Switzerland bores underground - <AUTHOR> http://www.revue.ch/en/editions/2016/04/detail/news/detail/News/switzerland-bores-underground/ <comment><USER2> "According to a study conducted under the leadership of the Federal Office for Spatial Development, the new alpine tunnel will hardly relieve any pressure on the roads but instead create new rail traffic, as the newspaper "Der Bund" reports."

Isn't the environmental impact of 1000 people traveling from point A to point B via rail far preferable to than 1000 people making the same journey by car? The quote above seems to imply that rail provides no appreciable environmental benefit, I'm finding that hard to believe.

<comment><USER3> What they're saying is that there will be just as many cars on the road as before and therefore not reducing the environmental impact of the road.

I imagined it to be something like this:

Old:

\- Road: 1000 users

\- Train tunnel: 1000 users

New:

\- Road: 1000 users

\- Train: 2000 users

Although the train is more environmentally friendly than the road, I think the article is saying the impact of adding it is just that more people make the trip rather than the same number of people doing it in a more environmentally friendly way. This is basically the concept of induced demand i.e. build it and they will come.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Am i reading right ? 17b € for a 57km tunnel (on an existing railway, only to flatter trajectory a little) just to save a little time ? That seems expensive..

<comment><USER5> "Just a little" reduction in grade can mean quite a lot. The grade on a typical staircase is about 60%--for every meter of horizontal distance, the staircase rises 60 cm. In terms of hiking, one trail I went downhill had a persistent 30% grade for 1.5km or so, very much to the complaint of my knees. A persistent 10% grade would usually be considered quite strenuous for hiking.

For roads, the maximum permissible grade is lower. The steepest road in the world is about 37% grade; the exit on a highway signed "Truckers: DO NOT USE" was 13% grade. In general, anything above about 5% grade requires excessive grade warning signs.

Railroads have even stricter grade tolerances. The original B&O used "inclined planes" (effectively stationary locomotives providing extra pulling power) to navigate the tortuous 5% grade in Mt. Airy. This was quickly replaced with a 1.5% grade loop and eventually a tunnel (.8% grade). In general, freight railroads like the max grade to be around .5-1%, although mountainous terrain is usually not so forgiving (most of the major passes in the Rocky Mountains run about ~2-2.5% grade). The steeper grades require either extra locomotives to be put on the trains or the weight of the trains to be drastically reduced.

<comment><USER6> I've seen trucks (tractor-trailers) with flames coming from the brakes on 6% grades downhill... and the uphill sides of those the trucks are in low gear at high RPM doing 15-20mph MAX, running at 3-4x the rpm they'd run doing 75 on the highway... people underestimate grade and the effect it has on heavy vehicles

The maximum commercially viable (due to weight restriction) grade for freight railroads is 2.2% ...

<comment><USER5> If you want some hard numbers on why high grade is so problematic:

When you're pulling something along a road or a railtrack on level ground, the primary force you need to overcome is rolling friction, which is proportional to µ×N, where µ is in the range of 0.001 (rail) to 0.01 (road) and N is the normal force against the surface. For a 10 kN car (that's about 1000 kilos), this means that you need a force of about 10 N for a railcar. When you go up an incline, the rolling friction decreases according to the cosine of the angle, but now you need to overcome gravity--and this amount goes up by the sine of the angle. A measly 2% grade requires pulling a force of about 210 N, a factor of 21×.

Basically, grade really kills because you actually have to counteract gravity as opposed to friction.

<comment><USER6> First, thanks! I genuinely appreciate that knowledge, I'd have never looked it up on my own..

Second... why's gravity gotta be such a dick? :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Appears to be down and I couldn't find a cached copy.

</comment><comment><USER8> The original title is "Switzerland bores underground". I'm fine with a different title, but please replace "it's" with "its". Thanks, and sorry for nitpicking.

<comment><USER9> When I saw the title and the domain I knew the title had been changed because no average Swiss would do such a stupid mistake as to get its and it's confused

<comment><USER10> It is indeed a mistake that is almost only made by native English speakers, which is in itself an interesting phenomenon.

<comment><USER11> IMHO it's because you learn your first language spoken first, written after -- and most people learn further languages after they learned writing, so they can learn to differentiate between words that sound similar/same.

<comment><USER12> Perhaps it's because native English speakers more frequently communicate with English-speaking people in an informal setting (where such mistakes happen more often and are copied), whereas non-native speakers tend to read English mostly in edited publications etc. and (more sloppily) communicate with friends in their native language.

<comment><USER9> While it is true that yes, people in general communicate more sloppily in informal settings it doesn't mean they don't know the formal way of writing (at least for common terms)

German dialects are pretty far from the "official" language, but everybody knows that

<comment><USER13> You're assuming its vs it's is always due to lack of knowledge. Sometimes it's just a brainfart.

I noticed today that I had sent an email that used the wrong form of "to" ("too" instead). This isn't because I don't know English. It's just that what came out of my fingers was wrong. Mea culpa, it happens.

The way English uses the apostrophe is especially tedious and offers no value: it'd be no real shame if the distinction between "its" and "it's" disappeared over time, just like English lost gendered nouns and words like thy and thine.

<comment><USER9> Oh brainfarts and autocorrects do happen, but by the frequency I see this mistake happening I see it's not just a regular slip

<comment><USER13> You probably see a lot more English than other languages, so you'll see a proportionally higher number of mistakes too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The amount of traffic they're getting from that Newsletter will look insane on their dashboard.

URL has : ?utm_source=Newsletter42016&utm_medium=E-Mail

<comment><USER7> It would do if the site was up. HN hug of death?

<comment><USER10> It was sluggish, but I did get through.

<comment><USER10> Archive: [http://archive.is/AdZrF](http://archive.is/AdZrF)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Should it be "its" instead of "it's" in the title?

At least that's the way they taught me English in high school (in Italy).

</comment><comment><USER16> It is, is it?

</comment><comment><USER17> ...but above ground, they're killing</comment>


Show HN: Udemy Clone Template built without code - <AUTHOR> https://www.producthunt.com/posts/zeroqode-learning-platform-template <comment><USER2> Hey, thanks for sharing!

I see that this runs on Bubble. What do you think of Bubble? Although I write code for a living, I'm very interested in alternative approaches to software development.

In many ways, I feel like modern development is much harder to learn and is less intuitive than it was 20 years ago using something like VB6.

<comment><USER3> You should also check out Anvil ([https://anvil.works](https://anvil.works)). It's even more like VB than Bubble is: you build the UI with drag-and-drop, then write your code in a Python IDE. (Everything is Python, client-side as well as server - no HTML or JS required.)

This probably makes it less accessible for non-programmers than Bubble, but it does make it more powerful in the hands of someone who can code, and makes it useful for bigger/more complex projects.</comment></comment>


A browser benchmark that has your back: Robohornet - <AUTHOR> http://paulirish.com/2012/a-browser-benchmark-that-has-your-back-robohornet/ <comment><USER2> Oh god, just when web people were starting to understand how to create good benchmarks ([https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2012/08/24/octane- minus...](https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2012/08/24/octane-minus-v8/)), now we're going back to 1980s microbenchmark hell.

Doesn't anyone read Hennessy and Patterson any more? The best benchmarks are real apps, not crappy little microbenchmarks that measure a single thing.

(Can you hear that thud, thud, thud? It's the sound of me beating my head against my desk.)

<comment><USER3> Some of the tests are indeed pretty awful. The canvas clearing test doesn't even draw anything, so it's literally the equivalent of benchmarking an empty for loop...

<comment><USER2> Superb!

Also, they say "The current items that RoboHornet tests captures the major pain points of jQuery, Google Apps, Google Maps, Ember, Handlebars and Cappuccino" but one of the tests is "Calculating primes from 2 to N". Srsly. Hennessy and Patterson specifically mention the Sieve of Erastosthenes (a common prime number finding algorithm) as an example of a bad toy benchmark.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Doesn't run that well on my android phone, since my browser has only 2 modes of pop-up handling: deny all and confirm each.

In firefox-ESR on Win7-64 it seems to get stuck in one of the SVG tests, unless it's supposed to take an extraordinarily long time (I killed it after 15+ minutes).

Neat idea, though. I love having a great go-to benchmark for web, so I have a good baseline for expectations when whipping up mobile sites.

