Focus on Infants During Childbirth Leaves U.S. Moms in Danger - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/2017/05/12/527806002/focus-on-infants-during-childbirth-leaves-u-s-moms-in-danger <comment><USER2> _The ability to protect the health of mothers and babies in childbirth is a basic measure of a society 's development. Yet every year in the U.S., 700 to 900 women die from pregnancy or childbirth-related causes, and some 65,000 nearly die — by many measures, the worst record in the developed world._

Being one of the statistics sucks. Coming up on 37 years since I was born and she was gone less than 30 days later from a pregnancy-induced rare blood disease. Middle class. Suburban Chicago. Instilled in me from a very young age to try to live a good life because of her sacrifice.

<comment><USER3> That's terrible, I am sorry for your loss.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I feel in the US that we have an almost unnatural desire to protect children, to the exclusion of other people.

Sure, who can be against children? They're young, cute (as long as you aren't changing their diapers at the time), and innocent of any possible wrong doing. Anything bad they do is just reflected on poor parenting, if that's the case or not.

But yet the same pro-life people who want to save every child's life don't seem nearly so sympathetic to mothers, even mothers that want to have healthy children. The calls for de-funding planned parenthood and bad maternity leave policies are at odds with having healthy babies and families. And healthy families are exactly what insurance companies, the government, and families can agree on. (It's cheaper for insurance, more citizens to be tax payers, and families love kids)

Yet in the political sphere, we're trying to take away programs like SNAP and WIC (which provide assistance to families and mothers). It's a lot cheaper to feed a baby at home and keep them healthy than it is to feed them in a hospital. Don't even get me started on childhood education.

I do think we have the technology to do much better, but we lack funding, education, and political will. And it's all become entangled in the welfare/abortion debate, which in America seems evergreen for political abuse.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h > But yet the same pro-life people who want to save every child's life don't > seem nearly so sympathetic to mothers, even mothers that want to have > healthy children.

This is rather disingenuous if you're referring to the practice of making sure one's children are healthy by murdering the unhealthy ones before birth. If, on the other hand, you refer to the coexistence of pro-life positions with being unwilling to allocate money to healthcare... Yeah, that's unfortunate, although not inherently contradictory (in my experience, both frequently co- occur with a strong emphasis on private charity rather that government services).

<comment><USER4> While there is something to be said for screening for genetic diseases, etc, I was referring more to how pro-life people more seem to care about people having babies, rather than those babies being treated well and having a good life and good future. Healthcare, education, nutrition, and safe & stable housing are key to a young family.

I hear a lot about how we shouldn't have abortions, but I worry more about all the kids and babies in foster care that aren't getting the love and attention they deserve. Another hugely underfunded system that is notorious for abuse.

I've got nothing against people being for life, and having kids. I'd suggest they go adopt a few kids rather than having them though. It's probably what Jesus would want you to do.

But I can't and won't prescribe for everyone or even me before I'd have to make such a choice. Life is strange, and complicated in so many ways. Ways so crazy people couldn't invent them if they tried. I personally don't think we need to make it harder on anyone.

<comment><USER5> A lot of pro life people feel that actively killing sometime (they consider a fetus alive) is very bad and should be stopped. Where as keeping another person alive (not passively killing them) and happy is the individuals responsibility.

Think about the trolley problem. In one case you passively kill 4 people and in the other case you actively kill 1. Pro life people would probably choose to passively kill 4 while pro choice would probably choose to actively kill 1.

<comment><USER6> A lot of people think letting people die is very bad too. And also a lot of people think there is a responsibility to not let others die.

<comment><USER5> Sure, that's what's great about democracy, we can vote for what the majority wants. I was responding to what cbanek wrote, as it seemed to me that cbanek did not correctly understand some of the pro-lifers viewpoints.

<comment><USER7> > Sure, that's what's great about democracy, we can vote for what the majority > wants.

Sometimes what the majority wants, is wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Heard this story on the way home, made the drive hard trying to hold back the tears.

Off topic but I have two healthy daughters and a healthy wife. When I was with my wife giving birth in the hospital it was a terrifying feeling knowing much of it was out of my control. I can only imagine what these husbands went through watching their wives die right before their eyes

<comment><USER9> It sucks, but that's how humans existed for 300,000+ years.

<comment><USER10> What a brutally insensitive comment.

<comment> le-mark I don't read this as being insensitive, I read it as a reminder to be thankful and mindful of the 'miracles' of modern medicine. Application of the principal of charity.

<comment><USER9> Thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So sad. I think that this is one of the areas where the advances in machine learning in recent years can actually save lives. In medicine, the overlooking of subtle and not so subtle clues because you are focused on something else that grabs your attention is probably one of the big causes of these preventable deaths. Computers are wonderful in that they can always be analyzing and putting together patterns even when humans are focused on something else. My hope is that in the near future these systems will get deployed throughout the healthcare system and save many lives.

On a different note, one of the most important things for doctors to develop is a "gut feeling" of badly sick vs sick vs not sick. Some of the best doctors I worked with had an uncanny sense that there was something terribly wrong with the patient, even when the lab data, etc was not very alarming, and by acting quickly prevented all sorts of complications.

<comment><USER12> I just had a disheartening conversation with someone involved in healthcare data AI, not a doctor rather a technologist. The topic of maternal death came up, mentioned that the US was going backwards, and holy smokes it was an eye opener.

1 - they did not believe the maternal mortality data capturing methods in other countries was on par with US so failed to see the backwards trends in the US alone.

2 - called my interest in pointing out maternal death rates "noble" but misguided as hospitals will pay attention to their "pain points" such as out of control costs, readmission rates.

3 - after pointing out that pregnancy is the 6th highest reason for death women 15-34, said we should focus on the top 5 because that would have more impact on women's health.

There was more but those were main points. I ended my debate with this message: pregnancy is the one "illness" where the patient was likely relatively healthy to begin, and once over, will likely have similar health after with 100% guaranteed remission upon menopause. Hospitals just need to keep them alive. What other medical condition can have such positive outcomes over the long term?

The whole conversation just kept reinforcing the point that maternal outcomes are indeed affected by society / medical professionals not caring enough.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h > we should focus on the top 5 because that would have more impact on women's > health

Eh, sorry if I'm missing something obvious, but isn't this true? Obviously it's best to pursue everything possible at once, but with limited resources it _is_ optimal to hit them in order of magnitude.

<comment><USER12> It's not that the person was wrong, it's that the person saw no difference between an accidental death (#1 cause) and death from pregnancy. Look at these causes, and you tell me which type of death a hospital can best actively prevent as a part of the treatment plan and those measures have the most impact:

#1 Unintentional injuries

#2 Cancer

#3 Suicide

#4 Heart disease

#5 Chronic lower respiratory diseases

#6 Pregnancy complications

Think about which type of _young_ patient comes to them with at minimum of 6 to 9 months of warning, so much time to prepare for the "event". Think about which type of patient can leave the hospital well with a completely normal life expectancy. Out of those #6 death options, pregnancy is the only type of event where, if you survive, you have a completely normal life & life expectancy. Given that, why wouldn't a hospital invest the resource?

[https://www.cdc.gov/women/lcod/2014/all- females/index.htm](https://www.cdc.gov/women/lcod/2014/all-females/index.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My wife was assessed as a preeclampsia risk during all her pregnancies. The last one they were so concerned she was airlifted to the state's top maternity and neonatal hospital. I can't imagine getting the same level of care in a profit motivated healthcare system without bankrupting our family.

I doubt that it is the focus on infants that is the real problem in the US but it might be difficult to say what the real problem is without getting into a shitstorm as health care has become so politicised.

<comment><USER14> _I can 't imagine getting the same level of care in a profit motivated healthcare system without bankrupting our family._

That happens all the time in the US without bankrupting people.

<comment><USER15> It also happens all the time _with_ bankrupting people. I have several friends that have gone bankrupt due to medical conditions, one who's now homeless because he contracted MRSA in the ER, and it took 9 months in sub-ICU and several long, expensive surgeries. His insurance capped at at 1 million per year, but his bill was way over that by 6 months. I think it ended up being 1.5 or 2.5 million total, but I could be wrong.

So I'm not quite sure what you point is... That it's possible to get expensive care without going bankrupt? Sometimes the US medical system works well?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is there anything the family can do to be better prepared when the institution is not prepared? My wife is pregnant (high-risk) and we have been concerned since reading this article. We are in the SF Bay Area.

<comment><USER17> We just had our first child a few months ago. We had some pretty serious complications, but the UCSF hospital system is amazing and all is good now. We are blessed to have world class hospitals in the Bay Area.

As the article says California has been proactive and countered the national trend: "By 2013, according to Main, maternal deaths in California fell to around 7 per 100,000 births, similar to the numbers in Canada, France and the Netherlands — a dramatic counter to the trends in other parts of the U.S."

The major hospitals are some of the best in the state and probably contribute to those numbers, but just in case you may want to ask your OBGYN about the protocols and whether they have a hemorrhage cart or other recommended toolkits. I would also learn the symptoms of preeclampsia, and if you're ever concerned in the hospital, ask. Congratulations and best of luck!

<comment><USER18> Here's a nice article summarizing what California does right: [https://www.vox.com/science-and- health/2017/6/29/15830970/wo...](https://www.vox.com/science-and- health/2017/6/29/15830970/women-health-care-maternal-mortality-rate)

<comment><USER19> My wife has said that if we ever end up in California, she wants to fly back the last month of pregnancy to have our child in Knoxville (she's not a big fan of California). This article presents compelling evidence that it would be much safer to stay there in fact.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> My daughter was born tonight.

