How to Buy a Gun in 15 Countries - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/02/world/international-gun-laws.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=g-artboard%20g-artboard-v4&module=photo-spot-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news <comment><USER2> They left out the Czech republic! Concealed carry for all!

 _A gun in the Czech Republic is available to anybody subject to acquiring a shall issue firearms license first. Gun licenses may be obtained in a way very similar to a driving license – by passing a gun proficiency exam, medical examination and having a clean criminal record. Unlike in most other European countries, the Czech gun legislation also permits a citizen to carry a concealed weapon for self-defense – 240,000 out of some 300,000 legal gun owners have concealed carry permit. The vast majority of Czech gun owners possess their firearms for protection, with hunting and sport shooting being less common._

Also made me chuckle a bit when they talk about Mexico and Brazil. How many people who own guns actually do so legally?

<comment><USER3> And Switzerland, Norway, Finland...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I guess we could repeal a part of the Bill of Rights.

<comment><USER5> I hate this counter argument. It's cheap, low effort, and dishonest. "Oh gee, look at that, this piece of paper says I can own a killing machine, pack it up boys".

Constitutions can change; it was changed to get rid of slavery. It's not some kind of immortal document handed down by god.

<comment><USER6> >Constitutions can change; it was changed to get rid of slavery.

Not the same thing. The constitution didn't grant slavery, it just didn't restrict it. The amendment to stop slavery had no impact on the constitution that existed before-hand.

The bill of rights has never been changed.

<comment><USER7> The Bill of Rights only restricted the Federal government, until 1897 when SCOTUS began the process of so-called incorporation. It's non-sensical to try to use it as a template for individual rights because that wasn't its primary design. It obviously reflected such notions, but only indirectly and distantly. The Bill of Rights very clearly changed because it's now applied in ways that were not only unforeseen, but presumed to have been impossible given how the Founders understood and _designed_ separation of powers.

That's why debate about the meaning of the _text_ of the Bill of Rights often borders on the absurd. The 2nd Amendment was _never_ about the individual right to own personal firearms because the Federal government never had the _power_ to regulate personal gun ownership until the re-interpretation of its Commerce Clause powers in the 1930s. (Well, in the case of guns sooner with the passage of Prohibition.) But the Federal government did have the very controversial power to control state militias as part of its enhanced (relative to Articles of Confederation) national defense powers, which is why the 2nd Amendment talks about militias and "arms" (i.e. military weapons--see Samuel Johnson's dictionary from the 18th century).

The whole original meaning debate about the 2nd Amendment is ridiculous; for this and a million other reasons--like the fact that conservatives like Scalia and Thomas relied on incorporation doctrines that they previously had despised. That said, the courts have spoken and as a matter of _law_ it creates a personal right. Which is fine by me because the one thing this whole debate should make abundantly clear to people is that we have courts and judges for a reason--people will always disagree about the meaning of a written law; at the end of the day you _need_ a court to, effectively, lay down the law and decide exactly what it means in real situations, and that's the only law that counts. Whether they read the text wrong or right is in a very real sense irrelevant, as long they adhere to consistent principles of justice that are substantially divorced from the politics du jour. It'd be a stretch to say that the recent 2nd Amendment decisions were apolitical or entirely consistent with the conservative justices' legal jurisprudence, but it's not beyond the pale. For someone like me who defends liberal notions like substantive due process, it's hard to complain about the judicial overreach regarding the 2nd Amendment. (What irks me isn't the outcome, but the intellectually hypocritical--nay, dishonest--way the conservative justices got there.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So NYT is against gun control now? Because that's the argument here. Some of those countries clearly have a laundry list of things you'd need to do to get a gun yet have violence that far surpasses anything seen in the US. I'm talking about large zones and cities that are not under government control in Mexico and Brazil and the large amounts of violence in South Africa. Not only that, but they explicitly admit--in the text--that gun laws are ineffective in at least Russia. I agree: gun laws are ineffective in Russia, in the US, and elsewhere. I just didn't think the NYT would be my main backing source.

<comment><USER9> I don't think so, what they are trying to show is quite the opposite, mass shooting in Brazil is rare, and that's manly because individuals that are likely to commit this kind of crime wouldn't easily get a gun like an AR-15, access to this kind of guns without a tough background check is insane even for countries like Brazil. General crimes (non mass shooting) involving handguns are common though, because it's easy for criminals to get illegal handguns. The latest is not fault of gun control policies, but a very corrupted system.

<comment><USER10>
      mass shooting in Brazil is rare

Murder rate in Brazil is 440% of US rate.

Violent crime intentional homicide rate is 600% of US rate.

etc.

[http://www.nationmaster.com/country- info/compare/Brazil/Unit...](http://www.nationmaster.com/country- info/compare/Brazil/United-States/Crime)

      General crimes (non mass shooting) involving handguns are common though

It's far easier to a mass public shooting with handguns than with long guns.

<comment><USER9> Yes, murder rate in Brazil is far higher than any other developed country, and this is not related to firearms selling policy. Trying to link firearms selling policy to the crime level in Brazil is misleading and irresponsible, as the issues are further down and start with inequality and lack of proper education.

Violent crimes over there (Brazil) and homicide rates are quite high, not only because innocent people are killed every day, but also because of the war between drug gangs/cartels, so we're also talking about criminals killing each other.

And sorry, I gave the impression that only long guns were used to mass shooting, if anyone look at the history of mass shooting in Brazil, they will see that handguns were used on the latest big one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Now do Switzerland.

<comment><USER12> I can't tell you how many friends and family (I'm in the US) have posted nonsense about swiss gun laws all over social media. They drastically changed about 20 years ago or so. (and a few other major changes 7 or 8 years ago) But they like to talk all over social media about how anyone in Switzerland can walk down the street with a fully automatic rifle..

<comment><USER11> I never said any of that.

But they have a pretty high ownership rate and are always left out of the discussion when it doesn't fit the narrative.

Process for actually getting a gun in Switzerland - [https://www.ch.ch/en/acquiring-firearm/](https://www.ch.ch/en/acquiring- firearm/)

No one's arguing about full automatic rifles. There's very few places where fully automatic rifles are actually legal.</comment></comment></comment>


I need a hacker. - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> (I searched this site for a better way to post this, but didn't find anything. Please let me know if there is a more appropriate forum for this type of request.)

I'm an Internet business/marketing guy with a prototype. I'm looking for a hacker to be my cofounder.

I first heard about Y Combinator while participating in a similar program called Junto (www.juntopartners.com). As a frequent news.ycombinator reader, I've admired from a distance the work that Y Combinator participants and applicants have done. I'm looking for someone with that kind of skill set to work with me on a niche community site.

Part-time commitment initially, more involvement as we're able to grow the site. With regards to equity, I believe in growing the pie rather than my slice. I want a cofounder, not an employee.

Email me if you're interested: billallred [at] Google mail etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, you guys are fast. You responded before I even finished typing the details!

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> for what? Hope not to hack into forbidden stuff and become a fugitive

</comment><comment><USER3> to...?</comment>


Why don't economists like Bitcoin? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/31/5260534/krugman-bitcoin-evil-economists

<comment><USER2> Because their whole field has become centered around a government monopoly over the issuance of money, rather than on human choices in a free market.

Since Bitcoin is violence-resistant, economists (and the bureaucratic institutions that employ them) view it as a threat.</comment>


$1 Early Bird Special – Intelishake Bottle, will you back this to reality? - <AUTHOR>

Hey guys, feedback is appreciated, have a look at our campaign coming up here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1593175966/1002071867?token=56fd5a61<p>Sign up to be emailed when live as you will only have minutes to get your hands on the bottle for $1 delivered to your door as there are only 100. http://shop.newtonstein.com/products/1 <comment><USER2> What's the real angle here?

It seems like I should be your target demographic (fitness guy/obsessive hydrator/3 vitamix smoothies a day drinker/iPhone user) but I just can't muster any excitement for what I'm seeing.

Help me out here? Why is this better than a pocket and a $4 BPA-free shaker (with stainless steel spring ball and much more capacity) off of Amazon?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey,

well its about preference and lifestyle, it is for a guy that likes sports, outdoor activities or simply going to the gym. For example,you go to the gym, and have pockets full of cards, cash, car or locker keys, mobile phone etc... Then gusy that take shakes or amino acids have powders and pills to carry to during their work out sessions.

Some people simply take fruits and an energy bar to keep them going.

Some people take their watches with them e.g. Apple Watch next year but you would not want to wear it whilst sweating.

All these things would be lying around in pockets, a large bag with a separate drinks bottle, as you can see the approach Intelishake takes is that it enables you to merge all this into one product, you are able to store all these things inside your drinks bottle and only have to carry around one thing.

It would be hard to carry things around in your pocket if say you were playing football at an Astro turf, but easier in an all in one bottle! Only one thing to carry with you!

The bottle takes a mix and match approach, you can change colours, interchange the compartments and make it larger or smaller, you can even carry two drinks instead of using it as storage, say a smoothie and juice.

It certainly gives you more options, and yes you can buy basic bottles on Amazon for about $10 delivered price, but then imagine if you could buy the Intelishake for $10 delivered, you would probably pick Intelishake because you can then use it at half the size or with added storage modules. We are driving down the price within 6 months to $10 as it becomes possible when you sell enough volumes of the product long term.

I hope that you feel it makes more sense, your feedback is much appreciated!

<comment><USER2> Sorry to play "Mr. Wonderful" but I still have a hard time with a lot of your selling points and reasoning.

