The Really Big One - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one <comment><USER2> I was in New Orleans in October 2002, and this guy was on the front page of the main newspaper predicting that within 20 years a category 5 hurricane was likely to whip around Florida and strike the city head on. He said the levies weren't high or strong enough, and that downtown New Orleans would be under 20 feet of water:

[http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/predicting- katrina.html](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/predicting-katrina.html)

I remember reading it with interest and then shrugging and moving on with my day. Three years later I remembered that moment and realized that as a society we just don't care that much about our long-term safety.

<comment><USER3> Lots of people predict lots of catastrophes. The trick is identifying the correct ones ahead of time. This is much more difficult than you are implying.

<comment><USER4> I think it's still very simple. We can view it through the concept of discount rate [0], basically people don't value a future event as much as a present one.

The world ending in 50 years is not worth making drastic efforts now, at least for most people. If your prediction is too costly on the short term, as accurate as it can be most people won't act on it.

[0][https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intertemporal_choice](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intertemporal_choice)

<comment><USER5> I suspect this is in part a side-effect of the Anglo-American (maturity- mismatched) banking system, which keeps long-term interest rates artificially low, leading to higher time preference.

<comment><USER6> Wouldn't a lower interest rate cause us to value the future more? (Or you mean, the natural interest rate should be higher?)

<comment><USER5> Lower interest rates increase your relative propensity to spend by lowering the opportunity cost of consumption. For example, if you have $10K and can get only a 1% annual return, you might as well take that trip to Vegas. If you could get a 15% return, though, you might rather stay home and rake in the interest.

<comment><USER6> OK, you basically have to compare your own internal discounting rate of consumption with the public rate of interest offered on savings.

If your own internal rate is higher than the public one, then indeed you should borrow to consume (or put off saving).

Companies only care about the public rate---if they have a higher rate of reliable return internally, they can keep borrowing money to invest until there's an equilibrium. A low interest rate makes companies more forward looking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Meanwhile the barrier to a proper early warning system for the west coast is a whopping $15.6 million a year, of which California has managed to get a whole $5 million from Congress so far - [http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la- me-quake-early-wa...](http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-quake- early-warning-20141215-story.html)

Honestly, I'm a little unclear as to why we are even going to Congress for this, instead of the governments of CA, WA and OR agreeing to divide up the sum based on population or state GDP or some other obvious metric. The sums involved are so small in budgetary terms as to seem less than the cost of conducting studies and federal lobbying activities.

<comment><USER8> How about a kickstarter?!

<comment><USER7> That's a fine idea. Now that you mention it I'm surprised it hasn't been tried already (unless it has and failed...). I'll look into it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hmm, in the spirit of thinking of worst-case scenarios, most of the engineering talent for Amazon and Microsoft is in Seattle and Redmond, respectively. There's even a sizable percentage of Google cloud platform in Fremont and Kirkland.

Even if most of the employees live, it's likely basic infrastructure will be a disaster for quite a while. Maybe Google would be able to offload ops work to Mountain View, but it seems likely Amazon.com, AWS and Azure would go down, possibly for months. I wonder what the effect would be on the global economy.

<comment><USER10> Not only would there be significant downtime of major internet services, but lots of people would die as well!

<comment><USER11> Downtime of major internet services could also cause deaths elsewhere, as more industries become reliant on cloud services.

I could imagine hospitals losing access to health records, emergency responders losing access to mapping or route planning software, people losing access to Uber and not being able to get to the hospital because the taxi companies have gone out of business.

Of course all this stuff is supposed to have clean failover, but not all of it has had its mettle tested.

<comment><USER12> Man. In times like these—the northwest falling into the ocean or whatever—it's unimaginable to think about the sheer amount of data loss that could occur. I'd probably be really worried about that loss of data or, worse, the loss of _services_ if millions of people suddenly died.

<comment><USER13> Isn't it the case that there is replication across data centers which are geologically spread apart?

<comment><USER14> Only if you had the foresight to set that up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Well this article at least justifies that perhaps we don't need to replace the viaduct after all if everything is going to get destroyed anyways!

While my fear of "the big one" doesn't keep me up at night, Seattle is going to be a classic example of "we should have known this was going to happen!" after a sizable earthquake costs substantial life at some point in the future. But this article does seem to stretch itself into making me think that nothing can really be done. It's not going to be realistic to establish safeguards against an 8.5+ if it/or the subsequent tsunami is going to flatten the city west of I-5

<comment><USER16> I don't think a tsunami is going to flatten the city. A wave has a _lot_ to go through (peninsulas, narrow straights, etc) before it could reach the city, all of which would likely lessen its impact significantly. Where the area will get hit hard, though, is liquifaction and landslides.

<comment><USER17> There will be significant damage from water all around inland Puget Sound, though I agree not on the scale of the full-blown tsunami on the coast. Everything is going to shift 30 to 100 feet west over the course of a couple minutes - the water _in_ Puget Sound is going to slosh around like crazy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> FYI, the two-hundred year figure that this article mentions appears to be in dispute. Wikipedia ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_subduction_zone#Earth...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_subduction_zone#Earthquake_timing)) includes much more specific, cited information which puts the frequency at 300-600 years between significant quakes with the earthquake of 1700 having occurred after a 780 year lull.

<comment><USER19> I am really interested to learn how they calculate the probability of 1/3\. I think there is a legitimate question here about the methods used. In technical terms: what is the sample space and what set are you looking for within that sample space? How strong is the justification to treat the sequence of earthquakes as a sequence of independent identically distributed random numbers? Leaves me scratching my head. I looked at Professor Goldfinger's papers and couldn't find a reasonable answer. Perhaps it is more fundamental knowledge (e.g. something one would find in geology textbooks)?

<comment><USER20> From what I've heard, earthquakes are frequently modeled as following a poisson process

<comment><USER19> How reliable is such a model? I'd imagine they have gigatons of data on earthquakes, so validating the model must be fairly straightforward.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is there any work on inducing earthquakes to relieve stress before it builds to catastrophe levels?

<comment><USER22> I like how you think. If we are going to have an earthquake, at the very least we should have an scheduled organized mild one.

<comment> nappy-doo On the Richter scale, the difference a full step (7.0 to 8.0) is about a factor of 32. So if we're trying to mitigate an 8.0 earthquake every 100 years, you're talking about a magnitude 7.0 every 3 years to release the same amount of energy.

Most engineering structures on the west coastare built to withstand a 6-7. When a magnitude 8 comes (and it will come, and in some sense we're coming out of the stress shadow from the 1906 quake just now) the devastation will be horrendous.

*Editting to add: The structures on the west coast are engineered to withstand a SINGLE 6-7 magnitude event. Not one every 3 years.

<comment><USER23> And even if they were built to withstand a mag 7 earthquake every three years, the things inside of them likely won't be. Imagine the engineering that would have to go into designing every single item in your house to withstand a deadly earthquake on a regular basis. No more popping out to Ikea to grab the same furniture everyone else uses. Your TV stand is on springs. Your TV is on springs connected to the TV stand on springs. Your cupboards have notches where your dishes can lock into them so they don't slide. The cupboard doors have latches that let them open when pulled slowly, but resist opening when sudden force is applied. Your refrigerator bolts to the floor and is filled will elastic pockets that hold every item individually.

Its either that, or spend a significant amount of time every few years packing all of your items into boxes to ensure they won't be damaged when it's earthquake time.

<comment><USER24> My mom's strategy for the biggest items: lash them to the walls so that they don't topple or walk out of position. This doesn't solve the problems of falling plates, but it does mitigate death-by-cabinet.

That said 80% of the benefits are in location. If you're on flat bedrock, located away from the coast, you just don't feel the most intense shaking, and you won't face a tsunami.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> So how can you escape from a 10-meter tsunami, like the 11-meter Tohoku tsunami that wrecked Fukushima Dai-Ichi, assuming you have years to prepare?

You _could_ build buildings that could withstand the water flowing around them, as the nuclear reactor center itself did; but windows that can survive not just ten meters of water pressure but also cars and trees being dashed against them by the tsunami are going to be less like windows and more like plastic-filled tunnels to the daylight.

You could ensure that all of your buildings are at least 10 meters tall, built to withstand the tsunami without collapsing, and with adequate escape routes to the upper floors, space therein to ensure that everyone can escape, and emergency supplies (e.g. first-aid kits, food, water, insulin) to keep incidental deaths to a minimum. Then you just have to get everyone up four flights of stairs before the tsunami hits. The bottom floors will fill with water, destroying everybody's TV, and then recede. Maybe make it 20 meters, just in case the tsunami is extra huge, like the Kuril Islands tsunami of 2006.

Or you could build your houses a meter underground. You might lose the top 50cm of dirt cover, and if you illuminate with lightpipes, your lightpipes will fill with silt and other mud; but you should be able to keep your subterranean house well enough sealed that the water itself won't be a problem. Escaping the house after the water recedes, though, may be a problem if you turn out to be in a sediment-deposition zone instead of an erosion zone. Tunneling out, using a door built to open inwards specifically for this purpose, may be your only option.

Other options are possible; Stapledon's _Star Maker_ suggests taking flight when the water is incoming, but that would seem to require a sufficient population of evacuation helicopters to evacuate the entire population within the few minutes of warning you have. This is probably not possible for biological humans. And if you have boats, especially if you live in boats, you could take them a few hundred meters offshore and be, in all likelihood, perfectly fine.