</comment><comment><USER5> <http://www.robohornet.org/> doesn't even load on IE7

</comment><comment><USER6> How do browser benchmarks account for incorrectly drawn or spaced items. Could I write a browser that will ignore everything except the elapsed time measure?

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice to see getters/setters in there. Performance for them is absolutely abysmal in modern runtimes. :(

EDIT: Is it my imagination or is it really difficult to find a link to RobotHornet itself in the OP?

<comment><USER7> Click the large image.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nice idea. It won't run on my iPad 2, though.</comment>


IBM Builds Biggest Data Drive Ever - 120 PB - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/computing/38440/?ref=rss <comment><USER2> That would be a pain to back up.</comment>


Show HN: SQLite ORDER BY RANDOM() frequency tester - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/attogram/random-sqlite-test <comment><AUTHOR> Working demo: [http://fosiper.com/random/sqlite/](http://fosiper.com/random/sqlite/)

<comment><USER2> It is interesting to note the randomness, but shouldn't we avoid "order by rand()" clauses, or is there a good use case?

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8200189/select-random- ro...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8200189/select-random-row-from-sql- using-php/8200193#8200193)

ps, not a php specific question/answer

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, this tester really shows how slow ORDER BY RANDOM() is on larger tables. Because of this, the tester code is now updated with an internal time limit, so it won't overload servers.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why aren't we penalising companies for not contributing to open source? - <AUTHOR> Companies often complain about taxation and various costs of doing business eg salaries. Yet they also use open source software and don't contribute back. A lot are making source code changes and aren't passing them back either. Often in violation of the license (gpl) or even simply the spirit in which they received the code (open source in general).
Why don't we change the social landscape so that companies that don't contribute something back are seen as unethical?
Eg A for-profit organisation providing web services using a host of open source software can afford to support those projects.
The license associated with the project shouldn't matter. Even if it's been released bsd, mit etc and there's no explicit obligation.
Maybe penalising is wrong approach. Perhaps incentivising would be better? Or is this all a bad idea?
Thoughts? <comment><USER2> I don't agree that we should make companies pay for open source or contribute towards it or whatever.

(I'll put the "open source" vs. "free" thing to one side for a minute, but I will assume you mean anything on Github (etc.) with a permissive license and is free of charge.)

Also there is no reason individuals should produce open source code for free. If you want to, then that is fine, but remember you don't have to.

It would be a lot better for developers if fewer people created open source software. Paid software (perhaps with exceptions for destitute people) would be better and more developers could make a living in such a way. The stuff that is good to have open source is the frameworks and toolchains like React and NPM, which big companies can bankroll for PR purposes.

</comment><comment><USER3> It would be unreasonable to expect every company that uses open source software to have a PR accepted for every such software they use.. most companies using open source software are not software companies and don't employ programmers.

It also goes against the spirit of the free software ethos. The end user has the right to use their software as they see fit, which includes not contributing back. If you don't find that acceptable, _write it in the license._ If they violate the license, _sue them._

</comment><comment><USER4> We sort of are. My company does anti-spam and email security for over half the fortune 500 with 3000+ employees. We use FOSS everywhere. We contribute absolutely nothing back afaict.

We are trying to recruit people who use these open source tools/languages and literally no one has ever heard of us. Forget college graduates -- I've been to an industry conference which I think we create, and even there, the majority of people have never heard of us, which is imho an accomplishment.

</comment><comment><USER5> First offenders are governments. There should be provisions for (non-security) software build by the government or publicly-owned corporations to become open source. The UK does some of that i believe.

Private corporations pay taxes, which should be enough to be their fair share. They are not obliged to otherwise contribute back to public infrastructure, even if they use it.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's starting to happen, with things like the recent Redis labs and MongoDB license updates.

But it seems to me there's at least a couple of different categories of "open source" that have quite different backgrounds and motivations.

Things like Linux, Perl, Python, PHP, Apache, all of GNUs code - I guess much of the well known "old-school" open source software - was very much the "some developer 'scratching their own itch'" and then choosing to share their work, with some more or less onerous obligation that others who use it also share their work.

Lately we're hearing about "company backed" open source projects like Redis and Mongo (and I'm not claiming this model hasn't existed for a long time, just that it's making noise in the tech news sphere a lot recently), where there are founders/employees/staff getting paid to work on open source software - which is then being used and significantly monetised by other companies (mostly cloud providers) who are benefiting from the work without needing to give anything back - either time/effort or money.

The first category of projects don't seem to have much problem at all with FAANG or other businesses using their code - either incidentally (Facebook being built on PHP) or directly (every web hosting company and ISP in the world effectively just selling Apache). These projects all wrote or popularised the common/established open source licenses, and they're mostly optimised for how these projects run. Often this is one person of a small core who're either self funded or supported by the business they work for, and a few or a huge number of contributors who are effectively "volunteers", at least from the point of view that they are not looking to be financially compensated for the time they spend on the project by the project itself. They either work on the project in their own time for their own reasons, or they've got agreement with their boss that working on the project is beneficial enough to their business that they can do it on company time.

The second category though, are actually spending money running companies and paying staff - funding it either through selling consulting services, burning VC money, or upselling freemium versions, or whatever else they can think of to bring in revenue. I think this part of the open source eco system is still trying to explore new avenues for generating sustainable revenue to pay for software development while still being "open source". The "old school" licenses were not written with this model in mind, and so are not really working well for some of these projects. For the same sorts of reasons that some of the more permissive old-school licenses spun out from the GPL, giving us things like Perl's Artistic License and the Apache License, these contemporary "business owned/funded open source projects" are experimenting - with more or less success and with more or less publicity backlash - with new licenses or new clauses added to existing licenses.

I think the "penalising users who're not contributing back" isn't the right way to think about how to create a new open source model, even if only because of the negativity inherent in that way of expressing it. I don't though, have a good alternative to offer. I hope somebody hits on a good solution, because I genuinely think it's possible that company-funded projects (like Redis and Mongo for example) might be able to tackle difficult problems in different ways to the "bazaar" model of open source.

</comment><comment><USER7> How do you propose to enforce such laws?</comment>


Systemic Risk of Pandemic via Novel Pathogens-Coronavirus [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5b68a4e4a2772c2a206180a1/t/5e2efaa2ff2cf27efbe8fc91/1580137123173/Systemic_Risk_of_Pandemic_via_Novel_Path.pdf <comment><USER2> "Historically based estimates of spreading rates for pandemics in general, and for the current one in particular, underestimate the rate of spread because of the rapid increases in transportation connectivity over recent years. This means that expectations of the extent of harm are underestimates both because events are inherently fat tailed, and because the tail is becoming fatter as connectivity increases" ...

"Together, these observations lead to the necessity of a precautionary approach to current and potential pandemic outbreaks that must include constraining mobility patterns..."

"It will cost something to reduce mobility in the short term, but to fail do so will eventually cost everything—if not from this event, then one in the future...."</comment>


State Dept.: Clinton IT aide's email archive is lost - <AUTHOR> http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/279233-state-dept-claims-to-have-no-emails-from-clinton-it-aide <comment><USER2> See also the "Bush White House email controversy": [1]

 _> The "gwb43.com" domain name was publicized by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), who sent a letter to Oversight and Government Reform Committee committee chairman Henry A. Waxman requesting an investigation._

 _> Waxman sent a formal warning to the RNC, advising them to retain copies of all emails sent by White House employees. According to Waxman, "in some instances, White House officials were using nongovernmental accounts specifically to avoid creating a record of the communications."_

 _> The Republican National Committee claims to have erased the emails, supposedly making them unavailable for Congressional investigators_

It is hopeless to expect voluntary transparency by the government, there is no incentive to

1) comply with the rules when transparency is clearly detrimental to your backroom deals or

2) to punish the very people that appointed you to your high positioned job or

3) to punish the opponents in the other party when they fail to comply while, after 4 years, the positions can be reversed and you may be in the crosshairs in a similar investigation.

Nothing was done when Bush did it, nothing will be done now that is Hillary doing it and don't expect anything different regardless of what party manage to snag the congress and White House.

If regulatory capture is a significant problem in the private sector imagine inside the government itself. It is hopeless.

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

<comment><USER3> The Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed the initial suits, suing for information related to Hillary Clinton's e-mails. Then they were taken over by Clinton acolyte and hatchet-man David Brock, using his super PAC money. They have since had a, um, strategic restructuring.

Incredibly, this line of inquiry has been dropped by CREW.

