US woman accused of laundering Bitcoin for Islamic State - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-42362478 <comment><USER2> > Ms Shahnaz was born in Pakistan and worked as a lab technician in the US.

I'm not american, though I spend some time in US, mostly in Maine. Every-time I hear this kind of stories, I can't help but thinking: you go through all that trouble to immigrate to US to build yourself a lot of opportunities for your life and all you end up doing is shit like these? while millions of people are waiting in line wishing for a better life? Same for anybody living an Europe who rushed to go live in the Caliphate... while people are fleeing these very places because of the insane violence... I can't understand this.

<comment><USER3> I was in the US an H1B worker highly skilled in a top company. I wanted to be a US citizen. US is a great country. But I have to wait 10 years minimum (India queue) to get a greencard and my wife cannot work because is an H4 visa holder. So I left US and immigrated to Canada and is a citizen now.

US should stop taking in people thru diversity visas and family categories, but skilled people like me who wants to contribute and make it big in life are made to wait forever. Your loss US, your loss.

US' immigration system is broken. Diversity visa system & the entire family tree of that person moving to the US in the course of time. What a burden to the US taxpayers !. While skilled workers like me bringing high value to the US economy are being pushed away. US immigration system is a joke. Take a cue from Canada's express entry system and learn.

<comment><USER4> As an American, I find this opinion offensive. When you say the US needs to import skilled workers you are insinuating that Anericans aren't intelligent enough or capable enough to fill positions. It doesn't do my country any good to import someone to do a job while there are skilled Americans looking for work.

<comment><USER5> I dunno, I think a country benefits when it imports talented people, full stop. Americans can be intelligent and capable, and companies can still benefit from hiring more people just like them (or, in some cases, more intelligent and more capable than them).

Perhaps it'd make sense to be protectionist if there was a fixed pool of employment/business opportunities, but I don't think that's the case for technology workers at the moment--lots of room at the margin for talented people.

I am possibly biased, though. I was in the US on an H1B for a few years from 2008-2011, but left due to the immigration bullshit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> From the article:

"Prosecutors said that Ms Shahnaz obtained a Pakistani passport in July and booked a flight to Pakistan with a layover in Istanbul, intending to travel to Syria.

She was arrested at John F Kennedy airport carrying $9,500 in cash, just under the limit of $10,000 that a person can legally take out of the country without declaring the funds.

Searches of her electronic devices showed numerous searches for Islamic State- related material. "

Also the following:

"Prosecutors say she took out fraudulent loans of $85,000 (£63,000) in order to buy the bitcoin online."

How you take out a fraudulent loan? How can they know her intent from just a couple of searches? Lots of information missing from this article, and makes me think that this woman commited thoughtcrime rather than an actual crime...

<comment><USER7> How were they able to search electronic devices? It's that easy / routine now at airports?

<comment> LV-426 I'll never bring my phone on an international flight again: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13645825](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13645825)

I Had My Electronics Seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13453189](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13453189)

A US-born NASA scientist was detained at the border until he unlocked his phone: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13629593](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13629593)

US Customs block Canadian man after reading his Scruff profile: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13702981](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13702981)

The last one didn't even happen on US soil but at Vancouver airport; there are now more than 600 US customs agents stationed in multiple airports around the world:

        Dublin and Shannon in Ireland; Aruba; Freeport and Nassau in The Bahamas; Bermuda;
        Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; and Calgary, Toronto, Edmonton, Halifax, Montreal,
        Ottawa, Vancouver, and Winnipeg in Canada.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Her lawyer, Steve Zissou, said she was sending money overseas to help Syrian > refugees.

> "What she saw made her devoted to lessening the suffering of a lot of the > Syrian refugees and everything she does is for that purpose," Mr Zissou said > outside the courthouse.

That's a hell of a defense

<comment><USER9> This defense might actually work in Germany/Sweden.

<comment><USER10> If you actually believe that, I have two pieces of advice for you:

1) Stop reading Breitbart / Dailymail.

2) Go travel a bit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The arrest on the verge of her alleged flight to Syria makes this sound very similar to the FBI undercover "terrorist" stings. She was doing nothing obviously wrong at the airport, so the arrest signals they were expecting her.

</comment><comment><USER12> I get the sense that bitcoin, all these coins, are going the way of Tor: ostensibly an innocent channel. In fact, the dominant activity is foul in the extreme.</comment>


A country's third-most spoken language can be surprising - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/10/17/why-do-so-many-australians-speak-arabic <comment><USER2> Some of these are expected, but it was a surprise to see Brazil having 'Hunsrik' as it's third language; I thought this was certainly an editorial mistake.

It's not! It's the german dialect all countryside people speak in the south, the one I've been hearing growing up - I just learned that 'alles gut' is not exactly standard German. This is the wikipedia page for it: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riograndenser_Hunsr%C3%BCckisc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riograndenser_Hunsr%C3%BCckisch_German)</comment>


Tesla to unveil D and other product on October 9th - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/517486950589014016 <comment><USER2> Some are speculating a dual-motor Model S, which would be quite interesting.

<comment><USER3> Would you mind elaborating on the "dual motor" aspect? That would be down from 4 motors?

<comment><USER4> Dual motor would make it AWD. The current Model S is a single motor RWD.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Model D - 2-door coupe

My reasoning: Tesla has vehicles (for sale or in plan) in three segments: high-end sedan, CUV, and mid-range sedan. Building a coupe would fill another segment.

Also, the 2-door market has lots of models (2/4/6 series, C/E/S class, A5, CTS) that are priced high. Attracting higher income buyers to Tesla from these companies with a 2-door would be a very logical next step.

D = dual, as in dual door?

<comment><USER6> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Roadster](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Roadster)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ignoring the "D" part, seeing the garage door covering the top portion of the car I am guessing a convertible edition.

</comment><comment><USER8> My first thought was D for driverless but perhaps the more conservative guesses are correct. Dual drive etc.

<comment><USER9> [http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/18/6446245/musk-says-fully- se...](http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/18/6446245/musk-says-fully-self-driving- car-tech-5-to-6-years-out)

<comment><USER8> Yeah, I know, but I still think there will be semi-autonomous driver assist features much sooner and wild speculation is fun.

<comment><USER8> I win :) [http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/2/6894875/elon-musk-says- nex...](http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/2/6894875/elon-musk-says-next-years- tesla-cars-will-be-able-to-self-drive-90-percent-of-the-time)

<comment><USER9> :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I predict this will be on a same price range of the Model S, or even more expensive.

By the way, what happened to Model X?

<comment><USER11> Delivery ETA is now Fall of 2015 [http://www.teslamotors.com/modelx](http://www.teslamotors.com/modelx)

Not too bad for a new design.

<comment><USER12> Can't find a reference to it right now; but, I recall them saying back post-Q1 or Q2 that they had delayed production due to higher than expected demand for the Model S.

<comment><USER11> I think this is it (from May) : [http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi- hy-tesla-first-q...](http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-tesla- first-quarter-loss-20140507-story.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What is it?

<comment><USER14> new car and maybe some semi-autonomous functions?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> model d???

who wants the d?

</comment><comment><USER16> what about a Hybrid? Diesel and Battery! I would love to see the Model X be a hybrid instead of pure EV, or at least an option for those of us who need to pull trailers and boats on occasion with our SUV.

<comment><USER17> That would go against everything this company stands for and what sets it apart from other car companies.

<comment><USER6> Not to mention, all of the safety and luxury perks we see from Tesla vehicles would be compromised as well.</comment></comment></comment>


Why I left my iPhone for a Blackberry. - <AUTHOR> http://www.benackerman.com/2009/02/05/to-boldly-go/

<comment><USER2> As a former 5-year, very satisfied Blackberry user who switched to the iPhone 3G last June, I have this to say about the comparison:

For business use that requires lots of _replying_ to email, management of large volumes of email, copy/paste functionality, and the possibility of integration with existing Enterprise systems, the Blackberry is a must.

If you mostly just need to _read_ email and only occasionally reply, you have a moderate volume of email (< 30 per day), and you are more interested in a device you can have fun with on the train and use as a replacement for your iPod, then iPhone is perfect. The apps available on the iPhone are truly killer. Real, playable games that you can fully enjoy. Also, web browsing on the iPhone is beautiful -- sometimes I find myself using it in front of my laptop!

I've convinced both my boss and my manager NOT to get an iPhone and to instead upgrade their phones to either the BB Curve or Bold. They both thanked me afterward when they realized just how much they relied on easy email reply and the ability to "mark as read" multiple messages (come on iPhone!). The iPhone is definitely a more media-centric device, whereas the Blackberry has been refined for the specific needs of business users.

<comment><USER3> I recommend an iPod touch and a Blackberry Curve, you get the best of both worlds.

I love Blackberries keyboard for sms/email and ipod for productivity apps (omnifocus)/games/music.

<comment><USER2> I can definitely see how that is the best of both worlds. In fact, I thought of doing that before I bought an iPhone, but carrying around fewer devices is more important to me than having a perfect keyboard.

Also, being able to listen to music (with a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, btw) and not worry that I'm missing calls is invaluable (the call just interrupts the music).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Proving, once again: Get what works for you, not what is trendy.

//edit: I didn't mean this in a negative way. If a blackberry does what _you_ need it to do in relation to whatever your needs are, then thats what you should be using. While hype is fun to get lost in, "Because its popular" is a poor reason to force yourself to do something in a manner that isn't beneficial.