How can we engineer human civilization to be robust against natural disasters? The Chile and Haïti earthquakes of 2010 showed that there is enormous scope for doing so; how can we do better? [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/27/chile-haiti- earthqu...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/27/chile-haiti-earthquake- co_n_479705.html)

<comment><USER26> Running in the opposite direction and toward high ground is sufficient. In the case of Japan's tsunami in 2011, there was 25 minutes of warning, which is enough time to get clear of most inundation zones if you indeed do start moving immediately.

This isn't a catchall solution (old folks, the disabled, children), but it would work for a lot of downtown people.

<comment><USER25> It depends on how far away the high ground is. There are islands where it's hundreds of miles away (and putting out to sea is by far the better idea) but even miles away would be too far to run for me.

<comment><USER26> We're talking about Seattle. I don't know if you've been there, but most of it is pretty hilly.

<comment><USER25> I used to live in Seattle — I used to bike up Yesler to go home from work — but I was talking about tsunami zones in general, especially the Pacific Northwest mentioned in the New Yorker article, not just Seattle. Maybe you replied to the wrong thread by mistake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> For a good read on another somewhat overlooked seismic zone: [http://idlewords.com/2015/07/confronting_new_madrid.htm](http://idlewords.com/2015/07/confronting_new_madrid.htm)

Most people don't think of the midwest/great plains states as being seismically active, but they're home to some of the most geologically interesting history in the United States.

<comment><USER28> surfaced here just 3 days ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9862451](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9862451)

<comment><USER29> Consider this an aftershock

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> "The Cascadia subduction zone stretches from Cape Mendocino in northern California to Brooks Peninsula on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, a distance of about 700 miles (1,130 km). All along this zone, which begins beneath the seafloor to the west and extends inland towards the Cascade and Coastal mountains, the subducting plates are forced beneath the North American Plate. At a relatively shallow depth (less than about 20 miles/30 km down), the plates have become stuck. Below this locked zone, warmer temperatures make the plates more pliable, allowing them to move more readily past each other. This freer movement deeper down causes strain to accumulate along the locked zone. Once that strain is great enough to overcome the friction that keeps the plates locked, the fault will rupture: the edge of the North American Plate will lurch suddenly upwards and southwestwards as the subducting plates slip under and northeastwards. With this movement, the deformed western edge of the North American Plate will flex, causing the land along large sections of Cascadia" [0]

Also check the diagram(s) for a better understanding.

[0][http://crew.org/sites/default/files/cascadia_subduction_scen...](http://crew.org/sites/default/files/cascadia_subduction_scenario_2013.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER31> As usual, paste this exact url into a google search box to reach a non- paywalled version of the article.

[https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=http:%2F%2Fwww.newyorke...](https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=http:%2F%2Fwww.newyorker.com%2Fmagazine%2F2015%2F07%2F20%2Fthe- really-big-one)

<comment><USER32> or pay for the New Yorker because they do really excellent work.

<comment><USER33> To read one article once every few months at best is not worth it.

Edit: I spoke my opinion. Down vote me!

<comment><USER34> (If you only read one article every few months, you wouldn't be hitting their pay wall)

<comment><USER31> I am hitting their pay wall by occasionally clicking links from HN. I never read the full articles, but I skim roughly 4x the amount of information provided before the pay wall. It's not worth the full price for me. I'd like a happy medium.

<comment><USER35> So, your medium is free content as often as you want it? What's in it for them?

<comment><USER36> There's no shortage of advertising on The New Yorker.

<comment><USER23> That killed me when I subscribed to the NYT online. I was paying $15/mo and seeing as many ads as I would expect from a free site. I love the NYT journalism and am willing to pay for it, and I understand they have bills to pay, but it's a lot of money to be sitting on ads. In fact I canceled my subscription (not a quick or easy process) and have the same amount of advertising on their NYT Now app whether I subscribe or not. So what's the point?

<comment><USER35> This is how dead tree magazines and papers work. You pay for a subscription and you still receive ads. Why would they think the web should be any different?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I used to live in Portland, and thought about this impending catastrophe a lot. Once -- under the influence of intoxicants, most likely -- I came up with a way of dramatically reducing its impact. It's a batshit crazy solution which will never actually happen -- but even when I'm sober, I still think it would work.

Here's what I'm thinking: the major problem with a disaster like this is the uncertainty surrounding its timing. " _Maybe it 'll be some other generation's problem. Maybe we don't actually need to let it affect our thinking about where we live and what we build._" This kind of thinking is expedient and economical right up to the point where it gets absolutely everybody killed.

There's a second, somewhat less fundamental problem: the causality count can depend dramatically on _exactly_ when the earthquake happens. It'll be worse if it happens at high tide rather than low tide (the tsunami will reach farther). Worse if it happens at night rather during the day (darkness is harder for emergency services to cope with). Worse if it happens in the winter rather than the summer (more deaths from exposure), etc.

These problems aside, a 9.0 with a tsunami is eminently survivable. You just need to be in the right place at the right time, surrounded by the right types of buildings / geology / topography, when it happens.

Anyhow, how do we solve these problems? Stopping the earthquake is out of the question ... but _making_ it happen isn't. So here's what I propose: we announce an exact date and time for the earthquake.

Give everybody, say, 30 years to prepare for it. That's a decent-enough timescale for the sort of population displacements which will need to happen. So we'll have the earthquake in 2045. Let's have it in the mid-summer, at 10AM during a low tide, to minimise all the timing-related casualties. Then, at the appointed time and date -- if the earthquake hasn't happened yet -- we set off howevermany scores of nukes it's been calculated to take, drilled into the subduction zone, to lubricate the fault enough for a full-fault rupture. Shouldn't take _too_ much of a push to get things going.

Over the next 30 years, the absolutely certain foreknowledge of this event would alter the planning, policy, and insurance environments dramatically. Tsunami walls etc. would be built in areas which are planned to be defended. In areas which cannot be defended and must be abandoned, the property prices, development activity, and eventually population levels would gradually crash. Within defended / geological stable zones, buildings which you want to be standing in 31 years would still need to be retrofitted to survive a 9.0 quake; otherwise, they'd be torn down before that point. Finally, on the appointed day of the quake, everybody could gather in the most geologically- stable high-grounds they can find, and just sit back and watch the fun.

Of course there'd be a danger that the quake might arrive at a bad time before then -- but even if it does, the incremental changes in land-use and the built environment, which such a policy would provoke, would result in far fewer casualties than our current trajectory.

Alas, it'll never happen, if only because a policy which results in the _intentional_ destruction of millions of peoples' homes is a bit difficult to sell in a democracy, even if it _would_ save tens to hundreds of thousands of lives.

<comment><USER38> If you are now fully retrofitted to survive a 9.0, why do we _absolutely have to set off this earthquake now_ using hundreds of nuclear bombs?

<comment><USER39> The point was that many optimizations can be made if you make the quake happen at a specific time of day.

<comment><USER38> My point is that you can perform all of those optimizations and still not make the quake happen (since all of the optimizations seem to be occurring before the quake).

<comment><USER40> A good chunk of the optimizations are timing related, though. Low tide, summer, mid-day, etc. Not inducing the quake gives all of those up (not to mention the moral hazard of lying about it mentioned by others).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> After watching the Japanese Tsunami, it got me wondering about a weather- balloon-like device.

You strap it on like a life jacket, and you wait for the wave to come your way. As it approaches, you pull the cord. Something that looks like a weather balloon inflates, extends the length of a tether, and then you float a few hundred feet in the air, and then float back down a while later.

Why is this a dumb idea?

<comment><USER23> Where do you get the helium needed to make it fly through the air? If you're just pumping air, at best you would float on water, which still leaves you vulnerable to being killed by something else that is floating (possibly a pickup truck, a growler of Rogue Dead Guy Ale or maybe the Space Needle).

<comment><USER42> You'd get helium from a tank. But you'd need a regulator with a huge heat exchanger to get fast inflation. Maybe use a high-volume whitewater kayak as the "basket".

<comment><USER41> Hmmm - how fast is fast?

Do you know how to actually do this math?

Like, to lift a 200 lb person, without a heat exchanger (or a more reasonably sized one)?

How long would it take?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Portland has an admirable style when it comes to resilience. At least at the grass roots. It'd be great to see an Apollo program around earthquake preparedness.

There is a carry-heavy loads around the city cargo bike race that's been going on for a few years. [http://disasterrelieftrials.com/](http://disasterrelieftrials.com/)

</comment><comment><USER44> I like to think about how I'd react in the 15 minutes I have between the earthquake and tsunami.

How tall would this tsunami be? Quick googling shows the tallest one ever is 524 meters. Assuming the tsunami is that tall, going into tall buildings might not work - tallest building in Seattle, Columbia Tower, is 287 meters (+50m in elevation increase), and is a few blocks from the waterfront . Best bet is to run/bike up the hill to Capitol Hill, which is 100m higher in elevation, and about 2 miles inland (and east of the I5).

Just need some science to figure out how far the wave will go given these hill angles and elevations in Seattle to find a precise safe spot (assuming the tallest tsunami ever, and assuming all other variables like me being able to react instantly and fallen buildings not blocking my path stay constant, which they of course won't).

