Stockton is giving people $500 a month. Here's how they're spending it - <AUTHOR> https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article235716022.html <comment><USER2> > about 38 percent of purchases each month go toward food, and 25 percent on > sales and merchandise such as clothing, home goods and items from discount > stores such as Walmart.

> Gas, electric and telecommunication bill payments make up the third largest > spending category, about 11 percent. Less than 1 percent of total money > tracked has been spent at alcohol or tobacco retailers, according to SEED > spokeswoman Amanda Blanton.

</comment><comment><USER3> If they had prior data on their spending to compare against, that would be interesting to see if anything changed immediately.</comment>


Free book on Statistics for Programmers - <AUTHOR> http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkstats/thinkstats.pdf

<comment><USER2> The posted URL links directly to a PDF file. Here's a link to the book's home page, where you can read its description, browse it in HTML or download the PDF, code samples and data files:

Think Stats -- Probability and Statistics for Programmers

<http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkstats>

(The book is published under Creative Commons, so this is a legal download.)

</comment><comment><USER3> The author, Allen B. Downey, also has another free book called _Think Complexity_.

      This book is about complexity science, data structures and
      algorithms, intermediate programming in Python, and the
      philosophy of science:

<http://www.greenteapress.com/compmod/>

<comment><USER4> Hah, I just bought this book from O'Reilly last week. I had no idea it was available online. Though, the ereader formats might be worth it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> When glancing through the book, I noticed the brief section on the Monty Hall problem. When I first heard about the problem, my immediate reaction was to simulate it, which is exactly what this book suggests doing. For those inclined to approach problems this way, I think this book could be very helpful in teaching baseline statistics.

One of the things that bugged me about my college stats class was that it was taught at such a low-level. The material never advanced to a point to where I felt I was learning things that could be resourceful down the line. Instead of immediately jumping into Excel or SPSS datasets and doing meaningful things with them, we were busy doing stats exercises by-hand, which seems like such a waste of time. Sure, you have to know what the various elements mean, but do you really need to know the nuts and bolts of it, when in actually, you're going to be using a computer to do it anyway?

</comment><comment><USER6> I really liked O'Reilly's _Statistics in a Nutshell_ ; it's readable, it's well structured if you need to look up something, but it isn't just a toolbox, it also spends the time to lay down the concepts and put things in perspective.

<comment><USER7> I would wait for the second edition, the first edition has too many errors and typos. The errata is very long.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is the content in this version any different from the ebook by the same author and published by O'Reilly? (Because I bought the latter awhile back...)</comment>


Show HN: my weekend project - stumbleupon for videos - <AUTHOR> http://cyrolaughs.com/videos/1605610326-1kAG39jKi0lI#.Ts18MnNZiz0

<comment><USER2> Does it use any algorithms to figure out what I might like most given my voting history, or is it just random?

<comment><AUTHOR> It is trying to use your voting history during a session to line up the best video to show you next without repeating.

It balances certain priorities. It starts by showing you popular videos and then based on how you vote shows you similar ones, while mixing in new videos so that they can get profiled.

About 20% of the time it will show you a random video that h received positive reviews overall.

If people have ideas about cool algorithms to try, I'm all ears. How is it doing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> There was a site called Nowmov (backed by Ashton Kutcher) that did something very similar, but took videos from twitter as ones to show. It's been shut down after a number of improvements, it is now called nowbox - a set top box and tv guide of youtube channels, apparently.

You could let people sign-in with youtube, grab their likes, favourites and subscriptions - analyze the tags of those videos and try and tailor videos around those. YT already has a recommendations tab so you'd be playing second fiddle to that.

</comment><comment><USER4> You do know about <http://video.stumbleupon.com/> right? :)

Not that that takes away anything from your project of course :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I really like <http://video.stumbleupon.com>, but I feel like I spend 90% of the time stumbling after a few secs.

I wanted to try to make a site where I want to watch a higher proportion of the videos all the way through. Figured that it would be a fun weekend project.

<comment><USER4> Mad props on sitting down and actually hacking something out :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. My goals was to release as fast as possible. Probably going to add accounts so people can get credit for submitting awesome videos.

Figured it would be fun to use even before I had that part finished.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice attempt. I had created <http://mustwatchvideos.com> couple of years before (still running great), just to filter the wheat from the chaff. It is very difficult to find really good videos from the thousands out there on the net. Most of the popular ones are either some tv shows or albums, but the real gems though small in number are really gems.

Edit: One thing to watch out for is the spammy and porn# submissions that you need to moderate each and every day. Its a huge effort specially when you accept user submissions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool site. Thanks for the tips and advice.

I tried to challenge myself to keep things as simple as possible and to minimize click count.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> When my friends and I were sharing videos online this weekend, I realized that a lot of times we just wanted to have something interesting play. It was a drag having to rack our brains or look for new videos to watch. Hopefully this will be fun.

I'd love as much feedback as possible.

Also if you have fun and interesting videos, please submit them.

Added bonuses: It seems that watching embedded videos means that you don't have to watch ads before a youtube video starts. You also don't need to resize the video or click play.

<comment><USER6> love it!!! brilliant idea!i usually 'stumble upon' videos via facebook when my friends post anything interesting.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I'm glad you like it.

Most of the videos that I've enjoyed recently come from friends on Facebook and Twitter too. Wanted it to be easier to find videos that like-minded people enjoy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like it, it would be better if it had a few more options your opinion on the video instead of just awesome or dislike, maybe a middle option would be good?

Also if this is successful and people actually use which I will when procrastinating, maybe add some other genres like extreme sports, interesting etc?

</comment><comment><USER8> This is pretty cool. I like <http://www.shortform.com/>. You can browse by keyword then press Play, Pause, Next, and Previous. It's great for people who want to stumble on videos for some time.

</comment><comment><USER9> cool project! one design advice though. Remove the large yellow rectangle above the video that shows your history. I like the idea, but dont make it so dominant, it kinda distracts too much. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I moved the messages to the bottom. Do you think I should just get rid of the box all together?

<comment><USER9> super mate! yeah, try it without the box. ill have some free time tomorrow so ill try to do a little mockup if you want :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Good stuff. I'd love to see a mockup of what you have in mind. Thanks for the support.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If I hit awesome, it shouldn't load a new page. It should just vote "Awesome" through AJAX therefore I can continue watching the video.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. I totally agree. Hopefully I'll get that out soon.

I'm thinking that after you click awesome the button will change to a "next video" button. Is that what you had in mind?

Are there any other places that you think I should be using AJAX?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nice stuff just spend ten minutes watching it ! keep it up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the support :)</comment></comment>


Microsoft Excel Course Written Inside Excel - <AUTHOR> http://www.exceleverest.com

<comment><USER2> What a neat idea. How are sales?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thx! We launched last summer and are picking up a little momentum... Moving a copy every other / every day & landed a few good Corp site licenses. Not banking on it being a million dollar business obviously but hoping it'll let me feel like less of a student. If you've got any ideas on how to spread the word, I'm all ears! Sean</comment></comment>


Investors view default by U.S. Treasury as more likely than Coca-Cola - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703389004575033273534678554.html

<comment><USER2> Except this whole concept of a developed economy defaulting on it's debt is to all extents and purposes irrelevant.

The US government has the ability to raise taxes and has organisations which can enforce these tax rises and an army to defend itself. It also has vast assets that it can sell off. Whilst the market might think that the Treasury is more likely to default than Coca-Cola, the markets don't represent reality in this instance.

<comment><USER3> You'd be surprised. Russia, which was still a pretty decent sized world power, defaulted on its debt in the 90s.

I'm not an expert on what occurred, but I believe the Russian government thought process was something along the lines of: -We could either sell off all the country's assets OR -Default on debt now, have a bad reputation with future foreign investors, but not shrink our country further.

They went with option B.

Not saying this would or will happen to the USA, but theoretically it could.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> New York City defaulted on its debts 25 years ago, despite having a huge tax base and some very desirable assets.

California has been teetering on the edge of default -- not always making payments on time -- despite having the ability to raise taxes. CA also owns vast assets it too can sell off.

