An open letter to Netflix from the authors of the de-anonymization paper - <AUTHOR> http://33bits.org/2010/03/15/open-letter-to-netflix/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm a little taken aback by the tone of some of the comments here, so I thought I'd offer a few points of clarification.

* For the longest time we mostly stuck to doing the math. We certainly didn't call for the contest to be cancelled, and we had nothing to do with the lawsuit. But when some people implied that we were responsible for the mess that ensued, we were kind of pulled into it. We posted this as a way of explaining our point of view and reaching out to see if there's a possibility of collaboration.

* The sadness we expressed is genuine. The reason we brought up Netflix's response to our paper wasn't "snark" or "gloating." Rather, we were pointing out that the cancellation of this contest was rather needless, because if they had acknowledged the privacy risks back when we published the paper, they would have had more than enough time to deploy an opt-in system for this contest. I think it is really unfortunate that that didn't happen.

* Someone wanted to know exactly what I thought of the "greater good" argument. Well, I'll tell ya. I'm vehemently opposed to it and I think it's a dangerous slippery slope. I think this point of view is enshrined in the ethos of this country -- "better let ten guilty men walk free than to convict one innocent man," etc. I don't think anyone has the moral authority to decide that the privacy concerns of a few can be sacrificed.

* There is a specific reason we chose the open letter format rather than communicating with Netflix directly. Acutally, two reasons. First, there are many data privacy researchers who are at least as qualified as we are for this role. We wanted to make sure the community had the opportunity to participate in whatever ensures, rather than just us.

Second, I'm sure there are many companies other than Netflix who have a similar need for privacy preserving data mining. If Netflix doesn't take us up, perhaps one of the others will. Bottom line, since there are multiple parties on both sides, and we don't really know who they are, we felt it is better to have this dialog in public.

* Finally, it is understandable when something like this happens to want to find someone to blame. But think twice before shooting the messenger.

<comment><USER2> Please. You directly enabled the lawsuit. At least have the integrity to acknowledge your part -- your pretense "Oh wow, a lawsuit just happened! But I had nothing to do with it!" -- is pretty stupid.

I'll bet money the most likely result of this lawsuits -- and your actions are a big piece of it -- is Netflix, et al, will release no more datasets to the public. Instead, only researchers under NDA will be allowed to work with the data, as was basically the tradition before this.

Good job.

<comment><USER3> Please. You're acting like Netflix did nothing wrong in releasing the dataset when they knew that they could be pretty easily de-anonimized. Thus providing a privacy risk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm saddened to see someone gloating at having helped to prevent the release of a dataset that I see as beneficial. Netflix offered an unprecedented corpus for research, and now someone is proud about helping the lawyers to lock it up. I think I just have a fundamentally different sense of privacy than the author. I think this comes out most clearly in their FAQ:

      Furthermore, even if the algorithm finds the "wrong"
      record, with high probability this record is very similar
      to the right record, so it still tells us a lot about the
      person we are looking for.

So the "violation of privacy" occurs even we don't actually reveal information about the individual, even if we only provide a framework for making predictions? So if I publish a study (with backing data) that says that 38 year old males are likely to commit adultery, I've "violated the privacy" of all 38 year old males?

Could someone who shares the author's worldview try to explain it? I've tried, but I just don't see it.

<comment><AUTHOR> 'Gloating' is so diametrically opposed to the view expressed in the article that I have no idea how to respond.

As for that part of the FAQ, it is intended as an explanation of some of the theorems proved in the paper and is a response to some of the theoretical objections we face from the data privacy community. It is not an issue that arises in practice.

<comment><USER2> Well, I can say this: congrats on getting one of the best industrial data sets locked up. I hope you're proud of the work you did.

As for the possibility of netflix running a contest like this in an online fashion, well, maybe, but the benefits of having access to the data are enormous, plus you've now moved to a model where only the privileged few are allowed access via NDA, or Netflix has to provide computing resources to all researchers, etc. I don't see it happening.

<comment><USER5> If Netflix had attached credit card info and social security numbers to the info would you be singing the same tune? You're basically saying that you don't like the outcome due to your perceived utility of the data. Thanks I don't see you talking about:

      - Do you view this as a breach of privacy?
      - What do you consider private?
      - Do you view this as a breach of privacy, but just
        don't care?
      - Do you feel that the utility of the data out-weighs
        the privacy concerns?
      - What about the people that view this as an invasion
        of privacy and have their Netflix user data in that
        set? Should they be thrown under the bus in the pursuit
        of progress because *you* feel that the data has more
        utility than the privacy concerns do?

I see a lot of people arguing that this is 'stifling innovation,' but innovation is not an end unto itself. Banning using human test subjects against their will in the pursuit of scientific knowledge 'stifles innovation' too, but I think you would be hard-pressed to find many people to see that as a bad thing. "Stifling innovation" in the pursuit of privacy concerns should be a noble cause. It benefits the public. This is hardly the argument against intellectual property rights and I really find it annoying that people seem to be lumping it into the same ballpark with these boilerplate "stifling innovation" comments.

<comment><USER6> I see it as a breach of privacy people _might have prevented_ had they known about the dangers of their reviews getting linked to their accounts. Many companies have their large credit card databases stolen or hacked into through sheer incompetence. Netflix is not in the same boat with these.

<comment><USER7> So... having private info stolen == bad company, releasing private info == good company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I looked at the methods used in the paper and it's clear that my definition of "privacy" varies greatly from the author's definition.

Essentially they are saying that if you know what rating someone gave 8 movies and the date that they gave those ratings, you can find a sample of their rating list (or something very similar to it) with 99% accuracy. So freaking what?

"Evidence" that flimsy wouldn't stand up in a local bar argument, much less a court of law. The records are still completely and totally anonymous. No names, no addresses, no way to identify anyone...nothing but a strong statistical correlation to a set of ratings in a database.

It sounds like they have a problem with the power of predictive modeling and not with the handling of anonymous data. Esstentially what they are saying is "if we know a little about you, we find can out things that we didn't know with a very high degree of accuracy, but no certainty.". Duh. That's what the whole netflix prize was about...using known data to make strong predictions about unknowns.

They had some interesting methods (especially in their similarity calculations) but this has nothing to do with privacy.

</comment><comment><USER9> It seems to me that any data at all will necessarily reduce the entropy of the probability distribution of members' preferences, likes, dislikes, habits, and so on (i.e., their privacy). The authors seem to brush off the "greater good" argument here, but I don't understand how any large scale data release can happen without at least some reference to such an argument given that context. Given that, the authors seem to be making a fairly strong claim here: that no large scale "anonymised" data release should ever happen. Is that helping anyone in the context of movie viewing? And is it hurting anyone other than academic researchers, given that companies share more sensitive data anyway?

<comment><USER10> The authors mentioned two alternatives to the current form of large-scale release. First, opt-in. Second, contestants submit programs that run on the anonymized data but the contestants do not have access to the data itself. Could either of these approaches contribute to the greater good without compromising privacy?

<comment><USER9> I do not have any data regarding opt-in, but my impression was that as a rule, no one opts-in, and no one opts-out of basically anything (excepting the notorious cases, e.g., Real Player). If it worked, and somehow gave an at least somewhat unbiased sampling of the data, opt-in would obviously be best.

I am completely unsatisfied with the submit-and-run model. Feature engineering seems to rely on knowing your data really intimately, and that does not seem possible in a submit-and-run model.

<comment><USER11> What happened with Real Player?

<comment><USER9> The Real Player installer, over the course of maybe five to ten years, was so pushy about installing extra, unwanted software and sending private data that it garnered a reputation that caused people to be really careful when installing it, if they installed it at all. It is not really a perfect example for people actually opting-out, because I think one of the many criticisms was that it was often either not possible or extremely difficult to determine how to opt-out of its features (sending titles of files being played, annoying message center and ad popups, packaged additional software). That said, check out the Wikipedia page for further details.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> IIRC, in some countries census data is sometimes released with small, intentional errors to prevent the ability to locate specific individuals. Make a 36 year old sometimes a 37 year old or a 35 year old. Make a 180 cm person sometimes 182 cm or 178 cm. Small enough errors not to make the aggregate data invalid, but enough to make it hard to identify individuals from the data.

Perhaps this is a partial solution for the Netflix dataset.

<comment><USER4> This is the approach that Netflix took with the initial data. The paper referred to shows that this is insufficient, and does little to ease privacy concerns. The general problem is that if you 'fuzz' up the data enough to make identification impossible, it's no longer useful as a dataset.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> fyi: randomwalker is Arvind Narayanan.

</comment><comment><USER14> P.S. - BTW, when do you expect to allow your linux-using, paying customers to watch your instant streaming movies online?!

(off topic rant, I know. goodbye karma!)</comment>


Being UV Aware: Wearable Devices to Prevent Sunburn - <AUTHOR> http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/06/16/wearable-devices-to-prevent-sunburn/

<comment><AUTHOR> Perhaps UV sensors should be added to the worn materials themselves - something integrating Google's Project Jacquard and small UV sensors.

Project Jacquard: [https://www.google.com/atap/project- jacquard/](https://www.google.com/atap/project-jacquard/) UV Sensor: [http://www.adafruit.com/products/1918](http://www.adafruit.com/products/1918)

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, just found this 'smart' bikini: [http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool- tech/smart-bikini-sun-expo...](http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/smart- bikini-sun-exposure-tracking/)</comment></comment>


Amazon CodeGuru Is Blatantly Taking over CodeGuru from Microsoft - <AUTHOR> https://thehftguy.com/2020/08/03/amazon-blatantly-taking-over-the-codeguru-trademark-from-microsoft/ <comment><USER2> Betteridge's law of headlines states:

> "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

So no.

