El Faro Sinking – full report [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://media.defense.gov/2017/Oct/01/2001820187/-1/-1/0/FINAL%20PDF%20ROI%2024%20SEP%2017.PDF <comment><USER2> Reading that, at first it's just "oh that doesn't sound good" and then later it's "oh that's bad", then "omg that's horrifying". All in very polite language.

So the ship was not properly maintained, never did drills, did not verify maintenance that was done to life rafts, the "load limits" were not updated when major modifications were made, it had improper sealing against water, it was loaded very poorly with insufficient oversight, there were insufficient tie-downs for cargo, entire rows of cars were tied to a single chain instead of individual tie-downs, it routinely ran with too-little oil, the captain assumed weather prediction is perfect and plotted an aggressive course extremely close to the hurricane, the captain went to sleep during the critical hours the ship approached the storm and blew off course change suggestions, captain failed to get up in a timely manner, failed to recognize they were in an "oh hell no" proximity to the hurricane, failed to realize they were taking on water until too late, steered almost into the Cat3 eye while trying to fix stuff, did a turn which caused the oil to slide to the side of the tank and turn off the engine, still optimistically thought they'd get it together instead of calling for help, and generally ditzed around until it was too late to abandon ship.

The company which owns this ship needs to die.

Also, there was some fine smell of corruption. Coast Guard did a surprise inspection and found serious issues on a sister ship. They got called by their home base to stop that. The CG then flagged the type of issue on the ship and noted that the rest of the similar components needed to be checked. The Certification Agency performed the inspections and said "no it was just the one that was bad." Then the GC does another inspection a few months later and finds that every one of the components was rusted through.

</comment><comment><USER3> El Faro is a vivid example of how the Jones Act chokes competitiveness in the domestic shipping market. El Faro was 40 years old at the time of sinking - the global average container ship age is ~11 years. El Faro would've not met modern shipbuilding standards. Domestic shippers are not incentivized to modernize their ships. The Jones Act shipping industry is sustained on corruption, lobbying, and special interests.

The Jones Act makes me very mad.

<comment><USER4> El Faro wasn't unseaworthy because it was old. There are plenty of old seaworthy vessels at sea today and there are also newer coffin ships. In fact, flags of convenience and competition between international Classification societies has driven _down_ standards in shipbuilding. There's a long, exhaustive PDF on the subject, written by a veteran of the oil shipping industry, available here[0]

Without the Jones Act the American merchant marine would not exist. It would be entirely driven out by third world shipping. Nobody who tries to maintain a first world workforce can compete. For Neoliberals that would be a great victory. Replacing American merchant sailors with Chinese or Filipinos on the Mississippi or the Great Lakes would be a great boon for them because it would undoubtedly reduce costs.

Personally I don't buy it. Bottom dollar prices are not always the most important thing. Most countries place restrictions on operations by foreign shippers between internal ports (look up cabotage).

Keeping a semblance of an American merchant marine in place is still important, if for no other reason because the military often needs to rely on commercial shipping. American merchant men are consummate professionals who uphold the best standards of seamanship (I know this from personal experience) and they deserve respect. And Americans have the right to demand that the government protect nation's middle class and working class from being crushed by hyperglobalization.

[0] [http://www.c4tx.org/ctx/pub/tromedy2.pdf](http://www.c4tx.org/ctx/pub/tromedy2.pdf)

<comment><USER5> Filipinos on the Mississipi?

I don't buy it. They would still have to pay Illinois prices for food and coffee every time they docked. They could only take so much of a pay cut.

Not that there isn't a place for the Jones Act. But it really needs, at minimum, to have an exemption for Puerto Rico and the USVI

<comment><USER4> Some people from PR who argue against the Jones Act claim that ships in the trans-Atlantic trade used to call on PR on their way to Florida. But that was back in the age of sail and coal-fired steam when ships sailed south to catch the trades across the Atlantic. Foreign ships can easily call at PR now, they just have to call at BVI, Cuba or the Bahamas between PR and Florida. But they don't because ships now follow great circles and PR is too far south.

Shipping to islands is expensive. I have a friend who comes from Bermuda. FedEx flies a 727 to that island and the locals say that they buy that airplane every time it lands. Shipping to Bermuda very expensive and the Jones Act is hardly to blame. Shipping from China to the USA is cheaper than to Australia even though Australia is closer. Again, Jones Act can not be to blame, being off the main routes is.

PR's horrible economic troubles are caused by loss of industry and loss of jobs, not by expensive shipping. In fact, PR has a maritime industry that would be ruined without the Jones Act. PR has been hit hardest by the globalization of the pharmaceutical industry, which left PR when it found even cheaper labor abroad.

<comment><USER3> Yeah - foreign ships are not the issue.

Only about a third of the trade comes from foreign ships. Most of the inbound cargo to PR comes directly from U.S. (and mostly U.S. products) thus requiring Jones Act ships. PR is also net exporter (about 50% value add to imported goods) and its largest market is the U.S. (again thus requiring Jones Act ships). So foreign imports/exports are NOT the crux of the issue here.

<comment><USER4> Why don't foreign shippers set up a route from Florida to the Bahamas to Puerto Rico? This would be perfectly legal under the Jones Act. Or alternately Florida - BVI - PR. If they can't make that work because of the slight additional cost of a stop in Nassau then I don't really buy the idea that PR is getting hosed by the Jones act.

Sure the Jones act is protecting "only" 60,000 American jobs. And everyone would benefit a little from cheaper shipping. That's the exact same argument neoliberals made when textiles and furniture and everything else beat a path to Asia and left behind rusting factories and opiod-popping towns. I mean, sure, lots of devastation in the rust belt and New England but hey, we all get cheaper underwear!

The problem is that 60,000 jobs here 60,000 jobs there starts to add up across industries until you get stagnant wages, collapsing labor participation rates, collapsing labor share of income, fraying social net, the worst economic inequality in the history of this country, an ever growing group of hopeless, despondent (or angry) people, eventually, even, Donald J Trump as President of the United States.

<comment><USER3> Well, tell that to the thousands of small businesses in Hawaii, PR etc. that can't export, and therefore can't compete because sea shipping prices are too high.

A vivid example is Hawaii. Hawaii produces excellent cattle and livestock - plenty of sun and great weather. It is cheaper to fly cattle to the U.S. than it is to transport it in a Jones Act trade ship. There is a weekly Boeing 747 from HNL to LAX to transport cows to the mainland U.S. market. Imagine how much more competitive the Hawaiian livestock industry could be if sea shipping rates were competitive.

As Americans, it is our choice if we want to stimulate and connect our territories to our vast mainland market or if we want to protect special interests, lobbying, and corruption that supports the Jones Act trade.

<comment><USER4> As I said above shipping is always high to islands. You can say the same thing (small business hurt by shipping) in Bermuda or Tahiti or Antigua, in all these cases the cost of shipping has nothing to do with the Jones Act.

If Jones Act shippers were fleecing PR, then it would be very profitable for foreign shippers to set up a route from Florida to PR via the Bahamas. This would be 100% legal under the Jones Act and the fact that they haven't demonstrates that it isn't very profitable to try to undercut the current shippers.

The same for Hawaii, all foreign ships have to do is stop in Ensenada and then they can go to San Diego or Longbeach and it'd be 100% legal under the Jones Act. Foreign-flagged cruise ships are already doing exactly this.

Also live animals nearly always travel long distances by air. Putting them on a boat for a long sea voyage means you have to make provisions to feed and care for them, which eliminates any potential cost savings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think this trade mag does a good job covering this.

The Captain was a stateroom Captain and it shows.

[http://gcaptain.com/coast-guard-releases-el-faro- investigati...](http://gcaptain.com/coast-guard-releases-el-faro- investigation-report-summary-conclusions-recommendations/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Jeff Wise wrote a good story on this [http://www.mensjournal.com/features/articles/the-last- voyage...](http://www.mensjournal.com/features/articles/the-last-voyage-of- the-ss-el-faro-w495797)

<comment><USER8> Another good article is [https://newengland.com/yankee- magazine/living/profiles/el-fa...](https://newengland.com/yankee- magazine/living/profiles/el-faro/) which goes into more detail about the crew and the shipping company.

<comment><USER9> Sigh ... they've worked really hard over the past 10 years to remove the definite article from Maine Maritime Academy, and then _bam_ Yankee Magazine goes and uses it all throughout this otherwise fantastic article.

<comment><USER10> Which definite article?

<comment><USER11> (There is only one, at least in English. The word "the".)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The El Faro is a good example of how a rigid chain of command can be disastrous. I'm reminded of Malcolm Gladwell's analysis of "cockpit culture" and deference caused an airliner to run out of fuel and crash.[0] In the case of the El Faro, perhaps not deferring to the Captain could have saved the ship.

[0]. [https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/07/malcolm...](https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/07/malcolm- gladwells-cockpit-culture-theory-everywhere-after-asiana-crash/313442/)

<comment><USER13> Sounds like a Gladwell story, probably not true -

[https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/07/130709-asia...](https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/07/130709-asiana- flight-214-crash-korean-airlines-culture-outliers/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I feel like this is all the same absurd realities as with Flight M370.

A vessel carrying 33 lives into the path of a hurricane was relying on hourly EMAILS from a for-profit weather aggregation service? What the hell? Why wouldn't you have up to the minute satellite transmissions of developing whether on every ship that leaves port?

It seems the world is poorer, and people greedier, than can possibly be imagined.

<comment><USER11> The thing that shocks me is how easily it all could have been prevented by laying a slightly more conservative course a few days before. Just a reminder of how an early course correction has so much more effect than heroic efforts later on. It's amazing how many places this is true: shipping, retirement plans, and orbital dynamics to pick just a few examples.

