Ask HN: I got the job, but how do I get a place to live? - <AUTHOR>

So I recently took a job with a startup headquartered in Mountain View. By and of itself, this is an awesome opportunity for me and I consider myself lucky to be in the position I'm in.
Then I woke up and realized taking a job in and moving to Silicon Valley means I have to find a new place to live near my office. I'm moving from Tennessee and while my landlord there was awesome to work with regarding my crappy credit, I'm having no such luck in the managed-property-metropolis of Mountain View and its surrounding areas.
Anyway, my question is this: how have you (if indeed there are any of you out there) who are now working in Silicon Valley with crappy credit been able to find a decent apartment and property manager that is actually willing to work with you? The people that surround me are either in a similar position as myself or just not willing to help, so finding a co-signer has proven to be a non-existant option for me.
Any tips would be greatly appreciated. <comment><USER2> Sublet a room. If you're new here it well help to buffer you against the cost of living, plus at least part of your social circle should be from outside your workplace. You need about $2000 in your pocket when you arrive to get through month 1. On the upside, you can easily do without a car. Consider a bike, and don't forget to ask your employer for commuter checks if you end up taking a bus/train every day, because that's tax-deductible.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm looking into similar logistical challenges with the possibility of moving to NYC. I will probably try starting out with a place from Airbnb so that I can bypass all the typical issues with landing a pad. For you, another possibility might be to locate a roommate with better credit.

ETA: Whoops, just saw in a reply that you have two dogs. Might be a problem for the options I mentioned.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've also just moved to the Bay Area from Tennessee (well, after 21 years in Asia in the middle).

Do you have to live near the office? Can't you telecommute some days? Investigate cheaper apartments a little bit farther out -- e.g., Fremont.

Perhaps consider buying a house as well as prices will only go up here (again, a little or a lot farther out and telecommute and commute).

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool! Maybe we could grab a coffee sometime next week if you're up for it.

It's funny you mention that..that's exactly what I'm thinking about doing now. I found a house a little further out (Los Gatos) owned by a nice lady that is willing to work with me.

My coworkers think I'm crazy for considering being so far away (20 miles, ~45 minutes with traffic?), but I really haven't had any luck finding anything similar that's closer to MV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't have bad credit so I can't relate but typically to solve this problem:

1\. Talk to the agents/landlords/whoever and show proof of stable income. Some are willing to talk.

2\. Alternatively, seek out roommates who have spare rooms to rent just to get your foot in the door. Craigslist comes to mind.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Im being paid to relocate and my salary is sufficient to afford an apartment. Money isnt the concern here. I have 2 dogs and a girlfriend so rooms or hostels are not an option. Perhaps I should have been more clear... I'm simply interested in finding privately owned rentals in the area more or less.

</comment><comment><USER6> Money talks man. Offer to pay X months upfront. It's a tactic I've used twice to negotiate a rent discount. Be sure the upfront payment is documented.

Then again, how bad can you AND your girlfriends credit be that they won't even work with you?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's not a bad idea, and I did offer to pay upfront when I was denied but the corporate managed properties seem to not be as flexible there.

Regarding the credit issue, long story short -- my girlfriend is Indian and her parents are rather 'traditional'.. so our relationship has for a number of years been on the down-low. That given, her signing on the lease isn't really much of an option right now. (i talked to my landlord in TN about this and he worked with us on it, so that's how I got my current apt)

My plan now is to either sublet a place or find a private property owner who is more willing. As you said, money talks.. and I'm definitely willing to put some down to get into a place at this point just to save my sanity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> couchsurfing.org is a good place to start for temporary housing, or look at the "Rooms/Shares" section on Craigslist. I guess some people call this "subletting", but the point is it's easier to move into a room in someone else's house, without being on the lease, then to get your own apartment right out of the gate.

</comment><comment><USER8> Sublet from a stanford student: <http://supost.com/>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Those are both good suggestions. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER9> Check out the Men's hostel.</comment>


Makani Power, a Google funded wind energy startup, comes out of stealth - <AUTHOR> http://www.makanipower.com/

<comment><USER2> Wow, where to begin. First off, I'm really happy that Google continues to fund energy related start-ups, their solar and wind efforts are commendable.

Also, I'm fairly sure that the engineers behind this project are top notch and giving this project all they've got, it sure looks like they have picked some interesting challenges.

That said, I don't think this will ever 'fly' (pun intended) on any appreciable scale.

Wind is a fickle thing, and if you look at the design parameters of even the smallest windmills you realize that it takes bullet proof engineering to get a windmill to operate at all for any stretch of time without catastrophe, tying one to a kite seems to compound those problems to the point where even if the power generated were substantially higher than that on the ground you'd still be left with a higher per KW bill. Being able to operate in places where windmills are otherwise not viable is nice, but at 600 meters above the ground there will be substantial risk from getting kits entangled so the closest spacing will probably be such that a 'farm' of these will generate relatively little power for a given area of the planet over which the kites fly.

1 MW seems to be a pretty ambitious goal for a first setup, think about it, a 1 MW turbine sitting on the other side of a line will pull on the tether with a very impressive force, the kite will have to pull aloft a tether strong enough to withstand that force and up to 600 meters of power transmission cabling. These are not simple challenges. What I don't understand is why they don't build a 10 KW or so scale model and gain experience from that before going for a full MW, even a 10KW system flown for a year or two would give them plenty of experimental data to help design a larger one.

Then there are the liability issues, windmill towers are pretty solid and yet they've been known to fail. I figure the failure rate of kite lines+power lines would be substantially higher than that of a tower and so you'd have to contend with the occasional free flying kite+windmill combination.

All that said I wish these folks best of luck with what they're doing, but unlike the cheap solar panel revolution I highly doubt that this will ever be deployed at a scale large enough to be notable. Neat project though!

<comment><USER3> I was ready to be all sceptical too, but I actually came away from the site quite impressed.

They seem to say that their wing tracing out the movement of the tip of a turbine, as well as operating at higher altitude will increase efficiency. They also have dynamic control systems to deal with variable conditions, increasing reliability.

As for your windfarm density reasoning, I think the vast majority of potentially viable land is currently unused, so achieving high density is not an issue now (although it might become one in future); there is more than enough land area to go around. Also they mention as a selling point of their system that it would be much more suited to deep sea locations than conventional turbines, opening up even more space for potential exploitation.

Concerning the need to build a scaled-down prototype, I think they mentioned somewhere that the pictures on their site are of a 10kW prototype :-)

About the liability in case of failure, they mention that they have implemented redundancy of systems on the wing itself, so in case of wing failure, it can still be brought down safely, and in case of tether failure, it can fly autonomously to a predefined location.

The only thing I don't understand is how they prevent the tether from getting all twisted up while still transmitting power through it (although I'm not a mechanical engineer, so there's probably a relatively simple solution to that) :-)

As I said earlier, I'm very impressed. This has got me excited.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for digging further, I read most of the site and I missed the 10KW prototype thing (it is the sensible thing to do, and I'm glad they did it).

The reason why I'm skeptical is because systems that are 'far out' in wind power have been proposed over and over again during the last decade each with even better on paper performance than the last one. Then as soon as a full scale model is tried it turns out the economies aren't there any more for some subtle reason (and sometimes not so subtle).

The wing tracing out the movement of the tip of a turbine makes the wing a turbine, there is no way around that, and as such it will be governed by the same laws, there are no exceptions from that. 1MW is not just 2 orders of magnitude more complicated than 10KW, it is probably more like 3 or 4. I've hand built a 2.5 KW machine, I'd be very careful to extrapolate my hard-won knowledge to a machine that is only 4 times as powerful.

For lower power levels a slipring arrangement is customary to avoid twisting up the cable inside a windmill tower, at higher power levels the mill is usually steered in such a way that the cables will not tangle.

I'm very curious how this will develop, I'm a huge fan of renewable energy but I've been around the awea boards long enough that I'd like to see some longer term results and at higher power levels before getting really excited. I do sincerely hope they succeed, time will tell, and google backing these guys is simply awesome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I used to live in a co-op with Corwin (the CEO/CTO). The main thing I remember about him was that he was really into kite surfing.

He was also scary smart and about as good of a mechanical engineer PhD as I have ever met.

Him being the CEO/CTO of makani makes a whole lot of sense.

Good luck, makani!

<comment><USER5> Interesting, when I saw the video I was immediately thinking it must have been a kiter dreaming up this contraption ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> _"Makani AWTs will produce energy at an unsubsidized real cost competitive with coal-fired power plants, the current benchmark of the lowest cost source of power."_

If this is true, it could be huge. Would these be deployable basically anywhere that is reasonably open?

<comment><USER7> In the "Fundamentals" section of the website (<http://www.makanipower.com/concept/fundamentals/>) Makani claims that their system can operate in 85% of the areas in the US vs. traditional windmills that need class 4 wind which is only present in 15% of areas in the US. Also there is some interesting info about why their approach could be better for offshore wind generation.

I know some of the Makani guys and they are the real deal. These guys are seriously smart, and talented. I am glad everything is going so well for them.

<comment><USER5> Offshore wind generation seems to be an obvious win, although the materials will have to be tougher.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This looks pretty interesting. They have some nice explanations of their concept- particularly the fundamentals link: <http://www.makanipower.com/concept/fundamentals/>

It looks pretty complex, but if the numbers work out right, this is probably the cheapest way to tap into the great winds available high in the sky.

</comment><comment><USER9> It's an interesting idea (more wind higher up, without the expensive tall shaft required for a regular wind turbine), but how does it get relaunched when it falls to the ground? Wouldn't a balloon or regular kite be simpler and just as effective?