<comment><USER3> Am I missing the question mark in the headline?

<comment><AUTHOR> I edited out the question mark.

Had a question mark to invite open discussion (it's up to court to decide on the law) but apparently there is a meme that any title formulated as a question is meant ironically.</comment></comment></comment>


A Short History of the Index Card - <AUTHOR> http://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/a19379/a-short-history-of-the-index-card/ <comment><USER2> Oddly enough I still use index cards for writing down my todo lists. I have a box separated into Today/Tomorrow/Sometime/Done, then write down ideas and tasks as they come to me. Pick a few from the box and do them each day.

It seems strangely simplistic for a computer guy - compared to big full featured apps like Asana or Trello at least, but I find it so much easier to keep track of actual physical information as opposed to digital. ie. If I need to make a note of a task and keep it with me all day, I just stick the card in my pocket and it's there everytime. No need to remember to unlock my phone -> open an app -> check my todo list -> etc...

<comment><USER3> Thought experiment: How could a computer UI be made equally accessible and efficient?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's non-electronic structured data. If you need mobile data entry, without room or hands to manage a laptop (e.g., you're walking around a lab looking at different samples), is there anything as efficient as writing on index cards?

(My point is more about the efficiency of mobile UIs than index cards.)</comment>


How Gandhi argued his way into first-class rail car in apartheid South Africa. - <AUTHOR> http://books.google.com/books?id=n7lwt8FKO7IC&pg=PA47&dq=%22using+audiences%22&ei=HXsTSeKFNIW-tgPnvoTdBA#PPA48,M1 <comment><USER2> You'll get the full story if you use this link instead

[http://books.google.com/books?id=n7lwt8FKO7IC&pg=PA49...](http://books.google.com/books?id=n7lwt8FKO7IC&pg=PA49&dq=ghandi+%22bargaining+for+advantage%22#PPA50,M1)

the link posted is missing a couple of pages because of google books

<comment><USER3> Page 113, to be precise. Great book by the way.

<comment><USER4> [http://books.google.com/books?id=n7lwt8FKO7IC&pg=PA49...](http://books.google.com/books?id=n7lwt8FKO7IC&pg=PA49&dq=gandhi+)"bargaining+for+advantage"#PPA50,M1 this link helps even more. Actually, in the previous search, the word "Gandhi" is spelled wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Being thrown out of that train is what motivated Gandhi to spend his life defending the rights of the underprivileged, and giving up anything of luxury along the way. I remembered this as the story of someone who finds his vocation. It's weird to see it told as the story of a clever trick for getting into first-class.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not about cushy seats in first-class, it's about hacking the system.

You see, Gandhi is one of the most successful hackers - he hacked the first- class, then he learned from that and hacked the british empire.

<comment><USER5> If this is the story I am thinking of, then Gandhi didn't even know he wasn't allowed to be in the first class.

(The different links to the negotiation book don't seem to work, so what I am talking about is the story linked to by sfk, which I also read in the autobiography and also figures prominently in the film).

<comment><AUTHOR> Did you try the actual headline story?

He knew pefectly well he was not allowed there, he prepared and succeeded.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have sneaked into many concerts using the same techniques:

1\. Dress nicely. (It works the best when you look nicer than anyone else in the concert, especially the artists.)

2\. Immediately chat up and possibly be friend with someone who looks important. (e.g. host, venue owner, the person that would most likely to kick you out.)

3\. Have your story ready, just in case.

<comment><USER7> What stories do you use if step 3 is needed?

Also - by "sneak into" concerts you mean that you get yourself into concerts without having to pay or that you get into otherwise sold-out concerts but still pay?

<comment><USER6> In my book:

sneak into == not paying

The best story is the one that is not explanatory. The whole point is to take the focus off you. So I would usually start with asking the person how his job is going, or if the band found fix their PA, or just borrow a cigarette, etc.

If he asks directly "who are you", depend on who this person is, I'd tell him I'm with the band, with the stage crew, with the press, or a promoter.

But really, if you do it right you shouldn't need to explain anything to anyone.

<comment><USER8> So, uhh, you're stealing and then coming here to brag about it? (Not to mention comparing yourself to Gandhi...)

What's that you say? It doesn't count as stealing because you didn't deny the ticket to anybody else? Sure, but everybody else at the concert had to deal with having one extra stinking body taking up room there, didn't they?

Seriously. If you wanna steal stuff that's between you and your conscience, but bragging about it just makes you a dick.

<comment><USER6> I'm sorry if you feel insulted by my comment. I was merely approving these bargain techniques with my real life experience. And in no way would I ever compare myself to Gandhi. You must have miss-read my writing.

Sure, it's technically stealing, in the same way that downloading music is. I don't deny it.

If you could take a second to forgive my misdeed, and maybe even consider calling it "selective stealing"?

Selective because I only sneak into shows that charges $50+ by musicians who are already rich. On the other hand, I often donate money to smaller independent bands as they come through the non-profit venue I used to help at.

I hope my act will balance out (even just a little bit) the heavily screwed music industry. And if I have to endure being called a thief, so be it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't seem to get a preview on Google books, but there appear to be thousands of versions of that story on the web, e.g:

<http://www.progress.org/gandhi/gandhi03.htm>

"He wrote the station master requesting a first-class ticket and received it only because the man was not a local Boer but a Dutchman from Holland."

I don't claim that this link gives an accurate story, but I would view the negotiation story in the book with equal suspicion.

</comment><comment><USER10> Ah, fascinating. I was aware of Gandhi's actions on behalf of Indians vs. "Negroes" but hadn't heard this story.

Watch the interesting intersections of class vs. race vs. nationality. Gandhi was probably quite aware of the difference between the centuries-old Afrikaans (dutch-decescended) and the recently arrived British who would eventually destroy South Africa. This was very similar to the Scotch-Irish vs. Yankee schism in America today.

Gandhi was an Indian nationalist first and last, but would play any necessary games necessary on his way... I won't draw any further comparisons.</comment>


Abstaining From Alcohol Significantly Shortens Life - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/abstaining-from-alcohol-significantly-shortens-life-2013-12?IR=T <comment><USER2> When articles like this come out it's important to exercise a bit of healthy scepticism and look at whether this study was funded by interested corporations. This does happen, and sometimes through non-profits that are themselves fronts for corporations. See this excellent article by George Monbiot from a while back: [http://www.monbiot.com/2006/02/07/smoke- rings/](http://www.monbiot.com/2006/02/07/smoke-rings/)</comment>


CSS Challenge - <AUTHOR> http://goo.gl/y1l8

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks @faramarz a lot for the try. I cannot say that it doesn't work; it definitely does. The thing is, this solution cannot be accepted as generic. I couldn't explain all the conditions in the twitter post; my mistake. But it was rather a sarcastic post. If someone would want to try for a generic solution: 1) Horizontal centering isn't necessary. So let the DIV width occupy all the available width. 2) The height cannot be fixed. The content can vary.

I doubt if there exist any solution to this. My point is, if we are talking about Clones, Moon, Rocket Science and HTML5, a simple thing like this is not possible even today. If CSS can offer margin: 0 auto; why can't it offer something to align elements vertically center? May be, margin: auto 0;???

@faramarz, once again, thank you very much for spending time on this.

</comment><comment><USER2> Done! Works in every single browser.

      div {
      background: red;
      width: 250px;
      height: 250px;
      top: 50%;
      left: 50%;
      position: absolute;
      margin: -125px 0 0 -125px; /* Width of Element / 2 = Negative Left Margin
    				Height of Element / 2 = Negative Top Margin */
     }

Live demo <http://www.faramarzhashemi.com/valign.html></comment>


Steve Bannon (Trump Advisor) implied that Silicon Valley has too many Asian CEOs - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/16/13653490/steve-bannon-trump-presidency-chief-strategist-breitbart-tech-visa <comment><USER2> "When two-thirds or three-quarters of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia"

What version of Silicon Valley is this?

"Ascend, an Asian-American professional organization based in New York, found that although 27 percent of professionals working at those companies are Asian or Asian-American, fewer than 19 percent of managers, and just under 14 percent of executives, are." [1]

[1] [http://www.npr.org/2015/05/17/407478606/often-employees- rare...](http://www.npr.org/2015/05/17/407478606/often-employees-rarely-ceos- challenges-asian-americans-face-in-tech)

</comment><comment><USER3> Everywhere else has too many white ones IMO.</comment>


How Russia's Icebreakers Came to Dominate the Frozen Seas - <AUTHOR> https://www.rferl.org/a/the-story-of-russian-icebreaker-ships/30363257.html <comment><USER2> Amazing photos inside</comment>


Serial art thief arrested again - <AUTHOR> https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/serial-art-thief-stephane-breitwieser-arrested-again <comment><USER2> > Most of the loot was hidden in his family home. Subsequently, his mother > destroyed and threw away dozens of paintings and drawings, some by Cranach, > Bruegel and Watteau, and dumped more than a hundred works into a canal. A > pious woman, she chose not to destroy a Medieval sculpture of the Virgin > Mary, abandoning it instead in a forest chapel.

I'm curious why she chose to do this. Was she trying to hide the evidence? Did she just consider the art to be junk?

<comment><USER3> Omg she threw away a Breugel that should be prison time.

<comment><USER4> Destroying that much evidence should be prison time anyway, Breugel or not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was amazed that someone could steal so much art and imagined a sophisicated and expert professional thief with a brilliant mind for security and a taste in art. But apparently he just picked it up off the wall and walked out the door with it. You can't get away with that at most grocery stores.

<comment><USER6> There was a Russian guy recently that did exactly that [1], and then swat showed up at his home not long after.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0V8APbxMqM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0V8APbxMqM)

<comment><USER7> Wait WTF how does that even work? The guy picked up the painting while an entire crowd was looking at it, and proceeded to walk away... That's Borat level absurdity.

