Prevented mortality from historical and projected nuclear power (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/kh05000e.html <comment><USER2> I see this argument made again and again. Just because one is "worse" by selective parameters doesn't mean that the other option is any good either. Can we build safe nuclear power plants? Yes. Does money, greed, pride, and stupidity triumph in the end? Yes. And then you end up with safety precautions and risks being hand-waved just as what is happening in the US where most of the nuclear power plants are operating beyond their designed life span.

Why are we ignoring the fact that this geographic location is unusable now? I don't see anybody rushing to get in line to walk into the Fukushima plant or to move back to Chernobyl. There's more damage than immediate death. That environment is lost. It contaminates ground water, soil, the wildlife, the air. You're willfully ignoring the reality and taking the hopeful ideals.

<comment><USER3> Animals and plant life are thriving in the fallout zone of Chernobyl. It's only unusable by humans, and even then not all humans; there is a community that lives in the fallout zone, not to mention tourism.

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

Also, money and greed does not always win out. See: the Onagawa nuclear reactor which is closer to the epicenter than Fukishima, and which was properly managed and is still running.

<comment><USER4> It is a cognitive bias to believe the worst thing that has happened in the past is the worst that will happen in the future. Chernobyl occurred in an era with less people globally, less people locally, worse sensing technology/less transparent politics to more accurately gauge worldwide impact, and smaller nuclear reactors. Chernobyl proves the black swan risk could have been far graver - making Kiev and large parts of Ukraine uninhabitable. Most people are logical to choose a risk they can understand (solar, carbon, etc.) vs a complicated risk they can't (nuclear). Which may be 1000x worse.

The nuclear argument gets weaker by the year considering rapid advancements in renewables and the decades+ period of time it takes to build a new nuclear reactor. We have the safest nuclear reactor available. The sun.

<comment><USER5> The soviet nuclear industry was very close to the worst-case scenario - inherently unsafe reactors being operated by badly trained personnel and overseen by a corrupt and secretive agency that barely deserves the title of "regulator". The Chernobyl disaster could have been far worse if it weren't for the extraordinary bravery of the liquidators, but there's just no way that such a catastrophically dangerous reactor could be built in 2019.

The RBMK reactors at Chernobyl were based on a design from the the early 1950s and were crude even by the standards of the time. The reactor design is inherently unsafe for several reasons, which was compounded by inadequate monitoring and containment systems. Safe operation of the reactor was hindered by a deliberate and systematic cover-up of the flawed nature of the reactor design; the emergency response was similarly hindered by a deliberate and systematic cover-up of the scale of the disaster.

Comparing a modern nuclear power plant to Chernobyl is like comparing a 2019 Honda Civic with a 1961 Chevy Corvair. We've learned so many lessons and changed our safety culture so profoundly in in the intervening period. If we are allowed to keep developing and building nuclear reactors, we'll keep building safer and more efficient reactors.

<comment><USER6> "Comparing a modern nuclear power plant to Chernobyl is like comparing a 2019 Honda Civic with a 1961 Chevy Corvair"

That's a pretty interesting metaphor, because while the newer car is indeed much safer, there are many types of accidents where the driver will be killed no matter what car they're driving. Perhaps they'll still have all the body parts attached in the Honda though ;)

One of my favorite books is "Normal accidents" by Perrow, where atomic plants are the perfect example of high-risk systems which invite system accidents.

Their dedicated chapter is comically horrific. e.g.:

"In 1978 a worker changing a light bulb in a control panel at the Rancho Secco 1 reactor in Clay Station, California, dropped the bulb. It created a short circuit in some sensors and controls. Fortunately, the reactor scram controls were not among those affected, and the reactor automatically scrammed. But the loss of some sensors meant the operators could not determine the condition of the plant, and there was a rapid cooling of the core. [...] did not in this case damage the core. But this is probably only because the plant had been operating at full power for less than three years. A spokesman for the NRC said: "If it had been 10 to 15 full power years, instead of two to three, which it was, that vessel might have cracked." A cracked vessel would result in a loss of coolant and a meltdown; no emergency system would be available to cool the core."

<comment><USER7> I like _Normal Accidents_ as well and I think it should be more widely read.

Perrow's thesis was that systems needed three characteristics to generate normal accidents: to be very complex (beyond any single human's detailed comprehension), to be tightly coupled (meaning that the system can change its behaviour quickly) and to have catastrophic potential.

Pressurised water designs are inherently complex and coupled because the necessity to circulate fluid at all times without failure, making them complex (lots of moving parts and failure modes) and coupled (failures can rapidly propagate their effects). They also produce plentiful radioactive byproducts.

A counterargument is that non-PWR designs in Gen-III+ and Gen-IV actually address some or all of these characteristics. Many of them are much simpler, reducing complexity. Many of them are design to operate passively, reducing complexity and coupling. And some of them reduce radioactive byproducts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> When discussing the safety of nuclear power most comments seem to focus on the number of deaths. While death count is tragic in itself, it doesn't capture the full extent of human drama.

Consider this

Fukushima

"the nuclear accident was responsible for 154,000 being evacuated"

"In December 2016 the government estimated decontamination, compensation, decommissioning, and radioactive waste storage costs at 21.5 trillion yen ($187 billion), nearly double the 2013 estimate."

Chernobyl

"In 2005, the total cost over 30 years for Belarus alone was estimated at US$235 billion; about $301 billion in today's dollars given inflation rates."

"between 5% and 7% of government spending in Ukraine is still related to Chernobyl"

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

<comment><USER9> I think it's important to avoid treating the history of nuclear power as expectation for its future use. Nuclear power has evolved, much like fossil fuel power has evolved.

When we consider future use of fossil fuels, we do not think of the Great Smog of London which acutely killed 4000 people in a few days, plus around 6000 in the following months. Cognitive biases prevent us from being as forgiving with nuclear power, despite the evolution of its safety.

<comment><USER10> Or more recent industrial accidents like the Bhopal disaster (3000 deads). It's only one of a very long list:

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My wife and I started watching HBO's new mini-series "Chernobyl", and she's now terrified of nuclear power plants despite my reassurances. I'll have to show this to her, but based on this anecdote, I suspect more voters who see this TV show will also be biased against nuclear power.

Anyone else hear friends/family talking about this show as "terrifying" or "concerning"?

<comment><USER12> Not to underplay the seriousness of the event or heroism of all those involved in the aftermath, but the show does make it look scarier than it deserves. For me part of this is simply down to the Russian equipment - it just looks scarier seeing those guys in those green rubbery looking suits like something out of an alien movie, vs when you see guys at Fukushima in plain white protective gear.

It's worth pointing out that the RBMK reactor design used at Chernobyl has no comparison in the west. Not to mention they had no (none!) containment building on those things. The design of the RBMK was in part because it's simpler to build. It's a kind of evolution of the very early reactor "piles" used during the lead up to and through the Manhattan project. The pressure vessels used in western reactors are difficult to produce. (We apparently no longer have any iron works left in the US that could produce them, the last one closed down some time ago.) On top of being simpler to build the RBMK style reactor also has (IIRC) the benefit (for Russia) that it can be used to produce the right kind of plutonium for nuclear weapons. Something that in the west was done in dedicated military reactors because civilian designed light water reactors suck for that task.

<comment><USER13> The thing about the iron works is actually one of the main problems with scaling up nuclear power. Modern designs are very safe yes, but, building them requires steelworking ability that apparently only exists in (yes!) Russia and Japan. There is a multi-decade backlog of orders for the necessary metal, and learning how to work steel in the necessary way is ... not trivial. So it's not even like we could build tons of reactors if we wanted to, designs or no designs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wikipedia has many lists about nuclear accidents - the "mother" of all those articles might be this one:

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

It points to other sub-lists and some of them have links to sub-sub-articles that explain what happened in a specific case, for example this one:

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

Unluckily not all lists have always a link available to the detailed article, so for example in the case of the SL-1 accident ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1) ) you'll find the link to the details only in this other list:

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

Reading about the details has always been very interesting for me as I love everything involving cause/effect.

</comment><comment><USER15> False-dichotomy. There are plenty of ways to generate energy and the more diverse, less centralized they are, the more robust the system is.

Wow since the Chernobyl series HN has suddenly had an uptick in pro-nuclear posts.

<comment><USER12> I think it started before the Chernobyl series. There have been a lot of increasingly serious climate change reports over the past year, and when you start looking into what can be done, you have to take another neutral look at nuclear power. And when you look at it neutrally in the face of the alternatives you quickly get converted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Sadly humans have proven multiple times that they are not capable of handling the responsibilities that come with nuclear power. It should be a no-go path, and existing nuclear should be phased out immediately and fast.

On top of that the neo-liberal market economy is a compounding risk, ultimately absolving all responsibilities or even rewarding companies for failing to protect the public.

<comment><USER17> I couldn't disagree more.

We have proven that we aren't capable of handling the responsibility that comes with handling coal/gas. And unless you live in a shack in the woods you're a contributor.

Nuclear is the only energy source where we have a 100% plan for the byproduct of energy. While I agree we really need to come up with an alternative. Nuclear may be the only short term stopgap that gets us off of CO2 producing plants in the short term so we can get to a long term.

No nuclear planet has sent our entire planet on a crash course with climate change... Every energy source that powers our lives has a trade off and a byproduct. We all need to admit that, accept it and then make a plan to live in harmony with as much of the earth as we can.

<comment><USER2> All it takes is a decent natural disaster and you have a nuclear catastrophe. With global warming, this risk of an unusual or unplanned/unlikely event for that geographic region increases.

<comment><USER17> Devastating natural disaster. Fukishima handled the earthquake fine it was when (i believe) their generators were washed away that the problem started.