<comment><USER10> _how does it get relaunched when it falls to the ground?_

I'm guessing: the same way you'd launch a regular kite: by starting with it off the ground and slowly letting out the line. Possibly the propellors can be switched from generators to motors if it needs an extra boost.

A balloon would lose too much in drag. If they can actually solve the software problem to get these things up and flying autonomously, it'd be pretty darn effective.

<comment><USER11> Why guess when the answer is clear on the second frame of <http://www.makanipower.com/concept/makani-m1/> ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The anser to the FAQ "Will this harm birds or bats?" was obviously crafted with the careful help of a PR and Legal team. :-p

<http://www.makanipower.com/faq/faq/#2>

</comment><comment><USER13> The contrarian in me has always been curious about how tapping "eco friendly" energy sources impact the environment. (Any here have some serious pointers?)

For example, if the energy of the wind at high altitudes is tapped, the wind will (duh) lose its force. How will that impact weather systems?

Same for solar power - we'll be trapping radiation that will otherwise be reflected back into space. How does this affect thermodynamic equilibrium?

Same for geothermal energy - how does it affect deep-earth physics?

Maybe the effects in these cases are indeed linear in the small - like taking a drink from a river, but it is hard to be sure about whether they can be scaled with continued linear behaviour. Just as with fossil fuels ... one car probably didn't do much damage. 8 orders of magnitude later, its a different story altogether.

<comment><USER2> There is an easy way to see why this would not happen. A mountain range is a pretty sizable obstacle to the progress of airflow. It affects the weather directly around the mountain, and as much as 50 miles _before_ the mountain and after it. But that's as far as the influence extends, and you'd need some pretty good data gathering and analysis to prove that. The effects that you can actually feel with your senses usually don't extend more than 10 miles or so beyond the mountain in the leeward direction, upwind you'd be hard pressed to notice any change at all.

There will _never_ be a windfarm that has a cross section comparable to a mountain range.

<comment><USER14> That's not a good answer here.

A mountain range isn't sucking the energy out of the system and sending into another one. The mountain range sucks the energy out of the air and transfers it elsewhere -- leading to the violent and unpredictable weather that large mountain ranges are known for.

Turbines suck the energy out of the air and don't put it back in the same place.

I don't think that we'll be able to draw enough energy out of the air to make more than micro-climate level changes, but then if you look at what's happening to the eastern Washington water table and the massive reservoirs on the Columbia River, the massive reservoirs on the Colorado, and so on, things start to look a little bit less promising.

<comment><USER2> You are missing some basic stuff here. A mountain range is _more_ , not less effective at 'sucking energy out of the air', it's basic physics. A windmill can only oppose the wind so much before it fails to work (see Betz' limit), a mountain range can suck 100% of the energy out of the air as you word it by simply converting the energy in the air to heat on impact (that's simplified but that's a good part of it).

As to your choice of words, turbines don't 'suck energy out of the air', they slow down the moving air. A mountain range does the exact same thing.

<comment><USER14> Read my post again. I did not say "mountain ranges don't suck energy out of the air."

BTW, turbines don't 'suck energy out of the air', they slow down the moving air

Those two statements are identical. Slowing down is sucking energy out of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is an incredible idea and an amazing feat of engineering. I'm sure they'll face huge challenges in deploying this thing but it just shows that real engineering is still alive. Damn, makes me wanna break out my fluid mechanics textbook :).

</comment><comment><USER16> Did they convert a fire engine into a mobile ground station?

[http://www.makanipower.com/wp- content/uploads/2010/06/IMG_70...](http://www.makanipower.com/wp- content/uploads/2010/06/IMG_7011.jpg)

EDIT: yup

[http://www.makanipower.com/wp- content/uploads/2010/07/201006...](http://www.makanipower.com/wp- content/uploads/2010/07/20100610-IMG_2189.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER17> This looks way better than than the giant fixed turbines they are putting in Eastern Oregon which cost $2.4 million a pop, interrupt the view, and can't pay for themselves.

It's also funny Oregon has abundant hydroelectric power, but subsidizes these wind projects with rate hikes and taxes - while selling billions of dollars of these electrons to California at market rates.

</comment><comment><USER18> I thought this was Saul Griffith's startup, but I see no mention of him on the about page. At his Long Now talk last year, I recall him talking about Makani as being his new effort.

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

Saul seems totally awesome; his Long Now talk "Climate Change Revisited" was a fantastic survey of alternative energy solutions, and how no one was the answer, but that a cocktail of solutions is. His ability to put big numbers in context was stunning, especially his equating of industrial output in the US pre-WWII to the effort required to build wind turbines to cover half the usage of the current US electricity grid.

Here's the video of the talk: [http://fora.tv/2009/01/16/Saul_Griffith_Climate_Change_Recal...](http://fora.tv/2009/01/16/Saul_Griffith_Climate_Change_Recalculated)

</comment><comment><USER19> Joby Energy is another company in the area working on this problem. <http://www.jobyenergy.com/>

</comment><comment><USER20> This idea has been batted around for a while and in fact the biggest risk to getting a project like this aloft will be regulators like the FAA.

</comment><comment><USER21> The concept looks amazing!

I'm a bit concerned about how to protect human lives around - will it be required to forbid access to a large area ?

The FAQ states that the peak altitude is 600 meter. Does that mean a circle with a radius of 600m must be protected ?

Pretty sure they thought of it already, it looks like a well thought out project, I'm just wondering.

<comment><USER16> There is so much flexibility in where these can be deployed that you would probably never find them near a populated area anyway, just for economic reasons. They can also be deployed at sea much more practically than a tower turbine.

EDIT: according to the FAQ, there are failsafes for both navigation and tether failure. It can even land itself untethered!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Since this is a hacker site, any control theorists in the house? From observation and experience, controlling a tethered airplane is the most pressing technical challenge facing the team right now. Anyone ever modeled the dynamics of a glider or a turboprop?

</comment><comment><USER23> The only question I have is: how does it deal with harsh weather? Especially with offshore setups where storms are frequent, can it handle high winds and strong waves?

Overall it's an incredible step towards innovation in energy, kudos to the entire team.

</comment><comment><USER24> They are mentioned on Discovery Channel's Powering the Future. I believe it was Saturday's episode. It has interviews and demos. No mention of Google but they do say they feel their problem is control systems for the kites, not the actual energy generation.

</comment><comment><USER25> Hope Google also invests in solar powered [http://www.bogolight.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=BOGO...](http://www.bogolight.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=BOGO- BUYONESN2&Show=TechSpecs)

</comment><comment><USER26> What happens when the wind stops blowing or changes direction?

<comment><USER27> It lands! (The tether gets it done, and the rotors also back up as engines)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> So, uh, a bunch of my friends are working on this:

<http://www.jobyenergy.com/>

Which is pretty awesome.

</comment><comment><USER29> If they can make it work, this could be perfect for powering ships, too.

</comment><comment><USER30> So, does the M1 produce 1 MW on average, or peak?

<comment><USER31> 1 MW is the rated capacity. The actual amount of energy produced depends on where it is deployed. They go into detail about how much energy is produced on the "fundamentals" page:

<http://www.makanipower.com/concept/fundamentals/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> So... do they makani power?

</comment><comment><USER33> Rotors are tiny compared to conventional wind turbines. Even with six of them, just no comparison. Sure they harvest the wind much higher and it flys in circles quite fast, but I'm not quite sure how they'll be able to generate 1MW with on of those production things. It has the wingspan of B737!

It's a neat idea, but do benefits outweigh problems?

<comment><USER34> I was under the impression that most of the reason conventional wind turbines are so huge is so they can have the blades move slowly, to be more hospitable to local birds.

<comment><USER2> That impression is completely wrong.

The tip speed is what counts, the key governing factor is called the 'tip- speed-ratio', the apparent wind speed (as seen by the tips of the rotor) versus the real wind speed (as seen by an observer relative to the ground).

Almost all windmills that want to be efficient have design TSRs somewhere between 6 and 8, and consequently, in a given wind they all travel about as fast at the tips.

The design constraints are the speed of sound and the forces on the blade root as well as the tendency of the blade to start fluttering.

It has absolutely nothing to do with birds. Birds will fly in to a stationary building just as easily as they'll fly in to windmills, it's rare but it does happen every now and then.

The larger a windmill, the slower the blades will rotate.

The reason why they are so large is because the power harvested by a windmill goes up with the square of the rotor diameter, many small windmills are more costly to maintain and operate than a single larger one. Right now the sweet spot is somewhere around 2MW and 80 meter rotors for best $/W.

<comment><USER35> _The reason why they are so large is because the power harvested by a windmill goes up with the square of the rotor diameter_

Doesn't the Makani wings get around this issue by equivalent to a turbine with a massive wingspan and a wingtip that generates power, but without the rest of the structure?

<comment><USER2> The outer third of the blades account for roughly 60% of the total power generated by a windmill, the 'massive wingspan' would have to be normal to the direction of the wind, in order to say more about what Makani does or does not do there would have to be a lot more design data available than there is now.

Windmills with 'just the tips' have been proposed and constructed, there are some good reasons to include the blade all the way to the root. Part of that is to stem vibration, also to help with rotor start-up and low wind conditions.

<comment><USER35> It is normal to the wind direction, that's clear on the site. From the way you're talking it doesn't sound like you bothered to even look at what they're doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> my nephew got recruited by a similar wind startup.