To address your points:

* Competition: The current hotness as far as shaker bottles is only $7 on Amazon [1]

* Watches: Most people don't wear watches anymore. I'm one of the rare people who do, but if I didn't want to wear it, I'd just leave it in my gym locker. Why carry it if I don't need it? Especially if it's an expensive watch.

* Phones: Likewise with my phone. If I'm not listening to music on it, I'm going to store it elsewhere secure. I'm not going to carry it in a sealed compartment in a bottle that I'm setting down a lot (and thus have to keep an eye on).

* Shakes/powders/amino acids: For a lot of these, you're working with 32 oz increments of capacity. Hence why most shaker bottles are 32 oz.

The configurability as far as fluid mix/match is really, really cool, though. Being able to buy parts is attractive (eg. to put together 2 large fluid compartments, one for water, one for electrolytes or something). And at a $10 price point, this becomes more attractive.

The device storage though, seems kinda gimmicky or ancillary.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not necessarily trying to tell you to drop this product. I'm just hitting you with the questions that come to my mind, as a potential consumer. If I didn't care, I wouldn't even have bothered to post :-)

1\. [http://www.amazon.com/BlenderBottle-Classic-Shaker- Bottle-28...](http://www.amazon.com/BlenderBottle-Classic-Shaker- Bottle-28-ounce/dp/B001KADGMI/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello,

we do appreciate your time no doubt, and it is great to have a challenging view.

We condicted alot of research in the UK about how people use products and what they do in terms of behaviour in the gym and outdoor sports, what we found is yes not everyone uses the entire functionality, but they use atleast 2 or 3 of the Intelishake's uses in varied ways, this product then makes it great for these enthusiasts.

The competition at $7 is doing well because of the price, there is no doubt about it, but our product with all its functions at say $10 will no doubt be a preferred pick since it can have the same use as the $7 one or much more. If you want just a plain bottle, then sure go ahead and save the money, but for something more useful and relevant, we know that people would buy the intelishake.

Watches and other accessories are just examples, people will use it in different ways as per their needs.

We found that many people do have their phone with them whilst in the Gym or playing football in the field, and hence storing it this ay makes it easy for them to keep an eye on their stuff all in one place, in the bottle they need regularly to drink from.

Yes 32oz is quite alot and you would have to use both compartments for that much liquid, we had to stick to 500ml because otherwise the bottles become too large and we dont want to put people off.

I think the key with this product is that it has many selling points and fits various needs, some people will have use for it, others will not like with everything, we would want to convince everyone to take one because of its great price, that would be the key convincing reason fro any doubters, those that love it will by without hesitation.

Thank you for your time runjake, it has been helpful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hope you sell more than 100!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes I am sure we will based on the huge amount of interest I have seen from everyone that has heard of it... Fingers crossed!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can I send you $25 now?

<comment><AUTHOR> You will be the first to place an order if you do so :)

We would be grateful for your support by buying one for yourself. You can place an order here: [http://shop.newtonstein.com/products/1](http://shop.newtonstein.com/products/1)

We will ship it to you as soon as it is produced!

Many thanks again!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is anyone working on open source DIY artificial ventilators/respirators? - <AUTHOR> There's a possibility the spread of COVID-19 leads to a lot of people needing help to breathe and not enough equipment.
Is anyone working on easy-to-build DIY versions?
What are the requirements?
- Made of ubiquitous simple components
- Provides "clean" air
- What flow rate?
- What cadence?
- What feedback mechanisms? Can it (or an operator) close the loop with cheap fingertip O2 sensors?
What's the starting point - designs from the 1800s/1900s? <comment><USER2> Lot of stuff that can go wrong with ventilator patients:

\- Blood pressure from intrathoracic pressure caused by ventilation. \- Sedation and pain from ventilation \- Obstruction of airway \- Removal of airway secretions \- Arterial Blood Gas checks (Blood Ph, Oxygenation, CO2 levels) \- Secondary infection due to ventilation

[https://www.nursingcenter.com/clinical-resources/nursing- poc...](https://www.nursingcenter.com/clinical-resources/nursing-pocket- cards/caring-for-the-mechanically-ventilated-patient)

<comment><AUTHOR> Fundamental stuff that can go wrong with ventilator patients who don't have ventilation:

Death.

<comment><USER2> Just saying, without medical supervision, current ventilator models are going to almost certain to cause deaths. An open source ventilator would either need to be implemented by medical experts or account for the above.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Stealing a comment I saw the other day in a thread where a open source ventilator was shown, if you need a ventilator you'd need intensive care as well.

</comment><comment><USER4> I wonder if CPAP/BiPAP machines can be software hacked into ventilators. Some BiPAP models are almost identical to those labeled as "ventilators."</comment>


Taylor Swift showed us the scary future of facial recognition - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/15/how-taylor-swift-showed-us-the-scary-future-of-facial-recognition <comment><USER2> So like with most ML/AI technologies, it's usually not the specific use case that is the most troubling. The most troubling is that _everyone_ scanned are put into the database for later use or as training data.

So even if I'm not a stalker of Taylor Swift, I'm now part of ISM Connect's database, so when they release a "EnergyGuard" product, it will certainly recognize my face at an environmental protest at a coal power plant. And now they know that I'm a climate change advocate _and_ I like Taylor Swift.

This kind of mapping is what scares me about ML/AI the most, where you pretty much have to collect, store, share, and map data that violates your Fourth Amendment rights (e.g. the "mosaic" principle of privacy from US v. Jones[1]).

[1]: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh- conspiracy/wp/201...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh- conspiracy/wp/2014/04/28/courts-grapple-with-the-mosaic-theory-of-the-fourth- amendment/)</comment>


SOPA blackout - while minimizing the impact of your site on Google - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/u/0/109412257237874861202/posts/aHXh7UY7xM6

<comment><USER2> Useful if you're taking (part of) your site offline for any reason, not only if you're protesting against SOPA+PIPA.</comment>


Show HN: Make Your PDF Look Scanned - <AUTHOR> http://www.scanyourpdf.com <comment><USER2> From the github repo, the site is a wrapper around exactly two shell commands. Instead of uploading your data to an untrusted site, you can run from the comfort and safety of your local computer:

      convert -density 150 input.pdf -colorspace gray -linear-stretch 3.5%x10% -blur 0x0.5 -attenuate 0.25 +noise Gaussian -rotate 0.5 temp.pdf
      gs -dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -dNOCACHE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sColorConversionStrategy=LeaveColorUnchanged dAutoFilterColorImages=true -dAutoFilterGrayImages=true -dDownsampleMonoImages=true -dDownsampleGrayImages=true -dDownsampleColorImages=true -sOutputFile=output.pdf temp.pdf

<comment><USER3> Try this one-line ImageMagick command to make COMPACT pseudo-scanned files:

      convert -density 150 ORIGINAL.pdf -colorspace gray +noise Gaussian -rotate 0.5 -depth 2 SCANNED.pdf

Consider using `-depth 1`, `-depth 3` as a final parameter to map colors to only 2¹=2 or 2³=8 instead of 2²=4 gray levels. Using a small number of gray levels SIGNIFICANTLY reduces file size and also gives your pseudo-scanned document a more pixelated, it-just-came-out-of-my-old-printer look.

Also consider using `-density 100` or even `-density 75` for long text documents. Using a density of 75 dpi produces documents that are 4x smaller than 150 dpi (75²=150²/4) and doesn't affect the readability of normal-sized (10-12pt) text that much.

Finally, sometimes it works best not to add Gaussian noise.

<comment><USER4> Rather than making a COMPACT version, your command created a file over twice the size of one created using the aforementioned

convert letter.pdf -colorspace gray \\( +clone -blur 0x1 \\) +swap -compose divide -composite -linear-stretch 5%x0% -rotate 1.5 as-scanned.pdf

However, that may be a useful feature, since many users end up inadvertently creating very large PDFs when scanning.

<comment><USER5> If you lower the resolution those auto-scanning services that does OCR on the documents will get problems converting the tex back to normal text. Which might or might not be the point of doing this in the first place... :-)

<comment><USER6> Just remember that if you make it harder for OCR to produce accurate text from an image, you also make it harder for blind people to read it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Show HN: FalsiScan – Make it look like a PDF has been hand signed and scanned (770 points, 34 days ago) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22811653](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22811653)

<comment><USER7> Thought this sounded familiar.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I recently came across a couple of institutions which required me to print, sign and send back a couple of documents. COVID and all of that means I don't have a printer at home. I made this website by inspiration from other posts here and now it's free to use! Code is open source so feel free to comment any new ideas or things you would like includede!

<comment><USER8> What do you mean "required"? Like, they wouldn't accept a clean, non-scanned copy? That's absurd.

<comment><USER9> Some types of documents/deeds do require "wet ink" signatures by law - [https://www.lawsociety.org.uk/support- services/advice/articl...](https://www.lawsociety.org.uk/support- services/advice/articles/signing-and-exchanging-documents/)

<comment><USER10> 7 years of being a digital nomad, and signing every document digitally, and I never ran into this. TIL.

<comment> blaser-waffle Unless there is a serious challenge to the contract no one cares. You obviously are okay with the contract and are signing it (if only in an obfuscated, non-physical sense), and they're just looking for a signature that could be kinda real -- if you're good with the deal, and they're good, who cares?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Edit: fixed now.