<comment><USER45> I wish I could find some definitive resources on whether or not a building would be considered safe in a tsunami, and if it would be better to go for higher floors or lower floors.

I imagine that after such a large earth quake, many buildings would be unstable and potentially open to collapse from the force of a tsunami. I'm sure going to higher ground would be a better idea if possible, but say if it was iffy to get there in 10 minutes, should I spend that time looking for a high building instead or just get as far inland as possible?

<comment><USER46> Remembering a lot of the video from Japan, it looked like most of videos were from people who went into parking garages (concrete)[1]. Regular buildings took a pretty big hit, but I'm not sure how the local building code / materials played in that.

1) I'm going with the logic that surviving video person uploading to youtube is probably a good sample of the "worked" side of the equation.

<comment><USER47> I suppose parking garages would let a lot of the water flow through the open sides, whereas a regular building would receive a lot of force against the exterior walls.

<comment><USER46> Probably, and they are designed for a higher weight load than a regular building.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> There are roughly 3 million people in this area. The really big earthquake may cause death of 13,000 people - or about ~0.5% of the population. Chance of that happening over next 50 years is 10%. In other words, if you were living in this zone, your chance of dyeing due to a big earthquake over next 50 years is about 0.05%.

It occurs to me that your chance of dyeing over next 50 years for reasons _other_ than earthquake is 90%. Nevertheless, my hope from this article is that government will invest much more in early warning systems and enact laws to build structures to withstand such natural disasters. As it appears now, government is starving off these kind of projects from funding.

</comment><comment><USER21> It would be nice if they'd cite their sources. This looks to be one of the main ones:

[http://www.crew.org/sites/default/files/cascadia_subduction_...](http://www.crew.org/sites/default/files/cascadia_subduction_scenario_2013.pdf)

But this is not nearly as dire. For example, "the Pacific Northwest's largest population centers and ports, including Portland (OR), Seattle and Tacoma (WA), and Vancouver (BC), are not expected to experience any significant tsunami impacts."

<comment><USER49> I can't speak for any other cities but I do know that Portland is much too far in land to be hit by a tsunami. The destruction within Portland would come from the earthquake itself.

Also, here are some sources that seem to coincide with what the author wrote.

\- [http://www.oregon.gov/OMD/OEM/osspac/docs/Oregon_Resilience_...](http://www.oregon.gov/OMD/OEM/osspac/docs/Oregon_Resilience_Plan_Final.pdf)

\- [http://i.imgur.com/MX7okVp.png](http://i.imgur.com/MX7okVp.png)

\- [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_subduction_zone](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_subduction_zone)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Reminds me of the movie quote: "Wiped clean by the wrath of God.", I suspect from one of the movies _Indiana Jones_.

Right, at

[https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Raiders_of_the_Lost_Ark](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Raiders_of_the_Lost_Ark)

> Brody: However, about a year after the pharaoh had returned to Egypt, the > city of Tanis was consumed by the desert in a sandstorm that lasted a whole > year. Wiped clean by the wrath of God.

</comment><comment><USER51> Outside Magazine did a great article about the Cascadia Subduction Zone a few years ago.

[http://www.outsideonline.com/1819046/totally-psyched-full- ri...](http://www.outsideonline.com/1819046/totally-psyched-full-rip-nine)

</comment><comment><USER52> Apparently it also created the Bridge of the Gods [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_of_the_Gods_(land_bridg...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_of_the_Gods_\(land_bridge\))

</comment><comment><USER53> the question I would be asking myself is Am I prepared for such a natural disaster ? Or What steps can I take on a personal level to be ready ? For eg: Always have an evac bag ready to take off Or live out of a suitcase so that I dont have to worry about stuff & data. Or distribute my personal resources (cards, cash) etc in PO boxes across the country. Ofcourse, in such a huge disaster these steps wont matter but in small events, there might be of help.

<comment><USER54> ready.gov has some basic steps. But, they don't have enough emphasis on having clean water, IMO. Having a storage sharing agreement with friends within a day or two's walk could be useful, so if your home is destroyed (along with your emergency supplies) your friend's might still be in good shape. And vice- versa.

<comment><USER55> Sadly, being well prepared with clean water, food, medicine and shelter does you no good if someone else takes it from you. The very first item on your list should be a powerful firearm & sufficient ammo.

Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle has a pretty good take on the post-apocalyptic chaos & breakdown in society that will likely ensue.

<comment><USER54> Agreed. But ... California makes that tough. Oregon & Washington are more in line with the rest of the country. Something to check is whether your state restricts carrying when a state of emergency has been declared.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Worth noting that the state of warning systems there is somewhere between dismal and non-existent and the disaster preparedness of most cities seems to vary between unprepared and comically inept.

Is there anything anyone can do to set up an alert for these sorts of things?

If these predictions are true, there's a good chance that the entirety of Silicon Valley could be utterly destroyed. You'd think people would take more of an interest in preventing that.

<comment><USER57> Earthquakes are, for now, impossible to predict so there is little forewarning (and not for the lack of people trying). However, there is a huge interest in the geological/hazards community in earthquake early warning systems in the US, especially focused on California[1][2]. The Napa earthquake last summer was the first real test of the more modern components and was successful. But again, you're dependent on warning the populace after the earthquake has begun, which isn't useful for people near the epicenter.

Tsunami warning systems have been in place for many places for decades; whether people respond is a different story.

In terms of people preparedness, again, California is the leader in the US but there are drills in many places[3], though they're generally voluntary and totally ignored by most.

[1]: [http://earthquake.usgs.gov/research/earlywarning/](http://earthquake.usgs.gov/research/earlywarning/) [2]: [http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-lanow-ln- earthquake...](http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-lanow-ln-earthquake- earlywarning-system-gave-10second-alert-before-napa-quake- felt-20140824-story.html) [3]

<comment><USER56> It takes measurable time for communities miles away from the epicentre to get hit, and in that time you could easily send a warning.

Many of the videos from the Japan tsunami showed people getting alerted well before the quake hit. All TV stations flipped over to a warning screen with information on the quake and a map of tsunami danger areas based on computed projections.

I can see how having the fault line directly under your city is a problem, but this "mega quake" is projected to originate off-shore.

I guess the US solution is to keep watching Twitter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> "The Pacific Northwest sits squarely within the Ring of Fire. Off its coast, an oceanic plate is slipping beneath a continental one. Inland, the Cascade volcanoes mark the line where, far below, the Juan de Fuca plate is heating up and melting everything above it. In other words, the Cascadia subduction zone has, as Goldfinger put it, "all the right anatomical parts." Yet not once in recorded history has it caused a major earthquake—or, for that matter, any quake to speak of. By contrast, other subduction zones produce major earthquakes occasionally and minor ones all the time: magnitude 5.0, magnitude 4.0, magnitude why are the neighbors moving their sofa at midnight. You can scarcely spend a week in Japan without feeling this sort of earthquake. You can spend a lifetime in many parts of the Northwest—several, in fact, if you had them to spend—and not feel so much as a quiver." This is total crap. There was a 6.8 magnitude earthquake in Seattle in 2001.

<comment><USER59> They are contrasting what they describe as weekly small quakes in Japan with long periods of inactivity in the Pacific Northwest. A significant quake in one city in the region 14 years ago doesn't invalidate the claim that you could spend a significant time in the northwest without feeling a tremor.

<comment><USER60> But the article says you could spend many lifetimes.

<comment><USER61> Maybe you could, as long as those lifetimes don't happen to contain that one 6.8 event. I don't think the point was to look back several lifetimes from right now, but rather to talk about the overall frequency of earthquakes in recorded history. (Caveat: I know nothing about the seismic history of the Pacific NW, this is just how i read the statement.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Seems the science on this may not be as settled as the article indicates.

nature.com/news/seabed-samples-cast-doubt-on-earthquake-risk-for-pacific- northwest-1.15655

But I won't fault the author for not getting it quite right on a shifting area of research.

</comment><comment><USER63> These guys need to do a kickstarter - [http://grillo.io/](http://grillo.io/)

</comment><comment><USER64> I can't read the article, says I've read my last complimentary issue. That's in Chrome, I added them to my allowed cookie list. It still doesn't work. I tried Firefox with cookies enabled and it works so guessing something to do with the ad cookies from their site I have blocked.

If I open an Incognito window in Chrome it works.

</comment><comment><USER65> There's a nuclear submarine base there too :(

</comment><comment><USER66> So SF is screwed right?

</comment><comment><USER67> Silicon Valley refugees and people complaining about Bay Area prices, please note that this is 100% true. Portland will be completely wiped out within the next couple years by a giant earthquake followed by a Sasquatch Apocalypse.

Don't move here. You will die. But please visit and enjoy your stay!

Love, Portland

<comment><USER68> Also, please don't move to San Luis Obispo / Avila Beach. We have a nuclear power plant on a bluff near a fault line.

Come visit though. We have great tri-tip and outdoor activities.

<comment><USER69> not only that, it's called "diabolo canyon". I mean talk about tempting fate.

<comment><USER70> At the end of the road through Montaña de Oro State Park there's a warning siren[1] that will go off if there's a problem at the Diablo Canyon facility. Every time I get out there and see it there's a part of me that expects it to start to blare... and I'm totally glad when I'm "disappointed" and it doesn't.

