Restoring a Photograph from the 1870s - <AUTHOR> http://topdogimaging.net/blog/restoring-a-photograph-from-the-1870s

<comment><USER2> I guess I see the loss of the added color as unfortunate because it removes some of the meaning which the artist and the portrait sitter felt was important to express - the vitality of the person depicted. Keeping in mind that the Civil War was so recently passed and the degree to which disease and violence could cut life short - that someone would pay more for such an upgrade is unsurprising.

Without the color, it tends more toward being just another black and white photo and more easily ignored - and that was clearly not what the artist and patron had in mind.

<comment><USER3> I suppose we should probably repaint all of those greek statues too...

<comment><USER4> Well, what is the reasoning behind not doing this? Other than that our image of a marble statue is unpainted.

<comment><USER3> Mainly that it would look like ass. Authenticity is overrated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This was cool right up until the "and then I just fixed it in Photoshop" glossing over.

<comment><USER5> Here you go: [http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Restoration-Start-Finish- photo...](http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Restoration-Start-Finish- photographs/dp/0240808142)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sounds like at least a day's work, and this guy seems like a top-notch pro. How much could he charge for a job like this? $500-$1000? more?

<comment><USER7> He said the touchup work was 4 hours, so I'd imagine getting the original in, then printing afterwards, and the original consultation would probably be yeah, about a day's work. Not sure on what this sort of work carries as a charge, but a few hundred $ doesn't seem unreasonable if you really need the pic.

<comment><USER8> Perhaps there was a discount for allowing him to use the photo in the blog post? Also, I'd say that $500-$1000 is comfortably in the "want" (rather than need) range for something like this.

<comment><USER7> Agreed in this case, it's probably a want. I wasn't suggesting this person paid $500 - the post I replied to was asking what this sort of procedure might cost, and I was replying in the general sense.

Interesting to think how many tintypes may be out there still, and what can really be done with them. Even just using the camera and strobe like he did, without the hours of touchup work, seems to do quite a lot of good. Perhaps that's a cheaper service people could offer over the 'scanner' solution.

<comment><USER9> >Even just using the camera and strobe like he did, without the hours of touchup work, seems to do quite a lot of good. Perhaps that's a cheaper service people could offer over the 'scanner' solution.

Most good labs offer this service. Sadly, most also charge as much or more to take the shot as they do to scan. Often labs will charge based on digital resolution and ignore the ease or cost associated with obtaining that image.

If you were able to shoot prints in RAW and then again with the same camera and position only in IR you could automate a lot of the dust and surface scratch removal with minimal loss in fidelity [1].

Really, a modest investment in time and available consumer technology could allow an enterprising individual/company to outfit themselves very well for performing print archival/restoration at reasonable rates.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared_cleaning>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting tip on using a flash and a super fancy camera. Having done this (actually I usually use sunlight not flash but if it's not a perfectly clear day outside the consistency of flash is useful), he should have mentioned you need to set the camera a great distance from the image to minimize perspective distortion.

The blurring of the background is abysmal and destroys the notion it is a restored photograph. Even if the client demanded this, the restorer should have refused. As it is it makes his work look shoddy. I give him the benefit of the doubt it was not his decision. If it was his decision to blur the background that much, for shame.

The conversion to greyscale was also ill considered.

The loss of curls in the hair is a pity.

</comment><comment><USER11> TL;DR version:

1\. Take a photo

2\. ...

3\. Photo restored to amazing clarity!

</comment><comment><USER12> I quite like the effect on Wikipedia's restoration of the Billy the Kid tintype mentioned in the article:

[http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Billy_the_Kid_correct...](http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Billy_the_Kid_corrected.jpg)

They have some other candidates for restoration if anyone wants to give this a try (though obviously the main thrust of this article was how to get the original image capture right, rather than the digital retouching stage):

[http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Files_needing_res...](http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Files_needing_restoration)

</comment><comment><USER13> I would have also considered layering a wet layer/mount to fill in some of the scrapes when using a LED scanner. There are other side effects but they are a lot easier to control if you can keep things relatively flat (might require a lot of fluid in some cases but it works wonders).

Macro shots are another good way to pull out detail though I find my scanner does a better job in most cases (scanning 2400 to 3200 DPI helps, more is usually overkill for most mediums). The use of a polarizer is a great idea though.

</comment><comment><USER14> There are offshore companies that will do 'photoshop work' for $5 or $10 per image. As excellent as his skills are, most clients do not understand the difference.

</comment><comment><USER15> I was just looking at something similar but probably not as old:

[https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.238775029469055.68...](https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.238775029469055.68199.139410389405520)

</comment><comment><USER16> Only 4 hours for that kind of quality work. Very nice! I'd imagine that he can charge more.

</comment><comment><USER17> Doesn't the new Photoshop have a "Dark-magic" option that does this? ;)</comment>


Rust Gets a Lot of Things Right - <AUTHOR> http://spin.atomicobject.com/2013/06/25/rust-language/

<comment><USER2> rust and scala are the best practical and powerful language that I have ever known.

<comment><USER2> I found HN is very interesting... especially the feather of link is lispy.</comment></comment>


"Let There Be Peace " – A System to Deal with Online Information Overwhelm - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/gpestana/notes/issues/20 <comment><AUTHOR> OP here. Do you have any system to cope with the _overwhelming_ amount of (interesting) information we can find online nowadays? How does it work?</comment>


Ask HN: What are you using now that screenhero is dead? - <AUTHOR> Lets face it.. Slack has dropped the ball so hard here I don't even know what to say.  Slack IS NOT a replacement for Screenhero.
Not only is it not a replacement, it doesn't even work as good.
Slack has really soured me how they've handled this entire thing and I'm looking to move my dev team to something different.. Anyone got any recommendations?
We desperately need a pair coding replacement. We rely heavily on pairing and the slack implementation of screenhero is really just so bad. Sad Sad Sad day... R.I.P. Screenhero.
P.S. If anyone wants to build screenhero again I'll be your first customer and I'm sure i'm not the only one.
Especially when the announcement of the shutdown looks like this https://twitter.com/screenhero/status/923237002538913792 <comment><USER2> Hey, we are building USE Together, fast collaborative screen sharing with multiple mouse cursors, available on Windows and MacOS! Check it out: www.use- together.com/screenhero-alternative/</comment>


Woman Lost on Deserted Island Found on Google Earth - <AUTHOR> http://news-hound.org/google-earth-finds-woman-trapped-on-deserted-island-for-7-years/

<comment><USER2> Fake. [http://urbanlegends.about.com/b/2014/03/19/google-earth- find...](http://urbanlegends.about.com/b/2014/03/19/google-earth-finds-woman- trapped-on-deserted-island-story-is-bogus.htm)</comment>


Erlang is a hoarder - <AUTHOR> http://andy.wordpress.com/2012/02/13/erlang-is-a-hoarder/

<comment><USER2> I think two things are interesting here. 1: "when does Erlang GC a process' heap?" and 2: "where does Erlang keep a process' data?".

1: Erlang GCs a process' heap whenever that process' heap gets full, or when you call erlang:garbage_collect() explicitly.

