The Most Misused SSN of All Time - <AUTHOR> https://www.ssa.gov/history/ssn/misused.html <comment><USER2> > They started using the number. They thought it was their own. I can't > understand how people can be so stupid. I can't understand that."

Based on the number of emails I get because other people think my email address is their email address, I too can't understand how people can be so stupid.

<comment><USER3> Oddly my wife is experiencing the same thing: some random person in Ireland keeps trying to sign up for things using her email address.

The latest is Paypal who WON'T DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT! (sorry, needed to have a dig at Paypal's awful support there).

This person has tried to sign up for at least 6 things over the last year only to find that the registration confirmation emails never reach her.

It's nuts!

<comment><USER4> I have a simple firstname.lastname@example.com as my gmail address, with my real name.

Some lawyer with an amazingly active life, and is learning to be a pilot, and other things I've forgotten has the same not too common name as me, and has email@example.com as his email address.

While at first cute, the number of times I've had to deal with other law firms who have sent me some incredibly sensitive document and then demanded I sign a document somehow proving I never read, nor will keep, the document they sent me by mistake is getting old.

Or my favorite, when a plane leasing company sent me some very large bill, and when I tried to explain the confusion, they claimed it was my responsibility to find the right person, or pay the bill.

People amaze me.

(And it's super petty of me, but this lawyer's family sends invites to family events to me now. The first few times I responded trying to fix the situation. Then I tried going radio silent to these, but they got more and more incessant on a response, so now I just respond that I'm not interested in attending.)

<comment><USER5> > this lawyer's family sends invites to family events to me now.

Just show up to the party?

<comment><USER4> I considered that. They live too far away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Guessing the LifeLock CEO might be the distant #2 on the list.

[https://www.wired.com/2010/05/lifelock-identity- theft/](https://www.wired.com/2010/05/lifelock-identity-theft/)

<comment><USER7> Almost 15 years later I can still remember that number from the TV commercials.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> CGP Grey did a great video a few years ago explaining how bad SSNs are.

[https://youtu.be/Erp8IAUouus](https://youtu.be/Erp8IAUouus)

<comment><USER9> Wow, i had never seen this video. I've been somewhat familiar with some of the topics depicted in the video...But seeing them all in one place - and of course the brilliantly cute and funny method - taught me lots more....Which lead to me remembering that this is all true and not fictitious...which instantly makes me a sad panda. :-(

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Company Vice President and Treasurer Douglas Patterson thought it would be a > clever idea to use the actual SSN of his secretary, Mrs. Hilda Schrader > Whitcher.

Can someone explain _why_ this would be "clever?" It just sounds like a bad idea to me.

<comment><USER11> The SSN was never intended to be a secret. Nobody in 1938 thought that one day banks and other businesses would use it as a credential to establish identity.

<comment><USER12> SSCs even used to have "not for identification" stamped on them before SSA gave up (the note was there from '46 to '72).

<comment><USER13> My circa 1969 SSC has that printed on it.

For GP, actually yes, people did think it would be used as a credential to establish identity, and many feared (correctly, as it turns out) that would happen. The phrase used by those people was "Papers, please!" with a German accent, since it was well known by the mid-40s that identity papers were used by the Nazis to control the population. Later variations by people my age was to use a Russian accent since the Bolsheviks also used papers to control the population.

My uncle and aunt never had SSNs for that reason (and no, never paid into or collected social security either.)

I have a friend who is now in his late 50s who has never given his SSN to anyone except the IRS and his employer -- which is actually the law, or at least used to be, perhaps it has changed.

Rather than assume older people are less privacy conscious, the correct assumption is that younger people are less inclined to protect their privacy. Many millennials don't even believe in privacy. I blame it on the generally poor education in history that most younger people have received.

<comment><USER14> I was renting an apartment few weeks ago, & If I had refused to not give SSN, tough luck, application will not move forward.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't know if I'm having one of my hyper-literal moments, or if this is some other neurodiversity thing, but I can't make sense of the last paragraph... Can someone help explain it to me?

The way I read it is:

* 219-09-9999 is a made-up number that was never issued to anyone.

* The woman thought it was her number for unexplained reasons.

* She used the pamphlet as evidence that it was her number.

I must be missing something important. Is it a joke, with the punchline being that she thought the pamphlet was her social security card? If so, how was this the fault of the Board? _Was_ it her SSN somehow? If so, how did the pamphlet prove it?

<comment><USER16> >The way I read it

Looks right to me. She received a document from the Social Security Board with a made up SSN on it, and thought it was hers. It's not a joke, just an example of how people can get confused by real-looking fake numbers.

This can be said to be the fault of the board in the sense that after dealing with the 1938 incident they could have learned that this is confusing to some people, and for example printed 219-09-XXXX instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> SSN misuse will stop the moment companies are made responsible for all actions that result from using SSN as an authentication token.

<comment><USER18> SSN misuse will stop once the USA has a secure national ID that is free and easy to get (don't have to go to a DMV). Driver's licenses aren't a good enough solution. Less than 10% of Americans have a passport. But somehow the idea of a national ID has opponents everywhere. The right thinks it will create a surveillance state, the left thinks it will be used for voter suppression. So we are stuck with the misuse and abuse of SSNs because they weren't designed as an ID number.

<comment><USER19> >SSN misuse will stop once the USA has a secure national ID that is free and easy to get (don't have to go to a DMV).

What does that even mean? There will definitely be a bureaucracy with offices that administers it, which will be functionally a "DMV".

<comment> crooked-v The distinction here would probably be with how state DMVs do things like 'only open every fifth Wednesday' ([https://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/statements/2016/feb/19/...](https://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/statements/2016/feb/19/john- oliver/office-provides-id-voting-one-wisconsin-burg-open-/)).

<comment><USER18> Sorry, the distinction was supposed to be that state level DMVs can't securely verify someone's identity. Although they are often frustrating to deal with, it's the issue with fragmented administration that's the real problem with a DMV- each state decides the burden of proof before they give out an official "government issued ID" and most states are very lax- there is no way the DMV is Nevada is going to call up a county records office in Georgia to verify someone's birth information. A national system would be better at verifying identities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> " Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning." -Rick Cook

I'm sure that this sentiment isn't exclusive to programmers, but applies to anyone who has to consider how the general population will handle their product.

<comment><USER20> The arrogance and tone-deafness of such statements astounds me when they come supposed professionals. Those "idiots" you so frequently run into? Yeah, polite people call them "your customers", or "your boss", or "people who will complain to your boss". Or just "people who look at the world differently than you do".

If you consider the "general population" to be idiots, you:

a. Don't know how intelligence measurement works. (Hint: they cant all be idiots. Maybe it's you.)

b. Are still an amateur who will hopefully someday mature into a professional who works with the circumstances at hand rather than complaining that conditions aren't right for the world to appreciate your genius.

<comment><USER21> I was on board with your comment until the mean-spirited "maybe you're the idiot or unprofessional". I don't like how people are calling some people idiots and stupid over _dumb mistakes_. It definitely gives a bad vibe about developer culture that is only detrimental. Developers and tech professionals exist to serve users... Without them we would be shit out of luck. I don't think turning that mean-spiritedness back on them helps either, though. Tone- deafness all around here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This wouldn't be possible if we were serious about stopping identity theft. The usage of inconsistent identity would trigger an alert, immediately dispatching law enforcement to deal with the problem. Most identity thieves would find themselves in jail within hours, so there wouldn't be many people willing to risk it.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, sadly there's just no incentive for anyone - neither U.S. government or U.S businesses - to alter their behavior. Even sadder, any pain of identity theft/fraud are felt by the victims/citizens, and not felt by businesses or government. Unless/if/when this changes, identity theft/fraud won't really go away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I thought for sure it'd be 123-45-6789.

</comment><comment><USER24> > Even though the card was only half the size of a real card

I'm confused by this statement. The card appears to be the same size as a real card in the picture of her holding up the two cards, and for the purposes of showing people that the card would fit in a wallet, it'd have to be regular- card-size.

<comment><USER20> Accurate statement or not, how many people in 1938 had seen a "real card" with which to compare? Having been born several decades later, I think I've seen one real SS card in my life: my own. And I lost that years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I was really expecting the most misused SSN to be Richard Nixon's.

Whenever someone asks me for my SSN without having a legal need for it, I give them Richard Nixon's instead. I know first hand that I'm not nearly the only one.

<comment><USER26> Who does or doesn't have a legal need for your SSN? How do you tell?

<comment><USER25> You are legally required to supply your SSN for the following reasons:

Credit applications

Cash transactions over $10,000

Applications for certain federal benefits, including Medicare and Medicaid

Military paperwork

Interactions with the Department of Motor Vehicles

Social Security business

You also need to supply either your SSN or a taxpayer ID number to companies that are required to report about you to the IRS.

Under all other circumstances, there is no legal requirement to provide your SSN.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great list! Do you have an official source we can reference?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Nice of Treasurer Douglas Patterson to use his secretary's number and not his own!</comment>


Beyond Automation - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/2015/06/beyond-automation

<comment><USER2> One interesting effect not mentioned in the article: there will still be a net jobs decrease, even as the median grows more prosperous.