<http://www.jobyenergy.com/tech>

<comment><USER37> Looks like they're still some time away from having a working prototype though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> This will not work. It uses too much space and It looks like it will need repairs or at least maintenance all the time.</comment>


Immunity Passports Could Create a New Category of Privilege - <AUTHOR> https://onezero.medium.com/immunity-passports-could-create-a-new-category-of-privilege-2f70ce1b905 <comment><USER2> Do you want people to seek the virus?

Because this will accomplish that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Off course not. It's one of the worst things that can happen. But these claims are out there and people and governments are talking about them. My goal is just conversation and getting inputs and I don't think not talking about bad things make them go away.</comment></comment>


Facebook Launches New Initiative to Help Scholars Assess Impact on Elections - <AUTHOR> https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/04/new-elections-initiative/ <comment><USER2> Facebook has been doing their own internal research on election manipulation since at least 2010. Subtle UI variations can be targeted at users to effectively increase and decrease voter turnout as desired.

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/facebook- experime...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/facebook-experiment- found-to-boost-us-voter-turnout/)</comment>


Flavors of programming ... - <AUTHOR> http://pozorvlak.livejournal.com/135255.html

<comment><USER2> I find it interesting that you (implicitly) like Data Munging better than Clever Algorithms. I agree that the former is orders of magnitude more common. I haven't encountered a Clever Algorithms problem very often at all on commercial projects. My current project is an outlier insofar as we've been doing algorithmic work for months. It's fun, in the way any good hacker would expect such a challenge to be, but it's also stressful to work on something for a long time and not know for sure whether you'll end up with a solution. (Especially when the context is a startup and not a research project.) It's much easier when you know for sure you can get there, you just have to figure out how. Thankfully, the Algorithms category gets more and more fun as you knock off significant chunks of the problem. Once you see the light at the end of the tunnel, you're home free. Unless, of course, you got it wrong. :)

Edit: by the way, do you actually use APL/J/K in the way you mentioned? I really like that paradigm. I think it deserves a place alongside OO and the others as a fundamentally different approach to programming. However, I haven't used it nearly enough.

Edit 2: I would distinguish two different kinds of Data Munging. One is Data Transformation, where you have data in some original context and it needs to go through a series of transformations or passes until you've extracted or computed what's suitable for your problem. That is way fun. The other type, though, sucks rocks. I call it Meat Grinding. That's when you have the _exact data you need_ in a form that you can't use because of some purely technical limitation. A common example is you have data in a database or a DTO when what your code need is a domain object, so you have to copy the properties over like this:

      myStupidObject.CustomerName = stupidDataObject.CustomerName

This isn't so much a programming problem as an integration one. (You sort of touch on it at the end.) It's also one of the worst things about programming in less powerful languages where you can't easily write a program to do the gruntwork for you.

Edit 3: I'd also argue that your "API spelunking" nightmare is at its nastiest in OO systems. In poorly designed pre-OO APIs (like Win32), it might take a long time to figure out how to call a function or what to do next; there might have been some ugly one-off struct you had to populate, etc.; but at least you didn't have to figure out how the hell to make a Bar out of a Foo so you can pass it as the third argument to Baz, when neither Foo nor Bar has anything to do with your problem. But with poorly designed OO APIs, these absurd hurdles seem endless. I used to compensate for this by studying such code archaeologically (if I couldn't avoid it altogether), in order to learn how the absurdities had arisen over time. This was a way to escape Dostoevsky's definition of the easiest way to drive a man insane: make him move a pile of dirt from one end of a prison yard to another _and then move it back_.

<comment><AUTHOR> I understand your use of the pronoun "you", but it's not me. I work almost exclusively on algorithmic stuff, and when I do work on data munging it's the direct application of algorithms just developed. So I'm lucky.

<comment><USER2> Oops, I assumed from your other comments that the OP was yours. Sounds like you've got a good situation though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't think one of my favorite (OOPish) flavors was included. I think of it as something like designing an organism out of various independent parts, figuring out how they will work together and respond to input.

For me a lot of more complicated UI design is like this, I have objects representing each part of the interface and spend a lot of time sending messages between objects and figuring out how to handle user events. I guess the focus isn't so much on algorithms or if-statements so much as high-level architecture.

</comment><comment><USER4> at first i thought this would be good. data munging is definitely a time of programming that occurs.

but then the list just gets ridiculous, almost poking fun at the different jobs one might do. more importantly, real tasks are left off.

i flagged this submission for being boring.

<comment><USER5> The list is meant with a wink, the references to the maze are really a funny way to get the point across. Grow a sense of humour and flag stuff that really needs flagging, such as this: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943367>

In case you missed, it, let me spell it out for you:

Programming is idiomatic at a higher level than you'd think by casual inspection of the code, when you zoom out to the level of individual programs, maybe even projects there is a very limited set of classes that you can group most if not all programs in to.

I'm missing one for web programming, so let me supply that one here:

WebApps: data gets moved from some datastore, through some processing machinery to produce html, then gets sent to the user, the interactions get captured in forms or ajax and pass a bunch of processing machinery on the way to some datastore. Repeat until machine failure.

<comment><AUTHOR> Have you put that in the comments on the site? It fits ...</comment></comment></comment>


Comparing the Top Five Computer Vision APIs - <AUTHOR> https://goberoi.com/comparing-the-top-five-computer-vision-apis-98e3e3d7c647 <comment><USER2> Full output of the experiment is here: [https://goberoi.github.io/cloudy_vision/output/output.html](https://goberoi.github.io/cloudy_vision/output/output.html)

I'm surprised by how good some of the CloudSight captions are.

<comment><AUTHOR> I address that in the post: apparently Cloud Sight uses a mix of machine learning and crowd sourcing. My experiments and their pricing suggest that the captions you see were mostly crowdsourced. Still, the quality is great, and if their pricing works for your use-case, they offer a great solution.</comment></comment>


The Diseases You Only Get If You Believe in Them - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/04/the-diseases-you-only-get-if-you-believe-in-them/479367/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> > "hikikomori," in Japan, when people socially withdraw to the point where > they never leave home.

That's not a "made up disease you only get if you believe in it" it is a well established mental illness. Also known as agoraphobia commonly linked to severe depression.

I was hoping there wouldn't be mental illnesses listed here. I was disappointed. This is the worst kind of click bait. Quackery that encourages the harmful notion that people suffering from mental illness should "just get over it".

<comment><USER3> > Quackery that encourages the harmful notion that people suffering from > mental illness should "just get over it".

That is the exact opposite of the author's position. Perhaps you should actually read the article.

<comment><USER2> I did read it. Did you? It is full of this garbage:

> The more powerful those stories are, the more you believe in the root forces > in them and the causal forces that are holding those stories together. In > our culture it would be biochemistry, in traditional Chinese medicine it > would be balancing between yin and yang, balancing the forces in the > universe, in Nigerian traditional beliefs it would be the power of magic and > the ability of people to manipulate that.

And another:

> You think when you take an aspirin that your pain relief is coming purely > from the aspirin doing something biochemical in your body, but part of > that's also coming from your belief in aspirin, and the knowledge that you > took the aspirin.

The whole article is about "placebo" disease. This is a crappy way to think about mental illness.

<comment><USER4> There's an interesting CGP video related to placebo disease: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2hO4_UEe-4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2hO4_UEe-4)

I'd be curious to know if you think the video is also bad.

<comment><USER2> That video does a good job of explaining the difference between negative placebo effects and illness. The article conflates actual mental illness with placebo effect. They are not the same, and telling someone who is suffering depression that it's all in their head is harmful, not helpful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Okay, one thing the article didn't make clear to me that maybe somebody else knows: what is penis theft? The Internet seems to think it's when people believe their penises have been shrunken or have entirely disappeared. Do sufferers believe that they don't have genitalia anymore? If you point to it, would they not see anything?

<comment><USER6> You never played American Football, did you?

Basically, if you have a small penis and gain weight (especially for already heavyset guys) everything around it grows while it doesn't get any bigger. This is otherwise known in the west via the not-unheard-of insult to overweight men: "You can't even see your own penis " In other words, they might imagine it shrinking into their body when their body is really just growing around it.

<comment><USER7> You didn't say what this has to do with American Football.

<comment><USER6> Locker rooms and showers full of men who are both overweight and are trying to prove their manliness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was expecting a mention of Morgellons, a disease in the U.S. where the skin is invaded by fibers. It was discussed a couple years ago on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8769925](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8769925)

</comment><comment><USER9> I like this book/article/interview for its willingness to explore (at times controversially) what Western cultural syndromes might be. So much of the coverage of 'cultural syndromes' seems to be in the Entertaining Stories of Benighted Cultures genre - snickering about penis thieves and latah.

</comment><comment><USER10> There's Fan Death in Korea.

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

<comment><USER11> That's a great example!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> They're diseases of the superego, not social or cultural diseases.

It makes no sense to say that a culture or society can directly bring about mental illness, but it makes sense to say that a person's superego is influenced by society and culture, and it makes sense that the superego can make a person mentally ill.

Otherwise, people will (correctly) argue that society and culture doesn't have that much power over a person's psyche.

Just use the correct term: superego.

<comment><USER13> I think you'll find Freud is largely not taken seriously. You can't use whatever model you want, but I wouldn't call it correct.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The best disease prevention in this case is to not read the article. You can't believe in these diseases if you don't know about them.

<comment><USER15> So, Roko's basilisk should be on the list then?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I caught RSI from a coworker. 20 pages of the Sarno book cured it. Never would have believed could happen if it hadn't happened to me.