<comment><USER8> Many years ago at a car trade show in Amsterdam a high end luxury car was stolen under the noses of 10's of thousands of visitors and attendants. Thief #1 put a scratch in the paint of the car, thieves #2, #3 and #4 calmly drove a flatbed truck backwards through the crowded tradeshow to the stand of the brand whose car was stolen and pushed it on to remove the 'damaged car' from the trade show floor at the instructions of unseen higher ups. Their major high tech tools to get away with all this was blue overalls with the brand logo on their backs and breast pockets.

<comment><USER9> Got a link about that theft?

<comment><USER8> It was _well_ before the days of the internet, and it happened at Amsterdam Auto RAI.

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

Possibly some newspaper morgue has an article about it, it caused quite a few giggles at the time. The funny thing is that nobody could describe the perps but everybody could describe their overalls.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I couldn't understand why people steal famous art because there can't be any buyers who would feel safe about displaying it in their homes. There's no market to fence it. I tried googling for an answer and found only the explanation that there's no good rhyme or reason, the thieves are just that stupid. [https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/here-s-why-art-thieves- st...](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/here-s-why-art-thieves-steal- paintings-they-can-t-n657656)

<comment><USER11> I've looked into this before, following the same question you had. The most logical answer I found was the criminal version of an insurance policy.

Basically they would steal said artwork but instead of selling, the point is to keep it in hidden storage. Then if at some point further down the line the criminal gets arrested in relation to another crime, they use the location of the artwork as leverage during plea bargaining.

This is one of the major theories in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heists in the 90's.

<comment><USER12> I think this was going on with the mafia because the Italian legal system was conducive to it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> is he a serial prisoner now?

</comment><comment><USER14> Serial art thief pants himself into a corner... A clear picture emerges...

<comment><USER15> I think we may only be getting the broad strokes…

<comment><USER12> He will end up in the rogues gallery.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > Most of the loot was hidden in his family home. Subsequently, his mother > destroyed and threw away dozens of paintings and drawings, some by Cranach, > Bruegel and Watteau, and dumped more than a hundred works into a canal. A > pious woman, she chose not to destroy a Medieval sculpture of the Virgin > Mary, abandoning it instead in a forest chapel.

His mother is a terrible person who should go to prison for life for intentional destruction of irreplaceable cultural items in order to cover up serious crimes.

As far as the thief himself goes his own culpability is much less than hers.

<comment><USER17> Netherlands extremely rarely gives anyone an actual life sentence for anything. Plus, it's a property crime, and depends if she had knowledge of their value and intent based on that. Also, you'd need to lock-up half of the European aristocracy and most galleries for taking, and not willingly- returning, works taken from WW2 Holocaust victims and survivors. So in the grand scheme of things, she's, at most, a committer of criminal mischief.

<comment><USER16> > you'd need to lock-up half of the European aristocracy...

Is that bad?

<comment><USER8> Suggest nickname change ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Mental illness.

</comment><comment><USER19> I wonder if the fact that serial anything criminals exist at all indicates that the criminal justice system might be broken? I wonder if the deterrence aspect of law enforcement is actually working in Western countries.

<comment><USER20> > I wonder if the fact that serial anything criminals exist at all indicates > that the criminal justice system might be broken?

I'm a serial jay walker. I'm not sure that's evidence of the crumbling of western civilization.

I don't think the law should aim to eliminate all crime. In my opinion, there are systemic limits to how efficient law enforcement can me: clamp down too hard on type 2 errors, and type 1 errors rear their ugly heads.

Which isn't to say that what we've got is the best that can be.

<comment><USER21> I've heard the term jaywalking a few times (with a dispiseful tone) and looked it up now. the concept doesnt even make sense to me. here the 'weaker' have precedence over the 'stronger'. plus there's always the 'vertrauensgrundsatz' (principle of reliance) that states that you have to rely on others to behave correct (except children), but as soon as they give you a sign that this might not be the case it's _your_ duty to compensate. man I'm glad not to live in the land of the free.....

<comment><USER22> Ignoring a red light as a pedestrian carries a 5 € fine in Germany [1]. 10 € if it causes an accident. Jaywalking (crossing the street where you're not supposed to) also carries a 10 € fine.

[1] [https://www.bussgeldkatalog.org/fussgaenger/](https://www.bussgeldkatalog.org/fussgaenger/)

<comment><USER2> That's a pretty small fine for some pretty serious consequences…

<comment><USER12> It probably isn't meant to be punitive, just a deterrent. A 5p charge for plastic bags cut the usage massively in the UK.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Groupon's Hidden Influence on Yelp Reputation - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27150/ <comment><USER2> First, a direct link to Arxiv and the study: <http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1109/1109.1530v1.pdf>

Second, let's avoid talk about how "correlation doesn't imply causation". Quote:

 _They examine this effect in more detail by pinpointing reviews that specifically mention the words "Groupon" and "coupon". "Reviews mentioning either keyword are associated with star ratings that are 10% lower on average than reviews that do not, while the very small fraction of reviews mentioning both keywords are more than 20% lower on average," they say._

I'll offer an alternative to the hypothesis that "Groupon customers are terrible:" customer volume shoots up after a deal, causing service to suffer. I haven't read the paper yet, but I hoped they checked reviews for content as well as final ratings.

Still, a novel little study that takes advantage of a naturally-occurring experiment. I'd love to work on research like this in the future.

<comment><USER3> Every year, our city has 'restaurant week', where tons of local restaurants offer 3 or 4 course prix fixe menus for the same price (usually $24.99 or so).

For some of these restaurants, that price point is SIGNIFICANTLY lower than their normal price.

Inevitably, what happens, is that throngs of people who wouldn't dream of making reservations and paying $150 for a meal show up and demand the same high quality food and service for $25. Guess what - it doesn't happen.

Now those people who don't know any better, assume that the $150 is a total rip off and that the restaurant isn't any better than the $20 place down the street. It also makes life hell if you want a real 'nice' meal that week...

Is it dumb for the high end places to do this? I think so, but I guess they like to 'show support' for local restaurants or whatever. Groupon feels like it's just the same thing, one place at a time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This raises the question: Are the merchants giving poorer customer service to Groupon customers, because Grouponers are cheapskates, or are Groupon customers just jerks?</comment>


Google Starts Including AMP Content in Mobile Search Results - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/google-starts-including-amp-content-in-mobile-search-results-1456326159 <comment><USER2> I feel that Google is harming themselves (as discussed in another thread) by increasing the ad content above the fold related to search. I'm not sure how they will integrate even "recent" news into results without adjusting things.

That said, I think it's a good idea to reduce the overhead of mobile news pages. However so many of the clickbait sites are too heavy for mobile to be useful. On the occasion I see something interesting, and click on it, a lot of the time the page is barely responsive, and I'm on a relatively fast device.

I feel like it's time to start enforcing better standards on the advertisers in order to improve the usability. This is a large part of why people lean towards captive apps on mobile.</comment>


Vagrant, Docker and Ansible. WTF? - <AUTHOR> http://devo.ps/blog/2013/09/25/vagrant-docker-and-ansible-wtf.html

<comment><USER2> As far as I can tell, Docker & Ansible don't work well together.

If you provision your app using a Dockerfile, you get a bunch of cool stuff because it knows what's been applied and what isn't.

If you provision your app using ansible, you get a bunch of cool provisioning features from ansible.

I want both. It looks like you provision your app using ansible, meaning that you're missing out on a some cool Docker features. Our ansible scripts take over a minute to run even when it doesn't make any changes but one of the major reasons to use docker is because you can spin up an instance instantaneously.

<comment><USER3> Indeed, hence the numerous cheats in the playbook to make things work together. Still need some digging to figure out the perfect workflow; Dockerfile that runs some git clone vs. add of local code vs. deploy via ansible - the ansible approach still provides the flexibility to have a customized container per dev that includes one custom set of ssh keys for example to fetch code from github or alike...

<comment><USER2> One thought I had was that you could get some of the benefits of both by using a large number or "ansible" commands in a Dockerfile rather than using a single ansible-playbook command to kick off the process. You'd most of the organization features that ansible gives (like roles etc), but you would get most of the docker features.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cool. I've done something similar for testing Puppet manifeste here: [https://github.com/anderssv/puppet- docker](https://github.com/anderssv/puppet-docker) .

Like Bryan points out I would love to construct something that utilises the features of Docker in production too, but right now it's just a awesome testing tool with minimal turn around.</comment>


Show HN: Flushout - A distributed data model based on event sourcing - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/saarw/flushout <comment><USER2> Nice! I had built something similar for an offline react native mobile app three years ago, then regretted I had not simply used Google Firestore. How does Flushout compare to Firestore? How do you solve access control?

<comment><AUTHOR> Flushout is not a hosted solution like Firestore, it's a component for systems that have their own backend that handles access control and need a data model.

Flushout isn't tied to any particular cloud provider (my backend is running in AWS), and lets you preserve a history of every update to the model to make it easy to implement undo or just display historical updates to the document. As Flushout can also send individual updates to sync models, it may also be more efficient than sending snapshot updates (especially for large documents), but don't know how Firestore transfers its model updates internally...</comment></comment>


Teenager killed himself hours after Wonga cleared out his account - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/sep/25/teenager-killed-himself-wonga-cleared-out-account <comment><USER2> That story has so shaken me. Just learned now that these Payday loan ops charge on average 391% to 521%.

[http://www.responsiblelending.org/payday-lending/tools- resou...](http://www.responsiblelending.org/payday-lending/tools- resources/fast-facts.html?referrer=https://www.google.com/)

Clearing a bank account could obviously lead to more significant damage to society at large than a loan company that "only made" 75% off the original loan.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Curious if this is the YC incubated company or some other entity?