Admittedly we'll probably see places like Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal default first, but it can happen here too.</comment>


Ask HN: How do I trade Bitcoins smartly? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> If you are in the US i would start with Coinbase and their trading platform GDAX. With regards to trading strategy it is dependent on your personal preference and the time/resources you have to devote. I am using the buy and hold method which has worked out well due to the steady price increase and minimal volatility the coin has had over the past two years.</comment>


Man Spends 23 Years Carving Sprawling Underground Temple Under His House - <AUTHOR> http://www.odditycentral.com/architecture/man-spends-23-years-carving-sprawling-underground-temple-under-his-house.html <comment><USER2> Frankly, I find it refreshing.

Here is a man who found Quality in his life. He didn't care about the market. He eschewed the call of mammon. This gentleman dug himself a glorious hole, and worshipped in the one way he knew how.

Building.

You can laugh or call him insane if you like. Here was a man who knew what he wanted and hew it from the earth itself.

Gaze in awe mortals. This man has truly exercised his free agency.

<comment><USER3> If I had basalt under my house I would dig a system of tunnels too. But our water table is basically 2 feet under ground. :(

<comment><USER4> Wish I could get a house...

<comment><USER5> If you're posting on this website, you can probably get a house. Just not the house you want, where you want.

<comment> King-Aaron Not if you're posting on this website from Sydney

<comment><USER6> To be fair, he did say you might not be able to get it WHERE YOU WANT. There are houses in the west that are cheaper than the northern beaches. There's also QLD and other areas of AUS.

<comment> King-Aaron I do agree generally to be honest. However I can also understand people who end up in a scenario where they don't really have an 'easy' option to move location.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _It 's perfectly simple," said Wednesday. "In other countries, over the years, people recognized the places of power. Sometimes it would be a natural formation, sometimes it would just be a place that was, somehow, special. They knew that something important was happening there, that there was some focusing point, some channel, some window to the Immanent. And so they would build temples or cathedrals, or erect stone circles, or...well, you get the idea."

"There are churches all across the States, though," said Shadow.

"In every town. Sometimes on every block. And about as significant, in this context, as dentists' offices. No, in the USA, people still get the call, or some of them, and they feel themselves being called to from the transcendent void, and they respond to it by building a model out of beer bottles of somewhere they've never visited, or by erecting a gigantic bat house in some part of the country that bats have traditionally declined to visit. Roadside attractions: people feel themselves pulled to places where, in other parts of the world, they would recognize that part of themselves that is truly transcendent, and buy a hot dog, and walk around, feeling satisfied on a level they cannot truly describe, and profoundly dissatisfied on a level beneath that._

<comment><USER8> This is a quote from Neil Gaiman's _American Gods_

<comment><USER9> It was this (and Sam & Max Hit the Road) that first got me interested in roadside attractions. I've since visited a ton of them, generally guided by [https://www.atlasobscura.com/](https://www.atlasobscura.com/) and [https://www.roadsideamerica.com/](https://www.roadsideamerica.com/) \- it's a very rewarding hobby.

<comment><USER7> I read American gods and played Sam and max (in scummvm) over the same summer. They're inextricably linked in my head, now...and I think a good deal of why the tv adaptation doesn't work for me is because the vibe isn't lucasarts enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Man, this is Armenia we're talking about. Carving into rocks is a national idea here.

see Geghard monastery, for example [http://www.ancientpages.com/2016/03/09/fascinating- geghard-m...](http://www.ancientpages.com/2016/03/09/fascinating-geghard- monastery-rock-cut-secret-caves-passages-and-hundreds-of-monk-cells/) \- one of the churches is just a giant boulder cut from inside. And khachkars everywhere in the country and outside (in Turkey, Azerbaijan, in a whole greater Armenenia of the past), some of them older than 1000 years.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is basically how I play Minecraft: seeing how many pointless, elaborate rooms I can build below an unassuming surface structure.

<comment><USER12> Sounds like you've got a future in amateur templing! Immortality is only a drill hammer, chisel, and cooperative geological formation away!

<comment><USER11> I did build a temple to an imaginary fire dragon once. Unfortunately, this was before I discovered WorldEdit and its schematic saving functionality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Reminds me of Manjhi, another guy who also kept chiseling a mountain for 22 years to create a path for fellow villagers (1).

(1) [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashrath_Manjhi](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashrath_Manjhi)

</comment><comment><USER14> Pictures aren't loading on the link above but this one didn't give me any trouble. [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/travel_news/article-587011...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/travel_news/article-5870117/Inside-65ft- deep-man-cave-dug-one-man-23-YEARS.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> See also the Forestiere Underground Gardens in Fresno, dug by one man over a period of 40 years from 1906 to his death in 1946. He came to Fresno from Sicily and when he couldn't productively grow citrus on his property, he began digging. The tunnels are nice and cool in the hot Fresno summers and there are fruit trees growing in open-air sections. They give tours.

[http://www.undergroundgardens.com/](http://www.undergroundgardens.com/)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forestiere_Underground_Gardens](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forestiere_Underground_Gardens)

</comment><comment><USER16> This is being framed as a great accomplishment, and it is, but the details seem disturbing. Working 18 hours a day, every day? Barely sleeping? I wonder if there was some kind of mental illness at play, and what about the wife? What kind of life would that be, having a partner who is essentially avoiding you at such an extreme for 23 years? And "donating" rubble, 1 bucket at a time, to other construction projects? What kind of construction projects can use material in any meaningful way at such a slow rate? And how did they survive if he wasn't working a job?

So many questions.

</comment><comment><USER17> > " Levon Arakelyan pulled out an estimated 450 truckloads of rubble, > exclusively by metal bucket. He gave it all to a local company which used it > in various construction projects."

Sounds like he didn't profit from it during his lifetime but his wife now runs it as a tourist attraction. Perhaps would have been appropriate for the construction company to have contributed something along the way.

</comment><comment><USER18> This reminds me of a far better executed version of London's "Mole Man" [1]. I think it must've been linked on HN a few months back, but I can't find the link now.

[1]: [https://www.theguardian.com/society/2006/aug/08/communities....](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2006/aug/08/communities.uknews)

<comment><USER19> Reminds me of "The Underground Man", a book I bought second hand just because I liked the title.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Underground_Man_(novel)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Underground_Man_\(novel\))

Loosely based on John Bentinck, 5th Duke of Portland: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bentinck,_5th_Duke_of_Por...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bentinck,_5th_Duke_of_Portland)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Seymour Cray (the supercomputer designer) famously dug tunnels underneath his house when he lived in Minnesota. It sounds like fun, really.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm reminded of [https://singularityhub.com/2012/02/19/canadian-man- excavates...](https://singularityhub.com/2012/02/19/canadian-man-excavates- his-basement-using-rc-trucks-over-7-years/)

Every winter he's been using small remote controlled vehicles to dig out his basement.

</comment><comment><USER22> Since nobody has mentioned it, a French postman was known for building a palace with stones he picked up during work over 33 years: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Cheval](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Cheval)

</comment><comment><USER23> You think that's something, you should see this documentary called CAVEDIGGER about a guy named Ra Paulette in New Mexico who carves exquisite caves for customers. It's really something. Watch the trailer: [http://cavediggerdocumentary.com/](http://cavediggerdocumentary.com/)

</comment><comment><USER24> The question was never answered: did she ever end up actually getting the storage space for the potatoes?

<comment><USER25> In the first few lines, "after finishing work on the pit" refers to the potato storage pit

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I wonder what the HOA thinks about that :P

</comment><comment><USER27> If you are ever in the Fresno area, there is an underground garden built by a single man also.

[http://www.undergroundgardens.com/](http://www.undergroundgardens.com/)

</comment><comment><USER28> Reminds me of this [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derinkuyu_underground_city](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derinkuyu_underground_city)

</comment><comment><USER29> Interesting. I liked the 'Burro' Schmidt project as well. [http://www.odditycentral.com/travel/human-mole-the-man- who-s...](http://www.odditycentral.com/travel/human-mole-the-man-who- spent-32-years-digging-a-tunnel-to-the-middle-of-nowhere.html)

Unlike Ozymandias, his monument ain't goin' nowhere.

