Game developer Brianna Wu leaves home after death threats for supporting women - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2014/10/10/game-developer-brianna-wu-leaves-home-after-receiving-death-threats-for-speaking-out-in-support-of-women/ <comment><USER2> It's interesting what a chilling effect the evil "gamergate" people have.

By making it clear they target anyone who stands up for women in gaming or for freedom of press they have intimidated people who would usually be up front in their support for the people attacked.

I hope someone can come up with a sensible strategy for dealing with these trolls. I'd like to see real-world consequences.

The article indicates there are "some well known names" involved in the group. Who are they and what companies do they work for?

(Written from a throwaway, which says a lot doesn't it?)

<comment><USER3> This narrative you're pushing here is a very hard sell considering this is one of their most prominent banners: [http://www.nichegamer.net/media/2014/09/gamergate.jpg](http://www.nichegamer.net/media/2014/09/gamergate.jpg)

Being the interenet, there are naturally aggressive and violent people who will throw harassment around. With regard to this issue, it is downright false to claim that they originate from, or are encouraged by, any one camp, as there are examples of harassment originating from both sides. One of the more prominent journalists writing articles supporting gamergate was mailed a syringe filled with mystery liquid; far from a friendly gesture.

There are, however, a lot of people who wish to paint gamergate as woman- hating trolls - the kind of people in the media who have a lot to lose, who always pick up on these sort of outliers and point to them as the bulk of the movement, to try to distract the public from the real message of gamergate, which is that they want proper ethics and integrity in gaming journalism, not 10/10's for games made by your friends, or articles brazenly insulting your readership.

<comment><USER4> Neither side of things is that simple. While people who openly support gamergate now focus on journalism and condemn misogynistic threats, a look at GG's origins (e.g. the #burgersandfries IRC logs, which as much as anything else started the whole thing[1]), reveals plenty to abhor - way more discussion of how to effectively character-assassinate Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian than of how to reform games journalism, anyway. If the "real message" of the movement is now completely removed from that, that's great, but I don't think the idea that misogynistic threats have no connection to the "real" gamergate stands up to scrutiny.

[1] [http://puu.sh/boAEC/f072f259b6.txt](http://puu.sh/boAEC/f072f259b6.txt)

<comment><USER5> TotalBiscuit supports GG, and he's the most trustworthy person reporting on games out there. (He's also received threats for his stance, though he did not receive a series of news articles reporting them.)

[https://twitter.com/Totalbiscuit/status/520247895996395520](https://twitter.com/Totalbiscuit/status/520247895996395520)

<comment><USER6> The guy who doesn't disclose when he's being paid to pimp a game, while pimping that game, is "most trustworthy"? Interesting. Or is it just that he waves his hands at SJWs that you like him?

<comment><USER5> No. TB has been plenty trustworthy in my experience and I started watching him when he started making Starcraft content. Care to back up that allegation?

Frankly, the last line is irrelevant. Anti-GG involves plenty of classism (cheeto basement dwelling loser) and more than enough icky gender policing (not a real man!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The way Twitter handles these types of incidents needs to change as well: [https://twitter.com/StuHorvath/status/520750049702473729](https://twitter.com/StuHorvath/status/520750049702473729)

<comment><USER8> Are you certain? What exactly do you propose Twitter do?

Twitter is not a real-space police force and in many cases does not have true- identity information.

It's possible that a faster move against threat-originators, through action like a ban on their Twitter account, would do one or both of (1) escalating their misguided anger; or (2) limiting evidence-gathering by real authorities.

Also, note that new Twitter sign-ups are very easy. That's a policy which overall provides benefits to Twitter and many Twitter users, especially newbies. But it means that it's trivial for griefers to circumvent simplistic account bans. So it may be better that they keep abusing via the one account, which collects evidence and can be blocked/muted by reputation, than they burn through the namespace with short-lived throwaway accounts.

It's a bit like managing antibiotic resistance with bacterial diseases. Sure, if you have a killer formula, deploy it and fix the problem. But if all you've got are incremental amelioration and escalation mechanisms, you need to use those very carefully to avoid training-up even worse malevolence. Practice game theory, not knee-jerk symbolism.

<comment><USER9> A few simple things which would help and are easy to implement:

1\. Stop auto-discarding abuse reports which aren't from the target of an attack. Right now, Twitter won't investigate a credible death threat unless you say you're the target. 2\. Limit new accounts ability to send messages to people who don't follow them 3\. Apply blocks to email addresses, requiring griefers to churn validated addresses rather than reusing them 4\. Give you better filters for notifications: i.e. currently there's no way to have it default to only notifications from people you follow so you can't avoid seeing crap unless you use a bookmark. Similarly, filtering out messages from new accounts you don't follow or which don't have n followers in common, etc. etc. would reduce the dog-pile effect. 5\. Allow friends to help: auto-block/mute accounts which people you follow have blocked (specific people, threshold, etc.); hide tweets which people you follow have flagged as annoying / abusive; etc. There's a ton of interesting opportunity to use the social network for good here.

None of this is perfect but increasing the frictional costs matters a lot for this kind of thing when they're only in it for fun. A lot of prior art from the email spam prevention world applies here as well – the main thing is simply that Twitter's management clearly don't care to make any significant investment in this area.

<comment><USER10> Twitter is not an investigation authority. Nor should they be. Report it to the proper authorities.

None of your suggestions are going to do anything but aggravate the offender further, which is the entire point of the post you've replied to.

It's like suggesting Snapchat monitor and deny underaged teens from from taking suggestive photos.

<comment><USER11> Or like asking Twitter or Instagram to delete accounts used by ISIS, a terrorist group that coordinates things via social networks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have no interest in taking sides in #gamergate but it should be pointed out that someone trying to make #gamergate look bad could have posted the threats on twitter.

As heated and complex as this dustup has become you really can't take anything at face value any more. Its become a pretty intense propaganda war by both sides, or maybe all sides, so unless you have posts from a verified account or video of someone saying something you should take just about everything else with a grain of salt.

Its pretty naive to think anyone knows the true motives of someone posting with a probably throw away twitter account.

</comment><comment><USER8> The out-group homogeneity bias, it runs deep in everyone loudly discussing these issues:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out- group_homogeneity](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity)

</comment><comment><USER13> Ms. Wu's bitterly sarcastic tweet pretty much says it all:

> _The police just came by. Husband and I are going somewhere safe.

> Remember, #gamergate isn't about attacking women._

<comment><USER14> The question is, why does "#gamergate" get the blame for this? This trend of vilifying any group one disagrees with based on the actions of individuals with no indication they are even connected to the group is pretty disturbing. Remember when Jack Thompson got death threats? Remember how it was not acceptable to pretend "gamers" were at fault for that, but rather the individual people committing those crimes were at fault for their own behavior?

<comment><USER13> Because #gamergate is a name that was _created_ to attack one woman based on completely spurious claims.

If you really care about corruption in games journalism (and I do) then it makes no sense to continue rallying behind this banner that was tainted from the start.

<comment><USER14> >Because #gamergate is a name that was created to attack one woman based on completely spurious claims.

No it was not. Again, where are people getting this bizarre idea? It was created by Adam Baldwin, on twitter, specifically about games journalism and the game websites silencing discussion of games journalism. It seems really hard to believe that these constant claims that #gamergate was started to attack someone (who?) is all honest ignorance rather than deliberate dishonesty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Before anyone jumps to any conclusions these threats are anonymous and nobody knows if they are tied to any group.

There have been a series of feminists who make fake Twitter accounts to threaten themselves and later on were proven to be hoaxes for attention.

[http://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/womens-rights- activist...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/womens-rights-activist- charged-with-rape-threat-hoax-on-face)

[http://www.goingyourownway.com/mgtow-lounge-main- forum/rok-a...](http://www.goingyourownway.com/mgtow-lounge-main-forum/rok- article-anita-sarkeesian-fake-2826/)

[http://www.returnofkings.com/42602/did-anita-sarkeesian- fake...](http://www.returnofkings.com/42602/did-anita-sarkeesian-fake-death- threats-against-herself)

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErGcBxMpgwA](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErGcBxMpgwA)

Apparently they can create all of the fake Twitter accounts they want, sign out, and take a picture of it 12 minutes later. Then log back into the account and delete all of the history.

The news media just has to believe them, because they believe that these anonymous people are behind death and rape threats to everyone. Even if the Twitter accounts doing the threats have the same IP as the feminist's accounts. Sometimes the police catch the feminists and arrest them for filing a false report.

[http://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/false-claims-of-rape- an...](http://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/false-claims-of-rape-and- harassment-are-now-employed-by-activists-as-tools-of-social-change/)

This fake rape and fake death threats and fake sexual assaults are nothing new:

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

Feminists will keep doing this stuff to get popular, and attention, and speaking gigs, and sell books and promote blogs and websites.

They think by faking this stuff they raise awareness for it.

With this past history of hoaxes, it is hard to tell with each new case of harassment if it is real or just another hoax for attention.

If real she and her family have my deepest sympathies, if fake she will be found out eventually I guess?

<comment><USER15> You don't do yourself much favor in this discussion when you post links to returnofkings.com or avoiceformen.com :-)

<comment><USER14> The source of a fact does not matter. Your post is the very definition of ad- hominem.

<comment><USER6> I don't think you know how things...like...work. Being an _ad hominem_ argument and being _accurate_ are not disjoint sets. You don't just get to blow the whistle and say "AD HOMINEM, ARGUMENT GOES TO THE RECEIVING TEAM!".

It's not even an _ad hominem_ , though, because the credibility of your sources is at the core of your argument. returnofkings and avoiceformen have a storied and well-covered history of being astonishing shitheads towards women and doing everything in their (meager, thankfully) power to turn the clock back to 1950 or thereabouts. They have an inherent bias, and a real real disgusting one, that makes them immediately incredible. It's like citing Andrew Wakefield on autism--you aren't entitled to the respect of having an argument when you _don 't have an argument based on reality_.