As I sit here holding her while her mom tries to get some sleep after an emergency C section, this was a terrifying read.

<comment><USER21> Congratulations, I hope both baby and mother are doing okay.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The article obviously make comparisons to the UK and having given birth twice in the UK, it struck me as really strange that you could go for 8 hours without having your blood pressure measured. I can't remember the exact interval they do it at here, but I had straightforward natural births with no major risk factors and it felt like I was having my blood pressure checked frequently when I was in labour.

I was also surprised that somebody would be induced that early unless there was a risk that made it necessary. I really can't imagine that happening here and most pregnant women I've known have been desperate to avoid being induced if they can help it.

I don't know if it's relevant to maternal mortality, but the epidural rates in the US always stun me compare to those in the UK. The culture in my limited circles is to try and avoid them if you can manage without. You can obviously have one if you want and there is an anaesthetist available, but it's been a small minority of people I know who have gone in knowing they definitely want one. I guess they cost money too so the NHS probably doesn't push them!

<comment> le-mark My understanding is that during natural childbirth, the pain level gradual increases as contractions increase in strength, so there's supposedly and acclimation to the pain going on. When labor is induced, the strong contractions start right away and the pain is just as intense without the the ramp up. Source: my sister who had labor induced :)

Is it possible that there's a higher use of epidurals that correlates with induced labor because of this? Continuing with my sisters example, she did not plan on having an epidural, but requested one after being induced.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Very sad. However maternal mortality rates have declined so much in past century or so, that a case like this merits a news story. There is still room to improve.</comment>


What Laibach Learned in North Korea - <AUTHOR> http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/cannabis-and-the-sound-of-music-what-laibach-learned-in-north-korea-20150825 <comment><USER2> Laibach are master trolls.</comment>


Poker program Cepheus is unbeatable, claim scientists - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jan/08/poker-program-cepheus-unbeatable

<comment><USER2> This is laughable. You don't need AI to write program that plays mathematically perfect poker. Play against opponents and adapt to them is a whole different ballgame where you don't have gazillion artificial hands to play against another dumb computer. I am pretty sure Phil Ivey would love to play against that unbeatable program, if those scientist would put their money where their mouths are :)</comment>


I Think I Finally Understand Haskell Type Classes - <AUTHOR> http://bladeismyna.me/writing/articles/haskell_typeclasses/haskell_typeclasses.blg.html <comment><USER2> Haskell's type classes made sense to me when I asked myself why Haskell needed them and thought that if it didn't have them, you could end up writing almost exactly the same function a dozen times just with different type parameters.</comment>


Ask HN: Why does Apple need to know how subscription fees will be used? - <AUTHOR>

I've submitted an app for review that will be used with a companion, subscription based web app.
The submission was rejected because they needed to ask me some questions about my app. One of them really bothers me.
3) How does the user/company pay, is it subscription-based or lump-sum? What's the cost, what is it for, and what are the payment options?
I'm using stripe to take credit card payments but why does apple need to know how the money will be used? No payment will every be made inside the app itself. <comment><USER2> Apple wants 30% of your subscription rate if you charge by subscription. I know this b/c I have had the same thing happen, and it's complete bs.

This is why you should be publishing an API and having a "3rd party" writing and publishing your app, so there is no revenue behind it for the douchebags at Apple to screw you out of.

Apple won't care if your app is free and uses a public API, but if there's ANY money in it, they want their 30%, _especially_ if it's recurring revenue.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for answering my question.

I wish I knew that before going into all of this. How would they even know how much money you are making? Hopefully not by the number of people using the app.

The 30% cut would make sense if they were hosting my servers but 30% for just being a name is insane.</comment></comment>


I had to get a background check for my job; the report is a 300 page pdf - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/kmlefranc/status/1221869659139366912 <comment><USER3> Here's the company doing this: [https://fama.io/](https://fama.io/)

The idea that you can assess someone's workplace performance based on automated screening of their tweets is utterly absurd.

If anyone works somewhere that uses this tool, or anything similar to it, you should run far, far away from that company. This is a terrible precedent, and much too much Orwellian for my taste.

EDIT: somewhat related, but a while back I made a Twitter bot to delete my tweets because I was worried about how someone might misinterpret them: [https://github.com/brndnmtthws/tweet- delete](https://github.com/brndnmtthws/tweet-delete)

<comment><USER4> Looks like Hire Right ([https://www.hireright.com/](https://www.hireright.com/)) uses this. And a lot of the FANG tier companies use Hire Right. That'd a exclude a lot of the tech companies.

<comment><USER5> HireRight almost failed my background check because I got the month wrong on my graduation from high school. I legitimately don't understand why a background check has to be this in-depth.

Edit: actually I think it was elementary school. Even worse.

<comment><USER6> similar here. got laid off with severance in month x. company reported employing ending month x+2, my resume says I started a new job month x+1. HR calls me in a disdained huff "Sorry Mr. Effect, but we don't handle prevarications lightly."

<comment><USER7> Holy shit, I'm surprised they care THAT much about start date/end date. Like.. seriously? WTF? That's insane lol.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> They claim machine learning, but I'd guess their workhorse is a "grep -f badwords tweets.json | makepdf | send boss@employer" kind of thingy.

<comment><USER9> They're definitely using some form of sentiment analysis, but IMO these are exactly the kind of results you'd get after setting a programmer, with little to no actual data science background, loose to train his nets on data with a limited or absent intuitive understanding of bias from training data. And what's worse is that in their business false flags probably aren't even considered. It's an extra wide supercharged net.

E.G the "BIG DICK ENERGY" post being flagged as bigotry and sexism, no doubt they trained on limited data of hand curated "questionable posts" and I wouldn't be surprised if they used a source like 4chan and just automatically assigned negative labels to the vast majority of posts.

<comment><USER10> The problem here is rather likely to be to not have someone with human science background... but then that person would likely just tell them their whole premise is flawed?

<comment><USER9> I don't think so. There are valid use cases for sentiment analysis, but you need to understand the limitations of your training data and probably still want humans to QC at least some representative proportion of flagged posts, if you're going to do this legitimately. Of course a company like this just wants to sell any garbage they can dig up.

<comment><USER10> Well, I will admit that I am quite ignorant of what _exactly_ a background check is, but I just don't see how such a morally fraught question can be legally allowed to be decided by anyone else than a psychologist.

In fact, considering the moral hazard, I don't even see how even using an AI, even as simple as "grep", helping that psychologist in the cost-minimization contexts of a private company would not result in an unacceptable slippery slope where the psychologist would end up just rubber-stamping the decisions of the AI and its creator ? Maybe someone with a dual data "science" / psychology degree would be acceptable, but I'm guessing he/she wouldn't be able to use any "black box" AI...

<comment><USER11> That's not what moral hazard means.

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

<comment><USER10> Right, it's probably inappropriate to use this term at this specific place in my argument.

However, in what is probably not just a coincidence, the global issue this is only one facet of _is_ about the information asymmetry between citizens and corporations...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Oy. Similarly, I'm mystified with the CIA's and NSA's fascination with mandatory recurring polygraph tests. It's pretty well known the whole area is flawed bullshit. It doesn't measure anything remotely related to "truth".

<b>Edit:</b> I know we aren't supposed to discuss downvotes here, but the activity on this comment and my replies are very interesting. It's curious why discussion on this topic is so controversial. Why wouldn't the UK want it's own foreign policy distinct from the US policy? Downvotes welcome. I give zero shits about my HN _" karma score"_.

<comment><USER13> I think the polygraph is really just an additional tool to aid the main goal, which is to interrogate the participant. To this end the polygraph is a useful tool as it provides added discomfort, which can help the interrogator get answers from the participant.

<comment><USER12> Depends, I guess, on what they do with it. Indicators of stress could be a "good thing" in a lot of cases. It might show maturity and broad thinking versus deception. I'm a bit biased in thinking they probably bias towards loyalty and party line vs the real story. In any case, it probably excludes a lot of real talent that won't put up with the bullshit. They are inadvertently creating a very narrow culture that hurts their effectiveness.

<comment><USER14> It's just a technique to scare you into providing evidence. And in the CIA it's a test of your resilience to interrogation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So the company requesting the background check for a job get's to decide what they'd like included. Which means they believe knowing what you tweet is important. Probably due to all the public flogging of companies where someone was found to have posted "inappropriate" things (or donated to an "inappropriate" candidate, etc.). Where inappropriate is defined as whatever the group of people doing the flogging think shouldn't be done so you get a rather large pool once you combine the definitions from all groups.

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't even know what to say about this. I'm speechless.

This is so, so, so, so, stupid, yet it's presumably being used to curtail some people's job opportunities in a society where you basically need to be employed by a corporation to be a first-class citizen.

There need to be laws against arbitrary background checks. If only our government had a real interest in protecting its citizens.

<comment><USER17> There need to be laws against background checks in their entirety. People who have supposedly paid their penitence for their crimes are still punished up to 7 years after the fact, or longer, and cannot obtain meaningful employment due to it, and are thus stuck committing crimes to survive. Absolutely abhorrent.

<comment><USER18> Yep, in the state in which I reside (Indiana), there is no seven-year limit.

