How Dangerous Is Your Couch? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/09/magazine/arlene-blums-crusade-against-household-toxins.html?pagewanted=all <comment><USER3> The irony of the whole thing is that the flame retardants don't even make furniture any less flammable:

"The problem, [the fire expert] argues, is that the standard is based on applying a small flame to a bare piece of foam - a situation unlikely to happen in real life. ... In real life, before the flame gets to the foam, it has to ignite the fabric. Once the fabric catches fire, it becomes a sheet of flame that can easily overwhelm the fire-suppression properties of treated foam. In tests, TB 117 compliant chairs catch fire just as easily as ones that aren't compliant - and they burn just as hot."

So the entire country is now exposed to the dangers of these chemicals because in 1975 some bureaucrats at an obscure government agency in California came up with an arbitrary standard that was not based in reality.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for digging that up, I was wondering about that.

The article cites a retardant advocate as saying "Deaths caused by furniture fires dropped from 1,400 in 1980 to 600 in 2004; a 57 percent reduction."

We know that almost all of these couch fires are caused by people falling asleep while smoking cigarettes.

According to the CDC, in the same period, cigarette consumption in the US adult population has fallen from 33.2% in 1980 to 20.9% in 2004. (<http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0762370.html>)

So a certain portion of the decline is due to the reduction in cigarette use.

Also, 43 out of 50 states now mandate "fire safe" cigarettes which contain substances such as ethylene vinyl acetate which increase the chance an unsmoked but lit cigarette will stop burning. The presence of these cigarettes has also certainly led to fewer couch fires.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_safe_cigarette>

It is unlikely that the entire 57 percent reduction in couch fires over 24 years is entirely due to the use of carcinogenic flame retardants.

<comment><USER5> "According to the CDC, in the same period, cigarette consumption in the US adult population has fallen from 33.2% in 1980 to 20.9% in 2004."

Those who smoke cigarettes also smoke a lot less than they used to, so total cigarette consumption is maybe only half as much or less compared to what it once was.

<comment><USER6> Also, it seems that smokers (at least in the US) are much more likely to go outside to smoke now, even when at their own home. Sorry, no data just personal recollections from childhood in the '80s.

<comment><USER5> This seems correct anecdotally. At some point they figured out that smoking is somewhat less bad for you if you smoke outside, so maybe this had some effect.

<comment><USER7>
      At some point they figured out that smoking is somewhat less bad for you if you smoke outside

Smoking is in no way less bad for you if done out of doors. It's because no one, not even a smoker, wants their domicile to smell like an ash tray...and when selling a house, you don't want to cut out that large swath of the population that doesn't smoke from your buyer pool.

<comment><USER5> "Smoking is in no way less bad for you if done out of doors."

That's not true. If you live in the house of someone who was formerly a heavy smoker then you have a higher cancer risk yourself, because the radiation from the cigarrettes gets into the walls and carpet. Which means that smokers themselves also have a lower cancer risk if they smoke outside for the same reason. I'd imagine it also somewhat reduces their risk for heart attack, since second hand smoke increases your risk of heart attack, although I haven't seen any stats on that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looking at mattresses without flame-retardent led me to this provider: <http://www.whitelotus.net/green-cotton-rx/>

Turns out you'll need a doctor's prescription to even order a plain cotton mattress. Yet another perfectly reasonable regulation from our friends in the California Legislature! :)

My least-favorite CA regulation has to do with eye-glasses. I lost my only pair and went in to get a replacement on a Saturday, but I couldn't because my (perfectly fine) prescription had expired. I had to make an appointment to get an exam in order to get new glasses, but they were closed for the weekend and booked for a few days.

So I spent about a week with headaches because some CA legislator decided it was in my best interest to pay some practitioner to get the same prescription for glasses every year.

<comment><USER9> Are there any states that don't have a requirement of a current prescription to purchase glasses? I've had the same issue in Texas [1], which usually considers itself small-government.

[1] cf. <http://www.tob.state.tx.us/tobrx.htm>

<comment><USER10> I've ordered glasses from the internet here in Georgia maybe a dozen times without them requiring verification of prescription.

Contacts do require one though.

Don't know if the company is just skirting regulation or if it doesn't exist, however.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _Of the 84,000 industrial chemicals registered for use in the United States, only about 200 have been evaluated for human safety by the Environmental Protection Agency_

\--Wait, what? What is the EPA doing, then for 42 years?

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

<comment><USER12> The next sentence:

 _That's because industrial chemicals are presumed safe unless proved otherwise, under the 1976 federal Toxic Substances Control Act._

In other words, the EPA isn't _allowed_ to investigate products unless evidence that they are unsafe is brought before it. Makers get the benefit of the doubt.

<comment><USER13> The environmental movement in America is worthless. They spent all of their time on lifestyle issues like battery cars, recycling, and global warming (issues that also line the pockets of their large donors) when there are real, profound issues like this. Even if the EPA can't act, how come only one crazy lady is working on building the case?

<comment><USER14> I wouldn't blame the movement itself. There's always a buzz around lifestyle issues because there's continual evolution. Every day millions of individuals make millions of choices, so every day the culture is changing in little ways. There's a certain portion of the population that is an easy target for the kind of education and advocacy that scientists are good at. Politics is a lot harder. It's harder to make people care, and the target audience is much more diverse. When it comes to people who aren't as well educated or who aren't members of the reality-based community, you need an entirely different message. You have to go toe-to-toe with industries that pay millions of dollars to lobbyists and trot out doctors who say you're trying to kill kids. And even if you try hard and do a good job, it's still boring stuff that's a lot harder to turn into a story than lifestyle issues. Would this article exist without a glamorous protagonist and the harm-to-children angle?

<comment><USER11> _When it comes to people who aren't as well educated or who aren't members of the reality-based community,_

Please. This is america. We don't need to talk down to people like this.

200/84000 = 0.24%. EPA doesn't have a clue about 99.76% of the _registered_ chemicals for sale? Experts?

It doesn't take a rocket scientis or a member of the tea party to figure out something is odd-ball with that?

It would seem more politically feasible to say, here is some tax money. Lets test this stuff.

Because it looks like the original CA regs. requiring these chemicals was also written to "protect" the public? who's protecting the people from the protectors?

Ya know? its just kind of weird all around.

<comment><USER14> I didn't mean to rag on conservatives, though I guess my wording made it sound that way. I just mean people who aren't susceptible to argument with numbers and facts, the kind of argument you would be comfortable making, the kind of argument scientists are good at making.

 _It would seem more politically feasible to say, here is some tax money. Lets test this stuff._

You're suggesting the most politically appealing pitch would be science and government spending (on something that doesn't create working-class jobs.) I'm not an expert on politics, but luckily we do have an expert opinion to compare that to. The million dollar industry lobbyists thought the most effective appeal would be a scare campaign in newspapers and a venal doctor talking about imaginary suffering babies. They won. I think I'll trust them.

 _Because it looks like the original CA regs. requiring these chemicals was also written to "protect" the public? who's protecting the people from the protectors?_

Whenever we let science affect policy, policy is open to revision, just like science is. We got seat belts right, we got a lot of emissions and pollution laws right, but we're never going to get everything right. It will always be a process of revise, revise, revise as we learn more about the science.

<comment><USER11> This is one of those cases where the old saying comes to mind:

 _Sunlight is the best disenfectant_

Good news is that sunlight is cheap and easy.

Science needs to do science. Information needs to flow. right now, the system looks more a bunch of "experts" on the take or incompetent. More worried about securing funding, managing their careers, promoting their pet projects, etc. The [trust me] argument is a political failure, because of these demonstrated problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Reminds me of the situation around one of theories that tries to explain SIDS - Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. If you had a kid, you know what it is - <USER2> newborn dying in his sleep for no apparent reason. You put a healthy baby to sleep in his bed only to find him dead in the morning. Fun stuff.

There are no exact explanation for the syndrome, but there are preventive measures (such as always let newborn fall asleep on his back) that statistically lessen the risk of it occurring.

One of the theories was that a typical crib mattress creates a fertile ground for some fungal growth. Coupled with chemicals found in the mattress, this creates weak poisonous gas emission, which ultimately kills the child. It's an older theory that was verified and formally considered invalid. _However_ in one country, New Zealand, there's a doctor who has been a vigorously arguing in favor of this theory and now has a statistic to show that proper mattress wrapping nullifies the risk of SIDS. From what I've read, he had very hard time getting the authorities to even _listen_ to his findings, leave alone to act on them.

I wish this lady the best of luck, she's got NYT on her side, I hope she takes a full advantage of this exposure.

[0] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_infant_death_syndrome>

<comment><USER16> Unfortunately sometimes smart people believe dumb things, and Dr. Sprott is one of these people.

When you read the reasons why his "research" has been ignored you hear things like "vested interest", "cover up", and "politics".

Dr. T.J Sprott has a book, and several products for sale.

His "statistic" is bogus; the NZ authorities stopped recommending mattress wrapping in the 90s; he has no idea if babies slept or died on wrapped mattresses; yet he claims it as fact.

His paper was awful. That's why people didn't listen to him - he has weird ideas, he can't write them up, other research has tested his ideas and found them wanting.

He claims that decreases in SIDS are because of his mattress wrapping programme. He cannot explain why SIDS is dropping in countries that don't practice mattress wrapping. He cannot explain why SIDS was dropping in NZ _before_ antimoney was addedd to mattresses.

Don't forget that he's not a medical doctor. He is a chemist.