2: Erlang stores most data associated with a process on the process heap, there's one such heap per erlang process. Binaries are a special case. If they're large (> 64 octets), the heap only contains a reference to the binary, the binary itself is stored in an area specifically for binaries.

1+2 can result in a lot of binary garbage left lying around. Here's how it can happen:

a) A process creates a relatively large amount of unused heap space. This could happen by temporarily using a large amount of heap, e.g. by calling binary_to_list() on a large-ish binary, doing something with the list then dropping it. For arguments' sake, let's say we made a heap (for one Erlang process) with 30M free.

b) Now the process moves on to a new phase: creating large but short-lived binaries. Let's say 1M each. Those binaries don't live on the heap, only a reference to them does. So they only consume 8 (?) octets on the heap.

c) If the references are the only thing using the heap, then you can make 4M of them before filling the process heap. But since they're 1M each, they'll eat 4T of the binary heap. i.e. you'll run out of memory.

As you found out, setting 'fullsweep_after' to 0 doesn't help, since a GC is never triggered. But explicitly calling erlang:garbage_collect() does.

You can investigate a bit more using tracing. erlang:trace/3 can generate a message whenever the target process is GCed (the garbage_collection entry in flaglist). If my guess is right, then you should see that your processes holding all the binaries are never (or rarely) GCed. Tracing the GC is cheap, you won't notice any performance difference if you only do it on a few processes.

The process_info BIF can also tell you quite a bit, e.g. the process heap size.

Disclaimer #1: my knowledge about the details above may be wrong or out of date. But the mechanism is known. I've seen it in embedded systems and handled it in similar ways to your approach.

Disclaimer #2: obviously I'm taking a guess. It's possible you've run into something else entirely. That's why I suggested some things to look at to confirm or reject my suspicion.

<comment><USER3> Might this be considered a symptom of an architecture problem? I'm far from an Erlang expert but my understanding is that processes generally should be short lived, except for supervisors, which should only supervise. Instead of having a single long-lived process handling a lot of large binaries would a better design be to have separate processes handling each binary?

<comment><USER4> It depends. Some state needs to live, some needs to go. Long-lived processes should ideally do few state manipulations, or be easy to replace (so they store less state). Risky or frequent operations should be done far down in the supervision tree.

The processes with complex state, things that can't be lost, might tend to be long-lived. In these cases, they should either only do very simple operations, or be isolated from the operations on that state.

These processes will generally live higher up in the supervision tree structure and delegate the risky work to processes lower in the hierarchy; these short-lived workers will thus have their impact limited, but will also have their state known before some unit of work, a bit like an invariant. If the short-lived worker dies, then restarting it with its short-lived state is a cheap operation.

Restarting the long-lived process is a difficult thing because the state might be a) possible to re-compute, but complex to do so, or b) bound to events that cannot be repeated, and can't be lost.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> as described here: [http://www.erlang.org/doc/efficiency_guide/binaryhandling.ht...](http://www.erlang.org/doc/efficiency_guide/binaryhandling.html)

Binaries are either stored on a private heap or in a global area where they are reference counted. Binary reference counting depends on ProcBin objects stored on a process heap.

Reference counting is only effective when garbage collection occurs, thus forcing an explicit collection on an process removes the ProbBin objects.

The system has no way of knowing if a collection should be triggered to free ref counted memory. Collection is local to a process.

</comment><comment><USER6> Uhh, I've seen this too. Part of the reason we are migrating some code from Erlang to C.

<comment><USER7> It could be argued that this is a poor reason to switch from Erlang to C -- this is a problem with how binaries are handled in user code, not something intrinsic to Erlang VM.

<comment><USER8> Eh, every factor involved is implementation detail. The threshold at which binaries are heap-alloc'ed, gc behavior, etc. I really fail to see how this is user error.

<comment><USER9> _I really fail to see how this is user error._

That isn't what the parent comment said.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Utah governor signs law legalizing 'free-range parenting' - <AUTHOR> https://www.deseretnews.com/article/900013224/utah-governor-signs-law-legalizing-free-range-parenting.html <comment><USER2> A lot of posts in this thread are not understanding the point of the law. Sentiments such as:

"Why need a law? Just let your children be free and independent. They need that." "If anyone threatens to call CPS on me I'll tell them to fuck off."

That's why the law is needed! Currently, in a lot of jurisdictions, do either of those two things and your kids can arbitrarily be taken from you, legally, by the government.

This law makes it so that allowing children normal independence _is legal_. Because slowly administrative agencies started to take a stricter view on what was "safe".

<comment><USER3> My friend had a babysitter report her to CPS because there were stuffed animals in her 7-month old's crib, which apparently contradicts some guidance. CPS closed the investigation without doing anything, but not before causing a lot of unnecessary worry.

<comment><USER4> > which apparently contradicts some guidance

This isn't just "some guidance". Its the American Academy of Pediatrics guidance which shows stuffed animals, pillows, and blankets increase the risk factor for SIDS.

<comment><USER3> A lot of medical guidance comes from busybodies who have no ability to perform cost-benefit analysis ( _e.g._ pregnant women and caffeine). SIDS risk is around 0.5 per 1,000. The major cause of the decrease since the 1980s seems to be the decline of smoking. Everything else is noise for something that's already low probability.

<comment><USER5> Do you have a source for this claim?

References like [https://www1.nichd.nih.gov/sts/campaign/science/Pages/backsl...](https://www1.nichd.nih.gov/sts/campaign/science/Pages/backsleeping.aspx) and articles like [https://www.npr.org/2011/07/15/137859024/rethinking-sids- man...](https://www.npr.org/2011/07/15/137859024/rethinking-sids-many-deaths- no-longer-a-mystery) make it likely that the increase in sleeping children on their back is the bulk of the reduction. And that the fact that blacks are less likely to take that recommendation is the reason why the black community has twice the death rate of whites.

This is something that I have a personal interest in. My nephew died of SIDS months before the recommendation about sleeping positions was reversed back in the early 90s. My sister did not smoke. She did put him to sleep on his stomach.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's sad to me that the 24h news cycle that depends on selling fear causes people to misestimate the dangers in the world. My sister doesn't allow her teenage children to take the bus in a wealthy suburb for fear of something happening to them, yet both she and I took buses around SF and the bay starting at age 10 without cellphones. Statistics show that things are _less_ dangerous now than when we were kids — but she's been made paranoid via attention grabbing media.

<comment><USER7> Could the world be less dangerous now because kids aren't riding around unescorted on buses any more?

<comment><USER8> Unlikely because it is much less dangerous for everyone, not just kids.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Child abuse and neglect laws started in the 1940s after a series of articles were published by a doctor with accounts of children with injuries clearly caused by adults and by the 1970s most states had passed them. They were well meaning and only intended to protect children from real harm.

The problem is they are (somewhat necessarily) vague. They didn't think the laws would be used for trivial things but words like "endangerment" can easily be applied to letting your kid walk home alone.

This is the first real attempt that I know of to scale back some of it and I suspect we'll see more of this in other states as society realizes some of this has gone to far.

