Search Hillary Clinton's Emails - <AUTHOR> http://graphics.wsj.com/hillary-clinton-email-documents/ <comment><USER5> The banality of it all is what strikes me.

A personal favorite: [http://graphics.wsj.com/hillary-clinton-email- documents/#/?d...](http://graphics.wsj.com/hillary-clinton-email- documents/#/?docid=C05787922)

Been there, Hil :)

<comment><USER6> All the interesting stuff has been [ ].

<comment><USER7> Exactly. If anyone were to think that hillarys email server was not wiped with cloth prior to any of this BS - they'd be a full on idiot.

<comment><USER8> Well, every email exists in at least one other email account as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What striking to me, however certainly expected, is all the sycophantic drivel heaped onto a powerful person. "You looked fabulous", "we were discussing how incredible you are".

Perhaps aides think somehow they are being supportive, but if I were that powerful person, I believe I would rather just a few people I trust to tell me when I'm effing up - than everyone telling me how fantastic I am.

<comment><USER10> I work with some colleagues who use this kind of conversation. Full disclosure: I am a female, they are also female. They wouldn't talk to you like that -- it's a female-female communication style with a lot of subtext, common in parts of corporate America as well.

The majority (by far!) of my colleagues are male, and part of the subtext and context of this type of conversation is (1) to comment on things guys "can't" comment on, like "did I wear the appropriate jewelry or footwear for this event to project the social and intellectual persona that I'm trying to project", and (2) to combat the everyday little degradations you encounter, like someone at the registration table not registering you because they figured you're a girlfriend not a real participant. Women who are trying to maintain and accumulate power know that they can support each other in maintaining a stance of confidence rather than acceptance. Being primarily socialized into a stance of acceptance due to my historically all-male and socially inept professional circles, I was _way_ confused when I got a female boss who started saying nice things about/to me. It is true that I do good things at work, although I don't manage to find the right shoes to project being corporate -- but I've _never_ had anyone say anything about either of those things! Ever!

It's a reasonable management tool in some ways. My male bosses asked me (forced me?) to do my job and also take care of "women things" (recruitment and retention of women and minorities) without ever saying anything nice or giving me any credit, so I quit doing most of that. Altruism has limits that are often reached at the bank account. But now I have a boss who views outreach as a positive and actually says nice things ("you're incredible! I'm amazed at how much you do!" etc) so yep, I'm more likely to do it. And it is good for my organization.

<comment><USER11> Interesting perspective. Personally, I would find effusive praise of that kind profoundly weird, and uncomfortable, because it doesn't fit into the framework of mostly male-male communication I'm used to(relatively traditional, tinged with some ex-military vibes). In large part, the sign of doing a good job is the absence of criticism. Since you could almost always improve on your performance, there tends to always be some level of criticism.

Maybe I'm weird, but external validation doesn't really push any of my buttons. If you think I really did a great job, give me a bonus, or an extra day or two of vacation. Otherwise, I've got work to do.

<comment><USER12> I would have said the same until I had a boss who was very openly and naturally complimentary. It does wonders for impostor syndrome and definitely kept me motivated through the hard times. It only worked because it came off as very natural and sincere, though.

Edit: I guess for context I should add we're both male.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Chelsea's email to B & H about her experience in Haiti is an informative read.

I had assumed our disaster mitigation/rescue NGOs were a lot more effective than they actually are. They sound pretty awful, reading that email.

<comment><USER14> I never really had an opinion about Chelsea Clinton, one way or another, but after reading that email I respect her.

<comment><USER15> It was incredibly well-written. Much respect to her.

You can tell that she is the kind of person that demands action and hates any kind of BS. Very business like.

This is also why you should always write emails assuming they're public record. Because one day... They just might be!

<comment><USER16> It was quite 'over-written', if that's even a term. The sentences were very dense with long compound sentences. Maybe I'm just stupid, but I feel like it's a failure on her part to drown the reader in text with a low readability score that isn't even jargon.

<comment><USER17> In fairness to her, her preamble explicitly stated that it was written hastily and without revision, and she did explicitly ask that, if it was to be shared, her name not be attached to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hi, I'm one of the developers of this interactive graphic. If our search isn't doing it for you, why not download all the emails yourself? Check out our code to build a SQLite full-text database [https://github.com/wsjdata/clinton- email-cruncher](https://github.com/wsjdata/clinton-email-cruncher)

<comment><USER19> If someone does this, and wants to use a full-text search-as-a-service to power the search, I'll provide a free Searchify account for it (I'm the founder). For example code, see our Enron email search demo: [http://gosearchify.herokuapp.com/](http://gosearchify.herokuapp.com/)

<comment><USER20> Thank you for offering this to any takers. I personally don't have the know- how to do this but if somebody out there does, it would be great if you could donate your time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> They redacted Sidney Blumenthal's email domain, but they did not redact the email headers from this email:

[http://graphics.wsj.com/hillary-clinton-email- documents/pdfs...](http://graphics.wsj.com/hillary-clinton-email- documents/pdfs/C05791488.pdf)

Looks like he had an @aol.com address, which matches up with the length of the redacted bit and you can even see the top of the 'l' in some cases.

</comment><comment><USER19> Search for wikileaks, you'll see how concerned they are with it. They get a periodic update of how worldwide media are covering wikileaks.

</comment><comment><USER22> Neat, but the search interface needs some work. You can choose a sender/recipient but you can't specify whether they are the sender or receiver. I was trying to sort by all emails sent by H, but you don't seem to be able to do that. Still very cool.

Favorite headline so far: H: HIGHLY IMPORTANT! COMPREHENSIVE INTEL REPORT ON LIBYA. AND DRINK 8 GLASSES OF WATER. SID

P.S. search for 'mini' to get granular breakdowns of H's schedule.

<comment><USER23> Hopefully wikileaks will mirror it, their search is decent

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Can someone explain why this is happening for us non-Americans (or possibly just me if I missed some major news event)?

<comment><USER25> When Hillary Clinton served as Secretary of State, she used a private email server that was stored at her home and later in hosting facility not cleared for classified information (supposedly in a bathroom).

Initially, she claimed there was no classified information on the server at any time. Further, when she was required to turn over records to comply with archival rules, she had her staff delete the personal messages and pass the rest along.

In the current investigation, they've discovered classified emails - <USER4> classified after the fact, some not - which included KH-designated intelligence (aka detailed satellite images). In addition, when she delivered the data to the State Department, she gave a copy of all of it to her lawyer, who didn't have clearance for the classified data.. which shouldn't have been there anyway.

Yes, previous Cabinet-level staff had used private servers but the National Archives explicitly recommended against it in 2006 (a recommendation, not law) and then President Obama signed an Executive Order making it the law in 2009. Secretary Clinton continued doing it until she left the State Department in 2013.

At minimum, it was disregard for the recommendations and eventual law. At worse, it was flagrant disregard for protecting the means and methods - <USER3> includes people - who collected and needed that information.

<comment><USER26> > In the current investigation, they've discovered classified emails - <USER4> > classified after the fact, some not

"some not"? If you are implying that Clinton's server held messages marked as classified when sent, could you provide some evidence to this effect? The Clinton campaign is quite adamant that this is not true.

<comment><USER27> This is a red herring. It doesn't matter if it was marked or not. It is up to the sender to take the precaution. That there are now thousands of emails marked after the fact as classified, wouldn't that tell you the assumption should have been made to err on the side of caution, and assume most everything you are discussing has high probability to be classified information?

And using your own insecure personal server for these emails essentially guarantees that it's been hacked by.. China, Russia, take your pick.

In fact there is a term called "born-classified" which applies to information about foreign governments provided by foreign sources. Here's some evidence:

[http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-clinton- email...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-clinton-emails- idUSKCN0QQ0BW20150821)

<comment><USER28> There's a fundamental misunderstanding about classified material, which is that it becomes de-classified once it is public. Not true.

For example, take the Wikileaks information dump, which came from a huge cache of State Dept. cables and has now been covered in hundreds of public newspaper articles. If one of her friends forwarded one of those articles to Clinton, boom, she now has classified information in her email. Why? Because those cables, despite being leaked, were never de-classified.

Another example: a lot of the stuff revealed by Snowden was classified at a very high level. _It still is today_ , even though it is widely available public information. Can you see how this could cause problems for someone who is a government official, but has friends/family/contacts who wish to discuss these news articles?

The press is a well-known vector that leads to a lot of government staff having classified information in their unclassified email systems. Typically investigations are rare and prosecutions rarer, because it's basically impossible to prevent and does no practical damage (since the info is already out there).

This is why the mere fact of having classified material on an email server does not necessarily imply incompetence or malice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> While it doesn't excuse Clinton, I think it's a lead pipe cinch that every single politician since Jimmy Carter has used some sort of off-the-books email service.

</comment><comment><USER30> ObamaLeaks

[http://graphics.wsj.com/hillary-clinton-email- documents/pdfs...](http://graphics.wsj.com/hillary-clinton-email- documents/pdfs/C05794787.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER31> I can't shake the feeling that this was all part of the plan.

We all learn of the true value and humanity of The Hillary by reading her true, uncensored, selfless self. Now we know who She Really Is(TM).

Plans within plans within plans ...

<comment><USER32> The content seems very banal and will only serve to humanize her in the coming primaries. Super Tuesday is March 1st.