Why? Because a "job" that is "created" is a static task, and that's exactly what's being automated away. What will remain will be cyborg-people (whether _physically_ or not; but aren't I talking into your brain right now with a finger prosthetic?) coming up with unique value propositions.</comment>


Beverly Hills to install more than 600 cameras in effort to curb crime - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-beverly-hills-cameras-20180127-story.html <comment><USER2> When we are all complicit in building our own panopticons, of which we play the role of subject, we are doomed.</comment>


Hong Kongers Are Erasing Their Own Internet Histories Before China's Crackdown - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qj4k95/hong-kong-residents-are-erasing-their-own-internet-histories-before-chinas-big-crackdown <comment><USER2> They have just 27 more years to protest. After that, they will most probably be under the Great Firewall.</comment>


Show HN: Graph Galaxy – Graph Visualization Made Easy - <AUTHOR> https://apps.apple.com/us/app/graph-galaxy/id1473722262 <comment><AUTHOR> Graph Galaxy is a modern WYSIWYG editor for Graphviz.

You can use it to create a large graph without writing any source code. It has an intuitive and efficient user interface. One of the most powerful features is that it implements a full-featured attribute system to support the cascading style. That means it's easy to set the default attributes for graph components.</comment>


Why S3 went down - <AUTHOR> http://status.aws.amazon.com/s3-20080720.html

<comment><USER2> I think amazon is approaching this in the right fashion - when you have a major outage, show that you understand exactly what the issue is, and why it won't happen in the future. That's quite a while to be down, but their openness, and what I perceive as honesty, helps me trust that they know what they're doing. And like mixmax said, their detailed description and timeline scores them extra points, instead of the usual corporate nothingness. We're still planning on moving over to "cloud-computing", or "infrastructure- outsourcing", and AWS still seems to be the leader in the field.

</comment><comment><USER3> They get a lot of points in my book by providing a reasonably detailed description of the event instead of delivering the usual non-informative yada- yada.

</comment><comment><USER4> _On Sunday, we saw a large number of servers that were spending almost all of their time gossiping and a disproportionate amount of servers that had failed while gossiping._

This is my favorite sentence of the day.

Now every time I see that damned whale on Twitter I'm going to find myself involuntarily crying out, "Oh, no! Failed while Gossiping!"

<comment><USER5> The converse is true too, when Twitter is up and running just fine. I'm going to think of that every time I tweet - I _succeeded_ at gossiping and failed at working.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> A single bit was flipped? Cosmic radiation comes back and us all in the rear! (Of course there's more reasonable reasons, but cosmic radiation is always my favorite. :D)

</comment><comment><USER7> This is exactly the kind of RFO I would like to get from our telephony providers after an outage. Detailed, honest (no point lying -- you just had an outage!), and taking steps to improve matters in the future.

Everyone has outages: it's what you learn from them that counts.

</comment><comment><USER8> That's a great bug, very nice "illness"-like behaviour. The spread of a corrupt bit, infecting and taking down the host.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, it almost read like a description of a virus.

<comment><USER10> That is why gossip protocols are also called "epidemic."

<comment><USER9> Thanks, I meant to look up gossip protocols after reading the article but forgot. Your comment reminded me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Does anyone know if there is a "best" paper that describes gossip protocols? They were mentioned in the Dynamo paper, but they didn't really get into them.

<comment><USER11> try:

[http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs614/2004sp/papers/BHO99....](http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs614/2004sp/papers/BHO99.pdf)

and

[http://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/quicksilver/public_pdfs/B...](http://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/quicksilver/public_pdfs/BringingAutonomic.pdf)

both by Ken Birman

<comment><AUTHOR> Great! Thank you very much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Can I point out that this explanation did not identify a root cause? How was the corrupt message originally produced?

If they know how it happened, it's not reflected in this article. The solution they describe addresses the detection of and recovery from future mysterious occurrences rather than identifying, understanding and eliminating whatever bug or condition caused this one.

<comment><USER13> Memory corruption.

<comment><USER14> Right, it likely wasn't a bug if it is a single bit and this only happens once in a blue moon. A machine can only transmit perfect 1's and 0's for so long before getting one wrong.

<comment><USER15> But they're adding checksums right? Anyone see any holes in that?

<comment><USER14> Do you mean this?

> we're adding checksums to proactively detect corruption of system state > messages

I dobut that means they're actually _adding_ them together, they're adding checksums to the process to ensure data corruption has no effect. Or am I misunderstanding you?

<comment><USER16> They use MD5 in other areas, but not that particular message. So now they will. Do people call hashes "checksums" in a colloquial sense? no one actually uses a "check sum" literally any more do they?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What was Amazon's response when their storefront went down a couple months ago? Were they this upfront about it?

<comment><USER18> I think this is possible with developer relations.

Trying this approach with consumers could backfire horribly if someone misunderstands the details or tries to twist them out of context.

That's a lot hard to do with a developer audience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think that while it is unfortunate that Amazon went down, they handled the situation properly. I'm sure that within a couple of years they'll hammer out all the kinks in the system.

</comment><comment><USER20> "By 11:05am PDT, all server-to-server communication was stopped...

By 2:20pm PDT, we'd restored internal communication..."

I wonder why it took 3 hours to clear state.

<comment><USER21> _I wonder why it took 3 hours to clear state._

It didn't -- it took 3 hours to get all the machines talking again after the state was cleared.

This is probably mostly due to two factors: 1. When doing a "clean restart" Amazon almost certainly had each S3 node look at the data it had stored to make sure that they had correct metadata; and 2. After each node had been restarted, Amazon probably had to relink them gradually rather than all at once -- most self-organizing network protocols have limits on the rate at which nodes can join or leave the network.

<comment><USER22> Data integrity testing?

<comment><USER21> _Data integrity testing?_

This question no verb? Or rather... I have no clue what you're asking, can you clarify?

<comment><USER8> The question mark isn't being used to end a question, he's using it to ask for confirmation of a statement. He's writing in a way that mimics how people talk to each when they meet face-to-face.

For example:

        Jack: I wonder what Jill's favourite flavour of ice cream is.
        Sam:  Chocolate?
        Jack: Yes, that's the one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> i agree with mixmax in that i really appreciate them being open and forthcoming about the problems, and giving detailed explainations -- on the flipside, im wondering what the outage will do to potential customers and those who are currently using the service...its a bit scary to think that they are hosting some very serious businesses and everyone went down for many hours

</comment><comment><USER24> Downtime? It was only an 'Availability Event', thank you very much. But yes, I like that they provide details.

</comment><comment><USER25> That's why git is using checksums as commit labels. It forces consistency checks at every step.

</comment><comment><USER26> Is it only me reading the message as "we don't actually know the reason, but in an act of desperation we rebooted all of our servers and hopefully this wont happen again"?

<comment><USER27> FTA: "We use MD5 checksums throughout the system, for example, to prevent, detect, and recover from corruption that can occur during receipt, storage, and retrieval of customers' objects. However, we didn't have the same protection in place to detect whether this particular internal state information had been corrupted. As a result, when the corruption occurred, we didn't detect it and it spread throughout the system causing the symptoms described above."

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Someone checked in an infinite recursive loop.

</comment><comment><USER29> _Loose lips sink ships!_

(sorry, I had to...)</comment>


Send a connection request to anyone on LinkedIn - <AUTHOR> http://qzaidi.github.com/2012/07/29/linkedin-hack/

<comment><USER2> You can also use this system to find the name of anyone whose LinkedIn profile says private instead of their name.

Find someone who instead of a name has Private, eg <http://linkd.in/T0BzOz> \- then copy their view?id, eg. 196011057 and enter it after the viewee?id here - <http://www.linkedin.com/miniprofile> view=&vieweeID=196011057&context=nus. Then alakazam, you can see their name. Also, the auth type and auth token in the url will change as well when you click on the 'View Profile' button within the new view.

</comment><comment><USER3> I didn't know LinkedIn limited connections to anyone before. Is this something based on newer accounts or accounts without a certain number of connects? I've always been able to 'connect' to anyone even outside of my network.

<comment><USER4> You still need to specify "how do you know that person", if you don't know him they still block your request.

<comment><USER5> The number of people I've never heard of who manage to send me an invite to connect... It's not exactly hard to answer "do you know this person" untruthfully.

<comment><USER6> Flag that account and their spam protection _should_ kick in if enough other people are getting the same kind of unsolicited and unknown connection requests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you use your phone to search for the person (using a browser, not the app), you just get a connect option for everyone, regardless of the separation. The button just says "invite to connect", no warning about knowing them or not.

Slight issue is the invitation says you know them as a friend, but if you're going a abuse a system, do it properly.

</comment><comment><USER8> You can 'connect' with anyone at all on LinkedIn. I don't see what the news is here, or why you need a hack.

I just did a company search for Register.com, opened their page, click to see employees and every single one of them has a 'Connect' button.

What's the hack?

</comment><comment><USER9> The link doesn't work any longer.

I'm guessing linkedin fixed the problem?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, this is still working for me.</comment></comment>


Computers Don't Argue (1965) - <AUTHOR> https://www.atariarchives.org/bcc2/showpage.php?page=133 <comment><USER2> It's a future-telling story on how computerized bureaucracies can create great troubles. But in real life, often the problems are not even caused by computers, but by government officials, humans, that fail the Turing Test.

I share the following story which is a typical occurrence in China, it's all folklore and unsourced, but certainly true and similar stories have happened for at least a hundred times:

One person went to the local government to correct the errors in family records in the government database for his mother. Then, the official asked, how do you prove that your mom is your mom? It turns out, in order to make a change, it's required to obtain a proof, and he is asked to obtain it from the police department. He went to the police for a proof, nevertheless, the officials here were only allowed to create a proof based on the information from the government database, and this was the very database that needs to be corrected, and he was suggested to go to the local government to correct this record. This process took years without progress, until he...