Original: Please don't upload any private or confidential pdfs right now. I emailed OP two security concerns that trivially allow anybody to see any of the converted pdfs.

<comment><USER12> It's still far short of being suitable for use of any private documents.

[https://github.com/baicunko/scanyourpdf/blob/master/pdfwebsi...](https://github.com/baicunko/scanyourpdf/blob/master/pdfwebsite/views.py#L45)

This is rather less than secure; output files are named, e.g., "Scan_2020512_{four random lower-case letters}.pdf" into a web-server-readable directory.

That gives a total of 456976 different possible filenames on a day. It's more than feasible to brute-force that many filenames in the hour before files get deleted.

OP: I don't think randomly-suffixed file names are an inherently bad way to approach this. But you should definitely consider using a longer random string, and definitely consider not using the `random` module too (it is not secure and is not intended to be).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the comments. I agree with you, I will decrease how long the file is in the server (I just hit 40gb from hacker news) as well as implement rate limiting to prevent any brute force

<comment><USER12> Rate limiting (if by that you mean at the firewall or the web server) is not the way to do it. That shifts the problem somewhere else in the stack, into a place that isn't under version control in the same repository.

Consider: If you moved this on to another server, would you remember to enable rate limiting there? If someone else uses your code, will they know to enable rate limiting?

Rate limiting isn't a bad idea, but your security should not depend on it, especially as you have a way of securing it in your application. base64.b16encode(os.urandom(8)) will give you a 64-bit, filename-safe, as- close-to-random-as-reasonable suffix that should be long enough to make it brute-force-proof :)

The same reasoning applies to the cron job (I presume) that is cleaning your files - that's something you have to remember to set up for future (re-)deployments.

Edit: I'd also like to add that showing your code on HN takes bravery and this is, in fact, a neat tool that solves a problem I really wish _didn 't_ exist. So, good work on both counts :)

<comment><USER13> Or use secrets.token_urlsafe [https://docs.python.org/3/library/secrets.html#secrets.token...](https://docs.python.org/3/library/secrets.html#secrets.token_urlsafe)

<comment><USER12> Hey thanks - somehow, I entirely missed this being a Thing in the stdlib in 3. :) I've used it in my PR on baicunko's repo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Great you decided to share the source code, but then I was able to see that you let the admin session enabled. you can disable that on production

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4845239/how-can-i- disabl...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4845239/how-can-i-disable- djangos-admin-in-a-deployed-project-but-keep-it-for-local-de)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I will implement this once the traffic from HackerNews decreases a bit (server is getting totally hammered).

Still there's no admin user configured so it's safe

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Not to detract from this, because it is brilliant, and I'll definitely use in the future as a last resort.

Before resorting to this, I've found that if I convert the PDF to an image, and send it as a TIFF file, that is usually what the organization's people are looking for. I haven't had to do that for years now.

On the extremely rare occasions someone asks if I signed it on "real paper" (lol), I say with a straight face, "yep, I'm a computer guy, I have a really good scanner and image software". I do. It's just gathering dust. Last time that happened was about 5 years ago.

Over 20 years ago, I wrote my signature in thick, black Sharpie across an entire letter-sized, landscape-orientation page, scanned it with the highest resolution scanner I could cadge at the time (600 dpi, wooo!), laboriously cleaned it up, added an alpha channel, then even more laboriously vectorized it. Ever since then, dropping my signature into PDF's has worked except for those situations where a physical, wet-signed notarized document was required.

At first I took to the trouble to convert the resultant PDF into TIFFs and digitally sign them. Then with some experimentation I found that flattened and stripped PDFs without the digital signature were accepted without comment. Further experimentation revealed to me that only developers like us could even tell the difference, and plain PDF's where I dropped the signature into them are accepted these days.

Now, I use an Acrobat DC stamp that I converted from the vectorized form, and haven't touched the old bitmap or vectorized versions in years. Ironically, the most secure option of digital signatures gave me the most problems.

</comment><comment><USER16> Impressed to see this is your first open source project! What a fantastic blend of simplicity, technology, and wit.

I love it.

Original (was PDF): [https://i.imgur.com/v5nn1ql.png](https://i.imgur.com/v5nn1ql.png)

Processed: [https://www.scanyourpdf.com/media/Scan_2020512_wegb.pdf](https://www.scanyourpdf.com/media/Scan_2020512_wegb.pdf)

<comment><USER17> uploaded again: [https://www.scanyourpdf.com/media/Scan_2020512_oqkk.pdf](https://www.scanyourpdf.com/media/Scan_2020512_oqkk.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I can't believe that I'm saying this but this is soooo needed. It's ridiculous to me how many organizations still require hand-signed copies as if that is somehow a deterrent to anything.

<comment><USER19> I have to submit my work hours in an excel sheet. There is a section for "Signature". I didn't put anything since it's an electronic file and my email sending the file should serve as a "signature". However, my manager insisted I use a cursive font to type out my signature.

<comment><USER20> What if your signature can't be spelled (mine doesn't mean anything, it's just random symbol) ? Ridiculous

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Not saying this site is, but it makes me think of all the (less legit) file conversion websites which are basically portals to harvest your documents (or your aging parents' documents that they don't otherwise know how to convert), and you later find they appear on crappy sites like Scribd. Or worse.

<comment><USER22> I use these to 'accidentally' upload marketing collateral. Got some clickbacks through unique UTMs so I know it works.

<comment><USER23> Any chance you could elaborate a bit? This sounds interesting but I'm not in the know enough to read between the lines.

You were trying to see if someone was sniffing the documents uploaded (and confirmed they were).... or you realized you could use them as a vector though which others would post your materials on websites elsewhere (and they did)?

<comment><USER22> The latter. It goes all over the place, so that's cool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I find that digital books are simply too perfect. There should be pdf fonts where there are maybe 10 incantations of each character, and the display:

1\. picks one incantation randomly for each display 2\. slightly and randomly alters the position/rotation of each character 3\. adds a tiny blotch now and then

Like the print in a real book, especially ones printed before 1970.

I also suggest that the background be an actual scanned image of a blank piece of paper. Those "paper color" backgrounds are too perfect. Take some blank pages out of an older book sometime and scan them, and you'll see what I mean.

<comment><USER25> Most of the "book simulation" features I've seen (background textures, page turn animations, the like) have come across as gimmicky and useless, meanwhile digital books tend to still suffer from conceptually simple formatting problems like poor responsive text reflow or baking detailed vector figures into tiny JPEGs.

I'd settle for "too perfect" in a heartbeat.

<comment><USER24> I've sent many suggestions to the Kindle people of things they could improve on the Kindle, all of which were very simple to do. The years go by, they've done exactly 0 of them.

One of them, for example, was an option to eliminate the margin in a pdf display. The pdf already has a margin, so there's the pdf margin plus the margin the ereader puts around the pdf. This significantly reduces the number of pixels displaying information.

<comment><USER26> Making PDF display better doesn't make them any money.

<comment><USER27> More likely, there are multiple sev5 issues for it in the ticket system that nobody will _ever_ get around to implementing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Haha, great job. There's also something to be said for the grim humour of how technology led us to this point.

Sadly, I'd also be extremely wary of sending the kind of documents that I need to print out and sign through some server-side black box.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I totally agree. That's why I made the code public so you can see what's being run. A friend very privacy-minded told me maybe a desktop app could be used by those who don't want to upload their documents so that's something I'm currently exploring

<comment><USER29> > made the code public so you can see what's being run

The thing is, sharing a repository does not prove that the server is running that same code. And someone worried about their document security wouldn't run some random binary locally either, because it could send the document off to a server. They would run the source code locally after reading it, which sharing the repository allows for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Suggestion: Include some before/after examples

<comment><USER31> This. I had no idea what this did until I read a couple of HN-comments. The short introduction could mean a couple of things:

Just downgrading the pdf? Looking for a signature-like part and turns this to pseduo-handwritten characters, maybe changing the color? Something completely different?

Naturally, I did not want to upload a potentially confidential document to some random webservice.

I actually had a pdf file containing several pages of "Lorem ipsum" that I needed for another thing, but I deleted it yesterday because I was done with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I've extracted the oneliner command that runs this into a gist of a simple bash script. I don't want to send my PDFs to an unknown server. Also modified a bit (density and output compression) to reduce file size. [https://gist.github.com/jduckles/29a7c5b0b8f91530af5ca3c22b8...](https://gist.github.com/jduckles/29a7c5b0b8f91530af5ca3c22b897e10)

<comment><AUTHOR> Great idea, I will probably include your gist in the original GitHub mentioning you

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Neat site, but is this really necessary? I switched to digital-only PDFs (edit online & slap in image of signature) a long time ago, without doing any obfuscation to make them look "real", and I've never gotten any pushback from the various government agencies, banks, insurance companies etc that insist on signed & scanned forms.

<comment><USER34> I tried to get a refund from MyProtein about 18 months ago because my order never arrived. I filled in the refund pdf and slapped on a previously scanned copy of my signature that's stored in the MacOS Preview app. They rejected it and said it had to be my real signature. I was really annoyed with them and haven't shopped there since.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> It looks like what is being used for the transformation is:

1) set to grayscale (optional), 2) add blur, 3) slight rotational tilt, 4) add gaussian blur (?)

You can go one further by randomly adding tiny artifacts (ie. specks) to add even more realism. Maybe even a simulated crease in a corner.

<comment><AUTHOR> I will check regarding artifact. Also someone else mentioned to add random rotational tilt per page to ensure it looks more "legit"

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This is cool and would be useful from time to time with some stupid organisations that insist for some reason on full scanning.