</comment><comment><USER30> In a similar vein there's these Italian carve outs. [1]

[1][https://www.google.ca/search?q=italian+subterranean+temple&r...](https://www.google.ca/search?q=italian+subterranean+temple&rlz=1CAASUL_enCA765CA765&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj1ofL9oYfcAhV7CTQIHe_cAKsQ_AUICigB&biw=1745&bih=846)

</comment><comment><USER31> Check out the Australian city of Coober Pedy where half of the residents live underground:

[https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/unearthing-coober- pedy...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/unearthing-coober-pedy- australias-hidden-city-180958162/)

</comment><comment><USER32> Reminds of the rock-hewn churches of Ethiopia[1] or the underground cities of Cappadocia.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lalibela](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lalibela) "Each church was carved from a single piece of rock"

</comment><comment><USER33> I totally grok this, he's not the first or last: [http://www.kuriositas.com/2015/05/the-mystery-of-margate- she...](http://www.kuriositas.com/2015/05/the-mystery-of-margate-shell- grotto.html)

</comment><comment><USER34> It's like a real-life minecraft.

</comment><comment><USER35> I dunno, that's pretty badass. I have clay soils so it's out for me, though.

</comment><comment><USER36> this sounds just like my father's long long legs, eek! [http://correlatedcontents.com/misc/Father.html](http://correlatedcontents.com/misc/Father.html)

</comment><comment><USER37> How does it not flood?

</comment><comment><USER38> 23 years a spiral?

just sayin big up the one like Levon Arakelyan for his human accomplishments

</comment><comment><USER39> O Nariz de Isabelle.

</comment><comment><USER40> It's always a man. No matter that most differences between the sexes approach zero when examined in a large sample, males seem to be way more prone to undertaking a single project with this kind of obsession.

</comment><comment><USER41> Is this trending on hn because "working yourself to death by digging an empty hole in the ground you're obsessed with, that some VC you're married to will spin off and profit from" is so analagous to generic tech startups?

<comment><USER42> "working yourself to death by ______"

Analogous to life _cough cough_

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Not sure why this is of interest to this crowd. Must be a slow day, these are dangerous to build. Unfortunately no background on the persons engineering experience or mental health... [https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public- safety/mysteriou...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public- safety/mysterious-tunnels-in-bethesda-murder-case-were-being-built-as-nuclear- bomb-shelter/2018/05/31/cc87aafa-64ee-11e8-a69c-b944de66d9e7_story.html)

<comment><USER44> I thought Levon Arakelyan was a true hacker. I can relate this to my own side- projects. Most of them start with a simple "what-if" question in my head. Once I've started writing code, I won't stop until I have some kind of prototype ready. That aside, agreed that for digging tunnels it could be dangerous.</comment></comment>


2 billion may die following a nuclear war between India and Pakistan [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7hOpT0lPGI&feature=youtu.be&t=484 <comment><USER2> Millions of people will die on the subcontinent but I'm thinking that we blew up thousands of nukes in the atmosphere in the 50s and 60s. In 1962 178 nukes exploded in the atmosphere and AFAIK crops were fine. [https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/nucleartesttally](https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/nucleartesttally)

I don't mean to downplay the severity of the situation. A nuclear offensive and counter offensive could drag other powers in to the conflict. We can only hope and pray that cooler heads prevail.

<comment><USER3> >I don't mean to downplay the severity of the situation.

Isn't that exactly what you meant to do?

Almost every day I see "Nuclear war - pfft, no worries, not a big deal" comments on here. I'm not sure why. It's a bit of a worry! Maybe the culture had enough of freaking out in the 80s and now has to pretend nothing terrible could happen from nuclear war. Or that accidents don't happen, that having a lot of nukes everywhere isn't incredibly risky.

<comment><USER2> Did you want me to give you the 4 horsemen speech? Anyway there are other things people believe that aren't true beside the nuclear winter story. Like we'll all be dead anyway from a nuke war so why bother to prepare. We seem to have taken this view but a lot of the rest of the world didn't.

India Pakistan have a couple hundred smaller nukes:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Criticism_and_d...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Criticism_and_debate)

Seems to be a lot of forest fires over a very large area recently

[https://www.popsci.com/california-five-year- wildfire#page-2](https://www.popsci.com/california-five-year-wildfire#page-2)

And there have been bigger fires in the past which is what a lot of people say nuclear winter is mainly about.

Perhaps a nuclear winter scenario could happen in a total global thermonuclear war but even that has been in debate for a while. I don't want a war to be proven wrong.

<comment><USER3> >Did you want me to give you the 4 horsemen speech?

I don't know what that means, sorry.

<comment><USER2> Well what I mean is that an end days prophecy starts with a quarter of the world population put down by famine, war, plagues, and breakdown of civilization to the point a leading cause of death was from wild beasts. The figure is around two billion. So doom is on the menu, maybe that is what we could be served from South Asia.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not to downplay the severity of tension between India and Pakistan but nuclear bombs impact is highly exaggerated. Anyone can check impact virtually here- [https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/](https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/)

<comment><AUTHOR> This site gives you single bomb impacts, not the impact of a full scale war between two countries that unload their arsenals on each other.

<comment><USER4> Even if all 140 nuclear warheads of Pakistan are deployed their impact will barely destroy a district in India. Same applies for Indian warheads. It is dangerous but nowhere near what media exgaggerate. Try nukemap site once again and see coverage area.</comment></comment></comment>


Gmail and Google Drive Outage - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status <comment><USER2> There was an outage August 19th, 2019 - almost 1 year ago to the day. As I posted at the time: "Google often has a outage or two around this time of the year when all the US schools come back and millions of students log in at the same time."

My pet theory wasn't too popular but I'm going to stick with it :)

1- [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20740997](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20740997)

<comment><USER3> Millions of people are searching simultaneously at google.com or youtube.com but servers are not crashing. Issue is not traffic overload but something else.

<comment><USER4> These are not the same products nor infrastructure

<comment><USER3> But I'm sure similar infrastructure architecture was applied to gmail.com as it was to google.com and youtube.com.

And similar concepts of maintaining by sysadmins are practiced.

<comment><USER5> Hah...

Press and hold the F5 key on your keyboard for 2 minutes while on gmail.com. You will get a "service unavailable" error. About 500 other people whose data happens to be cohosted with you will also get the same error, and all of you will be unable to send or receive email, even by IMAP, for about 10 mins while your particular corner of the data store is restarted and the data integrity checked.

That doesn't happen on Google.com

<comment><USER2> Ok, I definitely want to know how you discovered that... (and found one of those 500 people to verify?)

<comment><USER5> Not sure if this is still the case, but if you did this a couple of times, your account data would be permanently migrated to an instance with more CPU and RAM allocated - you'd also be in with all the other badly behaved accounts, so reliability goes down lots. The benefit was much quicker complex searches, and being able to bulk label or delete emails without it taking minutes or hours.

Don't believe me how slow it is on a regular instance? Try going to "All mail", selecting all of your emails, and applying a label to them all. In my experience, it can only label about 50 mails per second, so it can take hours to do them all. It will keep going if you quit the browser, but will stop if the gmail devs do a software update, which they seem to do on usually tuesdays, but never fridays or the weekends.

<comment><USER6> I find it hard to believe that Gmail will always serve certain users from the same machines, especially in this day and age, with "cattle, not pets" and ephemeral containers.

I'm sure they have machines that are only used to serve G Suite and Google One customers, and maybe some other VIPs, but regular heavy users? It sounds like an urban legend to me.

<comment><USER7> Gmail accounts will sometimes be automatically "hospitalized" \-- assigned more than the usual amount of resources because for some reason they are chronically behind or growing without bound -- or "jailed" \-- moved into isolation along with other bozo accounts, to keep from disturbing normal people's accounts. Not a legend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The status from Google Cloud status page offers a bit more technical details of what happened:

"We are experiencing an issue with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters using node auto-provisioning becoming stuck during node version upgrades. Node auto-upgrades have been disabled temporarily."

[https://status.cloud.google.com/](https://status.cloud.google.com/)

<comment><USER9> Does it mean, that Gmail is hosted on GKE?

<comment> brown9-2 No, it's likely the GKE incident is caused by a dependency that Gmail also has.

<comment><USER9> thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm guessing this outage will allow GSuite customers to claim Service Credits under the SLA - does anyone have any experience with doing so? Google's documentation is lacking in detail[0].

