The CDC lost control of the coronavirus pandemic, then the agency disappeared - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/danvergano/cdc-coronavirus-containment-redfield <comment><USER3> Over the past few years a series of American agencies have lost their reputation and world standing. The FAA with the 737 max, the CDC with the test, the FDA with testing regulation and hydroxychloroquine. Its important to have institutions that work, but we've spent years deliberately gutting them and undervaluing them. All that money spent on the military and homeland security, and in the end we were caught utterly unprepared for the greatest national security threat of the past few decades. Even though we have more aircraft carriers than makes sense to have, we'd rather build another one than invest in crucial infrastructure such as strong regulatory agencies and science infrastructure. And we get to pay the price of those misplaced priorities as we barrel towards 200,000 dead. Hopefully this serves as a sort of wakeup call.

<comment><USER4> I think you'd make a stronger argument by instead of making a military or other things argument, and just make a 'fund other things more' argument.

The reason I think you should stay away from pointing fingers, especially at a relatively divisive issue like military or especially aircraft carrier funding is because then you shift a question of "should American be world leading in commercial air travel regulation, pandemic prevention and control, and medical development" to a far more complex one of what America's role in the world should be.

The combined CDC, FDA and FAA budget is something like 35 billion dollars a year. Overall DOD budget is is nearly 700 billion, making up nearly half of annual discretionary spending (roughly 1.5 trillion). You could literally double the funding of those three agencies and barely budge the overall calculus of the budget.

Edit/Add-on: I think the whole sub-thread under my comment (my bad =/ \- I get the irony...) is an example of the types of distractions that might be avoidable if you don't scope military spending into discussions.

<comment><USER5> The fact that "military" is a "divisive" issue proves the point of how we got to this point in the first place.

<comment><USER6> People are divided on what the US military's role in the world should be and how much money it should take to uphold that role.

Sitting atop the longest stretch of global stability (largely enforced/maintained by the US military), it's very hard to think clearly about what variables we can or should fiddle with.

<comment><USER7> The globe might feel stable while sitting inside the US and reading domestic media sources, but it sure hasn't been easy for the dozens of countries we've been invading/occupying for the past decades.

<comment><USER8> If we're making sweeping generalizations, then countries with stable benevolent governments who don't threaten their neighbors / the US and fund terrorism don't get invaded or occupied either. To be clear, I'm not saying every foreign policy action the US has undertaken in the last few decades has been superb.

<comment><USER9> If we're making sweeping generalizations, then countries that don't project military power to prop up dodgy regimes and enforce their currency on major commodities don't get targetted by terrorist action. To be clear, I'm not saying every action that resistance organisations and foreign governments have taken in the last few decades has been superb.

:) :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> ed-209 "Believing people without symptoms didn't spread the virus, the agency limited testing, discouraged masking..."

This is false by Fauci's own account (see below interview) in which he states mask wearing was discouraged in order to secure availability for health workers. This is no small distinction as it raises questions about the importance of public trust/credibility during a health crisis.

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0XHC5Kxxv_w](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0XHC5Kxxv_w)

<comment><USER10> There are a minimal number of excess deaths now associated with COVID, so what is the problem? Allowing the community to acquire immunity naturally during Summer is a good way to minimise the spread of the virus come Winter. COVID severity seems heavily linked with Vitamin D levels, so lockdown during Summer would possibly have been counter-productive for the general population.

[https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm)

Why should Governments force people into lockdown for a virus with a CFR of 0.26%, marginally more deadly than the Flu at 0.1%? In particular, COVID deaths are concentrated at those aged 70+ with existing health conditions, so broad-scale lockdown and enforced mask wearing doesn't make sense - <USER2> targeted support for the elderly and vulnerable would be effective and less disruptive.

<comment><USER11> > There are a minimal number of excess deaths now associated with COVID, so > what is the problem?

I don't usually use such language on HN, but this is absolutely delusional. Covid19 has killed more people in 6 months, with lockdowns, than Malaria did all of last year. More than a third of those deaths are in the US.

How can you possibly in good conscience claim this is even remotely comparable to the Flu?

<comment><USER12> You're using ambiguous language, and you didn't at all refute the parent's argument.

If sars-cov-2 actually turns out to have overall IFR of around a quarter of a percent, then it most certainly is comparable to seasonal flu. I personally think that's unlikely, as most reputable estimates have continued to converge on the 0.5-1% range. But even that is "comparable" in the true sense of the word, in that reasonable and fruitful comparisons can be made between the two. Which is exactly what epidemiologists do for a living.

I rather think it's _your_ comparison that's delusional. Two-thirds of of the people killed by malaria are children. Millions more children are afflicted with symptoms severe enough to lead to long-term health problems. Malaria literally robs countries of their future. And malaria's transmission is a much harder problem to solve, because we're fighting a resilient, ubiquitous, nearly invisible vector that can spread the disease miles from the nearest infected person.

To be sure sars-cov-2 is worser and scarier than seasonal flu in every way, but the hysteria isn't helpful.

You didn't even bother to try to refute the parent's assertion that more limited but better targeted restriction might work just as well with less economic damage. This is an area of active, legitimate debate.

<comment><USER11> The IFR for Covid-19 is still not known, but just based on deaths, it is obviously either much more virulent or much more deadly than a seasonal flu. There is no way to look at ~127k deaths in the US for half a year, with no sign of slowing down in summer, and say that it is similar to the flu (which killed ~34k people last year in the US).

The comparison to malaria is also interesting. You're absolutely right that the infection vector is completely different in almost all characteristics. The difference between a disease killing mostly children and a disease killing mostly old people is important, but I don't think "robbing a country of its future" is a meaningful way to look at it. For example, there are no demographic risks from malaria, like your metaphor would seem to imply. The majority of the economic impact is coming either from households having to pay for the care of their sick family, or from lost work due to the sickness. The long-term impairments that malaria may leave children with are also a factor.

Of these, the first and possibly the third apply to COVID-19 as well, except that the costs for COVID-19 care are much higher, and with the important caveat that we don't know the long-term impacts of COVID-19 (though it is very likely not to affect children significantly, fortunately).

And while malaria can be eradicated (with great effort and time), as has been done in the southern US and southern Europe at least, it remains much more likely that COVID-19 will remain an endemic burden that we will just live and die with. I don't think we have any examples of successfully eliminating a human-to-human transmitted respiratory disease, unless we get lucky with a vaccine. It may well end up as a new tuberculosis.

And the assertion that limited restrictions could work as well as lockdowns is an extraordinary claim without any form of evidence. The only countries that successfully stopped the disease used some combination of timely lockdowns, travel restrictions, ubiquitous mask wearing, large scale testing, and excellent universal healthcare. Limited protections for the elderly have not been shown to work anywhere in the world, so why bother discussing them?

Note: in the spirit of nitpicking about my use of "not comparable" when I meant "much worse than", I should also point out that SARS-CoV-2 is a virus, so it is literally not comparable to the Flu, which is a disease. You can compare SARS-CoV-2 with (one of) the Influenza virus(es), or compare COVID-19 with the Flu/Influenza.

<comment><USER12> > _And the assertion that limited restrictions could work as well as lockdowns > is an extraordinary claim without any form of evidence._

Japan, for example, has so far found success with very limited restrictions. There are other examples.

> _The only countries that successfully stopped the disease used some > combination of timely lockdowns, travel restrictions, ubiquitous mask > wearing, large scale testing, and excellent universal healthcare._

This completely contradicts your previous sentence. Every intervention that you listed except for "lockdown" is... not a lockdown, and therefore by definition an alternative to a lockdown. Governments at all levels around the world are exploring alternatives, which will largely be judged to "work as well as lockdowns" if they can keep healthcare systems from being overwhelmed while significantly avoiding the economic devastation caused by the stricter interventions.

> _Limited protections for the elderly have not been shown to work anywhere in > the world, so why bother discussing them?_

That's an extremely unhelpful way to approach any complicated subject, especially one of such enormous importance. Thankfully, most healthcare professionals don't indulge is such nonsense, and have in many places been successful in keeping infections out of care homes. As of this weekend, there are still nursing homes in the USA reporting zero deaths from COVID, and many others that have kept infections to a level similar to that of other respiratory diseases.

<comment><USER11> I didn't contradict myself, I was referring to 'limited restrictions for the elderly', the parent commenter's recommendation. The parent commenter was also explicitly against widespread mask wearing, and for allowing the disease to spread during summer. Japan has extremely widespread mask wearing, and while lockdown orders were not enforced, there were recommendations for the populace to work from home and avoid going out for the night which were respected on a wide scale, paired with travel restrictions both internally and internationally, and school closure in the cirtical period at the beginning of spring.

Related to targeted measures for the elderly and their success, of course care homes should take all precautions, who would oppose that?? I am saying that it can't be considered enough, and we have seen that it is not enough, for example in Sweden. The fact that there exist care homes in the US that have had few or no COVID-19 deaths is proof of nothing, except of a job well done by those people, and of good luck.

But the elderly don't live only in care homes, and it is not only the elderly who are getting sick and dying. And many more care homes have done a terrible job in keeping their wards safe, becoming hot beds of infection themselves.