1\. Use personal connections in his network to find a relative/colleague, who knew one official that workes inside the government, and passes his message and persuade that person to handle it, using the relative/colleague's personal relationship, or by sending gift or bribe, it's how the majority of issues were handled.

2\. Reporte this incident to the upper bureaucrat. The upper bureaucrat would usually send orders down to the lower bureaucrat and ask them to handle this case. However, whether the order is executed or not would be a matter of the local bureaucrats. Refusing to handle it while attempting to stop you from doing it again is common (don't solve the problem, just solves the people who have problems).

3\. Tell the story to the media, later, a journalist wrote a "How to Prove My Mom is my Mom" story and became national hit, and upper bureaucrat intervened and solved the problem. But hundred thousands of citizens have the same issue and nobody cared.

Bureaucrats don't argue. Bureaucrats with computers never argue. Same for private businesses, a common problem is, if the machine works, everything is perfect; if the machine doesn't work, no human is helpful.

<comment><USER3> > It's a future-telling story on how computerized bureaucracies can create > great troubles. But in real life, often the problems are not even caused by > computers, but by government officials, humans, that fail the Turing Test.

I think the story makes this point, effectively, when it gets to the court system and everyone goes on vacation at exactly the wrong moment. You could make the case this is a story about Fate in the Greek sense, with the computer merely being Fate's instrument and everyone being helpless in the face of one man's fated demise.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Synopsis: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue)

</comment><comment><USER4> "Please reinstate my youtube video, I created my own original music and you owe ME money."

</comment><comment><USER5> C̶o̶m̶p̶u̶t̶e̶r̶s̶ ̶D̶o̶n̶'̶t̶ _Google Doesn 't_ Argue</comment>


Official Google Blog: Ending our agreement with Yahoo - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/ending-our-agreement-with-yahoo.html <comment><USER2> YHOO: 14.21 +0.86 (6.44%) GOOG: 350.61 -16.33 (-4.45%)

Interesting.

<comment><USER3> I think that market is predicting an acquisition...

</comment></comment><comment> a-priori Anyone else notice his title: "David Drummond, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer"?

Does that not sound like a very unusual combination of roles?

</comment><comment><USER4> Reading between the lines, does this mean: We are scared that pursuing this "legal battle" might open up a can of worms we'd rather keep under the covers?

<comment><USER5> I read it as, "now that MS has backed off from Yahoo, we can can this deal and blame it on the lawyers."

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is this the new corporate speak? Because it seems remarkably lucid, am I missing something?

</comment><comment><USER7> what's all this talk of 'partners' is the reffering to their adwords customers?

</comment><comment><USER8> it was never going to go through anyway, smart of them to cut their losses</comment>


Chinese Labor - watch the first 34 minutes at least - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZnZOe_tKCs&feature=player_embedded

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufactured_Landscapes>

Awards: Best Documentary – 2007 Genie Awards[1] Best Canadian Film – Toronto International Film Festival[1] Best Canadian Film & Best Documentary - <USER2> Film Critics Association Awards[1] Nominated for Grand Jury Prize - <USER3> Sundance Film Festival[1] Won the Reel Current Award (presented by Al Gore) - 2007 Nashville Film Festival</comment>


Commas in big numbers everywhere: An OpenType adventure - <AUTHOR> https://blog.janestreet.com/commas-in-big-numbers-everywhere/ <comment><USER2> AFAIK general style guides don't recommend using thousand separators in numbers below 10000, so "variable #1,234" is not quite good, it should've been simply "variable #1234". "Variable 12,345" would've probably been OK, but then there's another semantic issue: thousand separators are only used in numbers that mean quantities, not identifiers. Long numeric identifiers like phone number or SSN are usually separated differently.

Generally the issue should not be handled at the font level, it lacks sufficient context to make intelligent decisions and can never handle all possible cases. The font should just provide the required glyph variants and means to use them.

<comment><USER3> Also, this is locale specific. Here in Germany we use dots instead of commas for that.

<comment><USER4> Not just Germany. Comma vs dot is just a big mess with some countries using both[1]. Even in Germany, which is _decimal comma_ country, the dot is ubiquitous in science and technology publications. Best thing is to stick with dot and us neither comma nor dot as thousands separator but a thin, fixed space. This also what NIST recommends[2]:

> #16 Digit spacing

> The digits of numerical values having more than four digits on either side > of the decimal marker are separated into groups of three using a thin, fixed > space counting from both the left and right of the decimal marker. Commas > are not used to separate digits into groups of three.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#/media/File:...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#/media/File:DecimalSeparator.svg)

[2] [https://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/checklist.html](https://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/checklist.html)

<comment><USER2> There are much more variants. E.g. Russia uses space for thousands and decimal comma. And I may be mistaken, but I believe in Japan the grouping is by four digits, not by three.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting article! Time to start a new crusade, I guess like I did for True Colors[1], and BiDirectional[2] text. This time for a better font shaping support. If you have ready tests it would help a lot. Personally, I am waiting for ligatures support to be merged[3] in alacritty terminal emulator.

Update: I started a list[4] of terminal emulators supporting it and not.

[1] [https://github.com/termstandard/colors](https://github.com/termstandard/colors)

[2] [https://gist.github.com/XVilka/a0e49e1c65370ba11c17](https://gist.github.com/XVilka/a0e49e1c65370ba11c17)

[3] [https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty/pull/2677](https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty/pull/2677)

[4] [https://gist.github.com/XVilka/070ed8b1c1186097cad65ef492201...](https://gist.github.com/XVilka/070ed8b1c1186097cad65ef49220175a)

<comment><USER6> Regarding your list, I'm not sure what specifically you mean by "font shaping", but VS Code definitely supports programming ligatures:

[https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode/wiki/VS-Code- Instructions](https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode/wiki/VS-Code-Instructions)

<comment><USER5> Yes, I know. I will extend the list with more information soon. Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Brilliant.

This should be an opt-in feature in all programmers fonts.

<comment><USER8> You can use the patcher on Github to patch a font of your choice, although underlining currently only works well with some fonts.

I also have some good fonts pre-patched on the download site at [https://thume.ca/numderline](https://thume.ca/numderline)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Could this be an potential avenue for some sort of exploit? I had no idea that you could "execute" logic via fonts.

<comment><USER10> Uh oh. Are fonts now Turing-complete?

<comment><USER11> Yes: [https://litherum.blogspot.com/2019/03/addition- font.html](https://litherum.blogspot.com/2019/03/addition-font.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Now I am really jealous, and want a hex version that introduces underscores for every group of four...

<comment><USER8> If you want it should be reasonably straightforward to modify the code to do that: [https://github.com/trishume/numderline](https://github.com/trishume/numderline)

More advanced but totally doable would be switching to that mode for hex strings after "0x" or "0X"

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Probably cool, but the website disables zooming in phones so I can't tell. I wish pages couldn't disable zooming -- that should be up to me. Does anyone know browsers that always allow zoomi (If any Jane Street blog folks read this, please fix your blog.)

<comment><USER8> Huh interesting. Zooming works fine for me on IOS. Maybe it's only blocked on Android. If I remember I'll take a look on Monday.

<comment><USER14> I'd start with this line:

      <meta content='width=device-width, initial-scale=1, maximum-scale=1' name='viewport'/>

(I also can't zoom, android/firefox)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is there a way to make the font locale sensitive? Half of the planet uses dots instead of commas

<comment><USER16> Make what locale sensitive?

There are no commas in his font.

"I realized that instead of inserting commas, I wanted to underline alternating groups of 3 digits so that the font would work in monospace contexts."

<comment><USER6> The author made multiple variants available, including bolding, grouping via squashing, and commas. There are versions of each type published.

[https://thume.ca/numderline/](https://thume.ca/numderline/)

<comment><USER16> If you're downloading and installing a custom font, why do you need it to be locale-aware? Just down the variant that uses whatever your locale needs. (Or if there isn't one, fork it and change the commas to periods and the install that.)

It seems like the only reason you'd need a locale-aware one is on a multi-user system where you'd expect users to have different locales and you're installing the font globally.

But that doesn't really seem like a likely use-case for this pretty niche font that is almost exclusively going to installed on single-user machines by the end-user.

<comment><USER17> A web page you visit might tell your browser to download the font ([https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Learn/CSS/Styling_t...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Learn/CSS/Styling_text/Web_fonts))

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Kind of off topic, but the latencies in which they operate are out of this world. Amazing stuff

</comment><comment><USER19> Wow, that's an elegant solution!

I also have a difficult time reading large numbers without commas. Because I use Alfred (mac command launcher) quite a bit, I wrote up a simple workflow to re-display selected numbers with commas. Not as universal as the font-based solution but might be useful to some:

[https://github.com/abhik/tres-commas](https://github.com/abhik/tres-commas)

</comment><comment><USER20> Presumable it handles text that already has a comma separator OK, since there isn't a continuous group of >3 digits in '1,234'.

I suppose the same is true of continental Europe's '1.234', though it would be very cool if it could be determined that the '.' was a thousand separator and modified to ','.

What happens though if the text is using '.' separator and ',' decimal, such as (roughly 123 and a half) '123,456789', is it going to determine there's a missing ',' between '6' & '7' (making it roughly 123 and a half _million_ )?

</comment><comment><USER21> I wonder why not to use scientific exponential notation. Once you get used to it, it comes really handy to compare numbers of many magnitudes.