</comment><comment><USER17> My roommate blames everything on invisible mold that I can't see and is impossible to detect.

<comment><USER18> Thats funny, but also freakin scary and possible if u think about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I am curious if these types of beliefs are similar to western "fad disorders"

<comment><USER20> Perhaps of interest:

[https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/03/chronic-w...](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/03/chronic- whiplash-is-a-medical-mystery/476052/)

<comment><USER19> This was an interesting read, thanks. My assumption, as someone who worked with cervicospinal injuries professionally, some whiplash doesn't go away quickly because it damages areas that are largely avascular, like cartilage and bone and connective tissue which take much much more time to heal than soft tissue like the rotatores and multifidi of the neck

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> At one point I thought I had some kind of gender identity disorder until I realise of how much culturally bound it is.

</comment><comment><USER6> >Hikikomori

I believe this is pretty much agoraphobia

<comment><USER22> No it's much more cultural and social than pure agoraphobia.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> In Romania "the draft" (ie: air current when you have two open windows) is a powerful enemy which can cause many symptoms or diseases: back pain, neck paralysis, ...

The "draft" can only happen inside, outside wind can't cause such symptoms.

If you feel such an air current inside you must immediately close something to stop it. Damage is cumulative. A bit of draft today, a bit tomorrow, and 10 years later you are paralyzed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Same in Turkey. Actually I think even in Germany ("im Zug gestanden haben." Where "Zug" = "Zugluft")

<comment><USER24> On the other hand, one peculiar thing I noticed about all Germans that I've lived with is their obsession with opening all their windows to 'air out the apartment'. They do this regularly (almost daily it seems) and regardless of season (freezing icy winter-wind? No matter, we need fresh air!).

I've also lived with many other nationalities and none of them do this. Fascinating.

<comment><USER25> One reason might be that air conditioning/flow systems are not very common in Germany an thus you feel the need to create your own air exchange.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Well, ADHD is one of them. We don't have ADHD in Europe (and no where else in the world).

<comment><USER27> If I were to point fingers at ADHD at all, I'd be more likely to mark it as an example of overzealous diagnosis of normal human variance than as a culturally-created disorder. At least in the relatively high-functioning cases.

(Are those stories of people with ADHD who are completely distracted by any arbitrary stimulus true? I've never heard of them closer than two or three degrees of separation from where I heard the story, and never a trustworthy source. Regardless, I don't mean those, hence "high-functioning")

<comment><USER28> Here's how a friend of mine described it:

 _Think about how well you 'd behave if you lived your life trying to sort out the information you needed with three radio stations and five televisions all playing different things blaring at you all at once 24/7\. That's kinda what it's like.

If you struggle, see about medication. I resisted for years. I was afraid it would take away the sparkle. Now, medication probably isn't for everyone, and some medications will not be for certain people, but let me tell you something: life works now. My apartment is clean; I know where my stuff is; I do better with relationships; I show up to meetings early; life doesn't feel like I'm constantly on the edge of imploding. And the sparkle is far from gone. I'm still the same person. I just feel like I can actually be that person without a wall of fog and noise to constantly battle through._

[https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1015517761698970...](https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10155177616989700&id=557909699&ref=content_filter)</comment></comment></comment>


Oklahoma city threatens to call FBI over 'renegade' Linux maker (2006) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/24/tuttle_centos/ <comment><AUTHOR> Full email thread on the Wayback Machine (worth the read) [https://web.archive.org/web/20080112204313/http://www.centos...](https://web.archive.org/web/20080112204313/http://www.centos.org/modules/news/article.php?storyid=127)</comment>


Ask HN: Tell us how you hire - <AUTHOR> We're HireArt (YC W'12), a marketplace for jobs. We're doing a survey to assess how different companies hire (e.g., success rate per applicant, processes used, types of candidates hired etc). We hope the results of this survey will help companies figure out how they compare (e.g, perhaps you're getting way more/less applicants than the average start-up).
The survey is mostly focused on non-technical hiring as that's what our company primarily recruits for.
Please fill this out and we'll publish the results. Would really appreciate your help!
http://hireartsurvey.wufoo.com/forms/please-tell-us-how-you-hire/ <comment><USER3> This is a pretty bad survey. It asks if I have hired any non-technical people or technical people, then 100% of the deeper questions are about non-technical hires. Yet, there was no way to enter "n/a" for MOST of those questions, so instead, I polluted your data, unfortunately.

(I have zero desire to hire non-technical hires for as long as possible. I pray I can put that off for well over another year. Even sales can be replaced with Sales Engineer or Sales Analyst, Palantir-style. We outsource the useless non-differentiated parts of the business -- hr, accounting, compliance.)

<comment><USER4> I had the same problem, FWIW. I gave up about 3 pages in. I've hired a lot of technical people, but no non-technical people.

<comment> barry-cotter Matasano's careers page is the best I have ever seen.

<http://matasano.com/careers/>

<comment><USER4> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a very poorly written survey; you post on Hacker News and you make it very difficult for someone who does 100% technical hires (not unusual for this board) to fill out your survey. I just left one abandoned.

If you're looking for information on non-technical position hiring, this is probably not the place to gather it.

<comment><USER3> Founders often do have to hire non-tech people. The first non-tech hires are some of the most difficult for tech founders. HN is a pretty decent place to find technical founders of companies.

It's just a badly written survey, not a bad idea to post the survey. They should fix the survey and re-ask, or just make it entirely and explicitly about "hiring early non-technical hires", which is what I think they care about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I will tell you my favorite hiring trick, by far. Before I do, though, I'll set the scene. I was looking for a new gig a few years back. I was mostly happy at my job, doing interesting stuff, not killing myself, and making good money, but itching to do something new. Wanted to get in the startup scene, etc. So I see a new company's job posting, and it looks like a perfect fit (location, mission, everything). I meet with the CEO, have a few conversations with investors and employees, and things are looking good. Then they throw me a curve ball - "We want you to do something interesting with our product." - <USER2> spent the next two weeks working my ass off nights and weekends. Mind you, not compromising my full time position in any way. In the end, I did something interesting, and it turned out to be a great thing for the company. More importantly, it let me get to know their product deeply, and I understood the kind of environment I'd be entering.

The moral of that story - when hiring, challenge people to do something for you. Give them a week to work with you. Pay them even. Just see how they actually work. It'll work well for you, and them - even if your rate of hiring is lower than you'd like.

<comment><USER7> Did they compensate you?

<comment><USER6> In this situation, I did not receive compensation because of my employment agreement with my then-current employer. That was my choice, and I'm sure we could have figured something else out.

I have seen candidates handle it differently, though - one potential hire we paid for a 3-week engagement as a contractor, for example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As others have stated, this probably isn't the best way to do a survey. At the very least, you're going to have some bias from posting this on HN late at night (in the US).

If you want a more representative answer to the question "How do companies hire?", I'd recommend using Google Consumer Surveys (<http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/home>)

You'll be able to survey a much larger audience, get more responses, and have statistically significant results. In addition, Google has a nice dashboard which lets you compare answers according to various demographic information such as gender, age, location, income, etc.

</comment><comment><USER9> Very interesting hiring approach. The space has seemed ripe for innovation for years and years.

Highly motivated job seekers willing to jump through a lot of hoops seem to be on the bottom side of talent. How do you solve this issue?

<comment><USER10> Wait, are you saying that more talented people aren't going to bust their ass to prove themselves to you? Puzzling.

<comment><USER11> There's a theory that says top tier candidates aren't often on the market, as their employers are keen to retain them and people in their personal networks are keen to offer them work.

It makes sense to me that an employed, well paid person who isn't actively seeking a job wouldn't be as motivated as an unemployed, unpaid person who is actively seeking a job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why are "None" and "Not Applicable" grouped into one answer? Surely they are significantly different responses.

</comment><comment><USER13> Hyperlink to the survey: [http://hireartsurvey.wufoo.com/forms/please-tell-us- how-you-...](http://hireartsurvey.wufoo.com/forms/please-tell-us-how-you- hire/)

</comment><comment><USER14> This link to an earlier HN comment from 59 days ago is not a response to your survey, but it includes tips about hiring processes in general.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4613543>

Read this for background. Check all the linked articles mentioned in the comment for more details.

</comment><comment><USER15> Interested to find out the results of this!

<comment><AUTHOR> will share with you when it's done. thank you!

<comment><USER15> Thanks! You should add Product Managers to the survey.</comment></comment></comment>


UK's Chinook HC Mk3 special forces helicopters set to become usable - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/29/chinook_mk3s_receive_mk5_update_16_yrs_late/ <comment><USER2> I've experienced this personally, as a controls engineer for a test/manufacturing equipment shop. Usually, customers accept our ready-to-go controls. But a half dozen times in the last few years, they say "don't bother pulling wiring or writing software, we'll do that". 5 out of those 6 machines are still non-operational.

<comment><USER3> Is it because the customers think they'll save money making the software themselves?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> ARRSE sums it up nicely:

[https://www.arrse.co.uk/wiki/British_Military_Procurement_Su...](https://www.arrse.co.uk/wiki/British_Military_Procurement_Successes)

[Probably not wise to click around much on that site as a lot of content is NSFW]

 _Lions, Donkeys and Dinosaurs_ is also quite good:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lions,_Donkeys_and_Dinosaurs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lions,_Donkeys_and_Dinosaurs)

</comment><comment><USER5> The Israelis have their own modified version of the F-15, the F-15I. Some of the mods are done at the factory and some done in Israel: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_F-15E_Strike...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_F-15E_Strike_Eagle#F-15I)

</comment><comment><USER6> I think it's just cultural. British Airways has the same reputation for tinkering with oem stuff and generally making it worse or at least harder to maintain requiring specialist in house engineering.</comment>


A lot of what we think we know about WWII is wrong - <AUTHOR> http://warisboring.com/articles/a-lot-of-what-we-think-we-know-about-world-war-ii-is-wrong <comment><USER3> This seems like a junk article. World War 2, especially the European theater, is one of the best studied historical times in existence. Especially since the Russian archives have come to light. It is really not believable to claim that we have gotten the story that wrong -- with such weak evidence.

