Is Sunscreen the New Margarine? (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://www.outsideonline.com/2380751/sunscreen-sun-exposure-skin-cancer-science <comment><USER2> > How did we get through the Neolithic Era without sunscreen? Actually, > perfectly well.

I have to suspect that this logic won't apply if you're a light skinned person in a place where the natives are all fairly dark skinned.

<comment><USER3> I live in Australia. I always wondered if a change in attitude/behavior has resulted in the increasing skin cancer rates.

When I talk to my grandparents. The idea of doing anything during the hottest part of the day is crazy to them. They would go for a swim at the beach in the morning or afternoon. Not at midday.

I guess they also had people that rubbed themselves in butter to get a nice tan too, but I'm interested if there has been that sort of change.

<comment><USER4> A sunny place where a lot of people coming from a cloudy place have arrived in the last few centuries. Not a fair comparison with "we survived neolithic".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> On the other hand, massive sun exposure also ages your skin vastly faster. Remember this famous photo of the truck driver who got sun on one side of his face? [1]

I've been aware for a very long time that when I don't get enough sun, I have less energy, I get sick more often, and my mood suffers. But at the same time, I don't want my skin to look like leather.

So it's a pretty easy compromise: I make sure to get a couple hours' of sunbathing without sunscreen every couple weeks, whether at a park, beach, or tanning salon (for a few minutes) in the winter. (Basically cured my seasonal affective disorder in the winter.) The goal is to stay healthily moderately tanned (absolutely not over-tanned) year-round. (And if I spend the whole day at the beach, I put on moderate-strength sunblock after an hour or so.)

But I put sunscreen moisturizer on my face and the back of my neck any day I know I'll be outside in the sun for more than a few minutes -- if I'll be taking a walk or eating lunch outside.

It seems to be a good middle ground -- and the possibility of a middle ground seems to be what is ignored in most conversations on this topic. You don't need to choose between being a sun "worshipper" versus never letting a drop of sun touch your skin.

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/society/shortcuts/2012/jun/05/fa...](https://www.theguardian.com/society/shortcuts/2012/jun/05/face- shows-damage-from-sun)

<comment><USER6> Glass windows filter out UV wavelengths that stimulate vitamin D production. Ironically, they pass wavelengths that cause skin cancer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Best sunscreen is zinc oxide btw.

There are two classes of sunscreen, chemical and mineral/physical.

The mineral/physical ones are group by two mineral zinc oxide and titanium dioxide.

You get a ghost cast using mineral but you can offset it by using a tan/colored version.

Mineral sunscreen are better because it stop UVB and UVA. It also doesn't require a waiting period after applying. Zinc provide wider spectrum of protection than titanium.

<comment><USER8> A sunscreen that blocks UVB, harm marine life [1] and can cause allergic airways inflammation [2] when breathed (inevitable when it dries on your skin) is hardly the best sunscreen in my option.

My personal choice for to vitamin D synthesis is Avobenzone stabilized with ubiquinone.

[1] [https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/news/sunscreen- corals.html](https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/news/sunscreen-corals.html) [2] [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0041008X1...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0041008X19303953)

<comment><USER9> Non-nano zinc oxide, the traditional kind that is white, like OP is talking about, is fine as far as I know([https://www.vogue.com/article/reef-safe- sunscreens-oxybenzon...](https://www.vogue.com/article/reef-safe-sunscreens- oxybenzone-free-sea-turtles-environment-stream2sea)).

The nano mineral sunscreens are bad, but they can be coated, which sounds like it makes them less harmful.

<comment><USER8> The issues I enumerated affects both nano and non-nano sunscreen with different degrees.

The most commons concerns specific of the nano version are the skin absorption and free radical creation when expose to UV radiation -- not exclusive of the mineral sunscreen though, azobenzene is also highly unstable.

We often hear about studies done with the nano crystal because are worst. Experiments done with them are more likely to produce a negative result. But this doesn't mean the "macro" version isn't affected as well.

The aspiration concern is very serious one. Some countries bans spray and power mineral sunscreen of any kind.

Just to be clear. I'm not advocating against using them. Every sunscreen has its place, saying one option is better than other is reductive.

For instance, think an Avobenzone + antiox only chemical sunscreen is a good option to minimize the UVA damage and enable the body to produce vitamin D minimizing the damage created by UVA radiation. But they wouldn't be my choice when going to the beach.

Similarly, Mineral sunscreens don't degrade in the sun and block a wide range of UV radiation. But they are bad for marine wild life. They are a good choice for daily facial sunscreen, specially for skin sensitized by "anti aging" treatments.

Again. There is no such thing as the best sunscreen. Each is best in different use cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This article makes an interesting point. It is more than a year old, which means there has been ample time for the research to be replicated, expanded, challenged, or even debunked. Has there been any new development in this regard?

</comment><comment><USER11> I dislike sunscreen and I dislike having to use it all the time, but the reality is that if I'm under the full sun here in California for more than 10 minutes I'll get a sunburn and after a few more we're talking bubbles and water, i.e. a serious large burn. Long term disease risk is really a secondary concern for me, I can't have half my body covered in burns all the time. I'm not some crazy outlier, but more like your regular guy from Scandinavia or what people in central Europe might call "northern type" informally.

</comment><comment><USER12> I had done a small bit of research online some time back to know what was best for sun exposure and vitamin D. And had concluded that sunscreen on your face, ear and neck which are more likely to burn and also cause wrinkles, with about 20 to 30 minute of direct sunlight exposure on your body per day was the current recommendation.

I think one issue is it's not very socially accepted for me to take a walk shirtless in the middle of the day. So I had found it quite hard to take in the sun.

The other thing I had read was that clothes accentuate skin cancer, because it means that we expose the same parts over and over to sun, yet we get way less amount of vitamin D and other benefits for the amount of time we are out.

Like 5 minutes out in the sun naked, you get a lot of surface sun, but no part of the skin is exposed for too long. While if you go out for 1 hour in the sun with clothes, you might have sunburn in the exposed areas yet didn't even get as much vitamin D from it.

</comment><comment><USER13> UV damage accounts for 80+% of visible signs of aging. The difference between daily protection with sunscreen and not compounds over years and you can find plenty of pictures illustrating the sharp divergence in end result.

You should use sunscreen with a minimum SPF of 30 every day on your face and neck. Reapply with every 2 hours of direct sun exposure, accounting for things like being in the shade or behind windows (most windows filter out a significant proportion of incoming UV). This is easily the smallest change you can make to get the greatest return on anti-aging and, reiterating the above, the difference produced can be astounding.

For purposes of vitamin D 'intake', leave the other exposed parts of your body unslathered, as long as you're not deliberately increasing exposure (e.g. hitting the beach). Easy fix.

<comment><USER14> >anti-aging

Since when did "anti-aging" come to mean "anti-visible signs of aging"? Why should I care about looking old when I am old? Shouldn't I care more about being healthy when I am old?

<comment><USER15> Whether or not you care about your appearance, your skin is still a very important organ.

For skin it just happens that "aging" and "visible signs of aging" are synonymous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> To help control my sun exposure, I use UV widgets on my dashboard.

They help me know when I can expose as much skin as possible to get gentle exposure everywhere, and when I'll burn in 5 minutes.

It's interesting, the heat of the sun and the actual risk of burning don't seem to be 100% correlated.

I find it really helpful to have actual knowledge of what the sun is doing at any one time, instead of having to guess and under or over exposing myself.

I've listed the widgets I use below for Australia, I'm sure you can find them for your location too.

[https://www.arpansa.gov.au/our- services/monitoring/ultraviol...](https://www.arpansa.gov.au/our- services/monitoring/ultraviolet-radiation-monitoring/ultraviolet-radiation- index)

[https://www.cancer.org.au/preventing-cancer/sun- protection/u...](https://www.cancer.org.au/preventing-cancer/sun- protection/uv-alert/uv-alert-widget.html)

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm one of those weird people who gets a rash when using sunscreen, and am also one of those folks who has dental fluorosis.

I simply stay out of the sun, wear long sleeves and a hat if I can't avoid it, and ... Well I have ugly teeth.

Not wearing sunscreen isn't a pass for exposure; there are still precautions that can be taken.

<comment><USER8> The the most commonly used sunscreen chemical have hormone like activity [1].

[https://www.ewg.org/sunscreen/report/the-trouble-with- sunscr...](https://www.ewg.org/sunscreen/report/the-trouble-with-sunscreen- chemicals/)

<comment><USER17> Sunscreen sensitivity is definitely a real thing, too:

[https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/sunscreen- sensitivity-1.42009...](https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/sunscreen- sensitivity-1.4200914)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I am a Norwegian German mix and fairly white. Living in Wisconsin for the winters was difficult. The overcast weather and low sun on the horizon tended to make me feel pretty low.

Having moved to Florida, I get as much sun as I can take and haven't experienced some of the lows I had in previous Wisconsin winters. I wear a straw hat, breathable long sleeve shirts and long pants to moderate my sun exposure. I have spent more time outdoors and away from cities. All together, I feel less stressed at 38 than I have in years. I attribute it to being out in the elements, WFH and pushing outside my comfort zone. It just feels better to be out here, anchored next to Cape Canaveral.

</comment><comment><USER19> This glosses over the far more important question: Is Margarine the New Sunscreen?

</comment><comment><USER20> I find that when I am outside a lot starting early spring, and of course not go out during noon hours (11am-4pm) in high summer, I have almost no need for sunscreen.

If however I spend the spring mostly indoors with few opportunities to go outside, then no matter what I do later I can not habituate and will get 'sun allergy' for the season.

</comment><comment> 2019-nCoV The optimal application frequency and SPF of Sunscreen is going to differ drastically from person to person, place to place, all within a given year.

A fresh-faced Irish tourist will be burnt to a crisp after a 20 min stroll on the beach in QLD, Australia in January. Yet slathering on SPF 50 in rainy Dublin upon their return would be all but detrimental.

