Introducing U.S. Web Design Standards - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@USDigitalService/introducing-u-s-web-design-standards-aff21383afd6 <comment><USER3> I encourage people to check out 18F's Github repos...there's a lot of useful tools and libraries, for starters. And then there's full projects to learn from, such as APIs and front-facing static sites.

I don't know if they use any other kind of project manager besides Github Issues, but their projects have among the most active Issues activity...it seems that the USDS/18F team uses them as project discussion rooms that also happen to be public...as they should be for government, public facing work. And they accept pull requests from the public...here's one I made to make their style guides more readable on mobile/non-traditional-browsers:

[https://github.com/18F/content-guide/pull/43](https://github.com/18F/content- guide/pull/43)

They talked about it amongst themselves (in public) and then merged it in. I know that's part for course for most industry teams...but not for the federal government. Think about all the regulations and CYA-guideliens (cover-your- ass) that have built-up over the years that would've made accepting code, or any input, from a total outsider, to be...not a priority. A few years ago I remember finding a very obvious, easily fixable XSS vulnerability across all of the Department of Homeland Security sites...not only was it hard to find a point of contact, but I was pretty much ignored until I sent emails to US- CERT, and then also threatened to have a tech journalist write about it.

With the USDS projects, it's a completely different paradigm to work via systems like Github. At the very least, you can more easily take credit for suggestions/fixes you made.

<comment><USER4> >A few years ago I remember finding a very obvious, easily fixable XSS vulnerability across all of the Department of Homeland Security sites...

I think if I were in this situation today, I just wouldn't say anything. Being ignored would be one of the _good_ outcomes; I'd be terrified of getting chucked into court for being a "HACKER AGAINST HOMELAND SECURITY."

<comment><USER5> Disclosing the vulnerability - what law could they prosecute you under?

<comment><USER6> Depends how you found/testes/found it. In general it's a case of being uncertain what they could do if they decided to.

<comment><USER5> Holy Typo Batman!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice, they use SASS/Bourbon/Neat for their styling.[0][1] Huge fan and recommend it to anyone using Ruby for web development.

[0] - [https://playbook.cio.gov/designstandards/getting- started/](https://playbook.cio.gov/designstandards/getting-started/)

[1] - [http://bourbon.io/](http://bourbon.io/)

<comment><USER8> I second this recommendation, even for those _not_ using Ruby! The Sass compiler is written in Ruby but that doesn't mean you have to know Ruby to use Sass.

<comment><USER9> If you can do without the latest of the latest in Sass I highly recommend using a libsass implementation. So much faster than the Ruby version! OT: I also like that they've used a BEM-like approach, although I personally prefer a double underscore as separator between elements.

<comment><USER10> Libsass is night & day vs Ruby Sass. No problems using libsass with Bourbon, Bourbon thankfully stays away from the bleeding-edge features (many of which can be emulated with clever functions).

In a previous project, we saw Sass compiles go from ~15s to about 400ms by moving to libsass. Completely changes the development cycle (with HMR or livereload) as you see changes immediately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _" is it possible to create a shared set of tools to provide consistent, beautiful, and easy-to-use government websites?"_

Yup: [http://gov.uk](http://gov.uk)

They even copied the colour scheme: [https://playbook.cio.gov/designstandards/visual- style/#color...](https://playbook.cio.gov/designstandards/visual- style/#colors)

<comment><USER12> Gov.UK is a terrible website.

[https://medium.com/@prenticemathew/ux-specialists-are- killin...](https://medium.com/@prenticemathew/ux-specialists-are-killing-web- design-50b7d7607c13)

<comment><USER13> That article is bullshit. You can't judge gov.uk by its homepage, because that's almost never where you land.

Now that we have gov.uk, whenever I google something about doing my tax, or registering to vote at a new address, or any other arduous governmental admin shit, I usually end up on a beautifully simple and focused gov.uk page, and I'm _in and out in 2 minutes_. That's what a government website is about.

I agree the homepage looks like a parked domain but whatever. Take a random page like this: [https://www.gov.uk/alter-a-will-after-a- death](https://www.gov.uk/alter-a-will-after-a-death)

Look at how brief and clear the writing is. Look at how straightforward its URL is. Have a look at some more pages, look how consistent the design language is. This is exactly what a government website should be like.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There's a number of comments here about this making phishing easier. The bigger issue is that the US gov doesn't consistently use .gov domain names.

[http://www.ustraveldocs.com/](http://www.ustraveldocs.com/)

This is the official US gov site for applying for a visa. Given there are so many dodgy immigration agents operating with .com addresses it makes no sense as to why the official site is not just 'visa.gov'.

<comment><USER15> Can anyone think of any reasons that any and all interaction with the US Government via the web shouldn't take place via a .gov website? If something like healthcare takes place on a .gov site, visas definitely should.

<comment><USER16> Good reasons, no, but check out what getting a .gov domain looks like:

[https://www.dotgov.gov/portal/web/dotgov/registration- proces...](https://www.dotgov.gov/portal/web/dotgov/registration-process) [https://www.dotgov.gov/portal/web/dotgov/policy#10217335](https://www.dotgov.gov/portal/web/dotgov/policy#10217335)

It's really easy to imagine a lowly staffer with an unrealistic deadline or contractor deciding to register a .com to use for a demo and thinking they'll go through simply learning who the official contact is, getting the agency CIO / agency head to sign off, dealing with internal politics[1], etc. later and then never actually getting around to that part. At some point the argument probably became "Now we've advertised it too much to change".

1\. At large organizations both public and private I've seen this kind of fragmentation happen because person A wanted a project to exist and person B, who controlled DNS, thought it should be included in their application (horrible vendorware, the first big Cold Fusion project they personally managed which will be upgraded over their dead body, etc.).

<comment><USER15> The process looks about as bureaucratically complicated as I would expect.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, and I'm not even sure that's wrong: trusted top-level domains should be hard to get since they'd make great phishing sites.

There are something like 5,300 domains on the list currently:

[https://github.com/GSA/data/blob/gh-pages/dotgov- domains/201...](https://github.com/GSA/data/blob/gh-pages/dotgov- domains/2015-03-15-full.csv)

I'm curious how many of those are actively supported and secure – I'd bet there are a least a few where almost nobody even remembers registering it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> That's a great initiative. Being from a country that changes the URLs of a bunch of ministries (and breaks half of them) each time a new government takes charge, I envy it!

Now, for improved consistency, adopt the metric system.

<comment><USER18> Which country?

<comment><USER17> Good ol' Kingdom of Spain. Governments tend to rearrange ministries (fusing them, eliminating some and embedding their competences in another, or simply renaming them) and the URL changes accordingly, but most of the times links break, the styles of a former deleted ministry are different from the new host, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The Medium article says to visit the site for the standards.[1] That yields:

        MAX.gov Application Unavailable

        If you are seeing this message and it is not Sunday 2AM-8AM ET then
        please contact MAX Support by clicking here.
        If you're trying to access MAX Community, please use our snapshot
        site: MAX Snapshot Community Site

"MAX.gov" appears to be some kind of in-house cloud service for the Federal government.

[1] [https://playbook.cio.gov/designstandards/](https://playbook.cio.gov/designstandards/)

Update: now it's up.

<comment><USER20> It's not fully in house. The idea is to centralize management of services (both in-house and external) for budgeting reasons, since MAX is part of GSA which is part of the OMB (Office of Management and Budget).

<comment><USER21> MAX.gov was kind enough to run us a proxy in order to support https, and that proxy had a bad day under load. Described more here [https://github.com/18F/web-design- standards/issues/733](https://github.com/18F/web-design-standards/issues/733)

Btw, GSA and OMB aren't connected the way you describe. They just happen to be the respective parent agencies of 18F and USDS-HQ. Here's a tree.

      POTUS
      ├── GSA
      │   └── 18F
      └── OMB
          ├── USDS-HQ
          └── MAX

<comment><USER19> GSA, the General Services Administration, is the purchasing, construction, and building operations unit of the US Government. They're a huge operation, with a $20 billion budget and operations all over the US. The Office of Management and Budget is a White House staff unit with about 500 employees, most in an office building next to the White House.

GSA has forklifts. OMB has clout.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What a great step in the right direction. Every time I navigate through another government website in search of information, it is a different experience. I'm all for consistency and can't wait until this is well adopted in all the .gov's I find myself visiting.

</comment><comment><USER23> I really like this, but as someone who recently went through the federal loans process I know that the interface isn't the only thing holding back our government's web presence. Can we adopt a standard work flow? Something that behaves as expected when you submit forms?

