SQL Injecting PhpMyAdmin - <AUTHOR> http://www.0x000000.com/?i=587 <comment><USER2> Not real likely to be attacked, since they would not only need to know the database name, but the address of the PHPMyAdmin install. But hopefully it's addressed quickly.

<comment><USER3> How about 127.0.0.1?

<comment><USER2> I don't have PHPMyAdmin installed locally, I use GUI client. And you also don't know the name of my databases. As I said, I hope it gets addressed quickly, but I just don't see it very likely that this will be exploited whatsoever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Now if the title was "CSRF against PhpMyAdmin" then it would make more sense. Given that PMA has a form dedicated to letting you run arbitrary SQL statements, the fact that it allows arbitrary statements to be run is not news.

</comment><comment><USER5> CSRF attacks are weak. You'd have to know my website's phpMyAdmin location (if I used phpMyAdmin) and my table names in order to do this. CSRF attacks are only scary when they effect major websites.

<comment><USER6> CSRF attacks are strong. I can write an attack that tries dozens of different potential combinations of URL and table names just as easily as I can attack one.

Not to mention that many people use their web host's one-click install tool which always puts scripts like phpMyAdmin in the same place.

<comment><USER2> But you still need to know the address of the site. You'd need to create a new attack site for every victim. And then lure the victim there after they had just been in PHPMyAdmin. Not exactly like a CSRF in Facebook or something.

It should definitely be fixed, but it really is a weak attack.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> the solution is simple, give access to your database only to people you trust and don´t access to your super important database from a public location using phpMyAdmin!

<comment><USER8> Actually, the solution is not to _ever_ use phpMyAdmin on a public web server. Just like Webmin, and every other tool that has god-like power over critical system resources, it should be on a private IP, accessible only from trusted systems via an encrypted, strongly-authenticated channel.

<comment><USER9> This doesn't help. If you use the same web browser for using phpMyAdmin that you use for visiting the attacker's site, you're hacked.

<comment><USER8> "Strongly-encrypted channel" basically means VPN in my book. If the phpMyAdmin server isn't on a publicly-routable IP, and you don't have the VPN tunnel open when you aren't using the secure host, then it will in fact defeat CSRF.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Robots learn to evolve and improve - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-33867941 <comment><USER2> I think they just took a concept figured out in 1994 ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBgG_VSP7f8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBgG_VSP7f8)) and applied it to robots, in an attempt to get an easy publication written up.

Really, though, we know we can make robot parts. The hard part is the software. What these people did by making it robotic was completely pointless (because making the robots is a huge amount of unnecessary added work) that doesn't add to our knowledge until we can solve all the software problems in simulations first.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's a thing that's concerning to me about AI and robotics articles in mainstream media; nearly every such article has some sort of "but there's no need to worry just yet" qualifying statement before the end.

It's almost as if there is this obvious future we're all subconsciously aware of, that we fear greatly, but that we're somehow afraid to confront in meaningful way.

<comment><USER4> Yes, that's pretty much the case. You can think about it like this: the alien intelligence will arrive on this planet in a few decades, and we have no clue how to "confront in meaningful way". The question is not "if", it's "when".</comment></comment>


Google to open artificial intelligence centre in China - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/business-42334583 <comment><USER2> Perhaps this is because I don't have the hard facts and figures right in front of me, but I have a hard time believing that foreign tech investments in China really pay off. The Chinese strategy seems to be to woo big foreign companies, build a critical mass of local users who want the product, ban or otherwise limit the foreign company's influence in China, then develop a home-grown Chinese version of the foreign company's product with state support and the newly acquired domestic talent.

If Google accomplishes anything worthwhile at this research center, won't China just shut it down and re-employ those researchers at a domestic company? Why do high-tech companies even continue to try to break into China?

<comment><USER3> An AI center is not a product like a search engine or Windows, or an e-commerce site.

It helps China cultivate talents, why would China limit its influence.

MSRA accomplishes many things worthwhile such as ResNet in China, and it prospers now. Some researchers enter MSRA, and some leave. They enter or leave not because the government force them to do so, they enter or leave because they can tell where opportunity resides.

<comment><USER2> I'm not asking why China would limit it, I'm asking what Google _gains_ from it.

If Google's top talent in China will mostly be poached within the next 10 years, is it really worthwhile to open a research center there? MSRA is a very good example, but at the end of the day, it's still a training ground for Chinese researchers. Paradoxically, the more important it is that Chinese researchers work on at Google China, the more likely that Google is to lose those researchers to government or private competitors.

<comment><USER4> On one hand, I have to agree that China's closed/censored society is directly at odds with the product offering of a company like Google ... on the other hand, does one simply disengage from such a massive market as China? Perhaps Google is betting on a future when there is greater freedom for the Chinese people.

<comment><USER2> I personally think Google's best approach would be to pay hand-over-fist for the best Chinese AI/ML experts to emigrate to the US and do their work here. However, Google seems to be taking the shotgun approach of employing more experts in the short-term while guaranteeing them less job stability in the long-term.

I think you're right in that it really does depend on when China becomes a free society. Personally, from what/who I know from China, I don't see this happening within the next decade. I expect political instability within China to reach a tipping point, after which we'll either see a very slow global liberalization or a definitive move towards a more totalitarian Chinese government with a modern twist.

Honestly I don't know why Google has any faith in the good will of the future Chinese government. As has been established for a very long time, China needs foreign expertise more than any foreign company needs a labor or consumer market within China.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A lot of people still are questioning the motion. But it's fair and simple: Google needs to tap local Chinese AI talents. Their size is grow so large that it can't be ignore. And you don't have to read it between the lines, it's front and center on the Google's official blog post[1], stated by Google Chief Scientist for AI/ML Feifei Li:

         China is home to many of the world's top experts in artificial intelligence (AI)
         and machine learning. All three winning teams of the ImageNet Challenge
         in the past three years have been largely composed of Chinese researchers.
         Chinese authors contributed 43 percent of all content in the top 100 AI journals in 2015
         and when the Association for the Advancement of AI discovered that
         their annual meeting overlapped with Chinese New Year this year, they rescheduled.

[1]: [https://www.blog.google/topics/google-asia/google-ai- china-c...](https://www.blog.google/topics/google-asia/google-ai-china- center/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Didn't expect a simple job offering would bring all these political arguments and speculation from people hardly read any Chinese or understand Chinese history & economics. smh. It's just business, China has a strong STEM talent pool, and Google can easily select them from top in top at a competitive price.

<comment><USER7> Every HN thread about china has the exact same anti-chinese comments. Every single one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Please understand that we are still in the midst of a 'war for talent' as far as AI is concerned. Since getting them to the US is less likely, Google is just moving to where the talent is.

<comment><USER9> True. It is a pretty strong endorsement from Google to setup a specific research division in a country where they effectively get banned. The only logical reason is to hire talents at local price for projects outside of China. Not sure how the return would be though.

</comment></comment><comment> dis-sys When google initially entered the Chinese market more than a decade ago, it offered a censored version of google search conformed to the censorship requirements set by the Chinese government. It argued that the most ethical option was to offer some restricted services to Chinese rather than leave hundreds of millions of Chinese Internet users with limited access to information [1]. Basically it argued that Chinese need google (and other American internet companies) to avoid being left behind in the Internet age.

Interestingly, 7 years after its quit from the Chinese market, the Internet sector in China is booming with 4 out of world's top 10 Internet companies being Chinese companies [2]. Now they are setting up this AI centre, surely that is to help Chinese avoid being left behind in the AI age again.

We will see. ;)

[1] [https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/why-g...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/why- google-quit-china-and-why-its-heading-back/424482/)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_Internet_compa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_Internet_companies)

<comment><USER10> Google.cn _was_ better than the alternatives, since it at least disclosed when search results had to be censored (sorta like the notices when links are removed due to copyright takedowns). Of course the CPC didn't like that, and it was probably one of the things which ultimately led to Google leaving/being driven out of China.

It would have been much more profitable to simply comply rather than lose the Chinese market, as numerous other Western companies have done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> An under-reported fact is that Google has done more than any other country to help spread the use of AI in China. AlphaGo was a Sputnik moment that galvanized the government, which threw its weight behind AI a few months later. TensorFlow is widely used and Google is paying evangelists to tour the country, giving speeches and writing books about its use. This hiring center is just one piece of a larger strategy for them to ensure that TensorFlow wins the API wars in machine learning.

</comment><comment><USER12> Please HN don't censor this comment. I legitimately believe that the US and China are on the road to war, and this war will draw on in all the powers of the world.

This comment might be mocked, but if you read into history you can see how unbelievable war seemed within weeks of a conflict. The day WWI broke out the French and German ambassador were trying out each other's cars and drinking wine in Alsace.

This research center is a bad idea. It's like if the University of Chicago and Enrico Fermi decided to establish their atomic research lab in Munich in the 1930's.

Don't see this as an anti-Chinese comment, if anything the fault lies with Americans who abused, overused, and failed to adjust an international trade/monetary system. The fact that our government is now run by no one who served in or remembered World War II / The Great Depression seems a likely cause of how we went down this path.

If you're curious for more on this, look into how close the US came to war with China in 1995 in Taiwan. Also look up the RAND Corporation's study on war with China from 2015.

