The Everything Drive - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/04/google_drive_why_you_re_a_sucker_if_you_pay_for_online_file_storage_.single.html <comment><USER2> A bit outlandish at first sight, but a very interesting idea. RAID over cloud storage services! Call it RAICS. You could even build some actual redundancy into it, just in case one of them goes down. Also add client-side encryption, and I'm in!

But honestly,

> _if you're paying anyone for online storage, you're a chump._

No. If you're not paying anyone, you're everyone's product.

<comment><USER3> The problem with such a service is that your typical client would be the sort of person that doesn't pay for anything. An interesting technical challenge but hardly a viable business opportunity.

<comment><USER4> I don't agree; a lot of those people with lots of data are not necessarily going to be technical enough to, say, jailbreak an iPhone and install pirated apps, so it could work as a iOS app. Or it could be implemented by cloud- enabled OSes with different revenue models (desktop Linux, Android, etc).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The problem in using multiple services is split between pricing, limitations, and to a certain extent attack surface area.

If you start using lesser and lesser known services, the greater the potential threat of odd limitations (SkyDrive's 2gb file size limit, for instance), and especially apparent, a greater surface area for compromising someone's stuff. Trusting 7 companies with data, each secured with a (hopefully different) password is just too big of a risk to practically take. I'm slowly switching to Google Drive for most of my important stuff (I have my eclipse workspace in Dropbox) as a result of two factor and a proven track record of not being compromised. I keep raising the point, but Dropbox has already made this mistake once ([http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20072755-281/dropbox- confi...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20072755-281/dropbox-confirms- security-glitch-no-password-required/)). Though they're very likely more secure as a result, I'd be hesitant to trust any company lesser known than them for security.

When it comes down to it, a lot more goes into choosing a space provider than just the amounts offered free - making a decision on that alone is bound to lead down troublesome paths.

<comment><USER6> I don't see why you'd trust any company with your unencrypted data. Use encrypted disk images.

TrueCrypt is free and cross-platform: <http://www.truecrypt.org/>

If you're only on Mac, encrypted disk images are very easy to make and use: [http://matthew.mceachen.us/blog/free-easy-encrypted- storage-...](http://matthew.mceachen.us/blog/free-easy-encrypted-storage-for- mac-142.html)

<comment><USER2> Yes, you can put a TrueCrypt volume in your Dropbox, and Dropbox is even smart enough to upload only those bits that you change. But it means you lose the benefits of syncing individual files between multiple devices. Good luck trying to mount the same TrueCrypt volume in two devices at the same time. Instant conflict!

The same problem happens with every encryption solution that uses a large container. The only viable solution is filesystem-based encryption schemes that work with individual files, like EncFS or eCryptFS.

By the way, SpiderOak has client-side encryption and two-factor authentication. But it's slow as molasses.

<comment><USER7> Seeing as dropbox stores the file local, you will not have any problem with mounting it simultaneously. You couldn't merge the changes, though.

The bigger problem would be to access it e.g. on your iphone/from the web. For that reason, the webservice should be able to serve an unencrypted part if you enable that functionality. upon providing the passphrase, of course and waiting for the decryption. that could be a special feature which costs more, but would definitely add something special, which others do not provide as of now.

<comment><USER2> In most cases, merely mounting a filesystem causes a few bits to change, unless you take special care with your mount options. I'm not even sure if you can tweak mount options with TrueCrypt. So I still think that per-file encryption systems like EncFS work better with cloud storage than container- based systems like TrueCrypt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The idea is not new (and certainly I'm not the only one using this since years - there must be hundreds of thousands doing it if not soon millions of users).

I guess integration of storage aggregation might soon be seen in various apps (if ToS of the storage services allow) as more and more apps now can make use of online storage and services like box.com, dropbox and the many others that started about 4-5 years ago have made normal computer users familiar with these concepts.

As mentioned again in one of the links within the article ([http://pandodaily.com/2012/02/26/steve-jobs-was-right- dropbo...](http://pandodaily.com/2012/02/26/steve-jobs-was-right-dropbox-is-a- feature-not-a-product/) \- was previously discussed here on HN) providing online storage is a feature and not a product.

Like with many other things before, pure-play online storage is becoming / always was a commodity service. I guess providers will continue to compete around add-on services. That can only be good for consumers of these services.

</comment><comment><USER9> Could try SMEstorage. I think they have an "aggregation" concept like this.

I think this article misses the point of the these new cloud solutions though. I'm not a fan of aggregation.

The next big stage of cloud storage is integration. Integration into 3rd party apps. Integration deep into devices (iCloud for iOS and Google Drive for Android). Coupling them together will miss the biggest advantage of cloud storage.</comment>


Tesla launches solar rental service – solar panel system for $50 per month - <AUTHOR> https://electrek.co/2019/08/16/tesla-solar-rental-service-solar-panel-system/ <comment><USER2> The solar install industry is going to "DIY". The do it yourself is going to happen when people realize they are getting duped into 20k contracts for a few thousand worth of equipment.

<comment><USER3> The problem isn't the equipment, but all the crap you have to go through to install it. In most areas, you need to:

\- get building permit (requires a general contractor to sign off) \- get electrical company to approve connection of your panels to the grid \- install the panels (heavy) without compromising the integrity of your roof \- get an electrician to sign off on electrical work and connect to the grid

The solar installer takes care of all of that for you and gets it installed quickly.

I've looked into it myself, and the cost for all of the equipment is ~$7k, while the best quote I got from an installer was ~$20k. I think a lot more people would DIY if it wasn't so difficult to do it legally.

<comment><USER4> If you DIY it without all the permits, the chances of getting caught is very low. The only reason to do the paperwork is if you want to sell your house before the solar tech becomes obsolete.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm kind of astonished that they're trying to bring SolarCity back from the dead after so long. I guess they must have finally got some contracts with energy companies sorted to make this viable - because let's face it, funding solar installations with junk bonds and then selling the electricity seems like quite a capital intensive project for a company that is already capital intensive.

</comment><comment><USER4> Pay for 1 months rental, cancel service.

Still get all your neighbours thinking you're green for just $50...