</comment><comment><USER24> Interesting. Another place where I've seen something similiarly done is for the Canadian Gov't.

See [https://github.com/wet-boew/wet-boew](https://github.com/wet-boew/wet- boew)

</comment><comment><USER25> When looking at a random website I expect to know roughly what I'm looking at within 20 seconds - max. Ideally 5 if not text heavy.

>shared set of tools [...] government websites

That is exactly what I wanted to know. Pity thats hidden on page 3 and I had to read credits & something about some Joanne's problems first.

The narrative story flow is fine...but you've got to give something solid up front. e.g. Do the startup cliche and say how you're revolutionising the world in a short sentence. Then launch into the speech about Joanne's problems...

<comment><USER26> That's a bit unfair — you're talking about an expository and introductory Medium post. Compare that to the first sentence of the guide itself:

      Open source UI components and visual style guide to create consistency and
      beautiful user experiences across U.S. federal government websites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I really like the look of this and think it is a great initiative. Especially as I am the only human on earth who don't love Material Design more than my own mother.

<comment><USER28> I think that material design works well for applications in particular... a lot of the time too much is shoveled into applications without a concern for information overload, material design enforces this to some extent.

That said, even looking a step back towards, for example twitter bootstrap, it's about keeping things clean and orderly. One of the examples I appreciated was the password prompt, too often what is allowed in a password isn't clear, and to be honest, I'm almost in favor of allowing pretty much anything, I wish people would use "passphrase" instead of "password" and encourage multi-word phrases, even a full sentence. "Fear is the mind k1ll3r." for example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This post doesn't address the most important thing: when can we actually expect all of the government's websites to start using these common patterns?

Creating a library/set of guidelines that you expect other developers to use is great and all, but not impactful in and of itself. Right now it looks like the library's authors are more focused on making their library _useful_ than _used_ , which is a thousand times more important.

</comment><comment><USER30> Nice! I did notice some of the component definitions look like very close paraphrases to Semantic UI's component descriptions though, but I'll take that as a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER31> Hopefully this guide will be updated as time goes on to stay relevant as technology changes. Otherwise in a few years from now, everything will look outdated again.

<comment><USER32> Looking outdated isn't the worst thing in a world. I think National Forest signs look like hotel signs from the 1950s, and that's probably not a coincidence.

What's more interesting is if this will lead to better maintainability. Since this includes code as well as guidelines, hopefully it will reduce the variation between various agencies' websites. That in turn should make future upgrades more uniform and therefore less costly.

<comment><USER33> If you're curious, Forest Service signs are specified by _Sign and Poster Guidelines Engineering Manual EM7100-15_ [1].

[1] [http://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprd3810021...](http://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprd3810021.pdf)

<comment><USER34> That standard is incredible, I had a good flick through it just in awe of the level of specification that goes into signage, I love that type of stuff, it's a hidden world.

<comment><USER35> The British standards for road signs and markings are also online, and with much better typography :-)

[https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/traffic-signs- man...](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/traffic-signs-manual) (chapter 7 is best, for kerning rules, and making and face the right way).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Doesn't this make it incredibly easy for phishing websites to be created? I suppose such websites would exist anyway, but this would certainly diminish a user's ability to differentiate between a legitimate .gov or another page with malicious intent at a glance.

<comment><USER23> That was my thought at first glance too, however it is already really easy to just download a sites assets and make a mock up.

Sometimes you just have to trust that people are going to pay attention before submitting sensitive information on the net.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Nice work Mollie and team!

</comment><comment><USER38> Thanks Obama.

</comment><comment><USER39> When design becomes a standard, is its purpose not lost?

<comment><USER40> No, it's fullfilled. The design of the average table, pencil, glass, fork, spoon, text-based book etc. is fairly standard (save for few ornamental details).

That's not because its purpose is lost for design conformity, but because those are peak designs that work best for what they need to do.

The only purpose design for government sites has is to be able to give information quickly and in a legible and accessible way. No artistic ambitions here. That can be standardized very well.

<comment><USER41> > average table, pencil, glass, fork, spoon, text-based book etc. is fairly > standard (save for few ornamental details).

Except that's the point of the OP's comment. These items actually do not have any explicitly declared standard like this design standard published by the government. Design became standardized through people landing on a good design, not through a government mandate.

<comment><USER40> > _Except that 's the point of the OP's comment._

I don't think that that's his point -- I see this as orthogonal to whether there is a standard or not.

The reason those don't have a standard is merely because they are so simple they don't need a full document to describe them.

And I don't see a clash between a "goverment mandate" and "design", since in this case the government mandate is exactly a design, that is, the work and output of a set of designers working for the government.

It's not like some random bureucrat that knows nothing about the web created the standard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> "It doesn't do anything useful and it only loads Saturdays at 3am, but it sure has some syntactically awesome stylesheets!" ...Anyway, it sounds good on paper.

</comment><comment><USER43> Oh goodie, now there's a canonical description of how to make a US gov't website for all the phishers out there...

<comment><USER40> The design level is the wrong level to solve the fishing problem. Any site can be immitated, and 100 differently-looking sites can be immitated with almost the same ease as 100 same-looking ones...

For one, you don't even have to create anything -- you just download the original assets, and merely inject some JS or change a form destination in your version.

So mirrorring (wget -mkp [http://foo.bar](http://foo.bar)) designs is not that more difficult...

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> OK, now that it's back up, let's take a look at the examples. There's a "register to vote" page, but that's trivial. Here's a more difficult one - <USER2> mockup of a Veterans Administration form.[1] This is clearly for use by a Government employee, not the public.

(The first question one asks is, if an appeal is "certified", why does it also have to be "activated" by a human before anything happens? But that's the organization's problem, not web design.)

It's a high-contrast layout, to support the visually impaired. Although it does have both white on black and black on white buttons, visually it seems OK.

The form has a pull-down for "Confirm type action". This isn't a "Confirm" button, it's a selection option, for selecting the type of bureaucratic action. There are several documents mentioned, "Form 8", "Form 9", etc. These are in bold sans-serif blue text. The "NOD" document is apparently missing, so you couldn't view it, but the text for it is the same as for the documents you can view. At the end of each line is the word "Change", in the same font and color. It's not clear if "Form 8" is clickable, leading to a view of the form. "Change" is presumably clickable, and ought to lead to a popup. It's not clear whether changes commit immediately, or when the final buttons at the bottom ("Reassign" or "Activate Appeal") are clicked.

The "POA" heading is misaligned. You can tell they used table-less design - things don't line up right.

This form is useful only if the user has paper materials on hand against which they are checking. Functionally, this form is exactly equivalent to something on a green-screen IBM 3270 terminal from 30 years ago, which may be what it is emulating.

This is their example of good Government web design.

[1] [https://playbook.cio.gov/designstandards/assets- styleguide/i...](https://playbook.cio.gov/designstandards/assets- styleguide/img/home/example_VAappeals_full_mock.png)

<comment><USER44> > The "POA" heading is misaligned. You can tell they used table-less design - > things don't line up right.

Um, that's not the case. Those look like table tags, as they should be (it's a table). The only problem is that that column header is left-aligned, not right-aligned like the rows are.

Most of your complaints are bullshit, frankly, and the rest are about interaction design/UX, not visual design, which is all that this project claimed to be. The visual design and layout look fine, with the exception of that misaligned column heading (the horror!).

<comment><USER45> This would have been a great comment without the word "bullshit", which made the whole thing read needlessly venomous.

<comment><USER44> Re-reading this a couple hours later, I agree. I responded to needless negativity with more needless negativity. Guess my IRC habits have been leaking into my other hobbies. I'd edit it, but it's been too long since it was posted.

<comment><USER12> There's no need to apologise for using the word bullshit. It's bullshit that we have to be PC about words we use.

<comment><USER45> This is nothing to do with political correctness. The word "bullshit" is perfectly fine; it's the way it was used here.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Year of Linux Desktop At Westcliff High School - Slashdot - <AUTHOR> http://linux.slashdot.org/story/13/07/31/1645240/a-year-of-linux-desktop-at-westcliff-high-school?sdsrc=popbyskid <comment><USER2> Original article at

[http://dot.kde.org/2013/07/04/year-linux- desktop](http://dot.kde.org/2013/07/04/year-linux-desktop)

Looks sensible for their use case, see quote below...