<comment><USER4> If you're interested in corruption in government, the CREW story is incredibly interesting. Most of these agencies have internal quality control and feedback systems, notably the Inspectors General.

In many cases these systems are no longer working like they should. NGOs tried taking over that role.

Now we're seeing the NGOs being "strategically restructured"

Who's left? The press? They suck up to whomever is in power. If they don't, they get locked out. SV? All they care about is keeping the money machine going.

I'm looking around and not seeing much of an answer.

<comment><USER5> Perhaps forums like HN and /r/politics genuinely are the best we have.

<comment><USER6> Seriously? The prevailing biases of both, while not making them completely useless, prevent them from being a useful feedback mechanism. /r/politics sure isn't going to hold HRC accountable for an illegal email server. It's _why_ /r/the_donald has become what it is.

<comment><USER7> My general feeling about r/the_donald is that it is a perfect example of Poe's Law [1] driving a feedback cycle of continued irrational extremism. I used to think i had a pretty good eye/ear for spotting subtle sarcasm and trolling, but I honestly haven't been able to tell what is a serious post in that subreddit for months now.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law)

<comment><USER8> I think you may be reading it the wrong way. I've been in their IRC channel a few times - there is very little trolling happening in there, lots of genuine enthusiasm.

..combined with a stated and enforced policy of zero tolerance for public dissent, mostly as a defense mechanism from the divide-and-conquer concern trolls who tend to infest political communities. They characterize it as a "24x7 Trump Rally", and that's exactly what it is.

If you're more interested in the discussion than the echo chamber, there's /r/asktrumpsupporters. You'll find little of value on the main subreddit unless you actually support the guy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Shouldn't they be in the Datto backups? The ones that even Clinton herself didn't know about because they were kept by mistake (and against her orders)? The ones that contain the 30,000+ emails she and her lawyers attempted to delete because they were "personal"? The ones that _still_ haven't been released despite numerous FOIA requests and a lawsuit?

I have a feeling we're only getting one side of this (the State Department's) while the FBI already has these emails. The FBI would have no reason to chime in and tell the public "It's ok, everyone, we have those emails too." And the State Department obviously wouldn't have them since she wasn't using their email system.

I'm 99.99% sure nothing is _missing_ here, it's just not where they expected it to be. Pagliano already struck a deal with the DOJ and appears to be cooperating, which probably isn't a good thing for Clinton.

<comment><USER10> > Pagliano already struck a deal with the DOJ and appears to be cooperating

No, not really - [http://bigstory.ap.org/article/a2bf597d0dec4780af6f8710822ee...](http://bigstory.ap.org/article/a2bf597d0dec4780af6f8710822ee9d7/ex- clinton-staffer-again-says-no-testifying-congress)

Unless he changes his mind again or is compelled to testify...

<comment><USER9> He's cooperating with the FBI and DOJ. Do you really think they'd offer him an immunity deal that allowed him to plead the 5th?

What you're talking about are separate investigations by Senate committees. It's understandable that he has no desire to participate in those dog and pony shows.

<comment><USER11> I may be mistaken, but judicial immunity automatically waives your fifth amendment rights since you can no longer incriminate yourself. I can't really imagine the point otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Can't the FBI just query the NSA's impressive archive?

They don't even need a warrant.

[https://www.aclu.org/doj-report-fbi-activities-under- section...](https://www.aclu.org/doj-report-fbi-activities-under-section-702)

<comment><USER13> Maybe they did and the rest is parallel construction?

<comment><USER14> Parallel destruction?

<comment><USER15> No, parallel construction. That's what law enforcement does when it has illegally gathered proofs: knowing what they're looking for, they figure out another way to "find" it again, but this time through legal and seemingly lucky paths. The later proof is expected to stand in front of a judge, whereas the "real", original one wouldn't. They might also do it to protect a confidential informant.

Essentially, it's to legal proofs what laundering is to money.

<comment><USER16> Daveguy was making a joke with the "parallel destruction". I think he already knows what parallel construction is, but your clarification here is well- placed for those unacquainted with the concept.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Isn't this the least bit fishy? To say that politicians are held to a different standard than the average citizen is in full effect here. Its a HUGE cover up. How is she not in jail yet?

<comment><USER18> You're right, politicians are held to a different standard-- a much more strict one. Clinton had her own private email server set up. I'm sure that many people on this forum can back me up on this one, it's quite legal to set up an SMTP host on your own domain.

The issue is that she was apparently told to use the .gov email address provided to her by her work, and she did this instead.

People have accused her of doing this for various reasons, but personally I don't believe there's evidence to show that she did this for any other reason than wanting to stand out and look special by sending mail from firstname.lastname@example.com, and so that she could use her own BlackBerry.

<comment><USER19> If I told my employer that I refused to use a company email address, they would absolutely be suspicious.

And that's for a lowly developer job dealing with absolutely no classified information.

<comment><USER20> That's not the right analogy. It would be more like if you were a famous business person brought in to be CEO, and wanted to keep using your personal email.

You'd probably still catch some flak but you might have enough power/influence to actually do it whereas if you're employee #42593 of a big company there's no way in hell you're gonna get your way.

<comment><USER19> Oh, I agree that a CEO might get away with it. That doesn't make it right.

Similarly, Clinton will probably get away with it. That doesn't excuse her behavior though. Might does not make right.

<comment><USER20> You're absolutely right. I think a lot of people who get to the top in politics or business have an extremely high level of confidence and determination, but sometimes that turns into arrogance and a disdain for rules. Clinton is one of those people that I think has an attitude of 'rules are for little people'.

Hopefully she'll keep that character flaw in check as president, but I wouldn't be surprised if she didn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have a feeling that this case is going to be studied for years no matter how it turns out.

In ethics the appearance of impropriety is generally considered enough to be a breach. I _think_ most independent observers would admit that there's plenty of bad-looking stuff here, however with the election season in full swing I could be wrong.

More interesting, I imagine, is the legal maneuverings going on. Assuming that something went way wrong here, and please enough with the clintonesque _tu quoque_ arguments, it's fascinating comparing what happened to the witnesses after the investigation was launched here compared to, say, aaronsw.

In Aaron's case, a school set up a camera and caught him accessing files he shouldn't. In the Clinton case, scads of sensitive emails were sent all over the internet from a server that shouldn't be handling them.

The difference in evidence here looks astounding, especially if you know something about email.

In the first case, a lone prosecutor is able to use the full force and weight of the U.S. government to harass and threaten. There's a small number of people involved, limited resources, and lots of press.

In the second case, over a hundred FBI agents are working hard night and day, one supposes, but evidence goes missing, hard drives which need to be in evidence are instead sent to secure destruction facilities, and we can't even seem to be able to to locate low-value secondary information. Press consists of lots of pieces slanted against the government's case.

My money says nothing comes of this. I'd give 50-50 odds that in some fashion it's tossed to the Congress to consider impeachment, and of course that'll never happen.

There are a lot more incredible contrasts between these cases. I hesitate to mention them due to folks getting upset about their political candidate not looking so good.

<comment><USER16> _"...over a hundred FBI agents are working hard night and day, one supposes..."_

NBC says there are _12_ FBI agents working on the case:

[http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/fed-source- about-12-fbi-...](http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/fed-source-about-12-fbi- agents-working-clinton-email-inquiry-n548026)

titled

"Fed Source: About 12 FBI Agents Working on Clinton Email Inquiry".

Undoubtedly they are a hand-picked group (although whose hand did the picking, I don't know).

Furthermore I fear that FBI agent Comey is in Clinton's pocket/corner. Comey gave Hillary Clinton a bye in the Whitewater investigation:

[http://www.westernjournalism.com/wow-something- from-20-years...](http://www.westernjournalism.com/wow-something- from-20-years-ago-is-a-major-clue-about-what-fbi-will-do-to-hillary/)

Comey has done well in his career in the years since Whitewater.

<comment><USER4> I must be repeating what I heard in March.

"Official: FBI team on Clinton email probe not near 150" [http://www.politico.com/story/2016/03/how-many-fbi-agents- hi...](http://www.politico.com/story/2016/03/how-many-fbi-agents-hillary- clinton-email-221299)

The Washington Post reports "dozens" [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- fix/wp/2016/03/28/th...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- fix/wp/2016/03/28/there-are-147-fbi-agents-involved-in-the-hillary-clinton- email-investigation/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I still don't understand how someone who is being investigated by the FBI can run for President of the United States and have this be perceived as a non issue.