Perhaps one suggestion. Can you update your documentation a bit to make it easier for someone to be able to implement it themselves? There's not much about that on the Github and I would guess some people would rather run their own locally.

</comment><comment><USER37> Apparently I'm the only person on HN that doesn't understand what a "scanned look" means, and the author doesn't provide any images to illustrate. Could someone enlighten me?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure! I tried to simulate the print, sign and scan of documents to avoid having to do it.

Sample PDF: [https://campustecnologicoalgeciras.es/wp- content/uploads/201...](https://campustecnologicoalgeciras.es/wp- content/uploads/2017/07/OoPdfFormExample.pdf)

Output PDF: [https://scanyourpdf.com/media/Scan_2020513_gtqh.pdf](https://scanyourpdf.com/media/Scan_2020513_gtqh.pdf)

EDIT: Forgot to mention that a before and after will be included in the website as it has been mentioned multiple times as a great way of showing what the website does!

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I live in Germany and I never had anyone telling me that a PDF signed digitally wasn't enough, especially if they expect you to e-mail it back to them. Is this a US problem?

<comment><USER39> Just had it in Germany with an application to a bank (DKB). Digitally signed one was rejected. I need to print on paper, sign and then scan. Signing the PDF in an iPad app was not OK.

<comment><USER38> Oh, interesting, then I guess I was just lucky. DKB is indeed well known for being quite old-school. I'll add that in my case the need for a printed and hand-signed copy was always connected to shipping the document or faxing it. Never through email.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> What I do, is print the PDF as image, with 60% jpg quality. JPG artifacts make it look like normal quality scan.

I have my 3-4 copies of signatures as font file, along with initials.

</comment><comment><USER41> Is this project different in some way from many already existing solutions that do the same?

I like that it is open source and in theory possible to self host since I really wouldn't want to upload my documents anywhere.

I would really like to know if a similar solution exists that is very easy to run locally or if it runs in the browser it does everything client-side?

<comment><AUTHOR> I like to think this solution is way more friendly than using terminal for 99% of people. What others have suggested is to develop a stand-alone app for more private documents which can't be sent somewhere else

<comment><USER41> I didn't mean the terminal. Typing "make pdf look like scanned" into google returns me many websites with same functionality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Your convert and gs mastery is truly impressive, great job and great project.

</comment><comment><USER43> Slightly related: add artificial coffee stains to LaTeX documents: [http://hanno-rein.de/archives/349](http://hanno-rein.de/archives/349)

</comment><comment><USER44> I believe printing, signing and scanning should be a punishable crime. It has a terrible impact on accessibility, as the whole text layer of the PDF is lost and it becomes unreadable for screen readers.

</comment><comment><USER45> Only semi-related, but I thought their was an open source PDF-flowing tool featured on hacker news a while back (that turned PDF into responsive HTML). Anyone know of something like that?

</comment><comment><USER46> Really question is in some cases, you still need to sign your signature and then scan the document again, I hope this website can let you add signature automatically...

</comment><comment><USER47> For signing docs I open PDF in Illustrator and place my signature image then save and send. Are they really looking for signs of document having been scanned?

</comment><comment><USER48> Pretty cool!

What I normally do in a pinch is use Google Drive.. it has a "scan" option that you can take a picture with your phone.

<comment><USER49> FWIW the output can be significantly better using PhotoScan app, also from Google, no idea why they don't integrate them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Needs options for adding dog ears and a shadow cast from the top of the page, and maybe stapler holes.

</comment><comment><USER51> Funny thing is, some countries require documents to be signed on paper and then scanned. E.g. Japan.

</comment><comment><USER52> What are the legitimate uses of this? The only uses I can think of are less than kosher.

<comment><USER53> Maybe you are at home and you need to sign something, but you don't have a printer and scanner because its 2020 and those are seldom needed. You can use this and move on with your life, or drive to a Kinkos or other place that will let you print and scan for a small fee. The latter may be a waste of time.

Wait, what less than kosher method were you thinking?

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> That's a pretty cool project. Do you mind explaining your deployment process?

<comment><AUTHOR> I will include a more in-depth deployment process in Github to simplify implementing this by anyone

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Can this be done client side so the PDF does not need to be uploaded anywhere?

<comment><AUTHOR> I will implement a desktop stand-alone app for those private documents which can't be uploaded somewhere else!

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> can you put an example picture side by side, right on the frontpage

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I think it's a great idea. I'll work on this through the weekend and update the website with other feedback received. Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Seriously, how stupid it is that this can be actually useful.

</comment><comment><USER58> You may want to purge the key in your repo (settings.py)

</comment><comment><USER59> Hav somebody download ROBLOX on a school computer

</comment><comment><USER60> Why not deleting the file after 1 download?

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought someone might want to share their document with someone else. I may include in a future release a max number of downloads (i.e. 2 or 30 minutes and then delete)

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Also semi-related: [http://ismycreditcardstolen.com/](http://ismycreditcardstolen.com/)

</comment><comment><USER62> I just edit files with masterpdf under the linux free version, and send them back with a transparent png of my signature merged. Good enough.

</comment><comment><USER63> example on landing page would be great

</comment><comment><USER64> Genius. Nice work.

</comment><comment><USER59> have somebody download Roblox on school compoter

</comment><comment><USER65> Obligatory xkcd reference: [https://xkcd.com/1683/](https://xkcd.com/1683/)

</comment><comment><USER66> To OP:

the server is down.

<comment><AUTHOR> Seems OK on my side. What are you seeing?

<comment><USER66> it works fine now.

Just one comment: maybe you could randomize the rotation angle so that all pages don't look the same.</comment></comment></comment>


"I'm not a climate change guy, but ": Farmers reckon with new reality - <AUTHOR> Watch the video as well. What's fascinating is that the records of the army corps show climate change, but the interviewee cannot "speculate." Similarly, many of the farmers see "climate change" but struggle to say those words, even as some start adapting.<p>https://www.cbsnews.com/news/climate-reckoning-in-the-heartland-cbsn-originals/<p>>Walking over soggy lifeless crops, Brett Adams, a fifth generation Nebraska farmer, paused to catch his breath. Under the dark grey clouds of the Midwestern spring, he was forced to come to terms with an alarming reality: 80% of his farmland was under freezing floodwater.<p>...<p>>The floods damaged public infrastructure and led to the loss of crops, livestock and the evacuation of thousands of people from their homes. Nebraska's governor said that in that state alone alone, the cost of damage has surpassed $1.3 billion.<p>...<p>>Modern agriculture and food production aren't just impacted by climate change — they also contribute to it. According to the EPA, more than 8% of all U.S greenhouse gas emissions in 2017 came from the agriculture sector.<p>>While some farmers in conservative parts of the country may be reluctant to define increasingly extreme weather as climate change, Christensen says with each storm, more attitudes start to change. <comment><USER2> Meanwhile, the most recent heatwave in Europe is attributable to climate change: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/07/26/european-h...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/07/26/european- heat-wave-bears-fingerprint-climate-change/)</comment>


A Post-PIPA Post - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/01/a-post-pipa-post.html

<comment><USER2> > But before that happens, the content industry, as represented by the MPAA > and the RIAA, needs to understand that a litigation heavy invasive approach > will not fly and they need to forget about that framework and come ready to > come up with an entirely new one. I hope they can do that.

The problem is that it is not actually about piracy. It is about control. The MPAA and RIAA want the absolute ability to control your every move so that they, and they alone, are your sole suppliers of content. Because without that control, they can't attach themselves to your wallet and extract money from you for the content you consume.

Watch this (only 14 minutes long). It will make it all clear: [http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/defend_our_freedom_to_share...](http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/defend_our_freedom_to_share_or_why_sopa_is_a_bad_idea.html)</comment>


Poet: I can't answer questions on Texas standardized tests about my own poems - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/01/07/poet-i-cant-answer-questions-on-texas-standardized-tests-about-my-own-poems/ <comment><USER2> If she had known the answer, would that make the question any better?

I remember back when I was in high school, I always sort of assumed that the authors of the poems we were tested on wouldn't be able to answer the ridiculous questions on our assessments. But even if they did, I've never been able to figure out what skills these questions were testing. If poems are open to interpretation, isn't it reasonable to think that two equally skilled readers would arrive at different conclusions? Which is to say: Is the answer really objective?

In any case, the state of standardized testing is miserable, and unfortunately from all accounts I have heard it is worse abroad. I don't think this should be much of a surprise to anyone.

<comment><USER3> > If she had known the answer, would that make the question any better?

If anyone can answer what the 'correct' interpretation of a piece of writing is, it's the author. If they can not, well maybe the authors intent wasn't what the questions are asking.

Of course this is a fundamental problem in the way we teach and test literature. No piece of work has a single meaning because meaning is found in the merging of the work and the viewers background. What we teach is that works have one correct interpretation and if you do not read it that way, you are wrong.

<comment><USER4> _> If anyone can answer what the 'correct' interpretation of a piece of writing is, it's the author._

To echo the other comments questioning that premise, there's also the famous Isaac Asimov anecdote:

 _Isaac Asimov often repeated an anecdote based on this: He once sat in on a class where the topic of discussion was one of his own works. (He did this in the back of a large lecture hall so he could remain semi-anonymous). After the class ended, he went up and introduced himself to the teacher, saying that he had found the teacher 's interpretation of the story interesting, though it really wasn't what he had meant at all. The teacher's response: "Just because you wrote it, what makes you think you have the slightest idea what it's about?"_

<comment><USER5> Asimov being Asimov, he then went on to write a story about Shakespeare being summoned from the past to take a college course on his plays. He failed, of course.

