plausible than Thor.

<comment><USER23> > _"It works well against Christians"_

No it doesn't.

It amazes me how often I hear Christians say "this argument works well against atheists" and then make an utterly stupid argument that none of the atheists I know would take seriously. This strikes me as much the same -- it's an argument that atheists _think_ should work well against Christians, but that most Christians will think is stupid and misses the point.

<comment><USER24> It works well against the argument, "How can you _not_ believe in God?" The belief that 'belief in God' is a given is equally stupid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The story was good, I'm definitely happy to live in a time with such easy access to information, but as for the actual argument, haven't we all heard this before? That doesn't diminish it, but I'm surprised by how new it seems to many people. It's been argued forever. I'm sure it goes back much further than this, but here's a passage from 2005's "Sense and Goodness Without God" ([http://www.amazon.com/Sense-Goodness-Without-God- Metaphysica...](http://www.amazon.com/Sense-Goodness-Without-God- Metaphysical/dp/1420802933/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-3991836-2050562?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1183299102&sr=8-1)):

But if the idea of a god is inherently illogical (if the very idea is self- contradictory or meaningless), or if it is contradicted by the evidence, then there are strong positive reasons to take a harder stance as an atheist – with respect to that particular god. For in this sense, even believers are strong atheists – they deny the existence of hundreds of gods. Atheists like me merely deny one more god than everyone else already does – in fact, I deny the existence of the same god already denied by believers in other gods, so I am not doing anything that billions of people don't do already.

</comment><comment><USER26> Interestingly, "Sunday" in Japanese is expressed with the kanji for "sun" and the kanji for "day". It's obviously pronounced differently, but the literal meaning is the same as the English phonetics.

<comment><USER27> That's true for Monday as well, which I've always thought was cool:

月曜日 = Monday

月 = Moon, 曜日 = day of the week

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Derek makes the same mistake many make when dealing with deities -- he personalizes them.

My guess is that the ancients viewed deities as categories of things we don't know -- hence the 6 zillion gods. Over time, organization set into religion and people began anthropomorphizing the gods.

Judaism moved "categories of things we don't know" from a multiple choice to a single entity. Then organization set in again with the anthropomorphizing.

It's a mistake to take this to zero -- the assumption that we know everything and things we cannot prove are not worthy of consideration. Having a deep understanding of the huge amount of unknown in the universe is a critical part of a balanced life. To say you don't believe in one person's personification is to miss the point entirely.

</comment><comment><USER29> Reframing is just a fantastic psychological tool/technique, and is the logical follow-up to Einstein's maxim that "The world will not evolve past its current state of crisis by using the same thinking that created the situation." This example by Sivers is brilliant.

</comment><comment><USER30> I've always found this an interesting topic, and once in a while it's interesting to discuss it with someone who believes in a god.

Sometimes I wonder how much we choose what we believe, especially when it gets down to this bottom-of-the-soul (or "soul"), meaning-of-life stuff. When someone is incredulous at the fact that I don't believe in any sort of god, I 've said: "Let's try this: for the next sixty seconds, I'll start believing in God, and for the same sixty seconds, you have to stop believing in God. Are you in?"

Naturally, it's not really possible for either person to do this, but sometimes it promotes interesting discussion about the nature of faith — _why_ can't we do this, etc, etc?

Of course, a lot of times it just pisses people off too.

</comment><comment><USER31> _Now you can start to dive into any subject with some whimsical web browsing - an alternate to watching a TV show_

Wow, I just had a discussion with my wife about giving up cable TV but keeping cable Internet for this reason. My argument was during the 1/2 hour of a silly sitcom, I can become knowledgeable with just about any subject of my choosing. And even if I want to veg out, I can still find most shows on the web.

Her counter argument was the cable box + remote are easier to use than hooking up a computer to the TV, which is what we currently do.

<comment><USER32> ... until the iPad came along. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I think a lot of people are missing the point (although the comments are really interesting...keep those up).

One person is just trying to say to the other that their different beliefs don't make them very different people. Based on the second person's reaction, I'd say their beliefs _don't_ make them that different (in this case).

Someone mentioned that this argument came from Dawkins' book; this seems like a small twist on that argument to make a different (and demonstrably valid) point.

</comment><comment><USER34> There is one "error" in that discussion imho. Even if Thursday is named after Thor, it doesn't mean that Thursday was dedicated in celebration of Thor. And on the other side, Easter isn't named after Jesus. So I'm not following how Thursday and Easter are even remotely related.

edit: of course this is just nit picking, and is not really relevant on the big picture.

<comment><USER35> easter is named after a month in the germanic calendar named after the goddess Ēostre

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I can't believe nobody has brought up the Flying Spaghetti Monster: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_spaghetti_monster>

</comment><comment><USER36> George Carlin put it best: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeSSwKffj9o>

</comment><comment><USER37> I love that guy's responses! Though when I do something similar (not quite same level as him), my friends usually give me the weird look..

</comment><comment><USER38> Reddit was down?

</comment><comment><USER32> My minimum requirement for believing in any particular god is if I can have lunch with them. Can I call them, invite to a party, and they actually show up. Etc.

<comment><USER22> Does this apply to people as well?

<comment><USER32> Nope I believe Linus Torvalds exists even though I don't expect to have lunch with him. I have _higher_ standards for gods. Unlike most of the planet. Unfortunately.

<comment><USER22> It still seems a little unfair. If Thor flew across the sky right now, brought thunderstorms to the desert, Mjolnir-ed the Space Needle, appeared on television shaking hands with Conan O'Brien, and rebuffed your lunch invitation on the grounds that he has a thumb-wrestling appointment with Quetzalcoatl, you still wouldn't believe in him?

<comment><USER35> but he won't. and neither would any other deity. they're just made up.

<comment><USER22> Now now, that's a skepticism failure. A proper skeptic should acknowledge that it's very very unlikely that Thor exists, but that there is a small nonzero probability that he _might_.