"...I would argue that an 11 year old student starting with us in September 2014 will probably not reach the job market until 2024 or there about. What will Office 2024 look like? Your guess is as good as mine, but good basic skills and a logical and analytical way of dealing with computers will be good for a lifetime."

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally agree, I even think that the interaction with computer possibly be radically different than now. So knowing the under the hood mechanics of OS is great skill...</comment></comment>


Kim Dotcom Spying Operation Was Illegal, NZ High Court Rules - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/entire-kim-dotcom-spying-operation-was-illegal-high-court-rules-170825/ <comment><USER2> At this point I think the entire case needs to be thrown out, or settled. Leave Kim alone. This entire mess really should've never gotten this far.

<comment><USER3> I honestly think this guy is a fraud and a complete idiot, but the state really did wrong here, so I have to agree. If this isn't thrown out, then what ever will?

<comment><USER4> Unless you've started a multi-million dollar company... I don't think you're in any place to call KimDotCom "fraud" or "idiot"

<comment><USER5> You could make literally, word-for-word the same argument about Bernard Madoff. All you'd have to do is change the names.

<comment><USER6> Or Jordan Belfort for that matter. Not sure if "idiot" is warranted though; it's not like they made their money through dumb blind luck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If the spying had been "successful" Kim would have gone to jail, lost his wealth, etc. for breaking the law.

So, now that it's clear the GCSB broke the law and did wrong, who of them is going to jail?

Until individuals are held responsible and go to jail, this kind of thing will never stop, because there are no consequences.

<comment><USER8> The same people that are going to jail for Obama admin's illegal unmasking of US citizen names or Hillary's illegal destruction of evidence under federal subpoena: NO ONE.

Not only are their no consequences, but the actors at that level know there will be no consequences if they get caught before they commit the crimes. The justice & legal system is far too corrupt to ever touch the de facto oligarchy.

<comment><USER9> Let's not forget the kidnap and murder of Osama bin Laden.

<comment><USER10> I know this is controversial, but he was sentences to death with no trail or anything.

Violating human rights against one individual, is, as per the original definition, violating the rights of all of humanity.

I get that this was an extreme case, but there's always an extreme case that goes first, and the line gets gradually pushed further and further. We've seen this in history countless times.

<comment><USER11> You can't exactly expect all war deaths to come with trials though.

<comment><USER12> You could expect Congress to authorize the military action or declare war though. Without Congressional approval that was just an extrajudicial killing.

Would have been better if the US took the Taliban up on their offer to turn over Bin Laden shortly after the WTC attacks. Very few people even remember the offer was made.

<comment><USER11> >You could expect Congress to authorize the military action or declare war though.

Yeah you could. But that's a constitutional procedural issue. It's very separate from whether it was in practice a war action, and it was.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Snowdens documents shown that the GCSB is really just a front for NSA intelligence gathering and is likely mostly funded by US Tax dollars, I guess they are just doing what their paymaster asked of them.

</comment><comment><USER14> Great, now who would be held responsible for that?

<comment><USER15> It's the government, so nobody. I guess someone might get fired if it negatively affects the governments case against Kim.

Governments never punish their own agents for illegal deeds performed in furtherance of the governments agenda, that'd just be tremendously inconvenient.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> What's worrying is that apparently NZ secret service just spied on Kim Dotcom, even though NZ national security was not at stake.

</comment><comment><USER17> If you haven't seen it, this is a pretty good documentary on the whole situation: [http://kimdotcom.film/](http://kimdotcom.film/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Does New Zealand have a history of hosting its security services personally accountable when they break the law?

<comment><USER19> Do changing the laws to make it legal count? [http://i.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/9070435/Controversial...](http://i.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/9070435/Controversial- GCSB-laws-pass-by-two-votes)</comment></comment>


Getting your C++ to the Web with Node.js - <AUTHOR> http://blog.scottfrees.com/getting-your-c-to-the-web-with-node-js <comment><USER2> If you're feeling adventurous and don't mind the performance penalty, I guess you could try compiling the C++ source into asm.js with Emscripten for the added bonus of having it work in modern browsers.

<comment><USER3> The simplicity and ease of use of C++ combined with the blazing performance of JavaScript. Truly the best of both worlds!

<comment><USER4> The real answer is to reprogram the whole thing in JavaScript. C++ just doesn't have the amazing frameworks that make JavaScript a developer's dream. I have even heard rumors that if you use the right ones, JavaScript becomes a programming language!

<comment><USER5> What's next, a turing complete Javascript?

We'll all get downvoted if someone misses the sarcasm. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Kinda surprised there's not a mention of emscripten in the options.

<comment><USER2> I guess Emscripten is the less reliable route. I think one can't reasonably expect any C++ code to be readily compileable with emscripten with no modifications whatsoever

<comment><USER7> We are using Emscripten for compiling C++ to to Javascript and use it on the browser. And it works well. So at this moment we can use the same code base for Android(JNI)/iOS/Facebook. It works perfectly well. Why do you think that it is not reliable?

<comment><USER2> I assume you wrote your code while keeping in mind that it will be compiled by ES. But we're talking about porting legacy code. ES may be reliable, but you have to have the source code for _all_ of your dependencies and not rely on platform-specific functions at all.

<comment><USER8> In general there is no need to write code in mind for compiling with Emscripten. The codebase just needs to be reasonably portable C++ or C. For example, if the codebase runs on both x86 desktop and ARM Android, then it will almost certainly run properly using Emscripten.

For APIs, you also need to use something portable and standard, like SDL for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So I have this big chunk of legacy C++ code, I don't want to rewrite it, because it's a huge horrible mess and I don't have the source code of all its dependencies anyway. So I'm gonna compile it to native code and run it as a CGI. What could possibly go wrong?</comment>


Why is Google so hysterically hypocritical about Bing using its public data? - <AUTHOR> http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2011/02/01/why-is-google-so-hysterically-hypocritical-about-bing-using-its-public-data/ <comment><USER2> I read half of this. Its late, and I don't have the time or energy to refute point by point every single wrong thing that is written in that half.

Its easy to sum up. Yes, Google indexes hundreds of millions of sites. It does so in order for other people to be able to search and find those sites, which is important to their owners. Its a symbiotic relationship, not theft of intellectual property.

Google has spent billions of dollars in manpower and physical capacity in order to be able to do that. Also, each and every one of those sites can _very_ easily say "don't index me" with a simple robot.txt file on their site. Some do, most don't, because most sites find it valuable for Google to index them.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is trying to compete in the same space as Google. They are also spending lots of money and manpower to build their search engine. But, by using Google's search results to improve their own product, they are acting as a parasite. Google gets no benefit from Microsoft using their data.

So to sum up my own summary: Google is a mass symbiote, Microsoft is a parasite.

<comment><USER3> Microsoft do NOT steal Google's search results. They use clickstream data from Bing toolbar users to improve their search results.

What happened is that Google engineers engineered a use case, in which signal from those clickstream appear like a stealing of search results. Or in other words, Microsoft uses Google _users behaviour_ in their ranking algorithm. But that's not unethical, and Google is doing the same thing.

<comment><USER4> But the effect is the same as intentional scraping and outright stealing: search results that could have only come from Google are appearing as Bing results.

Bing needs to blacklist Google from its clickstream. Simple.

<comment><USER5> I don't even think they should just blacklist Google. They should just respect robots.txt.

edit: I should have clarified. I know that the Bing crawler likely respects robots.txt, but if they are using clickstream info to build their index, it seems right that they should respect robots.txt there as well, no?

<comment><USER6> I'm pretty sure the Bing Crawler does respect robots.txt. The data Bing collected didn't come from spidering Google.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I had to reread the original Google article to verify a point. The signal Bing is alleged to be using is that users CLICKED on the result that came up ... not the results that just came up first in Google upon a search query. And these are users who agreed to install the Bing toolbar!

Here's a hypothesis. I suspect Bing is making use of data that is typed in the toolbar or browser's search box ... not data captured from text typed directly into Google's search page. This might explain why their "honeypot-take" rate was only 8%. This is a subtle point. So ... imagine if you are the coder who wrote this signal collection feature. Would you capture "term in search box,next URL clicked" OR would you capture "if search box search engine == BING or Yahoo or something else then capture term in search box, next URL clicked".

Let me propose an alternative experiment. The test clickers should have clicked on the second or third (or some position N where N > 1) link. This would have demonstrated if Bing is using the actual click information or the search results themselves directly. The former seems completely fair on Bing's part. The latter _might_ be debatable. My point is this ... the Google geniuses fail to distinct these two cases and are muddling it up for the PR drones. This waste everyone's time and productivity. Moreover, they belittle the hard-work of engineers and scientists. It is sad that this is what it has come to.