<comment><USER3> There's a YC incubated company named Wonga? Searching "Wonga YC" brought few results.

Their Techcrunch article doesn't mention YC... [http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/07/wonga-extends-its-payday- lo...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/07/wonga-extends-its-payday-loans-to- small-businesses-in-uk/)

Previous discussion of Wonga using a fake law firm for enhanced collections, doesn't mention them as a YC company: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7943094](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7943094)</comment></comment>


The Golden Age of Podcasts Is Coming to an End - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@juicelake/the-golden-age-of-podcasts-is-coming-to-an-end-7503fb22f533 <comment><USER2> I listen to several podcasts.

I learned from this article that Spotify bought Gimlet Media for 200 million.

That's about it.</comment>


Your Job? Ensure this NEVER Happens to You - <AUTHOR> http://unicornfree.com/2011/your-job-ensure-this-never-happens-to-you/

<comment><USER2> > What a product needs to survive, of course, is cash. And that has to be > baked in from the very start; the product-baby must be trained from infancy, > as it were. A product's gotta have what it takes to convince people to turn > over their hard-earned money… or it's going to end badly.

Amy's been putting out some really, really good writing lately. If you missed it, definitely check out "Don't Follow Your Passion" too -

<http://unicornfree.com/2011/dont-follow-your-passion/>

I actually laughed out loud at the "It's an age-old story" intro when I read it. Very good stuff.</comment>


Which countries are mentioned the most on Hacker News? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bemmu.com/which-countries-are-mentioned-the-most-on-hacker-news <comment><USER2> There are many comments remarking on how Jordan because of the large number of stories mentioning Michael Jordan (both of them) is causing problems.

Apparently people are unaware that this problem is at least partially solved in modern named entity recognition systems.

The first story from a search for "Jordan"[1] is "Machine-Learning Maestro Michael Jordan on the Delusions of Big Data and Others".

Stanford NLP[2] tags "Michael Jordan" as PERSON.

The first story mentioning Jordan as a country is "Internet Blocking Begins In Jordan". It tags Jordan as LOCATION

Spacy's POS tagging tags "Michael" and "Jordan" as a compound person in the first example[3] and "Jordan" as GPE (geo-poltical entity) in the second[4]

[1] [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Jordan&sort=byPopularity&prefi...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Jordan&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

[2] [http://corenlp.run/](http://corenlp.run/) (annoyingly the state can't be passed via URL parameters)

[3] [https://api.spacy.io/displacy/index.html?full=Machine- Learni...](https://api.spacy.io/displacy/index.html?full=Machine- Learning%20Maestro%20Michael%20Jordan%20on%20the%20Delusions%20of%20Big%20Data%20and%20Others)

[4] [https://api.spacy.io/displacy/index.html?full=Internet%20Blo...](https://api.spacy.io/displacy/index.html?full=Internet%20Blocking%20Begins%20In%20Jordan)

<comment><USER3> I imagine it's a lot easier to tag "Michael Jordan" (correctly spelled) as a person than "Micheal Jordan".

<comment><USER2> Ha. Fixed, thanks.

(Note that the headlines were correctly spelled, so the computer part worked. The failure was at the human end..)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder how well this corresponds to the classic Heatmap xkcd comic; i.e. is the distribution of mentions not just a proxy measure for the geographical location of HN users..? Surely, you're more likely to submit a post about your home country since you can relate to that.

[https://xkcd.com/1138/](https://xkcd.com/1138/)

<comment><USER5> But would that really work in this case? China is the number 2 mentioned country and while I don't have any demographic information, I find it hard to believe that there would be that many Chinese on HN. Well, not just any Chinese, but Chinese nationalists (people who still feel like China is "home")?

I guess it's possible it could be the work of their "reputation management" online guerrilla tactics. Though, the people engaging in that work generally aren't even Chinese, they're usually subcontractors paid by the Chinese to promote a "positive China" (in my experience, promoting a positive China usually means downplaying or mitigating whatever bad news has come out that day, or if nothing is going on, Japan bashing is on the docket).

For whatever reason, people are under the false assumption that China only tries to manipulate public opinion and spread propaganda domestically. This couldn't be further from the truth. I remember Digg.com having to sue and fight to get the Chinese to stop gaming their system (source: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Water_Army#Legal_prob...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Water_Army#Legal_problems))

People know that the U.S government does it, but they either forget or ignore the fact that _other_ countries do it too. Maybe they just underestimate the scope, or are wholly ignorant of it because they believe they haven't encountered such propaganda before (believing something like that would be "obvious"). But it isn't. Hell, RussiaToday (RT.com) exists almost exclusively for this purpose (to spread russia's narrative of world events). China has their own government ran/directed version as well, Xinhua.com. You see these two websites submitted in excess to reddit and other social media sites.

And do you know what's so great about reddit and HN to a person looking to spread or push an ideology or narrative? The points. They can keep track of what works, what doesn't, how well it works, and they can keep track of their employees. They can see how well each employee is doing at their job. It provides a measurement for them. A quantifiable piece of information to gauge the value of their work. Something they can bring to their bosses.

I know I'm getting off topic here but I'm actually (surprisingly) not surprised India is so high if xkcd's premise holds. While I don't see many Chinese commentors, I do see loads of highly intelligent Indians here. I met one last year on HN who I had do some freelance work for me.

<comment><USER4> > _But would that really work in this case? China is the number 2 mentioned > country and while I don 't have any demographic information, I find it hard > to believe that there would be that many Chinese on HN._

I follow you up to this point (although I don't necessarily agree)

> _Well, not just any Chinese, but Chinese nationalists_

Why would you have to be a nationalist to post about China? In fact, you could submit a "China is bad" post. Everything after this point seems to miss my point completely.

Also, a sister comment didn't read the part of the submission where it stated that "This only counts news stories posted, not comments."

<comment><USER5> > Why would you have to be a nationalist to post about China?

Because the guy I replied to said: " _Surely, you 're more likely to submit a post about your home country_"

I'm an American but my grandparents are from Ireland. I personally feel no connection to Ireland nor do I have any idea what's going on over there. It's any other country as far as I'm concerned. I wouldn't post news about the country to HN. However, if I did, I would be a Irish Nationalist. Feeling any sort of loyalty to a country (whatever the reason or justification) is nationalism. It's literally the definition of the word.

> "This only counts news stories posted, not comments."

I'm not sure that distinction matters for my comment. It may for the study, but my comment was a bit of a tangent anyways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> HN Search on Algolia says India is more mentioned than China. India has 37,236 results but China has only 15,228.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=china&sort=byPopularity&prefix...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=china&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

<comment><USER7> Interestingly, if I type _china_ I get 15,228 results but then after I hit _enter_ it drops to 8,682. 8,318 if I wrap it in quotes.

Ah, actually, if I leave it for a minute it bounces back up to original number.

This is all very curious behaviour!

Edit it's the same for India too, btw

<comment><USER8> I observed that it shows results like 'Indie', 'Indians' etc. , when you type 'India', until you press <enter>. On pressing <enter> there is a finality to the search, and it removes other possibilities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here[1] are the countries sorted by stories per capita which shows which countries are over represented.

If you want to play with the script that fetches the population numbers, go to Tools > Script Editor and add your Wolfram Alpha API key.

[1] [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UX3OvN6MXDkuCiLpKPW2...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UX3OvN6MXDkuCiLpKPW2xB74UQz8F9KVapm7Xy_JLCg/edit#gid=0)

</comment><comment><USER10> At least Finland isn't a poor second to Belgium [1] in this ranking.

[1] [http://www.montypython.net/scripts/finland.php](http://www.montypython.net/scripts/finland.php)

<comment><USER11> Suomi mainittu

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does this under-count the US? A lot of stories will be about "California", and they don't feel the need to say "California the US"

<comment><USER13> Many stories are pertinent to a particular geography but fail to mention it at all. Commenters seem often to assume all readers are in the USA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This looks like it's searching literally for just the country name in text (and I guess that's all it can really do). Of course, this slightly favours countries with a name that might have another meaning (China, Turkey) or might represent another geographic location (Georgia).

<comment><USER15> I'm guessing the number of stories about people's "China" tea sets & "Turkey" dinners are statistically minimal on Hacker News.

Couldn't tell you how much Georgia is skewed, as a quick scan shows they are almost all from the state. Being number 40 on the list, I suspect it isn't that interesting to most people.

<comment><USER14> A quick scan revealed a story about going 'cold turkey' but, I'm sure you're right. I was actually expecting some thanksgiving-related stories; I'm sure they're there!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Actually he talks about "popularity" however without knowing how many people are posting here from japan, this says nothing at all. Also as soon as you don't analyze the posts you don't know if it's popularity or not since you don't analyze the content. Maybe they talk about "I dislike something in Japan"? statistics only make sense when you have a bigger picture, everything else is just guessing how it could be and not how it is.

<comment><USER17> I think the post makes it pretty clear that it's about how popular _stories_ about various countries are, it's not trying to establish a popularity ranking of the countries themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> HN barely pays attention to anything outside of silly valley, in or outside of the US. Lots of spam and low quality marketing content for shitty west coast startups.

</comment><comment><USER19> Interesting, though a lot of posts seem to be about the US by default.

I see he's missing Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as mappings for the UK. It would also be useful to add capital or major cities as synonyms (e.g. Paris, London, Berlin...).

<comment><USER20> I would love to have the ability to tag a post as "relevant outside of the US" vs. "not relevant outside of the US" for things like tax, identity theft and banking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I find it curious that Austria ranks last in countries mentioned (with >100), but ranks #4 in upvotes. This is a very interesting and big discrepancy. Are the Austrians really that silent and excellent?