Did something stupid when you were 20? It's still gonna be held against you when you're 65.

<comment><USER19> To change this, I think you need to change the culture first. Our culture thinks that once you commit even the tiniest of crimes, your life is no longer worth anything. That's why we do not rehabilitate people and have such long prison terms. Until we fix our culture, I don't think we can get traction on this problem. As long as we think of someone who smoked a joint as not human, deserving not only to be thrown in jail but also to be raped (yes this is part of our culture and there are plenty examples of it) we are not going to fix the issue of denying people jobs for something that did 50 years ago. Culture matters and when it comes to punishment and justice, our society is beyond sick. To me, it's amazing it still stands and hasn't collapsed yet due to the complete and utter lack of thought or motivation towards justice, let alone rehabilitation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Anyone who appreciates freedom shouldn't lend so much as a thought to a company that tries to do something like this. Get my credit score, call my last employer, do a criminal background check, whatever. But if you scour the internet for any possible kindergarten wrongdoing I've made, _goodbye_. I'd rather live in a van down by the river.

</comment><comment><USER21> Get used to it... this is the world we (the tech community) helped, even pushed, to create.

I ask myself, would a FAANG company hire someone who doesn't actively tweet? Somehow, I doubt it.

It is increasingly impossible to live in the modern world without using the internet. Try buying something these days; many of the brick-and-mortar stores are disappearing. Try getting a job without using online services. Try buying a home or even renting an apartment without online services. The cost benefits of leveraging the internet for most operations (help-desk, ordering, even viewing) grossly outweigh the expense of having people perform such duties. The digitization of life is only going to grow, IMO.

We, the people, are being (operationally) forced to use the internet for more and more aspects of post-industrial life.

For now, our Orwellian dystopia persuades us to use the system. As the "free market" pushes us more and more in the direction of online-only services, AI- driven chat bots and the like, we will reach a point where you must be online to get nearly anything done.

Treat every activity you perform on the internet as if it will last forever. Because it will. And people can judge you for it now and forever; even after you've passed on.

Most of us have nothing to hide; but this perspective is based on our past experiences. We have nothing to hide if the old rules apply. But these are new rules. I can laugh at an off-color joke in the closeness of friends. Do the same online (via a like, re-tweet, share, whatever) and it becomes part of the permanent BigBrother data store... discover-able, query-able, judge-able _forever_.

Scary stuff.

<comment><USER14> FAANG is full of people who don't actively tweet. G+ was famous for Google execs not using it.

<comment><USER21> Ok, fair enough, but try and extend the pattern. What if the technical candidates don't have a Facebook account, a twitter account, a github account, or any other active online presence? Do you think such resume's will jump to the top of the decision pile? I highly doubt it.

<comment><USER22> As someone who doesn't have Facebook, barely uses Twitter (zero tweets, I just use tweetdeck to follow some people), doesn't share his GitHub account with employers (just don't really care to) - my resume still jumps to the top of the pile based solely on the big names I've worked for in the past.

So - yes.

Sure, you're going to add more qualifiers now, but I'm giving a counterpoint to your original claim.

<comment><USER21> I could easily add more qualifiers, but won't. I see the pattern and support my argument: The original poster is but one example. This company (fama.io) is in the business of performing exactly these types of social media background checks. (Reference: [https://craft.co/fama/competitors](https://craft.co/fama/competitors))

As the masses (and I mean MASSES) of people buy into the social media explosion going on all over the planet, these "low-profile" individuals will A) become rarer, and B) start to look suspicious. Whether the sub-population of computer engineers see it for "what it is" or not; the general population apparently doesn't.

Example: I have a friend who, begrudgingly, created a Facebook account and used it rarely. Several months in, he started getting "friend" requests from (presumably) middle-eastern men, often shown with photos of AK-47s. If this is not a clear demonstration of a IS NULL business rule to figure out who might be anti-social, I don't know what it.

I stand by my prediction as well: Over time, a lack of an online presence (in a world where online presence is virtually required to live modern daily life) will be deemed "anti-social".

The lure (both ease and historical/digital facts) provided by scanning social media history will only grow in popularity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think it's insane schools and companies are monitoring peoples social media, should keep work and personal separate.

For example went viral that a Christian school very recently expelled a girl because she had a rainbow cake that they seen in a photo on social media, and then heard some kid got in trouble for going to a gun range with his dad over the weekend and posting about having a fun day. Then there was another case with a college student.

Looks like many of these schools are currently being sued too, but recent developments. I think trying to control personal social media is over reaching. Not sure if companies get sued over this, but since many schools are government ran they are opening up a can of worms relating being subjected to section 1983 civil rights lawsuits. Plus schools keep cutting stuff due to funding, like one of the elementary schools nearby cut both art and music completely so I think they should tread carefully if they are going to start monitoring student's social media since they can't afford to be sued. One of those schools thought is a private school, so not sure how far that lawsuit would go since many states it's legal to discriminate against LGBT since not as protected like race is, you can get married on the weekend and be fired on Monday.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm torn between "My god, this is a dystopian nightmare" and "Well, you did all that in public, in print, with your real name attached, what did you expect?".

Maybe both things are right.

Edit: Since, looking at the downvotes, this seems to be controversial, let me clarify that I'm not blaming the victim, I'm questioning whether it's a good general policy to give everyone, including various bad actors, a vast database of information about you, carefully indexed and attached to your real name, that they can then use against you.

<comment><USER25> Is it normal to live your private life in accordance to what a future hypothetical employer might think ?

EDIT: private should be replaced with personal, as opposed to work

<comment><USER26> Isn't the OP's point that people shouldn't live their private lives in public?

<comment><USER25> I used the wrong word: I meant "personal life" as opposition to "work life". I don't think personal life should be done in private.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Let's put aside the absurd conclusion that you can actually assess job fit and performance based on twitter engagement... you could scroll their feed for 5 minutes and have a more accurate feel for their attitude, humor, and public persona than this keyword matching.

If you HAVE to go this route...as an employer I'd rather see something like Github's contributions by DateTime showing me when they are most active on social media lol. Ah 200 posts every Monday at 2PM, eh? Interesting.

</comment><comment><USER28> From their "Privacy" page[1]:

\---

You have the right, and we encourage you to:

View the publicly available information that is available about you online. Contact us at email@example.com to see a copy of your Fama report, if it has been created on behalf of a Customer. We'll get back to you within 24 hours.

...

You can opt out of our service by contacting us at firstname.lastname@example.com, as long as you have not provided written consent to one of our clients so Fama may access this information on your behalf. Further, Fama will delete all of the data that we have collected about you at your written request pending those same criteria.

\---

[1] [https://fama.io/privacy/](https://fama.io/privacy/)

<comment><USER29> Isn't this against GDPR?

<comment><USER30> 1) no

2) they don't appear to be doing business in Europe anyways (based in California, only contact number is North American)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Name and shame these companies until this stops.

<comment><USER15> I mean, as I see it the reason companies are requesting these checks is because of all the naming and shaming of companies whose employees were found to have posted inappropriate things (or done other actions). So naming and shaming them seems sort of ironic to me.

<comment><USER31> It's about power dynamics. Generally speaking, one bad employee isn't going to tank a company, whereas this makes it possible for one bad tweet to tank a person's employment prospects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The main thing I'm getting from this is that Twitter is terrible. Why do likes have to be public? Why can't you choose to make some tweets followers-only? Those two things would cripple this kind of background check.

(Mastodon has both of those, but a social network is only as good as its userbase, and Mastodon's is small and niche.)

</comment><comment><USER33> 300 pages is not all that surprising considering the amount of stuff that could be requested from some assortment of background check companies by whoever is willing to pay for it.

Even the background checks to open a bank account are commonly 50+ pages of information.

Whether or not the information is entirely correct (or even for the right person) is a whole other matter. Sure, a company could scrape someone's tweets or assign probabilities to how likely various accounts and services are owned by that person, but at the end of the day it's not 100%. Even alerts could come up for news articles mentioning a person of the same name from the same area as the person undergoing the background check, but is a completely different person. Depending on how much someone cares to read the whole report and the analysis versus just look at a few flag icons, that could make a difference.

In the end, as long as background check companies can still sell fear and risk, they can live with the tradeoffs of relying on statistical significance determinations to assess people.

</comment><comment><USER34> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_in,_garbage_out](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_in,_garbage_out)

I remember back in the 1980s when large numbers of regular folks were trying to come to grips with the question, "What the hell actually _is_ a computer, anyway?". This phrase (GIGO) had to be repeated constantly. People had all these wild ideas that computers were just magic and could turn nothing into something. And that whatever information came out of a computer, it can't be wrong, because computers don't make mistakes.

After a while, it seemed to catch on and penetrate into the collective consciousness. People would even repeat "Garbage In, Garbage Out!" or "GIGO!" with delight, proud that they'd learned something about computers.

Anyway (finally) my point: it seems like we've regressed. GIGO wasn't common sense, and then it was, and now... it's not again? It feels like computer literacy is moving backward a bit.

</comment><comment><USER35> It seems against the grain on this board, but people actually think airing all their little annoyances publicly online is a good idea that will never affect their actual lives?

<comment><USER36> You're missing the point. This is a bad algorithm that is in effect nothing but false positives, and not even on his posts, but on posts he _liked_

Do you want to live in a world where you don't dare to do or say _anything_ online that can be traced back to you, cause now you even have to factor in shitty algorithms like these? I sure don't.