> > Limited protections for the elderly have not been shown to work anywhere > in the world, so why bother discussing them?

> That's an extremely unhelpful way to approach any complicated subject, > especially one of such enormous importance. Thankfully, most healthcare > professionals don't indulge is such nonsense

Limited restrictions <for the elderly> as the only measure taken against COVID-19 have not worked anywhere in the world, are against almost all medical professionals' recommendations, and aren't even worth discussing. It has been tried by madmen, and it leads to tragedy. This is what the parent was proposing, and this is what I am combating.

Less-than-lockdown restrictions for the entire populace can work, if they are respected on a wide scale. Unfortunately, most of the people who are against lockdowns are also against any such restrictions, imagining instead that they can shift all of the burden on the elderly and sick. Not only is that a heinous attitude, it has also been shown not to work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> At the moment we're well beyond the CDC. We have a President and his various acolyte governors who have so utterly botched and politicized our COVID-19 response that many people won't take the most basic steps to protect themselves and those around them. It's maddening and leaves those of us who are trying to do the right thing feel totally unprotected and unsupported, especially in states like Texas and Florida.

The CDC may have made missteps, but there's no way it can possibly operate as well as it should in this political climate.

<comment><USER14> Of course there'll be politics on an issue of great social importance. That's _supposed_ to be the point of having a CDC, that they can offer respected, apolitical advice on what we need to do. When they fail catastrophically, we inevitably fall back to the normal strategy for resolving disputes about what our society should do, which is politics.

<comment><USER15> Looking at the HN comments apparently nobody wants to believe that civil servants can fail unless hindered by the political bosses, and that Presidents are personally responsible for what 2.8 million federal employees do all day.

I wonder if they blame the Queen in the U.K.?

<comment><USER16> The queen isn't in charge of the civil service.

People in Britain absolutely do blame the cabinet (the UK's executive) and particularly the prime minster when they fuck up, yes. I mean, obviously.

<comment><USER15> You should watch "Yes, Minister" and "Yes, Prime Minister" for reasons why you shouldn't believe the elected politicians have anything to do with what the UK government actually does.

<comment><USER17> Just watching the House of Commons debate finer points about covid-19 is hilarious seems like they're more clueless than the public because they're scared blind over losing their positions

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The CDC is an executive agency and therefore under the ultimate control of the presidency. There is no way that this was not orchestrated from the top by an ignorant president. This isn't stupidity. It's malice. Even if the CDC wanted to do better, they can't. They can't provide messaging or testing or anything against the wishes of the white house. Want to force everyone to wear masks? Can't because it'll embarrass the president. What is the point of even having such an institution when all of its actions can be overridden by a mad man determined to only advance his selfish agenda, an agenda that clearly does not include dealing with this virus in any way? The failure of the CDC has been catastrophic, but there's no way things would have turned out this way had they had free reign to implement proper policies based on science.

</comment><comment><USER19> > Frieden, the former CDC chief, argued that the agency failed largely because > it has been shackled to an inept administration. "The overarching problem > has been the failure to have a clear national strategy, a national plan, and > consistent communication. Everything really stems from that," he said.

That's a common refrain and the gist of the article. But it's helpful to zoom out.

At the end of WWII, the US stood as the only intact industrial producer. It parleyed this win into a decades-long economic/military/political advantage. Through a collection of unsavory attitudes, the country began to think of itself as different in some magical way. The reverence toward WWII as the last "good" war has kept the focus on winning WWIII for over 70 years. The belief that somehow we're special has made it impossible to look at actually solving domestic problems or even act internationally.

This mix fed directly into a world view in which problems come from abroad. You see it with The Wall and immigration policy. You see it with the focus on foreign election interference. When there's a problem, its source more likely than not falls outside US borders.

The marginalization we see with CDC can be found in a wide range of American institutions: the military; the space program; regulatory agencies including FDA, FAA, and EPA; the educational system; Congress; the White House; even recently agriculture.

The failure of these institutions, combined with exceptionalism borne of a military victory 75 years ago, has led to a broad abdication of responsibility.

You can see this in how the US spends money. Consider the US Federal budget. Over 85% of expenditures fall into three categories: benefits/entitlements; military; and interest payments, in that order.

[https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal- bud...](https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal- budget-101/spending/)

This has been a bipartisan effort that predates 2016 by decades. The latest incarnation is just one station on a very long railroad.

</comment><comment><USER20> Woulda,shoulda,coulda...

We live in a very different world today where someone can get on a plane and spread a virus across the planet in a matter of days. The only hope in containment was that the virus didn't spread easily.

The best solution that I can think of that may have stopped the spread of the virus would've been giving everyone as many N95 masks as needed and make wearing them mandatory. Unfortunately it was far easier to spend 5 trillion $$$ on everything but that. These masks should have been free and available at every street corner of the USA, Subways, Buses, Airports, Supermarkets, etc.

This isn't over and I don't know how it ends, but hopefully we'll come out the other side a little smarter and more prepared for the next one.

<comment><USER21> The country still refuses to wear masks. Led behind a president who refuses to wear masks. This is literally the minimum he could do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I did some work with the CDC in 2014. They were organised and sensible and fantastic to work with, especially in comparison to local equivalents here in Australia.

It's shocking to see how badly they failed.

<comment> o-__-o Fun fact,CDC was not prepared in 2014.

FEMA appeared to have their shit together but completely boondoggled every disaster response in some way.

It's amazing we didn't see this coming sooner

<comment><USER22> The project I was on was on Dengue Fever and Zika and they had their shit together on that. The data was clean, well organised, delivered quickly.

Somehow between then and now that data collection side has fallen to bits to the point where efforts like the John Hopkins tracking project had to rely on the NYT open source collection on GitHub.

I don't know who is responsible for pandemic response in the US, but back then everyone at CDC seemed competent and dedicated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> One of my pet peeves is the way nobody in the Government is caring about safety on air travel.

I had to fly recently and someone near me was using a CPAP.

Study after study shows that CPAP aerosolizes and spreads virus particles much more rapidly than normal respiration. Various Government agencies warn about this.

\- [https://www.cdcr.ca.gov/covid19/wp- content/uploads/sites/197...](https://www.cdcr.ca.gov/covid19/wp- content/uploads/sites/197/2020/04/COVID-19-and-CPAP-Frequently-Asked- Questions.pdf)

\- [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6832307/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6832307/)

\- [https://www.health.state.mn.us/diseases/coronavirus/hcp/aero...](https://www.health.state.mn.us/diseases/coronavirus/hcp/aerosol.pdf)

\- [https://em.umaryland.edu/educational_pearls/3741/](https://em.umaryland.edu/educational_pearls/3741/)

I've written (FedEx) to the CEOs of United and American. American didn't answer. United says they're required by law to allow people to use CPAP in- flight.

There's no excuse for this. A person who needs a CPAP is already a high-risk for dying if they contract COVID. Do they want to take down everyone else with them?

<comment><USER24> Americans with Disabilities Act may require the airlines to permit CPAP users to travel with the machine. It's a tough call, but I don't think "CPAP users are grounded indefinitely" is a fair and equitable position.

<comment><USER25> Where did "indefinitely" come from? That's a rather big jump, isn't it?

It's the middle of a pandemic! Surely this is not the time to have a big germ- spraying machine in the middle of an airplane?

CPAP users can wait until after the epidemic has stabilized to travel. I mean, everyone should avoid travelling.

Given that the last two days in a row had record new cases and that three states today already had record numbers by midday, I'm... disconcerted at the lack of urgency that seems to be so common.

<comment><USER24> Given that it's the literal definition and common usage of "indefinitely" (without fixed or specified limit, not precise or exact), I don't think it's a big jump at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The United States doesn't have effective federal pandemic laws. The federal government looks to the states to manage their own health arenas and in those states many allow county level health departments to run with the ball. This is how you end up with one state doing x and another state next door doing y. It even gets to the county level with a county in a state doing x and the county next to it doing y during a pandemic. The CDC lost the battle before it began.

It was heartening to see everyone sort of pull together to flatten the curve, but with what has happened during the phased reopenings, you'll never have American citizens do it again voluntarily.

</comment><comment><USER27> I wonder if that title is the best one to suit te reality. From an outsider it would look like control was 'taken' from, or never 'given to' the CDC, rather than lost.

</comment><comment><USER28> The pandemic has done a great job of highlighting weaknesses inherit to democratic governments. Populism and demagoguery, combined with rewarding loyalty and punishing dissidents. A dysfunctional democratic republic isn't very different from an autocracy. I suspect during times like this it might even weaker, since you end up with no national unity. You can't deal with a pandemic effectively in this kind of political environment.

</comment><comment><USER29> This is classic starve the beast. There is one party that continuously tries to gut government institutions - like putting Betsy Devos to head education, Wheeler to head EPA etc etc and then has the gall to say that government institutions don't work

Who gutted the pandemic response unit?

<comment><USER30> Trump, Trump did.

Edit:

Trump's administration did request funding to the "pandemic response team", set up by the Obama administration, be cut.