The timing is uncanny.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> "Today, in 2011, I'm giving Secretary Hillary Clinton the nod as the Obama Administration's improbable MVP in the technology realm. "

[http://graphics.wsj.com/hillary-clinton-email- documents/pdfs...](http://graphics.wsj.com/hillary-clinton-email- documents/pdfs/C05778327.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER34> It's fun to search for "Syria" then go the second last page and read a curious e-mail from Sept. 2009 about "the first known case of a successful social media campaign in Syria".. Then a few pages later, June 2010 - "Bay Area execs seek to open doors with Syria" about a trip that Hillary's staff took part in including the infamous Jared Cohen whom Julian Assange talked about in one of his rants ([https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it- seems/](https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/)).

One could weave a compelling conspiracy theory if one were so inclined.

</comment><comment><USER35> Interesting to note that searching using terms to probe her connections to the financial industry brings back a bunch of heavily redacted emails.

<comment><USER36> There's one with the subject "Koch" that is completely blanked out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I searched by Susan rice and I'm (not) surprised that much of it is redacted, i.e. the people releasing this do not think it's suitable for release to the public.

In the end you can't be the most effective Secretary of state (Kissinger's words) in decades and not be emailing top secret material

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm not sure how well the search actually works. I searched for "fart" in the "Search email text" field, and it returns 2 emails as results, but they don't contain the word "fart" as far as I can tell.

Can anyone else confirm this? And does anyone have any idea why this would happen? Some kind of partial text match?

One of the 2 results definitely doesn't contain the substring "fart" anywhere: "will be available in 10 minutes, per ops. They will connect you as soon as she calls in. "

<comment><USER39> The OCR is flaky. The first email has "Release in Part" and the 'Part' is coming up as 'Fart' after OCR. And in the second email the word "fact" is coming up as "fart".

If you download the PDFs you can search by text and it matches on your search term.

I have to say that I am sad no one actually said "fart".

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I tried searching for middle-east-related keywords, and got tons of hits. Then I tried searching for Central American and South American topics, and got very little.

It's a shame that the Mexican drug cartels, the murders in Central America, and the economic rise of Brazil/Argentina are not given more priority by our government. These are both the greatest threats to and the largest opportunities for the US.

</comment><comment><USER41> Why are they scanned pdfs of printed copies of the original e-mails?

It's clear in several of these e-mails there are hyperlinks, which are completely lost.

<comment><USER42> Frequently when the government is forced to release documents by FOIA requests, they do in the most deliberately inconvenient way possible.

Previous example: [https://www.propublica.org/blog/item/a-readers-guide-to- the-...](https://www.propublica.org/blog/item/a-readers-guide-to-the-sarah- palin-emails)

> The emails, which presumably could fit on a few discs, now fit in six boxes > and weigh 250 pounds per set. Journalists have trekked to Juneau to pick up > them up. (Mother Jones notes that the state is helpfully lending journalists > "hand trucks" for hauling the boxes out.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> The different email addresses seem to contain interesting classification. HRC16, HDR22 and HRC17 are some that jumped out. HRC1 & HRC2 must of been some particularly lofty circles.

</comment><comment><USER43> Does anyone doubt a grand that a Grand Jury would indict based on this evidence alone? I would like to see a Judge or Jury hear evidence and render a verdict here.

<comment><USER44> If that were to happen before January, Obama would just issue a final-day pardon to quash it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Given these are _email_ , why the heck is the government providing PDFs of printouts? Why aren't they providing a text version?

<comment><USER46> One reason (of probably a few that add up), is that it's safer to redact a printed copy than a digital copy that might have metadata hidden to reveal the original pre-redacted information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I don't get it. She used a personal account for official business. That's against policy, I get that part. But why are we punishing her by releasing all of those e-mails to the general public? That sounds like a very unorthodox punishment.

<comment><USER48> It's the result of Freedom of Information Act requests. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton_email_controve...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton_email_controversy#Freedom_of_Information_lawsuits)

<comment><USER47> So I still don't get why we can open private communications to everyone, or what purpose that serves but to (1) humiliate her and (2) expose her to identity theft risk, neither of which are usual forms of punishment. Why not just fine her, ban her from working for the government, or some other similar punishment?

Also, what about the fact that I write SO many e-mails using special language, inside jokes that only the other party would know, PGP, foreign languages, self-modified languages, and so on? What if in my communications with a particular friend, red meant blue, blue meant red, building meant banana, and foreign meant domestic? What if she encoded deeper meaning into what is seemingly innocuous English text? If I knew that I was at risk of being victimized by such a system and having my e-mails exposed, you can be sure that I would use language like that. Or simply avoid using English, use a smattering of 20 different obscure tribal languages, and write my e-mails in a form with hidden meanings that I would agree in advance with the receiving party. Just to make it hard for everyone who really shouldn't be reading my e-mails. And then use PGP on top of that, although PGP is probably ineffective against this [0], but the smattering of tribal languages and English language mappings would at least make it deliberately hard and annoying.

Why is it that "being secretary of state" all of a sudden means that you have no right to the same level of privacy, identity protection, and security that everyone else has in the country?

[0] [https://xkcd.com/538/](https://xkcd.com/538/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Wonder what's classified related to Price Waterhouse

</comment><comment><USER50> Read "Flowers"

</comment><comment><USER51> hmmm. no hits for "Lewinski."

</comment><comment><USER52> All politicians have personal email servers before they're elected and after they are un-elected. It's human nature that there is a transition time between pre-election and post-election in which personal email will continue to be used. Rarely do analysis pieces mention this fact. If our government really cared about that, they would have dedicated IT staff to onboarding new officials with systems that actually work.

</comment><comment><USER53> Oh cool, top secret files in a searchable index :|</comment>


Puppet 2.7 Released - <AUTHOR> http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-users/browse_thread/thread/ffe1345c165bf293#

<comment><USER3> Can anyone point us towards good "server configuration management for dummies (who happen to run startups)" documentation?

I've been looking at Puppet and Chef, but we're not just Rails anymore and I can't imagine that the Ruby world's tools are the only popular ones. I just don't know where to look for how to make an informed choice, how to get started, etc. It feels like there is a large gap in available knowledge between running a couple of processes on a single server and anything I'd trust to some paying customers.

<comment><USER4> Puppet and Chef are pretty agnostic. You can use them to manage only your infrastructure (packages, user accounts, databases) and leave app deployment up to something like capistrano or fabric if you like (although at a certain level of app complexity it makes sense to integrate.)

cfengine has been around longer, but seems to have negative adoption since puppet became well-known. I know a few people who swear by it, though.

FWIW, at my current startup I use Chef to manage a mid-sized collection of servers (app, load balancers, DBs/replicas, task processors) where the app is written mostly in Python, and it took a ton of pain out of scaling up to deal with a very large paying customer two nights ago.

Puppet has better documentation, but learning either is a bit of a trial and error process I think. You might find Blueprint (<https://github.com/devstructure/blueprint>) useful to bootstrap (the authors are around in the HN community, I think.)

<comment><USER5> Blueprint author here. Our goal is dead simple configuration management, so it might be just what you need. Check it out and feel free to email me with any questions email@example.com

Blueprint (<https://github.com/devstructure/blueprint>)

Blueprint I/O (<https://github.com/devstructure.com/blueprint-io>)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would love it if people would share their real world experiences with either (or both) Puppet and Chef in dynamic environments that needed more than a few servers to be maintained. In particular, polyglot persistent environments that aren't necessarily tied to a particular framework requirement.

</comment><comment><USER7> WTF is Puppet?

 _Puppet is an enterprise systems management platform that standardizes the way IT staff deploy and manage infrastructure in the enterprise and the cloud.

By automating the provisioning, patching, and configuration of operating system and application components across infrastructure, Puppet enables IT staff to master their infrastructure even as complexity grows._

<comment><USER8> It's really similar to Chef, but I find Puppet way easier to work with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I know tools like Puppet and Chef really shine when you have 'a lot' of servers that you need to handle, but from my humble experience (only with Chef) they can also make things more complicated then they should be if you are not a heavy user.

I am not deploying Ruby applications so I really don't like the idea of installing a bunch of software on my production servers. Not to mention that chef also installed a compiler on my server and that is a big no-no in my book.

Am I the only one that has an aversion of using these tools?

<comment><USER10> I see where you're coming from - however, the great thing about CM tools is that they abstract a lot of the weird differences between UNIX's and Linux distributions. Defining a user in Puppet or Chef _will_ create that user the same way, whether it's in RHEL, Solaris, FreeBSD, etc.

Puppet is also more lightweight than Chef in terms of the amount of dependencies it requires, given an already existing installation of Ruby (in fact, I think there's only one dependency: facter.) The only problem is that it comes with a lot less available language features out of the box than Chef, mainly because Puppet doesn't have a way to store and serve configurations of other machines out of the box without something backing the data store, like MySQL or CouchDB.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've been using Puppet for Linux servers and SCCM for Windows stuff... what's missing for me is good out of band configuration verification.

Is there a good replacement for Tripwire out there? It's a great toolset for change management and security, but is too expensive for my current endeavours. I played with an open source tool a couple of years ago that kind of sucked.

<comment><USER12> Cfengine has tripwire-like functionality. There is an example in the default promises.cf that ships with Cfengine 3. (Look for "tripwire".)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> What are the best practices for maintaining Puppet code in version control? Do people usually keep separate branches for different kinds of machines (e.g. webservers, SMTP servers, etc)? Is there a discussion about this documented somewhere?

<comment><USER10> Over at Seattle Biomed, we keep everything in the same branch (for now) - <USER2> of our nodes are defined in nodes.pp, and we have modules that install software/configuration files as needed. We include modules in the node definition that should comprise the service we want to run on the server.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Actual release notes: [https://projects.puppetlabs.com/projects/puppet/wiki/Release...](https://projects.puppetlabs.com/projects/puppet/wiki/Release_Notes)

</comment><comment><USER8> Oh thank the heavens, this was literally the only thing keeping me from upgrading my Rails apps to Ruby 1.9.x (all of my "serious" apps are deployed via Moonshine).</comment>


Rsync mishandles archaic checksums in v3.1.3-dev (before 24-Oct-2017) - <AUTHOR> https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2017-15994 <comment><USER2> Mod suggestion - make an addition in the title to indicate that this vulnerability is from October.