<comment><USER13> How many wars were started over tensions concerning research centers / science? WW1 was started by an assassination, WW2 by an aggressive annexation of countries and race-based extermination.

If China and the US go to war, it'll probably be over aggression in North Korea; not over a corporately funded scientific research center.

<comment><USER14> The parent comment is not claiming that war will start because of a research lab. (S)he is saying it is against the interest of the US to start an AI lab there because AI will be critical to the war effort if there is war.

<comment><USER3> Maybe that Google sets up an AI lab is not in the interest of the US, but it is in the interest of Google.

Google is a multinational company and its employees come from diverse countries. Although it is headquartered in the US and its founders are American citizens, its core interests may not fully align with the core interests of the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> this will be an extremely good fit, china and google. Their ideologies for the most part are the same.

</comment><comment><USER16> When we'll look back 20 years from now, we'll we see Google in the same light as we did IBM after helping the Nazi with their computers?

Will Google allow its DeepMind technology to be used to spy on Chinese citizens and dissidents?

<comment><USER3> I find your argument rather lame.

First, Chinese government is not Nazi and Google is not IBM. You can't just say that a government is Nazi just because you hate that government.

Second, even if Google openly broke with Chinese government, it still has offices in China. I doubt that Google opens an AI center in China to "allow its DeepMind technology to be used to spy on Chinese citizens and dissidents", and I do think that Google has a big ambition than you can think in China. And I think that ambition is to advance AI with the help of local talents.

<comment><USER2> At its core, the goal of the two regimes (China, Nazi Germany) is the same: control information so that the existing regime is portrayed in a good light that preserves stability. Just because China isn't genocoding Jews doesn't mean they don't have hundreds of thousands of political prisoners, disadvantaged minorities, and a completely authoritarian government. As is, you would never hear of the North Korean concentration camps that China supports, nor the Tibetan and Uighur genocides that are ongoing.

Google's move is purely financial. Google's biggest ambition is to control Chinese search, but its greatest ambition is to control _all_ search, and the internet as whole. Google, as all other appreciably large tech companies, wants to hold a dominant position in the Chinse market, and to do so is willing to sacrifice market share in inferuor products. How much China gets involved is TB.

The really fun part? Watching corporate entities justify genocide, sexism, racism, etc. in their grabs for dominance over the remaining European provinces.

<comment><USER3> Can you give some credible sources on "Tibetan and Uighur genocides that are ongoing"?

<comment><USER2> Tibet: [https://www.ncas.rutgers.edu/center-study-genocide- conflict-...](https://www.ncas.rutgers.edu/center-study-genocide-conflict- resolution-and-human-rights/tibet)

>"The Tibetan government in exile in India estimates that the death toll since 1950 due to starvation, outright violence, and other indirect causes amounts to 1.2 million. However, some Tibetologists place the figure closer to half a million. The non-governmental International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) released a report to the United Nations in 1959, and another in 1960, which documented accounts of atrocities and accused the Chinese of religious-based genocide in Tibet. "

Could possibly be biased by CIA it says.

Uighur: [https://uhrp.org/featured-articles/arguing-genocide- xinjiang...](https://uhrp.org/featured-articles/arguing-genocide-xinjiang- east-turkestan)

Ehh this is as biased as it probably gets and it doesn't really make it sound like genocide. I guess I had heard of this (and maybe Tibet too) as cultural genocides before, and got it mixed up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Did anyone else here grow up being told that the Chinese government stole search technology from Google when they tried to do business there, and this is how Baidu got started?

<comment><USER3> Once www.people.cn (the website of People's Daily) built a search engine and failed. If Chinese government stole search technology from Google, why would it give it to Baidu not to a search engine set up by its mouthpiece?

Baidu had already been popular in China before Google officially entered China, so there is no 'this is how Baidu got started' thing.

<comment><USER18> No idea if they stole anything and I wouldn't/couldn't/won't make any claims about that etc. but what I've seen of Baidu's open sourced offerings, they are based on Google's publically promoted/published designs down to the types of components (their own implementations of protobuf RPC, GFS, etc.), class names, API C++ style, etc.

Lots of others have done this (some parts of Facebook, too) and I don't think this was based on Google source code or anything, but it doesn't exactly smell terribly innovative on its own?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Since the beginning, Google has claimed it was an AI company. They have killed their mantra "do no evil" and now they are putting labs in a country with lower values of ethic. Recently they were selling their robotic activity because it was too frightening. All their actions are consistent with a single aim: build an AI like in singularity or terminator.

<comment><USER3> Maybe you should not use anything Made in China, 'a country with lower values of ethic', because anything Made in China you consumed contribute to the economy of the China.

If you continue to use made in China, your criticizing Google setting up an AI lab in China is just hypocrisy.

<comment><USER19> I did not expect my comment to be interpreted as a critic of China. I have nothing against Chinese people and I am glad that Google setting in China will help the country to develop.</comment></comment></comment>


Releasing a Public Domain Image of the NSA's Utah Data Center - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/07/releasing-public-domain-image-nsas-utah-data-center <comment><USER2> Man, are you sure that landscape isn't copyrighted or something like that? Or that the view of those gentle slopes doesn't totally and utterly destroy National Security (read: the NSA's security)? You know, everyone in the Home Of The Brave is legally bound to be afraid now, or else! I'm sure they'll find a way to put the Fear Of Alexander (formerly known as The Fear Of God) into that shameless shutterbug.</comment>


Ask HN: Looking for landing page reviews - <AUTHOR>

Recently launched a landing page for our app doctant: a non-complex approach to writing, publishing, and collaborating on technical documentation.
Any feedback on the landing page / idea would be awesome!
http://www.doctant.com <comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.doctant.com](http://www.doctant.com)</comment>


The problem of China's huge bike graveyards [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-china-43999482/the-problem-of-china-s-huge-bike-graveyards <comment><USER2> This is a failure of collection because buying new bikes is apparently cheaper than the cost of collecting and repairing existing bikes. [0]

It's reminiscent of glass bottle deposits in the USA and other places.[1] Should municipalities charge a mandatory $20 bike deposit? If nothing else, it would incentivize beggars and others looking for a quick buck - they could collect rogue bikes and return them for a deposit.

Not sure how to incentivize fixing bikes over replacing, short of a tax or regulation on new bikes. Especially in cultures where even cell phones and computers get replaced instead of fixed.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16964298](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16964298)

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

</comment><comment><USER3> Related recent discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16961726](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16961726)</comment>


KoNLPy: Korean NLP in Python - <AUTHOR> https://konlpy.org <comment><USER2> I'm greatly happy on seeing libraries that work with my mother language on HN :-)

I guess people think that well... 'glorified wrappers' aren't worth discussion on HN because there's too many NLP libraries on English? There aren't a lot of libraries around Korean, especially practical ones so I'm happy to see KoLNPy on HN.

</comment><comment><USER3> Surprised but happy to see this here. I maintain a few Python wrappers for MeCab and was working on Korean support when I found this - it was better than I whatever I was doing so I linked to it instead.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is very cool. While I do not speak Korean, I can appreciate the part-of- speech tagging and the other features, as that's required in any NLP framework. I'm wondering, is there a way to generate a syntax tree using this framework? Just looking at the docs now.

</comment><comment><USER5> why is this getting attention?

<comment><USER6> Irony abounds

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is just a glorified wrapper around existing solutions. Can't understand that this is worth doctoral dissertation.

<comment><USER8> Everyone stands on the shoulder of giants.

Some stands on the shoulders of TPUs that do 1 century worth of compute in a day. Other stands on the shoulders of C or Python libraries.

Also, is engineering "just a glorified wrapper around science"?, is physics "just a glorified wrapper around maths"?, and is litterature "just a glorified wrapper around words"?

What's with the condescension culture?</comment></comment>


Show HN: Dating website where ladies get paid - <AUTHOR>

Happy new year fellow HNers! This is my first Show HN... and it's a dating website. The crowd here is not my target market, so I'm not looking for SEO/traffic, but looking for feedbacks. Lots of it. I'm fully prepared that I'll get bashed due to the nature of my product.
What: An online Indonesian dating website where the ladies get paid if their date sucks. That "paid" part is just a gimmick (the feature is not fully implemented) which seems to work. So far nobody questions the lack of implementation. If people do need it, I'll implement it.
Why: I want to quit my job and "do startup" but I don't have any good idea. Dating website is (saturated but still) easy to get traction. I also use this as a learning vehicle (Scala, CoffeeScript, AngularJS, Google App Engine).
When: I'm doing this after hours and weekends.
Where: http://www.ngajakjalan.com
How: Most likely you don't want to create an account, so please login with demo/demo. It's a real account, so please don't send message to other members from there :)
Stats so far: Landing page for 2 months, then 2 months running. 8k members, 85% male, 100k pageviews/month. Spending $10 daily for FB ads to get female members.
Specific questions: I'm thinking of raising seed money so I can quit my job and work on this fulltime. Given my situation (single, employed, solo founder) and my website progress, (1) Is this a good idea? (2) What would it take to get me there? (3) If not good idea, what are the alternatives? <comment><USER2> Another thing to think about is dating is local so I would concentrate my marketing on one town to add more value to your users. You might want to think about partnering with a daily deals site and cross marketing dating type deals to your members. You might be able to become an affiliate. review the deal and then only forward the good date deals.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think of dealing with daily deals site, but I don't have leverage yet (not incorporated, small userbase). Thanks for the "review the deal" idea, I didn't think about that! (I was simply thinking to pass everything). Regarding locals, I pinpoint the capital city (Jakarta) in my FB ad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> I think in genral too early to tell

some questions: what's your cost per female aquisition cost? what's your cost per male member aquisition cost? Look at montlhy active users(how many users from last month logged in this month)

Test other advertising avenues to get costs via those channels

Do two tests(not at the same time): 1\. setup up something like adsense for a couple of days maybe for like 10% of the male users. 2\. stop advertsing for a month, does the site still grow?

if I were going to invest I'd like to know how are you going to make money. how much are you going to make per user. how much does it cost to get a user? so, if I pay for X number of users how long do I need to wait to double my money.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't use AdSense because I think, "Why would anyone search for dating websites?" as dating is more like "as you go" kind of thing. Thanks for your advice regarding how I'm going to make money, I haven't really thought about that. I just keep on developing and spending ads (for growth) without thinking the other end.

