Mysterious 2008 Turkey Pipeline Blast Opened New Cyberwar Era - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-12-10/mysterious-08-turkey-pipeline-blast-opened-new-cyberwar.html <comment><USER2> Well in that case the New Cyberwar Era started in 1982 not 2008:

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

<comment><USER3> Almost related link [http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/russians.html](http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/russians.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It feels like there's been a weird lukewarm warm war going on, mostly via economic malice.

<comment><USER5> The question I have, is it better for all of us than one of the old-fashioned guns-n-bombs style wars? If so, I am more than in favor of moving to a world where all warfare is just rich, powerful entities fucking with each other monetarily.

<comment><USER6> Better, yes. Good no.

It does seem like this war will at least be paid for with tax dollars and wasted time rather than conscription and wasted life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As investigators followed the trail of the failed alarm system, they found the hackers' point of entry was an unexpected one: the surveillance cameras themselves.

That's not unexpected for anyone even vaguely familiar with security.

This is not about there cannot be security with physical access. This is about not understanding the possible risk scenario's and mitigating them.

Please note that the US once fed malicious software to USSR spies and this caused a Russian pipeline to blowup. [http://www.zdnet.com/article/us- software-blew-up-russian-gas...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/us-software- blew-up-russian-gas-pipeline/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Well, instead of their laptops the two people seen near the pipeline segment could have just brought explosives. That would probably have been just as effective. I guess they just didn't want to bother digging it up.

The notion of any security goes out of the window pretty fast once theres _physical access_. That goes doubly when you realize that the same Windows 98 running your ATM is controlling pipelines and other safety relevant systems and some middle manager decided to replace local personnel with a serial-port- over-TCP-IP directly connected to the logic controller in charge.

</comment><comment><USER9> How convenient that this article comes out just when people are discussing the US/British Regin malware.

[https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/11/24/secret- regin-m...](https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/11/24/secret-regin- malware-belgacom-nsa-gchq/)

</comment><comment><USER10> The only sources for this information are four unnamed people?

<comment><USER11> Don't worry about it, they were people that were briefed on the relevant issues...</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Looking for new opportunities? Want to help? - <AUTHOR> I've been active on Twitter for around 1 month and already feeling the power of this social network. One simple tweet can be seen by thousands or even millions of people if shared by high-profile users.
Seeing millions losing jobs and clients during this pandemic I thought: why not help those people to find new revenue streams? How?
Tweeting profiles of people looking for job/clients
Combining the power of Twitter, this lovely community and my mission to help people, I'd suggest we use our Twitter knowledge and influence to help.
I plan to do it in 2 steps
1. Please, drop your Twitter handle below telling if you either a) want to share a profile or b) need help. If you need help, tell a short story that the sharer can include in the tweet to be shared
2. Match those in need with people that are happy to share.
What do you think? <comment><AUTHOR> @leonagano - want to share a profile</comment>


Much fridge food 'goes there to die' - <AUTHOR> https://news.osu.edu/much-fridge-food-goes-there-to-die/ <comment><USER2> Three things I have found that help to cut down food waste (and times pent at the grocery store):

\- Develop a notion of cadence: how much food could you get through in a given interval (3-7 days), and how will this be affected by visitors, eating out, and travel. This might seem obvious but it's not — a lot of people have a "stocking up" mentality — if I buy a lot now, I won't need to go to the store for a while--that leads to suboptimal nutrition, more trips to the store, or eating out more b/c the fridge is empty. Using a standardized interval makes it much easier to learn adjustments.

\- Develop an inventory of "endgame" meals that are less perishable that you can always have on hand so you can maintain your cadence. Examples: Halloumi (grilling cheese, good for months), tacos (canned beans; refrigerated tortillas, cheese, peppers and onions are good for weeks), pasta (olive oil and parmesean). Things like charcuterie, esp smoked and jarred meats, and fermented foods were originally invented by peasants to last for a long time and they still have their use, whether you are peasant or not. By contrast, there are "opening" meals like fresh seafood, which really should be eaten on the same day as the trip to the grocery store.

\- Have so many food-safe containers on hand that any leftovers get stored without a second thought. Then your endgame meals get pushed back.

<comment><USER3> So much good advice there. I have noticed that (esp. when I'm dining alone at home) I can get into the rut where a) I didn't go to the store and then b) order takeout creates an a->b->a vicious circle.

Developing a habit of going to the store (even if you don't feel like it) and getting some of those less-perishable items so you have endgame options is key.

One thing I've found helps is to get really comfortable cooking. First I plan a bit getting a recipe (this is best done @work or on the way back. I stop over at a store. Finally, at home, I pour a small glass of wine/open a beer, turn on music or a podcast (or netflix) and walk through my recipe.

This clearly takes time investment, so it's important to go through the habit so you can 1) be comfortable with it and 2) optimize it for you. Rewarding myself with desirable activities as part of the meal-prep is great. Taking pix and sharing what I made is also fun (even if it's bad - can be a good laugh).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> One of the best tips I learned about reducing food waste is to freeze bread and avoid putting it into the fridge. Frozen bread stays fresh and can go directly into a toaster or toaster oven:

 _Harold McGee replies: Good point to bring up! Bread and other lean baked goods are the exception to the rule that cold storage is good. Bread stales faster at refrigerator temperatures than at room temperature. So if you want to keep a loaf for a couple of days, a breadbox is better than the fridge. For much longer than that, the freezer is the best place._

[https://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/09/harold- mc...](https://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/09/harold-mcgee-on- bread-and-baking/)

<comment><USER5> Why simply not to buy less, exactly as much as you will consume? Here at a bakery around corner I simply buy fresh bread every morning.

<comment><USER6> You buy 2-3 slices of bread every morning? Or are you buying some kind of roll or smaller unit of bread? The smallest unit of bread most people are able to buy is a loaf, and for me, it takes a week or two to go through a loaf of bread.

<comment><USER7> This is pretty common in most of Europe (especially Spain and France). People will buy a (demi) baguette or equivalent every day and it'll get eaten. We're not talking about sliced bread.

<comment><USER8> Which is easy to do in Europe, because you have a bakery on every corner, so it takes a 5 minutes walk to get fresh bread. In the US the nearest place selling bread might be 10 minutes car ride from home.

<comment><USER9> Not in every place in the US you need a car, not in every place in Europe you have a bakery around the corner. We are talking half-continent sized areas with several hundred million people. There is quite a variance.

But more to the point, good quality bread has been more ingrained in the culture of several (but not all) European countries than in the US, and while the wheels are turning, it seems to take some time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think the _main_ reasons why so much food is wasted are the same reasons why so much water, petrol and electricity are wasted: all of those have become commodities in endless supply, literally streaming out of a pipe (well, a distribution pipe in the case of food) at the push of a button; and all those things are in fact too cheap (the price for the end user does not reflect the cost of production and of externalities like CO2 emissions, health and environmental damage).

In my analysis, one of the best ways to reduce waste and over-consumption is to stop subsidies for agriculture, water, oil etc, and let prices reflect the real cost. Of course, in a growth-based economy this kind of change would never happen.

But other solutions are also possible, even in the current system. Our family of four is slowly transitioning to sustainable consumption, starting from food and hopefully becoming fully autonomous someday with regards to water and electricity.

One of the changes we've made is buying higher-quality products in smaller quantities, preferably from local sources. Another change is to try and close the waste loop. Any food not eaten by us will go to our dog and cat, and eventually to our chickens, who provide eggs, meat and soil fertiliser. Further optimisation is achieved by using dry toilets - our bodily waste is composted on site, the carbon is sequestered and eventually turns into soil.

I strongly believe that "closing the loop" like that can be practiced on a much larger scale, even on a national scale.

<comment><USER11> The pricing should penalize over-consumption. Let's say the first 10 gallons of gas per week are taxed at a certain rate, the next 10 gallons a higher rate and so forth.

<comment><USER12> Why the downvotes, this is an insightful (if inconvenient to some) point.

<comment><USER13> Why do you find the point insightful? A defense will work better than a lament.

<comment><USER11> Think of it as a subsidiary for the poor. Market forces have not been responsive to creating a sustainable planet, while we also have to recognize the necessities for life/production in society. The cost increases at a higher rate for those who go beyond the basic needs.

