The Era of Easy Recycling May Be Coming to an End - <AUTHOR> https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-era-of-easy-recycling-may-be-coming-to-an-end/ <comment><USER2> From a linked nat geo article:

"I never thought plastic recycling would work," says Roland Geyer, an engineering professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and author of the study "Production, use and fate of all plastics ever made." "There is a viable business model around metal, but plastics never has had that. It's too low-value, too contaminated, with too many different polymers mixed together. And you can only make it work with a really low cost of labor."

Fascinating stuff. Perhaps it's time to step away from plastic containers for foodstuffs. I'm a little surprised we didn't move at least a little further away post BPA awareness.

In Salt Lake City they stopped accepting many types of plastic in the recycling bin this summer, it's been a huge PITA. It's also led me to recycle less. This bugged me so I've changed my shopping habits a bit to compensate. For example, I avoid shopping at Trader Joe's, because everything there comes wrapped in plastic. Everything. It doesn't seem like retailers have quite caught on that it's becoming more difficult to recycle.

<comment><USER3> > you can only make it work with a really low cost of labor.

Yet, isn't that what automation provides? It has been two decades since supermarkets in the Nordic countries have whizbang bottle-return machines that take back plastic, aluminium, and glass bottles as long as the barcode is still legible. Is there really no way to make a machine that scans the barcode of various other forms of plastic packaging (like yoghurt containers, ketchup bottles, etc.) and then directs the item to the appropriate container? Since the machine will know the exact categorization of the packaging on the basis of the barcode, then consumers would not be required to correctly sort plastic rubbish themselves.

<comment><USER2> Oh man, the Nordic nations. I remember studying abroad and being the industrious-borderline-alchoholic I am, taking the empties from any classmate I could, so I could re-up the beer supply for free.

Here in salt lake, however, we actually have to pay extra to have a glass collection bin at home. There are a dozen or so sites in the city that one could dump the glass, if they were so inclined, or into the general trash bin it goes. We certainly don't get paid for our our glass.

It's extra disappointing because local...legal strangeness, has been encouraging a bit of a local brewery boom. I'd love to return the glass to the brewery for cleaning and reuse, but that's not an option here.

All that said, there's a ton of plastic that goes into single stream recycling that isn't barcoded...

<comment><USER4> >I'd love to return the glass to the brewery for cleaning and reuse

This is one of the few cases where glass "recycling" makes sense. Unfortunately, glass is stupid cheap in terms of base material and production process so the only way to make recycling glass products worthwhile is to put the used product right back into service in its whole form (after cleaning of course). I'll try to find the study I'm thinking of but from what I recall, glass recycling isn't just uneconomical to recycle, it often winds up requiring more energy to recycle than it does to obtain the base materials and create a new container. Contamination knocks down the efficiency and the logistics of collecting and sorting glass are far less efficient than the bulk mining and transport of silica into a centralized production plant.

A possible solution to this, IMO, is to force bottling operations to standardize on a handful of containers in different sizes, colors/opaqueness, and closure type. This could also work hand in hand with a ban on plastic bottles for common products like juice, soda, etc. Marketing departments would hate it but the centralized redistribution of reusable containers that are useful to every bottling operation would finally make glass recycling a rational concept.

<comment><USER5> This is what a local milk company does in Illinois (Oberweis). You get $1.50 for returning the jug to the store.

[https://patch.com/img/cdn/users/37924/2013/01/T800x600/3722a...](https://patch.com/img/cdn/users/37924/2013/01/T800x600/3722af7cf19bee74765e0f81fcb005dc.jpg?width=705)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We need to focus more on reuse than on recycling. I'd like to see regulations and tax incentives to encourage beverage companies to use glass bottles that can be washed and reused, rather than disposable aluminum or (even worse) plastic.

It's a common sight in Silicon Valley offices to see greasy empty pizza boxes in the recycling bin. People just don't seem to realize that greasy cardboard can't be recycled, and might even contaminate other material.

<comment><USER7> But as the article suggest, most glass is contaminated and thrown away.

<comment><USER6> It's tough to recycle glass. That's why I suggested we focus on _reusing_ glass bottles. Use deposits to encourage consumers to return bottles to retailers, then send them back to bottling plants to be washed and refilled. That actually used to be common in the US but doesn't happen much anymore.

<comment><USER8> There is a slow turnaround happening in this area with milk, at least in the cities I've lived in the last several years. You can buy milk in glass jars, (as a bonus, produced within the state) and take the the empty bottles back to the grocery store for a $2 credit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Single stream recycling was a big scam that worked as long as China was accepting this kind of garbage. The more people used this type of recycling, the more they could send to China and the less garbage had to be processed locally. Now that they have to deal locally with the realities of recycling, you see that the equation is changing.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is primarily a cultural issue.

Taiwanese children are taught from day one how to sort recyclables. It is standard not only to sort properly, but also wash containers and decompose them into parts if they are made up of different materials.

Not only that but due to Japanese influence, reuse is a huge part of the culture already.

There's even a completely different conversation about how children are taught how to fold their trash and stack containers to minimize space use in trash.

Weird how if we take advantage of the neural nets we are born with what we can do...

</comment><comment><USER11> Wonder what would happen if plastic bags and straws were just no longer used, I already pack my groceries in a school bag when I go shopping because the plastic bags are flimsy.

Straws aren't also necessary, I don't drink coffee I buy with a straw and I'm managing fine. Soft drinks can probably just have those coffee caps and then gradually transition.

<comment><USER12> I think this is coming. Straws are getting banned in EU next year and many countries already implemented the ban. Where i am from they got replaced with paper ones and in bars etc with metal / glass ones that get washed like regular glasses. Plastic bags cannot be given for free so you have to buy them and many chains are transitioning to paper or more durable ikea style bags.

The big problem in my eyes are trash bags. Don't know how to replace those.

<comment><USER13> > The big problem in my eyes are trash bags. Don't know how to replace those.

Composting, and recycling glass, metal, and paper greatly reduces the need for plastic trash bags. Most of my regular trash these days is plastic that can't be recycled - either food contaminated, or thin plastic bags. And when you have so little landfill trash, you don't need to buy those massive plastic garbage bags. In my household, we just use the plastic bags that we get our produce in - and we don't even bag all of our produce, just things like leafy greens (delicate) or green beans/okra (hard to keep together)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Plastic is hard, but it does not necessarily need to go back to what it was.

Burning it or turning it into asphalt or other kind of building material might be easier/cheaper

</comment><comment><USER15> Recycling and trash separation would be a great a project for a "moonshot". You need big advancements in robotics, computer vision and probably a lot of other areas to make this. I wish some billionaire would throw some money at it. It would be more helpful to humanity than flying to Mars for example.

</comment><comment><USER16> I can't wait for the glorious era of fusion-powered recycling. Dump literally anything in the bin. It all gets vaporized (thanks to plentiful, cheap energy), and is centrifuge-sorted into its constituent atoms.

Out of curiosity... Just how delusional am I?

<comment><USER17> High heat is one of the ways PCBs are reprocessed to constituents. Given the energy cost to make long chain molecules it seems a shame to spend energy breaking them. I think it might be better to not make as much in the first place and make kinds which are thermo-mouldable to repurpose

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Out of curiosity does anyone know of any startups in the trash/recycling space?

</comment><comment><USER19> There are compostable plastics (e.g. [http://www.worldcentric.org/biocompostables/bioplastics](http://www.worldcentric.org/biocompostables/bioplastics))

(No info there on pricing ...)

"Bioplastics can take different length of times to totally compost ... and are meant to be composted in a commercial composting facility, where higher composting temperatures can be reached and is between 90-180 days. Most existing international standards require biodegradation of 60% within 180 days..."

</comment><comment><USER20> By weight, I estimate that my household produces about 1/3 recyclable trash vs. landfill trash. But by volume, it's almost at parity (before compaction, since I'm a household).

I wonder if an equal alternative would be to collect each type of recyclable once a month. Eg.

\- 1st week: paper/cardboards

\- 2nd week: plastics

\- 3rd week: glass

\- 4th week: metals

Yes it would mean more trash cans but in total volume I don't think it would be much different than my current single-stream bi-weekly collection.

<comment><USER21> Different parts of the UK have different collection policies, but for us, our food waste is collected every week, while recycling (paper/card, plastic, metal, but not glass in our area :/) and rubbish ("garbage" for merkins) are collected on alternating weeks.

There was uproar when we moved to this from weekly rubbish and recycling collection, but most of the time it really seems to work - we recycle far more than I thought we would.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm not sure how it is elsewhere, but here if you peek inside the separate bins outside, or in restaurants, it's basically just mixed trash.

Aside from the usual problem of people not caring about sorting, one or more of the bins is often full, and homeless people sort through the trash to take the aluminum cans, leaving mostly the incorrectly sorted stuff behind.

</comment><comment><USER17> Some domestic recycling was partially sorted to separate cardboard and paper from glass and metal. I think cost shifting and effort/cost decisions here are heading back to the user/consumer input end having more work to do. Incentives here would have to be things like a discount on the waste levy.

</comment><comment><USER23> It is surreal, but it's true, the biggest American export to China was literally garbage...

And it kept being such after decades of different rounds of bans, until the blanket ban last year.