</comment><comment><USER5> Funny, I did the exact opposite.

edit: Just to expand -- I got given a BlackBerry for work purposes and it drove me crazy. Generally terrible user experience, unintuitive, and aesthetically awful. Funnily enough, since the iPhone was my first smartphone, I actually found it difficult transitioning to a physical keyboard. I got too used to be able to button mash and have it auto-correct.

</comment><comment><USER6> I use the Google G1 and I love it. Everything is seamlessly backed up for free, everything works, and everything works integrated. I get the multiple applications running of a blackberry with the coolness of the iphone with out the "trendy"

</comment><comment><USER7> My second biggest gripe with the iPhone, after the virtual keyboard, is, ironically, the phone. I just can't hear the damn thing, even at max volume (perhaps due to too many years of using an mp3 player) when in public. The ringer is too quiet as well, all of my friends who have iPhones always end up missing my call and calling my back.

But then maybe they just hate me because I'm still rocking WinMo.

</comment><comment><USER8> I _really_ miss my Blackberry Pearl. Currently I have an HTC from work, and it's complete crap. It's bulky and constantly restarting. Having to slide out the keyboard and wait for the screen to turn is also annoying when you want to send a text or respond to an email. I also never warmed up to the idea of the iPhone's virtual keyboard or the inability to run apps in the background.

</comment><comment><USER9> I never left my Blackberry... when I first saw my buddy finally whip out his BB after struggling for 5 mins to find a location on a map... a knew i'd keep mine...

Then I meet my best friend for lunch to weeks in a row. Both days, he's having iPhone problems and just can't bring himself to return it...

</comment><comment><USER10> The Blackberry Bold is an excellent device. I prefer the iPhone for the stuff that I do - I rarely need a keyboard - but the Bold is beautiful.</comment>


Refusing Facebook has social cost - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2011/08/26/technology-refusal-marwick-facebook-cellphones.html

<comment><USER2> I recently left Facebook and I am acutely aware of the social cost. I had some idea what the cost would be before I left, and I have found it well worth it.

Also, I think the author overstates the amount of event organization going on with young people on FB. I have a 22 year old daughter and I see how she uses FB, and far more often than not events are organized with text messages, and it's iffy whether there's an announcement of FB. More likely a status update during or after the event. I work at a university and was FB friends with some students I work with, and the same trend seemed to hold with them.

Young people are comfortable with many different means of communication, and often use one that fits well for their purpose at the time.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is an important countervailing concern to the 'just don't use the service' argument in the G+ real name controversy. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2932331>

I'm more sympathetic to this type of argument after reading Jonathan Haidt's book: [http://www.amazon.com/Happiness-Hypothesis-Finding-Modern- An...](http://www.amazon.com/Happiness-Hypothesis-Finding-Modern- Ancient/dp/0465028012)

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice confusion of correlation and causation in the closing paragraph. The fact that Facebook users are also more likely to smoke, drink, and use drugs doesn't mean that Facebook _causes_ (or "results in") those behaviors.

</comment><comment><USER5> Resistance is futile. (Come on, somebody had to say it.)</comment>


TelegraphCQ: Continuous Dataflow Processing for an Uncertain World [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/cidr03-tcq.pdf <comment><USER2> TelegraphCQ was also a fork of PostgreSQL which implemented streamed queries. Not only a white paper.

It was way ahead it's time in implementation, maybe it's dead by now. They still have the site here: [http://telegraph.cs.berkeley.edu/](http://telegraph.cs.berkeley.edu/)

Direct link to 2.1 last version: [http://telegraph.cs.berkeley.edu/telegraphcq/v2.1/](http://telegraph.cs.berkeley.edu/telegraphcq/v2.1/)</comment>


SoCal Startups: I Want to put your logo on my business cards. No strings. - <AUTHOR>

I'm ordering my business cards for The Startup Cafe and I want to put your startup's logo and URL on the back.
How do you get in on this? Simple:
Do you have a Web, open-source, or mobile startup or event located somewhere in SoCal?
Does it have a logo?
Can you design the back of a business card using this template and these guidelines?
Can you upload that design to Flickr and tag it with tscMoo?
Awesome, you've made the cut. I'm getting 100 cards printed so get your logo in. First come first served. <comment><AUTHOR> ... i'm dumb... Template: [http://us.moo.com/bit- bucket/templates/minicard_template_us....](http://us.moo.com/bit- bucket/templates/minicard_template_us.jpg)

Guidelines: <http://us.moo.com/help/faq/yay-nay.html>

</comment><comment><USER2> Where is the Template and the Guidelines ?</comment>


I decided to try messing around with React - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@Jarmar/getting-started-with-react-7009ea93f863#.jyk31u6is <comment><USER2> although I empathize, often having to go through the same sort of thing myself, whenever it happens to me or someone else I can't help but think of a day, many years ago, when I showed a friend (who had just finished making his kickass table-based with javascript stuff happening site) how the new-fangled css worked and he shouted "That is the problem with this industry! You always have to learn new stuff!"</comment>


Standalone OSX git-annex.app  beta released - <AUTHOR> http://git-annex.branchable.com/install/OSX/ <comment><USER2> Following the instructions to install via Homebrew, I got an error installing haskell-platform. Anyone have a solution?

<https://gist.github.com/1a59577ead61a401f330></comment>


Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught (1997) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.ams.org/notices/199701/comm-rota.pdf <comment><USER2> "Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps."

Basically just did this again this week. I was re-reading a three year old board game design diary I had written, and came upon an old idea that I had put on the backburner after the prototype played just "ok". I tried to come up with ways to fix it for awhile, and the ideas I had then were so different they morphed into completely different designs (more specifically, it morphed into 1 different design, which bombed in playtesting, and then that morphed into a totally different design, which did really well in playtesting and I showed to publishers, and then reflecting on their feedback resulted in a completely new design sparking in my head).

I thought about the problem for a few more seconds, and one new thing to try popped into my head, not a totally different game this time still keeping with the core mechanism, but a different method how players were given and used the cards, and I dug into it a bit more, and I decided on a different method of point distribution for the cards, and then thought a bit more, and the thought of adding abilities that encourage comboing based one previous or next cards played popped into my head, and then I decided to run with it, came up with a new prototype, tried it out, and it felt at least three times better, and felt more like a game that could be published.

I have a game that is currently a finalist in a game design contest whose design had remained dormant for over a year because I was unsatisfied with it, but something made me think about it again and a new mechanism popped in my head and I tried that and felt a lot better about it.

The Feynman method works for me, at least when it comes to designing board games. I don't mind shelving game designs for a long period of time anymore, since I have had so much luck with just thinking about them again every once in awhile and fresh new ideas popping into my head to improve the game, that likely wouldn't have happened if I kept forcing myself to think about that game.

<comment><USER3> RUMINATING!

I just watched a bunch of Marvin Minsky lectures about his theory of the Society of Mind. One of his early questions was (paraphrased) "With all these words for emotions where are the words for thinking?" He eventually popped the ones he'd found up on the board. And, of course, I sketched up some of my own. But nowhere in either of those lists was the quite apropos reference to how a whole swath of unrelated mammals have come to solve the process of digestion of rough food material. And, if we consider thoughts, ideas, and problems to be rough material then I think the word works perfectly.

I'd heard of Feynman's process, but for some reason never thought to assign it this very appropriate word. Thanks for the inspiration and reminder. Best of luck on the game! Please Show HN when you can share it. :)

<comment><USER2> I'll check out Marvin Minsky, thanks for the mention.

I am planning to take advantage of this weekend and try to get a little caught up on how to play videos for my games. I've got 6 designs already filmed (Cake Walk is the one that's a finalist in a game competition): [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDjU-rdSngu- eeqJnc2On...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDjU-rdSngu-eeqJnc2OnQl- QG4FcI_IA)

If I get the newest one up this weekend, it will probably be called 'Shared Fate'.

I didn't think Show HN is really the place to show off analog board games, so I wasn't really considering it. I don't have anything published yet anyway (just one game signed with a publisher), so they're all prototypes.

Does anyone know if posting my game design videos on Show HN would be appreciated? I come up with a lot of designs, though (my 'need to make a how to play video' backlog is like 30 games at this point). Assuming I got more consistent at filming videos, I could probably post one every week or two. Several of them you could probably play at home with components from other games.

<comment><USER3> > I didn't think Show HN is really the place to show off analog board games

Let's game it out:

Worst case scenario it gets flagged for removal and your account gets deleted. How likely is that? ;)

Most likely scenario, I think, it goes the way of most posts, ignored.

Best case scenario, people like it and you get some good conversations about it, some interest, and a few new players.

<comment><USER2> I think I still have a bit of residual hesitation from my Reddit days when I posted about a video game I worked on to a couple of subreddits (r/gaming and r/indiegames, I believe) and an admin shadowbanned me from the entire Reddit site for self-promotion (and didn't realize it until a moderator informed me months later that he'd been manually approving my comments periodically. I just thought people didn't care about half of my comments anymore).

Makes me a little more cautious of posting in places where it may not be welcome.

<comment><USER3> Fair enough. HN isn't Reddit, if it needs to be said.

Also I've found there's a knack to promoting your game on Reddit and you may have been a bit too forward. From what I recall it works if you take time to figure out what tone and explanation works. I feel there's a tutorial out there somewhere about how to market well on social media. Myself I'm not an expert.

Also Reddit mods can be petty little tyrants. I'm sorry one traumatized you so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> (I really enjoyed this article) It does take some effort to translate from academia to a corporate environment I'll try do so in a reply.