<comment><USER22> Welcome to the circus that is the 2016 Presidential Election. She's running against "The Donald" ffs! The whole thing is just disgusting, top to bottom.

<comment><USER21> Ha! Yes, it is disgusting. Can you imagine applying for a job and the employer finds out that you are being investigated by the FBI. I would imagine that there would be some questions/concerns about hiring you. You can't just brush it off and say "Oh that, don't worry about that."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The RNC also said they have no text messages or blackberry messages sent to or form Clinton during her time in office lol the state department declined to discuss that, isn't that nice.

"In addition to the emails, the State Department also does not have any text messages or BlackBerry Messenger messages sent to or from Clinton during her time in office, the RNC claimed. The State Department declined to discuss that declaration."

</comment><comment><USER24> Audit-ability is essential to accountability is essential to effective government -- in our case, a democracy (well, ok, a republic).

Failure to provide for this should be considered outright failure in one's job. Failure to serve a fundamental tenant of our form of government.

To the extent it is define as a crime by our laws, it should be fully prosecuted.

In the private sector, I've cleaned up far too many ill-defined, ill- documented messes. Private or public, these things end up being and serving gross dereliction of duty. I've seen it over and over.

<comment><USER25> The counter perspective to this is that Hillary's privately managed server has better audit-ability (and could be interpreted to higher security standards) than government IT.

The big "flaw" that I see in this "crisis" is the assumption that government servers (which have knowingly and publicly been hacked: OPM - or have leaks: Snowden) are somehow more secure than a given private server. And we can all probably find both a government and private website that doesn't use TLS/SSL, SPF, or authenticated SMTP.

<comment><USER24> Thank you. I, for one, don't assume government server configuration and management is necessarily better.

Another thing that bothers me about Clinton, is that years after Manning's leaks (which I do not condemn, personally), word was/is that State's document / information systems situation is as messed up and deficient as ever.

They had a "big problem", by their own definition and rhetoric. Yet, years later -- years under her watch -- apparently nothing substantial has been fixed. (I may be wrong on this, but it's the latest that I recall reading on the matter.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> They don't have a PST archive, but they still have at least some of his emails. FTA:

> "The absence of this email file, however, does not indicate that the > department has no emails sent or received by him," she added. "In fact, we > have previously produced through [the Freedom of Information Act] and to > Congress emails sent and received by Mr. Pagliano during Secretary Clinton's > tenure."

</comment><comment><USER27> Makes me wonder whether NSA is seriously involved. If they were to have vacuumed up and provided all these deleted emails to the FBI in the course of this investigation, that will have been the absolutely most benevolent application of broad surveillance powers I can think of.

<comment><USER28> The NSA quietly and illegally helping an investigation into a presidential candidate in an election year is pretty much the antithesis of benevolence, regardless of what you think of Hillary. That kind of activity is basically worst-case scenario, war-on-democracy level stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Let's hope the Hacker that claims he got in has a backup and can supply it to the FBI.

</comment><comment><USER30> Obstruction of justice anyone? Ooops, wrong caste!

</comment><comment><USER31> No coverups here at all.

<comment><USER32> Move along, _citizen_.

<comment><USER33> And pick up that can while you're at it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> If there are emails that were deleted in a .pst file, they are (or at least were back when I was a MS desktop admin 8ish years ago) entirely recoverable by remapping the index at the head of the file (i.e. the messages are "soft- deleted")...should be a piece of cake to recover...

</comment><comment><USER35> It increasingly seems that they knew what they were doing since the beginning when they decided to use the private server rather it being a mistake/oversight. One can just hope this drama gets over before the convention.

</comment><comment><USER36> NSA should have a copy...

</comment><comment><USER37> .pst? Microsoft Outlook? Really? Wasn't that software package very exploitable in the 08-12 timeframe? It seems likely the server was some version of Exchange.

Why would anybody in her right mind -- not to mention a powerful and visible government official -- operate her own email server?

In that timeframe there were several SaaS email providers that were very secure. A couple were even certified as HIPAA Associated Business Entities (for certain limited use cases). That's a high standard of security.

It's not hard to believe that servers for staff use operated by a department of the US federal government were ancient, poorly maintained, and vulnerable. It's almost certain they had unreasonable usage limitations. "Sorry, your mailbox contains 24 / 25 megabytes so it's almost full." Plus, they probably thought they were cool because they had a T1.

But why couldn't a powerful person like Secretary Clinton figure out how to contract with a competent SaaS? I bet the big email provider on Amphitheater Road would have jumped at this project.

Finally, how come nobody involved in this cluster __*k has ever answered the question "why?"

<comment><USER25> > In that timeframe there were several SaaS email providers that were very > secure. A couple were even certified as HIPAA Associated Business Entities > (for certain limited use cases). That's a high standard of security.

Thank you for saying this.

In this crises we're comparing a government IT department that can't keep audit logs via .pst, imap, or exchange and comparing it to a non-cloud provided private email server.

Both should be considered inept in 2008 and certainly now. Unfortunately, the assumption is that the government IT is somehow trustworthy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I'd look at the same place where those IRS email backups are. Ask Lois Lerner.

</comment><comment><USER39> After the Microsoft anti-trust trial, people started to realize just how much information there was in an email history log. Later trials just hammered it home.

In response, everyone added a chapter to their document retention policy to cover emails. Emails are typically kept for 1 year, with exceptions for specific named individuals (CEO, Member of Parliament, Senator, Secretary of State, you get the idea). Secretary of State's retention period seems to be 30 years [3].

Individuals would be able to mark a document to be kept, but that's the exception rather than the rule.

As soon as a court case where a person is mentioned starts, that person's documents are typically retained regardless of schedule - destroying docs that might be material is really frowned upon by the courts.

All of this is typically mediated by a custom document retention server which costs a lot of money.

The state department has a document retention policy [1], and I think this section [2] covers email. It lists retention at TEMPORARY:

      Transitory Files (including in electronic form)
      TEMPORARY: Destroy immediately, or when no longer needed for reference, or
      according to a predetermined time period or business rule (e.g., implementing the
      auto-delete feature of electronic mail systems).

There might be something specific, but they all seem to be 1-2 years.

With that in mind, let's look at this specific situation. The controversy started in March 2015. That puts Feb 2013 - the date the RNC is saying marks the end of the period they want revealed, outside of the document retention window (Controvery Start - 2 years).

However, once asked you have to _search_ for a record. So the State Department would have searched through backups, there may be an old tape sitting around containing a backup of his personal computer. Nope, they couldn't find a copy of the PST (Microsoft Exchange or Outlook!). They would have found emails that he was party to where the other person was on a longer retention schedule.

They may still find others if he sent emails to departments that don't have retention policies.

Since this is a government department, all of this is defined by statute - it's up to Congress to set the time periods. If they want it changed, they need to pass a bill and then fund it because document retention is expensive (think format conversion).

Finally, I understand that finance companies (stock traders) have additional retention requirements, even covering chat/SMS/etc messages.

There is no cover up here, just proper application of good policy.

[1] [https://foia.state.gov/Learn/RecordsDisposition.aspx](https://foia.state.gov/Learn/RecordsDisposition.aspx)

[2] [https://foia.state.gov/_docs/RecordsDisposition/A-03.pdf](https://foia.state.gov/_docs/RecordsDisposition/A-03.pdf)

[3] [https://foia.state.gov/_docs/RecordsDisposition/A-01.pdf](https://foia.state.gov/_docs/RecordsDisposition/A-01.pdf)

</comment><comment> jonny-bravo "Lost"

</comment><comment><USER40> Oh just give this nonsense up.

WTF are y'all hoping to find? Seriously.

If you have issues with Hillary there are plenty of policy issues you could attack and at least I'd respect your right to argument.

</comment><comment><USER41> Maybe Lois Lerner has it?

</comment><comment><USER42> Well, that's convenient!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Huh.

<comment><USER43> >The State Department has lost all archived copies of the emails sent to and from the man believed to have set up and maintained Hillary Clinton's private email server during the four years she served as secretary.</comment></comment>


DataMexico: Explore, Visualize and Download Mexican Public Data - <AUTHOR> https://datamexico.org/ <comment><USER2> Really full of data!