It should also be said that this is just codifying what was basically already the case. Utah's Child Protective Services supported this law and already considered the behaviors the law protects to be perfectly fine but they were obligated to open investigations anyway. Now they don't have to. It also prevents Utah's CPS in the future from doing some of the ridiculous actions that have occurred in other states if the attitude of the workers/leadership at Utah's CPS shifted.

<comment><USER10> I seriously hope other states take the opportunity to review this legislation for similar adoption.

As a parent, the shuffle to drive or walk my bike-capable kids 0.5 miles to their school costs us time or money (to have someone shepherd them).

These days we have ways to track kids or kids have their own phone, tools like Nextdoor and crime levels are low. Why shouldn't we trust kids to be able to navigate (perhaps in a group) themselves to a local school?

</comment></comment><comment> d--b It is awfully sad that we need laws that describe what we're allowed to do rather than what's forbidden.

<comment><USER11> That's the wrong way to look at it, this is a law limiting what the government can do. For really broad, difficult to define crimes like "neglect" or "child abuse", it makes sense to pass additional legislation limiting how those laws can be applied.

<comment><USER12> The parent is correct. It is sad that this is necessary. Similarly, the bill of rights was almost not included at all, because the original premise was that you had ALL rights that were not specifically prohibited in the constitution. That the bill of rights has turned out to be necessary at all, is also sad.

I am thankful for this law, and for the bill of rights, but it is sad that we require either. We were not supposed to.

<comment><USER11> I don't understand the issue. Do you agree that child abuse should be a crime? If so, do you think you could correctly define it in legally precise language on the first try, with no unintended consequences? Legislators are human and make mistakes. It's good that they're proactively considering potential unintended effects of a law, and it's not that sad that they didn't get it exactly right the first time.

<comment><USER13> I don't think child abuse necessarily needs to be a separate law from general harm.

<comment><USER11> You'd have the same issue even if there weren't a specific child abuse law. Does letting your 8-year-old walk to school alone count as "general harm"? What about leaving them home alone for a day? A week? A month? Who gets to decide? If the law doesn't specify, the police and the courts decide. And if the police start making decisions that the public disagrees with, then we pass new legislation to clarify what exactly counts as general harm.

<comment><USER13> How is that different from a 35 year old mentally handicapped sibling under your care? It's not a question of age, it's one of responsibility.

<comment><USER11> It's not different. If police started arresting people for letting their adult mentally handicapped dependents do reasonably independent things, then it might be a good idea to pass some legislation to modify the relevant law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The US has a slow decline where the acceptable level of risk to expose your children to is nil. This is not good parenting; good parenting involves teaching your children to navigate the world with increasing independence and ability to judge and handle risk. It is, however, what people will pressure each other into doing when something bad happens (or looks like it might).

You cannot and should not prevent every possible bad thing from happening to your child. It doesn't produce the best outcome.

</comment><comment><USER15> That a law like this is even necessary seems absurd to me. A child learns by doing, by making mistakes by itself. By being curious about the world. By feeling the consequences of ones actions. Of course parenting is needed, but much less restrictive as it apparently is. My parents sent me to the UK when I was 12. i knew no-one. Yes, there was a school and a host family that fulfilled my basic needs, but I had to become selfconscious and responsible. I would never want to miss that. Your parents won't always be here and the earlier you learn to get on by yourself, the better. A child must develop a sense of self dependency IMO.

Disclaimer: I'm from Europe.

<comment><USER2> That's the point of the law. In many north american jurisdictions you can have your children taken from you if you let them roam around freely.

There was a notable story of a parent in Vancouver who had to stop letting his kids take the city bus to school because a neighbour complained.

<comment><USER15> Wow, so hard for me to grasp. I didn't know. When I was young I used to climb on trees all the time. I remember one incident where a neighbour called my mother and told her that I was doing that and that she should tell me to stop this as it was dangerous. My mother told her that this was none of her business. For such a drastic measure (taking ones child away) much more severe neglect is needed here in Austria (e.g. drug abuse, violence,...)

<comment><USER16> Remember though, the reason it became a news story was because it was so absurd. Kids take public transit to school here in Seattle all the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm glad to see some sense coming back, after having seen things get to the point where most of what's happening in the Charlie Brown Chrismas special would be unthinkable. ("He bought a _Chrismas tree?_ Without _adult supervision!?!?_ ")

<comment><USER18> So? Charlie Brown is a cartoon that mostly erases adults from the plot because they are boring. It's not a documentary of the 1950s.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Link to the actual law, in case people want to discuss the law and not their own preconceptoins: [https://le.utah.gov/~2018/bills/static/SB0065.html](https://le.utah.gov/~2018/bills/static/SB0065.html)

<comment><USER19> Right. To clarify what that page is showing, the bill is a proposed change of the Utah code and it's presented almost like a "diff" file. Underlined portions are additions, strikeouts are removals. Lines 309 through 325 contain the important parts.

<comment><USER20> Your comment helped me find the part in question thank you very much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I feel like we don't have enough free-range parenting, even if silly new laws seem to support it. Not nearly enough parents let their kids walk to school where I live. (But I'll be careful to admit this view may be much more upper- middle class centric than for poorer families.)

My parents took me and my siblings to Mexico when I was a kid, I was the oldest at 7 years old. My brother and sister were 6 and 4. We'd go walking for miles on our own. In retrospect it seems amazing that nothing serious happened to us, though once my brother decided to pet a horse from behind and got kicked.

This article also reminds me of a story comedian Molly Shannon tells about sneaking onto an airplane with her friend when they were 13 and flying to New York City to spend the day.

It seems like nobody does this kind of stuff anymore, parents are much more on top of it than 30 years ago.

<comment><USER22> Could that be a survivor bias?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The fact that our society needs such a law is beyond insane. When did the law change? I walked to school in the 90's by myself at 9 years. Or has the law changed? Or has the enforcement just changed without anyone's consent? I can't imagine raising kids in America today. I'd never subject another human being to this kind of life. Children are human too but Americans seem to have forgotten that lately.

<comment><USER18> Thanks to Internet and mass media, the occasional extreme case gets misreported and widely publicized as "the new normal"

The irony is not lost: "Free-range" advocates say that society vastly overestimates the risk of harms, so they campaign against child-protection laws that they vastly overestimate the harm of.

<comment><USER24> I've dealt with those agencies enough to know that they are horrible. I've even caught them in criminal acts, which of course won't be prosecuted.

The typical harassment starts with a kid who gets a normal childhood injury or is found unattended at a library or church, or sometimes an anonymous tip by somebody who wants to cause trouble. This is enough to start an investigation. The agency's workers then feel entitled to interview and examine the kids alone, invade the home, and even inspect the content of a refrigerator. Depending on your location, a warrant may be automatically approved by a judge.

The thing with the refrigerator is particularly absurd. It's not as if you can't feed children without one. You could even eat out every day! If the agency's workers find moldy food you forgot in the back of your refrigerator, they will presume that the children are being fed moldy food. If you haven't been shopping recently and the refrigerator is mostly empty, they will assume the kids aren't being fed.