I run a public OSS mirror website and had a moment of panic before I read the details :)

Also - this specifically impacts 3.1.3-dev.</comment>


Boeing 737 Max pilots complained to feds for months about suspected safety flaw - <AUTHOR> https://www.dallasnews.com/business/airlines/2019/03/12/boeing-737-max-8-pilots-complained-feds-months-suspected-safety-flaw <comment> tuna-piano Some context:

1\. There have been 865 737 related ASRS reports since 1/1/2018

2\. I don't know how to quickly separate out 737-MAX reports from the non 737-MAX reports, as the ASRS database doesn't include 737-MAX as an airplane type! From scanning, I can say that there are more than five MAX related reports, though.

[1] All 865 737 reports since 1/1/2018

CSV - [http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=546686797940621...](http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=54668679794062195281)

DOC - [http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=726497188798253...](http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=72649718879825392207)

[2] Airplane model filter with no MAX option: [https://imgur.com/a/09rRtzX](https://imgur.com/a/09rRtzX)

[3] ASRS database: [https://titan- server.arc.nasa.gov/ASRSPublicQueryWizard/Quer...](https://titan- server.arc.nasa.gov/ASRSPublicQueryWizard/QueryWizard_Filter.aspx#)

[4] Document linked in the article with plane models listed under 737-800 or 737-Next Generation Undifferentiated [https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5766398-ASRS- Reports...](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5766398-ASRS-Reports- for-737-max8.html)

<comment><USER2> Great links! Here are the three 737-related ASRS reports that mention MCAS:

ACN: 1597286

"Day 3 of 3 departing in a MAX 8 after a long overnight. I was well rested and had discussed the recent MAX 8 MCAS guidance with the Captain. On departure, we had strong crosswinds (gusts > 30 knots) directly off the right wing, however, no LLWS or Micro-burst activity was reported at the field. After verifying LNAV, selecting gear and flaps up, I set "UP" speed. The aircraft accelerated normally and the Captain engaged the "A" autopilot after reaching set speed. Within two to three seconds the aircraft pitched nose down bringing the VSI to approximately 1,200 to 1,500 FPM. I called "descending" just prior to the GPWS sounding "don't sink, don't sink." The Captain immediately disconnected the autopilot and pitched into a climb. The remainder of the flight was uneventful. We discussed the departure at length and I reviewed in my mind our automation setup and flight profile but can't think of any reason the aircraft would pitch nose down so aggressively."

ACN: 1597380

"It was day three of six for me and day three with very good FO (First Officer). Well rested, great rapport and above average Crew coordination. Knew we had a MAX. It was my leg, normal Ops Brief, plus I briefed our concerns with the MAX issues, bulletin, MCAS, stab trim cutout response etc. I mentioned I would engage autopilot sooner than usual (I generally hand fly to at least above 10,000 ft.) to remove the possible MCAS threat.

Weather was about 1000 OVC drizzle, temperature dropping and an occasional snow flake. I double checked with an additional personal walkaround just prior to push; a few drops of water on the aircraft but clean aircraft, no deice required. Strong crosswind and I asked Tug Driver to push a little more tail east so as not to have slow/hung start gusts 30+.

Wind and mechanical turbulence was noted. Careful engine warm times, normal flaps 5 takeoff in strong (appeared almost direct) crosswind. Departure was normal. Takeoff and climb in light to moderate turbulence. After flaps 1 to "up" and above clean "MASI up speed" with LNAV engaged I looked at and engaged A Autopilot. As I was returning to my PFD (Primary Flight Display) PM (Pilot Monitoring) called "DESCENDING" followed by almost an immediate: "DONT SINK DONT SINK!"

I immediately disconnected AP (Autopilot) (it WAS engaged as we got full horn etc.) and resumed climb. Now, I would generally assume it was my automation error, i.e., aircraft was trying to acquire a miss-commanded speed/no autothrottles, crossing restriction etc., but frankly neither of us could find an inappropriate setup error (not to say there wasn't one).

With the concerns with the MAX 8 nose down stuff, we both thought it appropriate to bring it to your attention. We discussed issue at length over the course of the return to ZZZ. Best guess from me is airspeed fluctuation due to mechanical shear/frontal passage that overwhelmed automation temporarily or something incorrectly setup in MCP (Mode Control Panel). PM's callout on "descending" was particularly quick and welcome as I was just coming back to my display after looking away. System and procedures coupled with CRM (Resource Management) trapped and mitigated issue."

ACN: 1593017

"The recently released 737 MAX8 Emergency Airworthiness Directive directs pilots how to deal with a known issue, but it does nothing to address the systems issues with the AOA system.

MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System) is implemented on the 737 MAX to enhance pitch characteristics with flaps UP and at elevated angles of attack. The MCAS function commands nose down stabilizer to enhance pitch characteristics during steep turns with elevated load factors and during flaps up flight at airspeeds approaching stall. MCAS is activated without pilot input and only operates in manual, flaps up flight. The system is designed to allow the flight crew to use column trim switch or stabilizer aisle stand cutout switches to override MCAS input. The function is commanded by the Flight Control computer using input data from sensors and other airplane systems.

The MCAS function becomes active when the airplane Angle of Attack exceeds a threshold based on airspeed and altitude. Stabilizer incremental commands are limited to 2.5 degrees and are provided at a rate of 0.27 degrees per second. The magnitude of the stabilizer input is lower at high Mach number and greater at low Mach numbers. The function is reset once angle of attack falls below the Angle of Attack threshold or if manual stabilizer commands are provided by the flight crew. If the original elevated AOA condition persists, the MCAS function commands another incremental stabilizer nose down command according to current aircraft Mach number at actuation.

This description is not currently in the 737 Flight Manual Part 2, nor the Boeing FCOM, though it will be added to them soon. This communication highlights that an entire system is not described in our Flight Manual. This system is now the subject of an AD.

I think it is unconscionable that a manufacturer, the FAA, and the airlines would have pilots flying an airplane without adequately training, or even providing available resources and sufficient documentation to understand the highly complex systems that differentiate this aircraft from prior models. The fact that this airplane requires such jury rigging to fly is a red flag. Now we know the systems employed are error prone--even if the pilots aren't sure what those systems are, what redundancies are in place, and failure modes.

I am left to wonder: what else don't I know? The Flight Manual is inadequate and almost criminally insufficient. All airlines that operate the MAX must insist that Boeing incorporate ALL systems in their manuals."

<comment><USER3> These all sound extremely serious and damning, but it's hard to know whether these match the typical tone and content of these kind of reports. Is this is well inside the standard for adjusting to a new aircraft or does this suggest a serious hazard left unaddressed?

<comment><USER4> > I would generally assume it was my automation error, i.e., aircraft was > trying to acquire a miss-commanded speed/no autothrottles, crossing > restriction etc., but frankly neither of us could find an inappropriate > setup error (not to say there wasn't one).

Regardless of the usual tone, I find this particular paragraph a fairly terrifying indictment of cockpit human factors across the board. Apparently it's not unusual for aircraft behave unusually with the pilots not understanding why - and the poor pilots "generally" blame themselves!

<comment><USER5> If you ever have some time, you should try playing microsoft flight simulator and you will come to an understanding of this phenomenon.

Aircraft have many states, and there is a lot of information to process to fly an aircraft, even in normal flight. When situations develop in real time, it takes a lot of mental horsepower to understand the situation and react appropriately. Despite all this, aviation is safer than driving a car.

It is one of the reasons I find aviation to be inspiring. Conscientious humans have mastered this unforgiving domain through effort and power of will. When you talk to a real pilot, there are certain mannerisms that they share that tend to show that the practice of flying really makes you a thoughtful person.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For a car analogy, imagine Tesla creates a new model that under certain conditions tends to over-steer left. To prevent any accidents because of that, they have added a system that turns the steering wheel clockwise. To disable the system it is not enough to try to prevent by force the steering wheel from turning, but you have to press a button that disables electric steering assistance.

Notice they have never briefed you about this new system because they didn't want to retrain you.

You happily drive along the highway at 70mph when the system malfunctions and incorrectly thinks the car is over-steering left, so the steering wheel starts rotating clockwise. The car swiftly moves to the lane in your right as you use all your strength to prevent it and manage to bring the car back in the lane.

In the mean time all kind of lights and sounds go off on your cockpit. In 5 seconds, while you are trying to find out what to make out of all the lights flashing, the steering wheel starts turning the card right again. This time you are not so lucky and you crash into the truck on your right.

<comment><USER7> I feel like every time someone insists on making a car analogy, it just piles on more evidence that car analogies never work.

At least you don't have to get a new endorsement on your license for every model of car.

<comment><USER6> Analogy implies partial similarity. Of course there will be differences.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is off topic. But I've been skeptical of the commercial aviation accident risk compared to cars.

I'm not saying cars are safer. But using accident count per mileage seems a bit odd, especially when the most risky parts of flying are taking off and landing.

A plane travelling 400 more miles doesn't incur much more risk. But a car travelling 400 more miles incur a much bigger risk (e.g. fatigue, car malfunctioning). So, of course, the stats for planes is going to look much better.

I wonder if anyone has an insight into why we are using this metrics, and what is a better metrics?