But from my personal experiences in popular european culture they are compared to their more northern european fellas louder (and they do publish a lot) and of the same kind of excellence.

<comment><USER22> It's lumped together with Germany in a big chunk of the few submissions where it gets mentioned, so that could explain the similar scores.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Surprisingly Title wise the result is bit different:

India in title was more than China: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=India&sort=byPopularity&prefix...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=India&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=China&sort=byPopularity&prefix...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=China&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

And United States lesser than both:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=United%20States&sort=byPopular...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=United%20States&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

<comment><USER24> "United States" doesn't account for "US", "USA" or "America"

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Count for country Georgia is wrong, because it's associated to U.S state Georgia. I wonder how its possible to distinguish these two.

<comment><AUTHOR> I suspect there are some other homonyms in there as well. Luckily most country names are not used that much for other meanings.

<comment><USER26> "Jordan" is. Most of these posts are about Michael Jordan, not the country Jordan. That messes up the entire analysis/rating.

<comment><USER2> Michael Jordan is a homonym as well. Apparently there was some basketballer with the same name as the famous AI researcher[1].

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It is a bit unfortunate he omitted Korea (both Koreas, since it is ambiguous). I would expect North Korea to have shown up quite often. There appears to be a certain morbid fascination with that country on this site (which I can somehow understand).

</comment><comment><USER28> Might be fun to see EU countries combined under single label.

</comment><comment><USER29> Are they different from [http://stackoverflow.com/](http://stackoverflow.com/)?

</comment><comment><USER30> Average score is a very poor measure. Because averages get pulled down heavily by extremes. Not a proper way to analyze such series.

<comment><USER17> You should write your own post! I'd be curious to see score compared to country population.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> How can I be notified when a particular country is mentioned on HN, whether stories or comments?

</comment><comment><USER32> #51-#54 have practically the same combination of colors on the flags...

<comment><USER33> Almost, because Belgium has black while the rest have blue

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> really? you just left out korea completely? that sucks. the confounding of north and south korea would have been informative nonetheless.

</comment><comment><USER35> I see South Africa is nowhere on the list :/

</comment><comment><USER36> Austria has the least mentions but is in 4th place when it comes to upvotes per post. That's what I'd call efficiency ;)

</comment><comment><USER37> No mentions of New Zealand? :(

</comment><comment><USER38> Jordan's results are wrong because it's counting things like "Michael Jordan" etc.

</comment><comment><USER39> Well, Turkey has double meanings which makes it wrongly #24 :)

</comment><comment><USER40> feeling kinda pround seeing india on no 3

</comment><comment> amar-singh Mostly US ...

</comment><comment><USER41> On a related note: Most articles in my medium.com-digests originate in the US and focus on US-discourse.

It's not interesting to read yet another debate on state health-care or dating, if you're living in europe where state health-care is really a no- brainer and dating isn't that structured.

I asked the medium-team if I could somehow configure my digest, so that I have more diversity in the origins of the articles they send me.

They declined, so I stopped reading it. It's a shame. I backed them on kickstarter originally.

<comment><USER42> What sort of structure does dating have in the US? (Genuinely curious, I've never thought about this before)

<comment><USER20> The idea that a meeting is a date or not has to be clarified. You can't just have a drink with a colleague, and let the romantic interest to-be-determined. Americans, as I understand it, tend to have "the talk" which is a clear idiom for an actual conversation where they mutually decide to "be exclusive", i.e. not take dates with other people. Timing, number of dates and all that are also fairly established.

I have regularly seen in several countries in Europe a relationship going from inexistent to committed, public and exclusive in a matter of hours. "Having the talk" is often understood as an intent to break-up (because it sounds like "We need to talk"). Whether a meeting has a romantic interest is never really expressed: it's generally either obvious or purposely vague than anything. That has lead many American friends in Europe very frustrated with the dating scene, because it comes off as unreadable. Europeans in the US can find the formalism icky, but they generally adapt more easily.

There are also far more differences between European countries (wolf-calls are apparently common in Italy; Scandinavia can come of as the opposite) than with the US — but formalism is certainly the big one.

<comment><USER43> Thanks for this post. As a European I wasn't aware these rules actually existed. I thought they were merely "Hollywood" tropes to have explicit romantic interest in fiction while keeping a G rating.

<comment><USER20> A lot of it might have started that way —French kissing for instance has a complicated and not well documented history of misunderstood euphemisms– but they have influenced culture and expectations. Most people have lived through less relationships and break-ups in real life than they've seen in movies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Themes:

1 United States: masters of the Universe

2 China: evils commies, but biggest capitalists

3 India: H-1B source

4 United Kingdom: mother of colonial masters

5 Japan: funny robots

6 Russia: evil soviets conquering the free world

7 Canada: mounted police

8 Germany: nazi cars

9 Australia: other indigenous people genocidal colonists, but more discrete

10 France: messy/ordered, free/binding systems no one understands; Parisss

11 Israel: origin of half of the problems of the world, but nothing can be said against them for they are friends of the masters (even masters cannot say anything), so let us talk about drones

12 Spain: collapsing tomayto economics

13 Brazil: bikini crimelords, evil socialists

15 Pakistan : like H-1B, but terrorists

16 Netherlands: technical devices for growers

17 Sweden: boring devices

18 Greece: collapsing goat economics, might become evil socialists

19 Italy: romantic bunga-bunga

20 Ireland: collapsing potayto economics, less Irish than 4th generation American-Irish masters.

21 Mexico: builds and feeds Silicon Valley

22 Switzerland: safe, safes, savings

<comment><USER45> > 9 Australia: other indigenous people genocidal colonists, but more discrete

Psst. _Discrete_ is when you're doing math with integers and exploring non- continuous phenomenon. _Discreet_ is when you're trying to keep a low profile. Pass it on.

> 11 Israel: origin of half of the problems of the world

Certainly _involved_ in half the problems, but is it the origin or is it the destination of the problems? One way or another: some day long after they're finally vaporized by atom bombs, history will surely look back on us and wonder what was wrong with humanity in our day and age (while pointing fingers about the next brewing crisis, obviously)

<comment><USER46> Israel is neither involved in half the problems of world nor is it the cause of most the problems with which it is involved.

Look at all the problems of the world. The vast majority have nothing to do with Israel. This holds by a count of problems as well as by weighting by magnitude or people affected. (Certainly it is featured in the media more often than other conflicts.)

As for the problems with which Israel is involved, I don't want to start a political discussion, but I must dispute wott's assertion and say it is more a target of violence than an instigator.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> No wonder its American-centric. Is statistics for the USSR and Russia aggregated as single line for "Russia"? These are two different countries.

<comment><USER48> I can't find any reference to the USSR on that page. Funnily enough I can't find any reference to Yugoslavia, Zaire, Czechoslovakia, the Ottoman Empire, Babylonia, Olmec or Mesopotamia either.

<comment><USER47> Have you checked the whole 1.1 GB uncompressed JSON for :The USSR? Should be more than twenty.

<comment><USER48> I'm sure it is, as I'm sure some of my other examples are. There's even 123 results for Mordor. Still no reason for any of them to go in the rankings.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Instant QR Feedback Codes - <AUTHOR> http://feedback.codes <comment><AUTHOR> Allow customers to report a problem within seconds, privacy protected. Imagine putting a call button everywhere you want. What do you think about this idea?</comment>


List of Free Science Books - <AUTHOR> http://physicsdatabase.com/book-list-by-title/ <comment><USER2> VIRUS/MALWARE ALERRT! It quickly prompts to to download malware disguised as a Firefox update. It's in a zipped folder

</comment><comment><USER3> I attempted to check the list, but the website tried to get me to download malware disguised as a Firefox update.

<comment><USER4> here also. just going to the hn link produced this

[https://ibb.co/vZGpDtf](https://ibb.co/vZGpDtf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> So I want to start off and say that there are some good books on this list and that there is a decent range of topics: biology, chemistry, mathematics, and physics. However, it is like 90% physics books and not a whole lot in the computer science or engineering fields which are massive. I own 20-30 textbooks in my very narrow sub-slice of a subsection of electrical engineering. This is a terrific start, but we need a whole lot more.

Wikipedia is completely inadequate in my field too.

<comment><USER6> I'd actually be really interested to know what causes discrepancies in subject matter authorship in Wikipedia.

Physics, for example, is rife with very thorough articles, many of which are written for a graduate level. (Not everything is right everywhere, but a surprising amount for the volume.) Lots and lots of thoroughly explained equations.

Computer science is also very well documented, with numerous examples.

Materials science is very poor though, and with biology it seems to depend. Evolutionary theory seems popular but detailed taxonomy entries do not.

I'm curious why this is. Do professionals or enthusiasts in different fields really have such gaps in their willingness to contribute? In computer science, open source software could provide some prior art to convince people that Wikipedia is worth contributing to, but what about the rest?

<comment><USER5> To be honest, I'm not sure I ever thought too and mine is sparse. I've repeatedly heard that contributing is a difficult process.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> [http://physicsdatabase.com/free-math-books/](http://physicsdatabase.com/free- math-books/)</comment>


Facebook, the PR Firm - <AUTHOR> https://themargins.substack.com/p/facebook-the-pr-firm <comment><AUTHOR> The money quote:

I read Facebook less as a tech company, but instead a communications one. Not a telecom communications, but more like a PR / marketing consultancy. There's nothing original about Facebook. It's a company that hires people to build others' ideas, and, more often than not, it does that better and faster than them too. And when it can't do that, it just buys them outright. There is a lot of building, but the ideas are outsourced. But what Facebook is really good at is actually doing all this while fighting what seems to be a never- ending, at least since 2016 or so, PR battle while not giving an inch.</comment>


Comcast to handle DNS-over-HTTPS for Firefox-using subscribers - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/26/firefox_comcast_dns_https/ <comment><USER2> > And yet, here's Comcast providing a DNS-over-HTTPS service for Firefox fans, > allowing it to inspect and exploit their incoming queries if it so wishes.