<comment><USER6> HAHA if you cancel you have to pay 1500 $

<comment><USER4> I thought you could cancel but not have them removed from your roof.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I couldn't find this offering on Tesla's website.

<comment><USER8> I found this in the FAQ: [https://www.tesla.com/support/energy/solar- panels/learn/rent...](https://www.tesla.com/support/energy/solar- panels/learn/rent-solar)

I couldn't find anywhere to sign up though.

<comment><USER4> It seems like it might be guerilla marketing rather than an actual product...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How can this product be economically viable for Tesla?

<comment><USER4> They have deals with the power company for frequency regulation or some other high value service I would guess. That's why only certain electricity companies are allowed.

I bet the homeowner gets a reduction in their bill on the basis of total kWh per month, but Tesla is participating in the local energy market on an hour by hour basis, earning far more money in the afternoon "peak AC" hours.</comment></comment>


The Best Time of the Year to Trick Your Psychology into Success - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/best-time-year-trick-your-psychology-success-sidar-ok <comment><USER2> You really, _really_ need a proofreader.

<comment><AUTHOR> Care to give a few examples to help?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Stuck in a cafe, I decided to write an article on how to take advantage of an ancient wisdom.</comment>


List of Great Papers in Computer Science - <AUTHOR> http://www.csc.lsu.edu/~chen/GreatPapers.html

<comment><USER2> It really should have direct links to the papers. Even some of the author links gave me 404 errors</comment>


How the FBI found Miss Teen USA's webcam spy - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-09/30/miss-teen-usa <comment><USER3> The question to ask yourself when reading this article is... "Why the hell is there a Miss Teen USA competition?"

<comment><USER4> The competitors of Miss Tween, Miss Pre-Teen, and Little Miss America need a competition to move into?

Child beauty pageants is a reasonable amount of money. $20bn according to WP. ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_beauty_pageant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_beauty_pageant))

<comment><USER5> Even if ethically dubious...

There are far worst things happening in the UK though. It's becoming a career decision to neglect your children so you can claim special needs status and therefore disability benefit (and celebrity status on FaceBook amongst peers).

<comment><USER6> Citation needed.

<comment><USER5> [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCnchausen_syndrome_by_p...](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCnchausen_syndrome_by_proxy)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I can't believe this idiot was sending the data back to a .no-ip.org domain. Aside from the fact that he did some pretty awful stuff to a lot of girls and deserves to be jailed, how could you be so proficient in web camera hacking, frequent so many hacking forums, and still not know to send the data back to a domain that can't be linked DIRECTLY to your home machine?

<comment><USER8> He isn't proficient in web camera hacking. He managed to install someone else's tool on someone else's computer. He didn't write the RAT I bet. There isn't much hacking in this story at all, the guy just got lucky that he managed to get Miss Teen USA's computer.

<comment><USER9> Seeing how it turned out, I'd say he was rather unlucky that he got Miss Teen USA's computer.

Little bastard could use some jail time.

<comment><USER10> Admittedly, this article changed my understanding - for better or worse I confess my first thoughts in hearing all this was that it was someone she was "sexting" with, he discovered the competition aspect, blackmailed... and the whole "webcam hacked" was the excuse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why are the camera lights controlled by software? I would rather they come on when the camera gets powered up, ie. controlled by hardware.

<comment><USER3> I would like that too, but my solution is to not trust the camera and have a sticker over it which I can remove when I want.

There work well because they have a sticky portion and a part that has no adhesive: [http://www.post- it.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/Post_It/Global/Pr...](http://www.post- it.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/Post_It/Global/Products/Product-Catalog/~/Post-it- Flags-Value-Pack-Primary-Colors-1-in-and-1-2-in-wide-240-Pk- BONUS?N=4327+3294647218&rt=rud)

The view from my camera with the sticker on is: [http://i.imgur.com/y0OKxqO.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/y0OKxqO.jpg)

<comment><USER12> My solution is to be a moderately unattractive male with facial hair, lead a boring life, and keep my clothes on when in front of my computer (although the later is probably a mitigating factor).

<comment><USER13> Does being overweight male with excessive facial and body hair, wearing nothing but underpants counts as black ICE?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Nothing technically relevant here. Just your regular not-so-clever asshole behind a computer.

</comment><comment><USER15> It's interesting to note that at least one school system itself has surreptitiously installed this kind of thing on laptops given to students, with the express purpose of monitoring them at home. A student was punished for behavior at home which was only detected by the secret image capture software installed.

So why don't all embedded cameras have hardware indicator lights that can't be disabled?

<comment><USER16> Didn't that student sue his school and get a settlement for a whole lot of money? I know that doesn't mean there aren't more of these cases but its still illegal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's hard to describe the contempt I feel for ratters. I hope the guy gets a nice long jail sentence.

<comment><USER4> Coercing an under 18 year old (and knowing she was under 18) into providing nude photographs against her will should be prison time.

It's cases like this - where people are rightly disgusted and horrified - <USER2> make other cases seem really baffling.

([http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/06/webcam-scandal- resu...](http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/06/webcam-scandal-resurfaces/))

> A suburban Philadelphia school district embroiled in a webcam spy scandal > was hit Tuesday with new allegations that a student-issued laptop secretly > recorded more than 8,000 images.

> The latest accusations, which were said to occur during a six-month period > ending September 2008, has left the high school student "shocked, humiliated > and severely emotionally distressed," (.pdf) according to a federal > invasion-of-privacy lawsuit, which seeks unspecified monetary damages.

> As part of an FBI investigation and a lawsuit brought by a different > student, a judge had contacted the boy's parents informing him of the > breach, and invited them to view the pictures. The youth's parents were > shown 4,404 webcam photographs and 3,978 screenshots captured with the Lower > Merion School District–issued MacBook.

Who the hell thought that could ever possibly be a good idea?

<comment><USER15> School districts have an enormous sense of entitlement. These are the same people who put zero tolerance disciplinary policies in place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Two considerations: 1) a real genius, using VPN for sending email and then using his own IP for remote back connection from the infected clients 2) why FBI went to FB to search for his name and check who he is, when they could use the dyn-dns logs (or even just do a lookup on the current-at-that-time IP) and ask his ISP who was using that IP address?