[https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-fire-pandemic- team/](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-fire-pandemic-team/)

<comment><USER31> Obama cut it too. Until Ebola.

<comment><USER32> Which was handled before it made its way to the US in any significant capacity. Imagine Trump had taken clear and decisive action against COVID in January.

<comment><USER31> Hindsight is easy.

> Imagine Trump had taken clear and decisive action against COVID in January

Like the travel ban, which he announced on Jan 31?

<comment><USER32> Of course hindsight is easy. Does that mean we shouldn't make use of it?

And yes, like the travel ban, which clearly was the wrong solution for the problem.

I don't blame the Trump administration for failing to predict the future, but I do see that they willfully ignored bad news over and over again and in fact continue to do so even today, which is completely unconscionable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The FDA, the CDC, WHO, our media and governments in the US and UK all need massive systematic reform if not outright replacement.

</comment><comment><USER34> This is my favorite chart:

[https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/new-covid-deaths-per- mill...](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/new-covid-deaths-per- million?tab=chart&country=OWID_WRL~USA~SWZ~NOR~ITA~DEU~FIN~FRA~CAN)

<comment><USER9> Best they rename Swaziland to its new name "eSwatini" before the woke find out!

<comment><USER16> Being offended by completely speculative offence theoretically been taken by ill-defined third parties is one of the Internet's weirder trends.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I haven't seen any mention in the article about political interference. Consider Trumps policies and you'll see why all these organizations are failing. He's destroying them.

</comment><comment><USER36> Clearly it was the CDC at fault here, not a few hand picked bureaucrats, not the chain of command, not a president with a penchant for firing people who challenge his authority.

What a poorly concocted article. The least the author could do so remind people of the "starve the beast" approach to public utilities that the Republicans have been pursuing for decades.

Nope, we'll just throw the entire CDC under a bus.

<comment><USER37> There's this strange phenomenon on HN sometimes -- or at least I've noticed it here several times -- where people will somehow manage to condemn the article while arguing for _exactly the thesis of the article_. That's what you're doing here.

<comment><USER38> Given that a lot of people dont read articles and go straight to comments, comments that challenge title are valuable if the title is at odds with article content.

<comment><USER39> I literally can't read most articles due do adblock blocker or because they block european visitors.

<comment><USER40> Turn your adblocker off if you want to read those articles? If you don't, don't.

<comment><USER39> adblockers are a non-negotiable necessity nowadays. not due to ads, but due to tracking.

<comment><USER40> OK, then you don't get to read the article. It's a fair trade.

<comment><USER39> That is fine, I just wanted to give another perspective why people only read the title and not articles.

<comment><USER40> That doesn't give a perspective on why they feel compelled to comment though. This is a discussion of the article not a guess-what-the-article-might've-said contest.

<comment><USER39> Most articles end up being a discussion of only what the title says, and not being able to read the articles is one of the reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Who trusted the CDC in the first place? The US healthcare system has been compromised by rampant profiteering for a long time.

<comment><USER42> This is a bit like blaming fire fighters for your disagreements with your fire insurance issuer.

They may indeed both suck, but blaming one for the failure of the other doesn't make much sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I can't take Buzzfeed 'news reporters' very seriously given the recent debacle with Zerohedge and subsequent plagiarism firing of Ryan Broderick. [https://www.zerohedge.com/political/buzzfeed-reporter-who- go...](https://www.zerohedge.com/political/buzzfeed-reporter-who-got- zerohedge-banned-twitter-fired-plagiarism)

This CDC piece by Vergano & Hirji is more of an opinion and perception article than 'news reporting. I worry that click bait sites like 'Buzzfeed'(ridiculous name) are taken too seriously, especially when there is so much great well researched and argued material online that is often dismissed as 'conspiracy theories' etc etc

</comment><comment><USER44> The article started off convincingly "On January 17th...", but i gave up after "....the world's most trusted public health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,...".

If the sentence had've been "...the world's most trusted public health agency, [in The United States (well, maybe)]", I would have perhaps considered reading more.

<comment><USER45> Just wondering what you would nominate for the worlds most trusted public health agency? Maybe the WHO?

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I hope we do a serious review of the cdc when this is all over. For all the money we give them, they totally failed to "control" the outbreak. It feels like it's devolved into an academic institution and we have enough of those.

<comment><USER47> IDK the US that well, but if you don't have coercitive power over politicians what can you do. I'm aware that CDC has been criticized for other stuff as well, but in the end they seem to not have that much power.

In my country (Spain) it has been a shitshow. Everyone who warned about the upcoming situation was ridiculed and/or insulted in a coordinated effort between government and media. Now the same people is being called _captain after the fact_. It's pretty sad to see, and I've been subject to this myself despite not being a public figure.

Everything has turned into a political shitshow. When you have medical professionals in TV insisting that the government is right, and that this is just a flu, when you have your lead epidemiologist in TV with absurd claims, when you have your OSHA-spanish-equivalent in National Police fired for buying masks (and the list goes on and on), then how can anyone trust _the institutions_.

I mean, my regional government which is corrupt, and sometimes hilariously inept has done a better job. What the *@^- man.

<comment><USER48> > IDK the US that well

If I can offer a piece of advice in that direction, it is to remember that the US is in fact a union of 50 states, and those states actually have a fair amount of power. The federal government, as powerful as it appears to be, really does lack authority in many areas. While they could absolutely have done a 1000% better job leading the response to the coronavirus, it was always going to fall mostly on the states to do the actual heavy lifting. It's the nature of our political system.

<comment><USER25> And yet America managed two world wars just fine.

Speaking from the Netherlands, it seems clear that about 40% of Americans lost their marbles in this grand collective paranoid fantasy starting around Nixon, growing through Reagan, and then really taking off around the end of the W. Bush administration.

They started to believe these terrible and terribly false things about their fellow citizens, about science, about pretty well everything.

And they purchase hundreds of millions of weapons.

I can't see how it will possibly end well.

<comment><USER48> > And yet America managed two world wars just fine.

Sure, defense is one of those things that is definitely the purview of the federal government.

But for many things that the feds haven't managed to figure out how to control yet, the tenth amendment is very much in play. For pandemic response this is definitely true. It was true in 1918, remains true today. The states are in charge.

Given recent history (in particular, as it relates to your 40%), I expect that the states may actually start asserting more authority, instead of continuing to cede it bit-by-bit to the federal government. Which perhaps does lead to your final comment ;-).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


To Understand Jio, You Need to Understand Reliance - <AUTHOR> https://diff.substack.com/p/to-understand-jio-you-need-to-understand <comment><USER2> This article delivers a very good understanding of what it's like to be an entrepreneur in India. Kudos.

One of the coolest things I've read about Jio is something I read on a previous post on HN: that the name and logo were designed to be the mirror image of oiL.

> Later, Reliance profited from other parts of India's protectionist regime. > Their synthetic fiber arbitrage worked like this: to make manufacturers > self-sufficient, the Indian government allowed them to import raw materials > only in proportion to the goods they exported. Ambani persuaded the > government to let him import polyester filament yarn in proportion to the > nylon goods he exported. Nylon was available cheaply in India, polyester > filament was 600% more expensive when locally sourced in India than its cost > when imported. So Ambani set up a closed loop: make nylon clothes from > locally-sourced materials; sell them abroad; use the import quota to import > polyester filament; sell it at home. And, just to be safe, he took care of > the demand side, too: at least according to The Polyester Prince, Ambani > sent money abroad to buy his own products at duty-free ports, and then sold > them for cheap, gave them away, or even dumped them in the ocean.

All true except in many cases, the exporters didn't need to actually export anything. If the right bribes were paid (Congress Party's modus operandi), it was all a "receipts game"... you just needed receipts that "proved" that you had sent goods abroad, that money had hit the bank, etc.

There was a huge fertilizer subsidies scam in India a couple decades ago which was another case of "receipts game". (The scam involved subsidies [given by the government] for using fertilizer [similar to Agricultural Subsidies in the USA]. Turns out that most of the subsidies were going to politicians who weren't using any fertilizer, they were just providing the correct receipts that "proved" that they had bought -- and presumably used -- fertilizer.)

Finally, I worked at a bank in India for a short while, just after the major devaluation of the currency in the nineties (the Indian Rupee was devalued by over 50% in two phases). Around midnight, the day before the surprise announcement by the Reserve Bank of India (and the Government of India), a bunch of treasury operations staff at the bank got marching orders to go to the office and sell off, as much as they could, the Indian Rupee, and buy foreign currencies. They worked all night. The client made millions from this bank's operations alone. The client? Reliance.

<comment><USER3> India is a tough market with overregulation and corruption as the article points out. Being an Entrepreneur must be hard in India.

<comment><USER4> Jeff Bezos himself isn't spared from Jio tax[1], what chance does a measly entrepreneur stand against Ambani and Jio!