High level points:

Lecturing

Blackboard Technique

Publish the Same Result Several Times

You Are More Likely to Be Remembered by Your Expository Work

Every Mathematician Has Only a Few Tricks

Do Not Worry about Your Mistakes

Use the Feynman Method

Give Lavish Acknowledgments

Write Informative Introductions

Be Prepared for Old Age

<comment><USER4> Present Directly

Present Clearly

Iterate On Your Work

Specialize: Add as much new detail to a single piece of work.

Everyone has specialized skills, there's fame in using them to their fullest potential to explore many areas.

>There are two kinds of mistakes. There are fatal mistakes that destroy a theory, but there are also contingent ones, which are useful in testing the stability of a theory.

Use the Feynman Method >keep a dozen of your favorite problems con- stantly present in your mind, [...] Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps.

Give Credit To Others no matter how small

Summarize Everything Clearly and as long as is necessary: show your work second.

Your position as an authority will change abruptly. (I'm have a harder time rephrasing this. Your work will go from "meh he's washed out" to "he's perfected his craft" for identical reasons depending on how well it's received)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Related to the "Every Mathematician Has Only a Few Tricks" point, there is a Mathoverflow question [https://mathoverflow.net/questions/363119/every- mathematicia...](https://mathoverflow.net/questions/363119/every- mathematician-has-only-a-few-tricks) that tries to list all of those tricks, which is pretty interesting.

<comment><USER6> That quote about hating Erdos is interesting. I think my professor for UCLA undergraduate honors seminar from years ago, hated Erdos (he at least express dislike for a colleague of Erdos who operated similar). My impression is Erdos appeared to operated as something like a whirlwind of chaotic fact and theory finding whereas at least some other mathematicians aim to build larger unifying structures. It's a sort of Erdos versus Bourbaki divide (not to say who's right).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder how the "Publish the Same Result Several Times" recommendation ties into the "publish or perish"-mantra. I suspect that 1997 was a different time. Many academics have a super-human publication cadence, not so much because of all the new knowledge they've extracted from the universe but because they aggressively re-publish their existing results. Very low read- and citation counts are common implications.

From the outside, it seems hard to sift through all the redundancy. At the edge of knowledge it gets harder to verify what is genuinely new and what is a rehash.

It feels like the infrastructure and format around scientific publishing could benefit from compression, consistency and version control.

<comment><USER8> > "Publish the Same Result Several Times"

Do not take this too literally. Usually it won't work or will get you branded as a self-plagiarist (not exactly a deadly sin, but not a good reputation either; people will discount your work for this). In Rota's example of Riesz, the first publication was "in some obscure Hungarian journal", the second one was in Comptes Rendus, and the third was in a "real" journal. The choice of venues is no accident; you couldn't do it the other way round. Comptes is specifically for short (ca. 4 page long) communications that mostly serve to announce results and ideas; it's not unlike the "extended abstracts" you submit to conferences. And there are no obscure Hungarian journals any more in the age of the Internet. You won't get the same result published in 3 "normal" journals unless at least two referees are asleep at the wheel.

The modern way to get high publication count "for free" is doing a lot of incremental work (as opposed to trying to write up something definitive and general) and splitting your papers up into "least publishable units". These aren't bad things to do, though: Often you have to do incremental work as a warm-up before you have a chance to see the full picture (unless you are Grothendieck, presumably), and the thinner your papers are, the easier (and faster) they will get through peer review. It's a matter of knowing where to stop.

<comment><USER9> There's a Wikipedia article on this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Least_publishable_unit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Least_publishable_unit)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Rota had at least three different ten-lesson sets: [https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=comments%3E0%20rota%20lessons&sort=byDate&type=story&storyText=none)

Looks like the previous discussions of this set are:

2017 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15989599](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15989599)

2016 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11747598](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11747598)

2011 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3220746](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3220746)

2007 (1 comment) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=85611](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=85611)

<comment><USER11> Wait, we can limit Algolia results by comment counts?

Oh, also author, points, and timestamps:

[https://hn.algolia.com/help](https://hn.algolia.com/help)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> These hints reminded me that we don't have "great scientists" anymore. Can you list recent Nobel Prize laureates?

Great scientists were basically people-institutions and all the mundane and scrupulous work was done by assistants, doctoral candidates, technicians, as we have an example of Hilbert and some much less known mathematician. There still exist relicts of this system in the academia.

With increasing emancipation and alternative opportunities this extend of exploitation of the nameless is not possible anymore, and this is good.

<comment><USER13> We do have "pop scientists". While they're not all necessarily "groundbreaking" or "leading researchers", I wouldn't discount the impact of folks like Neil Degrasse Tyson, Michio Kaku, and Brian Greene.

<comment><USER14> In the UK, Brian Cox for physics/astronomy and David Attenborough in the natural sciences are likely responsible for enough recruitment that will probably lead to significant knowledge gains.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Could we put "Rota" in the title? It's currently not even clear from the title that this is about mathematics, let alone that it's written by an expert and highly opinionated mathematician.

</comment><comment><USER16> Rota is sort of the RP Feynman of mathematics; his "Indiscrete Thoughts" was probably the best thing I read in 2019; I recommend it to anyone who enjoys two fisted tales of applied math.

</comment><comment><USER17> The author writes that a scientist is probably best remembered by his or her expository work. How ironic that I have never heard of this author before, and this paper is probably the only one I will ever read of him. So his statement rings true. His name is Gian-Carlo Rota.

</comment><comment><USER18> "My late friend Stan Ulam used to remark that his life was sharply divided into two halves. In the first half, he was always the youngest person in the group; in the second half, he was always the oldest."

Can confirm that this happens to software engineers.

</comment><comment><USER19> This seems to be related to doing well in Academia

<comment><USER4> It is, but the advice isn't strictly academic. How to give good lectures -> how to present well in a meeting.

How to acknowledge mistakes, and differentiate between fatal mistakes ones of lesser detail

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Damn, I really like the design/layout. Anyone know where to find it by any chance?

<comment><USER21> The AMS uses LaTeX for typesetting. They release packages for their other journals [1], but not _Notices_ , which apparently [2] uses Lucia Bright, a font that is not free.

[1]: [https://www.ams.org/arc/journals/journal- produce.html](https://www.ams.org/arc/journals/journal-produce.html)

[2]: [https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/76053/which-font- is-...](https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/76053/which-font-is-used-in- notices-of-the-ams)

<comment><USER22> The PDF file contains the string "/Creator (QuarkXPress\252: LaserWriter 8 8.3.3)", so it doesn't appear to be made with LaTeX.

I'm not a designer but I know designer friends using QuarkXPress around that time, and it is my understanding that you'd create the layout largely via the QuarkXPress GUI and also much manual tweaking, so the layout was probably confined to the company producing this document.</comment></comment></comment>


Former Twitter Employees Charged with Spying for Saudi Arabia - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/former-twitter-employees-charged-with-spying-for-saudi-arabia-by-digging-into-the-accounts-of-kingdom-critics/2019/11/06/2e9593da-00a0-11ea-8bab-0fc209e065a8_story.html <comment><USER2> The complaint [0] is both very interesting – particularly the details on how sloppy/non-existent Twitter's user-access-control was back in 2015 – and pretty funny, such as how one of the suspects tried to fake a digital document but didn't fake the timestamp, and the FBI noticed the receipt having a creation date the same day of their interview with him (pg 13).

According to one of the suspects' LinkedIn, he left Twitter in 2015, and then worked at Amazon for 3 years in marketing and social media. While I have little doubt Amazon's internal auditing and access control are better than Twitter's, it'd be nice to hear confirmation from Amazon that he didn't access any private user data.

[0] [https://context- cdn.washingtonpost.com/notes/prod/default/do...](https://context- cdn.washingtonpost.com/notes/prod/default/documents/ab8276a2-2185-4345-956b-26cd1e52b228/note/e5624393-c7e9-4c7e-93e4-30d8fff6c28a.pdf#page=1)

<comment><USER3> Tangent, but one of the most interesting things in the complaint -- to me -- was this language:

> Many Twitter users live in Saudi Arabia and some users of Saudi nationality > or descent live outside of Saudi Arabia, including in the United States.

It's kind of surreal to use "Saudi" as the demonym for the people of Arabia. "Arab" would be normal. The language is Arabic, the country is Arabia, and those are both named after the people, the Arabs. The "Saudi" in the name of the country refers to the royal house, the House of Saud, and I would expect a "person of Saudi descent" to be Arabic royalty, not just any old Arab.

<comment> barry-cotter Arabia is a peninsula. Qataris, Yemenis and Emiratis among others would not appreciate Saudis attempting to appropriate Arabian to refer to those from Saudi Arabia.

And Arab refers to people from Morocco to Iraq so it's equally unsuitable.

<comment><USER4> Exactly, imagine if people of the United States appropriated the name 'American'! I'm sure that every other country in the two Americas would be up in arms!

(It is a joke, laugh).

<comment><USER5> Some other countries actually use terms like United Statians or North Americans. And after traveling a bit makes the USA's use of 'America' seem arrogant or ignorant.

<comment><USER6> I'm guessing you haven't traveled much. American is a virtually ubiquitous term to describe someone from the United States worldwide, no matter which language you're speaking. Countries which have a problem with calling yourself American are a minority, and even then it's usually a small minority of the younger generation.

<comment><USER7> If you go anywhere within Latin America, you'll find quite quickly that "American" is used to describe someone from the continents, and it's consider very odd to introduce yourself as "American" to a local. You say you're Estadounidense, or "Soy de Estados Unidos" (From the United States).

It's actually a very charged topic in Latin America, as many latinos feel that the word they use to describe themselves has been stolen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is anyone surprised considering the amount of saudi money flooding around traditional and social media?

Now lets look into israel and their spying/influence in traditional and social media.