</comment><comment><USER3> Wohoo! What a site!</comment>


Ask HN: Is knowing English a prerequisite for being a software engineer? - <AUTHOR> Languages, libraries, and frameworks are pretty much all open source. Is there anyone out there translating docs? Can you write JavaScript or Python or something using Japanese or Cyrillic characters? <comment><USER2> Imagine you'd asked "Is knowing how to sight read music a prerequisite for being a musician?".

You can make music without knowing how to read a score. You can perhaps even make a good living from it - many musicians you know and perhaps are a fan of have never learned how to read a score.

But you're not going to get a job working for somebody else to produce music, who will expect you to use the lingua franca of music: the score.

If you plan to be the Michael Jackson, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix or Kanye West of software - producing your own thing and expecting others to fit in around you - do your thing.

But if you want to do the equivalent of join a band or an orchestra, well...

The largest employers of software engineers, the highest salaries and the most interesting work right now, all require you to communicate well in English.

The early Ruby community was a self-contained ecosystem conducted entirely in Japanese. It seems to have stumbled along for a few years and only got traction when it became accessible to English speakers.

You can write your own code in any language you want - UTF-8 is widespread and non-Latin character sets are accepted in several language interpreters/compilers/transpilers. You will get work without speaking English, I'm sure.

However it will be a struggle compared to those who know English. It will mean your income is capped _unless_ you become a breakout start (and the odds are stacked against you). It will mean you might not get to reach all of your potential if you're treating this as a career.

It's your choice, nobody will force you, but the benefits of knowing English are considerable, not just for this career but in business in general.

<comment><USER3> 99% of the people who play in bands have no idea how to read a score, let alone sight read.

<comment><USER4> If they want to get hired for playing with someone else they still need to communicate using a common language with those they are working with. For someone asked to be a guitarist on a tour that's likely a combination of verbal communication, sheets with tabs or chords etc. I'd say most people playing _claviature_ in bands probably read musical notation, but guitarists, drummers etc just don't have the same need (so many pop/rock acts simply have no need).

The thing with notation in scores is that it's nearly a complete mysucal description; someone given a score could play in a orchestra without sharing any other language.

For programming there is no other way of communicating than a shared verbal language. A team can easily use any language but it needs to be a _common_ language.

Tooling and documentation will also most likely be in English. So while it's possible in some parts of the world to software development without knowing English, it's clearly a handicap.

We use English for communication even though we have another shared first language.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> No it's not a prerequisite. When I started programming I didn't know English, and it didn't matter.

I actually learned the meaning of some words in English because I knew them from programming.

One example is while (mentre in Italian), I knew the difference between a do/while vs a while loop in C, and that helped me with the meaning/use of while in the spoken language.

From time to time I discover that some words have a meaning in English, other than tech. For example ping, I thought for many years it was just a network command. In Italian we "Italianize" many words, for example I often say "pingare" (to ping), that has no meaning in my mother tongue, so often I don't think it has to have a meaning in other languages as well.

As for typing in non-latin alphabets I don't know. My 2 cents on the topic are that I buy US keyboards and set international layout to be able to type letters with accents (needed in Italian) vs I hate Italian layout with accents but no parenthesis for programming. So my guess would be no: you need a US keyboard and thus alphabet to program.

<comment><USER6> My case: I'm from Spain and I was 6 years old with a Commodore VIC-20: just "setup" papers were translated, the BASIC manual was in English, so you had to read English without really knowing the language. Those days I was years away of English classes from the National Education System.

I would say that we "latinos", including Italians, tend to "latinize" words like "ping", in my case "pingear" (to ping) in Spanish.

<comment><USER7> Yes! We do it all the time, even more often than necessary. Like, you could say "Set foo to 0" as "Setta foo a zero" and IT people will understand you, although "settare" is not even a verb (the correct translation would be "impostare")

<comment><USER8> Settare is an Italian verb: [https://www.garzantilinguistica.it/ricerca/?q=settare](https://www.garzantilinguistica.it/ricerca/?q=settare)

[http://www.treccani.it/vocabolario/settare/](http://www.treccani.it/vocabolario/settare/)

It has been derived from the equivalent English verb, but nowadays it is a real Italian world.

"Mouse" is another word borrowed from English while in Spanish for example it's called "Raton". In Italian you will never find anyone calling it "Topo".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> You can use unicode characters in identifiers in many modern languages including JavaScript and Python. So you can write _your own code_ in whatever languages you like. You could learn the meaning of language keywords without knowing English. But all libraries are still in English, so I would say it would be almost impossible to become a productive developer without being able to read technical English. (Which to be fair is not the same as to be able to speak fluently, and is much easier to pick up on your own without access to teachers or other English-speakers.)

A few programming languages like "turtle" have been translated to many human languages because they are intended for the education of children. I know VisualBasic for Office also have some translated version (and translated documentation). There are some other historical examples. But I don't know of any mainstream general purpose language where this is the case.

I know of some workplaces which wrote all their own code in the local language - but standard and third-party libraries were still in English of course, so you needed to understand English anyway.

So I will say you can _learn_ to program without knowing English, but you will not be able to be a professional developer, except in some niche areas.

</comment><comment><USER10> My comment is all speculation

\---

I have always assumed that you can need to know either English or Chinese to be a software developer.

Mainly because the bulk of resources are in English, except China which has a large enough population that it can sustain it's own ecosystem internally.

I think the smaller your country is, and the software engineer population within it, the more you need to rely on English. E.g. I could see Russia and Japan having non-english speaking software developers, they have relatively small populations (<150M) but seemingly a lot of tech stuff going on.

You can also see which languages technology blogs / documentation are usually translated too. Which is usually Chinese, Japanese, Russian. Unless I'm wrong, because I can't point to any examples off of the top of my head.

</comment><comment><USER11> Absolutely yes. Virtually every relevant and up-to-date resource out there is in English. Stack Overflow, GitHub repos, documentation, official specifications, technical articles, tutorials and blog posts, podcasts, videos. English is the lingua franca of the community. You need to be able to: A. Read and understand an enormous amount of written material on complex matters in English with no more effort than you'd expend reading in your mother tongue and B. Produce clear, concise and elegant prose in order to engage with the community (not to mention your coworkers!), learn and exchange ideas.

I could hardly take seriously a software developer (or scientist, researcher, teacher for that matter) who has poor English.

</comment><comment><USER12> I am not a native English speaker and a professional developer. My advice is get good at English and write your software in English.

Not only is all technical documentation in English and speaking English will give you access to the whole world in terms of jobs. But software in general is better written in English. English has well-established and broadly shared naming conventions other languages simply do not have.

Occasionally I see software written in Danish and generally it is a mess. How do you break words? What do you name collections? What about the terms that are used to structure the overall application (service, repository, factory etc.)? Is it Leveringsadresse, LeveringsAdresse, LeveringAdresse? Or what about leveringsadresser, leveringsadresseListe or maybe leveringAdresseList?

While the corresponding naming in English is clear to any programmer: DeliveryAddress, deliveryAddresses.

</comment><comment><USER13> Yes, you can write code in different langugages and alphabets, in most modern programming language, but you shouldn't. If you do open source, then using Albanian variable names will limit the amount of people able to contribute and utilise your project. For inhouse code, you restrict you employer to hiring within a limitted pool of candidates. If you're in China or Japan that might not matter, in the EU that's just hurting your business.

I know that many will say that English isn't required, but I can't imagine how hard I would make my job if I only spoke Danish. The ability to read almost any English text is In my mind an absolute must en the field of computers and software, you simply can't keep up otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER14> An interesting point about programming is that so much of it comes down to thinking of names. I found this article by a Russian native about programming and naming things rather fascinating:

[https://temochka.com/blog/posts/2017/06/28/the-language- of-p...](https://temochka.com/blog/posts/2017/06/28/the-language-of- programming.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> You might get more correct answers if you ask on a non-English speaking forum. I imagine there are plenty of developers in Russia and China who don't speak English. We often hire remote developers on Upwork and many can't speak (orally) English.

<comment><USER16> Not being able to speak English is very different from not being able to read it, in my experience. I know multiple people in that situation, and I'm the same with French.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It depends where you live and what company you work for. I have been working in Spain for some years and only a few of my peers spoke English comfortably (I'm German). But you limit your options without it. I would not be able to hire you if you don't have at least a basic grasp of English (you can participate in our online meetings that are held in English, and you can read and write somewhat fluently).

</comment><comment><USER18> Yes, if you want to become a good software developer.