[1] [http://www.andremount.net/vanstravaganza_iii_2010/images/ful...](http://www.andremount.net/vanstravaganza_iii_2010/images/fullsize/IMG_1350.jpg)

<comment><USER68> Its fun when they test the sirens a couple times a year ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Does the New Yorker just inject random comics into their stories? None of these illustrations appear to be related to the content.

<comment><USER72> It's worse than that: none of those illustrations appear to be related to _humor_.

Edit: Looks like we've got a couple of _New Yorker_ cartoon aficionados on HN. I guess I'll have to save my stinging comments for edgier content, such as Doonsbury and Garfield. /s

<comment><USER73> Yeah it is some kind if weird palette cleanse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> TLDR someone?

<comment><USER75> The Really Big One: earthquake wipes out the Pacific Northwest.

Really needed that?

<comment><USER74> ... this article seemed to be talking about a potential future earthquake. And it's a very long article.

<comment><USER23> It discusses why a big earthquake is likely to hit the PNW in the next 50 years with lots of flowery language and science. TL;DR: There's a big earthquake that is likely to hit the PNW in the next 50 years.

<comment><USER74> Thanks freehunter, I appreciate you taking the time to do that. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> A heads up: this peace is 6.3K+ word long and according to my estimate it would take you around 45 mins to finish reading it.

Enjoy!

<comment><USER77> Well, its title is "The really big one" after all.

<comment><USER76> Shouldn't it have been "The really LOOOONG one" instead?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> In recent past, I had this thought that Silicon Valley is sitting on top of, or very close to, potential future fault activity. And I have a hard time believing that the key component of human civilization (technology) is so vulnerable, and was built after the 1906 disaster.

It's one of the factors I would consider when deciding if I really want to move to west coast.

<comment><USER79> You think technology is the key component to human civilization?

I would have thought of food.

<comment><USER80> Food _is_ a technology. Horticulture, breeding, domestication, threshing, plowing, sowing, crop rotation, cooking, drying, pickling, brining, canning, curing, refrigerating, etc.

Modern civilization is massively more efficient at extracting food from a given piece of arable land than our hunter gatherer forebears were able too, all thanks to thousands of years of food technology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> at-fates-hands It's interesting to see several articles about this recently. Ever since I was growing up in the 1970's, they've been talking about "the big one".

Here's the 1979 show "In Seach Of" discussing it:

Leonard Nimoy's narration is top notch as always: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=148UfHK6pbs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=148UfHK6pbs)

At the time of the video, they said over 15 million people live along the various fault lines.</comment>


Example.com - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Example.com

<comment><AUTHOR> example.com appears to not have as general usage as it should. It is incredibly useful.</comment>


CloudControl Shutdown - <AUTHOR> http://www.paasfinder.com/cloudcontrol-shutdown/ <comment><AUTHOR> Parse.com, cloudControl, and I'm just curious, who will be next?</comment>


Windows Phone 7 Sales — and Microsoft's Hopes — Are in Free Fall - <AUTHOR> http://www.bnet.com/blog/technology-business/windows-phone-7-sales-8212-and-microsoft-8217s-hopes-8212-are-in-free-fall/7306

<comment><USER2> Lame article that makes claims it can't back up.

Some dealers pricing some headsets very cheaply temporarily doesn't strike me as a _good_ sign for WP7 but it certainly doesn't necessarily mean bad things for the platform or anything specific about sales.

<comment><USER3> It is more worrying when your executives admit things like this:

"In an appearance at the All Things Digital D: Dive Into Mobile conference, Joe Belfiore, Microsoft's corporate vice-president for the Windows Phone program, said that at only a month after the introduction, it was too early to comment on specific sales numbers."

Microsoft knows about the rumours of poor WP7s sales figures. You would think that if they had ANY good news, they would have shared it.

Aggressively selling the handsets could be a great thing for Microsoft and the WP7 handset manufacturers, but if the sales figures stay low even with BOGOs, then Microsoft would have to buy RIM to stay in the smartphone business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's the holiday season. Of course there are going to be discounts. If you follow a couple of the links in the article you'll find that some of those discount were temporary promotions.

<comment><USER5> Exactly. Verizon did a 2 for 1 for Droids a long time ago, must have meant Android failed and we didn't know it.

<comment><USER3> Having BOGO (buy one get one) deals wasn't a sign that Android was in danger of being a failure, but Motorola certainly was. Motorola desperately needed to have a hit with their models of the Droid so I suspect they practically gave them away to Verizon.

Here is one of the articles outlining Motorola's success but limited profits from Droid, see: [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-28/motorola-profit- top...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-28/motorola-profit-tops- estimates-on-rising-sales-of-droid-phones.html)</comment></comment></comment>


Now You Can Buy Solar Power from Your Neighbor - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcoexist.com/3047758/with-this-airbnb-for-energy-now-you-can-buy-solar-power-from-your-neighbor

<comment><USER2> As a Massachusetts resident with solar panels I can tell you that this is a useful service. In this state you do not get paid for the over production and instead it just accumulates in your account. I currently have a $500 credit with the electric company and no good way to cash out.

There is a mechanism in place to _give_ someone else your extra credit but then you need to figure out how to charge them by looking at your bill every month. There is also a requirement that the person you transfer to must be in the same "ISO-NE load zone" and I haven't figure out what that means yet. It probably means that my neighbors are ok, but my co-workers might not be an option.

I don't know know how they set their rates, but I would be happy to sell people electricity at 75% of what they pay the power company since I am not doing anything with my extra as it is.

To answer the power or money question: This is just a money transfer. It is similar to the way anyone can purchase renewable energy for a 10% premium. They don't send you different electrons, it just gets paid differently.

<comment><USER3> You could run BOINC or mine Bitcoin or something similar with your excess electricity assuming you also have idle computer hardware, at least until there's a better option for you.

<comment><USER4> Not a bad idea, but I thought ASICs basically killed the profitability of mining on standard computer hardware? Still, if the electricity is free then at least it's something.

<comment><USER5> Why not buy ASICs then?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is just... odd! In the UK, the Government pay me (via my energy company) for every kWh I generate. I also get paid for every unit I export.

Once a quarter (or automatically if I have a smart-meter) I take meter readings and email them to the Energy Company. A few days later they transfer the cash to my account.

Why bother with this middleman? What's the use of an inefficient 3rd party? Energy is fungible. Unless you've actually got a direct wire between your panels and your neighbour's property, this is just nonsense.

<comment><USER7> Not every region of the world is as green energy progressive as the UK.

In the US, states make their own regulations on energy - and it is reflected in the state of Florida. FL only has 5 utility companies, but Duke (the largest utility in the country) and FPL (the 3rd largest in the county) control most of the state (the other 3 utility companies purchase power from Duke and FPL, essentially making them the only 2 providers in the state). FPL's parent company NextEra is the largest supplier of Solar Energy in North America. Duke is a top 5 provider of solar energy in North America.

Yet it is illegal for me to power my home on solar panels that I buy. If I do buy the panels, I still have to pay my utility for every kWh I use even if I didn't get it from the utility (negating any financial benefits).

Two of the top providers of solar energy on the continent control the utilities in FL and their lobbying is what keeps us from getting any solar benefits.

OUR NICKNAME IS THE SUNSHINE STATE!!!

Hopefully, companies such as Yeloha can show our legislators and their constituents the power of home owner solar and it's sharing capacity. They could provide a lot of data to empower change.

<comment><USER8> What if you have no contracts with any utility companies whatsoever? Are you still required to pick one and pay them?

<comment><USER7> We don't get to pick, we have one that services our house and we are required to use them.

If we don't connect the panels to the grid - they send out inspectors to homes that are drawing below the norm power and look for panels. If they find panels or any renewable energy source they call the cops and start a lawsuit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Do they actually transfer power between "host" and "partner", or just money?

<comment><USER10> This looks more like a transfer of credits, not of the actual power.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> There is nothing new about the technology or the business model. Maybe it's an unusual one for Americans, but for everyone else, it's not.

</comment><comment><USER12> Hasn't this been covered through the Utilities, already? Most utilities here allow you to buy different plans, normal electricity, or electricity generated from renewable sources. At the end of the day it's just a 'accounting trick', as it's not like the green energy is being routed specifically to you, you get the same energy, most of it from a coal burning plant, but your payments are earmarked (in the accounting) to pay for existing or new green energy projects, and you hope they're audited such that this is actually true (as opposed to selling 15% of their electricity as 'green' when their green sources are only 5% and growing slowly).

And this isn't even any different from having your own solar, unless you're in a remote location unconnected to the grid and uninterested in interconnecting to the grid. Most people who have solar simply get two energy meters. One of your power being generated and going to the grid (not to your own home), and one of power from the grid going into your home. It's pretty rare that you actually use the energy that the panels on your roof generate. Which means that whether those panels are on your own roof, or on the other side of the planet, doesn't really make any difference as long as they cost the same and have the same sun conditions. Except of course for the fact your home rises in value with panels on them because panels are essentially a small currency printer that takes sunlight as its ink, which has value.