There isn't enough _there_ to the spittle-flecked, cheeto-dusting link parade to argue about. It's _prima facie_ nonsense being peddled by people with much, much more of an axe to grind than anyone on the "other side" that you (strangely) fear; there's no serious coverage of this sordid stain on a hobby of mine that's pro-#GG except from people whose entire worldview is predicated on being anti-women. And you know it, which is why you would rather blow the whistle and hope the ref stops the fight because-- _gasp!_ \--somebody used a fallacy.

<comment><USER16> >there isn't enough there to the spittle-flecked, cheeto-dusting link...

Why, exactly, did you use this particular choice of words?

<comment><USER6> Because I felt like reaching deep and verbalizing the contempt I have for this brutally disingenuous crowd. (And before you step up about oh, no, it's not disingenuous at all, answer yourself this: why's everyone making a big stink about Nathan Grayson at Kotaku and not, oh, the lack of a wall between marketing/ad-sales and content generation at IGN?)

<comment><USER11> The whole thing is the gaming industry is corrupt. People can pay for good reviews or have sexual relations with the reviewer in exchange for a good review.

It doesn't matter if one is male or female that does those sorts of things. But when one gets caught he or she can fake threats with Twitter accounts to cover it up.

For some reason most of the people doing this are feminists, I don't know why, nor do I know why the mainstream media and news media won't cover it. Why is it a non-story if a feminist does bad things for a good review and when caught does a Twitter hoax, and then rewarded for it?

Sure those sites might be crappy towards women, but they uncovered some facts about the hoaxes. Something the news media refuses to do, which is why those websites report on it. I wish the news media would investigate it and find out if it is a hoax or not.

But taking a picture of a Tweet 12 minutes after it happened is very suspicious, esp when that Tweet is deleted in less than half an hour and the account gets deleted as well. So nobody else can see it or what IP it got posted from.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Harassing women is NOT okay, in any form.

That said, Brianna is extremely inflammatory and vitriolic in her speech. She doesn't help her cause, at all.

Of course, no one will notice that, or care one whit.

<comment><USER18> oh, she was asking for it! well, that changes everything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is totally tragic and unacceptable. I hope the troll is met with punishment he/she deserves. But I am wondering - is our reaction to them is empowering these trolls. Its better to be safer than sorry. This is truly disturbing.

<comment><USER20> Yeah, I am wondering the same thing. When they hide behind anonymity (cowards) what the hell can anyone do to A) support these women and B) stop these people from creating a new account and repeating the behavior.

<comment><USER21> Here's a different perspective on anonymity that I think few people appreciate or even consider [http://kazerad.tumblr.com/post/99022123468/shepherd-of- the-m...](http://kazerad.tumblr.com/post/99022123468/shepherd-of-the-masked), which also might point to a solution to the problem you mention.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Things like this make me feel physically uncomfortable.

How do you even deal with something like that?

</comment><comment><USER4> Just a meta-question, but is there some kind of flagging/downvoting system on HN that's hidden to newer users? It seems odd that this thread quickly fell off the top page, below older posts with fewer upvotes.

<comment><USER23> > is there some kind of flagging/downvoting system on HN that's hidden to > newer users

yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This sort of thing makes me glad I quit playing video games 20 years ago. What an absolutely toxic scene.

Games were an escape, but I feel that's been ruined because you have to deal with so many real people, both in-game and in the "community." I wonder how many other people avoid getting (back) into games because of that.

<comment><USER25> That's a surprise, because I'm able to enjoy my video games without feeling any connection to the "scene" whatsoever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> My question is how crazy jerks are able to find addresses for targets they want to harass? Simple public record searches? I think in this age, having a very common first and last name combination helps protect your privacy.

<comment><USER27> Internet anonymity died when the net went mainstream. Most of us have public profiles which are explicitly linked to your real life identities.

Where we've lagged is deciding how we deal with pseudo-anonymous harassment. This has probably been an issue longer then the net though: stop and think for a moment just how utterly ridiculous it is that people can call you on your telephone, but don't have to disclose the phone number they dial from (i.e. so you can't just block them trivially).

I somewhat suspect communications policy of the future needs to, at the very least, enforce the idea that big providers have to take some steps to allow easy selective filtering of contacts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is no different than fringe radical feminists attacking people on the internet, I dont have a link but there was an incident of a grown woman doxing a 13 year old kid.

If that doesnt make all feminists bad then this shouldnt make all gamers bad at least apply consistent logic and standards.

<comment><USER2> I think you might lack a little perspective here. Radical feminists attacking people is _NOT_ the same as someone threatening to go to a persons house, rape and kill them, and then proving they know where the person lives.

"ps4fanboy". Hmm.

<comment><USER28> Sorry to be clear by attacking I meant threatening peoples safety in much the same way. My username is caricature so I am not sure why you are trying to attack me based on it, very childish.

Just a single example. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Pizzey#Overview](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Pizzey#Overview)

"Pizzey has been the subject of death threats and boycotts because of her research into the claim that most domestic violence is reciprocal, and that women are equally as capable of violence as men. Pizzey has said that the threats were from militant feminists."

No sane person would suggest because of this that all feminists support this action. Why is it ok for you to say the same about Gamers?</comment></comment></comment>


Scissors Congruence - <AUTHOR> https://dmsm.github.io/scissors-congruence/ <comment><USER2> I've been into _hinged_ dissections in woodworking for a while. This algorithm _isn't_ hinged, but it is cool to directly see the Wallace-Bolyai-Gerwain theorem in action.

Here's a video with more context! [https://youtu.be/ysV6iF3Rmjo](https://youtu.be/ysV6iF3Rmjo)

<comment><USER3> You might enjoy Frederickson's book on hinged dissections [https://amzn.com/0521811929/](https://amzn.com/0521811929/)

<comment><USER4> Add the title?

Edit: Many thanks. That does look like a great book.

<comment><USER5> Generally, in mathematical publishing, when someone refers to a book by the author's name, the title is (essentially) the topic.

Without clicking the link, I'd bet dollars to donuts the book is titled "Hinged Dissections", "Hinged Dissections: A Pivotal Analysis", "Hinged Dissections: Swing Sets", etc.

edit: it's "Hinged Dissections: Swinging and Twisting". I prefer "A Pivotal Analysis".

<comment><USER4> (When I commented above the author had not yet been added to parent comment. It was just an Amazon link. I suspect that's why it was getting downvotes.)

<comment><USER5> Thanks for asking for it, then! :)

<comment><USER4> Cheers :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is the kind of stuff I miss seeing on the good old days of HN

</comment><comment><USER7> That's pretty neat</comment>


How is HN karma calculated? - <AUTHOR> I understand how HN calculates top posts (roughly, points divided by age to the power gravity) - but how is a user's karma calculated? I looked at the points in the threads/comments link on the top of HN, but the sum of the points there do not add up to my karma.
I'm guessing the answer to this is pretty simple and it bugs me no end that I don't know it :(
PS: Are all votes equal (when it comes to deciding the rank of a post), or does it depend on the karma of the voter? <comment><USER2> I would like to know how the average is calculated. When I was a noob below 100 Karma, the average was regularly updated to reflect the actual average karma of all my comments. However, this stopped around the time I reached 100. Now, my avg remains fixed at 2.17, a value that I'm sure has nothing to do with my actual ($karma_total/$comments_count) ratio anymore. Does anyone know how this works?

<comment><USER3> Ask HN: How is the avg in my HN profile calculated? -> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1648811>

<comment><USER2> Thanks! So it would appear that my hunch was right, only the first comments are used for avg, after that it never changes again:

" _So it takes your comments numbered 6-50, throws out the highest-scoring one, and averages them._ "

<comment><USER4> Comment 1 is the most recent comment, not your oldest one.

<comment><USER2> In this case, I believe there might be a bug. Not that it matters. Just saying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It seems to be the sum of upvotes for anything you submitted, plus (or minus) any points from comments you've made; and a comment score of 1 is not counted.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I thought that would be the case, but some how it doesn't seem to add up in my case ... But wait, the "threads" link does not show the posts I made - only comments ... So I might be missing upvotes on the posts ... hmm, how do I see all th posts I made?

<comment><USER5> Click your name to see your profile page, which has links to submissions and comments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just something to note: I lost 40 karma points in a day when I was only downvoted 20 points... some of which I deserved, but still, something didn't work as expected.

<comment><USER7> Can someone explain how to downvote something? I only see an up arrow next to posts.

<comment><USER8> You can down-vote after reaching a particular karma threshold.

<comment><USER9> At this point, you need 500 karma to downvote, per pg:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1853529></comment></comment></comment></comment>


I solved this encrypted BART ad. Can you? - <AUTHOR> http://sfbart.posterous.com/cryptic-math-ad-explained

<comment><USER2> I guess "Come work for Macrovision!" didn't have the geek appeal they were seeking.

<comment><USER3> It should. They have awesome fun problems to solve.

<comment><USER4> I'm sure they do, but solving those problems is a means to an end considered evil (or at least unethical) by many hackers.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's kind of like saying you'd never work for MSFT or Apple because both create DRM. If you're that kind of absolutist, yes, you don't want to work there. But Rovi is a big company and the Blu-ray content protection system is quite interesting.

The ultimate equilibrium they will achieve if they do their job properly is that discs will not be rippable when they first come out, but after a couple months will get cracked. In that time period, the studio makes 90% of their lost revenue and you still have the ability to make backups after a delay. BD+ has had its ups and downs, but I think it has the potential to achieve this. It's more than you can say for most DRM systems.

Disclaimer: I am a co-designer of BD+.