<comment><USER19> More specifically, I think it's needed to be efficient.

Sure you can get things done in some other languages and become good at it, but being used to read source code written for an english speaking audience, read english docs and browse english Q&A sites and forums makes a huge difference from my own experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Yes, knowing English enough to read/understand the latest books in your field and being able to look up solutions online is absolutely necessary.

While I don't recommend it, you can definitely use Japanese and Cyrillic characters in Unicode compatible languages. There are people out there translating docs of popular libraries. Heck, even 3rd rate Blender books get translated into Japanese but they rarely make it into stores before the version used is already out of date.

<comment><USER21> I don't have any numbers, but I'm inclined to claim that in any reasonably large economy there's tons of software engineering (or maybe programmer) jobs where you will never touch anything "latest" :)

In Germany there are quite some developers whose English is very basic (very often older than 40 or 50) and especially those who grew up in the East (some or most had Russian in school and not English). I mean, usually it's not -zero- but really basic on a reading level, even less writing. I'm not in any way saying they're bad at what they do - if you work in some fields you can absolutely get by just sticking to German variable names (or guesswork English) and those 50 keywords of your language aren't usually a problem. For looking stuff up online there's google translate.

On the other hand I would not -advise- against trying to be the best at English that you can, because if you happen to need to read some complicated stuff like advanced books or papers.. Let's just say I wouldn't look forward to reading even anything medium-level in another language where I only have basic proficiency...

Fun fact: I've actually seen one codebase where all the domain knowledge was German and everything "normal" was English - and it was the right thing to do. Was an application for a bank and they had a technical Glossary with obscure financial technical terms where a) the meaning might get lost in the translation and b) not even the domain experts would know them off the back of the hand. Also the chance you'll have international people working on this intra-country level stuff was deemed very slim. Not sure if the bank got bought by an int'l one later though :P

<comment><USER20> You actually describe my day job pretty accurately. SAP based legacy systems where everything from system variables to customer codebase is this weird mix of English and German. Strict project guidelines and code review sessions can only catch part of this mess before it's rolled into production.

We have junior devs come and go that simply look problems up online, because they are able to translate their questions into proper English, that the senior German-only devs would spend days trying to work out by themselves. Or they somehow find the same solutions online but can't make sense of what Google Translate spits out for them. It's equally hilarious and sad to see a junior dev being used as a seniors LetMeGoogleThatForYou.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Not knowing English in software engineering is the same as living in the USA not knowing English or flying airplanes not knowing English. It might be possible, but it leaves you with a lot pf restrictions and a very small community. Personally, I got fluent in English by reading a lot of manuals and documents when I learned programming in the 90s where I had no internet and thus no way to connect to other German developers.

</comment><comment><USER23> Yes, if you want to actually work with teams in the wilder world. English is the lingua franca of effectively all major programming languages. North American teams, EU teams, and Indian teams are all on English by default.

I'm not totally sure how worthwhile supporting internationalisation really is. Localization is a bitch, and doing things in ISO formats as far as possible is best anyway.

</comment><comment><USER24> Some languages (for exemple Golang) allow you to use any utf8 symbols in your code, so you can name your variables in Russian, for example - [https://play.golang.org/p/oWs6mc-JOpI](https://play.golang.org/p/oWs6mc-JOpI)

There is a russian platform 1C:Enterprise that has it's own scripting language that uses syntax similar to Visual Basic and Cyrillic characters too.

You can develop your own language that can allow you to write in Church Slavonic if you wish so: [https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/ibigdan/8161099/4947638/4947...](https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/ibigdan/8161099/4947638/4947638_original.jpg)

But the thing is - we write in english because it's a defacto standart right now.

Is it a prerequisite for being a software engineer? No. Is it a prerequisite for when you decide to work with an international team or contribute to an opensource project? Pretty much yeah.

<comment><USER25> Ugh, I worked in a code base that had a lot of Cyrillic characters and the code base got moved to our (English language) team. It was difficult to work out what was going on and with a lot of Google translate we ended up with an English code base. Another interesting thing that happened once was that a German team had a comment with an umlaut in it that would crash certain code/text editors. It took them a long time to figure out what was happening.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> No, absolutely not. Many Germans, Japanese, Chinese, French, ... knew terrible English in the early days, and translations from English to their native language were very common. They were still very good engineers, just their comments were hard to understand for others.

Nowadays it's a business requirement but you still would find a job.

Many languages do support unicode in strings and identifiers, but almost none of them get them right. It's a security risk. I only know of java and cperl with unicode identifiers following the unicode security recommendations. Eg with Cyrillic you'd need to forbid Greek but almost nobody does so.

Also the various libc's cannot handle unicode strings properly, eg it will be hard to use grep or git grep in such a project. So better use english.

</comment><comment><USER27> As a non-native speaker I would say it is absolutely necessary. You can get through university without it and you can probably get a job in your country without it but you really shouldn't. Never ever write code in non-English. I hate it when programming is tough with localized variable names etc. Just imagine a coworker from another country being stuck with your codebase with all non-English words in it...it's a nightmare.

Also the best tutorials, books etc. are in English and the most new content is released in English as well. Going a step further if you are interested in NLP it's very likely that more interesting datasets will be available in English. State of the art academic research (new algorithms etc.) will also very likely be published in English.

</comment><comment><USER28> Yes.

This is a problem we have in France and Germany where the law requires you to have everything relevant in the native language. While I love my language, I find this particularly dumb because we are just making it difficult for us to get up to speed.

I know some engineers who do not speak English (or their English is poor) and they always yell when there is a mail or documentation in English. They are also whimpering of never being promoted. I think they expect our customers to work French to accommodate them.

Software engineering is in English, this is a fact of life and there is no other choice to speak of if you want to progress.

</comment><comment><USER29> Speaking of using non-ASCII and non-English names in program, I'd suggest not to use them. People who don't know the alphabet/language will understand literally nothing; it's much better to use English names.

</comment><comment><USER30> There's loads of non-English documentation, open source and otherwise. The quality is usually not bad. Like everyone says, many languages let you put Unicode in identifiers. I've never actually seen anyone do that. I've seen Unicode in comments, or foreign words romanized to [A-Za-z] for identifiers.

For a high-end customer-facing role involving complex business logic, you probably need something close to native ability. I've seen (and hired) lots of developers with B2 or worse English doing mathematical stuff. Their language skills were an impediment, but not a serious one.

</comment><comment><USER31> That question is asked to an English programming community - mainly western- ish - , the answer is therefore going to be heavily biased towards it.

I'm sure there are many non English programming communities, but somehow the pieces that are used to build the syntax of a programming language are mostly English (with a few rare exception)

So I don't think you _need_ it, I think you need to speak the language of your closest programming community (mandarin, french whatever) and you'll happen to use English keywords.

</comment><comment><USER32> I work in Japan and most of my coworkers speak next to no English. I also see them mostly googling in Japanese to find answers to questions, or searching on popular Japanese-based websites (qiita, hatenablog).

A lot of the popular frameworks have community maintained, up to date docs, at least in the stack we are using (Ruby, RoR, Vue.js, and Jest all have good translations, and tons of non-English resources).

I have never seen anyone writing actual code using non-English characters, but usually comments are in Japanese.

</comment><comment><USER33> To anyone that this question would apply: just learn it. You don't have to do it, but it will make your life way easier, even counting the effort needed to learn it.

</comment><comment><USER34> For the time being, yes. I'm from Algiers, Algeria. We switch between three languages at the office (Algerian, French, and English) but the documentation, issues, comments, commit messages, mails, charting/architecture/naming, data, etc. are in English.

We all understand and use the three languages (some of us use a fourth) but we still, for some reason, use English for all the above.

Slack conversations are 99% in French.

</comment><comment><USER35> There seems to be a burgeoning Chinese open source community with many go projects and a few rust projects. They don't always translate things to English.

</comment><comment><USER36> I know a program language that can be written in Korean. It only needs 'Hangul' to program. However, it is not used very much and requires knowledge of basic computers. link is here [https://aheui.github.io/specification.en](https://aheui.github.io/specification.en)

</comment><comment><USER37> From my experience in Japan and C# Unity. Japanese don't know English well to be able to communicate. But they're still good at coding. My mentor didn't know any English but he bought English books and looked at the code rather than reading it. People who don't know English can do the job but communication would be a problem.