It was amazing the amount of "news" and social media spam we got about russia ( We were always at war with eurasia ). It's amazing the amount of "news" and social media spam we are getting about china ( We were always at war with eastasia ).

But one hardly ever hears a peep about israel or saudi arabia. Considering what is happening to the palestinians, yemenis, etc, you would think you'd hear a lot more "news" about them. Especially about saudi arabia from the feminist/lgbt traditional media considering the saudis probably treat women and the lgbt as badly as any nation on earth.

How come the "news" industry isn't going apeshit over more than half of the state and the US house of senate pushing unconstitutional anti-BDS laws?

[https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/rights- protesters/new-...](https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/rights- protesters/new-israel-anti-boycott-act-still-unconstitutional)

[https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-house-overwhelmingly- passes...](https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-house-overwhelmingly-passes-anti- bds-resolution/)

A country founded on boycotts banning its corporations from boycotting a foreign country?

<comment><USER9> I can't stand these kind of takes that are based purely in anecdote. On what basis are you claiming we "hardly ever hear a peep about israel or saudi arabia"? How do you even measure that?

<comment><USER10> > How do you even measure that?

All this sort of stuff is claimed under Manufacturing Consent. Chomsky's point is often why don't we hear about these other incidents .. because the news isn't balanced and the government is trying to fashion a narrative and they use the media to do this by selectivly choosing what we hear and see.

<comment><USER11> Can you tell me a major news event that I haven't heard about?

<comment><USER10> You're proabaly up to date with the war in Syria but why not Yemen? Why is Syria vastly more newsworthy than Yemen? Because this is what the column inches suggest.

<comment><USER12> The Yemeni Civil War makes it appear as if there is very little involvement from the three global superpowers, while the Syrian standoff was worryingly similar to a cold war era proxy war. Also quite close to Europe, thus more important for our media and upcoming elections.

Though with the Syrian conflict dying down, I'd expect others like Yemen to get more attention by filling the "war" slot in media.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I worked directly with Ahmad at Twitter on the international media team. All I can say is I now understand how the next door neighbor to a serial killer can say "but he always seemed like the nicest guy." He really was very nice to everybody, worked hard, and seemed genuine.

They were definitely tools available to all of us that allowed this type of access to personal data and more. Specifically a lot of the lists that were generated about who to follow suggestions were manually curated at the time and we could put whoever we wanted on the list. We were expected to put people that were relevant in our industry on those lists, but I think Ahmed actually got in trouble for putting himself on that list to build up his Twitter following.

At the time it was certainly a major initiative to rebuild the legacy systems to fix exactly this type of problem. There were strong mandates from the top of the company that were made abundantly clear to us that while they were fixing these things we were all under agreement and NDA to keep all of this data private. The systems were broken no question, but the message was clear. That just makes it even more disappointing to see what he did. He has a very young family at home that is now going to be totally broken.

<comment><USER14> > All I can say is I now understand how the next door neighbor to a serial > killer

Hey, i get it, its a little surprising and scary. But this is just a quick reminder that we do the whole innocent until proven guilty thing here in the US. He hasn't been convicted yet, just keep that in mind when thinking about your colleague.

<comment><USER15> Innocent until proven guilty is for the US courts though. Real life operates by a different principle -- use your eyes and don't f __* up.

There are accusations that a teacher sexually molested somebody, but the investigations never went anywhere; do you hire that teacher? I don't think parents are about to blame you for not hiring that teacher.

<comment><USER16> > There are accusations that a teacher sexually molested somebody, but the > investigations never went anywhere; do you hire that teacher? I don't think > parents are about to blame you for not hiring that teacher.

That has bad externalities. In particular, you'd be creating perverse incentives for people to make accusations against those they dislike (or threaten to do so), a very asymmetric weapon that benefits liars more than anyone else.

<comment><USER15> I agree there are perverse incentives and an asymmetry to power, but I'm not the one creating things, I'm making an observation of the land.

<comment><USER16> That "you" was in the sense of "one, not in the sense of "threatofrain".

That particular confusion in the English language is probably responsible for a noticeable amount of drama in the world...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Should anyone have access to the actual data at their company? I feel like this is an indication of maybe scrubbing the said data is a "must" before it goes into the hands of employees.

Then again, what type of side-affects would that have on the quality of the products moving forward.

<comment><USER18> You can and should restrict the number of people with access to the data, but in a tech company there's always going to be a significant number of people with direct access to the raw data. Software engineers on an on-call rotation, full-time site reliability engineers, data analysts, maybe even some external contractors... maybe this isn't the case for Twitter, but many companies also have to put complete trust in their cloud provider or datacenter, which puts even more people in the loop.

Even if you follow best practices with access control, in the end you're always going to have a group of people who you need to trust with access to folks' personal data. Maybe the solution is better audit logging and even tighter access, but I'm not sure leaks of this nature are preventable.

<comment><USER19> "Software engineers on an on-call rotation...data analysts, maybe even some external contractors"

These groups usually get access through a bastion that anonymizes data and logs access. I remember that as a SWE at Google, I could run aggregated & anonymized statistics across query logs, but some info (eg. IPs, user logins) had been scrubbed before any of my code could get access to it, and for things that were more personal (eg. your GMail login) you could only get access to your own account.

There's nothing you can do about SREs who have root access on the box or the SWEs who need to implement & maintain the bastion servers, but that's presumably a more restricted, vetted, and trusted group.

<comment><USER20> Would it be smart for companies like google and twitter to publish how they vet people for these roles? That's a seriously tremendous amount of power. I almost think it needs to be regulated like heath info. I get that that would make it more expensive to handle this data at all, and would serve as a significant barrier to entry for startups ... but data breach after data breach is pushing me in the regulation direction.

<comment><USER21> Pretty much nobody at Google has that kind of access. You can be an SRE of just about anything at Google and never access user data. The "break-glass" means of emergency access is ridiculously booby-trapped. A person wanting to do this thing has to 1) badge into a special room, at which time both production security and privacy incident teams are notified, 2) use a special hardware security device that is used for no other purpose than to activate a VPN box with a hard-line into the production network. By the way if a random Googler just rolls up to a datacenter without a reason to be there, that also triggers privacy incident response, even though physical access to production storage is virtually useless due to all the encryption.

I would say it is much more likely that Google will accidentally lose the organizational ability to become root-in-prod, than it is that a person has done this thing without being noticed.

In short, insider risk cannot be mitigated with hiring practices. You need robust technical measures against insider risk.

<comment><USER22> When did that start? Here's an account of someone working at Google accessing info to stalk teens.

[https://www.businessinsider.com/google-engineer-stalked- teen...](https://www.businessinsider.com/google-engineer-stalked-teens-spied- on-chats-2010-9)

<comment><USER23> That story dates from 2010.

Snowden's revelations (2013) were a major watershed. There'd been several measures taken since, based on what I heard on the outside, largely through discussions, mostly public, a few direct, with Google staff via G+.

Starting on, of all days, November 9th, 2016, I began regularly posting an image of Jewish shop windows shattered during Krystallnacht, asking whether Google were thinking of brownshirt-proofing their data. That generated responses including from G+'s architect (then in a role with user data safety & privicy), and the data security lead.

It wasn't until some time later that I realised I'd entirely accidentally picked the anniversary of the event for the post. Though the coincidence was useful.

My understanding was that numerous protections were in place by that time. I continue to have concerns.

<comment><USER24> > I began regularly posting an image of Jewish shop windows shattered during > Krystallnacht

This is so incredibly cringey. You're actively building the panopticon and yet you think of yourselves as righteous warriors for justice.

I don't mean this to be a personal attack, but yours is such a revealing comment about the mindset of people inside these surveillance behemoths.

(See also: this "pledge" [http://neveragain.tech/](http://neveragain.tech/) to not build registries for targeting citizens...signed by a bunch of people who work at companies whose entire business is targeting citizens with ads)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The best way to protect dissidents would be not to ask unnecessary personal information like phone numbers. Sadly, it is difficult to find a messenger or web email service that doesn't require it.

<comment><USER26> It's hard to deduplicate spam users without an identifier that is at least slightly costly to get. There's no easy/practical way to do "charge $0.02 per signup".

If you get 10k new accounts in 5 minutes and they're all from some VoIP provider in a tiny corner of the second or third world, you have some data to work with there.

<comment><USER27> Could someone who downvoted explain their disagreement? There seems a kernel of truth here that more than a few of us could agree on.

<comment><USER26> I think I have attracted someone's ire, that seems to happen to all or most of my comments within a short window after posting.

<comment><USER28> This happened to me for awhile too. I think people that disagreed with you on a previous post are using bots to downvote you.

<comment><USER29> This would surprise me given the fairly high karma minimum to downvote.

<comment><USER30> Make a new account every time you reach the threshold, add it to the bot list.

<comment><USER29> Yeah, I thought of that, I was just thinking that surely someone able to create sufficient karma to do something like that would necessarily also be unlikely to be petty enough to bother.

Maybe I am too charitable.

<comment><USER30> You can gain karma fairly casually by just using the site, you get 1 karma per comment, so it's easy to make it a passive activity.

The site has also been around for over a decade, lots of opportunity to accumulate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I had to command-f for "isp" and "comcast" because that's the stuff that should scare you. The kind of data someone can get and the ease of which they can get it while not even going through so much as a background check should scare you. We had internal tools, such as the aptly named Xray, which would give you a pretty detailed profile on someone, everything from the names of the devices attached to their wifi network, places that they used Xfinity Wifi, and even what they ordered on Pay-per-view. Going further down the rabbit hole, we had access to logging that could tell you what you passed into your voice remote, what channels you watched and for how long, and what you were downloading. To me, it is a matter of time until a tool like this is abused and you find out that some NFL star was watching scandalous pornography, or even worse, using the Xfinity wifi hotspots to get an idea on where someone was in the US.