<comment><USER3> You should trial some adverts, hunches are great, but testing is relatively cheap these days and can make a big difference.

Always test your assumptions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How is the conversion rate of your FB ads to get female members? Or what are your costs per female subscription?

Regarding your questions 1,2: Raising money for dating is quite hard. Still everyone believes online dating is broken and there must be something better but looking back at dating deals and exits (there are very few) I doubt that you are able to raise any money with dating

<comment><AUTHOR> Roughly $10 gets a dozen per day, so lets say it's $1/female signup. I dont really care about males now as they seem to come "free" and I might need to close registration for them to maintain balance.

This is an after-thought but... I heard that dating is a billion dollar industry in the US alone, how come it can be hard to raise money for this kind of website?

<comment><USER5> It would be easy for some, hard for others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Also, how big is the market. Invests want you to be able acheive revenue of >$20 million. If we assume you make as much as facebook per year per user at something like $1 per user then you'll need 20 million active users. If you look at your current advertsing channels can you get there.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm thinking of advertising in magazine/tabloid, like a small box in the corner, anyone have experience with this kind of offline-to-online marketing like this?

<comment><USER6> People have become blind to these kind of mass-marketing advertisements. If you let a few people read a newspaper with a full page advertisement somewhere hidden inside, everyone will just skip the ad and go to the next page. To make things worse: nobody will even remember what the advertisement was about.

Plus it's impossible to accurately measure the results of your campaign.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> How do you verify that a member is female or not?

<comment><USER8> Fraud in this area is not a major problem. Participants who misrepresent their gender usually do not find dating success.</comment></comment>


Mapping neural activity in response to watching horror movies - <AUTHOR> https://nuadox.com/post/190520598072/horror-movies-neural-activity <comment><USER2> I want to see a study like this where people watch grisly war documentaries. Do some people turn off parts of their minds where they can't peer in the film with the minds eye out of shock or denial?</comment>


Show HN: Gophish – An Open-Source Phishing Framework - <AUTHOR> https://getgophish.com <comment><USER2> Even among open-source titles, this one excels. Witness:

* Uses Golang

* For Phishing

* Gopher, a digging rodent

* Go Fish, a card game where you steal from your opponent

That's a quadruple entendre. Well played.

</comment><comment><USER3> Really impressive site, FWIW. Great presentation for a startup FOSS tool.

The user guide is great; do you expect any kind of video demos available?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Eventually we will have a full online demo where users can see what the product looks like without having to download it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Evil Genius!</comment>


Copper Nanorods Increase Boiling Water Bubbles 3,000% Order of magnitude efficiency gain. - <AUTHOR> http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/07/nanotechnology-copper-nanorods-water-boiling-faster-bubbles.php

<comment><USER2> Not exactly. It makes more bubbles, but it doesn't make it more efficient.</comment>


Show HN: I Built a Remote Job Board on GitHub Issues Page - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/remote-job-boards/software-engineering/issues <comment><AUTHOR> The idea is to have a community around Job Posts, where people can comment on job descriptions and share thoughts about the company. Job posts are never deleted, they are just closed, so we keep historical data.

It has ~700 jobs posted right now imported from other sources, but you can also post:

\- a job manually there

\- purchase a job highlight

<comment><USER2> How can you know if people leave legit comments? Anybody can write a message in a GitHub issue.

<comment><USER3> I think that's the same problem we can have on Glassdoor or in the HN's "Who is hiring" page - we have to trust the community and if anything raises an eyebrown, you can report it.

But at least, like in these other apps, you can only leave a comment on GitHub if you're signed-in

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Bring the data to where your users are. This approach implements this idea to the core. Loved it!</comment>


An iOS, Android app to get healthy with friends - <AUTHOR> https://wellwith.me/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a neat little free app we made, after placing second on the Berlin Health 2.0 hackathon last year ([http://thehealthcareblog.com/blog/2012/11/28/health-2-0-berl...](http://thehealthcareblog.com/blog/2012/11/28/health-2-0-berlin- code-a-thon-sponsored-by-aetna-international-2/)). In a nutshell, it's like an Instagram/Lift mashup, and is really fun to use (take my word for it, ha :). It's goal is for people to be motivated to do something about their health, when they see their friends also doing fun challenges to get healthier. We'd love to hear your opinions!</comment>


A JavaScript algorithm to identify fonts in pictures - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Sirvasile/Typefont <comment><AUTHOR> Thank you all!</comment>


DIY : USB Password Dongle - <AUTHOR> http://codeandlife.com/2012/03/03/diy-usb-password-generator/

<comment><USER2> [slight spoiler ahead] The caps lock LED toggle detection reminds me of Cryptonomicon, during Randy's stint in the cell.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is interesting, it simulates a USB keyboard to enter your password.</comment>


Show HN: LibreRead 1.0 – Self-Hosted Free Ebook Reader - <AUTHOR> https://libreread.org <comment><USER2>
        Features
        - Built using Golang

More general commentary: For people actually using the software, is the implementation language really a feature?

EDIT: to be clear, I'm not attacking go as a language but rather the general trend of citing the implementation language as a feature when the audience is more than just "developers"

<comment><USER3> For the end user? No. For the self-hoster making the decision on whether or not to pick this solution? Yes.

The same goes with "Easy Installation". The end user doesn't care if the install or easy or hard.

You have to consider the dependencies, resource requirements, and manageability of anything you host.

<comment><USER4> Or just containerize and don't think about that :)

<comment><USER5> Containers can be just as much of a pain in the ass to set up as anything else. I've had instances of much better experiences setting up software running out of container than in container.

<comment><USER6> A lousy Dockerfile or missing docker-compose.yml will do that. Just because someone took the time to lump together _a_ container doesn't mean it's the right one or that it would be reasonably useful to someone seeking to take advantage of the containerized software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looking at the demo (why does it _show_ the demo login details to have us copy-paste it, instead of autofilling it or even auto-logging in?), I feel like they tweaked the mobile interface a little bit and serve it for the desktop, and called it 'responsive design'. Basic actions like 'Add new books' are hidden in a hamburger menu over at a corner, easily overlooked on a desktop, and the menu fills up the whole screen when expanded, despite having only four options.

I like the idea, but an explanation or a FAQ would be much more useful than a small list of vague bullet points. It looks like it takes PDFs and epubs and serves them as HTML - but PDF conversion is particularly tricky and prone to failure. Are there options to tweak the conversion like in Calibre, to work around badly formatted PDFs (which seems to be most of them)? How does it handle figures, or tables that are too large for a given mobile screen? Can it fetch covers and/or metadata for books if necessary? Answering some use-case questions like these can give users a better feel for the scope and goals of the project.

<comment><USER8> _It looks like it takes PDFs and epubs and serves them as HTML - but PDF conversion is particularly tricky and prone to failure._

When I clicked a PDF link it opened in FireFox's PDF viewer. Thought that was odd/a bug. I checked it out because I would like a ePub/PDF reader that works on any machine I have access to and can connect to a machine running this but at first glance it needs a little work. Still, I'll check in a few weeks from now, it's a good idea if they can overcome the issues you mentioned and make sure things render consistently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If this gets good reception, would you consider adapting this for Sandstorm.io? Seems like it would be fitting:

[https://apps.sandstorm.io/genre/Media](https://apps.sandstorm.io/genre/Media)

</comment><comment><USER10> Awesome project!

I see you're using ebooks from the project I lead, Standard Ebooks, in your front page screenshot. Glad to see you're liking our work, and keep up your own good work!

Drop me a line if you need any help with epub compatibility/quirks :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Standard Ebooks is a great project. I personally download and read books from there and also used it for a lot of testing in LibreRead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I really like full-text search for books. Currently I use:

\- Safari Books Online: expensive, and only works with books on their platform

\- Recoll: libre/free, and can search a local book collection. Built as a desktop app, although there's at least one web client[0]

If either LibreRead or one of the Recoll web UIs can match the speed and UI of Safari's full-text search, I'll be very happy.

[0] I haven't tried it, because it didn't occur to me to look for one until today: [https://github.com/koniu/recoll- webui](https://github.com/koniu/recoll-webui)

<comment><USER12> If you get a chance, try DocFetcher[0]. I use it for my personal calibre ebook library at home, and I love the fact that between it's independent indexing and the calibre portable distribution, I have a completely portable library on my network.