Secondly to incentivize less consumption.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There are some things that people just get a lot better at with life experience, like managing your food. When I was younger my fridge was full of moldy takeout containers. Now I use a meal planning app that generates a shopping list for me (plus other staples that we go through like hand fruit, bread, milk etc.) My grocery bill for home cooked breakfast, lunch and dinner 5-6 days a week for a family of 4 is about $200 a week. I think it's kind of high, but we mostly eat fresh meat, veggies, and fruit, not much grain or processed food, and we waste almost no food. We do spend on average an hour a day preparing lunch and dinner, but that's usually family time where we're all in the kitchen talking. One of my favorite feelings is after putting everything away from a grocery shopping trip and seeing my kitchen and refrigerator full of healthy food that I know will nourish my family for the upcoming week.

edit: App I use is eMeals, I tried several and this is my favorite so far, we are on the Paleo plan right now but they have maybe 8 or 10 different plans and you can switch pretty much at will. If anyone else has one they love please let me know!

<comment><USER15> Mind sharing the name of the meal planning app?

<comment><USER16> Not the OC, but I've used [https://www.plantoeat.com/](https://www.plantoeat.com/) for a couple of years now, cooking for a family of five. It's a wonderful tool, especially for only $5 month.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> An interesting related question -- can refrigerator design help to address this issue? We have one of those side-by-side fridges with more shelf depth than shelf width. The design results in food getting pushed far back where it is easy to miss/forget food that is there and difficult to access food without causing an avalanche of containers. I often wonder if our (rented) home had a different style of refrigerator if we would deal with less forgotten/spoiled foods.

<comment><USER18> Honestly I don't think there is any innovation in the appliance space. The companies take the same components slap a new face plate on them or a led display and sell the same shit at different price points. In 2019 I'm still not sure that you can get a PID controlled oven or fridge and that should be trivially easy to implement.

<comment><USER9> Modern fridges have temperature sensors, per-drawer ventilated air-cooling, auto-detection of when particular high-thermal mass un-frozen food (i.e. a turkey) is added and start quick-freezing, and provide alarms when door or cooling fail. Also, energy efficiency for the EU A+++ rated units is really good.

And you get that already for the cheap units.

So, it's a freezer, it freezes, and it doesn't send a post to Facebook. The only complaint I would have is their loudness. Modern extra-slow compressors are often (perceived) louder than previous-gen units.

Also: given that even DIY ovens usually start with "get a cheap PID controller from e-bay", I doubt that commercial ones use anything else.

<comment><USER18> My fridge is modern but pretty simple. It's really just a freezer with a vent that regulates fridge temps. It's got some othe functions like defrost and seal warming but it's a remarkably crude device

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm pretty guilty of food waste. In particular fresh produce. But to be honest I'm unrepentant about it.

The health benefits of a diet high in fruits and vegetables are just enormous. I'd much rather over-buy than under-buy. If someone in the household ends up eating junk food because there was no fruit/veggie option, that's a disastrous failure condition. The solution is to make sure that we never run out of fruits and vegetables, which necessarily entails keeping excess inventory that will eventually be thrown out.

Is this financially wasteful? In a very narrow sense, sure. Yet even in just economic terms the health benefits from a diet high in fruits and vegetables overwhelms any grocery bill considerations. At the end of the day produce is much cheaper than insulin.

<comment><USER20> certain aspects of nutrition are best met with fresh vegetables, and definitely taste desires, but supplementing with frozen fruits and veggies can be just as healthy, reduce waste and let you stock up in-season for later in the year.

It's pretty hard to freeze leafy greens for a nice salad though...

<comment><USER19> That's an excellent point about freezing. And we certainly do keep the freezer stocked to the brim with frozen options.

Like you alluded to the biggest challenge is the taste factor. Eating veggies over junk food is already enough of an uphill battle willpower wise. Especially with kids in the house. Combined with the inconvenience of dethawing, they're just not that popular.

I wish American super-markets would stock a wider range of fermented vegetables. In terms of long-term preservation, I find fermentation to be more appealing than freezing for most cases. Frozen veggies typically just taste like a flatter version of their fresh counterparts. Whereas fermented veggies have a unique taste that's appealing all on its own.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've been thinking this for a while, but always thought the problem wasn't overestimation of food needs, but rather aversion to making more frequent grocery trips (pushing people to "stock up".

<comment><USER22> We have three kids and the amount each of them eat varies wildly from day to day. Sometimes they are fighting over who gets the swipe the last sauce out of the pot, other days they are "not hungry" and hardly eat anything. So some days we have a lot of leftover.

I suppose if we had like 100 kids then the variances would probably average out and we'd waste far less leftovers. I'll bring that idea up with the spouse.

<comment><USER23> "Dad, we need way more X!"

"Are you sure? That seems like a lot..."

"Yes-- we ate all of it in 2 days last week."

"Well, OK."

...

A week later, 90% of X is still sitting there. I try not to get too upset, because I remember doing the same thing when I was a kid. I'm better at predicting what I will actually eat these days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> My partner and bought a CSA share, and the entire food planning for each week is based on that CSA share. Often times, food is prepared on the weekend, and we eat only left overs all week. We also have a small garden outside. Between the two, we have little need to buy anything but proteins, all of which are vegan, and perhaps a few additional food items like bread.

Our food waste and costs have dropped dramatically, but we did have to make a 'sacrifice' of choice. Each week, the food that is produced for consumption in the house is decided not by us, but by what is produced and distributed by the farm. Due to this process, we might have lost choice, but we have gained, surprisingly, variety.

To expand on this idea: I think that the prevalence of choice in our supermarkets (example: fresh fruit in the middle of winter, wtf?) is massively inefficient, and should be reconsidered. Of course, when human society decides to get its collective act together and fight climate change, the point is moot. The entire 'choice regime' is dependent on high density fuels, and energy density will make these choices for us if/when carbon based fuels are made more expensive.

<comment><USER25> You get back a little bit of choice if you pickle some of the produce.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It sure seems the size of the refrigerator itself is significant: if you have tons of space, you just store more, and it's easy to lose track of.

Basically, a smaller fridge might comes with lifestyle changes, but, also a much smaller cognitive load. If you can't store that much, you don't have to recall when you bought it, or what you still have.

In our house, a lot of food waste is in cooked or par-cooked food, which comes without a label, stored in a container.

I'd be very curious, but I do notice that the US wastes a ridiculous amount of food (~30% I've read in recent articles). We also have the largest refrigerators.

Of course, I seriously doubt you'd ever get any kind of regulation on refrigerator size in the US. But, it would be interesting to see how that compares with label changes. My suspicion is that in the US, the effects from label dates isn't that great. We just have too much stuff.

<comment><USER27> Having a large fridge seems super daft to me.

A large freezer - now that's a lifesaver. Buy in bulk or cook batches and win the game.

But a fridge? Once you go beyond N days of food per person, you're literally wasting food! It's impossible to use the space for the most part other than some condiments.

<comment><USER28> Soda? Beer? Cheese? Preserves?

Lots of things have long shelf-lives and want cooling. Its not all about leftovers and vegetables.

And even vegetables have their place. We preserve (can/freeze) garden produce. Where to put it between harvest and processing? The fridge.

<comment><USER27> Heh. I guess I forget that soda is a thing. Doh :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> You can find the original study here: [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092134491...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921344919303350)

Study highlights:

> Institutional signals of food quality drive consumer food waste behaviors.

> Food-related routines affect whether refrigerated food gets eaten.

> Ambiguous date labeling decreases the odds that refrigerated food will be > eaten.

> Respondents are systematically over-optimistic that refrigerated food will > be eaten.

<comment><USER29> > Ambiguous date labeling decreases the odds that refrigerated food will be > eaten.

Honestly this is part of why I throw food out maybe more frequently than others do. The plethora of dates is extremely confusing. Pair that with the fact that I've had awful food poisoning a few times in my life and I end up tossing food out that's probably still fine to eat, but I just don't want to risk it.

<comment><USER30> Did you get food poisoning from home cooked food or when you were eating out?

Find the pattern and avoid those situations. There's no need to be wasteful by blindly following those arbitrary dates.

It's usually easy to tell when most food has spoiled by smelling or examining it. Another important aspect is making sure the food is cooked thoroughly.

<comment><USER31> > It's usually easy to tell when most food has spoiled by smelling or > examining it.

Buy 100 fresh chickens from the supermarket. Then tell me which ones are contaminated with campylobacter just by smelling them. You can't.

You can't.

All smell tells you is when the food is rotting, but no-one eats rotting food because it smells foul and because it tastes foul.

People get food poisoning because pathogens often are not detectable by smell or taste.

<comment><USER32> It disingenuous to ignore the parent's very next sentence, which recommends cooking food properly. It's estimated that the majority of raw chicken sold in the UK carries campylobacter, and a major factor in making sure it doesn't poison you is cooking the chicken through. No one is recommending eating raw meat and using your nose to tell whether that's OK.