[0] [https://gsuite.google.com/intl/en/terms/sla.html](https://gsuite.google.com/intl/en/terms/sla.html)

<comment><USER11> Good luck with that - read GSuite's terms, they, Google, define what an outage is, not the customer.

<comment><USER12> The linked terms say:

> "Downtime" means, for a domain, if there is more than a five percent user > error rate. Downtime is measured based on server side error rate.

<comment><USER13> Which is fantastic if the error causes the server side not to be able to log errors

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Incident says it's affecting anything that uses Cloud Storage, which I'm guessing is most things.

[https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/zall/20007](https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/zall/20007)

Edit: New incident number [https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/zall/20008](https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/zall/20008)

<comment> downvote-avoid Well this happens if you rely only on 3rd party providers. My email server is still running without any issues and without any indecent for last 3 years (system reinstall).

Surely no one can send me emails now that gmail is down as most of world is relying on single point of failure, but this is another story.

Moral of this story is - always own your mission critical infrastructure.

<comment><USER15> > Moral of this story is - always own your mission critical infrastructure.

Sure, if you have the time and money to own it properly. How far do you need to go to say you own it? Multi-regional servers located on properties that you own?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm so used to Gmail/Gsuite working that i assumed the problem was with my internet and restarted the router a couple of times.

<comment><USER17> Yeah same w/ hotel internet.

Especially because Teams status notifications seem funky today too

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Gmail is practically unusable at the moment. It's been going on for a while too, so I'm interested in the post mortem for this.

I'm in Sydney, Australia.

<comment><USER19> Do you have a signature image or other attachment? It sends instantly without, fails with [on the desktop web client]. The google drive server they save our stuff on is giving a 503.

<comment><USER18> My email drafts can't even save. A popup saying "Oops, something went wrong. Recent changes may not have been saved."

No images either!

<comment><USER19> Hmm odd. I had a draft from this morning (I took a photo on my phone, attached, then went to desktop later to type the rest up). It would not send and kept popping up that error you mentioned while typing. As soon as I deleted the attachment, I could send it. New emails with nothing attached work fine too in all 3 accounts.

<comment><USER20> Yes -- remove the attachment (including in-line images) and it'll work

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Was greeted by this just as we started work. Observations so far: Reading and receiving emails via the Gmail web UI works, sending emails via the web UI doesn't work, sending emails via SMTP works.

<comment><USER20> It's mostly related to attachment. Regular emails should be fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Youtube is also affected. You can upload files but they won't process.

</comment><comment><USER23> Gmail accessible via IMAP at $undisclosed_location. SMTP send works, but sent messages reappear in the inbox rather than in sent mail.

Haven't tested the Gmail web interface. I don't use it.

<comment><USER5> Sent messages appearing in the inbox has been a bug with Gmail since the dawn of time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I have 5 tabs open with emails written ready to send at some point. Had issues saving drafts, too.

<comment><USER25> In fairness Gmail has a good uptime record, so it's not the end of the world

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm not that interested in a dashboard, but I'd bee interested in reading the post-mortem. Since they have paying customers for these products, they might release that.

<comment><USER27> They usually provide it on the same page after the incident (an example: [https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&ts=159398639...](https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&ts=1593986399000&sid=1&iid=be4cdd50ed9bc6458ede98158a71cfd4) )

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I wonder how much money this kind of outages can cost to all affected companies and institutions

<comment><USER29> Hopefully a lot less than they save by outsourcing this part of their infrastructure :-)

<comment><USER28> Yeah, I imagine so :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Right at 9am pacific too. Good reason for me to wrap up in APAC. Thanks Google!

<comment><USER19> It's nearly the end of the workday here in Australia. Very insensitive of them, they should be more timezone aware.

Edit: I seem to be able to send from some accounts but not others. It looks like emails without attachments are fine, otherwise the drive error messes them up.

<comment><USER31> >It's nearly the end of the workday here in Australia. Very insensitive of them

It's nearly the end of the workday on the east coast of Australia. Very insensitive of you. Sincerely, Western Australia

The above is a joke just in case that wasn't clear.

<comment><USER19> I guess I kicked an own goal there.

At least it's not daylight savings yet so the QLDers can't be annoyed at me too!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Is this only affecting G suite? I still can send and receive email nornally.

</comment><comment><USER33> That would explain why my ETLs are failing at 3am in the morning !!!

<comment><USER34> Your ETL processes write to google drive or are dependent on email?

Earnest question, don't mean to sound derisive.

<comment><USER35> I'm assuming some kind of workflow which uses email notifications, and only goes to the next step if the email notification succeeds..?

</comment></comment></comment><comment> laurynas-s Gmail works but I can't send any emails - so frustrating.

</comment><comment><USER36> We're unable to publish apps in the Play Store console/fastlane, too.</comment>


Speech Recognition Better Than a Human's Exists. You Just Can't Use It Yet - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-12-23/speech-recognition-better-than-a-human-s-exists-you-just-can-t-use-it-yet.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Anyone know if they're only talking about search queries, or should stenographers start retooling? [http://plover.stenoknight.com](http://plover.stenoknight.com) developer and stenographer Mirabai Knight in 2012 said real-time transcription was far off:

      Are you worried that it's going to supplant my
      99.67% accuracy rating in another two years?
      Or ten years? Or 20? And that's just talking about
      the technical accuracy; I haven't even begun to
      get into the semantic accuracy.

The Bloomberg article says speech recognition in the lab already applies semantic context to improve accuracy. The article also says 75% percent accuracy from 2012 is up to 92% today, and that we can expect super-human speech recognition online before 2017.</comment>


Why does soap work so well on most viruses - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/pallithordarson/status/1236549305189597189 <comment><USER2> Polar molecules love them some encapsulation lipids on one side and water on the other. Then, IIRC, doesn't either water attack the naked virus or the virus becomes unprotected? I'm probably totally wrong.

EtOH hand sanitizer up to 70% strips away lipids too and the water content has a synergistic effect. It'd be nice to know how that works. (Seems like a good video project for Destin at SED.)

</comment><comment><USER3> If soap is less bad for the environment and still really effective, why not just spray a soapy solution around some areas where there it is safe to property to do so?

</comment><comment><USER4> Better presentation than Twitter:

[https://www.targetliberty.com/2020/03/everything-you- should-...](https://www.targetliberty.com/2020/03/everything-you-should-know- about.html)</comment>


ECMA TC39: "SmooshGate" was officially resolved by renaming flatten to flat - <AUTHOR> https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/03/smooshgate <comment><USER2> When is ECMA/JS going to be versioned in <script> tags so we can avoid this the next time around?

Catering to an implementation that does bad things is an awful way to build standards, but it's only going to happen again and again and again unless the developer is forced to pick a version and build / maintain compatibility with exactly that version.

<comment><USER3> This is unlikely to happen. Browser developers don't want to maintain multiple forks of their JavaScript engines. They want new features introduced in a backward compatible manner so they can maintain a single engine. Imagine in 10 years if you had to maintain 7 slightly incompatible engines in parallel. A new browser written from scratch would have to implement all 7 engines since the older versions would never go away.

<comment><USER2> JS is no different from HTML in this regard. HTML has (at least) several variants of 4.x, quirks mode, HTML5, new features, deprecated features, etc. which all demand separate rendering engines. At some point, the browser stops supporting those things because they don't have to.

I don't know what kind of backward compatibility is inherent in their designs, but just remember <marquee> if you think that browsers have to support all features ad infinitum.

<comment><USER3> In practice, browsers does not recognize HTML versions. All HTML is handled by the same engine. This is one of the reasons HTML has moved to a living standard - the versioning was purely an artifact of the standard document and did not correspond to versioning in the rendering engines. (XHTML did introduce branching front-end parsers, which was a lot of wasted work.)

Adding new backward-compatible features does not require branching the engine, neither does removing older features.

The quirks/standards-mode distinction did require branching engines, and it has lead to increased complexity and testing burden. It was necessary at the time to move forward so the cost was accepted, but it is a complexity burden all browser have to carry for the foreseeable future. There should be a _very_ good reason to introduce such branching - wanting to write "flatten" rather than "flat" is not a good enough reason.