</comment><comment><USER21> You'll have to pry the Sun Bum spf 70 from my pink sunburned hands. I'm not giving that stuff up and if they go out of business my family is going to be hurting.

</comment><comment><USER22> I just tried it on toast, and I'm going to have to agree that it's as bad as margarine.

<comment><USER23> Soft, creamy mouthfeel. Earthy, metallic notes - like a brisk bite of aluminum foil. Strong aftertaste of own puke.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> God, can't I just get vitamin D from other sources? I drink 24oz of milk a day and that's about 75% of the RDI.

<comment><USER25> RDI for vitamin D is too low, and probably resulted from a calculation error. Should probably aim for 5-10x the RDI. [https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/03/150317122458.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/03/150317122458.htm) [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28768407](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28768407)

<comment><USER6> The article cites a study where _large_ doses of vitamin D had no benefit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is terrible advice that will kill people.

Here in Australia skin cancer (directly caused by exposure to UV) is the most common cancer[1] and kills an increasing proportion of people every year.

Sure, vitamin D deficiency is bad. But don't tell people who are spending all day in the sun not to wear sunscreen! Tell people who never go outside to get 20 minutes of sun a day instead!

As pointed out elsewhere, the primary argument ("how did we get through the neolithic age") is bunk - there is no evolutionary pressure once someone has reproduced, and almost always skin cancer kills people over 30.

[1] [https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/cancer/skin-cancer-in- austra...](https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/cancer/skin-cancer-in- australia/summary)

<comment><USER27> Both are addressed in the article. The floated theory is that a lack of uv is responsible for more death then skin cancer.

<comment><USER16> I'm a fair skinned Aussie, who doesn't really like sunscreen.

I can 100% understand nl's position - skin cancer is really prevalent here, and the sun can be incredibly harsh. The skies here are usually completely cloudless, and we're affected by the ozone hole too. Skin cancer is a big deal here. The aboriginal people are very dark, which should be a big hint as to the amount of UV we get, and that will have been selected for from before the ozone hole.

I keep track of UV levels on my personal dashboard, so I _know_ when it's dangerous or not. Previously I was overly cautious, but now I can enjoy time outdoors with skin exposed without the worry of burning, and get gentle UV exposure over my whole body for the vit D.

Personally I prefer to cover up rather than use sunscreen. I don't like the feel of sunscreen, and when covered up there is no risk of the sunscreen slowly washing away. I do use sunscreen on exposed areas, such as hands, face, and feet.

Here are the UV widgets I use.

[https://www.arpansa.gov.au/our- services/monitoring/ultraviol...](https://www.arpansa.gov.au/our- services/monitoring/ultraviolet-radiation-monitoring/ultraviolet-radiation- index)

[https://www.cancer.org.au/preventing-cancer/sun- protection/u...](https://www.cancer.org.au/preventing-cancer/sun- protection/uv-alert/uv-alert-widget.html)</comment></comment></comment>


Astronomers have found water vapor in a planet in the constellation Cygnus - <AUTHOR>

http://www.astronomy.com/news/2014/09/major-milestone-in-the-search-for-water-on-distant-planets <comment><USER2> Why is this in the 'ask' list?

<comment><USER3> The submitter put the url in the text field.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, my mistake. Since you're here, dang, can I resubmit it correctly?

<comment><USER3> In principle, sure. But IIRC the article has already appeared on the front page.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


New data shows London's property boom is a money laundering horror - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.co.uk/article/money-laundering-hmrc-tax-update <comment><USER2> Vancouver, Toronto, NYC...

<comment><USER3> Until recently, you could show up in Vancouver and buy a $10 million house for cash, and then put the company into the name of some obscure trust and nobody would ever find out who you are. And it turns out that there were only five RCMP officers handling money laundering in the entire country or something like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not just London ...

</comment><comment><USER5> And water is wet</comment>


The new log4j 2.0 - <AUTHOR> http://www.grobmeier.de/the-new-log4j-2-0-05122012.html <comment><USER3> I found the english not very easy to follow, was it automatically translated?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am sorry to say, but no. It's how I actually write :-(

<comment><USER3> Heh, no problem :) , a native English speaker might be able to point them out better, but some of the sentences are a bit awkward, for example the beginning:

"Before a while a new major version of the well known log4j logging framework was released"

Starting your sentence with "Before" is awkward, because I'm expecting another language construction (for example "Before log4j was released, X happened"), I would have phrased it "It's been a while since"...

There are other phrasing constructs that signal that you're not a native English speaker (neither am I, so maybe that's why I might get confused by your phrasing).

Sorry to nitpick, the main point was talking about log4j :) , I've already recommended trying it out to the Java developers in my company :) - <USER2> mentioned that they're currently using logback, but that the improvements in log4j sound very promising.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, we never can hide our roots ;-)

Logback has been developed by the same guy who wrote log4j 1.x. He left and log4j 1 was not maintained a long time. But before a good while a few others have teamed up to bring the project back to life. With log4j 2 we have looked closely at other frameworks, including logback, and tried to make things better. Actually we have found a few things which we consider better. Still you need to consider log4j 2.0 is a young framework and in beta. That said, we are always glad about feedback. You and your developers are invited to join us on our mailing list and tell us what you think - good or bad. Thanks again for your interest (and bearing with my english)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


5 Things Security Can Learn from Operations' Transition into DevOps - <AUTHOR> http://blog.threatstack.com/5-things-security-can-learn-from-operations-transition-into-devops <comment><AUTHOR> I'm an infrastructure engineer that's now working in the security space. What myself and others have found is security appears to be slightly behind ops in terms of adapting to the changing world of software deliver. I've highlighted a few key areas that I plan on expanding. Thoughts? Comments? Have I missed the marks?</comment>


StartupSchool schedule - <AUTHOR> http://www.startupschool.org/schedule.html

<comment><USER2> The schedule says that talks start at 9:00, but Kirsty's email said they start at 9:30. Does anyone know which is correct?

<comment><USER3> Not sure, but I would go with the published schedule. Better to be early than late.</comment></comment>


Python – Writing large ZIP archives without memory inflation - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/BuzonIO/zipfly#zipfly <comment><USER2> It'd be better if they didn't require knowing the paths a priori. One of the fundamental strengths of ZIP is that the file list is at the end of the archive rather than the beginning, letting you dynamically discover and send contents in a streaming fashion. Forcing the list of files to be known a priori works against that.

<comment><USER3> I have this same gripe with libzip in C.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Please test your library with the c10-archive test suite [https://www.ee.oulu.fi/research/ouspg/PROTOS_Test- Suite_c10-...](https://www.ee.oulu.fi/research/ouspg/PROTOS_Test- Suite_c10-archive)

<comment><USER5> How would one test a library for generating compressed archives with a test designed for testing decompressors?

<comment><USER4> Sorry. My bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I did something similar to stream large amounts of data off of an embedded device via a zip file, falcon, and wsgi server with no external dependencies for actual zip stream.

Proof of concept: [https://gist.github.com/1e22bbf31b7e5ae84bbdfa32c68e03a9](https://gist.github.com/1e22bbf31b7e5ae84bbdfa32c68e03a9)

</comment><comment><USER7> I remember needing this 5+ years ago, I used a branch of a fork of python- zipstream [https://github.com/longaccess/python- zipstream/tree/streamin...](https://github.com/longaccess/python- zipstream/tree/streaminput)

</comment><comment><USER8> Yeah, I looked into this a while ago forgenerating photo gallery zip files on the fly. Currently I'm using lazygal to generate static html galleries and if I want to give users the option to easoly download the full gallery, it basically doubles the size I need to store, as lazygal simply creates a zip file and puts it next to the photos and html files in the static gallery folder it generates.

So I looked to creating the zip files on the fly when requested & streaming them to the client onthe other end withou having to create temporary files and/or a lot of memmory consumption on the server. I got it working on a prototype and even found some articles from others that got it working - it is not that hard, really.

<comment><USER9> It was apparently hard enough that you had to build a prototype and consult other prior write ups.

When you really need something done it's sometimes very helpful to be able quickly get it done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The zip file format itself, and the compression algorithms, like deflate...all seem set up to encourage low memory usage. The directory, for example, is at the end of the file.

Also, most places in a zipfile you might not have context to write in a streaming fashion are predictable in size/position so you can throw in a placeholder and seek() back to it later.

Kind of a shame someone has to specifically implement a low memory usage library. That implies other implementations went the lazy route.

<comment><USER11> Certain fields in the ZIP local file header require random access at write time. Although deflate is self-delimiting, for non-compressed items you must either know the size of item upfront, seek after learning the size, or force all readers to fully buffer the ZIP before decompressing any entry, in order to access the size stored in the central directory at the end of the ZIP

The CRC field of the local file header is similar, but its optionality is less painful than the length field

In other words, there isn't a single 'good' ZIP implementation, it all depends on what you're aiming for. AFAIK the built-in Python zipfile module always fully populates the local file header.

<comment><USER12> > Certain fields in the ZIP local file header require random access at write > time.

Isn't that what bit 3 in the general purpose bit flags if for? When that's set, the CRC and compressed/uncompressed file lengths are written in a Data Descriptor block after the member file data.

<comment><USER11> It's been a few years, but I seem to remember there simply was no way to detect end of non-compressed content lacking a length header without first reading the TOC except substring search. This would quickly get very messy when the non-compressed content might contain another embedded ZIP, etc.

<comment><USER12> That's during extraction though. There's no way to reliably decompress a ZIP without reading the Central Directory first. While scanning for the Local File Headers works for most files, it's not guaranteed to be correct since it may not match what's in the Central Directory. Also as you point out it doesn't work when the file length is not in the LFH.