Which brings me to the weirdness of this project. People with roofs get free panels and some free electricity. And people without roofs have to pay for that, which is obviously going to be quite expensive. Residential solar is already 2x, almost 3x as expensive as industrial solar projects, plus solar is still more expensive than your utility in the first place, and then you have to pay for extra panels for someone else's energy bill, plus the panels you do pay for aren't owned by you and don't add value to your home, and of course the energy of the panels doesn't even go directly to you, or hell even directly to the person whose house's panels you're paying for. I don't see why this would be a better idea than buying solar credits, shares in an industrial solar farm or green energy from your utility. It sounds like a waste of money to me, magnifying the very concern that is keeping solar from taking over the energy market.

For example that's what vandebron.nl does here in the Netherlands. They essentially sell green energy credits (I call them credits not because it's not green energy, but because it's delivered to the grid in general, and not to them specifically) to consumers by facilitating the financial link between independent producers (e.g. a farmer who has a wind turbine and who can sell to 600 households) and the consumer.

<comment><USER13> More green energy is being produced as a result of this project. How is that a bad thing or waste of money? People save a little money and help create clean energy. More companies like Yeloha, the better.

The main issue with your first point is that big utilities in the states lack incentive to push for renewables. So yes, all of the actual power will still come from the grid but that's how the entire industry is structured. Federal and state incentives that help make commercial and residential solar affordable demand that energy flow onto the grid. This company sounds like they've got a nice angle on increasing the adoption of solar and there's nothing wrong about that.</comment></comment>


Uber knows exactly when you'll pay more for surge pricing - <AUTHOR> http://slashdot.org/story/311465 <comment><USER2> I observed this myself when i've got worse surge pricing rate than my friend who was trying to get Uber in the same time.

I wonder if such practices are legal - because for example Uber can measure somehow wealthiness level of somebody to make additional surge prices just for him.

We heard stories when buying plane ticket from mac will be much more costly then buying them from linux machine.

Someday Uber will need a another disruption to prevent abuse of power and that will make on-demand transportation a commodity.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's a better article [http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/20/11721890/uber- surge-pricin...](http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/20/11721890/uber-surge- pricing-low-battery)</comment>


Intelligence Agencies Running Mass Number of Propaganda Accounts on Social Media - <AUTHOR> http://politicalblindspot.com/leaked-intelligence-agencies-running-mass-number-of-propaganda-accounts-on-social-media/

<comment><USER2> That Doctorow book "Little Brother" sure seems to have hit the nail on the head in a lot of the examples he was giving of government activity...</comment>


Book: The Design of Approximation Algorithms - <AUTHOR> http://www.designofapproxalgs.com/download.php

<comment><AUTHOR> What does this book cover?

From FAQ ....

While there is some amount of overlap in results presented in other books (reflecting consensus in what the field views as the important results and techniques), because of our interests in the field there is more coverage of scheduling problems (especially single machine scheduling) and semidefinite programming.

Simply because the book is more recent, it has some coverage of the unique games problem and the unique games conjecture. The book also covers recent results on uniform sparsest cut (the Arora-Rao-Vazirani result), minimum bisection (due to Racke), and some of the recent work on the minimum Steiner tree problem. The book covers the probabilistic embedding of metrics into tree metrics result of Fakcharoenphol-Rao-Talwar that is now a standard technique in the field. It also covers recent work on minimum-cost bounded-degree spanning trees, and the local search algorithms for facility location and k-median problems.

Also because the book is more recent, it can give simplified proofs that didn't appear in the original papers. For instance, the proof for the survivable network design algorithm of Jain has a simplified proof that was devised just a few years ago.

A final difference is that the book's organization shows how different techniques can lead to improved results. The book returns several times to the facility location problem, prize-collecting Steiner tree problem, bin-packing problem, among others, showing how a new technique gives an improvement over previous results.

</comment><comment><USER2> C.f.,

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1850554></comment>


Firefox 3 - The Shape of Things To Come - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mozilla.com/faaborg/2007/11/15/the-shape-of-things-to-come/

<comment><AUTHOR> A picture is worth a thousand words. It's one thing to read about theory and quite another to get a glimpse of how their design process works.</comment>


Apple to ban Facebook's research app that collects users' personal information - <AUTHOR> https://www.recode.net/2019/1/30/18203231/apple-says-its-banning-facebooks-research-that-collected-users-personal-information <comment><USER2> Using Enterprise license to give people outside of the company access to an app is really going to piss off Apple (seen someone try to do it). I hope they terminated all of their enterprise certs for now. Facebooks statement is pretty much hubris. Not to mentioned its a disgusting app, paying people to let Facebook spy on their usage. Apple's lawyers are not fun to try to fool.</comment>


Show HN: MVP Clear your head - <AUTHOR> http://talkproductivity.xyz/cyh/clear-your-head.html <comment><USER2> Nice and easy to use. Really useful. One comment is that when I click on "talk productivity" and "popular books", it would be nicer to get an external link so I can keep "my todo list" at sight. Good work.</comment>


Epic Browser – Chrome fork focused on privacy - <AUTHOR> http://epicbrowser.com

<comment><USER2> Always love to see some innovation in the Browser space! You say no third party cookies. At all? That means no more facebook like, no more twitter share? Can we white-list third-party cookies that we accept?

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm the founder of Hidden Reflex, the creator of Epic...please do post your comments as you get a chance to use Epic! Our mission is to build a browser built on chromium that protects your privacy to the maximum extent possible without "breaking the internet". Tell us what you think, thanks!

</comment><comment><USER3> @tejus thanks! @mknits thanks & nice tagline!! @spolu you can whitelist sites to allow third-party cookies via the "umbrella button" at the top right for particular sites. FB like & twitter shares should still work -- you may be asked to log into the respective sites.

<comment><USER4> I remember when Epic browser was Firefox based; used to hang a lot. But had very nice features - India specific.

Could you try to implement those features now also?

Please provide users a link to full-size download. Otherwise it would be a big turn-off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Finally! Nice to see browsers working towards maintaining privacy, rather than doing what's in the best interest of advertisers. I was shocked to see AdBlock Plus is planning on charging big advertisers a fee to not block some of their ads.

</comment><comment><USER4> Reddit discussion: [http://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1lut4v/here_comes_a...](http://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1lut4v/here_comes_a_chromium_based_browser_focused_on/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Absolutely stunning. No browser comes close to what you offer. Great work.

Your tagline should be - The Most Privacy-Conscious Browser On the Earth.

</comment><comment><USER6> wow, this is amazing! Been using it for the last half-hour, and it's been a fantastic experience so far. Kudos!</comment>


Email scam costs couple £25,000 – but no one will help - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/mar/04/fraud-scam-email-barclays-lloyds <comment><AUTHOR> I'm interested in the mechanics of this because it seems to be a very difficult scam to pull off.

First they need to hack a tradesman's emails, then register a similar domain, then open a bank account in the same name (presumably using some fake ID), then receive the funds and clear them out of the account.

<comment><USER2> Seeing the amount of the scam, it does not seem that difficult. Anyone with the knowledge to hack the mail of the tradesman (using software or social engineering) could pull that off. Especially they can try with multiple clients. The most complicated thing is probably to open the bank account with fake information otherwise you could easily be found. It's actually quite brilliant of simplicity I find.</comment></comment>


Facebook rejects ad of two men kissing to spread awareness on world-aids day - <AUTHOR> http://mannschaft.com/2019/12/01/facebook-verbietet-werbung-mit-kuessenden-maennern/ <comment><USER2> Some people don't want anyone kissing in their feed. Don't they remove all sexual content?

</comment><comment><USER3> Imagine the outcry if they rejected a picture of a straight interracial couple

</comment><comment><USER4> An equal number of people would be offended by this being injected onto their morning feed, probably more, than those that are offended by its rejection. Facebook is an algorithm after all.

</comment><comment><USER5> Feels like Zuckerberg and co is pivoting from being politically 'left' to politically 'right' and I'm wondering if it has to do w/ data. I.e. data says if you support conservative media/causes/etc you'll get more mass appeal, and more eyes glued to facebook. Or more people who lean right-wing are on FB so make it an echo chamber for them. Supposedly he's been having a lot of closed door meetings w/ people on the right.

At once it seemed he wanted to be more like gates and influence the world for good. I think all the privacy scandals have made him more jaded and ruined chances of him getting into politics like he wanted, so buckle down and make FB more profitable through political coercion and using data to get the most advertising buck.

I mean they don't allow this, but Trump could run an ad saying Bernie Sanders is having an Affair with AOC and has poor family values and they'd allow it - because political ad.

</comment><comment><USER6> Why is this post flagged?

</comment><comment><USER7> Awful lot of "some people" argumentation in this thread.

</comment><comment><USER8> Well I definitely don't want to see something like this in my feed, so thanks.

<comment><USER9> I don't want to see you in this thread.

Somehow, I bet you would say this is my problem, and that you have a right to exist, including in public where I might see you and your homophobic or perhaps merely insufferably prudish opinions.</comment></comment>


A mysterious crystal that melts at two different temperatures - <AUTHOR> https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.1.20190606a/full/ <comment><USER3> The actual publication that resolves this riddle is here: [https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.cgd.8b01459](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.cgd.8b01459)

The gist is that a chemical called acetaldehyde phenylhydrazone (APH) produces crystals in the solid state. Very minute contamination of the crystal can cause the melting point to go from 96 degrees C (uncontaminated) to 56 degrees C (contaminated), even if the contaminating agent (an acid) is virtually undetectable. A contaminated (low melting point crystal) and uncontaminated crystal appear identical under crystal structure and spectroscopy.