I feel like this made the whole DoH thing meaningless, as Comcast will still be able to collect and correlate user's identity and browsing history.</comment>


What career should I choose? - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/What-career-should-I-choose-4/answer/Auren-Hoffman?share=1 <comment><USER2> Many of the best careers are ones that have a fairly high degree of specialization and an official and well recognized track for certification.

Grind hard to meet all of the official certification requirements and do your best to immerse yourself in the body of knowledge. Usually this results in a long career full of flexibility and good pay.

Examples: Actuaries. Consultants. Lawyers. Professional Engineers (Civil, Mechanical, etc). Auto Mechanics. Paramedic.

There are tons of them off the beaten path if you look for recognized certifications.

Also look for quality of life not prestige. There are plenty of great "blue collar" positions with good pay and work life balance.

</comment><comment><USER3> _Your career should be dependent on the timescale that you operate best in._

What about the hiring market that pays you best in</comment>


A Curated List of Wordpress and Wordpress.com REST API Apps - <AUTHOR> http://www.justthink.it/wordpress-rest-api-applications/ <comment><AUTHOR> I haven't found a list like this the net, so I thought it would be interesting to have one.</comment>


Walkthrough of a D2C rebrand - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@shwinnabego/rebranding-modern-mammals-e32bdfe966f1 <comment><AUTHOR> I operate a small digital studio that focuses on branding, design and dev for direct-to-consumer brands. This was our first effort managing all of the pieces end-to-end, so thought I'd share what that process looks like.</comment>


Château Sucker – Wine Fraud (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/news/features/rudy-kurniawan-wine-fraud-2012-5/ <comment><USER2> Speaking about wines from the 1960s, I have cool story. My dad is a refrigeration engineer for large installations. Many years ago when I was around my teens, he did a job for a winery. The winery was left from the times of the Soviets (it was in one of the republics). Well, as a thank you they gave him a bottle of wine from the 1960s.

The bottle looked like crap on the outside, it was covered in dust and grime. We kept it for a bit, then at a birthday or some other occasion, maybe New Years, we opened it. And it was, well ... different. It did not taste like wine. It wasn't spoiled or bad. It wasn't vinegar. It was rather smooth and "velvety". Had very good and distinctive taste. I have tried other wines since then, but nothing like it. Didn't try any vintage since then, because it is too expensive, and I am not that much into it (A $10 bottle is good enough for me). But I always remember that as a fun story, how growing up as a family barely able to scrape by, got to taste vintage 1960s wine.

</comment><comment><USER3> Three years later, this is still an amazing story. It has less to do with wine than with the ease with which certain types of people can be separated from their money.

For the exceptionally curious, the message board thread referenced in the article is still up: [http://www.wineberserkers.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=6117...](http://www.wineberserkers.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=61172)

<comment><USER4> Wine is an area ripe for fraud. I seem to have inherited a fairly good palette from my mother. I'm probably a super taster for some things (which is often annoying as some smells are enough to strike me down when most other people can't even detect them). Although I'm not super serious about it, I enjoy wine and have been part of some wine appreciation societies.

There are a lot of people who are really passionate and knowledgeable about wine. They are true experts in the area, but it is striking how often it becomes apparent that they have a really serious physical handicap -- they can't taste the wine. I'd like to invoke Dunning Kruger here, because these experts are usually completely unaware that they can not taste the wine. However, it is much more complicated than that.

As an example, imagine that you went to an art gallery. A crowd of people are gathered around one picture. One person, obviously very knowledgeable about art and art history is waxing poetic about the use of colour, the balance of round shapes with square shapes and the almost beastial quality of the theme. You look at the picture and instantly recognize it as "Dogs Playing Poker". Of the 20-30 people looking at the picture, you realize that you are the only one who can actually see the dogs and notice that they are playing poker. Everybody else is entranced with vague, undefined shapes and mysterious gradients of colour.

You say, "It's 'Dogs Playing Poker'" and the esteemed expert beams in your direction saying, "You are absolutely right! Do you see the green here, it's almost like the felt on a gambling table. These shapes here seem to be alive with animal ferocity. I like your description of playing poker, as it fits well with the whimsical nature of the composition." The others in the group nod approvingly.

Someone who has a really good palette and who has trained it well can easily tell who can taste the wine and who can't -- just in the same way that most people can tell who is visually impaired and who isn't. And because the ability to taste the wine to that level is really, really rare, the experts who have a disability are often completely unaware of it -- they are miles better than your average person who has not studied the subject every minute of their adult life. So the wool is already over their eyes, so to speak.

The thing I'm incredulous about is the lack of due diligence from the auction houses. Someone claims to be selling hundreds of thousands of dollars of incredibly rare wine dating from WWII and before. When someone asks where a wine was originally bought, the seller says he will have to look it up. There is _no_ provenance at all!!! "Oh I just happened to have this bottle of 1923 Bordeaux in my basement". Pull the other one... So from that perspective, it truly is amazing how gullible people are.

<comment><USER5> On the other hand people have curious tastes. I enjoy some "stinky" cheeses but I do not enjoy "stinky" tofu. In a way, this illustrates that what is palatable and refined is very whimsical.

In the middle ages, for example, sweet wines were drunk on special occasions. Today, not many people would think too highly of sweet wines. So tastes change. The point is there is no good and better wine, just wines you like more and ones you like less, but for no discernible reason, other than present "tastes."

<comment><USER6> Not many people would think too highly of sweet wines?

I might have a biased perspective because of my being French, but sweet wines (in all its varieties) are rather sought after here. Wines like Montbazillac, Loupiac, Pineau des Charentes, Sauternes, the wide gamut of wines from Alsace and Jura are all respected and recognized as "the good stuff".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This story reads a bit like a rehash of the Hardy "Jefferson Bottles" Rodenstock story, right down to being tripped up by Bill Koch:

[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/09/03/the- jefferson-b...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/09/03/the-jefferson- bottles)

</comment><comment><USER8> There was a great recent podcast about Wine Fraud from How Stuff Works: [http://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/podcasts/how-wine-fraud- wo...](http://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/podcasts/how-wine-fraud-works/)</comment>


ZhongGuanCun: The next silicon valley - <AUTHOR> http://steveblank.com/2013/04/13/zhongguancun-in-beijing-chinas-silicon-valley-part-4-of-5/

<comment><USER2> I work in zhongguancun, it's not the next valley. Beijing just has too many problems with traffic and pollution to be the next tech hotspot, not to mention an over emphasis on SOEs. Given protections from the government that favor home grown champions, there is also a distinct lack of innovation, even most of wechat's features were ripped off from somewhere else.

</comment><comment><USER3> Read this and see Steve Blank get sold a bill of goods. Kai Fu Lee and Innovation Works make money by charging western investors for the privilege of funding Chinese clones. This is why they play up the "copy to China" model as if it is some sort of grand innovation. Most HN teams could run circles around these guys with their eyes closed.

Reality is that their terms for financing are hilariously punitive -- real entrepreneurs with traction and revenue won't touch them unless their businesses are profitless sinkholes. But did I fail to mention China's aggregate growth figures and imply that I have anything to do with them? And do YOU want outsized returns and enjoy lightweight blogging platforms and social/mobile html5 games??? Flip. Flip. Flip!

</comment><comment><USER4> its a lie, zhongguancun could never be the next silicon valley if it is in beijing

ask anyone who have come to beijing, let them talk about the problem to you</comment>


Tell HN: My 9YO son said: "Dad! Stop reading Hacker News" - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Does he mean "stop reading HN", or "stop reading HN _to me_ "?

If he means "stop reading it to me", yeah, I'm with him. Having someone consistently reading stuff to you that they see on the internet (not just HN) gets old, especially if it's stuff that you're not as interested in as they are.

If he means "stop reading it", though... one of my biggest regrets from those days is how often I was too busy doing stuff I wanted to do to be available for my kids. I regret how often I chose to do something else rather than give them love.

Make sure you love your kids more than you love HN. Make sure that they _know_ that you love them more than you love HN. If that puts a crimp in your reading HN, so be it. Love them anyway.

</comment><comment><USER3> Dad, drop your hands and back away from the computer. Nobody has to get hurt.

</comment><comment><USER4> My son is 7, and he's been saying that for about 4 years now. :)

It's become a bad dad joke. He'll ask me to look up some origami, and I'll go to HN. But seriously, he's gotten used to me sharing really interesting articles and conversations from HN. I think he'll start to enjoy it himself sometime in the next ~5 years.

<comment><USER5> Speaking of dad jokes.

When my son searches using siri/voice and I'm in the room/car I yell out PRINCESS at the end of all his searches.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> He told you to think about Donald Trump, transgenders, or suffering in Syria , right ?

</comment><comment><USER7> Ahhh the warm embrace of the orange band on top.

</comment><comment><USER8> Spend as much time with your kids as you can while they are still young. They grow up fast.

</comment><comment><USER9> Well, why don't you?

</comment><comment><USER10> Of course he did. :)</comment>


Alan Kay on Why is FP seen as the opposite of OOP rather than an addition to it - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/Why-is-functional-programming-seen-as-the-opposite-of-OOP-rather-than-an-addition-to-it/answer/Alan-Kay-11?share=1 <comment><USER2> I find this post a bit wordy but interesting. It notably points out well how the two approaches to deal with the state of a system, using versions or overwriting it, are in competition since a long time and in various domain of computer sciences.