</comment><comment><USER38> Yeah, English is the biggest standing in the way that being a software engineer. e.g. If you are not Enligsh as mother language, you can't smoothly read doc writed in English. But many docs and papers write with English in the world. Furthermore, Possiblely you couldn't my words above. Because I am non- English :<

</comment><comment><USER39> I can tell that things became muuuuch easier as soon as I was able to switch from Russian to English while looking for docs and help. There are simply so much more information on various topics. I dunno about Chinese though, with more than 1 billion people the community might be at least as vibrant as English speaking one.

</comment><comment><USER40> Well, when you type "If, for, foreach, switch, GoTo, Resume, Continue, Break..." you are already using English so I would say that if you are able to code, then you are capable of at least, understand a basic level of English (which translates into English being a requirement to even start to code).

</comment><comment><USER41> No, knowing English is not required to be a software engineer. There are millions of software engineers around the world, a large percentage of which do not know english. Virtually all modern languages and tools support UTF-8 which can encode almost all symbols of all languages.

</comment><comment><USER42> English required to be a software engineer? Of course not. But it helps a lot to understand many resources online and it benefits everyone if you can contribute to a larger community (asking/answering stackoverflow posts, using/creating open source software, etc.).

</comment><comment><USER43> Cutting-edge technology might be hard to learn without English. With more conservative technologies it should be possible. I know developers who's not fluent in English and prefers local resources whenever possible, so it's definitely not a prerequisite.

</comment><comment><USER44> I read once 'the most important language for a progammer to learn isn't a programming language, but English'.

Easy for me to say being born in the US, but it's just kinda how it is. Especially if you want to contribute to open source, etc

</comment><comment><USER45> You don't really need to speak English, having some vague basic notion of English is more than enough, I did not know English when I started and it wasn't blocking me much.

</comment><comment><USER46> > Can you write JavaScript or Python or something using Japanese or Cyrillic > characters?

I believe identifiers in those languages have to be ascii characters but I'm not 100% sure. Go however allows any valid unicode character for variable names. The rest of the language is in English though.

Valid Go w/ variable in Japanese: [https://goplay.space/#whU6ErYq_wR](https://goplay.space/#whU6ErYq_wR)

<comment><USER47> JavaScript identifiers can be emoji, I think. This is also valid JavaScript (you can test it by pasting it into your console):

      let ಠ_ಠ = "Hello, world!";
      alert(ಠ_ಠ);

Some more examples: [https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/javascript- identifiers#exampl...](https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/javascript- identifiers#examples)

d3.js used to also use Unicode identifiers:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20140802202152/https://github.co...](https://web.archive.org/web/20140802202152/https://github.com/mbostock/d3/blob/master/d3.js#L1185) [https://web.archive.org/web/20140802202152/https://github.co...](https://web.archive.org/web/20140802202152/https://github.com/mbostock/d3/blob/master/d3.js#L1210)

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> As a Russian who speaks fluent English while most of my coworkers don't – YES.

</comment><comment><USER49> Yes.</comment>


In-depth look at gaming and the Mozilla Labs Apps Project - <AUTHOR> http://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/12/gaming-and-the-mozilla-labs-apps-project/

<comment><USER2> Can't wait to see the first ad going fullscreen and locking my mouse...

<comment><AUTHOR> Security of these new features is something that is being taken very seriously. APIs like the Full Screen API and Mouse Lock API can only be invoked manually by a user, either by clicking something on the screen or pressing a key.

It is also impossible for a website to take control of the Full Screen or Mouse Lock API without your direct knowledge. A big message appears at the top of the screen when in full screen mode and you can always exit it at any time by pressing the Esc key.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for making that clear. But making the user click on something is not really difficult. Don't get me wrong, I really love the possibilities this gives to web developers, I just wanted to point out that this will open yet another way to do harmful things, especially to novice users.</comment></comment></comment>


What is wrong with this message? - <AUTHOR> http://dbushell.com/2013/11/14/what-is-wrong-with-this-message/

<comment><USER3> That is some distracting ad placement, particularly given the content of the blog post. I spent a good couple of minutes trying to figure out what was wrong with the copy on the "Heart Internet" ad before I realized that it had nothing to do with the blog post.

<comment><USER4> Why should I want to disable Adblock, given horror stories like this one?

<comment><USER5> Yeah, "what ad?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Leaving aside the question of whether this message should even _exist_ , here's a somewhat better approach:

Your profile "Your Name" has been temporarily suspended because it appears confusingly similar to Other User. We do not allow profiles that appear to impersonate another user. If this is not correct, please contact us.

Of course, having a "contact us" link would break Google's usual support policy (namely, don't offer any).

</comment><comment><USER7> Google has gotten big enough to where "don't be evil" is just a cute saying that people mouth with absolutely no conviction whatsoever.

The company can distinguish spam from legit messages pretty well from what I hear so there's clearly corporate knowledge of the notion of false positives and false negatives. But seemingly none of that made it from the gmail division over to the G+ division.

<comment><USER8> Not being evil doesn't mean that you're an angel incapable of doing harm. It just means you're not malicious.

It's the difference between a car accident, and murder by car.

<comment><USER9> And they are malicious. For instance they are forcing removal YouTube apps on WP by revoking their API keys, simply for being on the wrong OS. They also removed mail features out of the blue to hamper WP users. By malice they also make it as hard as possible to select which calendars to sync (they hide the option when the browser is on a WP) and force phones to use legacy google maps. Luckily Nokia's HERE is much better.

<comment><USER10> "simply for being on the wrong OS"?!?

I was under the impression that the youtube app was revoked because it displayed videos without the requisite ads. That is, Microsoft was using Google as an unpaid content-hosting service.

<comment><USER11> Not for lack of trying - Google and Microsoft would on-again off-again "work together" and suddenly the requirements would be different or the result would be insufficient. Most recently, they decided that the Windows Phone app must be an HTML5 application even though it isn't on iOS or Android. Microsoft expressed interest in using the advertising APIs to adhere to Google's requirements, but for whatever reason those were never made available.

The whole Terms of Service for YouTube is very _anti_ open web - <USER2> about it screams distinguishing between privileged and unprivileged user agents. Now, of course neither Google nor any other company is beholden to making their platform work on every platform, but these actions seem deliberate.

For more on this, look into the blocking of Google Maps on Windows Phone, which was based solely on the user agent string sent to Google's servers. Or look into the curious case of IE11 receiving a different search page on the date of Windows 8.1's general availability, making it appear as though the update "broke" Google. Curiously, for weeks before Windows 8.1's general availability people using pre-release versions and MSDN/Technet versions had no problems whatsoever.

It's not clearly deliberate, malicious evil, and I'm perpetually a fan of Hanlon's Razor; but it definitely gives me pause every time I hear another one of the stories of Google's interoperability with Windows and Windows Phone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I was expecting a complaint about a difficult-to-debug DBUS message.

<comment><USER13> No, that would mean "Hacker" was back in "Hacker News". Of course it's a post about Google+.

<comment><USER14> That's a bit uncalled for, this story is really not the worse "off topic" story we've seen on the frontpage lately, even though I agree it's a bit short on actual content.

To me the actual problem is not the error message though (which is fairly straightforward and informative) but rather the fact that there seems to be no recourse or ways to contest that. But then again, in my opinion, if you outsource your identity online by having it managed by a third party like google, facebook or twitter you deserve everything you get. That seems to be a fairly unpopular opinion however.

<comment><USER13> Eh, we share the same sentiment.

I don't think people should be surprised when (and these are all examples from the front page over the past couple days) the terms and conditions change, the URLs might start costing money or Youtube merges with G+. It's not news and it shouldn't be surprising.

If you want to own your online identity, buy a domain name instead of trusting a third party to manage it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> <rant> The question I am going to ask is - What's wrong with Google? They had solid services, great reputation, every techie loved them. Now they fit perfectly in the stereotype for a big, bad and greedy corporation.

In retrospect: April 2013 - they butchered Adsense YT reporting by removing the real-time reports from your Adsense profile and moving them to YT. There was a massive drop in earnings afterwards! Instead of aiming for transparency they gave their users the finger.

Then comes the constant harassment with this G+ thing. I've gotten the popup message around 50 times.

Should I discuss Gmail redesign - hidden interfaces, new sorting system. Absurd things!

And the latest - G+ comments on YT. Yeah, that improved the comment quality.

I am wondering who's fault that is. There probably is a committee of managers who come up with these "changes".