<comment><USER8> From your comment: I suspect Bing is making use of data that is typed in the toolbar or browser's search box ... not data captured from text typed directly into Google's search page.

From the official Google blog: We asked these engineers to enter the synthetic queries _into the search box on the Google home page,_ and click on the results, i.e., the results we inserted.

<comment><USER9> The search text is in the referring URL no matter where it was typed in. It's captured without ever looking at Google.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Oh jeez, not again. _This is the Microsoft we know and love to hate, less so now that it is falling apart and must be pitied as an underdog._

Let's see:

Market cap: Microsoft - 239.49B, Google - 195.50B. Revenue: Microsoft - 66.69B, Google - 29.32B. Profit margin: Microsoft - 30.84%, Google - 29.01%.

Falling apart. Right...

<comment><USER11> All it took to piece together the author's ignorance was the

"Daniel Eran Dilger is the author of "Snow Leopard Server (Developer Reference),"

quote down at the end. I'm sure his line of thought was: "All my friends at Starbucks have MacBook Pros, so Microsoft must be doing really badly."

Probably the same reason half his argument seemed to involve Android jealousy...

<comment><USER12> Goodness, your comment seems to imply you have an issue with Apple products, their policies, and/or Steve Jobs. Yeah, the guy writes about OS X and Apple, but he's been a tech consultant for nearly two decades. He's worked with various technologies, from various companies. A quick Google search (heh) would have revealed this. Or, what? Did you believe he was some 20-something year old blogger regurgitating the same "FUD" you believe all Apple fanboys are spewing regarding their "Android jealousy"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> First article I've read in a while that's taking Microsoft's side in the whole situation. Every paragraph of this screams publicity. I am just wondering here if this is a PR tactic. Here I would be happy to see a balanced review of both companies behavior but this is just one sided bashing.

<quote>Shame on your pretentious, obnoxious, indefensibly egregious double standard in the field of using public information to turn a profit.</quote> <<\-- Ironically, Bing is doing the same and unlike content creators who can opt out by putting a robots.txt file Google cannot opt out of this because like it or not toolbar is always sending back information.

Google indexes public content but how it aggregates it and displays it is their deed. The ordering, etc is Google's work not content creators.Copying it is just like copying an IP. I would love to see this go to court and be fought.

<comment><USER14> I think that the Phineas Barnum assumption is pretty much valid and this article proves it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is starting to get interesting.

Google makes money aggregating other people's content. What happens when people aggregate Google's content? What's fair?

<comment><USER16> Explain what you mean when you say that Google makes money by aggregating other people's content? Google makes money by indexing other people's content and driving traffic to other people's sites. That hardly seems like a bad thing.

<comment><USER17> <http://books.google.com> is considered one of the more egregious examples, with many authors and publicists having complained about Google taking samples of the content and posting it online. I did a Google search a while back on a graphics issue, and got the answer I needed from a Google book search result. You could argue (as Google does) that they are really just helping promote the book. But I have no need too buy - I got the answer for free.

<comment><USER18> Would you have bought that book just to get that one answer? Would you have known the book even had the information you needed without Google's help?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Hmm. It might just be me, but I get the feeling that they aren't exactly fans of Google?!

<comment><USER20> Which doesn't make his point less or more valid. Just because you dislike something doesn't mean you can't provide insight and valid opinions about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I find it amusing that Dilger mentions Overture, which bought alltheweb from FAST in 2003. FAST, of course, was later acquired by Microsoft in 2008. The number of connections among the major search companies is rather amusing, if not necessarily surprising.

</comment><comment><USER22> I have a feeling that people's reaction on this is biased by the fact that one of the two companies is Microsoft. What happened here it's not ethically correct, but come on guys, we must be honest. This is business, it's about billions, it's about market shares. It's not a news that money is not ethical.

Google collects data too, Google does its own shit like everybody else, like Microsoft. Google has its own toolbar too. And all this story seems more a marketing move against Bing.

What I want now to happen is to have more competition, instead of crying Google should work hard to be unbeatable and competitive. History teaches us a copy it's never better than the original.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'll try to make my point again. There is one school of thinking that Google is profiting by farming information from the Internet, literally on the back of many people's labor. You can prove this by running a "Google Sting", that is known as "Google bombing". By having many people setting up honeypot to link an arbitrary keyword to certain URL, you seem to be able to fool Google to artifically associate such keyword with the URL, thus "proving" Google is profiting from your labor. I don't really buy this logic. But Google's accusation of Bing steal from them seems very close to this line of framing.

</comment><comment><USER24> Is anyone else bothered by the fact that the article switches back and forth between serif and sans-serif font?

<comment><USER25> Nope. Just you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> <http://createasearchengine.appspot.com>

</comment><comment><USER27> <http://www.google.com/robots.txt>

First two lines:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /search

<comment><USER28> There is no robot involved. An actual human instructs their user agent to retrieve a document on Google. A piece of code, running in that user agent, does something. If anyone has a complaint here, it is the user, not Google. (Google really really doesn't want to spin this as "MS is spying on our users" because as soon as they say that some person is going to point out "Google is spying on the entire world" and that person _will be right_.)

<comment><USER29> Although strictly speaking you're right, it breaks the _intent_ of robots.txt as the users' clickstream is fed into the server-side indexing engine alongside robot crawled data.

Arguing that according to the strict letter of the spec, robots.txt only has to be obeyed by true crawlers does hold water as strictly speaking Bing could disregard robots.txt altogether - it's not certainly not legally enforceable. The intent of robots.txt is clear and Bing should be trying to obey it wherever possible.

In this case it appears the keyword was associated because it was typed into the Google search box, and from the there to the faked destination. IMHO when the clickstream was analysed it should have disregarded clickstreams that pass a robots.txt-excluded page as these could establish associations that were not supposed to revealed by crawlers.

We aught to hold Bing and any search engine to the highest standard when talking about crawling etiquette.

Also, see <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2169817>

<comment><USER30> If I'm google and I block /search I want no company to collect the data.

If I'm a site that blocks /dynamic because I want to make sure my stats are accurate, not factoring bots, and I want to keep the load down on slow- generating pages, then I'm perfectly happy with the data being collected.

Is it the intent of robots.txt _itself_ to block the clickstream data, or is it just google's intent?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Dilger first asks "Bing is using Google's search results to improve its own. But what's wrong with that?"

If Bing uses Google's search results, then we effectively only have one major search engine. Yahoo has switched to the Bing engine, and Bing gets a big chunk of it's results from Google. So we have a search engine monopoly. That's wrong with that.

> "This is the company that indexes blogs [...], and then makes all this > information available without consent"

He first asks what's wrong with Bing copying Google's results, because it's public content, then says it's immoral to index public content. Double morals? Logic fail?

<comment><USER32> Where did he say it is immoral to index public content?

Google complains about Bing using public content. Google uses public content.

Snarky question? Fail?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Imagine a playground. Young, pre-alpha nerds writhing in chaos. Little arms flailing. Faces red. "Poopy face". "Your mommy smells".

Nerd fight.

</comment><comment><USER34> The world's largest scraper is complaining about being scraped...when Yelp and all the rest of the local businesses directories realized they were being scraped and the data was being used to google's advantage, it doesn't appear that Google gave two shits. Tables have turned, and it's like someone stole the handball from the recess yard.

<comment><USER35> > when Yelp and all the rest of the local businesses directories realized they > were being scraped and the data was being used to google's advantage,

<http://yelp.com/robots.txt>

Not a mention of GoogleBot.

<comment><USER34> well, they're presented with either 1) killing their organic search traffic by blocking Google or 2) allowing the crawlers but not being able to stop their data from being aggregated and included in local results.

Yelp's API specifically says their data cannot be aggregated with other sources. When presented with that, Google simply said they weren't using the API, they were scraping.

Apparently scraping is a free pass to do whatever the hell you want if you're Google.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I think Google is being disingenuous with their "bing is copying my data" story.

However, please avoid linking to roughlydrafted.com. At the risk of going ad- hominem, I just wanted to point out that if you have read any of the material on the site, you will know that it is just full of flamebait articles with an absurd Apple fixation.