I would never advocate for a nuclear power plant on the side of an active volcano. _at all_.

You put the right technology in the right spot.

Also, I'm really hoping to see thorium get more time in the sun because it doesn't go critical and cause a catastrophe. They melt down but don't explode (from what I've been able to find).

<comment><USER2> Yes, thorium plus smaller reactors would be nice. A few years ago I saw work being done on reactors the size of a car that are much safer because the fuel is only the size of a tennis ball and much easier to control as well as contain if anything were to go wrong. The issue I see with this approach though is that if there's too many then maintenance and monitoring becomes difficult.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Comparing 'Apples' that are killing us to 'Oranges' that will kill us.</comment>


Anti-Cancer Agent Stops Metastasis In Its Tracks   - <AUTHOR> http://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/pubaf/pr/PR_display.asp?prID=1117

<comment><USER2> As another comment mentioned, the full paper is subscriber-only.

Paywalls for scientific research are evil.

Do something people.

Here: <http://184.108.40.206/misc/nature08978.pdf>

<comment><USER3> I'm curious: are you a regular HN user who decided to create a throw-away login or a person who stumbled across this page and decided to comment?

<comment><USER2> Yes, regular. However, I hope this isn't gonna be a throw-away login: I've done this before with my regular account, and plan to do it every time I see a link posted where the paper is behind a paywall, both to help the discussion and as an act of civil disobedience. So I decided to create an account for this purpose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It looks promising, but I saw so much articles on new miraculous treatments that I became a little bit more dubious every time I read an article like this one.

</comment><comment><USER5> Its interesting (to me) that some of the funding for this work was provided by the Department of Defense. Is this common for the DoD to fund this type of research?

<comment><USER6> The US DoD health care systems supports approximately 10 million beneficiaries and has a budget of approximately 40 billion dollars, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Health_System>.

<comment><USER7> About the size of Sweden's population -- which also has a state medical system. :-)

So there is as much socialism in the US as in Sweden? :-)

This gave me a sense of wonder insight into how large the large countries are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Link to the original Nature article: [http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v464/n7291/full/nature0...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v464/n7291/full/nature08978.html)

<comment><USER5> Looks like the full article is behind a paywall. :(

<comment><USER8> You're right :( The article is pretty remarkable for its breadth. Let me try to give a synopsis:

They synthesize a new biotinylated ketone. They determine that this compound binds to fascin, which has some molecular biological background as something that bundles actin, and some population biological background as something that corresponds with worse survival in breast cancer. They then develop the crystal structure for fascin both with and without their new molecule, and they show that their macroketone binds to the actin binding sites on fascin. They also use electron microscopy to determine that their new molecule indeed appears to disrupt actin bundling by fascin.

They then gave to immune-deficient mice human breast cancer cells. These cells typically metastasize aggressively. They gave the mice a 'placebo' and/or shRNA against fascin and/or their new macroketone. The shRNA and their macroketone successfully cut the metastatic burden by ~50-80%. (shRNA ultimately leads to downregulation of the mRNA of target proteins, so their shRNA should reduce fascin synthesis while their macroketone reduces the function of already-made fascin.)

It's not a silver bullet against metastatic breast cancer, but it's an impressively complete story for one paper. And promising, perhaps, as a therapeutic.</comment></comment></comment>


Doat.com is the Future of the Mobile Browser - <AUTHOR> http://www.daniellemorrill.com/2011/05/doat-com-aka-do-is-the-future-of-the-mobile-browser-techcrunch-disrupt/

<comment><USER2> Wow, it's just as annoying when a woman has a giant picture of herself on every page of her blog as it is when a man does it.

<comment><USER3> The HN implicit political correctness unable me of writing "tits or gtfo" as a representation of my rebel spirit within this case.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I get that a lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Extremely impressive stuff.

Just yesterday I have been thinking of how federation and mobile will be the cornerstones for the next leap in search and doat.com nails both perfectly.

Has my vote for the google-killer-of-the-year.

</comment><comment><USER5> I can't actually find this thing in the app store. It doesn't show up in search and the app store link just shows me a dialog that says "Your request could not be completed".

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I noticed that too... I think the name is going to have some SEO issues. Try searching for "do@"

<comment><USER6> Direct link: <http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/do/id423328852?mt=8> It's not available outside the US though.

<comment><USER5> _It's not available outside the US though_

Well, that would be the problem then. I should have known. Whenever Apple gives me a vague error message, it always turns out to be political.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder why it isn't available outside of the US? Probably because a number of the services aren't available to non-US citizens.

</comment><comment><USER8> Danielle is awesome. I've known her since her beginning at Twilio. Worth reading.

</comment><comment><USER9> No android app? Boo :(

<comment><USER10> We're working on an Android version - its coming...</comment></comment>


VGA, DVI display interfaces to bow out in five years - <AUTHOR> http://www.techworld.com.au/article/412885/vga_dvi_display_interfaces_bow_five_years

<comment><USER2> All the world's a VAX^WPC^Wmobile device^W^W…

Meanwhile, lots of PC mainboards still have serial ports – and quite often I've seen people where its presence was one of the most important decision points for buying a new laptop.

Never mind that with adapters DVI/HDMI is really a non-issue.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wait, when did DVI become obsolete?

<comment><USER4> It was recently replaced with HDMI or DisplayPort.</comment></comment>


Millions of Lines of Code - <AUTHOR> http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/million-lines-of-code

<comment><USER2> Interesting graph if it were accurate. The healthcare.gov stuff seems like jokes, right? That makes it seem less accurate. What else in the graph is a joke? E.g. can car software really have more lines of code than a boeing 787, operating systems, and the LHC?

<comment><USER3> It's not a joke, it's Obamacode. Allegedly there are 500 million lines of code running healthcare.gov. That figure is, of course, wildly inaccurate, not unlike most everything else concerning Obamacare. But their PR people passed this number to journalists in an effort to blame the sheer complexity of the project rather than run-of-the-mill incompetence.

<comment><USER2> I'm not from the US, so don't really know why there is so much focus on the website rather than the healthcare itself in the US news. But now I'm wondering, what language is healthcare.gov written in and did they put every keyword on a new line?

<comment><USER3> The focus on the failure of the website is actually mainly being pushed by Democrats and liberal US media organizations. The reality is that enrollment figures have been staggeringly low, and the program at this time appears to be headed to fall far short of the 7 million enrollees it needs to be financially viable. They can choose to either have stories about how Americans appear to be roundly rejecting the program itself, or they can talk about website failures. This being Obama's signature piece of legislation, Democrats and most of the left-leaning media have chosen to focus on the website issues while praying that Americans somehow come around and start signing up. There was actually a recent Associated Press article saying that the low enrollment numbers "only show the vast number of Americans eagerly waiting to sign up". Other, similar nonsense has been published extensively by left-leaning media hoping to spur public interest in signing up.

As for the language/line count, I don't know what language it is but this 500 million number had to have been picked out of thin air. Perhaps they counted the number of lines of actual code and multiplied it by the number of servers it is running on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The chart would be more helpful if it compared lines of assembly and not lines of original code (which is what I suspect it's comparing).

</comment><comment><USER5> The most surprising item in the list to me is Visual Studio 2012 with 50M LoC (healthcare.gov might considered ridiculous, but after all we observed, it is not surprising at all) .

This is by far, more than I can imagine needed for the most sophisticated IDE one will ever need.

It might includes all compilers for all supported languages though.

Also note they provide many of their infographic works as printed posters at [http://store.informationisbeautiful.net/](http://store.informationisbeautiful.net/)

<comment> loup-vaillant About _everything_ we use consume far more lines of source code it could (at least if we rewrite it with current knowledge). See the VPRI and their almost full featured OS (with compilers and applications) in less than 20.000 lines.

(Manifesto) [http://www.vpri.org/html/work/ifnct.htm](http://www.vpri.org/html/work/ifnct.htm)

(Latest progress report) [http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf](http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Something that might have been interesting (information content of life forms vs. programs) has been wasted by equating base pairs with lines of code. This is totally arbitrary.

Unfortunately I don't know of a specific better measure, but it might consider the used and potential information content in the structures encoded. Anybody know of such a metric for source code complexity?

</comment><comment><USER7> Ah, lines of code... the most useless metric in software development known to man.

</comment><comment><USER8> wow look at the symbian its double the android

</comment><comment><USER9> What do the big semicircles with %s mean?

<comment><USER9> Ok figured it out. Wow that is unclear, its totally illogical too, the size of the circle seems proportional to the increase in LOC in the next random iteration he has chosen, but the diameter is also the distance between them vertically which is based on the order they are in. I reckon there was a lot of hacking and including / not including stuff in order to get those circles to match up and also present stuff in ever increasing order. Also size of circles is arbitrary 100% size cirle is just whatever +organism?? really? That is not helpful</comment></comment>


A debate over the theory of cosmic inflation - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/a-cosmic-controversy/ <comment><USER2> Unrelated to article content:

This site's progress bar that correlates to scrolling down on the page is one of the most pleasing 'new' web ideas I've seen in awhile. I'm surprised I haven't seen it before. It's unobtrusive, clean, and ideally could provide a nice idea of the length of the article.

It would be even better if the bar represented the length of the article instead of the full page which you already derive from the scroll bar.

<comment><USER3> The scrollbar of your browser already does this - also it _has_ been done before and was a common trend a few years ago (2014-2015) dictated by the _article length_ rather than an arbitrary length (this one seems to be article + recommended articles below). It was used because on infinite scrolling pages you couldn't tell the length of your next read based on your scrollbar.