</comment><comment><USER24> Maybe this is a silly question, but what are the downsides of going back to sending more trash to landfills?</comment>


Ask HN: Payment systems that don't suck? - <AUTHOR>

It has been a long while since I've played in the arena requiring interactions with payment systems.  There is a lot of buzz around iTunes for in-app payments, FB credits get mentioned as well.  However, for your general web app, have things gotten more graceful than the good ol' days of multiple paypal screens / etc?<p>What are the credit card transaction systems that provide for the most seamless site interactions? <comment><USER2> WePay is a great solution for certain problems and their API has straightforward documentation.

I built <http://www.everribbon.com> with it.

If you have any questions about the WePay API feel free to shoot me an email.

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://www.fastspring.com/>

</comment><comment><USER4> <http://saasy.com> by Fast Spring

</comment><comment><USER5> Stripe.com

<comment><USER6> Looking forward to this</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What was your "why didn't I start doing this sooner" moment? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER3> Exercising. I run 3x/week now, and I sleep better, I feel better, I'm thinner, and I snagged a wife. Should have started running back in high school instead of spending my days playing MUDs. (Not really. I don't regret anything... but I could have made more time for exercising.)

Also, playing guitar. I'm hearing impaired, and my audiologist told my parents I could never be in the band at school, so they never pressed me to take guitar or piano lessons. I wish I had learned piano as a kid, because I love music so, so much (despite my hearing loss). That said, playing guitar is one of my favorite things ever. It's so cathartic. I'm really bad at it, but just playing helps melt away the stress of my life.

Also, when I was in college, I dated this gym rat for awhile. She told me one day, "On days when I don't feel like going to the gym, I tell myself to do it for five minutes. If I do it for five minutes and still am not feeling it, then I give myself permission to leave." Then a few seconds later, she said, "I never leave after five minutes."

I've adopted that outlook for almost everything. I don't want to go for a run? I'll run for five minutes. If I still don't want to run, I can stop. I never stop and always run the whole route. If I'd rather stay home and watch TV than accept an invitation to happy hour with coworkers, I'll do happy hour for five minutes. If I don't like it, I can make up an excuse and leave. I usually wind up staying the whole time. This outlook has gotten me to do dozens of things I'd never do: get certified as a scuba diver, take a trip to Peru, run a half marathon, audition for a play, and so on. It's a game-changer, for me.

<comment><USER4> > I don't want to go for a run? I'll run for five minutes. If I still don't > want to run, I can stop.

That seems like it's missing the point, though. When I don't want to go running, say, it's the actual getting ready and starting to run that I don't like. If I have gone through 95% of the effort to get ready and get into that whole headspace and started doing it, it's really easy to just keep it up.

Ie it's not the "lifting weights" part of the gym that I don't want to do, it's the "getting out of bed" part.

<comment><USER3> That actually IS the point. The point is that I convince myself to do the hassle by saying "It's only for five minutes," but obviously after five minutes, you've already done the hard part, so you might as well do the rest. It's just a psychological trick to actually start doing the thing I don't want to do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Marriage.

She is my everything, and though as a GF she was that too, marriage is just _deeper_.

Many of my single/unmarried friends don't have the trust and support that I have. I try to tell them that 'pulling the trigger' is not with a gun aimed at your head, but more of the starter's pistol in a 3-legged-race; it's fun. Yes, we have issues, just like all humans. But as we have both grown and changed, holding each other up is something I can't believe I used to not have.

Many 'millenials' seem to view marriage as a capstone to their pyramid. Get 'a degree', get 'a career', find 'the one', fall 'in love', etc. That's wrong, marriage a cornerstone you build a life together on top of. And yes, I am lucky, I know it, and I love her even more as a result.

Maybe readers can extend this to any committed relationship, but I highly recommend taking the time to find that person and jumping in when you are only 70% certain of the commitment ( about 1 - 1/e, for the math folks). Don't wait, just love.

<comment><AUTHOR> I understand your point, but I think people put too much into the actual act of getting married. For my wife and I, I realized essentially nothing changed between us. The only real change was that I was no longer "living in sin" according to my family, and people pester us more often about having kids.

Also people make the mistake of thinking getting married will change things for the better. It never fixes issues.

<comment><USER6> Marriage never fixes things, agreed, nobody should expect that.

However, marriage made our relationship way _deeper_ and _stronger_ compared to just living together. Even though we committed to being life partners before legally marrying.

(I'm talking about marriage here, not having a wedding - sometimes people seem to confuse the two.)

<comment><USER5> > sometimes people seem to confuse the two

Holy cow, will I ever echo that. I mention it in another comment, but to be clear, marriage is _work_. Again, it's a cornerstone, not a capstone, you have to build the house now.

(Another piece of advice: In an argument, you are both correct at the same time. This is because you are co-owners and not co-workers)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Accepting that I was an introvert. I remember the exact moment: I was traveling, had just settled down with a good book at a hostel, and then heard some folks heading to the bar. I remember thinking "gosh, I should be social," and then "nah, I'd rather be here."

Self acceptance of that was a big change for me.

<comment><USER8> I was going to add almost the exact same experience. Congrats to us both!

<comment><USER9> Y'all should go have a drink and be social! Oh, wait...

I kid. I'm in the same boat. People exhaust me. I often tell people who ask me to come do something "I'm peopled out." After a while they get it. My better extraverted friends never stop asking, though, for which I am thankful because I occasionally do like to be social and who better to be social with than an extrovert[0].

[0] They get me and fill in all the awkward silences.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For me, it was using version control on my code.

I was up late finishing a large programming assignment for class, when inexplicably at 3 am, my code stopped compiling with a super generic error message.

Turns out I had somehow added a random character at the top line, but it took me the next 1-2 hours being dumbfounded, confused, over-tired and frustrated before I found the problem.

It would have been a 60 second fix with a simple diff against the repo version.

After that day, I learned how to use svn and always start every project (no matter how small) inside some type of version control system.

<comment><USER11> I would prefer linter's. Go's tools just make your code stand out in vscode especially.

<comment><USER6> No reason not to use both.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> 1: Kids. My wife and I waited to get married, and then were part scared after we got married, and part selfish and wanted freedom to play and travel, so we waited more. I don't regret our adventures at all, but after we had kids, I realized my fear was unfounded and we still had a lot of freedom to play and travel.

2: Startup. I wanted to start my own business my whole life, and I waited to try until I had enough of a plan, enough personal savings for a runway, and until the kids weren't toddlers anymore. I wish I had done it a lot sooner, before having kids, and with someone else's money.

Yes, those two kinda contradict each other. :) I don't know how I'd resolve it, were I to do it again. Not sure I would do it any different, my takeaway is just that in both cases I waited because of fears that turned out to be only fear.

<comment><USER13> Is there some factor you can share that allowed you still to enjoy your "freedom" even after having kids? I share that same fear.

<comment><USER14> One thing to consider is that the sooner you have kids, the longer you get to have them in your life.

<comment><USER15> Given his question, that would sound like an argument to have kids later, rather than earlier, or what exactly do you mean?

<comment><USER12> Only if you don't like your kids. If you like them, having them around is a lot of fun. :)

Side note that kids start spending time away from parents when they become teenagers. That's happening to me now, and I am slowly gaining extra free time. Half the time I still want to spend my free time with the kids. But I'd assume that the younger someone is post-kids, the more energy and options they have for starting new things with that free time. I'm just entering my forties and glad I'm not starting to have kids right now. It might have been a little nicer to start earlier just so we could have hit this point while we were younger.

<comment><USER15> Thanks, that's reassuring. For some time, I rather settled on not wanting children, but my SO is convincing me otherwise. It's always nice to read that I won't have to completely give my life up, or at least not forever. :) I understand that that depends a lot on the situation, but I think we might be financially stable enough, and also potentially moving to a country that gives much more support to parents, that it might be the case for us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Turning off email notifications on my phone. Finally pulled the trigger when I was relaxing on a Friday night and getting work emails. It's usually more efficient to deal with email only once per day anyways.

<comment><USER17> I've never understood why people started subscribing to work email on their personal phones to begin with. Why would you _want_ to get work mail when you're not at work, and why would you want to use your own hardware to do it? I've never done that and nobody I've worked for has ever asked me to do that; my personal phone is for my personal communication.

<comment><USER18> I had similar feelings until I realized that work would pay for my monthly cellular bill (including data roaming while abroad).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Stop blaming my feelings on other people. Always take ownership of how you feel; I'm responsible for my feelings.

For example, if I feel lonely because my friends didn't invite me to the party, don't blame them. Loneliness is my feeling, so I should do something about it. i.e. Go out and do something that I like, invite some other friends over, whatever... If I don't take any action, blaming other people for my feelings won't change how I feel.

<comment><USER20> Amen to that. I still have that reflex of "blaming" others (thinking something happens because THEY believe something instead of what I am doing) and I really have to step back from the situation and think about it. Absolutely hate it when my brain does this

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Getting professional help for everything. Speaking, singing, powerlifting, acting, etc. I enjoy learning on my own but having a good coach can accelerate my progress and catch bad habits.

<comment><USER22> Cool. Where have you found good coaches for these activities?

<comment><USER5> Tim Ferris talks about this problem. His solution was to look up the 'Silver/Bronze' people, not just the 'Gold' people, in an event and just email them. I think he went to a 'silver medalist' in some surfing competition for lessons and claimed that 3 hours skype sessions were only $120. Ferris' reasoning was that the silver person was only 0.1% 'less' than the gold, so the price differential is totally worth it for private lessons. Also that most 'silver' people have never done private lessons in their expertise so they are very willing to help. It takes like 5 minutes of googling for this and writing some emails, maybe 30 minutes in total including negotiations for payment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've got two: buying a house and going back to grad school.