Everything Android does is copying Apple. Everything Microsoft does is wrong and stupid. If flash is not supported on iPhone it is because it is the morally correct thing to do. When Apple announced the iPhone without an SDK roughlydrafted called developers stupid for asking for an SDK and that javascript on the web is the new SDK. This post however takes the cake, you must side with Bing because Google is a greater threat to Apple than Microsoft. Seriously, how does Overture even enter into this discussion. It is tiresome to see this site linked to all over the web.

</comment><comment><USER37> Responding to merely two points, one hopes Daniel isn't as stupid as his writing. "This is the company that indexes blogs, newspapers, and both digital and physical books, and then makes all this information available without consent in the contexts of its ads and paid search space, and is dismissal of anyone who objects to Google's ultra liberal sense of copyright. "

robots.txt and noindex [http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en...](http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156449)

And "Install the Google Toolbar and do a search of Bing, and Google actually directs your clickstream back for its own analysis"

Google/Matt Cutts have been very open about what they do and don't use that information for, and they aren't using click tracking.

</comment><comment><USER38> Not really. If Google wants to publicly shame Microsoft it can and is. They're basically saying that Bing is the new "Let me Google that for you". Since they're not currently proceeding with legal motions it's basically just a smear campaign to make people think twice about Bing.

And there's truth to it.

</comment><comment><USER39> Microsoft did nothing wrong. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_linking>

</comment><comment><USER40> Google makes money out of being the #1 search engine. Concurrence from others is one thing. Concurrence from someone stealing your source code (open source or not) is a whole different story. That should be reason enough, in my humble opinion.

<comment><USER40> Oh I obviously misunderstood the article. I'm so sorry.</comment></comment>


The Biggest Changes in C++11 (and Why You Should Care) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.smartbear.com/software-quality/bid/167271/The-Biggest-Changes-in-C-11-and-Why-You-Should-Care <comment><USER2> "C++11 still lacks a few useful libraries such as an XML API, sockets, GUI, reflection"

that's a bit of a strange statement, no? Since when is a GUI or even an XML API part of the core language features? And adding reflection would, erm, kinda mean that every compiler has to be rewritten almost from scratch.

<comment><USER3> C++ already needs runtime type information [0] for certain features (dynamic_cast, typeid). So the basic compiler infrastructure is already there. No need to "rewrite from scratch". Just add more information into the RTTI data structures and provide the mechanisms to inspect (optionally modify) classes.

[0] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run-time_type_information>

<comment><USER2> good point actually, didn't think that through. Still full reflection like in C# for instance seems quite a long way from RTTI.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Too bad "Concepts" did not make it into the standard. Would help avoid the tons of unintelligible error messages one gets when using template functions incorrectly.

Given that C++ libraries are getting so complex (now with _move_ semantics!) there is no way a library _user_ can understand why something does not work as expected. Especially when dealing with sophisticated libraries: Boost, Eigen, etc.

<comment><USER5> > Too bad "Concepts" did not make it into the standard. Would help avoid the > tons of unintelligible error messages one gets when using template functions > incorrectly.

As far as I understood it, this was merely due to discussions what types of Concepts would be supported. There was one group of people that wanted very granular Concepts, and another group of people that wanted just very broadly defined Concepts. They never reached an agreement on this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm really looking forward to when the standard is implemented across most compilers. There's some great new features that I hope goes some way to addressing some of the complaints levied at C++ (there's still plenty left to go).

<comment><USER7> The support is actually pretty good - since the standard went through such a long process, most compilers had support for at least some of the features as long as a couple of years ago (back around the TR1 draft).

I already use it for some little new projects. I'm sure a lot of legacy stuff won't be able to move on to the new standard for a while because they need backwards compatibility with old compilers though.

<comment><USER6> No doubt it's getting there, but with a couple of the big ones (MSVC especially) missing chunks it's hard to shift over completely. I've used it a few times with GCC and I've been pretty much happy with all the new features, looking forward to using it a bit more often.

<comment><USER8> VS2010 implemented much of the C++11 feature set, and VS2012 implements almost all of it. See [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/vstudio/hh567368.asp...](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/vstudio/hh567368.aspx) for a table comparison of C++11 support.

I'm itching to start using this stuff in QuickBooks; I love smart pointers but hate auto_ptr and being able to safely use STL containers with smart pointers opens a new world of entity processing.

<comment><USER9> Unfortunately there's still lots of stuff missing, e.g. delegated constructors and, probably most significantly, constexpr.

The apache table[+] has been updated as of this month, and MSVC (with a version given as "11.0 nov'12") now is looking rather better, but is still missing constexpr... :(

Still, it appears that there should be fairly good support in all major compilers within the next few years, at least if you can depend on your devs using relatively up-to-date compiler releases (not at all a given where I work!)... :]

[+] <http://wiki.apache.org/stdcxx/C%2B%2B0xCompilerSupport></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Competing From The Fringe - How To Outsmart Big, Dumb Companies - <AUTHOR> http://www.infochachkie.com/competition/ Entrepreneurial tips for competing with both big and small companies. <comment><USER2> " _Let's face it. Life would be pretty boring without the Darwinian struggle for survival. Without external forces pushing organisms to adapt in order to ensure their continued survival, you would be swimming in a primordial goop, along with the other single-cell creatures, rather than reading this enlightening article._ "

Ironic. Value systems evolved because they conferred an advantage and were passed on. He's quite literally programmed to think competition is good & promordial goops are boring.</comment>


Is Science Slowing Down? - <AUTHOR> http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/11/26/is-science-slowing-down-2/ <comment><USER2> I can't help but have the feeling that there is something simplistic and fundamentally flawed with the concept of productivity in this context. The assumption appears to be that advances, like buses in the public transport system, should show up on a more or less regular basis. However that appears to ignore or misunderstand what all these scientists and engineers are actually doing - foraging. They are searching for new things in a multi- dimensional space with the added complication that traversing the area where ideas may be encountered gets increasingly more complex to navigate and relies on more people - either searchers or support staff or other searchers building the tools needed to do the searching, etc. etc.

The apt (but somewhat stretched) analogy here is space travel. It's relatively simple to put up a high-altitude balloon - even school kids can do it now. Travel to the local planets - difficult but we've been doing it for a few years now. Sending probes to the next galaxy - not happening anytime soon. So why don't we ask the same questions of the aerospace industry? Probably because it's easier to see that getting from A to B and then to C takes a lot more effort and a lot more people and support infrastructure.

Of course the other possibility is that advances are simply harder to find, not because we are looking in the wrong places or not looking hard enough but that there are limits to creativity in the way we think and so advances become a form of the infinite number of monkeys scenario where if you throw enough monkeys at the problem you will get the complete works of Shakespeare - eventually.

I know this must be disappointing for the bean-counters that fund all this science but some problems are hard and barring the arrival of a generation of super-geniuses are going to stay hard unless we can find completely new ways of doing things - which is going to take a lot more effort.</comment>


Please share your (non-computer) system hacker stories - <AUTHOR> The new question from the yc application "Please tell us about the time you (...) most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage" filters me out right there, so far I can't think of anything. How about you? I love that kind of stories, and I suppose giving them away now won't hurt the applicants chances?
I can only imagine that my whole live is a kind of hack: I hacked my girl-friends brain so that she actually went out with me. I hacked my own brain so that I managed to learn Computer Science, exercise regularly and eat reasonably healthy. I twisted my CV in the right way to land that job etc. And so on... But I guess that is not quite what YC is looking for... But I mean, people's life are essentially an attempt at optimizing their standing in the system, are they not?
I guess I am also not quite the "real world" systems hacker, because often it seems to entail taking advantage of somebody else? Ever since I read "The Art Of Intrusion", I remember it's lessons in all sorts of situations. Like today I was standing in line for cinema tickets, which were likely to be sold out before my turn. It would have been fun to try something, but not really fair towards the other queuing people. Not that I had a really great idea, but who knows, something might have worked (art of intrusion style, discover name of some employee of the cinema, then call cinema and pretend that person was supposed to reserve some tickets for me - one idea). <comment><USER2> I assume that the PG et al. mean "hack" in the positive sense -- as much as news.yc occasionally sounds cultish, I don't think they're following the usual cult scheme of having prospective members confess their crimes in order to ensure that the cult has blackmail material on everybody. :-)

That said, I'm having trouble coming up with a good example of what would qualify here -- the best I have so far is when I was a new graduate student at Oxford and dug through the Exam Decrees And Regulations (also known as the "big grey book") to discover what nobody else in the Computing Lab was aware of: That instead of writing a 50 page dissertation at the end of my first year and being examined on it, I could count the fact that I had a paper published in a major journal as equivalent to holding a Master's degree, and thereby transfer from Probationary Research Student status to D.Phil. Student status six months early and with hundreds of hours less work.