The agency benefits greatly from people's reluctance to talk with friends, news media, and so on. So much of the malicious activity occurs in private.

These investigations have lasting effects. Years later, one can snap awake in a panic due to a nightmare about kids being grabbed out of the home. You can forever lose your feeling of safety and security in your own home. When the report is anonymous, you can no longer trust anybody you know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I"m shocked that this is even forbidden in the "land of the free". I was walking home alone from school. In fact, my father once said to me that I basically raised myself on my own.

<comment><USER26> Walking alone might be too scary for the "land of the brave".

Jokes aside, I'm often surprised by how frequently people in US describe places, people and ideas as "threats".

<comment><USER24> You can't be brave unless you perceive a threat. Being oblivious to a threat, or being in denial of a threat, is not bravery. Bravery requires well- considered acceptance of a recognized threat. It's a matter of being able to justify taking a risk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Should call this the "let city kids have the same rights as rural kids" law. All the kids on farms are just looking at this like "what the...?" (yes, kids still live and work on farms)

<comment><USER28> This is the part where I make some reply that subtly suggests that everyone BFE is a backwards hick, that there's no economic opportunity there and that kids who don't get out will all turn to drugs.

If I really wanna show how out of touch I am I should take pity on anyone who lives somewhere without over 9000 ethic restaurants and bars that serve hipster micro-brews within walking distance and mention startups somehow.

(yes, this is sarcasm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> > On the federal level, another Utah politician, U.S. Sen. Mike Lee, added an > amendment to a 2015 federal education bill supporting the concept. It said > kids shouldn't be stopped from biking or walking to school alone with a > parent's permission, and parents shouldn't face charges for letting them.

Ah, what?

In Florida in the late 90s, my my 2nd grade self and my 1st grade sister walked a mile to school every day.

The thought that someone would find that objectionable...genuinely bizarre.

</comment><comment><USER30> When I was a kid, they just called that "parenting". The generation that has been growing up locked away from the world under constant adult supervision is going to have a hell of a time leaving the crib when the time comes. 30 will be the new 18.

Maybe this will help Facebook and Google's surveillance towns take off, since these adult children would be able to move somewhere else where they'd be under constant supervision.

<comment><USER31> When real life sounds like a Black Mirror episode

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> English is not my first language - forgive the stupid question: does "free- range" come from animal farming?

(I hope not, that would sound quite patronizing)

<comment><USER32> It's an ironic joke. By saying that you raise "free-range kids" you are accusing (correctly these days for the U.S.!) that other parents are raising caged, confined kids.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> This law is coming from a good place, but I'm not sure how much it can accomplish. The pressure against "free-range parenting" is much more social than legal, and it doesn't seem like the government can do a lot about that. Although maybe it will be enough knowing that if someone threatens to call CPS on you for letting your kid walk to school, you can tell them to fuck off.

<comment><USER34> Social pressure is fine, the problem is that right now people leverage the law to force their culture of helicopter parenting on people not complying.

Frankly, I think it should go even further, it should be a civil offense to frivolously report child endangerment based only on the fact that children are unsupervised. Even with a protection bill, people will still report parents if there are no consequences, and not everyone on the enforcement side will get the message. Best to level the playing field so helicopter reporters will have some skin in the game.

<comment><USER35> > it should be a civil offense to frivolously report child endangerment based > only on the fact that children are unsupervised.

So when I see children alone and think they might be lost, what do I do? Trust the runaways who tell me that all is good? Creepily follow them until they reach their destination? What you call "frivolous reporting" in one area would be "criminal neglect" in another.

That's the whole idea of child protection services: Give them slightly more power to investigate than an ordinary citizen, so they can make an informed decision according to the law. After all, the _reporting_ is not the problem, lack of standards/consensus what good parenting means en detail is.

> not everyone on the enforcement side will get the message

Lack of ongoing training in law enforcement should, IMHO, never be a reason not to change things for the better.

<comment><USER36> > So when I see children alone and think they might be lost, what do I do?

do they appear to be in distress? are they in some strange location away from civilization? quite possibly "nothing" is the correct answer, because "alone" doesn't mean much.

if you really have reason to think they're "lost", you could ask whether they are and if they need an assist in finding their way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> As a parent of three it seems ridiculous that we need these laws, but sadly we do to reverse the years of overly anxious people creating a world hostile to kids exploring it without hovering caretakers.

I won't move to Utah because of this, but hopefully other states take notice and I'll be lobbying my state to use this as precedent.

</comment><comment><USER38> What is wrong with people if they need to make a law for this? Seriously, just because a kid is playing outside instead of being confined indoors playing video games is no reason to call the cops.

</comment><comment><USER39> Coming from UT, I remember a lot of teens in high school that had over reaching parents and as a result they didn't get the full experience of being a junior or senior in HS.

Luckily for me, my parents had trust in me so in high school I could hang out with my friends without my parents questioning my every move. They just wanted me home before 10.

</comment><comment><USER19> The news is about Utah SB 65:

[https://le.utah.gov/~2018/bills/static/SB0065.html](https://le.utah.gov/~2018/bills/static/SB0065.html)

Look specifically at the underlined additions on lines 309-325.

This is simply a refinement of the definition of "neglect".

</comment><comment><USER40> Social trust is falling in the west. I appreciate Utah making an effort here, but the problem is systemic.

There are specific reasons that this is the case, but most people will not discuss it openly. Putnam sat on his results for years because it is simply not acceptable to discuss in polite society.

<comment><USER41> Would you care to discuss these so-called "specific reasons" relatively anonymously then? I genuinely have no idea what you might be referring to.

<comment><USER42> >>A study conducted by Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam suggests that diversity hurts civic life and that differences can actually translate into distrust [https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128026...](https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12802663)

Seems logical but social isolation is also increasing in Japan with their ethnic homogeneity. I think its all related to the collapse of large families. People have few children and when the kids grow up they're likely to move away.

<comment><USER43> >social isolation is also increasing in Japan

When was the last time you were there? I spent most of the past month in metro Osaka, as a parent of young children, and I noted:

* Young children freely coming to city parks, fraternizing, and leaving, in absence of any adult supervision, indeed, without any adults other than myself even present

* Groups of young schoolchildren traveling mostly autonomously to and from school among busy urban streets (though sometimes under the watchful eye of many volunteer shepherds along the route)

* Children as young as 8 approaching me to be generally curious, maturely and completely without fear

* Proprietor of a local bar I visited knew everyone around, including my in-laws' family, this in the busy inner-city

* Ample resources and facilities provided by the prefectural and local governments, including staffed play areas and civic center events. My older daughter was broadcast on-air TV with other children attending a Girls' Day event.

* health care including vision/dental costs hard capped to 500 yen/treatment day (~$5) for children under 6

So yeah. I don't think the situation in Japan is comparable at all in any way to what's happened here in the USA. I would not allow even the appearance of my daughter playing alone in my own front yard, for fear of what well- intentioned neighbors might say or do, let alone the boogie-man.