Streaming zip creation is well supported by the format though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wrote a servlet that streamed gigabytes of zipped data to HTTP clients in 2005. Something like this was baked into the JDK awhile ago. Why is it an achievement for Python, though?

<comment><USER14> I think you can get the size of the zip before creating it. [https://github.com/BuzonIO/zipfly/blob/master/zipfly/zipfly....](https://github.com/BuzonIO/zipfly/blob/master/zipfly/zipfly.py#L119)

<comment><USER15> smart! but always using ZIP_STORED?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wish windows supported more than just zip natively. I would love something like a tar. So much easier to generate on the fly than compressed formats.

<comment><USER17> If all you want is to generate zip files and not read them, you can use uncompressed blocks, barely more complicated than tar and a lot faster and less memory hungry than many compression libraries: [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1951#page-11](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1951#page-11)

I've been using this for a javascript bookmarklet (< 2000 characters) which automatically downloads all images from a web page on click.

<comment><USER18> And if one wants to list the content of the archives, zip is better and orders of magnitude faster, as it also has a "central directory" so one doesn't have to read the whole archive to get the list.

I've used that "central directory" approach even over the internet with a great success (downloading just that segment instead of the whole archive to get a list of what is inside).

But how did you make a bookmarklet to produce a zip archive, even non- compressed?

<comment><USER17> > But how did you make a bookmarklet to produce a zip archive, even non- > compressed?

Not quite sure I understand the question. Bookmarklets are bookmarks which contain JavaScript code, for example:

javascript:alert('Hello, World!');

You can put that in a link

Bookmarklet

and then you can right-click the link to bookmark it. Now, when you want to run that JavaScript code on some website, visit the website and click on the bookmark.

<comment><USER18> I know bookmarklets basics. What I wanted to know is which API calls you used inside of the < 2000 character bookmarklet to achieve the functionality you described. I also believed that the bookmarklets are limited to the security context of the web page and I don't understand how you did all that, if I understood you correctly you are generating zip out of the images from the web page using only the bookmarklet?

Do you, or do you do something much simpler?

<comment><USER17> > I know bookmarklets basics. What I wanted to know is which API calls you > used inside of the < 2000 character bookmarklet to achieve the functionality > you described.

To create the archive data, I used an Uint8Array where I wrote the bytes into.

To download the images, I used XMLHttpRequest.

> I also believed that the bookmarklets are limited to the security context of > the web page

That seems to be true unfortunately. However, besides the images on the same domain, it should also be possible to download some more images from other domains by allowing cross origin requests if the remote server cooperates and sets the respective header. but I have not looked into that yet.

The bookmarklet is here if you have more questions: [https://github.com/983/FileDownloader](https://github.com/983/FileDownloader)

It is a bit larger than 2500 characters now since previously the code was optimized for size. Now it is slightly more readable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is this an issue in new versions of vanilla Python? I mostly bang on crusty old Java stuff and zip streaming has been built into JDK for decades

<comment><USER20> Zip support in cpython stdlib has been there forever (I think it might even be from 2.0 times, early '00s) but it's never been very user-friendly or particularly advanced. It's one of those things like timezone and http, where the implemented API didn't really come out "right" and there has been some pain ever since. It's a bit like SSL stuff in JDK: something that should instinctively be very easy just... isn't.</comment></comment>


An Ikea Bowl Has Been Setting Things on Fire - <AUTHOR> http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/ikea-bowl-blanda-blank-fire <comment><USER3> The same phenomenon occurs with glass spheres. If you think about it it is obvious enough (most people are familiar with how a magnifying glass concentrates the ray of the sun in a single spot), but it is something people tend to overlook when employing glass spheres as elements of your interior design — e.g., glass door knobs, large marbles, and decorative knick-knacks (which people have a tendency to place on their windowsills).

Every once in a while a house fire is started because the sun sat at just the right angle at a certain time of the year, placing the focal point on the curtains. But because the risk is so low (it doesn't happen that frequently) many people are completely unaware of the phenomenon.

<comment><USER4> Actually one of the official 'old school' tool to measure sun exposure thru the day in meteo stations is a glass sphere with a calibrated piece of paper underneath. Needs to be changed everyday, but the burn mark is quite neatly drawn on the chart.

EDIT: Found it again [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%E2%80%93Stokes_record...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%E2%80%93Stokes_recorder)

<comment><USER5> One of the photographers that I'm intrigued by is Michael Wesely ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Wesely](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Wesely) ) who takes ultra long exposures (a two week long exposure is "short" \- his flower photographs are in that range). The museum of modern art was about two years. [http://www.amusingplanet.com/2010/08/unusually-long- exposure...](http://www.amusingplanet.com/2010/08/unusually-long-exposure- photographs-by.html)

You can see the tracks of the days and the cloud cover in those photographs. Note that the multiple year ones have multiple days going over a single track.

Aside from the extreme reciprocity failure in the film, its "only" about three stops from a one day exposure to a one week exposure... and another two stops to a month, and then another three and a half stops to a year.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the reminder on the reciprocity rules! I used to take super-long exposure with my 4x5/10x8 view cameras as well... basically after a few minutes, it doesn't /really/ matter anymore so stop counting in minutes/seconds, more in teacups+newspaper pages :-) I always loved the tonal range you get on way, WAY overexposed film.

<comment><USER5> Digging up an old page (I am not sure if the film still has that characteristic curve), Provia 100F had some very nice _lack_ of reciprocity failure. [http://home.earthlink.net/~kitathome/LunarLight/moonlight_ga...](http://home.earthlink.net/~kitathome/LunarLight/moonlight_gallery/technique/reciprocity.htm) (from [http://home.earthlink.net/~kitathome/LunarLight/moonlight_ga...](http://home.earthlink.net/~kitathome/LunarLight/moonlight_gallery/) \- its an old frames page).

The correction for a 1200 second (20m) exposure on Kodak black and white film was at 12x (for 14400s, 4h). However, the extrapolation for the curve for Provia 100F put the reciprocity failure for 1200s at 2.35 for a 3000 second exposure.

Looking at the methods and results is interesting, though I've gone nearly full digital now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Works also with skyscrapers:

[http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england- london-23930675](http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-23930675)

<comment><USER7> Same architect did the same thing with their previous building, then didn't learn their lesson.

<comment><USER8> I still wonder if it was more a case of wanting to see how many times they could get away with it.

<comment><USER9> I think he did learn the lesson, but then his fix for it was removed in the cost-cutting phase.

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/1029...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/10290615/Cost- cutting-could-have-caused-Walkie-Talkie-skyscraper-ray-damage.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Archimedes heat bowl" would be a better name,

Wikipedia: "The device, sometimes called the "Archimedes heat ray", was used to focus sunlight onto approaching ships, causing them to catch fire. "

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

<comment><USER11> I believe that mythbusters had an episode disproving the Archimedes heat ray

<comment><USER12> They tried and failed three times (episodes 16, 46, and 157).

Here's an interesting write-up about the team of MIT students that worked with them on the second try: [http://web.mit.edu/2.009/www/experiments/deathray/10_Mythbus...](http://web.mit.edu/2.009/www/experiments/deathray/10_Mythbusters.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can't help myself: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJuuFLo1a84&t=252s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJuuFLo1a84&t=252s)

Getting fire with the spoon (!) in Siberia's (!!) Winter (!!!).

The sun light is not very bright at that time, just for a note. Sun is about couple tens of degrees above horizon and (infrared) light mostly caught by the atmosphere.

<comment><USER14> "Sure, it's cold—but to a fire, everything is cold" [https://what- if.xkcd.com/155/](https://what-if.xkcd.com/155/)

<comment><USER13> My note was mainly about sun ascension, not temperature.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The focal length of a spherical mirror is R/2\. The focus is not perfectly sharp, but gets sharper if the mirror shape approaches a parabola. Finally, for a symmetrical bowl, the effect is greatest at high noon, since off-axis rays are not focused to as intense a spot as rays parallel to the bowl axis.

</comment><comment><USER16> Feature. Not a bug.

<comment><USER17> Basically, it's a marketing/naming problem. They should sell it as an eco- friendly fire starter.

<comment><USER18> Free Energy Maxx Heater

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> they can change the description to self lighting bbq and give it legs.

It's also on my list of things to bring on a desert island.

<comment><USER20> You'd probably be better off with a magnifying or fresnel lens (or set of lenses), they're available as portable/survival tools (sometimes called "fire lenses" or "burning glass").

Fresnel are convenient as they're available in flexible flat rectangular plastic (e.g. credit-card sized). You lose in image quality so it's not great if you're trying to look at mosses or small critters, but to set stuff on fire it's really great as they're light, easy to pack and can be much larger than glass magnifying lenses (of equivalent or lower convenience).

<comment><USER21> I carry three or four different means to set a fire in the backpack I carry when I go hiking; a credit-card sized fresnel lens is one of them.

I also like to scavenge the huge fresnel lens from larger (40+ inch) rear- projection TVs - these are often thrown out by people during our "bulk-trash pickup" days. It only takes a few minutes of work to remove the front screen of the TV (they are designed to be removed). A few more minutes will net you a huge silver first-surface mirror, too.

The fresnel lens from one of these TVs - mounted in a proper frame - <USER2> easily melt steel and rock. You have to be very careful when using it (wear proper clothing, plus welding goggles and gloves), and store it properly out of the sun afterward (because it can easily set things randomly on fire you don't want set on fire).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It concentrates the sun from what I could understand from the article. Should work the same for any spherical bowl (parabolic would work even better) that is shiny enough.

<comment><USER23> It's a known way of cooking[0], saw them in Tibet years ago.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I hope they don't change the design. This would be great for camping/hiking/backpacking. Having a bowl that's also capable of starting a fire is a nice extra safety measure and it takes up almost no space because you pack stuff into it.