<comment> k-mcgrady Would the FBI need a warrant to get that info from the ISP? If so that's probably why they went the FB route.

<comment><USER18> Don't they need the same for historical dyn-dns logs and account owner details? And same for warrant for searching his home?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> My take away from this article is _teach your children about digital security_ and always keep webcams covered or hardware disabled.* There will always be people willing to do this and it will probably continue to be technically feasible for the foreseeable future (if not "as long as we continue using computers) so preventing it at the demand side isn't realistic.

Children/teens are apparently being digitally raped (I think this is a reasonable description of blackmailing/coercing a teen into doing "what I tell you" over webcam)... it baffles me that we place so low a value on the sort of computer literacy that could prevent this. Hopefully cases like this will cause enough outrage to give hardware producers the kick int he ass they need to fix this issue & alert parents & others to this issue.

* Why the hell don't cameras & mics have hardware switches to turn them off?? Wifi hardware switches are common on laptops now, why doesn't this _basic_ defense covering an obvious, proven attack vector exist??

</comment><comment><USER20> all these guys thinking connecting to a no logging proxy will protect them. logs show kid connected to vpn and show vpn connected to victim. another evil genius not so genius.

<comment><USER21> The no-logging VPN was a dead-ended according to the article. His 'sin' was that all of the RATs were connecting back to him directly (via the no-ip dynamic DNS).

<comment><USER22> Malware was connecting back to an ip, at a household with multiple people. It's hard to arrest an ip. The logs at his university confirmed that __he __and not anyone else at his household connected to VPN.

<comment><USER21> Once they had it traced to his household, it was pretty much game over though. Even if they didn't have technical means to determine which family member was using it, I'm sure they could find others.

Using just the information that he used VPN Product A, and the extortionist used VPN Product A doesn't mean anything without other information, and they wouldn't have even found the information that _he_ connected to VPN Product A without having a reason to look into him specifically (vs. any other customer of VPN Product A).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Doesn't this count as possession/production of child pornography, under current laws?

</comment><comment><USER24> Summary: _Well, he was an idiot._

</comment><comment><USER25> This was the easiest way this guy could figure out to see naked women on the internet.

</comment><comment><USER26> What VPN provider this he use?</comment>


Chinese scientists convert desert sand into fertile soil - <AUTHOR> http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2016-09/03/c_135658106.htm <comment><USER2> Lets hope it is viable on a bigger scale. We could open a lot of land for development, and it will be terrific CO2 sink</comment>


Ubuntu: Wake up and smell the Unity against you - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/computing/106703-ubuntu-wake-up-and-smell-the-unity-against-you

<comment><USER2> I don't get the Unity hate. Sure, it's nowhere near as polished as the traditional Gnome desktop, but everything cool and new started out as something crappy and new. If you don't like watching the sausage get made, wait for the LTS releases. Or just turn Unity off, the option's still there.

I have a lot of time for Shuttleworth and the Ubuntu crew. Here's the rest of the "if you don't like it, don't use it" quote mentioned in the article: "If there is selfishness here, it's selfishness on the part of people who DEMAND attention and offer no constructive solution. Nobody has a right to expect someone else to devote their time to a mission in which they have no interest."

"Devote their time to a mission" - isn't that a great description of Open Source at it's best? Not playing with a weekend project, trying to impress pundits, or making a super friendly don't-offend-anyone party. A mission that people devote their time to.

Will it work? I have no idea, but I hope so. Ubuntu didn't become the most popular distro by having the best wallpaper. They've been making hard decisions and pissing people off since 2004. To anyone who considers Unity a death knell, I'd ask you to estimate how many projects are killed by innovating too much when people want stability, and compare it to how many projects die a slow, apathetic death because they've been standing still while the rest of the world moves on.

<comment><USER3> > it's nowhere near as polished as the traditional Gnome desktop, but > everything cool and new started out as something crappy and new

Many cool things starting out crappy and new doesn't mean that all crappy new things will be cool. I think most people that dislike Unity (myself included) feel like Unity is going in the wrong direction. If pressed, I could point out some really fundamental design issues with Unity, issues that fixing would make Unity less "Unity-like"

Also, I think the introduction of this major change was done in a very polarizing way. It was basically "use this new interface or F-off, maybe there's a way to use the old one, but go figure that out yourself." Making the new interface optional by default would have been _way_ smoother.

<comment><USER4> I agree that the way it was presented to the community was a big issue. Plus, when people bring genuine complaints to the table, a lot of geekier open- source advocates say, "hey, it's open source, fix it yourself instead of complaining." (Though that's not an Ubuntu-specific problem.) Well, tearing open the guts of something as complex as a DE just to fix, say, the launcher position is just not something I'm going to do. If a distro's attitude is going to be, "if you don't like our half-baked product don't use it, because we're not going to listen to you," then yup, I'm going to go use something else and not recommend that distro any more. All they succeed in doing with that attitude is alienating a former advocate. That's not the way to approach Shuttleworth's goal of X million users by 20-whatever.

<comment><USER5> apt-get gnome-shell

Linux is built around choice. You have the choice to get rid of Unity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Unity could have been something great if only Ubuntu had decided to release it after thorough QA testing and polishing. First impressions are everything, and Ubuntu chose to release Unity in an objectively unfinished state. They effectively made their entire userbase their beta-testers. I for one have work to get done, and I'm not interested in being the subject of a grand UI experiment--especially one that's run by what seem to be a group of UX amateurs.

Ubuntu wasted that crucial first impression and alienated a significant portion of their core userbase--tech geeks and programmers--by pushing a half- baked product. Who knows: if I had tried Unity in 2014 instead of in Natty, maybe I would have liked it and recommended it.

Unity is just a symptom of the deeper problem, though, which is that Ubuntu is never in a finished, polished state. I tell anyone who asks what OS I'm using that I use Ubuntu, but that they should stick with Windows because Ubuntu invariably breaks every 6 months and everything is half-baked.