People like Sprott are evil. They come up with some plausible sounding theory, and then they try to publish. No scientific journal wants it, so he self publishes, and publicizes. This creates fear and uncertainty in parents. And so children are at greater risk of death, because parents don't follow current best practice (which is still not perfect but at least is evidence based) and decide to try the advice of a wingnut.

<comment><USER15> Well, from what I've read the book and the products came substantially after he started voicing his concerns, which sort of implies that he might've taken the matter in his own hands since no one would listen to him.

Even assuming he is a complete loon, the theory of an environmental cause is actually quite plausible. Perhaps not fungus, not phosphorus, but something in the bedding that just knocks those kids out.

With regards him being evil - I don't really see it that way. Why do you say that parents stop following established best practices once they wrap their kid's mattress? Parents aren't idiots, are they? What he's advocating for is orthogonal to existing prevention measures, both easily combined.

<comment><USER16> > Parents aren't idiots, are they?

The very many parents who believed Wakefield[1] and didn't immunise their children prove you wrong. Some parents are scared, and want to do the best, and cannot assess risk, and cannot understand scientific research, and thus are vulnerable to woo.

See also "wifi is dangerous"; "cellphones are dangerous" etc etc.

> the theory of an environmental cause is actually quite plausible.

I have no problem with someone saying "Cot death could be caused by environmental factors. Let's do lots of good quality research to see if we can discover that cause."

Sprott did not do that. Sprott said 'I have found the cause. This is the cause. There is no room for doubt. By not following my advice you are killing babies. By arguing against my advice you are covering up mistakes that you've made, or you are corrupt'.

Sprott says that no babies have died on wrapped mattresses. This is false. Babies have died on wrapped mattresses.

Sprott claims that toxic gases are produced by fungus and the fire-retardant chemicals. This is false - it's not possible to generate those toxic gases unless you do weird things in a lab. (ie, it doesn't happen in the home when the mattress is used normally.)

So what he has done is diverted attention from correct information; made it harder for parents to remember and follow correct information; caused fear and uncertainty among scared people. He has ignored the very clear recommendations against his advice. And finally he's making money off this FUD; he's using the conspiracy theory as a marketing gimmick.

[1] A really nice overview here: (<http://tallguywrites.livejournal.com/148012.html>)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's sad that premature regulation moved this into the sphere of politics and mandated-purchases (from companies with an incentive to lobby). That means any attempt to learn what's really going on, or make any incremental changes, is gummed up by the fog of adversarial, zero-sum politics.

Without the inflexible mandate, the rule could simply be: label whether your product has flame-retardants or not, and have evidence for your claims. Then the industry could diversify, some brands emphasizing flame-resistance and others lack of chemical additives. And, this diversity would mean we would gather more real-world experience about whether the flame-retardant units are really correlated with fewer/slower fires and fewer fatalities, or with more health/IQ/behavior problems in children and pets, or both, or neither.

But because of the uniform monoculture imposed by the premature politicization, we face a data white-out and policy is flying half-blind... with only indirect data on costs and benefits.

Maybe a way out would be to compel a bisection of the industry output: you must make half your units with, and half without, these additives, and clearly mark the units in each category. Five to ten years later, we'd likely have much better data about real effects.

</comment><comment><USER18> Another example of government creating arbitrary policies that just waste time and money, and probably kill us.

 _Since 1975, an obscure California agency called the Bureau of Home Furnishings and Thermal Insulation has mandated that the foam inside upholstered furniture be able to withstand exposure to a small flame, like a candle or cigarette lighter, for 12 seconds without igniting._

Who decided on 12 seconds? Why the inside of furniture rather than the outside? Who does this benefit? Why is there even a _Bureau of Home Furnishings and Thermal Insulation_? Why do government agencies like the EPA exist when they can't say anything about the safety of chemicals that are in couches in probably in upwards of 95% of homes in America?

It wouldn't surprise me if a flame retardant manufacturer was behind the law to begin with, which is even more disgusting.

<comment><USER19> It was totally a lobbying effort to get the legislation passed. First by the tobacco industry because of fires started by smokers falling asleep with lit cigarettes, then by the chemical industry (by courting state fire marshals) to boost sales of their flame retardants. The Chicago Tribune has a multi-part series on it here: <http://media.apps.chicagotribune.com/flames/index.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Memory-foam mattresses have the same problem apparently. I have one, and am looking into a dust mite bed casing (~$100) to prevent the chemicals from getting into the air...

[http://lesstoxicstuff.com/2011/09/how-to-reduce-your- familys...](http://lesstoxicstuff.com/2011/09/how-to-reduce-your-familys- toxic-flame-retardant-exposure/)

<comment><USER21> We spend a lot of time in our beds (at least we should), so we should take everything about it very serious!

We recently switched to a bed that strictly consists of natural materials like wood, latex, cotton and natural rubber. Absolutely no metal and no toxic additives. Costs as much as our car, but is worth every cent. Sleeping feels like holiday now. I also can smell the difference.

<comment><USER22> Do you have a link to info on such beds?

<comment><USER21> It is called "Relax" and is manufactured by an austrian company.

<http://www.relax-bettsysteme.at/en>

<comment><USER23> Are you in the states? How did you order it? I could only find a link for finding dealers in Europe.

<comment><USER21> No, I'm in the EU and bought it from a local dealer. However, I wouldn't order such a bed without having tested it. There are some parameters like the thickness and the softness of the mattress that should be adjusted to your needs, but maybe the Manufacturer ships also to the US when they get an order.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Chemtura Firemaster 550 is "just starting to be analyzed"? It was introduced in '05-'06, and here's its 2006 MSDS:

<http://www.busbrp.org/cireeh/uploads/Main/FM550msds.pdf>

</comment><comment><USER25> I feel like the article is missing a basic analysis of whether there would be more deaths by an increased number of fires caused by removing the fire retardant, or by cancer cancer caused by fire retardant. Just give me some numbers, and let me decide what kind of furniture I want.

<comment><USER26> How does a couch catch fire, though? I suspect falling asleep on a couch with a cigarette is the main cause. Smokers want to die anyway, so I'd give priority to safety of children.

<comment><USER27> But what about the people living next door to your hypothetical smoker? It's a good idea to have fire safety regulations, for the reason that a fire usually will not just burn the person who caused it in the first place. (Whether this fire retardent helps prevent fires or not is of course a more difficult question...)

<comment><USER28> The article specifically mentioned this case. The chemicals they put in the foam would have absolutely no benefit if your apartment was burning because the neighbor's started. Furthermore, there is little evidence that the chemicals will prevent your sleeping smoker from burning the place down. Droithomme's comment[1] very much applies.

1\. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4493813>

<comment><USER26> I think the argument is that if your neighbor's couch catches fire, there is a risk of the fire spreading to your apartment.

<comment><USER29> I've seen a number of fire videos as part of a training class. It is astonishing how fast a couch + room full of furnishings will burn: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ult6Biaf7oM>. From ignition to flashover/fully-involved in 2-3 minutes. In a major urban area like SF, 5-10 minutes is a good response time for the first units on scene, not to mention the time to coordinate a fire attack, ventilate and flow water.

I don't know whether the claims in the article are well-supported or not (or what type of treatment the couch in the video had, as the videos are from the late 80s/early 90s), but I think most people don't realize just how dangerous a working fire in a single room full of ordinary furnishings can be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Arlene Blum is kind of amazing. I met her maybe 20 years ago in the context of mountain climbing. Can't imagine climbing with a baby strapped to myself.

<comment><USER26> So basically she is completely crazy? However I hope she wins the fight against toxic chemicals...

<comment><USER31> I climbed mountain passes that size with my infants carried in a pack. It was good clean fun and the babies loved it.

They play in the pine needles and the sand and get sap all over themselves and then snuggle up with you in the cold alpine nights. Everybody has a good time.

And I'm nowhere near as tough as Ms. Blum. (Annapurna I! Holy. Cow.)

<comment><USER26> Not sure about the definition of climbing. Seems to me falling might not be healthy for babies? As for hiking in the mountains, sure, why not.

<comment><USER31> Climb is an English word which simply means to rise. "The sun came out and the temperature was climbing."

Of course, there are various activities we describe as climbing that need more precise descriptions. Some of them are more perilous than others.

The most I did in the mountains with baby in tow was class 3 scrambling with a spotter.[0] Hacker News types like it specific.

[0] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grade_(climbing)>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> between this and the article about brain parasites in california, HN is scaring the crap out of me

<comment><USER33> I don't know which article you're referencing, but we also had brain parasites found in a man who died about 50 miles from me in Indiana. We've basically been told to avoid freshwater lakes and rivers for now.

<comment><USER11> Those freshwater incidents sound like protozoa (amoeba) infections with an high mortality rate ("Brain-eating amoeba suspected in Indiana death"). GP is referring to another hazard, also seems to be from nasty water. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4492244>. Don't say you weren't warned though !

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> After the foam in cushions described in the OP, the biggest source of human exposure to flame retardants is probably consumer electronics. Particularly, most televisions and computer monitors are encased in a plastic housing which by law must be resistant to catching fire, and the universal way that is achieved is by mixing flame retardants with the plastic while the plastic is still "liquid". I read once that flame retardants make up up to 20% of the volume of the material of the housings.

When you remove this toxic plastic housing, there is another housing underneath made of steel, which holds the monitor or TV together just fine on its own. The exception is the buttons for adjusting brightness, etc.

Last year, I removed _all_ the urethane foam from my home and the plastic housing from my monitor. There is a row of buttons for brightness, etc, that now hangs by wires, and there is a button near the top of the monitor for power which now hangs down the back of the monitor by wires. Now that the buttons are no longer held in place by the plastic housing, it is much harder to press them, but that is OK because I never adjust the brightness (preferring to use OS X to "switch black and white" at night). And I never use the power button. (The monitor draws one watt when it is on but not receiving video input).