Marquee was never supported by all browsers. But the article does mention some widely supported elements where support have been removed (<keygen>, <applet>) so it is not unheard of. But it requires that the element is almost never used on the web. Apparently this is not the case for MooTools library in question which still has some penetration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I admit I was an avid MooTools user back in the day. I remember that users of _that other js library_ often pointed out that MooTools' messing with prototypes was going to be a problem someday. They were right. Also, looking back on it, MooTools really wasn't as cool as I thought it was.

</comment><comment><USER5> _Every_ one should be using MooTools now. The ECMAScript committee has basically made it an unofficial extension of the language by vowing never to break that library. Guaranteeing its stability for years to come.

<comment><USER3> You can be certain the ECMAScript committee is not going to break any of the more popular libraries (like JQuery, Angular etc) either. It just because these libraries were better designed in the first place that it hasn't been an issue.

<comment><USER6> > Zones monkey-patches global asynchronous operations such as setTimeout() and > addEventListener(), which is why Angular can easily find out, when to update > the DOM.

[https://blog.thoughtram.io/angular/2016/02/01/zones-in- angul...](https://blog.thoughtram.io/angular/2016/02/01/zones-in- angular-2.html)

I can imagine Angular zones becoming problematic in exactly this kind of way in a few years...

<comment><USER3> Monkey-patching is not in itself a problem though since it just overrides the built-in functionality. The problem in shooshgate was (if I understand correctly) specifically monkey-pathing Array _and_ relying on the added property to be enumerable. This meant JavaScript could not introduce a non- enumerable property with the same name without breaking code.

While monkey patching in general is problematic, monkey-patching Array or Object is _much_ worse than monkey-patching Window.

<comment><USER6> You're right, it's not as bad. But the metaproblem here is making the assumption that the global environment is not going to add new APIs.

In the case of Angular zones, if additional async APIs are added to the browser, Angular needs to be updated to patch them with its own zone implementation.

This wouldn't break existing sites, but could leave, for example, sites on older angular versions unable to use new browser APIs, use libraries that use new browser APIs, or install security updates to dependencies if newer versions rely on new browser APIs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why do they make such a fuss about MooTools .flatten? Nobody cared about prototype.js breaking dozens of ECMAScript array methods (e.g. map, reduce, contains,...) some years ago. Site owners were simply supposed to update or remove it.

<comment><USER8> The article addresses your question directly under the heading "Why don't we just keep the existing name and break the Web?"

> _Why don't we just keep the existing name and break the Web?_

> _In 1996, before CSS became widespread, and long before "HTML5" became a > thing, the Space Jam website went live. Today, the website still works the > same way it did 22 years ago._

> _How did that happen? Did someone maintain that website for all these years, > updating it every time browser vendors shipped a new feature?_

> _As it turns out, "don't break the Web" is the number one design principle > for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and any other standard that's widely used on the > Web. If shipping a new browser feature causes existing websites to stop > working, that's bad for everyone:_

> _\- visitors of the affected websites suddenly get a broken user > experience;_

> _\- the website owners went from having a perfectly-working website to a > non-functional one without them changing anything;_

> _\- browser vendors shipping the new feature lose market share, due to users > switching browsers after noticing "it works in browser X";_

> _\- once the compatibility issue is known, other browser vendors refuse to > ship it. The feature specification does not match reality ("nothing but a > work of fiction"), which is bad for the standardization process._

> _Sure, in retrospect MooTools did the wrong thing — but breaking the web > doesn't punish them, it punishes users. These users do not know what a moo > tool is. Alternatively, we can find another solution, and users can continue > to use the web. The choice is easy to make. "_

<comment><USER9> For the life of me I just can't fucking understand what did we gain from this website in this fairy tale.

Who ever thought future progress can be sacrificed just so that some obscure website (obscure because it is no longer supported, people no longer care) can work for 22 years during which the world has changed so much that this website is probably no longer relevant under any objective measure.

I mean yes, maintain SOME backward compatibility but dragging bs like typeof null === 'object' all along is just nuts.

<comment><USER3> Imagine if books became unreadable the day the author died.

Some people care about books, even books written by people long dead. And some people care about the content on some older websites, even if they are not using the newest flashy framework.

As developers, we hate the demands of legacy code and backward compatibility. We would like to scrap everything and rewrite in the cool new language and framework every few years. But a browser is not only a fun playground for developers. It is a tool for accessing information for people who couldn't care less about what an identifier is called in JavaScript. They just want it to work.

<comment><USER10> Imagine if people left books to rot in a garbage dump rather than taking care of them.

<comment><USER3> This is where the analogy to books breaks down. If you have a book you care about you can take care of it. If you care about some website where the owner is long dead, there is probably nothing you can do to maintain it, except keep using a backwards compatible browser.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The "don't break the web" excuse is the same old bad-faith nonsense:

1\. The number of websites using the old version of Mootools is vanishingly remote, relative to the number of existing websites not using it, and the number of as-yet-unmade websites who will also not use it (but who will be harmed by the committee's dedication to retarding the development of the language).

2\. Of those websites using this old version of Mootools, the number that use flatten, and do so in a way that would definitely be broken by the introduction of standardised "flatten", and wouldn't be fixed thereafter is, statistically speaking, zero.

3\. Most of the same people who are affecting concern about backwards compatibility in the case of the web work for tech giants who _regularly_ retire products and APIs that are relied upon by thousands of people, and make backwards incompatible changes to their operating systems that break masses of unmaintained apps.

But the fact is, you can't make arguments like this to groups like the TC39 and expect to even get a hearing. Despite their occasional spiel about seeking outsider feedback they are, like any institution, happy in their long-settled groupthink positions, and reflexively frightened and dismissive of any challenge or criticism by outsiders.

You saw this when the whole "smoosh" affair first broke. There was a long, passionate, but civilised debate about it on GitHub ([https://github.com/tc39/proposal- flatMap/pull/56](https://github.com/tc39/proposal-flatMap/pull/56) ) which was abruptly cut off by a TC39 committee member, who locked out non-contributors entirely, with the dishonest claim that things had become "too heated". What he really couldn't stand was the sight of the committee's dogma being challenged.

Remember that next time the representative of a standards body whines about lack of participation in the process by regular web developers. It's a lie. These groups are only interested in the opinion of outsiders if they align with a set of fixed and unchallengeable precepts, and they will revert to depressingly familiar suppression of speech the moment it looks like things aren't going their way.

<comment><USER12> Frankly, as an outsider, your post doesn't convince me. Where's your source for (1) and (2)? I read the whole GH thread and didn't find anyone presenting credible data. (3) is even weaker; it's perfectly reasonable to distinguish between an external API and the runtime of the web (it's also fine to disagree with this distinction, of course).

Also, at least two, maybe three comments were moderated for violated the code of conduct, and the commenter admitted his language was inappropriate. So there's an argument to be made that the conversation was too heated. Again, you can disagree, but your opinion doesn't make anyone else's invalid or bad- faith.

I also saw multiple committee members discussing the counterarguments, and by the time the thread was locked it was essentially just rehashing the same points. So I find it hard to agree with your claim that they refused to hear dissenters.

<comment><USER13> A link in TFA that contains 'The 1.3% of HTTPArchive's URLs that have MooTools present.'

[https://gist.github.com/paulirish/a135445fc84f7ca5c486b52d56...](https://gist.github.com/paulirish/a135445fc84f7ca5c486b52d5699825a)

<comment><USER12> Thanks. That makes the previous post even less convincing :) Over 1 in 100 is not vanishingly remote, and that's just on the top 500k sites (who knows how representative that sample is of the whole web).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wouldn't it be possible to introduce a versioning mechanism, similar to strict mode, where you could opt in to a newer version of JavaScript? This issue is not going to go away, almost any sensible method names you might want to use in the future are likely to cause problems with some legacy code.

<comment><USER3> It is possible, but I think the committees would prefer to avoid too many "modes" which makes specification and testing much more complex. Just think about the complexity caused by having "quirks" and "standards" rendering modes. In this case the issue could be resolved with a simple (if slightly awkward) rename which is certainly preferable to forking all the JavaScript engines.

<comment><USER15> Maybe that is the thing. That the committee just wants to avoid versions. At work we always skip versioning when a developer or manager doesn't want it. That's modern web dev right there.

<comment><USER3> This is also why HTML has moved to a "living standard". To avoid versions. The philosophy is to only introduce backwards-compatible changes so everything can be handled by a single engine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> They made the right call here.