<comment><USER37> Exactly. I tend to browse Twitter on my phone. Judging by the number of times I've accidentally clicked on a tweet while scrolling, I'm sure I've accidentally "liked" more than a few tweets that I find abhorrent.

I'd hate to think that such mis-touches would harm me personally or professionally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I stopped using my real name on social media in 2016. I wonder if Fama can still associate my posts with my fake names. Because if so, holy shit I'm fucked for dozens of reasons.

I guess they could ask Reddit and Hacker News for IP logs of user ip addresses, especially since HN doesn't delete accounts.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, you shouldn't count on it. Especially if they use neural networks - <USER2> likely have the know-how to identify you using your writing patterns (though the needle in the haystack issue might help you against not really persistent detectives...)

<comment><USER38> "Especially if they use neural networks"

LOL.

<comment><USER10> "LOL" as in "heh, like they have the know-how to use them properly !" or as in "duh, of course they do!" ?

<comment><USER39> I think that was a LOL as in "your comment lacks understanding of the capabilities of neural networks in it's suggestion a neural network could identify someone in the pool of... everyone (lets even say in a certain area), based on writing style."

You'd need countless IDed writing samples to even give yourself a 50% chance of making a network able to with 50% accuracy match an unIDed writing sample to an IDed one.

Facial recognition is easier (yet still very hard) to implement because there're characteristics about people's faces that're hard to modify unless you're really trying.

Compared to writing style which could differ based on too many factors.

<comment><USER10> > In one experiment, researchers were able to identify 80% of users with a > 5,000-word writing sample.

[https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/01/identifying_p...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/01/identifying_peo_3.html)

?

<comment><USER39> I'll just steal one of the comments from the article. "It isn't new, and it's just as overstated as previous studies. The 80% accurate identification rate applies only within the 5,000 subjects. The identification rate will plummet when the pool of writers expands to everyone who can write in English" Like I said, if you can narrow the pool to a small amount of people, than you probably could accomplish this (but even then, there's always the chance two people have similar writing styles.)

<comment><USER10> And if you had read further, you would have seen him corrected : it's 5k words, not 5k subjects. (And, also, I do raise this potential caveat in my mention of "needles"...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I used a script to delete all my tweets on my twitter however many years ago. I'm not the one to say anything inflammatory/offensive but I just couldn't risk some errant like or retweet causing me grief in the future. It seems like that wasn't a bad move.

<comment><USER41> Having no online presence can also be viewed suspicious. Pick your poison.

<comment><USER42> Ah! He doesn't eat meat! Suspicious, suspiciuos. Perhaps a communist, or a homosexual?

<comment><USER41> He very well maybe, the point is whatever you do there will be trade off.

<comment><USER42> My point is there shouldn't.

<comment><USER41> Likewise, making any kind of tweet including inflammatory/offensive kind shouldn't cause grief in the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Whatever happened to the 90s where the prevailing advice was that the internet was a dangerous place, and you should always used pseudonyms?

<comment><USER14> Adtech happened. Deanonymized people are more exploitable.

<comment><USER44> Adtech didn't deanonymize people, just exploited them after everyone willingly did that themselves, chasing internet fame under real identities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> If a company asks me to do a background check during application I will just instantly abort. Like ok, if they don't trust me that I'm not an asshole how can I trust them that they treat me right?

<comment><USER39> What about post-offer?

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Online background checks increasingly incorporate all this social info but ALSO link it to other identity data. Next, combine it with profiles bought from data brokers which can include all basic personal info combined with political affiliation and prior salary, etc. Here's some steps to opt out of their databases: [https://joindeleteme.com/help/deleteme-help-topics/opt- out-g...](https://joindeleteme.com/help/deleteme-help-topics/opt-out-guide/)

<comment><USER10> So, cross-referencing databases is (usually) illegal for the government to do, but private companies can do it just fine? Am I the only one of noticing a loophole here?

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> In fairness I don't use social media (well, other than posting here from time to time), so it's difficult for me to identify with folks who spend a considerable (IMHO) amount of time recording their activities and thoughts on third party systems which have dubious, at best, privacy policies. My naive understanding of these platforms is for you to make yourself discoverable.

Can someone help me understand why after spending time over years recording yourself it is now a surprise companies are using that data?

<comment><USER10> Not sure who the GP is (I'm not dirty myself by going on Twitter just for _this_ ), but I assume a lot of people didn't realize at the time (and maybe still don't), that this is the kind of public discourse that does NOT quickly vanish into thin air, and all of the implications that follow?

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I've built a very similar algorithm and website for a class I was taking a few years ago, however, we never considered monetizing it like this: [https://github.com/adamwespiser/toxic- twitter](https://github.com/adamwespiser/toxic-twitter)

There is a large collection of "negative tweets" available in a public dataset, and training a simple neural network will give you a rough way to classify a tweet as either "toxic" or not with decently accuracy. However, there are problems.

\- Basic algorithms are "context-free" and therefore don't get sarcasm or jest. There are more sophisticated approaches that can handle these semantic categories, but they require large datasets of tweets that do not publicly exist.

\- The easiest thing the algorithm can learn is profanity, so for example, the model we built classified tweets in poor taste as "okay", if they were used with decent language.

\- There is definitely a balanced dataset issue that makes training good classifiers harder, due to the overwhelming majority of tweets on twitter being positive, and it being hard to find unblocked toxic users.

At the time, we figured the best use of the website was to check your own twitter history, and although I find some of this user's tweet pretty offensive, I'm sad the day has come where people would actually need to use something like "toxic-twitter" to get a job! If anyone wants to fork this repo and get it up again, please reach out!

</comment><comment><USER49> The master plan of the entire real names thing juuuuust landed.

<comment><USER50> You're ... a little late to that realisation, though I only learnt of this a little over a year ago myself as Google+ was shutting down.

The project was called NSTIC: National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace. Alex Howard of O'Reilly's _Radar_ had one of the most comprehensive explorations I've seen "A Manhattan Project for online identity: A look at the White House's National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace."

[http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/05/nstic-analysis-identity- pri...](http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/05/nstic-analysis-identity-privacy.html)

The relationship with Google+ itself was spelled out by Kristine Schachinger at Searchengine Journal: "In Memoriam: The Rise, Fall & Death of Google Plus"

 _Google was only going to be one of many identity service providers for a program run by the Federal Government called the NSTIC, or National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace._

[https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-plus-history- deat...](https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-plus-history- death/283685/)

There were some HN submissions on the topic, but virtually no discussion:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?q=nstic](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=nstic)

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I seriously doubt that punishing people for their opinions is going to change any minds. Totalitarian countries tried that for decades, with severe punishments. All it did was cause people to hide their opinions, and have a fake society with fake consensus that everyone knew was fake.

</comment><comment><USER52> Fuck Fama and fuck any company using them. If you're a candidate and a company asks you to submit to one of these, just save them the time and write a giant fuck you on a piece of paper and hand it to them.

<comment><USER53> Nah don't do that. Just ghost them like so many companies do to candidates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I wonder how long it will be before someone competent starts doing this and including deanonymized data from places like HN, Reddit, Twitter accounts without your real name attached, phone location, etc.

<comment><USER18> What makes you believe there aren't already dozens of companies working on exactly this?

<comment><USER54> Ha, absolutely nothing. I'm sure there are people working on it, not sure if they are in the pre-employment job screening space.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I personally think background checks should just be like, hey are you a violent person, but before any in person interview I've been a part of the person has been internet stalked by the whole group and anyone who knows the candidate or someone who does has gotten the tea. I just don't see any value in this

</comment><comment><USER56> Did you have to pay for the background check?

A lot of asset management companies require regular background checks from their service providers and the service providers have to foot the bill.

Always wondered if there was some kind of kick back going on that motivated the frequency or if it was a legal requirement.

</comment><comment><USER57> The reason companies have to do so damn much checking upon hiring is because the employment laws make it damn near impossible to recover from a mistake. If you want to make a difference in this space, don't always vote for whatever issue the screws the rich companies.

<comment><USER58> I'm not sure where this comes from. Any halfway-competent company in a right- to-work state can drop you like a sack of potatoes with no cause or notice, and you won't be able to do anything unless you have a documented history of them doing something stupidly, obviously discriminatory.

<comment><USER57> It's coming from California. Sorry, that's my only experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> So its the equivalent of a credit check but focused on how you conduct yourself online. I'm okay with this only if its law that the report details are shared with the applicant.

The odds of mistaken identity are too high with an automated service.

</comment><comment><USER60> How long would the report be if you have your profile privacy on lockdown? ie. all public profiles are private and you don't reuse usernames

Are they able to do more nefarious things like use fingerprint/IP/device history to connect random accounts together?

<comment><USER61> Or just ask Facebook about everything they've linked together. Maybe sign up for some sort of FB service, and then create a business model that abuses the access you've been granted to gain the information you're ultimately trying to get. If questioned about it, just blame some rouge employee as a scapegoat for being a bad apple abusing the trust that FB granted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Maybe I'm not understanding. How would the company know the twitter account? Could you give them someone elses twitter account? Why did author give twitter account and get surprised when they have a report based on it?

<comment><USER30> My guess is they have an agreement with twitter where they provide the email address and twitter will tell you the account id. They would have the candidate's email address from their job application.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Does this include retweets?

I'm mostly a passive twitter user who mostly likes/retweets tweets that pique my interest.