[1][https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/23/amazon-reportedly-in- talks...](https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/23/amazon-reportedly-in-talks-to- buy-a-9-9-stake-in-indias-reliance-retail/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For those looking for the banned book "The Polyester Prince: The Rise of Dhirubhai Ambani" ... here's the link to donwload: [https://www.dropbox.com/s/e1kdqqnqpl9uhfv/The-Polyester- Prin...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/e1kdqqnqpl9uhfv/The-Polyester- Prince.pdf?dl=0)

<comment><USER3> The book doesnt seem to be banned [https://www.amazon.in/Polyester-Prince- rise-Dhirubhai-Ambani...](https://www.amazon.in/Polyester-Prince-rise- Dhirubhai-Ambani/dp/B073N397G9)

What you are posting is a pirated copy.

<comment><USER6> lol the book is selling for Rs30,000 used on amazon. New books cost Rs300.

What you are posting is a self certificate of ignorance.

<comment><USER3> Are you endorsing piracy on HN?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Agreed with the premise of title. I think Vedica Kant does a more comprehensive job laying out where Reliance comes from & how it was shaped in her substack newsletter two-parter:

[https://hind.substack.com/p/reliance- origins](https://hind.substack.com/p/reliance-origins)

[https://hind.substack.com/p/from-oil-to- jio](https://hind.substack.com/p/from-oil-to-jio)

</comment><comment><USER8> > That JIO has designed and developed a complete 5G solution from scratch

Is that really true, or just some marketing hogwash? If true, then why is Jio not building a Huawei and helping install 5G all over the world? From what I know, very few companies have the technology to build 5G infrastructure.

<comment><USER9> Somewhat. It sounds like they have designed some of their own hardware [0] and they're working on building their own IMS stack [1]. I think Samsung is still their radio vendor.

[0] [https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/telecom/teleco...](https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/telecom/telecom- news/jio-develops-in-house-5g-tech-to-reduce-costs/articleshow/74543900.cms)

[1] [https://telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/reliance-j...](https://telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/reliance- jio-builds-in-house-5g-iot-tech-to-reduce-dependence-on-foreign-gear-replaces- nokia-oracle-tech-with-own-tech/74534777)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If India is Detroit in the Robocop universe, Reliance is OCP.

<comment><USER11> Oh, for an Alex Murphy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Reliance's timing was uncanny: when tariffs went up, Reliance happened to > have stockpiled the goods in question; when their inventories ran down, > tariffs dropped. It's unclear when the system switched from Reliance knowing > what the government would do to Reliance deciding what the government would > do, but clearly at the peak of their power they were able to call the shots.

> As a public company, Reliance engaged in some novel financial > engineering—issuing convertible bonds with ambiguous conversion terms, > exploiting those terms to get cash when necessary, and at one point > cornering the market in their own stock. Perhaps the high point of > Reliance's financial engineering was in 1986, when the company publicly > stated that earnings would rise, then found that earnings weren't rising > after all. The solution: an 18-month fiscal year. Record profits secured.

> Jio's fundraise was opportunistic in two directions: Reliance wanted to > delever, and outside investors wanted access to India's market. It's not a > coincidence that this fundraising occurred at the same time that tensions > with China erupted; a country that can ban TikTok and restrict Chinese > investments can do the same to other countries, too. And, of course, it > helps that Jio is getting more liquidity at the same time that its > competitors mysteriously found themselves on the hook for giant fines.

For clarity's sake, usually bribery, securities fraud, money laundering, revenue recognition fraud and other demonstrably fraudulent activities gets you put in jail. Not lauded as being clever.

If the investments put in by Facebook and Google are used to manipulate the local political environment, does this mean that they're on the hook for liability via 15 U.S.C. § 78dd-1, et seq.? Or, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act? Do the firms have liability, or are they shielded via virtue of the "investment"?

-

Some Google searches later, one of their executives, p̶r̶e̶s̶u̶m̶a̶b̶l̶y̶ ̶a̶ ̶f̶a̶m̶i̶l̶y̶ ̶m̶e̶m̶b̶e̶r̶, tried to get someone killed by calling in the mob, [https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/cover- story/story/1989083...](https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/cover- story/story/19890831-bombay-dyeing-reliance-feud-ril-executive-arrested-on- charge-of-conspiring-to-kill-nusli-wadia-816444-1989-08-31)

[https://www.economist.com/leaders/2014/08/02/an-unloved- bill...](https://www.economist.com/leaders/2014/08/02/an-unloved-billionaire)

Their history is hard to believe and harder to square away. Will this lower FB and G's liability shield? Any thorough due diligence should easily uncover more in this wretched hive of scum and villainy.

<comment><USER13> A little bit more Googling will tell you that Kirti Ambani, the man accused of ordering the hit, was no relative of Dhirubai, the Godfather.

Nusli Wadia, the man he was supposedly getting killed, is the head of an important textile firm himself and the grandson of the founder of Pakistan.

The scandal of which this episode is but one battle, led to the downfall of Rajiv Gandhi's government and triggered the long downfall of the Congress party, which is how Dhirubai's son Mukesh finds himself so close to the current regime whose predecessors, ironically, benefited enormously from the alleged chumminess between the father Ambani and Rajiv.

Wretched hive of scum and villainy seems a bit overwrought though; par for the course for robber barons and way less scummy and violent than Andrew Carnegie or Cecil Rhodes and other titans of western industry.

Plus they haven't caused coups in Central American countries. Yet. Though I wouldn't mind if Mukesh bhai bought England and replaced the Union Jack with the Tricolour.

<comment><USER3> > Though I wouldn't mind if Mukesh bhai bought England and replaced the Union > Jack with the Tricolour.

I dont think he has enough buck in the bank to buy an entire country.

<comment><USER14> > I dont think he has enough buck in the bank to buy an entire country.

give it some time

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So will Ambani become the India's tech Godfather. If that so then it is interesting if we compare India's tech scene and China's.

For example, the Chinese tech giants (Jack Ma, Pony Ma, Robin Li, et al) seems come from zero, instead of other established rich folks (Dalian Wanda group, Li Ka Shing, Walter Kwok).

<comment><USER6> Mukesh does nothing if he can't be a monopoly.

He will allow thousands to succeed or fail under him, but nobody will participate without paying their tax.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I am stuck in a small city near Delhi.

It's hard to find things like olive oil anywhere except for Jio app. Atleast I am thankful for that.

</comment><comment><USER17> Jio/Reliance is [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligarchy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligarchy)

</comment><comment><USER18> tl;dr: a monopoly with deep ties to government.

</comment><comment><USER17> And to understand Reliance, you need to understand Caste system in India;

TL;DR

Casteism is an Organized mafia in India since 700 BC [https://archive.is/PdiUF](https://archive.is/PdiUF)

BC/SC/ST people, 80% in India, were denied education/employment and basic human rights for 2700+ years as per [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigveda](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigveda) in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Indian_history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Indian_history)

In 1932 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._R._Ambedkar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._R._Ambedkar), Architect of the Constitution of India demanded a separate country (not Reservations/Affirmative Action) for them [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_Award](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_Award)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi) opposed it, bullied and bribed them with [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poona_Pact](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poona_Pact)

<comment><USER19> I would acknowledge that opportunities were denied based on caste, But 'Denied education for 2700+ years' is a strong claim with out any proof is taking your argument little too far.

Aatukuri Molla was a celebrated poet, not from upper caste.

She faced initial resistance not because of her caste, but because of her choice not to use sanskrit while translating the epic ramayana to Telugu. Once she proved her talent, she was granted audience to emperor and awarded with title 'Gem of Poets'. Her version of ramayana is still popular to this day.

Annamacharya, is also another poet who being a brahmin, also faced similar resistance from established scholars because he composed his poems with local lingo rather than sanskrit.

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

Dont confuse elitism with casteism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is a bizarre article in the flavor of NY Times India coverage which cannot look at India except through the lens of cow, caste and curry. After all how could a third world entrepreneur build the biggest data network in the world for the cheapest price? Not once but twice!

One instance of how the article is riddled with errors:

 _" From 1980 to 1985, the number of equity investors in India rose from 1m to 5m, and by 1985 1 million of them owned shares of Reliance. Since equity investors are likely to be middle class and above, this gave Reliance a broader political constituency: instead of buying individual regulators with bribes, they nudged the electorate with dividends."_

As per [1] 240 _million_ people cast votes in the 1985 election. So with 0.25% of the total vote scattered across hundreds of constituencies Reliance was able to swing the electorate which is fractured across die-hard political affiliations, economic interests, religions and caste hierarchies. Sure whatever.

Perhaps it is hard for the author to admit that Mukesh Ambani, the current CEO of Relaince/Jio and son of the founder, is a unparalleled operational genius. He singlehandedly led the team that rolled out the biggest refinery in the world in Gujurat in 1999 [2] where "biggest in the world" and India never went together for anything manufactured.

He also rolled out Reliance Communications in the 1990s which was then the cheapest mobile provider by an _order_ of magnitude [3]. That business went to his brother Anil in the family split in 2006 and Anil ran it into the ground. When their fraternal non-complete expired Mukesh built out Jio which again dropped data pricing by an order of magnitude and made voice free. Jio now has the cheapest data in the world [4]. This bankrupted all his competitors who were centi-billion market cap companies and forced them to drop prices and merge. It also bought hundreds of millions of extremely poor Indians to feature phone ownership for the first time. They had the opportunity to what he did but could not. They also wielded the same power with the bureaucracy that he did but were not able to leverage it.