I see so much API breakage in modern software ecosystems that I consciously try to minimise my dependencies so I don't have to spend all of my time constantly updating my code to work with the latest versions of everything. One only has to look at disasters like the transition from Python 2 to Python 3 to see how much pain breaking changes cause for both developers and users.

If TC39 took the attitude of "hey, here's a cool new feature, who cares if it breaks a bunch of existing sites, everyone can update their code, right?" then web developers would never get to make actual improvements their sites or do anything cool, because they'd be stuck in a constant cycle of maintenance hell. Sure, I find it silly that typeof(null) === 'object' because of a 20 year-old bug, but I consider the stability that comes from the "don't break the web" principle to be more than worth a few small annoyances like this.

If more of the industry followed this approach the world would be a better place.

<comment><USER17> While I agree with your general point ("don't break existing APIs"), I disagree with the current approach (I made a specific comment down there).

This would NOT have been a breaking language change; the problem was introduced by a library that overrides a BUILTIN PROTOTYPE. Let's hope no library (or userspace code) overrides the "flat" method as well.

Overriding other people's code, especially core languages parts, is inherently risky from an API stability POV. I don't think all users appreciate such risk.

<comment><USER18> If you aren't supposed to override the builtins, why does the language allow it at all? Lots of others don't.

The answer, of course, is that we didn't realize it was a bad practice at the time and there's a bunch of legacy code around that uses the misfeature. If the JS community doesn't want to support this paradigm anymore, they should do it explicitly and lock the builtins from being changed in user code. Until then, we should treat it like the valid approach it is.

<comment><USER17> If you prevent builtin overrides now, you'll break the API. We should start discouraging it, as Mozilla does in its MDN. Maybe some deprecationwarning is a good point to start with.

By the way, Javascript was designed in two weeks. I doubt a lot of thought went into such specific details. And the fact that the language doesn't prevent it doesn't make it a good idea - otherwise I'd claim that UB in C is a good idea.

<comment><USER18> I never claimed it was a good feature, only that the language maintainers should either support code written with it or formally remove it instead of letting it rot with subtle breakage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I have seen a couple people suggesting the solution that reassigning a non- enumerable property should make it enumerable. Does anyone here have any insight on why they didn't go with that solution?

<comment><USER20> Possibly it's considered too difficult to move the standard to this behaviour since it's not a new feature per-se? Or I guess a change as subtle as this could also have unforeseen consequences?

It does seem to me like a more elegant solution, and perhaps what the behaviour should have been in the first place.

<comment><USER19> I agree, it seems like it would be a perfectly reasonable behaviour and furthermore it could prevent future situations like this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wish they would've gone with Array.flatten() instead of Array.prototype.flat. We have `Array.from` and `Array.of` in the language already why not continue that trend? Am I missing some reason why that couldn't have happened? Also strange to see that infinite flattening is not the default behavior.

<comment><USER22> The static methods take probably-not-arrays and return arrays. An instance method takes an existing array (`this`) and returns a modified array.

Of course, you could implement a static flatten, but it goes against the grain of all the other instance methods (map, reduce, filter, etc.). Considering how often they are chained together, it would be especially weird.

<comment><USER21> If the pipeline operator gets accepted into JS[0], I think we should go in the direction of copying those as static methods. An example would look like:

        [1,2,[3,4,5]]
        |> Array.flatten()
        |> Array.filter((x) => x % 2 === 0)
        |> Array.map((x) => x * 2)
        |> Array.reduce((acc, x) => acc + x)

[0]: [https://github.com/tc39/proposal-pipeline- operator](https://github.com/tc39/proposal-pipeline-operator)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The PR in question: [https://github.com/tc39/proposal- flatMap/pull/56](https://github.com/tc39/proposal-flatMap/pull/56)

</comment><comment><USER24> Unless I'm much mistaken, this is the second time MooTools has caused a renaming, after .contains() -> .includes()

</comment><comment><USER25> At some point, javascript is going to have to realize that they are the language and these other little tools are just that: little tools that other people have written.

The programming language will be around for a really long time. Little tools come and go. Never rename things in your language just to accomodate some little tool. There are millions of little tools. There are simply not enough synonyms available to accomodate them all.

The only sensible choice is to stand up for yourself and name things the right way in the language itself. The library will come out with a patch next week.

Here's a link to the last time they caved on the exact same type of issue, to the same silly library, a couple weeks ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16753851](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16753851)

<comment><USER26> I'd recommend reading the article, it does a fairly good job explaining why they chose to go that way.

"Might makes right" is rarely a good choice, not even for programming languages.

<comment><USER25> I'd rephrase that as "Only one of these things is going to still exist in 15 years" makes right.

<comment><USER26> You must enjoy commenting without reading the article. The website in question is 22 years old.

<comment><USER25> The 22 year old website runs fine with this new change.

We're talking about MooTools, the library hardly anybody uses today and to 5 significant figures nobody will use 15 years from now. (It's 11 years old today).

The important point is that this will teach _new_ libraries not to make the same mistake as this old one. That is, if you're going to add things to the standard library, first check to ensure you're not clobbering anything that gets added later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Sure, in retrospect MooTools did the wrong thing...

Are you kidding me? Overwriting prototype is a widespread design pattern. Either ECMA ships the next version making it impossible (and breaking significantly larger parts of the web) or they shut up and accept that this mess is fully theirs. They designed themselves into a corner where developing without breaking user space is hard, they did that, and then they failed, they did that.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is what happens when you use monkey patching (ie. overwriting the builtins of a language/library). Unfortunately, it's a very common technique in the JS World. It's sad that so much of modern development (JavaScript) is based on such bad practices. Just because it's easy doesn't mean people should do it. Touching globals is almost never a good idea.

<comment><USER3> Monkey patching is also what allows polyfills, which are one of the things which allow the web to move forward. So I would say it is more of a double- edged sword than an all-around bad practice.

<comment><USER17> Monkey patching for backporting can be fine. But, monkeypatching to add arbitrary functionality? Totally unneeded.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Mootools is dead: [https://mootools.net/blog/2016/01/14/mootools-1-6-0-release](https://mootools.net/blog/2016/01/14/mootools-1-6-0-release)

Last release was more than two years ago. It's time to move on.

</comment><comment><USER17> The chance for this to happen should make us think both about a) the language b) the commonly accepted use of language features.

How come that user code of any kind gets to override a builtin prototype, and that people are happy with that?

Would it be THAT bad to create a "mootools.Arrays" object with a "flatten" function? I think that either you've got a way to do such language extensions in a narrow scope (I think Ruby modules can do that, but I should check) so that they don't influence the whole app, or you simply shouldn't do that, period. Crazy interactions are hidden everywhere, otherwise.

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Inhe...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Inheritance_and_the_prototype_chain#Bad_practice_Extension_of_native_prototypes)

"One misfeature that is often used is to extend Object.prototype or one of the other built-in prototypes."

</comment><comment><USER29> Website uses Mootools. Mootools messes with built-in objects. Language moves to change built-in object. Mootools breaks.

So what is to be done here?

How about leave it up to Mootools to release a new version that is compatible and the website owners can adjust their code accordingly.

<comment><USER30> Websites that are still running ancient mootools versions are almost by definition ones that are not operated by professionals and extremely unlikely to be updated. So - as discussed before - the result would be to break the very people (random Chinese restaurants in Connecticut or whatever) least likely to know it is going to happen, and least able to respond.

<comment><USER10> Random Chinese restaurants in Connecticut are probably hosting malware, botnets and pirated torrents on Fedora Core 2.

<comment><USER10> The downmod makes it seems like I may have been unclear for those who aren't from a sysadmin background:

an unmaintained website is likely already cracked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Is this type of issue the reason that Symbols were added to the JS Standard?

</comment><comment><USER32> I think the article does a pretty good job at convincing the most perfectionist of web developers that "Well... _okay_ , sure, we'll call it flat instead of flatten."

<comment><USER33> I'd consider 'flatten' a common, somewhat agreed upon term for that specific operation. Which is why I find this annoying, not a huge deal, but certainly annoying. The perfectionist in me though is most annoyed that calling flatten 'flat' feels like calling reduce 'reduction', it's just not consistent with the other methods.

<comment><USER32> But after reading the article, you should agree with the decision, right? It was completely justified, and all options were explored.