I wonder if these companies evaluate what sort of things you are liking/endorsing and associating that with your character...

<comment><USER64> This has all tweets the person has liked that their algorithm flags as bad. Not just their own tweets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Startup idea: A service that seeds the Internet with only a fake, G-rated version of yourself that shows you liking pictures of kittens, automatically posting inspirational quotes, completely politically correct.

</comment><comment><USER66> In the Twitter thread (regarding Fama):

> You can opt out of our service by contacting us at email@example.com as long > as you have not provided written consent to one of our clients so Fama may > access this information on your behalf.

</comment><comment><USER67> That's wild. I got my first ever background check to volunteer at a high school. The report was three checkboxes indicating "we found nothing wrong"

<comment><USER45> A background check before volunteering? Isn't that extremely counterproductive for getting applications?

<comment><USER37> My school district requires all volunteers to undergo a background check renewed every 2 years. I think it's pretty basic, mainly just criminal history. It's really a CYA for the district should anything harmful occur between a student and volunteer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Running a simple algorithm that flags specific words in liked tweets: meh, whatever.

But why waste 350 printed pages of paper for that?

<comment><USER69> They offer the checked person the option to get a report of whatever they found and reported to the company.

<comment><USER23> Probably a legal requirement to provide it, such as credit reports if used for employment or apartments, etc of providing a copy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> Of course, this stock photo looking guy started the company [https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben- mones-45740a2a/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-mones-45740a2a/)

</comment><comment><USER71> How do they handle extremely common names?

<comment><USER72> The name doesn't even need to be common. There are a dozen's dozen ways to spell my last name, and I've received emails intended for somebody else simply because the sender searched the directory and clicked the first hit they got.

For extra credit, I share the same name [spelling and all] with a decently famous musician. If you search for me you'll get him unless you include//exclude an extra choice word or two.

<comment><USER73> There was nothing wrong with your name until you were about 12 years old?

<comment><USER72> Specifically for the music artist, there was nothing wrong until my mid-to- late 30s. Both myself and the musician artist in question are similar in age.

Regarding common mis-spelling, that has been as issue for decades. It is a regular deal of "that's an 'e', not a 'o'".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> So, if you're not on Twitter...

</comment><comment><USER75> For those wondering, as I did, who's behind this terrible report:

> The background check company is Sterling Talent Solutions, and it looks like > they contracted with Fama Technologies for this part of the report.

<comment><USER76> Sterling is terrible not only because they're needlessly invasive, but also because they cannot run a background check.

Before I got into software I was a model, something very obvious if you search my name. I've had two background checks done by Sterling and they've never connected the dots.

<comment><USER77> On the last background check I had with them, they marked every one of my previous employers as "unable to contact" and asked me to provide proof of employment. I have to wonder whether they just didn't bother picking up the phone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> I clicked on their twitter and I'd think twice before hiring them unless the interview went really well.

</comment><comment><USER79> What ever happened to anayomous message boards like 4chan?

We demonize those people but they're the ones not letting their freedom of expression be repressed by future job prospects?

<comment><USER80> From what I can tell, 4chan went downhill after smartphones became the norm, then very fast after 2015-16. If you're asking 'how could it go downhill any more than it was?' that means most of the hobbyists and content creators left. Most of the popular boards seem to be spam or copypasta threads only vaguely related to the board subject.

8chan was taken down after some mass shooters posted there but I don't know if it's gone permanently or just went to an onion server.</comment></comment>


PGP rolls out Whole Disk Encryption for Mac - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=9037 <comment><USER2> I'm curious if full-disk encryption works with Time Machine. Since upgrading to Leopard, Time Machine is one of my favorite features, and I know FileVault users can't back up home directory files on Mac OS X.

In theory, there's no reason a file couldn't be backed up from one fully- encrypted disk to another fully-encrypted disk, as long as the copy can be authenticated.

But Time Machine likes to treat its target disk as "special"; I'm not sure if this is simply due to the presence of "/Backup.db", or if the entire disk needs special formatting.

Of course, if PGP is targeting the enterprise, businesses may already back up their Macs in some other way and not care if Time Machine works.

<comment><USER3> I think the problem is that FileVault (and presumably PGP) stores your home directory as one large file, so every time _any_ change is made to _any_ file it has to backup the _entire_ home directory.

I have the same problem with Parallels images... any time a change is made on Windows filesystem in Parallels the entire image needs to be backed up (several GB). I ended up excluding the Parallels images from Time Machine.</comment></comment>


ShopLocket Now Lets Merchants Bundle Physical And Digital Goods - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/06/shoplocket-physical-digital-bundles/

<comment><USER2> Great news Katherine. Are you planning to provide a fulfillment service at any point?

Also - Do you have anything on the roadmap that will aid the seller's exposure of their goods? I ask that because many existing sellers are able to take advantage of the huge customer base on places like Amazon and eBay which gives them a huge advantage.

Either way, wish you the best of luck with ShopLocket ;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the support! Getting wider distribution for sellers products is definitely one of our top priorities right now. We've never been out to build a marketplace, but keep your eye out for some exciting things coming down the line :)

As for fulfillment, we recommend Shipwire or Amazon fulfillment to our sellers right now. They do a great job.

<comment><USER2> OK, thanks.

Look forward to your future announcements.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Great the see the product evolve. Keep it up!</comment>


Ask HN: List of features you'd like to return to a product - <AUTHOR> Ex esc key on Macbook keyboard <comment><USER2> Entity Framework Core: support many-to-many relationships.</comment>


I'm a bit brown. But in America I'm white. Not for much longer - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/21/us-census-whiteness-race-colour-middle-east-north-africa-america <comment><USER2> I find this an utterly bizarre issue. Why does the government even need to know this? How do you deal with people of mixed ethnicity? Do you tick all the relevant boxes? Can't you just fill in "human"?

As far as I know, the Dutch government doesn't register any "race" for its citizens. It used to, and in WW2, the nazis used that to easily figure out who was Jewish, so a lot of people feel it's better not to register anything like that at all. Some political parties are in favour of removing gender registration as well.

<comment><USER3> I too found it a bit strange when I moved here. My understanding (gleaned over time) is America is heavily focused on race metrics to measure progress towards equality. My employer wanted all sorts of information for various reporting requirements they were under. Identifying as disabled was optional - I don't remember if race was.

America takes it to extreme, but in over places such as Canada a very public battle was fought over elimination of the long form census which asks questions on a number of personal topics such as religion. There the argument was public services couldn't properly be provided without such information.

<comment><USER4> In Northern Ireland they ask for one's religion in the context of a job application. Over there it's the Catholics that have traditionally been the targets of discrimination and the Protestants are the ruling caste. That's how the HR guy explained it.

It's understandable, the new "Middle Eastern" category. You do ask yourself how a person of Jewish extraction would answer the question, though. "Jew" isn't a race on the census right now, even though antisemitism was a thing in the US up until WW II.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Like school grades, competitive sports, policemen, and war, race is an idea that only serves to divide us. I want to see humanity reach its true potential, and not be endlessly mucking about over rank and status (or ownership of resources).

I've struggled to stop identifying as white, and to not think "black" when I see a black person. But I was raised in the white supremacist society that is the united states, and the programming/brainwashing runs deep.

This article reminds me of the work we still need to do. And how close we are to presiding over another holocaust.

<comment><USER6> You are already divided. Unreciprocated altruism will only be harmful to you. Collective strategies win against individualist strategies.

You may want to deny this, but nothing will make reality conform to your desires.

<comment><USER5> > Collective strategies win against individualist strategies.

Sounds very "black and white" to me. Besides, I believe in magic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd like to address this specific portion of the article: "Ignatiev quotes John Finch, an Englishman who travelled the US in 1843, saying: "It is a curious fact that … the poorer class of Irish immigrants in America, are greater enemies to the Negro population … than any portion of the population in the free States.""

On the surface it might seem that one downtrodden group would instinctively support another one out of solidarity, but in reality a lot of racism has its origins in economic competition. The Irish and African Americans were competing for the same menial and manual jobs in many places, which lead to distrust, anger, fighting, and racism. You could see some of this happening when mining companies would bring in African Americans as scabs during strikes which lead to violent brawls. The Irish weren't fighting a WASP for a job, they were fighting other immigrants or ethnic groups.

This same reality continues to this day in many places. Ask someone who works in a field where an undocumented immigrant might compete with them for a job how they feel about it and compare that to someone working at Facebook or Google who isn't worried about the cleaner taking their job as DBA.

<comment><USER2> I heard about an experiment once where a number of test subjects were ranked from rich to poor, and everybody got some money that they had to give either to the person above them in the ranking, or to the person below them.

In most countries, people tend to give the money to the people below them, because they need it more. Only in the US, do people give the money to the person above them. The explanation was that they tend to see the person below them as competition.

It seems there's just something about the US that fucks up people's sense of fairness. Maybe the US plays different downtrodden groups off against each other so they fight each other instead of uniting and fighting the people treading down on them.

<comment><USER7> Oh please. How do you explain lower class voters voting in droves for Brexit? They did not like all the immigrants from the EU coming and taking plumber and cleaner and other manual labor type jobs. This is not just a US issue.

<comment><USER2> Are you suggesting England is becoming more like the US? Maybe you're right.