[0] [https://digiday.com/media/designers-hate-article-progress- ba...](https://digiday.com/media/designers-hate-article-progress-bar/)

[1] [https://css-tricks.com/reading-position-indicator/](https://css- tricks.com/reading-position-indicator/)

[2] [https://www.designernews.co/stories/61326-whats-up-with- all-...](https://www.designernews.co/stories/61326-whats-up-with-all-the- added-progress-bars)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't think it fair to say that inflationary models aren't empirically testable. It would be more accurate to say that inflationary models cannot be subjected to experiemental manipulation. It is not my field, but it seems to be of the sort where the model gives you an idea what you might see, then you go see if you find what you predicted.

<comment><USER5> No, the article claims the opposite of what you just said.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Concise statement of the trio's point: [http://physics.princeton.edu/~cosmo/sciam/index.html#faq](http://physics.princeton.edu/~cosmo/sciam/index.html#faq)

</comment><comment><USER7> PBS SpaceTime have an awesome episode on cosmic inflation[1]

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZTb6sfHEX8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZTb6sfHEX8)

</comment><comment><USER8> Probably a stupid question: if the average mass density is agreeing perfectly with everything and all that, what is all this 'dark' matter and energy necessary for?

<comment><USER9> Those are included in the mass density.

<comment><USER8> Ok, then I don't understand the claim that the measurement plus a fudgefactor matches perfectly.

Well, I don't know shit about the topic, I'll go back to my code editor now...

<comment><USER10> Just one example why it's actually more than a "fudge factor": When you have an alternative hypothesis (like, "it's not really the energy") it's not that you just have to say so, you have to model your assumption with the formulas, the formulas then can be calculated and compared with the measurements, just like the calculations of the hypothesis "it's a real energy" can. The result is that the formulas that are described to those who just want the description as "it's a real energy" match the best with the measurements:

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/04/11/no-d...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/04/11/no- dark-energy-isnt-an-illusion/)

See the "Ned Wright, based on the latest data from Betoule et al." illustration in the text.

It's significantly more than "I say, he says."</comment></comment></comment></comment>


I hope Chris Dixon has a sense of humor - <AUTHOR> http://vimeo.com/28418455

<comment><USER2> Great marketing concept - I hope he finds this funny as well, at least for your sake</comment>


SQLite3 Hash Code 2018 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mingodad/sqlite3-hashcode-2018/blob/master/hashcode2018.sql <comment><AUTHOR> Hello !

I've been looking ath the HASHCODE 2018 competition and got interested on the problem proposition:

Task Given a list of pre-booked rides in a city and a fleet of self-driving vehicles, assign the rides to vehicles, so that riders get to their destinations on time.

For every ride that finishes on time (or early), you will earn points proportional to the distance of that ride; plus an additional bonus if the ride also started precisely on time.

It took me a while to get something working and at end I saw that I was basically using sqlite3 capabilities to do the data manipulation tasks and only needed a few calculations for the rest.

So I tried to see if I also could make those calculations inside sqlite3 and after a while I could get it to work:

[https://github.com/mingodad/sqlite3-hashcode-2018/blob/maste...](https://github.com/mingodad/sqlite3-hashcode-2018/blob/master/hashcode2018.sql)

As I stated there:

By no means I claim that solutions like this (stretching sqlite3) are good practice. Take it as an example that demonstrates several capabilities of sqlite3 in a hack/compact way.

So I'm showing it here just in case it can help/invite other people to find imaginative ways where sqlite3 can be used to solve problems.

Cheers !

<comment><USER2> Would this comment make a good source code comment?

<comment><AUTHOR> In fact most of the referred comment come from the source code.

The main idea was to see how minimal a working solution could be achieved.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: In what interesting ways do you parse emails for your web app? - <AUTHOR>

You might be familiar with TripIt's email parsing feature. Basically, you forward trip itineraries and airfare/hotel booking confirmations to TripIt, and it imports it into TripIt for you. It made TripIt so much more useful and convenient.
Now I am working on a hosted email parsing service and I want to present data in a more useful format to web app developers. I started simple, extracting URLs and phone numbers from the email.
So I want to ask you, in what interesting ways do you parse emails for your web app? Or do you have any novel ideas?
Shameless plug: http://www.apinbox.com/ It's a free way to get incoming emails for your web app. <comment><USER2> you might want to give developers the ability to supply you with regex expressions perhaps and then do something like vary the post url/data based on any matches -- would enable matching of tech support ids or order ids, etc. but then again, developers can do the same thing in their code i guess, so you'd need a compelling reason as to why it should be done within your service.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable: <http://www.apinbox.com/></comment>


Dining with the Walking Dead - <AUTHOR> http://hartmans.livejournal.com/90754.html

<comment><USER2> It's pretty surreal to see this, since Sam is one of the most generally kind, rational, level-headed, and law-abiding people I know (from school).</comment>


Ask HN: How does one get better at problem solving? - <AUTHOR> Although I am most interested in Programming and Software Architectural problem solving, I am open to other areas too, including but not limited to Math, Art, Logic etc. <comment><USER2> Here are seven-steps for an effective problem-solving process. Identify the issues. Be clear about what the problem is. ... Understand everyone's interests. ...

List the possible solutions (options) ...

Evaluate the options. ...

Select an option or options. ...

Document the agreement(s). ...

Agree on contingencies, monitoring, and evaluation.

[http://www.mediate.com/articles/thicks.cfm](http://www.mediate.com/articles/thicks.cfm)

<comment><USER2> Standing meetings with vague purposes, such as "status updates," are rarely a good use of time. Consider who is invited. When you're calling a meeting, take time to think about who really needs to be there. ...

Stick to your schedule. ...

Take no hostages. ...

Start on time, end on time. ...

Ban technology. ...

Follow up.

[https://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/?toURL=https://www.for...](https://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/?toURL=https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesleadershipforum/2014/02/05/seven- steps-to-running-the-most-effective-meeting- possible/&refURL=https://www.google.com/&referrer=https://www.google.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Try to solve problems. If you solve one, great. If you don't, try to solve the problem of why you couldn't solve that problem. If possible, try to solve the problem again.</comment>


Man Behind Coronavirus 5G Conspiracy, Has YouTube Channel Shuttered - <AUTHOR> https://www.newsweek.com/david-icke-man-behind-coronavirus-5g-conspiracy-has-youtube-channel-shuttered-sharing-1501641 <comment><USER2> Misleading title. Youtube actually terminated the man's account.</comment>


How much does it cost to lose one pound? - <AUTHOR> https://www.intentapp.com/blog/weight-loss-cost/ <comment><USER2> Second sentence:

"The only weight loss intervention that can produce that amount [30 lbs, first sentence] of average weight loss is bariatric surgery."

False.

Stopped reading after that. Nothing to see here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you mind sharing which interventions you're familiar with that result in average weight loss of 15% or more?</comment></comment>


Fears grow that WW2 wreck could explode on Kent coast (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/17/fresh-fears-ss-richard-montgomery-wartime-wreck-kent-explosive-munitions <comment><AUTHOR> 6,000 tonnes of WWII munitions lie in shallow waters of the Thames estuary, one of the busiest shipping channels of the world, threatening coastal inhabitants and presenting a tsunami risk to central London. There are no good options.

Excellent video treatments by The History Guy:

[https://youtube.com/watch?v=wP1kq9H7TYg](https://youtube.com/watch?v=wP1kq9H7TYg)

And Tom Scott:

[https://youtube.com/watch?v=R9u41aeItss](https://youtube.com/watch?v=R9u41aeItss)

</comment><comment><USER2> I wonder how many ticking time bombs there are like this around the world...</comment>


How YipitData slashed $2.5M, or 50%, off our AWS bill - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/yipitdata-engineering/how-yipitdata-slashed-over-2-5-million-off-of-our-aws-bill-43ca1125e03b <comment><AUTHOR> We're also happy to try and answer any questions the HN community has on how we did this or why it worked for us

</comment><comment><USER2> Did the switch to Ohio change anything with regard to performance?

<comment><AUTHOR> We took an initial performance hit as a result of not moving everything to Ohio at once. We moved our EC2 machines first but then saw increased latency between other services like ECR (where we store our Docker images) and Kinesis Firehose that were still in Virginia, so ultimately we moved those too.

So it wasn't so much that Ohio has worse performance, but that talking to services across region does.

One note on Firehose specifically for the curious - we make requests to Firehose in Ohio, and then Firehose sends the data to S3 back in Virginia (which we didn't want to move). Normally sending data across regions is expensive, but Firehose actually absorbs the cost in sending the streams to S3. We're honestly not quite sure why, but it worked out great for our costs!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Was there any response from AWS after this?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, we found AWS to be helpful throughout the cost optimization process. If you think about it, AWS probably also benefits from happier customers with more sustainable bills since it makes them less likely to look for more cost effective alternatives. It's better for both sides from a long-term perspective</comment></comment>


Revolut blocking accounts for days without any reason - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.twitter.com/RevolutApp/status/1110152044617310208 <comment><AUTHOR> Clarification: this just happened to me as well, I've been using revolut as my main source of paying for things. I transfer money through a uk bank and also have provided them with payslips and tax documents. Everything was fine up to 1 day ago that they blocked a bank transfer I tried to make which I've been making for the past year or so and which is around £36 for a debt of mine to a bank.

Since then no explanation, just that they are looking into it and they haven't explained to me what the issue is and if they need any documents of me.