<comment><USER33> Personally I somewhat lean towards the side of breaking the library in question, which could be ok if enough warning is given. They mentioned being worried that not everyone would fix their unmaintained sites but I don't think unmaintained sites make a lot of long term promises anyway. Space Jams aside of course.

So while I don't necessarily agree with the decision I completely understand it, their motivation is very noble. And again, it's not that big of a deal as a one off decision.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> So now mootools, prototype.js and similar libs that extend native objects are basically a new IE6...

</comment><comment><USER35> Awesome. .flatten is now a free-for-all place to store any method you want.

</comment><comment><USER36> I do like the name smoosh

</comment><comment><USER37> i thought this was going to be about a scandalous kiss

</comment><comment><USER38> I can't wait to read the n-gate writeup about this one...</comment>


Decentralize now? - <AUTHOR> https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/decentralize-now?imm_mid=0e5f27&cmp=em-web-na-na-newsltr_20160720 <comment><USER2> Actually a pretty good write up of something that got a lot of hype but didn't receive meaty context in the other coverage I've read.</comment>


Google Creates Alphabet and Registers .XYZ Domain Name, Then Crashes with BMW - <AUTHOR> https://verified.domains/google-creates-alphabet-and-registers-xyz-domain-name-then-crashes-with-bmw/

<comment><USER2> Engadget article: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10043212](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10043212)

NYTimes article, has comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10043152](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10043152)</comment>


The CIA's eerily accurate technology predictions from 1962 - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/culture/2013/3/14/4105286/cia-accurately-predicted-future-technology-in-1962 <comment><USER2> It would be interesting to see what they are predicting for 50 years from now. Transporters maybe?</comment>


Writing a Lexer - <AUTHOR> http://lazypython.blogspot.com/2009/11/writing-lexer.html <comment><USER2> I think the coolest way to write a lexer is to use the derivative of regular expressions:

[http://matt.might.net/articles/implementation-of-regular- exp...](http://matt.might.net/articles/implementation-of-regular-expression- matching-in-scheme-with-derivatives/)

It's surprisingly easy to implement, as the prior example demonstrates in Scheme.

This is the technique I recommend to my advanced compilers class.

<comment><USER3> The first lexer and recursive descent parser from Levine's "Lex & Yacc" book has been hammered into my head. I rewrote it from memory so often it's now part of my internal standard library; as late as this morning I was writing it in lisp to process the beanstalkd message queue protocol. I wrote it a few days ago as well, for Redis, and before that by a week for Memcached.

Manual lexer writing is a reusable but non-transferable technique, specially when regexes are slow or over kill; every little use-case has its small set of states, own termination condition, constituent characters and tokens :-)

Basic compiler techniques gave me the freedom to write software that _I_ wanted, not software prescribed to me by a book or work specs (let's face it, writing tools is the most fun kind of programming.) Sometimes I am grateful I know these things and can make whatever I fancy, other times I am spiteful for not being good at it; my work has thus far been marked by exuberant incompetence :-P

[Edit:

Or you can skip lexing and go straight to language design:

[http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Books/ProgLangs/200...](http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Books/ProgLangs/2007-04-26/)

]</comment></comment>


Secrets of octopus intelligence - <AUTHOR> http://www.boingboing.net/2010/02/01/the-secrets-of-octop.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+boingboing%2FiBag+%28Boing+Boing%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

<comment><USER2> from the comment:

[http://www.boingboing.net/2010/02/01/the-secrets-of- octop.ht...](http://www.boingboing.net/2010/02/01/the-secrets-of- octop.html#comment-702129)

      "Turns out, on a scale of one to chimpanzee, octopuses are
      probably somewhere close to matching wits with a dog"
      Interesting numbering system -- is one the only digit?</comment>


Investigators who know you've faked your death - <AUTHOR> https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/inside-the-world-of-investigators-who-know-youve-faked-your-death <comment><USER2> > _"You have to have an actual body to collect on insurance," says Ahearn. > "And it has to be the body of the insured. Ashes are not a body."_

Absolutely false. An obvious counterexample is that the "victims of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks received more than $38 billion in compensation"[1], even though, as of 2015, "40% of those who died are unidentified".[2]

The article itself gives a counterexample: "In 2002, a British man named John Darwin "disappeared" in a canoeing accident only to be discovered five years later with his wife in Panama. Apparently, she'd cashed his life insurance policy to pay off their mortgage."

And if it were true, insurance companies would simply say, "no body, so payment denied". They wouldn't rush to hire a skip tracer as the article claims: "remains don't turn up within a few weeks of their disappearance, that's when insurance companies start blowing up his phone".

The article is very muddled on this point.

[1] [https://www.latimes.com/la-110804compensation_lat- story.html](https://www.latimes.com/la-110804compensation_lat-story.html)

[2] [https://www.theguardian.com/us- news/2017/aug/08/remains-911-...](https://www.theguardian.com/us- news/2017/aug/08/remains-911-victim-identified-16-years-terror-attack)

<comment><USER3> When the author primarily interviews insurance company representatives, of course they're going to use the opportunity to lie a little bit in their favor :P

<comment><USER4> This isn't an interview, it's an ad by the insurance companies - _Don 't do this or we will find you_.

<comment><USER3> But if they're so sure, they wouldn't need to resort to propaganda ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > With a team like that, Rambam says he has a near 100 percent effectiveness > rate at finding people, usually within a few weeks of their death (although > sometimes, unfortunately, it turns out that the people he's looking for > actually are dead). Even so, he says he's never been stumped.

> "Some investigations have been pretty tedious," he says. "Some have been > time-consuming, but only because the person went to the trouble of going > from one country to another multiple times. I've basically had to follow the > trail of breadcrumbs, but it wasn't cleverness that helped them hide. It was > just that they were internationally mobile weasels to begin with. If you > have resources, you can disappear for a certain amount of time. But no one > can disappear forever."

That sounds pretty bold. Could it be that he exaggerates the truth as advertisement for his service?

<comment><USER6> Well, it's a little hard to make the math on this other claim work out: _Steven Rambam, a blunt-talking, New York P.I. who's helped locate tens of thousands of missing and dubiously dead people over the course of his 40-year career_

20,000/(40 * 365) = 1.3 found per day for 40 years. Maybe there are large groups faking their deaths at the same time?

<comment><USER7> I'm not totally sure who fucked up that, but his website says this:

> Since 1981, our investigators have conducted more than one thousand (1,000) > missing person investigations, with a better than 90% successful closure > rate.

[http://pallorium.com/News.html](http://pallorium.com/News.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Maybe a completely naive question: Insurance companies seem to be one of the main entities interested in tracking such people down, and are pretty big, regulated companies. Meanwhile, some of the "unlicensed investigators" interviewed in the article openly admit to doing illegal things in their investigations, like obtaining phone records by impersonating phone company employees. Seems a bit brazen. Are there enough intermediaries to somehow give the big companies plausible deniability? Or do police just not care to crack down on this arrangement?

<comment><USER9> You don't have to explain how you found someone. They can't get one of your steps declared inadmissible and then have a second chance at running. I don't see how the police would know, unless the phone company detected and reported it.

You do sometimes see news stories about police officers getting caught selling DMV database queries to PIs.

<comment><USER10> You even see stories about those officers going to jail, there was a pretty prominent case in the UK.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> >Ahearn tells me he's spent a large part of his career working as a "really good liar," manipulating people and situations into giving him information about the people he was tracking down... [snip] "All a skip tracer needs is charm and a telephone," he told the Believer in 2012, explaining that he could access any record by pretending to be someone else and providing false pretenses. In investigator-speak, this is called "pretexting," a form of social engineering in which someone lies to obtain privileged information. Skip tracers and P.I.s do it all the time.

>Let's say a client wanted the phone records of a dead person who might not have actually been dead. Ahearn would call up their phone company pretending to be an employee from a different department, and tell them his system was down and he needed to bring up an account for date of activation. More often than not, Ahearn would sound confident, and he'd have just the right amount of information that whoever on the end of the end would give him the name, account number or passcode he needed to get in.

Am I missing something or is this named individual really stating that he and his compatriots regularly break the law? I understand that PIs may play around the lines a bit, but this seems egregious.

<comment><USER12> What law would you say is broken?