I don't believe carping about the merits of specific machine guns is substantive, and I think what he said about tanks was incomplete and misleading, although I don't want to spend the time to demonstrate it.

The article really went off the rails in dismissing the significance of the Battle of the Atlantic. TFA claims that U boats only sunk 127 ships during 1940, but Wiki claims that 270 ships were sunk during June-October alone. And it is well known that Churchill himself said that winning the battle of the Atlantic was critical to Great Britain's survival.

In a later phase in early 1942, after America had entered the war but before it understood the threat, German subs sunk 609 ships at a loss of only 22 u-boats. ([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Happy_Time](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Happy_Time))

A recent examples of a book that _has_ changed emphases and perceptions about WWII is Timothy Snyder's _Bloodlands_ , on the unique savagery of the Eastern European conflict.

<comment><USER4> I found David Edgerton's "Britain's War Machine) ([http://www.amazon.com/Britains-War-Machine-David- Edgerton/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Britains-War-Machine-David- Edgerton/dp/0141026103/ref=mt_paperback?_encoding=UTF8&me=)) quit interesting.

He highlights that the Germans---far from the technical wizards they are often portrayed as these days---won in the beginning despite inferior material. The British and their allies always had material and technological superiority. (Lots of their gadgets just didn't work very well at the beginning.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Everything you need to understand about Germany's defeat in two numbers, which can be surprising ones for Brits and Americans:

German troops killed, missing or POW on the Eastern front: 2.1m

German troops killed, missing or POW _everywhere_ else: 1.2m

The Russians beat the Germans in any meaningful sense of the word.

<comment><USER6> This used to be a widespread perception in Western Europe, too, but changed during the cold war. When people in France were asked in May 1945 which country had contributed most to the defeat of the Germans, the answers were: 57% USSR, 20% USA, 12% UK. But asked again in 1994, the numbers had shifted to: 49% USA, 25% USSR, 16% UK.

According to: [http://www.les-crises.fr/wp- content/uploads/2014/06/sondage-...](http://www.les-crises.fr/wp- content/uploads/2014/06/sondage-nation-contribue-defaite-nazis.jpg)

<comment><USER7> This is weird, because it is mostly accepted in American History classes - <USER2> least from my school and a few other public school kids I asked when I saw this. Everyone I asked at LEAST thought the USSR contributed as much as the USA in terms of winning the war.

<comment><USER8> My experience has been the exact opposite. Americans by and large see themselves as the "saviors of Europe" when it comes to World War II. That's where a lot of the deeply rooted hostility towards Europe (especially France) comes from: they shouldn't be giving the USA shit about anything, they should be grateful we saved them from Hitler, etc. etc.

<comment><USER9> Serious question then: what would Europe look like today if the US had stayed home and not engaged at all in WW2 in Europe or the aftermath? How many more countries would have fallen to the USSR in Europe? Without US supplies, would the UK or the USSR have been able to keep fighting? Would WW2 have dragged out for years longer than it did? And so on.

The US spent a huge amount of money to stand off with the USSR in Europe after WW2 (which was in its self-interest). In fact it's still dealing with Russia in Europe to this day, trying to keep them from reclaiming more former Soviet territory, and carrying the majority of the burden in NATO.

Most Americans I talk to view their country's contribution in WW2 as the push that tipped the scales in the allies favor once and for all (rather than being the savior of Europe). Or allow me to paraphrase Churchill - he believed the war was won, when the US was convinced to fully join the war effort.

Further, what other countries in Europe are we going to claim had a large contribution to defeating Germany? The list is really, really, really short. The UK, Russia and the US carried the radical majority of the effort. It's that simple.

<comment><USER10> > In fact it's still dealing with Russia in Europe to this day, trying to keep > them from reclaiming more former Soviet territory, and carrying the majority > of the burden in NATO.

How many foreign military bases does Russia have in other countries ?

How many foreign military bases does USA have in other countries (NATO or not) ?

Who's the "territory reclaimer" now ?

<comment><USER11> Since WWII, how many square-kilometers of territory did the US seize from its neighbors, versus USSR (before it broke up) or Russia (after breakup) from its neighbors?

Even if you believe the leases on US bases are somehow secret hostile seizures from their host country (which is unlikely, except for in Cuba)... I'm pretty sure we're talking _much_ less in terms of "taken" territory and people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I just watched "Back to 1942" which shows a glimpse of WWII from the Chinese perspective. They had to cope with a famine AND a war, and lost ~20 million people during the struggle. To put it into perspective Russia lost around ~28 million [1].

In my opinion it was an excellent film that left me again pondering how much I've really lost in my education by only getting the "Western" version of history.

Word of warning, the movie has no happy ending. It's also in Chinese with English subtitles. Available on Netflix.

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

<comment><USER13> Being a Chinese growing up in America, what you said is true and often I feel the Western civilization didn't appreciate the war in Asia until the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor, and even then I feel people see America as the sole savior in the pop culture. America's first battle in Africa was a huge casualty (echoes the stuff in the movie Fury). Of course no one is born out to succeed, but the truth is thousands died on the path to victory.

Korean and Chinese had been fighting the Japanese long before Germany declaring war in Europe, way before 1937. For more than a decade, the Chinese had been fighting alone (well with very unpleasant support from the Western civilization like getting weapons at a very expensive rate and siding with the Japanese). Everyone else was still supplying industrial material to Japan, aiding and helping killing millions in Southern-Asia, because the rest of the world wanted to stay neutral. If the Chinese didn't hold back the Japanese, the entire Southern Asia would have fall in the hand of Japan in a few months (what the Japanese generals had promised their emperor). The British and the French armies did not stand a chance in their colonines against the Japanese.

Soon May-in, First Lady of Republic China came to the U.S. and begged the U.S. Congress to help China [1]. I quote: "When Japan thrust total war on China in 1937 military experts of every nation did not give China even a ghost of a chance. But when Japan failed to bring China cringing to her knees as she vaunted, the world took solace in this phenomenon by declaring that they had overestimated Japan's military might."

It wasn't until late in the war did the Chinese receive air support (and many kind volunteers from the U.S. Army such as the Flying Tigers group) to help stabilize the war against Japan in China. But millions, were poured into the battlefield, untrained, uneducated, with little armor, fought against a modernized elite army from Japan.

Oh not to mention the shitty Commander Stilwell who caused a huge causality of the allies in the Southern-Pacific/Burma...don't get me started there. The British hated him. The Chinese hated him (he seized control of an elite Chinese army division and lost 60% of them - that division stayed and fought the Japanese so hard the Japanese had to surrender).

We had lost so many lives in WWII, including tens of thousands of American (some were recruited from U.S. territories that still don't have voting right in the Congress!). We can definitely improve history class by not just always focusing on American's effort. Even the local rebels in Europe helped the Allies to finish missions. Intelligence that the Chinese had provided to the Allies regarding the Japanese had helped Allies in attacking Japanese later in the war.

[1]: [http://china.usc.edu/soong-mei-ling-%E2%80%9Caddresses- house...](http://china.usc.edu/soong-mei-ling-%E2%80%9Caddresses-house- respresentatives-and-senate%E2%80%9D-february-18-1943)

\-- edit --

For those who can comprehend Mandarin, you can watch [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30QQtJoJ9Zg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30QQtJoJ9Zg) (and other episodes).

<comment><USER14> You appear to have a view shaped by the Nationalist propaganda. The Flying Tigers were mercenaries recruited from US Naval aviation and Marine corps because the top commanders were more sympathetic to Chinese plight. They were in China before Pearl Harbor, hence so-called "volunteers." Russian pilots, also called "volunteers," helped defend Wuhan before Americans got there. The demise of Chinese Air Force was a direct result of incompetence on Madam Soon, who for political reason had a hand in procurement and wanted to save money until the war started. The Chinese pilots were exclusively recruited from the upper class and generally lacked skills and capabilities to mount effective campaigns or devise innovative tactics. The Kumingdon so mismanaged the war efforts that in 1945 Japanese force could still launch successful drive across China to improve their line of communication, and when American air power failed to stop Japanese advances, the American Commanding general, general Chennault wanted to fly in ammunitions to Chinese ground troops, like general Stilwell earlier advocated, generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (that is right, the husband of the first lady wasn't the president of China; in fact he lacked legality, but had legitimacy, for his rule during the entire war) refused because he couldn't be certain his troops wouldn't turn their guns on him and replace him with a competent leader. The performance of Chinese force during WWII was abysmal, which directly contributed to loss of the Outer Mongolia as the price for Soviets to open a second front against the Japanese. It is not just that Chinese troops were ill trained, ill equipped, and poorly led; they were ill clothed, ill fed, had no ammunition; the Chinese soldiers were worth more to his commander dead then alive because the commander could forge headcounts and pocket dead soldiers' pay. The entire government and the armed force were thoroughly corrupted.