I think everyone needs to know of what can happen to them. I am personally extremely confident that am going to resolve my issue since I have all the paperwork and everything that is needed to show that the money comes from honest work and every single penny of tax have been paid. Thing is after this, I'll be looking at alternatives as I can't have this happen to me again. Personally I feel like chat messages doesn't seem to work really well for those kind of issues and the fact that you can't phone anyone about it apart from financial bodies in each country to report the incident, or moan on Twitter is not a good solution.</comment>


Twilio Open Sources Stashboard, the Status Dashboard - <AUTHOR> http://blog.twilio.com/2010/07/twilio-open-sources-stashboard-the-status-dashboard.html <comment><USER2> After reading most of the docs, am I correct in understanding that Stashboard is a front-end display of event statuses, which need to be manually set by the site/service (or perhaps updated programmatically by mashing it up with nagios or some such)? That is to say, Stashboard itself does not do any sort of monitoring or status checking on its own, yes?

<comment><USER3> Correct. Stashboard is simply a lightweight frontend display for your API/service status. It has a GUI and REST API that allow you to update status information. Using the API, one could wire Stashboard into Nagios or any other alerting system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hey guys, main developer behind Stashboard here. Just wanted to say thanks for all the feedback. If you have any questions, feel free to ask away :)

<comment><USER5> This is great, thanks, I've already implemented at <http://status.currencyconnect.com> and am working on integration with other pieces. Do you have any suggestions on how to best run a private instance of this for internal use only?

<comment><USER6> Awesome! With appeengine, you can require authentication by users in your domain...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like the idea of a dashboard but most of the time they are really only useful when they are custom dashboards displaying what is relevant to your project. But great work getting something out that is simple.

<comment><USER6> With stashboard, you can define all the services and statuses that are relevant to your product... it makes no assumptions. For us, it's Calls API, Account Dashboard, etc. But you can make them whatever is relevant to your customers.

<comment><USER7> Looks great simple is good! Might use it for a few things I have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I like the branding.

<comment><USER9> Best. Name. Ever.

8{D

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> to see an example check out status.twilio.com

</comment><comment><USER11> Not nearly as pretty, but my CS department has had a good experience using Xymon for monitoring:

<http://www.xymon.com/></comment>


The Mac Inventor's Gift Before Dying - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663156/the-macs-inventors-deathbed-gift-an-immortal-lesson-in-design-for-his-son

<comment><USER2> dup <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2177218></comment>


Adobe credentials and the serious insecurity of password hints  - <AUTHOR> http://www.troyhunt.com/2013/11/adobe-credentials-and-serious.html <comment><USER2> It was smart of Facebook to look for reused passwords.

Troy wondered if there might be a security risk to announcing having found these matches (I suppose the reasoning is that if passwords are reused once, they are probably reused more than once, and so looking for such notices might help crackers track down easily compromised accounts), but decides there is not. Given the low-key way FB have gone about this, I guess this is right, and maybe this should be best practice for future password leaks. I wonder if anyone else has done this?

For convenience, the announcement by Chris Long, of FB (from his comment on Brian Krebs' blog, at [http://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/11/facebook-warns- users-afte...](http://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/11/facebook-warns-users-after- adobe-breach/comment-page-1/#comment-208063)):

> I work at Facebook on the security team that helped protect the accounts > affected by the Adobe breach. Brian's comment above is essentially spot on. > We used the plaintext passwords that had already been worked out by > researchers. We took those recovered plaintext passwords and ran them > through the same code that we use to check your password at login time.

> Like Brian's story indicates, we're proactive about finding sources of > compromised passwords on the Internet. Through practice, we've become more > efficient and effective at protecting accounts with credentials that have > been leaked, and we use an automated process for securing those accounts.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't have the resources of a Facebook, but I'd pay a few hundred bucks a year for a HTTPS secured REST API which let me post an email address and receive a list of candidate passwords. Bonus for a callback if someone I've queried gets added. The service would maintain that list in a fashion similar to whitehat security researchers.

Use case is to implement the FB-style security escalation for high-value accounts at my businesses, without requiring an on-call security team. If a dentist loses their client database because they reused the password on a PHPBB somewhere I'm likely in for a lot of headaches even if eventually found to not be at fault.

<comment><USER4> The noise you hear is five hundred patio11 followers writing that app... myself included :)

<comment><USER5> The app part is trivial, the hard part would be maintaining good up to date datasets to make this actuallly useful. You'd also need quite a few more costumers than one patio11 to make it worth your while, and ironically, the need for this service in the first place suggests the potential market is still small.

I.e. lots of organizations don't quite realize they have a need for this and would have a hard time understanding why its useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I got Ghostery installed, the page loads and then suddenly the text of the article is removed.

I know I know, I just shouldn't use Ghostery but I like to have a little privacy online.

Sorry I won't return to your site again...

<comment><USER7> Don't use Ghostery because they're tracking you: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostery#Criticism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostery#Criticism)

Try disconnect.me or blacklisting the sites directly from the hosts file.

<comment><USER8> I kept using ghostery because I didn't know of any alternative and sometimes I can't install adsuck. (which is is better than a huge hosts file. An oversized hosts file can have a negative impact on DNS and overall network responsiveness).

Thanks for disconnect.me, I'll give it a shot :)

<comment><USER9> > An oversized hosts file can have a negative impact on DNS and overall > network responsiveness

how many hosts entries would you say it is before the negative impact is significant? 20? 100?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> 0\. Password hints, the horror. As a user, the wisest thing is to just put something misleading and use good password hygiene.

1\. This reminds me of a funny thing I did at big name university that shall remain nameless. On the CS network which used NIS, I ran getent passwd as a regular user and received everyone's hashed passwords! Then, I piped that through john the ripper.... Say hello to 50 user's passwords in 30 seconds with nothing more than the standard English dictionary. (In an era just before shmoo, et. al. rainbowtables.). Dept chair, ~20 profs and some students. Drop a cron to start xeyes every 30 minutes anyone? }:)

</comment><comment><USER11> How is Facebook getting the plaintext passwords to compare to their hashed user passwords? Since the passwords are 3DES encrypted, only adobe should be able to do that.

They could just be using email addresses, but that seems rather blunt.

I'm not a huge fan of Facebook, but what they're doing does seem like an excellent idea.

<comment><USER12> The passwords were all encrypted with the same key, and ECB mode still leaks some patterns. Jeremi Gosney of Stricture Consulting Group was "fairly confident" of his decoding of many of the passwords. [http://www.zdnet.com/just-how-bad-are-the- top-100-passwords-...](http://www.zdnet.com/just-how-bad-are-the- top-100-passwords-from-the-adobe-hack-hint-think-really-really- bad-7000022782/)

Edit: oh it's the same guy who has this beast of a cracking cluster! [http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/12/25-gpu-cluster- crack...](http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/12/25-gpu-cluster-cracks-every- standard-windows-password-in-6-hours/)

Edit2: more details about how the decoding works [http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/11/04/anatomy-of-a- pass...](http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/11/04/anatomy-of-a-password- disaster-adobes-giant-sized-cryptographic-blunder/)

<comment><USER13> I believe the question was more of how does facebook know it was the same password? My guess is this was a "lazy" calculation. That is, they had to get their users to reenter their password so they could check it then. (Make sense?)

<comment><USER12> They said in the article, they took the plaintext from the Adobe leak and hashed it using their own login algorithm, then compared hashes. Edit: wait, must have been a different article. Oh well, I read it somewhere :)

<comment><USER13> Ah, that makes a ton of sense. I was thinking in the case of if a hashed database of passwords got leaked. If you know the scheme, you could do this sort of comparison at a login. But, yeah, overly complicated for this scenario, I believe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I like the idea of having to rename your dog after a password breach. Lol

</comment><comment><USER15> Great insight/writeup but the last bit gets to me:

 _Ultimately, password hints are evil and they add nothing to an online system that can't be achieved with a secure password reset feature._

It's a classic case of someone criticizing one important feature without suggesting viable alternatives. He might as well have said,

 _Gasoline engines are evil and they add nothing to a world that can 't be achieved with a more efficient propellant._

Yeah, okay - but _what 's the more efficient propellant?!?!_

Password hints aren't "evil" just because (a) Adobe happened to store theirs in plain text, and (b) some users do use seriously identifying information in theirs. Password hints make it fast and easy for an actual user who genuinely needs to reset their password to be able to do so quickly and efficiently. What's the _secure password reset feature_ that Troy alludes to? I missed it.

<comment><USER16> The viable alternative is in the sentence you quoted:

"Ultimately, password hints are evil and they add nothing to an online system that can't be achieved with a secure password reset feature."

Secure password reset.

<comment><USER15> Oh, pish posh. You could've just as easily said, "The viable alternative is to make password resets secure" and said the same thing. It's doublespeak. It's basically an easy way to say, "There are a lot of different things you can do but I don't feel like taking the time to list each of the options right now."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Really interesting post and strong argument. Shame about the pie charts for data viz but hey, nobody's perfect.

<comment><USER18> Here's some of the data in tables: [http://adobe.breach.il.ly/#/stats](http://adobe.breach.il.ly/#/stats)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> > Password hints are an absolutely ridiculous security measure.

Password hints have multiple uses. For identity management and verification systems, it's used as an additional identity check after the password if the host seems to have changed. For password recovery, it's a "need to know" factor you have to pass before you get to the "need to have" of e-mail account access. Since it's trivial to bruteforce, multiple hints of different categories are usually deployed.

In the real world, hackers compromise accounts by finding out the personal details they need to subvert password-recovery steps. Find the last four of the social, their birth date, address, and phone number, and you can basically hijack any bank, telephone, utility or government account a person has. Password hints are (when properly implemented) more secure because they can leverage other access methods.

Did they need to keep the hint plaintext? No; they can hash it just like any other password. But as the complexity requirement of the hint is much lower than that of passwords, it should be required to use another factor (such as an e-mailed confirmation code, SMS, or many more hints or sensitive information) to allow the hint to succeed.

<comment><USER20> I think you've mixed up password hints with security questions.

You seem to be talking about stuff of the form, "What is my mother's maiden name?"