I just can't recommend an OS where the most important part, the DE, is buggy and unfinished, and where every distro upgrade reliably introduces random and serious regressions. (Though to be fair it's often upstream's fault on those.) I know that if I install Ubuntu for my mom, she'll click 'Upgrade to Ubuntu xx.yy' without thinking, then she'll call me because her computer won't hibernate any more, or because all of a sudden her window buttons are on the left. If a hard-core geek like me won't recommend the friendliest Linux distro, who will?

<comment><USER6> I used to recommend Ubuntu or Mint. These days, it's switched to Mint or Fedora. Ubuntu's ability to "just work" has been unsatisfactory for a while, while Mint's and Fedora's has only been getting better. I recently did a Fedora upgrade, and the only thing that broke was my hacked-up xmonad setup, which was to be expected. Everything else was either the same or better.

<comment><USER7> Who are you recommending Fedora to?

Ubuntu was a good recommendation for people who could just about re-install Windows. Fedora, not so much.

((Ubuntu is also good for many other users too!) I'm using Fedora on my other machine.)

<comment><USER6> Generally, I'm recommending Fedora KDE (what I use) to somewhat tech-savvy people who are seriously looking into Linux and asking me for recommendations. If I'm just trying to get someone off of Windows, I recommend Mint. It's the first Linux distro I genuinely enjoyed using, since if I wanted to tweak I had room to tweak, and if I wanted to get work done it tended to Just Work. (I used Fedora 11 directly beforehand, and it was horrible. When Fedora 13 came out, I hopped on that and it was great.) While I haven't used it for any significant length of time since then, what I've seen of it has been great. A friend recently started using it when I suggested it - quite a tech-savvy guy, actually - and he loves it, so I'd say it's still good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Do you know what else happened with the release of 11.10? _They switched from Python 2.7.1 to python 2.7.2_. And it shows the _exact_ same correlation to this sag in downloads as the Unity UI.

Clearly, Canonical can't do anything right.

Oh, and also, Mint has had a huge rise in popularity at the same time, and, by the way, the graph shown in the article, in addition to any methodological flaws it may have, only shows relative numbers; Ubuntu drops from 11% down to something like 4%, but of what total? We have no idea from this graph whether there is an absolute drop or rise in the number of Ubuntu installs; only that Mint has taken off, relative to other distributions.

There's nothing in the data shown that ties this to Unity specifically, or even anything about Ubuntu itself. There have been hundreds of changes between 11.04 and 11.10, and the Linux landscape itself is changing at the same time. I don't see any firm data presented to blame the UI.

<comment><USER9> Given that the point of Ubuntu is to try to expand the appeal of desktop Linux, no matter what the absolute number of installs it's hard to argue that their current approach is working if they've been so comprehensively overtaken by a more traditional distro. If the absolute number of Ubuntu installs has remained the same and Mint's growth happens to be entirely new users, _why did those new users not pick Ubuntu_?

<comment><USER10> Distrowatch's audience is not a useful metric.

<comment><USER8> Maybe a better question for them to ask is "Why are Ubuntu users staying away from DistroWatch.com in droves?"

<comment><USER10> Why would I visit Distrowatch?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've been using ubuntu for about 5 years now, and using it as basically my only OS for the last 3. I was very satisfied with it. The reason I'm not a fan of Unity is that not only did it break my workflow, but there appears to be no way to customize it to get back to what I have been doing for the past 5 years.

I understand the developers don't owe anyone anything, and everyone's free to leave (and I may, once staying on 10.10 gets to be a problem). I'm just unhappy that they decided to break what I was doing after 5 good years.

For those curious, the features I'm referring to are alt-tab to switch between windows (not applications) and proper virtual desktop support. Doesn't seem like much, and indeed, these features have worked flawlessly for me for years. Once I'm too far behind the upgrade curve, I'll probably have to try another distro or window manager, since from what I've read, Unity has no intention of un-breaking these. It was fun while it lasted though.

<comment><USER12> Unity isn't hard to customize. It's generally customized the same way that window managers in Ubuntu have been customized for the last few years, through CompizConfig Settings Manager (ccsm). For alt-tab just choose another switcher under "Window Management" -- there are 4 to choose from. To remove the menu- on-top silliness, `sudo apt-get remove appmenu-gtk indicator-applet-appmenu indicator-appmenu` And I don't understand your comment about virtual desktops. They work fine in Unity.

<comment><USER11> I'll give this a try. I did some research a month or so ago when I upgraded one of my machines to 11.10 (which I now really regret doing). At the time, everywhere I looked said alt+tab for switching applications, and alt+~ for switching windows within applications. If there's a way to get alt+tab back to just switching windows, I'll gladly give it a try.

The issue I had with virtual workspaces was that alt+tab still showed every app on every workspace. The menu on top thing is annoying, but not a deal- breaker I guess.

Anyways, I know this is not the ubuntu forums, I just thought I would chime in with the regressions in my workflow. I spent 2 or 3 hours trying to make it work. I am aware of ccsm, and I don't consider myself an expert, but I'm not a complete n00b either. I gave up and went back to the GNOME fallback. My other machines I won't be upgrading. Backwards compatibility is important, even with new fancy window managers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13>
       Data source:  DistroWatch's Page Hit Ranking

Well there's your problem. What a terrible metric. That's a good way of finding out what one type of linux user is using, but not a good way to sample the population of computer users, and the changing face of linux users.

<comment><USER14> I agree, DistroWatch is not a good metric of measuring which distros are in use. Page hit ranking is more about which distros are currently being discussed more and talked about. Ive looked into mint and a few others on distrowatch, but I have never until today visited the Ubuntu.. Yet most all of my machines run Ubuntu or some version of Debian.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've been working on a MBP for the last 5 month and like it. I recently installed Ubuntu 11.10 on a desktop PC I had at home. I setup everything for my needed dev environment, and unlike many other articles/posts I read, I loved it.

The computer specs are not the same, but unity is overall MUCH faster and smooth than my OSX MBP. The interface just works very smoothly and intuitively for me. I do most of my work in the terminal so I don't get to do every operations using the interface though. I'm even thinking about trading my MBP for a system76 ubuntu machine.

Unity is also quite new and I expect it to get better with every releases. Am I the only one in this situation?

<comment><USER16> For the rest of us,

MBP :== MacBook Pro

and not

Maximally Bogus Product

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I was the first to criticize Unity back in the day, but I believe Unity has a bright future.