I just cannot let you cast aspersion on general Stilwell without challenge. He did clash repeatedly with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek because he wanted to fight the Japanese and the generalissimo did not. He wanted to equip and train Chinese Army, but the generalissimo only wanted to maintain his control over elite Chinese units because that is how he controlled China. An American once asked the commander of the best artillery unit, after patiently inspecting German made 150mm guns, why he didn't move his unit to the front line and actually fight, he was astounded when the commander replied that he didn't want to suffer loss and no longer being the best artillery unit in Chinese Army. The Chinese Expeditionary force to Burma was remote-controlled by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, who insisted that the entire force go through dangerous mountain range to retreat back into China rather than going to India. The units that obeyed and went back to Chine suffered such loss that they had to be reconstituted, while one brave commander took his troops to India saw his division forming the core of counter offensives later. The same commander, who was trained in US, would later train the main force defending Taiwan. Most of loss suffered by the Chinese Expeditionary force was non- combat causalities.

Madam Soon May-in, as you call her, was greedy, corrupt, clever in PR, and did more than her part in losing China to the Communists. Her meddling in politics made it impossible for Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's son to do even minor reforms to cleanse the government. Corruption was so bad that when a top commander correctly outed a Communist spy because the spy was above reproach, the spy correctly fingered another spy (they worked for different branches of Communists) in the Defense department because he was also clean, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek chastised his top commander for effectively saying no Nationalists could be clean. I couldn't make this up.

I suggest you carefully read all sides before making your mind. I hate the Communist with all my heart but the Nationalist lost the mainland because they were corrupt, incompetent, and organized themselves on a classical Chinese patronage system, which ironically the Communists are doing their best to emulate. The corrupt but all powerful bureaucracy has reasserted itself, as it has done for two thousand years. The choice is suicide now, by attempting reform, or suicide later, by doing nothing. All the wounds are self-inflicted. The Chinese Communists are wisely choosing to wait, as the Empress Dowager did during the last era of Qin dynasty. It is truly a tragedy. The Chinese revolution, it turned out, wasn't necessary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is pretty much the premise of "Brute Force" by John Ellis (1). It argues that Britain, Russia and especially America won the war by sheer industrial capacity, which vastly exceeded Germany's output. Their logistical advantage was reflected in their tactics. If I remember correctly, in the battle of El Alamein, Montgomery had vastly more equipment than Rommel, and won the battle through massive artillery bombardments and by numerical superiority in tanks. In the invasion of Normandy huge numbers of shells were fired, using carpet bombing which overpowered the Germans in the Falaise gap. Germany's "war of movement", with its aggressive advances, which had been so successful at the start of the war, sputtered to a halt before sheer quantity of materiel against both Russians and Americans.

The book also argues that the Allied "brute force" mentality worked against them at times. Patton used a dynamic war of movement against the Germans several times, but was often held back by the plodding methodical approach of his superiors.

1.[http://www.amazon.com/Brute-Force-Allied-Strategy- Tactics/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Brute-Force-Allied-Strategy- Tactics/dp/0670807737)

<comment><USER4> Britain's War Machine by David Edgerton argues similarly. ([http://www.amazon.com/Britains-War-Machine-David- Edgerton/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Britains-War-Machine-David- Edgerton/dp/0141026103/ref=mt_paperback?_encoding=UTF8&me=))

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> These are old, well-known issues. WWII machine gun designs reflected WWI trench warfare experience - fixed gun positions, fire in the general direction of the enemy. WWII didn't go that way, mostly because everybody had tanks, and could now operate against machine guns.

The most effective tank of the war was the USSR's T-34. More T-34s were produced than any other tank, including Shermans. The T-34 had a good gun, a decent Diesel engine, and an adequate transmission. The Sherman was a lighter tank, and early Shermans had a rather weak gun and some strange powerplants. (One version had five V-8 car engines arranged in a circle around one crankshaft. Chrysler had a good plant for making V-8 car engines, but the specialized machinery could not make a bigger engine.) The Sherman's big strength was simply that it was a good driving machine, and tens of thousands of them were driven from the French coast all the way to Berlin. Patton's "War as I knew it" talks about this, in the chapter "Touring France with an army". Many of the heavier German tanks would wear out on a long road trip; within Germany, tanks were often moved by rail. Basic truth: the tank that makes it to the battlefield beats the tank that doesn't.

(The overly complex Tiger tank transmission thing is real, but confusing. Tanks steer with the transmission. The Tiger tank had a steering wheel, which controlled the relative speed of the two tracks. The Sherman had two foot clutches which disengaged the left or right track, and turning was more of a lurch than a smooth turn. The Sherman could not turn in place. There was a Tiger variant with an electric drive, like a Diesel-electric locomotive, but that was harder to keep working than the hydraulic/gear system. Modern tanks steer like the Tiger, but now the technology works.)

The article author's info about the U-boat was is totally bogus. There was a big worry that Germany would be able to starve out the UK. Liberty ships, convoys, "jeep" carriers, periscope-spotting radar, and Ultra intercepts reduced the effectiveness of U-boats. The US Merchant Marine puts the number of ships lost to U-boats between 2,742 and 2,919.[1] The figures for 1940 are from 470 to 520, compared to the author's 127.

[1] [http://www.usmm.org/battleatlantic.html](http://www.usmm.org/battleatlantic.html)

</comment><comment><USER17> Those first few paragraphs give off so many crank vibes.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, this sentence, "Almost every narrative history of the war ever published almost entirely concentrates on the strategic and tactical levels, but gives scant regard to the operational," either suggests the author hasn't read much or is a really poor reader.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> the history that I got about WWII was that Germany built wunder-weapons that individually were of far superior quality to anything else, but couldn't be built at any kind of scale. their tanks were initially technologically superior, but not much else about their mechanized infantry stuff was. the bismark was probably better than any individual ship in the british navy (when they finally found the wreck they determined that british main gun shells literally bounced off of the armor), but it wasn't better than _all_ of them and the germans could only build one.

<comment><USER20> The Germans built just fine at scale - remember that it took the resources of Russia, the British Empire, and half of the US industrial juggernaut to take them down.

<comment><USER19> > America built 74,000 Sherman hulls and engines; Germany built just 1,347 > Tigers.

<comment><USER18> The Tigers were heavy tanks plagued by manufacturing problems. The Sherman was a medium tank more comparable to the Panzer line - the Germans built around 45,000 of those. The American M6 was comparable to the Tigers, of which few were built and 0 saw battle.

<comment><USER21> Panzer is just the German generic term for tank (or more literally, "armor".) Everything from the tiny, machine-gun armed Panzer I, to the Panzer VI Tiger.

The standard, 75mm Sherman was roughly equal to the long-barreled Panzer IV (~6000 built).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > In truth, there were never enough U-boats to more than dent the flow of > shipping to Britain. In fact, out of 18,772 sailings in 1940, they sank just > 127 ships, that is, 0.7 percent, and 1.4 percent in the entire war.

I thought this was partly thanks to Turing et al's breaking of Enigma. The allies had a window into tons of "secret" Nazi communication.

<comment><USER23> And airborne Radar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's a very interesting article arguing the simplicity of Russian armaments:

[http://militera.lib.ru/research/suvorov12/06.html](http://militera.lib.ru/research/suvorov12/06.html)

<comment><USER24> Suvorov is worth reading at length - you can learn a lot about Soviet/Russian strategy, tactics, and military culture from him.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> If you look specifically at the Spandeau machine gun mentioned in the article, Is the US using the same damn process with the F-35 Strike Fighter? A plane that is over designed, clunky and extravagantly expensive?

From War is Boring: No, the F-35 Can't Fight at Long Range, Either — Stealth fighter can't see, shoot or survive.

[https://medium.com/war-is-boring/no-the-f-35-can-t-fight- at-...](https://medium.com/war-is-boring/no-the-f-35-can-t-fight-at-long- range-either-5508913252dd#.igh2f33ob)

<comment><USER26> I don't find the comparison particularly compelling.

The MG 42's issues were more logistical. It was designed for an idealised situation (e.g. shooting range). Not as the article describes it "total war" where you have to carry everything you need to the battlefield. That meant issues like weight, complexity (for field repair), and replacements became a real headache. Arguably the real issue could have been bad feedback/communications between lower ranks and engineers/designers (and something we still see today with field equipment failing e.g. see the M16's long history, and how long it took for some of the changes).

The F-35 is more "too many chefs in the kitchen." The F-35 likely is over- engineered, but not because of too little feedback like the MG 42, but too much. Every major US military arm tacked on their own little requirements here and there, until the aircraft was so loaded down with toys and gadgets that it could barely fly. For example, the entire airframe is designed around a lift fan that the vast majority will never be fitted with.

<comment><USER27> _The MG 42 's issues were more logistical. It was designed for an idealised situation (e.g. shooting range). Not as the article describes it "total war" where you have to carry everything you need to the battlefield. That meant issues like weight, complexity (for field repair), and replacements became a real headache._

But the whole idea of the General Purpose Machine Gun (GPMG), which I'll note _everybody_ adapted after WWII, was to make a lightweight "heavy" machine gun. No water cooled barrel, no requirement for a heavy tripod, in the light machine gun use case it was fired from a bipod, and could be put into use quickly.

Those extra, quick change barrels were a _feature_ , not a bug, such a German infantry unit was organized around the GPMG, one guy would carry it, others would carry spare barrels and ammo, their job was in part to keep the machine gun running and protected from the enemy.