<comment><USER9> I'd say it's accidents per person/hour. And I've read somewhere that the figures used to be similar for cars and airplanes (though aircraft safety is constantly improving, cars probably less).

<comment><USER10> Cars have been improving safety significantly over time as well. However, the fatality rates seem to be significantly better for airlines.

[https://www.bts.gov/content/fatality-rates- mode](https://www.bts.gov/content/fatality-rates-mode)

For the sake of argument, assume cars travel an average of only 10 mph, and air carriers carry just 50 passengers (low estimates tilt the comparison in favor of cars). That would mean cars had 1.1 fatality for every 10 million hours in 2015. The corresponding figure has been between 0.0 and 0.6 for the last decade, and airlines come out way ahead even after amortizing the 5.8 from 2001 over the following years. And this is with very conservative assumptions.

On the other hand if you add in non-occupant deaths, the numbers might work out better for cars, even after using less conservative assumptions, once you amortize the non-occupant deaths from 9/11.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There are at least three inter-related issues here: 1) Was MCAS an issue in the Ethiopian Airlines crash? 2) Did Boeing err, prior to the Lion Air crash, in not informing pilots of the existence of MCAS, and the way it changes how a failure is experienced by the flight crew? 3) Does MCAS pose a risk that cannot be adequately addressed through appropriate awareness and training?

IIRC, after the existence of MCAS was disclosed, the US pilots' unions were divided over this issue, with the union representing Southwest pilots castigating Boeing for its nondisclosure, while that representing United pilots did not consider it to be a big issue. Unfortunately, this article does not make it clear where pilots stand on issue 3, and the investigation of the Ethiopian Airlines crash might reveal additional issues.

The forthcoming software upgrade for MCAS certainly implies that there were improvements to be made.

<comment><USER12> I don't know the answer to 1 or 2, but regarding 3, if the issue in the reports via this article are the same issue, which it seems like they may be, then no I don't believe it poses a risk that can't be addressed through training. Through awareness these pilots and FOs filing reports seemed to know, at least through intuition if not outright knowledge of the new MCAS system, to disconnect the autopilot system when the nose goes down inappropriately.

My question is, should the onus be on the pilots? Yes, they should know about it if they're going to be piloting an aircraft with it, but is this expected behavior? To me it seems more like a bug than expected behavior...why would you want to pitch downwards in a climb?

I don't really understand defense of Boeing in any scenario. This seems like a mistake in any case, whether it's just lack of instruction or documentation in the relevant flight manuals, or an outright system failure.

<comment><USER13> >why would you want to pitch downwards in a climb?

Because due to the different shape and position of the nacelles, there are aerodynamic effects that cause the plane to want to pitch up at high AoA. If you are already close to a stall condition, and you were caught unawares, bad times would be had.

The major issue though is pilots were left to 'just figure this out' instead of being informed of the change. I have a feeling Boeing felt justified doing this because they pitched it as a "reconfiguration" of an old airframe, not warranting any explanation.

As with any task I've attempted that involves deadly failure modes, this should have struck someone as being a terrible idea.

<comment><USER14> From what I have read, the NG series had the habit of pitching up under go- around conditions and this system exists because Boeing expected that issue to be more prevalent on the Max and also to try and solve it.

So its not a new thing on the Max, its just expected to be more prominent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The thing that worries me most is that, based on mere amateur observations in the media, the number of incidents involving user interfaces, repeated changes to procedures, and software fixes to "unexpected" corner-cases seems to have been in the increase.

To the uninitiated, it seems that problems in airline incidents used to revolve around mechanical failures, bad wiring, sensor malfunctions, toasted electronics causing smell of smoke and such. Plain and simple. Issue a fix in the design and apply to all planes of the same type, and you'll end up reducing the failure surface bit by bit.

I might be totally wrong about this because I don't track actual data. But if I've spotted the trend right it's scary because the problems are shifting into _our space_ , i.e. software engineering. And being a software engineer, I know we're pretty much fucked at that point. We've only ever managed to write reliable and trustworthy software when we've split it into very tiny pieces that we can verify and kept the number of pieces small.

Maybe aviation computers used to be much simpler that they could be verified more throughoutly. Maybe airplanes used to have less features and they could keep the complexity sufficiently down and functionality orthogonal. Maybe there was enough human glue in between the systems so that there was a live sanity-check during flights and pilots could react properly if the computers didn't agree on something.

But now I sense a new category of error conditions that are eerily similar to what we've had in non-critical software for decades where assumptions are laid on top of other assumptions, and when they fail the whole stack comes crashing down. Only this time there might be a whole plane coming down instead of getting a curious SIGSEGV on the screen with a blinking cursor. It might start as an innocent "couldn't access flight plan because of wifi went down" but such interdependencies between certified and uncertified systems grow exponentially and this will snowball into the unmanageable very soon.

<comment><USER16> If you split a complex systems into a tiny pieces, you imo just shift a locus of problems from individual modules into their more and more complex network of interactions and emergent behaviors.

<comment><USER15> Hence you keep the number of pieces small to avoid the exponential interactions. You only ever implement what is really needed instead of letting feature creep and excess convenience work their way into your plane. It's not like N times more of that sweet complexity is required to fly a plane today than what was needed in the 80's or 90's.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > The News found at least five complaints about the Boeing model in a federal > database where pilots can voluntarily report about aviation incidents > without fear of repercussions.

Is this a lot?

<comment><USER18> Yes. Recalls with autos happen more often with a lot less. Consider the amount of cars out there. It only takes a few to put one in play.

<comment><USER19> If the US would treat car safety like airplane safety there would be no SUVs driving out there.

<comment><USER20> Airplane safety should be more strict than car safety, because the damage an airplane crash causes is a handful of orders of magnitude higher than a car accident...

<comment><USER19> Yet deaths in the latter vastly outpace adverse events in the former. What is the criteria by which public safety should operate? Is it biggest explosion?

<comment><USER21> Opportunity cost of safety improvements to vehicles. Airliners cost like $100 million each, so they can afford to perfect safety. You can't get airliner- level safety in a vehicle that costs less than $50,000.

<comment><USER22> Maybe not airliner level of safety, but based on the top causes of car accidents, they could probably be reduced by an order of magnitude with relatively inexpensive improvements:

      1. better driver training
      2. breathalyzer ignition interlocks
      3. speed limiters (even more reduced speed at night/rain)
      4. traffic light detection/automatic braking
      5. enforced following distance

(I'd add "sleep/impaired driver warnings", automatic emergency braking (including pedestrian detection) even though it doesn't quite relate to the top causes of accidents))

Here's the top ten:

      1. Distracted Driving
      2. Drunk Driving
      3. Speeding
      4. Reckless Driving
      5. Rain
      6. Running Red Lights
      7. Night Driving
      8. Design Defects/Maintenace
      9. Tailgating
     10. Wrong-Way Driving/ Improper Turns

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Please make a conscious choice when flying 737 Max on US domestic flights. It is your right to know the type of aircraft when you are booking your flight. Switching to a reasonably expensive alternative is worth more than any foreseeable trouble.

<comment><USER24> > It is your right to know the type of aircraft when you are booking your > flight.

This is not actually any kind of right in the US. The airline can switch to using a MAX just before the flight boards without breaking any law or contract with you, and would not have to honor your request to travel on a non-MAX aircraft instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This article is less compelling than the title would suggest.

After the Lion Air crash the FAA released a Emergency Airworthiness Directive, these five comments are in response to that directive. That differentiates it from pilots that had a negative run-in with MCAS or other defects in the 737 Max 8 (which would be significant news).

This article might inform you pilots are unhappy, but that fact has been widely circulated elsewhere since the Lion Air crash. The fact that five pilots submitted official comments doesn't add to what we knew.

These comments for example wouldn't have helped inform the FAA's decisions, since the FAA told the pilots about the issues in the Emergency Airworthiness Directive that these comments are based upon.

<comment><USER26> The Dallas News report shows two separate complaints where the pilots knew of and discussed MCAS on the flight deck before take off and still had serious problems with it.

<comment><USER14> They had serious problems with the autopilot, which also disables MCAS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> In the wake of the previous Boeing 737 Max crash:

"Boeing Co. _withheld information about potential hazards_ associated with a new flight-control feature suspected of playing a role in last month's fatal Lion Air jet crash, according to safety experts involved in the investigation, as well as midlevel FAA officials and airline pilots."

"Safety experts involved in and tracking the investigation said that at U.S. carriers, _neither airline managers nor pilots had been told such a system had been added to the latest 737 variant_ — and therefore aviators typically weren't prepared to cope with the possible risks."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18438607](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18438607)

</comment><comment><USER7> If I am reading the article correctly, the complaints all came after JT610? It would have been more damning if they had been complaining about this for the last couple years.

<comment><USER28> That's impossible, 737 MAX hasn't been in service for 2 years yet.

<comment><USER7> I meant in round numbers ;). It's been pretty close to two full years now, so I wrote "a couple years" instead of 22 months.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> [https://outline.com/fLAE8N](https://outline.com/fLAE8N)

</comment><comment><USER30> You can see the archive.is copy of it without jumping through hoops: [http://archive.is/GsHVR](http://archive.is/GsHVR)

</comment><comment><USER31> man fuck canada and the usa. how are we the only ones in the world to not care about safety. even if its a 0.5% chance 150+ people die, isn't that enough to warrant temporarily grounding a handful of planes. sigh common

</comment><comment><USER32> This is a great video that does a concise and understandable of the main theory for the issue that occured on the LionAir flight: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfQW0upkVus](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfQW0upkVus)

It was very helpful for me to understand exactly what "runaway trim" meant. Essentially, it's a force (down or up) on the elevator on the horizontal stabilizer. The pilot still controls it from his yoke, but the more trim applied the more it pushes the result in a given direction. If the system applies trim consistently to push the nose down (to avoid what it thinks is an imminent staff), it will progressively more difficult for the pilot to counteract that and pitch up. Eventually, it's too much to handle.