</comment><comment><USER32> This was talked about in the great PBS Frontline documentary about MBS: [https://www.pbs.org/video/crown-prince-saudi- arabia-1jt2ey/](https://www.pbs.org/video/crown-prince-saudi-arabia-1jt2ey/)

<comment><USER33> Interesting that MBS has ties to both Jack Dorsey and Jeff Bezos, CEOs of the companies where these spies were placed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's interesting to see how the phrasing of the headline makes this seem totally different. "Saudi Spies Managed To Infiltrate Twitter as Employees" reads very differently than "Former Twitter Employees Charged with Spying for Saudi Arabia".

It again raises my periodic wonder: how many spies, both for the USA, as well as the intel agencies of others, are employed in sensitive roles at Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and others? How many of them work on the cloud platforms? How many of them have access to HSMs and other internal systems that are used as trust roots?

Can we assume that any major platform provider's highest level keys haven't been stolen, perhaps without their own knowledge? It's safe to assume that if they were stolen by their own government's agents, they probably wouldn't tell anyone even if they found out (even if they weren't gag ordered, which they probably would be).

You can trust a company down to the ground but still necessarily realize that everyone who hires engineers is going to be vulnerable to this. AWS' GovCloud that only permits US citizens physical access to the facilities doesn't even totally solve the problem, it just (somewhat) reduces the risk, because even US citizens like bribes.

<comment><USER34> How do those titles sound different to you? Seems pretty similar to me.

Anyway, from the article it seems at least some of them were groomed after becoming Twitter employees, so it wouldn't be quite accurate.

<comment><USER35> Are they:

employees who happened to become spies

or

spies which happened to become employees

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Seemed rather a weird coincidence that after leaving(or being fired from) Twitter, Ali was appointed the CEO of MBS's MiSK Foundation – which is essentially a mafia organization for his loyalists.

</comment><comment><USER37> What other tech companies have in house spies. NordVPN? Wikipedia? Facebook? Gmail?

<comment><USER21> It seems like there is an inverse relationship between sophistication and risk. If everything is full-custom then it may be quite easy to integrate auditing tools for who accessed user data. If an org uses mostly off-the-shelf software then it's pretty much impossible to audit e.g. who connected to what mysql server and ran which queries. So I'd be a lot more worried about a Twitter (fairly unsophisticated deployments of standard software stacks), moderately worried about Facebook (hacks upon the usual stack) and not very worried about Google (literally everything written in-house).

<comment><USER38> >who connected to what mysql server and ran which queries

I'm pretty sure that is not really a hard task

<comment><USER39> It is quite common that sql servers run just with a few accounts. Helpful audit logs on critical systems have a high cost. So technically it is not hard but practically it is.

<comment><USER40> True but they can have systems which execute on the behalf of an authenticated user and pass that to the SQL server but the system in the middle would have logs of that query and by whom. Now, to be fair, there are usually holes that allow direct access as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> So that mysterious Gitlab customer's demand to protect their data was... not unreasonable.

<comment><USER42> It was unreasonable.

1\. You can build systems in a way that every access is strictly logged and audited.

2\. Many companies like Facebook or Google employ engineers who could be possibly spying for Russia or China. But the systems and trust models are designed with this in mind.

Here we see unrestricted access to user data, not even sure there's audit logging in place.

<comment><USER43> Google or Facebook employees in China do not have access to overseas data.

Gitlab doesn't really serve China and has no need for support engineers with in China.

<comment><USER42> Correct, they do not have overseas data (at least in China).

However, GitLab's restriction also prevented them from employees moving to China as well. Many companies employ people in Asia/Europe timezones as a night-time on-call engineers and support.

Not to mention, the list (China, Russia) is a list of countries made up by GitLab, with no particular backing that's officially recognized by any particular government or organization, which makes the situation discriminatory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I wonder if GitLab will add Saudi Arabia to their employee region block?

<comment><USER45> Saudi Arabia is a US ally, so family region block against them is unlikely. Even if it is a country that tolerates and promotes open slave trade (look up #maidsfortransfer on BBC).

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> A few comments about how a non-negligent company handles user data:

* They wouldn't respond to "emergency disclosure" requests from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia about random users

* The average developer has _zero_ access to user data besides names in crash logs and things that the developer has been explicitly copied on in the support system.

* Every command run on production servers by developers requires approval by someone above your org chart level (up to the executive level, when you just need someone at your level) and is logged forever.

* SREs who have to shell in to servers use Unix accounts that have no access to user data. Root access, which should hardly ever happen, requires org chart approval.

* Test environments use synthetic or anonymized data

* There is a separate team of dozens of highly paid people whose only job is it to identify, classify, and monitor access to user data. This is not even the same as the infosec team, who also would be looking for insider breaches.

</comment><comment><USER47> It would be interesting to know what Saudi Arabia asked Abouammo to do at Amazon as well.

</comment><comment><USER48> I would be shocked if there weren't a handful of spies working for various countries at every large tech company at this very moment. I have no idea how a company would screen for that but it would make little sense to not embed insiders into each of these companies.

<comment><USER43> Don't screen; how can you? Principle of least access.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Ive always wondered if social media companies had any nefarious parts to play in the arab spring, since it all started on social media and this was before the accute awareness of bots to cause crazes on social media. Things like this make me wonder more.

<comment><USER32> They absolutely did - at the behest of the US State Department. Twitter was scheduled to have some planned downtime during the Egyptian Arab Spring, but they postponed it at the request of State. Evgeny talks about this.

<comment><USER50> I wouldn't call that nefarious.

<comment><USER32> That depends on your perspective. I support the intentions of the Arab Spring, but I still think it's inherently nefarious for a private technology company to partner with the US government in order to overthrow governments. I also seriously doubt that they were simply sitting idly by and hoping that the revolution went their way, as we now see that most all world governments have their own online propaganda divisions.

<comment><USER51> It's a long way from postponing scheduled downtime to 'partnering with the US government in order to overthrow governments'. I don't have any difficult seeing how someone could view the former as nefarious but they aren't the same thing.

<comment><USER52> You mean the latter not the former.

<comment><USER51> No, I mean what I wrote. I don't have to agree with it but there are plenty of people who think cooperation, however indirect, with a US foreign policy goal is bad. It's a viewpoint. Calling a thing something that it isn't is not a viewpoint, it's just wrong.

<comment><USER52> I think perhaps you misunderstood me? You're saying:

> I don't have any [difficulty] seeing how someone could view [postponing > scheduled downtime] as nefarious but they aren't the same thing.

Didn't you instead mean the following?

> I don't have any [difficulty] seeing how someone could view [partnering with > the US government in order to overthrow governments] as nefarious but they > aren't the same thing.

Or maybe you did mean that postponing scheduled downtime looks nefarious to some. It just seemed like a weird thing to say compared to the other option.

<comment><USER51> _maybe you did mean that postponing scheduled downtime looks nefarious to some_

You got it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Interesting story here from someone who may have been targeted for an in- person "warning" from Saudi security forces in New Delhi after posting critical remarks from an anonymous Twitter account: [https://mobile.twitter.com/marxatfarpoint/status/11921987493...](https://mobile.twitter.com/marxatfarpoint/status/1192198749331824645)

</comment><comment><USER53> This is why people who work in IT must be very careful with their loyalties. If the charges are true for these two individuals, Kashoggi's blood is on their hands.

We all need to be circumspect about the effects of our own actions, especially as it relates to climate change, mass extinction, and the military industrial complex.

</comment><comment><USER54> [http://archive.is/byhRv](http://archive.is/byhRv)

</comment><comment><USER55> This is a very interesting article and complaint. Worth reading to get insights into Twitter's insider threat countermeasures and their compliance regime, at least as of 2014-2015.

</comment><comment><USER56> It's probably more difficult for social media companies like Twitter to prevent something like this than it is to actually properly secure and protect user data.

<comment><USER57> Even Twitter money pales in comparison to sheik money. I'm not sure you can defend against somebody giving an engineer with admin access a suitcase with $300k in it. Not to mention any other pressures that MBS could potentially have brought to bear in these cases.

<comment><USER58> I wonder what the maximum here is. Cash is harder to spend than it used to be and in addition you'd be at risk that the actual people facilitating the payment delivery would be your biggest risk since it would be very likely they would turn around later and rob/murder you.

There's probably some optimal "suitcase full of cash" number that basically optimizes for spendability and risk.

<comment><USER59> Maybe it could be a house or other asset bought for a less than market amount or sold for a greater than market amount.

Example: [https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2019/04/08...](https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2019/04/08/report- purchase-coachs-house-brings-admissions-scandal-harvard)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> There needs to be multi-person authorization required for account spelunking. Engineer files a DB lookup request, and it must be signed by other personnel.

<comment><USER61> Won't work, people probably need to query details of accounts hundreds of times a day just in the course of daily business. Bad actors would just make the request look like another standard query. People would likely become numb to it after having to approve so many requests.

I know at a previous company, we needed a business signoff, and a technical sign off on every deploy. While the technical sign off was usually painstaking, the business sign off was rubber stamped. The guy who signed off on my tickets was so overloaded, he barely even read the titles of the tickets.

<comment><USER43> Your processes are broken if an individual needs to query hundreds of accounts for private information a day. That is a gigantic problem in itself.