<comment><USER22> yes, it counts the numbers for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is fantastic for command line output and whatever that doesn't natively support digit grouping. I have no idea how people live without enabling it.

I turn it on my Windows calculator, and I'm also happy that now programming languages like JavaScript, Python and recently Go allows using underscores in numeric literals for doing this in code to make it more readable.

</comment><comment><USER24> My primary calculator in linux is speedcrunch which lets you do adjustable squishing as it is referred to in the article which is pretty nice.</comment>


How Floyd Mayweather Helped Two Young Guys from Miami Get Rich - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/27/technology/how-floyd-mayweather-helped-two-young-guys-from-miami-get-rich.html <comment><USER2> This reminds me of the free-banking era. I believe half of the currencies failed within five years, and none survived twenty.

It would be a smarter move for most of these young men to produce a useful product instead of trying to get rich by pecuniary rentierism, but "get rich quick" scams seem popular now.</comment>


World's loudest sound sent shock waves 100,000X nitrogen bomb - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencealert.com.au/features/20143009-26257.html

<comment><USER2> Article title: "The world's loudest sound caused shock waves 100,000 times that of a hydrogen bomb"

Submission title: "World's loudest sound sent shock waves 100,000X nitrogen bomb"

WTF? Nitrogen bomb? Does no one know how to copy and paste any more?</comment>


Dither stabilisation - <AUTHOR> https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.msg1363742#msg1363742 <comment><USER2> The dithered highlight on the sphere looks odd because it was calculated in a non-linear colorspace. You can get better looking results by converting to a linear colorspace, dithering, then converting back to sRGB. Eg, in ImageMagick, using the same 8x8 matrix:

convert Dither2-Exp_crop_resize.png -colorspace RGB -ordered-dither o8x8,2 -colorspace sRGB Dither2-Exp_dithered.png

Result: [https://imgur.com/a/81bNg](https://imgur.com/a/81bNg)

<comment><USER3> Although in this case, the conversion back to sRGB is just the identity…

<comment><USER4> True. But if the dither mask was computed without taking into account sRGB's nonlinearity (which I assume it was), then the algorithm will have the same incorrect output.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think the problem now is that the dithering is no longer done on the screen space, but instead looks like a texture slapped on top of the objects in orthogonal projection. You can easily notice it in the comparison shots; you'll notice that the sphere projection is angled at around 20-30 degrees, and it's not pixel-perfect on the screen as the original effect is.

I'm not a fan, to be fair.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I couldn't agree more. The original effect is really interesting and evokes nostalgia of old Mac games, as the developer intended. I think he's reacting too harshly to criticism, or overthinking things, because my reaction to the pixel swimming effect matched his first assumption: "yeah that's how dither works."

The screen-space solution for stable dithering looks fine, and I'm glad it will be an option in the final game, but the sphere mapping looks weird. With non-screen-aligned "pixels" it looks like it's just a normal 3D game but with a "dither" texture on every object, rather than a true 1-bit game. I just hope the aesthetic from the demo isn't watered down too much for the final game.

<comment><USER7> The original effect is how it's supposed to look and how it would have looked on an old computer with 1-bit graphics.

If there is an option to choose between the different effects, I would personally go with the first one, because that's exactly how I remember old games looking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This post is written by the creator of the wonderful game Papers, Please.

</comment><comment><USER9> I replied on the original thread too, but I wonder if it'd work to use a mipmapped dither texture in texture space like this old hatching paper: [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.28....](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.28.8017&rep=rep1&type=pdf) It probably won't give you exact 1 pixel dither without some hacks, but maybe something along those lines could work.

<comment><USER10> That is really cool, especially for the time. Only downside is I think some uv mapping is required to map the hatching onto the models. Here is a video of the paper [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6Ta35AiE1I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6Ta35AiE1I)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> What a delightful attention to detail! I love this!

It is totally not weird to me to spend time on something with the goal for it not to be noticed in the end.

</comment><comment><USER12> Related: \- [http://bisqwit.iki.fi/story/howto/dither/jy/](http://bisqwit.iki.fi/story/howto/dither/jy/) \- [http://pippin.gimp.org/a_dither/](http://pippin.gimp.org/a_dither/)

</comment><comment><USER13> I wonder how using error diffusion on the time axis would look, I guess it would stabilise the image a bit.

<comment><USER14> It would look like sensor noise ?

<comment><USER15> Noise has samples that are statistically independent from each other. Diffusion has samples such that their _increments_ are independent. But it's path dependent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is the approach I'd use...

* Take the previous frame.

* Warp to the shape of the new frame using motion vectors.

* Dither the new frame using the warped old frame to modulate the white/black threshold when carrying forward the error to the next pixel.

That will lead to a pixel remaining white/black, and only a minimal number of pixels changing color between frames.

</comment><comment><USER17> I couldn't find out why he wanted a 1 bit image. Was there a reason other than "it looks cool"?

<comment><USER18> From the first post of the forum thread:

"My first computer was a Mac Plus. I've always had a nostalgia-softened spot in my heart for 1-bit graphics. I'd like to capture the detailed black & white look of old Mac games in a realtime 1st person game."</comment></comment>


UML to Be Ejected from Microsoft Visual Studio - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoworld.com/article/3131600/application-development/uml-to-be-ejected-from-microsoft-visual-studio.html <comment><USER2> Wait, there was a UML tool in VS? I didn't even notice... although I did need to make a UML diagram once or twice.

I've always found UML a bit counterintuitive. The inheritance arrows seem to go the wrong direction. It also focuses too much on inheritance and not enough on convention, which object is responsible for what, and data flow. I won't miss it, but a well-designed sketching tool to explain code would be nice.

</comment><comment><USER3> Would be interesting to see a poll of Hacker News readers on use of UML over the last 10 years.

<comment><USER4> I use it now and again as a documentation aid, for example to explain complex relationships between entities, use case diagrams and sequence diagrams. But I don't use it to design or round-trip my development process.

Seeing some of the horrors created by Rational Rose and it's aficionado's back in the late 90's turned me off from all that. _/ shudders_</comment></comment>


Gems of HN: What is your candidate for best comment ? - <AUTHOR>

I know that you can vote here to express that, but a vote is just one tiny bit of information and it can be that you think that some stuff is undervalued.
Maybe HN was still small at the time, or maybe it was the dead of night when it came by or the superbowl was on...
What comment have you come across over your time at HN that you thought deserved more credit than it got ?
One favourite per person, don't post your own stuff ;) <comment><AUTHOR> To kick it off, here is my nomination:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5793>

</comment><comment><USER2> This is one of my favorites ("How I Hacked Hacker News"):

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=639976>

<comment><AUTHOR> wow :)

"So for a start, I thought, perhaps I could determine the server's start time to within a few seconds or minutes. A boring way to go about this would be simply to monitor the server for downtime, and record when it became accessible again. But impatience is one of the three great programmer's virtues, and the best way to predict the future is to create it, and so forth, so I decided on a more proactive approach: crash it!"

A nice reminder to stay on dfranke's good side.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=469940>

</comment><comment><USER4> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=179639>

</comment><comment><USER5> More advice for new Y Combinator founders by Sam Altman

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=95857></comment>


One-fourth of Americans drink water from systems that don't meet standards - <AUTHOR> https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2019/03/drinking-water-safety-in-united-sates-can-be-fixed/ <comment><USER3> As someone who worked in this field for several years, and worked closely with EPA, the biggest problem is the politicization of funding for EPA. Year after year its funding gets slashed, or at the very least stays the same and so is eroded by inflation. A 2013 report on state drinking water resources [1] showed that state drinking water programs continually do more with less, and are barely able to maintain their infrastructure as they have to dig into their emergency funds to do routine maintenance, which leaves them in a bind when a true emergency does happen, such as the rupture of a water main.

The legislation in place is solid, scientifically-sound, and thoroughly vetted from a cost-benefit analysis side of things. The problem is lack of funding, and visibility into the issue. Apart from high-profile incidents of sickness and water main breaks, people just assume their tap generates clean drinking water and give no thought to where it comes from, or the work that is required to make it happen.

I wish people would think to what life must have been like in the 18th century, and how difficult it must've been to secure clean drinking water. The idea of having clean drinking water coming into your house via tap would've been a pipe dream (pun not intended), and a luxury only the most rich could afford. And now it's shunned in some crowds.

The bottled water crowd thinks they're immune to these issues around drinking water systems, but in fact the bottled water companies generally get their water from the same public drinking water systems we use, and their standards are in fact lower than those surrounding your tap water (as it's policed by the FDA, not the EPA).

All that said, we have amazing tap water in this country, and it is a testament to the people and agencies responsible for making that happen. I lived in Asia for over a year, and coming back to a country where I can drink what comes out of the tap, use it to brush my teeth, and not worry about getting it in my mouth while showering really puts things in perspective.

[1] (pdf) [https://www.asdwa.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/SRNAP- Analy...](https://www.asdwa.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/SRNAP-Analysis.pdf)

<comment><USER4> "The bottled water crowd thinks they're immune to these issues around drinking water systems, but in fact the bottled water companies generally get their water from the same public drinking water systems we use, and their standards are in fact lower than those surrounding your tap water (as it's policed by the FDA, not the EPA)."

Excuse my choice of words here, but wtf. I always thought water in bottled units is held to a higher standard.

<comment><USER5> For bottled water that goes through reverse osmosis and carbon filtration, many of the common contaminants in tap water would be removed. Also the bottling might happen in areas with better quality water.