I would personally call this "reading the rules and understanding how they work" rather than "hacking the system", but maybe that's what they mean.

<comment><USER3> That is exactly what we mean.

<comment><USER2> In that case, could I suggest making the question a bit clearer (perhaps s/hacked (.*) system/made $1 system work/ or by giving an example of what you mean)? The fact that I apparently had exactly what you were looking for, yet wasn't sure if it qualified at all, is I think a good indication that the language is ambiguous.

<comment><USER4> If it had been me doing the application (haven't seen it) I would probably build in some ambiguity. It gives a greater degree of freedom for the applicant, and also in the real world you have to deal with ambiguity on a daily basis, so I would like to see how an applicant deals with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Years back, I helped run 6.270, the LEGO Robotics contest. The winners got a very cool Lego watch. One of them was a friend of mine. She was more than a little bummed because the stem on her watch didn't pull out far enough to allow the time to be set.

Recalling that an adage that "even a broken clock is right twice a day", I suggested she remove the battery. Then, when the current time was the same as the time on the watch, reinstall the battery.

I've never seen her so delighted!

<comment><USER6> Quality. Plus one just for mentioning 6.270.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I volunteered with my (then-) future wife to help build a big community playground.

At one point there were maybe 5 of use moving this tube slide into place. It was a very big, heavy, very twisty-shaped tubed. And we could feel it starting to slip.

We were all struggling to hold it up. It wasnt working, and there was noone else nearby to help.

Suddenly I leaped up and grabbed a hold onto an edge at the top. As I leaped I could hear and feel people being like "wha..?" because the shape was so strange, it was really hard to tell where the center of gravity was and how to adjust it.

But in that moment, all my physics and calculus classes merged with instinct like never before. I was hanging from this very counterintuitive top edge with all my weight, and it stopped it slipping. The group then had time to organize how to ease it - and me - down.

I am generally a non-athletic geek. That morning I felt like a sports star. The best part was, I needed no external validation for it. My intellect was no longer relegated to the exam halls.

</comment><comment><USER8> I travel very frequently by plane and almost always in economy. At one particular airport that I regularly fly through there's always a really long line for security, except for business and first class passengers.

Happily, my airline offers online checkin and the print out is a PDF file. So I download the PDF file and print out my genuine boarding pass and put it in my bag, then I doctor the boarding pass in Acrobat so that it says Business instead of Economy and I change my seat assignment from something like 125H to 2D to make it look legit. Obviously, my name, flight, date, etc. are all genuine.

</comment><comment><USER9> I have another one for the application, but this one would have been a better hack had it worked.

I use to work at research lab where they named all the buildings after numbers. No rhyme or reason. Building 1 was next to Building 9, which connected to Building 42. For the important buildings, they were named after famous ex-directors. They were building a new building, and I decided to name it after my roommate (who is no director), Ian Montoya (name changed), who also worked there.

The whole campus is connected via walkways between buildings, so you can walk to the cafeteria from your office without going outside. So, you often ended up walking with other employees on your way to lunch. What Ian and I would do when we found ourselves in a cluster was to act out a scripted conversation as if it was normal conversation:

      me: did you hear about that new building they're building?
      Ian: You mean BUILDING 23?
      me: yeah, THAT'S THE ONE.
      Ian: Yeah, what about it?
      me: I hear that they're going to call it the Ian Montoya Building.
      Ian: The IAN MONTOYA BUILDING?
      me: Yeah, the IAN MONTOYA BUILDING.
      Ian: huh, I should remember that, the IAN MONTOYA BUILDING.

I'd correct people when they mentioned it, at meetings, in the hallways, at lunch, hoping it'd spread, but alas, I only was able to get the new hires to call it that.

The only other one off the top of my head is a small one. From June until April of next year, whenever people would ask, I'd tell them my birthday was on April 1st. I also changed it on friendster, and other places mentioning my birthday that friends would see. Come April 1st, I got a couple calls for my birthday. "Happy Birthday!" they'd say, and I'd go, "Thanks! April Fools!" After that, I had to convince them that I wasn't joking.

<comment><USER10> Wright State?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> My dissertation involved segmenting and rendering brains from 3D MR images of the head. One of the ways I checked my software was by hacking the head off a cadaver, imaging it, hacking out the brain, and then successfully matching volumes and photographs of the brain sulci from various POVs with the 3D renderings generated from the segmented images. That's probably my most successful hacking of a non-computer system :)

<comment><USER12> Has anyone ever placed speakers or moving parts in the cadavers? I often wanted to do this at my college.

<comment><USER11> We must pay respect to the people who donate their bodies for educational and scientific studies. So if the speakers or moving parts don't increase our knowledge, the keeper of the cadavers should veto their use. The excellent book "Stiff" by Mary Roach describes many interesting uses of cadavers, from crash test dummies to Death's Acre in Knoxville, TN.

<comment><USER12> Good point, that was wrong of me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Hmm. I was bored in high school, and wanted to keep up my summer job. So I enrolled in a dropout prevention program intended for people who had to work to support their families & such. My high school career was a short morning of advanced-placement classes & then my "real" job. The counselors and teachers didn't like it, but couldn't do much about it.

</comment><comment><USER12> Well, you don't always have to subvert the system to take advantage of the situation. For instance, last time I was at the airport I skipped two lines because I was just more aware (probably more awake:).

As for fun hacks, during college and group of friends and I put together a raft from an old futon frame and trash bags instead of studying one night. We sailed 14 people out to a small island in a nearby pond and planted our flag.

</comment><comment><USER14> In high school, I filled out some form on the Princeton Review's website claiming I was a high school teacher in order to download sample Advanced Placement tests. I worked through them and thought nothing more of it.

A month later the teachers in my AP classes gave me those same tests, unmodified. I did pretty well.

I went to a community college for a year and then transferred over to university to save some money, and it turned out by taking a calculus test with about a month more of material in it, I could get out of an entire extra semester of calculus classes. I taught myself the extra stuff and skipped an entire year of math.

...I got nothin'. Good thing I'm not applying for YC funding!

</comment><comment><USER15> Sometimes when visiting big cities I'll check google maps/city newspapers for big construction projects and high end hotels - then get reservations at them for a fifth the price. It's how I ended up in a penthouse at a swanky hotel in Toronto for an eighth of what it would have cost me otherwise.

Besides, when you're twenty stories up and can sleep through anything who cares what's going on outside?

</comment><comment><USER4> Did a nice real-world hack in Ibiza some 10 years back...

A friend of mine and I went to Ibiza in may hoping to land some kind of bar job, thinking it would be pretty easy.

It turned out that we weren't the only ones to have gotten this great idea, and all the bars and clubs in the place had already hired for the summer season, so getting a job was near impossible. After having been there for around 2 weeks we had no money, no jobs, no food and no money to get back home. And we didn't even speak the language..

Desperate measures were needed, So I thought up a plan...

Back home I had been to this club where a guy was running a tequila slammer bar over in the corner of the club - basically just a slab of wood across two upright steel drums, a bottle of tequila, sprite and lemons and a couple of shot glasses. He would fill the shotglasses with half sprite, half tequila, slam them into the table so the sprite fizzed up, and people would gulp it down while it was still fizzing.

I noticed that noone did tequila slammers in Ibiza...

So my plan was to locate the club I most wanted to work in (the one with the hottest and most drunk chicks obviously), talk to the manager and tell him how amazingly cool I was, and that back home I was a huge celebrity with my crazy tequila slammer bar. And that he should be honored that he was the first one I offered to strike a deal with to do my stuff. He would make loads of money, and his place would be the most popular in town because of me and my amazing skills.

I had of course never done a tequila slammer in my life...

So I sent my friend down the club I had chosen pretending to be my manager with a handwritten letter explaining my successful (and faked...) track record as a master tequila slammer showman. He said that I would be along the next day, and that they had 24 hours to consider my offer, or I would move on.

The next day I went down to the club to meet the manager. He was impressed by the letter that I had written, and agreed that I had to be quite a star based on the experience and track record that I had made up the day before. So we struck a deal: I would get a 14 day period to show that I was as amazing as i said I was.

The next day my friend and I set up a bar in the back of the club and got ready for the action. I was scared shitless since I had set pretty high expectations for everyone, and the word had gotten around the club about this crazy guy that was supposed to be some kind of star. To top it off the manager of the bar had brought in the managers of quite a few of the other bars to show off his new amazing crazy new tequila bar. Everyone was expecting a huge spectacle of a show.