Alan also cites a paper about [Worlds: Controlling the Scope of Side Effects]([http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011001_final_worlds.pdf](http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011001_final_worlds.pdf)). A hot topic in the functional programming world. That paper makes me remember that ideas from FP and OO can mutually improve (an idea well developed in this short video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSmkqocn0oQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSmkqocn0oQ).</comment>


Ask HN: Recommend Log Sanitizers - <AUTHOR> When you have logs that need to be "sanitized" (i.e., clear any identifying information like IP addresses, host names, usernames, etc.), what tools do you find most useful? <comment><USER2> We've had this problem, and ended up having to write it ourselves. There are a lot of patterns that identify data as potentially sensitive, and being able to redact this is part of something we've created.

It's open source and written in Go -- so you can see the types of data that we've identified as needing redaction:

[https://github.com/replicatedhq/troubleshoot/blob/e42b7c3d77...](https://github.com/replicatedhq/troubleshoot/blob/e42b7c3d7747cbf0b6e2058745e889f8e03e6f63/pkg/redact/redact.go#L39)

</comment><comment><USER3> You may be interested in Sentry's data scrubber to remove things like credit card numbers, password and API keys: [https://github.com/getsentry/sentry/blob/95767d455b8004ec4b4...](https://github.com/getsentry/sentry/blob/95767d455b8004ec4b4c5026d84b64b6348e6d37/src/sentry/utils/data_scrubber.py#L39)</comment>


Unauthorized Access to or Acquisition of Chili's Grill and Bar Guest Data - <AUTHOR> http://brinker.com/mediaroom/partials/newsdetail.html?news_id=135394 <comment><USER2> This is a very easy list of things they want you to do:

1\. Contact the nationwide credit-reporting agencies as soon as possible to 2\. Add fraud alert 3\. Place a "security freeze" on your credit account: with experian, trans union, equifax 4\. Watch Bills, Statements and Mailing Lists 5\. Contact the Federal Trade Commission, if you suspect or know that you are the victim of identity theft (report to their fraud dept) 6\. If you believe you are a victim of identity theft you should immediately report same to law enforcement and/or your state attorney general

Serious question: given that this happens quite frequently (with with Equifax! One of the places where you must go to report this stuff), are there any services that do some of the above steps automatically on your behalf?

Also, this was posted here a while ago: some excellent advice —> [https://www.kalzumeus.com/2017/09/09/identity-theft- credit-r...](https://www.kalzumeus.com/2017/09/09/identity-theft-credit- reports/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Not surprising. I think it's been written how easy it is to hack into PA systems at restaurants. Apparently they all have remote dial-in features secured by nothing more than a numerical pin.

</comment><comment><USER4> Cue the chorus!

"I want my databack.. databack.. databack.. databack.."

<comment><USER5> Came here for this comment. +1 was not disappointed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This press release is from May 18th, quite a while ago.

</comment><comment><USER7> Can you change the title so it's not in AllCaps?

</comment><comment><USER8> Ugg.... All-Caps.</comment>


Intelsat Signs First Launch Agreement With SpaceX - <AUTHOR> http://www.techtaffy.com/intelsat-signs-first-launch-agreement-with-spacex/ <comment><USER2> Link to SpaceX press announcement submitted here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4039313>

No discussion as of this time.</comment>


Injectable oxygen keeps people alive without breathing - <AUTHOR> http://techandfacts.com/injectable-oxygen/

<comment><USER2> Oxygenation is only part of the problem, so I'm a little wary of the title "Injectable oxygen _keeps people alive_ without breathing" [emphasis added].

EDIT: The actual paper's [2] title and abstract reads " _Boosting_ Oxygenation During Acute Respiratory Failure - A new microparticle-based oxygen-delivery technology has been developed for _short-term resuscitation_ of pulmonary function" [emphasis added].

The real problem is ultimately _ventilation_ , or gas exchange at the alveoli. When it's impaired, both oxygenation and removal of carbon dioxide are affected. One result is respiratory acidosis. There is some literature[1] indicating the body can tolerate such acidosis better in the absence of hypoxemia so the cited idea may have merit as a stopgap measure, but I'm not sure how effective this scheme would be in near or complete _absence_ of ventilation - like the example cited where the little girl's lungs are full of blood.

[1] - Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome: Adjuncts to Lung-Protective Ventilation; [http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/410886_2](http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/410886_2)

[2] - [http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/4/140/140fs21.abstract?sid...](http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/4/140/140fs21.abstract?sid=129ecfae-12f1-4fc4-8b72-2e0395799de2)

<comment><USER3> The bigger problem is oxygenation, at least in the short term. You can worry about ventilation later.

Lack of oxygen delivery from the blood will kill the brain sooner than the acidosis. Specifically, if this substance actually existed in a working form usable by humans, I could imagine its frequent use in pulseless electrical activity arrest. In PEA arrest, you fix the arrest by fixing the underlying problem; hypoxemia is one of the catch-all problems, and such a technology could permit you to intervene on hypoxemia even before you get airway control.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, big cause of PEA is hypoxia - delivery of this substance _directly_ to an end organ's (brain) vasculature reliably and quickly (albeit in the absence of efficient _circulation_ ) is an interesting thought.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A research article about work by the same researcher:

[http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/4/140/140ra88](http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/4/140/140ra88)

There have been several submissions of articles to Hacker News based on press releases from that researcher's lab that go far beyond the firm research findings here. This is preliminary research. Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, reminds readers of press releases about scientific research what to look for in his online essay, "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation."

[http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html](http://norvig.com/experiment- design.html)

The preliminary experimental findings here are a LONG way from showing that human beings can breathe underwater to do work underwater without scuba apparatus, or that patients with severely damaged lung tissue can recover from that life-threatening condition.

<comment><USER5> Such a wet blanket you are! :-) Ok so the actual research doesn't live up to the press release, I for one wasn't particularly surprised by that.

I was pleasantly surprised though that they managed to get cell/oxygen transfer in bodily fluids without hemoglobin. One of the challenges of heart/lung machines is the variability of the oxygen absorption leading to variable oxygen levels during a procedure that have post operative effects. So if its even possible to replace the current oxygenation in a heart/lung machine with an injector/cleaner of oxygen laced nano-particles it seems plausible it would improve outcomes.

We will ignore for the moment that a "bad guy" would love to mix up a Malatov cocktail with a shot of this stuff for a bit more punch.

If this stuff was shelf stable one could imagine and AED that would be even better than the current setup, both keeping oxygen levels within spec and shocking the heart when needed, of course we still need to work on robo- insertion of IV needles [1].

[1] [https://www.stanford.edu/group/sailsbury_robotx/cgi- bin/sali...](https://www.stanford.edu/group/sailsbury_robotx/cgi- bin/salisbury_lab/?page_id=265)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > "Some of the most convincing experiments were the early ones," Dr. Kheir > said. "We drew each other's blood, mixed it in a test tube with the > microparticles, and watched blue blood turn immediately red, right before > our eyes."

That sounds very unconvincing to me, considering that actual human blood is never blue, not even when deoxygenated.

<comment><USER7> Blood from arteries are light red, while blood from veins is dark red. I don't know, but could not 'blue blood' be a term used for deoxygenated blood?

<comment><USER8> Or just someone without medical training going by what they see, I mean I look at my veins in my arms and they look blue but I have no idea why that is.

<comment><USER9> That's just an optical effect caused by the fact that the veins are (normally at least) underneath the skin. Even oxygen poor blood is not blue.

<comment><USER8> Yeah I figured something like that.

I found this very detailed explanation, in a nutshell skin scatters light. [https://www.imt.liu.se/edu/courses/TBMT36/pdf/blue.pdf](https://www.imt.liu.se/edu/courses/TBMT36/pdf/blue.pdf)

And this list of animals with actual blue blood, when its healthy and oxygenated not de-oxygenated: [http://www.buzzfeed.com/donnad/10-animals-that- bleed-blue](http://www.buzzfeed.com/donnad/10-animals-that-bleed-blue)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This technology will never allow you to "breathe". Breathing does two things, it adds oxygen and removes CO2. The human body requires about a liter of oxygen every 3 minutes. I don't know how big their syringe is, but I doubt they can inject this much. Also, they provide no mechanism for carbon dioxide removal. After a while, the carbon dioxide buildup in the body would become toxic. At most, they could keep a sedated patient fully oxygenated for about 10 minutes. Potentially useful in a medical emergency, but that's about it.

</comment><comment><USER11> If you haven't heard it before, the Rule of 3 Survival usually applies.

3 minutes without air

3 hours without shelter (extreme conditions, hot or cold)

3 days without water

3 weeks without food

However, there have been documented cases of extraordinary human survival.

"Swedish Man Survives Two Months Inside Snow-Covered Car"

[http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/02/21/swedish-man-survives- two...](http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/02/21/swedish-man-survives-two-months- inside-snow-covered-car/)

<comment><USER12> and documented doubts about those cases [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/sweden/9106...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/sweden/9106027/Swedish- man-was-not-trapped-in-his-car.html)

<comment><USER11> ok, a better example. The point remains that the body can do amazing things to survive once it reaches the point of possibly no return.

"Cold comfort: hibernation helped man survive 24 days in wild"

[http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2006/12/21/1166290678782.html](http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2006/12/21/1166290678782.html)

<comment><USER12> while i don't have a handy link doubting this one, there's not actually any proof that he really spent 24 days "hibernating"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _...who would be able to breathe underwater for 30 minutes at a time without coming above for air._

This seems like a loose interpretation of "breathe". But leads to a question I had -- assuming the injection described in the article works properly, what would the result of inhaling water be? I can't imagine it's very comfortable, but assuming the person's oxygen is handled by this injection, would the body adjust?