A password hint is exactly what it says: a hint for what your password was, to help you avoid forgetting it. If your password is "lassie", then your password hint might be something like, "That dog you like from TV." The problem, of course, is that just about any hint that helps you remember your password also helps an attacker guess it.

<comment><USER19> Ah, you're right, got the two confused

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I changed my password to "photoshop", because I was expecting an advice from adobe telling me to pick something more secure, nothing happened :/

</comment><comment><USER22> in other news, 93,000 people still have a juno.com email address.

<comment><USER23> These were both for active and inactive accounts.</comment></comment>


ASP.NET MVC Now Accepting Pull Requests - <AUTHOR> http://haacked.com/archive/2012/03/28/asp-net-mvc-now-accepting-pull-requests.aspx <comment><USER2> This is an honest question: Having been in IT and software development for over a decade, I have never encountered a problem that required me to look at the source code. As such, I've never really understood the open source movement. I can't imagine a scenario where the software I am using, the same software used by hundreds of thousands of others, would be broken to the point where I had to go into the source and fix it. I can't even imagine going into the source to figure out how it works-- usually the documentation and online help is sufficient.

What is the typical scenario where one really benefits in open over closed source? How often does it occur? I am curious.

<comment><USER3> I started working with Microsoft platforms professionally at age 15 or so. I worked for Microsoft as a software developer doing integration work on Visual Studio. More than ten years after I first wrote a line of Visual Basic, I wish I could never link against a closed library ever again.

Using software is different than building software. When you're using most software for it's primary function, it's a well worn path. Others have encountered the problems and enough people have spoken up to prompt the core contributors to correct the issue. But when you're building software, you're doing something new. And there are so many ways to do it, you'll encounter unused bits, rusty corners, and unfinished experimental code paths. You'll encounter edge cases that have been known to be broken, but were worked around.

Sometimes, the documentation isn't complete. Sometimes, it's wrong. The source code never lies. For an experienced developer, reading the source can often be faster... especially if you're already familiar with the package's architecture.

I'm in a medium-sized co-working space with several startups. A lot of the other CTOs and engineers come to our team for guidance and advice on occasion. When people report a problem with their stack, the first question I ask them is: "Well, did you read the source code?"

I encourage developers to git clone anything and everything they depend on. Initially, they are all afraid. "That project is too big, I'll never find it!" or "I'm not smart enough to understand it" or "That code is so ugly! I can't stand to look at it". But you don't have to search the whole thing, you just need to follow the trail. And if you can't understand the platform below you, how can you understand your own software? And most of the time, what inexperienced developers consider beautiful is superficial, and what they consider ugly, is battle-hardened production-ready code from master hackers.

Now, a year or two later, I've had a couple of developers come up to me and thank me for forcing them to sink or swim in other people's code bases. They are better at their craft and they wonder how they ever got anything done without the source code in the past.

When you run a business, if your software has a bug, your customers don't care if it is your fault or Linus' or some random Rails developer's. They care that your software is bugged. Everyone's software becomes my software because all of their bugs are my bugs. When something goes wrong, you need to seek out what is broken, and you need to fix it. You fix it at the right spot in the stack to minimize risks, maintenance costs, and turnaround time. Sometimes, a quick workaround is best. Other times, you'll need to recompile your compiler. Often, you can ask someone else to fix it upstream, but just as often, you'll need to fix it yourself.

Closed-software shops have two choices: beg for generosity, or work around it.

Open source shops with weaker developers tend to act the same as closed- software shops.

Older shops tend to slowly build the muscles required to maintain their own forks and patches and whatnot.

True hackers have come to terms with a simple fact: If it runs on my machine, it's my software. I'm responsible for it. I must understand it. Building from source is the rule and not an exception. I must control my environment and I must control my dependencies.

<comment><USER4> This is part of the reason why I really appreciate m2clipse (Maven Eclipse IDE) ability to download the source code (when available in the repository, which, in Java land, almost always) when I tried to navigate to the Class definition, method implementation, interface or whatnot.

It's very empowering to read the source code because one can learn a lot.

A few more things to add from your points:

To work-around a software, sometime I have to understand how it works internally and given the source code, I don't have to spend a lot of time to reverse-engineer it.

Having said that, sometime the customers do care if it's my fault or IBM faults if we stated clearly in the deliverable that "hey, we're using IBM WebSphere for this...". They would give IBM some time to fix it, or ask us if we can work-around it, or they would bend certain requirements (i.e.: work- around the requirements, not the code).

This is why sometimes, probably a dying trend given the quality of open source software, an outsource project chose software based on the company behind it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> After working in a Linux/Open-source environment for several years and then switching to Microsoft a few years ago, I noticed that things seemed to be getting progressively more open and developer-friendly. I've wondered if it was just me being biased toward my current environment, but there has definitely been progress.

I think that Microsoft has finally realized that the best way to build and maintain a community of software professionals is to treat them like esteemed associates. It's too bad Haack left, but with Scott Hanselman evangelizing (he even came to my mid-sized midwest city a few weeks ago) and ScottGu running the show, things are looking bright for MS devs.

<comment><USER6> I started my career in MS ASP.NET WebForms/MVC, and then recently switched to RoR, and it's obvious that they're mimicking the success of RoR development environment and, more importantly, the culture. Their Nuget packaging system is pretty much RubyGems + Bundler. Last year was the last time I touched MS stuff, and it was pretty raw and not ready for the masses yet. With people like Hanselman and ScottGu pushing the MS culture towards more open, I'm hopeful for the direction of MS's Web stack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have one thing to say: Finally.

To give some context, my first job out of college was in a small WebForms/MVC shop in LA. It was very progressive in that my managers always pushed me to question the conventional "MS" way of programming/architecting. However, what frustrated the hell out of me was all the other MS companies around us: they were so damn dependent on what MS gave them.

I've heard countless MS devs in local meetups screaming bloody murder when MVC first came out, "Microsoft, you HAVE to train us on MVC! It's a black box, we're effed!" This shocked me, because these people wanted to literally be force-fed with MVC. Microsoft (intentionally or not) encouraged this kind of behavior with their close-mindedness, and this dependency/babying was crippling to the MS dev community.

Accepting pull requests signifies a _tremendous_ step on MS's side, because they're finally admitting that there are actually smart developers OUTSIDE OF MS BUILDING who can help out with the framework. Their closed-software drove me away from them to RoR. Now, I have some peace of mind knowing that the bleeding of good devs away from MS stack may finally slow down. I can't wait to see the next generations of Scott Hanselman and ScottGu pushing the envelope for MS.

</comment><comment><USER7> Well, that's a first! I'm really happy to see this change. MS has some _excellent_ dev tools out there, and really the only thing holding back .NET development is the strong "if it ain't MS, it ain't good" culture among many of its users. Moves like this might help break that strong singular dependency.

<comment><USER8> And what about IronPython, IronRuby? they are mentioned in the article

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I agree with one the commentators on the linked article, I'd rather had Microsoft support Mercurial instead git.

</comment><comment><USER10> Wow. I thought I saw a pig just fly past my office! I never thought this would happen - but then neither did Mr Haack.. Kudos to Microsoft for coming to join the party.

Hopefully with a bit of luck I'll never be using or coding on MS stack ever again though!</comment>


Using Solr and Sunspot to Search Within Words - <AUTHOR> http://collectiveidea.com/blog/archives/2011/03/23/using-solr-and-sunspot-to-search-within-words/

<comment><USER2> Love these guys.

Asked a question on StackOverflow about DelayedJobs and one of them, with a newly registered SO account, provided an insightful answer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Danneu - I'll pass this comment on to the rest of the team :)</comment></comment>


Kentucky governor says he deliberately exposed his children to chickenpox - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/20/kentucky-governor-exposes-children-chickenpox-vaccines <comment><USER2> Lol, just saw the South Park episode about this. Hope they don't give him back the same thing those four did to their parents.</comment>


Search engine manipulation effect and possible impact on election outcomes - <AUTHOR> http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/E4512 <comment><AUTHOR> > Specifically, we show that (i) biased search rankings can shift the voting > preferences of undecided voters by 20% or more, (ii) the shift can be much > higher in some demographic groups, and (iii) such rankings can be masked so > that people show no awareness of the manipulation.

Interesting research given how everyone is currently looking at facebook.</comment>


AmazonFresh rolls out mandatory $299/year 'Prime Fresh' grocery membership - <AUTHOR> http://www.geekwire.com/2015/after-delay-amazon-rolls-out-mandatory-299year-prime-fresh-membership-as-promised/ <comment><USER2> As a Los Angeles resident, when I experimented with Amazon Fresh, it required a Prime Fresh subscription. I don't recall it ever being free. The $300 annual subscription, when combined with my assessment that the value I received for that $300 was very low, is the reason I did not renew.

That said, I _can_ understand offended customers taking to Twitter to express their frustration. Sometimes, it's not quite enough of a signal to simply not renew a subscription. If you want the company to actually understand why you didn't renew and possibly improve in ways that matter to you as a customer, you must communicate your displeasure in some way. These tweets are just a convenient way to be heard. And lo, here is an article republishing them, possibly to Amazon's frustration.

I love the free market, and recognize that consumer demand is a very strong signal, ultimately the most important signal for a supplier. But I don't see why consumers shouldn't augment that signal with plain old English.

<comment><USER3> > But I don't see why consumers shouldn't augment that signal with plain old > English.