Support tickets can be exempt because they're initiated by user interaction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Could Jamal Khashoggi might have been a victim of this?

<comment><USER63> There's really no part of his assassination that needs a connection to Twitter to explain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> not a good time to be a foreign tech worker in the US

<comment><USER17> I don't think it's fair to generalize on a sensitive topic like this. People are already scrutinized enough when it comes to getting a working visa.

<comment><USER64> my point is innocent people are going to be unduly scrutinized further. plus our current admin as-is doesn't exactly love foreign workers (a massive understatement)

<comment><USER20> I don't doubt that this will happen, but it's perfectly within the rights of the United States to apply more scrutiny to e.g. Chinese nationals seeking employment at tech companies. We're in a trade war with them and a de facto state of cyberwar. It's not at all unreasonable to expect the US Government to look a little more closely at people coming here to work in tech, especially for roles in sensitive positions.

<comment><USER65> Nobody said it wasn't reasonable. They're saying this will make your life suck more if you're a foreign worker regardless of whether or not you're a spy. Even if you view it as a necessary evil, it can still suck for people doing nothing wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Isn't a large part of Twitter owned by Saudi interests?

<comment><USER67> Nope.

You could have just Googled "twitters largest stockholders" but the answer is:

The largest stockholders of Twitter are all US mutual funds. Vanguard owns 10%, Morgan Stanley owns 5%, BlackRock owns 5%, StateStreet owns 4%, Fidelity owns 2%, etc.

Really nothing comes to close to the index funds. Vanguard, BlackRock, State Street own 20% of pretty much every company.

<comment><USER68> That's not a complete picture, Prince Alwaleed owned 4.9% of Twitter as recently as the end of 2016 (the alleged espionage happened before this). It is unknown how much he owns now after his late 2017 detainment, presumably shares were either sold off, seized by Saudi authorities, or both. It's not unusual for ownership to be split among smaller entities, and there is no requirement for US companies to consolidate myriad unknown foreign stock holders into specific entities in their reports.

[https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/05/citigroup-twitter-held-by- de...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/05/citigroup-twitter-held-by-detained- billionaire-alwaleed-bin-talal.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> If I were spying at Twitter for Saudi Arabia, I'd stream Trump's real-time location back to my handlers, as the Twitter app gathers location data and Trump's online habits are lax.

</comment><comment><USER70> end to end encrypted everything.

</comment><comment><USER71> This sounds like a great script for movie.

</comment><comment><USER72> I wonder if this is in addition to or was part of the McKinsey scandal where they targeted Saudi dissidents on Twitter for Saudi Arabia [1]. I wouldn't be surprised if getting people on the inside like this was part of it though just conjecture.

> _Role in Saudi clampdown on dissidents_

> _In October 2018, in the wake of the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, a > Saudi dissident and journalist, The New York Times reported that McKinsey > had identified the most prominent Saudi dissidents on Twitter and that the > Saudi government subsequently repressed the dissidents and their families. > One of the dissidents was arrested. Another dissident 's family members were > arrested, and the cell phone of the dissident was hacked. McKinsey issued a > statement, saying "We are horrified by the possibility, however remote, that > [the report] could have been misused. We have seen no evidence to suggest > that it was misused, but we are urgently investigating how and with whom the > document was shared." In December 2018, The New York Times reported that > "the kingdom is a such a vital client for the firm — the source of nearly > 600 projects from 2011 to 2016 alone — that McKinsey chose to participate in > a major Saudi investment conference in October 2018 even after the killing > and dismemberment of a Washington Post columnist by Saudi agents."_ [1]

> _On the 12th of February 2019, the European Parliament Greens /EFA group > presented a motion for a resolution on the situation on women's rights > defenders in Saudi Arabia denouncing the involvement of foreign public > relations companies in representing Saudi Arabia and handling its public > image namely McKinsey & Company._ [1]

McKinsey also supports authoritarian regimes if they ask for reports and have the money.

> _Support of authoritarian regimes_ [1]

> _McKinsey 's business and policy support for authoritarian regimes came > under scrutiny in December 2018, in the wake of a lavish company retreat in > China held adjacent to Chinese government internment camps where thousands > of Uyghurs were being detained without cause. In the preceding few years, > McKinsey's clients included Saudi Arabia's absolute monarchy, Turkey's > autocratic leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, ousted former President of Ukraine > Viktor Yanukovych, and several Chinese and Russian companies under > sanctions._ [1]

McKinsey one of the Big Three management consulting firms [4] is widely used to use plausible deniability for private equity leveraged buyouts and corruption like the Enron scandals. [2]

> _Enron was the creation of Jeff Skilling, a McKinsey consultant of 21 years, > who was jailed after the company collapsed. McKinsey reportedly "fully > endorsed the dubious accounting methods that caused the company to implode > in 2001." Enron reportedly used McKinsey on 20 different projects, and > McKinsey consultants had "used Enron as their sandbox."_

McKinsey was also a big part of the plausible deniability for big banks and funds during the Great Recession. [3]. Very questionable ethics at McKinsey, hard to trust anyone from there.

> _McKinsey is said to have played a significant role in the 2008 financial > crisis by promoting the securitization of mortgage assets and encouraged the > banks to fund their balance sheets with debt, driving up risk, which > 'poisoned the global financial system and precipitated the 2008 credit > meltdown'. Furthermore, McKinsey advised Allstate Insurance to purposefully > give low offers to claimants. The Huffington Post revealed that the strategy > was to make claims "so expensive and so time-consuming that lawyers would > start refusing to help clients." Next to this, 2016 McKinsey partner Navdeep > Arora was convicted for illegally depleting State Farm of over $500,000 over > a period of 8 years, in collaboration with a State Farm employee._

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKinsey_%26_Company#Role_in_S...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKinsey_%26_Company#Role_in_Saudi_clampdown_on_dissidents)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKinsey_%26_Company#Role_in_c...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKinsey_%26_Company#Role_in_corporate_accounting_scandals)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKinsey_%26_Company#2008_fina...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKinsey_%26_Company#2008_financial_crisis)

[4] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Three_(management_consulta...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Three_\(management_consultancies\))

</comment><comment><USER73> > who the CIA has concluded likely ordered the assassination of journalist > Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul last year.

More crack work from the cia.

</comment><comment><USER74> I smell a fall guy or two. What do you think the odds are that the token optics of this can be replayed as "standing up" for free speech? Not that what actually happened wasn't sketchy (it was) -- just that I have a sense this slap on the wrist will be enough for some to say "At least we can say we tried"

<comment><USER75> Slim to none, the article claims they accessed info of people close to the murdered journalist.</comment></comment>


Amazon buys rights to the prequel of Lord of the Rings for $250M - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-ratings-exclusive/exclusive-amazons-internal-numbers-on-prime-video-revealed-idUSKCN1GR0FX <comment><USER2> "Dwarves are not heroes, but a calculating folk with a great idea of the value of money; some are tricky and treacherous and pretty bad lots; some are not but are decent enough people like Thorin and Company, if you don't expect too much."

J. R. R. Tolkien</comment>


Can big databases be kept both anonymous and useful? - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21660966-can-big-databases-be-kept-both-anonymous-and-useful-well-see-you-anon <comment><USER2> yes, if the headers for the data is known and the value in the dataset revolves around the relationships between entities rather than the identifiable data. As an example - an anonymized sample from facebook where emails and names are anonymized would still be useful for all other kinds of stats regarding friend groups, interest clusters etc etc</comment>


To Hold Women Back, Keep Treating Them Like Men - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/2015/07/to-hold-women-back-keep-treating-them-like-men

<comment><USER2> Probably the most sensible article about sex (and not gender) differences that I have read in a long time.

The way school treats little boys is especially frightening to me as an immigrant living in the US (by that I mean that I was used to a very different system as a kid/teenager). Instead of recognizing that boys and girls _do_ behave differently and have different needs we force feed a unique system/method down everyone's throat, and it happens that this system is built around little girls (I never thought that the strong majority of female teachers may be the reason, very good point made in the article). Boys who can't adapt are just diagnosed - so that the parents don't feel like they screwed up something - and drugged.

This is really sad. I'll be downvoted by feminists, but I'm more chocked by the way we ruin generations of little boys than by the way women are treated some workplaces.

<comment><USER3> Your comments about ADHD are completely wrong, as any parent of a child (male or female) with a bonafide diagnosis of the disorder (or adult with the disorder) can tell you.</comment></comment>


Fab.com Runs $8M TV Ad Campaign, Expects $25M In 2012 Facebook Ads - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2012/10/18/fab-com-runs-8m-national-tv-ad-expects-25m-in-2012-facebook-ads/ <comment><USER2> I was wondering why I'd seen so many more Fab ad's on Facebook recently, two out of the 300 people in my friends network have liked the page, so it ends up pretty much dead centre of my news feed a few times a day.</comment>


What Montezuma's Aztec Sounded Like – And How We Know - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-dQdASWkDU <comment><USER2> i showed this to a mexican friend of mine (who only knows [mexican] spanish and english), and she told me that the pronunciation in the video sounds off ---a bit too "english".

she doesn't know any of the the languages described in the videos, but she says one becomes familiar with quite a lot of native words when learning mexican spanish, because it borrows a lot of native words. i believe her; her name after all, is of native origin...and that for some reason is worth a little more to me than a youtuber's pronunciation---what fallacy am i falling into there?</comment>


Go is PHP for the Backend - <AUTHOR> http://skife.org/go/2012/11/18/go_part_1.html <comment><USER3> _Go has a way of programming. Go is totally optimized for that way of programming, in fact. Programming any way other than Go's way, with Go, will be that recipe for frustration I bounced my skull against. Go's way is not pretty to someone indoctrinated with the modern functional aesthetic, but it works, and works well. Really well._

A good summary of programming in Go.