For buying a house, I latched onto the idea that I needed a 20% down payment so I wouldn't have to pay for mortgage insurance so I was trying to save like crazy. Meanwhile, the property values were going through the roof and I realized that I'd always be chasing that 20%. I sat down and ran some numbers with a mortgage lender and that made everything a lot clearer. I could have bought a place two or three years earlier and been making money on the property value with essentially the same amount of savings. Probably not true in every area though.

Kind of the same thing with grad school. I needed a break from school after undergrad, so I took a few years. Work experience is great, but I hit a career ceiling in terms of being seen as "qualified" for certain opportunities. I should have just gone back and started taking classes much sooner.

<comment><USER14> For going back to grad school, was this a masters or phd or mba or something else?

<comment><USER23> Masters. If I got a phd, it wouldn't be in engineering. I thought about an MBA, but I felt I needed to focus on becoming much more technical.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Cleaning. It sounds sort of childish, I know, but cleaning was always such a secondary thing to me. I wasn't dirty, but I was messy. I would constantly buy things from Amazon, toss the box in the garage.

One weekend, a friend and I flattened and recycled every box in that garage. I bagged up every messy bit of trash, bought new furniture to help organize my things, and I feel like I can relax again in my own home. It was a problem I never knew was harming me, but since that weekend, I've been happier than I have been for several years.

</comment><comment><USER25> Automating cold outreach emails.

I organise an event for people who run agencies in London (www.agencysummit.co.uk). I use bots to find relevant people on LinkedIn, and then pay somebody on Fiverr to find their email addresses. Then, I put them into Reply.io and send short two sentence emails asking people if they'd like to check out the event.

It works. Two or three times a day, I get push notifications telling me somebody I've never met has bought a ticket.

Without a cold outreach system like this, there's no way I'd be able to run this business.

<comment><USER26> Wow, illegal marketing. Go you.

[https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to- pecr/electroni...](https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to- pecr/electronic-and-telephone-marketing/electronic-mail-marketing/)

<comment><USER25> "You can send marketing emails or texts to companies." Am I missing something?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Partnership.

Literally everything in this world is easier with partners you can trust. Because of this I do everything with every others now.

* Real Estate - Find people you want to live with and split the cost. Everyone wins.

* Friendships - These are people who can emotionally support you, teach you, mentor you, etc.

* Marriage - For obvious reasons.

\---

I'm attempting to "split everything". So far I split rent, my phone bill, all utilities, Netflix, Google Play, etc. People are rightfully concerned about the potential downside to such partnership, but I realize now, more than ever that somehow, paradoxically the more you want partners the better it will work out. The key is that you should try to make it so that all people involved have similar stake. All for one, one for all, so to speak.

TLDR: Life is a multiplayer game. Find your players immediately.

<comment><USER28> What areas have you found to have most impact/benefit from splitting in this way, and how have you split them?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Wearing earplugs at night. _Vastly_ improved my quality of sleep. I use a vibrating watch to wake me in the morning.

<comment><USER30> Is your environment noisy, or does this help you even in a quiet room?

<comment><USER29> It's not especially noisy, but it helps me sleep anywhere. It's a godsend in hotels. I don't know why I never considered them before.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Getting a domain expert (which I wasn't) to analyze my solution, long after launching it, and realizing it wasn't the ideal solution.

And blocking the shithole site Reddit until I didn't have the urge to check it.

</comment><comment><USER14> Deleting the twitter, reddit, and facebook apps from my phone. I still access FB through the browser when I want to check something, and I check strava and instagram daily, so I'm not totally free, but it feels better.

I use that free time for reading, coding, cleaning, cooking, and running.

</comment><comment><USER32> Leaving grad school and getting a real, balanced job. It really hit me when during an internship I asked 'is the building open on weekends', and I was told 'yes, but why would you want to be here?' A further 'reckoning' was when I realized each year of grad school cost me 100k+. Opportunity costs.

Also if you are obese, you need to fix that sooner rather than later.

<comment><USER33> > was when I realized each year of grad school cost me 100k+. Opportunity > costs.

Money aside, the biggest opportunity cost of education is time. Looking back on my undergrad, I spent an extra year trying to edge out a BS degree when everyone around me was telling me to take the BA in CS and settle for that. In the moment, I felt that the BA would hinder my job prospects. Now that I've been out for a year and a half, I realize that I kind of wasted a year in terms of time. I probably would have been in the exact same place I am now if I had just decided to graduate with what I had at the time.

And, to add further, I ended up earning a BA anyways. But that's another rant.

<comment><USER32> There are other opportunity costs, like losing your passion for what you're doing. After going to grad school in CS I can't do anything with computers beyond my day job. I can't even play video games anymore.

There are other costs too like dealing with unnecessary mental stress of job scarcity, arbitrary deadlines, arrogant and self-absorbed people.

But time is very easy to overlook as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Keeping my personal and professional projects notes in digital format. I used physical notebooks as my sole tool for project notes from 2002 to 2013, so "more than 10 years". It is very hard for me to search for things that I actually remember I took notes at the time, but can't find them quickly. Sometimes I need contact information or even addresses I made sidenotes of, but they are lost somewhere in my stack of dusty notebooks.

Curiously enough I took one of them last weekend and tried to digitize it into Evernote, via a photo. But I didn't like the final format, and it felt like a ton of repetitive work to get a single notebook in. So I put this aside.

</comment><comment><USER35> Buying the most expensive bin bags my supermarket sells. They come with a nice drawstring and are tougher than normal ones. It's remarkable how much more pleasant the task of taking the bins out is for the sake of spending about an extra £1 every month or so.

(I imagine you can probably extend the same reasoning to many things, but for me, it was bin bags.)

<comment><USER4> For me, it was brand-name socks. They just last so much longer than off-brand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I dropped out of the software industry and moved to Greece. Now I go fishing in the morning, read in the backyard in the afternoon and play saxophone at the local taverna at night. I make all my money committing cybercrime.

<comment><USER37> Can you elaborate on the last sentence? Serious question, unsure of the seriousness of statement.

<comment><USER38> His other post states:

> I make $3000 a month committing cybercrime

EDIT: AFAIK a decent threat hunter or RE can earn about 3x that legally in the US.

<comment><USER37> I think I am just shocked someone is okay with saying they make a living off screwing others

yes, that is a low amount of money in the US but in a place like greece, you would be doing pretty well. (only know because I visited this past summer) I just cannot fathom how any of that money can be 'taken' and spent with any conscious at all. but I suppose he/she is not alone...

<comment><USER38> I figure it's along the same lines of being a sex worker or something like that. I would gladly be one if it weren't for the fact that I (probably) wouldn't be able to work in tech and would have to live with social stigma attached.

Same goes for cyber-crime. I want to be on the good side of cyber, and I can't do that if I'm a criminal. I also don't want to live my whole life looking over my shoulder over fear of something I did in the past. This happened to malwaretech and they're not even sure he actually committed the crime.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Stopped thinking that working harder at what others think I should be doing is the key to my success and start evaluating what should I do rather than only how do I do it better.

Stopped eating added sugar and refined carbohydrates.

</comment><comment><USER40> Exercising every day as the first thing I do every day.

I used to do it when I was younger, but took a break for about 6 years. A year later still trying to catch up from that lost fitness.

</comment><comment><USER41> For me, it was budgeting my money with intention. YNAB happened to be the tool that worked for me, after many failed attempts with other products.

I believe that my quality of life would have been significantly better if I had started those habits earlier in my money-earning years.

<comment><USER15> Same here. I thought budgeting was only for when money is tight, but it is amazing how much clarity and overview a budget gives you over your financial situation, and how it helps in attaining even larger goals.

It's just a shame that desktop YNAB isn't developed anymore. I will hold onto YNAB4 until it falls apart.

<comment><USER42> You might be interested in this: [https://www.bucketsisbetter.com](https://www.bucketsisbetter.com)

<comment><USER43> May I ask if there are any limitations for the untimed, free trial as provided on your site? If none, what is stopping from any of your users from using the trial indefinitely?

But at $20 for a unlimited lifetime license, it seems affordable enough for me to want to try using it with my SO.

<comment><USER42> No limitations. After a few months, you'll get nagged a bit, but the trial version has every feature the full version has. There's nothing but your penchant for honesty stopping you from using it indefinitely :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Only enable desktop notifications that I actually need to respond to immediately. Since about two years I only get notified for:

\- Laptop about to fail (Battery less than 10min, out of disk space)

\- Calendar

\- Site reliability alerts

Similarly I hide things like menu/tasks bars by default and just toggle them in for the rare cases I need some information from there.

It is just such a pleasant experience to have 100% of the screen be used by stuff relevant to the task at hand and only allow very specific distractions. It is a bit less pleasant at times to make it clear to some coworkers, that just because the company uses a chat system and project management tools with live updates, that not everyone has to respond to anyone immediately.

</comment><comment><USER45> Cooking, Airbnb, Uber, working independently, pursuing physics seriously.

Physics in particular has been oddly life changing. At some point I think we all look for some purpose or meaning in life. I found it in discovering how little I truly understood about our universe and how bizarre and illogical a universe we truly live in. The mystery and intrigue of our universe leaves me with that child like enthusiasm and interest for discovering ever more.