I certainly would like 12GB of data $1.23. Heck, even 10x that is a bargain. But instead of pondering what he did the author spins dark tales of subterfuge, mafia, corruption and bribes.

 _Eye-roll_

[1] [https://www.idea.int/data-tools/country- view/146/40](https://www.idea.int/data-tools/country-view/146/40)

[2] [https://www.bechtel.com/projects/jamnagar-oil- refinery/](https://www.bechtel.com/projects/jamnagar-oil-refinery/)

[3] [https://www.rediff.com/money/2002/dec/27ril1.htm](https://www.rediff.com/money/2002/dec/27ril1.htm)

[4] [https://www.cable.co.uk/mobiles/worldwide-data- pricing/](https://www.cable.co.uk/mobiles/worldwide-data-pricing/)</comment>


Loss of power grid automatic control due to software update [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.nerc.com/pa/rrm/ea/Lessons%20Learned%20Document%20Library/LL20200403_Loss_of_AGC_During_Routine_Update.pdf <comment><USER2> > It was discovered that there was a change made to the alarm text during this > AGC update that caused the failure. Prior to the update, when the PII value > exceeded +/-999 MW, the value in the alarm text defaulted to "xxxx," > preventing dispatchers from having an accurate indication of the amount of > PII change. During this deployment, the two MW value fields in the PII alarm > text were modified from i4 to i5 (4 digit integers to 5 digit integers) to > allow for an additional digit.

> The original alarm text array had 79 characters which almost hit the max > character limit of 80, and the change from i4 to i5 resulted in the alarm > text increasing by 2 characters to 81 characters in length. Writing an 81 > character text string into an 80 character fixed length array resulted in a > run-time abort of the task.

I bet nobody expected that modifying a string can crash the entire control system due to a (caught) buffer overflow. Apparently the reason it went undetected was that the modification was not tested on a demo system first, since it was believed to be trivial.

> Lesson Learned: No matter how small the change is, validate changes in a > test environment first. This requires using a thorough test script for the > changes.

<comment><USER3> Generally, SCADA, AGC, and any EMS software updates should go through multiple lower environments before getting into a production environment. Even critical patches would spend a little bit if time in a lower environment prior to production.

<comment><USER4> If my SCADA work is anything, it goes on a demo/staging area for a week then is deployed, in 90% of cases.

It's rare for an org (and usually only very large heavily regulated government orgs) do full testing on new builds.

<comment><USER5> I would assume controlling GW of power generation would be a very large, heavily regulated org...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> No lesson learned, they're still doing it wrong.

1\. They shouldn't be deploying to one of two redundant systems and then deploying to the other one an hour later. One system should keep running the old code for days, if not weeks. That would have prevented the loss of AGC.

2\. They should have rollback procedures in case an update causes problems. Instead they added an emergency patch on top of the new bad code. This worked out OK but could have fucked things up even worse.

<comment><USER4> 1\. when doing a system upgrade, a lot of times the new version won't play nicely with the old version. Key example iFix, not backwards (or forwards!) compatible.

2\. sometimes addin a quick fix with a support engineer on the line is quicker than attempting a role back. You're making a lot of assumptions here, but likely what happened was a try to fix this asap and if that fails roll back scenario.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> A similar thing happened to a Fortune 500 client of mine when a payment gateway decided to make a production change to their API without notice and without deploy to their sandbox first.

Another case is the E911 system used by either Vacaville, CA or Solano County that cannot correctly parse GPS information from Verizon Wireless's system, leading to an inability to find callers. It is likely still an unresolved safety issue that will never be fixed.

Here are some important principles in this kind of critical system engineering:

0\. Waterflow development model

1\. Formal verification

2\. Staging env

3\. "Space Shuttle" control system quorum with deploy new code to one system of three for a month

4\. Externally-coordinated change control approval, deployment and notification processes, including subscriber-published specifications

5\. All unexpected software conditions raise human attention to relevant stakeholders, similar to Taiichi Ohno's "Stop the Line"

</comment><comment><USER8> All I've ever heard about the US grid is that it's held together with spit and baling wire and is highly insecure--but that's just anecdotal.

(E.g., the SCAD systems that control various aspects are eminently hackable; a few high-powered rifle rounds fired at a Palo Alto area transformer caused serious problems for days; etc, etc.)

Does anyone have any good references about overall grid reliability and security?

<comment><USER3> That sounds a bit extreme. Keep in mind that the US is broadly split into the Eastern and Western Interconnect where the East is a much more dense network compared to the West. Also there is ERCOT (Texas) which only connects to the East and West through DC tie substations.

The acronym is SCADA too.

<comment><USER9> Quebec Canada is like that: it's own system, and only interconnected through HVDC links.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Strong type checking should be able to detect this kind of overflow statically. Probably not practical in the kinds of software involved though.

</comment><comment><USER11> The footer indicated the issue occurred in the western region. I wonder if this AGC system is built On a scada or control system package offering from one of the major vendors or if it is more or a one off or even totally home brew.

Some SCADA software has existed since the early 80s and they have supported their customers through upgrades the whole way. As you can imagine there is some serious cruft.

<comment><USER3> I'm pretty sure all decent sized utilities and system operators use one of the major vendors, but there are many customizations for each customer. You're right that most vendors go back decades which is a blessing (proven to work for decades) and a curse (lots of feature bloat and dated design decisions).

<comment><USER4> Its very rare that anyone goes through a SCADA vendor.

Most SCADA software is done through a system integrator which is the wild west.

And the projects that do go through the original software vendor tend to be massive multi million dollar ones that require significant custom work and new features.

<comment><USER3> Yep. I generically refer to that as a vendor as well lol.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm not really surprised, but the human process around this is designed to catch such failures, and react to them.

Most complex systems are at least somewhat brittle, brittle can be okay so long as the human process around it is designed to deal with that brittleness.</comment>


Ask HN: what are some dynamic programming environments other than emacs? - <AUTHOR>

By dynamic I mean it can be altered and introspected at runtime without having to relaunch the app.
By environment I mean something with a UI and some kind of access to the local system.
I'm looking for an alternative dynamic environment to live in during work. <comment><USER2> 1- unix of course. The simple fact of compiling and linking a program, or writing a script, changes the unix environment since you can then on use it as a new command.

2- MPW, the Macintosh Programmer Workshop, which was influenced by the unix design and also by emacs did let you write new commands, and install them under menus.

3- any application with some kind of scriptability feature where you can add new scripts that you can use as new command would fit the bill.

</comment><comment><USER3> There is Pharo: [http://www.pharo-project.org/](http://www.pharo-project.org/)

But it is more an IDE, not a general UI for work like Emacs. (But it could for sure be turned into one)

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm not sure these qualify as solutions that your are looking for, but they are very interesting, fun, and useful.

      1) Squeak Smalltalk
      2) IPython</comment>


Stephen King on Adverbs - <AUTHOR> http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/03/13/stephen-king-on-adverbs/

<comment><USER2> Interesting how he uses "usually" and "clearly" in the very paragraph he is using to slam adverbs. The only blanket generalization that is true is that all blanket generalizations are false.</comment>


Everything I Knew About Reading Was Wrong - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/everything-i-knew-about-reading-was-wrong-bde7e57fbfdc?gi=6f81b03b144d <comment><USER2> Note: the 14 book links are all affiliate links. Third submittal.</comment>


'Good news day' decimates website's readership - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-30318261

<comment><USER2> I do accept that negative new stories are in important staple of news organisations, but It's not as if only negative stories sell. Everyone wants to buy a paper about their sports team's great victory, the daring exploits of a military hero or about an amazing new drug that defeats a previously untreatable disease.

'No disruption on the roads due to snow' and 'Underpass to be built by Victory Day' are non-stories. They're either about things not happening, or things happening as they were probably expected to happen anyway. It's not that they're 'positive', it's that they're not news.

I read web sites and jurnals on specific topics like scinece or history and their content is almost always positive. They are about progress and uncovering new information. People love that stuff. Positive news isn't the same thing as 'bad things not happening'.</comment>


Facebook's open-sourcing of AI hardware is the start of a revolution - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2015/12/facebooks-open-sourcing-of-ai-hardware-is-the-start-of-the-deep-learning-revolution/ <comment><AUTHOR> Open-sourcing Facebook's AI hardware means that deep learning has graduated from the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) lab into Facebook's mainstream production systems intended to run apps created by its product development teams. centre.</comment>


Ask YC: How did you choose a name for your startup? - <AUTHOR> I'm a student working in my spare time on a web application.  One of the big things keeping me from taking it off my personal server (on a subdomain) is the lack of a good name, and hence a domain name.<p>Do you have an advice on how to come up with a good name? <comment><USER3> We knew the site would involve reading what's new online, so I would spend classtime thinking about domains involving something like "read." It was also during this classtime that I first doodled the alien in the corner of a notebook.