However I would like you to give some examples of inconsistencies in Go. And I believe that leaving features out ("anything a modern programming language is supposed to include") makes Go cleaner, safer and more understandable than any other language I know of (IMO).

<comment><USER4> From what I was able to gather, the authors gripes tend to be with the lack of meaningful whitespace and "tabs".

Both the goto arguments of someone who lacks enough understanding of language fundamentals to point out any actual flaws.

<comment><USER5> For the sake of accuracy there was also some stuff in there about a conflict between first-class functions and the type system, and some stuff about errors being easy-to-ignore return values.

<comment><USER6> Yes, and those are pretty solid points. Too substantial to just sweep under the rug.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Go has a way of programming. Go is totally optimized for that way of programming, in fact. Programming any way other than Go's way, with Go, will be that recipe for frustration I bounced my skull against."

I think this is something a lot of people think when they first come to Go. Especially if you come from a higher lang like ruby or js or something since on other places on the net its kind of being marketed as a nodejs alternative. However, in my experience the "frustration" hasn't been there at all. I came from c and I think you get basically just a vamped up "better" (I know bad word) c. I love having multiple return vals and error handling in my returns and message passing and threading to any types is so easy in Go it just makes life nicer.

These are all my biased opinions as an avid Go user of course, but honestly I find the language extremely expressive and powerfull, and not really that it forces you to do something the Go way, other than the sense that yes you need to know the syntax and not have type errors etc, but this is the case with every language.

<comment><USER3> I quoted the same paragraph, and I'd be interested to know how much people think it applies to other languages.

Obviously there are languages using whole other paradigms that you would struggle immensely in, try writing Prolog like Java! But I wonder if the "Go mindset" is really any stronger than the "Ruby/erlang/lisp mindset" - <USER2> whether it's just the proximity of Go's appearance to C,C++,Java that causes new Go programmers to try to port incompatible idioms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Woo Woo Woo...Am I missing something or isn't PHP also a back-end language?

About the article, I think you are just doing it wrong. I personally never used Go, like I never used many other languages, but I tried many. Everyone has it's own way, just because one does things differently and not your way doesn't mean it's wrong. It means is different. You know...taste...

<comment><USER9> PHP is weak for long running back-end services.

<comment><USER10> True, but if you have to:

<https://github.com/shaneharter/PHP-Daemon>

<comment><USER9> From your link.

"Note: For many reasons PHP is not an optimal language choice for creating servers or daemons. I created this library so if you must use PHP for these things, you can do it with ease and produce great results. But if you have the choice, Java, Python, Ruby, etc, are all better suited for this."

Possible but not recommended.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, it's my project. It's OSS so I figured a shameless plug wouldn't hurt anybody.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> >Idiommatic Go is to have several lines of boilerplate after every single function invocation which can possibly fail.

This is an issue in every language. If you want to do something that might fail, you have to handle the possibility of failure. There are only two ways to handle this - return values and exceptions - and they differ in style more than in functionality.

So what is this guy suggesting? Does he want Go to have exceptions? Or does he want every function to magically succeed somehow? I don't enjoy writing error handling either but I see no way around it.

<comment><USER12> I think he wants a non-boilerplate way of doing operation b only if operation a succeeds. Instead of writing:

       result = operation_a()
       if not result:
           return ERROR
       result = operation_b()
       if not result:
           return ERROR
       return result

He wants to write:

       operation_a()
       return operation_b()

This is a logical thing to want, because the program is not semantically correct if operation b executes after a failed operation a. It is correct, however, if a failing operation_a causes the entire routine to fail by bailing out early. So it would make sense that that be the simplest thing to write, and then make the case where you ignore errors from operation_a be the thing that's a lot of lines of code.

Ultimately, it's a problem of not enough abstraction. Users of traditional programming languages are held hostage by the control-flow abstractions that the language designers put in place. But if they weren't, then they'd simply write the top code block and call it "combine_failing_operations" or something and they'd write their program in terms of combine_failing_operations:

       combine_failing_operations(
           operation_a,
           operation_b)

Of course, combine_failing_operations is itself a failing operation, so one can also write:

       combine_failing_operations(
           combine_failing_operations(
               operation_a,
               operation_b),
           operation_c)

The reason why people don't is because the resulting code is ugly and it's not encouraged by the langauge's style guide (which usually says, "I'm the programming language designer, if there's missing functionality it's because the functionality is wrong").

In languages where function application is the only syntax, though, this pattern shows up all the time.

For example, in Haskell, you normally combine two functions with the . operator. (f . g) x = f(g(x)). It follows that if you want to combine two functions that can fail, you'll just write that function. Haskell does exactly this and even gives you some syntax sugar: if you call your function >>=, then you can write:

       do
         operation_a
         operation_b

instead of "combine_failing_operations operation_a operation_b", which means you get both pretty code _and_ context-specific only-written-once correctness.

Semantically this is what Go does, but the syntax isn't as nice. (Exceptions are certainly irritating when applied to Go's concurrency model, but at least they are fail-safe. I don't trust myself to get every line of code 100% correct, and I _want_ my program to crash when it gets into a state I didn't write code to handle. Go makes this harder than it should.)

<comment><USER13> The error handling is the single thing that annoys me about Go. If you look at every hello world tutorial, the error return of println is ignored. In languages that use exceptions an error would not be ignored.

A happy medium for me in Go would be if you ignored the error then an implicit "return error" is added at that point. That way errors you handle locally get handled, and those not get passed to the caller. This is somewhat semantically similar to exceptions, but is a lot less code to write. And as a bonus all the hello worlds will have error handling.

(Yes I am aware there are some implementation details.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> >PHP is horribly inconsistent, breaks all the rules about programming language design, and is infuriating.

Some say that rules are made to be broken. In the context of Go, Rob Pike argues exactly that in this short talk on why they made Go: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kj5ApnhPAE>

</comment><comment><USER15> Rarely do I get to read articles that are that low on substance, facts or concrete examples. What is a "Go's particular way" and how does it differ from the author's way? What are these 'particular' structures and behaviour? What is this "particular way", and again "particular way", of solving design issues? Is it like Fight Club?

</comment><comment><USER16> >PHP is horribly inconsistent, breaks all the rules about programming language design, and is infuriating.

I stopped reading upon the first bold statement.

<comment><USER17> I didn't even click on the link, I knew I was going to find hollow statements like that one.

After reading the fantastic article from patio11 that was reposted today, I can't read this kind of ----.

<comment><USER18> Thanks for taking the time to write this insightful comment.

You guys should go find some corner to sit in and be negative. Jeering with no actual feedback is tacky and makes you look childish.

<comment><USER19> And yet somehow you couldn't resist playing along...

<comment><USER18> I had had some hope that there would be some actual feedback and a discussion about why Go is bad or why PHP deserves lauding.

And you were expecting what with your reply?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I enjoyed the article but came away frustrated by one thing -- it offers _specifics_ about the problems with Go, but only _generalities_ regarding what is good about Go.

I haven't tried Go, but I'm aware of things that seem like short-comings to me (most especially, the lack of exceptions). So I understood the first part of the article.

The second part was vague ... I could tell that the author decided that all those problems were OK, but I don't really know how that happened. He chalked it up to the "way of Go". I'd really like to hear some concrete descriptions of what that is.

</comment><comment><USER20> > [go] gets out of your way and make building [services] easy

> stop programming _my_ way, and start programming Go's way

These are inconsistent assertions fundamental to the point the article tries to make.

</comment><comment><USER21> PHP is for the backend too.

<comment><USER22> PHP doesn't support multi-threading -- or concurrency of any kind _at all_ because it's not thread-safe.

<comment><USER10> No threading is accurate, and that makes it less ideal than many languages.

But it does provide thin wrappers over process forking and implementations/wrapper of libraries necessary for IPC (eg SysV queues, shared memory, semaphores, pipes and sockets).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've run a symbolic analysis on this article, it came out empty.</comment>


Amazon Assistant: Chrome extension that adds Amazon products to Google results - <AUTHOR> https://www.amazon.com/assistant <comment><AUTHOR> Would love to see the HN crowd's take on this. I had thought that using extensions to modify someone else's site becomes a bit of a legal issue. See Facebook's legal threats to extension writers that add features like "who de- friended me" to Facebook.</comment>


The interactive life of pablo - <AUTHOR> https://brod.io/thelifeofpablo/ <comment><AUTHOR> easter eggs included.</comment>


The Axiom of Choice is Wrong (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://cornellmath.wordpress.com/2007/09/13/the-axiom-of-choice-is-wrong/

<comment><USER2> So this guy is against using the axiom of choice because a countably infinite number of prisoners in a row who have agreed on an infinite set of equivalence classes just between breakfast and hat game time and remember them and each of them can recognize infinitely many hat colors in finite time (takes deep breath) suddenly becomes unintuitive using the axiom of choice?

I can't help him there.

</comment><comment><USER3> Be sure to check out the comments. Lots of good discussion in there, on both the paradox at hand and mathematical Platonism in general, by people who know what they're talking about.

</comment><comment><USER4> More troubling to me has been the continuum hypothesis. The notion that you can toss a dart (whose tip is the width of a point) at the real number line and hit an integer or rational number with probability zero is very unintuitive.

I can kind of grasp the continuum hypothesis, there does seem to be a distinction between countable and uncountable infinity. Continuing the game beyond that to this area of large cardinals strikes me as just a language game.