I mean understanding something relatively simple like time dilation, and its implications, is something that is sufficient to upset one's entire view of the universe. Or even very simple things that we all learn in high school but mostly take for granted such as the beautiful interaction in energy conversion and conservation - and again the implications of such. On that topic the nature of energy itself. Could most people describe energy to a person with no knowledge of physics? And then you can start getting into truly bizarre things which I suppose is an appropriate synonym for quantum mechanics. And this is all just a random sampling of one specific area. Understanding things on a deeper level, and the interaction between all of our physical systems - <USER2> just creates a very interesting and exciting universe that I'm happy to simply seek to learn more of. Prior to pursuing physics more seriously, I did not have any clue how little I knew. And it's the sort of subject where the more I learn the more I understand how little I know. Fun stuff!

<comment><USER28> How did you go about learning this?

I have had Feyman's lectures sitting on my bookshelf for well over a year now, and hope it won't always be in my "someday" bucket.

<comment><USER45> I had the same thing in that it was always an issue of motivation. Try to find something to draws you in. For me this was special relativity and its implications. Time dilation in particular felt like something that could not be what it seemed after covering the basics using Wiki/YouTube/etc. So I picked up an introductory book on it. I'd highly recommend _Spacetime Physics: Introduction to Special Relativity_ by Taylor/Wheeler. It's extremely well written and just as importantly has plenty of problems to test your understanding. And it was even more fascinating, and bizarre, than I initially thought. From there everything becomes much easier to get into simply because of that intrinsic motivation of awe and wonder.

After that I turned to more 'big picture' stuff to try to at least get a survey of the breadth of knowledge. Like you mention the Feynman Lectures are great for this. You can also find them online [1] which may be more convenient. "A Brief History of Time" is also a phenomenal big picture look at cosmology, which is my current primary interest.

Perhaps the best resource of all, and what I'm currently working through, is Leonard Susskind's "The Theoretic Minimum." I first saw this as a book. It's essentially a physics overview intended for those with a solid mathematical background, but without much formal education in physics. The book is excellent, an even better resource for this is the site [2] for it. It has extensive coverage and lectures on all major topics. The only downside is the lack of questions or material to test your understanding.

Ultimately, I think the most important thing is to find something that draws you in. From there everything is easy. Take a weekend sometime and really dig into something that fascinates you. Time dilation in general, the twin paradox, black holes and their funkiness at the event horizon, the two slit experiment in quantum mechanics, etc. These are all things with massive amounts of information available that can really draw you in.

[1] - [http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/](http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/) [2] - [http://theoreticalminimum.com/courses](http://theoreticalminimum.com/courses)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> June 30 2016: counseling, with the corollary--August 19: 30 mg citalopram

<comment><USER47> +1 citalopram. only downside is a bit of jaw tightness

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Plotting my escape from the corporate world

</comment><comment><USER49> Music. Music has such mathematical undertones - classical music especially speaks to me.

I wished I started learning music, especially reading music and music theory when I was a child. Now that I'm old, I realize that neuroplasticity is a bitch to fight against. Thank God I learned another language as a child, and a tonal language at that.

</comment><comment><USER50> Applying project management tools to manage everything in my life.

For example: getting a mortgage or paying taxes are relatively complex processes with alot of moving parts: tasks, documents, deadlines, etc.

You make a Kanban and divide it up into tasks and a pipeline and notes for each tasks status.

Trello is what I use but there's other tools as well.

Holy crap it makes your life easier.

</comment><comment><USER51> I've been practicing yoga for about 4 years now, and I'm amazed at how positively it's impacted my other sports (climbing, snowboarding) as well as my mental well being. Also excited that this is a form of exercise I won't "age out of".

</comment><comment><USER52> Lifewise: Adopting a dog (suspect next one will be quitting smoking when I finally muster the willpower to do it)

Techwise: Moving away from piles of hacked up bash scripts and fully embracing an 'infrastructure as code' mindset (and the associated tools)

</comment><comment><USER53> Not focusing on what it takes to retire from Day 1. I did several startups and always dreamed I would retire rich from those pursuits. I got close, but no cigar. I am 42, and just a few years ago turned my sights hardcore towards hitting retirement goals. It might take another 20 years. It is something I will drive into my kids once they enter college. I will still also encourage them to do startups, but I will want them to understand the impact it has on their ability to retire early.

Side note: if I had held the Amazon stock I sold to start my second company and focused on retirement the past 15 years I would be (semi) retiring right about now.

</comment><comment><USER54> Moving from the suburbs to the city. Turns out that buying you way out of an hour-long 3-segment public transit odyssey is actually a _great_ use of discretionary income. It was also basically budget-neutral when I sold my car.

</comment><comment><USER55> Bash. As an intermediate programmer, I learned it too late. Scripts were always magic to me since I was used to compiled languages. Especially useful for certain build tools and manual steps programmers are running from the command line.

Personal financial tracking - budgeting and tracking everything in Mint or YNAB. Going from "I spend about this much total money per month" to "I spend this month in each of these categories" was big as far as having confidence in my finances.

Similarly, setting up a retirement account. You should do this as soon as you're over 18 and have a full-time job, no matter whether your salary is low.

</comment><comment><USER56> One was when I realized I should try to do something that I can do to push my boundaries and instead do something I can right now. I'm writing down more koans like this and I might sell it as a deck of inspiration cards.

Another was Quitting Facebook. I tried a bunch of times but wasn't successful but I have been Facebook free for a few months now. I might turn it back on just to get a backup of my data for my own data science projects but I would immediately turn it off.

Yet another keeping a paper notebook with a pen with me at all times. Some notes are better written.

</comment><comment><USER57> Virtually every major step forward I've undertaken in life, I've had this reaction after the fact. "Why didn't I do this sooner?" It's making me a little bit quicker on the draw as time goes by. When weighing risk vs. reward, I'm more apt to lean into the reward. Risks are usually far more daunting when they're in the realm of the imagination. (And like many I suspect, I'm pretty good at imagining impending doom.)

</comment><comment><USER58> Blogging.

EDIT:

It would be nice to look back at a decade of blogging, but I only started like ~3 years ago. It has many, many benefits: Practicing written communication, organizing one's thoughts, build up credibility, learn things in-depth by teaching etc.

Now that I think about it, actually, publishing anything in general. Working out in the open. I often kept side project to myself. I should have just open sourced that (did that for some projects after the fact).

<comment><USER21> Story? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Spending less and saving more.

<comment><USER60> Spending more and saving less.

To explain: savings is great and smart. But I never evolved past university frugal living. I recently realised that I was living like a student despite a good salary. So I bought some nice furniture and other things. I didn't realise I was missing out on reduced life friction.

<comment><USER59> That makes sense. Until I started tracking it, I was surprised at how much I was spending that I really didn't need to be. That's more the kind of spending I was talking about.

<comment><USER60> Yeah for sure! I'm in favour of your approach too. I think maybe there's a magical answer of, "all things in balance!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Listening to podcasts or reading while commuting.

<comment><USER51> More specifically for me: podcasts while I'm walking to/from transit or driving, and reading a BOOK (not HN, Reddit, etc) if I'm sitting on a bus or train.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Using a chrome extension[0] to block social media sites during work hours.

[0] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/block- site/eiimnmi...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/block- site/eiimnmioipafcokbfikbljfdeojpcgbh)

<comment><USER63> Seems this particular extension is very upfront about the fact that they gather quite a lot of data from your tab history/usage/habits and then pass that to 3rd parties.

[https://yourblocksite.com/privacy.html](https://yourblocksite.com/privacy.html)

<comment><USER62> Hadn't considered that. Are there others you would recommend?

<comment><USER6> If your work computer is not also your home computer you can just edit your hosts file to block social sites on your work computer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Reducing sodium intake. You will instantly lose weight, feel less sluggish, have more energy etc. By simply reducing the amount of sodium in your diet you are increasing your chances of living longer. Over 500,000 deaths each are from complications with high sodium levels causing health problems.

<comment><USER6> I don't doubt that you might have benefited from a reduction in sodium intake but most people won't. The majority of people are not hypersensitive to sodium[1]. Limiting salt to some arbitrarily low number can have negative side effects, for example, my vegetable consumption went up _dramatically_ when I let go of my anxiety over putting salt on them.

[1] [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-time-to- end-t...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-time-to-end-the-war- on-salt/)

<comment><USER64> Keep in mind that fast food companies and a large share of food manufactures thrive on using high amounts of sodium in their processed foods to increase shelf life and improve margins (i.e. from factory until bought by consumer). I don't doubt the validity of that research, but I would be interested to see who funded it. And of course all humans need sodium to maintain a healthy balance, but many foods we eat today unexpectedly have excessive amounts of sodium in them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> PrettierJS. Do you write javascript and have heard about this and thought to yourself "oh yeah sounds neat I'll look into it when I have the time" just like a ton of other things? This is the exception. Go spend 1/2 hour getting it set up now.

</comment><comment><USER51> Better posture. It's really easy to dump all your weight into a rounded back with your head reaching super far forward. But if you are mindful about your posture, you can help prevent lower back injuries.

</comment><comment><USER66> Cutting out BS from my life.

Quitting a job. Firing a client. Breaking up with a girl. Talking with recruiters I don't like.

It never gets better. Just cut it when there's enough evidence to support.

</comment><comment><USER67> Cancer that wasn't fatal, but close.

Followed by less interest in work/money, more interest in family.

Money still matters, of course, but I'm much more in tune with how much I really need.

</comment><comment><USER68> Equity investments and research.

You don't know how compounding works, unless you actually have some skin in the game and see it work.

</comment><comment><USER69> Listening to Tchaikovsky instead of metal while working, makes the whole process feel a _lot_ more epic!

</comment><comment><USER70> Quit Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER71> Getting therapy. Reckon I could have saved myself ten or fifteen years of suffering.