There is a big difference between the people who are saying "wait, now it costs this much money? ok, I'm no longer buying this: that is way too much for too little value; there's no way I'd pay more than $X (where X might be 0)... I wonder what Amazon might be thinking here" and the people who are leaning on "it is morally wrong to be charging a fee for something that was free yesterday" (especially given the system-wide workaround these people often don't even notice, which is the company with the too-low pricing goes out of business and gets replaced by a competitor that charged the right amount from the first day of operation) or the people who are pushing at "I am incredibly angry at Amazon for doing this" (seriously? there's no good reason to be angry). I do not think the latter two are appropriate behaviors for consumers, and it is those kinds of responses I think the people you are trying to speak at are taking issue with.

<comment><USER4> Factual writing has linear reach and exponential decay through networks, such that most people feel it pointless to bother expressing the facts of their problem. Moral-panic propaganda, meanwhile, is an instrument that companies actually fear, because it has viral potential; and so the one people tend to feel will actually get their complaints acknowledged. It's unrealistic to expect people to engage with companies in any other way (at least unless there's some sort of collective-bargaining structure in place; unions and guilds are perfectly fine making factual arguments.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm constantly amazed that supermarkets in the US don't do delivery like those in the UK. Almost all will do next day delivery for just a few pounds at most. No subscription, just go to the site and order, picking the delivery slot. It works, and is massively popular.

<comment><USER6> Stop & Shop (Peapod), Whole foods, Shoprite, Kings, and until its bankrupcy, A&P - i.e. every major chain in NJ - all offer online ordering + free pickup and/or cheap (usually free with threshold) delivery for at least 3 years now. Its wildly popular, especially with seniors who get help with heavier items.

<comment><USER5> So why do people pay subscriptions to Amazon then if they can get it so much cheaper elsewhere?

<comment><USER7> Marketing?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was using Fresh in Manhattan (for free, for several months) with absolutely zero sign they would ever be trying their (ludicrous) $300 annual membership here as early as 3 days ago, and I got no notice whatsoever that I now needed to buy-up to a more expensive membership other than when I tried to go back in and place an order today.

They have shitloads of competition in this market. I don't get why they think they can get away with a $300 fee when Peapod/FreshDirect both charge $100 a year. Granted, it isn't same-day delivery, but same-day was rarely available to me anyway. Additionally, Prime Now further cannibalizes the value of this, because most of the grocery items you'd want last minute are available there for no additional upcharge with a smaller minimum and the ability to get a 1-hour window if you Really Need It Now™.

Ah well, thanks Amazon for the totes; I still have a few that I was supposed to return with my next order, which will now be never.

<comment><USER6> +1 for peapod - and if you switch your grocery shopping to twice a month instead of weekly, you get discounted/free shipping anyway on orders over 100$.

Something wrong with item (e.g. bananas too ripe or eggs broken?) - 10 min phone call and you get a credit for entire item no questions asked. Last time i tried getting in touch with amazon it was a 2 day ordeal (though to their credit, the result was similar).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Honestly, $6 a week for delivered groceries doesn't seem too crazy to me. I guess the bigger issue is that starting with a free or cheap product, and then upping the price later, is a lot more offensive than vice versa.

<comment><USER10> It was actually advertised as a trial program when you signed up. I started using them in NYC since February.Since then I've received two emails from them that my subscription has been extended. This email was received in June.

That being said, I don't plan on paying an extra $200 on top of my prime to renew this service. While the prices are comparable to Whole Foods / Fairway / Trade Joes the inventory isn't great. A lot of the items I use to purchase in February are no longer available. I can't ever seem to place an order for baby spinach.... I mean something as simple as that is always out of stock...

\---

Thank you for being an AmazonFresh customer! We're happy to let you know we're extending the use of AmazonFresh to Amazon Prime members through September 2015. At the end of this free period, you'll need to sign up for a Prime Fresh membership (an upgraded tier of Amazon Prime) to continue enjoying free delivery from AmazonFresh.

We hope you continue to make AmazonFresh your favorite place to shop for groceries, fresh produce, and everyday essentials. Be sure to visit our Summer Treats store for delicious ways to cool down over the summer.

Thank you,

AmazonFresh

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I remember when Publix tried to do grocery delivery in 2003 and it failed. It makes me think the issue isn't with the technology on the web-side, or even in the route planning. The costs of having refrigerated trucks continually roaming the streets in such large, suburban areas just might not be feasible yet.

<comment><USER12> In lower-density areas, I think most supermarkets have found that online order + in-person pickup has been more successful, as a halfway solution that's much cheaper. A huge portion of their customers drive past one of their supermarkets on the way home from work anyway. Obviously this doesn't apply to people who don't drive to work in the first place, but about 90% of Americans do drive to work, so the numbers for that option are fairly favorable [1]. And in many zip codes the proportion approaches 100%. Walmart also recently rolled out an online-order / curbside pickup thing for groceries [2]. I'll be interested if any numbers emerge about how it's doing.

[1] [http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/brookings- now/posts/2013/10/n...](http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/brookings- now/posts/2013/10/ninety-percent-of-americans-drive-to-work)

[2] [http://time.com/money/4054549/wal-mart-grocery-pickup- amazon...](http://time.com/money/4054549/wal-mart-grocery-pickup-amazon/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> _" I Am Altering The Deal. Pray I Don't Alter It Any Further"_ \- Lord Vader.

This may indicate a failure. What killed Webvan was low market penetration. They had 3% of the market in 30 markets, and needed 30% of the market in 3 markets. With low market penetration, deliveries are too far apart and there are too few deliveries per truck per hour. Amazon could succeed where Webvan failed only if they achieved a high percentage of potential customers. They'd like the truck to stop at every house. To get there, they had to offer cheap/free delivery at a loss, trying for market saturation.

At $299 per year, that may mean Amazon is giving up on Fresh as a high volume service with high market penetration, and repositioning it as a luxury service with few customers.

<comment><USER14> In the UK Amazon have said they want to take 2% of the fresh-food delivery market in their initial areas, so it does appear that they're targeting a particular demographic which is price-insensitive but time-sensitive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> What's happening with Fresh looks to me like nothing was learned from the Fire phone fiasco. Amazon became big as a low-price, low-margin online retail company providing a near endless selection of products.

Fresh however already now has a in my opinion a too high price point on many products and a 300.- yearly fee will just make the situation worse. But what's really a deal-breaker for me is that the selection is barely larger than the one of my local deli around the corner and can definitely not compete with the choice offered going to any major super market.

This was very astonishing to me trying out Fresh for the first time, coming from Switzerland where we have the two major supermarket chains delivering their whole range of products all over the country without the need for a yearly subscription. I can't really understand why an international, multi- billion dollar company like Amazon is not able to provide a similar selection, especially given the restriction of currently only servicing major US cities.

</comment><comment><USER16> Mini rant ahead... I'm in Tempe (near Phoeinix). It is very frustrating that I live in a pretty large area in terms of technology and population. Yet, this seems to be one of the last cities to see services like this (instacart, AmazonFresh, etc). Phoenix is the fifth largest city in the country, and including the suburbs is #4 iirc. I realize we're geographically spread out, but so is the L.A. area.

All of that said, it's a lot easier to plan for per-delivery fees over an annual fee much more than $100, which you already pay for prime... I think they should just let straight prime members order with at $10-20 per delivery fee... that would be a lot easier to swallow.

<comment><USER17> The Sears & Roebuck catalog was sent to rural farmers who had limited access to durable goods. It does seem to me counterproductive that Amazon tested this in cities that already have easy access to grocery markets.

$299/yr is $5.75 per delivery if you order something every week. But $25 if you only buy once a month. For the service to be worthwhile they need to sell to areas that need better access to fresh foods. There's a name for that, food deserts _. And Los Angeles, Seattle, and New York are not on that list. Maybe if they had tested in a place like Phoenix they would have seen much higher use and could justify a lower subscription rate with delivery charge.

_ [http://apps.ams.usda.gov/fooddeserts/foodDeserts.aspx](http://apps.ams.usda.gov/fooddeserts/foodDeserts.aspx)

<comment><USER18> I'm guessing places that are "food deserts" are generally not affluent enough to be the target market that will pay a delivery fee.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Huh. In SF, at least for me, I think they've always required the $299/year fee. I had wanted to try it out, but since I get most of my groceries from the neighborhood store, it never made financial sense for me.

</comment><comment><USER20> I can already get free same-day delivery from Amazon or various grocery stores via Amazon Prime Now (I'm in Manhattan). What does an extra $200/year get me?

<comment><USER10> The key differences are the unattended delivery and the instacart (1 hr time slot delivery). The unattended is nice, they put it in a tote/cooler and it stays cool for 3 hours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Wow that is expensive. Is it because it is same-day delivery? Most UK supermarkets do delivery for a quid or two. It doesn't come the same day, but... $300?!

<comment><USER22> The only way you'll get it on the same day is if you order it early in the morning for evening delivery. It's not a local supermarket, they need to schedule a driver and bring the stuff to you from their warehouse.

Most supermarkets around me (NYC area) do deliver. Some for free. On top of that, there's Peapod, Fresh Direct, and a bunch of others.

This is a profoundly stupid move by Amazon. I can't imagine anyone would want to pay for this considering the alternatives available in most metro areas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> 2 months ago trying to use amazon fresh told me I needed to be a prime member to use it. I signed up for a year of prime for the sole purpose of using amazon fresh and I was very happy. Now 2 months in they are forcing me to pay another 200$. This may be my fault for not reading my prime subscription terms but I feel tricked into buying prime. I will be trying out instacart in the future.

<comment><USER24> Amazon generally has good customer service. They might refund you if you ask.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Insane. Amazon Fresh has good quality product but it's very expensive. This makes it not even close to worth it.

</comment><comment><USER26> i cannot fucking understand offended customers. you dont want to pay? dont pay.

<comment><USER19> They had a deal. Amazon unilaterally renegotiated with no notice or explanation. Nobody likes a sudden deal change, and nobody likes being powerless.