This situation should be easily detectable, from what I understand, due to large wheels moving visibly in the center console, and the pilots can counteract the trim in a known procedure.

</comment><comment><USER33> I think it would've been cool to have a database for anonymous complaints at most of my previous jobs.

<comment><USER34> that's a very interesting idea! let's build it :D

<comment><USER35> reminds me of ratemyprofessor

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Can anyone at this point provide a legitimate argument for not grounding this model?

<comment><USER37> A best it's reactionary as we simply don't have enough data. The FAA said it will review once the crash investigation has been completed.

Sometimes clustering occurs, such as Maylasian airlines being shot down and lost in an ocean and never found. We didn't ground the whole airline.

<comment><USER24> It sounds like you're going for a "innocent until proven guilty" approach to the Max's airworthiness, if I'm understanding your comment correctly. That seems opposite to the culture of air safety, where planes are certified airworthy because the data prove them to be so.

I don't think the data prove airworthiness of the Max anymore.

<comment><USER37> However no data that originally certified it as airworthy has changed. All we have is two incidents, one of which we have no information about. For all we know it was a hijacking, or a drunk pilot.

Absurd ideas, however in my mind without any evidence it is equally likely. They have the CVR and I'm sure very shortly we'll know for sure.

If it turns out to be MCAS then we can ground the fleet, the extra day of delay doesn't seem like the highest risk factor.

<comment><USER24> That's not really true. MCAS can not be argued to meet [https://www.risingup.com/fars/info/part25-672-FAR.shtml](https://www.risingup.com/fars/info/part25-672-FAR.shtml), so it's not airworthy. The FAA's allowed them to continue flying anyway while they disclose the problem and workarounds, and deploy a fix which is now very delayed. That's a much more questionable decision now that another flight with similar characteristics has crashed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> > Nor have other civil aviation authorities provided data to us that would > warrant action,

What, except for the data of __the two crashes happening __? The person that wrote this statement is a fucking idiot.

</comment><comment><USER39> >> Thank you for being a patron of the Dallas Morning News. Unfortunately, our site is unavailable to European Union visitors

Please learn some basic geography. Norway (and Switzerland) are not in the EU.

<comment><USER40> GDPR applies to Norway, even if it's not in EU

<comment><USER41> Well, they give same message for Ukraine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Are we grounding MAX yet? Seriously...

<comment><USER43> Sec of Defense is an ex-Boeing man.

<comment><USER24> And on a less individual level, just the MAX order book alone is larger than the market cap of Apple. Boeing is the largest exporter in the US.

<comment><USER44> But how would it help to not grounding the plane in the US if it is grounded pretty much elsewhere? I am pretty sure orders will get canceled or at least postponed over this. And Boeing pretty sure cannot risk another incident.

<comment><USER24> It helps because it influences other authorities and buyers not to do anything drastic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> In order to increase fuel efficiency on the 737 MAX, the engine fan diameter was increased;

       "Premature optimization is the root of all evil" -- Knuth

</comment><comment><USER46> This is insane.

Between this and Tesla Autopilot I'm left speechless.

</comment><comment><USER31> Here are a few links to petitions you can sign to help out and ground boeing:

[https://groundboeing.com](https://groundboeing.com)

[https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/ground- boeing-737-...](https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/ground- boeing-737-max)

[https://www.change.org/p/your-government-ground-the- boeing-7...](https://www.change.org/p/your-government-ground-the- boeing-737-max)

</comment><comment><USER47> More context missing in this news. Southwest certainly was aware of the MCAS issues, they are the only airline having demanded a second AOA sensor to be installed and used, they also changed the UI to display the attack angle.

So they lied. Even if it's safer to fly a SW max than AA.

> A spokesperson for Southwest Airlines told The News that it hasn't received > any reports of issues with MCAS from its pilots, "nor do any of our > thousands of data points from the aircraft indicate any issues with MCAS."

</comment><comment><USER48> Maybe it was scheduled for next sprint?

</comment><comment><USER45> Car manufacturers RECALL defective cars; Why isn't Boeing doing that?

And hope Boeing is NOT simulating [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruise_control](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruise_control)

<comment><USER49> This comment reallly comes off as a procedurally generated combination. Can you rephrase your point another way? I don't think it's even clear what point you are trying to make.

<comment><USER50> that's interesting, their other comment in this thread is also a bit wtf

> In order to increase fuel efficiency on the 737 MAX, the engine fan diameter > was increased;

> "Premature optimization is the root of all evil" \-- Knuth

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Looks like another DC-10 PR disaster in the making.

</comment><comment><USER51> Is it time to buy Boeing put options already?

<comment><USER52> wait until the mounting pressure makes FAA ground the plane, then buy shortly after

<comment><USER51> [https://edition.cnn.com/2019/03/12/investing/boeing-stock- up...](https://edition.cnn.com/2019/03/12/investing/boeing-stock- update/index.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Well guess I'm not flying on 737 Max anymore. Unsafe plane with a terrible record. Should be banned.

</comment><comment><USER54> US media. Why do I need always a VPN from Europe? Beeing GDPR compliant is not rocket science. "Unfortunately, our site is unavailable to European Union visitors... blablabla".

UPDATE: And this news website even detects if I use incognito mode: "To continue reading, please disable private/incognito mode, log in, or enroll as a member" omg

<comment><USER55> Wow, the incognito mode blocking is something I've never seen before. Disgusting. Hopefully Google corrects the bug which they are using to discover the incognito mode status.

<comment><USER56> They are working on that actually, planned to be in Chrome 74 and then enabled by default in Chrome 76.

<comment><USER57> Interesting. Here's an article describing the changes: [https://9to5google.com/2019/02/15/google-chrome-detect- incog...](https://9to5google.com/2019/02/15/google-chrome-detect-incognito/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What programming language do you find the smartest and most efficient? - <AUTHOR> I use JavaScript and python regularly and I am willing to learn a new language that will increase my programming capabilities. What are some good suggestions and why? <comment><USER2> Haskell because of the type system. It's very satisfying to start a change in one location and have the compiler automatically tell you all the other places you need to modify across the whole project to finish the change and practically guarantee that it runs correctly. It's also great to not have to rely on human documentation to learn how to use a library. Looking at the type signatures is enough to learn how to use most of them. The type system also alleviates the need to write many tests.

It's also efficient in that it runs very, very fast thanks to being compiled. The size of the compiled executables can be very small too, when you chose to use dynamic linking of the libraries. Choosing static linking comes with the advantage of not having to worry about installing library dependencies (beyond libc) where-ever you chose to run the resulting executables.

</comment><comment><USER3> Lua. Its main selling points are that it's small, simple to embed and easy to learn. You also won't find many interpreted languages that can even come close to match its speed.

Also multiple returns. I find it hard to believe that nobody else thought of that, but it's just not something any other language has.

<comment><USER4> Golang does multiple returns.

Can also accomplish the same in PHP by returning arrays and using list() syntax as the lvalue.

<comment><USER5> How do Lua and Go differ from returning a tuple in Python?

<comment><USER4> # python, fn() returns tuple

       (college, student, type_ofcollege) = fn()

# php, fn() returns array

       list(college, student, type_ofcollege) = fn()

# go, fn() returns multiple values

       college, student, type_ofcollege := fn()

# lua, fn() returns multiple values

       college, student, type_ofcollege = fn()

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a skills exercise, I'd recommend pure-functional programming with immutable data structures (clojure, elixir, etc). Getting to a point where you "own" recursion and non-mutation will pay dividends in any language.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was looking for that kind of answers,can you elaborate more, with some practical examples, on the rewards someone can get from "mastering" a pure- functional language?

<comment><USER4> Some solutions are easier to express recursively than iteratively--especially in the graph/tree space. Filesystem? Tree. XML/JSON? Tree. Relational database? Graph w/ underlying tree implementation. State machine? Graph.

As for immutability, consider how in languages like javascript, some mental accounting has to take place over what is passed by reference, and what is passed by value. Any error in this accounting can cause big problems. A pure- functional approach really cuts that problem down to size. New values are returned, and parameters are unchanged.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Python is easily the most efficient at getting things done at our shop. Not sure it's the smartest, but we care a lot less about that.

We were a C# shop for a long while, but even with .Net Core and a Windows/azure heavy tech stack Python is just consistently better at getting things into production.

Dynamic types aren't always the greatest though.

</comment><comment><USER7> Golang is a good next step.</comment>


Bedbug bait and trap invented by Simon Fraser University scientists - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bedbug-bait-and-trap-invented-by-simon-fraser-university-scientists-1.2881654 <comment><USER2> I'm surprised blood alone (perhaps heated to body temperature) doesn't attract them.

I expect in the next decade or so, sensors and microrobotics will become good and cheap enough that mechanical pest control will outcompete chemical: finding and squashing the bugs with inhuman reach, patience and thoroughness. Of course the tiny exterma-drones may be pretty creepy-looking, themselves.

I could picture one implementation being a skirt/kill-zone around a bed, such that any bug that feeds is definitively killed before it can return to nesting/breeding spots. So the customer is still the bait... but they quickly win a war of attrition against any local bug population, unless it's being replenished from elsewhere.

<comment><USER3> I'm surprised there haven't been kickstarters for little robotic bug killers yet. The processors and sensors are getting powerful enough, and within the right power band, that the premise of having a stabby little anti-bug device (a small roomba that kills) is within reach.