I was in my beloved Alderman library when "reddit" came to mind, as in "I reddit on reddit" (although this slogan was courtesy of PG). I'd also registered reditt because I couldn't decide which one was better. Granted, I was worried about how poorly it was spelled, but it seemed easy enough to remember.

For a time, it was just added to a long list of potential names. We spent the first month of YC without a confirmed name, but I always stuck with reddit despite being repeatedly told how terrible a name it was :-)

Finally Steve acquiesced and we went with reddit. This was after wasting a solid 2 entire days just hunting for domains -- not a great use of time, I must say.

It was also before instantdomainsearch.com, which I highly recommend.

</comment><comment><USER4> I found a good URL that didn't have a squatter and then developed a product to fit that URL.

<comment><USER5> Was the URL bass-ackwards.com? ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things" - Phil Karlton

For, <http://www.mobtropolis.com>, it came out of the concept of collectively finding interesting things to do that were out of the norm. If they were doing it all at the same time and place, it would be likened to a mob. I figured this sort of thing would only happen in more urban areas with denser concentration of people. Hence after a short brainstorming session..."Mobs in the City" became "Mobtropolis".

I hesitated for a while since it's a 4 syllable word, and people might not remember it. But since I couldn't find anything better, I just went with it.

After a while, a name just grows on you and others, as long as you're consistent about it. It also helps you when you're pitching it if you don't feel stupid saying it. I would imagine del.icio.us wasn't exactly easy to associate with bookmarking, but as long as people consistently associate a name with a clear idea of what your product is, I think it'll be ok.

</comment><comment><USER5> I go to thesaurus.com and try mutilating synonyms of what I want to convey. I mash word combos together, along with substituting similar sounding made up syllables. If you tell me what you're working on and want to convey, I'll take a crack at it. I bet others on here will too. Some examples of my creations (I've only paid a squatter once):

Testomatix: test + automation + "ix" added in for high-tech-soundiness and anti-domain-squatter non-obviousness.

RentRocket: I loved the alliteration, and got it cheap.

Wincognito: (privacy software and pop-up blocker for windows back before they were free) win + incognito

Ziptuck:(fashion site) I have a theory that similar known names "prime" the mind to remember other like names. (Osama, Obama, Paris Hilton, Perez Hilton) and that the other associations of the 'original name' disappear quickly, so I went with it.

Edit: Also, I suggest moniker's bulk lookup: <http://www.moniker.com/domains/batch_reg.jsp>

<comment><USER7> A friend's favourite was: sport + portal = sportal

<comment><USER5> I like that--it's a good name. That's the spirit of what I tried for in most of my names.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I had tipr.net for a while. I think tipr.com was some italian trading platform.

I just kept thinking about it. It is a iterative process. I like flow of consciousness. Two short words together work. Tipping, giving, paying, happy, support, joyful, micro (all all other SI prefixes)...

Shortest words there: tip pay joy

tipjoy.com was available and I immediately purchased it.

</comment><comment><USER9> Domain availability. Think of a two/three word description for what your app is, see if it's available. Go to the thesaurus and look up alternates.

<http://instantdomainsearch.com/> roxx

<comment><USER10> or ajaxwhois.com (not quite as fast, but does more than com/net/org for delicious-type names)

<comment><USER11> or <http://domify.com> \-- it bruteforces the synonyms for you and checks availability

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I recommend <http://www.bustaname.com>. It allows you to check the availability of websites as you type and has a word combining feature (warning: it's very easy to waste hours on that site trying out various combinations of words)

</comment><comment><USER13> 1.) always do your domain searches on <http://www.internic.net/whois.html> so you can be sure that they're not being registered as you search for them.

2.) Read <http://www.thenameinspector.com> from beginning to end

3.) Come up with words that describe your ideas then use thesaurus.com

4.) Look to chop words down by syllables and then combine. ie. a personal bookmarking service or online profile service that was described as "my highlights" would become mylights.com.

<comment><USER5> I agree overall, although Moniker's batch lookup is much faster, IMHO.

<http://www.moniker.com/domains/batch_reg.jsp>

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> That's one of the hardest things about a startup, if you ask me. I find that brainstorming a little each day helps, and then eventually names will come to you when you're not trying to think of them.

</comment><comment><USER15> Opened a text document on my Palm Pilot. (You could use any computer, but I always have my Palm with me.) Every time I had an idea, I appended it to the end. Every once in a while, I sorted them into "most desirable" sequence. After a year or so, I noticed that the same name was at the top of the list for the previous 3 months. It won.

(It's also amazing to see how bad some of your ideas look a week later.)

</comment><comment><USER16> I like to have a consonant-vowel-consonant pattern throughout any name I create. Such names are easy to pronounce and can sometimes have a sing-song sound to it.

I usually think of the idea I am working on and write as many words about it as possible. I then filter/add as needed. After I have a long enough list (and this is where it gets sketchy) I read the words aloud and then set the list aside.

At this point it's worth mentioning that I'm HIGHLY dyslexic and this is where it comes handy: I start mixing the words together in my mind by cutting them up and combining them. This is a process that is very specific to how I might create a name for a project and it might not work for you ;)

Also, I sometimes violate the first rule of the consonant-vowel pattern if I have two words that compliment each other semantically. This can yields the worst results, but it helps filter out what I don't want in a name.

When creating a list of words, I sometimes throw in adjectives that are not related to the concept but evoke a certain feeling/emotion/color. This sometimes helps, sometimes doesn't.

</comment><comment><USER17> I found my application name, Tasko (<http://taskodone.com>), from esperanto. (mean 'task').

[http://www.itanda.com/dictionary.php?Dictionary=EnglishEsper...](http://www.itanda.com/dictionary.php?Dictionary=EnglishEsperanto) <http://www.kisa.ca/vortaro/>

</comment><comment><USER18> You are not trying to pick a name. You are trying to build a brand. The canonical text on the subject is The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding.

The name, logo type, mascot, tag line etc should all be coherent and consistent.

Here's Steve Yegge on branding: <http://blip.tv/file/319044/>

</comment><comment><USER19> We worked with words that essentialized what we were trying to achieve - <USER2> more than 2 together.

<comment><USER20> I recommend naming your startup "Essentialize", or some variation thereof.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Oh, we spent much time trying different combinations of short english words having any relations to what we do, but all the domain names were taken. Then we tried a world play on english and latin words and came to "talk" + "naut" (lat. for sail) = talkonaut.com, which I believe precisely represents our mobile chat/voip software we develop: talk while you go. We also discovered that there's a chinese word "taikonaut" meaning astronaut (cosmonaut). So we used the idea of "talk while travel in space" in logo and promo. I think digging some rare languages (greek, latin, japanese, maybe scandinavian) can give you interesting names as well.

</comment><comment><USER22> If you know your target market (and you should), and you have direct access to them, propose possible names to them and get feedback, while at the same time soliciting them for more name ideas.

We struggled with ours for a while. We had several possibilities that we liked, and started telling people we'd meet at conferences and whatnot. When we talked to them again days later, they would always remember one more than the others. We had several clever names with nice flow and alliteration, but RateMyStudentRental.com is what everyone always remembered (though for us, this is most likely due to the already-existing and popular ratemyprofessors.com).

</comment><comment><USER23> Think about what your application's supposed to do - what are its benefits for users, then come up with some metaphors for that. Should be terms that give people a general concept of what it is that you're offering. Then use the various domain search engines mentioned here until you find a free domain. BTW, make sure you can get the .com, .net, .org, and that all the rest (.biz, .us, .eu) are free. Once you're certain you have a name you'll stay with, register a trademark ASAP.

<comment><USER7> A former client named his educational enterprise after his building which was named after his area. He was able to register the .com despite .net, .org, .co.uk and .sch.uk being registered. How fluky!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think that it is important to have a story behind the name it doesn't have to be something complex, but a sense of authenticity does come through.

The easiest way to do this (and advice elsewhere here in the comments) is to switch up different descriptors of your idea, businees, etc into something where you can get a free domain.

I did this for my startup, Fabjectory, and it was even written up by The Name Inspector:

<http://www.thenameinspector.com/fabjectory/>

\- Mike

</comment><comment><USER25> Check out <http://instantdomainsearch.com/>

It's a tools that lets you check the availability of domain names on the fly, without reloading pages. They index available domains and then display the results based on what you type in. the result is that you get the availability quickly, but it's not always up to date (as we found out after several "available" names were really taken).

It's still a powerful tool and a great brainstorming help.

</comment><comment><USER26> I did a domain hack using .us, but i would say you could also use an action word plus your product name. 37Signals does it for most of their apps, backpackit.com, campfirenow.com also the vitamin web resource thinkvitamin.com. The trick is to create something memorable for people. I also try to make its easy for people to say over the phone to someone. Take slashdot.org, if the app is for normal people a name like that is not the greatest.

<comment><USER27> Your slashdot.org thing reminded me of this list: <http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/lists/27MichaelWard.html>

Email addresses it would be really annoying to give out over the phone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> * Use a thesaurus * Read lots about the problem you're solving. You may find obscure (but cool) academic terms that apply to your space. * Buy theburdenofdestiny.com from me for a MILLLION DOLLARS

It took us _months_ to think of a domain name we really liked. We thought we'd have to settle for something we hated. But we didn't -- we thought of something, and we love it.