</comment><comment><USER72> Hatha yoga.</comment>


What I mean by "the open web" - <AUTHOR> http://scripting.com/stories/2011/01/04/whatIMeanByTheOpenWeb.html <comment><USER2> I didn't follow the original discussion, but while I agree with the importance of the "open web" and the relative evilness of "corporate blogging silos", I don't quite understand how RSS and HTML are "really different faces of the same thing".

RSS is an open way of discovering new content; it is dead(-ish) because _real people don't use it_.

I'm aware that there are RSS readers; there even are RSS readers that actually work.

But RSS readers are not what the great majority of people use to discover new content; new content is discovered "socially" on YC or Reddit, etc.

<comment><USER3> I was stumped by the "really different faces of the same thing" claim as well in relation to HTML and RSS.

While RSS is not dead, and probably wont be for a long long time, I also think it needs to be viewed in perspective. "normal" people (not you and me) don't know what RSS is and for the most-part don't use it (or don't know that they are using it sometimes).

Dave has some good insights from time to time, but I get the impression that he is stretching his credits and claims far beyond reality.

You can only wave the "I co-invented RSS way back" flag for so long.

<comment><AUTHOR> Where do you see me waving any flags? I think you should be equally protective of open formats and protocols. Stand up for them. That's all I'm doing donahoe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> To me the critical distinction hinges on required logins/APIs vs. open sites. (Redefining 'open' just be a bit provocative.) In any case, you could argue that loads of _unsilo'd_ sites have been unfairly open to Google through their robots.txt.

<comment><AUTHOR> What does "unfairly open to google" mean?

<comment><USER4> Something like

      User-agent: *
      Disallow: /

      User-agent: Googlebot
      Allow: /

This can be found on many /robots.txt files. I imagine that some of them will try to enforce this access policy. My point is that _equal access for all_ has never existed. (Not that it would be realistic to expect it.)

<comment><AUTHOR> So to be more precise you mean open to Google and closed to everyone else. I agree that sucks.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Twitter and how to go beyond 140-char limit - <AUTHOR> http://a.longreply.com/

<comment><USER2> er so it's a pastebin. wow. Underwhelmed. I thought it was going to be some interesting ascii->utf8 hack or something.

</comment><comment><USER3> Something that struck me about these is that they are for twitter but still relatively long url's in themselves. longreply.com is 13 characters, twitlonger.com is 14, and the last mentioned in this discussion logilogi.org is 12. For me, that alone makes these not worth a second look.

I realize that if you're using this, you likely have room under 140 to post the URL, but I believe that in practice many will use this to continue posts -- I'd still post the beginning and then finish in one of these pastebins, rather than just post the URL. People are not going to just click on a rogue URL but they are more likely with a bit of an intro.

</comment><comment><USER4> Something like <http://en.logilogi.org/> is a better solutions for this. Especially when you value quality.

</comment><comment><USER5> There are a bunch of sites that offer some kind of functionality like this. Some well known apps (like Tweetie 2) let you do it as well.

<comment><USER6> Seriously. I have used/seen the exact same functionality from other services for at least a year, and they give you a shorter url to boot. What's new about this? Sparseness?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> <http://www.twitlonger.com/> just found another alternative

</comment><comment><USER7> Yeah I agree. I was expecting a bunch of utf8 ligatures (or maybe emoji!) used to condense the text.

</comment><comment><USER8> I have posterous so don't need a service like this. If I did there are better alternatives.

<comment><USER9> I have to agree, if you've a throwaway comment you want to make that's too long for twitter, then I can't imagine anyone's that interested anyway. Learn to shorten yourself, or make a comment you don't mind being a little more permanent on a service like posterous (that then posts to twitter in an identical way to these "paste bins", but with hashtags and a shorter url (post.ly))</comment></comment>


One Thing Well: eg, companion to man - <AUTHOR> http://onethingwell.org/post/117169086837/eg

<comment><AUTHOR> Version 0.0.3 released last night.</comment>


Github.com is down - <AUTHOR> http://is-it-down.com/github.com

<comment><USER2> [https://status.github.com/messages](https://status.github.com/messages) is a better place to keep up with news like that.

<comment><USER3> My intuition would be that status.service.com is not a useful place to look if service.com is down...

 _edit_ that's not supposed to be as snarkey as it sounds reading it back :-)

 _edit again_ The reason for this intuition is that I assume that not being able to reach service.com could indicate a DNS problem. Possibly from the comments below I need to go and read a DNS book :-)

<comment><USER4> Most services run their `status` service on a different server entirely. It's the only possible way it could ever make sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How is this an interesting news ?

Because my comment isn't clear. This is not an interesting news. A link to the twitter status or the github status ([https://status.github.com/messages](https://status.github.com/messages)) would be relevant in that case. not just some link to a third party telling us it's down. Yeah thank you. I could have notice it on my own....

<comment><USER6> It's the main hosting service for most developers' source code and a large part of how many open source projects organize, communicate and work.

I guess that makes it a tiny bit more relevant than yet another post about how some mediocre entrepreneur thinks we should all live our lives.

<comment><USER7> You didn't get his point. The submitted URL doesn't provide useful information, [https://status.github.com/messages](https://status.github.com/messages) could have been used instead.

May be when the link was submitted the official information wasn't available. OK, then just wait for something useful because if the site is down and I'm affected I can see that myself, I don't need to read HN.

EDIT: oh, looks like the original comment was edited.

<comment><USER6> Well, in that case, sure.

His statement was a little broad (or even ambiguous) and I think my interpretation was the most obvious/straightforward one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why this kind of links get always promoted? What's the point? Genuine question.

<comment><USER9> Good question!

One reason I like them is that it's easy to pull your hair out trying to figure out why something isn't working without checking an obvious (but not entirely likely) cause.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wouldn't it be a good idea for Github to set up a video + sound stream from their office when these things occur? I for one would watch. Can't really work anyway (at least that's what I persuade myself to think).

<comment><USER11> GitHub's employees are massively distributed. A video + sound stream might not be as interesting as you think.

<comment><USER10> Alright, perhaps ordinary web cams on the faces of the employees involved? Just seeing the hard work and stress in their eyes would be pretty soothing. That might be an idea for any site: "We're currently down, but here are the faces in real-time of our engineers trying to fix it".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Right in the middle of a deploy for us! Thankfully we're getting enterprise so hopefully this is last time a DDoS messes with our productivity.

<comment><USER13> Don't forget you have a complete copy locally. Throw it in bit bucket and deploy!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I put all my personal projects on BitBucket and GitHub (and sometimes CodePlex for the comunities into that sort of thing) and just push to all of them. Never ever had both down at the same time (in fact I don't think BitBucket has gone down once since I started using it). There are multiple free git hosting sites no reason not to use them all at once.

</comment><comment><USER15> Good thing about decentralized version control systems is that they're decentralized.

I hope github can deal with today's issue without too much trouble, but it's not a major inconvenience to me and the rest of my company's devs. We can just push and pull changes to some convenient in-house server via ssh to sync up our work.

<comment><USER16> Bad thing about github is that people tend to use it in a non-decentralized manner. In our case, all of our deploys do a clone from github.

<comment><USER15> That's true, it's a problem when you depend on having the repository at a specific location or depend on something that's not in the repo, like wiki or issue tracking, as mentioned in the other comments.

I just wanted to express my appreciation that github being down is not as big an issue for most people as it would be if github was cvshub or svnhub. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "12:44 UTC We've put mitigation in place that should deflect the attack, and services are recovering. We're continuing to monitor closely." \- [https://status.github.com/](https://status.github.com/)

And it seems to be working for me again not.

</comment><comment><USER18> Where are these attacks coming from? Or is it just failure to keep up with increased client traffic?

I've noticed recently how frequently there are service issues with Github, many times service has been disrupted because of DDoS attacks and similar malicious activity.

</comment><comment><USER19> @githubstatus: Working with our upstream providers to mitigate a rather large DDoS at the moment.

<comment><USER20> Why would someone go to all the trouble of making a botnet, then DDoSing GitHub ffs.

<comment><USER21> Why not? They likely already have a botnet, they didn't make it to DDoS GitHub specifically. Maybe they were annoyed with someone who was using GitHub, or they wanted to prove a point, who knows. All in all, the reason is because they can.

<comment><USER22> Maybe there is NO ddos

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> [https://status.github.com/](https://status.github.com/)

Interestingly while the message at top indicates the DDOS issue the availabilities all show "Normal" for me.

</comment><comment><USER22> They are not going to say "this person did this error", so "we have a DDOS" sounds more pro.

</comment><comment><USER23> And we're back!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> it's back</comment>


Ask HN: Running a contest/competition - <AUTHOR>

So I'm working on my little side project,  a webapp builder called AppRabbit (http://apprabbit.com) that is similar to Zoho Creator or DabbleDB.  It's still missing some key features but I'd love to get people using it and giving me ideas for the direction I should take it.  So I decided it might be fun to have a contest to see who can build the coolest or most useful app with it, and I'd give away something small like a gift card or a something as a reward to the winner.
So my question is, has anyone done something like this before?  Do I need to worry about laws and regulations with regards to doing a little contest like this, or should I just wing it and try to keep it simple?  I figured I'd just judge this round myself, and maybe down the road if I do something like this again have some sort of judging committee or something.
So what do you folks think? <comment><USER2> (disclosure: it's been ~10 years since I last had direct first-hand knowledge of this).