<comment><USER31> Let's use reheated rice instead of chicken.

Cook rice. Chill the rice. Store it correctly. Reheat it thoroughly.

Sniff it at every stage.

Can you smell the bacillus cereus, can you smell the toxins they produce? The toxins are not destroyed by heat from cooking, and this is a very common form of food poisoning.

Stop telling people they can smell food poisoning. They can't.

> It disingenuous to ignore the parent's very next sentence,

No, because parent poster is talking about ignoring the "arbitrary" food safety dates. If you ignore the date you significantly increase the risk of food poisoning, and not all of those are fixed by thorough cooking.

For many people food poisoning might be a few days of unpleasant illness, but we need to remember that it can also be a life-changing illness.

<comment><USER33> > No, because parent poster is talking about ignoring the "arbitrary" food > safety dates.

Most of what I buy has a 'best before end' (BBE) date, not a 'use by', which is not a 'food safety date'.

Many supermarkets in the UK are removing BBE dates from vegetables because of exactly this issue (and as discussed in the article) - people blindly chucking food that's fine because the date is yesterday's.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> It took me (us as we are a family now) to get a good system to manage food.

With a few exceptions, like going on vacation, I never throw away meat or fish, it's not that hard to manage, if I don't eat it within 1-3 days, I either freeze it, salt it or boil it. What you can do with what product requires a bit of experience, for example chicken must be boiled, pork and fish can be salted...

It's much harder with vegetables, because they are not all equal, you might keep an egg plant for a month and another one for a week. I highly recommend fridges with a vegetable compartment that monitor humidity and keep temperature just above 0°C, you can keep a salad in good condition for weeks in it.

For milk derived product, I think the date on the product is a big culprit here. You can eat yogurt weeks after the "best by" date. Same for cheese. The good thing is that it's easy to tell if a yogurt or cheese has turned bad. For cheese we don't eat quickly, I use a vacuum pump with a hard container. There are also some little tricks like putting old yogurt in front at the height of the kids.

</comment><comment><USER35> We have little to no food waste. Here's what we do:

\- Wait until the food is 90+% gone before going to the grocery again. On the last day we might eat out once.

\- Eat fresh food first, frozen/canned last.

\- lots of containers for leftovers, they get gobbled in 24-48 hours.

\- Walk to the local market when a few in demand items run out, like bananas, baby spinach, or coconut/almond milk.

</comment><comment><USER36> For my family, the simple trick of getting a smaller fridge cut down on food waste. This has worked great, even though, we are avid cooks who almost always make meals from scratch.

<comment><USER37> +1 smaller fridge

Changing how I eat greatly reduced my food waste.

Now eating a lot of bulk foods with high soluble fiber. Porridge, beans, lentils, seeds. Instapot for the win. Uncooked (dry) stores very well.

All my excess produce goes into smoothies, also greatly reducing my waste.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> This doesn't surprise me when I see how big the fridges in the US are.

<comment><USER39> I'm not sure why you were downvoted. In my experience, one reason why food goes to waste is because the further it travels back to the fridge the more likely it is to be forgotten. Of course, that isn't the only reason and that process seems to be biased toward certain kinds of foods. Worth examining, though. Perhaps shallower fridges make sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> It's like that joke: saving leftovers makes you feel good twice; once when you put them away, and the next time when you pull them out and realize you dodged a bullet by not eating them.

My wife certainly treats the fridge like 'write only media' at times.

</comment><comment><USER41> I've figured out meats. I can vacuum-seal, freeze and throw right into sous vide. Veggies and especially fruit have to be eaten almost immediately or they go bad (mold). I eat a lot of zucchini and carrots because they'll keep a while.

<comment><USER30> > _Veggies and especially fruit have to be eaten almost immediately or they go > bad (mold)._

That seems like an exaggeration or maybe you're not storing them correctly. What do you buy and how do you store it that won't last several days to a week?

<comment><USER14> Mold is a common problem for small soft fruit that come in plastic clamshells, like blueberries and raspberries. Often it has a little mold right from the store. I try to wash these in water with a some white vinegar as soon as I get home from the grocery store and then right in the fridge.

<comment><USER30> And they last for several days in the refrigerator, right?

<comment><USER14> There can definitely be too much mold to eat right when you open it. You can usually return it, but for a couple of bucks it's a hassle. And if you don't wash it right away, even a small amount of mold will grow to more than you want to try to wash/cut off in a couple of days.

I buy and eat a lot of fruit and my experience agrees with OPs, at least in some cases.

<comment><USER30> > at least in some cases.

So most of the time, fruits and vegetables keep for days and don't have to be eaten immediately, right?

I'm being not picky because this is a conversation in a thread about how people throw out a lot of food. That waste is due, in part, to false sense of spoilage and OP was furthering that false sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I try to batch cook 1-2 large meals that everyone in the family likes. This lessens the likely hood that food would be wasted.

I have also made it a habit of freezing half the meet or seafood when I buy in larger quantities. It is good to label when you freeze something as there is still a shelf life.

I remember several years back there was a post on HN about a food expiration database that showed true dates food was good until. Many times the sell by date is not the same as the good until date.

</comment><comment><USER43> I live by myself and I eat very little. When I have to throwaway food, it's often because I wasn't able to purchase small enough portions in the first place.

One example is eggs. They only stay good for 2–3 weeks, and I can't buy less than a half dozen. If I decide to make pancakes one morning (which I do occasionally, but rarely), that's one egg. I'll maybe find a use for one or two more before the batch goes bad. :(

<comment><USER44> Perhaps buy a smaller variety of foods, and make more items from from those, especially basic scratch items such as eggs.

Boiled or scrambled eggs are a fast easy meal, and can be made in units of 1.

My solution generally is to have standard stock meals and buy for those. There can be variety, though it's around the basics. And eating within a range rarely proves fatal.

</comment></comment><comment> bash-j Maybe supermarkets and their suppliers could stop selling bulk quantities at a huge discount? You can sometimes be paying double the price per kilo for the smallest packet, so you end up picking up the bigger packet thinking you're saving money, but how much will end up spoiling before you get around to using it? Supermarkets also often have specials where if you buy multiple packets you save a few dollars.

</comment><comment><USER45> A lot of produce is already molding by the time it gets to the shelves, it just isn't visible to the consumer. I would love to see that problem fixed.

</comment><comment><USER46> Good thing my parents keep it around and eat it anyhow. My dad once made me a sandwich with mayo that had "expired" nine years earlier.

<comment><USER47> What's wrong with eating 9 year old mayonnaise?

<comment><USER46> It was kind of crystalized and ew.... I just shudder thinking about it. To the point of the article, however, I didn't get sick.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> While thinking about this I feel most of my fridge graveyard is because I'd rather eat something else.

That's horribly entitled and now I feel bad.

</comment><comment><USER49> A basic traditional trick to minimize waste is to repurpose yesterday's leftovers into today's entree. Nearly every culture has a version of this, from Asian fried rice to American casserole.

</comment><comment><USER50> Instacart has helped our family because we can have 2-3 deliveries a week with fresh produce. Before, it was such a hassle to bring kids <5 yrs old shopping that we would stock up...

</comment><comment><USER51> Restore home economics to school, along with reasonable lunch time and recess.

People think packaged food is more convenient or cheaper. Cooking from scratch isn't more expensive or time consuming. _Not knowing how to cook and shop_ is expensive and time consuming.

Here's a great guideline for "best by" and other dates: if the product has one, _don 't buy it_. I don't think I've bought a product with one in several years.

<comment><USER52> > _Here 's a great guideline for "best by" and other dates: if the product has > one, don't buy it. I don't think I've bought a product with one in several > years._

This doesn't make sense to me unless our locales differ greatly in labelling practices. Virtually everything but fresh produce comes with a date. Even independent butcher shops close the wrapping paper with a date sticker.

<comment><USER51> I challenged myself to avoid packaged food for a week. It went so well that I continued, in the process learning to cook from scratch.

I was surprised to learn that it took less time, cost less, tasted better, and led me to see packaged food as unnecessary.

I wrote a bunch of posts on it since I felt my ignorance and inexperience kept me from a better life and wanted to make the experience available to others [http://joshuaspodek.com/avoiding-food- packaging-2](http://joshuaspodek.com/avoiding-food-packaging-2)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I was raised on the concept that we are lucky to have an abundance of food and that there are people going hungry in the world. In my house almost no food goes to waste. I would feel like a scumbag if I was throwing out food.

</comment><comment><USER54> Much of the vaccines storages are going to die and are regularly replaced just to die again, but if you keep highly optimized storage just for current purposes, you are screwed big time in the case of outbreak.