</comment><comment><USER29> Our name was based on established (oldish media) competitors and a requirement to have the main search word/term in the URL (not for SEO but rather to avoid the confusion most 2.0 startup names incur)

<http://www.OtherWeather.com>

</comment><comment><USER30> Its hard to do. It took me 2 months to settle on fotoblur for my project. Try combining different words together and you'll find something unique. The other day I just thought of the url linkolicious.com ...and guess what, It was available.

Nice try...I already registered it :)!

</comment><comment><USER31> You can always hire some high-paid consultants to come up with the perfect name for you: [http://www.salon.com/media/col/shal/1999/11/30/naming/print....](http://www.salon.com/media/col/shal/1999/11/30/naming/print.html)

</comment><comment><USER32> "The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names" – Old Chinese proverb.

<comment><USER33> "But if you misspell it, it's easier to trademark, and the domain is probably still free." -- the Google guys, the Digg people, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> You seem to be having an e-dentity crisis. Try 37 Signals' Nametron 3000:

<http://www.37signals.com/enormicom/>

</comment><comment><USER35> It seems that latest iteration of web company names do the following: start with a "regular" word, then start dropping vowels.

Flickr, et al.

</comment><comment><USER36> girlfriend came up with it based on certain requirements (had to begin with "m" and be short)

<comment><USER37> like "mine," "moped," "moping," ...

or perhaps, "muzzle" ??

;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Science fiction has been very fruitful for band names, such as Duran Duran and T'Pau.

</comment><comment><USER38> I name the project/product based off what it does, like:

remindsyou.com (mine) routetracker.com

</comment><comment><USER39> www.microsoft.ac is available through www.speednames.com

That's a great name, I'm sure you will get a lot of publicity if you do your PR right.

All you need is a good lawyer ;-)

<comment><USER40> Do you remember the _www.mikerowsoft.com_ story :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> An acronym of a common accounting equation.

</comment><comment><USER42> it is easy, you take a bunch of popular sites and combine into one mega name.

Myfacebookinrtube.com

<comment><USER7> yooglebookapedia.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> my middle name + a color as a prefix</comment>


O'Reilly Maker - Create your own O'Reilly book cover - <AUTHOR> http://www.oreillymaker.com/ <comment><USER2> <http://www.oreillymaker.com/link/7686/arc-for-dummies/>

Please forgive me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Shouldn't there be two of each animal on the cover?

<comment><USER2> I figured that bird's neck was the closest thing I was going to get to an "arc".</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: WordPass – password generator giving over 90 bits of entropy - <AUTHOR> http://hackage.haskell.org/package/wordpass <comment><USER2> We need to just get away from remembering passwords. Something like Mozilla Persona would have been great, but since it didn't catch on we already have KeePass (and for mac/linux, keepassx2 alpha works quite well).

These cutesy little passwords might be fairly strong and easy to remember, but it hardly matters because having to remember them results in reuse and an upper bound on the possible entropy. The human mind has more important things to do than remembering thousands of bits of entropy (spread among all your passwords, you should have at least that much)... we made computers to remember this sort of stuff for us.

If these passwords aren't meant to be remembered, but put in keepass, then there's no point in not just upping the entropy by randomizing at the character granularity.

KeePass makes it much easier; you have it generate you 300 bits of entropy passwords (or whatever you feel is enough), and then you can focus all your security efforts on that one database file. Having a "single point of failure/password" doesn't have to be bad because it lets you guard more closely against that single point.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't understand how 4 random words from a 50k dictionary gives 90 bits of entropy.

        50k ^ 4 => 6.25e+18

        2 ^ 90  => 1.24e+27

Am I missing something?

<comment><USER4> Can you offer a link on how do you do these measurements and what exactly do they mean?

Reading the wikipedia article about entropy in (computing) I stumbled across this[1]:

" _Around 2011, two of the random devices were dropped and linked into a single source as it could produce hundreds of megabytes per second of high quality random data on an average system._ "

What does it mean _high quality random data_ in this context?. I mean 'random' is a precise definition, something 'is random' (e.g. distance of next prime :-P, kill Riemann) or 'not random' (distance of next prime if Riemann's ζ(s) is solved).

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dasil003](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dasil003)

<comment><USER5> "Distance of next prime" is not random, it's entirely deterministic. It's a well-defined function. Just because we don't have an analytical solution for it doesn't make it random.

As for "high quality", some random variables are less predictable than others. A weighted coin that comes up heads 51% of the time is still random (not deterministic), but more predictable than a fair coin.

<comment><USER6> I don't like calling non-uniform distributions 'predictable'.

Think of it like this: A coin which produces heads 99/100 times is not predictable, since you cannot predict when the next tails is coming, you just know that they are rarer.

As for the distance to the next prime thing, you are just plain wrong, in a sense that he is talking about a seeded pnrg, i.e the starting prime is a seed and you don't get to know which it is, out of all integers...

<comment><USER5> > in a sense that he is talking about a seeded pnrg

That little "p" makes all the difference. The post I was replying to was asking about the precise definition of "random", not "pseudorandom".

As you allude to, any real randomness in such a scheme needs to come in the form of a seed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My favourite tool is simply gpw(1). It tries to generate semi-pronounceable words that aren't necessarily dictionary words:

      $ gpw
        rpreence
        rethersi
        atencend
        rostrass
        rtschers
        pocrevoy
        umblowfl
        disalsit
        rmsturnu
        tinfethe

I then have a perl script which can give me slightly more interesting capitalizations and numbers:

      nessinea 258 rusness
      redoodr rInGLe 893
      orinGsT 87 iNdaPeRv
      3423 RisEv screar bullys

I've become quite good at remembering these. I can usually remember them even if I go a month or two between usages. It's hard to explain, but it seems to require a different memorization effort that somehow sticks better into my long-term memory than with random dictionary words.

(1) [http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/hardy/man1/gpw.1.html](http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/hardy/man1/gpw.1.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it is critical constraint - if you find it easy to remember.

What's the size of random password space there?

<comment><USER7> You just prompted me to read the source code :-) gpw.c has this comment at the top:

      /* GPW - Generate pronounceable passwords
       This program uses statistics on the frequency of three-letter sequences
       in your dictionary to generate passwords.  The statistics are in trigram.h,
       generated there by the program loadtris.  Use different dictionaries
       and you'll get different statistics.

       This program can generate every word in the dictionary, and a lot of
       non-words.  It won't generate a bunch of other non-words, call them the
       unpronounceable ones, containing letter combinations found nowhere in
       the dictionary.  My rough estimate is that if there are 10^6 words,
       then there are about 10^9 pronounceables, out of a total population
       of 10^11 8-character strings.  I base this on running the program a lot
       and looking for real words in its output.. they are very rare, on the
       order of one in a thousand.

       ...

I'm not really in a position to properly figure this out... for a start, it's commonly claimed that there are 1M words used in English however my local /usr/share/dict/words has only 100K entries (and a even lot of those seem redundant).

Assuming my gpw binary was "trained" on a 1M wordlist, and that my algorithm averages three 8-char strings per passphrase... and we take the comments at face-value, i.e. 10^9 possibilities per 8-char string generated.

I'm going to pretend I can competently use M _log2(N) to estimate that three such strings might make up 3_ log2(10^9)=89 bits of entropy. Throw in a 0-9999 number, let's pretend that's worth 13-ish bits, let's call it 100 bits?

I haven't factored in the capitalizations yet, and I'm not sure how much the random placement of the numbers and the random lengths of each "word" are worth.

IANACG (I am not a crypto guy) but that seems like a huge number of bits and so this is likely completely wrong (I'd start with going back to trying to properly analyze how many combinations my gpw binary can actually produces in an n-char string - that 10^9 combinations from a 10^6 wordlist needs testing).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This inspired me to write a rudimentary version in bash/C:

        ----pwgen.sh
        #!/usr/bin/env bash
        DICT=/usr/share/dict/words
        NL=$(wc -l $DICT | sed 's_[ \t]*\([0-9]*\).*_\1_')
        PW=""
        for i in {1..4}; do
        RAND=$(./arc4random)
        LINE=$[$RAND % $NL]
        WORD=$(sed -n $LINE"p" < $DICT)
        PW=$WORD" "$PW
        done
        echo $PW

        ----arc4random.c
        #include <stdio.h>
        #include <stdlib.h>
        int main() {
            printf("%u\n", arc4random());
            return 0;
        }

They're not always easy to remember, though, at least for me:

        > ./pwgen.sh
        interdepartmental anesthyl intrabranchial physiolatrous

<comment><USER9> Your little script performs amazingly well on my Mac, coming in at about 165 ms, quite a bit faster than I expected. If your script is too fast for you, you could consider reading the dictionary into a bash array instead of using sed. My /usr/share/dict/words contains 234,936 words.