<comment><USER5> If studios wanted to preserve that balance, they'd release keys to decrypt the movies for personal use on a set schedule after release. As it stands right now, users need to hope that someone will manage to "crack" the next BD+ revision (ie: building up the BD+ emulators to a point where they can pass the next set of checks) in order to back up or transcode their disks. At times, the cracking community is further behind than a few months, making these movies useless outside of the standard player. I can't watch Blu-ray movies on my MacBook or iPhone at all without ripping them, one of the reasons I haven't bought a single BR disc to own.

If users knew that a key release is coming on a set date, it would remove a lot of the motivation for people to work on cracking BD+.

<comment><AUTHOR> Where are those libertarian commenters when you need them? This is a classic example of letting the market decide.

If there is enough demand for cracking a given disc, then users will pay higher prices for ripping software updates and crackers will put more effort into it. If no one cares about a given disc, then it may never get ripped (but no one cares so it doesn't matter).

<comment><USER5> Aren't disks cracked in batches though? It seems to my (admittedly not as familiar as I'd like) eye that there are releases of BD+ reference code pushed out every few months that make it on to a few dozen titles, big and small.

Maybe publishers should release decryption keys for movies after a few months out using something akin to the street-performer protocol. :)

<comment><USER3> We're probably treading close to the line where Nate can't talk about stuff. I should say that it would seem downright weird to me for them to simply publish the circumvention to a currently unbroken BD+ VM, or unprotection information for any protected title.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I am really let down by the answer to this poster.

</comment><comment><USER6> Is this Jacques Binet?

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

If so, is it about Fibonacci numbers?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I know it is solvable because I've done it.

Disclaimer: I did not create it. The source of the ad is one of my customers, although they gave me no hints to solve it.

<comment><USER3> You pretty much gave away the answer with the title of the posting, for what it's worth.

<comment><AUTHOR> The most important hint is to realize it is encrypted, not a math equation.

<comment><USER7> That, along with finding out who Binet is (if you weren't already aware), makes it pretty trivial to solve.

<comment><USER8> Ok so l = map(ord,message) for i in l: a = f(l) And now hat? a is a big integer, chr(a mod 256)? nothing.. :-/

<comment><USER7> I posted the solution on my blog. If anyone wants to figure it out themselves, then don't read it.

<http://ahlatimer.wordpress.com/2010/01/12/bart-solution/></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Wordpress.com was storing passwords in plain text - <AUTHOR>

Just received this nice email:
-----
Hello,
During an internal audit we noticed that we recorded the password you chose during signup for WordPress.com in plain text. Our policy is to never store plain-text passwords, and we have taken steps to remove the passwords from our systems.
These passwords were stored in a secure location, and there is nothing that suggests they were compromised or the security of your account was decreased in any way. However, out of an abundance of caution we have reset your password.
To reset your password and get access to your account and blog, please follow these steps:
Go to WordPress.com
Click the "Log In" button on the homepage
Click on the link "Lost your password?"
Enter your WordPress.com username:
Click the "Get New Password" button
If you have any further questions or trouble resetting your password, please reply to this message to get help from our support team. We will never ask you to supply your account password or financial information via email.
The WordPress.com Team
-----
Le sigh. <comment><USER2> I thought your first sentence was sincere, but your last implies otherwise. I don't think everybody received this email.

We should be happy that WordPress didn't hide this fact and came clean by informing users. Of course, the email doesn't list _when_ they noticed your password (or other passwords) recorded in plaintext, but at least it's been identified and steps taken to address the problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was admittedly a little heavy handed on the sarcasm (it's been a long day).

Absolutely appreciate that they were open and honest about this and that it was discovered during an audit and fixed.

Sigh was more that best practices may or may not have been followed up to this point, and there are likely many other companies with similar holes that may not have been as proactive or transparent as WP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I really hope the WordPress.com team is using the password_* API provided in PHP 5.5 or by ircmaxell/password_compat for their password storage. That, or scrypt (available in PECL thanks to Dominick Black!)

</comment><comment><USER4> "Le sigh."

This doesn't mean it was stored in plain text. There are plenty of 2-way encryption schemes.

<comment><USER5> "we noticed that we recorded the password you chose during signup for WordPress.com in plain text"

agreed, the wording is 'recorded' not stored which makes me lean(naively?) towards something like inadvertent logging for example?

ie. plaintext over https through a loadbalancer, with http communication internally, and an internal app logging all its traffic for debugging purposes?

then sometime later: oops, we found some log files with plaintext passwords on our servers.

IDK, just one scenario that might fall under this description</comment></comment>


Principally new search - <AUTHOR> We've been working on a new knowledge system which is fully objective with no trusted third party.
The paper is available at:
https://github.com/cybercongress/cyber/releases/tag/1.0.0
and using the following hash
https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmceNpj6HfS81PcCaQXrFMQf7LR5FTLkdG9sbSRNy3UXoZ
The main properties: - The ranking is sybil-resistant - No trusted third parties - Participants can be anonymous
cyber: Computing the knowledge of the Great Web.
Abstract: A consensus computer allows for the computing of provably relevant answers without any opinionated blackbox intermediaries, such as Google, Amazon or Facebook. Stateless, content-addressable peer-to-peer communication networks, such as IPFS, and stateful consensus computers such as Ethereum, are only able to provide part of the solution needed to obtain akin answers. But, there are at least 3 problems associated with the above-mentioned implementations. The first problem is the subjective nature of relevance. The second problem is the difficulty in scaling consensus computers for over-sized knowledge graphs. The third problem is the lack of quality amongst such knowledge graphs. They will be prone to various surface attacks, such as: sybil attacks, and the selfish behaviour of the interacting agents. In this document, we define a protocol for provable consensus computing of relevance, between IPFS objects, which are based on the Tendermint consensus of cyber~rank, which is itself - computed on GPUs in consensus. As proof-of-stake consensus does not help with the initial distribution, we outline the design for ecologic distribution games. We believe that a minimalistic architecture of the protocol is critical for the formation of a network of domain-specific knowledge consensus computers. As a result of our work, some applications never to have existed before - will emerge. We expand this work with our vision of possible features and potential applications.
@xhipster and @litvintech <comment><USER2>
        We have designed the network under the assumption that
        with regards to search, such a thing as malicious behaviour
        does not exist.

An entire SEO industry would beg to differ, and that's before you get to _seriously_ malicious stuff like lifting fake Bitcoin QR code generators to the top of the results...

<comment><AUTHOR> The system is designed to learn what is lie and what is not.</comment></comment>


Women Are Better Under Pressure Than Men - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/2017/11/women-respond-better-than-men-to-competitive-pressure <comment><USER2> Why is it acceptable to say that women are better under pressure than men, but unacceptable to say that men are better at STEM than women?</comment>


Found the way how to hack GitHub storage - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@okhlopkov/microsoft-will-pay-for-your-unlimited-cloud-storage-bc1a3a8a5727 <comment><USER2> I like how this is clearly abuse but the author tries to spin it as "oh just share some hackathon stuff"

Oh you mean like you could use S3 for in about all of 10 minutes?

</comment><comment><USER3> Finally true hacking</comment>


Bitcoin Paper Wallets (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://jrruethe.github.io/blog/2015/04/23/bitcoin-paper-wallets/ <comment><USER2> A better way to store your coins is to to get a HD hardware wallet like the Ledger Nano S, or KeepKey. These paper wallets are too vulnerable to destruction. With an HD wallet you get a 24 word seed (see BIP39) and if anything ever happens to the wallet you just buy a new one and restore from the see. To protect your seed you can carve the words into a block of brass which has a high enough melting point that it should survive a house fire. You can use something like a Bantam Milling machine if you don't want to do it by hand.

For smaller amounts of money there is also OpenDime. They don't provide a back-up mechanism though so if the hardware goes your money is lost forever.

<comment><USER3> > _To protect your seed you can carve the words into a block of brass which > has a high enough melting point that it should survive a house fire. You can > use something like a Bantam Milling machine if you don 't want to do it by > hand._

And people say that Bitcoin isn't user-friendly for beginners.

<comment><USER4> It isn't. So what? Things will get better. And even if it doesn't, those who really need bitcoin will be able to use it.

<comment><USER5> Who "really needs to use it," in your estimation?

<comment><USER4> People whose freedoms are challenged by authorities they didn't consent to.

<comment><USER5> ...that would be at odds with the reality that much of these currencies are hoarded.

<comment><USER4> Why?

<comment><USER5> How is hoarding something like Bitcoin, or the world of ICOs anything like oppressed people exercising freedoms?

<comment><USER4> Whataboutism. If people is bitcoin for other things, fine. What matters is the network is also available when and where it is needed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I thought it would make a cool movie device if you encrypt your paper wallet in a 2-of-3 method. Then store 2 parts in different safety deposit boxes in different countries and carry the 3rd on you. The movie then revolves about getting your cash while on the run from several governments.

I bet James Bond uses bitcoin.

<comment><USER7> It's less effort to just memorize a 256 bit private key.

<comment><USER8> One neat thing about multisig keys physically spread is that it's extremely more difficult to coerce someone to make a payment. If an attacker knows you have a ton of money locked up behind a key you have memorized, they can kidnap and torture you until you give them the key. If the money is locked behind multiple keys physically spread and you're known to be the paranoid sort to do that, then it becomes a lot more logistically challenging and may deter kidnappers: some of the locations could have physical security (ie. it's in a bank safe deposit box that the bank only allows the owner alone to physically access), there's more chances for the victim to get away, the attackers can't know ahead of time if the victim is leading them on a wild goose chase to incorrect locations, etc.

<comment><USER9> This appeals to me in a way that's hard to articulate. It's the perfect combination of "this will never happen" and "well now, let's not be too hasty with our assumptions..."