<comment><USER6> professors teach to their opinion

i took a shakespeare course at university where we were asked to read troilus and cressida and compare it to its source troilus and criseyde by chaucer

i wrote that i disliked the piece because it just read like someone who recently got burned in love venting irrationally, noting that i liked shakespeare's version more because he gives the last word to pandarus(o) who uses it to comically complain about his health and i felt this beautifully subverted the assumed tragedy the characters felt subject to in their stories.. woe is me!

i failed the exam

frustrated i went looking for evidence to defend my claim(i).. though contrary to the linked comic i did find some interesting notes

first off chaucer was a source for shakespeare, but hardly the source of the work

chaucer's main source was boccaccio's il filastrato.. which was based off an earlier version known as le roman de troie by benoît de sainte-maure

but the interesting bit comes from boccaccio's version(ii) because the story itself is only 8 cantos long, even the wikipedia page says the work itself is only 8 cantos long!(iii), but there is an additional canto, a ninth canto, wherein the author, boccaccio, addresses the reader and apologises for writing the poem and states he's unsure where it came from but asserts that he was recently dumped

(o) [http://shakespeare.mit.edu/troilus_cressida/full.html](http://shakespeare.mit.edu/troilus_cressida/full.html)

(i) [https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2012/01/06](https://www.penny- arcade.com/comic/2012/01/06)

(i/2) [https://store.penny-arcade.com/products/agree-with-me- tee](https://store.penny-arcade.com/products/agree-with-me-tee)

(ii) [http://www.yorku.ca/inpar/filostrato_griffin.pdf](http://www.yorku.ca/inpar/filostrato_griffin.pdf)

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

front page of reddit right now.. [https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/5mr6ws/shakespeare_i...](https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/5mr6ws/shakespeare_in_school/) ;P

<comment><USER7> Why did you omit capital letters and periods and misuse ellipses in a post which attacks academic English? These choices would be annoying enough in any post but for this one in particular they undermine your credibility.

<comment><USER8> You've just called into question a race car driver's driving ability because you saw them not use their turn signal.

Capitalization and punctuation shouldn't be your signals for quality in a comment on Chaucer and Shakespeare and literary history.

I'm demonstrating one natural outcome of your criticism here by using proper punctuation, capitalization, and other grammatical minutiae while knowing not the damnedest thing about the quality or literary history of _Troilus and Cressida_.

<comment><USER7> > You've just called into question a race car driver's driving ability because > you saw them not use their turn signal.

Note that I used the word "choice," indicating that I understood it to be a conscious decision rather than a lack of competence.

> Capitalization and punctuation shouldn't be your signals for quality in a > comment on Chaucer and Shakespeare and literary history.

What makes you think I used them as exclusive signals? My claim wasn't that bad grammar made the parent post bad, it was that bad grammar had a negative contribution towards the overall credibility of the post.

> I'm demonstrating one natural outcome of your criticism...

Your reading comprehension might leave something to be desired, but the fact that a weak building may be built on a strong foundation does not imply that a strong building may have a weak foundation. To be clear: I am referring to your "example," not justifier's post, because I do not believe that _justifier_ has a weak foundation, at least not with respect to grammar, which brings us back to the question of _why_.

Purposefully employing bad grammar in a post about English is a signal both that the writer holds strong and nontraditional opinions about English _and_ that (s)he lacks the persuasive tact to fight one battle at a time. The way I see it, either quality alone could have led to a justified failing grade on an essay for reasons that have nothing to do with the veracity of its core claim.

<comment><USER8> Alright, I wrote my reply to you in good humor, but you've clearly taken it personally, so I'll write more plainly.

You're essentially bikeshedding [1] here. 'justifier' wrote an interesting comment that had some actual substance to it, and now you and I are engaged here in a pissing match over the value of its grammar and punctuation, and we're doing that because neither of us is well-enough educated on the actual topic of 'justifier's comment to respond substantively to it but yet we both want to express an opinion about it.

It's an ugly, ugly habit that I see _a lot_ in HN comments, whether it's in reply to a long-form essay or in reply to a newly announced startup or a new programming language. It discourages comments and participation from more thoughtful people because they can expect whatever they write to get henpecked by other people who, having no mastery of the actual subject matter, turn instead to the most trivial-to-understand bits and pieces.

I picked on you at random to try to discourage that behavior a little. And since I'm contributing to that problem now myself, this'll be my last word about it today.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I read parts of the article, skipped a bit, read the questions 32-36 and her remarks. And I don't think there is anything wrong with the questions.

Maybe she's just trying too hard to make a point, but in many cases it seems like she just can't read or doesn't understand the question(?).

E.g. 36 - "The poet reveals the speaker's feelings mainly by –", then she goes on to say that most of the answers are viable, but clearly the question says "mainly", indicating you are supposed to choose the "F using similes and metaphors to describe them" since there's much more of those.

About 35 - "The imagery in lines 16 through 19 helps the reader understand –" she says that

 _" And of course there's an argument to be made for A, I did shift into this mood TODAY."_

But the question is about lines 16-19, which don't mention any attitude changes, so A clearly can't be the right answer.

Etc., etc.

I'm sorry, but being the author doesn't and shouldn't guarantee a perfect score.

<comment><USER10> The problem isn't that the author doesn't know the answers, it's that _the test is looking for 1 correct answer_. The point of reading and analyzing poetry is in the process and being able to explain your reasoning coherently.

<comment><USER11> I uh, apologize in advance for the wall of text. It started out shorter.

# TL;DR

\- I don't think the questions are unreasonable \- I'm not surprised the poet says she can't answer them \- I agree with you that the point of analysis is the process, but that gets tested in _writing_ assessments \- _reading_ assessments get bad rap because people forget reading/understanding the questions is just as important as reading/understanding the texts

# BODY

Before reading the whole article (so before reading her analysis of the questions near the end), I followed the source links from the first section to try answering the 5 questions about "A Real Case" myself.

I got them all correct and (discounting the initial time taken to read the poem) spent more time scrolling up and down in the pdf to refer back to the text than I did thinking about the questions.

This is a reading assessment for 7th graders. Perhaps all the commotion in the article and in the news and in this thread is because people are assuming that it is assessing 7th graders' abilities to read and understand poetry. I don't think this is true at all. I think it's assessing 7th graders' abilities to read and understand questions.

The question of whether the ability to read and understand poetry is of lasting value may be up in the air, but the ability to read and understand questions is an essential communication skill in modern life, imo. The material the questions are _about_ is - not quite incidental, but honestly no more than half of the picture.

The single question that I spent more time on than all the others combined was 35. Maybe my approach to answering a question that I considered poorly worded (at first) might be of interest.

Here it is, with the stanza it concerns included and the highlighted lines marked:

      --> My mood's as welcome as
      --> incoming dog breath,
      --> or a terminal case of split ends.
      --> I sparkle like a dust rag,
          I could attract mosquitoes -
          maybe - not friends.

      35) The imagery in these lines helps the reader understand-

          A) the shift in the speaker's attitude
          B) the speaker's unpleasantness
          C) why the speaker has no friends
          D) what the speaker thinks of others

And the issue there was that one of the two possible answers, B, implies the other, C. If the speaker is unpleasant, that is a perfectly good reason for the speaker to have no friends.

I eventually decided on B for two reasons:

1) Friends are only ever mentioned _after_ the highlighted lines. To put it in programming terms (sorry!) a first-time reader streaming the poem (i.e., the way most people read) would lack a mental "parser" labelled "now the speakers's talking about friends" with which to process the highlighted lines. My experience is that most straightforward writers (the ones we can reasonably expect 7th graders to parse) do not expect their readers to manage their own mental "heap" of unexplained information and compare all of its contents to each new bit of information received as reading proceeds. When unexplained information _does_ come along ("Where did my bike go? I parked it right here!") it's usually clearly labelled as such, so the reader need only maintain the heap of "information the author labelled for me as unknown". This is both less work for the reader than figuring out the labels on their own, and requires them to remember less. When this sort of labeling is not done, it's called a mystery novel.

[Aside: of course, writers who are not targeting 7th graders can and do write however they want; a favorite example of mine is Neal Stephenson, who seems to take perverse pleasure in quietly building up a narrative out of elements that he introduces so familiarly and with so little fanfare or detail that you swear he must have explained this thing a few pages back and you just missed it somehow, but after checking the previous 50 pages you can't find any mention of it so you eventually give up and continue and 150 pages later you read a paragraph that tumbles around in your head for a few seconds and then it clicks snugly into place in your heap and completely illuminates the question you had earlier. And I love him for it.]

2) Most of the rest of the poem is composed of atomic ideas expressed in one or two lines (with the exception of the first stanza that keeps the "sickness" ball bouncing for 5 lines). To match the rest of the poem, it seemed more likely the highlighted stanza expressed four nearly-independent thoughts: I smell bad, I'm irritating, I'm boring, and I'm unattractive. In that structure, the concept of friends is restricted to the "scope" of the final thought, and _only_ used to illustrate just how unattractive the speaker is. None of the other thoughts are involved. As such, C is unrelated to the highlighted lines but B is still a good match.