Most mind blowing, IMHO, is Cantor's middle third's set[1]. Uncountable nowhere dense totally disconnected, ... it's an amazing set and so easy to construct.

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

<comment><USER5> You're not talking about the continuum hypothesis. The continuum hypothesis just states that there isn't any set with cardinality larger than the natural numbers (aleph_0) but smaller than the reals (2^aleph_0). Interestingly this can't be proven or disproven within set theory if you assume the axiom of choice.

Comparing the cardinality of the natural and real numbers doesn't have much to do with the continuum hypothesis. It's simply true that there are many many many more reals than rationals. It's not a hypothesis.

But I do agree that the Cantor set is pretty awesome.

<comment><USER4> Actually I was talking about it. My mind wanders. Sorry to be so vague (it's been years since I read this stuff). I didn't mean to imply sets of measure zero were what CH is about. The reals can be essentially equated with the powerset of the naturals. It's very intriguing that there is no set with cardinality in between that of the naturals and that of the reals.

The Axiom of Choice is also independent of ZF set theory. Have you read the more modern expositions of these independence proofs based on various Topoi?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Its interesting to notice that a larger number of hat colors poses no > problem here. For any set of hat colors , the prisoners can pick an abelian > group structure on . Then, the first prisoner guesses the 'sum' of all the > hat colors he can see. The next guy can then subtract the sum of the hat > colors he sees from the hat color the first guy said to find his own hat > color. Again, this argument repeats, and so everyone except the first guy > gets out. For the case of black and white, the previous argument used black > = 0 (mod 2) and white = 1 (mod 2).

So the first guy says the sum, not a color? If he's allowed to say arbitrary things he can as well tell everyone their color "next guy is white, next green, etc.".

<comment><USER7> No, he translates the sum back to colors. E.g., there is a map f:colors->H with an inverse g:H->colors and he says the color g(sum(f(hat))) where the index hat ranges over all of the hats.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is still only an argument against the uncountable axiom of choice.

The set of equivalence classes of infinite strings is uncountable, so using the axiom of choice here is invalid.

As far as I know, the countable one is still reasonable.

</comment><comment><USER9> I feel like the axiom of choice can't be used here.

Let's say we have a infinitely long bit string, b. This equivalence class has an infinite number of elements in it! That is, there is an infinite number of strings with suffix b.

b, 0b, 1b, 00b, 01b, 10b, 11b, etc.

Can you use the axiom of choice in this case? I think it is required that each bin has a finite number of objects, even though there are infinite bins.

<comment><USER10> > Can you use the axiom of choice in this case?

Yes, you can.

> I think it is required that each bin has a finite number of objects, even > though there are infinite bins.

No, the axiom says only that the product of nonempty sets is nonempty. It doesn't say anything about the number of sets or their sizes.

For those who don't see the connection: Each element of a product of sets consists of a choice of one item from each set. Saying the product is nonempty is saying there _is_ a way to make such choices. For example, the product of {1,2} and {a,b} contains, among other things, the pair (1, b), which can be thought of as choosing 1 from the first set and b from the second.

There _are_ restricted versions of the Axiom of Choice (e.g., Countable Choice, Dependent Choice); however, none of these are called "the Axiom of Choice".

<comment><USER9> Ok. My other gripe with his argument is that these aren't equivalence classes. Let the string be 01b, where b is an infinitely long bit string. Then the string 01b belongs to equivalence class b, and also equivalence class 1b... and an element cannot belong to multiple equivalence classes at once.

The only way out of this is for 1b and b to actually be the same equivalence class, that is, that of b. But, can we do that? I feel like that is wrong.

<comment><USER11> It's like saying 128x and 28x, considered as finite sequences of digits followed by a letter, are in the class of sequences that end in x. Except in the infinite case, there are a lot more than 26 letters.

<comment><USER9> They also happen to be in the class of sequences that end in 8x and 28x... also definitely their own classes. So 128x is in at least 4 classes, 28x is in at least 3. Therefore it's not an equivalence relation.

<comment><USER10> Ah, but 8x and 28x are not different classes; they are all the same class.

I think it's clearer if you describe things the way the article does. Don't say "these are the classes"; say "here is the relation".

As the article says:

> Call two such sequences 'equivalent' if they are equal after a finite number > of entries.

To see whether this is an equivalence relation, you only need to check whether it is reflexive, symmetric, and transitive. Figuring out what the classes are, might be interesting, but it is not necessary.

<comment><USER9> If an item belongs to multiple equivalence classes, then transitivity does not hold. In other words, if you show that the classes are not disjoint, then it's not an equivalence relation.

18x belongs in the 8x class, but 28x belongs in both the 28x and 8x classes.

<comment><USER7> And 8x belongs in 28x's class, since 8x and 28x share a tail.

I think the author meant for you to interpret "equal after a finite number of entries" in the more normal fashion (e.g., 123x = 456x but 1x != 111x, the prefixes have to have equal length.) But your way seems to work fine too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Looks like another example of infinity leading to nonsensical (or at least unintuitive) results.

</comment><comment><USER13> If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. -- unsourced René Descartes

</comment><comment><USER14> Sounds like Bridge. I hate Bridge!</comment>


What technique can I use to drive traffic - <AUTHOR>

Do you guys have any suggestion on how I can drive more traffic or more specifically get people who offer stuff on craigslist free section or offer on freecycle to offer on onelovee.org?
Any advice would be much appreciated.<p>Thank you very much. <comment><USER2> if your on a short budget, check out Freelancer.com. their service allows you to post a project idea (you can choose a marketing genre and even be general and have experts suggest what to do to increase traffic)

freelancers and companies will underbid eachother with a price quote on how much it will cost to complete your project.

Pick a cost effective freelancer with a good user feedback rating.

Freelancer.com is also an escrow service to protect yourself from freelancers obtaining your money without completing the job.

However, the cheap price comes at a cost; in my experience, the quality of the job is significantly less. However, I am still recommending this technique as I have first hand experienced the benefits of outsourcing the work using Freelancer.com for costs at under 1/4th of estimated costs of US services.

</comment><comment><USER3> You should prefix the title with "Ask HN: "</comment>


These are the things no one tells you about working remote - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/the-things-no-one-tells-you-about-working-remote-79b6bf33576e <comment><USER2> Why do people writing this kind of post need to use "you" instead of "I"? This is a very subjective view, I have been working remote for 4 years, and although I can relate to some of these points, I think it would be less pretentious to add some subjectivity to this point of view

</comment><comment><USER3> I just had a chat with a friend about another problem of working remote: How to meet people. This gets harder when you can't personally hangout with your colleagues. Mostly when you live in a country different than your own, where they speak another language it can be challenging.

I gave him these tips, but I would appreciate if you share some advice about it:

\- Join any kind of sports club or whatever group of people that you share interests with. \- I sometimes use Couchsurfing to meet people. The app has something called hangouts that lets you meet people that are close by. \- Working from a coworking space could also help. \- Joining a language school is another option; you meet people and learn the language at the same time.

<comment><USER4> These are good ones. Also: Meetups, going to coffee shops, and joining online remote worker communities/Slack channels (although this is just online, not in person). I wfh and go to coffee shops like twice a day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> One thing I've found that greatly helps me keep work and non-work separated when working at home is to dress like I'm going to the office.

Normally at home I either go barefoot (during warmer weather) or just wear socks (during colder weather). When working at home, I put on shoes and that makes it feel sufficiently different than normal home time that I have no trouble getting into and staying in work mode. When I'm done for the day, I kick off the shoes and it feels just like I returned home from a day away.

</comment><comment><USER6> Personally, I seem to get more motivated when I'm working in coffee shops. There's something about the environment that is stimulating.

[https://www.skipthedrive.com/3-reasons-working-in-coffee- sho...](https://www.skipthedrive.com/3-reasons-working-in-coffee-shops-can- boost-your-productivity/)

<comment><USER7> Libraries are even better - disciplined, gets more work done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> >> You will lose motivation and you'll need to find it yourself

I've seen others say that, and I have yet to find that a problem for some reason. I am, in general, not a motivated person either. The work just always seems to push me to get things done.

>> You will need to learn to be a better communicator

Excellent point! Maybe not a "better" communicator, but for sure it requires a different kind of communication. When communication moves from talking to typing, it changes things.

I never get tired of these "working remote" posts, I think I've probably read every single one that's come across hn for years now, seems like many of them have a good nugget hidden in there.

</comment><comment><USER9> Well, based on where you are located, you might also rent an office or a desk at someone else's office.

Here in Berlin I was able to rent a desk and work from a close-to-home office- room. As a dev I need this 27" screen, so being in a coffee shop / co-working space is a no-go. The desk costed around 300 Euro per month ( lended by a friend ).

</comment><comment><USER10> All good points, which I (as a remote worker for several years) have encountered myself. Worth a read.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'll second the recommendation for Toggl.</comment>


Show HN: Cheaper alternative to Heroku starting at $1.55/month - <AUTHOR> https://www.opscaptain.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> It is not in doubt that application packaging and deployment could easily get complicated and there is no denying the fact that Platform as a Service has fulfilled so many business needs. The pioneers of PaaS is Heroku and now we have the likes of Google App Engine and NodeChef. Today, there is increasing number of developers looking for cheaper alternatives and OpsCaptain fulfils this need. For just $1.55/month, you can easily deploy your apps. Hope you will like OpsCaptain.

[https://www.heroku.com/](https://www.heroku.com/) [https://cloud.google.com/appengine/](https://cloud.google.com/appengine/) [https://nodechef.com/](https://nodechef.com/)</comment>