The cause turns out to be isomerization. The solid and liquid phases of APH have different stable isomer ratios (solid: 100% "Z" form, liquid: 37% Z, 62% "E" form); the contaminant appears to catalyze the isomeric transformation. With the catalyst, the Z form can transition quickly into the E form, making the liquid phase more accessible and lowering the melting point; without, the solid Z has to melt into the unstable liquid Z which then slowly (spontaneously) changes into the stable Z/E mix.

The paper's worth a read, if only to see how thoroughly the authors tried to rule out any other possible explanation for this very weird behavior - <USER2> many, many tests of the different solid samples and checking and rechecking equipment.

<comment><USER4> I have no understanding of chemistry, but you mention that it was contamination which caused the change.

Does this imply that despite the repeated references in the article to the crystals being identical, both when tested in the 19th and 21st century (with "modern structural analysis techniques"), the crystals are in fact different on a minute undetectable level? i.e. "a single molecule in the air" which causes the change?

<comment><USER3> The paper notes that a 1-in-1000 molar concentration of acid was sufficient to trigger low-temperature melting, indicating that the amount of contamination needed is indeed very, very small. The paper does not discuss exact mechanisms of action, but one of the conjectures is that the acid takes the form of excess hydrogen atoms, which could easily tuck themselves into a crystal structure nearly undetectably.

All it takes is catalyzing a few Z->E transitions when the temperature rises to cause the crystal structure to break down, which would explain the lower melting point despite the small amount of contaminant (catalysts often reduce the energy required to start a reaction, but are not themselves consumed so they can further catalyze other reactions).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a wonderful read. Seriously impressive employment of the scientific method (the way it should be). The take-home message is probably: identify (and, if necessary, test) _all_ of your assumptions. In this case, it was assumed that the different batches of material melted to become the same liquid, since that is pretty much how everything else melts (although that may be open to a new look now). On that assumption, the problem was intractable.

The problem was solved by someone questioning that assumption and finding out that, in fact, different samples melted to become _different_ liquids. Once over that hump, clever application of basic chemistry principles got the rest out. Lovely work.

</comment><comment><USER6> I can't say I understand all of that but I love a story about investigating something that is happening but seems impossible.

It often happens with my code.

<comment><USER7> "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth."

<comment><USER8> > "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how > improbable, must be the truth."

... authored by a man who believed in seances and faeries, and not an actual scientist.

<comment><USER9> Seances and faeries strike me as improbable rather than impossible.

<comment><USER10> Yes. Conan Doyle's maxim is apt - it's just he misapplied it. In his consideration of the case of Cottingley Fairies, he wrongly considered the girls as too unsophisticated to be able to pull off a deception, and too honest to want to. He eliminated the wrong elements.

<comment><USER8> That's the problem - the maxim only works in a fictional universe with a protagonist like Holmes who has an uncanny ability to deduce elements of the plot with perfect accuracy from details as minor as the angle of someone's shoulders or the way they tie their tie.

It doesn't work in the real world because it first requires perfect foreknowledge of all of the possible explanations for a phenomenon, as well as perfect confidence that the attempts to disprove all but one of those explanations were correct.

But, as demonstrated with Arthur Conan Doyle and the Cottingley faeries, there may be assumptions one is not willing to challenge (the literal existence of faeries themselves) and possibilities one may not have considered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Although the team's work breaks genuinely new ground, Meekes cheerfully > admits that the circumstances under which the melting-point suppression > occurs are so specific that the research is unlikely to have useful > applications.

Whenever I hear of something extremely sensitive, it makes me want to turn it into a measurement device.

Not clear what you'd use this to measure though.

<comment><USER12> Maybe presence of acid vapor? But this sounds possibly too sensitive to be useful.

<comment><USER13> I was thinking in space... measuring the corona of a comet or something. Anywhere you have a very faint hint of something

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The higher melting point is not the true thermodynamic melting point, which must be reversible. It's more akin to supersaturation, where a solvent temporarily holds more solid in the absence of a "seed" to induce crystallization. Really interesting though, and the historical connection even more so.

</comment><comment><USER15> A fascinating piece of chemistry. I like everything about the article except the claim, near the beginning, that it melts into two different liquid forms. I would have preferred to express it as two different melting processes (one catalyzed by tiny amounts of impurities, the other not catalyzed).

Normally, it is chemical reactions that get catalyzed, not state changes, but the behavior of this chemical is an exception.

<comment><USER16> No, it is truly a different chemical form, as evidenced by the shift in NMR spectrum.

Isomers often have an energy barrier between the two forms which can be overcome under certain conditions. Infamously, thalidomide easily converted between isomers, even if it was prepared chirally, it would convert in-vivo to the teratogenic form, due to a loose alpha hydrogen.

Usually, it's something like a chemical rearrangement, like the alpha hydrogen popping off then another attaching, inverting chirality.

At some point, this barrier can be low enough that it's very sensitive to these rearrangements, even a tiny fraction of acid or base can swing it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> >The team hasn't even coined a name for the physical process by which identical solids can melt into distinct liquids. "If someone else wants to name it, then they can," Threlfall says.

I think this is a challenge. Is HN up to the task?

<comment><USER18> I feel like this is basically asking for Melty McMeltface

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Corrected headline would be "two different substances melt at different temperatures". :(

I was so excited too.

<comment><USER20> No, this is the same substance that melts into two different liquids as the article states

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I sense a demonstration wherein a large APH crystal prepared in an alkaline environment is heated to 60 degrees, and then a single drop of acid is dripped onto it, and the whole thing melts away.

My vote for nomenclature is "catalyzed isomerization melting".

</comment><comment><USER22> makes me wonder how many ideas die(d) like this because they can't/couldn't reach the adequate attention from the public.</comment>


Ask HN: What is the significance of the proposed ICANN transfer? - <AUTHOR>

My mom recently asked me about the significance of the US handing over the oversight of ICANN to a yet-to-be-defined international body, and I didn't have a confident answer for her.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/us-to-relinquish-remaining-control-over-the-internet/2014/03/14/0c7472d0-abb5-11e3-adbc-888c8010c799_story.html
The instigation for this move is apparently international distrust of the US gov't following Snowden.  People have claimed that, through the control of the DNS root zone, an international ICANN could censor swastika imagery (e.g. France), political dissidents (e.g China), or dubious trademark infringement (e.g. US).  Others have said that ICANN has essentially no power, and that all of this is a political distraction with minimal real-world effect.  Still others have said that, by opening up the process, ICANN will become more transparent than when controlled by an imperfect US.
What are ICANN's actual abilities, and what are the possibilities for international control to lead to good or bad outcomes? <comment><USER2> Hi, there is a very good interview here which will give you some background:

[http://memex.org/meme4-01.html](http://memex.org/meme4-01.html)</comment>


Free implementation of Heroes of the Might and Magic II engine with source code - <AUTHOR> http://sourceforge.net/projects/fheroes2/files/fheroes2/

<comment><USER2> There is also VCMI - Heroes 3 WOG recreated and Attal - <http://sourceforge.net/projects/attal/>

Heroes is the game I own in most formats (even Gameboy, PS2, iPad, etc.)

I used to play it in the army, and we used to joke in the morning with how many turns one gets to the kitchen. The tiles on the ground were hexagonal like the one in heroes (we were playing 1, 2 then, and once I was out 3 came out).

I still like V, played a bit of VI, but III, and Palm Heroes one are the one playing lately...

Also Disciples II, and a bit of III (but it's buggy).

And Wesnoth (open source)

</comment><comment><USER3> The antivirus system at the company I work found a virus (keylogger) in fheroes2-20111117-win32-r2705.zip.

<comment><USER4> What is the keylogger's name?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I suspected that there will be a sentiment for this game here ... one of many reasons for me to become a hacker. Through games, their small imperfections, I've started programming computers and get passionate about it. Nowadays with game consoles, many kids will miss the joy of hex-editing binary files.

<comment><USER5> There've been unhexeditable game consoles since the 70s. Doesn't seem to have impacted people's desire to hack thus far.

<comment><USER6> But now also PC games are unhexeditable, so you don't have anything left to hexedit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I spent a large part of my childhood playing HOMM while not many of my other friends ever really played the game. One of the most underrated games out there IMHO.

</comment><comment><USER8> I spent a great deal of my childhood with this game. They don't make them like that anymore really.

<comment><USER9> You likely were saying that rhetorically, but in this particular case, Heroes of Might and Magic 5 was released pretty recently and is more or less the same game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is interesting, but why is this on Hacker News?

<comment><USER11> Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

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


Human Error - <AUTHOR> http://soveran.com/human-error.html <comment><AUTHOR> I happened to be reading The Design of Everyday Things at the same time as Understanding Air France 447. It was surprising to see how the concepts explained in the book by Don Norman applied perfectly to explain the errors made by the pilots -- even though airplanes are not everyday things.</comment>


How we use Redis at Bump - <AUTHOR> http://devblog.bu.mp/how-we-use-redis-at-bump

<comment><USER2> I'm curious as to what hardware specs are used for these various cases.

How much RAM? How many instances per server? How many servers?