<comment><USER35> Yes, technically you are correct. But we think in terms of absolutes all the time in order to live in this world (e.g. The statue could wave it's arm, but it is such a remote possibility that we can discount it for practical purposes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Aren't all these atheist/theist debates better housed on reddit with all the other dreck and stale debates the host? Hacker News is for news, not for silly things that just make people waste oxygen arguing about them.

</comment><comment><USER40> Hacker News?

<comment><USER41> I agree that it's not Hacker News, but it is intellectually engaging, and there are lessons to be learned ...

Conflict resolution, finding common ground, agreeing differences that exist, but don't have to matter, and the observation that today we can invest all of 3 minutes to discover stuff, then decide whether we want to know more.

When I was 22 I moved country, and I knew _nothing_ about where I was going. Encyclopedias told me very, very little, and after days, literally days, in the library, I still knew almost nothing.

Today I can spend 5 minutes on the 'net and know more in that time than I could've found in days of diligent, comprehensive, but above all _boring_ research.

Read with the intent of learning - not all lessons are obvious, and some are worth more for having found them, rather than being given them.

<comment><USER42> I think its been particularly interesting growing up during this transitional period. I'm 21 now, but I can remember up to about the 6th grade when card catalogs and encyclopedias were still pushed on us at school. But the internet was coming into its own during this period as well. These parallel environments have given my generation a unique perspective of the web. We've essentially grown up together--perhaps there's a psychological connection here that can explain other behaviors.</comment></comment></comment>


Fake Name Generator - <AUTHOR> http://fakenamegenerator.com <comment><USER2>
      # aptitude install rig

_RIG (Random Identity Generator) is a free replacement for a shareware program out there called 'fake'. It generates random, yet real-looking, personal data. It is useful if you need to feed a name to a Web site, BBS, or real person, and are too lazy to think of one yourself. Also, if the Web site/BBS/person you are giving the information to tries to cross-check the city, state, zip, or area code, it will check out._

      $ rig
      Adolph Cline
      739 Anton Dr
      Mentor, OH  44060
      (216) xxx-xxxx
      $

<comment><USER3> Someone please make a homebrew keg with this!

<comment><USER4> Or create a Fink/MacPorts port.

<comment><USER5> Is there a reason to use either of those systems over homebrew? Since homebrew seems to have a lot more community support now.

<comment><USER6> Once you start piling up some dependencies (vs. self-constained apps), I found homebrew more of a mess, while MacPorts more or less worked as I'd expect. The thing that drove me off Homebrew was dependency-hell with different versions of Python packages, while MacPorts pulled in the right versions of all the dependencies (it can even handle needing multiple versions of NLTK/SciPy/etc. installed in parallel, if different ports depend on them). This is perhaps the flipside of the reason many people prefer Homebrew: it tends to build against the base OSX stuff, while MacPorts tends to pull in its own parallel world of dependencies. IME the latter works more reliably, though it takes up more diskspace.

But, Debian's package management works better than either of them, so I've sort of been moving towards doing any kind of unixy work in a VM and treating OSX as just a desktop.

<comment><USER7> It's possible to end up in a different circle of dependency hell with macports, where it insists on installing 10 different versions of everything at great length, when you already had a perfectly good one. If I'm not a python or perl developer, I don't want to compile many different point releases of those language ecosystems just to run some little utility scripts. And then of course everything is connected to everything else, so you can end up trying to solve graph theory problems when you're meant to be working.

Battle-hardened *NIX admins rightfully laugh at this attitude, but for a lot of web developers who use their laptops as a "sharp tool" and do all the heavy lifting in linux vservers, it makes sense to have a slightly laxer approach to package management.

(and then there's the increasingly common cases of build scripts just being broken on macports, because it receives less and less community attention now. this can combine with the above dependency graph problems to produce situations where it's easier to just nuke /opt/local and start again.)

<comment><USER8> I'm a *NIX admin and actually, when it comes to OSX I'd rather go the VM route than homebrew/macports (either way, I don't run OSX daily).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Very useful resource!

I'm curious though, where did you get your Hispanic names from? Seems like they come from a database of funny, weird and probably offensive names. No one is called like that in Spanish-speaking countries, and yes, I know the names are supposed to be fake, but just comparing the Hispanic with the American ones, you can tell there's a big difference.

Whether or not is intentional, it could be even more helpful if you use "normal" names.

Disclaimer: I'm Hispanic.

<comment><USER10> The England/Wales names are weird too, lots of unusual first names.

Also, Wales seems way over-represented. It has a population that's tiny compared to England, but half the names generated seem to be Welsh names such as Cerys.

<comment><USER11> Also, I don't know any English/Welsh people who drive a 1992 Pontiac Sunbird.

<comment><USER12> The first thing I noticed was that the vehicle field doesn't seem to be sensitive to the products available domestically for the person's address. And for bonus points, it _could_ even consider demographics of the address versus price of the car (I got a Bentley while living in the middle of nowhere in the rust belt, which seems a bit suspicious).

<comment><USER13> The addresses it generates are generally non-existent (if they do exist, it's a coincidence)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Italian names are not realistic.

Try #1: "Dante Marcelo". Dante is a very strange name for an italian, I guess it is used in the US. Marcelo lacks an "l" (it is Marcello) so it sounds Spanish instead.

Try #2: "Berto Trentino". Trentino is realistic but Berto sounds a lot like an abbreviation of "Alberto", so not a real name even if I guess there are people actually named "Berto".

Try #3: "Pupetta Rizzo". Can't imagine somebody called "Pupetta", it is something you say to small children as "Little Doll" or alike.

<comment><USER15> My guess is that it's just randomly selecting from a list of names with equal probability, rather than weighting them based on how common they are. So all of these long-tail names are coming up way more often than you'd find in a phone book.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, similar is when you get names from Canada and look at the cities.