Though in a sense, this might be the case for all cases where racism is primarily supported by poorer classes: playing different lower class groups off against each other, so they won't rise up against the people keeping them down.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


(Pre Launch Discussion) Earn While You Learn - <AUTHOR> SkilBucks is the first family focused ecosystem that enables teenagers to earn money and encourage them to learn something new. <comment><AUTHOR> For the teenagers

Earn while your learn - as simple as that

For Parents

No more running behind children. Inspire your child to learn.

Sign Up for beta product at [https://skilbucks.com](https://skilbucks.com)

Like us on social media to be updated

Instagram - [https://www.instagram.com/skilbucks/](https://www.instagram.com/skilbucks/) Facebook - [https://www.facebook.com/SkilBucks-107820084348034](https://www.facebook.com/SkilBucks-107820084348034)</comment>


Sophie Tucker: Everybody loves a fat girl - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35505532 <comment><USER2> Bette Midler did a routine telling Sophie jokes. She nailed them. My favorite joke that Bette (Sophie) told was:

"I was in bed with my boyfriend Ernie. He said "Soph, you got no tits and a tight box. I told Ernie 'get off of my back'".

Are there obscenity rules on HN? This seems appropriate to me since the joke is true to Sophie and the article was about her.</comment>


Solomon Golomb and linear-feedback shift register sequences - <AUTHOR> https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/05/solomon-golomb-19322016/ <comment><USER2> "Solomon Golomb's classic book Shift Register Sequences, published in 1967—based on his work in the 1950s—went out of print long ago."

The third revised edition was the last thing Golomb worked on, and is now available as an e-book.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the updated reference.</comment></comment>


Fake news search engine tracks spread of lies - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnet.com/news/fake-news-search-engine-tracks-spread-of-lies/ <comment><USER2> Warning: Mute before visiting this cnet.com site.

I was treated to an autoplay video "This is CNET ... bla dee blaaaa!"</comment>


Ask HN: What it is like to use Rust for your API server? - <AUTHOR> I come from a Node.js background and I've started learning Rust. I would like to know pros and cons of writing APIs and other web-based services in Rust. <comment><USER2> Hi, Im working on a fairly large rust backe d which I'll release in ~3 weeks (>20k LoC).

Rust is really good (I'm using acti web), amd very low resources compared to node.

Compilation time is at the se time a disadvantage (~20sec for hot reload) and at the same time an advantage as it forces you to organize your code cleanly.

3rd party package are often very high quality and when your code compile, it (almost every time) works.</comment>


Suburban Ride-Sharing Is Mathematically Unlikely - <AUTHOR> http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/11/suburban-ride-sharing-is-mathematically-impossible/415494/ <comment><AUTHOR> It seems that the conclusion is drawn from specific premises:

\+ The measure of a ride sharing app's value is cash on cash returns to Silcon Valley style investors.

\+ A ride sharing app's primary market will be in the US.

\+ The suburbs served will be affluent, and hence the ride sharing app's user base will tend to have economic flexibility in regards to transportation.

\+ The served markets will have poor public transportation infrastructure.

On the one hand these are all reasonable assumptions for the conclusion regarding a ride sharing app's commercial prospects. This is important because ride sharing apps (particularly in a political context like Silicon Valley) are a free lunch: $200,000 spent on software development won't even buy the land for a ten parking space lot in a place where it would be useful.

On the other hand, the numbers in the article suggest that a ride sharing app could readily produce a ten parking space reduction in demand for a city like Palo Alto. And because the marginal costs of adding additional cities to such an application are negligible, reduction in demand for parking spaces across a region like Silicon Valley could be several times that.

In other words even if a ride sharing app is not going to pencil out into a possible unicorn, it still may be good public policy. And perhaps a better alternative to a public policy decision to raise the cash price of parking since it could induce willing social change via better communication infrastructure rather than forcing changes in behavior by pricing out those least able to afford changes in parking policy.

Parking policy is a great area for consultants to consult municipalities. Back in 2002 I was a junior urban planner in St. Pete, the city was "debating" removal of exiting parking meters installed for baseball in 1998. In the department library one day, I saw a study from 1962 that concluded that the parking meters installed in 1957 should be removed. The arguments are always the same: 1. Not enough spaces so install meters, 2. Meters are a hassle for local businesses' customers so take them out.

<comment><USER2> The numbers in this article are misleading as they're drawn from ridiculously underestimated assumptions. 25 - 33% is a more accurate number.

Pooled ridesharing is cheaper and better than owning a car in many cases (including mine), and the benefits will only increase with the network effect. (Imagine if 50% of the cars on the road are Ubers, and the average ETA to pickup is 30 seconds).

The positive externalities are more than just parking:

\+ Less traffic congestion, shorter commutes for everyone

\+ Less pollution and emissions, less lung cancer

\+ More experienced drivers, less traffic accidents

\+ And of course, less parking space.

<comment><AUTHOR> If a person calls for an Uber and rides alone, there's no less congestion because there is no reduction in commuter-vehicle trips. Just an increase in raw vehicle occupancy. In addition, unless the Uber is already in the commuter's driveway _and_ waits at the curb until the commuter is ready to leave _and_ parks in the commuter's driveway overnight, the use of an Uber increases traffic overall.

<comment><USER3> The previous person was talking about pooled ridesharing. In my case car pooling was only convenient when going to work. It was much harder to coordinate the afternoon/evening trip home. Services like Uber make it a lot easier for 3-4 people to carpool one way and then use different methods to get home.

<comment><USER4> Possibly. That effectively assumes that it's far enough (or parking costs are high enough, etc.) for it to be worthwhile to coordinate a carpool in the morning yet it's still viable to take an Uber/cab/etc. home in the evening. That seems like a pretty specific scenario.

>In my case car pooling was only convenient when going to work.

I suspect this is why, anecdotally, I don't hear much about carpooling in my circles any longer. Not that it's ever been all that common. Hours at the end of the day are probably more variable for a lot of people than they used to be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is probably about as accurate as the Drake equation.

At the company I work at in the UK, probably 80% of people lift-share. Admittedly that is unusual but still. The article makes several mistakes anyway:

* "8 out of 31000" is one source to one destination - so it is very misleading

* They don't realise that people might be willing to work different hours in order to find a lift share

* 10 percent seems unoptimistic

<comment><USER6> I was wondering why he would pick Redwood and Palo Alto as an example. To me that doesn't seem like a typical commute in the US. The distance is only 12.5km, you could almost travel by bike. Anyway I think VLM's first comment is a much more intuitive explanation why ride-sharing is not attractive.

<comment><USER7> In fact, from where I live in Redwood City, it's more like 4 miles by bicycle.

It's not really a typical commute, but I think the point is more than fair -- if the author picked 2 far-flung locations, the probability of a match is typically going to be even lower.

That said, yes, there are common commute routes -- for example, more distance suburbs, which will have a number of commuters going to the same urban core(s).

But statistically speaking, the longer the journey, the less likely the commute match, given a general tendency to live closer to work rather than, say, 5 states away. Even in the US!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The article has two insights, which are kinda related in an surprising way.

One is tangentially mentioning that car poolers almost always know each other and will not go with random strangers; I thought to myself, yes, I am not young and I cannot remember ever hearing or seeing first hand a "hitchhiker" style car pool although coworkers helping each other out (critically, without a dedicated app/service middleman) is almost normal. The insightful part is the successful ride sharing services actual business model is psychologically tricking users into pretending to be taxi drivers and taxi customers rather than some random dude picking up anonymous hitchhikers which is what they really are.

The second semi-related insight is when the free market numbers won't work, just demand the government socially engineer a private profit. Specifically the part of the article where the government should artificially manipulate parking prices to make him the billionaire he is entitled to be because he is so much more deserving of a billion than everyone else. As the article implies, the concept of suburban ride sharing IS mathematically impossible as defined and the only hope for that sector is winning some kind of "dictator for a day" lotto to basically oppress and dominate the inhuman locals.

What ties them together is the concept of LARPing, live action role play. In the first insight from the article, you can successfully run a middleman transport business, basically an online semi-illegal unlicensed gypsy cab dispatcher service, by convincing both participants to LARP that they're taxi drivers and passengers. In the second insight from the article, aside from all this complicated mathy stuff which is none the less true, you can tell a business sector is dead when the only serious business plan first involves LARPing like becoming dictator for life or mass social engineering or whatever other wish fulfillment.

The esoteric message of the article, as opposed to the mathy exoteric message, is the sector is dead because the only participants are the business hustler equivalent of joining the SCA and mistakenly thinking that means you're actually the municipal government, rather than the reality of getting drunk with friends in costume. Which is fun, but don't confuse it with actual political rule.

<comment><USER9> Hitchhiker-style carpooling is alive and well in DC. [http://www.slug- lines.com/](http://www.slug-lines.com/)

All the major arteries into DC from Virginia have HOV lanes. At many major interchanges, there are parking lots. If you want a ride that doesn't take 2+ hours, you park at the interchange and hop in a stranger's car.

<comment><USER8> Yes, but its a context switch. You can't build unicorn for a billion people if the maximum possible market size is actually 10K people, or to be extremely generous, we'll say a couple million absolute tops.

That is an interesting sized market for a lifestyle business or maybe a government sponsored non-profit to target. Startup with VC money? Not really.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree there's a context switch. But the original article makes one as well. It goes from the conclusion that a ride sharing app can't become a unicorn to suggesting a public policy that raises the costs of parking.