<comment><USER14> It's even worse than that, they had a chance to turn out of it just 6 hours before they sank.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple's Design Boss Jony Ive Gives a Rare On-Stage Interview - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/jony-ive-vanity-fair-summit-interview-2014-10

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's a short clip of him giving the answer on what he learned from Steve Jobs: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oksetv3i90](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oksetv3i90)</comment>


Johan van Hulst, Who Helped Save 600 Children from the Nazis, Dies at 107 (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/01/obituaries/johan-van-hulst-who-helped-save-600-children-from-the-nazis-dies-at-107.html <comment><USER2> (2018)</comment>


Lessons startups can learn from the infamous Gizmodo redesign - <AUTHOR> http://thestartupfoundry.com/2011/03/26/3-lessons-startups-can-learn-from-the-infamous-gizmodo-redesign/

<comment><USER2> Best Lesson from this article (for me): "Multiple small frequent iterations are better then one massive change [for already-established websites]". Amen brother.</comment>


Autodesk to acquire PlanGrid - <AUTHOR> https://blog.plangrid.com/2018/11/autodesk-acquisition/ <comment><USER2> mea culpa: I was a naysayer to plangrid when they first started out... I had done a LOT of project build, consulting blah blah blah...

I was negative on the device requirement. Which was extraordinarily foolish on my part given what I was doing at the time (attempting to convince medical that iOS was the future)

GOOD for them.

Nothing sucks more sweetly than being proven wrong in your "space"...

I have used Autodesk products for my entire adult life... I will be connected to them until I die.</comment>


Commodore 64 is back and running Linux - <AUTHOR> http://www.commodore-amiga.org/en/forum/27-commodore-usa/4257-more-photos-from-cusa#4257

<comment><USER2> Some company with the 'brilliant' idea of making PC:s in C64 cases has come up atleast once a decade since the 80's. Equally pointless each time.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't see anything related to Linux in that post at all. Infact, I dont see anything about being "back" either.

<comment><USER4> Indeed, that forum thread dosen't give much info. But judging by what it seems a new box and a little searching it seems that there's a joint between C= Commodore USA and Disney to bring C64 back.

<http://www.commodoreusa.net/CUSA_Home.aspx>

<comment><USER5> This website has been knocking around for some time (my human memory tells me at least a year) but I do not believe whoever owns the Commodore brand now has actually shipped any of these products.

<http://www.commodoreusa.net/CUSA_C64.aspx> \- the rendered images look like a machine significantly larger than the original C64.

<comment><USER6> Shipping "mid to late june" apparently.

<http://www.commodoreusa.net/CUSA_Store.aspx></comment></comment></comment></comment>


iPhone "is not married to the single, exclusive-carrier model" - <AUTHOR> http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/apple-not-wedded-iphone-sales/story.aspx?guid=%7B32D36E5C-A205-4573-98EF-1C521207D5AA%7D <comment><USER2> Looks like Apple hired a private eye and discovered that the "single, exclusive-carrier model" is cheating on them, in China, several hundred thousand times a day.

They have pictures.</comment>


Which X-Platform Mobile? titanium | PhoneGap | Xamarin - <AUTHOR> http://strongloop.com/strongblog/titanium-vs-phonegap-cross-platform-mobile-framework/ Thinking beyond just device access for cross-platform mobile success in 2014 <comment><AUTHOR> Thinking beyond cross-Platform Mobile device features for mobile success in 2014</comment>


Show HN: how I built my replacement for reading lists and Pocket - <AUTHOR> http://itemsy.com <comment><AUTHOR> There are always new articles, videos, podcasts, blogs, tweets, websites, books or plaintext thoughts that I'd discover or get recommended by friends. It's _impossible_ to consume all that content as soon as it arrives. But it's also really important that it doesn't get lost and I do get round to going through it at some point.

I would use several reading lists (or apps) which is a great solution in many ways. But they didn't feel like a _problem off your chest_. On the contrary, you need to remember where all your reading lists are so you get back to them at some point. I still have several of those buried somewhere on my computer.

Another big problem with reading lists is that it's so difficult to just _pick the next item to read_. Which list do I go for? Do I start off the top or at the bottom?

And when I've picked up that one article or video, I'm pretty sure there was a specific reason why I'd saved it or perhaps someone recommended it to me but I've forgotten now. Also, I'm pretty sure I've saved something more recent and relevant on the same topic since. At this point, _all the context is gone_.

That's why we built Itemsy around the exact experience I would've wanted for myself. _Here is how it works_ :

1\. Start emailing links to any content you want to save for later to email@example.com (optionally, include a note or email of a person you want to share it with)

2\. You get delivered your _personalised newsletter_ that's just the right volume so you can read it as soon as you get it

To me personally, the main thing has been that I can forget all about the reading lists and actively trying to find time to go back to them. Just _dump all the links onto Itemsy_ , they won't get lost and will be delivered to you in bite-sized chunks at a frequency of your choice.

We'd love for you to try it out. Signing up takes 10 seconds: [https://itemsy.com/](https://itemsy.com/)</comment>


CouchOne + Membase merge - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/07/nosql-companies-couchone-and-membase-merge-to-form-couchbase/

<comment><USER2> I commented on the TC article, but I'll repeat: CouchDB and CouchOne are awesome, and anything that makes them more awesome is very welcomed.

I do sometimes feel like I'm the only one using CouchDB sometimes, though... Hopefully this gets more devs on board with it.

<comment><USER3> I use it.

At first I was in love with it and now I just like it. It is a good tool for some things but it is not a universal replacement for everything database- like.

I like :

* futon (yes, I said it, I like couch because of a pretty GUI). I can quickly look at the database and debug what the problem is. Visibility into the database, the serialization format and the protocol are important to me.

* HTTP interface. Access it with curl or any other tools that speak HTTP.

* Documents are json. I like json.

* Can attach binary blobs to documents + have mime content types markers. Can serve this data to a web browser.

* Durable -- when my request finished, I know the data is on the disk.

* Map/Reduce -- I just like it. It makes sense to me.

Don't like:

* Not very good for high rate updates. Need to compact it periodically

* Not that fast. I know I can tweak it here and there, but by default it is on the slow end of the NoSQL DB speed range. I can live with this.

* MVCC. For some people this is a GoodThing for me it is a "Meh". Sometimes I would like to just update the document in place and overwrite the old one. Perhaps Redis or Mongo would be a better tool here. Now I just do it by repeatedly reading (on failure), updating _rev and then writing back.

* Map/Reduce -- Am I the only one who likes this? It is hard to get others onboard and start thinking of this instead of traditional queries.

Things I don't care about but others like:

* Offline replication. Others rave about it. I used it only a couple of times. Always afraid to end up conflicts silently buried in the DB history.

* Javascript -- don't really like it that much. I use the Python view server to write views. It is actually faster! :

<http://packages.python.org/CouchDB/views.html>

<comment><USER4> I agree on most of your points, but I use Node.js so the Javascript stuff is just great. I also like Couchapps so in any case, CouchDB is just fantastic for those.

I think people are tainted on Map/Reduce because they see how it is done with other NoSQL DBs like MongoDB where it doesn't store the indexes. The fact that CouchDB stores the views like it does, makes complex queries fast, and easy to use. Maybe there is a little initial overhead in writing the views, but after that it is efficient and leaves a lot of code out of the program, so you are getting the data you want in the way you want it.

<comment><USER5> _I think people are tainted on Map/Reduce because they see how it is done with other NoSQL DBs like MongoDB where it doesn't store the indexes_

Maybe I misunderstand what you mean by stored indexes, but MongoDB supports indexes (<http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Indexes>), it just doesn't require them so you can perform exploratory ad-hoc queries when you need to.

<comment><USER4> I used the wrong term, I apologize. From what I understand MongoDB doesn't store the results from Map/Reduce calculation and treats each query using Map/Reduce separately and on demand. Which means that if you have a large data set, your M/R might be too computationally demanding to run every time.

Where as with CouchDB, every time the view (M/R results) are accessed, it gets incrementally updated and stored. So even complex M/R queries on large datasets will be fast subsequently.

<comment><USER6> Just some clarification here as comparing MongoDB and CouchDB's Map/Reduce is a bit of "Apples and Oranges" as they are designed for different purposes.

While in CouchDB, all queries are created with Map/Reduce, in MongoDB Map/Reduce is designed for aggregation. There is a separate system for standard querying which performs much better than Map/Reduce (Before people jump on me here my performance comparison is Mongo queries to MONGO Map/Reduce. Not Couch Map/Reduce or Map/Reduce in general; Not looking to get into a benchmark discussion here, just feature clarification).

The two differ greatly---while Couch requires precalculation of "Views", MongoDB focuses on dynamic querying. Given CouchDB's use of Map/Reduce for these static views, the way they do the iterative addition of new data without re-reducing the entire dataset makes sense.

However, MongoDB doesn't require you to use Map/Reduce to run queries and its MapReduce not designed for day to day querying. Rather, one should use MongoDB Map/Reduce for data aggregation tasks.

Also notable is that in 1.8, MongoDB has added some additional functionality for those who are using Map/Reduce which allows you to merge output and build data across jobs. I did a write up on the changes a few weeks ago: [http://blog.evilmonkeylabs.com/2011/01/27/MongoDB-1_8-MapRed...](http://blog.evilmonkeylabs.com/2011/01/27/MongoDB-1_8-MapReduce/)

(In the interest of Full Disclosure: I work for 10gen, the company behind MongoDB; I'm also working on a book about MongoDB.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We had the Membase team visit the Seattle Google Tech User's group last month. We had about 100 folks in attendance - and I would say we were pretty impressed with the demos we saw of Membase - especially very nice administration dashboard and ease of administering a large cluster.

BTW - the official merger announcement just dropped in my inbox:

<http://www.membase.com/merger>

</comment><comment><USER8> Loggly has been using Membase for a good while now. We're seriously excited about this merger - CouchDB is a great choice for the persistant data store side of things...and fast as hell.

</comment><comment><USER9> Great to see CouchOne getting momentum. Their commitment to mobile solutions is a great direction.

Additionally there are so many use cases in the fields of data warehousing and analytics. I am sure that CouchDB will replace many cube-based solutions in the future. There is great potential for companies focusing on CouchDB, like CouchOne and also Cloudant.