Of course, then we'll make them larger. And larger. And eventually it will spell our doom.

<comment><USER4> > _Of course, then we 'll make them larger. And larger. And eventually it will > spell our doom._ //

I thought that we'd make them smaller and smaller ... and that will spell our doom.

Perhaps the bug killing squads of nanobots mutate - either by a human introduced [computer] virus or for a more ironic twist from a source that would normally be a DNA mutator (cosmic ray radiation say). The bugs will then hunt out not pathogens but something useful like human nerve cells or white blood cells. Caught in an international crisis - war or famine, you choose - humanity will have it's eyes off the ball until too late.

There must be Sci-Fi of this.

Aside: is there a rule akin to Rule 34, perhaps Rule 0100011, that says no matter how outlandish a distopian future scenario is that it is nonetheless already a feature in the plot of a Sci-Fi work?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We all but wiped out bedbugs in the 40's and 50's using DDT.

I find the short history of DDT fascinating - in two decades, we eliminated Typhus in Europe, went from 2.5 million cases of malaria in Ceylon, Sri Lanka in 1948 to 17 in 1963, we essentially eliminated bed bugs in the US and Canada, wiped most of Dengue fever out out the South Pacific...

Then DDT started getting banned after Silent Spring was published and the environmental movement kicked off. Malaria cases went back up to 2.8 million in Sri Lanka in 1969 and a lot of its effects were reversed. It took longer for bed bugs to come back because they don't spread as quickly as their flying counterparts.

I'm not a scientist in this field and I don't feel like I can comment on the validity of differing studies about the safety of DDT or its ecological effects. However, I think it's undoubtedly true that in many countries, malaria and dengue and typhus and all sorts of diseases were more of a concern than cancer (and still are). DDT saved millions of lives in the short span of time it was used.

To me, this makes the public health questions of the DDT ban incredibly interesting - if you have something that might cause cancer and kill some innocent people but at the same time use it to eliminate disease vectors and probably save more people in the long run, do you keep using it?

<comment><USER6> You make some good points, but you're missing some keys facts about why it was banned and why most people today don't really care that it's banned. This is a good read on the topic: [http://www.worldwatch.org/node/517](http://www.worldwatch.org/node/517)

tldr: DDT is _extremely_ dangerous because it is fat soluble, which means it accumulates up the food chain. It has been linked to all sorts of potential problems, both ecological and to human-health. The question of malaria is moot, mosquitos quickly developed a resistance to it. You can mitigate malaria with other means, such as bednets.

edit: specifically to your point, this is the relevant part (i.e. why it wasn't that controversial):

> The campaign managers knew that in mosquitoes, regular exposure to DDT > tended to produce widespread resistance in four to seven years. Since it > took three years to clear malaria from a human population, that didn't leave > a lot of leeway for the eradication effort. As it turned out, the logistics > simply couldn't be made to work in large, heavily infested areas with high > human populations, poor housing and roads, and generally minimal > infrastructure. In 1969, the campaign was abandoned

<comment><USER7> The WHO continues to endorse the use of DDT in malaria control:

[http://www.who.int/malaria/publications/atoz/who_htm_gmp_201...](http://www.who.int/malaria/publications/atoz/who_htm_gmp_2011/en/)

 _2\. Why is DDT still recommended?

2.1 Efficacy and effectiveness of DDT

DDT has several characteristics that are of particular relevance in malaria vector control. Among the 12 insecticides currently recommended for this intervention, DDT is the one with the longest residual efficacy when sprayed on walls and ceilings (6–12 months depending on dosage and nature of substrate).

In similar conditions, other insecticides have a much shorter residual efficacy (pyrethroids: 3–6 months; organophosphates and carbamates: 2–6 months). Depending on the duration of the transmission season, the use of DDT alternatives might require more than two spray cycles per year, which would be very difficult (if not impossible) to achieve and sustain in most settings.

DDT has a spatial repellency and an irritant effect on malaria vectors that strongly limit human-vector contact. Vector mosquitoes that are not directly killed by DDT are repelled and obliged to feed and rest outdoors, which contributes to effective disease-transmission control._

<comment><USER6> But only for indoor spraying:

> WHO recommends DDT only for indoor residual spraying. Countries can use DDT > for as long as necessary, in the quantity needed, provided that the > guidelines and recommendations of WHO and the Stockholm Convention are all > met...

The article I linked to discusses indoor spraying and supports it. They argue though that the primary use of DDT in Africa has been agricultural spraying, which is why the resistance formed (and which is what most people oppose).

<comment><USER7> You said _why it was banned_ , _The question of malaria is moot_ and _In 1969, the campaign was abandoned_.

It was worth clarifying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How long will it take for the bedbugs to mutate so they are no longer attracted to the trap?

<comment><USER9> Shouldn't it rather be (if I understand Darwin correclty):

How long will it take for the ones that are attracted to the trap to have their population reduced enough so that the ones who are not attracted can spread their genes more efficiently

<comment><USER10> Probably a distinction that is not conversationally useful.

<comment><USER11> I feel like this statement could get used a lot on HN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> These suckers bullied us for thousands of years, but now humankind has this crazy lady on its team so they finally get what they asked for.

</comment><comment><USER13> Such an act of dedication to science how they accomplished "feeding the horde".

</comment><comment><USER14> I wonder if they use the nanostructure of bean leafs [1] to entrap the bedbugs

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/10/science/earth/how-a- leafy-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/10/science/earth/how-a-leafy-folk- remedy-stopped-bedbugs-in-their-tracks.html?_r=0)

</comment><comment><USER15> Relevant HN discussion on the 'itch that nobody can scratch' refered to in a story on Medium: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8769925](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8769925). That story is about Morgellons, for which _some_ explanations refer to the presence of beg bugs or mites.

</comment><comment><USER16> _" Unfortunately, this means Regine Gries is still feeding the bedbug colony every week."_

\-- _Shudders_

<comment><USER17> Approximately 400 bugs in the colony if you do the math. 180k bites, 8 years, fed weekly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> No we cannot just simply erase bedbugs from existence. They are essential evolutionary factor of humans. How shall developers scratch their own itch with no bedbugs?

<comment><USER19> Similarly to mosquitoes, bedbugs serve no nessesary propose in the food chain that couldn't be immediately fulfilled and replaced over-night. Bedbugs could indeed be "erased".

<comment><USER18> You are not a biologist and your mistake is obvious. Mosqitoes larvae are extremely important part of the food chain, especially in lake and river ecosystems. When it comes to bedbugs, the answer is not that obvious. I do not understand people downvoting me. Had they read something about evolution? Bedbugs and humans successfully co-existed for thousands of years. There may be some important perk we shall all miss if we'll just erase them. We just do not know it yet.

<comment><USER20> > Mosqitoes larvae are extremely important part of the food chain, especially > in lake and river ecosystems.

This is less certain that you're letting on;

[http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html](http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html)

> There may be some important perk we shall all miss if we'll just erase them. > We just do not know it yet.

Probably true, but I'd argue whatever it is, it would be better to eliminate mosquitoes and save millions of lives annually if we had the capability.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Meadow in the Ocean with 'Flowers' Everywhere - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2012/12/17/167469845/suddenly-theres-a-meadow-in-the-ocean-with-flowers-everywhere

<comment><USER2> Strangest Weather On Earth: Arctic Blooms! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5Ed9Il2qSw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5Ed9Il2qSw)

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=068AFYvd58E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=068AFYvd58E)</comment>


What is Light anyway? - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/5985559/what-is-light-anyway

<comment><USER2> Light is an example of an electromagnetic field, a field whose carrier particle is the photon. Gravity is a field whose carrier particle is the graviton. In the same way, and generally:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_carrier>

Quote: "In particle physics, quantum field theories such as the Standard Model describe nature in terms of fields. Each field has a complementary description as the set of particles of a particular type. A force between two particles can be described either as the action of a force field generated by one particle on the other, or in terms of the exchange of virtual force carrier particles between them."

And to think --we could learn this in school along with who was president in 1801. The latter is interesting and useful, but the former is very, very interesting and useful.

When I was in school (long ago), at age 12 I wanted to know what made lenses work. I had a bunch of lenses and I was building little microscopes and telescopes, but I wanted to know how glass bent light. No one could tell me. They could tell me who was president in 1801, but nothing scientific or interesting.

Much later I learned that lenses bend light by slowing it down -- the thick part of the lens slows the light more than the edges, and this makes the light converge to a point. How hard is that?

<http://arachnoid.com/example/index.html#Lens_Example></comment>


M, or MUMPS is a procedural language with a built-in NoSQL database - <AUTHOR> https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/m/ <comment><USER2> When you have been working with a language for a long time, it is easy to forget what other languages don't have which the language does have. This is especially true for MUMPS. Most languages don't have a built-in data handler that maintains a memory cache of disk data effectively extending what can be stored to the capacity of your permanent storage. This isn't technically in the requirements for the language, but is expected by the marketplace. When contemporary languages during the 1960's (reaching past the 1980s) expected a programmer to know about disk sectors and blocks of disk, MUMPS programmers always programmed at the abstract level of sparse arrays indexed by strings of characters for multiple dimensions. The only difference between persistent data and temporary data was using a circumflex ^ as a prefix for the persistent names. The "MP" in MUMPS stands for "Multi Programming" which was an ancient way of saying that the language natively supports multiple programs running concurrently (or in parallel). The language met needs that particular niche markets required. Multiple people have to be able to access bank records at the same time, just as multiple people in a medical setting have to be able to access patient records.