</rant>

I come off as too negative, but I am just mad at them. That's why I've stopped using gmail, gtalk, hangouts, etc.

</comment><comment><USER16> My wife has had the same thing happen to her today. Her Google+, and by extension, her YouTube account through which she promotes her work (she's a musician) were suspended, apparently without any notification.

There's an appeals process, and she's linked to her website and Facebook profile and submitted a photocopy of her passport to prove her name. Does anybody here know how long this is likely to take, or the chances of it being successful?

edit: s/password/passport/

<comment><USER17> Ah, just like China where you need to hand over identification before using the internet at a cafe. You know, so you can be a "good citizen".

<comment><USER18> In my experience, Chinese wifi operates the same as in most other countries. Either no password, or the password is written on the menu or freely offered when asked for.

Chinese censorship is another issue, of course. But there's no need to post blatant lies about stuff you seemingly have no experience about.

<comment><USER19> How long ago was your experience? IIRC, they've been cracking down on this in more recent times. I guess it's possible that these crack-downs are temporary or regional though.

<comment><USER18> Two weeks ago. The situation seemed the same in a couple of cities. There were no restrictions at any shop or cafe that I came across.

WIFI access at Beijing airport did require a passport, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> _Your profile has been suspended because it impersonates someone._

This message is wrong because it asserts something which isn't true. That is, you are clearly not impersonating somebody else, right?

 _If it was a copy writer I've lost all hope._

Copywriters aren't responsible for this type of mistake.

A copywriter transforms a message into coherent language. The language here is clear and readable. The message is the problem.

 _A straight up accusation of potentially illegal acts._

This message is not accusing you of fraud, that's your own hyperbole.

</comment><comment><USER21> >A straight up accusation of potentially illegal acts. There's no ambiguity, I'm guilty until proven innocent

Usual complaints, but it's weird how people expect corporations to somehow adopt a charter of rights like "the right to a fair trial for your corporate ban-hammer". Much like complaints about "free speech" when reddit bans some subreddit.

There's no obligation for Google to prove anything (until you start paying for something, in which case you start entering contract law issues).

There's a lot of value-add in offering a minimum of customer service nowadays, considering the complete lack of service by most companies.

<comment><USER22> Why do people keep confusing the law with their own personal ultra-libertarian ideology?

Companies have plenty of legal obligations towards their clients, especially outside the US where consumer protection is actually a thing. And "free" users are clients as well (no such thing as a free lunch, there's a reason why Google wants you to agree to a very long legal document before signing up, you're entering into a business arrangement where you pay with your data).

It's weird how people expect there to be no laws concerning corporations and their clients.

By which I'm not saying that the OP has any recourse in this particular case. But corporations do _not_ have the absolute right to arbitrarily refuse or suspend services.

"My company, my rules" is an ideology, not the law.

<comment><USER21> I am generally pro-consumer protection, but filling in a sign-up form is in most cases not binding the company to much. Data protection laws is one thing, but obligation for eternal service isn't.

Generally an EULA specifies that a company has the right to suspend an account without cause (leading to termination of obligations on both sides, so you don't have to pay for a service anymore). I'm not sure how valid that has held up in courts, but the notion of ending a contract is not a new one.

>But corporations do not have the absolute right to arbitrarily refuse or suspend services.

I agree they can't arbitrarily suspend services if there's some sort of agreement, but I thought that , by default, they can refuse. There are exceptions but they have to be codified (healthcare, for example).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> _Presumption of Innocence_ is not directly enshrined in the US constitution. It is implied by the 5th, 6th, and 14th amendments. However, it is acceptable practice in the US for local jurisdictions to relax aspects of the Presumption of Innocence. For example, for rape cases in some jurisdictions, it is not necessary to address the _mens rea_.

[http://tipmra.com/new_tipmra/presumption_of_innocence.htm](http://tipmra.com/new_tipmra/presumption_of_innocence.htm)

 _" It is not that you are innocent until proven guilty as many believe. It is that you are assumed guilty because of the assertion made and until your presumption of innocence prevails your protestation of innocence is simply the challenge to the prosecution to prove its case...With the presumption is innocence you do not have to prove innocence as it is a given. The burden of proving otherwise is upon the party making the assertion."_

So the _Presumption of Innocence_ is simply placing the burden of proof on the accuser and therefore any lightening of the burden of proof is effectively an erosion of the _Presumption of Innocence_.

Is it really a right if local jurisdictions can simply decide to erode it?

Now, certainly there is another side to the story. The argument made in rape and sexual assault cases is that, "Of course, the defendant is going to claim consensuality." The position that _mens rea_ is impractical in cases of rape and sexual assault is not entirely unreasonable. My point is that the commonly held view that US citizens have a right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty isn't so assured and cut and dry as most of us believe.

</comment><comment><USER24> How should it be phrased? Honestly I see nothing wrong with this wording. Talk about an overreaction.

<comment> Joe-Z If it was just the message, maybe you could argue that he overreacted. But it isn't just the message, he can also no longer use his profile.

And why is that? Probably because some algorithm thought his profile impersonates someone else, which is apparently not the case.

And the way Google choose to communicate their suspicion and the actions that followed it to their user was by (practically) saying:

"You did bad thing x, and now you have to pay the consequences for it."

Can you see his point better now? (Personally I can fully understand him)

EDIT: Oh, and a better approach is mentioned in this HN-comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6732820](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6732820)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm not on the google+ hate train.

I don't think this message is really horrible. The fact that they suspend your account is kind of weird, but IMO, you shouldn't be using G+ as your "home" on the web. I don't think it's meant to be that way. I've been using it since beta, and I've found that joining relevant communities and following certain people makes it an awesome mix of reddit (sans-comments) and twitter. My home feed has all the stuff I want to see from G+, and I will look into new communities once every few months.

I would never send anyone to my G+ profile. There's nothing really on it. I don't use it as if it were Facebook and load my history with vapid statements or "inspirational" quotes.

I think now, more than ever, it's easy to get your own "destination" site up and running with minimal effort. The social stuff? It's just a way to kill time. It shouldn't be everything.

<comment><USER26> > ... you shouldn't be using G+ as your "home" on the web.

Just cross off everything after 'G+'...

<comment><USER25> I'm not sure why you'd say that. G+ has some valuable communities. It's no different than coming to this site or going to reddit, twitter, tumblr etc.

<comment><USER27> Exactly, G+ Twitter, FB are content exchanges with value added in form of comments and discovery in my opinion, not content creation places. P.s. Google returns 404 on his G+ profile, is it correct http code? Shouldn't it be something from 5 __while case is being resolved at least?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm intrigued: what's the other side of the "Take Action" link? Not curious enough to try to trigger the suspension, though.

Back to the topic at hand: writing "appears to impersonate" wouldn't have been so much extra effort, would it?

<comment><AUTHOR> The "Take Action" link opens a modal giving three options:

1\. appeal 2\. change name

I forget the third... The appeal asks for links to prove your name like other social profiles, plus an option to upload 1 document (e.g. photo ID / passport). After submitting you're told to wait and find out the outcome of the appeal. They also link to the rabbit hole that is Google "help" pages.

<comment><USER4> Is it possible to use G+ without my real name?

<comment><USER29> No, G+ has always required your real name, whatever that means.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> If Google would not require real names, it would not be an issue (I am not saying that nobody share the same real name, like Google seem to imply).

</comment><comment><USER31> Maybe they forgot to include "seems". Doesn't appear like that big of a deal. There's a "Take Action" button ready to fix the issue. Is such a thing illegal in the UK?

</comment><comment><USER32> The author left out a detail? Does his account impersonate someone else? I think that's an important part of the conversation, even if the messaging is presumptive.

<comment><USER33> The author's name is David Bushell. There are 25 David Bushell's in the UK who have accounts on LinkedIn. I have no idea how many David Bushell's there are world wide.

I assume the author wasn't pretending to be any of those other David Bushells.

Just for clarity: A few of the Dan Beales, or DanBCs, that show up on Google searches are not me. I've never worked in radio, for example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Out of interest - were you using your real name?

<comment><USER35> I never head of David Bushell before, but a Google search shows that he is a producer and production manager. However the OP's website comes before the IMDB site in the search. Interesting.

[http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0124239/](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0124239/)

<comment><USER36> I too share first and last name with some actor. This would be plain stupid of Google to suspend accounts based on that.</comment></comment></comment>