I can't understand people getting offended at that. Don't want to hear it? Don't listen.

<comment><USER27> FTA they announced this a year ago: [http://www.geekwire.com/2014/amazon- fresh-require-seattle-cu...](http://www.geekwire.com/2014/amazon-fresh- require-seattle-customers-buy-299year-prime-fresh-memberships-continue-using- grocery-service/)</comment></comment></comment>


Norway Wants to Blast a Hole in a Giant Hill for the World's First Ship Tunnel - <AUTHOR> http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/norway-wants-to-build-the-worlds-first-ship-tunnel-1793606315 <comment><USER2> Previous discussion of a similar post: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13920841](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13920841) (146 points, 5 days ago, 29 comments)

General idea of the comments: It's not the first ship tunnel, but it's much bigger than the previous tunnels.</comment>


Recommendation Systems are Redefining the Web - <AUTHOR> http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2006/12/13/uietips-article-watch-and-learn-recommendation-systems-are-redefining-the-web/ <comment><AUTHOR> The acceleration of computation has transformed everything from social and economic relations to political institutions. A social network can harness the combined computation of the average Joe and create a rudimentary form of artificial intelligence. Amazon has already accomplished it. Today, we depend on Amazon bots to tell us what we "will" like. This is a major paradigm shift from less than a decade ago when we bought books solely based on recommendations from humans rather than computers. Everything a user does on a social network says a little bit about them. What happens if all those bits get put into one big trove of data about the user and their tastes? Advertiser's heaven.

<comment><USER2> Advertiser heaven, absolutely.

Has anyone here read John Battelle's "The Search?"

He coins the term "Database of Intentions." He suggests some really provocative scenarios that is even more applicable now with recommendation engines.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, thanks for pointing that out. "The Search" does indeed provide provocative scenarios on this. I will quote directly from the book: "..Zeitgeist revealed to me that Google had more than its finger on the pulse of our culture, it was directly jacked into the culture's nervous system. This was my first glimpse into what I came to call the Database of Intentions-a living power of immense power. My God, I thought, Google knows what our culture wants!...Could it not also start a research and marketing company capable of telling clients exactly what people are buying, looking to buy, or avoiding? How about starting an e-commerce firm that already knew what the buyer wanted? How about a travel business that knew where the customer wanted to go? The possibilities, it seemed, were endless".</comment></comment></comment>


Str0ke (the guy who ran milw0rm) is dead? - <AUTHOR> http://bl4cksecurity.blogspot.com/2009/11/str0ke-milworms-funeral-is-this-friday.html

<comment><USER2> _I'm not dead yet, just being trolled._

<http://twitter.com/str0ke/status/5422531377>

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not sure who's running things there (if anyone) but he had said he turned over duties to some friends. Milw0rm was (is?) a source of quality PoC exploit code, much of which was zero-day. For security research, it used to be a great resource. I, too, have noticed it hadn't been very active lately, so it's hard telling who (again, if anyone) is running things there.

Also, I haven't really seen any other posts about str0ke's death, other than ones linking to bl4cksecurity or mentions of it quite a while after the initial post there.

It's not that I would consider it a hoax, but it highlights one of the oddities of pseudonymous culture. First and foremost, I was under the impression he was in his late 20s from his profiles elsewhere on the web, and the link says he was born in '74. Again, pseudonymous culture means that data could be false, accounts could be impostors, etc.

<comment><USER4> Is this his Twitter account? Apparently, not dead as of 22 min ago: <http://twitter.com/Str0ke>

<comment><USER5> He's not dead. Or someone's got his account. Hard to tell really.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _str0ke @ milw0rm has passed away due to_ cardiac arrest _early this morning at 9:23 AM. We @ blacksecurity are deeply saddened by the loss of a_ good hearted _friend._

At the risk (certainty?) of being downvoted, that's an interesting choice of words.

For those who don't know (I didn't), it appears milw0rm is a kind of exploits database:

<http://www.milw0rm.com/>

I had never heard of it before myself, but clearly some people had.

<comment><USER7> milw0rm is (or was) one of the first places I check each morning for new info. I was worried about the lack of updates - and this is sad news for both the security community and, obviously, str0ke's friends and family.

RIP.

<comment><USER8> I thought there was an announcement some time ago that he was done with milw0rm? Perhaps someone else has taken over already?

<comment><USER7> Yeh there was a lot of confusion (heh, how ironic :D) but I was under the impression he was still at the helm.

Might be wrong then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> RIP. It's good to know that a smart guy left four children to the world, so part of his essence will continue to live.

<comment><USER10> Thanks, antirez, for the nice thought.

Having children is sufficient, but not necessary for part of one's essence to continue to live. There are many great "DNA-less" ways to do this. For those without biological children, you can live on through hard work and good deeds that benefit others.

RIP.

<comment><USER9> Indeed thanks edw519 for adding this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> RIP :(

<comment><USER12> oh no :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is a sad day, RIP str0ke.

</comment><comment><USER14> <http://exploits.astalavista.com> they have a new section that accepts submissions</comment>


Avoid the fate of the frog - <AUTHOR> http://fridayreflections.typepad.com/weblog/2007/09/avoid-the-fate-.html

<comment><USER2> The boiling frog story is illustrative of humans, not frogs.

<http://www.snopes.com/critters/wild/frogboil.asp></comment>


Ask HN: Is there a cheap way to get money from customers (Not PayPal etc) - <AUTHOR>

Hello everyone
As part of my site, I need to allow users to transfer funds to the site's account (later to be used for online purchases).
It seems that the most common option, is using PayPal. But, for small transactions (<500$) the fee is close to 4%. That cuts very deeply into our profit margin.
Can anyone recommend other (cheaper) ways to allow users to transfer funds to a site ? <comment><USER2> You can do a bit better with a merchant account. Both merchant accounts and Paypal tend to be skeptical of pre-payment arrangements, since they don't make nearly enough off of you to absorb the risk of you taking the money and running.

That said, 4% is _cheap_ and it will go down as you process more orders. (The magic number is $3,000 per month to get your first .4% knocked off, and there is a sliding scale after that.) Note that it takes rather a lot of effort to get as far as $3k a month relative to what it takes to sell $12 worth of marginal product, which suggests to me that your time is better spent elsewhere, unless you are selling a product which has intrinsically low margins. For those of us in software or SAAS Paypal is pretty much the _only_ cost we have to pay out of our last dollar in sales every month.

See also their micropayments option, which is not advertised but costs 5 cents and 5%. The inflection point is at $12 transactions.

</comment><comment><USER3> People see the 2-4% that credit card processors take and view it in comparison to cash - something they see as having no cost per transaction. What people don't see is the cost of taking cash - it gets stolen, it gets you robbed, it needs special help(armed guards) getting to the bank.

You're online and stuck with credit cards and 2-4% fees, but that's just the cost of doing business. Money cost money to transfer. Build it into your model.

<comment><USER4> I don't think people trust any of the none popular gateways. Just add the cost of Paypal's fee to your product's cost and use different payment methods. credit card, Paypal, Google checkout, money orders and checks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think 4% is fairly small: A lot of payment methods ask more, ranging from 30% from Apple for in-app purchases, to 50+% for SMS payments. Here in the Netherlands we have Ideal, which mostly has fixed costs, but that is only attractive for bigger payments. When you have small payments, a fixed fee of E1,- isn't that nice... In the end 4% isn't that bad, and for credit cards is hard to get under 2.5% - 4%, unless you have an amazon-like scale. I would also check how easy it is for customers to pay you: If you make 1% more, but lose 50% of your customers, that might be a bad deal (or it can be good, depending on your type of business).

</comment><comment><USER6> If there was an answer to this question, I don't think PayPal would be in business.

At this point, PayPal is like Microsoft Office -- it's the de facto standard, no matter how crappy the product is. Sorry.

I know this is a really shitty answer to your question, but I think it's the truth.

If anyone else has an answer, I would _love_ to hear it, and there is no irony or malice in that statement -- as a developer who uses PayPal for donations as payment for my software, I would _love_ a way to get a bigger cut of the money.

<comment><USER2> Would you prefer a bigger cut, or more dollars in your pocket? That isn't a very hard question for most people, but they act like it is.

For example, assuming your average donation is somewhere in the region of $10, you're paying somewhere in the 6 ~ 8% region to Paypal. Yeah, annoying. But if you cut your costs of payment processing _in half_ , that only increases your net income by something like 3.1%.

There are much, muuuuuuch easier ways to get a 3.1% increase, particularly if (like most folks who accept donations) you have never attempted to optimize anything about your business. For example, most folks I know who accept donations are afraid of appearing commercially motivated so they create a discrete donation button and then place it down a rabbit hole in a mythical kingdom surrounded by lakes of fire and cloaked with Grumble's Greater Enchantment Of Decreasing Conversion.

Instead, move it to above the fold on your page, increase the size of the button, and prominently (and without sounding ashamed of yourself) ask for the donation around places where you provide value to your users (which is when they are the most inclined to say yes, because they're feeling all warm and fuzzy about you).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd be less worried about the cut they take and more worried about their annoying capacity to take a disliking to you and shutting down your account without warning while taking your money, and never, ever telling you why.

Make sure you have a backup.

<comment><USER8> And also how they deal with customers who reverse charges (happens more than you'd think). Not to mention dealing with actual fraud.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> 3% is as low as you can get with Amex. 2% is as low as you can get with Visa/MC. The only other thing consumers can pay you with is an ACH transfer (which is like a check) and even that costs money for both ends sometimes -- but the systems that let you write "electronic checks" are clunky and weird and 90% of your customers will want to use their credit card for fear of giving you their bank account numbers. That puts you back at 2-4%. So you're definitely on the high end, but you're going to save max about 1%. Is 1% of your revenue worth the cost of setting up your own merchant account (it will be a few weeks of work if you run your own payment system). If you use an off the shelf shopping cart system, go with authorize.net and it should work out of the box.