The first one I get is from Weagamow, ON, which is a North Caribou Lake Indian reservation, with like 900 people in it.

The second I get is from Cornwall, ON, a small city of 45k people, the next is from Orangeville, ON another town of 30k people. Then Wawa, ON, a town of 3k people.

Meanwhile, Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal are all unrepresented.

I just got a person from Byemoor Alberta, a hamlet of 35 people. It says she lives on 1304, 90th Ave, but there's a 1 Ave, a 2 Ave, a 1 St, and a 1 St North. Definitely no 90th Ave.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> How very coincidental. This afternoon I was talking to my cofounders about test data generation - and names were one of them.

Here are other resources that we found that were helpful:

\- [http://www.generatedata.com/](http://www.generatedata.com/)

\- [http://databasetestdata.com](http://databasetestdata.com)

\- [http://randomuser.me](http://randomuser.me) (useful for frontends)

\- [http://gedis-studio.com/](http://gedis-studio.com/) (not free)

Also, TIL that Hipchat doesn't always pull all the links

<comment><USER18> Interesting to see this come up. A couple years ago I started and then mothballed a system for generating realistic fake people (which I called golems) using deterministic and reversible algorithms instead of random numbers (it has a bunch of advantages). Got to love heroku's free tier, cause it's actually still on line:

[http://golems.herokuapp.com/person/random.json](http://golems.herokuapp.com/person/random.json)

If anyone's interested in learning more let me know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I just generated an icelandic hobbit and it GAVE ME MY OWN NAME! I actually WTFed out loud.

<comment><USER20> "Privacy concerns on the raise. A hobbit accidentally outed by a web service."

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> While this is very interesting, the profiles may need to be "tweaked" a bit to be realistic. For example, the first profile it generate for me was a:

-Female

-Fitness instructor

-Weighing 205.9 lbs

-Standing 5 feet 1 inch

Individually, any of these things might be ok. Any three could even be possible. All four, however, just doesn't seem to work.

<comment><USER22> The occupations do seem the most likely to cause suspicion. Some of them are trades where you have to be licensed or registered to have that occupation, so a quick search would prove the person does not exist, or at least is lying about their job.

Then there's the automobile, which could also raise red flags. A Fiat Tempra driven in the USA would probably be suspicious to anyone who knows that Fiats probably weren't sold in the US in 1994, for example. And it might be weird for a clerk to be driving a 2010 Infinity...

Back in the BBS days there used to be programs written to auto-generate identities in bulk, for reasons i'm not aware of. They were designed to minimize scrutiny because there might be humans actually looking at the data you used, since there was less automation in terms of processing accounts back then.

<comment><USER23> I'm not sure why National Auto Parts would needs a Perianesthesia nurse who runs a website called SuicideLaws.com, but they seem to be paying him well enough to drive 1992 Ferrari 512 TR.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> As an Indian I am a bit sad to see Hobbit, Klingon and Ninja in there but no option for Indian names.

<comment><USER25> Just as well, probably. If they had Indian, you'd get a Punjabi first name, an Urdu surname, and a 1992 Pontiac Sunbird in your New Delhi driveway.

<comment><USER26> Salman Rushdie has to get his story ideas from somewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> At least with Russian names, the algorithm seems to apply a uniform probability distribution over all names in its database. It results in way too many extremely rare names. In other words, a batch of Russian names generated using this program would not look statistically realistic.

<comment><USER28> Yes, a lot of archaic names which are very rare. Also, Russia is multinational country, so Russian (as in ethnicity) and Russian (as in nationality/citizenship) names are different things. A lot of names (but not family names) are actually Tatar, Armenian etc. A combination of that name with typical Russian family name is not unheard of, but pretty rare to attract the attention which is the last thing you want if you use fake name for any serious purpose.

<comment><USER29> Russian names - Ramiro? Rice?? Nicodemus???

Where the hell did they get those from:)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Suggestion: Have a 'profile basket' so I can recover the birth date the next time a service asks for security questions.

Actually, generating the "first boyfriend" and "my first car color" would be great too.

Actually, what about generating a facebook and linkedin profile for the fake names?

</comment><comment><USER31> First was a female dietitian, 5'7" and pushing 200lbs. Sounds like a great dietitian.

Next one had a hometown right down the road from me. Cool. She's 53 years old but her SSN starts with 180. PA's SSN range is 159 to 211, and everyone else my age has SSNs starting with 178. SSNs are assigned in-order. See the problem? Her SSN ought to be in the 160s I reckon.

Next was a 70-y/o timber and logging worker. I don't believe it.

<comment><USER32> Maybe she has a glandular disorder, or she's a special kind of dietitian who works mainly with sumo wrestlers, or she's 7' tall.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> They even support Klingon names! (after a big scandal [1])

[1]: [http://www.fakenamegenerator.com/blog/2013/10/response-to- ac...](http://www.fakenamegenerator.com/blog/2013/10/response-to-accusations- of-discrimination/)

</comment><comment><USER33> Hmm, in my experience, 85 yo Dutch women are unlikely to drive a Mazda Miata. Although maybe mine examiners are more thrill-seeking than the average 85 yo. Fun!

</comment><comment><USER34> "Per company policy you have been denied access to the URL: [http://fakenamegenerator.com/](http://fakenamegenerator.com/)

Reason: Not allowed to browse Questionable category"

Now I'm REALLY curious!

<comment><USER35> I imagine the block is in place because spammers and fraudsters might take advantage of it. Still kind of silly though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> There are also faker libraries for various languages, e.g. the famous [https://github.com/stympy/faker](https://github.com/stympy/faker), [https://github.com/fzaninotto/Faker](https://github.com/fzaninotto/Faker) and a little port in Scala (created by me) [https://github.com/justwrote/scala- faker](https://github.com/justwrote/scala-faker)

</comment><comment><USER37> Why are social security numbers generated? That seems necessary for supporting only dubious kinds of behavior.