Same here.

<comment><USER55> How does that analogy work? You're keeping your fridge overstocked in case of an outbreak of .. hunger? Unexpected guests?</comment></comment>


Dav1d – a BSD AV1 decoder for the future of multimedia - <AUTHOR> https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dav1d <comment><USER2> Any benchmarks in the presentation today?

<comment><USER3> in C-vs-C comparisons on the 1 test file given, dav1d was 60% faster than libaom v1.0.0.

But indeed, most of this is not yet very interesting, it looks like current git/master libaom has a good amount of SIMD, and in most user testing, it is approximately 4x as fast as dav1d, which does not yet have any SIMD. So at this point, users should probably still use libaom while the kinks are ironed out in dav1d and initial SIMD is added. But keep an eye out over the next few months.

<comment><USER2> The source I got the 4x slower C Vs ASM number claims a frame decoding fix already took it down to only 1.7x so it's looking good so far.

Thanks for all the hard work!</comment></comment></comment>


Before Risk, before Dungeons and Dragons, there was Diplomacy - <AUTHOR> http://grantland.com/features/diplomacy-the-board-game-of-the-alpha-nerds/#

<comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7913183](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7913183)</comment>


Object-Oriented HTML, and OOCSS - <AUTHOR> http://meiert.com/en/blog/20130806/object-oriented-html-and-oocss/

<comment><USER2> I agree with the author.</comment>


The downside of using LED traffic lights - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091215/ap_on_re_us/us_snow_covered_stoplights

<comment><AUTHOR> A side-effect of the conventional traffic lights (heat production) is now a requirement for the new energy efficient lights. This seems parallel to a bug becoming a important feature in a product.</comment>


Power Distribution in Three PCs - <AUTHOR> http://www.silentpcreview.com/Power_Distribution_in_Three_PCs

<comment><AUTHOR> I was surprised that desktop PCs still use at least 38W DC in idle, which is 54W AC due to the inefficiencies of PSUs at this relatively low load. How much do laptops draw in idle? Even half of that would still be pretty bad.</comment>


Ask HN: How to build an sass app on h1b - <AUTHOR> I am currently building a sass app for businesses. I am planning to launch it very soon.
I am currently on H1B visa in US. Has anyone faced a similar issue before?
How did you monetize and get payments without landing into any trouble?
PS : I am aware that one is not supposed to do any work outside the employer on H1b visa. Please don't write the same thing in the reply. I am looking for some innovative ways to bypass this and move out of this slave visa. <comment><USER2> Well, it's more about your risk tolerance than anything else.

I'm not sure if IRS knows your immigration status and even if they do, do they report "suspicious" earnings to ICE and if they do, does ICE goes out and investigates such cases?

So that is your unknown and you can simply risk it: register a business as DBA, open a Stripe account or PayPal account and start charging for you saas and report that as an income to IRS just like you would normally do.

The worst that can happen is that you'll get deported. I googled "deported for having a company on h1b" and nothing came up so there's that.

If you want to lessen the risk, you can register the company outside of US. Either in your home country (additionally, you could have e.g. family member be an owner, to completely cut connection to you) or in some jurisdictions that allow opening companies without being there physically.

That's still probably not entirely kosher but harder to trace.

To be completely safe, you can launch your project as completely free, build it up, wait until you get green card and then start charging for it.

There was some discussion in [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3691541](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3691541)</comment>


Tiktok's censorship isnt Chinese thought police, its just good business strategy - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/swlh/when-is-censorship-good-2dd6ff250f09 <comment><USER2> I don't quite follow this argument.

>So for them to attempt some sort of though-control by censoring content on their platform — only one of many which are not censored — logically, makes no sense at all.

Why wouldn't it? Clearly we see the Chinese government pressuring the NBA, and others to police speech that in other places would be acceptable.</comment>


How are H1N1 flu projections calculated? - <AUTHOR> http://wellness.blogs.time.com/2009/08/25/h1n1-death-projections-doing-the-math/

<comment><USER2> The submitted Time blog post is interesting but the first two posted comments are way below the usual standard of HN comments. The case fatality rate has to be calculated eventually from all cases that reach an outcome (death or recovery), so it is NOT correct to do arithmetic from current cases and currently reported deaths--there is always a lag in the reporting deaths as cases either resolve to health or end fatally. The other Time comment so far doesn't even deserve a response.</comment>


Ask HN: Sign up with Credit Card for trial or not? - <AUTHOR>

Is it better to force customers to give you there Credit Card details to sign up for a free trial of your software or to allow them to do the trial without a Credit Card and then ask for it at the end of the trial.<p>Please reply if you have tried one or both and what you discovered. <comment><USER2> I would say test both.

In the absence of a test, I would say free trial and then get the CC details. My logic being; I would prefer eyeballs on my product for a period (if it is not too expensive to do so) as they may come back a year or more later when they are ready to pay. If you do the CC up-front most people will never experience your product and it wont be recalled so easily.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. As a user, cc often deters me from signing up bc 1) I hate filling out forms, and 2) I know there's >30% chance I'm going to be too lazy/busy to cancel eom. From the company's perspective, maybe 2) is an argument in favor of cc signup so they can tax my carelessness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I did some A/B testing for a client a while back and the number of abandoned sign-ups was much higher with the CC option. With the non-CC option, the number of bogus email addresses was also very high.

I think your best option is to put a time-limit on the software and to block advanced functions.

<comment><AUTHOR> do you remember the % on those?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> That depends on your costs associated with a new signup. If they're nominal, then don't ask for a credit card, you're almost guaranteed a better conversion rate. If they're high (you often need to handhold new users through some kind of setup, your service is attractive to spammers or some other bad element you'll have to clean up after, it's resource-intensive to service each user, etc) then require a credit card to filter out all but the most committed prospects.

</comment><comment><USER6> The only right answer is to A/B test on your own product. It can work out that your initial conversions are higher but your paid conversions are much lower, so make sure to test the net result.

Convincing people they can cancel their account and get a 100% refund can go a long way, if that makes sense for your product.</comment>


Treehouse - <AUTHOR> http://teamtreehouse.com/

<comment><USER2> I am really excited about the rebranding and all the new things being rolled out to make what was formerly Think Vitamin Membership even better :)</comment>


How Git could be attacked if SHA-1 gets broken - <AUTHOR> http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/sha-1/

<comment><USER2> If SHA1 goes down, I think the world has bigger problems to worry about than Git....

</comment><comment><USER3> this scenario is still very unlikely, because the birthday attack method will just produce two randomly garbled files with the same hash.

No-one will accept a patch that introduces some garbled stuff into their repository, as it's just nonsense.

Even if you are able to upload it as a 'firmware patch' which goes by unchecked by everyone else, you still won't be able to produce any form of firmware that'll actually do something you want it to do -- let alone two versions that can run on the same hardware, where one is exploitless and the other has an exploit.

For that kind of stuff you'll have to wait a long time. It's still not even possible with MD5 (though partial data can be preserved with some of the attacks).

<comment><USER4> Well, we're talking about programs here. Once you've managed to get an arbitrary, suspicious-but-harmless patch accepted (which, admittedly, is quite the hurdle), you can switch one garbled section for another. Then, you can check which version of the garbled section is in place using your actual code, and branch based on that. There are of course obfuscated variants of this.

This is similar to that exploit on MD5 signatures of PDFs: trick someone into blessing something with harmless effects, and then change part of it so that the effects become harmful. It's not the most dangerous thing in the world, as we have human gatekeepers to ward against this sort of attack, but it may be something to watch out for.

<comment><USER5> It seems far more likely that the human gatekeepers will be more fallible than SHA1 in this context. How many people _really_ understand the deeper intricacies of C, for example? Submit a patch to a Ruby or Python project to "speed up parsing" that includes a hunk of C. If it actually does speed up parsing, it's possible that the patch would be accepted. Maybe there's also a backdoor in the code. It could take months or years to be discovered, if the project isn't heavily populated by paranoid C programmers and isn't being scrutinized by a lot of people (this is why I generally like really popular Open Source software over niche projects...the level of scrutiny by security experts is much higher).</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How long is your .bashrc file? - <AUTHOR> I keep my dot files in a git repo and I add useful aliases and functions to it as needs come up.  I love automating shell commands and have for over 10 years.  I've got my own little shell API at this point, and it's fantastic.
I took a moment to reflect on it a little earlier and realized I have over 3,000 lines in my .bashrc file!  Maybe this is a dumb question, but hey it's Friday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
How many lines is your .bashrc? <comment><USER2> wc -l < ~/.bashrc

=> 568 lines</comment>


Double-checking Dawkins - <AUTHOR> http://www.jgc.org/blog/2007/12/double-checking-dawkins.html

<comment><USER2> a) It's hilarious that Dawkins didn't just make that up, and bothered to make it factually accurate.

b) It's doubly-hilarious that you checked! :-)</comment>


The Real Story of 2016 - <AUTHOR> https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-real-story-of-2016/ <comment><USER2> Too much attention has been placed on polling predictors.