<comment><USER8> It makes me think of XKCD 538 and its alt-text ([https://xkcd.com/538/](https://xkcd.com/538/) \-- "Actual actual reality: nobody cares about his secrets"). The part that alt-text didn't foresee was that cryptocurrency would become a thing and that many people would store tons of value in it.

I think anyone that got into Bitcoin early or has otherwise made it big in the cryptocurrency scene ought to seriously investigate setting up their funds in a way that they can't be quickly coerced into transferring it.

<comment><USER10> All this discussion of furiously encrypting bitcoin reminds me of another xkcd: [https://www.xkcd.com/916/](https://www.xkcd.com/916/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why so much security focus on a non-internet connected PC, but so little focus on needing a non-internet connected (ever) printer?

The printer is potentially an easier attack vector, and you've got to pass the funds into an electronic wallet prior to spending, presumably on your PC or phone, whilst an internet connection is enabled.

Seems writing the wallet info down with a pen, then doing your best to ensure security when you have to use the wallet (e.g. live CD) is a better method?

</comment><comment><USER12> I presume these paper wallets, like paper cash, are subjected to possible erosion, water damage, or whatever happens during storage. Except with paper cash, you have some party, the government, willing to exchange it for new ones. What are the benefits of paper wallets over a hardware wallet or storing it online?

Also, is it me or are people more paranoid with their Bitcoins than others with their USDs?

<comment><USER13> >What are the benefits of paper wallets over a hardware wallet?

Cost. Use cases: one could transact in a medium trust environment using paper wallets passed around offline.

>What are the benefits of paper wallets over storing it online?

Limited attack surface. [https://cryptoconsortium.org/standards/CCSS](https://cryptoconsortium.org/standards/CCSS)

<comment><USER14> How do you assign the trust level?

The ease in duplicating a wallet beforehand (or even having a computer setup to dump it) points towards high trust for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I bought some water proof inkjet paper for my paper wallets. I did a few test runs under the kitchen sink. I don't know how this paper works but it's pretty awesome.

</comment><comment><USER16> Just create a file and put in in your google drive and don't lose access to that. Encrypt it as long as you are sure you will be able to decrypt it. I bet you that Google don't steal your bitcoins.

<comment><USER17> The point of Bitcoin is trust nooone. But as you say encrypt it, if you do this well Google can't steal the coins.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Neat! It's a lot like [http://adamjgrant.github.io/bitcoinbills/](http://adamjgrant.github.io/bitcoinbills/)</comment>


21 Indian habits i lost in San Francisco - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@syedshuttari/21-indian-habits-i-lost-in-san-francisco-49e57dadff30#.6pro0159m <comment><USER2> Hilarious! It also makes me understand Indian better.

One suggestion: please ask somebody to edit it before publishing it, unless it was meant to achieve some specific effects i am not aware of.</comment>


Facing $17B in Fire Damages, a CEO Blames Climate Change - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-13/facing-17-billion-in-fire-damages-a-ceo-blames-climate-change <comment><USER2> PG&E has is not trimming vegetation back sufficiently. It is an infrastructure expense that is easy to defer -- for a while.

In the Sonoma County fires, trees contacting power lines and either catching on fire directly, or causing a short leading to a transformer explosion sparked a lot of fires. Of course, 100kph winds will cause the fuel to burn wicked fast. I saw a photo of a melted cast metal BBQ grill after the Sonoma fire. A fire that hot is hard to fight in any circumstances.

As far as climate change, goes... well, maybe? We had five years of drought, followed by a very wet winter. I have property in the Sierra foothills. With dry, drought-stressed trees interspersed with a few drought-killed trees, there was a lot of standing "hot" fuel. The wet winter caused the grasses to grow like mad the next year -- by late summer, when the grass was dormant and tinder-dry, there was a lot of "cool" ground-fuel to spread fire. Some idiot drove through tall grass and the hot catalytic converter lit the grass, leading to the Detwieler fire, which burned over the top of my property -- most of which burned cool (I lost a few trees, and a 60 year old not- historical-at-all outhouse... some of my neighbors were not nearly so lucky.)

Back to PG&E maintenance practices, there was a tree that fell on a power line near my property taking a power for a short service stretch, luckily it didn't spark any more fire on the mountain.

PG&E can whine about climate change, but bottom line, they need to be much more diligent about vegetation control. It doesn't take a PhD to understand how some wind and a dry branch can cause a whole lot of trouble.

<comment><USER3> PG&E needs to be doing a better job and California should consider bringing back its logging industry.

I get burning wood isn't the cleanest energy source but dead trees are going to burn no matter what. I'd rather someone harvest it and burn it in a controlled environment rather than it rage uncontrollably.

<comment><USER4> There's plenty of western states on fire right now with robust logging industries.

<comment><USER5> Which? Oregon and Washington are a small fraction of what they used to be. Federal laws (endagered species act, etc) killed off the vast majority of it, and decimated many small towns.

<comment><USER4> Idaho and Montana.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If she's blaming climate change, doesn't that make PG&E culpable? IIRC the majority of their power is generated from natural gas (at least since they shut down San Ohnofre and planned closure of Diablo Canyon), not to mention what the "G" stands for.

<comment><USER7> Privatize the profits, socialize the losses...?

<comment><USER8> Works for banks alright.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Anthropogenic climate change is a real and significant threat to the current state of our planet. That being said...

It is likely a fairly minor player in the uptick in major wildfires over the past few decades. That is more due to mismanagement of forests, and a "zero tolerance" policy towards fires allowing a huge build up of fuel loads.

<comment><USER10> > It is likely a fairly minor player in the uptick in major wildfires over the > past few decades. That is more due to mismanagement of forests, and a "zero > tolerance" policy towards fires allowing a huge build up of fuel loads.

Don't want to sound combative, I'm actually very interested. Do do you have any proof of that?

<comment><USER11> [https://youtu.be/Y27lFsPEZ30](https://youtu.be/Y27lFsPEZ30)

Tom Scott made a little 4 minute video about the topic.

Basically by letting the forrest burn more often there would be less fuel available for the next fire.

And when the fires got smaller the biggest of trees in the forrest would also be more likely to survive through the fire.

So in some forrests that's what they do in some forrests now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ok it's face it seems the fires are made worse by climate change, but probably caused by poor infrastructure maintenance.

<comment><USER13> Which to me begs the question, shouldn't companies be doing more maintenance to ensure fires don't get out of control? If you really believe climate change was responsible, why were they asleep at the wheel?

Otherwise it just seems like a blatant attempt to socialize the losses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Novel, but likely ultimately to fail. IIUC, the CEO is claiming liability to PG&E is negated by the overall affect of climate change. That would likely have to be argued in court but that undertaking sounds quite massive, and would require a tremendous amount of science. What I think is really going on here is that she's trying to find someone else to take the blame, financially, and probably pushing the state to indemnify PG&E. A novel idea, but I think a court would rule this an act of God and tell PG&E that's what its insurance is for.

<comment><USER15> She isn't setting this up as a court case. She's trying to manufacture enough political cover for the governor and various other cronies to plausibly save her firm from its self-imposed predicament. They can pass any law they want, if the voting public is confused enough.

<comment><USER16> so confused we think its very nice of the legislative branch (or is it the executive) to show the judicial branch how its done?

<comment><USER15> "California Bill Would Shield PG&E, Edison from Some Wildfire Liability"

[https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/west/2018/04/26/487452...](https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/west/2018/04/26/487452.htm)

On a national level, the same thing happened for ATT etc. when Room 641A was exposed to public scrutiny. Otherwise there would have been lots of lawsuits on that. Actually, aside from the _post facto_ nature of these particular laws, I'm glad that the courts have to defer to the legislature in defining the Law. Judges are on average even more corrupt than legislators.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Could the hot air from these fires lift a balloon? Ignoring the difficulty of attaching a burning tree to a balloon, could it lift its own weight? Fireproof Robots, cutting burning trees into neat piles, tied together, to be lifted by balloon?

</comment><comment><USER17> Hmmm... data in the article isn't that compelling. You'd need to go back decades to see if recent fires are out of the norm.

<comment><USER18> There's a lot of data on this subject. BuzzFeed News recently had an article about how fires have changed over the past decades: [https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/california...](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/california- wildfires-people-climate)

And for the HackerNews-y type, they even made all the data and R code for the visualizations publicly available: [https://buzzfeednews.github.io/2018-07-wildfire- trends/](https://buzzfeednews.github.io/2018-07-wildfire-trends/)

It is hard to pin the increase on any one cause - it's a confluence of factors. Here's a perspective piece by a few well regarded experts: [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/aug/07/californ...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/aug/07/california- wildfires-megafires-future-climate-change)

One of those experts is Daniel Swain, who has an excellent Twitter account which posts a lot more data: [https://twitter.com/Weather_West](https://twitter.com/Weather_West)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I blame firefighting causing forest change. Firefighting causing fuel levels to build up to unprecedented densities. Who put out fires before we started? Nobody. Nature handles that fine herself. But leave it to us to try to "improve" on it.

<comment><USER20> Fire suppression is a major problem, for sure. But it wasn't all natural in the past, either. Humans have been managing forests through the use of fire for a very long time, setting fires to thin out the understory and make areas more appealing to wildlife they could then hunt, etc., which would in turn make the forest healthier and less prone to megafires.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Bloomberg should hire writers that know how to proofread their writing: "He's proposed a bill that would lesson utilities' exposure to damages from fires, citing climate change." That tends to "lesson" their credibility.

<comment><USER22> Enlighten me, what's the typo?

<comment><USER23> they used "lesson" in the quote/article when they almost certainly meant "lessen".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is why the rest of the world has abandoned above-ground power lines in favor of secure underground power lines. Fewer fires, fewer black outs...