Issues like the high rate of fire were a tactical choice the Germans made, shared by no others to my memory (I believe the theory is that you would seldom have a good target for long, so you had to make the best of it while it existed). E.g. I see in the Wikipedia page that the post-WWII Austrian version has a much heavier bolt to reduce the rate of fire: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MG_42](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MG_42) And the Germans are still using it in the adapted for 7.62 NATO MG 3 variant.

Accuracy is also a tradeoff, there are many modes of machine gun fire like plunging where you want a degree of dispersion.

That said, yeah, feedback from the front is slow, can take a whole war to result in real changes. These things don't get put to the real test until real war; e.g. aside from the earliest M16s, none of these issues are a patch on the string of problems that initially crippled our Mark 14 torpedo used in WWII: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_14_torpedo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_14_torpedo)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> War is a racket, some lesser acknowledged operation information of WW2:

a) IG Faben and Standard Oil and the supply of TEL (Tetraethyl Lead) to Nazi Germany. [0],[1]

b) Production of Ford (and GM) engines by German subsidiaries for motorised transport was directly used against the Allies.

 _" Mel Weiss, an American attorney for Iwanowa, argues that American Ford received "indirect" profits from forced labor at its Cologne plant because of the overall increase in the value of German operations during the war. He notes that Ford was eager to demand compensation from the U.S. government after the war for "losses" due to bomb damage to its German plants and therefore should also be responsible for any benefits derived from forced labor. Similar arguments apply to General Motors, which was paid $32 million by the U.S. government for damages sustained to its German plants."_

This came out from a law suit (class action) by Elsa Iwanowa in 1999 (IWANOWA v. FORD MOTOR CO) for being rendered from Belgium to work in Nazi Germany for a Ford subsidiary in Cologne. [3]

It could be argued, more effective control of TEL to the Nazi war machine would have resulted in a halt or severe reduction in Nazi air power. And Ford did sue the US Government post-war for $32M USD for bombing their factories in Germany during WW2. [4]

Reference:

[0] [http://web.mit.edu/thistle/www/v13/3/oil.html](http://web.mit.edu/thistle/www/v13/3/oil.html)

[1] [http://soilandhealth.org/wp- content/uploads/0303critic/03031...](http://soilandhealth.org/wp- content/uploads/0303critic/030311borkin/030311marriage.htm)

[2],[4] [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- srv/national/daily/nov98/na...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- srv/national/daily/nov98/nazicars30.htm)

[3] [http://www.leagle.com/decision/199949167FSupp2d424_1453/IWAN...](http://www.leagle.com/decision/199949167FSupp2d424_1453/IWANOWA%20v.%20FORD%20MOTOR%20CO).

</comment><comment><USER29> I think the most important fallacy about WW2 is that nobody entered the war for a noble cause. It was all self-serving. It's often held up as a just war. Now of course I agree Hitler had to be defeated once 1939 came around, but it was also preventable, like most wars. The extent of appeasement was really an eye-opener to me. I'm 1937 the US state department still said Hitler was a "moderate" and should be supported! The background to the Pacific war by Noam Chomsky also tells of an economic war among empires which led directly to the Pacific war.

[http://www.chomsky.info/articles/196709--.htm](http://www.chomsky.info/articles/196709--.htm)

The indescribable savagery of the war, particularly near the end is hard to imagine.

Lastly one of the biggest fallacies concerns Hitler's invasion of the USSR, and speculation as to whether he could have won. The truth is the Germans were incredibly fortunate to do as well as they did! In fact the USSR was a world leader in tank production and tank strategy, before the 1937 purges they had the best and most innovative tank commanders and the most advance tanks. They should have crushed the Germans from the beginning!

<comment><USER30> Nonsense, why did France, UK enter the war? How about Poland?

<comment><USER29> Well France tried to avoid confrontation and the U.K. was trying to hold on to its empire and contain the German threat, but also had many business interstate in Germany. The allies thought they could diplomatically outmaneuver Hitler.

France and the U.K. then caved to Hitler's demands repeatedly and essentially sold Czechoslovakia and Poland down the river to Hitler at Munich 1938, and during the "phoney war". France was then surprised by the swiftness of the German attack but capitulated very quickly. Her armies were still mostly intact when France fell.

It must also be remembered that the extent of collaboration in France under occupation was very great and the French resistance was always very small.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Yes, it is. Captain America is a fictional character, the US didn't 'win' the war, and yes, all 'winners' engaged in war crimes that were just as heinous and cruel as the losers.

<comment><USER29> I agree with you, except that the USA very much _did_ win the war. The problem with winning wars is that the victor gets the learns that military power violence is a solution to problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> After being downvoted for a completely innocuous comment on this thread it is apparent that people only want to hear 'textbook' history, so I won't bother adding anything other than to say politics runs roughshod over history all day long. If humans survive another 70 years, I wonder how the history of the War OF Terror's 'coalition of the willing' will be written(whitewashed is probably a more suitable term), tyrants and criminals or liberators?

</comment><comment><USER33> What I was taught in public school is that the Germans used slave labor and POWs to work in factories to make their weapons, tanks, planes, rockets, etc and this led to a quality control issue while the USA and Britain had well paid and well fed people who made better quality weapons, tanks, aircraft, etc.

The Russians had an advantage because of their AK-47 rifle and a lot of fighting was done at the Russian front as Hitler tried to take over Russia. People forgot that Russia did a lot of fighting as well as had better weapons and stuff as well.

The USA has military superiority because we have better technology and better trained people. For example our fighter jets are better designed and our pilots are better trained than their Russian counterparts. Most of the USA's enemies buy fighters and stuff form Russia, but they end up being no match for the USA stuff.

<comment><USER34> Ak-47 was designed in 1949, I think you are missing something, war was over by that time

<comment><USER35> After the war, yes, but design began in 1945 and was completed in 1947, thus the "-47."

<comment><USER34> But it was adopted by Soviet army in 1949 officially, at least that's what Wikipedia says

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> All histories of wars that are still in living memory or close are going to be grossly distorted because people want to hear stories that pander to their own emotions.

As a prime example, historians are often legally (and certainly professionally) forbidden from freely studying some aspects of WWII in case the come to conclusions that are still politically sensitive. I'm talking here about the Nazi concentration camps. This is a research no-go-zone where only the officially sanctioned results are allowed to be published and people can go to prison in many European countries for making false or unpopular claims about 80 year old history.

Then there's the opposite problem in Japan where the official and popular history paints them as the good guys and hides from their killing 10's of millions of Chinese. Americans fall for this too and feel bad about the nuclear bombing of Japan, despite the enormous good it did to the whole of south-east Asia.

<comment><USER20> I know that Nazi imagery has been banned in Germany, but I've not heard of professional historians being legally bound to avoid research into the topic of concentration camps, on threat of imprisonment no less. Do you have a source for this?

Edit: Have hit comment limit, so replying to AC__ here

I've been through all the sections in your link, and a total of 3 people have seen prison time. The only one that could be called a professional historian would be James Keegstra, who wasn't convicted on holocaust denial per se, but due to violating hate-speech laws by teaching his high school history class: _" During class, he would describe Jews as a people of profound evil who had "created the Holocaust to gain sympathy."_. Keegstra was convicted in Canada.

Ernst Zündel was convicted in Canada and Germany under hate speech laws. Having had a look at his website, it's about politicking his views, not history. But he's been in and out of court for decades on hate speech violations.

David Irving could theoretically be called a professional historian, if it wasn't proven that he used known fabricated documents as source - during the libel case he brought against someone else. Irving was convicted in Austria.

None of the above are professional or dispassionate historians taking the topic seriously. All of them are politicking.

<comment><USER36> You can't publish holocaust denial material. That means if you find a new discovery that seems to challenge the legally sanctioned story, you can be breaking the law by publishing it. I don't think that politicians should decide what research is "right" and what is "wrong". This is completely against the American concept of free speech.

Austrian law seems quite clear on holocaust denial being a crime:

§ 3g. He who operates in a manner characterized other than that in § § 3a – 3f will be punished (revitalising of the NSDAP or identification with), with imprisonment from one to up to ten years, and in cases of particularly dangerous suspects or activity, be punished with up to twenty years' imprisonment.

§ 3h. As an amendment to § 3 g., whoever denies, grossly plays down, approves or tries to excuse the National Socialist genocide or other National Socialist crimes against humanity in a print publication, in broadcast or other media.

[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial#Austria)]

Imagine if he US criminalized downplaying the crimes of the Vietnamese Communists or any other group the government decided was "bad". This should be a matter for public discourse, not an imposed official history.

<comment><USER20> The Austrian law you're quoting isn't a law sitting all by itself. It's part of a law saying "No Nazis, and no bullshitting about what they did"[1]. If you look at your own quote, you'll see it says "grossly plays down". The scale of the Holocaust was large - there was a heap of physical evidence, and tens of thousands of eyewitnesses. And it's not a topic that has had little research - to characterise the story of the holocaust as springing forth from the mouths of politicians is grossly misleading.

Denying the holocaust altogether is not research - it's an attempt to _stifle_ research for political gains. It moves the needle from 'what actually happened' to 'did it happen at all', wasting resources - the same needle- moving tactics are seen in intelligent-design and anti-climate-change arguments, stopping productive conversation on a topic to further a political goal.

Finally, note that these laws limiting freedom of speech around holocaust denial are particular to that topic and nazism. The 'slippery slope' argument hasn't taken hold; it's not these laws that are limiting freedom of speech (hell, even with "the American concept of free speech" you still have Free Speech Zones, National Security Letters, and copyright that lasts for author's life + 70 years). The laws don't stop you from doing research into the shitty things the Allies did. They don't stop you researching Nazism in general or the Holocaust in particular. They only stop you playing politics from pretending that something does't exist when it has tens of thousands of eye- witnesses, troves of physical evidence, and heavy existing research on the topic.