</comment><comment><USER10> Two previous threads:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=526517>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=432284>

both have good info

</comment><comment><USER11> <https://www.revolutionmoneyexchange.com/>

Payments to you from your customers are free, and it's free to transfer money to and from a bank account.

Apparently AmEx is buying Revolution Money... hopefully they aren't planning to kill it off: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=948464>

</comment><comment><USER12> Can't think of already available service for this problem right now. However there is one solution I think you would have already though of this but here we go; Assimilate the cost till it reaches a bit bigger sum. That is if you have multiple purchase from the same customer.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm trying to find a similar alternative service with an API and also keen to use something like TipJoy to collect smaller funds of $1 or less. But i just visited their homepage just to see the "Tipjoy is shutting down" message.

Does anybody known any alternatives?

<comment><USER14> Paypal has a small value transaction system I believe. I think it takes 8% rather than a standard per trasaction fee + ~2%.

It makes it reasonable up to about 10$

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Check? Look at how NearlyFree does it: <https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/about/mailing>

Cost of handling at some volumes may be more than 4% though.

</comment><comment><USER16> Check out Moneybookers. <http://www.moneybookers.com/app/help.pl?s=fees>

<comment><USER17> From a user's point of view, Moneybookers is truly, truly awful. I couldn't use PayPal for a while because I had to change my account country, and I was forced to use MoneyBookers to add money to my Skype account. Suffice to say that I will never use a service that requires me to use MB - or at least, I'd have to really, really want it.

<comment><USER16> Would you elaborate? I never tried Moneybookers myself but always thought they were good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Orcaone.com offers a cheap platform for collecting money whether on mobile or desktop web. They also have open API's. www.orcaone.com.

</comment><comment><USER19> you should checkout <http://noca.com/>

<comment><USER20> Any info on the traction of noca? How do consumers react to this new form of transaction? Is the merchant seeing lower conversions due to consumer unfamiliarity?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I have found the best non-PayPal solution to be iTransact (<http://www.itransact.com/marketing/referral/S33oOO>). They combine the gateway and the merchant account, and have lower fees than their competitors.

</comment><comment><USER22> I've heard very good things about Amazon Payments.

</comment><comment><USER23> Any experiences with Google Checkout?</comment>


60% of the apps in the App Store have never been downloaded - <AUTHOR> http://www.phonearena.com/news/400000-apps-in-the-App-Store-have-never-been-downloaded-says-report_id32943

<comment><USER2> Something is not kosher with these numbers. Anyone going through the effort of publishing an app to the App Store will at least download it themselves and have at least a few friends or family members do the same.

<comment><USER3> Pure speculation: maybe these apps are actually ebooks or some other kind of static content just packaged as an app and they are generated by an automatic or a semi-automatic process. Assuming that the article is correct, of course.

<comment><USER4> The article is not correct. The original source says these apps get 0-10 downloads per day. So they could be getting over three thousand downloads a year and still fall into the category that the article says has "never been downloaded."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think these numbers are based on one blog post the company made[1].

They wrote:

"[...] defined that an app has to hold a position for at least 7 days to be considered as "ranked". That was the case for 265,959 apps from the 18th of July 2012 to 25th of July 2012. To the remaining 410.023 apps off the ranks, we refer as app zombies, leading a life outside a prospering market."

and

"[...] in theory app zombies can still be downloaded, we concluded that an average zombie is getting _zero to ten downloads a day_ , depending on the country."

[1]: <http://www.apptrace.com/blog/2012-08-06/inside-zombie-land>

</comment><comment><USER6> If it's true (which I'm highly skeptical of) it should be encouraging because it means the median income that you can hope to capture is quite a bit higher than the averages people run based on totals.

</comment><comment><USER7> Makes me feel better about my 350 downloads...

<comment><USER8> I've got a small "scratching my own itch" app with a paid and ad version on the store for 6 months, no marketing at all really other than being in an underserved (and small) niche. Paid version has had about 75 downloads, the ad version has a few thousand. By the article's definition, it's "never been downloaded". However, even at such a low download rate, it's basically paid for the cost of putting it on the store, by the end of the first year and assuming the download rate stays the same it will have made a small return.

While it's not going to replace my day job, it was still worth doing IMO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> 80-20 principle working here. Not to be picky, but I think most app must've been downloaded at minimum a few times, if it's even by friends of the app builder.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is highly unlikely and probably flat out wrong. Placing any app in the app store will result in a few immediate downloads just from being listed.

</comment><comment><USER4> "...we concluded that an average zombie is getting zero to ten downloads a day, depending on the country."

This is not even remotely the same thing as "never been downloaded". I've flagged the article for blatant stupidity. Do people not think before they click the up arrow?

<comment><USER11> To be fair, it only has 12 points at this time.

<comment><USER4> Still enough to get it well up the front page, though.</comment></comment></comment>


Change your iCloud password NOW - <AUTHOR> https://blog.kaspersky.com/change-icloud-password/12544/ <comment><USER2> >> "As long as we're in the area, now would also be a great time to add two- step verification to your account

I changed my password, not because I think that there is a acute risk, but because I actually never changed it since I created my acc some years ago and this article reminded me.

Seems like its not even possible to activate 2FA for a couple of days, after you changed your password..

</comment><comment><USER3> >> "There's a rumor flying around the Internet that up to 40 million iCloud accounts have been compromised. Now, we normally wait for extra information and corroborating data to back up claims, if this one is true there's no time to lose"

Maybe it's me, but this post seems fishy, especially given the references to event that took place over two years ago.

<comment><USER4> _this post seems fishy_

I was thinking the same thing. The same company whose CEO hobnobs[1] with Vlad Putin's buddies says:

 _remember to test sample passwords with our online password checker_

Sure, be sure to send any password you're considering using to Kaspersky for thorough vetting. I'm sure they won't retain a copy of it. Trust them.

 _start thinking about investing in a password manager. Kaspersky's password manager is a great one_

How fortunate for everyone that they just happen to have such a useful product. But a quick Google also turned up a list of 7 open source password managers. Maybe consider using one of those instead?[2]

[1] [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-19/cybersecur...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-19/cybersecurity- kaspersky-has-close-ties-to-russian-spies) [2] [http://venturebeat.com/2015/10/13/7-open-source-password- man...](http://venturebeat.com/2015/10/13/7-open-source-password-managers-to- try-now-that-logmein-owns-lastpass/)

<comment><USER3> >> "Sure, be sure to send any password you're considering using to Kaspersky for thorough vetting. I'm sure they won't retain a copy of it. Trust them."

Assuming they did keep passwords, at best, be sides the password, what information would they have and how might it be used?</comment></comment></comment>


Every issue of New Scientist from 1956 to 1989 - <AUTHOR> http://books.google.com/books/about/New_Scientist.html?id=4BfSdk4mJfcC&redir_esc=y

<comment><USER2> There are piles of magazine archives on Google since quite some time:

Google blog entry when they introduced the feature: [http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2008/12/search-and-find- mag...](http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2008/12/search-and-find-magazines-on- google.html)

(and old partial list with links: <http://duvet- dayz.com/archives/2008/12/11/1037/> )

the full list of English magazines on Google Books: <http://books.google.co.uk/books/magazines/language/en>

</comment><comment><USER3> New Scientist's weekly issues are a real pleasure to read. Worth checking them out IMO, awesome that they put their old issues up for free.

<comment><USER4> It is truly awesome, and due to the slower nature of science, it still makes sense to read a lot of the insightful articles. Just compare it with engadget or gizmodo, 5 years later they make not much sense to read except for nostalgia.

<comment><USER5> Agreed that reading old science stuff is fascinating. When I was researching The Geek Atlas I read a lot of original scientific papers and reports. Some of the best are the lectures given by Nobel Prize winners. For example, Chadwick's 1935 lecture on the discovery of the neutron is great: [http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/193...](http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1935/chadwick- lecture.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seems to be missing most of 1965 and then up to Dec 1970. Which sucks, because I specifically went looking for the 1969 poster of Isaac Newton mentioned in the first episode of "Friday Night Dinner". (It's a collectable!)

</comment><comment><USER7> I remember coming across issue #1 of "New Scientist" in a university library in the mid-80s ... unfortunately it seems to be missing from Google (so far).

If it shows up I'd highly recommend looking at it, specifically for the editorial setting out the frame of reference for what the editors intended the magazine to do: it had a mass-educational brief that is virtually absent from science and tech reporting today. (Instead we get lots of gosh-wow sense-of- wonder stuff but precious little substance or analytical thinking.)

</comment><comment><USER8> I forgot how many adverts there were.</comment>


Does Kickstarter support innovation? - <AUTHOR> https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3003283 <comment><AUTHOR> Abstract:

Crowdfunding is the sourcing of funding for a new venture from a community (the "crowd"). Of late, online crowdfunding has shot into prominence. However, despite hype, relatively little is formally known of a crowd's appetite for funding product innovation. Our article addresses this research void. We carefully collect a novel, large-scale dataset describing projects in nine product-oriented categories on Kickstarter, from its inception on April 28, 2009 till February 15, 2017. We use state-of-the-art machine learning analytics to analyse descriptions (text, image, and video) of projects. We arrive at a startling conclusion: novelty and usefulness are not viewed as synergistic by the crowd. This is surprising, and disappointing, because innovation requires both novelty and usefulness. Thus, our findings suggest caution in construing crowdfunding as a panacea for innovation.</comment>