Giving away something for free in a "no purchase required to win" sort of promo is generally not a problem. The giveaway should generally be cheap (less than $600, or maybe it's $2000 now)... anyway, less than the amount that would be required to file a tax form in conjunction with the giveaway. Prize winnings are supposed to be considered taxable income, but at a low threshold point it is not an issue. In your case, I believe you're not going to be able to afford a big enough prize for this to matter :)

The contests where you have more issues are the lottery-ticket type systems where people pay to have a shot at winning a prize. The two big issues there (again, see disclosure above) are that you generally have to have some sort of non-profit status, and you have to have ownership/control of the physical prize before collecting money (you can't use a portion of the ticket sales to purchase the prize and then keep the difference).

For what you're describing, I think it's a good idea and easy to implement with no complex overhead or liability.

</comment><comment><USER3> Contests that don't have a sweepstakes component are generally simpler from a legal perspective -- many states regulate contests in which prizes are awarded at random.

Contest losers sometimes sue on grounds that the contest sponsor supposedly changed rules after the fact. (Such suits are often brought for breach of a "unilateral contract" (see generally [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract#Bilateral_v._unilatera...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract#Bilateral_v._unilateral_contracts)). With that in mind, it's usually better for contest rules to be as detailed as practicable, especially as to how winners will be selected.

(This isn't legal advice, we don't have an attorney-client relationship, etc., etc.)</comment>


How PayPal beats the bad guys with machine learning - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoworld.com/article/2907877/machine-learning/how-paypal-reduces-fraud-with-machine-learning.html

<comment><USER2> That is a great article!

I truly believe that the latest improvements we have seen in machine learning, will change the definitions of software. We are about to see software that can along with humans, decide what is the best path to take to solve a particular problem. Before, software were just made to execute a set of actions we humans set. However, now I have feeling that we will finally be able to work together with our machines, using its power to improve the outcomes of our decisions.

It is just fantastic what Artificial Intelligence can do to improve our lives.</comment>


Ask HN: Who here works long hours just because you have nothing better to do? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I do that and I'm happy. My regular workday starts at 6am and ends at 11pm, 6 days a week, with crossfit workout in the middle.

Bonus point - great impact on my career, although I'm doing that not for career but because even after more than a decade - it's still fun.

YMMV.

</comment><comment><USER3> I spent a year and worked 3,500 hours and recorded the tasks I completed down to the hour. That's about 80 hours per week and it is all a complete wash.</comment>


Dilbert's Scott Adams on How to Invest - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704025304575285000265955016.html?mod=wsj_share_facebook

<comment><USER2> Dup: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1407725>

From 27 days ago, and much discussion there.</comment>


BlackBerry buys Good Technology - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/04/blackberry-goes-shopping-again-buys-good-technology/#.yvmanf:fPUG <comment><USER2> Well that only took them way too long. Idiots should have purchased them in 2007</comment>


You Can't Have a Rollback Button - <AUTHOR> https://blog.skyliner.io/you-cant-have-a-rollback-button-83e914f420d9#.ns2uqasoj <comment><USER2> Article seems a bit over the top. Many of us can and do have a rollback button.

Sure, rolling back isn't trivial. If the code has side effects (e.g. database, disk or cache state), you need to account for those side effects when rolling back.

The example given in the article could be easily fixed by adding a cache.clear() to the rollback procedure (assuming cache performance isn't considered panic-critical)

For database state, use a migration system and make sure each change you make can be reversed (and make sure that's tested!)

> If developers incorrectly believe that their mistakes can be quickly > reversed, they will tend to take more foolish risks. It might be hard to > talk them out of it.

I doubt it. Either encourage rapid iteration and deployment, or encourage a more stable, well-tested production environment. Do that via feedback, code reviews, post-mortems, internal docs. The presence or absence of a rollback button is not going to a major contributor to this.

<comment><USER3> > For database state, use a migration system and make sure each change you > make can be reversed (and make sure that's tested!)

Isn't this debunked clearly in the article? If you add a new feature / column and users begin using it (adding data, making transactions) rolling back is a catastrophic data loss. Sure, the code and database schema will go back to a consistent state, but the data never can.

That's what the is pointing out - that deployed applications + data are a state machine without cycles - i.e., even if you 'rollback', it's akin to adding a revert commit on top of your existing state. The arrow of state, as with time, only moves forward.

<comment><USER4> That's why you don't do it that way.

Adding a new column to a database table (for example) is a single distinct deployment. You do that one without touching your application code. After the column has been added, you deploy the code that uses it. If the new column is a replacement for an existing column, your new code should continue to write to the existing column as well in the same way it always has. If you have to roll back, you roll back the application code change, but the database change remains, so there's no problem. Meanwhile, the new code that was rolled back was still writing to the existing column, so there's no data missing that the old code expects to be there.

After you are comfortable with the change, you can update your code to stop using the obsolete column, test that change, and then later drop the column from the database table.

If you've added a new column or database table for a new type of data, and have to roll back the application code that uses it, you don't lose any data. The customer is of course unable to use the new feature and new data post- rollback, but that's okay: you can roll out the new feature again when you've figured out what the problem is.

Yes, I'm sure we can all come up with examples where this approach won't work, but _they are not the norm_. The are rare. If they are not, then _you are doing infrastructure wrong_.

<comment><USER5> Exactly. Perfect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The author of the blog starts with the claim that you can't have a rollback button because applications aren't self contained and then at the bottom of the article proceeds to outline parts of how rollback "buttons" in distributed systems are enabled. A rollback button is rarely a "button" and is instead a procedure that was reasoned through in advance of deployment.

Every CM at every large cloud vendor/distributed infrastructure shop has a field asking the operator to detail the rollback procedure which is usually a set of steps that include both turning off new code and fixing up state. Moreover, virtually all large scale distributed systems need to be able to run in mixed mode with old versions and new versions co-existing in different parts of the fleet for hours or days at a time. It's simply not possible to flip from one version to the next in any way that even loosely approximates atomicity at the fleet scale of Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. Any competent distributed systems engineer will think through the upgrade implications... "How does Vnext RPC to/from Vcurrent?", "How will Vcurrent handle changes to central database state made by Vnext?", "How will Vcurrent handle local on- disk state if I need to flip back to it from Vnext on some set of nodes?", and so on. Often such upgrades entail multiple deployments where backward compatibility code is pushed ahead of RPC/state changing code.

Does all that mean there aren't occasional mistakes rendering a planned rollback impossible and the only path forward is to soldier through to V(original + 2)? Of course not. But the author's idea that you should generally plan to soldier through to newer code if things go wrong during deployment as a standard operating procedure betrays a lack of experience and sends a dangerous message. When deployments go off the rails is exactly the time when follow-on mistakes are made - at that point you've got a tense conference call going, the managers/PMs/VPs are asking for ETA for the restored system and the only acceptable reply is "very soon", the engineers are trying to diagnose quickly and may overlook some symptoms of the botched deployment, etc. Even the best engineer is not going to do a great job thinking through all the implications of the remediation they are attempting at that point and the code they're now about to push has almost certainly cut a bunch of corners in QA. That's not a situation I willingly put myself in.

<comment><USER7> > But the author's idea that you should generally plan to soldier through to > newer code if things go wrong during deployment as a standard operating > procedure betrays a lack of experience and sends a dangerous message.

The author says "reverting smaller diffs as a roll-forward is more verifiable" near the end of the article. I agree the title makes this a bit confusing, but I don't think he's arguing that the only way to recover is to write a patch under pressure.

<comment><USER4> Reverting a smaller diff _is_ writing a patch under pressure. Reverting a section of your new code is just as difficult as authoring a new fix. You need to be just as sure that the partial revert will not interact poorly with other parts of the new code that you are _not_ reverting.

<comment><USER7> > You need to be just as sure that the partial revert will not interact poorly > with other parts of the new code that you are not reverting.

By partial revert, I'm imagining that three people have changesets (A, B, C, in that order) that have been deployed. You notice that A broke and you make A' to revert it. I think the author is arguing that it is easier to review A' to see if it is a safe change than it is to verify that A', B', and C' (the full revert) are safe to revert.

In other words, even if you don't use version control to record that you reverted A, B, and C, you still effectively do that by reverting in full. You just know that the combination of A', B', and C' _was_ safe when it was deployed.

Is that what you're imagining or are we talking about different things? (I don't have strong opinions about this, I just want to make sure I understand your perspective (: )

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The title is a bit clickybaity, a better one would be: rolling back changes isn't as straightforward as just changing your git hash.

In addition to the strategies mentioned, having backward-and-forward migrations for all database changes is essential. You need to have a plausible path for how to restore state to where it was _before_ the broken change.

If you've done the necessary engineering work, this can ultimately be packaged into a "rollback" button which does things like ramping down dark deploys.

</comment><comment><USER9> The blurb about the company at the end of this article made me wince:

> Skyliner is an AWS platform for continuous delivery. We're trying to build a > straight jacket that you can wear to stop hitting yourself in the face.

I'm usually one of those guys with an instinctive distaste for marketing, but it seems like this is one startup that badly needs some professional help in the way they talk to potential customers...

<comment><USER10> I imagine it polls very well with developers who somewhat-distrust the flailings of "the business guys", but if the phrase gets past that layer...

<comment><USER11> Why would you ever buy a strait jacket in real life, though? The metaphor doesn't even make sense.

<comment><USER12> Well I guess if you're the type of person that can't stop hitting themselves in the face you may be in the market for one. Limited market though however.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This article should really be one sentence: "Pure codebase rollbacks in production are impossible if schema changes are made". Pretty obvious, frankly.