<comment><USER24> There is nowhere in the world that power lines are put underground unless there is a reason they can't go above ground: dense urban area, unable to secure a right-of-way, crossing another piece of linear infrastructure like a highway, etc.. It's way more expensive to go underground, it causes technical challenges at high voltage necessitating additional, expensive infrastructure like capacitor banks and point-on-wave energization control and it's harder and more costly to inspect, test and maintain. Insulated power cables are subject to third-party intrusion (technical jargon for people digging and hitting them), water and contaminant ingress, and it's hard to determine their condition without taking them out of service and using specialized equipment for testing. Even then, it's very hard to pinpoint the exact location of degradation and you have to dig to access it. Splicing them requires very highly trained workers and if the work isn't done right it fails in the middle of the night 5 years later.

There is more underground distribution (medium voltage) in Europe because cities are denser and older and there's less space for overhead lines. Transmission (high voltage) is still 99% above ground.

I'm a power systems engineer and I have no idea what 'rest of the world' you're talking about. The first choice for cost, reliability and ease of maintenance is always overhead.

<comment><USER25> Finland is moving quite a lot of power lines underground especially in the middle of forests, because falling trees are a problem during a seasonal storm[0]. I'm not sure how this cheaper than cutting down the trees though. Sadly most of the information is in Finnish.

>In reality, the difference in the status of power lines between Canada and Finland is not so clear-cut. As things stand now, 11% of power lines in Québec (my province of Canada) are buried, while this number is approximately 42% in Finland. The main difference though, is that Finland has an active strategy to increase this number to 65% by 2029. Helen, the energy company for Helsinki, already operates a power network buried at 97,7%.

The new law seems to demand that power outages must not be longer than 6 hours within cities or 36 hours on rural areas[1][2].

[0] [https://www.tys.fi/power-lines-buried-finland-not- canada/](https://www.tys.fi/power-lines-buried-finland-not-canada/) [1] [https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-6927938](https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-6927938) [2] [https://www.tekniikkatalous.fi/tekniikka/katkoton-sahko- vie-...](https://www.tekniikkatalous.fi/tekniikka/katkoton-sahko-vie-kaapelit- maan-alle-tiedossa-miljardilaskut-6210295)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> At a certain point, it's going to cost less to cover every sun facing surface in ultra low cost photovoltaics, and have on site battery storage, than to maintain, replace and repair last mile power lines and middle-mile + long distance high voltage lines. Imagine eliminating all of the salary and benefit costs for thousands of linemen, bucket trucks, insurance, consumables, transformers, substations, not to mention the cost of poles and lines themselves.

If PV panels were $0.10/watt and Powerwall-like batteries were 1/5th of the cost they are now, per kWh stored, I can totally see a future where suburban density homes have no power grid connections at all.

<comment><USER27> What happens when it's cloudy for a few days and the batteries are dead?

<comment><USER28> Why are the batteries dead? Anyway you might be able to run a cable to your next door neighbour. I know of people who already sell solar power to their neighbours.

<comment><USER27> Batteries die when it's too cloudy for solar panels to keep them charged. And unless "you" are a licensed electrician it's highly dangerous and irresponsible to run a cable to another house. That's how fires get started and people get electrocuted. In most of the developed world it's easier, safer, and cheaper to keep a grid connection for backup even if you generate most of your own power.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Józef Czapski: painter, prisoner, and disciple of Proust - <AUTHOR> https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2019/05/jozef-czapski-painter-prisoner-proust-lost-time-inhuman-land-almost-nothing-review <comment><USER2> Czapski was an extraordinary individual. I've just finished his biography (by Eric Karpeles) and I can recommend it, esp. to people interested in art and painting. It can also be great for people trapped in materialistic, reductionist mindset that is pretty common here - if you feel like your life is shallow and does not make sense, maybe read some Czapski, or his biography.

<comment><USER3> I'm reading his biography right now! What an interesting, tragic and hopeful life.</comment></comment>


Microsoft's Windows 7 Launch 'Party': Pass the Cringe - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/id/33007219/

<comment><AUTHOR> No thanks, but an Ubuntu Rave would be sweet!</comment>


Startup Growth Calculator - <AUTHOR> http://growth.tlb.org/ <comment><USER2> YC has now funded enough companies that if it has the data (likely in a bunch of spreadsheets) to do a more accurate version of this. Expenses aren't really flat, growth isn't purely exponential and today's estimates aren't reality. A simple model that fixes those three things, should improve accuracy though it would still be subject to enormous volatility which could also estimated based on the same history. This also ignores optionality and probability of a failed raise which would further shift the answer.

<comment><USER3> You're assuming that YC has this information from all the startups they fund. I doubt this for two reasons: YC is probably too busy to spend time collecting spreadsheets from everybody; and from what I've seen, most startups aren't careful enough about their accounting to have the data in the first place.

<comment><USER2> I doubt there's a formal collection but I'd be equally surprised if they don't have early stage projections from many of the companies. As silly as they can be, they're often part of pitches.

From my limited personal experience, every startup I've chatted about this with has some sort of forecast though the degree of seriousness with which is was constructed and is used varies.

<comment><USER4> I'm now working at my 3rd YC startup. Sometimes we show our Leftronic graphs to investors, but other than I have never seen someone send hard data to YC. YC is very hands off. You do a weekly dinner the first few weeks, then you do a demo day, and then after that maybe sometimes you get an email once every few months asking how you're doing. Maybe you go visit when you have a question or are bored. That's about it. Other than that you just write code and talk to users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It doesn't work for me (Firefox/Win7), I can't grab the dots/lines.

<comment><USER6> Thanks, I'll look into it.

<comment><USER7> One more suggestion: consider moving the text indicating the capital needed outside the blue area. Or at least provide another copy of that text outside the blue area.

It becomes hard to see that text with low weekly expenses($2500), close weekly revenue ($1000), and good growth rate (5%)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The biggest problem with this chart is that for most startups keeping a 2.5% weekly growth for years is impossible. Only a tiny percentage with viral products can accomplish it. For the rest of us, the growth percentage gets smaller as the number of users increase and churn starts kicking in.

<comment><USER9> That's not a problem with the chart. That's a problem with starting a business.

You don't have to _grow_ along a fixed axis, whether that be # of users, # of widgets, etc. You just have to average the growth in income.

I had a similar initial reaction to the chart because I stick to R&D-driven startups that will run at $0/week for as long as it takes. However, pushing the stop-energy out of my head and running with it is a good gut check for viability on _breaking even_ given assumptions about expenses vs income over time.

The output isn't "we will grow at an annualized 360% forever, yielding foo," it's "we only need to kick in $x to have a good shot at getting to B/E."

<comment><USER10> Yeah, I think many startups have a fairly long customer/product development period where their revenue will be $0, and then quickly pour on the gas once they have users and want to monetize.

I wish the tool had an additional degree of freedom, which is "time until first revenue". That would let you model how much time-to-market is costing you until breakeven, and trade off a business idea that generates revenue immediately vs. another business idea that takes a long time to incubate but may have a higher growth rate. I guess you can figure it out with some quick mental math (just multiply monthly expenses by time-to-market and add that on to capital required, and add the time-to-market on to the breakeven time), but if it were in the tool it'd be easier to visually see the effects of different choices there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It might be worth doing run rate and retention model vs. just net annual revenue. Showing how retention really matters would be worth the added complexity for SAAS companies, IMO.

<comment><USER12> Before you dismiss it for being too simple, think about the wider audience of startup founders, not just YC readers. They often can't predict churn rates or viral growth timelines or per-user infrastructure costs. This is a great starter model to say, "At the very minimum, you should plan on having $X."

After the first year of doing business (or faster?), you should revisit your model with these kinds of metrics and hone the model, but you usually won't have it going into year 1.

<comment><USER9> Fully agree. There are so many people who can't do the basic Excel work even to generate the information on the chart who are capable of starting a business. (I include in this every restaurant ever opened, modulo statistical outliers.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is a really nice visualization and a fun way to play with the model. Though for any start-up that sells physical goods...gross revenue is not very useful when it comes to projecting profitability. But it's fun anyway and maybe more accurate for pure software businesses. Kudos to the author, and great that it's on github as well!

<comment><USER14> 'the author' is a founding yc partner btw.

<comment><USER13> Hah! And kudos to him. For this, and for the Eunicycle...the scariest thing I have ever had the privilege of riding :)

<comment><USER15> Eunicycle certainly sounds scary

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Awesome tool! This assumes a somewhat constant expense so it doesn't apply as much to SaaS companies with inside sales model etc.

Hope someone makes a version that applies to SaaS companies where expenses usually increase almost linearly with growth at least initially(until the recurring revenue begins to come in).

At my start-up, a typical new sales rep makes back his monthly salary from month two on-wards costing us marginal amount initially. In year two is when we make the real money(off renewals; with no commission to pay). If you are wondering why we can't scale infinitely, scaling ad reps is a different beast the adwords - though at time, it certainly feels like a machine similar to adwords :)

</comment><comment><USER17> It's extremely unlikely that your costs would remain constant if you are growing at an exponential rate. So I'm not sure what the point of this calculator is.

But I love the graphical interactivity, very nice.

</comment><comment><USER18> This calculations are more about a financial projection than a model for growth, simply because you are picking growth as one of the variables.

Its practical for a very rough +- order of magnitude calculation if you are pretty sure about your growth and market size. Then again, as a startup in your first years, you have little idea about the last two.

A growth model has to balance how you go up and how you go down (both in business/user loss) and no business i can think of handles revenue exponentially and costs fix.

</comment><comment><USER19> For physical products, input gross profit in place of revenue.

</comment><comment><USER20> Reference from Source code [Don't be the startup that accidentally runs out of money]([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7239975](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7239975))

</comment><comment><USER21> This is so well designed, great stuff Trevor!