It wasn't just polling that was off, it was other predictors as well.

PollyVote, for examples, aggregates over many different types of predictors, and non-polling predictors still predicted a Clinton win.

So whatever you'd have to use to explain how the polls were off would also have to account for why economic predictors were off, index models...

If this were an undeveloped country, my first thought would have been election tampering.

However, people also seem to be forgetting that at some level, the polls were correct: Clinton did win the popular vote. The polls were just off about where the votes were won. Important, but a harder aim, prediction-wise.</comment>


Chasing the Sound Barrier in a Leap from 23 Miles Up - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/science/16tier.html

<comment><USER2> Obligatory picture of awesomeness: <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kittinger-jump.jpg>

The article neglects to mention that he'll be going supersonic in very thin air, so the stresses won't be as great as they would be for supersonic aircraft. Also, as the guy falls the air will get denser and he'll slow down to a more reasonable speed.

<comment><USER3> The terminal velocity of the human body at sea level, even in a streamlined position, is significantly shy of the sound barrier. The thin air is what enables supersonic speed in the first place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is absolutely crazy.

Has there been any modeling done to attempt to predict what will happen? This is a great time to make a prediction and see how well it holds later.

<comment><USER5> Modeling can't solved all problems. I guess they may drop some dummies from high latitude helium balloons in advance and use sensors to record some data against predictions from modelings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "I am impossibly, wonderfully alive." And a lot more alive than he was the day before. To quote Jimmy Stewart in "The Spirit of St. Louis," "We have to know and we have to try."

What a great story and project.

</comment><comment><USER7> Also this guy:

[http://www.ted.com/talks/steve_truglia_a_leap_from_the_edge_...](http://www.ted.com/talks/steve_truglia_a_leap_from_the_edge_of_space.html)</comment>


Maker Faire (May 3-4 2008) - <AUTHOR> http://www.makerfaire.com/

<comment><USER2> what would you do: maker faire in SF or red bull air race in SD? both are may 3-4. I'm considering driving to SD for the red bull event..</comment>


NEW Bitcoin 'Dusting Attack' SCAM – Please Read - <AUTHOR> If you have recently received a very small amount of BTC in your wallet unexpectedly, you may be the target of a "dusting attack" designed to deanonymize you by linking your inputs together - users can mark this as "Do Not Spend" to nip the attack in the bud. www.achainofblocks.com <comment><USER2> This is real! It happened to me.</comment>


Parler Speedruns the Content Moderation Learning Curve - <AUTHOR> https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200630/23525844821/parler-speedruns-content-moderation-learning-curve-goes-we-allow-everything-to-were-good-censors-days.shtml <comment><USER2> I think Parler will be a fascinating experiment in the type of community that eventually gravitates to it, especially those that leave Twitter for it. Will there be a cat-and-mouse game to see how to consistently troll without getting banned, sort of like the games Chinese play with their censors?

<comment><USER3> It will either turn into a real grown-up community with real content moderation and guidelines and nontrivial spend in automated and manual content removal or turn into a useless cesspit like Voat.

We've seen this experiment repeat itself over and over again in internet communities, there is little value in repeating it again with no novelties.</comment></comment>


FlightCaster (YC S09) Acquired - <AUTHOR> http://blog.flightcaster.com/flightcaster-acquired <comment><USER2> Super news for you guys, that's less than 18 months from launch to acquisition, really cool.

What I really love about this deal is this line:

"Before we go any further, let us address our users. FlightCaster.com will stay right where it is and continue to provide flight delay prediction for free. We're also making our mobile app free -- you can download it now. We'll continue to use our powerful algorithms to predict flight delays. We'll continue to push the envelope on getting the best travel intelligence to people when they need it."

How much better is that than: "hey our team just got acquired by Facebook/Some other 500 # gorilla and we'll be shutting down our service next week".

That really sets a good example on how it is done.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, it being a merger of interests rather than a strategic takeover will serve both the companies well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _"We're pleased to announce that FlightCaster has been acquired by Next Jump Inc. It's a good day here at FlightCaster HQ (freakin' phenomenal day!), and we're stoked about the new possibilities._ "

How much better an opening statement is that, when compared to generic PR shrill about XYZ Co joining with ABC Ltd to provide blah blah blah leverage. Made me even more excited for the team and FlightCaster users.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Jacob! --Jason from FlightCaster-- The good vibe is much appreciated. We've got really sweet stuff we'll be rolling out soon...

<comment><USER5> Congrats & thank you for a great product & access to your API!

We're (<http://sleep.fm>) using it to wake up our users & speak whether their flight is delayed or on-time. THough I do wonder if things will change in regards to the the API?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That sounds like an excellent deal for both the team and users, awesome, don't see that often :-) Congratulations.

</comment><comment><USER7> Again, where is the link to your site on your blog? I realize there is a link in the post. This has been a recurring theme here, site blogs that do not link to the site they are blogging about.

</comment><comment> muuh-gnu Another nice Lisp/Clojure success story. <http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/msg/9203e07d197dbd29>

Mentioning that, does anybody know what happened to Postabon, another Lisp startup, which went silent a while ago?

</comment><comment><USER8> Congratulations, I'm really looking forward to where this can go.

</comment><comment><USER9> Price?

<comment><USER10> _The price of the deal wasn't disclosed._

[http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/10/next-jump-acquires- flightca...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/10/next-jump-acquires-flightcaster- the-flight-delay-prediction-engine/)

<comment><USER9> I was aware of that, I was hoping for some "word on the street" type of information.

<comment><USER11> [http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/22/confirmed-motorola- mobility...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/22/confirmed-motorola-mobility- acquires-cloud-storage-startup-zecter/) [http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/05/yousendit-buys-email- collab...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/05/yousendit-buys-email- collaboration-startup-attassa-and-e-signature-service-zosh/) [http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/10/next-jump-acquires- flightca...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/10/next-jump-acquires-flightcaster- the-flight-delay-prediction-engine/)

Third exit by Tandem Entrepreneurs in less than a month -- ZumoDrive, Attassa, and now FlightCaster. All for undisclosed terms.

<comment><USER12> At first I thought tomtc meant that ex-Tandem computers folks had been part of these startups, But he is talking about <http://www.tandementrepreneurs.com/>

<comment><USER13> sherpalo <http://www.sherpalo.com/> has invested in these companies too.

<comment><USER12> Good catch:Ram Shiram, the prime mover behind Sherpalo, is also on the board of directors at NextJump.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Shouldn't we reserve the "congratulations" until more info is provided about the terms (price) of the deal.EG- Pownce.com wasn't congratulated for being acquired.

<comment><USER15> Pownce was floundering because Twitter basically made them irrelevant. Flightcaster hasn't been around all that long and seemed to be doing fine. It's pretty unlikely that they sold for a price that they're unhappy with.

<comment><USER12> Not clear what the real situation was and it may be difficult to determine for a while. They clearly abandoned their initial business and business model completely, no shame in that, but this may just be a talent acquisition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Congrats! I've always been curious how the conversation goes when one company reaches out to another in hopes of being acquired. Do deals like this usually happen as stock swaps?

</comment><comment><USER17> Congratulations! I was wondering why Bradford's posts were suddenly becoming so focused on the news and personalisation! :)

</comment><comment><USER18> Congratulations! Flightcaster seems like an awesome execution. Now I'm excited to see what you have planned... even though Woven is ambitious, you have the track record to pull it off!

</comment><comment><USER19> Why next jump acquired flightcaster? (May be they also want to combine their ecommerce shop with flights along with price predictions data as a differentiator) but why?

<comment><USER2> > Why next hump acquired flightcaster?

Freudian slip or typo?

<comment><USER19> :-) Fixed

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> For those seeing an Error 503, the post can be seen at the top of their blog: <http://blog.flightcaster.com/>

</comment><comment><USER21> How much??

</comment><comment><USER22> Congrats!

</comment><comment><USER23> Congratulations, sirs.

</comment><comment><USER24> very niice! how much?</comment>


Like an AI Could Ever Spot Sarcasm - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2018/01/31/ai-detect-sarcasm/ <comment><USER2> This is neat.

Sarcasm is hard because it's a violation of the cooperative principle. I think describing it as simply incongruity is understating the difficulty of the problem (that said, good enough for 80% accuracy on the task is nothing to sniff at).