<comment><USER14> See also the film "The Abyss" in which a rat is submerged in an oxygenated fluid, thus breathing the liquid. This technique is used for some military diving.

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

<comment><USER15> It's not used because the available oxygen density from the liquid is too low - a rat might survive as its volume is smaller but I am not sure of any long term research, or even anything other than a rat that might have held its breath.

The abyss was making it up.

<comment><USER16> According to this NYT article[1] the rat was indeed submerged in the movie (the scene wasn't faked). The article also states that it's been tested successfully on numerous animals - and even one human (although apparently they almost died in the process).

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/1989/08/06/movies/film-the-abyss-a- fo...](http://www.nytimes.com/1989/08/06/movies/film-the-abyss-a-foray-into- deep-waters.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> T-A A small step toward the real thing: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respirocyte](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respirocyte)

</comment><comment><USER17> How do they remove the CO2?

<comment><USER18> They don't, is my understanding. Not healthy, but healthier than no oxygen, so might be useful in some emergency situations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's saddening to see the potential uses go from saving a little girl's life to "military, coverts teams, even oil rig crews".

</comment><comment><USER20> _Researchers took years to whittle it down to the right oxygen concentration and size required to make it safe to inject. They used a sonicator that uses sound waves to blend the oxygen and fats together._

the manufacturing process sounds so simple. However if it will one day be in every hospital, these people will be millionaires with rights to the invention.

<comment><USER21> That sounds about as simple as 'Just write a kernel and a userland and then use some glue to hold it together'. The relevant point here is the 'size'/length of the oxygen-transporting molecules.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Could this be used to increase athletic performance?

Also, I'm wondering if there would be any negative effects from radically increasing the amount of oxygen your blood can hold. On the other hand, it would be like a superpower. I can imagine competitive free-divers using this or a future version of this to do some really impressive diving!

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm a little confused by the text. Can this be used to sustain someone indefinitely without breathing?

<comment><USER24> Nope. It gives the body/brain the O2 it needs to survive for a while, but CO2 will still build up, leading to:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respiratory_acidosis](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respiratory_acidosis)

Probably. So a life-saving measure in extreme circumstances, but certainly not something you can use indefinitely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Sounds like a candidate to go right next to epipens in "stuff that we're crazy for not putting in every first aid kit".

<comment><USER26> We have wasps around our farm and a fair bit of traffic, I was seriously seriously concerned about someone getting stung and going into anaphylactic shock. I looked into getting some Epipens. They are over 100 bucks a pen, and they don't have a long shelf life.

Turns out a more economical solution is Benadryl. Cheaper, you can smash it up, pour it in water and force it down someones throat if they can't drink.

<comment><USER25> Oh, yeah, the cost issue with EpiPens is a huge barrier. Getting a doctor to prescribe you one when you don't have a documented life-threatening allergy is another.

As far as I can tell, there's no fundamental reason for either of these issues. Epinephrine doesn't seem to be particularly expensive to produce, so my guess is that the auto-injectors are expensive simply because of the small scale of the market.

As for doctor reluctance, I don't know what's going on there. Our doctor said he didn't want to give us a prescription because he "didn't want us to use it instead of calling an ambulance". Ridiculous. An ambulance would easily take 10 minutes to reach us. Without oxygen, that's enough time for irreversible brain damage. (I'm also iffy on the wisdom of taking someone whose immune system you've just suppressed into a breeding ground for drug-resistant bacteria, but I digress).

Which brings me to one last thing: you cannot rely on benadryl as a solution in cases of anaphylaxis. For one thing, the onset orally is a minimum of 15 minutes. That's time you simply do not have if someone's airway has closed.

Worse, there isn't really good evidence that benadryl is effective at treating the symptoms of anaphylaxis in the first place. It is commonly used as an adjunct to epinephrine. But this seems to be on a "hey, it can't hurt" basis, given the lack of evidence.

For my part, $200/year (you should have two, in case the first is insufficient) is well worth it.

<comment><USER26> Thanks for the insight. I agree with your assessment. Though I think two pens might be overkill, I'll definitely get one as a present.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> No pinchzoom on iPad. Why do sites like this go out of their way to disable useful functionality.</comment>


GitHub's Game of Life (userscript) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ryanml/Github-Game-of-Life <comment><AUTHOR> Longtime lurker, thought this might be fun to someone else. Cellular automata for your Github activity map</comment>


Antirez Suggestion: "Redis Labs Sharing License" - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/antirez/status/1034435239651815424 <comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, antirez -- your suggested naming change would address the primary concerns of many of us. I hope that Redis Labs follows through with either that name or a similar one in the spirit of your tweet.

The ASF provides guidance for how to create your own license starting from the Apache License 2.0 as a point of departure: [http://www.apache.org/foundation/license-faq.html#mod- licens...](http://www.apache.org/foundation/license-faq.html#mod-license) Ensuring that "Apache" does not appear in the name of the modified license is one of the constraints.

The content of the Commons Clause is interesting as source-available license which allows certain freedoms yet attempts to target specific commercial use cases. Hopefully continued discussion of business models which support developers working on FOSS will prove fruitful.</comment>


Measuring the memory-level parallelism of a system using a small C++ program? - <AUTHOR> https://lemire.me/blog/2018/11/05/measuring-the-memory-level-parallelism-of-a-system-using-a-small-c-program/ <comment><USER2> Very interesting benchmark. He mentions that multicore systems would get higher aggregate throughput. Is this true? It would be interesting to see parallel results from a multithreaded run.

Anyone have results for a Ryzen system?

<comment><USER3> I would expect this to scale well with at least the first few additional cores: the total memory bandwidth used in this test is probably 10 GB/s or less, whereas system memory bandwidth depends on the number of memory channels and memory speed but ranges between 30 and more than 100 GB/s for most configurations, so there is a fair amount of unused capacity at the memory subsystem.

With enough additional cores though you'll hit some kind of shared limit, however. How many depends strongly on the details on your system, and this varies by nearly a factor of 10 between some server and client systems.</comment></comment>


Why Software is Expensive - <AUTHOR> http://itscommonsensestupid.blogspot.com/2009/10/why-software-is-expensive.html <comment> a-priori The most important one is the last one: anything custom-made is far more expensive than something that's mass produced. Would you go into a tailor and expect them to make you a suit at the same price as you'd pay for a pre-made suit in a store?

<comment><USER2> Actually, in much of the third-world, this is not true. Hand made is cheaper than manufactured . I know it seems ass backwards, but the best examples I know are in Mexico:

1) Guy selling handmade pots (or any handmade product) -- his product is worthless. Imported electronics -- very expensive.

2) It's cheaper to have 30-50 guys using hammers and handsaws on a home construction site, than to pay for power tools.

So to the third-worlders: Hand made is cheaper.

<comment><USER3> So let me get this straight, you're comparing pottery to iPods and from that drawing a conclusion?

Hand made goods are almost never cheaper, even in Mexico. A handmade pot would cost more than a machine produced one. It's just that the cheap labor makes the production equipment an unjustifiable investment because the ROI is less. It's less cheaper, but still cheaper. In general of course.

<comment><USER4> _cheap labor makes the production equipment an unjustifiable investment because the ROI is less_

I think that's his/her point. The manufactured pot would need to be priced higher (to pay for the production equipment over a reasonable depreciation period) in comparison to the hand produced pot that incurs no such overhead to produce, just cheap labor. So in effect, yes, a manufactured pot would be more than a hand produced pot.

I do think the commenter confused the matter by including imported items in the argument.

Given unlimited future earnings, you are right that a manufactured product may be cheaper to produce since there's much less labor cost, but in all practicality I'm not sure it applies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Price is determined by willingness to pay, not cost. The article talks about why costs might be high. But price is determined first and from _that_ acceptable cost levels set.

Software is expensive because people pay it.

<comment><USER4> Interesting perspective, but don't you think it takes two parties to establish a real price? If you want to pay $5 and I want to provide the service for $100, then no price is set.

To say that it's only the buyer's perspective seems to be ignoring the other side (as you correctly point out the OP did).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> These are actually just wrong. Computers are dirt cheap, for instance, and most programmers who aren't working on games don't need one that costs more than $1,000 for any reason at all. In fact they shouldn't want a cutting edge one, they'd rather see how the software runs on the computers that will typically host it.

The overhead costs of starting the next Google are significantly lower than the overhead costs of starting a McDonalds.

<comment><USER6> OK, I'll bite. If a set of tests on a feature that I'm working on runs in 15 seconds instead of in 30, I'll save that 15 seconds dozens of times. The benefits of a faster computer add up fast and shilling out a few hundred extra dollars is well worth it. Luckily, my employer got that. Especially fortunate since it doesn't seem like my Z61m will be replaced anytime soon (as we aren't doing so well) and a 2GHz core-duo with 2GB of RAM is only now starting to be limiting. If he had gone for a budget option, I would be tearing my hair out by now.

<comment><USER3> Even an extra few hundred per computer is virtually nothing. You can outfit a whole 5 man shop with top of the line Dells for what a McDonalds pays for one deep fryer. My startup quite literally ran for about 6 months on what one top of the line commercial fryer costs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> software expense = development cost/customers

</comment><comment><USER8> $200 expensive?

<comment><USER9> It's expensive by Malaysia-- a third world country-- and most third world country's standard.

<comment><USER10> I don't know if it's considered a third world country (I don't). But $200 is not expensive in cities there.

<comment><USER11> "Third world" hasn't been meaningful since the end of the cold war. (Originally it meant the countries that were aligned with neither the Soviet Union or NATO.)

Now the fashionable terms are "developed" and "developing" (which basically mean "rich" and "poor" and so are obviously two ends of a spectrum, not clearly-defined categories).</comment></comment></comment></comment>