<comment><USER6> It's probably less important what might have happened, that what is required by law. If I recall correctly some bottled water is basically just bottling the municipal supply (i.e. no additional treatment or filtration).

I don't really use bottled water, being lucky in where I live (and filtering). Does anyone know how much enforced transparency there is on the industry? In other words, can I in practice find out what processes they have applied or not to particular water, especially if the company has multiple plants ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm starting to think that bottled drinking water is a simpler and more efficient method that getting people to drink tap water. It seems crazy that every drop from the tap is high quality water good enough to drink - <USER2> 99.9% of it is not used for drinking. Perhaps its more efficient just to deliver drinking water to everyone in office cooler type bottles, and lower our standards for the water system.

<comment><USER8> > when 99.9% of it is not used for drinking

What is it used for? Cooking?

<comment><USER9> Showering, bathing, washing hands, flushing toilet, washing dishes, washing clothes, washing surfaces or floors (i.e. wetting and washing the rag/mop you use for wiping said surfaces), maybe watering lawns & washing cars, if I had to guess.

It's surprisingly easy and quick to run way more water than you could drink in a day just for some daily cleaning duties.

Come to think of it, I drink around 2 liters per day; that's six mugs of coffee plus maybe a couple glasses of water.

How much water do I spend when I flush the toilet once and then wash my hands? I do that quite a few times every day.

<comment><USER10> Some of those are handled more efficiently in Australia. Water tanks are required with new builds and they usually do rain collection. Those feed into toilets, lawn sprinklers, washing machine, etc. All car washes in the town also use some form of not drinkable water.

I'm not sure about the water used for cleaning though. If you want your hands to be clean before eating, why would you clean them in something your can't safely drink?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> [https://outline.com/BfUCs8](https://outline.com/BfUCs8)

</comment><comment> as-j I'm curious where this 25% statistic comes from, and after a bit of googleing it seems to be a 2015 report from:

[https://www.nrdc.org/resources/threats-tap-widespread- violat...](https://www.nrdc.org/resources/threats-tap-widespread-violations- water-infrastructure)

This does exlcude ~13 million private water systems (wells) which is good. On the link rhere's a map you can click on and see what the health violations are.

[edited to move into commentary comment]

<comment> as-j As I thought about this, it annoyed me a the way the information was presented, esepcially as I put my engineering/critical thinking hat on. Water systems are large ditributed systems, they require maintenance, have parts underground, are regulated and have testing.

If I click on San Mateo County, California for example, they have a water company "Ca Water Service - Bear Gulch" who reported 1 violation afecting 58,432 people for "Surface, Ground Water, and Filter Backwash rules."

This appears to be a leak, maybe some ground water got in and mixed with city water. You don't want ground water mixing into drinking water since it carries a higher change of bacteria, etc. (aka you don't want a bird pooping on a roof, then dripping into a water resevoir)

But:

1\. This is a transient problem, 54,000 people don't have bad water. The company reported a leak/problem and presumably fixed it.

2\. This is why we chlorinate water, it kills off bacteria that might somehow get in.

3\. This problem may not have even reached consumers. Aka, this is a system working as designed to provide safe water.

The other way of looking at this is, the systems were tested, violations were found reported, and it looks like in most cases resoled without formal enforcement action. (seems about 6-10% of cases went to formal enforcement)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> EPA standards are a joke, designed primarily to avoid panic in the masses and allow the polluters to continue doing their thing.

Go ahead, get your "just fine" tap water tested by a lab, it only costs a couple hundred bucks to do a full array.

Then, consider how misleading the "parts per million" metric is, considering Avogadro's number.

Just because all this shit does not lead to immediate and perceptible illness doesn't mean that it is not putting a strain on our immune systems and causing DNA damage left and right.

Each of those ppm requires an immune cell (or multiple) to bond with it, sacrificing itself, and transport it into the kidneys or liver, where it sits around also causing damage, and so on, until it is broken down into more hazardous substances, or finally leaves the body, if ever.

If you are not frantically getting filters installed in all your loved ones' homes, I think are just not paying attention. And I'm not talking about Brita either.

<comment><USER13> > Then, consider how misleading the "parts per million" metric is, considering > Avogadro's number.

What about Avogadro's number make a PPM metric (i.e. a ratio) misleading??? Because there are a lot of millions in Avogadro's number? How is that relevant to a ratio?

<comment><USER14> It's hand waving, and possibly orthorexia: [https://www.eatright.org/health/diseases-and- conditions/eati...](https://www.eatright.org/health/diseases-and- conditions/eating-disorders/orthorexia-an-obsession-with-eating-pure). Remember, the human immune system was designed to drink water out there in the world, which has animals pissing and shitting in it. Heavy metal pollution likewise occurs naturally. (Bangladesh, where I'm from, naturally has dangerously high levels of arsenic in the water.) Your immune system is designed to handle the "strain" of dealing with all that. We're drinking the cleanest water humanity has ever drank (and have the highest life expectancies in human history).

<comment><USER15> Humans were only "designed" to live until they reproduce and the human lifespan was far, far shorter until the last few hundred years. Just because it's possible to live till 25 and drink arsenic laced water, it doesn't mean it's good to do so.

<comment><USER16> You have kidneys, a liver, and a lymphatic system that all work wonders against small invaders in small quantities, perfect for the situation described with the "PPM" metric. We all love buying into these "it's xyz killing me!" stories but whats most likely causing you to feel terrible or potentially killing you is your lack of (quality) sleep, excess of stress, poor diet or potentially a combination of all three.

And if I may throw my two cents in, humans were "designed" to live right around somewhere in the 60-70 range. This has been true since we kept track of humans, at least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What consumer products are available for us to be able to filter our water?

<comment> bjelkeman-again There are lots of tech available. But depending on what the issue is with the water you have access to, you need to pick tech. It can be expensive to go overboard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> My understanding is water in US is generally very safe. I've been drinking tap my whole life. My understanding is human body can filter out or otherwise deal with small amounts of metals and other stuff, and that most city water systems are sufficient. I don't use a water filter at home, and drink from the faucet, and I seem to still be alive. I'll remain in the control group. But just my one data point.

"The Environmental Protection Agency regulates more than 90 contaminants—but a hundred more that are tracked are so far unregulated."

But are we supposed to worry about these other "contaminants"?

<comment><USER19> I'd be careful with the assumption that just because you're doing fine now, means you will continue to when you're 50+.

Watch this, if you haven't already:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84glf6F3b-Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84glf6F3b-Y)

"The Devil We Know". It's a documentary about the Ohio river valley polution by 3M and Dupont in the production of Teflon. There are many amazing parts in this documentary but one of the most eye opening, is the fact that Dupont understood the risks of dumping C8 into the water. Yet the continued to do it, because, profits.

Who can say what companies are around you, polluting the ground water? Just be careful with assumptions that its always safe, is all I'm saying. I'm sure people in the Ohio River Valley thought the same.

<comment><USER20> These guys like 3M and Dupont and Monsanto are doing worse things than tech to destroy our society - why aren't we hearing calls to break them up or take them over or stopping their operations in our society? (ie. Are you listening Elizabeth Warren?)

<comment><USER21> Dupont, Monsanto et al. have been the target of leftist rhetoric for many decades.

<comment><USER22> This is phrased as if it's supposed to be damning, and I'm not sure why. Both companies have been less than supportive of moves to determine if their practices and products are safe. As a business decision: yes, sound, but unfortunately, it's conceivable that their interests could encroach on what's necessary for the public good. Considering the breadth of their holdings and influence, it's important to be vigilant for even accidental missteps on their part.

<comment><USER21> I'm only damning MrTonyD's ignorance of politics, you're preaching to the choir.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> And allowing a small percentage of Americans to own unlimited wealth (which they also use to disproportionately influence politics to maintain the status quo) is morally justifiable how?</comment>


The Australian Government has greenlighted compulsory internet filtering - <AUTHOR> http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/12/15/2772467.htm <comment><USER3> What a crock of shit.

As an Aussie, I am disgusted that this is seen as a viable solution for an advanced democracy. It riles me on all sorts of censorship levels, even before it pisses me off as a taxpayer that a system so readily circumvented will be the subject of public spending.

I honestly thought the 'trial' was going to be used to demonstrate what a pathetic and short-minded idea this was, so that it could be quietly swept under the carpet. Instead, I can only assume the trial was always intended to arrive at a foregone conclusion.

Extreme conservatives - who won't ever support the current Labor government - must be delighted. And there will be a whole swathe of middle-class, swing- voting families relieved that their children will be protected, until they discover their 12 year old surfing the net _around_ the filter just to see what sites like donkeyporn.com and ruddisacommunist.org (sites I probably made up) are all about. At that point they'll be wondering why the government couldn't spend $125.8 million over four years on reducing the massive deficit or stimulating jobs.

Edit: The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away - the government has also communicated _today_ that they plan to open discussion for an R Rating on video games - [http://www.news.com.au/technology/australians-get-their- say-...](http://www.news.com.au/technology/australians-get-their-say-on-video- game-ratings/story-e6frfro0-1225810592521) I doubt it's a timing coincidence.

<comment><USER4> Aside from the censorship issues (I know which end of that spectrum Senator Conroy sits and I can't imagine him moving), I cannot believe they are going ahead with a plan that they have been told repeatedly will fail.

From the tv debate held here a while back, it all seems to be based on the ridiculous agrument that we have to try something...anything...for the children's sake.