<comment><USER42> Interesting counterpoint. So I guess the social isolation in America is one part poor urbanism (cities designed for cars, isolating suburbs) and one part decreasing social trust, one part due to small families and children moving away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Weird that such a law is even required -- what was the legal regime _before_ the law was enacted?

<comment><USER45> In Utah? Perfectly sane. The law just codifies Utah CPS practices. Other states with similar laws? You could have your children confiscated if they weren't in visual range.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> so cool they are finally gonna let the parents wander around freely.

</comment><comment><USER47> Is there any way to get rid of the original laws that this new law is addressing or is that not how it works?

<comment><USER48> It's not the original laws as written - they were fine for many generations. It's the modern interpretation of those same laws that often gets out of hand. Often it's changes in regulations, or court rulings related to those laws.

In this case, it was gradual shift in the perception of 'neglect' by CPS, helicopter parents, or overly concerned citizens who think every child is in mortal danger if they're not within 10 feet of a responsible adult.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is Utah, where the Mormon church has a de facto near-monopoly on large segments of society. The church (and parents) impose far more oppressiev restrictions of children's freedom than any CPS does.

</comment><comment><USER18> > _Utah lawmakers_ said they were prompted to pass the law after seeing _other > states_

Smells like political posturing.

</comment><comment><USER49> When I was 12 years old, my friends and I used to bike about 8 miles to the airport to see airplanes take off from a nearby hill. The hill was federal land, delimited by simple wire fencing, so we would climb it to get to the hill. The path was clearly there, so we must not have been the only ones there. As long as we came back before the light came on, we would be fine with my parents. Once, we had to cross a freeway and a truck hit our dog, who died. There was nothing we could do for it, so we left it there. We never went back after that.

If a kid was caught doing that today, it would legally be taken away form his/her family by Children Protective Services, the parents charged, tried, and probably convicted of child neglect and endangerment.

Some of the best memories from childhood for me are those trips. How sad that kids have to be home playing with their iPads today.

<comment><USER18> > it would legally be taken away form his/her family by Children Protective > Services, the parents charged, tried, and probably convicted of child > neglect and endangerment.

citation needed.

> Once, we had to cross a freeway and a truck hit our dog, who died.

Your parents negligently put you in charge of a dog that you negligently killed. That should be legal?

<comment><USER49> "citation needed" [http://www.masslive.com/living/index.ssf/2015/01/maryland_pa...](http://www.masslive.com/living/index.ssf/2015/01/maryland_parent_investigation_raises_issue_what_age_to_allow_children_free_range_to_walk_stay_home_a.html)

"Your parents negligently put you in charge of a dog that you negligently killed. That should be legal?"

Shit happens. The truck killed the dog, not me. Maybe you come from another continent or country, but America is a free country, so we don't care about what is legal, because the law establishes what is illegal, and everything else is legal. It is not illegal to run with your dog.

<comment><USER50> This is genuinely a fantastic comment. You dealt with a cold, rude comment with grace and calm, then provided an easily understood statement of what defines a country with both freedom and rule of law.

<comment><USER49> Thank you

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Last I checked, it's generally a bad idea to leave pets alone in a car so I'm not sure what the political or parental benefits are of leaving children alone in a car.

This just reads of something done purely for face-saving reasons rather than solving the greater issue of safety in America. Never mind that the concept of free range parenting in America is something mostly for the white and wealthy.

<comment><USER31> Leaving children in the car for short periods has occasionally practical benefits, just as with pets. And both humans and animals do just fine in cars as long as you make sure that the interior doesn't get too hot. In this instance it's more about making sure harmless behavior isn't accidentally outlawed.

>Never mind that the concept of free range parenting in America is something mostly for the white and wealthy.

How is that? The US isn't Norway, but it is still very safe. I don't see why helicopter parenting should be required?

<comment><USER51> Because the occasional practical benefits do not outweigh some of the more irresponsible parents leaving children or pets in cars on hot/cold days. I view that as being more of a public safety issue much like seat belts.

As for your second point, it's because for a lot of the poorer parents they don't really have the ability to let their kids roam freely. Either due to proximity, lack of funds and so forth. Not to mention the institutional problems minority kids face on a daily basis (see: black children being shot by police).

It's not about requiring helicopter parenting but rather that laws like this don't really solve the actual problem for the majority of parents in the US. It's effectively lip service and I guarantee the wriggle-room left in the law will be used to harm minorities more than anyone else.

<comment><USER18> Cars have air-conditioning, heaters, and openable windows.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How LinkedIn makes money - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/technology/18linkedin.html?pagewanted=1&ref=business

<comment><USER2> So that you don't have to read the article to answer the question of how they make money:

1) Ads

2) Premium subscriptions

3) Selling content to companies on prospective employees

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not too surprised. For all the flash and glam behind Facebook, I find LinkedIn more valuable.

</comment><comment><USER4> ""Scrabulous is not work, and it does not enable you to be an effective professional," he said."

That made me laugh -- very true, and why Fbook will have time selling the same demographic that LinkedIn is monetizing.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think their attempt at having "company groups" will be a "Facebook Beacon" like success, people will naturally be repulsed from using linkedin.

Personally, if they are making money off my personal data, then at least don't charge for the premium account.

<comment><USER3> Dunno. LinkedIn isn't like Facebook. Facebook is being intrusive when they shop you to companies. LinkedIn is sometimes doing you a favor.</comment></comment>


What is a Senior Programmer really? I wish I had known this when I was Junior - <AUTHOR> https://www.rafapaez.com/2019/10/what-is-a-senior-programmer-really.html <comment><AUTHOR> I know I couldn't get in-depth in all the aspects but let me know what are your thoughts about the post. Do you agree with my definition of Senior Programmer? What's the best tip it worked for you to advance in your career?

<comment><USER2> Maybe being a senior software engineer also means that you know the difference between what is important and what not in a particular situation. It is very easy to get caught in something that is not really important and put a lot of energy in it.

Another important area is battling with your ego. And this is something, I am afraid, is never going away. You mentioned that a lot of senior software engineers suffer from imposter syndrome. Maybe someone with imposter syndrome is not that senior yet with respect to his battle with his ego.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agree with what you said about what's important and what isn't in a particular situation. I mentioned it in the video (I said something like "...a Senior knows when to walk away and don't implement certain things...") but I forgot to write it in the post.

Your second comment is really interesting. I used to suffer from imposter syndrome but now I realised, as long as you got experienced and wiser, on just focus on different aspects, at a different level. I will probably talk about this topic soon.

Thanks for your comment, I appreciate it.</comment></comment></comment>


Paper Digital Camera - <AUTHOR> http://www.photoxels.com/paper-digital-camera/ <comment><USER2> Wow, a little pricey but cool. Only a matter of time before these come down to the $1-$2 range. I can see something like that as a pack-in on photography magazines, or for sale at tourist venues.

I'd like to know more about the battery on these.

<comment><USER3> The website says it has a built-in battery (3.7V 120mAh)</comment></comment>


Richard Feynman on Physics: 4-part lecture series (videos) - <AUTHOR> http://vega.org.uk/video/subseries/8

<comment><USER2> I've read the Feynman lectures on physics, but I had no idea there was actually a series of videos as well.