<comment><USER10> Was this comment produced by a Markov generator? No part of it makes any sense.

<comment><USER9> No, I tried to include every aspect into a short statement. Which part needs clarification? I'll be happy to elaborate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Apache CouchDB will become best-of-breed software sometime after couchio/couchone/couchbase is out of the picture. The technical foundation is there, but the culture is just 'off' somehow.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm glad to hear you'll be supporting both interfaces. And I'm looking forward to hearing details about how the two engines will be integrated going forward.

</comment><comment><USER13> All great except I can't fathom the decision to go with a wacky name like Couchbase when they already have a great name: Membase.

<comment><USER14> We believe the Couch-part is worth mentioning given its unique capabilities (real-time Map/Reduce, Sync) and that the new name should reflect that it is a merger of the two previous companies CouchOne and Membase.

<comment><USER15> Map/Reduce is a key feature that is required by the "one true datastore" along with the elegance of on the fly indexed views ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> and a complimentary folk song courtesy of Claire

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4mHHuc4NPc>

</comment><comment><USER17> Will it be free?

<comment><USER18> Everything remains open source and community editions remain freely available and fully featured. From that perspective, nothing really changes except each will get the best of what the other has to offer.

<comment><USER19> Even the new mobile stuff?

<comment><USER20> my next step is to clean up the mobile build so we can get it in a proper public repo.

<comment><USER19> How are you going to make it work on iphone by the way? I doubt spidermonkey and erlang will be accepted there. What's the plan?

<comment><USER14> We're waiting for the App Store Review team to get back to us before we're announcing things. I hope it'll be soon, can't wait!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Anyone running FusionIO products on membase or couchDB layers?

If not - take a look at them.</comment>


Brave browser – automatically blocks ads and trackers, will have micropayments - <AUTHOR> https://brave.com/ <comment><USER2> I don't see a compelling reason to use a new browser which requires me to pay in order to have an ad-free experience.

I can have that experience now, and by using an ad and script blocker keep the cash in my pocket. Plus, I have a higher degree of confidence that my browser is correct, tracks standards, implements security measures, and tracks vulnerabilities.</comment>


Show HN: Two grpc microservices with mutual TLS and token authentication in Go - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/enricofoltran/hello-auth-grpc <comment><USER2> How does the authentication work, what is authenticated and how are secrets or public keys used to accomplish it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi fulafel, sorry for my late response.

In this example we have two servers (hello-server and auth-server) and their respective clients (hello-client and auth-client).

The client-server communication is achieved using gRPC, a RPC framework that enstabish a bi-directional stream between the parties. gRPC use http/2 as the transport protocol and protocol buffer as serialization format.

The communication is secured using TLS. By default the TLS protocol only proves the identity of the server to the client (server-side authentication), however in this example the server require the client to provide its own certificated to proves its identity (client-side authentication). In this way we have mutual authetication (or two-way authentication); two parties authenticating each other at the same time.

The mutual authentication is achieved by generating a certificate (and a private key) for each server and (potentially) one for each client (in this case clients share the same certificate). Certificates are signed by a common trusted certificate authority and can be validated on each side.

In this example the auth-server provide token based authentication as a service for the hello-server. This is done by let the user login to the auth- server, using the auth-client, by providing username and password. Once the auth-server as determined the identity of the user, it generate a JWT token an sign it with a dedicated private key, then send it back to che auth-client which store it on the user's disk.

When the user use the hello-client to communicate with the hello-server the client load the token from disk and pass it in the request. The hello-server then validate the token signature with the corresponding public key.

Doing this allow servers to communicate in a secure way only with trusted clients and only the auth-server can generate valid auth tokens, that can be validated by other servers by sharing only the public key.

Thanks for your question, hope I answered. Sorry, english isn't my native language. Bye!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sorry for straying off-topic, but what are the use cases for grpc?

<comment><USER4> Microservice backends. And native app api servers.

Highly recommend over rest apis for anything with significant traffic.

The clients handle multiplexing over multiple threads. And avoiding a single tcp connection per api call.

And the servers give you a great api / microservice framework that's not too frameworky. It "just works" without magic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nicely done</comment>


Make the Internet Great - <AUTHOR> https://matthewcauble.com/make-the-internet-great-8de961c107be#.jdh9frxi6 <comment><USER2> Interesting post. I'd wager that the real barrier isn't getting a high speed signal to everyone, but rather getting electricity so that everyone can charge a high speed device. Check out this pic of the earth at night: [http://geology.com/articles/night-satellite/satellite- view-o...](http://geology.com/articles/night-satellite/satellite-view-of- earth-at-night.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not confident in representative democracy as a governance model for something as important as the Internet. The political climate in the US suggests the model's susceptible to emotional manipulation.

How about a system for people to independently register their needs & if the system is meeting them?</comment>


Show HN: Music Beat Detector with JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/chrvadala/music-beat-detector <comment><AUTHOR> Hi guys,

I'd like to show you music-beat-detector, my latest project.

It's a library that is able to analyse any mp3 files or youtube video and detect music beat.

I wrote it to control some lights in my room.

Enjoy!</comment>


Programmable Banking Usecases - <AUTHOR> I am wondering if anyone here has some creative uses for programmable banking of your personal bank account?
I've been invited to take part in a beta phase for programmable banking but deciding if it's worth the effort as they are wanting someone that actively contributes (makes sense of course).
I'm more than open to building something cool but the usual trope of 'bank your change' or 'limit your spending' is not for me as I am a naturally frugal person. <comment><USER2> Automatically categorize transactions and find abnormalities. I'd love for my bank to tell me "hey, you spend about 10% more on groceries this month" so I can go investigate why. Or even better, give me a warning that if I keep this up, I am going to be spending more than usual this month.

I am also frugal, but I still would like to cut some out of the hassle. I watch my finances like a hawk. I spend too much time on that.

<comment><AUTHOR> So more like trend spending than outright budget? Could be more interesting</comment></comment>


Varlink – A plain-text, type-safe, discoverable, self-documenting interface - <AUTHOR> https://varlink.org <comment> ar-nelson So... it looks like this is an RPC protocol, similar to JSON-RPC, but the word "RPC" doesn't appear anywhere on the homepage or the FAQ. And it has an interface description language, similar to Protobuf.

It seems like it might be a nice middle ground between Protobuf (strongly- typed, specified) and JSON-RPC (human-readable, doesn't need a special library). But requiring clients to use a new RPC format is still a tough sell. What are the main advantages of Varlink over more mainstream RPC formats?

<comment><AUTHOR> I read about Varlink while taking a look at podman, which uses it as a remote interface [1].

I don't think it does anything _much_ different than protobuf or JSON-RPC but simply IMO tries to create a common interface to interact with software or daemons. Protobuf is by itself just a protocol and encoding format, while Varlink wants to create a generic network-independent RPC interface you can easily access from your shell.

I'm not sure I understand what's the underlying transport protocol (HTTP? custom one?) but having JSON as encoding format is pretty nice, any shell script could talk with it and it's eas(ier) to inspect.

It looks like a generalised version of DBus, without requiring a central daemon. I think it looks pretty cool.

EDIT: also it seems to natively handle subscriptions/polling for changes.

EDIT 2: the transport protocol is just read/writing raw JSON to the file descriptor/socket, see the strace snippet at the bottom of [https://github.com/varlink/linux-varlink](https://github.com/varlink/linux- varlink)

1: [https://github.com/containers/libpod/blob/master/cmd/podman/...](https://github.com/containers/libpod/blob/master/cmd/podman/varlink/io.podman.varlink)

<comment><USER2> >having JSON as encoding format is pretty nice, any shell script could talk with it and it's eas(ier) to inspect

Why do people say things like this? The only format unix shell can reliably understand is tab-separated value.

<comment><AUTHOR> The shell can't speak HTTP either, but all OSes ship with a command line HTTP client. My point is that in 2019 JSON is such a common format _most_ people have or should have a JSON client encoder/decoder installed in their /bin, though I'm not sure any OS ships with any by default.

To be fair, I have jq installed and I have no idea how to use it.

<comment><USER3> I really love the jq language but I totally agree that the complexity skyrockets once you peek at the 'advanced' features because this neat little query language turns into a full programming language with io, variables, modules, functions. Very similar to AWK.

If you want something that is just a good query language then I would highly recommend JMESPath. It's a little harder to grok initially but the spec is extremely detailed, comes with examples, and there's libraries for all the 'popular' programming languages.

A good CLI tool that wraps the Go library is [https://github.com/jmespath/jp](https://github.com/jmespath/jp)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article gives some nice background.

[https://lwn.net/Articles/742675/](https://lwn.net/Articles/742675/)

It would be interesting for the shell to open a varlink connection to commands to allow progress updates. I could also see shells command completion interface being greatly simplified by using varlink.

</comment><comment><USER3> Since this seems to be a project by Red Hat developers I'm curious to see how this fits in with dbus which seems to have overlapping concerns.

</comment><comment><USER5> What are the pros/cons of using a custom built language/parser such as this(or others like googles gRPC IDL, etc), versus simply creating a DSL(Domain Specific Language) using an existing language like Kotlin,Scala et?

I feel that leveraging an existing language with good DSL support, along with an existing IDE (e.g. IntelliJ) would be a lot more pragmatic, easier to support and to potentially maintain.

<comment><USER6> it is going to be in C due to all the various bindings to Rust, Python, JS, Go, etc. Nobody is gonna want programs that currently rely on the existing dbus libraries to rely on a java VM.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is terrible, I hope it doesn't catch on.

There is absolutely no reason for a text format here, especially one as naive and inefficient as this. Binary messages that include size and version _at the beginning_ would be the expected solution.</comment>


The Spanish cooking oil scandal (2001) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/aug/25/research.highereducation <comment><USER3> It is interesting that that within the last few days the NY Post has published an article on the food supply that continues to promulgate this myth. The book author they cite is also blaming olive oil for the tragedy in Spain. It is unfortunate that even with better data available publishers continue to quote myth as fact.