As a point of comparison, here is a Python version that clocks in around 107 ms:

        #!/usr/bin/env python
        from random import SystemRandom as r

        with open('/usr/share/dict/words', 'rb') as f:
            lines = f.readlines()

        print ' '.join(r().choice(lines).rstrip() for x in xrange(4))

However, I don't know how well SystemRandom compares to arc4random in terms of crypto.

<comment><USER10> If you're set on using arc4random it's no big deal to use ctypes to invoke it from Python. Bash is quick to bang out but it's funny how your parent needs to compile a C program then invoke it N times per bash script run. Using Python for this is an obvious choice.

<comment><USER8> Yes thanks for pointing that out, I wrote a slightly faster version below. I took your advice and wanted just a single invoke on the C program, so I modified it to take an argument. I'm satisfied!

        > cat arc4random-v2.c
        #include <stdio.h>
        #include <stdlib.h>
        int main(int argc, char** argv) {
          if ( ! (argc == 1 || argc == 2) ) {
            printf("usage: %s [n_output]\n", argv[0]);
          } else {
            int n_iter = (argc == 2) ? atoi(argv[1]) : 1;
            for (int i = 0; i < n_iter; i++) {
              printf("%u\n", arc4random());
            }
          }
          return 0;
        }

        > ./arc4random 3
        4282823399
        333796506
        762478899

        > cat pwgen-v2.sh
        #!/usr/bin/env bash
        dict=/usr/share/dict/words
        n=4 # of words to include in passphrase
        nl=$(wc -l $dict | sed 's_[ \t]*\([0-9]*\).*_\1_')
        fmt_flag() { echo $[$1 % $nl] | sed -n -e 's_^_-e _' -e 's_$_p_p' ; }
        flags=$(./arc4random $n | while read -r i; do fmt_flag "$i"; done)
        words=$(sed -n $flags < $dict)
        echo $words

        > time ./pwgen.sh
        liparite evade retiringly spacious

        real	0m0.268s
        user	0m0.251s
        sys	        0m0.015s

        > time ./pwgen-v2.sh
        latherin prideling thumbscrew unraveled

        real	0m0.082s
        user	0m0.072s
        sys	        0m0.013s

EDIT: note that the single call to sed results in alphabetical/dictionary- dependent results... (!) oops

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11>
      import random, re

      lines=[re.sub('[-!.,;:]',' ',x).split() for x in open('in').readlines()]

      w=set()
      for l in lines:
          w=w | set(l)

      random.sample(w,4)

Hrm, for romeo and juliet I get some interesting combinations...

      ['unseen', 'iron', 'Catling', 'baked']
      ['grove', 'press', 'Aurora', 'garish']
      ['agate', 'She', 'drybeat', 'rather']
      ['flowed', 'sails', 'wed', 'masks']
      ['spilt', 'cage', 'Remembering', 'stiff']
      ['heartsick', 'shame', 'enjoin', 'weeping']

<comment><USER12> > import random, re

You'll want to replace random with a cryptographically secure RNG.

<comment><USER13> Could you describe a practical attack against this password generator based on how it actually works?

Specifically what information you would need to be in possession of in order to exploit it, and then a description of how you would - again, in practice - exploit that, inside a practical timeframe. Thanks.

<comment><USER14> I'm also interested in knowing a practical attack against this.

How could a weakness in the randomness be a problem at all in this case? (generating words to use as password)

Ok suppose I've used a not-at-all-random PRNG and got the following numbers: 1, 16, 29, 30, 18

So I grab the 1st, 16th, 29th, 30th and the 18th words from my list and those words are my generated password.

How is this vulnerable to any attacks?

<comment><USER2> To expound on the other response.

A PRNG is only as random as its seed / starting state. Let's say it gets this state from the current time, in milliseconds.

Now, let's assume the attacker knows, based on your "Time joined" statistic for some account, a roughly 2 minute period of when you generated your password (it's very common for a website to show time joined in the granularity of a second through an api; passwords are rarely generated more than a minute beforehand if you use a generator + keepass). 2 minutes is 3,600,000 milliseconds... or in other words, they can seed the RNG with all 3.6 million "time-in-milliseconds" and run the program and see the output. They now only have to guess 3.6 million possible passwords, not, say, 1e20 (assuming a dictionary of 10k words). That's a _massive_ speedup on the order of 1e14.

I hope that all made sense... the basic idea is just if the attacker can make any sort of estimate about the state of the PRNG, he can just test passwords generated from states like that, not all possible passwords.

You'll notice, of course, that this vulnerability relies on the other party being able to discern some information about the state. This doesn't have to be from guessing the seed directly (as was the case in the example above). It can also happen by observing multiple outputs and guessing at what seed could produce them both, or noticing a bias.

The last one, the chance for a bias, is quite possibly what you're asking about. "How could a weakness in the randomness be a problem at all in this case?". A weakness in randomness means that some combinations of words will show up more often than others, by definition. It makes the password weaker because the attacker can discover this bias and then guess more probable passwords first.

<comment><USER14> Thanks, but all of that is based o the assumption that the attacker has the list of words that I used to generate the password right?

<comment><USER2> That he has it or can get it, yes. Even if he doesn't have it, there are a few dictionaries (/usr/share/dict/words on various popular distros would be a good start) he could try and only guess the probable options in both of them.

Furthermore, it's possible he could figure out which dictionary you were using by another means. If a site that stored your password in plaintext was compromised, that would give him 4,5,whatever words in your dictionary, and using a similar attack on this flawed prng as discussed above, he could narrow down the possible positions of those words, thereby figuring what dictionary is most probable.

The assumption that the attacker can get your word list in this sort of password scheme is actually implicit in how the entropy is calculated; it's calculated assuming the attacker is stringing together words from the same known source in the same general format.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I made one in Ruby a few weeks ago. Please don't do what ghshephard does below and blindly import random. It's actually quite important that you use a secure random generator, or your entropy will be drastically reduced.

My solution is here, don't use it unless smart people have confirmed that it works:

[https://github.com/d-snp/wachtwoord/blob/master/wachtwoord.r...](https://github.com/d-snp/wachtwoord/blob/master/wachtwoord.rb)

Also smart people: please let me know if I've done anything stupid here, I actually use passwords generated by this tool.

For people who don't enjoy reading Ruby: My tool reads in a dictionary file, drops any too small words because they don't have enough absolute entropy and too long words because they're harder to remember (for Dutch anyway, your mileage might vary in your own language).

You can vary the amount of words you want to have in your passphrase, and the tool will print how much entropy the password has if the attacker is aware that you're using this scheme and this dictionary file, but not aware of the random values spitted out by the random generator to pick the words.

It will also spit out a cheesy ballpark estimate as to how long it might take an attacker to crack this password with reasonable effort, you can tweak what reasonable effort means for your context. What currently is a reasonable attack depends heavily on the hashing scheme you employ.

</comment><comment><USER16> Quick and dirty Bash one-liner:

      shuf -n4 /usr/share/dict/words | sed "s/'s//g" | tr -d "\\n"; echo;

</comment><comment><USER17> [https://www.schneier.com/essay-246.html](https://www.schneier.com/essay-246.html)

Oulipo rules. Latin squares. Nursery texts. Maps.

Anyone working on a generator based on this kind of approach?

<comment><AUTHOR> Could you elaborate and give pointers to what "Oulipo rules" and others are?

<comment><USER17> Oulipo was a silly 'organisation' invented by some writers in Paris after the second world war. The members included mathematics lecturers and writers interested in producing texts according to routines or with constraints. George Perec walked the streets of Paris systematically for some months according to a routine derived from a double latin square, and then wrote about what was happening at each location at a specified time.

I was alluding to the idea easily remembered _rules_ for selecting characters from a _text_ known to the person.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I made something similar [0] but based on Diceware [1] and a book you pass on to the app. It generates passphrases by using words from the book.

[0] [https://github.com/pjaspers/frasier](https://github.com/pjaspers/frasier)

[1] [http://world.std.com/~reinhold/diceware.html](http://world.std.com/~reinhold/diceware.html)

</comment><comment><USER19> A similar scheme used to save, retrieve, and publish elm code: [http://tomberek.insomnia247.nl:5055/xkcd/flowerbed/too/socio...](http://tomberek.insomnia247.nl:5055/xkcd/flowerbed/too/sociologically/defiantly)

Using 'Publish' will produce [http://tomberek.insomnia247.nl:5055/xkcd/2797191408452820889](http://tomberek.insomnia247.nl:5055/xkcd/2797191408452820889) which is just the output page without access to an editor.

Edit: go to [http://tomberek.insomnia247.nl:5055/try](http://tomberek.insomnia247.nl:5055/try) to make your own

</comment><comment><USER20> How do you install stuff like this? I've never touched Haskell, I tried "cabal install wordpass", but it seems it doesn't exist.

<comment><USER21> Assuming you mean wordpass doesn't exist: try "cabal update" first.

If you mean cabal doesn't exist, you'll need to install the Haskell Platform first. There may be a package for your distro (or Homebrew).

<comment><USER20> Thanks, "cabal update" did it for me. I guess I have no more excuses to dive into Haskell!</comment></comment></comment>