Great find.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have collected some Feynman lectures as well. See this:

[http://freescienceonline.blogspot.com/2008/12/richard- feynma...](http://freescienceonline.blogspot.com/2008/12/richard-feynman- physics-video-lectures.html)

</comment><comment> b-man Just a question, does anyone know how to download these videos to watch offline?

</comment><comment><USER4> I just finished watching the first lecture, it was very enjoyable as is typical of Feynman lectures, but what I'm confused about is the metaphor that he chose to give as an explanation for the reason the probabilities are the way they are.

Isn't another interpretation of that experiment (what I thought was the current default interpretation), that as you increase the distance between the two surfaces you have light rays reflecting back, and because of the distance (not the time it takes an arrow to spin as in the video), the two light rays become out-of-phase, and therefore you get constructive and destructive interference?

Secondly, I was also confused as to his insistence that "light is a particle", hasn't it be established that light has properties of both particles and waves? Certainly Feynman doesn't deny that, so why would he make that statement so insistently? The _wave_ -length of the light "particle" is very important in calculations, and while this characteristic of light wasn't denied in the lecture, it certainly seemed to be ignored amidst the talk of "little spinning arrows"...

<comment><USER5> To address your second concern, all quantum particles (this includes photons) have wavelike properties (including wavelength), and thus can show wavelike effects, such as interference. For example, a ray of light contains a huge number of photons and obeys certain wave equations, but if the intensity is decreased enough, the light is found to impinge in discrete units, which have been named photons.

When Feynman says light is particles, he means that it comes in discrete units, not that it behaves as a stream of tiny billiard balls with classical behavior.

<comment><USER4> I'm aware of this, but this is the exact sort of caveat that he failed to mention in his lecture, despite promising his audience that he would tell them exactly his understanding of the situation.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does the Following Service Exist - <AUTHOR>

I think I have seen someone post about this on HN before, so if you know the website, please let me know.<p>I want a group of random people with random browser and OS specs to use my website and report bugs. Is there a service like this, where you get standard reports with technical specs of the users and qualitative feedback as well? <comment><USER2> I've seen people discuss on HN how they've used Amazon MechTurk to do this as well. I believe their conclusion was that they weren't particularly happy with it.

Realistically, if you're looking for tech compatibility, you may need to do it yourself. It's not as bad as it seems, but you do have to test 3-6 browsers/OS combos. If you've used good stuff like jQuery, etc., lots of the browser differences can be made minimal.

Also, you're probably not going to get particularly phenomenal feedback from just any user. Try doing the testing in person, with just a few people (Jakob Nielsen has a post about how many people you need, and concludes something like 3 people will give you the majority of what you need to focus on. After all, you want to focus on the big issues, and as a startup you're likely to have tight resources available...)

</comment><comment><USER3> You can crowdsource QA through uTest.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you have any idea how much this costs? It's completely opaque on their website.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you just want to test static pages in different browsers, you can use this site for free - it's what I used to test my site (there are probably others): <http://browsershots.org/></comment>


The law is clear: FBI can't make Apple rewriter its OS - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@scrawford/the-law-is-clear-the-fbi-cannot-make-apple-rewrite-its-os-9ae60c3bbc7b#.1n6t5ebl0 <comment><USER2> HA! Law? You think the government is bound by a law? ESPECIALLY when "national security" is involved?

\- just ask Hillary. Laws mean nothing to politicians and are only a mild irritant to Law Enforcement.

</comment><comment><USER3> Copy paste is not one of your strong points is it.</comment>


Ask HN: Looking to get involved in the startup community in Toronto  - <AUTHOR>

I'm moving to Toronto in a few weeks time and am looking to connect with the startup community there.
Can anyone help? I will be living downtown.<p>As always,
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Take a look at startupnorth.ca, Toronto's DemoCamp events, StartupWeekend events, and Extreme VP's Extreme University. A lot of the community connects through these groups.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great. Thanks for the reply; I've been to a few of these, but will check out the others. Have you heard of this Word11 Blogging event? (<http://word11.com/>) I'm thinking it might be a good place to meet some people; ever heard of it or have any idea what it's like?</comment></comment>


Spotify Crop Circle Appears Near Stonehenge - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/04/spotify-crop-circle/ <comment><USER2> Are you kidding me? That is nothing like the Spotify logo. TC really turned into mostly a garbage publication.

How can they allow something like this to be posted?

I will never click on a TC link ever again.</comment>


Posiba shuts down office in Vietnam without paying their staff - <AUTHOR> Company hasn't paid the staff since Jun 2016. Now CEO decides to close office in VN without clear path to pay us. PosibaVn is the core engineering team and it's not their failure.<p>Is there anyone can help us? <comment><USER2> Posiba paid only 1/10 of bills to contractors in America. And still owes pay to American employees.

I worked in the San Diego office and watched upper-management lie to their employees, contractors, and the few customers they had. Good, honest staff only stayed a few months before calling B.S. or getting let go (often with pay still owing). Any ex-employee who complained got contacted by a lawyer.

After observing the CEO up close and personal, I can tell you that, though rich and pampered herself, she is a sociopath. She can talk a mean streak of lies with out blinking, feels very little emotion and cannot feel empathy, and will not think twice before hurting anyone.

Someday she will get her comeuppance.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's said to see our company is running in this situation, but it seems the CEO lost many chances to save us...

Was there any problem when company's laywer contacted ex-employeed? Is the Us laws system preventing you from suing the company, or you don't like / can't afford a court issue?

The team in VN tries to sue PosibaVn, and they will win. However, getting the full payment is another story when the company keeps saying they doesn't have anything to pay.

It's said to hear that company still owes pay to American employees; we here in Vn thought they were fully paid (I know CTO and some foreigners are not paid, though.)

It's nice if you would give me some contact points so we won't let this story go.

<comment><USER2> You can't get money out of a bankrupt company. Suing would cost several thousands. According to American law, in a bankruptcy, employees get paid first, then contractors if anything is left. Suing will only lose you money, nothing to gain.

<comment><AUTHOR> Except for time, it's free to sue PosibaVn in Vietnam (the company can't win for any reason)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Posiba in a nutshell [http://posibablog.cf/nutshell/](http://posibablog.cf/nutshell/)

CEO message: [http://posibablog.cf/closing_down/](http://posibablog.cf/closing_down/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The problem is now on public media in Vietnam

[http://phunuonline.com.vn/xa-hoi/phap-luat/hon-60-nhan- vien-...](http://phunuonline.com.vn/xa-hoi/phap-luat/hon-60-nhan-vien-posiba- viet-nam-mat-tet-vi-bi-quyt-luong-gan-40-ty-dong-90733/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Shoul we raise some voice to draw attention and solve this in a peaceful way?

</comment><comment><USER4> Unbelievable for a CEO is an american person. [https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabeth- dreicer-1a907b5](https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabeth-dreicer-1a907b5)

<comment><AUTHOR> The CEO doesn't bother to say "sorry" for their mistake that leads us to this situation. It's sad to see her message [http://posibablog.cf/closing_down/](http://posibablog.cf/closing_down/)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's not an internal problem. It's how some US start-up companies are working in Vietnam, and it's also a problem in Vietnam laws system that hasn't any strict rules for FDI companies.