[0] [http://docfetcher.sourceforge.net/en/index.html](http://docfetcher.sourceforge.net/en/index.html)

<comment><USER11> Thanks. Tried it yesterday. It works well for my use case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It would be great if we could integrate it with some ereader (kobo, Kindle).

I don't really like reading ebooks on my desktop or mobile

<comment><USER14> Yeah, that would really be great.

Just yesterday I wanted to order the new Kindle Oasis because I think the hardware is perfect (good to hold, physical buttons, …) but was told by a coworker just before ordering it can't open .epub files.

Edit: Thanks for all the tips about .epub + Kindle. I just found out that there also is an option to install Software like KOReader[1] if one wants to go the Jailbreak route.

[1] [https://github.com/koreader/koreader](https://github.com/koreader/koreader)

<comment><USER15> No Kindles can, they're based around Mobi, which is a quick file conversion away from an epub.

<comment><USER16> It's quick to convert but I've had varying results going from epub -> mobi, especially with calibre. What's worked for me the best has definitely been kindlegen but it's still not perfect.

<comment><USER17> In the Calibre settings, did you specify the exact version of the Kindle you have as the output device? With that set correctly, and not just left as the default, it has been years now since I had any formatting issues going from epub > mobi/azw to read books on my Kindle Paperwhite.

<comment><USER16> Thanks, I actually don't think I've done this so I'll give it a shot!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If this were designed to seamlessly interoperate with Calibre (a filesystem and sqlite3 iirc) this would be potentially useful to me.

I could more confidently selfhost a web version of my calibre library for reading and bookmarking. Calibre has a web version but I'm not confident in it and would be uninclined to host it even in a sandstorm instance for example.

The memory issues of libreread, as indicated by others, are too much for hosting in a friendly way with other apps. The value of full text search isn't nearly good enough to warrant the memory usage. Aim for < 60MB serverside.

Calibre has an large amount of features that are critical for people actually trying to maintain an ebook library. Those features have been added and polished over a decade. I'm very doubtful they can be replicated in a reasonable timeframe.

Valuable to see people making things in this area though! Cheers.

</comment><comment><USER19> I have been using Google Books for my reading. And that is just for one reason - all my highlights and notes are stored in Google Docs. You can use the doc to build your summaries or quickly read through all the highlights/notes.

I have yet to find a reader which can do this.

<comment><USER20> Thanks for sharing this. I've been quite frustrated by the low portability of Kindle annotations lately ...

<comment><USER21> I hate to self-promote on HN, but I recently developed a service which should help with this exact problem: [https://readwise.io](https://readwise.io)

Would love any feedback, if you have it :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> You could make a reader as a static website: just sync data to Google Drive / Dropbox / OneDrive. I have a simple EPub reader doing exactly that: [https://h5reader.azurewebsites.net/](https://h5reader.azurewebsites.net/)

</comment><comment><USER23> Does this track current page in PDFs? I had a quick look and it seems like this feature is supported for epub files.

I maintain, for personal use, a self-hosted web service that does something similar to this. In my custom service I split each PDF into a collection of images. This lets me download limited sets of the book (10-page chunks) for quick load times and also lets me remember which page was the last one I was reading.

A similar feature in something like this would be cool. Automatically extract the image from the page, transcode it into the best format supported by the browser, and remember which page is being read (regardless of the source book format).

</comment><comment><USER24> This is really nice and I'm definitely planning on giving it a looksee. I currently use Ubooquity since it's a very simply no-fuss reader that works fantastic on tablets and has pretty good format support. I currently have about 40,000 books, magazines and comics setup under it and I like generally how it works (with a few small problems that aren't deal breakers). Installing it involves running a jar file and that's it, so this looks pretty heavy to get setup.

One thing I really wish I could do with it (LibreRead or Ubooquity) is "add" books from the internet archive to it either as virtual links that simply opened up to the IA reader on their site, or with an option to download locally within the reader interface.

</comment><comment><USER25> Nice. This has been on my side project ToDo list for some time. I may need to clear that off now.

Thanks for this.

</comment><comment><USER26> I like the idea of having full text search, though I wonder how it behaves on large libraries... Calibre is great for managing a library, but not so much at searching through a large amount of books....

<comment><USER27> I had the same reaction after trying the demo. I have tens of thousands of e-books, and have been looking for some kind of self-hosted, web-based library system like this. Calibre has come close; I've also experimented with various digital repository software. If the LibreRead's search function just searched for books by default (by title/author/keyword), perhaps with full-text search as an advanced option, it would be just the solution I've been searching for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> 1GB memory min. That's heavy :/

<comment><USER29> An epub file is basically a web page; HTML/CSS rendering ain't cheap.

<comment><USER30> I _love_ that we've come far enough that we need 1GB to process the most basic HTML/CSS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Off the top of my head, this needs:

Table of Contents support with working links; per-user storable bookmarks; font and color control; margin control; multiple methods of page turning; a non-bookshelf library index (I have over a thousand authors, most of whom have more than one book -- any interface needs to be usable by someone with a library of ten thousand books); and probably a partridge in a pear tree.

But it looks like a good core on which to build.

<comment><USER32> Due to sheer volume of books, I have no intention to _browse_ my ebooks at this juncture personally. Search is the only option if you're in the 10k book range, IMHO.

LibreRead supports both metadata search and full-text search. (Though the latter requires a lot more RAM.)

<comment><USER33> What if you categorize and tag your collection? I like lots of overlapping tags, and I like using tags to filter. I personally hate search.

<comment><USER34> Yea I usually don't even know exactly what I'm looking for. I'd love an ebook reader which can nail something roughly like the experience of browsing library stacks.

<comment><USER35> I would love a reading room with a projector that turns a blank wall into a bookcase. It could interact with software on a tablet to "pull" books off the shelf and browse them on the tablet. It could even be responsive to gestures to roll, sort, etc. It seems like we have all the technology to something like this; calibre, Kinect, camera and projector?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I'd really like a project like this that could read mobi files. There's also calibre-web[1] which also has a nice mobile interface and also doesn't support mobi. I don't know what it is about the structure of this file that is so resistant to be parsed.

[1][https://github.com/janeczku/calibre- web](https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web)

</comment><comment><USER37> _Keep all your ebooks in one place. Access it on any device._

But then it supports PDF and EPUB, neither of which are directly supported by Kindle, they have to be converted first. So is LibreRead converting to AZW, or to HTML such that the Kindle's permanently experimental web browser can display it?

<comment><USER25> If it isn't, using Calibre to batch convert isn't hard (DRM free books, that is).

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Can I use it to store/read nasty formats and nasty DRM from actual ebook vendors like Amazon and Kobo?

<comment><USER39> No because DRM like Adobe ADEPT is very mysterious and only authorized ereaders are given access to it. I highly doubt they would allow an open source ereader to implement ADEPT.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I'd line to have an high quality TTS engine integrated with the ereader. Google's TTS API would work well for this.

<comment><USER32> Implementing a Google API would mostly defeat the point to providing a self- hosted alternative: Google would be able to mine text from your eBook library, hence being able to identify (using their own) which books you have and are reading.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Is there any way I can help with some translation? I would use it for people who don't speak English at all.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, Please come to the chat room or email info [at] libreread.org

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> It works with the epub book in the demo, but with the pdf one, it just opens the whole pdf file in my viewer.

<comment><USER32> It's easy to miss this, but that PDF viewer in your browser is customized! For example, look at the "edit metadata" button on the top towards the right side.

<comment><USER42> The books are gone now. Anyway, I would prefer the server to give me the book page by page (or some sort of segment) as I had to wait for it to load completely (which took some time in this case). I also lost the UI, the listing was different, etc...

Not sure how feasible it is with pdfs though. Maybe I would just not include them in the demo, I don't think it's a common ebook format anyway.

<comment><USER32> I suspect someone deleted the samples from the demo. :/

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> short question: what can you people recommend as eBook reader for one's computer? One that allows me to mark stuff and add comments? So far most readers I saw were low in usability or feature-set. Bonus if also available on mobile

</comment><comment><USER44> Nice! Why did you use golang over other programming languages?

<comment><AUTHOR> I initially implemented this app in python, but then seeing the complexity of deployment made me shift to golang. The result is a single binary deployment associated with static files.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I'll stick to Calbre

<comment><USER46> Calibre is a great piece of software.</comment></comment>


Steak from vegetable proteins - <AUTHOR> https://www.wageningenur.nl/en/newsarticle/Steak-from-vegetable-proteins.htm <comment><AUTHOR> More info at [http://www.foodnavigator.com/Market-Trends/Plant-based- meat-...](http://www.foodnavigator.com/Market-Trends/Plant-based-meat-that- matches-steak-for-texture-The-technology-is-unique-in-the-world)

Links to [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0260877415...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026087741500374X) (paywalled)</comment>


How can we monetize this site? - <AUTHOR> http://mybmore.net/ mybmore.net was an experiment made by a local Baltimore student to showcase the local flavor of his hometown. The site is well-liked among city business owners and school faculty, with the student now wanting to turn this into a real business. The question of how to generate revenue has been a challenging one. Traffic to the site is low and most business owners aren't willing to pay for anything. The videos were initially done for free since this began as a pet project. Any suggestions? <comment><USER2> It's going to be fairly difficult, but since you asked:

Step 1: Develop a sufficiently large following among Baltimoreans such that getting featured on mybmore.net meaningfully moves the needle for a business.