So the context of public policy is in the article and I suspect that the conclusion to raise parking prices "in Palo Alto" intends to make all four of its audiences - capital investors, parking consultants, municipal managers, and believers in the new urbanism - happy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Enough with the fancy vans and apps. Russia has already solved this problem: [http://www.st-petersburg-essentialguide.com/marshrutka.html](http://www.st- petersburg-essentialguide.com/marshrutka.html)

They're private, cheap and ubiquitous and make getting around anywhere in Russian cities easy. Without these, buses from the burbs can't work.

<comment><USER4> And car-pooling has a long history although my sense is that it's perhaps less common than it used to be--probably because work hours tend to be more variable than in the past. While apps and so forth _can_ reduce transaction friction enough to create markets where they didn't previously exist, I reserve the right to be suspicious of claims that an app suddenly makes a service viable that wasn't before.

<comment><USER11> There is also a huge cultural element to this. The element of trust is a huge problem in most countries and in my opinion this will make it hard for carpooling to scale as a business idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> This 'paper' relies on some very flawed assumptions and hence have no basis in reality.

Ridesharing services like Uber aim to be cheaper than car ownership, while being as reliable as running water. Many people are finding that once they add up all their vehicle costs (maintenance, depreciation, parking, registration, fuel), uberPOOL or even uberX is cheaper than owning a car. Plus, you get to work or relax on the ride instead of focusing on the road. How much is your time worth?

Assuming that only 10% is willing to pay less for a superior experience is absurd. Once you change it to a more realistic figure of a third to a quarter, the conclusions fall apart.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the author is using "ride sharing" more in the sense of car pooling for commuting rather than as a substitute for taxi cab and similar services where the rider hires the driver.

<comment><USER2> 'Ridesharing apps' _is_ a commute option.

I use Uber + public transport for commuting and getting around everywhere. I don't have a car, and I know many people in the same boat.

<comment><AUTHOR> The reason that I think the author is not using "ride sharing app" in your sense is that the author concludes that such apps will not pencil out to cash on cash returns attractive to Valley Venture Capital. If we assume that the author has at least half a clue, then the author could not reasonably be assumed to include Uber or Lyft type apps in their definition of "ride sharing app".

If the author is without a clue, then probably the article should be flagged.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Besides all the great points others have made, the origin and destination of the shared riders don't need to be the same, they just have to share some common segment. Furthermore, although there is time lost waiting for the other rider to be picked up or dropped off, there is also time gained by not having to find parking and then walk from the car to your destination, since the shared car can drop you off right out front.

</comment><comment><USER13> Hush. You're ruining my discount with math the companies should have done already. (=

I'm getting discounts on all my rides from home by using the carpool feature. In the last 3 months, I have had 0 people opt to share a ride with me from my house to downtown Austin. I'm 8 miles away from the city center.

<comment><USER14> Consider the MoPac toll lane that's supposed to open in a year or so. It's priced based on demand to keep the lane free-flowing at all times (barring an accident in the lane itself). You'll be able to shave significant time off your commute by paying extra, or you can pay less by sharing a ride with other people.

Demand pricing will make shared rides take off even in low density cities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I used to work with Steve, he's a great guy and it's good to see he's still working on this stuff.

There's a nice archive of papers plus some simulation models we put together at [http://www.ultraglobalprt.com/about- us/library/](http://www.ultraglobalprt.com/about-us/library/)

</comment><comment><USER16> Wait, what? The article actually derives the conclusion that 8 people live in the same zip code, are going to the same destination, in the 10% technophile bracket, and leaving in the same 20 minute window -- and this makes it impossible? Doesn't that show the exact opposite, that even with really pessimistic assumptions, matches are still likely?

</comment><comment><USER17> Where I live, commuter trains are packed, though (Europe). How can that be? The same logic should apply to commuter trains as to cars?

<comment><USER18> In Europe, the number of people willing to use public transit is much greater than 10%, for one thing. Another thing is that you don't really need to get matched with someone going the same direction as you: people generally value living close to public transit (which is completely opposite to people living in California, who try to avoid it), and public transit generally gets you where you want to be, possibly with one or rarely two transfers.

<comment><USER19> The prices in the Mission or downtown Palo Alto, for example, don't really reflect your contention that people in California don't want to live near public transit. The real issue is that California isn't building much new transit, and it's essentially impossible to build much new housing or corporate headquarters nearby— so it's mathematically impossible for many people to live near public transit.

<comment><USER4> In general, rail projects are considered to increase property values. In fact, I've read the argument that light rail isn't really cost effective vs. dedicated bus lanes but the commitment associated with a rail line makes often makes it preferable for planning purposes. (In that buses, in addition to having a lower-class image, can always have their routes altered so--the argument goes--people won't make property decisions based on bus lines.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Only one comment in here about slugline... shocked.

</comment><comment><USER8> Here's a super depressing mathematical proof of why the services fail in the burbs:

First the assumption is a car is necessary for living in general. I am very happy for the 0.1% of the population who live in an urban hugbox where they don't need a car, but this is a general argument for 99% of the population or a unicorn sized middleman app.

My garage costs perhaps $50K lifetime, including land, maint, all added together. An online mortgage calculator spat out $290/mo for my garage. I suppose as a fraction of the cost of the house its not ridiculous. Or at 20 working days per month, simply having the possibility to drive my own car costs $20 to park it at home. Use it or not, I'm out $20 per day.

I bought the cheapest toyota out there for my commute. Many people will insist on the largest SUV they can afford, but whatever. Many people will replace their car every two years to show off conspicuous consumption whereas I drive my cars into the ground because I'm super arrogant and rebellious about not impressing other people. Anyway simple straight line capex depreciation of $20K vs 250 commutes per year vs maybe a decade life of the car means each working day the car drops in value $8 no matter if I drive it to work or not.

Being a commuter car instead of a SUV I am kinda cheating on gas expense when I actually drive to work. Figure 40 miles round trip at 80 MPH (I don't live in CA LOL, and flex time a lot) and 40 / 30 mpg = 1.3 gallons burned per commute and we'll pessimistically call the average price of gas over a decade $3 (LOL) so it costs me $4 to actually drive instead of car pool.

Now there are two ways the math argument kills suburban car pooling. The first is I'm out $28/day to commute no matter if I actually commute, car pool, or call in sick. The variable cost is a menial minimal $4 to actually do it. So I do NOT save 100% of the cost of my commute, I only save about 10% of my commute cost by not commuting. Why bother? If I wanted to save 10% I'd be infinitely more likely to get an even smaller car or live in a cheaper area than to give up the convenience of my car for a mere 10% savings. This argument is like people who pay $4000 mortgage and then shiver in the dark because they can't afford the heating bill, its not that turning down the thermostat is a great idea, but its that they obviously demonstrate incredibly bad economic management to end up in a scenario like that.

The other killer is car pooling takes a lot of time, and regardless of how high or low an employer values his feudal servant's time, outside work people seem pretty happy to drop $20+/hr to get drunk or watch theater movies or whatever. So I feel $20/hr is a reasonable valuation of time for the general public. Now lets say car pooling costs 15 minutes extra wasted time at each of four endpoints, for a total of an hour. If you insist on matching up strangers online, they probably don't live or work nearby each other. Now an hour of free time is worth $20, and car pooling will cost me an hour, but save me $4... So car pooling puts me $16 in the lifestyle hole.

So mathematically I don't save much money by occasionally car pooling, and the standard of living is dramatically lower.

I tried to calculate a math model for reliability and dropped it... its hard to compare a nearly 100% reliable toyota vs a very hypothetical service that may or may not match you up after hours and may or may not match you up with weirdo axe murderers or maybe not. Basically you have one system that although expensive is nearly perfectly reliable and nearly perfectly safe, vs a pile of question marks that might ... might ... turn out as good. Maybe. But you can't build a math model off that so I gave up.

<comment><USER21> 0.1% really?

I live in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 25% of households here have no car, and we don't have the world's best transit system.

Per [http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2014/01/21/vital-signs- more-h...](http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2014/01/21/vital-signs-more- households-dont-own-a-car/) it's over 9% of households that don't have a car- and of course the average size of a household is above 1, so your fake statistic is two orders of magnitude off from reality.

You're welcome to be hyperbolic, but especially among engineers making up probabilities that have no bearing on reality feels more like intellectual dishonesty than hyperbole.

I think a lot of the HN demographic is completely out of touch with the fact that a lot of people simply can't afford a car.

<comment><USER22> Isn't this article about suburban ride-sharing? Car ownership in the suburbs is 100%.

I don't think anyone disputes that a lot of people live in cities and don't own cars.

<comment><USER8> More specifically the article is proposing that an uber-for-suburbs is a mathematical non-starter and the comments against that conclusion are primarily non sequiturs along the lines of "I live in an urban area and uber and mass transit work great for me". Cool. Rock on. But that has nothing at all to do with the article's business plan, or the research in the article or my own mathematical model that came to the same conclusion as the author via a different path.

This is also a live example of survivorship bias. Nobody who tries to live in a mass-transit-less uber-less suburb in the current year will last very long. Nobody who can't afford a car can afford a house in the burbs either. Therefore there is a natural self selection such that roughly 0% of potential uber-for-the-burbs startup can physically live at this time in the burbs. If uber-for-the-burbs already existed such that potential customers could be found in the burbs, then a startup could in fact sell to them, although starting up into entrenched competition isn't as much fun as a wide open field. But the geography has self selected such that all potential customers cannot currently live there. It is possibly one of the least possibly fertile areas to sell a service idea. It is like the proverbial trying to sell ice to eskimos. The burbs are multiply mathematically provably possibly the worst place on the entire planet to try an uber-for- startup.