[http://nypost.com/2016/07/10/the-truth-behind-how-were- scamm...](http://nypost.com/2016/07/10/the-truth-behind-how-were-scammed-into- eating-phony-food/?contact-form-id=widget-text-4&contact-form- sent=10277367&_wpnonce=bc86efccda#contact-form-widget-text-4)

</comment><comment><USER4> tldr: it wasn't the oil: "without any doubt, the contaminated foodstuff was tomatoes, and it was the pesticides on them that were responsible for the epidemic"

(This relates to the separate NYP post about phony food, which says "Fake olive oil...has killed people...more than 20,000 people were poisoned in Spain...")

<comment><USER5> Just like that the symptoms supposedly caused by the "Zika virus" is more likely to be a result from food by contaminated by pesticides/herbicides.

The last line of the article is most telling indeed:

> "Under no circumstances should the general public be informed."

This is the main problem. We would all be much more selective when it comes to our food if we knew how flaky the quality is. But instead we trust the gov't in controlling the food supply; which the quote shows we should not be doing.

<comment><USER6> > Just like that the symptoms supposedly caused by the "Zika virus" is more > likely to be a result from food by contaminated by pesticides/herbicides.

You're making a claim here that pretty radically departs from scientific consensus. Do you have any background information on where you read this/how you determined this?

<comment><USER5> Sure (sorry for not backing it up in the first place):

[http://thefreethoughtproject.com/doctors-groups-deny- microce...](http://thefreethoughtproject.com/doctors-groups-deny-microcephaly- zika-connection-blame-monsanto-linked-pesticide-birth-defects/)

Only days after a list of articles claiming no link with pesticides were published, here a link to one of them:

[http://www.sciencealert.com/argentinian-report-says- monsanto...](http://www.sciencealert.com/argentinian-report-says-monsanto- linked-pesticide-is-to-blame-for-microcephaly-outbreak-not-zika)

I'm quite close to some people in academic virology and they also were not to keen on calling for a Zika outbreak.

<comment><USER6> OK, you've implied or linked to some significantly different claims here:

1\. That there is no Zika outbreak / outbreak of Zika-like symptoms (this seems irrefutably wrong and as far as I know even the typical conspiracy theorist sites aren't claiming this much).

2\. That the symptoms of Zika are in fact caused by the organo-phosphate pesticide Pyriproxyfen (Zika has been a recognized viral illness just like others e.g. Dengue for at least 50 years, predating the widepread use of organo-phosphates in Brazil, so this also is very, very unlikely).

3\. That the microencephaly in babies borne to mothers with Zika, that is being attributed to the Zika virus, is in fact caused by Pyriproxyfen (for epidemiological reasons [1], this seems very unlikely but it cannot be ruled out at this point).

By the way, your second source didn't seem terribly bad, and assumed an appropriate amount of skepticism toward the claims in question. Your first source, written by an "political analyst" currently pursuing a global affairs degree, and with no apparent scientific credentials, wasn't as convincing.

Are any of the academic virologists you're referring to on public record with their skepticism about the Zika outbreak?

1\. In the three cities reporting the most cases — Recife, Jaboatao and Paulista — pyriproxyfen is not in use, according to: [http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/02/18/46713891...](http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/02/18/467138913/did- a-pesticide-cause-microcephaly-in-brazil-unlikely-say-experts).

<comment><USER5> > outbreak of Zika-like symptoms

The symptoms are witnessed, sure. But are they caused by Zika; I think not. Zika is around for a long time, and seems to be relatively harmless (as in: no obvious symptoms). Therefor I do not speak of Zika-symptoms.

The sources are merely by Google'ing, I did not do proper background checks. I did my own research on this some time ago and talked it though with a virologist I know; she was surprised that I knew about the absense of link and that they are also coming to that conclusion (though I do not know if her department made an official statement on that).

<comment><USER7> Look, you're making utterly unsubstantiated claims based on your own conjecture and some supposed virologist friend. No matter how smart and educated you might believe yourself to be, you are just as ridiculously making stuff up as eg climate deniers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't see any links whatsoever to hard evidence in the article. The only thing close are a book and an article published in Spanish and French, respectively, and seemingly no translation or availability in English bookstores. Yet everyone in the comments here are accepting it as fact, almost as readily as people accepted the tainted oil as fact.

It's funny how human heuristics prevent critical thinking, even after reading an article about the lack of critical thinking.

One of the most obvious pieces of evidence this article could have included is "The Spanish toxic oil syndrome 20 years after its onset: a multidisciplinary review of scientific knowledge." [1]. In the abstract you will find the following:

 _Attempts to reproduce the condition in laboratory animals have been unsuccessful, and no condition similar to TOS has been reported in the scientific literature._

[1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1240833/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1240833/)

<comment><USER9> Well, it's a newspaper article written by who would be a source, of sorts:

>The FIS - the government agency responsible for toxic oil syndrome - <USER2> to release details of the fieldwork carried out or any background information. However, the families described in the reports were given code numbers and these could be matched against the official list of victims which then became part of the trial documentation. Eventually we identified the families supposedly interviewed for the key epidemiological reports and went to see them.

I'd be interested if they have any full detailed notes about interviews published anywhere, other than the documentary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> FWIW, it appears many of these concerns were known and brought up during the original scandal 30 years ago:

[http://www.nytimes.com/1989/05/21/world/trial-in-spain-on- to...](http://www.nytimes.com/1989/05/21/world/trial-in-spain-on-toxic- cooking-oil-ends-in-uproar.html)

[http://www.nytimes.com/1987/08/02/world/a-long-trial-in- spai...](http://www.nytimes.com/1987/08/02/world/a-long-trial-in-spain-on- fatal-tainted-food.html)

<comment><USER11> "The epidemic is officially deemed to have started on May 1 1981"

<comment><USER10> Yes, and? Obviously people continued to investigate in subsequent years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Note the last paragraph that suggests that this isn't just the 80s scandal, but something that is on-going today as well:

> An internal German government memo was recently leaked to Der Spiegel. > According to this, the monitoring of imported produce had revealed that > there continued to be unsafe pesticide residues on fruit and vegetables from > Spain. Some peppers were "highly contaminated" and the residues had "reached > levels we can no longer tolerate". It was the last line of the memo that was > most telling: "Under no circumstances should the general public be > informed."

<comment><USER13> To be fair, the article was published in 2001.

<comment><USER14> If only we'd known back in 2001 that we were living in the bad old days when governments were irresponsible! At the time, we thought the new, shiny future had arrived!

Of course, we don't need to worry about this today, because the new, shiny future has arrived.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> And yet, Wikipedia only has an article about "Toxic Oil Syndrome" that doesn't mention at all that it might have been a cover-up: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_oil_syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_oil_syndrome)

<comment><USER16> Actually, the last paragraph of the linked wikipedia article mentions the organo-phosphate theory (it somewhat labels it as conspiracy-theory, but it mentions it).

The talk page actually mentions a kind of rebuttal to the organo-phosphate theory (which claims that the symptoms are not compatible with organo- phosphate poisoning):

[http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/33/3/443](http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/33/3/443)

I can't really evaluate any of these claims since my expertise in this field is non-existant. Things might be as simple as described in the Guardian article (which portrays the organo-phosphate theory as self-evident but suppressed truth), or maybe more complicated. The forced resignation of all responsible researchers certainly smells very funny and the Spanish government seems to have tried to suppress the truth or at least give the impression that they were able to handle things by suppressing dissenting opinions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This was a linked article from a comment in this thread, which contains quite a bit more discussion on the topic for those interested: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12068983](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12068983)

</comment><comment><USER7> Very interesting article and sounds well researched and conclusive on the toxic oil case. I'm not expert enough to draw any real conclusions or doubt the evidence but it seems all rather sound. But his wholesale dismissal of most of science as agenda driven is just absurd.

The US case... might be possible if it's to protect local industry, like the whole fracking instanity. That being said, the line he draws from the Spanish case to conclude without any actual evidence that the newer cases are the same is spurious at best and just pure conjecture. I highly doubt that German ministerial staff would avoid food warnings for a known polluted food. They give such warnings or ban sales all the time and certainly wouldn't risk their heads for some Spanish farmers. No link to the PDF or hint at the source makes this sound like just a typical crackpot.

As the author said, the media is not always to be trusted and while scientists might worry about funding, journalists certainly often have to make bold claims and publish unverified theories to make a living.

</comment><comment><USER18> I started to read the article but after reading some paragraphs it still continues spreading mistrust about scientists. This is a very bad indicator in my experience. I think there was some article about it here some time ago, since we cannot attack the science we attack the scientists. I skimmed the rest. I can believe in a government cover up, but I don't see the motivation. The article says it was to cover that some pesticides were harmful, but if that was the case the epidemic should have been more widespread. I don't see also the Spanish government covering a foreign multi national by spreading fear about oil in Spain. A link to the Der Spiegel article would have been great. There are lots of vegetables produced in Spain, that some have too high levels of pesticides is obvious, the question is how many but there is no mention of it. To me the article smells like FUD.

<comment><USER19> I started to read your comment, but stopped after the first sentence when you made it clear you didn't read the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Are particular politicians implicated?

Why does no Spanish TV station do a documentary on this scandal? What is the situation and dynamics of the 'free press' in Spain today?

<comment><USER21> I think you are wrong. This scandal is incredibly well-known in Spain.

It's gotten massive press coverage throughout the years. In fact, most people that used to use cheap cooking oils switched to olive oil after the scandal. (For those who are not familiar with the matter, the scandal involved using chemicals on industrial-grade rapeseed oil to remove dyes and re-sell it to consumers.)

<comment><USER22> > switched to olive oil after the scandal

Do you actually have olive oil in your olive oil? In the U.S., most of the olive oil for sale is either misgraded or adulterated[1]

[1] [http://time.com/money/4326354/fake-olive-oil-food- fraud/](http://time.com/money/4326354/fake-olive-oil-food-fraud/)

<comment><USER23> I was just in Spain, and was told that prior to the financial crisis much of the olive oil produced in Italy and Greece was made from olives grown in Spain. (Spain is a _massive_ producer of olives.) After the crisis they stopped exporting olives and started bottling their own oil, which was the cause of the shortage in supply of extra virgin oil from e.g. Italy that led to organised crime getting into the fake olive oil business. So there's every reason to think that Spain in particular is awash in genuine olive oil.