Step 2: Charge businesses who would not otherwise be featured in mybmore.net for advertising. You will primarily sell this in $X00 chunks via telephone sales reps.

Should you need good telephone sales reps, ask around at local papers. Their telephone sales reps are _exactly_ who you need to make these sales, and they may soon be be urgently in need of jobs. Why? Local papers already operate on this exact model, and they do not appear to be sustainable, due to high costs and cratering revenues.

Local papers have a host of advantages which you will find it difficult to replicate, such as built-in bases of hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers, irrational advertiser preferences involving overpaying for ads which are nearly untrackable and perform poorly, and cult-like brand loyalty which spans generations. Sadly, these advantages are not merely not in your favor, they work against you, because you will have potential advertisers say things like "Why should I pay you money for advertising to 100 people who we know see my ad, when I could instead pay 100 times more to advertise to 200,000 people who won't see my ad? I'm already spending everything I can afford on advertising."

There exist other potential business models for local-flavored businesses, but they'd involve you doing something more transactional in nature rather than creating videos, so I kept them out of scope for the moment. For example, one could -- hypothetically -- use the site as a portfolio for doing promotional videos of local businesses, and then charge them $X00 a pop for short 5 minute clips that they could e.g. upload to Youtube and thereby generate business from. For example, search for [baltimore hair salons] on Youtube -- now think of all the folks who probably _should_ be showing up there, but don't because they can't figure out how to script, shoot, and host a four minute video showing a nice, professional haircut in a clean environment.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the thoughtful reply, Patrick. Apparently the link description is missing so I'll reiterate some of it here. This was originally just an experiement/pet project by a University of Baltimore student to showcase local atmosphere with video mini-documentaries. However it has become popular enough by faculty and locals that the student decided to make venture out and try making it a real business. There are some design and seo issues that are known and can be improved, however the most challenging question was how to actually make this a revenue generating business. Interesting comparison to the newspaper companies and it is pretty spot on with what the Baltimore Sun is currently going through. Thanks again.

<comment><USER3> All good things started as pet projects...as long as you maintain an interest in building the community you should do fine. Sponsorships and ad sells will come naturally when you establish an engaged audience. Work on building up the content that you curate, and like someone else mentioned maybe use any video editing and recording skills that you may have to create your own video content and commentary, that will give people a reason to come back on a regular basis. Also you should have an email newsletter signup to interact with users when they're not actively looking for new info.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I spent two years operating, promoting, and working to monetize a city- specific site for Chicago called Windy Citizen.

We got the site up to 50k unique visitors/month within Chicago, and local advertising was still a very tough sell.

Eyeballs don't mean a lot for local. You have to build a brand and, more importantly, a community with a strong identity.

The three things you need are:

Events. Email. Web site.

Events are your main focus. If you can organize a quarterly event that brings out 300+ people at $25/head, maybe a debate about some local issue, you could build from there.

E-mail is how you keep in touch with people. You want to build a list of at least 20k people in Baltimore who might get a great local video in their inbox each day. That's a starting point.

The web site is where folks find you to join your e-mail list, learn about events, and browse some content.

You're not going to sell ads on your web site. It will never get big enough to create meaningful value in and of itself.

What you're going to do is sell sponrships that get a business featured at your next event, included in your e-mails, AND featured on your web site. You're going to offer them a ton of access to your audience. This is much more appealing to a local business than just web ads alone.

Check out <http://Technori.com> to see a great example of this. Seth started a site with some great content, spun off evnets that have gotten super popular, and has a great e-mail list that everyone gets.

He's building a brand, and eventually that will attract more and better sponsors.

<comment><USER5> And this is why you need to be lean.

A web site like this is all about brand and connecting the dots. But they grow slowly, so you need to run them for zero to no money initially. That pretty much rules out even AWS as a hosting option. You can host probably 10 of these sites on a cable modem like setup, or in someone's garage in a KS Google Fiberhood. But you when it grows you will need to scale it quickly to avoid a burnout effect.

So operationally you start with a plan to make something you can just push out static pages on a regular basis to a simple web server. Bring up thttpd on a Raspberry Pi and drop it with a baby UPS into a dirt cheap co-location facility. Your uptime won't be great but you will be able to pay all the hosting costs for a year with the sale of one advertising deal. Ultra-lean. When it grows you point your CMS at a bigger instance, push it, pop the DNS records and blam, you're at the next level. Rinse and repeat.

Now on sales. If you're going to monetize a 'city info' type thing to businesses the _only_ thing that matters to small business is if they spend money and it is 'worth it' to them. The only way to prove that is to create a way for visitors to your web site to self identify at the small business. Ask for them to provide a way, such as a coupon deal that is only available through you, and give them the advertising for free until they get their first, second, or maybe third customer who walks in the door with your coupon. The more robust you can make it, the more they will understand what you bring them. Then come to an agreed upon rate. Price your service to be better than the local newspaper or the Yellow pages. But as high as you can go until you lose sales over it. You won't get a lot of deals early on so you need to leave very little money on the table.

Don't get caught up in the GroupOn/LivingSocial crap, just drive feet into their doors with solid discovery tools. Seek out the people who you can serve who have more specialized needs, like companies that want to recruit quality talent, like realtors who want to get first shot at the person relocating to the city, or even local governments trying to educate the community about their activities.

I would expect it to take 3 - 5 years. Yes, three to five. If you can do 10 of these in parallel it will be easier to switch to full time sooner.

10 years from now you'll be an "overnight" success :-)

<comment><USER6> Why not use <http://appfog.com> ? Save a lot of time and effort and it's free and ready to scale.

<comment><USER7> Off topic, but I went to AppFog, and the title says "The Best Public Cloud PaaS". What is PaaS? Why isn't that defined anywhere on the page? What does AppFog DO exactly?

I guess I'm not their target customer, but I develop web sites and apps for a living.... Bad marketing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If I were you, I'd look at what similar sites in other cities are doing.

A friend of mine started this: <http://www.altdaily.com/>

They've been at it four years, and I know they've worked their butts off … and changed the model at least once. They've built huge influence in the community. I can get you in touch with them if it helps you idea-wise.

I heard the guy behind this site speak: <http://rvanews.com/>

Sounded like a similar, lots-of-work situation. It was borne of a smaller blog network, if I'm right. But they've gotten a long way.

A thought on the site's design: I like Jux as a platform for secondary (read: special feature) stuff, but you're really hurting yourself by making it a primary platform. One, it's very difficult to throw ads in, and two, while it offers a lot of creativity, you will feel somewhat boxed in because a lot of the design decisions have already been made for you. You should be making those decisions yourself.

FWIW, I'm familiar with the platform, and got a good number of visits from an interview I did with BJ Mendelson a while back: <http://slides.shortformblog.com/465373>

I did use ads in it, but I had to use some hacky techniques to embed them. (I also had to use hacky techniques to modify the CSS, but that's a different story.)

Also, understand your market: There are sites out there like Baristanet (<http://www.baristanet.com/>) and the New Haven Independent (<http://www.newhavenindependent.org/>) that have been mining this model for nearly a decade, and doing it well. Do your market research here, and see what they've done that's cool and interesting, and what can be easily translated to your model.

My suggestion: Don't be afraid to step back from this for a couple of months, work on the business model and start with a little more experience. It's way harder to get things moving without the business model already pre-considered.

Hope that helps!

</comment><comment><USER9> patio11's idea is pretty dead-on. I would probably start there.

But for variety, I'll give you an alternative to the advertising route. You could do a procured tour that changes every week. Even long-time residents might find that interesting if you can manage to stay away from monuments and such.

So this week's tour might look like: 1\. Start at a hole in the wall food place 2\. Go to some art exhibit / outdoor concert 3\. End in a less-heard of but fun night club

Charge X per person, make the group sizes small like under 8 people and it could be a way that locals do something social and fun.

Eventually, you would want relationships with the stops on the tour and get kick backs for it.

This doesn't scale in any way that would make a VC like it, but if you're looking for a small business idea I think that would also be fun to run.

</comment><comment><USER10> I was an intern for a local web development company (in Baltimore) that tried this with "netneighborhoods.com" around 1999 - 2000.

Simply, the idea was to create a hyper-local business listing as a way of letting local people know about the local businesses. (The local businesses would pay for being listing, which was really a mini-website for the business.)

Ultimately it wasn't sustainable and only lasted - to the best of my recollection - a couple of years.

Providing a profitable service to local businesses and communities is very difficult. As others have said here, you're competing with limited budgets and high expectations.

 _Edit: Fixed a typo and added more content._

</comment><comment><USER11> We have actually moved on from our original model because we realized that we did not want to be a business listing site.

The reason we started mybmore.net is because we love Baltimore and we feel that text and pictures dont do Baltimore justice. Videos give people the power to really paint the picture that needs to be painted.

About a month ago we came up with a solution as to how our company is really going to work and how it is going to be profitable. Currently we are readjusting our site to fit our new model.

I appreciate the support and advice.

I also encourage everyone to check out mybmore.net by the end of February and then let us know what you think.