Of course, most of this was unconscious when I was doing it. I wrote down B with about 70% confidence and kept going, because that's what you do on a timed test. Now that I put my reasoning it all down on paper, I'm much more confident in the result. (It helps that it turned out to be correct!)

If I recall correctly, I got a perfect score on the reading section of the SAT. I helped several of the international students at my school study for that section specifically, and my top recommendation was that they read books. I imagine that I'm to the left of the bell curve of reading speed/comprehension; I had read Ivanhoe by age seven or eight and the Lord of the Rings by age nine. (the hard part was getting started; after my mother had read the first two or three chapters to me, I got hooked and read the rest myself.)

Still, I have no aspirations as a poet or author. Likewise, I'm sure there are many superb poets who are quite terrible at analytical thinking. If poet was truly unable to answer the test questions confidently, I'm not surprised. On the other hand, if the poet could actually answer the questions just fine but was being hyperbolical to frame a strong point about how test writers are ignoring author intent and the result is bad test questions, that would not surprise me either. (After all, it makes sense that an author would take the conservative position in the "death of the author" discussion!)

You [my parent commenter, if you're still here!] stressed that the the problem with the test is that it has 1 correct answer for each question, and so cannot accurately test the test-taker's ability to perform a process for which the point is _not_ the result, but the ability to justify the validity one's process.

I agree with you!

But testing someone's ability to justify their analysis is called a _writing_ assessment. What we are dealing with is a _reading_ assessment.

This assessment measures the test-taker's ability to internalize the analysis process performed by the test-writer, apply that process to the text themselves, and demonstrate that they were successful by accurately predicting which conclusion the test-writer arrived at.

In other words, this is testing the test-taker's ability to accurately and productively process thoughts that originated outside of themselves. This is something that 7th graders are not very good at without practice. (This is one contributor, I think, to why bullying is common at those ages - kids have not yet learned to empathize.) This is a good skill to learn, and a good skill to test.

<comment><USER12> to somewhat illustrate your point regarding parsing.

I didnt read the article. I read question 35. I read the four lines you highlighted. I read the four potential answers. I reread the four lines, and then reread the answers. I chose B near immediately. Only after I read lines 5 and 6 did I realize C was even relevant. Even after reading C, I came to the conclusion you eloquently illustrated.

>In that structure, the concept of friends is restricted to the "scope" of the final thought, and only used to illustrate just how unattractive the speaker is.

I also agree with your general thesis. The poem is irrelevant, the test is testing your ability to parse instructions, not just poems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Predicted, mostly, by Isaac Asimov in 1954:

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

(TL;DR with spoiler: Time machine brings Shakespeare back to the current age, where he takes a class on his own work and is flunked.)

<comment><USER14> I've been only a tangential reader of Asimov, though definitely respectful of his contributions to the literary canon. This sounds fantastic to check out, thank you & also for the summary preview.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > I'm just down with a sniffly case/of sudden-self-loathing-syndrome … an > unexpected extra serving/ of just-for-now-self-hate.

How do these terrible poets even make it on to the curriculum / standardized- tests?

The author suggests:

> My poems are a whole lot cheaper than Mary Oliver's or Jane Kenyon's, so > there's that.

What about all the classics in the public domain?! I read a lot independently as a kid but I recall that we didn't read a single English 'classic' in school until grade 7 or 8 (everything else was scholastic co. for teens / young adult junk..)

I don't have a particular side to take on the standardized testing debate, but it's probably worth mentioning that countries with extremely successful public education systems (China, USSR) used a great deal of it -- so at the least that's probably _not_ the problem with the US public education system.

<comment><USER16> > How do these terrible poets even make it on to the curriculum / > standardized-tests?

Snobbish much?

<comment><USER17> We went from Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost to something that sounds like lyrics from a '90s grunge band. I don't quite think OP's criticism is unwarranted.

<comment><USER14> If a lot of the people who criticize using old dead white people as literary texts - which, having worked in Education I know is a "hegemony" hot-button issue - it's not like other brilliant works translated (or not) could be used. Neruda, Marquez...they're completely deserving classics and, I guess the real problem here, just as hard to study and work through as any of the other traditional texts. Kids don't like hard, never have, but that's the essence of education and brain growth - challenges.

<comment><USER16> So let's go straight into calculus because kids should be exposed to the good stuff, and skip going through the developmentally appropriate material that prepares for understanding and absorbing the advanced material.

I'd like to see some scientific studies that prove that teaching the classics, and skipping the "terrible" stuff, is a useful way to teach literary skills, as opposed to pushing a class (snobbery) agenda.

<comment><USER18> Why are those classics developmentally inappropriate? When I was a kid growing up, we read Pushkin - undeniably one of the greats, but very accessible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I thought a lot of what we learned about poems in school was overly prescriptive, and my friends and I could often invent and justify other meanings. But, unlike with multiple choice, in assignments and exams we were supposed to do exactly that. Exploring what something "might mean" is one of the ways to get into a poem. I mean, I still thought that how we studied poetry was not a very good way. But now I see it could have been much worse!

<comment><USER20> Indeed. I don't know why that sort of thing is on a standardized test anyway. We are having enough problems ensuring that all students have basic functional literacy.

If they can read a paragraph from a credit card application and understand it, that will go a long way towards increasing their overall successful functioning in society. Let them do poetry interpretation on their own time and according to their own interest.

I'm not saying that schools shouldn't teach poetry, but it shouldn't be on a standardized test either. What's the point? You want to expose kids to culture, but it may not stick, and that's OK.

<comment><USER21> That which isn't tested, isn't taught. This is particularly the case if the test and the curriculum are sold by the same vendor.

I could see a scenario where "elite" parents complain that their kids spent a year in school being drilled on reading credit card applications, at the expense of things like literature and poetry. (I'd probably be one of those parents, and in my locale, educated parents are constantly complaining that the school curriculum has too much drill work and not enough liberal arts). So, in order to broaden the curriculum, the tests have to somehow be broadened.

I suspect that the best education is also the hardest to test. There will always be a conflict between education and testing.

<comment><USER22> "There will always be a conflict between education and testing"

It's pretty much inevitable, if the results of the testing have consequences, for teacher/student/school system/etc. that what is taught will often excessively focus on testing outcomes.

Unfortunately, it's hard not to do this to at least some degree at scale. Without standardized testing of some sort, there isn't a lot of feedback for how well the process is working and you more or less fall back on trust the individual teachers and schools and everything will be just fine--which isn't the case in the main.

<comment><USER21> It seems like maybe we're already back at that point. We went from trusting the teachers and schools, to adopting a test that measures household income, to hoping that we can trust the teachers and schools to educate our kids in spite of the tests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> In the comedy movie "Back to School", wealthy business man Thornton Melon hires Kurt Vonnegut to write an essay for him on Kurt Vonnegut for English Literature class. The professor knows Melon did not write the essay and tells him "Whoever _did_ write this doesn't know the first thing about Kurt Vonnegut!." He got an F.

<comment><USER24> [ _removed and replaced by this cat:_ [http://i.imgur.com/f1yeHVO.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/f1yeHVO.jpg)]

<comment><USER25> I think because you're missing the point - which _was_ on topic.

It wasn't about the "F", it was about the teacher's reply to KV's essay about himself, saying that the author (KV) didn't know anything about KV .

Missing that wouldn't cause the downvotes on its own - but combined with comment about the offtopicness probably did it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Why the hell for-profit companies are tasked to set up the tests? This will invariably cause disasters like this. As the article says, first they will chose only the cheapest material available. Next, they will chose cheapest employees they can possibly get by to write the tests. They might even outsource whole thing to "reduce costs". For-profits may possibly work only when end goal is well measurable, system can't be rigged and monopolies are viciously squashed. This almost never happens in education (and prison management) because of layers of bureaucracies. The problem here is not standardized tests but the fact that test creation is outsourced to for- profits. Once a for-profit gets in to driving seat they will do everything possible to make sure they can't be driven out. They have already made requirements that their test questions are "copyrighted" and can't be published or even examined by 3rd parties and on so on. In other countries, they usually have committees of senior teachers who then sets up tests with mutual agreement for token extra pay. Why do you need for-profit for setting tests?

</comment><comment><USER27> I agree that it's useful to expose children to literature and art, but it feels like there's no way to objectively test it...

Maybe creative writing/literature courses should give marks for the most upvotes on Reddit (kidding, but probably more objective than current methods).

<comment><USER28> An essay in which the student has to present an argument would do finely. You ask "is this a reasonable interpretation, and does the student defend this interpretation in a logical way using the available evidence?" Not perfectly objective, but doable.

Unfortunately, that's much more expensive than a multiple choice test.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Why are we testing anyone on poems? The point is to be exposed to the possibilities of inducing emotional transformation through cultural creation and consumption. What is there to test about that other than, "did you feel it? Could you make something yourself that would also feel like something was happening? Do it." There's no proper interpretation, no expert opinion worth anything at all except for the salary the expert manages to squeeze out of people overly wed to the concept of correctness.

<comment><USER30> I agree that it's ridiculous to ask a student to interpret a poem on a test and expect them to interpret it in any way that resembles the test creator's interpretation.

But there are some things about poetry that are not subjective and that are related to the art of writing it and thus worth teaching.

In particular, metre/scansion and rhyme/rhyme schemes are crucial aspects of the art that can be identified objectively. (Analogous to expecting a music student to recognize syncopation or read musical notation.)