Except for the small and not particularly noticeable row of buttons hanging by wires from the bottom of the monitor, the monitor has a tidy, trim appearance and does not prevent me from feeling proud of how my computer looks.

I recommend these home modifications to almost everybody.

The way the flame retardants get into the human body, by the way, is by attaching to dust, which gets ingested in small amounts. Consequently, after removal and disposal of the housing, I recommend cleaning the area under and around the device.

Or get a recent Apple monitor, which has an aluminum housing.

</comment><comment><USER35> Another top-level comment wrote:

 _between this and the article about brain parasites in california, HN is scaring the crap out of me_

And I guess that's why my all-time favorite external link to share here on Hacker News is "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation"

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

by Peter Norvig, Google's director of research. To resolve the issue of the safety trade-offs of not treating furniture with flame-retardant chemicals (the status quo when I was a child) and treating it (the status quo for quite a while now in the United States) will take careful examination of the actual risk ratios of any disease said to be correlated with the chemicals, the risk ratios of injuries and deaths from fires, the cost of other preventive measures for each kind of harm, and so on. Public policy is not easy. The best public policies have to be carefully examined in light of verifiable facts.

I see from user danso's profile

<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=danso>

that he has a professional role in investigative journalism, and indeed I have enjoyed reading (and of course have upvoted) many of his comments here on HN over the past year. The piece submitted here mentions about its author that "Dashka Slater is the author of six books for children and adults. Her latest children's book, 'Dangerously Ever After,' is out this month," which prompted me to look up other information about the author. Her personal website

<http://www.dashkaslater.com/index.php/journalist>

declares that she has written pieces for a variety of publications, many in the "alternative" market for periodical articles, and her LinkedIn profile

<https://www.linkedin.com/in/dashkaslater>

declares her educational background. There is some interesting reporting here, but as a regular reader of Mother Jones (one of the publications that most often publishes her work) and of other "alternative" publications, I would like to see more follow-up on this issue before writing to my elected representatives, as I sometimes do, asking for a change in current law. I do remember when newspaper and magazine articles in my childhood were all about the fearsome dangers of fires killing little children.

A recent submission to HN based on very reliable statistics pointed out that life expectancy in the United States at birth, at age 40, at age 60, at age 65, and even at age 80 has been steadily RISING

[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity-w...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity- why-we-die-global-life-expectancy)

since 1960, so new regulations introduced since then so far don't seem to have net harm for the population in balance with all other social and environmental changes since then. Perhaps the purported flame-retardant chemicals don't prevent as many fires as people suppose. But perhaps they also don't cause any serious human illness in actual use. Let's not rush to judgment on this issue, but let's do actual, verifiable science that with sound economic and policy analysis can help guide lawmakers to the best currently available trade-off in regulation.

<comment><USER36> I think the thing that is reflexively offensive about this whole thing is that the government has taken a risk that is reasonably easy for a responsible adult to avoid (setting their couch on fire) and implemented a measure that is harmful and difficult or almost impossible to avoid. It's as if we are all made to pay for the morons who can't resist playing with matches in their couch.

<comment><USER24> It is not particularly easy to avoid setting your couch on fire. The problem with flaming couches is not just those cases where the couch is the primary contributor to the fire; it's also the cases where couches rapidly accelerate the intensity of a smaller fire, like from an electrical malfunction.

<comment><USER36> The regulation says, "the foam inside upholstered furniture be able to withstand exposure to a small flame, like a candle or cigarette lighter, for 12 seconds without igniting." so if a fire has already started and it is bigger than a small flame then this regulation isn't meant to help with that. In fact if you look around you can find [http://laurasrules.org/2012/04/15/sofa-saga- part-3-interview...](http://laurasrules.org/2012/04/15/sofa-saga- part-3-interview-with-flame-retardants-expert-heather-stapleton/) people talking about studies that show that in a actual fire these chemicals only slow down the burn rate by a couple seconds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> The single best way to protect your home against fire, by far, is to have a fire sprinkler system installed. Unfortunately, this can only be done when the house is built. So if you are planning on building a house, specify a sprinkler system.

It'll be the best money you ever spent.

<comment><USER38> Why can't you retrofit fire suppressing foam in the kitchen, like one does in a commercial kitchen range hood? I've seen this done on kitchen remodels. There are residential range hoods (Viking, Wolf, ...) which have a wall- mounted button or a pull which 1) kills the fuel source and 2) smothers the range area with fire suppression (class BC or K) to put out the fire and prevent re-ignition. Totally ruins your food AND needs to be cleaned off promptly since it's corrosive.

Kitchens are by far the most likely source of domestic fires.

<comment><USER9> > Kitchens are by far the most likely source of domestic fires.

Interesting; I would've guessed it'd be in closer running with other causes, but it looks like they constitute around 55% of total residential fires. According to some U.S. statistics from 2010 [1], the leading causes of residential fires are cooking, with 166k fires, followed by heating at 47k fires, electrical and "other unintentional" at ~25k each, and open flame and "intentional" at just under 20k each.

[1] [http://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/statistics/res_bldg_f...](http://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/statistics/res_bldg_fire_causes.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> When reading the title I thought the article will be about how dangerous the couch is for our generation, because we are spending more and more time on it and so do not exercise enough our body, etc. You know, related to Tablet devices and Internet which allow more and more entertainment from the couch.

Was quite surprised it is about another type of danger. I guess I am too much on portable devices and on the couch ;)

</comment><comment><USER40> >The baby's mother had placed a candle in her crib, he said, and the candle fell over, igniting a pillow.

I'm pretty sure the baby's mother didn't deserve to be the mother of anyone. Either that or she spent too much time sniffing her own couch and it lowered her IQ enough to put a CANDLE IN A FREAKING CRIB WITH A BABY.

</comment><comment><USER41> The Chicago Tribune has a good series about how Big Tobacco and chemical companies have pushed for more flame retardants in everything despite health concerns:

<http://media.apps.chicagotribune.com/flames/index.html>

</comment><comment><USER42> just in case your couch is dangerous: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJkhSUSnek>

10 seconds that can mushroom into a lot of wasted time, you've been warned.

</comment><comment><USER43> Vote for Mitt Romney, he'll scale back the EPA and you'll be able to wallow in carcinogenic substances all day long.

<comment><USER13> What is the EPA doing about it right now? You'd be surprised to learn that many U.S. environmental laws were passed by Republican presidents. There's a "Nixon-goes-to-China" aspect to it. Indeed, Nixon created the EPA...</comment></comment>


Apple Sues Motorola for Multi-Touch Phone Infringement - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2371822,00.asp

<comment><USER2> Apple is now suing the company that invented the cell phone. Granted, those original patents would be long expired by now, but I'm sure that Motorola still has lots of patents a lot more fundamental than the ones Apple has, so this is probably just a form of negotiation via nuclear weapon.

But it really does bother me. It just feels so offensive that a company that makes a cell phone thinks it's reasonable to sue the company that invented the cell phone. How can anybody argue that this is fair or reasonable? Apple's not only standing on the shoulders of giants like Motorola, but now they're kicking these giants in the face.</comment>


Ask HN: Designing a Database - <AUTHOR> I'm primarily a designer with a good amount of code experience (classes in school, messing around on my own etc.) I started to learn rails over the summer, and built one pretty messy app. That said, I'm gearing up to build my second app, this time around I've been thinking a lot about the database and how everything needs to connect etc. rather than doing it as I go.
So far I've drawn it on paper (looks like something out of MS Access) but I was wondering if there are any other recommended steps I should take before I start coding this all out (besides the usual flow charts etc.)?
Thanks!
-bgnm <comment><USER2> Do you need your system to be transaction-oriented (think ATMs and banking) or analytic (for doing slice and dice reporting of data)? You'll do well to check out normalization for the first and understand star schemas for the second.

It's awesome you are thinking about db design upfront, just think about what your data will be, how it will be used, and how you will want to move it around for your app. Don't discount not using a db at all (and I'm a db guy for work) - for one of my current projects, I'm simply dumping small data objects into individual JSON files. Easy to fetch with Ruby/Sinatra and easy for the GUI part of the app to play with (Javascript eats up JSON on that side). Not to discount Rails at all, but going with a minimal toolset like Ruby/Sinatra/Sequel might be just the ticket for you roll simple web apps really quickly.

Heck, this forum uses flat files for storing submissions, comments, and user data.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the reply!

I'd say the data is definitely going to be analytical - but some parts will be transaction oriented, if that makes sense (people will be able to pay for greater functionality).

I don't think I know enough about flat file systems to code one up myself at this point either (not that I know enough about DB's - but enough to create something).

Any good resources for understanding star schemas?

<comment><USER2> Sure, grab one of the data warehouse books from Kimball. Inmon is the other big data warehouse author out there, but I'm not as familiar with his texts. Kimball's stuff is an easy read and not platform focused in any way.

If you are aiming to do business visualizations with the data, you might want to check out Stephen Few - he's written several books on business data visualization (think Tufte distilled for charts and dashboards).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Make sure you've read Wikipedia's article on normalizing databases. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization>

<comment><USER4> If you understand such gems as:

 _[For 3NF ensuring that] Every non-prime attribute is non-transitively dependent on every key of the table_

Then that's the perfect reminder article. I did an undergrad course in db design covering db normalisation (years ago) and still found that page to be a bit dense. I'd look elsewhere for a primer.