No, you really don't have to try things we know will fail. That's just pure idiocy.

<comment><USER5> _it all seems to be based on the ridiculous agrument that we have to try something...anything...for the children's sake._

This seems to be an instance of a type of reasoning known as the Politician's Syllogism:

       Premise: Something must be done.
       Premise: This is something.
       Conclusion: We must do this.

<comment><USER6> This quote is from "Yes Minister": <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vidzkYnaf6Y>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think this is a pretty good indication of where Australia is at - welcome to the nanny-nation. What really grates me about this is the supporters always seem to fall back on saying it protects children. I find this absurd - <USER2> amounts to "can't see the problem therefore it doesn't exist".

<comment><USER8> _What really grates me about this is the supporters always seem to fall back on saying it protects children._

That always amuses me too; because it doesn't protect them at all (do Children really browse CP sites? no, they get caught in MSN or other chat rooms.... are they going to block all them ;))

It might limit the CP being viewed; but I highly doubt that will have an appreciable impact in the # of children abused.

<comment><USER9> > do Children really browse CP sites?

I registered this one-off account to respond to this point: yes, they do. Or rather, I did, so there exists at least one :)

When I was 11, even 18-year-olds tended to look ridiculously alien, anatomically, and were not something I would really consider myself aroused by. Instead, I tried to find porn of girls closer to my age, preferably ones I could fantasize were classmates or somesuch. I was much too introverted to strike up a conversation in a chat room; I just browsed websites until some random server somewhere transmitted the bits I wanted to see.

Totally agree that it won't impact abuse, though—the Australians seem to have never heard of Tor.

<comment><USER8> Thanks for the reply: your something of a statistical anomaly though (no offence intended). This, then, would have "protected" you, however the vast majority of kids looking at porn would be unaffected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How is this different from China's rationalization of their filtering? Is there any objective difference?

 _the Government will not determine what is blacklisted on the internet in Australia, rather an independent body will determine what sites are rated as RC for refused classification._

This will turn into a convenient way to let lobbyists ("Block the hate speech!" "Block the anticompetitive corporations" and ultimately "Block those who would weaken our country") hide behind a separate entity, giving the politicians a screen to hide behind while continuing to support the overall concept.

 _will require all ISPs to block material which has been refused classification in other countries_

Umm... who is in charge of classifying the content on the Internet? I know of no one doing so (let alone someone who can be trusted by all interested parties). I think this statement is 100% BS.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The full report for the Live Pilot is here: [http://www.scribd.com/doc/24108352/ISP-Filtering-Live- Pilot-...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/24108352/ISP-Filtering-Live-Pilot-Report- High-Res)

The report claims no degredation of speed, however it says that about 1 in 30 legitimate sites will be blocked.

<comment><USER11> Some observations from that report:

When they tested the filters they reported "less than 3.4%" of innocuous URLs were mistakenly blocked. They say this is too high (no kidding!), but that "blocking rates of below 2 percent would be considered low" and thus acceptable.

They also considered performance degradation of 0-10% to be "negligible", and 10-20% to be "minimal". The performance results looked incredibly noisy to me, but they don't report variance or any kind of statistical significance, so I don't think their results mean much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It seems that nowadays you can get pretty much anything through by playing the "think of the children" card even if it won't do anything to protect them.

I'm not adverse to interventions that will keep children safer (although I think their vulnerability is overplayed) but it'd be nice to see useless proposals get shot down at least once in a while.

<comment><USER13> Don't forget the terrorists and (copyright-) pirates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's so ironic to move to Australia from Russia ... the former Soviet Union ... just to find myself eventually back to roughly about the same level of government regulation. Hopefully not worse than that. Should I now set my goal to leave Australia for a better place ... but what could it be though? Any ideas?

<comment><USER15> Exaggerating much? An ineffective porn filter is a long way from the 'regulation' of the population as practiced by the KGB. You'll notice for example that you can openly call K-Rudd a bloody idiot on national television for trying to implement this, and nothing will happen to you.

<comment><USER14> _An ineffective porn filter is a long way from the 'regulation' of the population as practiced by the KGB_

Yes and no ... just as the filter is ineffective for someone who knows a bit about how stuff works, there always was the 'black market' in the SU where one could find books, movies, music etc. that were not supposed to be available to Soviet people.

Ineffective as it is, it may be just the first step towards a certain direction ...

 _you can openly call K-Rudd a bloody idiot on national television for trying to implement this, and nothing will happen to you_

Reminds me of a popular joke from Soviet times: American: In the USA you can go to the central square of your town, and shout out "Reagan is a bloody idiot" and nothing will happen to you! Soviet replied: Big deal! In the Soviet Union you, too, can go to the central square of your town, and shout out "Reagan is a bloody idiot" and nothing will happen to you.

So, basically, everyone is calling K-Rudd a bloody idiot about the filter, but still it gets implemented.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Gah. I've said it before, I'll say it again. I am very unhappy with my government, and very glad I moved to Canada.

<comment><USER17> Just in time for the Harper Conservatives, eh?

<comment><USER16> Haha, yes indeed.

I will admit that a large part of my satisfaction comes from the fact that I no longer have to be involved. I am not on the electoral roll in Australia (where voting is mandatory) and I can't vote in Canada... I guess I'm taking a 'hands-off' approach...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This makes me quite happy to be moving to Estonia in February.

It's not just this, it's a pattern of behavior in general by the Australian government. It's not even a single action, I don't play games that often anymore and the lack of an R18+ classification has almost no effect on me, there are many data points in Australian political actions though which reflect a deeply troubling underlying truth, the government perceives it's citizens as children.

My reasons for leaving are many, but the two big ones; primarily the above, but secondarily that I can't help thinking in a large amount of cases with regards to aforementioned citizens, the government is not entirely wrong.

So long Australia, and thanks for all the fish.

<comment><USER19> You are moving from Australia to Estonia ...? Really impressive. I kind of considered to do the opposite, though I'm not from Estonia.

<comment><USER18> Sydney vs Tallinn.

I dislike;

1) Very high cost of living.

2) Very high tax rate.

3) Poor quality of internet access.

4) Lack of R18+ rating for games.

5) Conroy's clean feed nonsense.

6) Quality of technological innovation in Australia in general.

7) General contempt for civil rights displayed by political parties in Australia.

8) Apathy disguised as being laid back.

9) Hot weather.

10) Sun.

I like;

1) Low cost of living.

2) Very low marginal tax rate.

3) High quality of internet access, almost ubiquitous wifi access.

4) One of the highest populations of atheist people in Europe.

5) Largest political party majority ideology is classical liberalism.

6) One of the most advanced technological infrastructure programs in Europe.

7) Straightforward no bullshit populace.

8) Very cold weather.

9) Very little sun.

All of that said, you can never really know until you've actually tried it a while, so start February I'm moving to Tallinn for a three month trial, in the event that it wasn't for me was planning on coming back to Sydney but in light of these new developments and a continuing frustration / annoyance with associated events, I think if Tallinn doesn't work out I'll just pick some place else, I have a pretty big laundry list to go through. :)

<comment><USER20> What about languages? Does English work fine there? What about Russian? The native language is very unlike any of the Indo-European ones I've studied.

<comment><USER18> From what I've heard from a friend who has already moved over there, English is fine for Tallinn (the capital). That said, if I do end up making the move permanent, I'd want to learn the language fluently regardless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I sure hope one day we will look back on the early age of the internet and even if the debate over illegal content, piracy and privacy and so on is still on going, we will at least have settled on one solid fact. Internet filtering doesn't work and people that want to access illegal content will get it anyways.

What a waste of money.

<comment><USER22> I think that from the point of view of global digital society, if this thing fails spectacularly and publicly, it could be money well spent - if it deters other nations from pouring their taxpayers money down this particular drain.

Can anyone think of a way to make it fail loudly, rather than quietly?

<comment><USER23> I don't like this method, but it might work. Maybe someone can help change it to something that doesn't do harm.

1) Setup a site that the government would want to block.

2) Make sure it gets blocked.

3) Have the site track whenever an aussie logs onto it.

4) Send out an email with statistics on a regular basis to someone.

You may want more than one site or find a way to use existing sites, etc...

You need to make sure your okay with posting whatever material would qualify though. That might be tough.

<comment><USER24> A problem with this idea is that the easiest ways to get around filters (secure tunnels) would generally result in the connection appearing to come from outside of the country.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I've voted ALP all my life, and this is absolutely a votechanger for me.

<comment><USER26> To who though? The crew who were pushing it previously? Remember Alston? Both parties have spoken out against it when in opposition but pushed it while in power? And no one would believe for a second that Abbott wouldn't want this or worse.

Family First love it. Xenophon has only gradually shrunk away. I think only the Greens have consistently opposed it. Very frustrating situation.

<comment><USER25> Probably Australian Sex Party first, Greens second.

<comment><USER12> Australian Sex Party first, Democrats second, Greens third.

The Greens lost a whole lot of credibility after they ran Clive Hamilton in the Higgins bielection. Clive Hamilton, for those who don't know, is a strident supporter of the content filter and has penned such dreadful op-ed pieces as:

[http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/web-doesnt-belong-to- ne...](http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/web-doesnt-belong-to-net- libertarians/story-0-1111118869227)

<comment><USER26> Fair points from both of you, and I wouldn't be unhappy about voting for these mentioned, but you have to worry when your best bet is the Sex Party, your second option is almost dead, and the third hosts a strong supporter of the filter.