You can also test recognition of metaphor and simile without requiring interpretation thereof. With allegory you get into issues of cultural exposure to the source of the allegory, but if that source is something else in the curriculum you could ask a student to identify the allegory without interpreting it subjectively.

And of course, many of these techniques are used by effective writers of prose (which we generally hope for students to become) - just typically more sparingly.

You can also (as with visual arts and music) teach students to identify poetry of different styles or from different eras.

Basically, you can teach and you can objectively test recognition of a lot of techniques used by poets. These standardized tests may have been ridiculous, but that doesn't mean that including poetry on a standardized test at all has to be ridiculous.

<comment><USER31> That study has a description: squeezing all the life out of poetry, leaving a dry meaningless husk. Its possible to recognize poetry for what it is, without deconstructing it to death. I'd like to take _that_ class.

<comment><USER30> But understanding those concepts gives you the tools to construct and improve poetry of your own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> > [do you] remember the question about a "talking pineapple" on a New York > test in 2012?

This story about "The Hare and the Pineapple" seems to have been debunked credulously some time ago: [http://ideas.time.com/2012/05/04/what-everyone- missed-on-the...](http://ideas.time.com/2012/05/04/what-everyone-missed-on- the-pineapple-question/)

I can of course understand that it hints to the sentiment of resentment about the state of standardized testing.

> The fable described several animals assuming that the pineapple must have a > trick up its sleeve that would enable the immobile fruit to win the race, > and when they discovered that it didn't, they ate it. Test-takers were > asked: Why did they eat the pineapple? The correct answer: because the > animals were annoyed. And who was the wisest of the animals? An owl that was > never mentioned in the passage [of the Daily News article].

> The item [The Hare and the Pineapple] went through a regular review process > and has been used since 2004 in Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Illinois, New > Mexico, and Florida as well as Chicago, Fort Worth and Houston. (Alabama > used it for seven years, Delaware for five.) And in the parlance of the > industry, the questions "perform" as they are supposed to — both in New York > and nationally. That means it reliably measures the ability of students to > read a passage and answer questions or make inferences from it and that the > series of questions can differentiate between higher-performing and lower- > performing students.

</comment><comment><USER33> The analogy is variable naming.

The skill they're testing in language arts on standardized tests is similar to skill of naming variables, objects, functions, in programming. Famously called one of the only 'hard' problems in coding.

Sure you could use your own house rules in your code and the program would execute perfectly. And sure you could follow some mechanistic system: CamelCase for classes, snake_case for functions.

But how descriptive, how much to abbreviate, how much to abstract into a concatenated phrase representing an algorithm _is_ subjective, but worthwhile to learn nonetheless. Knowing the correct answer to this multiple choice means noticing the context, and picking out what matters the most.

</comment><comment><USER34> It reminds me a story of an Japanese test. A Japanese school was going to test student from the text of Grave of the Fireflies by Akiyuki Nosaka. It so happens there was a daughter of the author in the student. She came back home and ask her father what was he thinking when he write that novel. The father, who is also the author, said, "I was trying so hard to meet the deadline."

So she answered so in the tomorrow's test "Explain the intent of the author when he write this novel", and she failed.

</comment><comment><USER35> There is a wonderfull joke in talmud when two rabbis argue about some problem. One says: Let's call Jehova and ask him directly! So Jehova comes but the other rabbi tells him: God go away, you did your thing now let us wise men discuss about this. God says oh my god you are right and he leaves.

<comment><USER36> The original is much more evocative: [http://jhom.com/topics/voice/bat_kol_bab.htm](http://jhom.com/topics/voice/bat_kol_bab.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Seems to be about on-par with the way high-school English is taught, honestly (at least in my area). I remember my English teacher dedicating a full class period to the FIRST TWO WORDS in "The Scarlet Letter" (the words being "A throng"). I found it absolutely nonsensical and told her as much, but even though much of the class agreed, she shut down our complaints and kept teaching this way.

Later in the year she began scrutinizing yet another book at the molecular level, but one of the kids in our class was the son of this book's author. He ran our teacher's analysis by his father, the author, and the guy found our teacher's reasoning hilariously inaccurate.

I'm all for teaching kids literacy, but there's only so much meaning that can be gleaned from any given passage of text. At some point you're assigning meaning where there really is none, and I felt this was prevalent in some SAT questions and other standardized tests I endured during K-12. This was in a very well-regarded school district: CHCCS in North Carolina.

</comment><comment><USER38> I still can't understand how standardized testing is useful for anything. The only true result of an educational system isn't apparent until years later. I assume it's popular for political and business reasons (testing companies are all for profit) which ultimately have nothing to do with children learning.

<comment><USER39> > I still can't understand how standardized testing is useful for anything.

It's the only fair and economic way to assign limited slots in post-secondary institutions. Assigning them subjectively leads to racism and corruption (see: Harvard et al. setting Jewish and now Asian quotas and the many undeserving rich/famous students that are admitted instead)

[http://www.businessinsider.com/the-ivy-leagues-history-of- di...](http://www.businessinsider.com/the-ivy-leagues-history-of- discriminating-against-jews-2014-12)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Perhaps related, an old piece by Richards Feynman on bad physics text books: [http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm](http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm)

</comment><comment><USER41> Years ago, I volunteered with a high school drama department and helped them design and build sets, lighting, etc. At one point, I went along on a competition where they delivered a piece written by the director.

During scoring, they got near perfect marks across the board on delivery, characterization, etc... and were hammered on "interpretation of the author's work." I asked one of the judges about it at the time and was told "they obviously didn't study the author's other works to understand his intent."

Our education system is broken.. in silly and sometimes dangerous ways.

</comment><comment><USER42> I remember my teacher teaching us a poem, dissecting it line by line. It took 1 month or more to complete the poem.

On most of the lines, he was overthinking and trying to find out some sort of hidden meaning in it. It was annoying.

</comment><comment><USER43> It's the same problem as any kind of training or testing system: The people employed to build and manage it are neither in prestigious nor high paying jobs, so there is little competition for their position, and little incentive for creative, thoughtful people to fill those positions.

It actually gets worse, because the bureaucracy mires everything in so much red tape that innovation becomes all but an impossibility, as any independent thought is quickly stamped out.

So yeah, it's no wonder that the tests are written by the dim witted and unimaginative.

</comment><comment><USER44> Personally I had sort of an epiphany when I discovered tvtropes.org . I discovered a different way of analyzing a work of art. A purely descriptive approach. I find this collaborative medium attempting to decipher why something works or doesn't work in an art piece far more productive than what I was thought in school (in Romania) about about literary analysis and attempting to extract meaning from any word. I would comment more about this but I don't have the time now.

</comment><comment><USER45> Regardless of what you think of the tests, it might just be possible that writing poems and analysing them is not an identical skill. I'm pretty sure that most professional sportsmen can't analyse why they play a particular shot or pass (other than "it looked good, he was open" etc).

There's probably a separate argument about why we'd want to train generations of passable poetry critics though...

</comment><comment><USER46> cixin, your comment is presently [dead], it seems like you've posted too much since your account was created (your comments seem fine to me).

<comment><USER47> I was wondering the same about why cixin was dead. Interesting heuristic in the HN codebase there. Is it a permanent death or does it back off after a cool down?

<comment><USER48> Users with a fair amount of 'karma' can vote to bring it back (which is likely what happened here).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> _any test that questions the motivations of the author without asking the author is a big baloney sandwich_

English 101, Homework Assignment: Write a 8 page literary essay about book-X

I presented my thesis and draft to the the instructor. She told me that I was completely wrong and that this paper would receive an inadequate grade. I admit, like all my other English papers, this one was BS, too. That doesn't inherently mean it's incorrect, though. I went to the library, sifted through a bunch of academic journals (which the instructor believed to be the only legitimate source of truth, unsurprisingly), and found an article with a thesis and supporting evidence that paralleled my argument! I showed the instructor this paper, and just like that she said "oh, okay. The thesis makes sense." I received an A+ on the paper.

Informatics 101 'Social Networks', Pop quiz! "HTML is for the following... (check all that apply)"

Times up! The correct answer is "specifying the LOOK and FEEL of the webpage."

It was 2011, and the professor of this "Social Networks" class, ironically, had been throwing 'Web 2.0' all over his powerpoint slides. I politely consulted him after class, as to not embarrass him that HTML with inline styling is frowned upon, and styling should be specified in CSS stylesheets. It was a matter of principle, rather than pragmatism, that I wasn't penalized for this invalid quiz question. He responded "we can talk about JAVA and the document-object model if you'd like." I immediately dropped the course.

Oh, and he has tenure. (Fortunately in the 'Informatics' department, rather than my own Computer Science department)

My point with these two anecdotes is that in the case of the 'Social Networks' professor I could have, in theory, filed a complaint to university should the professor refuse to acknowledge the invalidity of his grading and material. The English professor asymmetrically held power. My grade is dependent on what she deems a valid interpretation. Sure there's a "rubric", but the same thesis I had went from a D to an A+ in a matter of seconds.

In both cases, I grew my distaste of academia. Despite abhorring my English class, I do appreciate nonsense literature. It satirizes the intellectuals randomly throwing around fancy words like 'Web 2.0', 'Java' and 'document- object-model' in the same sentence, the intellectuals who base validity solely on academic authority, the intellectuals who try to standardize intellect. I leave you with the poem Jabberwocky, by the master Lewis Carroll.