<http://www.databaseprimer.com/normalization.html> is a bit too simplified but makes it easy to understand what's happening. This [http://www.databasejournal.com/sqletc/article.php/1428511/Da...](http://www.databasejournal.com/sqletc/article.php/1428511/Database- Normalization.htm) appears to be a good overview using a realistic worked example db.</comment></comment>


When the Earth Had Two Moons - <AUTHOR> http://m.nautil.us/issue/74/networks/when-the-earth-had-two-moons-rp <comment><USER2> One thing I did not spot in the article is how long the splat actually lasted. It called it a slow collision but was it 1 minute, 1 day ?

But in any case very interesting theory.</comment>


The cost of Coronavirus Covid-19 testing – Data from 2.6B medical claims - <AUTHOR> https://www.talktomira.com/post/the-real-cost-of-coronavirus-covid-19-testing-data-from-2-billion-medical-claims <comment><AUTHOR> When COVID-19 began to spread in the United States, we knew there was a limited amount of tests available. However, the cost of getting tested remained a mystery. Earlier this year, Congress and state governments moved to mandate free testing for the public, but that didn't stop people from receiving surprise medical bills.</comment>


Norsk Hydro ASA Suffers Extensive Cyber Attack - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-19/hydro-says-victim-of-extensive-cyber-attack-impacting-operations-jtfgz6td <comment><USER2> Aluminium plants are particularly vulnerable because the electrolysis "pots" _must_ be kept hot, requiring a continuous supply of electricity. Supply interruptions can be a disaster.

This has hit Venezuela badly: [https://twitter.com/AKurmanaev/status/1104141813936545793](https://twitter.com/AKurmanaev/status/1104141813936545793) "Today Venezuela basically crossed off an entire industry. In one day. No more industrial aluminum production. Just like that. It's gone."

[https://www.argusmedia.com/en/news/1863707-venezuelas- fragil...](https://www.argusmedia.com/en/news/1863707-venezuelas-fragile- power-grid-partially-restored) "State-owned aluminum smelter Venalum's remaining operational units and state-owned Bauxilum's alumina production units were destroyed by the blackout and likely will not be repaired for at least a year, a senior Venalum official said. "The primary aluminum and alumina sectors are dead for the foreseeable future." "

<comment><USER3> These seems like systems where the impact of disruption is so severe that it should be effectively offline as much as possible.

Now the power source of course... hard to manage that.

<comment><USER4> I think I read once that the last-ditch effort in case of power blackout is heating the ovens with gravity-fed kerosene burners to keep them from going titsup.

No source, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good twitter thread on this issue so far: [https://twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/1107928490580627456](https://twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/1107928490580627456)

</comment><comment><USER6> >> _A.P. Moller-Maersk A /S, the owner of the world's biggest container shipping company, lost about $200 million to $300 million because of a cyber attack in June_

Very soon we'll be talking real money. How do you price your ransom...we caused this much damage to Maersk, be smart...

</comment><comment><USER7> Are there any companies in the business of hardening SCADA systems?

I keep on hearing about the huge vulnerability they pose, which would make me expect a Y2K-level of focus by the industry.

<comment><USER8> Dragos Inc., I interviewed one of their senior threat hunters on Cyber Talk Radio (text recap with link to podcast audio) [https://www.jungledisk.com/blog/2017/06/27/industrial- cybers...](https://www.jungledisk.com/blog/2017/06/27/industrial- cybersecurity-ecosystem-dragos-episode-39/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> None of this type of equipment should be on the internet.

<comment><USER10> IMHO it was all downhill once VLAN use became the default and viewed as equally secure as physically disparate networks.

We used to physically isolate security domains across the board. Everything is virtualized now, which makes it a whole lot less visible when boundaries are being violated, where it used to be _obvious_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Stocks and commodities markets are moved by this, and someone in the know could plan and pounce on the situation. I wonder if that's the real motive, not the potential ransom sought.

</comment><comment><USER12> They should make it illegal to pay ransoms.

<comment><USER13> Were the affected systems running Windows? They should make it illegal to run critical systems on Windows.

<comment><USER14> Aside from being outdated advice, this is also globally impossible.

Microsoft Windows has got a major lock on the industrial control systems industry. Almost anything being produced today has a Windows machine in the workflow doing something critically important, from monitoring fluid flows to running microchip programmers and test stations.

<comment><USER13> Then people shouldn't be too surprised when stuff like this happens, and they should just pay the ransom: it's what they accepted by using Windows.

"That's the way it's always been" isn't a valid excuse for continuing to make something unsafe.

<comment><USER14> The advice is outdated because it is entirely possible for Windows machines to be secured well enough for this work. Windows security, like Linux security, is not a binary state with either a zero for no security or a one for security.

They did not accept crippling ransomware by using Windows. Nobody does. This attitude is fatalistic and somewhat juvenile.

They may have implicitly accepted crippling ransomware by not having sufficient internal security processes.

<comment><USER15> You are right, but still using an operating system with such large attack surface like Windows is a worldwide industry problem. No one is saying Linux is much better either, but there are other solutions like IncludeOS([http://www.includeos.org/technology.html#security](http://www.includeos.org/technology.html#security)) which has a very low attack surface, if not 100% impossible. I'm not saying IncludeOS would work in this case, but secure systems has come a loooong way the recent years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Windows tax.</comment>


Hungary: Ban on living in public areas taking effect - <AUTHOR> https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/hungary-ban-living-public-areas-taking-effect-58490044 <comment><USER2> Ah yes, PM Orban is such an amazing freedom fighter against the big bad European Union, and now he can go to war against his own constituents as well.

Long live King Orban!</comment>


The Copyright Lobby Absolutely Loves Child Pornography - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/the-copyright-lobby-absolutely-loves-child-pornography-110709/

<comment><USER2> _"We pointed out to [the governor] that there are overlaps between the child porn problem and piracy," Mr. Sherman [The RIAA president] said_

If most politicians knew anything about technology, they'd probably laugh him out of the building for saying that.</comment>


Track iPhone6 UPS Shipment - <AUTHOR>

You can track your iPhone shipment by going to UPS and instead of tracking by number, choose track by reference and type your phone number in there (the one tied to your order)<p>http://wwwapps.ups.com/WebTracking/track?loc=en_US <comment><USER2> Apple still haven't sent me a shipping notification, but via the Ref #, I was able to find my shipment. Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> your welcome :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> 1\. Is this applicable to only US orders? 2\. Is this applicable to only iPhones ordered via Apple Store?</comment>


The Pentium 4 and the G4e: An Architectural Comparison (2001) - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/features/2001/05/p4andg4e/

<comment><USER2> It was hard to tell who would win.

History tells us that the x86 architecture won, but the P4 lost out to AMD and later the Intel Core line. Furthermore, PowerPC is still used. From the article, I can't tell which of these architectures would have trouble scaling up clockspeed and power-consumption. AMD getting almost 50% of the market share was equally a shocking.

Lastly, there is the lingering thought that Windows market dominance facilitated investment that solved the shortcomings of x86, while G4 lingered.

I think the winners and losers were decided by factors other than architecture. x86 beat Power because of Windows, and Intel floated on their past success for a few years until they made a better architecture.

<comment><USER3> PowerPC at the high end still exists in the form of POWER8 for servers, but they're very expensive and don't perform all that well both in absolute terms and energy efficiency - it looks like they've gone down the same path as the P4 for the POWER series, with emphasis on high clock frequency and (extreme) hyperthreading - resulting in ~200W TDP and frequencies in the 4-5GHz range. .

<comment><USER4> 4-5 GHz is actually a low frequency today; a NetBurst/Power6-like processor would be running at 8-10 GHz today while consuming 500 W or more (if it were possible).

<comment><USER5> Given that we're speaking hypothetically (Since physics gets in the way) not sure why're saying Netburst would be consuming 500W - as the manufacturing processes shrink so does the power consumption.

<comment><USER6> Last few die shrinks have done little for power consumption.

<comment><USER7> It's because they keep shoving those pesky transistors in there.

<comment><USER6> There is some advantage, but

32nm Sandy Bridge vs 22 nm Ivy Bridge they take the same 2700K chip from 95W to 77 W.

Which seems ok progress, but at the high end:

Sandy Bridge: 32 nm Core i7 3820 (4 cores 10 MB cache) @ 3.6 GHz = 130W

Ivy Bridge: 22 nm Core i7 4820K (4 cores 10 MB cache) @ 3.7 GHz = 130W

So, you gained .1GHz granted their not identical but they have vary similar transistor counts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For what it's worth, while Intel did win the architecture wars here, the "deep and narrow" pipeline being described here died out with Netburst. The Core microarchitecture that replaced it (which is the predecessor of today's Intel CPUs) used a much more "wide and shallow" pipeline, and benefited greatly from it.

<comment><USER3> Indeed, the P4 was a very odd CPU to program and optimise for - in some ways, it's the "most RISC-like" microarchitecture Intel has attempted. It was far more sensitive to things like instruction alignment and branch prediction than its successors and predecessors, and likely in the pursuit of higher clock frequencies, some instructions (e.g. shifts/rotates) were made several times slower. This meant near-optimal code sequences for the P6 family and often before that would perform horribly on the P4, and vice-versa. It could beat the PIII in "straight-line" execution of simple integer instructions with no branches, but the PIII was faster (even at a lower clock frequency) with more complex and branch-heavy instructions. It's probably the only x86 where a significant speed advantage can be obtained by extreme loop unrolling, a practice that is mostly counterproductive for post-Nehalem.

One of the more amusing P4 oddities is that certain 32-bit add/sub instructions will have a very slightly higher latency if there is a carry/borrow between the two 16-bit halves - it's very difficult to detect (I believe it's ~0.5 cycle), but it's there. This is probably a consequence of pipelining in the ALU itself.