In communication, you've got two systems attempting to convey their internal, unobservable states to eachother. This happens across a number of different channels, each noisier and more imperfect than the next. Natural Language is lossy enough compression as it is. Now add idiolect, prosody, body language, context. And on top of that, the internal states of the two systems may only be alignable along the coarsest axes to begin with (do we share the same qualia?). The only way we can have any hope of understanding eachother is when we know both sides are trying their best to make themselves understood, as per Grice's maxims.

Sarcasm is a form of dissembly, a deliberate subversion of the cooperative principle, that words mean things, for other means. Sometimes to communicate to others, who are not the target. Sometimes for the communicator's own personal satisfaction. Sometimes it's meant to be understood, but the drier the sarcasm, the fewer hints are given.

And at the same time, in some cases, a sarcastic utterance is the most concise way of conveying information, if it is correctly received. Because acting in violation of typically observed rules of conversation carries its own set of semantics. It's another mode of communicating, and all of these different modes capture different lower-dimensional slices of the hyper-thing of mind- state and intent that they're purporting to convey.

All that to say, that elsewhere in these comments, the problem has been described as AI Complete. I'd go a step further, and say that it's telepath- complete, to know the intent of another, and even then, knowing the accurate truth of the thing by oracle might end you up with less Information than if you'd just gotten the joke in the first place.

<comment><USER3> That's a very good summary. I would say based on my experience on the internet, that spotting sarcasm is frequently beyond human capability, so it's not realistic to do it with an AI any time soon.

Besides communicating with a recipient, subverting the cooperative principle can also be used to selectively communicate with one recipient out of many, or to mislead some or all.

A lot of things people want to calculate these days seem like absurd hubris to me, but I suppose that's also how progress has always occurred, by trying to do things that seem out of reach.

<comment><USER4> > I would say based on my experience on the internet, that spotting sarcasm is > frequently beyond human capability ...

In a 1983 Usenet FAQ by Jerry Schwarz: "Avoid sarcasm and facetious remarks."

More recently, aka Poe's Law.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Last year we were working on a rubber ducky debugging chatbot and relying a bit too heavily on StackOverflow data for conversational training data. It frequently gave sarcastic answers, especially if you asked for help concerning regular expressions.

<comment><USER6> Did it respond with Zalgo if you asked about Regex and HTML? [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match- open...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags- except-xhtml-self-contained-tags)

<comment><USER7> He comes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I often recall this post from Andrej Karpathy when I'm noticing the current limitations of AI [http://karpathy.github.io/2012/10/22/state-of-computer- visio...](http://karpathy.github.io/2012/10/22/state-of-computer-vision/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Sarcasm is almost certainly AI-complete. Consider this post: [https://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2018/01/31/royal-mail- announ...](https://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2018/01/31/royal-mail-announces- commemorative-brexit-stamps/) which is pretty easy for a human to tell is sarcastic, but would be difficult for an AI unless it actually understood it.

<comment><USER10> Why? It has a few tell-tale word choices, and image recognition would indicate that the stamp images are "wrong" and/or correlated to humor memes.

<comment><USER9> Go and build an AI that detects sarcasm, then I will agree with you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If anyone is interested in studying sarcasm themselves, there is a dataset available:

A Large Self-Annotated Corpus for Sarcasm [https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.05579](https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.05579)

1.3 million sarcastic statements!

</comment><comment><USER12> > So now, computers can be as sarcastic as the rest of us. That sounds just > great.

I love how sarcasm has so many subtle ways to be use to break tensions in some meetings, and how it can quickly derail any light conversation into some almost-nuclear mood.

But computers generating sarcasm, well... that will put a whole new level to automatic chat bots.

</comment><comment><USER13> To be perfectly fair, human beings can't pick up on sarcasm reliably: or at the very least it seems to be cultural/contextual.

Australians/brits consistently bemoan the inability of Americans to understand deadpan and sarcasm.

And I'm even reminded of one of my European friends (from Austria) bemoaning conversations with Germans along the lines of:

Austrian: "could you be any more condescending!?" German: "yes I could be more condescending."...blank stare.

<comment><USER14> That is very much a statistically significant thing, yes. I'm Danish. Get along fine with Brits and Aussies, deadpans, understatements and poisonous sarcastic barbs translating well enough both ways. With Americans present, experience has taught me to shift into a far more cautious mode. And often these days, what Americans describe as irony, I fail to recognize as such.

A very broad generalization, of course, but has served me well enough as survival guide.

<comment><USER3> In some parts, "irony police" are a running joke - people will explain why any given example of irony is not _really_ ironic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Can't wait for the first next gen AI programming language to support an "as if" statement.

</comment><comment><USER16> > "We found lots of tweets, especially in politics, to be sarcastic," he said, > in what may be the biggest understatement so far of 2018.

</comment><comment><USER17> The Secret Service did want a sarcasm detector.

[https://www.thedailybeast.com/secret-service-wants-a- sarcasm...](https://www.thedailybeast.com/secret-service-wants-a-sarcasm- detector)

</comment><comment><USER18> (The Groucho Marx joke isn't sarcasm.)

</comment><comment><USER19> The point of sarcasm is to hide your true intent except for people who are sufficiently aligned with you to be able to decode it correctly.

If computers can decode sarcasm then it is not effective. Then sarcasm will evolve.

<comment><USER10> I trust many more details of the secrets of my life to computers than people. Computers are smarter than people in many areas, so sarcasm that only a computer recognizes is not a problem for sarcasm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Yes, this is exactly what we need.

<comment><USER21> Side note, is there a name for a type of humor where you are being facetious and serious at the same time?

That's kind of my go-to, and I'd say about 20% of people overall don't get it. I hear "I can't tell if you are joking or not" all the time. I personally think both is a reasonable answer, but if we aren't able to teach people how such a sense of humor works, I don't have much hope for training an AI.

<comment><USER3> If I was trying to explain humor to an alien, I would say it's a pleasurable sensation created by the resolution of ambiguity or uncertainty in the communications between two or more people. This is achieved by performing similar mental operations and reaching the same result as each other.

So typically, you say something, and someone understands that it is not serious, and they laugh at the point at which they realize you two understand each other.

Your style of humor is more evolved, in that it adds an additional step, where first they think you are not serious, and then they understand you are, and if they get it, they laugh because they have completed the path to a shared understanding. It may not be appreciated so much, because since the journey is more difficult, the listener may infer that you are trying to put down people who are not sufficiently quick witted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If humans can't identify sarcasm, why would you expect AI to?

It's like expecting AI to read handwriting, when people can't even do that 100% of the time.

<comment><USER23> People didn't expect to be humbled by a machine at the game of Go either. Yet here we are.

<comment><USER24> Apples and oranges comparison. Go is much closer to chess than it is to recognizing sarcasm.

<comment><USER25> I'm not convinced.

Good computer chess play is based on a deterministic tree walking algorithm, something that's been clearly in computers' wheelhouse since forever.

Good computer go play is based on neural pattern recognition, which is also (probably) what human sarcasm detection is based on.

<comment><USER21> On the other hand, go operates in a much more finite universe than conversation does. You have 2 pieces, and a number of places to put them. You have a goal.

Conversation doesn't work like that, and takes a vast amount of information to understand whether someone is being sarcastic.

<comment><USER23> So you're saying that the people cited in the article accomplished something more significant than the AlphaGo team…?

<comment><USER26> Probably not, because the approach taken in the paper is identifying a small set of patterns that are present in sarcasm, not fully understanding the meaning and context of why the sentence is sarcastic. It's a useful tool with pragmatic applications in online discourse analysis, but not a solved problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Sarcasm is a great tool. But there are a couple of people I know who never turn off their "Sarcastic tone", and it becomes impossible to tell what's genuine and what's bullshit. I try to tell them that their noise-to-signal ratio is bad, but they um... react defensively.

<comment><USER28> It can be a coping mechanism for depressive people just like cynism, at least I know that it serves that function for me: Can't be straight up negative, for dragging the mood down, so I'll settle for some sarcasm.

<comment><USER10> You are likely not fooling anyone with your sarcasm.

<comment><USER28> It's not about fooling anybody, I consider it more like gallows humor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I have to note that often humans fail to detect sarcasm, and police forums with religious fervor demanding the application of those ridiculous "\s" tags wherever they be deemed necessary. Small wonder, why it would be difficult to catch in a program.

</comment><comment><USER30> Inherently ambiguous medium of hierarchical, ambiguous data requiring personal and situational context difficult to interpret.