Canonical made a big big change with a lot of regressions and growing pains but as it stabilizes it will be a great desktop to use for normal people.

The worst thing they could do is go back again to gnome at this point.

The main problem Linux have it is that it is just copy what Apple or Windows do, look at Mint and you will see a copy of Windows(I really hate the windows start menu design and they copied it verbatim), look at Ubuntu and you will see a copy of MacOS but with no so many great designers and money behind(the minimize-maximaze window buttons disappearing drives me crazy).

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm reading conflicting reports. One place shows that people generally prefer Unity after being exposed to it, and others (like this article) are completely opposed to it.

Ubuntu is supposed to be Linux for the rest of us, not for hardcore enthusiasts, isn't it? If it is, why wouldn't it make sense to appeal to the general public?

<comment><USER19> Likewise, I've seen some reports that 'the rest of us' like Unity -- and some that despise it.

It's just a New Thing -- and like most New Things, it's probably a) not that polished, and b) people resist change.

<comment><USER20> And for some reason, people manage to resist change so much, that a change in the _default_ DE requires them sprinting to a new distro, with lashing words in tail for Ubuntu. Because changing distros is easier than install xfce, or gnome-shell, or kde, or something. Never mind that choice of distro often also includes things such as community, packages available in repos, packages available for smaller one-off projects, etc.

<comment><USER21> Have you personally tried changing to xfce, gnome-shell or KDE in Ubuntu 11.10? I have, and it's decidedly non-trivial. Switching to a different distro would probably be easier.

<comment><USER20> I remember `sudo apt-get install gnome-shell` and then choosing it at the next login and being quite smitten. (I later upgraded to ricotz's ppa for faster updates).

<comment><USER21> Again, is this in 11.10? Or 11.04?

<comment><USER22> I did this in 11.10, then switched back to unity because gnome-shell had some bugs that kept me from getting work done. I like it's interface design better, though.

<comment><USER20> Not sure what issues you had, but 3.2 is getting some bugfixes and ricotz's ppa has some good fixes as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> IMHO, Unity is a work in progress. It definitely requires more resources to run than other environments and it requires some getting used to. I miss the good old task-bar for quick switching instead of moving the cursor to the extreme left waiting for the tab to slide in, clicking the appropriate icon which may then load an undesired window if the sought application is running more than one instance. I tried 'mousing over' the topmost left corner too.. it is also slow. However, unity is clean. It just hasn't figured out how we want to do what we want or who we are.

</comment><comment><USER24> I installed Ubuntu 11.10 a few days ago on my AMD laptop as well as an ancient P4 that is inside of an arcade cabinet.

In some ways this article shows the gains made by the Linux community (and Ubuntu) in the last 5 years. It used to be the barrier to entry was lack of driver support for any number of peripherals, a user-unfriendly install that would render dual-booting impossible, performance so abhorrent without manual config changes, a community that would mock your problems, and regardless of package manager always having to break down and "untar; ./configure; make" at least one set of dependencies before getting your needed software to run.

Ubuntu (and the latest Fedora, as I've witnessed recently at work) installs with little more interaction than a partition selection.

That being said, I hated Unity and switched to fluxbox on both machines immediately. I'm not sure what they've accomplished exactly.. it's less intuitive for someone from a windows experience. I guess the dock is most similar to a tablet menu?

Anyways.. It's interesting, not for me, but if this is the new horizon of "linux problems" maybe <joke>this is finally the year of linux on the desktop? </joke>

</comment><comment><USER25> Off topic, but...

If you visit that site on an iPhone you will experience the absolute /worst/ kind of "enhancement" I've seen in ages - it manages to break vertical scrolling of all things. You can still scroll the content, but it no longer sticks to your to finger - it tries to jump to predefined scrolling points, but with an easing animation to make it feel even weirder. Horrible.

</comment><comment><USER26> I think readers on this forum might recognise the need Canonical has to turn a profit, and therefore to focus resources on the tasks/developments that will lead to an income stream.

A figure of $30million turnover was mentioned as a break even point by Shuttleworth in an interview in 2009, and a three to five year plan to reach that in 2008 (wikipedia article about Canonical Ltd).

I personally think I see a shift in strategy towards a tablet/mobile style desktop and a 'brittleness' about community involvement perhaps caused by the need to focus resources on the interface and user experience.

Hope they get it right before they burn through Shuttleworth's money. If it is the case they have hardware partners lined up to launch Ubuntu loaded devices (like the Chinese deal some weeks ago) then the 'long time user' community may just have to bend a little to keep the income coming. If they don't it isn't clear to me where these millions of new users are coming from...

</comment><comment><USER27> First, I question the stats in the article. I have 4 Linux installs right now, all Ubuntu, yet I have done a lot of web searches for "Mint" out of curiosity. I skewed the stats in the article, sorry :-)

Second, I really like Gnome but Unity is just fine __if __you take the time to learn keyboard shortcuts to switch between apps, workspaces, and windows for a given app.

I just am wrapping up a long term project for a customer that basically required OS X for work. I have thought about switching to Linux and Ubuntu for my day to day work now, but I just ordered an iPad 2, and I would like easy data exchange with my shiny new little toy.

</comment><comment><USER28> I find that Unity wastes vertical space, which to me is a sin. I have plenty of horizontal space, please waste that or let me configure it the way I like.

</comment><comment><USER29> Issue with Ubuntu is that 'new' is not that appealing, I don't think I would mind if things are not polished if those were the features that make me more productive, but they are in the way, and they are now instead of Windows, copying OSX, how is that innovative. Other than that, I respect work put in Ubuntu and it is solid foundation that we can enjoy. I switched to Mind on my desktop and loving it.

</comment><comment><USER30> On unity when I move the mouse to the left side to unhide the dock, an orange border takes up half the screen and stays there until I maximize any of the windows.

This is extremely confusing, does anyone know if it's supposed to be a feature? Or if there's a way to turn it off? I asked in #ubuntu and nobody replied.