</comment><comment><USER22> played with this for a bit and it filled my browser history (chrome) with a zillion urls of it.</comment>


Navy sailors have radiation sickness after Japan rescue - <AUTHOR> http://nypost.com/2013/12/22/70-navy-sailors-left-sickened-by-radiation-after-japan-rescue/ <comment><USER2> "The levels were incredibly dangerous and at one point, the radiation in the air measured 300 times higher than what was considered safe, Sebourn told The Post."

This doesn't mean anything, its technobabble. How many REM or mSv total exposure?

"I said something complicated and science-y sounding, so you are supposed to be scared right now".

The biggest misfortune is they may even accidentally be correct, just completely incompetent about it.

A big epidemiology problem is identifying the actual cause by symptom, and avoiding the assumption that participation in something big and scary therefore means all problems must be caused by big n scary. Some goofball tipping over a barrel of solvent in the maint bay could cause many cancers later, and is marginally more likely.

<comment><USER3> Amazing how you think your claim is better informed than those from a primary source. You're right, the mystery solvent must have been it.

<comment><USER4> You can't argue with some people, perhaps like the original poster.

Even if figures and readings are produced, some will talk about bananas, flying in an aeroplane, and background radiation.

The biggest joke of all has been how the "safety limits" of different types of radiation were all magically raised after Fukushima.

<comment><USER5> If actual measurements of radioactivity were produced rather than measurements in terms of "tons of water (with some tiny unknown percentage of radioactive component)" or "300 times the level considered safe (without saying what that level actually is)", then it would be _possible_ to talk sensibly about how it compares to other exposure sources. Such as eating bananas, living in Colorado, getting a dental x-ray and so on. And it might _still_ be scary if we knew the numbers, but without real numbers we can't _know_ that it's worth worrying about.

<comment><USER4> You cannot compare eating a banana to ingesting the by-products of man-made nuclear fission.

I'm sorry but you have fallen hook, line and sinker for the nuclear industry's PR / propaganda / talking points.

There are real numbers from the Fukushima disaster. Just because this single NYPost article does not cite that data does not mean it does not exist.

<comment><USER6> Why can't you compare eating a banana to ingesting the by-products of man-made nuclear fission? Aren't both ingestible substances bound by the same laws of physics?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Tokyo Electric Power also knew that radioactivity was leaking at a rate of 400 tons a day into the North Pacific, according to the lawsuit and Japanese officials."

I'm sorry, what? What does that even mean? 400 tons of.. Uranium? Water? Pure radioactive essence?

This article is shocking on many levels, but the lack of journalistic standards is appalling.

<comment><USER8> We're talking about the NY Post! It would be more surprising if it exhibited any standards at all.

<comment><USER9> They have standards. They pick a Tumblr at random and say, "I bet we can have higher journalistic standards than _that_ guy." And 50% of the time, they're right!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Of all groups you'd hope to be able to detect and protect their staff against radiation, wouldn't the US Navy be fairly near the top of the list?

Much as TEPCO may be at fault over the actual reactor the sailors being exposed unnecessarily sounds more like Naval negligence.

<comment><USER11> Yeah. It does say that

> By the time the Reagan realized it was contaminated and tried to shift > location, the radioactive plume had spread too far to be quickly outrun. > > > "We have a multimillion-dollar radiation-detection system, but . . . it > takes time to be set up and activated," Cooper said.

But... if you're on the coast helping deal with the tsunami damage like them and then a _nuclear disaster_ starts, setting it up & activating it seems like a priority task.

<comment><USER12> CBS - March 2011: [http://www.cbsnews.com/news/radiation-detected-on-us- warship...](http://www.cbsnews.com/news/radiation-detected-on-us-warship-near- japan/)

The U.S. Seventh Fleet said Monday it had moved its ships and aircraft away from a quake-stricken Japanese nuclear power plant after discovering low-level radioactive contamination.

CBS News national security correspondent David Martin reports that there were two separate radiation exposures on the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan. The first was to air crews who were swabbed upon returning from search and rescue (SAR) missions, 17 of whom were found to have received the equivalent of a month's radiation and had to be decontaminated.

The second exposure occurred when the carrier's shipboard alarms went off. Since the Reagan is nuclear-powered, it has sensors to detect radioactivity, said Martin, and those went off as soon as the radiation levels went above the naturally-occurring background.

...

The aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan was about 100 miles offshore when its instruments detected the radiation. The fleet said the dose of radiation was about the same as one month's normal exposure to natural background radiation in the environment, and no one was exposed to levels that would have made them sick, reports CBS News correspondent Celia Hatton.

The power plant and its plume are south of Sendai, so as long as the wind doesn't shift, the Reagan can stay out of the plume and still be in position to conduct SAR missions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This has come up several times in the Navy-nuke Facebook group in which I lurk (I used to be one of them). The posters in that group have been, shall we say, scathingly skeptical of these claims of radiation sickness. The group includes a number of current- and former radiological-controls specialists, known as engineering lab techs or "ELTs." Navy-nuke ELTs are a select lot who are trained to face the facts and tell it like it is. As a general rule, they're very good at spotting BS, and they're not especially inclined to just passively accept it when they do spot it. Their skepticism about this radiation-sickness story is worth taking into account.

EDIT: Consider some circumstantial evidence:

\- In the Navy nuclear-power subculture, people pay attention to detail (to put it mildly). This is true in general, and _especially_ on the subject of radiation exposure to the crew or the public.

\- The commanding officer and executive officer of every U.S. aircraft carrier are nuclear-trained, on top of being senior aviators or naval flight officers; they must successfully complete the full, one-year, very-intense nuke qualification course even to be eligible to hold those jobs. Then before they assume those jobs they undergo still more training to be an XO and then CO.

\- On any U.S. aircraft carrier, the chief engineer (who "owns" the evaporators that produce the ship's drinking- and washing water) and the [chief] reactor officer (who "owns" the ELTs) are nukes, of course. They're among the most-senior officers on the ship.

\- Unambitious people don't put in the years of stressful work that it takes to get these jobs. It's a safe bet that these senior officers all want to be admirals someday. A radiological "incident" of the kind being described likely would severely impair their chances of ever being assigned to a responsible job again, let alone being promoted to flag rank.

So: We're being asked to believe that, in a non-combat situation, somehow all of these career-minded senior officers aboard the _Reagan_ inadvertently allowed the crew's radiation exposure to get to dangerous levels. Sorry, I just don't buy it. I suppose we can't categorically rule out the possibility, but to me it's another reason to be skeptical of the radiation-sickness claims.

<comment><USER14> I can't claim to know anything about naval nuclear engineering. My intuition tells me that avoiding runaway criticality and avoiding crew contamination are high priorities. Based on this I can think of 4 significant questions off the top of my head:

1\. How might they ever know to avoid a massive radiation plume they weren't expecting? Particularly if the plume is very large and expanding faster than they can move the ship?

2\. How much of the crew would be informed of such a situation? Would there be a risk of panic or mutiny, if all of the crew were permitted to fully understand such circumstances?

3\. Given that this is a military vessel, if they are ordered into harm's way (or perhaps ordered to assist since they've already unwittingly suffered irreparable harm), would they say no? Would careers be protected and defended if orders were obeyed?

4\. Would it be possible to fake 70 cases of thyroid polyps, leukemia, testicular cancer and uterine bleeding so bad it requires transfusions?

...and as an aside, given that we're introducing the idea that everything might be a hoax, one more question: Given what we've learned about the NSA and Facebook over the past year, how probable is it that a Navy-nuke Facebook group might be astroturfed into an echo chamber aligned with a particular agenda?

<comment><USER13> > _1\. How might they ever know to avoid a massive radiation plume they weren > 't expecting? Particularly if the plume is very large and expanding faster > than they can move the ship?_

The crucial assumption here is that the crew supposedly wasn't expecting a radioactive fallout plume. From personal experience I can vouch that the crew is trained to deal with radioactive fallout. Given the Fukushima circumstances, I truly cannot imagine that the ship wasn't on alert for a radioactive plume, and would have either navigated around it or taken appropriate precautions such as setting Material Condition Zebra (closing hatches, buttoning down the ventilation system, and so on); activating the water-wash-down system; etc.

 _2\. How much of the crew would be informed of such a situation?_

The down-in-the-weeds details likely would have disseminated to the people who would deal with specific issues.

As to the big picture, I'm confident the CO would have told the entire crew the basics of what was going on -- not least so that they would be able to spot apparent anomalies and report them up the chain of command. Sailors at sea are keenly aware that they're "all in the same boat."

 _Would there be a risk of panic or mutiny, if all of the crew were permitted to fully understand such circumstances?_

No.

(OK, I've been out for a long time, and I didn't know every single person in the Navy even then, so I can't say for _certain_ , but ... no.)

 _3\. Given that this is a military vessel, if they are ordered into harm 's way (or perhaps ordered to assist since they've already unwittingly suffered irreparable harm), would they say no?_

That's a very imaginative hypothetical question, with no indication that it bears any relationship to the facts. The U.S. Navy has a tradition of doing the needful (as our British friends sometimes say). See, e.g., the self- sacrificing heroism of the USS Johnston, USS Hoel, USS Samuel B. Roberts, and USS Heerman at the Battle off Samar on Oct. 25, 1944 [1].

 _Would careers be protected and defended if orders were obeyed?_

Yes.

 _4\. Would it be possible to fake 70 cases of thyroid polyps, leukemia, testicular cancer and uterine bleeding so bad it requires transfusions?_

Probably not -- but that assumes facts not in evidence, namely that there actually were 70 such cases attributable to radiation. One thing I learned in years of doing litigation was not to believe everything you hear or read. For all I know, among a crew of around 5,000, the 70 cases mentioned might conceivably be within the bounds of statistical probability.