<comment><USER24> So, a result of the crisis was that Spain decided circumstances had changed such that foreigners' cash was needed _less_ than before?

Your facts may be right (I don't know) but if so, Spanish authorities made a basic economic error in that decision.

<comment><USER23> No, you make more money exporting value-added products (like olive oil) than raw ingredients (like olives). Basic economics says you want to move higher up the value chain, and that's what (I'm told) they did.

Of course this caused further problems for Greece and Italy, which were already not in good shape.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> To get an idea of how serious this scandal was, I have plenty of Spanish friends who won't use rapeseed oil today because they believe it's too risky.

</comment><comment><USER26> My grandmother got intoxicated by the oil. She got super sick but recovered completely. She´s been receiving a pension since as compensation.

<comment><USER24> Can you find out whether she was induced into claiming it was caused by the oil?

The article claims that victims were only classified as such after they had accepted oil as the cause of their sickness. So they had an incentive to do so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> It was not a scandal, it was criminal negligence, with lots of victims.

My hyphothesis after talking with chemists in the field is that someone reused a container tank for synthetic oil in order to carry rapeseed oil.

The rapeseed oil dissolves synthetic oil easily.

They probably thought nothing would happen because of ignorance on the part of the man that made it. He probably used water in order to clean the original tank.

We have some bottles today of the stuff that was retired from the market and could analyze it. There are traces on it of synthetic oil components.

This oil was sold in cheap rural markets, with a green colorant in order for it to look similar to olive oil.

Because of rapeseed accident, nobody in Spain uses rapeseed anymore. They use sunflower oil. Cheap oil from big multinationals that make things like cookies is basically Palm oil.

Palm oil is destroying a big part of the world natural environment.

<comment><USER24> By introducing such an irrelevant yet controversial topic as palm oil, this comment appears to deliberately attempt to deflect the thrust of the 2001 article: organophospates on tomatoes probably, not contaminated oils of any kind, were responsible for this epidemic.</comment></comment>


In South Korea, a Protester's Lone Fight Against Samsung - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/19/world/asia/samsung-tower-protest.html <comment><USER2> > Mr. Kim said Samsung fired him in 1995 for doing what many others, before > and since, have tried to do: organize an independent labor union.

No he was not. He was fired because he tried to sexually assult a women co- worker.

> The woman said in a notarized statement that Mr. Kim had not assaulted her, > and he sued Samsung, demanding his job back.

Although he 'claims' that he has a notarized paper that confirms he did not do it he never submitted it to the court and failed to show it to the public.

> In 1992, his wife was sexually assaulted, and an unsubstantiated newspaper > report speculated that the attacker had a connection to Samsung.

The only proof of the incident was the newspaper article, which was an allegation by his wife of attempted sexual assult. No other proof exists.

<comment><USER3> Do you have proof of your claims?

<comment><USER2> I have but they are all Korean.

<comment><USER4> Please send them to the New York Times.

<comment><USER4> I can't edit this anymore, but I should have said to post them here, and to send them to the New York Times. My mistake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have a friend who didn't know how to code in C++ (although he graudated from CS major) but still got into samsung as a developer, got trained how to write code there. It's a typical conglomerate thing in south korea though. The main strategy here is to assetize(they call them selves as samsung family member) their in-house trained developer. He's going to spend rest of his life there as a samsung developer, enjoying social prestige as a 'samsung employee'.

I recently heard they are now considering to move their code base from svn to git, and write some test code to stabilize the firmware that goes into the ssd products.

I don't think I can explain in short how a mediocre developer who never actually coded something into reality got a degree, and got a job in allegedly the biggest company in south korea... All I can say it is a complex korean thing that requires some cultural understanding of our society.

<comment><USER6> So, basically the company hired complete junior, was willing to train him and somehow that is bad thing as big companies should hire only already learned people?

<comment><USER7> What I read between the lines here is that the company hired someone with no experience and gave them more responsibility than they should have at the beginning of their careers.

<comment><USER8> I feel like this is somehow related to parasite.

<comment><USER6> None of the characters was incapable. All of them were good at what they were hired to - driver, housekeeper, tutor, art tutor. They were also hardworking at their jobs. The rich dude was also good in his job (and caring to his family) and worst you can say about rich mom is that she was naive.

I dont think you understood the movie.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm Korean ethnicity, but Canadian born, my wife is Korean ethnicity and Korean born. We keep talking about whether or not to live in Korea. Korea has seen more rapid economic advancement than any other country in the world. Yeah, I'm saying it beats out China in that regard. I work in China, and while China's progress has been insane, Korea's at a place where China is not yet. So the debate is live in Korea, Canada, or somewhere else (or could just continue working in China, but difficult to call China home, given our backgrounds).

The #1 reason why I wouldn't prefer Korea is because Samsung and other chaebols have too much of a grip on the country. They don't play fair. They don't give other companies even a chance to disrupt them. It's worse than what Microsoft was like in the 90s because at least Microsoft didn't blatantly bribe and corrupt the highest levels of government. They manipulate the stock market extremely maliciously to take out competitors before they can become disruptive. I attended a lecture from a professor at Seoul National University who was an advisor to the government on how to get them to make the stock market more fair and allow companies to grow and achieve success. It was startling to what extent the stock market got manipulated.

Never mind the idea of starting a company and being able to have a great exit. Even if I was just a normal worker, how would my retirement funds be able to grow in that kind of a stock market, even if my employer matched contributions? I'd be dependent on only my bank account savings for retirement, no chance for reinvestment. Or my retirement funds are all tied into the prospects of my employer's stock? Also scary, zero risk diversification.

I think Korea's long-term growth prospects will be severely limited as long as the chaebols have a stranglehold on the economy. I am hopeful by the fact that they let Hanjin go bankrupt. Apparently, everyone in Hanjin was just completely complacent and waiting for the government to bail them out. When they didn't get bailed out, it was a sign that the new government was willing to make some of the hard decisions necessary to allow for a properly entrepreneurial society to thrive.

<comment><USER2> Wow, I'll take this bait.

>They manipulate the stock market extremely maliciously to take out competitors before they can become disruptive.

>Even if I was just a normal worker, how would my retirement funds be able to grow in that kind of a stock market, even if my employer matched contributions?

You really think Samsung manipulates the market to gain something? And you think you'll lose something from it?

>They don't give other companies even a chance to disrupt them.

>Never mind the idea of starting a company and being able to have a great exit.

You know that startups in the United States also don't compete with the sectors where big companies' grip are strong, right?

>I'd be dependent on only my bank account savings for retirement, no chance for reinvestment.

There are loads of reinvestment options like real estate, foreign stocks and others if you think ((they)) are controlling the national stock market.

>Or my retirement funds are all tied into the prospects of my employer's stock? Also scary, zero risk diversification.

Then perhaps don't get a stock option?

>I think Korea's long-term growth prospects will be severely limited as long as the chaebols have a stranglehold on the economy.

And yet, when Samsung tries to close their Gwangju plant everyone starts their uprising. Not in my country but please in my back yard?

>I am hopeful by the fact that they let Hanjin go bankrupt.

 _Oh, I 'm so politically correct that I am happy with thousands losing their jobs! My views are more important than their lives._

I live in the US after living in Seoul and Newfoundland. I will choose Korea over Canada at any times. Canadian medical system is a shitter, slower and bureaucratic version of Korea. I feared for my life because I was not able to get an emergency surgery because they have shortage of doctors. I had to wait a week where in Korea I've had my surgery in 3:00 in the morning after waiting 20 minutes. Old people in Canada fear for their life and move to Mexico or US. It's a total mess.

Services at restaurants are shitty and more expensive. Groceries are shitty and expensive. Winter too long that people can't live without Xanax. Drug addicts on the street. Gun control. Housing prices. Trump ruining the economy. Unemployment rise and fall with raw material prices.... Yeah, I'd love to live in Canada to feel these.

<comment><USER9> _> You really think Samsung manipulates the market to gain something? And you think you'll lose something from it?_

Yes. But don't take my word for it. The lecture I attended was given by Woojin Kim, a professor of finance at Seoul National University's Business School. [http://cba.snu.ac.kr/en/faculty?memberidx=60582&major=6&mode...](http://cba.snu.ac.kr/en/faculty?memberidx=60582&major=6&mode=view&part=career)

He advises Korea's National Pension Service (NPS) how to become active in improving corporate transparency for share ownership. In his lecture, he explained that currently, what happens is that a variety of holding companies can by and sell companies, but the nature of who owns the holding companies can be obscured.

So imagine a Donkey Kong level four levels high. Various companies can own companies at any level below it. For a simplified explanation, you may have companies A, B, and C each holding 17% of companies D, E, and F. Then together, they hold 51% of each of D, E, and F, and thereby control all voting rights for those companies. Then companies A, D, and E also hold 13% each of companies G, H, I, and J. Likewise, companies C, F, I, and J each hold 9% of companies K, L, M, N, O, and P. And so on. Easy for all these companies to acquire these shares on the stock market.

But the chaebol at the top of the pyramid holds 51% of each of companies A, B, and C. So the chaebol effectively exercises control over companies K, L, M, N, O, and P without even owning shares in those companies, or owning only a minority percentage of shares. However, this control isn't visible to shareholders of companies K, L, M, N, O, and P, so they don't know that there are major fiduciary duty problems with companies K, L, M, N, O, and P. Multiple the 51% chain from the top to the bottom, you have outsized control of the bottom companies without the controllers actually owning 51% of those companies. Shareholders play a rigged game they are destined to lose, and it's rigged way more than other respectable stock markets (let's limit the discussion to respectable stock markets).