Aren't SSNs only useful for banking/credit-type services? (Perhaps someone can enlighten me.)

<comment><USER38> My guess is because they are also geo-dependent. Your fake person gets a valid SSN for where they are from.

<comment><USER39> Eh, SSNs aren't linked to location in any usable way. Obviously your SSN will not change when you move cross-country (so they're not linked to current address), and I think they're only based on the mailing address entered when the card was applied for, which may not even be where you were born.

<comment><USER40> Geo-dependent, as in across the otherside of the globe maybe...

<comment><USER39> Nope; I moved out of the US 8 years ago and my SSN remains the same. My daughters both have US SSNs and they've never lived there; the younger one hasn't even visited the US once yet. If they do live there someday, they'll still have the same SSNs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Quite useful but the site has ignored about 17.5% of the world population - Indian names are missing.

</comment><comment><USER42> The German names are all rather convincing, except for the sometimes lacking umlauts. (interestingly, only in the surnames) No one is called Jager here, unless they anglicized their name for some reason (Jäger is German for Hunter).

</comment><comment><USER43> Pretty awesome - although I keep on getting Ferraris and type two Diabetes. I guess it goes to show that you really can't have everything.

<comment><USER44> Surely it shows precisely the opposite! You have a Ferrari AND diabetes! Very lucky indeed!

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I wrote a library in JavaScript for the browser and Node.js called Chance to generate user info and other random things:

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

I don't have as much internationalization, and it doesn't generate a full user like that (it's in my todo) but perhaps it would be helpful for anyone looking for this kind of stuff.

</comment><comment><USER46> The Norwegian name set generates some really strange first names. Plausible surnames though.

<comment><USER47> Same with Icelandic names. Also, the GPS coordinates were often out at sea or on a mountain. Using openStreetMap it should be easy to generate more plausible coordinates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I am highly amused that this requires a google+ login. Do they detect their own fake names?

<comment><USER49> It does not require a G+ login for 99% of the features.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Finnish names were very good. Only thing that was a little off was the car models, which seemed very US centric. Car models have lot of regional variants (big differences in naming US vs EU vs Asia)

</comment><comment><USER51> A lot of the vehicles make/models are not typical cars you'd see on British roads i.e. the marketing name is for another country, even if the vehicle itself is largely the same.

</comment><comment><USER52> Hmm no API available (unlike randomuser). We need automated faking!

<comment><USER53> My thoughts exactly. After seeing the names it generated, along with the the addresses and so forth, I immediately started looking for the link to buy or download the code, database or whatever was on offer. To my disappointment, there was nothing available.

<comment><USER54> You can place bulk orders of up to 50,000: [http://www.fakenamegenerator.com/order.php](http://www.fakenamegenerator.com/order.php)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Brazilian names are perfect! Names, cities, phones, etc, everything so realistic!

As people are complaining of weird spanish, french, italian names, I wonder if the person who did this is brazilian.

<comment><USER56> The names are indeed realistic, but some details are not.

First are cars: most tests I made produced cars that are not sold in Brazil, althought some did.

The lack of apartment or similar data in most addresses will not raise suspicion in the US, where most people live at houses, but it will surely jump to the attention of anyone looking at the database in Brazil. Not to say, it won't test most DBs properly as we commonly store apartment numbers in a dedicated column.

The English name of the companies also won't help.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Unfortunately the English names don't really work as they haven't taken account of name clustering in Ethnic minorities.

"Mohammed Bennett" is possible but highly unlikely.

</comment><comment><USER58> The fascinating thing about fake names is that they often seem to be a little off, somehow, even when they draw from real names. Hard to put my finger on it.

</comment><comment><USER59> I don't need this website. I can go through the thousands of pages of wiki spam I've been hit with. I don't know why they think my wiki would have pages describing random teenagers from Germany who enjoy horseriding in their spare time and were medical equipment mechanics. Presumably these spammers must be using a similar database to this website.

The lack of unemployed people generated seems a bit unlike real life, however.

</comment><comment> vezzy-fnord It's a pretty old project. I know that it's been used quite successfully plenty of times for social engineering purposes.

<comment><USER60> Yeah, it is an old project. I would have posted a long time ago if I knew HN didn't know already.

The most useful tool besides this is [http://10minutemail.com/](http://10minutemail.com/)

Edit: Doing a HN search this was posted about a year ago. That is why I probably didn't post it. Should we start submitting reposts of old stuff? I probably missed "cool tools" from years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> The author must think highly of American women. A random sample showed nearly all of them between 65-69" and over 200lbs.

</comment><comment><USER62> I wonder what database they are using for the ZIP codes. I tried googling around a bit and only found a bunch of "pay X$ to get all US ZIP codes". I'm pretty sure I've found these before for an ERP project I worked for...maybe the CIA? database (I distinctly remember they had some pretty good stuff)

<comment><USER63> I thought there were plenty of those available freely.

Are these good enough? :

[http://geocoder.ca/?freedata=1](http://geocoder.ca/?freedata=1)

US Zip Codes

File of all US 5-digit ZIP codes. Includes zip, city, state, latitude, longitude, and county (Last Updated: March 30th 2010):

US Zip Codes (41,755)

or

[http://sourceforge.net/projects/zips/](http://sourceforge.net/projects/zips/)

Edit: MaxMind recommends this one

[http://download.geonames.org/export/zip/](http://download.geonames.org/export/zip/)

There's also Google's geocoding API.

Still, let's hope the project owners answer you :)

<comment><USER64> Not exactly.

"ZIP Codes are commercially sensitive... proprietary information"[1]

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6685917](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6685917)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> This is interesting, but the names are probably just pulled from US census data. If you want something to generate _new_ names, try

[https://elliottslaughter.com/names/rand](https://elliottslaughter.com/names/rand)

which uses (admittedly simple) machine learning algorithms to generate new names.