</comment><comment><USER12> And when figuring out "how many users is enough?" I think I would just use common sense and think about it like a business owner. If you had 100,000 monthly views or 16% of the Baltimore population could you charge a local business $30-$50 to advertise for a month? Absolutely and that would be pretty reasonable. You'd probably sell out quickly and be able to raise prices from there :)

</comment><comment><USER13> Another option may be to become a 501(c)3 and get local/regional foundation support... I'd think as a for-profit the odds are stacked against you and you're dividing an already too small pie. Going non-profit flips peoples' attitudes quite a bit and you can still make money in the form of salary, etc...

</comment><comment><USER12> Definitely an advertising play. Don't think I'd worry about that up front tho. I would focus on building a huge audience first. You didn't really say how many monthly visits you have right now, but really if you have the monthly views then selling advertising on the site would be the easy part.

</comment><comment><USER14> There are a couple of "local website" groups in the UK that have generated websites for most large towns and cities (may be all, not sure). The seemingly most successful have taken on local reps in a sort of franchise system [that's the appearance from the outside at least].

</comment><comment><USER15> How about a podcast (tour, presentations, you name it) and commercial activities within that podcast?</comment>


The Joy of Clojure - <AUTHOR> http://joyofclojure.com/ <comment><USER2> I just picked up the MEAP (Manning Early Access something-or-the-other) edition yesterday, and read the first 2 chapters.

Naturally, the book is an early access so it looks like it use a second pass with an editor. That aside, I really like the way the authors spend some time discussing the features of the language, and why they are implemented the way they are in Clojure. They do a great job of explaining Rich's design decisions, how they affect the way you would normally approach a problem in Clojure, the pitfalls, along with comparing some of them (esp. the concurrency aspects) with other languages like Erlang.

I was a little skeptical before buying this book, but I am glad I did. fogus and the others have done a pretty good job so far. Definitely worth the money.

<comment><USER3> How would you compare it to the Halloway Book?

<http://pragprog.com/titles/shcloj/programming-clojure>

<comment><USER4> It's a different intent entirely. Halloway's is purely meant as an introductory piece, this book is more targeted at giving you a deeper understanding of clojure and why you should do things in specific ways.

I'd think of them as companions to each other, and both likely worth getting (I've read 2 of the 4 available chapters and found them very good).

<comment><USER5> I'll "me too" this as well, though I'm only through the first chapter and part of the second. Pacing of the book is considerably faster than Halloway's so it's convenient if you like faster paced books. I was itching for a highlighter when reading through the stuff, but the material is interesting. The most interesting chapters, however, are the bits that they haven't gotten up to yet. Write faster! ;)

The promo discount code is pretty substantial, total cost of the print book was ~$33 shipped.

<comment><USER6> Thx for feedback. I might wait til a few more chapters are in and a little copyediting happens, but I'm very looking forward to finished product.

Discount/promo code; you can go to Manning.com, in upper left there's a "Email newsletter" link, they send out codes a few times a month.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Our very own fogus is one of the co-authors!

<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=fogus>

</comment><comment><USER8> Looks very promising! For a couple of years I've been thinking more and more about both jumping into the Java world and finally embracing a functional language; and Clojure seems like a great opportunity to take on both at the same time.

One note: I noticed what looks like a Markdown artifact in Footnote 3, in which the URL for the Wikipedia entry on jumping the shark appears to have interpreted the underscores in "Jumping_the_shark" as signifiers that "the" should be emphasized (i.e. rendered in italics).

<comment><USER4> I noticed the italics but don't have a solid enough knowledge of markdown to have realized that was what it was. Neat!

<comment><USER8> It's a common gotcha in markdown. Some implementations, e.g. Python-Markdown, actually default to ignoring middle-word emphasis. Others, e.g. Python- Markdown2, have ignoring middle-word emphasis as an optional parameter when calling the function.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Very excited about this book. Both chouser and fogus are ripe with deep knowledge of Clojure. It's great to see more books coming down the pipe as they'll only further the adoption of the language as a whole.

<comment><USER10> chouser has been so helpful to me - mostly indirectly, but directly as well - that I'd order the book even if it was just a rehash of stuff I've already learned reading his newsgroup posts and freenode chats. (order placed now, in fact)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> To me, looks like Chapter 11 could be the most valuable, with all the "When to Use..." sections. It's a good thing that Clojure offers multiple paradigms for managing concurrency, but I've had a hard time working out how to choose one to solve a given problem.

<comment><USER12> Nobody likes Chapter 11...

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Interesting manning has 2 clojure books out at around the same time.. <http://www.manning.com/rathore/>

<comment><USER13> Just got both, since I got a 50% on total order with my previous order (boofinal50 - may not work for everyone). Maybe I'll post feedback a few months later when there's more chapters. Just start reading the pragmatic one now.

<comment><USER14> I just ordered both Manning Clojure books for 50% ($45) off with your code. Thanks.</comment></comment></comment>


Bank consortium R3CEV successfully tests Bitcoin tech in bank transactions - <AUTHOR> https://thestack.com/cloud/2016/01/21/bank-consortium-r3cev-successfully-tests-bitcoin-tech-in-traditional-bank-transactions/ <comment><USER2> "R3 is not a bitcoin company, or even a cryptocurrency company, and there is no 'BankCoin' or 'R3Coin'. So this is really nothing to do with them and conspiracy theories are just a waste of time when there are more serious issues to consider."

Source: [http://www.coindesk.com/mike-hearn-bitcoin-post-banker- consp...](http://www.coindesk.com/mike-hearn-bitcoin-post-banker-conspiracy/)

<comment><USER3> Mike Hearn in his exit speech said... "R3 is not a bitcoin company, or even a cryptocurrency company, and there is no 'BankCoin' or 'R3Coin..." Not true Mike, there is a Bankcoin and you've always known it...

[http://www.reuters.com/article/fl-syndicatednewsnet- idUSnBw3...](http://www.reuters.com/article/fl-syndicatednewsnet- idUSnBw305295a+100+BSW20151130)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Please do not editorialize the titles of stories you submit to HN. The site guidelines ask you to use the original title except when it is misleading or linkbait—not to make it more baity.

Submitted title was "Mike Hearn, Bitcoin doomsday prophet, promotes his companies own blockchain tech".</comment>


Which company is the biggest? A primer on corporate valuation - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/apple/guides/2011/02/does-this-metric-make-my-company-look-big.ars <comment><USER2> A good way to think about market cap, is if a company had 100 equal shares, and those 100 shareholders stood in a room. Then if 2 of them traded shares and told everyone what the value of the company was, and the other 98 didn't say anything, so the statement of the 2 goes down on record. That's market cap. It's the instant opinion of a minority of shareholders as to the going value based on the trading value of a small percentage of shares. In other words, it means absolutely nothing.

<comment><USER3> That's bullshit. If a seller finds a buyer on an open market you've, more or less, found a value for the good. If it was too out of wack (either on the high or the low side) the other 98 people in the room wouldn't have stood pat. 2% of a company changing positions in a single day is a very high number.

<comment><USER2> Have to disagree strongly. A seller and a buyer have found a value for the individual share (or package of shares). The value of the company is not the multiple of shares x price paid, because not every share in the company is going to trade at that value. There will be a marginal change in price for each additional share sold. The other 98 people in the room may have other reasons for not buying or selling. They may agree with the price, they may not. They may think the price is going higher, they may not be even listening to the prices.

Think of it like inventory. If you have 100 cars in a lot, and you sell the first for 10,000. Is the stock worth $1m? For accounting purposes, yes. Are you going to get $1m if you sell all the cars - no, you're not. Either of two things is going to happen - only 50 people want the cars and you have to start discounting to move the rest, or, once alerted to the sale of the cars, 200 buyers turn up and the price goes higher. So the total value of the cars isn't really $1m, apart from on an accounting sheet. Same as market cap.

The other 98 people in the room haven't assigned a value to the item. You've only found a market for 2% of a company. The other 98 people may sell at a higher or lower amount, but for each one that did, there has to be a supply of buyers at that level.

Summarized : market cap is the total value as derived from the current opinions of the people trading shares. It's not the same as total market value, because you could never buy the entire company for that amount.

Yes, I know 2% turnover is a high value, chosen to make it a simple example.

<comment><USER4> Your assumption is that market cap dramatically overstates the market value of companies. Your car analogy is flawed.

Why not look at mergers and acquisitions? When companies attempt hostile takeovers, are they making bids that undercut the market's own valuations? Do people like to sell their shares at large discounts? No. Companies have to pay a hefty price premium over the existing market value.

<comment><USER2> No, if you re-read it, I implied that the market cap could be lower or higher. The car example said that either you have more buyers than you need, or less buyers than you need. You would end up with less than, or more than $1 million dollars, but it's unlikely you'd end up with exactly that amount.

Indeed an open-market acquisition is a good indicator of the value of the company - the value of anything being what someone is willing to pay for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow! This article certainly gives you a different perspective on how companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft really are small as compared to giants like GE, Exxon, etc.

What blows me away is that Wal-Mart has 2 million+ employees! A piece of information that would be interesting as a comparison is the number of government employees there are in different countries ...

<comment><USER6> To put that in perspective even further, that means Wal-Mart constitutes about 1% of the American workforce.