Surprise! NLP is still hard... which is good news for anyone interested in understanding language, neural networks, o the human condition.

</comment><comment><USER31> It's more than incongruity. Context is king. "I like being ignored" is sarcasm. But followed up with "No, really, I like being ignored. Its like a super power! I can ..." is serious (sort of).

<comment><USER13> And then you get people like me, where "I like being ignored" is not sarcasm, but a commentary/personality preference related to disliking a cultures obsession with fame and popularity and struggling to think of anything worse than being recognised/constantly under surveillance.

As you said, context is everything. It is literally impossible to detect sarcasm reliably with only the sentence in which sarcasm is contained.

<comment><USER32> There's also a blurry line between sarcasm and lies. I'll often say things that are patently untrue to people with the expectation that they know the truth (and me) well enough to get that I'm not serious.

For instance, to my sister:

"I hate you." \- sarcasm. "I've already told you many times that I hate you." \- obvious lie, maybe sarcasm?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Computers are getting smarter. They can do many stuff faster than humans. They can even detect sarcasm. But do they "understand" it? Can Computers understand a subtle joke? Maybe we could train a Computer to detect jokes and make it laugh, but can it really understand a joke? Interesting topic.

<comment><USER34> What does 'understand' mean, if not something functional? You mean consciousness? Tough question to answer.

Are you familiar with Daniel Dennett's 'Competence without comprehension' ideas? He points out for instance that even a very simple computer is far better at division and exponentiation than even the smartest human. It does this without any comprehension at all - a pocket calculator is far too simple to have any meaningful understanding of anything, but that has zero impact on its functional usefulness.

Another favourite example of his is evolution by natural selection.

Annoyingly I couldn't find a brief online article on the topic by the man himself.

<comment><USER33> Yeah I had consciousness in mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Yes! I need alexa to be sarcastic.

<comment><USER36> That's irony, not sarcasm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> > That was especially true for tweets that include numbers; their accuracy > rate of 80 percent more than triples previous efforts.

Which is to say that previous efforts had only half of the true positives a random number generator would have had. Neat.

<comment><USER38> Sounds like previous efforts might even have been outperformed by a naive algorithm that purely looked for one word sentences like "right", "totally" and "neat" :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Looking forward to Deep Sarcasm...

</comment><comment><USER40> claims too much. and the task definition seems off: sarcasm is more like a speaker attitude, while irony is the linguistic phenomenon. another case of "lets throw an ANN onto anything".

</comment><comment><USER41> Like a human being could ever read that text.

If you're having as much trouble reading it as I was, open the developer tools and on the body style, remove "DINPro" from the font-family, turn off the font-weight: 300 or change it to 400, and increase the font-size to 16px or whatever size you like.

If the AIs ever do take over, my one request is that they use plenty of sarcasm when they talk about designers who think unreadable text with substandard font-weight is a good thing.

Of course, being AIs, maybe they could care less.

<comment><USER42> It actually looks quite nice in Firefox, it is hard to read in Chrome though. Maybe they have the one last web design team that primarily tests in FF? :D

<comment><USER41> I'm curious which OS you're using. On Windows, it looks pretty much equally bad to my eyes in Chrome, Firefox, and Edge.

<comment><USER43> It's legible in my computer. Debian 8, with Firefox, no-script, and ublocker, with 24" screen and a forced minimum font size of something that I don't even remember.

Anything of those could be making it legible. I'd rather trust the opinion of somebody with a more standard system, and I doubt the GP is that somebody either.

<comment><USER44> It's the no-script. Allowing scripts loads a crappy font. Hurray for NoScript!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What makes a great software engineer? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nczonline.net/blog/2009/08/21/what-makes-a-great-software-engineer/ <comment><USER2> Discipline.

With all due respect to the author, it's not what's described in the article:

1\. Always do it the right way: Well, what's the right way?

2\. Be willing to suffer: You can suffer a lot and turn out absolute crap. In fact, if you turn out absolute crap you most certainly _will_ suffer.

3\. Never stop learning: You can learn all the trendy new technologies and still be mediocre in all of them. In fact it's common for fanyboys.

4\. Lend a helping hand: It's common for mediocre programmers to spread disinformation on their blogs.

5\. Take your time: And you can be slow doing it!

As I said, in my opinion software engineering is about discipline. You can do great stuff in any language, C/C++/Pascal/Java/Python/whatever, whether you use SVN or Git, whether you're on a Mac/Windows or Linux, but you have to be disciplined. You have to be patient enough not to start coding like a monkey and do come research before. I've known engineers who will do _weeks_ of research before writing a single line of code, driving everyone mad, but proving themselves right afterwards. You have to be patient enough to think about your code before you write it, follow best-practices and some conventions when you write, constantly re-factor you old crap, write good comments, write Makefiles, etc. You have to be disciplined enough to do testing, have a test environment and a deploy workflow. Write proper documentation (if required), write commit messages, and so on. Engineering is not science, so you don't have to invent the wheel, it's also not art, so you don't have to be super-creative, but you have to be smart enough to be disciplined in the old-school IBM way.

<comment><USER3> My dad has no background in IT at all. He once was appointed to lead the Operation division (everything including IT). He saw that the systems his bank used was buggy and spent a few days figuring out how the systems worked (flow of the systems, input, output, users, etc).

He found the problems eventually. His solution to the CEO? The IT team should be discipline in almost every step they execute. Discipline in terms of execution, discipline in terms of documentation, discipline in terms of logging information, etc.

Agile, SCRUM, or whatever new methodologies out there (including CMMI) directing engineers in the software industry specifically to be more discipline. Feel free to talk bad/negatives about CMMI, but the intention is to figure out what went wrong and how to not repeat the bad experience (describe in each level).

In Agile, process is not equal bureaucracy. Process is equals discipline. - Eric Ries

UNIX/Linux philosophies teaches software developer to be discipline.

Google has a set of coding/commit rules, rigid structures regarding their source code (code review, etc) because they knew if things were not in certain order, chaos rises.

<comment><USER4> _In Agile, process is not equal bureaucracy. Process is equals discipline. - Eric Ries_

This is false. Agile is total bureaucracy. From "no code without passing tests" to "pay $1 if you're late to the standup meeting", Agile is about everything but writing software that works.

When I think back to "Agile" jobs I had, I can remember our team spending about 4 months writing 3 files worth of code that did basically nothing for the application as a whole. We did have a lot of meetings and tests, though.

Conversely, when I think about code I've written on my own without any structure or rules, I have over 100 completed projects/libraries in a few years of hacking. And when I think about code I've written for non-Agile jobs, the amount is the same -- lots of reliable, finished projects.

Agile is a way for the bad programmers to slow down the good programmers, so everyone can feel better about themselves. Avoid.

 _UNIX/Linux philosophies teaches software developer to be discipline._

How? When I write a Windows application, I have a full-screen Emacs with my code, a compile buffer for builds and tests, and a ghci (etc.) buffer. When I write a UNIX application, well, it's exactly the same.

<comment><USER3> > "Pay $1 if you're late to the standup meeting"

If you're discipline enough with your time, you shouldn't worry about things like this. Life is not perfect, there will always be small things that might bother you but not other people. Take it easy, besides, like I said, if you're punctuate, why does it bother you much? maybe it is meant for your co-workers that have time-management issues.

> "No code without passing tests"

I've worked with smart people with big ego swinging their code like the best thing since slice of bread. I've worked with smart people who think they can solve everything by raw-talent. I've worked with smart people but not careful. In every situation, forcing TDD help to store "order".

People out there seems to echo the same story. Now here's the thing, what should I do? should I accept your story and have blind-faith on the new guys? Thinking that they're smart and all that and no unit-test?

Should I trust someone that say "I designed my code to be unit-testable, but I have no time to write unit-tests"?

How many allegedly "good developers" out there that my company can afford to pay? Market also determines the price and right now the price of junior developers are quite high.

And one more thing: I respect your skill for having over 100 projects over a few years of hacking. That's great. There should be more people like you, and less number of failed projects out there. What I'm trying to say is that the statistics (Standish Group) isn't on your side.

TDD is a topic that would always caused a disagreement with a group of programmers who have "success stories" without TDD, open source projects where there are no deadline and have millions contributors (well, eventually the bug will be fixed right... eventually... someday).

<comment><USER5> If you're advocating things like TDD or fixed daily meetings, you should perhaps avoid using words like "statistics". They most certainly are not on your side; indeed, there is very little evidence that these trendy Agile-based processes provide any benefit whatsoever.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sold completely on TDD. Part of me think that TDD is a necessary evil. Some organizations have the resources to hire many QAs that might help to reduce the number of unit-tests. I'm not saying that is the most cost effective way to go.