</comment><comment><USER66> On first glance, the whole thing looked very shady to me, since the web pages it generates look like this:

BakingBrokers.com

but it seems they are all non-registered domains, so it is indeed not a scam (and Baking is not quite Banking).

Would be a funny trick, though. Get a lot of people to use your identity generator in order to produce some backlinks.

<comment><USER67> I was wondering about that, especially because of the call out to activate your fake email address.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> It uses non-USA cars for the USA. We don't have the Chevrolet Matiz or Holden Senator here.

</comment><comment><USER69> I have used a similar service while preparing a lab assignment for a CS course this semester in my uni. But this one, whooa, just generate random users for your newest service and maybe with a little AI you can overcome the famous coldstart problem.

</comment><comment><USER70> There's a problem with Belgium: it generates street names in flemish for cities in the french speaking part of the country. Makes it obvious the address is fake.

<comment><USER71> Noticed it too, and it looks city-street are unique combinations (one street by city).

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> Fake names, cities, and other in python:

[https://pypi.python.org/pypi/fake- factory/](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/fake-factory/)

</comment><comment><USER73> Lithuanian names: [http://uza.lt/vardai/](http://uza.lt/vardai/)

It's more of a fun read than anything useful, really

</comment><comment><USER74> I've been using this for testing webapps for years

<comment><USER49> Me too, and when I do I always blindly copy and paste and end up with very fake looking data... Which doesn't matter to me at all!

<comment><USER75> Don't know where you live, but the Dutch government publishes spreadsheets with testdata. It contains names, middle names, addresses, domestic and foreign names, etc. No need to generate your own. I haven't had to use it yet and I didn't have a very good look, but I'd think it contains all sorts of exceptional cases which your system needs to handle. If it successfully processes that spreadsheet, it probably handles anything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> Well that's creepy: The address of my randomly generated person is 1 block from an place I stayed at (same street name, just one block down).

<comment><USER77> Go say hi! And deliver a certificate of congratulations for being included in the exclusive fakenamegenerator.com!

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> Interesting...one of the choices is Eritrean. Small country in East Africa. Names are pretty close to the region as well so I'm surprised.

</comment><comment><USER79> Russian first names (not Cyrillic) are very strange: "Innocent Korovin" \- really? Russian (cyrillic) seem more realistic though.

</comment><comment><USER80> Emergency care nurse for Champion Auto. Priceless.

<comment><USER81> Occupation: Funeral attendant

Company: Food Giant

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> Major issue here is that the site is linking to www.ssnregistry.org which is pretty obviously a honeypot for SSN numbers...

</comment><comment><USER83> I've used this in the past. Useful tool.

</comment><comment><USER84> French Canada names are not typical. Here are examples: François Tremblay Marc Gagnon Diane Côté Line Dion

<comment><USER85> I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not. The first three are pretty common French Canadian names. The last one isn't.

Francois Tremblay is the name of a goalie from Baie-Comeau.

Marc Gagnon is the name of an Olympic gold-medal winning speedskater from Chicoutimi.

There are a couple of dozen Diane Cotes from Canada on LinkedIn.

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> Could need some tweaking with the age. You mostly don't want information for a 60-90 year old person.

</comment><comment><USER87> So, I need a new dust filter for my Hoover MaxExtract PressurePro model 60 - can you help me with that?

</comment><comment><USER88> Super useful. Now if it only were to auto-create a G+ profile and scrape to find some profile pics.

<comment><USER89> For profile pics: [http://randomuser.me/](http://randomuser.me/)

<comment><USER90> Is this legal? Unless those faces are fictional drawings, using someone else's face for a fake profile seems way over the line.

<comment><USER91> That was my confusion as well. They are using actual photographs of people for a randomly generate profile!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER92> I am too afraid to realize I have been created in a random generator to use this service.

</comment><comment><USER93> This seems like it would be more accurately referred to as a real name generator :)

</comment><comment><USER94> i'm only modestly talented when it comes to design and layout, but i feel strongly enough about this to make a suggestion: cover this thing in more ads.

</comment><comment><USER95> This has helped me many a time to generate test data-set.

</comment><comment><USER96> I love it! ;) Just afraid that many trolls will use it...

</comment><comment><USER97> My favourite was _Brandon Bradshaw_.

</comment><comment><USER98> Brazilian names are quite convincing.

</comment><comment><USER99> Well, Let's celebrate anonymity

</comment><comment><USER100> People have a UPS tracking number?

</comment><comment><USER101> The arabic one is pretty accurate.

</comment><comment><USER102> I love it! Productivity : down.

</comment><comment><USER103> no , Indian names?

</comment><comment><USER104> no mclovin ?</comment>


Happypenguin.org: Hard drive crash, a cautionary tale - <AUTHOR> http://www.happypenguin.org/ <comment><USER2> For people who might check this link a few days/months later, here the text as of Nov 8th:

 _Due to a hard drive failure which occurred at the same time as our backup system failed, the site is currently down. We expect to have full data recovery within the next few days. As of 9th Oct 2010 the data recovery is still ongoing. We have been told to expect a result early next week, so crossed fingers, we are hoping to have service resumed on or around the 13th Oct.

As of 15th Oct 2010 the data recovery is still ongoing. Apparently the Western Digital HDD that died has corrupted itsown firmware, making it hard to extract the data from the disc. As such, we are beginning the process of backup recovery from our most recent tier 2 backups which are a few weeks out of date, but waiting on the tier 1 recovery is getting ridiculous. We plan on working over the weekend on this recovery, and hope to have more news for you shortly.

As of 22nd Oct 2010 data recovery is STILL ongoing. The Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB drive that failed has chemical degredation on the surface making the data recovery much slower and harder. All going well, we will have the older backups making sense soon, and will be back up to speed.