These fiduciary duty conflicts lead to problems where, for example, a company with a really good technology is forced to sell their technology to the chaebol for pennies on the dollar and leave the technology company with nothing of value. Classic corporate raiding, except even more dastardly. Now the professor said that although this happens in Korea, in other countries with more transparent stock markets, that would never happen because the minority shareholders could sue the company and stop the transaction from happening. But even if investigations happen and people get put in jail, the professor noted that there's a solution for that too! It is easy to hire a no- name off the street, make him CEO (remember, they have 51% voting rights, they can do whatever they want), and have him take the fall when the shit hits the fan. The no-name agrees to the deal because he'll be well-compensated for some years in jail, whereas his employment prospects weren't great otherwise anyway. It's hilarious.

The professor advises Korea's National Pension Service and advises them on how they can force companies to be more transparent with their ownership structures to ensure that if these 51% chains allow companies to have outsized control of companies, other shareholders are at least aware of what's going on, and there can possibly be the start of a legal framework to prevent this kind of corporate raiding from happening.

When a chaebol pulls this kind of stuff, yes, not only the average shareholder can lose something from it, the National Pension Service can also lose something from it. And the National Pension Service is supposed to be for the people. Corporations serving themselves at the expense of normal people, what else is new? But Korea's chaebols take it to another level.

South Korea is working to fix problems with its stock market, they know that it's an issue: [https://www.pionline.com/governance/s-koreas-600-billion- pen...](https://www.pionline.com/governance/s-koreas-600-billion-pension-fund- be-more-active-shareholder)

There's nothing incorrect about the very last quote in the article: _" But it is true that South Korea has been lagging far behind the global standard for corporate governance."_

 _> You know that startups in the United States also don't compete with the sectors where big companies' grip are strong, right?_

No, they disrupt them or force them to up their game. If the incumbents don't up their game, they become like the record companies. And if all goes well, they become major players that can compete with the big boys like Google and Slack competing with Microsoft, Microsoft and Apple competing with IBM, and so on. When was the last time you heard of a Korean startup growing up to compete with the big boys? It happens in the US, it happens in China, heck, it even happens in Canada sometimes. Korea?

 _> There are loads of reinvestment options like real estate, foreign stocks and others if you think ((they)) are controlling the national stock market.

> Then perhaps don't get a stock option?_

I think you're missing the point. My point is that I don't think there are many great options in Korea when the chaebol tentacles are everywhere, and foreign stock markets are easier to invest in, especially tax-wise, if you are a resident of those countries.

Also, if you think it's more important to prop up an unprofitable company because it employs people, I don't think you understand how much of a drain that would be on the Korean economy. Countries need strong companies led by competent management that can sustain themselves, not corrupt companies led by incompetent management that will cost the taxpayer money. I suppose you think that the US government bailing out the airlines is a great thing when it wouldn't have been necessary if those companies were run well? [https://www.businessinsider.com/taxpayers-bailout-us- airline...](https://www.businessinsider.com/taxpayers-bailout-us-airline- industry-2020-3) Or that the US government bails out banks every 10 years, despite bank executives receiving compensation that only top geniuses should deserve? [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/20/the-price- of-t...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/20/the-price-of-the- coronavirus-pandemic) Why is it the taxpayer that should pay the burden for corporate executives that do a bad job? Taking care of the people, that's what unemployment insurance should be for. The taxpayer shouldn't have to take care of the corporations too. Or should the government fund Kodak to continue to be the size it once was at the expense of taxpayers because it employed so many people, even though it can't figure out how to self-sustain itself as the world changes? Should the Canadian government have used taxpayer money to fund Nortel, even though nobody was buying their network switches?

You seem extremely emotional coming to the conclusion that because I think the chaebols having control is a bad thing, it in turn implies that I think Korea sucks as a country. I never said that Korea's worse than other countries regarding various services and attributes. I said that this chaebol thing was the #1 reason why I wouldn't consider Korea. There are many reasons why I would consider Korea, and maybe in the end, they would outweigh this #1 reason why I wouldn't. Do you not weigh pros and cons when you make your decisions?

Korea does many things well. Streets are super clean. Health care is great. It has the best COVID-19 response out of any country in the world. I am saying that the great progress that Korea has made to date is at risk if Korea lets the chaebols compete unfairly. It puts at risk Korea's ability to finance its current way of life in the future.

This thought of mine derives from Joseph Schumpeter's idea of creative destruction and Clayton M. Christensen's idea of the innovator's dilemma. Companies birthing and dying are a natural cycle of life. If chaebols compete fairly, they should be ripe for disruption. But they don't compete fairly. That is a artifact of Korea's economic history of how it was able to raise itself from poverty. Chaebol companies got special treatment and special rights in order to get them to be the economic engines that brought Korea into the modern age. We can be thankful for what they did in the past. But why let them abuse those privileges in the present? Are they more important than the nation? I hope you would not think that they are.

Never mind that OP is about how it treats workers. The chaebols are unfair about that too. The Korean elite are too afraid of losing their place in society, or too greedy, to give other members of society and competing corporations a fair shake.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> [https://archive.md/ZkJiy](https://archive.md/ZkJiy)</comment>


The Most Important Image Captured by Hubble - <AUTHOR> http://all-that-is-interesting.com/important-image-captured-by-hubble

<comment><USER2> Lately I've gotten interested in playing with some of the raw (or at least, more raw than the standard press image) data from the Hubble and other space telescopes... There is a massive archive of all the data Hubble has collected at [http://archive.stsci.edu/hst](http://archive.stsci.edu/hst) and an introduction to the FITS image format they use at [http://www.spacetelescope.org/projects/fits_liberator/](http://www.spacetelescope.org/projects/fits_liberator/)

However, I haven't made any impressive images yet because I'm still trying to wrap my head around the entire data pipeline & come up with a workflow that helps automate the process. There is a ton of preprocessing that goes into creating high-quality colored images from the raw data - you have to figure out white balance, clean up hot pixels, noise and cosmic ray hits among other things, align the images, decide which frequencies will represent which colors, align them correcting for geometric distortion, and finally combine them algorithmically.

There is an introduction to some of this work at [http://www.stsci.edu/ftp/science/hdf/pipeline/pipeline.html](http://www.stsci.edu/ftp/science/hdf/pipeline/pipeline.html) and [http://www.spacetelescope.org/projects/fits_liberator/improc...](http://www.spacetelescope.org/projects/fits_liberator/improc/) but I've had a hard time figuring out the best way to turn this process into a workflow - I've basically been manipulating them manually so far. Has anyone else experimented with this? I'm starting to consider putting together a collection of scripts to automate some of the process, but it's a difficult thing to do entirely automatically!

</comment><comment><USER3> I've watched this video several times and enjoyed it. But I'm skeptical about the claim that it was "questioned" or that they really thought the image might have come out completely black. Did any scientist think that between us and the edge of the observable universe there was absolutely nothing?

Another minor nitpick: between this video and a similar one by the same person, the image is said to have been captured in 1995, 1996, or 2003. Which is it? [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BG4IEePixoU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BG4IEePixoU)</comment>


The Rise and Fall of Thinking Machines, Bankruptcy Article - <AUTHOR> https://www.inc.com/magazine/19950915/2622.html <comment><USER2> From Sep 15, 1995</comment>


Facebook won't let you type this - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2015/11/05/technology/facebook-tsu/ <comment><USER2> >> Tsu users were creating fake accounts to boost their pages. Facebook says its users started reporting Tsu.co links as spam, which Facebook defines as "sending bulk messages, excessively posting links ... and sending friend requests to people you don't know personally."

TL;DR: tsu.co spams Facebook. Facebook brings the banhammer in the same way they ban every spammy app that does the same thing today, including removing posts of a lady who draws dogs and links to her tsu.co account. Tsu tries to play the victim.

Nothing to see here folks.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, if you spammed any other forum or social network, what do you think would happen? You'd probably get banned, and potentially get blacklisted. Same thing happened to Tsu. It's not surprising.

As far as the concept of the site... I strongly doubt it's going to succeed in the long run. Tsu's revenue sharing was already tried a bunch of times in the past, there were actually add ons for that sort of thing for many different forum scripts. Sometimes it was based on who made the original post/whose profile it was, sometimes it was based on some sort of percentage system where X percent of the site ads would go to a user based on how active they were.

It usually failed. People treated the site like a source of free money, and the inevitable result was a huge gold rush that ended up bringing in hordes of morons looking to get rich quick by putting in the minimum amount of effort. Fake users, thousands of spammy or low quality posts... it eventually made the world of Idiocracy look like something out of Shakespeare. Digitalpoint was a good example of one of the sites who tried and gave up this idea.

Either way, I'm not surprised they're blocked, and while I wish them the best of luck, I suspect they really won't like the results of this 'revenue sharing' gimmick.

</comment><comment><USER4> Tsu.co looks very similar to a pyramid/MLM scheme. When there's a growing tree of users making money from inviting other users, that is encouraging behavior that will end up being very spam-like, as has already been proven by users' activity so far, such as creating fake accounts to boost their own pages. I see no issue with Facebook's actions here. Plus it is their own platform, they can control it however they wish.

</comment><comment><USER5> Almost every Tsu submission to HN (and Reddit) has a received an incredibly suspicious amount of upvotes, which coincidentally demonstrates why it's a problem.

<comment><USER6> We'd see how much upvotes this history gets --although the fact that we're talking about that in here could bias the results?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > The content you're trying to share includes a link that our security systems > detected to be unsafe: tsu.co

Is it just me, or is this Facebook lying to its users about security? If they want to block it for spam reasons, they should say so.

</comment><comment><USER8> At least the 28-year-old model quoted at the end has enough wisdom to make this a non-story:

> "Very few people even know about Tsu," she said. "I don't believe that > Facebook and Instagram want Tsu to go viral. it would cost them a lot of > money."

Yeah, no kidding. Facebook isn't a public utility, it's a private company whose interests are best served in squashing all competition and doing whatever it can to maximise profit. If anyone is remotely surprised by this, they need to re-enrol in Capitalism 101.