</comment><comment><USER31> the percentage of distrowatch page hits that go to the ubuntu page is down 47%, but the total distrowatch page hits per month are up 50% this month. i'm no math genius, but doesn't that mean that distrowatch actually had _more_ hits to their ubuntu page last month than any other month?

<comment><USER32> No; a 50% increase followed by a 47% decrease represents a net 20.5% decrease, since (1 + 0.50)(1 - 0.47) = 0.795. (This assumes that Ubuntu visitors were represented in the same proportion pre- and post-decrease.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I very much like Unity. The eye-candy makes me happy and from a productivity perspective it allows me to keep my hands on the keyboard and off the mouse. It does indeed use way more resources than it should, but what else am I going to do with 4 cores?

</comment><comment><USER34> I like Unity and I prefer it more than gnome2. Furthermore I like Gnome3 more than Gnome2 or XFCE. And even furthermore, any "power user" can install the desktop of his preference fairly easy.

Sure Unity and Gnome3 need some polishing, but let's face it, cutting edge is... cutting. And many of us prefer the new unfinished than the old but stable[0]. That's why I switched from Debian to Ubuntu in the first place, and even then I was running Sid.

So, ubuntu on cell phones? What better news?

IMHO, in every matter, there is always big group that is more conservative and resists a change, but fortunately the change is happening anyway.

[0][http://blog.mugunthkumar.com/articles/software-philosophy- re...](http://blog.mugunthkumar.com/articles/software-philosophy-release- early-release-often-vs-polished-releases/)

</comment><comment><USER35> So, I have a buddy who wants to try Linux on a netbook that he has found no use for. Mint or Ubuntu?

<comment><USER12> Unity is ideal for netbooks/small screens. (thus menu on top, et cetera). The people complaining are largely those with larger screens who are either stuck in their ways or haven't bothered to figure out how to customize it to their liking.

<comment><USER26> I'd take a very minor issue with this: try xfce with dmenu (from the suckless tools package) bound to the super key. I maximise applications within xfce using alt-F11. All window decorations gone, no OS junk pixels visible at all. I invoke applications using dmenu. I switch between windows with alt-tab, and workspaces with alt-ctrl-arrows.

Perhaps I'm taking this to extremes...

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure what you're gaining (unless you're also hiding the application's menu). A maximized application in Unity doesn't waste any more space than what you describe. The top bar is still visible, but it's merged with the menu, so there's no effective wastage.

<comment><USER26> True, but there is nothing appearing at the left if I wait too long on the File menu, and the indicators are hidden.

Perhaps this is an extreme example. I actually rather like Unity on small screens.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Polly.IM: auto-suggests Twitter responses to local business customers - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/07/12/polly-im-helps-businesses-engage-with-customers-on-twitter/

<comment><USER2> Hmm, I'm torn. On the one hand - this seems like a great use of NLP and sentiment analysis, and I can see how this could be incredibly useful for someone like a restaurant owner who can't monitor twitter 24/7. On the other hand - I feel like this might be the beginning of the end of Twitter as a way to talk to _real people_ \- who can do more than send out automated messages.

<comment><USER3> Thank you for your feedback. We will take it into consideration, [name].

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Twitter and Facebook give businesses the opportunity to _interact_ with their customers. Using those channels as yet another way to talk _at_ customers is wasting that opportunity. The best way for local businesses to use Twitter is to actually use Twitter. Log in, respond to messages, join the conversation, act like a real person and connect with your customers.

Polly.IM may be a useful tool if you're already engaged on Twitter, but if you rely on automated responses to drive your "interactive" marketing you're doing it wrong.

<comment><USER5> Polly.IM right now requires you to have a Twitter account and so most current users are already engaging with Twitter. From our surveys and discussions with our trial users, they all nonetheless feel like they could use some help in categorizing tweets and helping with very routine stuff like distributing a promotion to new followers. At the end of the day, many local businesses have 1 person running their twitter account and that person generally is the owner who doubles as marketing if not everything else. Compare that situation to American Airlines which can hire 10 or 20 social media managers and you realize quickly why these folks could use some help organizing responses and conversations with customers.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is a side project by my company, PaperG, which is intended to help small businesses. Most SMBs we work with try to manage social accounts, but quickly get burned out trying to keep up and leave them dormant.

Polly.IM helps automate routine things (thanking new followers with coupons, responding to check-ins, etc). It also helps identify and and suggest responses to other things like compliments, complaints, suggestions, etc. using our sentiment analysis tech.

Would welcome any feedback or suggestions from HN!

<comment><USER6> I think a nice touch would be to auto follow or make it a selection that users can toggle on or off. Let's say someone tweets at my business, I think it adds a nice touch if the business auto follows the user who took the time to tweet about me.

<comment><USER5> that's a great idea. we wanted to release a minimal viable product first to get feedback and ideas for new features. our beta actually already yielded a lot of helpful suggestions like allowing manual approval/editing as well as enabling auto-generated coupons for new followers.

we definitely will allow more granular control going forward.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks like an awesome tool to help small businesses make sense of the Twitterverse</comment>


Show HN: Handicareers.com – A simple job board for disabled people - <AUTHOR> http://handicareers.com <comment><USER2> As a person with a disability myself (legally blind), I have a couple of concerns with this idea.

First, the category of people with disabilities is quite broad. There are not only different categories of disability, but also a broad spectrum of severity for any given disability. Why would an employer post to a job board for people with disabilities in general, except out of a misguided sense of charity, or perhaps to meet some kind of quota?

And that brings me to the bigger concern: Why do people with disabilities need a special job board just for us anyway? Surely that is a failure to fully integrate us into mainstream society, which I think is ultimately the best thing for everyone.

By the way, though I hate the clunkiness of terminology like "people with disabilities", I think it's justified in this case. For me, the word "disabled", particularly in the context of employment, has the connotation of being unable to be productive. Some people's disabilities are severe enough that that's true of them, but that's not all of us, not by a long shot. Maybe I'm being over-sensitive about that, but I'm just telling you how I see it, for what it's worth.