</comment><comment><USER3> We also find Redis perfect in a whole range of scenarios.

I like Redis because it's simple enough that I feel I easily understand what's going on (i.e. performance is predictable), yet powerful enough to do pretty much everything I want.

From a productivity point of view, the only scenarios that come to mind in which I've found myself thinking a relation database would be better are:

1\. Indices: In scenarios where you could use an index with a relational database you need to create and manage this by hand in Redis. This takes time, and increases application complexity.

2\. Transactions: They are far less flexible in Redis. Effectively you must get/WATCH all your data before entering a MULTI/EXEC block for setting. I've found organizing code for this can sometimes be very constraining. Of course on the upside, Redis is forcing you to be efficient.

<comment><USER4> Half the time, simply having transactional behavior on the application side is "enough" reliability for most.

App node goes down? Meh. If it's important, it'll get submitted again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I know redis is great, but I wondering what this

""" [persistence] This is something that every database has trouble with and Redis is no exception. """

is supposed to mean. To me it seems that most databases deal with persistence just fine.

</comment><comment><USER6> To read some previous discussion of this article, check here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2222431>

(We're still using Redis :-)

</comment><comment><USER7> The author mentions always giving MongoDB its own server. Can anyone shed some light on that?

<comment><USER8> For production apps, afaik that's always been a rule of thumb for any kind of db, be it rdbms, nosql, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Cool use with BSON as mentioned in the article:

<http://bsonspec.org/>

<comment><USER9> The problem with BSON is that the Python modules that implement it are incredibly slow when it comes to nested dicts. In fact, if you nest too deeply the BSON encoder will just seg fault.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the warning.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Review my web app / filtering Digg by languages (french, german, ...) - <AUTHOR> http://babeligg.com/

<comment><USER2> Some categorization would be really nice.</comment>


Half the DNA on the NYC Subway Matches No Known Organism - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/half-the-dna-on-the-nyc-subway-matches-no-known-organis-1684045880 <comment><USER2> iPhone refuses to load because of full page advertisement

<comment><AUTHOR> No ad on my desktop browser (Win10/Chrome/Firefox)</comment></comment>


PyCharm 2.5 python IDE released.  - <AUTHOR> http://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/whatsnew/index.html?PC25US <comment><USER2> Big PyCharm fan. I have used all the major IDEs, both python specific and general, and I always found they got in the way more than the time-saving features they purported to offer. I always switched back to a basic text editor (Sublime Text).

But then I found PyCharm and actually spent a weekend learning how to use it. It's a real pleasure to use. Intellisense stuff works very well, some of the refactoring features are excellent, and all the handy things like ctrl-enter to import things, ctrl-n/ctrl-shift-n to jump to different code in projects, really speeds up development.

I still use Sublime Text for short scripts, but for any major projects i use PyCharm for everything. The django support (with debugging, including template debugging) is killer.

Also my one interaction with the development has been excellent. I reported a bug (i did have to sign up to their bug track which was a bit of a nuisance), and the bug was fixed in a day and a new update with the fix pushed out to me within a week. Impressive iteration cycle given the size of the software.

</comment><comment><USER3> FWIW if you are an intellij user you can install the jetbrains python plugin, which offers much of the same functionality:

[http://confluence.jetbrains.net/display/PYH/PyCharm+vs.+Inte...](http://confluence.jetbrains.net/display/PYH/PyCharm+vs.+IntelliJ+IDEA+Python+plugin+FAQ)

</comment><comment><USER4> Favorite IDE for Python, and strong features for client-side development as well. It would be great to see them offer increased Tornado support.

</comment><comment><USER5> Non flame-bait question. I am mostly a VIM user. Are there people who do plug- ins on top of vim to get "similar" experience to PyCharm?

<comment><USER6> You need to write a full Python parser to get similar intelligence in vim - and it would be difficult to do smoothly given that vim plugins can't communicate with a long-running process as the code-assist emacs plugins do (which is my biggest complaint about modern vim).

Alternatively, PyCharm has a vi plugin which isn't too bad (depending on which features of vim you expect).

<comment><USER5> Interesting. So emacs would be able to do this well I imagine.

I'll look into the vi bindings support in PyCharm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Price of personal license is +25% for EU countries as opposed to US. I thought it's only game distributors who do this kind of thing.

<comment><USER8> Personally I've found their price for Personal licenses to be very low -- in the Python world, ActiveState Komodo is $295, Wing IDE is $245, BlackAdder is the only one under $100 and it looks quite "underpowered" when compared to PyCharm.

Regardless, they have promotions running for long periods, so it's easy to start with a trial and then pick up a real license when the price is lower -- the last one ended on 16 April and was 30% off, I got mine last September and it was 50% off.

In general, for software like for everything else, prices reflect what the market will bear. We are willing to pay more, clearly. It's slightly embittering that in this case they cannot bring the usual "import taxes" justification, since they're based in Czech Republic.

<comment><USER9> Based in the EU means they have to collect VAT for all EU customers. And the VAT amount depends on the volume of sales. If they sell more than a certain amount (€100k) to a specific country they can collect the VAT rate for the buyer country otherwise it is the seller country VAT. And the VAT seems to be 20% in Czech Republic. (see [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_value_added_tax#...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_value_added_tax#Distance_sales))

<comment><USER7> It specifically states that the price is without tax (tax excluded). I didn't proceed any further to see if it will be included in the later steps.

<comment><USER9> Checked my last receipt from them, 19% VAT was included in the total amount billed (this was 2011 and it was for Resharper). But the seem to sell it through a German company so I guess it is German VAT.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Using 2.5 as the version number for your Python IDE is somewhat irritating.

<comment><USER11> I don't understand your comment. Do you mind to elaborate?

<comment><USER12> I think he means the (obscure) risk of confusing it with the somewhat elderly Python 2.5.

<comment><USER11> I see. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> One major gotcha they're still working on is PyQt support -- their introspection techniques tend to break very often when dealing with it, which results in a lot of unnecessary warnings and word-completion being spotty. I understand their main target market is web-developers (Django and GAE support looks good, now virtualenv is also dealt with in the proper way), but that's a niche that has been crying out loud for good tools for ages (ERIC is weak, sorry).

<comment><USER13> Seems there's a number of issues reported for PyQT in PyCharm tracker: <http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issues/PY?q=PyQT> You're welcome to add yours and vote for existing. Votes matter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> OT - I'm seeing more OSX based screenshots of cross-platform tools. Is it just for aesthetic purposes or is there a trend where more and more devs are starting to use Macs?

<comment><USER13> We found that screenshots on Mac _do_ look better most of the time. And yes, you can see the trend of more and more devs using Macs. Prooflink: <http://dl.dropbox.com/u/228843/RailConf_Mac_vs_PC.jpg> That was shot at RailsConf, where historically more Macs are used, but this is quite general nowadays.

<comment><USER15> I dug up this shot of PyCon JP 2011: <http://www.ianlewis.org/media/img/662/audience.jpg>

I count at least 8 Macs, two more that may or may not be Macs. I don't see any blatantly non-Mac laptops.

To be fair, I can't be sure it's not a session on, say, PyObjC, but I also found this: [http://www.flickr.com/photos/shimizukawa/6142969129/in/set-7...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/shimizukawa/6142969129/in/set-72157627536036671/)

Five Macs, possibly a sixth hiding behind one guy's head. Two non-Macs (one looks like a thinkpad and I think the one in the lower right is a vaio).

<comment><USER8> The trend is undeniable, but there's some selection bias in your post: people with Macs do tend to flaunt them around, especially at geek gatherings where you find a lot of contractors/independent/superstar/fashion-victim developers who have a say in the hardware they use. You don't see the thousands of corporate developers with work-issued laptops nor the academic working on "big rigs"; they're not all uber-hackers but they're not all shit either. Apple adoption is also lower in Europe due to higher prices compared to NA and Japan.

Last few times I've been to (Euro) Python conventions, I was actually surprised to see a lot of really skilled guys doing real computation (3d, molecular modelling etc) while happily running Windows on their laptops.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Anyone else on OSX seeing high CPU usage? I get ~7% when it's just sitting there with 1 project open.

<comment><USER16> Here's a bug you can vote for: [http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-84652?projectKey=ID...](http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-84652?projectKey=IDEA)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> >Sun JDK 1.6. (OpenJDK is not supported)

On Ubuntu Sun JDK is not supported.

I'll stick to free Aptana plugin for Eclipse.

<comment><USER13> You can install Sun JDK on Ubuntu. It's not a big deal. There are still some problems with using OpenJDK, which are being solved now. So, it will be supported someday too.

<comment><USER15> Really? Because this issue is marked wontfix: <http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/PY-4763>

I've noticed that to the extent JetBrains communicates at all, it has a highly irritating habit of marking issues wontfix and making content-free statements (sometimes passive aggressive at that) until they get publicly called on it, and suddenly it's a completely different attitude.

<comment><USER13> It was 6 months ago. And it was a 100% wontfix then. But things change quite rapidly nowadays. Here's one problem solved: <https://twitter.com/#!/eniton/statuses/186861528677494784>. Maybe others can be solved too.

<comment><USER15> Six months ago, OpenJDK had already been declared the official reference implementation for Java SE 7 (for several months, in fact), and the OS Distributor License had already been withdrawn -- almost two months before that issue was closed.