</comment><comment><USER4> Article is just flat-out wrong. Sure, rollback buttons _can_ cause more problems than they solve, but depending on the problem at hand, they can also decrease customer downtime _greatly_ if you roll back in a situation where it's safe and possible to do so.

In my experience, assuming you're doing a decent job of separating your application code and application state, and are avoiding backward-incompatible changes to state storage, rollbacks are almost always safe, and almost always the right first step when a deployment causes customer-visible errors.

I don't find their trivial example of rollback failure compelling. Sure, you can always find an instance when a particular tool does more harm than good, or just doesn't do good. A single example, or even many examples of such, need not form a basis for discrediting that tool.

Rollbacks are a tool in your operations toolbox. Sometimes you should reach for them, and sometimes you should reach for another tool. Claiming you "can't have a rollback button" is counterproductive and needlessly discards a tool that can help your customers when your process fails and you put them in a tight spot.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'd like to know how you handle feature flags in a full feature web applications.

In my experience, it's relatively easy and clean to work with `if(feature) this else that` in a simple backend application (a service that pulls from a queue and maintain a state, for example).

The problem arise when you start working with more complex applications. Specifically application with complex UI where you have to check the state of the flag at multiple different places in the code. You end up adding branches all over the code, branches that will be removed once the feature is fully deployed and known to be correct.

It adds a lot of overhead, the code is less readable.

There must be a way to do implement feature flags in a smoother way.

<comment><USER15> Think of it as being exactly the same problem as "different customers have paid for different features". It's just that only the internal tester customer has paid for this new feature, so far.

How do you handle that? You need a consistent permissions framework.

<comment><USER14> The thing is that in my experience, features behind flags, are not always a per customer artifact.

Or maybe they should be and out implementation of feature flags should always take the current customer into consideration...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's somewhat unfair, but one of the best things about our current build system is that we have a very exact rollback button. So, first off, we're dealing with static sites, but there is still a dynamic data model since we utilize cloud based CMSs. However, since we only ever save the built output, we can rollback to any version of the site going all the way back to launch. I've never been able to do that before moving to this system - pretty neat.

<comment><USER17> Neat! Is it a custom built solution or you're using a product?

We are building similar capability for Pragma ([https://pragma.build](https://pragma.build)), if anyone else is interested in having a similar workflow.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, good question. We built out our own system on AWS w/ Lambda and S3 buckets, but lately we've been utilizing Netlify as well. Netlify has a pretty slick feature where each deploy is automatically available via a subdomain = the short git SHA - super clever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Doesn't CQRS style design attempt to promise a "rollback button" or method of rolling back ? In the example you would see the event emitted by the faulty program and then you would reconstruct the object based on replaying the log right before the invalid function was executed.

<comment><USER19> Yep, any sort of event sourcing approach will theoretically give you the time machine this guy is looking for (albeit with the data from the "bad" release being entirely thrown away). However in practice I think it's non-trivial to bake this into your deployments.

In the process of rolling out a CQRS-based system now though so maybe we'll give it a go when time allows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I really want to see some comments from SREs (or similar) at major companies on this. It seems like a lot have a rollback first, ask questions later policy, and I'd love to hear about how they mitigate or flat out avoid the problems described in this article, or if I'm just mistaken.

<comment><USER21> SREs only have a supporting role to play in change rollback. They maintain the tools/services used by SWEs, DBAs, etc to follow the rollback procedure documented in Change Management.

Rollback is often a suitable first response because the rollback is not a button, it is a procedure, and it can be practiced in a test environment and on a small subset of production without significant customer impact.

Like the other commenter suggested, gradual rollout is a great way to spot bugs or customer feedback. You can accomplish this by building deployment tools that allow for targeted deployment, and by maintaining services that can be targeted by release. For example, you can use your Configuration Management engine to snapshot a DB, deploy schema changes to it and then your code to the app servers using only that DB. If there's a problem you can roll back the code, the data, the schema, whatever changed at that release version, and reload all the services. For things that affect customer assets you'll need extra procedures to work around potential failures there, but that's not complicated (usually).

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> You can, but you need to design and plan for it. _State_ depended on by code is usually the biggest problem; you need to design your code and rollout process to work with both old and new state.

For example, if you add a column to a database table, then both the old code should be able to work seamlessly both with and without this column. In practice, this would mean not making the column a required one, unless you can invent some kind of neutral default value.

</comment><comment><USER23> A cache seems like a particularly odd example to choose for this. If you are changing the way a cache functions, then presumably you either have fairly short expiration times (problem will fix itself) or you would have some form of cache invalidation as part of the deployment process.

Additionally, it would have been nice to see some mention of patterns that solve this issue more completely, like CQRS, where state is disposable.

</comment><comment><USER24> Stopped reading at "The internet is a big truck", that's a flat-out lie, everyone knows that the internet is a series of tubes.

</comment><comment><USER25> Does anyone have resources on how one should design their changes to run side- by-side? I have not been at large companies and don't have the advantage of institutional knowledge to help here. Book, articles, and practical examples would be fantastic.

And since it's often hard to generalize, I work today with Elixir and Postgres. Anything specific around this stack would be exceptional.

<comment><USER26> I don't know if this helps, but reading up on backwards and forwards compatibility can get you in the right direction. The same concepts apply, but the details may very. For API interfaces read up on or think through best practices around overloading old fields, adding new fields, removing old fields, making them optional. I remember Acro had a "schema evolution" doc that talks through some of these concepts and they may apply to things you care about. For databases, I've seen updates staged as pre-commit, post- commit, and rollback patchs. Pre-commit modifies the database in a backwards compatible way -- for example adding new fields and mutating old fields into them if necessary. Code would be pushed live and could read the "old" or "new" way. After all the code is rolled out and there's high confidence the post commit would cleanup things left behind only for backwards conpatabaility reasons. Rollback only operated on pre-commit, post commit may be destructive.

<comment><USER26> Acro == Avro

<comment><USER27> click "edit"

<comment><USER26> sorry, was on mobile

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> if you have a load balanced system you could always have the "roll-back" button prevent users upgrading their profile to the newer version of the app.

but anyone already upgraded would be left to deal with the bugs till they are fixed and the there's a further upgrade scheduled.

</comment><comment><USER29> Realistically, when you run a website big enough that the people pushing the code to servers aren't the people who wrote it, you're going to have a rollback button. The ops people can't wait to figure out what commit caused the issue, much less wait for a fix. They're going to roll back the servers.

Note that a rollback could be useful even in the example in this post. Machines that have hit the bad codepath are corrupted, but machines that haven't hit it yet still have good data. Sometimes you need to stop the bleeding even if there's more work to be done for a fix.

> If developers incorrectly believe that their mistakes can be quickly > reversed, they will tend to take more foolish risks.

That may be true, but by the same token, if developers believe their code can't be rolled back, they're writing code that's broken in a different way.

<comment><USER30> We have milions of active users, and a large engineering organization, and our engineers push their own code. Every hour, every day.

We've internalized writing code that deploys well both going forwards and going back. 99% of all changes don't even need to worry about that, because they are UI/rules/bug changes, not base data schema.

We actually don't roll back database schemata; schemata are applied before code that relies on the changes can be written, and thus must be backwards compatible! If you think you can't do it that way, think harder.

It's not cheap to build all the necessary infrastructure and keep training all new engineers in the necessary skills, but it can absolutely be done and pay off handsomely. We never run stale code, and we never diverge far from master.</comment></comment>


Skills but need a cause? Neurotech of meaning - <AUTHOR> http://boston.craigslist.org/gbs/eng/283105047.html <comment><USER2> Wow, this looks very cool. I wish I had the skills - maybe just a few of them could help?</comment>


US Lifts Laptop Ban on Etihad, Emirates and Turkish Airlines - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/05/us-lifts-laptop-ban-on-airline-passengers-flying-with-etihad-emirates-and-turkish/ <comment><USER2> >"The department of Homeland Security initiated the ban in March. It came into effect covering all flights to U.S. destinations from 10 airports in the Middle East, including major travel hubs like Dubai, Abu Dabi and Dohar."

So how would a ban at flights originating at these airports prevent someone from exploiting this on a flight with a layover in this airport i.e while the plane was in route to one of these 10 airports?

>"While administration officials didn't comment on any new and specific threats, ..."

This is used to justify every questionable action or inaction in the "Endless War on Terror." The claim is always "we can't comment because its an issue of national security." Do people of that "Nation" have no right to be informed about decisions being made on their behalf? Especially where safety is concerned?

Shouldn't this information be shared with the citizens of that nation so they can make up their own minds and make informed decisions? This level of infantilizing is just completely unacceptable. Those in the U.S security apparatus seems to take the view that they are parents and everyone else is a child.

<comment><USER3> The government has made pretty clear over the last few months that the reason for the ban was intelligence that jihadist groups had made progress towards developing a laptop bomb. It is pretty reasonable for them to withhold details in order to protect sources and intelligence-gathering techniques.

<comment><USER2> No they haven' made it pretty clear that "jihadist groups had made progress." Please provide a citation for that. The official TSA website states:

"Evaluated intelligence indicates that terrorist groups continue to target commercial aviation and are aggressively pursuing innovative methods to undertake their attacks"[1]

It says nothing about them making progress. Also that's a pretty nebulous statement. "Evaluated intelligence indicates"? Why not share the details with the public in the form of a redacted report?