<comment><USER3> Interesting perspective on the terms (in your last paragraph). I've long thought it's odd how this language has changed over the years. A long time ago a disabled person might have been called "retarded" \-- that's probably the most offensive term of all now, but the literal meaning of the word itself is least offensive, simply meaning "slowed down". Then came "handicapped", which isn't used much anymore, but literally just means having some kind of restriction. Now we are much more enlightened and say "disabled" \-- it's the least offensive term now, but if you take it literally that word is quite horrible, meaning "not working" or "incapacitated" or "turned off" or "unable to be used", as in "the bomb squad disabled the bomb". Why did we settle on a word that means "not working" for someone who has a handicap?

<comment><USER4> I read GP's last paragraph as distinguishing between the use of "disabled people" vs. "people with disabilities," rather than between the use of "disabled" (or words with the same root) vs. other words.

My company did some work for an organization that supported people with disabilities in the workforce. The client stressed the importance of the distinction between using "people with disabilities" as opposed to "disabled people," with the former being much preferred because - due to its structure - it puts the focus (i.e. the first word) on "people" rather than "disabled/disability".

<comment><USER5> ...but it also says the disability lies with that person, and this is likely to be rejected by people who prefer the social model.

When people can't read a website it's tempting to tell them to ctrl + or install user CSS. But better is to just design the site in ways that don't exclude large numbers of the population, let alone people with visual impairment. It's not that person's eyesight that excludes them, it's the designer's poor choice of font size and colour that excludes them.

There are problems with this model, but it's still mostly useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Man, I'm quadriplegic and I had to set up my business as it was basically the only way I could get a job. People with severe disabilities don't tend to make the most reliable employees timekeeping wise because you just can't guarantee that you will be at a place at a given time, I cannot in any way guarantee that I will be fit for work at 9 AM on Monday morning, it's just the nature of the disability. And that's the same for most people with severe disabilities. That just won't fly with most employers. I'd be really interested where you've found a stock of sympathetic employers willing to deal with these issues, because I've not found many.

Also, why separate out disabled people from "normal" people, I'm genuinely curious? I mean I appreciate the effort of you trying to find us work, but don't you see how you are coming at it from the wrong angle. If you are going to separate out disabled people from the rest of the job market, how about a board where disabled people post their skills, the hours they can guarantee per week to work and the wage they are willing to work for just like other niche job markets? What separates out this job market from the others in the space?

Also, by disabled do you mean blind and deaf or do you mean anybody with any type of disability? The type of disability will have a huge impact on the type of job. You don't have any jobs listed so I can't get a handle on who exactly this is meant for you see.

I'm not trying to be a dick, I'm really not and I'm sure this effort comes from a good place but if you haven't got a group of employers willing to employ disabled people then you are really going to struggle. I wish you luck.

I have lots of questions, I may also have answers, hit me up if you want to chat.

<comment><USER7> > Also, why separate out disabled people from "normal" people, I'm genuinely > curious?

Since, as you recognize, many employers are unprepared to even think about how a particular disability is not a barrier to a particular job or about accommodations that would enable someone to perform the job, there could be value to people with disabilities for a site where employers identify themselves as having thought about it. Many, if not most, jobs appear in more than one place so this can be another one.

Still, I'm more inclined to prefer a job board for everyone that has options like Craigslist's "ok to highlight this job opening for persons with disabilities" checkbox [0].

[0] [https://www.craigslist.org/about/disabilities](https://www.craigslist.org/about/disabilities)

<comment><USER6> You're right, there could be value in a board like this.

I really do like the craigslist idea of marking a checkbox if you're willing to employ disabled people, that means that I as a quadriplegic don't need to learn a new interface or go to new website, I can just go to the same place as everyone else and just search by that criteria. That's a great idea.

<comment><USER8> Not checking that checkbox and admitting you're not willing to hire disabled people would likely expose you to a ton of lawsuits.

<comment><USER7> No, leaving the checkbox unchecked does not mean you're opposed to hiring people with disabilities. The job posting is still equally available to people with and without disabilities.

<comment><USER8> Then what is the point of the checkbox?

<comment><USER7> The link I provided to Craigslist explains it and my other comment also talks about what the checkbox does and doesn't do currently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For your niche, you should run your website through a few of these checkers and make sure it passes with flying colors:

[https://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tools/](https://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tools/)

<comment><USER10> Also you might try this during development: [http://khan.github.io/tota11y/](http://khan.github.io/tota11y/)

we've started to use it on the main theme for CBP apps: [https://github.com/US-CBP/cbp-theme](https://github.com/US-CBP/cbp-theme) and it helps catch a bunch of basic issues while developing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Cool!

I would suggest changing the branding to "a simple job board for people with disabilities." For many people the disability is a part of who they are - it's not how they self identify.

See some of the existing non-profits in this space like [http://www.bestbuddies.org](http://www.bestbuddies.org)

<comment><USER12> On the point of "disabled people" vs "people with disabilities" I have this conversation a lot with my wife, who is an Occupational Therapist and who first introduced me to the idea of people-first language. I think there's merit in the idea, but I'm not sure it's a settled issue. She's also fluent in American Sign Language and studied Deaf culture as an anthro undergrad, and they are one of several examples of groups who diametrically oppose people- first language: Deafness is a defining and inseparable part of who they are _as a person_. I would love to hear the opinions of other people on this board who live with Autism, blindness, para- or quadri-plegia, or other forms of disabilities on the matter, as I don't see myself as being able to have an authoritative opinion, as someone who does not live with disability.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People- first_language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People-first_language)

<comment><USER13> A few decades ago people would personify the word disability in Germany.

"Ein Behinderter hat dort geparkt" -> "A disabled was parking there"

But this changed drastically in my lifetime. We often just say "he is disabled" and mostly to people who are mentally challenged. For physical disabilities we often use the specific word directly.

If someone can't see or walk, we simply say it, we don't say he is disabled, it's already implied by his condition.

<comment><USER6> So has my one single factoid about the German language being wrong all these years? Well don't I feel silly?!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One of the forms mentions London, thus some UK advice.

"handicareers" seems like a play on the handicapped word. You might need to know that word is strongly rejected by large numbers of the UK population. This is possibly going to attract strongly negative attention.

You might want to link employers and potential employees to advice about Access to Work, and to best current practice about reasonable adjustments, and to advice about the Equality Act.