</comment><comment><USER9> A business model like Tsu's can kill Facebook.

Facebook keeps 100% of ad revenue; Tsu keeps 10% and pays 45% to it's users.

</comment><comment><USER10> I know some people will argue that FB can and should be able to set their own laws. I disagree. FB has reached such dominant status that behavior like this - blocking possible competitors should be fought by laws.

<comment><USER11> Of course not. If this is a meaningful afront to Facebook customers, those customers should leave Facebook. There is no valid moral principle by which the shareholders of Facebook should be forced to subsidize their competitors. Period.

Putting a gun to their heads (which is all a law really achieves) and telling those people that have invested, for their own self interest, that they now have to fund someone else's self interest is in fact, immoral.

<comment><USER10> What's the difference between Facebook in 2015 and Windows in 1998 ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp.))?

Both are software platforms bound by network effects which have reached monopoly situations and then abuse(d) their situation by attempting to use their dominance in one area to reach dominance in another area.

<comment><USER8> It used to be said that it was impossible for a website to have a monopoly because the cost of switching is zero. I rather think that facebook's dominance has disproven that rule, though; in the world of the social network, switching is actually much more difficult than we ever expected.

<comment><USER10> Google was the champion for that idea, regarding their Google Search product.

That is still valid - there are no (strong) network effects involved with a web search engine.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Sell Your Side Projects - <AUTHOR> https://sugarkubes.io/maker <comment><USER2> Not really a project I'm interested in, but my first impressions may valuable.

Initially, I though this was going to about selling copyright, but it appears to about selling containerized applications/servers.

The page loads and then is whited out with a loading circle when loaded without Javascript. This doesn't seem necessary; a slightly borked website is preferable to infinite loading without Javascript. You might slightly increase who you reach by being noscript compatible.</comment>


Ask HN: How to help my parents and grandparents understand Google reCaptcha? - <AUTHOR> After spending almost two hours helping my mother and grandparents to configure an online account, via phone calls, I realized that Google reCaptcha is a nightmare for people who are not so invested into the tech world. They are struggling to understand which images they are supposed to select, even using prescribed glasses. The whole experience affected my mother so much that she cried when, after 2.5 hours, she was able to register her account, maybe out of happiness.
My grandparents didn't do any better. We resorted to make a video call so I could tell them which images to select, but obviously this is not a solution in the long term. They will surely face this challenge over and over again. I fear that I will not be there to help them all the time. I want to know what is a good way to teach non-tech-savvy people about this type of things.
Note #1: I understand how Google reCaptcha works. It will stop showing the image-selection challenge after some time, when the user's behavior can be detected with enough accuracy to consider them a non-artificial entity (aka. robot). But with the little amount of time that my family spend on the computer, I am sure that they will have to face the infamous Google reCaptcha for a few months.
Note #2: The problem with the images is not with the quality of the pictures, but with the fact that they don't know if the objects in the squares are part of the category requested in the challenge. For example, my grandfather asked a couple of times if a truck could be selected even though the challenge was requesting to select only buses. Road signs were the most difficult ones to solve, some of them were too small, or were spread across different images, they though that selecting the image image would be enough, but clearly it wasn't (clearly for me, not for them). <comment><USER2> As one who hates the Recaptcha stuff, I feel for your parents and grandparents.

My problems are: 1) when it says signs, does it want the sign posts too? To be fair I have probably clicked the non road signs with the road signs.

2) click the images with cars ... hmmm is ther a car in that? I am not sure. Do partial cars count?

I kind of prefer the old illegible text ones.

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe signing them up to Be My Eyes ([https://www.bemyeyes.com/](https://www.bemyeyes.com/)) could help?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, I will sign them up on this service and see if it helps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I honestly never checked: do they still have an audio version? Maybe that's easier, even if it's still a shitty solution?

<comment><AUTHOR> There is an audio option, but there's two problems with that:

• My family doesn't speaks English, so they don't understand,

• The option to change the language is not easily reachable,

We just tried, in the official example [1] and this is what we get [2].

Edit: The error shown in the image about the automated queries may be explained by the fact that I have installed a VPN in their computers to protect them against unfiltered websites and generic malware. We are using _" Private Internet Access"_ [3] and although I could explain them that changing the IP address just requires a few clicks, I can see them forgetting that and getting stuck for several minutes trying to get the audio option working.

[1] [https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api2/demo](https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api2/demo)

[2] [https://i.imgur.com/0kmtCsE.png](https://i.imgur.com/0kmtCsE.png)

[3] [https://www.privateinternetaccess.com](https://www.privateinternetaccess.com)

<comment><USER4> I'm not convinced a VPN is that useful in the general case for normal users (i.e. no specific ISP badness or other thing to work around), so I'd consider dropping that to reduce the amount of challenges presented.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As another person said I also haven't checked recently but I remember "accessibility" being a consideration in captcha systems even 5-10 years ago. I expect by now they should have more accessible alternative methods.</comment>


Intel oneAPI - <AUTHOR> https://software.intel.com/en-us/oneapi <comment><USER2> This is very poorly named</comment>


Toxic Work Culture in Europe - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@gabriellemic/work-culture-in-europe-a398eaf2ab02 <comment><USER2> The way those comments are reported, completely removed from the context of the conversation, makes it very hard to draw any conclusion from them. It's impossible to tell whether they go towards the point presumably made by the title that there is a "toxic work culture in Europe" (full disclosure: I work in Europe).

For instance, this comment: "Be a good soldier, do what you're told and that's it." Was the person being told to "be a good soldier" actually a soldier? Is it metaphorical? What's going on there?

What about this one? "You need to learn, the contribution you can give right now is very limited." What is the context of this? Is the person being told so a new graduate, and the person speaking a senior dev? Why are they being told off? What's the situation?

"When I talk, you shut up and listen." Again, what is the situation? Is this really in a professional context (I find that very hard to believe)? Why is this presented as evidence that the climate in Europe is "limiting innovation"?

"You make it seem like you've been doing this for 50 years or something." Irony? Has the person really been doing that for 50 years? And what is "that"? Mainframe programming? Washing dishes? Animal husbandry? What?

Besides, in the last few weeks I've read a bunch of articles on HN that are very harshly critical of the work culture in the Valley, which I assume is supposed to be the counterpoint to Europe's "cultural climate" (whatever that's supposed to mean).

Maybe what's limiting growth in Europe is that we're still emerging from a global economic crisis- and maybe the fact that despite all that Europe is one of the most prosperous regions in the world with one of the highest standards of living is actually a reason to celebrate its work culture.

</comment><comment><USER3> "European" here[1], and I have no idea what I just read (lack of English wasn't the problem). I think this article is a joke or maybe a bit surreal? Or maybe written by somebody who had not enough sampling data from the rest of the continent but only had 3 jobs and they were all in the same city in some shitty place. Sure if you sample data exclusively from unhappy employees in Europe your answer is predetermined: we're all shit.

[1]whatever that means because we all know every country here from Italy, Spain, France, Romania, Croatia to Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Germany, UK are all identical and can be lumped together :-)</comment>


Orkut Now Encouraging Users to Project Different Personas to Different People - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/new_version_of_googles_orkut_separates_business_fr.php

<comment><AUTHOR> Prelude to Google Me?</comment>


ShowHear - Site to find concerts your area - <AUTHOR> http://showhear.com

<comment><USER2> 2camels.com is the another one to find festivals, concerts, and events around the world</comment>


How to Use Your DSLR Camera as a Webcam in Linux - <AUTHOR> https://www.crackedthecode.co/how-to-use-your-dslr-as-a-webcam-in-linux/ <comment><USER2> Author of the article here, thanks for the feedback! I've been using my DSLR as my daily-driver webcam for ~3 months now, and it's been working perfectly. Glad you found it helpful.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I just found this, going to try on my Sony RX100VA and Sony A7III in a bit. Will report back with results.

edit: it worked! flawlessly! take that capture card price gougers!!!

</comment><comment><USER3> I've started to use it, and it works flawlessly on Fedora. Well done!</comment>


Spark - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/holman/spark <comment><USER2> Just did a Haskell version of spark. It supports in 9 lines of code (exclude comment + empty line) Double instead of just Int. Negative numbers.

[https://github.com/Mgccl/mgccl- haskell/blob/master/random/sp...](https://github.com/Mgccl/mgccl- haskell/blob/master/random/spark.hs)

<comment><USER3> Same features. 4 SLoC of Ruby :)

<https://gist.github.com/1367091>

<comment><USER4> 'floor' on last line should be changed to 'round'.

      ▁▁▁▁▁▁▂▂▂▂▂▂▃▃▃▃▃▃▅▅▅▅▅▅▆▆▆▆▆▆▇ = floor
      ▁▁▁▂▂▂▂▂▂▃▃▃▃▃▃▅▅▅▅▅▅▆▆▆▆▆▆▇▇▇▇ = round

<comment><USER3> Thanks! Much better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is pretty cool. Unfortunately it's coupled with some of the more obnoxious documentation I have seen recently. While the docs aren't very long, I had to read through a third of it to figure out simply what Spark is.

I'm all for being cute, but it shouldn't come at the cost of a basic understanding of what the program actually does and is useful for.

<comment><USER6> In my defense, I _did_ try: <https://github.com/holman/spark/pull/34/files>

<comment><USER5> Excellent. Does a great job of clarifying.

<comment><USER6> Unfortunately, the maintainer didn't like it as much as you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The script is not a proper POSIX bourne shell script, as it uses arrays.

For starters, it won't work in dash (Debian and Ubuntu /bin/sh implementation). So the shebang line should be changed to #!/bin/bash (not sure if it would work in Zsh either).

<comment><USER8> Fork and fix please!

<comment><USER9> ... and send a pull-request, so everyone can share the happy.

<comment><USER7> Already done, and someone even did a better fix:

<https://github.com/holman/spark/pull/8>

<comment><USER10> NetBSD seriously doesn't put bash in /bin? That's just broken by design.