There are many other aspects of the language, which I can only touch upon here, atomic transaction processing that obey ACID requirements, hierarchical lock spaces of semaphors for interacting parallel processes, highly compressed data stored on disk, I/O processing, all the standard control flow models, string pattern matching equivalents of regular expressions (but different as they were created decades before the rest of the computing field was actively using them). Exact number operations to at least 15 digits of precision, (which means you don't lose pennies during math -- financial organizations love this) An interactive command line and the ability to construct code on the fly to be executed. There are many many capabilities in the language.

</comment><comment><USER3> The second time the universe slapped me on the face with paulg's Beating the Averages article was a couple years before it was written, when I was introduced to Dataflex 2.x on a Unix machine. It was Rails for the VT-100. If you are interested in Mumps, check that out.

The first time was with Mantis on an IBM 4381, but that's a completely different story.</comment>


Making async programming easier in emacs with macros - <AUTHOR> http://nic.ferrier.me.uk/blog/2011_10/emacs_lisp_is_good_further_reports_suggest

<comment><USER2> I wonder if future versions of Emacs will eventually support some kind of threading. Seems reasonable, considering that 24 is introducing real lexical scope. Just have to make sure that legacy dynamically-scoped code doesn't trip on the threads...

<comment><AUTHOR> as previously discussed here, threads are coming to emacs. there is a long standing effort to introduce them, here's the branch:

<http://bzr.savannah.gnu.org/lh/emacs/concurrency/files></comment></comment>


A question about down-voting comments... - <AUTHOR>

The web developer at my company is against having down-voting on comments after we spent days writing the code because people are using it to express disagreement over statements, and thinks that'll lead to users leaving the site who don't use the product.
I completely disagree.
The argument is that if a liberal posts a comment on a poll on a day when a lot of conservatives use the site, and the conservatives all down-vote his comment, that he might be turned off and not come back.
I find this to be incredulous. If the liberal were to create a poll that was "Obama vs. Ron Paul" and a lot of conservatives were on the site at the time and beat Obama by a few thousand votes (a likely scenario) then he's probably more likely to be turned off than if someone down-voted his comment because they disagreed.
I am really interested in getting everyone else's opinion on the subject of down-voting comments. <comment><USER2> How about something like Slashdot, where you can say why you are downvoting. +/-1 agree/disagree +/-1 thoughtful/usless

"Thank you for your thoughtful comment, but I disagree with your conclusion."

"I agree that 'Palin Rocks' but your comment adds nothing of interest to this discussion."</comment>


Summarising the submissions about HD 164595 - <AUTHOR> There have been a number of these submissions, so here's a summary. <comment><AUTHOR> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12372975](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12372975) : 2 comments

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12376805](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12376805) : 46 comments

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12382550](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12382550) : 1 comment

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12383098](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12383098) : 2 comments

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12384484](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12384484) : 3 comments

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12384837](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12384837)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12387936](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12387936) : 1 comment

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12388093](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12388093) : 3 comments

No doubt there will be more.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=SETI&sort=byDate&dateRange=all...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=SETI&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=164595&sort=byDate&dateRange=a...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=164595&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0)</comment>


Grounch uses the Hunch API to recommend movies for groups of friends - <AUTHOR> http://groun.ch/

<comment><USER2> Seems really useful. One thing I would love to see is a summary of why a certain movie was recommended. Like:

"You and your friends all liked X and Y is very similar."

<comment><USER3> This is a good idea, I'll investigate to see how easy it would be. Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Would love to see a blog post on how you used the Hunch API to recommend stuff (movies or other things) between groups of friends.

<comment><USER3> Hi there, I've cowritten the app. It's quite simple actually, in the API call to get references you can specify a list of ids to get recommendations for.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you deal with high-volume spam? - <AUTHOR>

I'm not talking about a really small site that you can put a captcha on, I mean more of a site like this: http://www.dzone.com/links/queue.html (which is supposed to be targeted to web development).
It is a very high trafficked site and is the target of a what seems like a million spammers, which is obvious given the entire 'new links' section is all garbage.
Their signup process requires a huge amount of information (home address, phone, etc), but that still wouldn't stop anyone from filling in bogus info..
They also moderate the first submission from new users, but that wouldn't stop someone from just submitting a legit first link, and then just submitting spam after their approved.
I just would really like to learn some of the REAL spam techniques that would help in this situation (a site people submit links to), that are a little more involved than just a captcha or some basic device. <comment><USER2> I have no experience with this subject, but clicked through in order to think about how I might want to attack such a problem.

At a glance, it looks like dzone.com there doesn't even try as the new page is full of accounts which shovel in half a dozen or more links per minute. I'd think that some basic means of rate limiting would be a start, a base cooldown which grows if an account continues to bang into it.

From there, further limit and eventually blackhole new links from accounts whose previous submissions fail to gain traction.

I'd also think about how to score the trustworthiness and relationships of accounts to qualify submissions. I'd expect that spam accounts wouldn't spend much time promoting stories other than those of their own network. On the other hand, promotion by a trusty account could indicate that a link and the submitting account is less spammy.

</comment><comment><USER3> One thing I use on a much lower volume site is very simple and looks at the volume of posts people are making, on my site spammers post a _lot_ more than regular people, that lets me automatically flag them and not show their posts to anyone but themselves / other spammers.

</comment><comment><USER4> IMO, I don't mind the 'new links' section. Seems like spam will naturally filter out anyway, since it would probably not get any upvotes.</comment>


Pebble + PagerDuty = PebbleDuty - <AUTHOR> http://blog.pagerduty.com/2013/07/june-hack-day-pebbleduty/

<comment><USER2> Pretty cool, though I'd say the ability to receive alerts is much more useful than sending them.

I'm still waiting for my Pebble but it's great to see people working with the SDK!</comment>


RSS data in JSON format - <AUTHOR> http://scripting.com/stories/2010/10/09/nextStepsInTheFeedhoseProj.html <comment><USER2> It doesn't appear there's any schema for this, which I see as a mistake. The validator he linked to accepts any well-formed JSON at all; it has no idea what valid RSS JSON should look like.

I would have done RSS based on <http://n2.talis.com/wiki/RDF_JSON_Specification>. But then I'm one of those who doesn't understand why RSS moved away from its RDF foundations in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice! XML is overrated, but the definition of RSS is really that it is in XML format. Perhaps it shouldn't be called RSS? Someone should come up with a JSON Schema ( [http://groups.google.com/group/json-schema/web/json- schema-i...](http://groups.google.com/group/json-schema/web/json-schema- implementations) ) for JSON "RSS" feeds.

<comment><USER4> XML isn't overrated, but it is often misunderstood and misused.

Know of any other data formats that allow schemas, validation, and transformation/styling of their content to other formats in a mature implementation independent manner?

If you're just moving bits around, use whatever.

If you're trying to create data interchange standards, XML is a pretty good choice.

<comment><USER3> There are a quite a few problems with XML:

* Few who were coming up with a format/DTD/schema understood the differentiation between placing value data in attribute values vs. element values.

* Element values would sometimes contain whitespace prefix and suffix due to formatting which caused problems with those values in the beginning.

* The optional XML declaration attribute didn't even fit in with the rest of the spirit of the format.

* The wealth of greater-than, less-than, slashes and quotes in the data was unnecessary, and converting from text to compressed format and back barely ever took off.

* The format allowed having one element partially within the scope of another <like><this></like></this> unlike bracket scope notation that would never have had such ambiguitity.

I could go on and on.

Transformation? Michael Kay may have been the man with the bible in the early 2000s, but I think everyone realized by the mid 2000s that XSLT and related XML transformations were a huge seemingly bottomless pit of wasted effort. What is needed was code, and people keep trying to make XSLT handle logic. Think of what those same people could have written in the same time using Java, Ruby, Python, PhP, Javascript. It is mind-boggling the amount of waste that XML and related formats have caused.

Moving bits around? Bits are moving around no matter what format you use. Why not use something that saves typing, and doesn't waste everyone's time?

All that said. XML is out there. I still do SOAP, WSDL, etc. I still mess with SAX and DOM in Java. I write XML services in Ruby and consume them. It is inescapable.

JSON doesn't yet cover all of the bases, but at least it is on a better track. Once people really think about the problems with XML- only then can we really evolve in the way we write and use unformatted human-readable data documents.

<comment><AUTHOR> The only reason I added JSON is so that people could use it in places that you can't use XML.

I wish the designers of JavaScript had been less keen on reinventing things. Yet another format we all have to support. Sigh.

<comment><USER3> While I agree that it is frustrating to worry about offering things in different formats, JSON is not terrible, and it is much more compact while still being human readable. It is only natural that something easier to read and type than XML would suffer a period of overlap with XML, etc.

<comment><USER4> Nobody manually enters all the tags for XML/HTML/SGML - you ought to be using an editor that supports some combination of tag shortcuts, tag completion, Zen Coding, or some other schema-aware entry method.

I'd go nuts too if I had to enter all the tags by hand, if my left index/ring fingers didn't fall off first.

<comment><USER3> The point is that XML, like any format, is not perfect. If you get the chance to transition to using JSON or another well-used less flawed format in the future, why not?

Some clarifications:

* XML's _End_ tags/elements are visual noise and cause additional unnecessary data to need to be stored.

* Greater thans, less thans, and slashes are more visual noise and less intuitive and readable than the brackets, commas, and colons in JSON.

* The fact that you can have values as attributes or as element values has caused confusion since the beginning. Attributes allow 1:1, but schemas can describe 1:1 as element values even though the same element could otherwise appear multiple times and be 1:*. Why should you be wasting time having to decide which to use when you are trying to define a format?