I was really disappointed to see the ALP pushing this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> "Successful technology isn't necessarily successful policy. We're still yet to hear a sensible explanation of what this policy is for, who it will help and why it is worth spending so much taxpayer money on."[1] \-- Colin Jacobs, spokesman for the EFA

[1]: [http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/internet- ce...](http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/internet-censorship- plan-gets-the-green-light-20091215-ktzc.html)

</comment><comment><USER28> Is this an Orwellian precursor or should we not get too upset about it? Should the Government really be playing internet police?

</comment><comment><USER29> There has to be a business idea in this, somewhere...

</comment><comment><USER30> For the sake of the kids, Rubbish!!! I feel my kids are safer in the USA than in Australia after the recent developments.

and you know, where they burn books...

</comment><comment><USER31> supporting freedom feels quite Sisyphean for the student of history.

</comment><comment><USER32> Wow, the comments here really suck. Filtered != Illegal, so work around it if you need to and tell your family and friends how.

<comment><USER12> The thing is we shouldn't be having to work around the filters, and we shouldn't have to put up with degraded performance just because some non- technical people think that it'll protect their kids from the Scary Internet.

Also we shouldn't be wasting tax dollars on a boondoggle that achieves nothing.

Finally, it's a bit embarrassing to be a citizen of an educated first world nation that is actually implementing something so ill advised.</comment></comment>


Shutting Down NavHere - <AUTHOR> https://jeremyaboyd.com/post/shutting-down-navhere <comment><USER2> The most important words in this are the near-last words:

"What becomes less fun is the after-building part of running the business."

So many of us want to turn our hobbies into side-hustles, or even full companies. But once the "new" feeling wears off, or we finish building the product, it's just business. It's ALL business.

When your hobby becomes a job, a problem, a customer support problem day in and day out, the fun is gone.

I had games in the app stores. I started an escape room business. I tried to make what I love my job, and that all turned out to be "not fun" anymore.

So, now I'm trying to focus on game making, escape room building, etc, as a side project that I can share with friends and others for free and then just shut it down if it's not fun. I'll keep developing websites and being bored when I need to make money.

<comment><USER3> As a brew-pub-owning home-brew friend said, "I took a fun hobby and turned it into work." I'm the same way, I've had some software businesses. Man, sure is fun building that product. Man, sure does suck doing customer support/business stuff/dealing with local government/pick your poison. That slurping sound? Yeah, that's the fun being sucked out of it. So about half the time (probably less, actually) I go work for The Man...until I once again think that this time will be different.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If there are companies paying $thousands per month then you may have just not been looking at the right potential customers. At 10-20x the price with service guarantees (maybe spread it across DO, AWS, Azure and emphasize your independence from problems with any) you might have been taken seriously by some of the companies paying higher bills. For enterprise customers the processing cost of paying $5-10/month recurring charges might be higher than the actual charges.

Edit: that doesn't mean it's bad to serve small clients, but if the concern is significant revenue....

<comment><AUTHOR> The concern wasn't significant revenue, it was really just to cover the cost of the more robust infrastructure without a single point of failure.

The initial product was just an nginx config for me and Austin's shortlinks and domain forwards. And that actually ran just fine for months with no downtime.

Problem is then you get customers and you want to promise them no down time, so you have to allow for failovers and high availability, and that adds complexity that really isn't needed... until it is. And in the almost 3 years, we had 1 database fail over to a slave that got promoted to master, and actually stayed that way for months before I manually failed it back to the bigger server.

<comment><USER5> Why not increase your prices and target larger customers then?

<comment><AUTHOR> I had a letter of intent for a large order right before the company froze budgets and the point of contact left, it was for $9k/year if I built an API for them to manage their domains inhouse. Currently they had a vendor they were paying $15k/mo and then on top of that $150 each time they wanted to add or edit a new link or domain. It was a win/win, our service remained viable, I could afford to make it better, and they have a 90% reduction in cost for that service.

Even if it had worked out, it still really wasn't worth it to increase revenues by $9k unless I was closing this sized deal at least monthly.

<comment><USER6> Interesting. I would think that $9k a month rather than year would've been better. $9k a month is really undercutting it. I've also seen that higher prices actually make customers more willing to buy, not less, especially big ones.

<comment><AUTHOR> This was after many back-and-forths. So we put together a contract that would be the same price as if they were a customer using our UI, but they would pay all at once instead of each time they added a domain, and they would get an API to manage their domains.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Thanks for sharing this. Having gone through this myself I can totally relate.

"By the end of 2018, we had hundreds of free-trial users, and were serving 100s of thousands of forwarding requests each day."

This is probably my biggest learning through my own entrepreneurial journey. The days of "freemium" are over. Long live fast profitability!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, that was my biggest challenge, since people were coming from an already free (but broken) product, they needed to see it work before they would pay for it.

<comment><USER8> True but as a solo or small team, freemium is not sustainable. Instead, double down on trying to get those previous Free users to actually pay for the service by providig something much better which solves real pain for them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Even at 100% conversion, we wouldn't have made enough money to make the service actually WORTH pursuing long term, but that wasn't the goal.

NavHere's losses were a budgetary rounding error across my larger organization, and it did provide us customers that actually USED the system.

It was never meant to be a profit center or a loss leader, but I had hoped from the start it would cover the cost to run it.

It lost a total of around $1200/year, and that money would have just gone toward some other random business expense anyway that wouldn't have captured customers.

All in all I'd say it was a worthy loss, just not one I want to continue maintaining.

<comment><USER8> Take it as a business lesson/course which you learned practically. Now you know what NOT To do next time :).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > But we had only converted a few paying customers (it was in the low 10s of > paying customers), and most of those sales were VERY hands on. I was having > to explain DNS to small business owners who all they know is their GoDaddy > stopped working. It would some times take over a week from when they first > contacted to when they had finally set up their DNS records, and another > week before they would set up their DNS records correctly, and all of that > for only $9/year. It wasn't sustainable.

Looks like the real money would've been a premium plan which offered hands on support and setup for non-technical users.

<comment><AUTHOR> Converting people accustomed to a free service that was already integrated into their DNS wasn't very easy even with a free trial and only $9/yr cost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There are two opposing factors: the mass market of products consists of people who don't understand the product domain. You used to have to be your own car mechanic; nowadays people not only don't know how to change their oil but don't know they have to — but the dashboard tells them to go get some service done.

This is a good thing, but doesn't favor the new entrant. Go daddy's service is aimed at the lowest of the low information level customer. If you help their customer you'll need to provide oodles of support (as the poster experienced).

Converting the mass customers would have required an expensive ad campaign because most people who need the product don't even know to look for it.

The poster was able to get a tiny number of knowledgeable customers which proves the value of the product. But getting paid for that value is hard.

<comment><AUTHOR> If I ever do it again, it will be a free service, that has premium offers you can pay for (domain masking, email, etc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> A 301-serving service is an interesting concept for a small service, though. I would probably assemble it from Kore ([https://kore.io/](https://kore.io/)) and sqlite, or maybe postgres; the hosting requirements would be pretty low. Maybe I'll do it this afternoon for fun.

Then it would just sit there, despite the fact that it could probably be sold for $15k/mo, because that's not a skill I have. If someone signs up for $15k/mo, it's worth a couple extra afternoons to make it more robust for them.

I'm pretty sure you could have done the same, but selling this stuff is a pretty difficult task!

e: another thing you could do is resell domains through it; you wouldn't be competing with registrar builtins then.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, it was a simple afternoon project on a down day where I didn't have much to do client wise.

The original code was only a single nginx config to fix the problem on my sites, when I realized there were others having the issue, I built out an application.

If I were redoing it today, I'd probably just have a running caddy server since it does HTTPS as well.

<comment><USER11> Still pretty cool. There's probably a lot of easy stuff like this that could sell.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think the problem this product solves falls into the chasm between teams that can fix this in a few hours themselves and people who don't know what DNS is. Unfortunately there's not many people in that gap.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, we were going after the mom and pops for sure, my misconception was that if I were willing to pay $9/yr, why wouldn't another small business.

Looking back, I shouldn't have ever scaled it beyond my personal needs, and kept the architecture simpler, and not "highly available". Cost would have been only 10% since that service could run on a single $5 droplet running Caddy server

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> We really did start NavHere as just a service to solve our own problem, and later thought it could help others after seeing all the complaints on the GoDaddy support forum.

It was quite the adrenaline rush getting our first few signups, but then it was so sad seeing it not get traction. We learned a lot though!

</comment><comment><USER14> Speaking purely about the technical side of things, I'm curious about the use of six servers at $55/month. I'd expect to do such a thing with one and $5/month, or two and $10/month if I wanted to absolutely minimise downtime.

It's well documented that making systems distributed to achieve high availability very often actually _reduces_ availability, because distributed systems failure modes are gnarly, and so there's just a lot more _complexity_ in the system as a whole, a lot more moving pieces to go wrong. (Relatedly, it is also well understood that error-handling code is about the buggiest code out there.)

For starters, I can't think of any reason to separate web application server from forwarding servers, so that'd lop it by one.

Then I'd lop the three database servers and put them on the forwarding servers as well, with something like a simple streaming replica arrangement if I was keeping both of the forwarding servers rather than reducing it to one.

This is pretty much guaranteed to be more robust, because now requests are depending on one machine only, perhaps with a second just hanging out in the background paying attention to what's going on; whereas in your distributed system, there are at least _two_ machines that can take things down by failing (if the DB server you're talking to goes down, it'll still be a short time before the system sorts itself out and switches to another one).