Start-up is hard, but it's not hard this way when the whole staff are not paid.

We need you to raise this problem on the start-up environments. Let me know what you think.

<comment><USER5> I agree, we should raise this problem to the start-up environments, but where and how to raise?

<comment><AUTHOR> HackerNews is where we start. The team tries with layer in Vietnam, but that doesn't really help as for FDI companies all money comes from US. No money in VN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> it's really a nightmare for Vietnam employee :(

</comment><comment><USER7> Please show me the upvote button.

<comment><USER8> it's the triangle next to the title on the left sweetie

<comment><USER7> thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> the dark side of startups :(

<comment><USER8> yeah, so sad for them, poor posiba employees :(

<comment><USER10> :)) ...</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why do sites give login page (instead of marketing) when I return? - <AUTHOR> I wanted to show someone an app I use but had to open the page in incognito just to get the marking page to show up.
I can find the login button just fine! I don't understand why they feel the need to save me the click.
Is there some sort of important metric I'm missing that makes this an amazing pattern for UX? <comment><USER2> sounds stupid. I wouldnt do that. I dont link the logo back to marketing for logged in users but its always there.</comment>


Show HN: Poetry – Python dependency management and packaging made easy - <AUTHOR> https://poetry.eustace.io <comment><AUTHOR> Poetry is a new tool to help you manage your Python projects.

It is both a dependency management tool and a packaging tool. Most of the reasons why I started this are detailed in the README (along with why I don't want to use Pipenv) here: [https://github.com/sdispater/poetry#why](https://github.com/sdispater/poetry#why), but if you want to know the advantages of Poetry compared to existing tools, here are a few:

\- Exhaustive dependency resolver

\- Intuitive CLI (See [https://poetry.eustace.io/docs/cli/](https://poetry.eustace.io/docs/cli/))

\- Emphasis on semantic versioning and constraint specification so that wildcard dependencies (`*`) will be considered bad practice

\- Support for dependencies caret, tilde, wildcard, inequality and multiple requirements.

\- Only one file: the standardised pyproject.toml which aims at being readable and clear.

\- Mandatory compatible python versions specification.

Also, Poetry is Python 3.6+ only but can manage Python 2 projects without any problem.

And finally, Poetry is not completely stable yet so internally things can change but the CLI and commands are pretty much stable so backwards- incompatible changes should not happen too often.

<comment><USER2> Your example of the "better" dependency resolutions seems to violate one of the constraints pipenv sees. Does pipenv somehow assume a rule that isn't there or what's going on in that example?

<comment><AUTHOR> Pipenv sees the wrong constraint. It just aggregates the constraint for pbr that it sees.

In details:

oslo.utils==1.4.0 requires:

\- pbr (>= 0.6, != 0.7, < 1.0) \- oslo.i18n (>= 1.3)

So, poetry will take the latest version of oslo.i18n which requires:

\- pbr (!= 2.1, >= 2.0)

Poetry will detect the conflict and backtrack oslo.i18n to version 2.1.0 which requires:

\- pbr (>= 0.11, < 2.0)

This is compatible with the requirements of oslo.utils and pbr==0.11.1 will be installed</comment></comment></comment>


2 Silicon Valley Billionaires Want to Reinvent the Democratic Party - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/wtf-win-the-future-reid-hoffman-democrats-2017-7 <comment><USER2> These guys are about as out of touch with reality as the Democratic party is. "Making engineering degrees free for everyone"? That question is of little interest to a 45 year old of average or below intelligence who struggles to earn his living by low-skilled, manual labor. And those are the people the Democratic party has driven into the arms of the Republicans by their desire to flood the country with low-skilled, low-educated immigrants who will compete for the shrinking number of jobs available to that person.

<comment><USER3> And identity politics and constantly reminding white people how bad they are, are of interest to this mythical 45 year old man (god forbid it be a woman)?

Sorry, the Dems (and I was one) have really lost their way. Anything that might force them to get their shit together is good, as far as I'm concerned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looking from the outside, the US needs more than two mainstream parties. The Republicans-Democrats play is nothing more than Good cop/Bad cop with changing roles of who is the good and who is the bad cop. Instead of reinventing a major party to work better in a broken system, fix (or replace) the broken system.

<comment><USER5> That will never happen so long as we have winner-takes-all elections.

<comment><USER6> It's happened before and it will happen again.

<comment><USER5> It never lasts more than a couple of election cycles, though, and basically coincides with a realignment between the dominant parties.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Good luck. It appears to me these people don't take kindly to outsiders. Look at how both sides have treated Trump. Anyone from the outside is going to get the same treatment no matter what side you are on.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, we really have one party, the business party. The Dems are the business party that is more multi-cultural and socially progressive...and the GOP is the business party that caters to the religious folk and more socially conservative...either way, we get the business party.

[https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on- poli...](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on- politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups- and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why reinvent it? Let it die like the whigs, when republicans came on the scene and represented new ideals in liberalism (not to be confused with republicans of present day).

We're on the verge of a tectonic shift in the way people identify and if you cling to the past you'll be left behind. Look at who now represents the poor, rural, working class? Look who represents the urban intelligentsia?

These are interesting times indeed.

</comment><comment><USER9> I can't speak to Hoffman, but Pincus sounds like a poor fit for the Democratic party. A former coworker went to work for Zynga pre-IPO and I got the gist that the leadership/organization values and DEM values are a very thin venn diagram overall.

<comment><USER10> Isn't Pincus famous for threatening to fire people unless they surrendered their stock options a few months before IPO? Just the kind of guy I'd want running my party.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Personally, I vote for decentralizing power a little bit. Got a problem getting red and blue states to agree on healthcare? Fine. Let the states decide.</comment>


"Asswipe," replied Yahoo's server. That's when I knew I had it - <AUTHOR> http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/YahooChatRooms.html?display=1 <comment><USER2> This entry made me smile. First, the title with its language caught my eye. Then, as I reached the end of the line and saw the domain name, my tired and sleepy face broke into a full-bodied grin.

fish is my most-favorite tongue-in-cheek technical blogger ever. He doesn't blog too often, but they're almost always very useful (and very witty!) gems.

(Hint: you can find out who he really is by reading far back enough.)

<comment><USER3> or if you click the "about fish" on the top right of the kitchen roll.

<comment><USER4> It still doesn't tell you who it is on the about page though, just that he's on the AppKit team.

<comment><USER5> I would imagine email address firstname.lastname@example.com would give a hint.

<comment><USER6> So, email firstname.lastname@example.com and he'll reply with a hint about his identity?

<comment><USER7> nah, you'll have to partion the pre @ part using a reg ex into 2 parts, and then take the one that makes the most sense. >c orydoras

>co rydoras

>cory doras

>coryd oras

>corydo ras

>corydor as

>corydora s

I'm going with coryd oras, sounds like a real name.

<comment><USER8> Why 2 parts?

Cory D Oras.