<comment><USER8> > One of the more amusing P4 oddities is that certain 32-bit add/sub > instructions will have a very slightly higher latency if there is a > carry/borrow between the two 16-bit halves

This kind of data-dependent delay gives crypto people hives, for what it's worth. It's the sort of thing that can make timing attacks possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I miss Jon Stokes articles. They were the best thing of Ars, along with Siracusa's writings.

<comment><AUTHOR> I must admit that while the article is fantastic (and inspired me to get into low level development), I had an ulterior motive in posting it.

I wish Ars would bring back these in depth architecture overviews. Maybe by bring traffic to them, Ars will notice there is still demand.

<comment><USER4> There's always [http://www.realworldtech.com/](http://www.realworldtech.com/)

<comment><USER10> Unfortunately RWT's David Kanter was recently hired by MPR and announced a near-hiatus from writing RWT in-depth articles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "For a look at two instructions as they travel through the G4e, check out this animated GIF. Modem users should beware, though, because the GIF weights in at 355K."

<comment><USER12> Funny thing is the CSS file for Ars weighs in at 381KB.

<comment><USER13> That is because we embed fonts in the CSS file to cut down on HTTP requests. It's about 100k without the fonts. Sure it's still much larger than existed 10 years ago, but it's pretty standard these days.

Also note that we're gzipping, so the transmitted size is much smaller. And we also correctly return 304 responses after the first request.</comment></comment></comment>


3 Reasons to Choose AngularJS - <AUTHOR> http://www.readability.com/articles/bwfp8erw <comment><USER2> Firstly just because some Google engineers wrote it doesn't mean that it is instantly perfect. And secondly it is not becoming the dominant Javascript framework by any stretch. Frankly this guy doesn't have a clue what is he on about and I couldn't think of 3 worse reasons to showcase AngularJS.</comment>


American has stopped building condos - <AUTHOR> http://eyeonhousing.org/2018/11/multifamily-construction-remains-a-built-for-rent-market/ <comment><USER2> Not sure where this says America has stopped building condos.

In Miami, there are so many active condo construction projects that they won't sell through for several years.[3]

This data implies that rentals are going up because Americans are buying less. (likely due to the cost of housing)) [1] Older generations are also more likely to rent than before. [2] It makes sense that rental construction is increasing, but the article says that condo construction remains the same.

[1] [https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2018/10/19/housing- mark...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2018/10/19/housing-market- slowdown-helping-home-buyers/1687082002/)

[2] [https://www.rentcafe.com/blog/rental-market/real-estate- news...](https://www.rentcafe.com/blog/rental-market/real-estate- news/todayrenterprofile-older-highly-educated-suburban)

[3] [https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/downtown-miami-has-six- ye...](https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/downtown-miami-has-six-year-luxury- condo-backlog-study-warns-10613118)

</comment><comment><USER3> Actualbtitle: "Multifamily Construction Remains a Built-for-Rent Market".

Submitted title is a complete fabrication contradicted by the article itself.</comment>


Choosing the VPN That's Right for You - <AUTHOR> https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/choosing-vpn-thats-right-you <comment><USER2> I guess it's right. Instead of the best, the word right makes more sense. It does boil down to one's taste and preference and a couple of other factors like the nearest server to the users' location, ISP speed and the purpose for which the user intends to use a VPN. In my case, I found Ivacy to be a decent vpn in terms of privacy because it offered me zero logs and encrypted transactions. tunnelbear is decent option as well but i haven't explored it fully.</comment>


The stress response can be contagious - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/31/stress/you-can-catch-stress-through-a-tv-screen <comment><USER2> Interesting, about 20 years ago my dad stopped consuming all news media. He said "It's all negative, it's killing us all and if anything important happens I'll find out anyway."

I've not been brave enough to totally "check out", but I do avoid sensationalized news and try to pay more attention to valuable information rather than "drama".

Meanwhile at work I always remind my team "Hey we are not curing cancer, relax, slow is fast, fast is slow."

I tell my teams my job is easy because as a manager I only have four things to do:

      1) Provide Air Cover (reduce stress)

      2) Provide resources

      3) Provide direction

      4) Get the F* out of the way

I find that #1 is harder than it sounds, but as this article points out stress is infectious and can really slow a team down. I've had more than one stressed out employee come into my office and explain how we're missing some deadline or whatever and I always say "Yup, ok we'll get through it, we're not curing cancer here." we both laugh and they walk out with a lighter step to their walk.

That said I believe in accountability and we try to pick these things up in retro's and figure out how to avoid them in the future.

I like to say "I like originality in mistakes, big massive mistakes are fine, just learn and try not to repeat them."

<comment><USER3> TV news is just terrible. Other sources are too, but TV news seems to excel at reporting on the same three stories with the same information for weeks.

I lived in Florida, and it's great to know when a hurricane is coming, but you gotta turn it off after the first ten minutes because after that it's just hype without substance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've noticed this in office situations. A bunch of people having a conversation are suddenly more stressed out than they have any reason to be. Why? It's just that time of year when everyone's on a deadline.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've always thought this was the case. I quit a job last year, and a large part of it was the 8:30 AM standups where our CTO would stress us out with customer woes and deadlines not entirely relevant to the current sprint. Instead of moving these issues through a process that resulted in better- defined deadlines and requirements, it just felt like we were perpetually behind, and it happened every single morning. Many technical leaders are stressed, but it makes everything worse when your anxieties leak in to your team every day.

<comment><USER2> I heard Gene Kranz[1] talk one day on the Apollo 13 mission[2]. And most people came away with the famous take away "Failure Is Not an Option" but I came away thinking how Gene was the calmest person I've ever met. I imagine in this high stress situation the best thing he did was keep people calm and focused. Too many managers fail at that task, it's hard to do right, but very valuable when it's done properly.

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

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_13](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_13)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Have you ever quit in your first week - <AUTHOR> Hi,
I post anonymous for obvious reason. I'm about to quit the company I just join. Nothing is wrong but I just feel like I won't be a part here and I don't want to wake up every morning. Again nothing is wrong, but it's just my gut feeling.
Have you ever done so? <comment><USER2> I once went to work for an online payments company that turned out to be a scam. But I waited for my full months paycheck before leaving.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wait until you have a new job. Seriously.</comment>


NSA's Backdoor Key from Lotus Notes (2002) - <AUTHOR> http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/hacks/lotus-nsa-key.html <comment><USER2> I think Lotus Notes has a fascinating history, cryptographic shenanigans asides. As far as I'm aware it is still the most successful "offline first" / "local-first" application platform in widespread use today, complete with multi-master document replication, highly-configurable conflict resolution and rapid application development. These were revolutionary capabilities during the dialup era. The email client just happens to be the most popularly recognised groupware application outside of individual corporate firewalls.

The original vision was very lofty: [https://web.archive.org/web/20180225100127/http://www.kapor....](https://web.archive.org/web/20180225100127/http://www.kapor.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/12/Notes-Project.pdf)

"Notes should take the first major crack at the area of idea processors, textual databases, and hypertext systems."

I would love to see where an open source equivalent built for the modern age could take us... (CouchDB gave it a good shot!)

<comment><USER3> Still, I believe it's wrong to distract here from all the other important topics addressed by Ray Ozzie, who was aware of all the important issues even in 1996, and for historical context of the NSA key from the title, here is the relevant part from his speech he gave in 1996, about how Lotus implemented what was legally required from them:

"As you know, the U.S. government has defined its "maximum tolerance level" for exportable unescrowed cryptography at 40 bits. That is, because they generally permit the export of 40-bit products, the U.S. government is clearly already willing to deal with a 40-bit work factor in order to examine encrypted communications outside of this country.

So, the system that we're shipping in Lotus Notes Release 4 overseas is one that presents different work factors to different parties, hence the name.

Against crackers -- against the run-of-the-mill adversary trying to break a message -- the work factor is 64 bits, just like it is in the U.S. That is, in the new International Edition of Lotus Notes, bulk data keys are now 64 bits just as they are in our North American Edition that's sold in the U.S. and Canada.

But when the U.S. Government needs access to a communications stream overseas encoded by the international edition of Lotus Notes, they are no worse off - and no better off - than they are today - they have to crack 40 bits."

Since then, the goals of different interest groups haven't changed, and we all now about many new possibilities and about the surveillance actually being done and the dangers that the changes brought and can bring.

Other comments here in the other threads are about these more recent issues and the readers should note them too.

<comment><USER4> This compromise was also used by WebTV in Japan in 1997. I vaguely recall that client/server comms were protected by 56 bit symmetric encryption, and that in international mode, 16 bits of the session key were explicitly sent in cleartext to respect the 40 bit limit. WebTV in the USA was full strength crypto, at least as strong as the little MIPS processor in the settop box could manage.

<comment><USER5> Claims that weak devices couldn't handle strong cryptography are mostly bogus.

Fun fact: The Atari 7800, designed in 1983, used a 956-bit Rabin signature to vendor lock games. Strong cryptography was unavailable for a long time primarily due to indifference, ignorance, and interference and not primarily due to computational limits.

<comment><USER3> > in 1983, used a 956-bit Rabin signature to vendor lock games.

But not to encrypt the communication -- that would have been, apparently, against the U.S. laws of that time.

> Strong cryptography was unavailable for a long time primarily due to > indifference, ignorance, and interference and not primarily due to > computational limits.

It's surely the "interference" in the form of the mentioned U.S. laws at the time, some other comments here detail the historical background.