As of Nov 4th, we have been unable to bring the site back up yet, due to the discovery that the older backups bring brought online would end up with a number of users being unable to access their games due to copy protection issues. As such, rather than give ANY user a problem with their legally purchased game, we will be keeping the site down for the next few days while the final stages of data recovery are performed. All going well, we hope to be back up towards the start of next week._

<comment><USER3> _As of Nov 8th, we have a report from the data recovery company of a complete recovery. We should be receiving the recovered data on Wednesday 10th and we can then begin the process of finally getting things back to normal around here.

As of Nov 12th, we have now received the data recovery files, but there has been a fair amount of filesystem damage, and it will take us some time to locate the files, rebuild the filesystem, and get everything back on its feet. We are still hoping for being back online next week, all going well.

As of Nov 15th, we have begin database reconstruction. As there was significant filesystem damage, this will take a while, as we need to manually sanity check the database records, and there are a lot of them. We still hope to have things up and running this week._

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The drive in question sounds like the 2TB bargain that New Egg regularly offers deals on: ([http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136...](http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136514))

I've got three of these in a JBOD server, running a couple of months without incident. They're cheap, quiet, and low-power. They're not high-performance, however, and not ideally suited to RAID applications. Also, given the new sector size you can get dreadful performance from them if you aren't careful in setting your partition boundaries.

Having suffered the consequences of ignoring data safety rules in the past, I now make a practice of having three copies of important data in at least two separate locations. I'm frankly astonished that there apparently wasn't a differential backup process at the company. I mean, a month's down time, WTF? These hard disks are pretty darn cheap backup media if you've got lots of data (e.g. video files), but after this item I'm wondering if biodiversity should be among my archive criteria.

That the drives in question had "chemical degredation on the surface making the data recovery much slower and harder" is a puzzler to me. Perhaps there's something about today's drive materials I'm unaware of, but my CYA radar went off on that choice of words: someone screwed up during the recovery process would be my first suspicion.

<comment> mike-cardwell Diversity is a good idea. I have a TimeCapsule which automatically backs up my Macbook once an hour, but I still put important files in my Dropbox folder so I have a 3rd offsite backup of them too.

<comment><USER5> Is there anything remotely as convenient as Dropbox, but with sane, client- side crypto? As far as I know, Dropbox encrypt the data, but on the server, which, as far as I'm concerned, is about as good as storing it in plaintext.

Alternatively/even better: is there a remote mirroring filesystem and/or block storage system which allows reasonable client-side crypto over a slow asymmetric (ADSL) link? I have a local backup server, it would be great if I could mirror that into a server in a datacentre somewhere. Is there anything remotely as convenient as Dropbox, but with sane, client-side crypto? As far as I know, Dropbox encrypt the data, but on the server, which, as far as I'm concerned, is about as good as storing it in plaintext.

Alternatively/even better: is there a remote mirroring filesystem and/or block storage system which allows reasonable client-side crypto over a slow asymmetric (ADSL) link? I have a local backup server, it would be great if I could mirror that into a server in a datacentre somewhere. Has anyone tried this kind of thing with lessfs, dm-crypt and drbd?

<comment><USER6> I think this is what TarSnap <http://www.tarsnap.com/> is meant to be for.

<comment><USER5> As far as I can tell, Tarsnap is only for archives, it doesn't give you random-access, mountable-as-a-filesystem style convenience. For backups, Tarsnap is definitely the correct architecture, for syncing, not so much.

<comment><USER7> Correct. Theoretically the Tarsnap client-server protocol could be used to synthesize a mountable filesystem, but that would add hard latency requirements -- one of the great advantages of Tarsnap's transactional archive-creation is that it can tolerate high latency and even requests failing with little impact.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Also: DRM, a cautionary tale (unless I misunderstood what they mean by that - I don't know what did happypenguin.org actually offer):

"older backups bring brought online would end up with a number of users being unable to access their games due to copy protection issues"

<comment><USER9> They're a non-profit bringing happiness to penguins?

<comment><USER10> No, they offer a list of linux games, a forum for the discussion of linux games, and a store for buying linux games.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Ma.gnolia anyone? <http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/01/magnolia-suffer/>

When our backups or replication fail I usually say we are at Ma.gnolia threat level orange :)

<comment><USER12> Don't forget the big CouchSurfing ([http://techcrunch.com/2006/06/29/couchsurfing-deletes- itself...](http://techcrunch.com/2006/06/29/couchsurfing-deletes-itself-shuts- down/)) crash. They appear to have recovered from it though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Offsite backup services created by HNers:

<http://www.tarsnap.com/>

<http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/>

<https://spideroak.com/>

(I co-founded SpiderOak in 2006.)

<comment><USER14> The problem with tarsnap is that it's run by one (extremely competent) guy. Unfortunately, if he dies/is disappeared/suffers a mental breakdown/etc your backups may well be toast and unrecoverable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have been places that have been through this same routine with backup after backup being found to have failed even though they were all checked recently through test restores.

Another thing that likes to happen is that even if you have a good backup, it's likely due to psychological stress that the first two or three restoration attempts will accidentally erase the backups due to someone typing an incorrect command.

<comment><USER8> So true. I lost ~3h of work because I screwed up my hg repo with msc dissertation somehow... on the hand-in day. Then in a panic, tried to restore it - of course I made a mistake in rsync source and destination and overwrote my backups before I could stop the sync (also ignored modification times - yay).

Fortunately I had another copy on bitbucket. Not the latest version, so I needed another day to finish all document formatting.... but I'm not sure how this would end otherwise.

<comment><USER16> I've had 5 years of graduate research literally walk out the door when someone decided to steal the workstation out of my office at the beginning of 2000. Thankfully everything was being backed up remotely but it took over a month before a successful restore from tape. I'm guessing it was the first time the department's backup system was put to an actual "test" and during that month it was questionable whether or not I'd get anything back.

Not the best thing to happen right before you're set to write your PhD dissertation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This keeps happening ... make sure to backup, and then test your backup. An easy way to do this is to run your dev environment on a backup snapshot.