Also, if the programmers words can be trusted (that their code is unit- testable, instead of highly-coupled, lots of dependency cycle, etc), writing unit-test last would be alright as well.

<comment><USER5> FWIW, I think the most important thing here is not to confuse use of unit tests with the adoption of TDD. The former does not imply the latter: you can write unit tests after you write your code, or even before/during writing code for that matter, without being test- _driven_ in your approach.

I have yet to see any credible study that showed a benefit for TDD _and_ controlled for the use of unit testing as part of a more traditional development process. There is some evidence that, at least for some types of project, TDD has been more successful by some metrics than a heavyweight, waterfall process with no unit testing, but there are usually so many uncontrolled variables involved that it's hard to read much of value into any of those results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > I am saying that you should try to accomplish the task on your own first, > and if you get stuck, then ask for help. Don't simply ask for help every > time without first trying to solve the problem yourself. Chances are, you'll > find that you could have figured it out on your own once you know the > answer.

If you're a junior engineer and are working with and older engineer you respect. I highly recommend you try to solve the problem, make a start at it, and then ask your mentor what they think of your approach at lunch, on break, or at the end of the day. This gives you most of the benefit of actually implementing something while saving you most of the pain of having to maintain your mistakes.

<comment><USER4> Yes, this is a good idea. I think you can get 90% of the way there on your own though, by asking yourself a few questions. Does it work? Am I sure it works? Will I be able to replace this code with new code in a year without touching anything else?

By the time you've answered "Am I sure it works?", the answer to the next question is almost always yes. If you can test something enough to be sure it works, it's probably modular enough for your application, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Communication is important enough to have had it's own section. Communicating to future maintainers through code, comments, tests, and documentation. Communicating designs, ideas, issues with team and leaders. Communicating everything with designers, customers, testers, and stake holders.

A good engineers are good individually. Great engineers work with and elevate the _team(s)_ they are part of. In military parlance they are force multipliers.

</comment><comment><USER8> Always do it the right way? What way is the right way? The right way from an engineering standpoint or a business standpoint?

In my experience the right engineering way and right business way are often at odds. My boss just says I'm 'developing under protest' in these situations. :)

</comment><comment><USER9> There's one thing that's missing from these kinds of posts. Usually, they describe _a_ set of characteristics of great software engineers. However, you have to be careful not to confuse that with _the_ set of characteristics of a great programmer.

<comment><USER5> Your contrast between "software engineer" in one sentence and "programmer" in the next is interesting. Did you mean to imply that there really is only one set of characteristics that define a great _programmer_ , or were you assuming that software engineers and programmers are the same thing? (I disagree in either case, but I'm not sure how to parse your post to debate the point you intended to make.)

<comment><USER9> I'm using them interchangeably. :-)

<comment><USER5> In that case, let me suggest as an alternative that a common problem with these posts is that they _only_ consider characteristics of programmers. The difference between being a mere programmer and a software engineer (at the risk of offending real engineers who earned that title) is the way the engineer runs his or her project, from capturing and interpreting the customer/client's actual requirements at the start, through to QA, deployment and beyond. Writing a program is hard, but writing the _right_ program and being sure that it _actually works_ is even harder, and herein lies the difference IMHO. That all said, this particular article doesn't fall into that trap, so I'll leave it there.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Chinese activist [Xu Zhiyong] arrested for tax evasion - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/03249866-8bcd-11de-b14f-00144feabdc0.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I offer this as a follow-up to the previous HN article here, "Where is Xu Zhiyong?". I make no insinuations about the legitimacy of the charges; tax evasion is the catch-all last refuge of the prosecutor, just ask Al Capone.</comment>


In Praise of Lectures (2004) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~twk/Lecture.pdf <comment><USER2> Körner is an amazing lecturer, and I was amazingly lucky to attend a course given by him. He explains things well, giving a great sense of what's going on, while still giving enough milestones to let you reconstruct the details. With enough work.

He's also an amazingly nice man.

<comment><AUTHOR> He basically taught me how to do mathematics: how a mathematician thinks about problems in a way that lets them get closer to solving one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "I have often thought that the technology of the TV game-show should be adapted to the lecture theatre. Each seat would have a concealed button which the auditors could press when they wanted the lecturer to slow down. "

Is there a mobile app that can do that easily?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd personally be wary of incentivising students to have their phones out during a lecture. The amount of concentration required is high enough without the extra distraction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> tl;dr lighthearted sociological exploration of lectures in university</comment>


I raised enough to last me for years. You should too. Now. If you can. - <AUTHOR> http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/3/calacanis_i_ve_get_plenty_of_money_you_should_get_some_too

<comment><USER2> Or you could just be profitable in multiple currencies. Anyone who's building a _web_ startup should realize they have a global business. It's a small amount of effort to provide a Canadian, Australian, and U.K. localized version if you're an English speaker.

Even if you're not concerned about the economy, there's no reason to not take advantage of foreign markets. StudiVZ, a straight-up clone of Facebook in Germany, was acquired for $100 million. How much more would Facebook be worth(really worth) if they had made an effort to go international sooner? Friendster is actually still alive, saved by foreign markets(they're huge in Asia).

If you're interested, I've written more about going global here: [http://socialstrategist.com/2007/08/20/go-global-or-lose- one...](http://socialstrategist.com/2007/08/20/go-global-or-lose-one-hundred- million-dollars)

<comment><USER3> Gaining global adoption is NOT about just translating some stuff. That's probably a very distant third in what matters for global adoption.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm sure the people who he raised money from are really thrilled by that picture and it's association with their money.

<comment><USER3> They aren't public servants or politicians, who cares about image.

<comment><USER4> Managing investors is important, and that means you have to think about their perception. Though I was probably a little unfair, part of Calacanis's job is to make things look glamorous and exciting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Truly profound advice.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm skeptical about the standard take on financial freedom. I think that a normal programmer can save enough in 5 years to live overseas off the interest with a comfortable standard of living. So, financial freedom isn't some high and lofty goal for the driven and privileged, but something we all can have fairly easily and dependably.

Things like startups should only be done because they are exciting and fun. Not out of some desperate drive for money.

<comment><USER7> While that may be true, there are two problems with this:

* Most of us don't want to move to most places which have such a low cost of living. Living in a beach hut for the rest of my life is just not very attractive to me. I guess it depends on your definition of "comfortable" but I'd have to say that I wouldn't want to live in any of the developing countries I've visited. Besides, luxury goods will be imports anyway, and still have western prices.

* Will those places that currently have such a low cost of living stay like that for another 60 years? I really doubt it.</comment></comment>


Show HN: An Empirical Evaluation of Linear Probing Algorithms - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/senderista/hashtable-benchmarks <comment><AUTHOR> Spoiler: the overall best algorithm is one you've probably never heard of...

Code: [https://github.com/senderista/hashtable- benchmarks](https://github.com/senderista/hashtable-benchmarks)

Docs: [https://senderista.github.io/hashtable- benchmarks/](https://senderista.github.io/hashtable-benchmarks/)

Graphs:

[https://github.com/senderista/hashtable- benchmarks/wiki/32-b...](https://github.com/senderista/hashtable- benchmarks/wiki/32-bit-benchmarks)

[https://github.com/senderista/hashtable- benchmarks/wiki/64-b...](https://github.com/senderista/hashtable- benchmarks/wiki/64-bit-benchmarks)

Shameless plug: I'm looking for a job, so if you like what you see and need a Java/Python/Rust hacker, feel free to email me at firstname.lastname@example.com.</comment>


Show HN: dcmntr.com - <AUTHOR>

Hey guys,
I am recreating dcmntr.com from what it used to be (a social bug tracking/discussion/documentation tool) to a private bug tracking/task tracking application.
I know there are a lot of bug tracking applications out there, but I'm trying to make it super easy to use and not overwhelming for people that want to do basic bug tracking or aren't very computer/technologically saavy.
The project is still in heavy development, but if any of you would be brave enough to test it and rip it to pieces, that would be awesome. The website is http://dcmntr.com (short for documenter)
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Clickable <http://dcmntr.com/> (although there's nothing to see - just a sign up screen)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, I need a pitch. I'm building up features, and eventually the login screen will look similar to how the Gmail login screen will look. I don't want it to be overwhelming.

<comment><USER3> Your app has a very nice design, so you should showcase it by putting a few screenshots on the homepage! You could show the New Project screen, as well as populated versions of the Account & Project Dashboards.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! I've been using Twitter Bootstrap since it first came out, so I'm trying to utilize all of elements it provides.</comment></comment></comment></comment>