Could you imagine the Surgeon General in the US issuing a statement that some food causes cancer and then not releasing any of the details? Of course not.

Withholding details that allow your citizens to make their own informed decisions regarding their safety and welfare is unacceptable.

Also did anyone ever assume that terrorists had stopped being interested in damaging aircraft? We are reminded of that every time we fly in the US and are berated and abused by TSA personal. So this isn't really a new development is it?

[1] [https://www.dhs.gov/news/2017/03/21/fact-sheet-aviation- secu...](https://www.dhs.gov/news/2017/03/21/fact-sheet-aviation-security- enhancements-select-last-point-departure-airports)

<comment><USER4> I don't get the aggressive tone here?

I think the ban is stupid, but they actually have had significant intelligence that (a) they have stolen scanning equipment they are using in the development of explosives so they can avoid detection and (b) they have developed newer laptop bombs that are more dangerous and harder to detect. It took me literally 30 seconds on Google to find an article detailing it with links: [http://heavy.com/news/2017/05/isis-laptop-bomb-threat- planes...](http://heavy.com/news/2017/05/isis-laptop-bomb-threat-planes-carry- on-ban-europe-middle-east/)

<comment><USER2> I didn't think my tonality was in any way aggressive. It certainly wasn't meant to be.

Yes I read that story on heavy.com back in May. And heavy.com is not part of the DHS, the TSA or any other US government agency.

Also the story on heavy.com is reporting about an unnamed source who reported it to another publication(the Washington Post.)

So in effect you have - someone saying that someone told someone else this. That's hardly counts as a credible intelligence. That's what I would third- hand news. It's like the children's game of "Telephone."

<comment><USER3> > _Also the story on heavy.com is reporting about an unnamed source who > reported it to another publication(the Washington Post.) So in effect you > have - someone saying that someone told someone else this. That 's hardly > counts as a credible intelligence. That's what I would third-hand news. It's > like the children's game of "Telephone."_

This is a rather disingenuous argument. You're making a big fuss about heavy.com linking to WaPo, but why not just disregard the heavy.com article and look at the WaPo article? Further, it's pretty standard for news reports concerning intelligence matters to originate from anonymous sources.

<comment><USER2> Please read the entire context. I was originally responding to the statement:

>"The government has made pretty clear over the last few months that the reason for the ban was intelligence that jihadist groups had made progress towards developing a laptop bomb."

A Washington Post article citing an anonymous source is not the government making it "pretty clear." I'm not being disingenuous at all. The US Government making it pretty clear would be via a press briefing or some other such official statement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not sure if this has hit the US news, but from a few days go in Argentina news, the US is going to require special scanners in the airports in other countries (Spanish article, English translation below):

[http://www.iprofesional.com/notas/252113-computadoras- tecnol...](http://www.iprofesional.com/notas/252113-computadoras-tecnologia-- Sumaran-mas-escanners-en-Ezeiza-tras-las-medidas-que-impuso-EEUU)

"The United States government will strengthen security measures for people traveling to that country with computers and tablets. Official sources from that country confirmed that you can still travel normally, with personal electronic devices. However, they said that in three weeks the stricter controls will apply.

....airports and airlines flying to the United States from 105 countries of the world, including Argentina, will be asked to install state-of-the-art scanners that detect traces of explosives in electronic equipment....From the moment they request it, passengers traveling to the USA from airports or by companies that do not have them, will not be able to carry either computers or tablets on board. Nor in the cargo hold....

....In this context, the transport authorities, representatives of the airlines and PSA [airport police] officials met urgently this Friday at the headquarters of the Ministry of Transport to discuss the issue. "What we defined is that this Tuesday we are going to communicate to companies a procedural plan: from what types of scanners to how to get them and how we are going to train those who operate them," explained Oscar Rubio, director of The Airport Security Police, Clarín.

In three weeks, passengers of companies or airports that do not have them, will be unable to bring the computers and tablets on board, and perhaps also in the hold because of the current restrictions on equipment containing nickel," added the official...."The truth is that it is not a difficult technology to get, it can be bought, acquired by leasing or through a supplier, it is not impossible, and we are moving with the fastest speed because we want to prevent the restriction from being applied. Therefore, we are not facing a prohibition, but before a new measure. If it is not fulfilled, then the impediment can come."

<comment><USER6> This is making me worried. When i was a student at mit, we had trips to boeing facilities in seattle. One time, i was again selected randomly for explosive trace sample collection from hands. I dont know what it was, but when they put the tissue in the machine, the machine showed a blinking text saying explosive detected. The tsa agent(iirc) paniced, tried to call out his supervisor while trying to keep an eye on me.

Now usa probably has more experience with false positives, i am curious how i will be treated when i go visit my parent :)

<comment><USER7> Happened to me about a year ago flying DEN to LGA. I had one of those thermal receipt printers in my carry on. Those set off the bomb swab machines. Luckily Mr. TSA knew that thermal printers could set the machine off so nobody panicked and I was allowed through.

<comment><USER8> So now all a terrorist needs to do is carry a thermal printer!

<comment><USER9> Soon: "Serengeti In Uproar As U.S. Travel Ban Extends to Zebras"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't understand why these bans are only for specific airlines. Maybe if the flights originate from specific airports which may have lax security. However the ban is also for flights to those destination originating from the US.

If there was a way to turn a laptop into a bomb I am sure the terrorist would just jump on a local US aircraft.

<comment><USER11> I don't think it is so much about it being a "bomb". I'm gonna take a stab and say it may be related to the ability to take over the control system of the plane via a laptop/wifi [1]. It would make sense to some degree if the US knew that an airline had planes that were "unpatched".

[1]: [http://observer.com/2016/02/midair-hack-shows-the-dangers- of...](http://observer.com/2016/02/midair-hack-shows-the-dangers-of-in-flight- wi-fi/)

<comment><USER12> No it's almost certainly due to the recent intel that found that ISIL had developed a way to hide bombs in laptops to evade airport security. [http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/31/politics/terrorist-laptop- bomb...](http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/31/politics/terrorist-laptop-bombs-may- evade-security/index.html) [http://heavy.com/news/2017/05/isis-laptop-bomb- threat-planes...](http://heavy.com/news/2017/05/isis-laptop-bomb-threat- planes-carry-on-ban-europe-middle-east/)

<comment><USER13> Let's see... they developed a way to hide a bomb powerful enough to bring down an airliner inside a laptop, but not a way to buy tickets for flights other than a few specific routes on a few specific airlines? If you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you.

<comment><USER12> I admit it's a little odd. Relatedly, the UK also instituted a similar laptop ban as well. If not the laptop bomb threat, then what do you think it is? [http://www.wired.co.uk/article/uk-laptop-ban-flights- explain...](http://www.wired.co.uk/article/uk-laptop-ban-flights-explained)

<comment><USER13> I know some (maybe even most) of the affected airlines have significant government ownership. It could therefore be a way of gaining political leverage.

It could also be a leg-up to American carriers competing on those routes. Another commercial option is a tactic to require implementation of security practices that involve American-made equipment.

I'm sure there are many other possibilities that make more sense than the public explanation, which only seems to make sense if we assume the people protecting us are incredibly stupid. I don't think they are, so the public story is probably just a cover.

<comment><USER14> What if instead of being stupid they were artificially limited in some other way?

Perhaps, they wanted a more comprehensive laptop ban but were stopped by someone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> On related news, Millimeter wave scanners are being installed in Turkish airports after the lifting of the ban...

<comment><USER16> Made by an US manufacturer?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> is this a thank you token for putting pressure on Qatar?

<comment><USER18> I'm not buying that as part of US strategy. Saudi vs Qatar seems to be part of the standard Saudi vs Iran stuff that the West tries its best to ignore.

<comment><USER2> Except that the West isn't trying to ignore it, at least not Trump:

[https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/06/tr...](https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/06/trump- qatar-saudi-arabia-terrorism-corker/529479/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Laptop bans are such a horrible idea. Yes, entrust a $2000+ dollar piece of hardware (with important software and files) to someone who is barely paid enough to care what happens to it.

<comment><USER20> Not just don't care, also deliberate theft. It's been a big problem with TSA agents in the United States.

<comment><USER8> That doesn't _necessarily_ mean it would have been a problem with middle- eastern airlines. They knew that the entire profitability of their US routes depended on well-off business travellers continuing to trust them — and unlike the TSA, they operate in a competitive market.

<comment><USER21> There are plenty of opportunities for things to be stollen from checked in luggage at the arriving airport.

This actually happened to me on a flight into the US, with an expensive set of german kitchen knives in checked-in. In the US my suitcase was taken out of the normal line for extra checking (I guess because the knives showed up in an xray?).

They then later gave me my suitcase, but the entire knife set was missing. No documentation that it was taken. No one even cared. No recourse. And nothing came of it.

If I have something valuable that I couldn't take in my carryon again, I'd rather just DHL than trust the TSA to not steal it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This makes me happy. I flew from Istanbul, Turkey to San Francisco, CA, USA while the ban was in place. The actual surrendering my laptop didn't bother me much. What did bother me was the humiliation the Turkish Airlines workers had to endure, and how hard I had to work to suppress my desire to complain about the process. Treating a few airlines differently never appealed to me. I "like" "necessary" suffering to be ubiquitous.

</comment><comment><USER19> The solution to the laptop bans is portable hard drives .Let the $15/hour worker lose your laptop. the software and files are more important

</comment><comment><USER6> I am looking forward to the day where global entry is applied worldwide :/ breezing through security is pretty nice after being aelected randomly so many times :)</comment>