<comment><USER7> And this doesn't count some of Walmart's main suppliers/logistics providers, like McLane (which is part of Berkshire Hathaway).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How cash balances are measured is a matter for considerable debate.

In general, it's important to distinguish cash balance and flows from _investments_ vs _operations_.

Banks often report their vast cash balance under _operations_ , as holding and lending cash is their core business, not something they do on the side.

Accountants like to project this aura that they're perfectly predictable categorisers of financial truth, but it's bunk. When you can change a company's reported cash balance by _billions of dollars_ through a clever argument, you're well and truly into the land of politics.

<comment><USER9> I'd argue that this is simply a matter of the nature of money and investments. When you're a regular Joe cashing a paycheck, the numbers on your bank account seem like absolutes. But on the scales that large companies operate, things are a lot more fluid. For instance, banks don't have direct access to all the money their account holders have deposited, the exact value of a large investment is subject to all sorts of market conditions, inflation and currency fluctuations changes the actual value of things over time etc. Even if you look at the economy of a single person, this phenomenon becomes apparent.

Remember that "reported cash balance" is just a number. The actual assets backing that number can always be tracked down somewhere.

<comment><USER8> This is all true, but I was referring to the financial accounting distinction between cash flow from _operating_ , _investing_ and _financing_ activities.

Some banks count the influx as gains from financing, others as from operations.

In both cases the cash balance is _not an asset_ , it's a liability because the bank can be called on to produce the money at any time.</comment></comment></comment>


Beautiful Code: False Optimizations - <AUTHOR> http://sernaferna.blogspot.com/2008/07/beautiful-code-false-optimizations.html

<comment><USER2> I'm sure the people who made those optimisations took very good benchmarks before they made them. And, most likely, they do work under the right circumstances.

However, to make a generalisation/optimisation of my own, in 99% of the cases, trying to write overly clever code like that is a waste of time and does not result in faster code - though it does obscure your code and make it harder to optimise later when you actually need to. It would probably be better for 90+% of the people who will stumble on this article to never have read it.

<comment><USER3> "I'm sure the people who made those optimisations took very good benchmarks before they made them."

Hah, good one! Very funny!

<comment><USER2> Well, Rusty is not exactly a n00b, so that's not a joke, really.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The sort, OK, but the URINameSpace lookups? I think all the other elements of parsing XML take so much more time that in this case the "optimization" is really nonsense. I mean even having spent time on optimizing that code was probably a waste, premature optimization. (I have never written an XML parser with namespaces, though).

<comment><USER3> XML parsing can be done with a simple tag stack and a linear walk through the document. It's very cheap. And a quick loop over 6 (or whatever) strings in L1 cache can easily be faster than a generalized hash table lookup. Given that the namespace tag lookup isn't a huge deal anyway (just walk up the stack doing a string comparison at each level), any optimization needs to be pretty lean to start with. I'd guess that the hash thing is probably a wash; this is the only technique likely to work well.</comment></comment>


Open Source Misogyny - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.osuosl.org/gchaix/2010/11/07/open-source-misogyny/ <comment><USER2> This is just dumb. I'll go down his suggestions to point out why...

\- We need to have codes of conduct in our projects and conferences that specifically ban abusive and sexist behavior: I don't see how a "Code of Conduct" is going to be more compelling than the law. Nor do I believe the type of person who would stick his hand down a girls pants or cheer someone like that on is going to adhere to a code of conduct no matter what.

\- Trainings around diversity and sexual harassment: Sexual Harassment trainings are done so employees will be able to recognize sexual harassment. Does anyone think there's an employee out there who wouldn't consider sticking your hand down a girl's pants sexual harassment? Moreover the two people didn't work for the same company anyway so it wasn't sexual harassment as much as it was a...y'know... felony.

\- Keep speaking out: As the post points out all "speaking out" did was cause this woman to be further abused. What she should (and apparently did do) is speak to the police.

People keep trying to make this into a macro issue and it's not. There might very well be misogyny in the tech industry but this is no more a sign of it than a rapist would be a sign of misogyny in a particular town.

<comment><USER3> TomfTTB, I think you missed some of my points in the post. Let's see if I can clarify:

1) Codes of conduct - I'm talking about community covenants that come from the community and that have real teeth enforced by the community. This is not about whether an action is illegal and enforceable in court, it's about a community setting standards of behavior for its members and taking real action against people who violate them. I can think of numerous unethical or abusive actions that, while not illegal, could (and should) be included in a community code of conduct as worthy of censure.

2) Training - I'm not talking about some quick and shallow two hour seminar with a cheezy twenty minute "this is sexual harassment" video. Those are nearly worthless. I'm talking about the much longer intensive trainings offered for and by domestic violence/sexual assault service agencies. Trainings where we learn to see the culture of oppression and violence through the eyes of the people who have survived it. We're talking about changing a culture and its underlying frame of reference, not simply pointing at something and saying, "don't do that, it's bad."

3) Speaking out - my point was that we need to be better at speaking out for exactly the reason you described. We need to do more than just shout incoherently into the void. We need to be more deliberate regarding _how_ we speak out. A quiet, one-on-one "dude, you can't say crap like that" to a peer or an "I'm sorry, but our community does not allow its members to behave in that manner. Please leave now," is more valuable and effective than a thousand blog comments. It's not a question of _whether_ we speak out, but _how_ we speak out.

Lastly, I'm not trying to make this into a "micro issue". I'm pointing out that the tech community is particularly hostile to women. Compared with the other communities I've worked with (primarily in the non-profit and education sectors), the tech community is shockingly bad.

<comment><USER4> Excellent points. It's disappointing to see the TomfTTB's comment ranked so much higher than this response.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The problem here isn't misogyny. The problem is the impact that the unreality of the Internet has on people's psychology, and what happens when Internet psychology crashes into cold, hard reality.

There are two events being "discussed" here: the alleged incident of sexual battery at ApacheCon, and the Internet's reaction to the report of the incident. Both are, to my eyes, shot through with Internet-thinking.

I can give you a pie-eyed exegesis of how the rapid-fire 140-character "we're all Interfriends" no-harm no-foul if - it's - easy - to - and - nobody - catches - fire - it - must - be - ok mentality might have led to some idiot allegedly assaulting a peer at a conference, but you can probably see those arguments coming a mile away.

But this article isn't mostly about the actual incident; it's motivated more by how the Internet responded to the incident. And the Internet handled this incident the same way the Internet handles everything else: the same way it handles an iPhone bug. So you've got people talking about "innocent until proven guilty full stop" (note: you are not in the real world trustworthy until proven untrustworthy), and other people saying "she wasn't actually injured so what's the big deal" (note: of the places I would not want to be locked up for sexual battery, Georgia tops the list).

But they're not _really_ talking about gender politics. They're nerds, trying to fit a complicated event into their mental models, which models _demand_ consistency and transparency and rigidity. It's just difficult for the nerdal cortex to process the idea that rather than laying out an irrefutable case in front of a court of law, the victim of sexual aggression can use other tools available to them to retaliate, deter future offenders, and reestablish a zone of control over themselves.

You saw _exactly the same mentality_ over the Reiser trial. "How can you be convicted of murder on circumstantial evidence?!" (answer: _very easily_ ). "Juries just don't understand Aspergers!" "His best friend is a serial killer!" The nerdal cortex tries to absorb these stimuli and turn it into a graph structure that can be traversed for answers, but no matter what the model is, at the end of the day, Reiser led the police to the body and confessed to the crime. Reality is inescapable, even when the graph isn't fully connected.

I wouldn't read this most recent story as an example of how geeks discriminate against women (though: they do), but I would look at it as another cautionary tale about how reliable the conventional wisdom of geekery is.

<comment><USER6> > _The problem is the impact that the unreality of the Internet has on > people's psychology, and what happens when Internet psychology crashes into > cold, hard reality._

I am not sure you can call it unreality anymore, except maybe for people above a certain age.

> _So you've got people talking about "innocent until proven guilty full stop" > […], and other people saying "she wasn't actually injured so what's the big > deal"_

I think you misrepresent the _ratios_ of "some people" (and omitting all the e-hug responses). Unfortunately this played out as I thought. "Innocent until proven guilty" is brought up because of the name and it will continue to be a distraction.

Well, perhaps there shall be a trite apology come Monday.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "when well-executed these trainings really do work"

There's absolutely no evidence that "sensitivity training" or "anger management" or any number of these programs designed to protect companies from liability have any sort of effect on anyone.

I actually expect that fear of being publicly named on someone's blog will be more effective. Not saying I approve; just that it has more chance of succeeding than any of those programs, well-done or not.

</comment><comment><USER8> I have an honest question to ask, since the number of comments hasn't exploded here, I hope some thoughtful people can see it and answer. Please don't attack me for anything I may be implicitly saying; this is honestly something I'm confused about regarding the culture in which this event took place, and from which I am an outsider.

A number of people have taken great pains to emphasize that the behavior of the lady involved was not justification for an unwanted advance and that men should all understand this. Now I understand 100% that if she clearly and explicitly rejected his kiss advance, it was obviously wrong to go further (all of this is theoretical/alleged but ignore that for a moment).

Let's consider _just the kissing portion_ and nothing beyond that.

Now, isn't sitting on people's laps and flirting exactly inviting this kind of advance? I mean isn't that exactly the point of those behaviors? To excite the passion of people it's being done to and who are watching?