<comment><USER25> I can't quite remember the exact make or model, but years ago there was a lightweight folding camp chair which has a removable plastic support. Its shape was perfect for a makeshift arm splint. Many people suggested that this camp chair should be part of their go-to gear. The following year the chair was redesigned without the removable support :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm definitely going to buy one of these bowls just for this highly useful feature...

<comment><USER27> If you don't live close to an IKEA store: [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00T5YMQIG/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_awdb_IY...](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00T5YMQIG/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_awdb_IYJuzbESBKGB1)

<comment><USER18> Thanks, not a trigger buy thing at that radius / price. Rare as second hand things, so far people liked the product it seems. Or died since.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Smiling hard, I was looking for a solar concentrator online when I should have gone to the nearest IKEA store.

ps: a video that go well with the PrimitiveTechnology channel

<comment><USER21> If you live in the US (or you know someone), and you have bulk-trash pickup (or can scavenge otherwise) - look around for an old 40 or 50 inch rear- projection television. All of them use a large fresnel lens for the screen (they also have an interest lenticular lens as well - but that isn't as useful due to it's short focal length). This lens, properly mounted, is capable of melting glass, rock, steel, etc. IE - if you use one as a solar concentrator, know what you are doing, as they can be very dangerous (not a toy). There are plenty of instructables and such online detailing how to build and use one - for instance:

[http://www.instructables.com/id/Giant-Fresnel-Lens- Deathray-...](http://www.instructables.com/id/Giant-Fresnel-Lens-Deathray-An- Experiment-in-Opti/)

<comment><USER18> Yeah I know, I've seen these dozens of time on youtube[1], but there's not a lot of these TV around anymore; or I need to find a real landfill.

A large fresnel lens is my most wished prize right now, I consider looking into manufacturing one.

[1] to recycle glass, metals etc, maybe produce some cute things or just to ease trashing (bins won't contains large empty bottles, but nice pellets)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I suddenly smelled smoke one morning and could not figure out where it came frome. Turned out it was a paper napkin i had left in one of those bowls on my kitchen table. And the sun came in through the window in just the right angle. Took me a few minutes to figure out what the reason was.

</comment><comment><USER29> A similar phenomenon causes birds to spontaneously combust when flying near industrial solar power plants: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICLXQN_lURk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICLXQN_lURk).

<comment><USER11> Hmmm.... spontaneous would be without an external source of ignition, which is the solar concentrators of the power plant. Probably more accurate to strike spontaneously and simply say "...causes birds to combust when flying near ..."

<comment><USER29> Right, but the source of ignition here is invisible to the human eye. So it's bit of a grey area.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Original source: [https://www.thelocal.se/20170620/video-ikea-bowl-sets- swedes...](https://www.thelocal.se/20170620/video-ikea-bowl-sets-swedes- grapes-on-fire)

</comment><comment><USER31> Is this a basic parabola effect by focusing the suns rays on a single point?

<comment><USER32> Yes, basically.

<comment><USER33> But actually how close is the bowl to a parabola?

<comment><USER34> Hopefully not too close, or else the parabola will be set on fire.

<comment><USER35> I LOLed

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> could be this adapted receive better wifi signal ?

<comment><USER37> Of course. As a matter of fact I once bought that very exact bowl for making a S band dish antenna.

There's a small caveat: The bottom of the bowl is flattened (so that it doesn't roll around). That's not a big deal though if you use a dipole feed; since the dipol radiates mostly normal to its axis (look up the pattern if it's unclear what I mean) a dipole mounted at the center and perpendicular to that flatted base will actually not "see" much of that flat base and work only against the curved part.

Due to the rather small radius and being a spherical shape the directivity/gain is not that great, compared to a parabolic dish antenna. But it's cheap and works well enough if you have to cover only a couple of km.

However keep in mind that regulations likely limit maximum transmission power to something like 20dB(m) EIRP, so depending on how much directivity gain you get, you'll have to reduce the TX power by that amount to stay legal… or get a license.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> A friend of mine had some prism on the window sill and the curtains cought fire. Luckily he was in the room and noticed.

</comment><comment><USER39> In other news, sales of the bowl spike :).

</comment><comment><USER40> Viewing the video I see that the paper smolders, smokes and burns, but I see no flames that consume the paper.

So it does not set things on fire.

Maybe change the title to "An IKEA Bowl Has Been Burning Things"

</comment><comment><USER41> I have a stainless steel saucepan from IKEA that I've used for camping for several years, and on a bright day, with some effort, I can start a fire with the lid.

</comment><comment><USER42> At my daughter's 2nd birthday, my mom had to put out a fire that spontaneously occurred in a bowl of chips outside. Not sure if it was this bowl or a doppelganger.

</comment><comment><USER43> Reminds of this (sadly discontinued) project: [http://www.photongrill.com/](http://www.photongrill.com/)

<comment><USER44> There's also this parabolic solar camp stove I spotted on the REI site a few months ago. Seems like an absolute gimmick, but the few reviews are all very positive:

[https://www.rei.com/product/100561/gosun-sport-solar-camp- st...](https://www.rei.com/product/100561/gosun-sport-solar-camp-stove)

<comment><USER27> The Boy Scout handbook (1980's version) had an aluminum foil solar oven design for cooking a hot dog. It was a version of that psychology test of putting marshmallows in front of kids. The patient scouts got a cooked hotdog in about 45 minutes - on a bright summer day. I ate a raw one after about 10.

<comment><USER45> Unfortunately, my kids already know from watching _How It 's Made_ that most wiener-type sausages sold in the US are fully cooked at the factory, and when you "cook" them at home, you're just heating them up. One would just eat it without bothering with the foil for even one minute, and the other doesn't eat hot dogs at any temperature.

I remember, as part of a wilderness survival challenge, being told to eat some breakfast, then they gave me one match, a juice can, a raw egg, and two uncooked pork sausage links. The "correct" solution was to build a fire, drink the juice, cut the top off the can, grease the inside of the can with cooking sausage, and then fry your egg in the greased can. Alternate solutions turned out to be a whole lot easier--left as an exercise for the reader because many of them are disgusting.

Knowing how to do this was of great comfort to me, because sausages, eggs, and juice cans actually grow on trees in the woods near me. Along with plastic tarps and alkaline batteries. It felt like the sort of thing that might give kids just enough confidence to wander off alone to die in the actual wilderness, or to miraculously return in five years speaking fluent Wolf, with plenty of helpful suggestions for the next edition of the manual--such as a primer on the intricacies of wolf pack politics.

That manual probably should have just skipped the solar oven and gone straight to starting a fire with the foil. (As though your average Boy Scout doesn't already know too many ways to set something on fire. Have you ever seen someone start a bonfire by shooting an arrow into it? That guy was probably a Boy Scout, and the secret he wouldn't tell you is that the tinder had KMnO4 in it, and the arrow popped a hidden balloon with some glycerol in it. It wasn't actually a ghost.)

<comment><USER21> > that the tinder had KMnO4 in it, and the arrow popped a hidden balloon with > some glycerol

For those that don't know, KMnO4 is also known as potassium permanganate:

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

As noted in that wikipedia article, when combined with glycerol or other glycerin containing products (like automotive antifreeze) it can also be used as a fire starter. It can be easily found online or at home improvement stores, as it is sold for water softening and filtration purposes.

Grant Thompson ("King of Random") documents how to make a survival fire starter kit using this knowledge:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ja_6Yin9JuM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ja_6Yin9JuM)

In short, keeping a bit of potassium permanganate in your car with you, should you get lost and don't have another source of fire making with you, might be a wise thing (then again, if you know anything about automobiles, there are tons of ways to use parts in them for starting a fire).

<comment><USER46> You just had to post that, didn't you!!!

Got a bottle of KMnO4 next to my iron filter and at least one jug of glycol antifreeze in the garage.

Guess what I'm doing when I get home :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> That's going to be the most sold bowl Ikea ever had, due to all the people who want to try this at home

</comment><comment><USER48> This is great if you need fire and you don't have matches...

<comment><USER49> I think it would actually be quite difficult to start a fire with this. Speaking as a former boy scout who had to build a fire with a magnifying glass for wilderness survival merit badge - it's really easy get smoke, it's quite difficult to get a flame.

The article claims that he "set a piece of newspaper on fire" using the bowl, but after watching the video I just saw some smoldering paper - no flames. I'm betting the grape stem just smoldered a bit as well.

You have to have very good airflow with dry, fine tinder in order to start a fire with a magnifying glass or parabolic mirror... unless of course you build a lens or mirror of monstrous proportions.

<comment><USER50> I can set a piece of cardboard on fire with visible flames in a few seconds. I carry a small fresnel lens, [https://www.amazon.com/3-Pack-Credit-Card-Pocket- Fresnel/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/3-Pack-Credit-Card-Pocket- Fresnel/dp/B00NWMUK0I)

<comment><USER49> I still maintain that it is much more difficult to start a fire with a lens or mirror than people seem to think. Post a video of using your fresnel lens on different material types (paper, cardboard, wood, pine needles) and see how quickly you can get a visible flame. I'm betting you won't be able to easily get a visible flame on most materials you try.

<comment><USER21> > I still maintain that it is much more difficult to start a fire with a lens > or mirror than people seem to think.

I'd have to agree with you. When I go hiking, I carry around 3 or 4 different kinds of "fire making" things, just in case I need them for any reason. I also practice with them on occasion to know what to do when I really need them.

It isn't easy to start a fire from scratch. It takes a bit of work, a bit of knowledge, and a ton of patience and perseverance. If you don't have any of that, you'll have a hard road ahead of you.

Even using good tinder plus magnesium bar shavings and a flint striker isn't as easy as you'd hope. In fact, it can be very frustrating. But once you get it going, it's very satisfying.

This is why I also carry a Bic lighter, strike-anywhere matches (in a waterproof container), esbit tablets, and a fresnel lens - all as backup fire sources.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Great for camping trips.