<comment><USER11> I can't speak to NetBSD, but FreeBSD doesn't put any user-installed programs in /bin or /usr/bin, they all go into /usr/local. Since bash isn't distributed as part of the base system, it goes into /usr/local/bin/bash

<comment><USER10> So then how do you write cross-platform scripts? You can't even do "#!/usr/bin/env bash" since I'm assuming what you're saying means 'env' is in /usr/local/ as well, but on Linux systems it'll be in /usr/.

Broken! Can we please just pick one convention and stick with it? Oh, standards... so many to choose from.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This reminds me of another useful utility from the childhood:

alias updick='/usr/bin/uptime | perl -ne "/(\d+) d/;print 8,q(=)x\$1,\"D\n\""'

<comment><USER13> The dick grows depending on how long the system has been running?

<comment><USER12> Exactly. Kinda measure of how strong is sysadmin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm curious: is there a reason U+2584 LOWER HALF BLOCK is missing from the character set, which otherwise contains the progression from U+2581 to U+2587?

Edit: U+2588 seems like an obvious candidate as well.

<comment><USER15> No idea. Here they are for everyone's use:

ticks = " ▁▂▃▄▅▆▇█"

I've included SPACE as well. That's an obvious missing one.

<comment><USER16> At least in my OS/X terminal using the "Monaco" font (which I think is the default), the final one (U+2588) doesn't descend as far as the rest of the characters. It really produces some ugly output with that one included.

Including the space character means that you lose a nice baseline if the input is fairly sparse, so it looks less like a bar graph and more like just some random blobs.

<comment><USER17> Yes, on the mac it seems only menlo renders it correctly, (vs all the other fixed with font families that bork the rendering in various ways)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Ah, as inspired by Edward ttyfte.

<comment><USER19> That ^ is why HN needs a LOL button :)

<http://img819.imageshack.us/img819/264/hnlol.png>

(edit) Ah, the downvoting frenzy! 4601 karma points to go. Bring it on, fellow HNers. Don't forget to quote the guidelines and to lecture me too as no bashing is complete without showing some smug superiority with a hint of righteousness.

<comment><USER20> I was about to upvote compensate you before I read your edit.

<comment><USER19> Well. When I posted the above comment, its parent was lingering at the very bottom of the page. Then it quickly floated to the top, and after that mine got as quickly downvoted into oblivion. Interesting dynamic in itself.

Right now the karma counter keeps oscillating around 4600... which makes me regret that I didn't say it was 4701 :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I rewrote it in C, so it's faster and can work more efficiently on different data sets. It also uses a prettier algorithm for determining heights. Have fun:

<http://git.zx2c4.com/spark/tree/spark.c>

        $ git clone http://git.zx2c4.com/spark
        $ cd spark
        $ make
        $ ./spark 1 4 2 8 14
        ▂▃▂▅█
        $ curl -s http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/catalogs/eqs1day-M1.txt | cut -d, -f9 | ./spark
        ▂▃▄▃▃▃▄▃▇▃▄▄▄▅▃▄▄▄▅▅▅▄▄▄▃▃▃▃▃▄▃▄█▅▄▄▄▄▃▇▄▄▄█▄▃▄▄▄▄▃▃▄▅▄▅▃▃▃▃▇▄▅▄▇▃▅▃▄▃▄▃▇▃▃▄▇▃▄▃▄▃▃▃▄▃▃▃▃▃▃▅▃▄▃▃

</comment><comment><USER22> Nice: found a spark _line_ generator at <http://sandbox.kidstrythisathome.com/louis/> :

⡠⠞⠉⠙⠦⣀⠴⠋⠉⠳⢄⡠⠞⠉⠙⠦⣀⠴⠋⠉⠳⢄

<comment><USER23> Needs a lot more characters to handle height progressions and angles better, but that's awesome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Hmm, I get the following:

      [scotty@Scotty-Allens-MacBook-Air ~/bin]$ spark 1,2,3,4,5
      ▇\c
      ▇\c
      ▇\c
      ▇\c
      ▇\c

I suspect this has something to do with my terminal settings, but I'm not sure quite what...

Nifty idea, regardless.

<comment><USER25> Try changing line 120 to

      echo -e $"$(print_tick $number)\c"

And it should work fine.

<comment><USER26> I found it necessary to escape the backslash

             echo -e $"$(print_tick $number)\\c"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I've quickly looked at the link, read the reviews here, and there's actually no description of what spark _is_. I gather is an UTF-8 graph generator.

<comment><USER28> Sparklines Wikipedia page: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparkline>

spark, the linked project, is just an implementation of a sparkline generator for the command line.

<comment><USER27> Thanks! First time I've heard of "sparkline". Of course I've seen these items for as long as I can remember, but I just call them "graphs". :P

<comment><USER29> A sparkline is a specific type of graph used for certain types of data. The wiki page is pretty clear with the uses and limitations.

Not all graphs are created equal, it's important to use the right tool for the job. This tool isnt just a graph generator, it's a spark bar chart generator that's compact enough to fit in the command line. Overall a cool idea.

<comment><USER27> I feel like I'm being reprimanded. Forgive me if I'm mistaken.

> A sparkline is a specific type of graph

My point is this should be explained _somewhere_. Anybody else unfamiliar with sparklines will now have the benefit of this thread. Previously, to me anyway, it was a mystery.

> The wiki page is pretty clear with the uses and limitations.

It is. It was only presented upon my initial query, and am grateful to @IgorPartola for providing!

> Not all graphs are created equal, it's important to use the right > tool for > the job. This tool isnt just a graph generator, > it's a > spark bar chart > generator that's compact enough to fit in > the > command line. Overall a > cool idea.

It is, indeed. My initial note wasn't about the coolness of the project, just "what _is_ the project"? Is clear now. Anybody else who is ignorant about sparklines as I was, enjoy this thread!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Cool. I also like that he set up a wiki where people can contribute interesting spark one liners:

<https://github.com/holman/spark/wiki/Wicked-Cool-Usage>

<comment><USER31> All involve awk or sed. That cuts out a large portion of the potential userbase...

Perhaps common uses could be wrapped in options to the script? For instance, an option to graph numbers on separate lines, to graph all numbers in the input in order, to graph a specific column of information (like passing through cut first) or to graph commonly graphed sources?

<comment><USER32> I feel like they're examples of really awesome use cases, so it shouldn't matter if people can't use them. Not to mention, I feel like this tool is targeted for terminal junkies who likely already have awk/sed.

<comment><USER6> Basically. Are there very many people who would generate sparklines, using a sh program - somewhere that has sh but not awk or sed?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> <https://github.com/bitly/data_hacks>

</comment><comment><USER34> Sparklines are cool. This is just a bar graph and not nearly as useful.

<comment><USER35> So, because you can't deviate below the x axis this is really that much less useful?

<comment><USER36> This also doesn't meet the high resolution part of Tufte's definition ("a small intense, simple, word-sized graphic with typographic resolution"[1]).

[1]: [http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch- msg?msg_id=0...](http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch- msg?msg_id=0001OR&topic_id=1)

<comment><USER37> They're _comparatively_ higher density...

<comment><USER36> This gives you eight levels (plus blank)[1]. Most of the type I read is at least twice that many pixels high.

[1]:<https://github.com/holman/spark/blob/master/spark#L46>

<comment><USER37> Tufte honestly thinks pixelated type is pretty terrible, too. 16 pixel density is embarrassing compared to printed or pressed text.

But in either case, it's obvious that's a silly argument. Trends posterized to 8 levels are far easier to read in "sparkbar" form than as a list of numbers. It's suboptimal, but better than the plain list.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I hooked this up to my homebrew cohort-analysis script and saw a gratifying terminal hockeystick :D

</comment><comment><USER39> a bit more efficient, and without the comma requirement

<https://gist.github.com/1366926>

</comment><comment><USER40> Because I want my shell prompt to be a giant graph.

▁▁▁▁▅▁▇▁▁▅▁▁▁▁▁▂▂▁▃▃▁▁▃▁▃▁▂▁▁▂▂▅▂▃▂▃▃▁▆▃▃▃▁▇▁▁▂▂▂▇▅▁▂▂▁▇▁▃▁▇▁▂▁▇▁▁▆▂▁▇▁▂▁▁▂▅▁▂▁▆▇▇▂▁▂▁▁▁▂▂▁▅▁▂▁▁▃▁▃▁▁▁▃▂▂▂▁▁▅▂▁▁▁▁▂▂▁▁▁▂▂$

Ship it.

<comment><USER41> Does HN really not have any protection against comments that are very long single words that screw up the page width?

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> What would be really interesting is finding out which decent programming fonts can show block elements. I mean, beyond the DejaVu Sans Mono fiasco.

<comment><USER43> <http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html>

<comment><USER44> This is what I've been using (after more than a year with DejaVu Sans Mono) and I sometimes still stop to admire my terminal ;)

Using #e8e8e8 instead of pure white for the text color helps too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> <https://gist.github.com/1366875> (python)

<comment><USER45> thanks. here's a couple bugfixes. fixed width calc & handles negative #s

<https://gist.github.com/1368454>

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Here's a port of it to Python already live:

<https://github.com/kennethreitz/spark.py>

<comment><USER47> Here's my effort: <https://gist.github.com/1368953>

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I would rather it took a number, one per line from stdin. Great idea though.

<comment><USER44> Try this:

        alias spark='tr "\\n" "," | xargs spark'

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> had basically the same idea a while back - but would have used standard ascii characters and written it in c... still cool though!

</comment><comment><USER50> this should be utf-8 supported.

</comment><comment><USER51> cool, but:

$ spark 3,4,9 ▃▇▇

huh?

<comment><USER6> A fixed bug <https://github.com/holman/spark/issues/19> With HEAD:

        $ spark 3 4 9
        ▃▄▇

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Holman never fails to impress

</comment><comment><USER53> Blogs on swearing are so last week. This week is Holman week.

Just an observation.

</comment><comment><USER54> This is sort of useless. Giving visual meaning to a bunch of numbers means nothing. It's just a bunch of numbers.</comment>