Few bust on XML because they think that would be lunacy, since it is so prevalent. If everyone uses it, it must be better right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been playing with the python dict output by <http://feedparser.org/>, which converts to JSON really nice (once you wrap the time object output). Admittedly schemaless, but it seems to normalize a bunch of different feed formats really well and predictably.</comment>


I Am Community (And So Are You) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.shoutt.me/post/51573499503/i-am-community-and-so-are-you <comment><USER2> Recently back in Bangalore a guy started harassing a family consisting of Mother & daughter by tapping on the door & window @ 1am, 3am in the night. Couple of calls to Police has not solved the mystery yet. It would be nice to have this app to alert the neighbors and nabbing him without a squabble.</comment>


Former Silicon Valley CEO Indicted for Allegedly Defrauding Employees of StartUp - <AUTHOR> https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-silicon-valley-ceo-indicted-allegedly-defrauding-employees-tech-company-start <comment><USER2> > Choi sent a series of individualized emails to WrkRiot's employees stating > that salary payments were forthcoming, and attaching documents purporting to > confirm wire transfers from a U.S.-based bank to the bank accounts of the > recipient WrkRiot employees. In reality, as alleged in the indictment, Choi > sent forged wire transfer confirmations in order to induce WrkRiot employees > to continue working for the company without being paid.

I don't get it. How long can you fool anyone with this? A couple of days at most? And after that you're irrevocably and unquestionably revealed to have lied? How does that help you in any way?

<comment><USER3> If you aren't accustom to receiving wires and most normal people aren't you might not realize they generally only take 1 business day to clear. Scammers often find benefit in areas that aren't commonly well understood.

<comment><USER4> A fair amount of the "clearing" time is usually not spent in clearing but in processing. Eg I don't know how common this is elsewhere, but here most of the banks I've delt with charge you more for a 12h/24H/immediate wire, and their regular service is in the 48h/72h (we're talking guaranteed time here, it's not uncommon for the regular option to be done under 36h).

<comment><USER5> Where is "here"? In the US wire transfers happen the same day as long as you schedule them before the cutoff, otherwise it's next business day. ACH takes longer, but that's not a wire transfer.

<comment><USER6> Which is insane. When I lived in Australia, 10+ years ago, inter bank transfers were settled within 4 hours (often hourly). Intra bank, immediately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This blog post[0] is ostensibly an account from one of their actual employees––considering the fraudulent actions happened on the same dates and both founders sent a fake wire as the account noted; among other shared similarities. Quite vindicating if it is so.

[0] [https://medium.com/startup-grind/i-got-scammed-by-a- silicon-...](https://medium.com/startup-grind/i-got-scammed-by-a-silicon- valley-startup-574ced8acdff)

<comment><USER8> I knew it sounded familiar - glad to see some action taking place, but jail time will not get those employees their money back, and it may prove hard to get any money out of him if he's currently broke.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm so glad that this is the result. I was following this in the days after Penny Kim wrote her story and still don't understand how anyone can be as stupid as Isaac and raise any capital. I guess pedigree matters more to investors than I'd like to believe.

<comment><USER10> Didn't he lie about his pedigree too?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> (somewhat) related story (from last Nov) => "After exposing Silicon Valley scam in viral post, Penny Kim finds new startup home in Dallas" [https://www.dallasnews.com/business/technology/2016/11/24/ex...](https://www.dallasnews.com/business/technology/2016/11/24/exposing- silicon-valley-scam-viral-post-penny-kim-finds-new-startup-home-dallas)

<comment><USER12> Hah, I was thinking of this story when reading the justice.gov page.. They actually put an update on the bottom of the blog with a link to the justice.gov page. Looks like it's the same person.

<comment><USER13> definitely the same person: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/womenatforbesfiles/2016/10/12/p...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/womenatforbesfiles/2016/10/12/penny- kim-the-personal-story-of-deception-hubris-and-the-networks-of-trust-in- silicon-valley/#2aab362f42bf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Listening the the Theranos story I can't figure out why she hasn't been charged.

<comment><USER15> Why is that? Which law did Theranos or their founder break?

<comment><USER16> She made totally false claims about her technology to investors; claiming they were performing tests with their own tech when they were using outside tech. That seems like fraud to me?

The reality is she's too well connected and wealthy to see any jail time, though.

<comment><USER17> Lead investor was a friend of her family if I remember the news correctly. I think there is also some deal to remunerate the investors with more shares in exchange for not filing a civil suit, but that might liquidate the company. Not sure if the SEC has weighed in yet or if there are financial crimes. Maybe.

Maybe there is hope the business can turn around. They have enough cash that they could buy a promising new technology/business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> [https://medium.com/startup-grind/i-got-scammed-by-a- silicon-...](https://medium.com/startup-grind/i-got-scammed-by-a-silicon- valley-startup-574ced8acdff)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> follow-up to this thread [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12379518](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12379518)

<comment><USER19> An article with more backstory: [http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2017/06/08/wrkriot-i...](http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2017/06/08/wrkriot- isaac-choi-indictment.html)

I'm guessing Al Brown, the CTO, is gonna leave this one off his resume. Here's his side of the story, btw [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12382955](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12382955) \-- he claims to have put $200k in. The feds didn't charge him, so presumably he was scammed along with everyone else.

<comment><USER20> Or he turned for immunity.

<comment><USER19> True, I didn't think of that!

Penny's account -- which to be clear I'm not arguing against; just reconciling multiple stories in my head -- made him sound shady, but putting in $200k of his own cash ( _if_ he so did; at this point, I'd want to see wire transfer receipts directly from the bank) is a pretty clear indicator he really was conned too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I remember Kim's story mentioned some H1B's from Asia who seemed stuck. What happened to them?

<comment><USER13> Good question. Hopefully they were able to figure it out. I had bad experience at startups on H1B. On my first day at the job on H1B, in the first 10 minutes I walk into CEO's office and he says the company has 1 month of runway in the bank. Imagine my reaction after I just moved my family to Silicon Valley. It turned out fine for me at the end but after that experience I feel that it's immoral for startups to hire H1Bs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I remember reading about WrkRiot's fall on HN. It doesn't look good for Choi.

I'm feeling sad over it because our justice system is designed to destroy lives, not repair them. I wouldn't wish most prison systems on my worst enemy.

</comment><comment><USER23> I think in twenty years someone is going to write a book about all of the startups out there that raked in the cash, never produced a viable, profit- making product or service, and eventually went bankrupt. There's an excellent article about the startup Tilt[0] and how it just went boom, and then bust. Makes me wonder if at least some of the startups out there know they're vapor but want to ride the gravy train.

[0] [https://www.fastcompany.com/3069164/how-tilt-veered-off- cour...](https://www.fastcompany.com/3069164/how-tilt-veered-off-course)

<comment><USER24> like Crinkl? I mean look at how many companies go public on the Dow without ever showing profitability...Netscape's IPO seems to have created this trend where tech IPOs don't have to be viable businesses

<comment><USER25> What was the photo company that raised 50M before launch, Color?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > The founder and chief executive officer of a now-defunct Silicon Valley > technology start-up company was charged in an indictment unsealed yesterday > in Orange County, California with allegedly defrauding several of his > company's former employees by luring them to join his company based on false > and misleading statements about his educational, professional and financial > background, and by allegedly enticing them to continue working for his > company by providing them with forged documents purportedly reflecting > payments for unpaid salaries.

I experienced something a little like this years ago. It was an awful experience, owing mostly to the fact that I was too young and naive to recognize it quickly and run away.

</comment><comment><USER27> "Isaac Choi, aka Yi Suk Choi, aka Yisuk Choi, aka Yi Suk Chae, aka Isaac Chae, (Choi)"

What is this about?! Do they have a legal obligation to list all his (nick)names?

<comment><USER28> Why would you go by so many different names if you weren't trying to hide something?

<comment><USER29> Though, I think only "Issac" and "Yi Suk" are his names, and others seem to be phonetic variations of his first / last names.

<comment><USER28> That looks like a deliberate attempt to avoid being searchable for, which makes it worse!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> You might expect more of these problems coming to light as this current economic expansion ages and starts to wobble.

</comment><comment><USER31> > An indictment is merely an allegation and all defendants are presumed > innocent unless and until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court > of law.

This verbiage sounds somewhat strange given the evidence they collected, but upon googling, this seems to be the standard clause in FBI indictments.

<comment><USER32> Yep, indicted just means being charged, which generally means a trial to result in a guilt/not-guilty verdict or out-of-court settlement.

<comment><USER33> > _or out-of-court settlement._

You mean a plea bargain? Criminal cases can't be settled out of court. Prosecutors have no authority to sentence a criminal so cannot "settle" in the absence of the judge.</comment></comment></comment>


Elon Musk: "Primary mission on target" - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/565657374128865281

<comment><USER2> I'm as much of an Elon fan as anyone, but scheduling this SpaceX event and the Tesla earnings call coincidentally shows that there's some growth needed in terms of corporate governance.</comment>


Show HN: repher.me, a referral network for tech employees - <AUTHOR> https://repher.me <comment><USER2> Nice easter eggs on inspecting the blurred out School and Linkedin text :-)

\- NoneOfYour School of Business \- linkedin.com/in/stopnosing

<comment><AUTHOR> didn't take long :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice idea!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!</comment></comment>


First side project – personal portfolio / blog - <AUTHOR> https://mariocod.es <comment><AUTHOR> Hello HN!

After 3 years of working as a backend developer, I'm here to share my very first side project. My personal portfolio.

It's written with Jekyll and it started as a github pages test, but almost after a year of constant use I moved it a couple of days ago to Google's Firebase. Mainly because I need to learn to use Google systems.

Please, be gentle as this is my very first solo project that's useful (for me) but any kind of feedback is welcome.</comment>