</comment><comment><USER52> Excellent doomsday fireplace with self ignition capabilities.

</comment><comment><USER7> I own one of these! Anyone on HN have ideas for pyro fun?

<comment><USER53> Not pyro-based fun, BUT a fun project nonetheless. Take a laser-pointer(s) and at multiple intervals map the trail of the reflection. Find out where the focal point is, and post for fun.

For bonus geekiness use some dry-ice to better illuminate the path.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Starting with clickbait...? Shame, shame

<comment><USER55> To be serious, title describes article accurately. Click bait style of title is a side effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> ordered, thanks. I needed a cheap parabolic to start fires.

</comment><comment><USER56> fucking parabolas man

</comment><comment><USER57> Curious how clickbaiting works now. Taking the articles title "This Ikea Bowl has been setting things on fire", the "This" is an interesting word choice that is a great reminder of the "You won't believe THIS simple trick to..." that started the whole craze. I'd be curious to see some A/B testing on semi- baiting titles vs something more descriptive like the original source 'Ikea investigates after 'bowl sets Swede's grapes on fire'

<comment><USER58> Where is the line between clickbait and attention grabbing headline. In the case of "You won't believe THIS simple trick to..." I'd definitely call it clickbait - but in this instance, the title reflects exactly what the article is about, and while the modified title on HN does a far better representation of the contents, I personally don't see the harm in how Atlas Obscura worded the title.

Or maybe I am just really susceptible to clickbait titles...

<comment><USER59> This is a very minor example, but compare the title to just "Ikea Bowl Has Been Setting Things on Fire". The word "this" naturally prompts the response "which one?", just like something saying "look at this" in real life. Again it's very minor, but the extra word adds nothing except a slight suggestion that this particular example is especially interesting and you should click to see it.

Compare "Florida Man Escapes Prison" to "This Florida Man Escaped Prison". You'd scroll past the first, but you might not scroll past the second, because it seems like there must be something particularly interesting about this florida man, so you might as well take a second to click and see the picture.

<comment><USER60> Yes, except that "This" in a title is a definite turn-off for me, and a sure way to make me avoid clicking. So sick of baiting.

<comment><USER61> Reddit has a bot that summarizes articles. A browser extension that replaces each Buzz! Feed! Headline! with such a summary would be an interesting programming exercise.

Or maybe not Buzzfeed, since even the summary will cause brain cancer.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


OOP Javascript (some magic included) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/benchmark-solutions/methadone

<comment><AUTHOR> This is the first open source project we've released, let us know what you think! Also, we're hiring talented programmers, so if you're looking for a job in NYC, let me know.</comment>


Is there a modern browser that runs on Windows 3.1? - <AUTHOR> http://superuser.com/questions/423061/is-there-a-modern-browser-that-runs-on-windows-3-1 <comment><USER2> Why does no one want to actually _answer his question_? It's one of my major gripes with tech forums these days: Someone asks a question about "How can I do X?" and instead of providing an answer, everyone piles up to say "HAHAH X is so stupid, you should be doing Y".

I actually preface some of my questions these days with "I realise X might sound silly, but I'd like to do it so please answer the question instead of telling my why I shouldn't be doing it"

Stop it already. Or at least ANSWER THE QUESTION and then politely suggest why you think it might be a bad idea.

<comment><USER3> What kind of knife should I use to behead a 5.8' average-build man?

<comment><USER4> Equating killing someone to using an old OS is a terrible straw-man argument.

<comment><USER3> It's not a comparison. Maybe I went a bit too far, but I think it answers "why does no one want to actually answer his question?". Sometimes the subject at hand or the content raises flags/concerns that overshadow the question. It's human nature.

<comment><USER5> In which case, _don't answer the question at all_.

If a person is completely new and this is obvious from the question, then you might be helping by saying "don't do that", otherwise, you're just adding noise.

<comment><USER6> No, I'm sorry. When you believe that someone is going to harm themselves or others with their decisions, and no one else has mentioned the dangerous of their intentions, it is the kind thing to do to warn them. This is especially the case here. This person wanted to do something clearly dangerous and with a critical system (see critical systems testing) that could potentially encourage it to fail and cause lives to be lost. They needed to be warned. Not answering when there is great danger is just as cruel as answering with the help to make it happen because yes, someone will help.

<comment><USER7> It's completely reasonable to warn them. It's _not_ reasonable to post yet another warning in a thread consisting entirely of warnings and _no answers_.

It's possible that they don't know what they are doing. It's also possible that _you_ don't know what they are doing. In this case, for example, it looks like the time clock software actually interfaces with the saw controller.

If you feel this level of risk aversion is unacceptable - well, I hope you have a better argument than what's been posted so far.

<comment><USER6> I don't, which is why I didn't add anything. Actually, the accepted, official answer was more than perfect. People rambling the same things isn't helpful, you're right; however, had no one said anything as useful as the accepted answer, then it would have been helpful to warn them. We were speaking on different wavelengths, I hope that clears it up

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I find it a little hard to believe that anyone would try to build a band-saw controller on a Windows box in the way suggested by the post and assumed by so many of the comments.

It seems likely that the Windows PC is just a job manager and GUI for a simpler embedded controller that actually controls the band-saw. A standard PC doesn't have, as standard equipment, any I/O capabilities suitable for machine control, after all. When I did software for industrial controls, most of the controls that had PC interfaces were built that way; an embedded controller in the machine, running a real-time OS, actually actuated all the relays and optos and was responsible for all the safety interlocks. The PC would talk to that controller through a serial port and put a pretty face on the front of things. If the PC crashed, the operator wouldn't be able to run the machine, but the machine wouldn't go berserk.

I understand why someone would say that running a browser on the Win 3.1 machine is a bad idea, but it may not really be that bad.

<comment><USER9> This likely the case but I'll also add that we have no idea what "bandsaw" this is. I think everyone is picturing a massively complex machine with automated feed mechanisms, computer controlled adjustments, lasers measuring blade sharpness, etc. That may be the case or more likely (in my opinion), its a much simpler device. Like on/off and a maybe a couple sensors.

As for the real time nature of this system, find it doubtful its that critical. Your not worried about micro-seconds when your talking about big 3-phase motors that take minutes to speed up or slow down.

<comment><USER10> It's the saw you'd most commonly use to cut irregular or curved shapes. [http://metalworkingmachine.net/wp- content/uploads/2011/05/ba...](http://metalworkingmachine.net/wp- content/uploads/2011/05/bandsaw.jpg)

<comment><USER9> Is that the actual saw in question or just an example?

If it is just an example there are many kinds of bandsaws at many different scales, anything from cutting irregular shapes to turning tree trunks into boards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yikes!

Reminds me of my last programming job.

I was working on a commercial printing company. It did a lot of products for the banking industry. The print machines were pretty old, and made by Xerox. So old, in fact, that most of the wiring/sensors were one-off replacements done by the technician in charge.

It was (still is) a mess. A computer running Windows 98 (this on 2011) talked to a Linux box. The Linux box then sent the job to the board on the machine. It was all done in Java, except the low level stuff that ran C.

The machines broke constantly, and they required some Oracle certified dev to come down and "fix it" (which cost thousands of dollars).

One day, I asked my boss "Why don't they just buy new machines? It costs more to keep these running than to buy a new ones."

His answer opened up my eyes to the corporate/bureocratric culture of mediocrity:

"This works."

And to to top it all off, the production manager wanted me to write him a "little" program for the Windows 98 machine. The program would be used to keep track of prodcution for the whole department.

Unbelievable.

<comment><USER12> There's probably some corruption in there as well. Management doesn't give a crap about the work function, and only one vendor is qualified to respond to the maintenance RFP. So some old-timer is probably making a mint "maintaining" the system.

<comment><USER11> You are totally right.

I forgot to mention that they are locked in to Oracle and Microsoft. My job was to develop a C# based system, but they made me use VS 2005 Express (!@#$%), because they would not buy the latest version/license.

That job taught me a lot about how not to treat your programmers.

<comment><USER13> "Would not buy the latest version/license" is .. misleading.

I don't want to offend you and cannot judge the motivations of your employer at that time, but .. You don't need a license to develop C#. Even if you _need_ VisualStudio (which you don't..), there's a free version available. Otherwise SharpDevelop/MonoDevelop (yes, the latter is available and applicable for Windows as well!) would've done the job. I'd probably have prefered to drop to a notepad/vim based setup before touching 2005 and looking at .Net 1.1/2.0 stuff again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Oh crap. Why on earth all this should be on the same computer?

I would not trust running timeclock software on a bandsaw controller even if it would be latest core-i7/xeon/whatever and QNX or VxWorks.

<comment><USER15> i wonder if the dust created by the bandsaw wouldn't make it difficult to replace it with a more modern system. we used to use standard office pcs to run a pos system for video shops around ireland. as the systems moved from been shipped with win 3.1 to win xp the processors got faster and the dust in the shops used to clog up the fans. machines pre pentium iii with passive cooling worked fine but anything with a cpu fan could be easily clogged with average dust levels in a pos location.

we also had a few pcs in engineering locations and even the power supply fans on 386s had problems with the dust in those locations. you have to wonder what the dust was doing to staffs lungs. after one particular location killed 1 pc a week for a month we ended up putting the pc in a pair of tights as this filtered out the dust. looked weird but far cheaper than a industrial pc.

but opera 3.62 seems to have support for css and works on win 3.1

haven't touched a win 3.1 system since around 2004 or so.

<comment><USER16> One of our clients is an electric motor shop. They're a pretty great little shop, they do work for elevator companies and PG&E and the like.

Anyway, they have a dust problem -- a carbon / metallic dust compound that permeates and settles on _everything_ in the shop. It's pretty ugly.

There are pretty much two strategies for that kind of an environment, computer-wise: construct a cheap acrylic enclosure with a HEPA filter and maybe a fan or two; or, buy a cheap computer and expect to replace it every 1 to 2 years.