Europe has a problem with violent nationalism; cutting off this particular avenue helps alleviate that, and doesn't do harm in return. These laws make Nazism (and it's trappings) less able to be used politically, something Europe is serious about - see Merkel's recent chiding of Netanyahu for him claiming that it was Palestinians who started the holocaust. How often do you see a head of government declare "Those atrocities, they're on us, not anyone else"?

[1][https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=y&prev...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nachkriegsjustiz.at%2Fservice%2Fgesetze%2Fgs_vg_3_1947.php&edit- text=&act=url) (does not have section 3h, added in '92)

<comment><USER36> Many countries have problems with violent political extremism of different sorts. When they outlaw free speech for supporters of those ideas, we call them violators of human rights. When China locks up dissidents because they spread anti-government messages, we say it's bad. But Germany and Austria do the same.

Would you really be happy if the US outlawed climate change denial and intelligent design? It's one thing to not like them but a massive step to imprison people for talking about them.

<comment><USER20> If intelligent design itself was responsible for drawing a demographic from all across a continent and destroying an estimated 6 million of them in an attempt to exterminate them completely, and was associated with a larger movement that was ultimately responsible for the deaths of 50 million people, then yes, I wouldn't have a problem with outlawing it to prevent a resurgence.

> _But Germany and Austria do the same._

Yeah, one each according to that WP link. Irving was imprisoned for all of 13 months in Austria. Compare to the recent HN article on Rikers Island in New York where 400 people have been imprisoned _for more than two years without being charged_ , and suddenly the _extremly low_ conviction numbers of these "political dissidents" comes into focus.

Also, classing holocaust denial as 'anti-government messages' is a pretty gross mischaracterisation.

<comment><USER36> Seperatist muslims in Xinjang, anti-government rebels in Egypt or Nazi sympathisers in countryside Germany. They're all people sharing ideas that can lead them to violence. It's not reasonable to pick one of them and class it as "truly worth suppressing their speech" while accusing governments which suppress the others of violating human rights.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Comcast: Your New Overlord - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/internet/103658/comcast-your-new-overlord <comment><USER2> I'm very much against the government enforcing "net neutrality", I'd much rather see regulations that eliminated the monopoly companies like comcast hold over a regional area and in turn lets the marketplace turn net neutrality a non-issue

<comment><USER3> It's a very uphill battle. I worked for the company that provides the "Get ___ Channel" promotions for MSOs (Multiple System Operators, like Comcast, Charter, Time-Warner before being bought by Comcast, etc.), and the stranglehold they have on cable is staggering.

When cable first came out, it was seen as both a luxury and a way to bring high-quality programming to rural areas. Once MSOs began providing upstream data connections, they jumped through a lot of hoops to remain out of reach of telco regulation.

Considering Comcast is the largest cable system provider in the US, they'll either keep lobbying themselves into immunity, or someone in Congress will get a big hair up their ass that can't be removed by "greasing the wheels," and it'll be a monopoly breakup on the scale of AT&T in 1984.

Personally, I wouldn't hold my breath. Lobby money is still pretty powerful.

Some good reading on the cable system history: <http://www.museum.tv/eotvsection.php?entrycode=unitedstatesc>

It was sickening when I first read the history of cable, but I have since come to realize that many industries operate the same way. Expecting companies to regulate their own industries is precisely how we arrived at the current situation. Anybody remember cable deregulation in 1996? Has it gotten better since? [http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/06/cable- deregulatio...](http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/06/cable-deregulation- good-for-consumers-ars-like-hell-it-is.ars)

How about energy industry deregulation? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis>

<comment><USER4> You forgot the big one: banking.</comment></comment></comment>


Toaster Central: Antique and Vintage Toasters and Waffle Irons - <AUTHOR> https://toastercentral.com <comment><USER2> Here's an interesting video on why these old toasters are better than the modern ones: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OfxlSG6q5Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OfxlSG6q5Y)

<comment><USER3> Discussed in depth! [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21164014](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21164014)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just this morning I cranked up my Sunbeam CG-1 waffle iron for our Sunday brunch. Still works pretty good for an appliance that's on the order of 60 years old.

</comment><comment><USER5> This site makes me miss living in New York. They have _everything_ there.

Also, one of the toasters on display is the same one that was given to me when I went to college.

[https://toastercentral.com/images/2SimplexT211-4921DL-02.jpg](https://toastercentral.com/images/2SimplexT211-4921DL-02.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER6> I _love_ websites like this—online museums which catalog relatively-mundane items. It reminds me that these "mundane" items actually have a lot of history, and I'm sure a lot of interesting stories from those who worked on them.

<comment><USER7> Coincidentally, last night I learned about a similar website by a collector of antique radios, Radio Heaven:

[http://radioheaven.homestead.com/](http://radioheaven.homestead.com/)

I was talking with Ron W4RON on ham radio and he mentioned that he collects old radios and told me about his site. I asked him if he had a Truetone radio and he said he had one from the 1930s.

I went on to explain that in the 1970s I saw a Truetone radio at a neighbor's garage sale, and the printing on the back panel said:

         Equipped with
      Truetone Stratoscope

          Eliminates
       Aerial and Ground

(The Stratoscope was a coil antenna on the inside of the cardboard back panel.)

I thought the Truetone Stratoscope name was pretty cool, and I adopted it as my hippie nickname and later my online handle. I used to try to get Truetone but someone always beat me to it, so I started using Stratoscope.

Ron said his Truetone radio didn't have a Stratoscope but he was familiar with it; it was something they added later.

Here's a Truetone Stratoscope from another antique radio site:

[https://www.radiomuseum.org/images/radio/western_auto_supply...](https://www.radiomuseum.org/images/radio/western_auto_supply/d2610_truetone_160_551837.jpg)

[https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/western_au_d2610.html](https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/western_au_d2610.html)

Back to Radio Heaven, Ron has a neat story of how he got started collecting radios and some wisdom he learned from his mom (edited for brevity):

 _I went with my mother to a local flea market and there sitting on the tailgate of a pickup just inside the gate was...an Atwater Kent model 20. I remember the dealer had it priced at $15, I only had $10 so I asked my mom for $5 so I could buy the radio. She said "I'm not going to give you $5 to buy that old piece of junk, if you want it try to haggle him down to $10". Well, he took the $10 and I was hooked, not only on old radio, but haggling with dealers over their price._

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Recent toaster thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21164014](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21164014)</comment>


Ask HN: Are business IP addresses confidential information? - <AUTHOR> Our company uses office365 for email among other things. Wordpress for www. This is just one more method of hiding our offices IP address from potential attackers. I assume that the better our IP address is hidden, the more effort it would take to attack our firewall to try and infiltrate our network. I also implement things like policies preventing external resources in email and stringent port and website filtering. In addition, we pay for all available security enhancements offered by vendors (e.g. O365 advanced threat protection, safelinks, DLP, etc.).
In O365, I have strict spam filtering policies and safe links enabled. One of the features of this service is quarantining suspicious email. In this quarantine, you can review emails and delete or release them and mark sender as safe as part of the workflow. In this quarantine, one of the tools is a "preview" where you can see the original email. I noticed that despite lack of warnings about dangers of viewing the original emails, this preview was rendering images that are embedded in the emails. Even though safelinks is enabled and the src endpoints reflect this in the code, I wondered how the images were being served. So I set up a test to send myself an email designed to get caught and quarantined with an embedded image referring an image on a server I have in the cloud. I monitored the http logs as I opened the quarantined email preview and sure enough my local IP address appeared in the http log.
We are a small firm in the high net-worth financial services industry and am concerned that my local IP could be leaked this way. A determined attacker could theoretically use this avenue to find our local office IP to start attacking directly.
I reported to Microsoft and they replied that ip addresses aren't confidential info and as such no action to fix would be made.
Am I just paranoid here and should IP addresses be considered confidential information in this day and age? <comment><USER2> [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1298588/should-ip- addres...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1298588/should-ip-addresses- and-ports-be-considered-confidential)

</comment><comment><USER3> Any website you visit knows your IP address. If there was a danger associated with that the web would've collapsed already.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess the difference here is the targeting.</comment></comment>


Japanese Complete Beta Invite Program - <AUTHOR> https://japanesecomplete.com/invite <comment><USER2> I was interested in this when I saw it posted recently, but I don't have the money for it, so I'm definitely interested in getting into the beta. Where would I even get the code though? Twitter? Reddit?</comment>


Open Wi-Fi 'outlawed' in Digital Economy Bill - <AUTHOR> http://news.zdnet.co.uk/communications/0,1000000085,40057470,00.htm

<comment><USER2> at this point I'm honestly just waiting for the UK to openly set up minitru etc.

<comment><USER3> This is the country that abolished the Right to Remain Silent and also deems that for certain crimes the accused does not have a right to be tried before a jury of his peers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great way to show how copyright is actually stiffing innovation and economy.... big times...

I mean they say "it does not seem sensible to force those universities who already have a system providing very effective action against copyright infringement to abandon it and replace it with an alternative". How about this law forcing _everyone else_ to abandon their way of doing things and to adopt such an "effective action" (which is definitely expensive, if it's anywhere near "effective" - I doubt it will ever be)?

</comment><comment><USER5> keep on bailing UK, the ship of state control is sinking

</comment><comment><USER6> ..but they're so easy to crack</comment>