<comment><USER5> I'm not aware of any law it would have been violating if was encrypted _in the US_.

However, export was another matter and the export version of the 7800 left the crypto out!

In any case, my point was that weak crypto spanning into the late 90s was not a result of technical limitations.

<comment><USER3> > I'm not aware of any law it would have been violating if was encrypted in > the US.

The laws as they were had exactly that effect: a lot of companies didn't intend to have products sold solely in the US. And it was problematic enough that most companies avoided making a US-only version: even carrying such a product on a floppy disk while travelling outside of US could get you in trouble, see this article from 1995:

[https://www.wired.com/1995/03/the-continuing- investigation-o...](https://www.wired.com/1995/03/the-continuing- investigation-of-phil-zimmermann/)

The companies that did use strong crypto typically had the contracts with the military.

<comment><USER5> Sorry, we're talking in loops. The legal issue wasn't encryption vs other cryptography, it was export or not. 7800 _did_ face that issue, and resolved it by making the non-US version not do the crypto. This was probably easier in their case due to PAL vs NTSC. :)

I think both of us might be making the error of correcting something the other person wasn't intending to comment on! :)

Some export complications around crypto exist to this very day-- at least for commercial hardware products. I've had to fill out the export forms myself, and not that many years ago.

<comment><USER3> > The legal issue wasn't encryption vs other cryptography, it was export or > not

And I have never claimed anything else, it can be easily verified.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Previous discussions:

\- [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5846189](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5846189) (June 2013)

\- [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9291404](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9291404) (2015)

<comment><USER6> Thank you for the link. I found barrkel's comment[1] particularly moving:

> A non-authoritarian government is an historical anomaly. It's a ball > balanced on top of a hill, pushed there by the deaths of millions, and kept > there by the vigilance of those who care. Please start caring.

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5847789](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5847789)

<comment><USER7> > It's a ball balanced on top of a hill, pushed there by the deaths of > millions, and kept there by the vigilance of those who care.

I feel like the ball has started to roll downhill, and is rapidly gaining speed, but that the only folks who can stop it are too dug into their own partisanship to take a look around them and do something.

That, or they _desire_ authoritarianism. I've frankly been surprised at the number of people I've talked to in the past few years who seem to _like_ the idea of a strongman leader. I always assumed everyone but the most extreme wings of the right and left believed in liberty and democracy, but I now see that was I mistaken.

<comment><USER8> My experience has been the opposite. I've rarely met anybody in the center ~80% or so that didn't have a little dictator inside of them, yearning to come out and strangle the masses under behavior controls, dictating how everyone else is to live. I find it doesn't take more than a few minutes of conversation with moderates, before you can see the gleam of dictator in their eye, where you can get them to openly state something about wanting to directly or indirectly control other people and how they live.

And when it comes to the extreme partisan wings, the dictator is giant rather than little. You don't have to engage them in conversation for it to come out, they project it all the time willingly, openly.

<comment><USER9> Everyone wants to believe that they know how other people should be living their lives. And everybody believes that they themselves know where to draw the line between freedom and order.

Freedom means something different to every person on the planet, and that makes it difficult to protect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA-768#RSA-768](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA-768#RSA-768) was factored almost exactly 10 years ago. I wonder if anyone has tried factoring this one? Hopefully the NSA doesn't still use this key...

</comment><comment><USER11> I have to chime in that I too have a love/hate relationship with Lotus Notes. I started using it back in '98. It was massively empowering to build functional and secure workflow apps, and do so faster than you could wireframe on other platforms. I rolled it out to thousands of users successfully. It was truly visionary in scope. However, the performance was mediocre and there were many really poor oversights and omissions. Often I would go to program some base operation and find out you just "can't get there from here". It seemed their QC process hadn't really given much though to global calendar synchronization or to very basic needs like printing landscape. I still use it daily for a large (funeral) industry specific app. and it has run flawlessly for a decade (albeit making API calls to MS Office and the web). I go to program new things in React or even Rails and am disappointed that you have to reinvent things that were built into Notes 20 yrs ago.

</comment><comment><USER12> They embedded an entire X.509 cert in it? I wonder if the Lotus devs just made an X.509 cert out of key material they were given or if the NSA actually minted it with that subject.

<comment><USER13> I have to think the engineers were maliciously complying with the directive. It's far too dark a joke to be honorific.

<comment><USER14> Ray Ozzie confirmed in a thread below that it was done by Charlie/Al/him as a joke.

<comment><USER13> Like laughing at a funeral?

<comment><USER3> Like "we do what we have to do because it's currently a law, but we can't be forced to give a nice name to it, let them know what we think of it:"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21859950](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21859950)

See the other comments here for a historical context: "exporting" stronger crypto software from the U.S. had the same status as exporting weapons of war.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I thought at first the NSA made the Orwell reference, but it looks just the lotus notes devs did?

I guess that's...reassuring.

<comment><USER16> Charlie, Al, and I were just trying to maintain a sense of humor in fairly tough times, knowing that the first who would see the key would be the folks we were working with at the ministry.

<comment><USER13> With no judgment whatsoever, may I ask: why did you do the work? Why did you not walk away and stand on moral principle against such intervention? From reading your comments, I gather this isn't something you agreed with.

<comment><USER3> The context has an unofficial name "crypto wars":

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

"In the U.S." since "the immediate post WWII period" the "crypto software was included as a Category XIII item into the _United States Munitions List._ " That meant that _exporting software with strong encryption was legally the same as exporting weapons_.

What they Ray Ozzie and colleagues implemented was at that moment (1996) claimed to be a "superior exportable encryption technology when compared to other US products on the market":

[https://packetstormsecurity.com/files/21281/lotus.notes.nsa....](https://packetstormsecurity.com/files/21281/lotus.notes.nsa.backdoor.txt.html)

To compare:

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

To be able to export Netscape web browser with SSL (a predecessor of TLS) "Netscape developed two versions of its web browser. The "U.S. edition" supported full size (typically 1024-bit or larger) RSA public keys in combination with full size symmetric keys (secret keys) (128-bit RC4 or 3DES in SSL 3.0 and TLS 1.0). The "International Edition" had its effective key lengths reduced to 512 bits and 40 bits respectively (RSA_EXPORT with 40-bit RC2 or RC4 in SSL 3.0 and TLS 1.0).[6] Acquiring the 'U.S. domestic' version turned out to be sufficient hassle that most computer users, even in the U.S., ended up with the 'International' version,[7] whose weak 40-bit encryption can currently be broken in a matter of days using a single computer."

Only later:

"In January 2000, the U.S. Government relaxed export regulations over certain classes of mass-market encryption products. In line with these changes, Netscape has made the strong-crypto versions of Communicator and Navigator available worldwide." (1)

[https://www.fortify.net/README.html#do](https://www.fortify.net/README.html#do)

<comment><USER13> I appreciate the illustrative nature of your comment, but I'm really looking to learn something from a rather influential mind in software engineering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is a bit spooky. I wonder if the engineers responsible were just trying to be cute, or "reaching out" in a way.

<comment><USER18> Probably just having a joke. Human psychology is complex, no matter what positive or negative things we do to each other.

<comment><USER14> Posted by the man himself before your reply:

> Charlie, Al, and I were just trying to maintain a sense of humor in fairly > tough times, knowing that the first who would see the key would be the folks > we were working with at the ministry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Inslaw's legal case-management system "PROMIS" also had a back door, put there by Michael Riconosciuto, under the direction of Earl Brian of Inslaw's competitor Hadron. Attorney General Edwin Meese's Department of Justice drove Inslaw out of business, pirated their software, and distributed it with the back door to Israel and 80 other countries so the US could spy on them. Danny Casolaro was investigating it, but suddenly died of an unlikely apparent suicide.

If Trump really wanted to investigate corruption in the deep state, he should start by interrogating his good buddy Edwin Meese, instead of honoring him with the Medal of Freedom. He could also ask his own Attorney General Bill Barr why he whitewashed the Justice Department last time he had it investigate itself. (Actually, maybe that's why he hired Barr!)

[https://www.npr.org/2019/10/08/768136964/trump-to-honor- form...](https://www.npr.org/2019/10/08/768136964/trump-to-honor-former- reagan-attorney-general-who-left-government-under-ethics-c)

>Trump To Honor Former Reagan Attorney General, Who Left Government Under Ethics Cloud

[http://nothingmajor.com/journal/775-meese-is-a-pig- returns/](http://nothingmajor.com/journal/775-meese-is-a-pig-returns/)

>Experts Agree! MEESE is a PIG

[https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1179701030520524801.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1179701030520524801.html)

>INSLAW/PROMIS links

>Barr refused to appoint an independent counsel to the Inslaw case, relying instead on a retired federal judge, in this case Nicholas Bua, who reported to Barr alone. In other words, the DOJ was responsible for investigating itself.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PROMIS_(software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PROMIS_\(software\))

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

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

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

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

>The Justice Department had dishonestly conspired to "drive Inslaw out of business 'through trickery, fraud and deceit'" by withholding payments to Inslaw and then pirating the software.

>The Justice Department had done so in order to modify PROMIS, originally created to manage legal cases, to become a monitoring software for intelligence operations.

>"PROMIS was then given or sold at a profit to Israel and as many as 80 other countries by Dr. Earl W. Brian, a man with close personal and business ties to then-President Ronald Reagan and then-Presidential counsel Edwin Meese."

>"There appears to be strong evidence, as indicated by the findings in two Federal Court proceedings as well as by the committee investigation, that the Department of Justice 'acted willfully and fraudulently,' and 'took, converted and stole,' Inslaw's Enhanced PROMIS by 'trickery fraud and deceit.'"