 _Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun

The frumious Bandersnatch!"_

<comment><USER50> " I went to the library, sifted through a bunch of academic journals (which the instructor believed to be the only legitimate source of truth, unsurprisingly), and found an article with a thesis and supporting evidence that paralleled my argument! I showed the instructor this paper, and just like that she said "oh, okay. The thesis makes sense.""

Congratulations, you just learned the difference between making unsubstantiated assertions and producing research.

<comment><USER51> This is a classic appeal from authority. Is the idea worth discussing/debating/exploring? If not, leave it. If so, explore it. But this "professor's" opinion is tied to someone else who published as the authority.

All in all, it's a great way to encourage group-think. But then again, so are most academic departments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Problem is that knowledge _can 't be measured_ because it's not a list of contents that can be checked off. Deep knowledge in one area is by its nature integrated with other areas. Thus exams and testing make as much sense as ranking authors by spelling bee.

<comment><USER28> In some sense, this problem at least indicates we're _trying_ to do something right.

Some knowledge is both necessary and testable: arithmetic, geometry, algorithmic solutions to common problems and properties of those algorithms, spelling of common words, basic grammar, many scientific facts/ideas/techniques.

The learning objectives of Common Core and other curriculum are ambitious -- they want to capture that "deep knowledge" you mention, and are often informed by input from subject matter experts.

However, the realities of modern schooling and assessment are not sufficiently resource-rich to fulfill and measure fulfillment of those standards.

<comment><USER52> Well physical quantities like length, time can be measured. Also fungible goods like wheat, oil. But knowledge is differentiated, non-homogenous and subject-specific. So it isn't measurable. Memorised facts like spellings, historical dates and common types of exam questions can be counted but these aren't useful in themselves. Knowledge is information that can _do_ things.

<comment><USER28> I feel like knowledge is one of those "I know it with I see it" type things. It can be assessed, but not systematically via a multiple choice standardized test. Which puts a lot of trust in the judgement of teachers.

Not exactly a politically viable solution in America.

<comment><USER52> "I know it with I see it". Yes indeed. One has to interact with a person to know that he knows stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> The questions are surely absurd, and common core is a disaster. But I do not understand the (self-)basing of the author. Self-hatred and self-doubt are very usual emotions for teenagers, so these poems actually are very much relatable for 7/8 grade students.

<comment><USER24> The question of that one poem of hers that she would prefer not to be used only is a small side-issue, the main issue she writes about is that many questions are made-up and arbitrary, you cannot answer them from actual knowledge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Woody Allen has covered this problem in one of his movies. This clip is under 3 minutes and worth watching in my opinion.

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sXJ8tKRlW3E](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sXJ8tKRlW3E)

</comment><comment><USER55> Tests aren't for students, they're for administrators.

When you process that view, educational systems make more sense, however tragic.

</comment><comment><USER56> If I could just change one thing in education. I would outlaw multiple choice questions.

</comment><comment><USER57> If you can answer the questions in the test correctly your level is the at least the highest level that can be measured by the test.

Why would it be a reasonable assumption that her level is the highest that can be measured? Should the test be changed so mediocre people can get the maximum score?

</comment><comment><USER58> Analysing poetry was the stupidest thing I had to do in school.

</comment><comment><USER59> jusy like with IQ tests the right answer is not the most logical or deepest, but the most naive.

<comment><USER60> That is so true. Frustrated me so much as a student, and even an adult taking interview tests as a software developer. If you happen to know more about the subject than the person who wrote the test question, frequently (or at least from time to time) you will see questions with multiple correct answers, and end up having to guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> One of the trust destroying parts of my K-12 was poetry interpretation. It became clear very quickly that we were being "given" the desired interpretation during class and not really taught to actually interpret the works.

I once challenged the head of my high school English department over the interpretation of a particular poem. They had weighed it down with layer upon layers of symbolism and interpretation but never able to answer the fundamental question of whether or not we were inventing meaning and attaching symbols and thus creating interpretation or the author intended this in his work.

I wasn't saying that our analysis wasn't important, but I still feel it's an important distinction that the pedagogy wasn't making and I got the feeling that compliance to the accepted interpretation was more desired than being able to interpret the work yourself.

Eventually I got so upset, I went and did some research and hunted down some interviews with the author which discussed the interpretation and in those interviews he explicitly called out the specific line of interpretation we were being taught as both nonsense and not at all what he meant in that particular piece and not how he generally writes.

I printed out these interviews, including revelation that the title had been added by an editor years later, made copies, highlighted the relevant sections and turned them in instead of my analysis paper and took the F. It broke all of the trust I had in the education system after that and I very much turned "off" as a student after that.

Later in college, when I felt my grades were more important to my future, I killed that little bit inside myself that fought the status quo and just regurgitated the accepted interpretation. I even became so good at it I found myself into various honors lit courses as a CS student. But I knew it was mostly nonsense and I honestly feel kind of ashamed at having learned to excel in the subject by become such a bullshit artist.

The experience was so poor that it's left a lifelong bad taste in my mouth for poetry and various other artforms that lend themselves to deep analysis and interpretation. It's largely ruined modern art for me and I find myself veering away from "intellectually challenging" works because I'm not sure if the meaning I'm getting is real, or if I'm supposed to give in to some popular interpretation -- which inevitably makes me feel like I'm being snookered.

Interestingly, modern analysis of that same poem now seem to agree with my young take on it and not the hard-line we were being force fed in high school (an invented anti-communism attachment) - but it seems only after the author made a particular point at becoming very vocal against the status quo. So small victories?

       so much depends
       upon

       a red wheel
       barrow

       glazed with rain
       water

       beside the white
       chickens

       ~William Carlos Williams

</comment><comment><USER31> English teachers serve to train a new generation of English teachers. Its a strange stable loop that formed in our educational system. The rest of us look on in confusion as they babble about imaginary features of written works that only they are competent to adjudicate.</comment>


Registry of interest - <AUTHOR> http://www.monbiot.com/registry-of-interests/

<comment><USER2> Monbiot is a shining beacon of integrity, in very sharp contrast to most of his peers. Exceptionally detailed in citations, the ability to change his mind and fight furiously for a cause he was previously against (Nuclear power), and now this.

Here's to hoping a few more follow in his footsteps...

<comment><USER2> I can't help but feel we have the media we deserve, if this is the scale of reaction to Monbiot's registry... _sigh_</comment></comment>


Rure – A C API for the Rust regex library - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/regex/tree/master/regex-capi <comment><USER2> Also go bindings with some impressive benchmark results:

[https://github.com/BurntSushi/rure-go](https://github.com/BurntSushi/rure-go)</comment>


Usb size Arduino board - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/digistump/digispark-the-tiny-arduino-enabled-usb-dev-board <comment><USER2> This is very nice. I've used Arduino Pro in a few projects (some listed here: <http://jgc.org/labs.html>) and this would have made a good alternative.

It has a nice combination of features: USB (no need for external FTDI cable), ability to use external power and has own regular (so can battery power it), and 6 I/O ports.

<comment><USER3> For the price, it certainly looks like a good deal. However, the ATtiny85 only has 8K flash, so using 2K of that for a boot loader is a fairly significant limitation.

I'm also curious about the "6 I/O ports" (and have asked the developers a question about it). I'm far from an expert on the matter, but I was under the impression that you could only reuse the RESET pin if you were willing to give up the ability to reprogram the chip in-system.

<comment><USER4> I didn't see it on first glance at the Kickstarter page, but I know Arduino has more than 6 pins and more than 3 PWM pins. I have to wonder how compatible this will be with projects that can work on Arduino but might not be able to fit on Digispark.

*edit - obviously it won't be, I'm just wondering out loud what kind of projects a user of this board would be unknowingly locking themselves out of when they assume "Arduino-capable" means they can fit that cool RFID project onto an $8 board.

<comment><USER3> I'd think that the Arduino community is pretty good at estimating their pin & memory needs, and the Arduino IDE handles the ATtiny85 just fine (Something that is, I believe, not true for something like the ATtiny10).

The biggest compatibility issue may be timers (each model has a different # of timers with different capabilities).

<comment><USER4> I guess my main concern is the amount of projects I see online where I think "man that's cool, I'm going to try to build that". These projects will tell you what pins you need if you read through them, but the various other incompatibilities (memory and timers being ones already called out) might not be fully realized until you've gotten some way into the build. The beauty of Arduino is that you don't need an EE degree to make a project.

Of course, these complaints can be leveraged to any fork of a project, I'm just throwing them out there. For what it's worth, I pledged $28 to get three of these, and am currently wondering if I maybe should have pledged for five. On the other hand, I'm mentally comparing the projects I have in my scrapbook that may or may not translate to this new board.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I caught a lot of flack for complaining that the blink device ([http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thingm/blink1-the-usb- rg...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thingm/blink1-the-usb-rgb-led)) was too expensive, and this just proves it.

$21 for _two_ of these things? They're a lot more sophisticated than a USB- connected LED, right?

Sold.

<comment><USER6> Depending how much you value miniaturization, these things aren't still super- cheap. TI sold MSP430 launchpad boards for $4.30 (probably at a loss though). ST sells STM32F4 discovery board for $15, which is way more powerful.

edit: Just checked, ST has also cheaper discovery boards, eg STM32F0 at $8.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Thanks everyone for the great feedback and for the support! Our pricing is as low as we can get it (US assembly of SMT boards can be expensive!), and we did that because we wanted to make it more accessible than the Blink(1). If we hit $100k we will even be adding RGB shield kits for $1 each for DIY blinks.

Erik Kettenburg - Digispark creator</comment>