<comment><USER13> Fraud mostly. Depending on specifics also impersonating an official/officer of the law and unauthorised access to information.

<comment><USER14> Its not fraud, at least not as federally defined because that only covers money, property, or "depriv[ing] another of the intangible right of honest services". It does not cover information.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> One day when I was homeless, I spent part of the day reading stories about intentional disappearances. I was fascinated by some of the parallels to homelessness in terms of both logistics for how to survive (relying on gift cards and prepaid phones) and that homelessness can be a form of social death to a surprising degree.

I blogged* a bit about it, but rereading the piece makes me feel like I didn't do a good job of really capturing my impressions. Perhaps I'll do an update sometime.

* [https://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/2017/05/l...](https://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/2017/05/lessons-borrowed-from-intentional.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> Here's a scenario I've always been curious about. One day, a person decides to just walk away. Not fake their own death, per se, but just says that they're going hiking and disappears.

Years go by, the family genuinely thinks the person is dead, they collect life insurance money and spend it on various things, as you do.

Years later, the person shows back up alive. The family didn't do anything wrong, they genuinely thought the person was dead. The "missing" person didn't really break any laws, just ran away from their family for a few years.

Can the insurance company try to recoup the money from anyone? If so, who and how does that work?

<comment><USER17> "... but won't in insurance fraud. "You have to have an actual body to collect on insurance," says Ahearn. "And it has to be the body of the insured. Ashes are not a body.""

It sounds like you can't just get insurance money for a missing person.

<comment><USER18> Twenty years ago the industry was suffering an onslaught of fraud. People would claim a person had died and was disposed of via cremation or there was no body at all, etc. I am no expert and the fellow quoted is clearly engaging in a bit of hyperbole, but one has to assume the bar is much higher than it used to be.

[https://www.nytimes.com/1997/07/01/business/fake-deaths- abro...](https://www.nytimes.com/1997/07/01/business/fake-deaths-abroad-are-a- growing-problem-for-insurers.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> For anyone interested looking into a recent case with some publicity:

Gerald Cotten was the CEO of a cryptocurrency exchange. It was reported that he died while traveling abroad due to health complications and was cremated where he died. He was the only person who had the private keys for the exchange's coins, and the coins went missing.

<comment><USER20> I think that's the conspiracy theory version. He died in India (and admittedly some details were strange), but AFAIK the body was returned to Canada before being cremated.

The lost keys nonsense has all evaporated. It was just a standard Ponzi scheme [1]. Had it all been planned, I would assume they'd have left things in a less disastrous state (Gerald and his co-conspirators).

[1] [https://documentcentre.eycan.com/eycm_library/Quadriga%20Fin...](https://documentcentre.eycan.com/eycm_library/Quadriga%20Fintech%20Solutions%20Corp/English/CCAA/1.%20Monitor's%20Reports/6.%20Fifth%20Report%20of%20the%20Monitor/Fifth%20Report%20of%20the%20Monitor%20dated%20June%2019,%202019.PDF)

<comment><USER21> Maybe he did it because things got so disastrous that he couldn't think of any other way out.

> If he looks into it further and finds out that the person who vanished in > that water was in serious debt or that they were "some kind of reluctant > witness or litigant who has the resources to disappear in a puff of smoke," > he says it's "just the most obvious thing. We see it all the time."

<comment><USER20> Maybe. I have a hard time believing that someone smart enough to set up the whole exchange and run it couldn't think of a better way to make a clean exit and not leave an enormous mess for his wife. She would need to help, bringing the "body" back to Canada, testifying about the hospital and what happened, etc. So the bet is she can handle everything, claim she wasn't involved, and after a few years go and join Gerry in India somewhere? That's a fools plan.

Then again, most criminals aren't smart. Maybe he was just lucky for a while.

It's possible, but I still think it's more likely that everything was going to shit for a while and he happened to die. If he hadn't died, given the BTC rally this year and renewed interest, he probably would have had a fresh infusion of capital and we might not even know!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The book mentioned in the article, "Playing Dead" is well worth a read.

I was surprised at to what lengths some people were willing to go to fake their own death as well as to _why_ they did so.

It kind of gave me the same sensation as "it'd be fun to try and rob a bank to see if I could pull it off."

...Not that I'm planning on doing either, if you're reading this FBI / Life Insurance Agent.

<comment><USER23> I often think about the tactics I'd use and would be interested in comparing notes with others, but always worry that publishing a plan would preclude me from every using it if I were desperate. Ha!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I hope they get on this guy soon:

 _" A millionaire model agency boss who is thought to have key information about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal 'has disappeared like a ghost without a trace'. Jean-Luc Brunel, 72, has vanished as police seek to ask the Frenchman 'urgent' questions about the paedophile."_

Ref: [https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7417633/Millionaire...](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7417633/Millionaire- thought-key-information-Epstein-scandal-vanishes.html)

</comment><comment><USER25> We've moving into the real of digitizing fingerprints, faces, DNA and everything else into databases.

Soon, faking your own death will be almost impossible. Maybe you can move to that remote village in France, but you aren't getting on a plane or a cruise to get there.

<comment><USER3> Sailing across the Atlantic is challenging, but absolutely doable and not ridiculously expensive. France and the US both have very long coastlines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I like the coin-collector catch.

I used to bowl competitively, every bowler has a fairly unique and recognizable style. I always kind of figured this would be enough to catch me if I ever went on the lam. You could put a wig on someone, change facial hair, even plastic surgery-- there's no hiding the ball's delivery.

<comment><USER27> In a weird way, if you intentionally lose your personality traits, skills, love, passion completely and thoroughly, then perhaps you really have "killed yourself".

It's a cost a person pays and a million dollars probably ain't enough to a lot of people compared to the missed opportunity cost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> > With a team like that, Rambam says he has a near 100 percent effectiveness > rate at finding people...

I'm not sure how one could measure this.

> I'm always amazed at how infrequently people use cash for this shit.

Maybe more of them do but they also get away. From the article I get the impression that these investigators just aim for the low-hanging fruit. There are enough of them to make a living.

<comment><USER29> >> With a team like that, Rambam says he has a near 100 percent effectiveness rate at finding people...

> I'm not sure how one could measure this.

You have a number of people you investigate N. You have a number of people who you find to be actually dead D, and a number of people who are fake dead F. Then there are some unknowns U.

F + D + U = N

If (F + D) / N is near 1, you have a near 100 percent effectiveness.

<comment><USER30> The question is how can you be confident that the cases you're putting into category D don't actually belong in category U. The investigator is tasked with finding people who faked their own death; how can you tell the difference between a successful con and the person you're looking for actually being deceased?

<comment><USER29> Teeth, DNA, fingerprints, etc

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> >Then there are the people who do it to escape from themselves — they don't like who they are or who they've become, and they want a fresh start in a place where no one knows their name. They don't do much planning. They don't concern themselves with the ramifications. They just disappear and don't look back. Experts call this "pseudocide."

I wish them the best of luck against the nannys of the world screaming after them to "get back here and fit your life into my database schema!"

</comment><comment><USER32> This sounds like the quadrigacx exit scam

</comment><comment><USER33> So many questions on this article. That don't get answers.

1/ If they claim they will find you. How many suspicious claims are there? How many get found? Would have loved some statistics going with the juicy anecdotes.

2/ If there are so many people working on it. Doing even shady things. How much money is there to be made? Is it a percentage of the claim?

</comment><comment><USER34> So, it would be fairly simple to hide your death if you're content to have a new life, without any money or resources from the old one. Wash dishes in a diner in Montana, attend the rodeo, live above a bar - if you want to check out of society, it'd be no problem.

</comment><comment><USER35> >A few years later, Olivia Newton-John's fuckboi boyfriend Patrick McDermott

What could have possessed the author to publish this phrase?

<comment><USER5> Mel Magazine is supposed to be an "Esquire meets Vice". The editor-in-chief comes from Playboy.[1]

[1]: [https://www.fastcompany.com/90217210/dollar-shave-clubs- mens...](https://www.fastcompany.com/90217210/dollar-shave-clubs-mens- magazine-mel-grows-up)

<comment><USER36> Mel is Dollar Shave Club's content team. They also produce the bathroom minutes that come in every box.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Excellent. I now know what I must do.</comment>