 _...and as an aside, given that we 're introducing the idea that everything might be a hoax, one more question: Given what we've learned about the NSA and Facebook over the past year, how probable is it that a Navy-nuke Facebook group might be astroturfed into an echo chamber aligned with a particular agenda?_

I doubt it -- U.S. Navy sailors are loyal but independent-minded, with very- sensitive and finely-calibrated bullshit detectors, coupled with a willingness to call bullshit when they encounter it.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Leyte_Gulf#The_battle](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Leyte_Gulf#The_battle)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> On its own, I can't treat this article as credible. The compensation lawyer presents the strongest possible case for his clients, and the journalist is clearly glossing over a great deal in order to get the juiciest quotes.

From what little details are given, it sounds like the crew of the Reagan suffered from some kind of gut infection, not radiation poisoning. That would explain why they were denied port entry at Guam, and so on.

I live on the fringe of the area where contamination from Fukushima can be detected. To my knowledge, doctors haven't noticed anything unusual yet, and believe me people are watching. Still, the article sends a chill...

<comment><USER16> " _From what little details are given, it sounds like the crew of the Reagan suffered from some kind of gut infection, not radiation poisoning._ "

Do gut infections cause thyroid problems, cancers and uncontrolled gynecological bleeding?

<comment><USER17> Keep in mind in any sizeable group of people those things happen. I was a healthy 25 year old male with no issues what so ever. I'm now a 26 year old male who doesn't a have a thyroid and takes a pill every day. In between was an unexplained baseball sized growth on my thyroid that had nothing to do with anything and was thankfully not cancerous.

Shit happens and we don't always know why.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It was much worse than was reported. An online forum of nuclear engineers (I may still have the link) was the most informative source of news about the disaster at the time. EDIT: found the link. [http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?s=8b5b840e5e9217...](http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?s=8b5b840e5e92174eb7a22932b9d60c0f&t=501974)

<comment><USER19> I hope I won't offend anyone by saying that some of the reported health problems after radioactive disaster are usually exaggerated to get reparations.

<comment><USER20> It's a two way street - they're usually dramatically downplayed by authorities and anybody who would otherwise have to pay. If you're not loud and exaggerated, nobody with any ability to do anything listens and powerful people actively want you to not be heard.

For illustration, the official number of deaths attributed to the Chernobyl disaster is 31.

<comment><USER21> > For illustration, the official number of deaths attributed to the Chernobyl > disaster is 31.

Link to a reputable source contradicting the official death toll please.

<comment><USER22> [http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20403-25-years- after-c...](http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20403-25-years-after- chernobyl-we-dont-know-how-many-died.html)

<comment><USER21> Eh, that doesn't contradict the official death toll. Did you even read it. It reckons that some people think there might be thousands by 2065... which is a little silly, since there would be thousands dead by then anyway and there is no way to link the deaths to the disaster.

3 out of every 7 people you know will die of cancer. Every single person you know will die of cancer if they aren't taken first by some other illness, accident, murder, or natural cause.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is why I wouldn't let my kids EVER enlist. The government has no regard for its enlisted. Doesn't take a genius to think our navy would be in harm's way during a RADIOACTIVE DISASTER. Reminds me of when soldiers were being electrocuted in showers in Iraq because of totally incompetent contractors wiring electricity near the showers.

<comment><USER24> Sure, better let somebody else's kids take care of the shitty work.

I agree wholeheartedly.

<comment><USER25> There is, of course, the better option. Invade less people and spy on less people and then the number of people needed and the danger they face is decreased. Additionally, using the military as a social welfare system may not be the great system some think it is. My perspective is skewed however, as being a New Zealander the threat level is zero (except from our so-called allies, who have bombed us in the past - thanks France).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Wikipedia says the USS Ronald Regan has a total crew of 5,680.

How statistically significant is 70 people out of 5,680 suffering serious health problems over 2.5 years? I'm guessing that most people on board were fairly young and in good health.

<comment><USER27> Radiation overdose is happy to cause you all kind of cancer 50 years down the road. Having been overexposed is really not something you want, even if you don't show symptoms so quickly. The psychological pressure on these people alone must be maddening.

Imagine waking up every day for the rest of your life and wondering if you have cancer today? Not good..

Edit: and let's not talk about the increased likelihood of disfigured offspring.

<comment><USER19> > Imagine waking up every day for the rest of your life and wondering if you > have cancer today? Not good..

30% of us will have it at some point, also you have chance 1 in 1000-2000 that you'll die next year.

<comment><USER28> > you have chance 1 in 1000-2000 that you'll die next year.

You have a 1000-2000 chance that you'll die when you are no longer an infant but still young. Your chances of dying next year go up as your get older. If you had only 1 chance in 1000 to die each year that would mean that people would live to be 1000 years old on average.

A good estimate of human mortality rates can be calculated from Gompertz law: [http://forio.com/simulate/mbean/death-probability- calculator...](http://forio.com/simulate/mbean/death-probability- calculator/simulation)

<comment><USER29> > If you had only 1 chance in 1000 to die each year that would mean that > people would live to be 1000 years old on average.

Actually it means your chances of living to be 1000 would be 37%.

0.999 ^ 1000 = .37

<comment><USER30> Your chances of living to be 1000 are approximately 1 in _e_ , 37%, yes. But that has nothing to do with the average age people live to. I don't get 1000 as the average lifespan, though, I get 999. Can someone explain where I'm going wrong with this reasoning?

If there is a 0.001 chance of dying every year, the average lifespan will be 0(0.001) + 1(0.001)(0.999) + 2(0.001)(0.999)^2 + 3(0.001)(0.999)^3 + ... , or \sum_{i=0}^\infty (i(0.001)(0.999)^i). The idea is that to live to the age of 0, you have to die in your first year; to live to be three, you have to live through exactly three years and then die, and so on. Then, \sum_{i=0}^\infty ix^i is x / (1-x)^2 .

So the sum of interest is 0.001 times (0.999) / (0.000001), which is exactly 999.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> A failed multimillion-dollar radiation-detection system. Why didn't they have this activated?

"The toxic seawater was sucked into the ship's desalinization system, flowing out of its faucets and showers — still radioactive — and into the crew member's bodies."

<comment><USER27> They could have sidestepped the whole issue with a simple reverse-osmosis water filter. Somehow I get the impression that they did not think the ABC (edit: CBRN) thing through.

<comment><USER32> A "simple" reverse-osmosis system?

A Nimitz class carrier can produce somewhere in the neighborhood of 400,000 gallons of desalinated (potable) water a day. Desalination is very energy intensive, but energy is something that a nuclear powered carrier has plenty of. There are obviously some consumables involved, but it's mostly just energy, and lots of it.

RO, on the other hand, requires a lot of high quality, small pore filters and membranes that need to be cleaned and changed regularly. RO systems have dramatically lower throughputs than desalination systems of similar size. An RO system capable of producing 400,000 gallons/day (especially one capable of filtering radioisotopes that are (while larger than a water molecule), still quite small) would be very large, and very maintenance intensive.

But hey... you're probably right... The folks who designed the potable water infrastructure for the Nimitz class aircraft carriers were probably idiots...

<comment><USER33> Actually, it looks like Ford-class carriers use, or will use (?), reverse osmosis for desal:

[http://www.gao.gov/assets/660/657412.pdf](http://www.gao.gov/assets/660/657412.pdf)

RO is already used in utility-scale desal plants:

[http://www.pub.gov.sg/water/Pages/DesalinatedWater.aspx](http://www.pub.gov.sg/water/Pages/DesalinatedWater.aspx)

 _" This plant can produce 30 million gallons of water a day (136, 000 cubic meters) and is one of the region's largest seawater reverse-osmosis plants."_

<comment><USER32> Yeah, they've done away with many of the steam systems on the new carriers (including the catapult launch system, which is now electric).

If you're trying to minimize energy (particularly steam) usage, then RO starts to make a bit more sense. On the Nimitz class, they have plenty of waste heat from the powerplant, and already had numerous steam distributions systems in place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Out of related curiosity, weren't there efforts to ban Geiger counters in the US post-9/11? Were any laws enacted?

</comment><comment><USER35> _Guam turned us away_

That sounds suspicious. Guam is a U.S. Territory.

<comment><USER36> It may be the lack of capabilities to deal with a mass radiation event.

I can't find any references to how many crew are typically assigned to the USS Ronald Regan. Guam doesn't seem like it has a lot of healthcare support for a full-aircraft carrier of irradiated seamen.

</comment></comment><comment> josh-wrale If I were losing 60 or 70 pounds a month due to hyperthyroidism, I'd request that my thyroid be removed and I'd probably then be prescribed levothyroxine. I'd say it's a safe bet the thyroid isn't the root cause here. Thyroid removal is pretty common.

</comment><comment><USER37> The meaning behind the story is far more sinister than the sad case of some people getting cancer...

it is that TEPCO, which is the organization best suited to know and measure what was/is going on, has been shown to lie, even to its own government, about the situation.

(mentioned in more detail here: [http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/28/world/asia/japan-fukushima- law...](http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/28/world/asia/japan-fukushima-lawsuit/) )

If it truly the case that TEPCO has been lying about things from the start, then nothing that they have said in the interim, or things that they say in the future, can be taken at face value, and whatever claims they make require independant third party confirmation.

</comment><comment><USER38> If there's any government agency that will obfuscate, stonewall, evade responsibility and generally bullshit their way out of helping the people who get hurt on their watch, it's the DoD.

When people sperg out over specific radiation claims being floated in the NY Post (of all places) they ought to keep in mind that if these people are anywhere near as sick as they're described to be they need help, and they're up against a nasty brick wall when it comes to getting that help. Picking a side here ought to be pretty damn easy unless this turns out to be some kind of outright fraud.

</comment><comment><USER39> Related post from NBC (27th of Dec 2012): US sailors sue Japan's TEPCO for post-quake radiation exposure ([http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/12/27/16197507-us- sa...](http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/12/27/16197507-us-sailors-sue- japans-tepco-for-post-quake-radiation-exposure)). Interesting they used almost the same photo on the article.