Perhaps the business model for uber-for-the-burbs should bootstrap off little kids and suburban nursing home residents (I mean, who else is left there, to sell to, who isn't already a car owner?). Although little kids have safety issues and nursing homes have privately owned bus routes and taxis are already pretty entrenched in the market. And the little kids and old people might not be the wealthiest residents of suburbia (demand doesn't matter without the cash revenue to back it up). I would guess the best bootstrap would be physically disabled / handicapped but then you run into wheelchair issues and drivers being medically qualified? And how many little kids / disabled / retired / nursing home residents are commuting into the big city to desk jobs anyway?

I edited this post to emphasize that the "startup lesson" of this whole topic is you can't just look at where to sell, you need to think up who to sell. Finding a giant underserved geographic area with plenty of money is utterly useless if by the inherent existence of the area they have no use for it. Hawaii is dramatically underserved with respect to snowshoes, but I would strongly recommend against a startup trying to sell snowshoes in the Hawaiian islands.

<comment><USER4> I'd just add that Uber being fairly successful in a lot of areas in spite of the fact that taxis were already a thing has probably led a lot of people to take away a (somewhat) incorrect lesson--namely that app-ing the taxi experience fundamentally changes the economics.

In fact, Uber has, for example, had a lot less relative impact in Manhattan which already has lots of taxis than in other locales. So the more correct lesson is that taxis were and are pretty broken in a lot of places and that those markets would actually have supported a more functional taxicab system.

Now, one can assume that low-density suburbs and exurbs are also underserved markets but I don't see a lot of evidence that's the case.

<comment><USER23> Yes! Here in Seattle, so far as I can tell, Uber succeeded mightily not because people particularly loved Uber, but because everybody hated the taxicab system.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Automatically minifying .cshtml files in .NET Core - <AUTHOR> https://debugandrelease.blogspot.com/2018/11/automatically-minifying-cshtml-files-in.html <comment><USER2> I think there is a better way.

1\. Add package called `WebMarkupMin.AspNetCore2`.

2\. Add and configure code in your `Startup.cs` like so.

      services.AddWebMarkupMin(
        options =>
        {
          options.AllowMinificationInDevelopmentEnvironment = true;
          options.AllowCompressionInDevelopmentEnvironment = true;
          options.DisablePoweredByHttpHeaders = true;
        })
        .AddHtmlMinification(
          options =>
          {
            options.MinificationSettings.RemoveRedundantAttributes = true;
            options.MinificationSettings.RemoveHttpProtocolFromAttributes = true;
            options.MinificationSettings.RemoveHttpsProtocolFromAttributes = true;
            // More options if you like so
          })
      .AddHttpCompression();

Not only will this minfy HTML output, but also apply a lot more optimisations based on your configuration.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm open to adding more of the options that WebMarkupMin provide.

The main difference between this and WebMarkupMin is that WebMarkupMin runs at runtime - therefore it is costing time to minify when you can already minify the files before launching your web application.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, that is true. However that HTML is usually cached so not a big deal.

Also, this reduces complexity of the project. Both methods are fine, it's just I prefer this one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> In all seriousness, is it really worth the effort and added complexity, when HTML is going to be compressed on the wire? What are you going to save, maybe a few bytes?

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure anyone who truly cares about effort uses .net core. :p

I mean, it's a cheap shot, but it's frankly so unproductive compared to Django it's basically a running joke. Not that .net core doesn't see a lot of usage, much like angular it's very popular in the european public sector, but it's just such a waste of resources. By resources I mean, man hours by the way, because it's really effective technically, it's just that, all that you can pay for around a million years of AWS/Azure time for the extra wage-hours you need to pay programmers when you use .net instead of something useful.

And in two years it'll be obsolete anyway, because by then Microsoft will have completely changed their direction, again. I say this, as as someone who's running Azure and 365 as our cloud provider for the majority of our services, as someone who's genuinely happy with the services Microsoft provides and having had a great 25 year long business relationship with them, but as far as development goes, .net is just too crazy to be worth it these years.

<comment><USER3> I actually love working with .NET Core, and I'm really productive with C#. For some background, I'm pretty much a polyglot; while C# is where I spend most of my time, I also regularly work with JavaScript and Typescript, and occasionally with Java, PHP and C.

I also find it preposterous that .NET Core will be obsolete in 2 years, and I'm not sure what you mean about Microsoft changing direction "again" \- the .NET Framework was released almost _2 decades_ ago, and I find the recent move to a cross-platform runtime to make for exciting times!

<comment><USER5> Have you tried the SAFE stack with .Net core?

[https://safe-stack.github.io/](https://safe-stack.github.io/)

<comment><USER3> I haven't, but it looks really interesting!

I've only dabbled with F#, but I always enjoyed it when I do - I just wish I could find the time to spend on it :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Neat, but I thought the view compilations were cached and optimized already? Wouldn't it be better to add a pipeline that minifies the compiled views instead of having files on disk?

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe the following project does exactly that: WebMarkupMin.AspNetCore2. The one consideration to this project is that the minifications are done at runtime.

Doing the minification before the application starts saves time from a pipeline minifying on the fly.

<comment><USER6> >Doing the minification before the application starts saves time from a pipeline minifying on the fly.

That would only affect a cold-start (app pool recycle) or a view recompile before that'd be an performance concern, unless I don't understand how/when views are cached and then evicted from cache.

If you have a lot of views with a lot of partial views inside them, then yeah, you'd only want to run minification once on the final view, instead of for every partial view. I'm not sure if you'd have (or want) that much control over the view rendering process.

Btw it's a cool post if you're the author.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, those points are true.

And yes, I am the author.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Neat, but I'm curious to know how many people are using server side templating with dotnet core? I avoid it like the plague these days, using vue/webpack and an http api. If there's actually a lot of razor still out there, I should probably keep up with the latest version of it.

<comment><USER8> A lot of times, that's all you need. For quick and dirty internal tools, its a godsend. I'd be happy to use it more, and cut out the whole Gordian Knot of overburdened front-end development.

<comment><USER7> I'm hoping that wasm leads to a unified dotnet stack with fantastic tooling and shared classes for front-end development. Best of both worlds at that point. That said, I resisted getting into the JavaScript front-end ecosystem, but I really like it at this point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I knew how to do it, but the combined files are new through the settings file: MinifiedCshtml. I knew how to do that also ( manually) in the csproj file ( similar to resource files), but not how to do it automaticly (y)

Thanks !

<comment><AUTHOR> You are welcome, I glad it helped.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does this actually do anything? Why not just gzip the transmission?

<comment><AUTHOR> Minification along with gzip gives slightly better compression than with gzip alone. Even if it is a slight gain, why not set it up once and forget it?

<comment><USER11> You can think of it like PNG vs JPG --- the former is entropy-coding only, the latter has a lossy transform before entropy coding. Minification is a lossy transform, and if it didn't provide any benefits, no one would be using JPG or any lossy video format.</comment></comment></comment>


iPhone 6 and Apple Watch seen boosting NFC technology - <AUTHOR> http://in.reuters.com/article/2014/09/10/apple-launch-nfc-idINKBN0H525F20140910

<comment><USER2> "Asked whether NXP supplies Apple with its NFC chips for the new iPhone, the company declined to comment. Apple suppliers are sworn to secrecy."

From: [http://www.chipworks.com/en/technical-competitive- analysis/r...](http://www.chipworks.com/en/technical-competitive- analysis/resources/blog/inside-the-iphone-6-and-iphone-6-plus/)

"Having now depotted the 65V10 device, we can positively identify the NFC controller as the PN548, a previously unannounced variant of the PN544 and PN547 devices by NXP. Industry sources identify this as a design that was tweaked specifically for Apple by NXP. If this is true, Apple has had access to this chip for over 18 months, since the mask date (the date appearing on the die itself and indicating the year the design was finalized) is 2012. Indeed, the die markings of the PN548 vary only slightly from those of the PN54"</comment>


The best programming language for you to learn - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/dd/2014/07/31/best-programming-language-learn/ <comment><USER2> Comes to no conclusion as to the best programming language for you to learn.</comment>


Basic Web Scraping with Emacs - <AUTHOR> https://nickdrozd.github.io/2018/10/17/web-scraping.html <comment><USER2> The idea here is that 1) Emacs has flexible means of automation (like keyboard macros), and 2) it also has a web browser, so 3) Emacs can be used for browser automation. The conclusion seems trivial in retrospect, but I hadn't seen it discussed anywhere, so I thought the techniques involved would be worth recording.

<comment><USER3> Thanks a lot! I use Emacs and have some scraping projects (mainly converting some websites' announcements into RSS feeds), but have never thought of this either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Had to search for how to use eww since I have never used it before now.

</comment><comment><USER5> Guess dynamical websites aren't supported?

<comment><USER6> JavaScript isn't run, so some dynamic web sites are supported and others (common today) aren't.</comment></comment>


No pay, no spray: Firefighters let home burn - <AUTHOR> http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/

<comment><USER2> I wonder what his insurance company will say. Do they require you to pay for the firefighter tax?

</comment><comment><USER3> somewhere I had heard that the firefighters had actually put out a fire at the same house previously, on another year where the same family hadn't 'gotten around to paying' for the service.</comment>