>A book written in 1997 by Fabrizio Calvi and Thierry Pfister claimed that the National Security Administration (NSA) had been "seeding computers abroad with PROMIS-embedded SMART (Systems Management Automated Reasoning Tools) chips, code-named Petrie, capable of covertly downloading data and transmitting it, using electrical wiring as an antenna, to U.S. intelligence satellites" as part of an espionage operation.

>"another undeclared mission of the Justice Department's covert agents was to insure that investigative journalist Danny Casolaro remained silent about the role of the Justice Department in the INSLAW scandal by murdering him in west Virginia in August 1991."

>Inslaw's new allegations described the Justice Department dispute with Inslaw as part of a broad conspiracy to drive Inslaw into bankruptcy so that Earl Brian, the founder of a venture capital firm called Biotech (later Infotechnology), could acquire Inslaw's assets, including its software Promis. Inslaw owner William Hamilton told PSI investigators that Brian had first attempted to acquire Inslaw through a computer services corporation he controlled, called Hadron. Hamilton said that he rejected an offer from Hadron to acquire Inslaw, and that Brian then attempted to drive Inslaw into bankruptcy through his influence with Attorney General Edwin Meese.

[https://www.wired.com/1993/01/inslaw/](https://www.wired.com/1993/01/inslaw/)

>The INSLAW Octopus

>Software piracy, conspiracy, cover-up, stonewalling, covert action: Just another decade at the Department of Justice

>The House Judiciary Committee lists these crimes as among the possible violations perpetrated by "high-level Justice officials and private individuals":

>> Conspiracy to commit an offense

>> Fraud

>> Wire fraud

>> Obstruction of proceedings before departments, agencies and committees

>> Tampering with a witness

>> Retaliation against a witness

>> Perjury

>> Interference with commerce by threats or violence

>> Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) violations

>> Transportation of stolen goods, securities, moneys

>> Receiving stolen goods

[https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/may/16/FBI- promi...](https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/may/16/FBI-promis- part-1/)

>The Undying Octopus: FBI and the PROMIS affair Part 1 35 years later, file reveals dropped leads and confirmed allegations in "the scandal that wouldn't die".

>Inslaw's attorneys, which included Elliot Richardson, who had previously resigned from the DOJ rather than comply with President Nixon's orders to fire the Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, repeatedly demanded a special prosecutor be appointed to investigate the matter, along with its numerous connections that implicated officials such as Ed Meese, who were in turn allegedly connected to affairs such as Iran-Contra and Reagan's October Surprise.

<comment><USER19> The perils of "Cloud Computing" in the 80's:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inslaw#Contract_disputes_and_I...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inslaw#Contract_disputes_and_Inslaw_bankruptcy)

> There were also disputes over service fees. During the first year of the > contract, the DOJ did not have the hardware to run Promis in any of the > offices covered by the contract. As a stopgap measure, Inslaw provided > Promis on a time-share basis through a Vax computer in Virginia, allowing > the offices to access Promis on the Inslaw Vax through remote terminals, > until the needed equipment was installed on-site. EOUSA claimed that Inslaw > had overcharged for this service and withheld payments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> O=MiniTruth CN=Big Brother :D love it

</comment><comment><USER21> Was it systematically leaking the same 24 bits (encrypted to the NSA public key), or a random contiguous selection of 24 bits?

in the second case having just a few documents would result in only the NSA being able to decrypt without even brute forcing...

</comment><comment><USER22> Does anyone else find it ironic that cypherspace.org doesn't support https?

</comment><comment><USER23> So the fact that most crypto export controls are gone now means NSA can crack everything now right?

<comment><USER5> The export controls weren't relaxed particularly willingly.

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

<comment><USER3> Also:

[https://www.wired.com/1995/03/the-continuing- investigation-o...](https://www.wired.com/1995/03/the-continuing- investigation-of-phil-zimmermann/)

[https://www.nytimes.com/1996/01/12/business/data-secrecy- exp...](https://www.nytimes.com/1996/01/12/business/data-secrecy-export-case- dropped-by-us.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Well DOH!

</comment><comment><USER25> > the NSA public key had an organizational name of "MiniTruth", and a common > name of "Big Brother"

> the Ministry of Truth was the agency who's job was propaganda and > suppression of truths that did not suit the malignant fictional future > government in the book, and "Big Brother" was the evil shadowy leader of > this government.

"Are we the baddies?", said nobody at the NSA.

Seriously, this is kind of blatant. I could see them using the phrase "Big Brother", because it has become a common saying and lost some of its edge. But not Ministry of Truth, that only has one meaning and it's terrifying. It literally means "ministry of lying to the people and denial of truth". There is no reading of the book, no matter how superficial, that the term "Ministry of Truth" is anything but overtly sarcastic.

What does this come from? Is it edgy young people (young back then), picking these names? Even if tongue-in-cheek, it has enormous consequences on the culture inside a rather insulated work environment of a job that really should be one of solemn responsibility.

<comment><USER14> > What does this come from?

Do some reading of the threads here + links to previous discussions. Ray Ozzie (one involved) has been commenting.</comment></comment>


A Co-Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1961297 <comment><USER2> > In this article we present a mathematical data model for the most common > noSQL databases—namely, key/value relationships—and demonstrate that this > data model is the mathematical dual of SQL's relational data model of > foreign-/primary-key relationships. Following established mathematical > nomenclature, we refer to the dual of SQL as coSQL. We also show how a > single generalization of the relational algebra over sets—namely, monads and > monad comprehensions—forms the basis of a common query language for both SQL > and noSQL. Despite common wisdom, SQL and coSQL are not diabolically > opposed, but instead deeply connected via beautiful mathematical theory.

I'm such a nerd, this makes me happy.

</comment><comment><USER3> I read this paper back in 2011, and it looked like an interesting way to address the impedance mismatch between OOP and relational databases.

Were there any follow-up papers or proof-of-concept software based on these ideas?

<comment><USER4> Doesn't appear this was intended as an idea to build software from, but a proof on how SQL vs noSQL is really SQL and coSQL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is an article written by someone who never heard of Graph Databases. The publish year was 2011, so that makes sense. They were not as well known 6 years ago.

<comment><USER6> Can you elaborate on why graph databases are important in this context?

<comment><USER5> >>A necessary condition for the network effect to take off in the noSQL database market is the availability of a common abstract mathematical data model and an associated query language for noSQL that removes product differentiation at the logical level and instead shifts competition to the physical and operational level.

A common abstract mathematical data model is Graphs.

The associated query language is any of the declarative graph query languages (see openCypher for example @ [http://www.opencypher.org/](http://www.opencypher.org/) ).

<comment><USER6> Great answer, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 2011

<comment><USER8> Added. Thanks!</comment></comment>


An analysis of Facebook Instagram Acquisition - <AUTHOR> http://myownfriends.blogspot.in/2012/04/facebook-instagram-acquisition-analysis.html

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a short post by me analyzing the FB Instagram acquisition. Please do share your opinions :)</comment>


Using AI to Detect If the World Leaders Are Lying About the Covid-19 - <AUTHOR> https://www.theclickreader.com/using-facial-expression-recognition-to-detect-if-the-world-leaders-are-lying-about-the-covid-19/ <comment><USER2> So they were sad and nervous. Sad, like everyone thinking about the current situation, nervous like everyone that has to give a speech about such a serious topic. I don't think that says anything about if they are lying or not.

Reading things like "sad" or "nervous" from someones body langage is one thing, but finding clusters of such tells and figuring out if someone lies or not is another thing.</comment>


The Tough Life of a Games Tester - <AUTHOR> http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/03/29/the-tough-life-of-a-games-tester

<comment><USER2> Do you remember EA Spouse? Although it looks defunct now, the spouse, Erin Hoffman, went on to found GameWatch[.org], which aimed to address these issues. AFAIK, they at least curbed the worst offenses, like those that led to the scandal, but...

If you could get enough studios to realize the important of a good QA department, there'd at least be a niche to form a company dedicated to it, where skilled QA could get what they deserve.</comment>


Nothing Is Agreed Yet – We Can Still Stop the TPP's Copyright Trap - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/08/nothing-agreed-yet-we-can-still-stop-tpps-copyright-trap <comment><AUTHOR> The TPP now hinges on the auto industry (US, Canada & Mexico vs. Japan) and dairy industry (New Zealand vs. Canada): [https://twitter.com/search?q=%40glynmoody%20AND%20%23tpp](https://twitter.com/search?q=%40glynmoody%20AND%20%23tpp)

If the TPP stalls due to auto industry supply chain tariffs, the new copyright laws identified by EFF will also be blocked, [http://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/2015/08/26/c...](http://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/2015/08/26/currency/32402273/), _" Under NAFTA, at least 62.5 percent of a passenger car or light truck's net cost must originate in North America to be considered tariff free under the agreement. Mexico wants to increase the percentage to 65 percent in the TPP, while Japan wants it to be about 45 percent for vehicles and 30 percent for parts themselves — which would allow for a greater number of parts from low- wage countries like China and Thailand to be included."_

Pairwise meetings have been reported in recent weeks and there will be a group meeting next week, when most media will be focused on world leaders visiting the UN from Sept. 25, [http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/final- round-of-...](http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/final-round-of-tpp- talks-set-for-end-of-september/article26384370/), _" Chief negotiators for the 12 countries involved .. will begin meeting in Atlanta on Sept. 26, and trade ministers will join the next week, possibly Sept. 30"_.