<comment><USER18> Having a mirrored RAID array would have helped here as well, as long as you don't mistake it for a backup solution.

<comment><USER19> And given how cheap hard drives are (and how likely they are to eventually fail) it seems like that would almost always be a good investment.

<comment><USER20> Indeed. My /home directory is on a 1TB 3-way RAID 1. Because I am that paranoid about disk failure.

Interestingly, all three disks failed, because Newegg does not know how to ship them properly. Never buying disks from them again. The good news is that only two failed at the same time, so there was no data loss. And the replacement disks from the manufacturer, Samsung, have been chugging along for months just fine.

RAID on your desktop is nice. RAID on your server is mandatory. The total cost was $300 for one fucking terabyte. Just do it :)

<comment> X-Istence I've purchased many hard drives from NewEgg, those same hard drives have been through two moves now and they are still going along strong. Not a single bad sector or anything along those lines.

<comment><USER20> OEM or retail? Retail disks have better packaging, but I bought OEM disks.

Mine came in plastic egg cartons with a few packing peanuts. I'm surprised they didn't shatter on their way across the country.

<comment> X-Istence OEM, never retail since retail is always more expensive. Yep, same plastic egg cartons with a ton of packaging peanuts. Received 8 1 TB drives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> If anything, it's better to have an over-zealous backup policy.

</comment><comment><USER22> And the classic LeafyHost Saga [http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=238085](http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=238085) ( might want to look for a summary, it's a long thread )

At least HappyPenguin sent their disk for real recovery...

</comment><comment><USER23> Whoa, I just visited this page 4 hours before I saw it here on HN front page, I used to visit the page weekly back in 2003 and 2004 when I had much more spare time. I wish everything goes fine for them.

Anyway, where I work we use a controller with 4 attached SAS hard disks working in RAID and also realize backups using bacula just to remain safe.

</comment><comment><USER24> There comes a point where "backup" does not mean another hard drive, it means another server. (preferably running in replicate so all you have to do is change a router entry to recover).

My bet is that Yoda would encourage you to know when this is.

</comment><comment><USER25> I read this, logged into the AWS console and grabbed a fresh snapshot of my EBS volumes. Problem solved.</comment>


The Sudden, Mysterious Exit Of A Quora Cofounder Has Silicon Valley Baffled - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/the-sudden-mysterious-exit-of-a-quora-cofounder-has-silicon-valley-baffled-2012-10

<comment><USER2> Dupe.</comment>


Ask HN: Any student bug bounty hunters? - <AUTHOR> Have any students been rewarded for bug bounties/does security research as a hobby? I'm working on a journalism project on student bug bounty hunters and would love to ask a couple of questions.
Please comment/email me if you'd be willing to help! I'd really appreciate it.
I also have personal experience doing this kind of stuff (I've found/been rewarded for bugs in Facebook/Google/Firefox/Apple) so happy to talk about my own experiences with anyone I'd be interviewing! <comment><USER2> I'm a student, but not a bug bounty hunter by any means. I've come across a few security bugs, nothing huge, and normally just send emails to the company with a quick note about what I've found. Every once in a while it leads to a little cash or so. I don't intentionally look for bugs, it just so happens that I enjoy poking other things to see what happens. The biggest bug I ever found was a wee-little searchbar error in LinekdIn (If typed a very specific gibberish string into the searchbar, you could crash Safari. To this day I'm still not exactly sure why), and instead of money, the guy offered me a job.

Am I student bug bounty hunter? No. I'm a student that sometimes breaks things and tells people when I do.

<comment><USER3> Hey, how did you get into poking things til they break? I just got into a comp sci program and i'm clueless about all of this.

<comment><USER2> Poke things.

Seriously though, I started because I wanted to secure my server. So I looked at how other people secure better severs. Sometimes I looked so deep I found errors, normally little things like leaving a default account set up, or leaving FTP wide open.

If you're looking for some generic response like "Just go to [http://hunt4.bugs"](http://hunt4.bugs"), I don't think one exists.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Take a look at - [https://bugcrowd.com/programs](https://bugcrowd.com/programs)

Here's some resources - [https://forum.bugcrowd.com/t/researcher-resources- how-to-bec...](https://forum.bugcrowd.com/t/researcher-resources-how-to- become-a-bug-bounty-hunter/1102)

</comment><comment><USER5> I made 7.5k for a Facebook Vulnerability that i found while procrastinating instead of studying for exams.

Haven't done much since though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, awesome! Do you mind answering a few follow up questions via email or something? You can drop me a line at the email found in my profile: [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lukezli](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lukezli) (I can't find your email unfortunately).

Really appreciate your help, and no worries if you're busy!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd be interested in hearing others' comments, since I'm also interested in getting into bug bounty programs as a hobby.

<comment><USER7> Seconded, I'd like to play around with this too but am not really sure where to start.

I get the impression the big bucks are in black-box proprietary/commercial systems? My only experience is with finding a small credential-leakage design flaw in an open source web app while poking through its source code one day.

I currently view most bug bounty hunting a bit like this - [https://www.corsix.org/content/malicious-luajit- bytecode](https://www.corsix.org/content/malicious-luajit-bytecode) \- so any suggestions about where to get started would be interesting. I'm not talking about "this is what XSS is", I'm talking megalists of recent compromises with annotated source code, that sort of thing. That would be both engaging, mentally challenging, and highly educational.

(As an aside, there _was_ that one time I accidentally crashed Uppsala University's PDP-11/70 a few months ago (the logout program may have stepped on some kernel data structures :D), but that was kind of a fluke.)</comment></comment>


Do you use cryptocurrency in real life? - <AUTHOR> Time goes on, and we hear about cryptocurrencies every day. Do you use it for anything? I mean payments etc. A lot of people trade it, but I can't see any real use cases. <comment><USER2> Shhh, don't let the secret out

<comment><USER3> hehe..</comment></comment>


Tupper's Self-Referential Formula - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupper%27s_self-referential_formula <comment><USER2> Awesome idea, too bad most of the heavy lifting is done by encoding the image in a big constant... if the constant itself was in the formula the awesomeness would be higher.