Since I had never done a tequila slammer in my life it was pretty obvious that I needed to do something drastic to survive this. So I went for broke and decided to start off by doing the first 10 shots myself, get totally drunk and just go crazy. And pray to god....

It worked: It went totally wild, I ended the night wearing nothing but underwear, having slammed tequilas on the bar, on the walls, the floor, the ceiling, and on peoples forehead. I think I broke at least fifty shot glasses, I was standing, sometimes lying, in a poddle of tequila and sprite. But people loved it.

After 14 days I got a sweet deal, making good money for being drunk, chatting up girls and generally having a splendid time. There was even an article in a major Spanish magazine about this crazy drunk Dane in Ibiza slamming tequilas on peoples forehead...

<comment><USER2> _[...] So I sent my friend down the club I had chosen pretending to be my manager with a handwritten letter explaining my successful (and faked...) track record as a master tequila slammer showman [...]_

As entertaining as the story is, I'm not sure that I'd count "being an effective fraud" as a skill I would want in someone I was considering funding. Some people may have a different perspective -- I've certainly heard it said that being able to lie with a straight face is a vital skill in business -- but given that the YC motto is "Make something people want", not "Lie to people to get them to pay for what you can offer them", I hope the YC crew doesn't take this view.

<comment><USER4> But on a more serious note...

The difference is intent. And there is a lesson to be learnt for startups.

If you go into a meeting with a customer and he asks for something that you think you can deliver, but are not sure you answer yes. And then you go back to your office, work your ass off and hope for the best. Sometimes you make it, sometimes you don't. This is not fraud, since you think (or hope...) that you can deliver - you have an intent of fulfilling your contract. It is merely pushing the envelope, which is what business people do. In a startup this is needed if you want to get ahead, the odds are stacked against you so you need every break you can get, even if that means exaggerating a bit to land the deal.

Good business people know this, as long as your intent is good this is OK. Developers often don't understand this, primarily because good business people don't bother them with how it works - just like good developers don't bother business people with what happens under the hood of their programs. As long as it works.

<comment><USER2> _If you go into a meeting with a customer and he asks for something that you think you can deliver, but are not sure you answer yes. And then you go back to your office, work your ass off and hope for the best._

Yes, but you don't (or shouldn't) lie to your customer and claim that you have a successful track record of doing exactly what he's asking you to do.

If you're interviewing for a job and your interviewer asks if you can program in language X (which you have little or no experience with), it's one thing to say that you can learn it; it's quite another to have listed "10 years of experience with language X" on your resume when you first applied for the position.

<comment><USER4> Well I don't think myspace got to where they are today by being really great guys. And they sure as hell haven't got a great codebase and a a great product.

How do you think it happened?

<comment><USER16> I don't think cperciva's sense of morals is conditioned on wanting to be the next Myspace.

If it's a success, the way you run your startup and the lessons you learn will have a tremendous effect on the rest of your life. It takes a huge amount of effort to get something going. You don't have time to make dozens of businesses, and if you're not clear about your values early on, you can find yourself a success, but without a strong internal sense of accomplishment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > But I mean, people's life are essentially an attempt at optimizing their > standing in the system, are they not?

Scary! But actually I used to think that way...

</comment><comment><USER8> Here's a very minor hack. One time I was going to the movies at Shoreline (Mountain View) and I wanted to go and see "Spy Game". Unfortunately, it was sold out.

But I have really good eye sight and I could see from the door which movies were playing on the same side of the theater as Spy Game. There's one control point on each side of the theater and so I bought a ticket for a less wanted movie on the same side as Spy Game. Showed my ticket to the guy who let me through. Then I simply walked into Spy Game and found a really crappy seat near the back (all that was left).

Good movie, though.

</comment><comment><USER18> I missed a large part of grade 10 because of moving and travelling. When time came to register for school (in Montreal, Quebec) the public school system wanted me to repeat grade 10 because I had missed so much. I and my parents found a private school that had entrance exams, and they let me take both the grade 10 and grade 11 exams. Passed the grade 11 one, and went right into grade 11.

</comment><comment><USER19> During my senior year in highschool, I was taking my second year of film production. We had a new teacher who didn't really know everything he was trying to teach. My previous teacher was a big name in the industry (he animated the end credits to Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events and a United Airlines commercial involving a dragon.) I learned more than I probably should have from him, but kept it a secret. At finals time senior year, most of the questions were opinionated (how many gigs does video take on a HDD, how many cuts does a typical commercial have etc..) I ended up getting 100% because I told the teacher he was wrong and proved how I was right. Everyone else did poorly.

</comment><comment><USER20> Clearly not my hack, but worth mentioning: <http://www.snopes.com/business/deals/pudding.asp>

</comment><comment><USER21> My proudest hack combines computers and the public school system. In 1998, going into my senior year of high school, I really wanted to take Computer Science AP. That year, the AP board was switching the course curriculum from Pascal to C++. Unfortunately for us, the school's computer lab was ancient-- a set of 8088 PCs with no hard drives, with each student given a floppy containing a bootable Pascal environment and all his/her code. The school didn't have any money for a new lab full of computers, and was planning to cancel the course. So I came up with the idea of building one reasonably powerful linux server, and networking the existing PCs to it using a bootable "dumb terminal" disk. Cost: about $2000 for the server and 20 network cards.

Several friends and I worked over the summer to set up our linux lab. It turned out the network card device driver, built for x86 boxes, wouldn't work on these 8088 CPUs. So we bought a big pile of old 386 motherboards with CPUs and RAM from a friendly alum for $200. It turned out the 8088 cases were not standard, with metal bumps that would instantly short one of our new motherboards. So we installed them on top of their anti-static bags, with only expansion cards to hold stuff in place. Everything except the server was overtly cheap and flimsy, like the 10-base-2 coax network we used instead of 10-base-T because it didn't require an expensive hub. But everything was also easily replaceable, and we built extras just in case the usual firm smack didn't fix a broken machine.

Then, on our last work visit at the end of summer, we got some discouraging news: the teacher who was supposed to lead CS AP in our new lab had suddenly departed for a better-paying job at another school district. We finished the lab, wondering how we'd get by without a teacher. The course remained tentatively scheduled and for the first few days we tried to teach everyone how to use the OS and compiler while supervised by a friendly but clueless substitute teacher.

Luckily, we ended up with a much better teacher. Brad Kuhn, a CS graduate student at the nearby University of Cincinnati, came to meet us and knew he was our only chance. Though I'm sure he didn't enjoy some of the disciplinary responsibilities that came with being a high school teacher, he shared with us a deep knowledge of CS and an honest passion for free software. (Brad went on to become director of the Free Software Foundation, and is now CTO at the Software Freedom Law Center.) We hung out after school playing netris and debating when (or if) Microsoft would start publishing free software. There was no shortage of disagreement.

That was ten years ago in Cincinnati, but my former classmates remain among my closest friends. We're now the age Brad was when he took that job. What am I going to do this year that will have as positive an impact on the world as Brad's decision to take that job 10 years ago? What are you going to do?</comment>


Talker's Block - Seth Godin - <AUTHOR> http://www.alearningaday.com/2011/09/talkers-block-seth-godin.html

<comment><USER2> Maybe this is true for Seth Godin. But I often find myself without a suitable conversation topic when the situation demands it, as do many others. Once you're talking then things are fine, but that's true for writing as well a large degree.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the point here is that in both cases, we only get better after we practice.

And if conversation is a problem, we know what to do! Converse.. :)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Verloop – Customer Engagement Automation with AI (SUS'17) - <AUTHOR> https://verloop.io <comment><USER2> I am founder of Verloop, happy to take questions and feedback.

One thing that sets us apart from similar tools available in the market is that we complete customer journey end to end. Let the bot gather leads, answer automated queries and when it fails, do a warm hand off to human agents.

Special shout out to YC and our awesome mentor Darshan Shankar at Startup School'17.</comment>


How tech baffled an elderly Congress - <AUTHOR> http://digitaledition.baltimoresun.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=13f67296-964c-469d-9c7f-d20a7dd550a4 <comment><USER2> > Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., attempted to ask Facebook Chief Executive Mark > Zuckerberg a question about data privacy, and revealed a conception of > social media resembling a wad of tangled Christmas lights: "Do you track > devices that an individual who uses Facebook has that is connected to the > device that they use for their Facebook connection, but not necessarily > connected to Facebook?"