"Things change quite rapidly" indeed. Is JetBrains not able to keep up?

<comment><USER13> Unfortunately, declaring something does not always really change things. Something else is often required.

JetBrains team has its opinions but is also flexible enough to change its mind. And it has been keeping up quite good during the last 10+ years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Unfortunately they don't have an academic license.

<comment><USER19> They do: <http://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/buy/buy.jsp#academic>

<comment><USER18> Thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


Original WWW announcement - <AUTHOR> http://groups.google.com/group/comp.text.sgml/browse_thread/thread/2c05895069db4203/339ad55b95ced310?lnk=st&q=&rnum=26#339ad55b95ced310 <comment><USER2> Now even more original (Aug 6 1991 instead of Aug 22): <http://groups.google.com/group/alt.hypertext/msg/395f282a67a1916c>

And the earlier message from the same day: <http://groups.google.com/group/alt.hypertext/msg/6dad279804cb3ba>

In the day, hypertext was already available, FTP was already available, but WWW provided the virally scalable integration. Interestingly, although Gopher initially became more popular than WWW, the first Gopher announcement I could find is from Oct 8: <http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.mac.announce/msg/24ad9de8dcfd6e4b>

In time, I hope Wikipedia will link to the important bits of history available in the archives of the Usenet.</comment>


Show HN: Visual programming for iOS and Android - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@johnbiggs/walkto-how-an-idea-became-a-real-mobile-app-in-15-hours-51654dd4e083#.6ve69zai1 <comment><AUTHOR> Hey! My name is Piotr and I wanted to show you what my team has built and hopefully hear your opinion. It is an online platform for developing custom, complex and native mobile apps using just drag&drop interface. Please don't mistake it with prototyping tool or with template-based app creator or even with hybrid apps rapid dev platforms. It produces purely native applications for iOS and Android (IPA and APK files). It is called Kinetise.

You put together your app as in prototyping tools - adding text label, image, list, etc. - but then you connect them logically, attach data from API call (which you can dynamically parametrize), define auth method, build stacks of reusable screens, optimize performance with cache'ing rules, connect to native phone features like GPS and much more.

So developing a custom app, which connects to custom backend you probably already have, takes minutes or hours, depending on app complexity and how much time you want to spend polishing it. And it looks exactly as you want it and works very fast. As one of our users said: "it is insanely fast".

Please have a look especially at this use case posted by one of our users: [https://medium.com/@johnbiggs/walkto-how-an-idea-became-a- re...](https://medium.com/@johnbiggs/walkto-how-an-idea-became-a-real-mobile- app-in-15-hours-51654dd4e083#.6ve69zai1)

I'm counting on your feedback. Please post it here or contact me directly by email: email@example.com.

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

</comment><comment><USER2> It might be useful to add URL to the platform itself... [http://www.kinetise.com](http://www.kinetise.com)</comment>


How Luther went viral - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/node/21541719 <comment><USER2> Oy. Follow the money. Luther had a very rich patron who wanted to cut a peasant uprising off at the pass, and who thought that redirecting or capturing the still-bubbling Huss Protestant movement by pushing forward a new religious leader who would agree to also oppose peasant rebellions was the way to do that. Luther, unlike others who had nailed protests to the same door (including Luther's mentor) agreed. The patron was also the local head of state and could afford to pour a lot of money into the then still very expensive process of printing. That free printed matter was passed around isn't surprising; the money to print it all was what was new. Admittedly, as printing costs reduced, sooner or later something like this was eventually very likely. Ideological leadership goes to those who can afford a printing press, a la Marx.

It was a shock just how successful the strategy was. true.</comment>


Redditor finds list of 47k email addresses with passwords - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/m8uuc/reddit_i_just_came_across_a_list_of_about_47k/ <comment><USER2> As suggested on reddit, they all might belong to the same spammer. I don't know about hotmail account creation, but if it's protected by captchas only spammers have no problems making the accounts. Some captchas can be decoded in code with high success relatively quickly, others can be fed to mturk style services.

Google has phone verification now, I guess that's harder to overcome.

<comment><USER3> You can (or could) buy 'aged' hotmail address for cents - these have never been used by real users. As for captchas a quick google search will offer up a heap of solving services, many even with APIs! The only way to protect a service against spammers or blackhatters is to stop it from being useful to them in the first place (i.e. don't allow links in profiles, etc. Harder for services like email which can't really be hobbled to prevent this sort of use without trashing the key function).

Either through automation software or (as you note) mturk style services, pretty much any anti-spam defence can be breached.

Presumably if the list of hotmail accounts was just for outbound spamming then one of the addresses on the list would have been used to send the original phishing email.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not a smart thing to do (to log into those accounts).

If you found a bunch of house keys, each one labled with the address of the house, would you go to each house and open each door? Stepping inside is not necessary.

That of itself, might not break any laws (without prior warning, or intent to cause harm, it might not be trespassing), but computer tresspass laws only require unauthorized access.

<comment><USER5> I never like it when people compare the digital world to the real world.

It's like the whole "would you download a pizza" statement.

The answer is always, yes, yes I would.

I hope our politicians and law enforcement officials do not treat the digital world like its the real world. Things are just not the same... We need separate rules and separate code of ethics for each.

<comment><USER6> I consider my email to be like a personal folder, where I have an expectation of privacy. If I accidentally left my briefcase at your office, I would hope you wouldn't look through it.

If you found the keys to a room full of filing cabinets with other people's papers, it wouldn't be right to go open them all. Similarly, if you find a list of credentials that grant you access to the electronic documents of others, it's not right to use those credentials. Of course 'downloading a car' is a terrible metaphor, but comparing electronic documents to printed documents seems very straightforward.

<comment><USER7> If we're forcing physical metaphors, I think it's more like finding a stack of 47000 briefcases in an alley somewhere. Unattended, no signs or anything. Opening a bunch of them to just see if people's stolen documents are inside seems reasonable in that case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Easiest thing would be to send the list to Hotmail

<comment><USER9> Yeah, but logging into half of the accounts first wasn't probably the smartest idea. Hope he is working from behind a proxy and not getting negative consequences out of that stupid idea.

<comment><USER10> I wonder why he felt the need to run it for two hours before deciding the login combinations were legit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is there a reason why the list contains Hotmail accounts only? Does this mean Hotmail users are easier to hack into?

<comment><USER12> According to the op he found the site via a phishing email. So likely it was just a mass mailing to hotmail accounts, or designed to look like it came from the hotmail team - naturally only Hotmail users would be worried about an email them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> See. I'm torn. I know it's illegal, but if you present the information about the list to a company (without logging in to the accounts), and they don't take action, what do you do?

I suppose you could email all of the people on the list, but how effective would that be?

<comment><USER14> You'd probably need a good spamming system to get it past the spam checkers. They're going to spam-bin short duplicate emails sent to a large multitude of users I'd expect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> From the look of it, this need not have to be hacked accounts. Normally spammers create thousands of accounts on free email services and the bots are used to auto login and send spams out. Mails sent from hotmail, msn etc has better chances of reaching your inbox than that sent from custom domains which could easily end up in spam folders.

The spammers favorites are hotmail and msn as they are easy to create. Gmail has phone verification and other added stuffs that makes it difficult for bots to create accounts.

The server that redditer accessed could be the spammer's server where he stored the user name / passwd in plaintext format for the bots.

</comment><comment><USER16> I say the chinese government is building a massive list of email password pairs that they can use down the road.

<comment><USER17> That's not a reasonable assumption given the data presented.</comment></comment>


Schönfinkelisation and Partial Application - <AUTHOR> https://functional.christmas/2019/9 <comment><USER2> Nice article! Partial application is a feature I sorely miss in other languages now. Wonder if the term Schönfinkelisation will catch on :)

</comment><comment><USER3> It's a very... elegant way of programming.</comment>


Microsoft takes Silverlight beyond Windows - <AUTHOR> http://news.com.com/Microsoft+takes+Silverlight+beyond+Windows/2100-1012_3-6180322.html?tag=nefd.top <comment><USER2> "The outstanding question is whether Microsoft plans to offer Silverlight support for Linux."

Yay... another potential headache for Linux users. Flash, WMV videos, and Java applets are bad enough, but there are at least solutions out there for those. I can't imagine Microsoft trying too hard to get this working in Linux, and it appears that websites like MLB.com already plan on using it.

I also didn't see any mention of supporting Firefox, so the problem may be bigger than just Linux users.

</comment><comment><USER3> If they are intent on supporting OS X, it seems quite likely that support for Linux will be technically feasible. Originally I was really bewildered by the MS decision to mimic Flash, but they really have done a pretty decent job with the .NET framework. Maybe the competition between Flash and Silverlight (which, btw, is a great name) will force one of them to opensource...</comment>


German officials restrict Autobahn speeds due to extreme temperatures - <AUTHOR> https://www.thedrive.com/news/28704/german-officials-restricting-autobahn-speeds-due-to-heat-waves-extreme-temperatures <comment><USER2> thedrive.com and bloomberg only use stock photos here. Photo of a cracked autobahn surface, apparently it happened 2015: [https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/wetter-in-deutschland- hitzes...](https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/wetter-in-deutschland- hitzeschaeden-auf-autobahnen-neue-tempolimits-a-1274193.html)</comment>