</comment><comment><USER40> We're either a one decade or two from having the necessary robotics technology needed to keep humans out of harm's way in these situations.

[http://singularityhub.com/2013/12/20/nasa-unveils- valkyrie-a...](http://singularityhub.com/2013/12/20/nasa-unveils-valkyrie-a- humanoid-robot-destined-for-space-exploration/)

It's really up to us if it's going to be 10 years or 20.

<comment><USER20> We already can make simple ones, it's a matter of radiation shielding. They don't have to be huge expensive humanoid ones. Robots were used in the Chernobyl cleanup 25 years ago although they ended up getting fried from the radiation. I haven't done much research on the topic of what exists today regarding workarounds for electronics in radioactive environments (if someone has domain knowledge, please tell!), but I suspect we could fix that.

For some interesting history, look up "Bio-Robots" to see how the Soviet Union dealt with the disaster. Basically they sent up humans in heavy lead suits for no more than 45 seconds at a time. Run up, get three or four shovelfuls (they were clearing radioactive debris from the roof), get out.

<comment><USER41> There is much more to it than getting hardened electronics. For example, I was talking with some Westinghouse engineers and the biggest problem with the robots at Fukushima were the cameras. The radiation crazes the lenses and you become blind.

Search and rescue is a hard problem and is terribly underfunded. It is also funded in a way that makes long term improvements hard. There is very little money until there's a disaster, then there is a ton of cash you have to spend right now.

<comment><USER20> Out of curiosity, do you have anything more on what destroys the lenses? Heat/melting? Some form of radioactive dust?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Not the most credible publication, and plaintiff's attorneys are clearly the primary sources for the article.

</comment><comment><USER43> At the TC Disrupt Europe hackathon, there was one team that build a hardware/software hack to crowdsource radioactivity data / warnings. Basically, a Geiger counter attached to your computer that sends readings to a server.

I think it was a really cool hack and one of my favorites, but it didn't go anywhere with the jury (I guess no business model and all :) ).

[http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/26/open-radioactivity- warning-...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/26/open-radioactivity-warning- system/)

[http://techcrunch.com/video/open-radioactivity-warning- syste...](http://techcrunch.com/video/open-radioactivity-warning-system-demo- at-hackathon-europe-2013/517988760/) (Video)

</comment><comment><USER44> I served on the Reagan from 2003-2007 and am lucky enough to have finished my enlistment before the Fukushima incident.

I still have a large network of friends in the military and work in the defense industry in San Diego so I was surprised when I first learned of this incident only a few weeks ago. I thought the post I was reading at the time was a sick hoax at first but have since learned otherwise.

This doesn't surprise me much at all unfortunately, and I wish my fellow sailors the best of luck in not getting screwed by Uncle Sam, which is what I fully expect will happen.

</comment><comment><USER45> As the reactors have now dumped thousands of tons of nuclear runoff water into the ocean which then drifts to the North American West Coast, is this not something we should be much more aware of and acting to protect against?

Is the US West Coast at danger of increased incidence rates of radiation related illness?

<comment><USER46> The answer is no, it is not even close to something we should be worried about.

<comment><USER47> Is that because it's going to be diluted to unnoticeable levels even near the origin?

<comment><USER46> Yes

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> You would think it would have been a good time to test or at least offer Ex- Rad to the sailors.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex-Rad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex-Rad)

 _" Ex-Rad (or Ex-RAD), also known by the code name ON 01210.Na, is a drug developed by Onconova Therapeutics and the U.S. Department of Defense.[1][2] This newly developed compound is said to be a potent radiation protection agent. Chemically, it is the sodium salt of 4-carboxystyryl-4-chlorobenzylsulfone.[3"_

</comment><comment><USER49> Negligence triumphed over excellence this time...

</comment><comment><USER50> Sad story and and it pisses me off that so many countries denied the carrier to dock up.

<comment><USER21> > it pisses me off that so many countries denied the carrier to dock up.

Why is that? Countries that don't have the technical expertise to judge how dangerous it could have been for their people are absolutely right to have prevented them from docking.

Their only loyalty is to their own people, as it should be. As long as they don't have the expertise to verify that their is no risk to their own people, they should default to GTFO.

Do you think the US would allow a shipload of people with the SARS coronavirus or Ebola to dock at one of their ports?

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> This story may or may not be accurate, but anything which comes from nypost is suspect.

</comment><comment><USER52> The nuclear apologists are out in full force today.

I love how you guys, mostly computer programmers, are so much more informed than experts in nearly every other field of science existing. It must be amazing to be that smart.

<comment><USER53> Er, the opinions expressed by the "nuclear apologists" generally line up with those of experts in the field.

It's the fools who talk about "400 tons of radiation" who are committing the sin of hubris in thinking that they know more than the experts.

<comment><USER25> If you want an independent opinion upon the pros and cons of disbanding my field of work, don't ask me.

<comment><USER53> You have to make up your mind: do we trust experts, or not?

The person I was replying to was clearly on the "yes" side of that.

You can certainly disagree, but then your argument is going to be radically different.

<comment><USER25> I'm not disagreeing with you, I'm just saying that one should bare this in mind while listening. Keep conflicts in mind and listen.

<comment><USER53> I'm with you, then. You have to learn and understand these things yourself, not just listen to whatever other people say. _But_ , when somebody criticizes you for thinking you know better than the experts, it's totally valid to point out that the experts say the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> A Geiger counter is a simple, inexpensive device, and several should be present at all significant military installations and turned on at all times. Why wasn't that the case here?

<comment><USER55> It was. The _Reagan_ is nuclear-powered and is capable of carrying nuclear missiles (and quite possibly was at the time). Unless Navy planning has entirely rotted away, that ship was plastered with radiation detectors, crewed with people trained for nuke decon, equipped with NBC (nuclear/bioweapon/chemical weapon) protection suits, and supplied with potassium iodide tablets for thyroid protection.

<comment><USER54> Then what really happened here?

<comment><USER56> I am a CBRN specialist in the Marine Corps. These ships run constant radiation detection, everywhere, especially in the water desal. The only probable cause for these kind of biological responses, would have to be inhalation of radiated particulates, but even that would be extremely difficult given the range from the source. Even the most basic respiratory protection(shirt over face) would prevent most of that type of contamination.

The entire CBRN community was hyper focused on these operations Navy wide, and the possibility of an entire group of ships not taking every precaution is very very very low. I am not discounting the possibility of equipment failure(unknowingly) or execution failure by individuals, but the chances of that with so much attention on the issue would be low.

EDIT: What do people do when they see snow? Think tounge out.

<comment><USER57> _" What do people do when they see snow? Think tounge out."_

I thought that as well, especially with the detail in the article about 'billows of metallic-tasting snow'.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Galileo goes live - <AUTHOR> http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-16-4366_en.htm <comment><USER2> > _So far, the first Galileo smartphone by Spanish company BQ is already > available on the market and other manufacturers are expected to follow > suit._

Is Galileo support not present in smartphone SoCs shipping today?

> _Galileo is fully interoperable with GPS_

What does this truly mean? Does it use GPS-compatible signalling and thus Galileo satellites masquerade as GPS satellites? Is there are separate 'overlay' Galileo stream for additional features?</comment>


Fastest Wordpress Hosts Compared - <AUTHOR> http://optimal.io/benchmarks/paas/wordpress-hosting-web-performance-report-Q1-2016.html <comment><AUTHOR> Would love to know if there are other wordpress hosts which are missing from this list..</comment>


Sorry, Blekko Is Doomed - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/11/01/businessinsider-blekko-doomed.DTL <comment><USER2> 'slash the web' -- i had a similar reaction. not a mainstream future in current incarnation. i went to the site and didn't understand what to do.</comment>


Connect - a high performance middleware framework for Node.js - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/extjs/Connect

<comment><USER2> Connect is a misguided effort IMHO, but as the creator of JSGI/Jack (<http://jackjs.org/>) I'm of course biased.

JSGI is a lot more elegant. It's more of a functional style (apps are just functions, middleware are functions that return another app, a function), asynchronous support is handled via promises. Connect is very much tied to the Node stream APIs, and ends up being more convoluted and difficult to understand, IMO.

Here's an analysis of Connect vs. JSGI by Kris Zyp: [http://www.sitepen.com/blog/2010/06/11/jsgi-vs-connect- for-n...](http://www.sitepen.com/blog/2010/06/11/jsgi-vs-connect-for-node- middleware/)

<comment><USER3> And here is TJ Holowaychuk's response to Zyp's article: <http://tjholowaychuk.com/post/698591492/connect-vs-jsgi>

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I like how it abstracts a server down to just a chain of modules that can be either a response provider or filter. This reminds me of the architecture of Nginx.

If someone could create a FastCGI implementation as a provider, this would be awesome. Then certain routes could be passed off to Ruby, PHP, Mono, (whatever) and simple things like static files, pub-sub, cache, etc can be handled by node.

I definitely like where they're going with the project and with the ExtJS team behind it, it should be a success.

</comment><comment><USER4> Cool project, but why saddle it with a search engine penalty for a name? It's like "Mail" redux.</comment>


Is your serverless system as good as you think? Are your sure? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@rehemagi/is-your-serverless-as-good-as-you-think-it-is-2baa3d36b1de <comment><USER2> Yes, because we use Cloudwatch and we monitor DLQ events.

That should be standard operating procedure.</comment>


50% off all O'Reilly Ebooks & Videos (Tues, March 22) - <AUTHOR> http://oreilly.com/store/dd-jpn.html

<comment><USER2> All revenues going to Japan Disaster Relief. Don't be shy everyone, buy as many as you can. This should be tax deductible ;p</comment>