</comment><comment><USER2> For anyone else who is looking to do(albeit small) after reading this. Please go to [https://act.eff.org/action/stop-the-tpp-s-copyright- trap](https://act.eff.org/action/stop-the-tpp-s-copyright-trap) and sign the petition.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does the EFF have any significant political allies in this?

<comment><AUTHOR> An overview of some groups who organized against the TPP, [http://www.hightowerlowdown.org/stopTPP#.Vf2visT3arU](http://www.hightowerlowdown.org/stopTPP#.Vf2visT3arU)

 _" In 2011 Lori Wallach began developing a strategy for taking the practically unheard of TPP out of the backrooms and splashing it into the faces of the public to awaken people to its multiple threats. Mainstream liberal organizations thought she was off on Mission Impossible, since the corporate side has thousands of trade lawyers, lobbyists, PR agents, and other experienced operatives working on this. Was Lori seriously proposing to confront that army with her 11 staffers?

Yes. Enlisting a core band of labor, environmental, and community allies, the dozen trade-watching stalwarts at Public Citizen divided into five teams and went after the Brobdingnagians of global corporate power.

...it's important to spread the story of the progressive coalition's successful confrontation with the Global Goliath. Its methods and achievements give us a new template for organizing (and winning) future populist challenges to the corporate order. And the breadth, depth, and intensity of this effort show what it will take to forge a real populist movement--multifaceted and with the long-term capacity to pursue our country's deep democratic principles. We can get there if we build on what we learn--and keep pushing."_

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> do we have $ to donate to congress?

<comment><USER5> Why not vote with your spending power instead? If a small percentage of consumers appear willing to permanently boycott some goods from the participating countries then it would get industries complicating the negotiations.

I.e. do you really care if you buy jeans that are from China v.s. Vietnam? Probably not as much as the textile industry of Vietnam does..</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do I secure Windows XP? - <AUTHOR> I have a few relatives who are resistant to change and are still using Windows XP. Does anyone have any recommendations on how best to secure XP?
I found bitdefender[1]. Has anyone ever used this?
1. https://www.bitdefender.com/solutions/security-for-xp-and-vista.html <comment><USER2> Are you providing friends-and-family support? If they are stubborn about moving on, you should be stubborn about continuing to support them. I think you can make a very reasonable argument there.

None of the answers here actually address your question. Probably not a coincidence.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wouldn't say they are stubborn about moving on, it will just take a little bit of time for them to migrate everything over. In the meantime I don't want to leave them exposed

</comment></comment><comment> mike-cardwell Disconnect it from the Internet and fill the USB ports with epoxy.

</comment><comment><USER3> Can you not get them to upgrade? It's a losing battle sticking with XP.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the ultimate goal but they are dependent on software that has also reached EOL. I'd like to get everything moved over within the next few months but in the mean time I'd like to patch them as best as possible

<comment><USER3> Personally, I would gift them a basic Chromebook. Technical support for relatives is a bottomless pit otherwise. :P

<comment><USER4> I agree. I'm willing to bet that if their naive enough to think Windows XP is still a good idea, then their computer usage probably exceed beyond emails/Facebook and the like. A Chromebook is inexpensive and will meet all the basic needs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This may be rather obvious but I would either dual boot(and disable the internet XP side and install antivirus or disable USB drives also) the machine or run the software in a VM. I have an EOL software for W7 and that is my plan at this point. The advantage with VM it that it rather easy to take snapshots.

</comment><comment><USER6> Enable the POSReady registry hack for getting the updates: [http://www.zdnet.com/article/registry-hack-enables- continued...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/registry-hack-enables-continued- updates-for-windows-xp/)

</comment><comment><USER7> You should really convince them to make the change. XP was was end-of-lifed April 2014.

</comment><comment><USER8> Why XP? There's so much more OS.

</comment><comment><USER9> Upgrade

Or move to Linux</comment>


Worst. Ideas. Ever. - <AUTHOR> http://rubyconf2009.confreaks.com/21-nov-2009-15-05-worst-ideas-ever-aaron-patterson-and-ryan-davis.html

<comment><USER2> For some reason I found myself laughing silly at most of this presentation. Those guys are brilliant.</comment>


Cinema Seating Preview - <AUTHOR> http://tympanus.net/Development/SeatPreview/ <comment><USER2> This is normal in many countries outside the US. I've used it and had positive experiences in India, for instance. It at least favors those who plan ahead and buy tickets sooner, along with limiting necessary waiting time at the theater to get good seats. Imagine the chaos if airplanes had open seating...

The main benefits as the Slate article points out are for theater owners (concession sales and pre-film advertising). I'd at least like to see the choice of local theaters with reserved seating.

[http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2013/08/movie_...](http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2013/08/movie_theater_seating_why_don_t_american_theaters_have_reserved_seating.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is cool, but might actually decrease attendance. I've been in some IMAX seats I definitely would not have bought if I'd known how acute the screen angle would be.

I wonder if theaters will be interested.</comment>


Show HN: can you spot the InvisiMark? - <AUTHOR> https://www.zing-app.com/can-spot-invisimark/ <comment><USER2> SPOILERS BELOW:

I don't have a mac. Can someone spoil me which is it? I say it's B. It has slightly desaturated or off colors.

edit: I now compared the two result screenshots, I was right.</comment>


Report says Uber surge pricing has a twist: some drivers flee - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Report-says-Uber-surge-pricing-has-a-twist-some-6597012.php <comment><USER2> If this is true, Uber would deliver better service if it decreased its cut of the bill in busy periods, as that would not cut demand, and should increase supply somewhat.

The question, of course, is whether that would bring them more profits, but if they do not do that, that is where a competitor could win the hearts of customers "it was raining cats and dogs, and I had to wait for 20 minutes, but I saw at least five guys being picked up by Unter")

(also Uber drivers could unionize or form gangs who deter other drivers from entering surge areas in order to increase their cut, but I doubt that either would happen in the current world)</comment>


Vega: Declarative language for creating interactive visualizations - <AUTHOR> http://vega.github.io/ <comment><USER2> I hope this standard gain traction, used it in place to replace superset based system and integrate an analytics dashboard within a web app.

Altair with Python generates the vega-lite json or a chatr directly. If it's vega-lite json use web component which uses JavaScript renderer for vega-lite. For react or vuejs based system encapsulated the JavaScript library of vega- lite renderer.

This is much easier to work with than superset which is tied to react frontend and python backend and require use of iframe.

Even if you look at any commercial offering they need to be embedded as iframe with different authentication and authorization, with complex integration in a webapp.

I have heard that vega is a heavy grammar and is complex to implement, also when the data is dense performance is a concern. I haven't faced those issues yet with vega-lite, may be my data is not that dense for visualisation.</comment>


What can CPython learn from the new JavaScript VMs? - <AUTHOR> http://sayspy.blogspot.com/2008/09/could-python-use-some-of-these-new.html

<comment><USER2> Python is a much larger language than javascript with a lot of edge cases in the rules and is highly introspective. This means that any work building a next gen VM for python is considerably harder and requires more work. PyPy adopted RPython (a restricted subset of CPython) to make up for that. You also need to be compatible with a large amount of standard libraries to be useful to a decent amount of python programmers. The end result is that we are going to see javascript environments pass up the various python environments (ironpython, psyco, etc.) before too long.

</comment><comment><USER3> Python already has Psyco[1] and some people claim[2] that Python+Psyco is faster than V8.

[1] <http://psyco.sourceforge.net/introduction.html>

[2] [http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/msg/f90342f5...](http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/msg/f90342f5c3edb453)</comment>


Sinatra 0.3 Features - <AUTHOR> http://www.gittr.com/index.php/archive/sinatra-03-features/ <comment><USER2> These aren't a list of features, it's a changelog -- a really hard-to-read changelog at that.

<comment><USER3> Sorry for the formatting, I wanted to get it up. My goal with this was to connect the changelog with my previous posts about these new features (that I wrote against the development branch). Didn't expect it to get linked from here...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The post or the headline should give a hint about what 'Sinatra' is. (Turns out, it's "a DSL for quickly creating web-applications in Ruby with minimal effort". An example program is:

      get '/' do
        'Hello world!'
      end

</comment><comment><USER5> yay! incoherent ruby stuff! heheh i look to a language to teach me about other languages, i don't know if ruby would do that for me.... i'm probably wrong, and it does get the job done, but i've a lot of ruby people ask me how to do some custom header thing or some other gloves-off task, and i dunno what to tell them since java, python, .net, and everything all have classes that make this a snap, but rails stuff hides this real deep? or makes it hard for moderate programmers to find? i'm just curious, sorry for flame bait ;p

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure what you're saying here. I like Sinatra for teaching the underlying http protocol. Unlike Rails, it doesn't hide things from you, but just tries to make it cleaner and easier to write an app.

I maintain that Sinatra:Rails::PHP:J2EE. They all have uses, but aim at different ends of the scale.

<comment><USER5> thank you!</comment></comment></comment>


All Interviews Suck - <AUTHOR> http://www.jroller.com/wj/entry/all_interviews_suck <comment><USER2> I'm not a programmer by trade, so I can't relate to that specific interviewing process. I do have to say though, not all interviews suck. I've been through a fair number of interviews. Some have been good, some have been bad, most are somewhere in between.

I've been offered jobs for most companies that I've interviewed with. I have two pieces of advice. First, be honest. If you don't know something, tell them you don't know it, but stress that you are willing to learn. Second, paint with broad strokes, and fill in with details as they ask for them. And third (I know, I said two,) be prepared, but not rehearsed. This will help to keep you calmer. If you are prepared, answers will come easily, but if you're rehearsed, when you start to forget exactly what you were going to say (and you probably will start to forget) you'll have a harder time improvising.</comment>