I would love kernel live patching to be better understood, tooled and used; then you could safely keep your single machine up indefinitely, just gracefully restarting your HTTP servers and databases as needed. As it is, if you go down to a single box, you'll want to do the occasional quick restart. Ten seconds of downtime every so often doesn't feel _too_ terrible to me, and if you happened to have an HTTP proxy in front of you it might even turn that into just a slow request. But yeah, the second server might be warranted so you can avoid this altogether: just switch which server is the primary and direct all traffic to it, and then freely reboot what is now the standby machine.

<comment><AUTHOR> The application server was actually a shared box with a bunch of my dotnet core applications. I used a 3 node cluster database because I've had single node failures on mongo on $5 droplets, so I did 2 $10 droplets for the slaves and a $20 for the master, it only failed over once. Then I had the primary forwarding application that was a $10 droplet, with a secondary $5 droplet that was just standing by until a failed heartbeat (every 10 seconds), then my floating IP would switch to the backup.

It was overly complicated for robustness. I tested multiple database crashes, servers going down in one zone, and it would always fail over just fine, because application code would connect to a slave if it could not connect to the master, so forwards would work, unless there were multiple outages in multiple data centers.

Now switching the floating IP to the backup forwarder did take about 5 seconds, and I could have made that better by putting a proxy in front, but I'm just moving the point of failure up a level, and it was never needed anyway.

<comment><USER14> Ah, MongoDB. I was guessing something more like PostgreSQL, which is decidedly more robust. I haven't used MongoDB at all for something like six years now, but the impression I get from the odd thing I hear about it is that although it's better than it used to be it's still decidedly less reliable than the likes of PostgreSQL.

It sounds like you've tested the simple failure modes, machines dropping off altogether, which is good; but I'd still be sceptical about the system's robustness, because those aren't the _interesting_ failure modes, and the interesting failure modes are the ones that give the most trouble. Systems are easy when a node is there or not there, but when a node becomes _unreliable_ (e.g. overloaded or network troubles of a variety of kinds), that's when the real trouble happens, and when it's most common that measures that were supposed to make things available actually make them unavailable. (This stuff is _hard_.) That's why avoiding a distributed architecture until you actually _need_ it can be well worthwhile.

<comment><AUTHOR> If I were to do this all over again, I don't think I would do it this way at all.

I would use something like Caddy which manages it's own config and has an API for live updates.

SQLite for the user management and administration.

I would possibly have 2 Caddy nodes though, with a LB between them (instead of my potentially flawed heartbeat floating IP mechanism). The application would do an atomic update to both Caddy servers, if either failed, it would roll it back.

But you are still looking at around $30-40/mo for hosting, not saving much money, but making it much simpler and saving headaches.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Do you mind sharing some of use cases for the service? Like why would a small business use something like this?

<comment><AUTHOR> It can be for SEO or just maintaining old links and pointing to their new location.

Let's say you are trying to capture keywords in a domain and path for luxury highrise apartments in NYC's Tribeca neighborhood, you might buy the domain newyorkluxuryhighriseapartments.com and point the link /tribeca-luxury- apartments/ to a highrise you have in Tribeca.

Or maybe the domain you have wanted forever finally went up for grabs, you buy it, and move your blog over to it, but now all of the links to your old domain are broken. Now you need to forward the old requests to the new blog.

But lets say you are a company and have bought another company, and have folded all of their content under different url structures into your website, you now need to point their old URLs to the new blog posts/product pages/knowledge base/etc.</comment></comment>


The 3-ladder system of social class in the U.S. (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://sasamat.xen.prgmr.com/michaelochurch/wp/2012/09/10/the-3-ladder-system-of-social-class-in-the-u-s/ <comment><USER2> (first HN comment)

I'm shocked that nobody has commented, this is a really well thought out view of the world and solidifies my optimism for the future of the 21st century. I think most people reading HN are G2 and I completely agree that we are the essence of the coming post-mathusalist society!

<comment><USER3> _(first HN comment)_

Your handle is green, so old timers know you are new. It takes a week or two for the green to wear off.

Welcome to HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This pattern of writing has been used for hundreds of years.

It starts with a base mostly detached description dividing people into groups. The groups begin mundane or at least non-threatening. The idea is the reader will attach themselves to one of those groups so that they are insulated from what is to come. The writing here even helps you with this, "G2 is my native social class, and probably that of most of my readers.". A flattering upper- middling position in the hierarchy just defined.

But past this point the article takes a hateful turn. The description of the previous groups existed merely so that the reader could ensure they personally don't exist as part of the target. Here the perpetrators are not people, they are rapists, war lords, and gamblers. There is nothing virtuous about this group, "they're the ugliest and most broken of each nation". In effect there are really only two groups, that of the good and that of the evil.

At this point, the reader is supposed to have two conclusions, 1. there exists a group of bad people we must do something about, and 2. they personally are one of the "good guys". The group descriptions merely exist to justify collective action against of group of "bad people" who are not bad because of actions but because of who they are intrinsically. They cannot be saved.

What action is to happen varies, this form of argument has been used to justify everything from the taking of land and property to outright genocide. They always target a small minority of the population and assure the reader the violence will not be directed at them.

<comment><USER5> I find the author's description of the E1 class persuasive. I think there is a selection effect here. To become a member of that class it is usually necessary to be a clever, heartless sociopath, and so most of the people who achieve that status have such personalities.

You want us to believe that today's E1 is not in fact an evil class, but you offer no specific arguments, instead just a vague historical one. Furthermore, you say, "What action is to happen varies, this form of argument has been used to justify everything from the taking of land and property to outright genocide." But as the article explained, what happened after WWII was instead the elite were restrained and forced to behave in a moral fashion, and the populations benefited enormously.

I am going to assume that the reason you offer no specific arguments that today's E1 is not evil is because you don't have any remotely persuasive ones, and the reason you don't is because they are in fact evil.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Although this article mentions racism later on, it would be interesting to see the distribution of various ethnicities among the ladders and levels mentioned in the first part of the article -- many people outside the U.S. view it as a 4-caste society made up of Caucasian, Asian, Black, and Hispanic, with an underclass of Muslim "untouchables".

</comment><comment><USER5> "The Elite is pre-Malthusian; they are obsessed with the zero-sum game of social status and the need to keep themselves elevated and others out"

In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith said that when people strive for more wealth than they need to live comfortably, it is to achieve high social esteem.</comment>


Aren't Django signals a little like COMEFROM? - <AUTHOR> http://uswaretech.com/blog/2009/07/arent-django-signals-a-little-like-comefrom/

<comment><USER2> I've always just looked at them the way I look at any other event-based hooks -- they're a way to say "when this thing happens, I want to know about it and run some code".

Some programming languages even have this built in :)

<comment><USER3> But doesn't it lead itself to "Action at distance" anti pattern?

Like everyone else, we use django-regsitration a lot. Here in your code, [http://bitbucket.org/ubernostrum/django- registration/src/tip...](http://bitbucket.org/ubernostrum/django- registration/src/tip/registration/models.py) you send a custom signal. Now any one can break the normal flow of control and call control _from any where in the project to anywhere in the project_.

<comment><USER4> Signals defines a fairly concise interface for interacting with events.

You're not "stealing" control from the loop. Rather, think of it more as listening and attaching something to an event.

For me, it helps to think of signals less as interrupts in a traditional program loop, but as something more akin to events in event-driven environments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's better because it doesn't require messing around with, or even being aware of the internals of the code it's being connected to. It's actually a lot like a Common Lisp :before method, which I've found really bloody useful on a few occasions.

<comment><USER6> CL's customizable generic dispatch is just more than :before :-) the whole thing is just tasty.

<comment><USER5> Indeed. If I ever design a general-purpose language, you can bet on it having something of that sort.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think it's fine to say that you don't like signals. But I wouldn't do so without proposing a better alternative.

</comment><comment><USER8> No they aren't. They are an implementation of the template method pattern, perhaps with some cross polination from an observer pattern.</comment>


There Is a Time Like the Present - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/54/the-unspoken/actually-there-is-a-time-like-the-present <comment><USER2> It seems logical that if space is not continuous [1] and relativity works roughly as we think it does, time couldn't be continuous either. If that's the case the shortest unit of time would intuitively be the planck length divided by C.

It would be interesting if the 'wavelength' of time gave rise to higher-order harmonics that we could actually observe.

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

<comment><USER3> Do we have solid evidence (theoretical or otherwise) that space is not continuous.

My understanding is that the only fully accepted implication of the plank length is that it is the smallest _measurable_ unit of length. Attempts to probe smaller regions result in black holes (do to the increasing energy necessary to probe small units of length; and the fact that energy is mass, and therefore exerts gravity).

<comment> T-A Correct. And to date, all data remains consistent with space being continuous. This was big a couple of years ago:

[https://phys.org/news/2015-03-einstein-scientists- spacetime-...](https://phys.org/news/2015-03-einstein-scientists-spacetime- foam.html)

(the news piece focuses on foam, but the constraint applies generally to any kind of discrete structure where derivatives get replaced by stencils).</comment></comment></comment>


The rational use for excess money - <AUTHOR> http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2010/10/the-rational-use-for-excess-money-is-longevity-science.php

<comment><USER2> Irony: a post about the fallacy of seeking local maxima urges focus on the extension of life on a planet which cannot support our current population's demands.</comment>