It's very strange for people to vehemently deny this. It's like if I was a biologist of another race observing human kind, what would I identify through observation as the beginning steps in the mating ritual? So why is an impression being given that that kind of behavior is "having fun" and has nothing to do with sex, and trying to attract the opposite sex?

Again, let me state- I don't drink, I don't go to parties like this, I've never been to a bar or a club or a girl's hotel room. So please don't assume I know the answer and I'm trying to imply the answer through these questions. I really just don't understand how you can hold this idealistic view of mankind that a member of one sex should enflame the passion of the opposite sex, through activities and clothing with deliberate, intentional sexual overtones and then expect people to overcome their natural, biological response to that kind of show.

Comments, please?

<comment><USER9> In the absence of power imbalances (doctor/patient, teacher/student, police/suspect etc), I think in general it's acceptable to make the first part of a first move _if you have reason to believe that it is welcome_ \- it becomes crystal clear whether it is or not very quickly. But obviously, the instant that rejection occurs, anything other than a sincere apology for misunderstanding the signals is unacceptable. It's a bit embarrassing, but you get over it :)

As for this (theoretical/alleged/etc etc) story - it doesn't sound like the guy even had reason to believe that his first move was welcome. She had flirted with a couple of _other_ guys, and sat on a few laps due to the lack of seating in the hotel room. As someone with a lot of female friends and who has been at a lot of drunken parties, I can say that this sort of thing is common, lots of fun, but NOT an invitation for any random guy within the group to make a move. There's a big difference between general flirty fun across a group and a girl specifically and exclusively flirting with a single guy. It _can_ take a while and a few mistakes to learn to tell the difference. Especially if you have spent more time on your computer than with friends as a child/teen and you haven't yet realised that the way these things happen on TV aren't how they happen in real life (yes, I am speaking from experience ;D ).

Pro tip for my fellow geek guys: Don't hit on the geek girl. Focus on being awesome. If there's a chance, she'll hit on you. If not, you still get to be awesome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is an interesting blog post, but I have to nitpick at a couple points.

First, the author says "Touching someone without their consent is assault." I hope that's just a not-so-well-thought-out sentence. What was described in the [original blog post <http://blog.nerdchic.net/archives/418>] that started this firestorm went well beyond "touching".

I hope we don't end up in a place where just touching someone (like a hand on someone's shoulder) is actually bad. That said, I really dislike even casual touch from anyone but people I'm very close too, so I can sympathize with people not liking that, but that's not the same as assault. I think there's other ways to handle things that make us uncomfortable without criminalizing them.

Second, I'm not sure if the author is implying in the final paragraph that sexual assault is one of the main reasons the male-female ratio at most tech conferences is so off. He just says it's "due to the behavior of us, the straight white male majority in the open source community".

That problem behavior often falls far short of sexual assault, but the behavior is still problematic ("how to X like a porn star" presentations, anyone?).

I suspect that there are also many other reasons that women don't go to conferences. I would love for someone to do some research on what is keeping women away so that we could make these conferences more attractive to everyone.

<comment><USER7> "I'm not sure if the author is implying in the final paragraph that sexual assault is one of the main reasons the male-female ratio at most tech conferences is so off."

I have a female friend that regularly attends tech conferences, and she said that what surprised _her_ about the blog post is not only that it happened at a tech conference, but that it had happened before. She said that she generally feels pretty safe at tech conferences and that people have always been very respectful of her. That said, she's a sample size of one.

But I'm not sure a sample size of two is enough to conclude it's a pervasive problem at conferences that really needs to be dealt with on a population level.

<comment><USER5> Without offering any evidence to support this, I agree that it _feels_ like this should be a rare event, if only because sexually assaulting someone attending a conference with friends is a great way to get your teeth knocked out, and _that's_ a story I haven't heard before.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The situation was more a product of booze, partying and potentially socially awkward people celebrating an event together as it was about an Open Source issue. This type of stuff happens elsewhere outside of Open Source. To suggest that somehow the Open Source community should rise above it more than say, the accountancy industry is a bit silly at best.

The measures put forward by the author, such as codes of conduct and training sound like the type of thing that might work in a company but are just not going to work at a conference, let alone one with lots of people present, let alone at a party peripheral to a conference.

Two people were very badly affected by the whole episode, the girl and the guy. I'd like to see people let these two sort their issues out with the authorities while we all move on, but something tells me that people are going to try and milk this as long as they can. Maybe I'm just incredibly cynical, but I get the impression that not all that I've read on this matter is as much about the girl or the guy, but more about generating noise to get links. I'm not suggesting that TFA has or hasn't done this, more that I'm an extremely cynical person.

<comment><USER12> Perhaps it's because our community is more interested in self-improvement? The argument that, "oh, this happens elsewhere, so we shouldn't give it any special attention" is moot because we're supposed to be smarter, more open and more enlightened than the average.

We should all be affected when women can't go to a conference now without feeling that they can't act normally without fear of (at best) having to fend off unwanted advances, or worse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The post conflates several issues and I think it is weaker for it. I doubt misogyny is behind the extreme gender ratios in the tech world, and I doubt public self-flagellation of males would encourage more females to participate in tech.

</comment><comment><USER6> Formulating for terseness, I think the responsibilities fall as follows:

1\. The community to ensure that such things do not happen[1]; and

2\. The police to ensure that _a specific person_ does not do such things.

Dunno how useful the proposals are. At first glance, they strike me as things that only involve the people who already are not a problem.

[1] Inasmuch we can. In the near-to-mid future, I think it must be expected that some number of predators still exist.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't think this has anything to do with the open source community at all. Men will fancy women and be stupid about it in all sorts of groups and environments.

</comment><comment><USER15> No amount of "sensitivity training" and related measures will change the behavior of psychopaths. The reason big companies have harassment seminars and rules of conduct is not to prevent this from happening, they need this to cover their asses legally when it does happen, and if at all possible to send a message to their employees that they better not be covering this shit up when the time comes.

Converting the open source community (or any community for that matter) into a paranoid kindergarten isn't gonna do anything besides make people miserable. Almost everyone already knows that this kind of behavior is not within the normal range of human interaction, no training necessary. And I suspect those who do not know this to begin with cannot be trained to reliably behave acceptably and normally, no matter how much effort is put into this.

Psychopaths don't need to be educated, they need to stay at home and take their meds.

If all that holds a guy back from acting like a retarded, violent asshole is a bunch of rigid rules and the threat of public shame, his true self will come out eventually no matter how much you invested in sensitivity training. Personality disorders cannot be treated with awareness campaigns. It's not like these people have somehow just missed the memo on how not to mistreat others and are then magically socialized once that information has been provided.

On a side note, I'm sick of (and kind of surprised by) this notion that all men are supposed to be like this by default and just have to restrain themselves all the time so as not to degenerate into drooling monkeys who rape everything in sight. And it's not just women putting this theory out there, I've seen quite a lot of male creeps on LifeJournal threads "confessing" to this kind of personality over the last few days. PSA: if you're like this, it isn't because you're a man. It's because you're sick and should consult professional help.

</comment><comment><USER16> Anywhere young people, booze, and partying mix, this sort of thing happens, so I don't see why the author sees it as a sign the OSS community, in particular, is "the epitome of a hostile misogynistic work environment".

Further, to publicly name the guy over this seems harsh. I don't really see what he did as a big deal. I've probably done similar things many times, as well as having similar done to me. If you're drinking with members of the opposite sex, have some rapport, kidding around, etc., then slapping a butt, putting a hand on a thigh, etc., is usually cool. Why the need to tell the entire world, probably ruining the dude's career?

<comment><USER17> Seriously? Are you reading the same blog post I am?

"He grabbed me, pulled me in to him, and kissed me. I tried to push him off, and told him I wasn't interested (I may have been less eloquent, but I don't think I was less clear). He responded by jamming his hand into my underwear and fumbling."

If you've "done similar things many times" you _are_ part of the problem, and are prabaly lucky not to be in jail for it.

<comment><USER16> I don't know what "jamming his hand into my underwear and fumbling" even means - did he penetrate her with three fingers right through her underwear (was she not wearing pants/skirt?), or was he playing with an exposed thong T-bar, or something else?

By something "similar" I mean I've been "rejected" by girls before, and not immediately raised my hands in submission and backed off. E.g., talking to a girl, tried to make out with her, and she said no, depending on what I thought, I might, say, keep a hand on her thigh, or playing with her pantie line. Not a perfect match, but I could definitely see someone wanting to make a big deal twisting that into something along the lines described here.

I could be wrong, and this guy could have committed the very worst interpretation of what the author described. But I doubt it, because the article seems like it's written for maximum effect.

<comment><USER18> _I don't know what "jamming his hand into my underwear and fumbling" even means_

Is there _any_ context/interpretation/way of which some dude jamming his hand into your underwear and fumbling after being told you weren't interested in such a thing wouldn't be considered highly invasive?

Jesus H. Christ, only in the geek community can people be outraged at backscatter machines and TSA patdowns, and then try in rationalize sticking your hand down a woman's pants despite her protests.

Disgusting.

<comment><USER19> > Disgusting. Go ahead, down mod me.

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

says:

"Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downmod you. "

<comment><USER18> edited, thx</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>