This seems like a very legitimate question. He wants to know if Facebook tracks e.g. your FitBit. It's connected to your phone, and your phone is connected to Facebook, but your FitBit isn't connected to Facebook. And to be honest, I don't know the answer to that question. I would hope that they can't, but knowing the state of the tech world (IoT: the 'S' stands for security), it's probably possible, and knowing what we know about Facebook, if it's possible they are probably doing it.

Not that Zuckerberg would necessarily know or confess to it before the Senate, but that's a separate issue (I often wonder what is the point of calling a corporate executive to DC anyway, since they have every reason to dissemble and no reason to cooperate in good faith).

<comment><USER3> > I often wonder what is the point of calling a corporate executive to DC > anyway, since they have every reason to dissemble and no reason to cooperate > in good faith

Showboating, I've always assumed. A good deal of the questioning was clearly grandstanding, and a good number of the questions asked could have been answered by the Senators' grandchildren.

That said, if you want to grandstand, you should first run your questions by your grandchildren so they can tell you about online advertising and such, lest you look like a fool on national television.

<comment><USER4> Misguided way of looking at things imho. He is bringing more attention to the question and a larger non-technical audience now is aware.

I have known techies voicing issues and asking questions about Facebook practices wayback in 2008-9. You can say it took 10 years for the rest of the population to start asking the same questions. But I see it as a failure of the early warning technical crowd, who knew bad things were unfolding, to warn us faster.

Whats the lesson there?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > We don't yet have comprehensive age data for the next Congress

Am I understanding this correctly? As of January 2[0], the day before the new session began, no one had yet compiled a full list of the ages of all members of Congress? That's baffling to me. Have an intern go look through the Wikipedia articles for each one of them.

[0] There's no mention of the in the Baltimore Sun article, but [https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/theres-so- man...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/theres-so-many- different-things-how-technology-baffled-an-elderly-congress- in-2018/2019/01/02/f583f368-ffe0-11e8-83c0-b06139e540e5_story.html) is dated 2019-01-02.

<comment><USER5> An age-based criterion for computer knowledge would write off Donald Knuth, while counting a tween that only knew snapchat as an expert. To be honest I'm not sure how useful the list of ages would be.

<comment><USER3> I've not proposed any sort of cutoff, and don't particularly care about the specific ages. I'm just astounded by the claim that data on the ages of members of Congress isn't readily available to a journalist at a major newspaper.

<comment><USER6> Of course it's _available_ , given that the birthdates all are. But, to paraphrase Barbie, "Math is hard."

I'm guessing that a quick Google of "116th Congress ages" didn't turn up a single preformatted source in the desired format in the first few links.

<comment><USER3> Having just spent a bit of time on this today[0], I realized there is one seat (NC district 9) that's still not set due to fraud allegations. Could be that's what they're referring to.

[0] Just threw this together to start playing with hosting using S3: [http://howoldiscongress.com/](http://howoldiscongress.com/) (Yes, I know that's absurd precision. wip and all.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This a good article but I would add that quoting a YouTube comment in a serious context also shows a critical lack of understanding of what the internet is and how its content should be regarded. The comment in question could be posted by the author or the subject of discussion without the reader having any way of determining or suspecting that fraud. The same cannot be said of a direct quote. It seems like the author was parsing YouTube comments to get an idea of what the young people who "get it" had to say and that absurd notion stayed with me throughout the article. Unlike the author scrolling through YouTube comments, I was questioning the quality and genuineness of what I was reading.

Doing so later led me to ask: are Senators who know how to text each other the most technologically knowledgeable people in Congress? Is that really good enough to inspire hope in the author?

</comment><comment><USER8> Senators don't have to know everything just as a CEO does not know everything. But they do have to be capable of hiring competent STAFF to help them!

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

In 2000, every Representative hired 14 staff members, while the average Senator hired 34.

In 2000, House committees had an average of 68 staff and Senate committees an average of 46.

Business CEOs don't know everything but they help hire the Chief Financial Officer, the Chief Technology Officer, legal counsel, etc.

If senators can't get a few tech people to advise the senators and committee chairpersons then they deserve to look like fools and be laughed at. It is their job to hire people to help educate and advise them.

</comment><comment><USER9> Since this is apparently a verbatim repost of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18813468](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18813468), I'm going to repost my (lightly edited) comment from that empty thread since I think it's a crap article with some serious flaws.

\---

This is a really disappointing article. I'd like to agree with the premise, but some of the specific examples they chose to use seem a more than a little unfair.

> There were the agonizing video clips from April's Facebook hearing, in which > 68-year-old Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) attempted to ask Facebook chief executive > Mark Zuckerberg a question about data privacy, and revealed a conception of > social media resembling a wad of tangled Christmas lights: "Do you track > devices that an individual who uses Facebook has that is connected to the > device that they use for their Facebook connection, but not necessarily > connected to Facebook?"

Yeah, sure, the phrasing is not great, but interpreted charitably there's a decent question in there:

> If I use Facebook on my desktop computer but don't use it on my phone, does > Facebook still associate activity on my phone (e.g. browsing, location, > payments) with my Facebook profile?

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the answer's almost definitely yes given existing info[1], and that that answer would be somewhat disquieting to even the most tech-impaired senator.

> Come December it was the Google chief Sundar Pichai's turn to visit the > Capitol and watch Rep. Steve Cohen, the 69-year-old Democrat from Tennessee, > wave his hands in the air and complain: "I use your apparatus often, or your > search engine, and I don't understand all of the different ways that you can > turn off the locations. There's so many different things!"

Google has an established track record[2] of forcing users to toggle multiple settings to achieve a simple goal: "stop tracking location history!" Cohen is fairly clearly referring to that issue. If frequent users can't figure out how to disable location history due to dark UX patterns, that's a problem.

So, again, actually a pretty reasonable question that hits close to a lot of fevered discussion in our circles[3].

This strikes me as, ironically enough, a technically illiterate reporter trawling for bad-sounding Twitter-length excerpts while ignoring any of the underlying issues.

At least the article goes on to quote Hatch's communications director:

> "Perhaps one part of the problem is Congress-illiteracy among tech > reporters."

> Maybe so. [continues to address tenuously related claims about the age of > Congress, which in itself plays into avocado-toast tier reporting by > generalizations]

What? That's got to be the weakest dismissal of a critique of the shallow reporting model underlying pieces like this that I've ever seen.

\---

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/03/facebook-...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/03/facebook- track-browsing-history-california-lawsuit)

[2] [https://www.techlicious.com/blog/google-tracking-after- locat...](https://www.techlicious.com/blog/google-tracking-after-location- history-turned-off/)

[3] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17749330](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17749330)

<comment><USER10> Yes, I actually don't see anything in that article that makes me come close to doing a facepalm. Some of the questions aren't the most elegantly worded but I'd be a lot more concerned if someone expressed surprise that users were tracked or data kept or some other naive lack of understanding of how social media and ad networks operate.

>revealed a conception of social media resembling a wad of tangled Christmas lights

That actually seems like a pretty good analogy. I might use it someday.

There's also the sort of smug superiority that one often sees directed at everyone who isn't as immersed in a particular field as the speaker or writer.

<comment><USER11> The "Internet is a series of tubes" meme from years back was an earlier example of this. The senator was trying to explain the concept of network congestion. Now, his actual argument was garbage (it was an anti-net neutrality argument), and there were things he said that were very funny (like referring to an email as "an Internet"), but the "series of tubes" language was a perfectly reasonable analogy.

<comment><USER10> People who are deep in a particular area are often very dismissive of metaphors and other simplifications or attempt to explain for a broader audience because they're not "right." But that's often fine if you're trying to get a concept across rather than writing technical documentation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Putting term limits for Senators is a good way to get rid of this old club and bring new blood. Some senators are there for their life.

<comment><USER13> It's not clear whether that would produce better outcomes. Some policy areas like healthcare, transportation, and the military are tremendously complex. It takes legislators years just to get up to speed on the issues. Inexperienced legislators have to rely on their staffs and lobbyists for guidance, so if we term out the experienced legislators then in effect we're handing more power to un-elected staffers and lobbyists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > average age 58 in the House, 62 in the Senate.

This right here is the main issue. The median age in the US is 38. Even if you remove people under 18 which cannot serve in Congress, that would raise the median to ~47.

<comment><USER11> The constitutional age limitation for serving in Congress is 25 for the House and 30 for the Senate.</comment></comment>