<comment><USER17> How about a completely fanless computer? Or does the metallic dust also cause shorts etc.?

Either way it also sounds like an unhealthy environment for humans to work in.

<comment><USER16> Fanless would have been better, but the case will still have some kind of vents for air cooling, and the dust tends to have a static charge -- so eventually it'll still kill the system.

It's not a great environment for people, no. I'd be wearing a dust mask for sure if I worked there. But, a lot of shop guys aren't like that, especially the older ones. They just do their job and don't mind the dust.

<comment><USER18> FitPC is what you want—sealed, passively cooled enclosure. We use their second-generation Atom machine for robots and it works great. <http://www.fit- pc.com/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Total hypothesizing and speculation here but...

I work with audio and music software (in which timing accuracy is a major component). Timing accuracy 20 years ago was generally far, far better than a modern PC. The Atari ST is still the gold standard -- with regard to timing it makes Ableton Live 8 running on OSX look/sound like garbage. Without multitasking, whatever program you were using could prioritize timing over the GUI and other components in a way that a modern name brand OS won't allow

Again, pure speculation here but this may be the case at least to some degree for Win 3.1 because there aren't as many network services and other bells and whistles running in the background. It may even be the case that Win 3.1 doesn't have real multitasking. Maybe someone can chime in on that

<comment><USER20> That's interesting. I've also done a lot of music production (just amateur stuff, as a hobby) with software like Reason, Ableton Live, and Cubase, and I've never noticed any shortcomings regarding timing accuracy. Latency is always an issue, so a good audio interface if imperative, but that's the only performance issues I've encountered. What exactly are the shortcomings of modern systems regarding timing accuracy?

<comment><USER19> It's not something that's easily perceptible unto itself unless you get into very radical inconsistencies. As an example using arbitrary numbers, a quarter note would be 500 ticks one time and 493 ticks the next and so on...

It can be measured by recording the audio on a (timing accurate!) dedicated system and analyzing the waveform

Subtle as it may be, timing accuracy has an essential impact on how we perceive music as a whole. This is one contributor among a few as to why vintage drum machines and sequencers have become so sought after as software- baed music production has become more prevalent. The Akai MPC series (at least the 2000XL and previous) models have been found to have the most consistent timing of any machine with the Atari ST being the strongest computer sequencer.

Sorry, I don't have time to cite this stuff (breaking my own rule) but it should be easy to google

As an aside, poor timing accuracy can be a reason why in pulse-based music that some human musicians "just suck" even if they're otherwise proficient. Or some musicians are "just have it" even though they're playing something unremarkable

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> 1) Buy a more modern computer with Windows 7, etc.

2) Set up a virtual machine with Windows 3.1 on it to run the bandsaw controller.

3) Now you can get any modern browser, still have the bandsaw software running, and not have to deal with multiple computers.

</comment><comment><USER22> I love the top ranked comment on that site: This is a _bandsaw_...you're using dos with a gui...this is a _bandsaw_...

<comment><USER23> Yeah...

What's odd about this is that, 20 years ago, that would have been 'state of the art'. Assuming the bandsaw hasn't changed, and the computer's still working, there's nothing inherently wrong or bad about having Win 3.1 control the bandsaw.

What's bad is trying to use that machine for other purposes - I'd suppose the manufacturer wouldn't support the software if they found out anything else was being run on the machine.

Look at the number of man hours wasted on everyone commenting on this question/topic! :) I'd imagine they could have got a $300 laptop to log in to the timesystem, put it next to the bandsaw computer, and have been done with it. But for some reason(?) they'd prefer to spend time dicking around trying to reuse 20 year old systems to save a few bucks.

Did I miss the reason why they're trying to run both on one system?

<comment><USER22> The main reason I garnered was that the boss didnt understand the danger/inanity in doing so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> VNC client and VNC server on another PC.

<comment><USER25> next question, VNC clients for Windows 3.1?

<comment><USER24> Install IE4, Java and use the Java VNC Client.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Sounds like the bandsaw industry, from sharpening to operating, could use some disruption.

I'm only half kidding. There are tons of niche commercial/industrial processes that can use 21st century solutions. They're just hard to see unless you're in them, which is why non-technical people sometimes have brilliant ideas.

<comment><USER27> There are a lot of vertical markets that could do with innovation.

Match up industrial chassis, with low power PCs, really good electrical noise filtering, really good air filtering, a locked down environment and good firewalls etc, and then offer to quote for interfacing it to existing machines. (Which is mostly just finding the right interface boards and connectors and software.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Oh, how I'd love to have DOS/Win3.1 or OS/2 programmer job these days... :)

<comment><USER29> Those were simpler times, weren't they? Back then you could practically feel the electrons coursing through the metal, and you were their master! You felt so powerful when you could orchestrate every action of those machines. These modern systems with their _virtual memory_ and their _context switching_... they're taking away our rights!

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Hmm. If the server-side app requires CSS/HTML4 and the client has to run on Win3.1, how about writing a proxy? The proxy would present a simplified HTML3.2 interface, and handle interpreting Javascript events and managing cookies to support a session talking to the server?

(It's a horrible kludge, but if it saves $150,000 ...)

<comment><USER31> Any idea what a $150,000 bandsaw can do to a man?

My brother's a lawyer. He just dropped about 20 times that amount on a penthouse in downtown Chicago.

He doesn't yet have a boat, although Lake Michigan beckons. Maybe when he buys his boat, he can christen it the _Horrible Kludge_!

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> <http://www.fdisk.com/doslynx/lynxport.htm>

</comment><comment><USER33> Perhaps they could reverse-engineer the Windows 3.1 software and get it to run on XP?

Can't tell from the details why the software won't do Windows XP.

<comment><USER16> Why would you think that someone whose day job is running a shop with a $150,000 bandsaw would have either the experience, tools, or inclination to reverse-engineer complex industrial control software?

It's likely they don't have installation media or any other reasonable way of transferring the software to a Windows XP system, even if it would possibly run in that environment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is kind of pointless. NComputing already does this over ethernet.

</comment><comment><USER35> It's just sad to be required to run Windows 3.1 in 2012.

<comment><USER36> Im still running 3.1 on 4 machines at work (slightly related to OP, we sharpen the bandsaws!). The thing is that the company that makes the machines is well known for their extortionate prices, so for us to update is not feasible. We just installed newer machines for everything else so the crappy old 3.1 boxes run only what they must to keep the machines running. I would love to try setting up a newer pc to run these machines, but there is so much propriety hardware and software in there that I keep putting it off for another day!

<comment><USER37> It's weird to think anything exists anymore running such old software. It feels like it just wouldn't even work now. I know that's absurd, but that's how it feels.

My friend sent me a video today of some guys hacking on Mac OS 9 at a hackathon he went to and it just felt odd to even look at it. It's been a solid decade since I've seen OS 9 alive and breathing, it feels like a friend who died long ago or something. And as far as Windows goes I don't think I ever saw anything before '98.

It's a peculiar feeling.

<comment><USER38> At my last work I was just finishing rewriting a database to get out of OS9.

Another person I help is in the newspaper business and does his layout with PageMaker on OS9, Iv'e been trying to get him over to InDesign but Adobe left behind a lot of the keyboard shortcuts he relies upon and its been a unsuccessful venture so far... As each year goes by its getting harder to find compatible hardware and currently the internet needs to be done on OSX... Would do it in classic mode on OSX but some of Adobe's rendering routines don't particularly like OS9. Talking with him about it many other papers still use OS9, mainly because like the OP said - "it just works" and I can understand their dilemma, when we have tried transitioning things, stuff doesn't "just work" anymore.

<comment><USER37> That's really interesting. Are any of the papers you know to use OS 9 national ones?

I have a Blackberry from about 7 years ago that won't even connect to my computer, but it's reliable. The battery lasts me 2 or 3 days, the software is perfectly stable and responsive, and I'm just used to it. I imagine the software it runs is insanely old and out of date, but I have no desire to replace it. It just works. So I understand the sentiment. Although as a developer I try to keep pretty up to date on my computer :P</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google to phase out user-agent strings in Chrome - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-to-phase-out-user-agent-strings-in-chrome/ <comment><USER2> For a company that claims not to do evil, they sure are going in that direction.

They are essentially closing the door behind them on tracking, to keep competitors out of the game..while continuing to use their own proprietary technology and data to track our habits and show us ads.

I'm not sure how this monopolistic behavior is much different than Microsoft in the 90s. I guess the main difference is that to the average person, it's not as obvious, and they can use the misdirection of 'privacy' to make it seem like they are improving things.

I stopped using Chrome this year. It suddenly started randomly freezing on me in Ubuntu after the last update.</comment>


Google's Neural Machine Translation System - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1609.08144 <comment><USER2> This paper is a good illustration of what I see as a critical shortcoming of modern NLP work: it is all about math and algorithms, there is nothing about actual language.

The paper has lots of information about: neural network architectures, parameter update equations, learning rules, and inference algorithms.

There is nothing about: part of speech categories, relative clauses, morphology, affixes or compound words, the theta criterion, the content/function distinction, verb tenses, agreement, or anything else related to actual linguistic phenomena.

To me this seems a bit like the Aristotelian thinkers who tried to reason about physics based on pure mathematical analysis, without any empirical work.

<comment><USER2> Fred Jelinek famously quipped: "Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the system goes up." Here are two hypotheses that could explain this observation:

1) Linguistic knowledge and theory is not useful for NLP work; instead, people should rely entirely on machine learning techniques.

2) Linguistic knowledge is useful in principle, but the field of linguistics has not yet obtained a sufficiently high-quality theory, and it is better to rely on ML than on low-quality theory.

Almost everyone in NLP adopted hypothesis #1; I believe hypothesis #2 is true.