Obviously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> :waves bye

Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris:1 and Hackers' Lounge:2 were the first major time sinks of my digital life in the late 90s and early 2000s. ychat and ymsg were my intro to network protocols. I learned Makefiles, C, C++, and Python so I could build, understand, and modify programs like curfloo, curphoo, zinc, and gchat+/gyach. Although I moved on to IRC, I'll never forget when someone passed me "Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit" (and the implicit link to Phrack) or the first time a bot I created logged in and took drink orders. The pride the first time I wrote a patch for my client to handle a login change all by myself.

A lifetime later, I know I wouldn't be where I am as a programmer if not for the encouragement of friends (some of whom I still talk with and do business with) I made as a teenager on yahoo chat. A lot of people I know grew up on IRC, but Yahoo Chat was my first love. Good bye, I'll miss you!

<comment><USER10> I had a really similar experience. As a bored teenager in the late 90s, I would sometimes log into the Yahoo chat rooms using the computers at my high school. The chat client was a Java applet, and it was atrociously slow and prone to crashing. I had started teaching myself to program a few years earlier, so creating a chat client seemed like a fun project.

There was a guy that hung out in the Programming:1 chat room with the chat handle was 127001 (he was able to create that handle before Yahoo became more strict with the chat handles one could create) that had reverse-engineered the protocol and posted a guide online. I wonder what happened to him. Thanks, loopy!

Anyway, I created a Yahoo chat client in Win32/C as I was learning the API and the language. I was the only user for quite a while, but eventually I posted it using the free web space EarthLink gave me for being a dial-up subscriber. It got pretty popular through word of mouth. Later, when I installed Linux for the first time, I took that code and turned it into an ncurses-based client. It was a lot of fun, and somehow I ended up turning the fun I had hacking on little projects like that into a living.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> At Microsoft, I once wrote code for a public facing login system where you had to make sure usernames didn't contain some banned words. I was surprised by how many words on the list were new to me and how, err, creative people get.

I always wondered who at Microsoft was tasked with keeping that list 'up to date'.

<comment><USER12> These lists can be very locale insensitive. A few years back my friend was trying to get a Gmail id with his name. To his surprise he wasnt able to get any id, no matter how long and obscure suffix he tried. Then it hit me that it was because of his name Kshitij. Systems should take terms from other languages and locales as white lists in these cases.

<comment><USER13> > _These lists can be very locale insensitive._

Perhaps because english is all it matters to them. Who in Europe, for example, even cares if a forum or chat has some swear words in his language?

We might be even more pissed off that we can't swear and leave the service, rather than complain about it.

<comment><USER7> Analogous to that, in Germany don't beep out any swearwords on television, which is why American celebrities appearing on TV here swear vedammt oft. For example this eminem interview

[http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x98y4u_eminem-interview- on-...](http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x98y4u_eminem-interview-on-german- tv_music#.UXALNH0gjw0)

It's at 2:30 where he talks about it. And swears a "little".

<comment><USER14> That brightened my day considerably.

When I watch Misfits (UK show) they say some things that I never hear on American shows. It only happens on shows that are after the watershed[1] though. Before then I don't know which parts are censored.

It always amuses me a little how Americans seem to be more strict than the Europeans for media censoring.

1\. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watershed_(television)>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If you're going to spam the system, why not just use Win32 API's and control their client like a zombie instead of trying to play the cat and mouse game reverse engineering their protocol?

You can send instructions to manipulate the client and have it do what you want almost as easily as you could if you knew their protocol. And that's without all the cat and mouse headaches.

<comment><USER16> I'm not familiar with Win32 APIs. Could you elaborate more as to how they would enable you to control the client like a zombie?

<comment><USER17> AutoIt is a popular software to automate GUI applications.

<http://www.autoitscript.com/site/autoit/>

<comment><USER18> Boston Workstation[0] is another, that I used quite a bit at work for a while. Pretty powerful, although I have no more desire to touch VB ever again.

[0]: <http://www.bostonsoftwaresystems.com/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What a charming and informative website! So refreshing to see an original design instead of another Wordpress, etc. site. Check out this fascinating note on how grep manages to be so fast by being secretly slow:

[http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/old-age-and- treachery.h...](http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/old-age-and- treachery.html)

</comment><comment><USER20> I had to work on implementing fairly well-known advertiser's banned-words list into our system recently. Their system is incredibly stupid. For example, they'll ban the word "Dimethltryptamine", but "Dimethyltryptamine" (the correct spelling) is allowed. You're not allowed to use the word "bulldog" under the Pets category. You can't use the word "dragon" under Jobs. It seems like they just have a form that visitors to the site can use to link ads containing "offensive" words and the system will automatically add it to a list.

</comment><comment><USER21> Awesome! Network sniffing and analyzing is one of my favorite hobbies since being introduced to it as a security analyst for an MSSP and then writing Wireshark plugins at Sandia. If anyone is looking for a fun Saturday, I highly recommend <http://forensicscontest.com/>.

</comment><comment><USER22> Seems to be down -- nyud cache here [http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/YahooChatRooms.html?dis...](http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/YahooChatRooms.html?display=1.nyud.net)

<comment><USER23> I think the .nyud.net has to go straight after the domain name: [http://ridiculousfish.com.nyud.net/blog/posts/YahooChatRooms...](http://ridiculousfish.com.nyud.net/blog/posts/YahooChatRooms.html?display=1)

<comment><USER24> That it does.

Visiting <http://example.com/index.html.nyud.net> would send a request to "example.com" for the path "/index.html.nyud.net". That's not what you want.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Der, why did they filter naughty words in the client?

<comment><USER26> They didn't -- the list was sent from the server, because "this list might need to be updated dynamically, in case someone on the Internet managed to think up a new word for sex."

<comment><USER27> The list sent was supposed to be used by the client to filter. What I think the OP is suggesting is that they should have just filtered server side not client side.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I suppose British people never really used the chat to talk about paedophiles. At least they looked for actual words rather than any occurrence in the string.

<comment><USER29> We'd also spell it "pædophile" just to make sure you understand Unicode...

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Obligatory SNL reference:

<http://www.hulu.com/watch/285711>

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm surprised that "phag" is blocked but "fag" isn't.

</comment><comment><USER32> and all this time I thought "shat" was being polite

<comment><USER33> Not sure about elsewhere in the world but in the UK "shat" is a sort-of fun past tense for "shit", e.g. "Ian shat in his pants"

<comment><USER34> It's not used very often in the US, but it's still a perfectly understood term.</comment></comment></comment>


Fixing Dirty COW in RHEL 6.5 Through 6.8 Kernels - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/stanford-rc/RHEL6.x-COW <comment><USER2> Now with patches for kernel from 6.0 to 6.4!</comment>


Alexa's offering a new widget to integrate graphs into your website - <AUTHOR> http://awis.blogspot.com/2007/04/alexa-traffic-graphs-come-and-get-em.html <comment><AUTHOR> Looks like they're working overtime to diffuse this whole thing. I wouldn't be surprised if they also leaked the dirt on the Statsaholic founder.

It'll be interesting to see how all this turns out.</comment>