From the WP entry: "The formula itself is a general purpose method of decoding a bitmap stored in the constant n, so it could actually be used to draw any other image, and does not in fact contain any reference to itself. This is not the case with Tupper's later self-referential equation whose plot describes only itself."

What's this "Tupper's later self-referential equation"?

</comment><comment><USER3> It's just like a quine that uses stores some sort of numerical representation of itself as a byte array in the code.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Other than using this as an example in C.S courses, would this be applicable or useful for anything?

<comment><USER4> No, but it's pretty cool.

"The formula itself is a general purpose method of decoding a bitmap stored in the constant n"

<comment><USER5> Although you need to tweak the constants (that 17) depending on the height.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Redirect stdout to EtherPad - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/o2Labs/etherpad-stream

<comment><USER2> One use of this which came to mind is tailing log files or watching the ongoing output of a process.

Are there any limits on how big a pad can get? Are there issues with scrolling when the content gets to the bottom? I haven't run EtherPad in a while, so don't remember.

There's a project called Log.io (<http://logio.org:8998/>) which does streaming and scrolling for events which ends up feeling a bit similar. Not sure if you can pipe stdout to it though.

Very interesting!

</comment><comment><USER3> Strictly speaking, this redirects its stdin to EtherPad.

If you pipe something into it, the first command's stdout will become this script's stdin.

</comment><comment><USER4> Can i use screen command with EtherPad too ?

Would be nice sharing a terminal session on the web with others.

<comment><USER5> You could at least hack something like that up. From within screen, yu should be able to type C-a H to begin logging to the `screenlog.0` file.

From another terminal, you can then do something like tail -f screenlog.0 | etherpad mypad

Also, look into the ttyrec and script commands

The limitations: The screen method won't follow you across screens and it won't interpret ansi escape codes

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great idea and it is HN-worthy. Thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER7> I thought I'd browse the source code and find a cool tool that does this using basic unix commands and syscalls. But then:

        #!/usr/bin/env node

_facepalm_. And since the code uses an etherpad dependency, it is completely trivial. How is this HN-worthy?

<comment><USER8> How is this comment HN worthy? It brings no valuable knowledge to the discussion, and discourages the sharing of novel ideas. The code may be trivial, but the idea certainly is not.</comment></comment>


Understanding Exponents (Why does 0^0 = 1?) - <AUTHOR> http://betterexplained.com/articles/understanding-exponents-why-does-00-1/ <comment><USER2> The article claims that 0^0 is 1 because it is defined to be 1; the article is wrong. 0^0 is undefined, just like 0/0.

<comment><USER3>
      $ python
      >>> 0 ** 0
      1
      >>> 0 / 0
      Traceback (most recent call last):
        File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
      ZeroDivisionError: integer division or modulo by zero
      >>>

<comment><USER2> Mathematics is not defined by how python does arithmetic.</comment></comment></comment>


Why Is Learning To Program A Good Thing? - <AUTHOR> http://devbootcamp.com/2013/02/12/why-is-learning-to-program-a-good-thing/

<comment><USER2> > _It is neigh impossible to program a computer without some semblance of > empathy, albeit for a machine and not for another human with all those > complicated feelings. You have to think like a computer: to envision how it > will respond to an input and what its options are for subsequent action._

Solid. I've never thought of development in terms of empathy for the machine, but it's a valid and interesting perspective.

Of course, one form of empathy that also gets cultivated is empathy for the programmer. It's quite easy from a non-technical perspective to gloss over the challenges that developers face when framing instructions for the inherently pedantic and narrowly logical beast that is a computer.

> _An analogy for this argument is that learning to program today is a bit > like learning to speak Phoenician if you happened to live on the shores of > the Mediterranean Sea in late antiquity. You could probably get by just fine > without speaking it, since most of the Phoenician traders you would > encounter most likely have a rudimentary grasp of the local language._

I agree. One nitpick, on which I'm happy to be proven wrong, is that IIRC the heyday of the Phoenician traders was well before what is normally termed 'late' antiquity (2nd century AD onward).

> _The correlation between literacy and political agency is undeniable. We > would be foolish to ignore this correlation in an age of digital literacy._

Salient point.

What I find these discussions typically end up revolving around is to what extent programming literacy should be encouraged.

From a macro perspective, we live in a world of finite resources, and computer programming is far from the only important skill in a well functioning society. Thus, how much is enough? To piggyback on the adage that "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing", how little is perilous?

<comment><USER3> Good catch re: 'late antiquity' -> I should have been a bit more rigorous in my research there.

I like your point about "how little knowledge is a perilous thing?" Completely agree that programming is far from the only important skill. I just generally think that demystifying what is popularly considered to be "esoteric" knowledge is almost always good for a healthy society. The less we know about how the mysterious machines work, the more we fear them and the more trust and power we give to the people who can manipulate them. I think this is hogwash and completely unnecessary since a computer is really just a super-fast filing clerk [<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA>].</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Co-founder can't move to BA. Apply as single founder? - <AUTHOR>

I will be applying to YC today. Thing is, there's a 50% chance my co-founder won't be moving to the Bay Area for the summer. If we get selected he would be working on the project, just not in the Bay Area, he'd stay in Mexico City.<p>Should I apply like this or should I apply as a single founder? <comment><USER2> Apply! Tell them whats going on when your up for your interview. If they can't do that you will understand and you will need to get another co-founder or YC might understand.

</comment><comment><USER3> You can still apply with him working from Mexico City. <http://ycombinator.com/faq.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> From the FAQ:

"You can leave one founder at home, but the rest, including the CEO, have to live where we are that cycle."

That's exactly what I needed to know, thanks!</comment></comment>