<comment><USER3> I'd extend hypothesis #2. We might not have a sufficiently high-quality theory, but we might also not know how to integrate the benefits of the theory we have with the benefits of data-driven approaches to NLP like those described in this paper.

It's clear to me that data-driven techniques are an essential part of the answer to the problem of language understanding. It's infeasible to design a complete set of rules for understanding natural language with all its exceptions and fuzzy relationships. I'd point to Wittgenstein for a stronger philosophical argument on this.

That's not to say that theory has no place in language understanding, but it's not immediately obvious how to combine rule-oriented theory with data-driven ML.

There has been work in this area though, and actually several important, state-of-the-art-moving contributions have been inspired by linguistics. My favorite are recursive neural nets, which benefit from the linguistic insight that language has recursive structure. This paper[1], for example, describes a system that combines a dependency parser with a recurrent neural net (gross oversimplification) to yield a state-of-the-art sentence understanding model.

[1] - [http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.06021](http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.06021)

<comment><USER4> Do you have any further detail or reference to Wittgenstein here? Curious to learn more

<comment><USER5> Not OP, but Wittgenstein covers this in his Philosophical Investigations. In the Tractatus, he tried to create an all-encompassing system for language, but in PI he more or less says it's impossible. It's an amazing read in any case, it has totally changed the way I approach philosophy.

<comment><USER4> Ok, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I hate when people judge machine translation progress by looking at Google translate. Google translate is really old and is no longer state of the art. But the best neural network based systems like this are much too expensive to use in production, at least for free. They say their new neural network ASICs will make it more practical, at least.

Anyway the scale of these neural nets is quite incredible. Google is getting far ahead of what any individual researcher with a few consumer GPUs can do.

<comment><USER7> But not, apparently, ahead of what you can do with 8 consumer GPUs

<comment><USER8> A $3k Tesla K80 GPU is not 'consumer', nor do most consumers (or most researchers or small businesses) have $24k to drop on a set of GPUs alone.

<comment><USER9> You're right - a $3k k80 is generally inferior for most DNN applications than a $1k Titan X. The primary reasons that big companies use K80s have to do with achieving high computational density, and licensing issues, more than the performance of a single GPU. Sticking 8 Titan X boards in a machine is a bummer job if you want to pack them closely together. But for academic researchers, a quad Titan X box is pretty solid and quite affordable.

<comment><USER8> A quad Titan X is still $4k for the GPUs alone, and was only possible in the past few months - people might have wanted to get stuff done in the years in between the last generation and the current generation...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Related blog post: [https://research.googleblog.com/2016/09/a-neural-network- for...](https://research.googleblog.com/2016/09/a-neural-network-for- machine.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> 60% better than Google translate still is at best elementary school level fluency in a language. It's a needed improvement, but still far from good.

It's crazy how bad Google translate is, try it with any German text, and you'll get 90% ununderstandable garbage out.

EDIT: Seriously, downvotes for this?

Try this: [https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/bratislava- eu-verteidigungsminister-wollen-enger-zusammenarbeiten-a-1114151.html)

What's " If you look at Ursula von der Leyen and Jean-Yves Le Drian before the meeting of defense ministers in Bratislava, one might think that Berlin and Paris would never prefer liked." supposed to mean?

Or "Individual states can not prevent the European Council may decide by a qualified majority, the SSZ."

<comment><USER12> I think you're getting downvoted because you picked one of the hardest language pairs there is for machine translation. German grammar is really hard to parse, e.g. verbs being split with one part at the beginning and the other at the end of the sentence. Generally, figuring out which part of the sentence refers to which other part is quite hard.

Google Translate works a lot better with many other language pairs, so people might be downvoting because your opinion sounds exaggerated and doesn't line up with their own experience. It's also quite dismissive of the submission, which is never nice. The guidelines ask us to "avoid gratuitous negativity". I often find your comments to be quite negative, often unnecessarily so.

<comment><USER13> Translations from French to English seem to be a lot better. Why is that?

<comment><USER14> The French/English language pair was the problem machine translation research started with and has seen the most work. There are also greater similarities than most language pairs between those two due to the Norman conquest in 1066.

<comment><USER13> I accept your first point, but I disagree with your second - 1066 and all that notwithstanding, English is still very much a Germanic language, and grammatically very different from French.

<comment><USER14> You're right; I was arguing that French and English are more highly correlated than a pair of languages chosen uniformly at random and therefore easier for MT, but I could have made that more clear. I think the difference in accuracy between English <\--> French and English <\--> German does largely come down to historical academic preferences and data availability, as opposed to linguistic reasons. English <\--> French vs. English <\--> Mandarin (for example) is a different story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "In addition to releasing this research paper today, we are announcing the launch of GNMT in production on a notoriously difficult language pair: Chinese to English.... we will be working to roll out GNMT to many more of these over the coming months."

interesting news for all the translation startups... like yc's unbabel.

</comment><comment><USER16> Dumb question: Why doesn't Google Translate hardcode perfect translations for 1,000,000 of the most popular requests?

So many times it screws up really basic, common phrases and I'm always wondering how is that bar that low?

<comment><USER17> Not a dumb question at all. Actually a very fundamental question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> "Using a human side-by-side evaluation on a set of isolated simple sentences, it reduces translation errors by an average of 60% compared to Google's phrase-based production system."

Does this mean that after checking the translation by a human it becomes 60% better than the phrase-based production system? (by which they presumably mean Google Translate...?). That seems rather disappointing.

<comment><USER19> I interpret this to mean "new system delivers 60% improvement. 'How did we measure this improvement?' you ask? Well, we asked humans to evaluate the old system and the new one."

<comment><USER18> Yeah, that makes more sense! Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've been attempting to use this system for a while today to converse with a native Chinese speaker and it seems to be better but still very far from human-level translation. Maybe they've been using especially bad human translators in their comparisons?

<comment><USER13> If its performance is dependent on proximity of words in the sentences of the two languages, its output for Chinese would be better than you'd otherwise expect. Chinese and English have similar word orders (though the underlying grammar's different).</comment></comment>


Chipping Away at Realtors Six Percent - <AUTHOR> http://www.flatfeelisting.com/60min.html

<comment><USER2> People always approach this problem from the seller's side, presumably because the seller is more aware of how much money goes to the agent. But the real issue is that people use an agent to buy their home, and agents won't show private sales. The MLS only matters because realtors exclusively show homes in the MLS. If private sellers had access to the MLS, realtors would probably find another way to avoid showing those homes and preserve their monopoly.

To attack the realtors, you need to do two things. First, sellers have to be willing to share the savings with unagented buyers. There's no incentive for buyers to tackle the process alone if they're stuck paying market price. Second, there needs to be a fixed price service for home buyers. There are plenty of fixed price agencies for sellers, but nothing for buyers.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> _Willis and Takeuchi's agent, Kelly Engel, used to be a traditional agent. "I had done quite a few deals where I spent maybe five hours total working on the deal. I never saw the house. My client found it online and, you know, I would make $12,000 for four hours of work. And I thought this cannot keep going on like this. Someone, I felt like I was going to get caught! You know, someone's going to see that this is happening and I think a lot of them hold that truth inside of them right now. They've got the clients that are finding houses on their own. They make $20,000 and did 10 hours of work," she says._

</comment><comment><USER3> Whenever I read about bypassing real estate agents, I wish there were some good statistics instead of just anecdotes. You might think you saved money by doing it yourself, but could an agent have gotten you a better deal?

For an anecdote opposing the article, our neighbor sold her house during the boom and reluctantly used an agent. There was a bidding war on the house and it sold for 15% more than her asking price. I doubt that would have happened without the agent.

</comment><comment><USER4> (from 2007)</comment>


AT&T, Apple, Google to work on 'robocall' crackdown - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-robocalls-idUSKCN10U18L <comment><USER3> I've always been confused as to why the phone companies refused to put any effort into this. Do they make significant money from spam calls? I can't see how that would be. Does anyone have any info?

In fact, when nomo robo (www.nomorobo.com) came up with a pretty good solution (they won an FCC robo blocking contest ), the phone companies lobbied congress to shut it down. No only were they not helping, they were blocking progress from others.

<comment><USER4> They do not make money from it. Actually, robocalls are really looked down upon in the industry, as the traffic is not profitable. Imagine this - <USER2> carriers are charging per minute. No monthly fee, no setup fee, no per-call fees, only per minute with 6 second minimums and 6 second increments. Now imagine all the robocalls where they keep calls open for 3 seconds ( enough to determine if it's a live human or answering machine ). That carrier has a lot of resource utilization to "setup" a call, but after that, there is not much that the carrier needs to do.

In order to combat this, all tier-1 carriers now have ASR (answer ratio) and ACD (average call duration) minimums. In addition, if you have more than ~10% of your calls less than 6 seconds, you get an ADDITIONAL 1-2 cent per call surcharge. That's a lot of money given that my average cost of long distance is .17 cents ($0.0017) per minute.

It's the second tier carriers that is "blending" this traffic with good traffic in order to get the minimums then charge the telemarketers much higher costs per minute.

<comment><USER5> Yep and it's a huge business for them. (I work in this industry, with these kinds of companies.) It results in great deals for non-robo callers, as they are desperate to get good conversational traffic to add to the mix.

It depends on which provider, but the dialer penalties usually aren't that harsh. Regardless, everyone's cautious. And they'll mix right to the limit. Put on restrictions on how many times a number can call? They'll switch up numbers and keep the mix perfect.

It creates a huge opportunity. If the FCC was serious, they'd just start cracking down and push liability on down the line. Then no one would want to take the risk. It's high volume, so without huge deposits and guarantees, no one would touch it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How about the caller id that's being sent has to match the billing number and company ?

The telcom companies _know_ who to bill, why do they have to develop any method to fight abuse ?

Being a suspicious person, I suspect it'll be a new feature to add to the bill.

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

<comment><USER7> That isn't an easy problem to solve.

What do you do when a company has a large set of numbers on a single trunk? Do you maintain a list of authorized CID source numbers? How do you enable 3rd parties to make calls on your behalf?

<comment><USER8> > How do you enable 3rd parties to make calls on your behalf?

Why should that be possible? If anything the disadvantages of nuisance or even scamming obviously far outweigh the benefits.

<comment><USER9> Few companies over a certain size run their own call centers. It's no different from a software startup using AWS or Rackspace instead of building a server room in their rented office space. I think it is both acceptable and desirable for my phone to tell me Comcast is calling me (as they currently do), even though it's technically an outsourced call center that makes/takes calls for several different companies from the same building and same set of phone numbers. Requiring caller ID match the billing address for the phone number would be like requiring Hacker News be hosted on a cloudflare.com subdomain because the IP space we're talking to isn't actually owned by YC.

<comment><USER4> You can set the CallerID name to whatever you want.

We once had a customer that set their callerID name to "DEAD" to signal that the phone number was no longer in use. People thought they were issuing threads on their outbound calls.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My cell and landline have been getting increasing robocalls. The ones to my cell have randomly generated caller id's that are near my own number. One day I got 3-4 scam/spam calls and I kept them on the line for a good 10-15 minutes. Every one was a free trip to Mexico. At the end, I would say (after the first time) "this is the Nth time you called me to day" and the people would actually argue with me that it was the first. Now, when I see an unknown number, I just send it to voicemail.

<comment><USER11> > My cell and landline have been getting increasing robocalls. The ones to my > cell have randomly generated caller id's that are near my own number.

You can exploit this, get a number in an small area code where you know no one and do no business with. Then don't answer any calls with that area code. This is highly effective.

<comment><USER12> For me, they also tend to throw in large cities like New York and Chicago. A lot of people know someone in a big city and might be willing to pick up an unknown number.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm using the Android 6.0 "mark call as spam" feature and it's working pretty well so far!

[https://support.google.com/nexus/answer/3459196?hl=en](https://support.google.com/nexus/answer/3459196?hl=en)

<comment><USER14> Cool. Unfortunately, I get a new number every call, so this would do nothing.

<comment><USER15> even if it works be ready to say goodbye soon.

I've used that feature on Google voice for years, until they decided drop it. 4yrs later they release this. let's count how long it take to go away again.

and fun fact, Google voice is the only Google product i pay to use from them

<comment><USER13> It's still there for me in GV?

[https://support.google.com/voice/answer/115089?hl=en](https://support.google.com/voice/answer/115089?hl=en)

[http://imgur.com/a/9Dvrw](http://imgur.com/a/9Dvrw)

[http://imgur.com/AxPTrUZ](http://imgur.com/AxPTrUZ)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is something going on with these? About two months ago I started getting 3-4 spam calls per day. Never had anything before that.

<comment><USER17> > Is something going on with these? About two months ago I started getting 3-4 > spam calls per day. Never had anything before that.

I think there are "waves" of it picking up. There was a time a few years ago where everybody and their dog was receiving a robocall about buying an extended vehicle warranty or Rachel from card services "just checking in".

<comment><USER18> Don't forget the "This is your captain speaking..." one with the blasted foghorn.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> At get about a half dozen robocalls a day. I'm using nomorobo on the home office VoIP line, so they only ring once. Still annoying but livable. Unfortunately, the scammers are now setting caller ID phone numbers of XXX- YYY-???? where XXX-YYY are the first 6 digits of your own number and the ???? are 4 random digits. As they randomly set this for each call, it gets around nomorobo and the call comes through. As more folks start using something like nomorobo, expect to see most scam callers adopt this approach.

<comment><USER4> That's correct and could cause the opposite problem (where a legitimate callerID gets blocked).

Smaller telcos restrict the outbound callerID to only CallerIDs (DIDs) that you own. This would be very difficult to enforce for a wholesale carrier - where their customer is an aggregate of thousands of customers.

<comment><USER5> It's not even feasible. Like IP, the outbound calls go via many paths. So like ISPs almost never filter your source address, same for telcos. Small ones with tiny accounts might, but no one even remotely on wholesale.

But changing IDs is already illegal, so the FCC could decide to chase it down if enough people complain.

<comment><USER20> Do you have a source for the claim of caller ID spoofing being illegal? AFAIK that's only illegal if you're using it to further a fraud.

<comment><USER5> Yeah I knew someone would point that out. In the case of evading robo laws, it'd be fraud, right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> For a while, I used Jolly Roger [1] as a sort of DDOS / attempt to get my number removed from the call lists. I have no problem paying for it if it were integrated/automatic. But after a while, I just got tired of manually adding it to a call.

[1] - [http://www.jollyrogertelco.com](http://www.jollyrogertelco.com)

<comment><USER22> I just spent an hour listening to some of their recorded call sessions on youtube, it is hillarious. ([https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3OxCWLEmoIhNMm- hnvBm9Q](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3OxCWLEmoIhNMm-hnvBm9Q))

It's also genius, if we can automate transferring telemarketers to stuff like this, we'd be using technology against them, use up all their human paid time and make it unprofitable to spam call.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> So a contact in your phonebook can have many phone numbers associated with it. We can make an open source contact that includes all of "possibly spam" numbers and if you have that contact on your phone, you'll see "possibly spam" is calling.

<comment><USER24> That's exactly what I've been doing for years. I also gave it a custom ringtone that's 4 seconds of silence and turned vibration off, so unless I'm actually doing something with my phone, or else listening to music, I don't notice the interruption.

The issue is that nowadays, I rarely get spam from the same numbers multiple times. They just generate a new fake number if the first one didn't get a response.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> We need something similar in UK and Europe. For the last year I've been getting 3-5 calls a day on weekdays and a couple of silents. Always the same scams and spam - Bank misselling, upgraded boiler or glazing. Something changed or I was just lucky up til the start of this year, but it's got really annoying.

I wish I could simply globally block international and unknown numbers unless on a whitelist. Every blocking solution I've seen works on individual caller IDs, which is obviously useless for witheld or spoofed calls. Sending to voicemail is a sort-of solution, but results in a lot of half scripts recorded - they must always start speaking the moment the answering message starts playing.

<comment><USER26> If you're on android and are rooted, root call blocker works great. I had to do this a few months ago and only let through calls in my address book. Funny thing is all this started after I added my number to the do not call list

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> For the last 2 years I've been receiving calls from some call center in India sometimes up to 5x a day asking if I want viagra. I've asked, pleaded, demanded and have blocked by now hundreds of the numbers they call me with which can range from a local number to one across the country.

I've had my number since I was a teenager and don't want to stop using it but I've been seriously considering it lately because the calls feel like harassment. I don't get how they are able to do this and why something hasn't been done about it.

</comment><comment><USER16> I've heard there's a do not disturb hack for the iPhone. You can set it to do not disturb but still allow numbers in your contacts through.

I'm really tempted to try that but I'm worried about missing important calls.

It would be neat if they simply let you block every number that's ever been reported. Sort of like a real time global blacklist.

<comment><USER28> > _I 'm really tempted to try that but I'm worried about missing important > calls._

i think most people are starting to realize that there really isn't any such thing as an important call from a number you don't recognize.

<comment><USER29> Unfortunately, if you are dealing with medical issues (your own or someone else's), you are going to get lots of important calls from numbers you don't recognize, and from phones with blocked caller id (doctors, for instance).

And because of privacy considerations, they are often reluctant to leave a detailed message.

<comment><USER30> Yep, when I get a call claiming to be a phone number that's not likely scammy (e.g. a state that no close friend or family member lives in or is visiting), I hesitate to just ignore it a lot of the time. Certainly if it's a possibly relevant area code, I'll tend to pick up.

This isn't because I can't resist picking up the phone. But checking for voicemail after the fact takes even more time and cycles. And I don't want to end up playing telephone tag if someone actually does need to reach me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Excuse me if I am less than enthused with AT&T being involved.

They send me physical mail addressed to resident. I called them to cancel it. They took my name and soon no more mail is going to resident. Its addressed to me personally.

I later call to cancel that mail. Soon, no more mail is going to me. Its going to resident again.

<comment><USER32> The ridiculous thing is even after the FCC said it was OK numerous times AT&T still refuse to do anything to work on robocalls claiming that they needed judicial approval.

The FCC had to pass a memorandum (or something) earlier this year explicitly spelling out the AT&T had absolutely no grounds for their believe and was allowed to and SHOULD work on the issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Interesting no one has mentioned this page in the thread: [https://www.fcc.gov/general/traffic- pumping](https://www.fcc.gov/general/traffic-pumping)

As I understand there is an incentive model in place to encourage this type of traffic.

<comment><USER4> That's not true, the carriers are compensated through CABS (carrier access billing) based on number of minutes, not number of connected calls.

Carriers have to accept traffic from other carriers, even if they have not paid their CABS bill.

Right now, no one is paying anyone. That's why fair cross-carrier compensation and flat-rates are a big talk in the FCC instead of what's called "Tariff rates" which vary by carrier and by destination.

Freeconferencecall.com exists because of CABS and having very high tariff rates. They do NOT want lots of short duration calls. That doesn't help them at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> People should stop using phone numbers all together, just 4g signal is fine.

</comment><comment><USER35> Url changed from [http://www.fiercetelecom.com/telecom/at-t-to-lead- robocall-s...](http://www.fiercetelecom.com/telecom/at-t-to-lead-robocall- strike-force-calls-for-industry-wide-cooperation), which points to this.</comment>


Depression Comix - <AUTHOR> https://radiosof.com/2015/01/20/depression-comix/ <comment><AUTHOR> "Depression isn't one illness, easily diagnosed and easily treated. Rather, depression can be thought of as a confluence of events ... situational, psychological, physical, or spiritual"</comment>