<comment><USER6> This exactly. This was my first clue that this person probably wasn't from the UK.

You're totally right, the word handicapped is definitely the first thing that came to my mind when I saw the name and it wasn't a nice association. But if they are not aiming at the UK market then there probably isn't a reason to change it, but if operating inside the UK then I think the name might be a real problem.

It just makes me think of "HandiCapable" which is a horrible term.

To be clear, I don't think the OP is trying to be offensive but inside the UK I think you might this kind of feedback quite a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I am mentally ill and disabled because of it. When companies have a disabled plan it is for people in wheelchairs, the blibd, and the deaf but not the mentally ill.

I have good days and bad days with my mental illness and sometimes lose track of what I am doing if interrupted too much. I know I have to take interruptions from my work for help desk assistance and other things like team members.

My mental illness has some things in common with high functioning autism, and bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia and is so rare that half of 1% get it, schixoaffective disorder. Nobody seems to know how to accomodate it and nobody wants someone with it to be a 50K or 150K a year programmer with it.

If only that job board worked, i tried searching jobs and waited over an hour for it to stop the circle spinning.

</comment><comment><USER15> I really LOVE this concept. I think it is much needed. I've seen studies of entire customer service departments staffed by disabled individuals who showed extreme patience and empathy with customers resulting in higher satisfaction.

One consideration to improve the user experience is to make sure that the website is Section 508 Compliant (www.section508.gov) so that it is easier to access for individuals with hearing and visual disabilities.

<comment><USER7> Section 508 is specifically for U.S. government work and rather outdated. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are much more useful [0] and if you meet all the success criteria for WCAG level AA, you should also meet Section 508 requirements (there may be one or two overly prescriptive details in 508 that may require tweaking to get to 100%).

[0] [https://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/wcag.php](https://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/wcag.php)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This sounds like a cool idea, good luck!

Am I right in thinking there's no jobs on there at the moment though, I couldn't seem to see any.

Edit: Getting a DB error now, but could see the page before

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! You are correct, the board is empty as I have literally just launched it. :-)

Getting DB errors also now, thinking it might be a traffic issue.

<comment><USER3> I don't know if this was an official launch, but if you do have an official launch I think it'd be better to seed it by reaching out to some folks first. Even two or three postings before a launch event would have made it seem more complete.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Looks like in Firefox page completely disappears when you turn all three right side toggles on and there's no way to roll back.

</comment><comment><USER18> Curious question: how do you deal with people who post stuff that isn't relevant?

</comment><comment><USER19> good job, but please try to fix ssh. I tried accessing the https version of your site but it didn't work. First chrome complained it was unsafe, and later your host returned a generic page for new sites.

<comment><USER7> I think you mean SSL or TLS, not SSH.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Nice idea. Can you tell a little about what got you started?

</comment><comment><USER21> I think that it's a very interesting idea!

</comment><comment><USER22> Love it

</comment><comment><USER23> It's offline... And powered by WordPress...

> Error establishing a database connection

<comment><USER24> I think we may have disabled it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am actually getting the same issue, intermittently. Is it just a traffic overload issue? Anything I can do to make this more robust? I was not getting this before sharing the site.

<comment><USER25> Look into caching so that it does not need to hit the database for everything. Been years since I used WordPress but there was something like WP Super Cache that worked OK. Your web server (e.g. Nginix) can also be configured to cache pages, and there are entire servers dedicated to caching like Varnish. Be forewarned that caching and cache invalidation can be surprisingly tricky to get perfect.

You also might just actually need a beefier server. But at the very least you should be able to serve the homepage, which doesn't change super often, to everyone.

Congrats on having a site popular enough that you get to learn about a whole new world of tools and technologies!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks I will look into caching plugins, starting with Super Cache. Hope this can stabilise things a bit.

If that does not work, will have to look into server options.

Thank you for your help and encouragement! :-)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Perfectionism Is Increasing Over Time (APA Study) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/bul-bul0000138.pdf <comment><USER2> In general I think I would agree from my own anecdotal evidence. However, I actually think a lot of the cultural causes revealed in the paper have a polarizing effect such that more kids want perfectionism and more kids stop caring altogether. I feel that fewer kids take the middle road of just having one aspect of their lives that they consider of utmost importance, and instead more are either tacking on yet another activity at the end of the school day, or giving up and playing video games all day.</comment>


Grassroots goes global: How YouTube is changing the face of football - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/Grassroots_Goes_Global_How_YouTube_is_Changing_Football <comment><USER2> This reminds me of Liverpool's CEO talking about the future of professional football [1]. Some excerpts:

> the new battle for fans is not with rival clubs – but with video games such > as Fortnite.

> "Ninety minutes is a long time for a millennial male to sit down on a couch. > When I look at viewing and attendance figures of millennial males, I'm > concerned as a CEO of a football club that relies on the next generation of > fans coming through"

[1] [https://www.businesscloud.co.uk/news/liverpool-fc-ceo- worrie...](https://www.businesscloud.co.uk/news/liverpool-fc-ceo-worried- about-losing-fans-to-fortnite)

</comment><comment><USER3> I know someone who was sold to Greek first league professional football club by sending a YouTube compilation video. I was surprised and pressed my friend many times that what was even the point of his agent then and he answered that guess he knew what the email address was. Obviously he had shown talent before in other lower European leagues and they did have medical before signing a contract, but the whole thing looked comical to me.

The compilation video that is still up on YouTube even has some video editor watermark on it... For an average person we are talking about a lot of money changing hands.

</comment><comment> open-source-ux Another recommended football (soccer) YouTube channel is Tifo Football. Even if you're not a football fan (I'm not particularly), it's one of the best sources of news, information and analysis on football. The quality is excellent:

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGYYNGmyhZ_kwBF_lqqXdAQ/vid...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGYYNGmyhZ_kwBF_lqqXdAQ/videos)

</comment><comment><USER4> Excellent photos and mobile experience without any ads. Thank you BBC

<comment><USER5> Really? That page was horribly broken on my phone. Unreadable really.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why does it say "[video]" in the title? The link is to a 'regular' written article (albeit with a lot of scrolling effects).

<comment><USER7> Whoops, that was my mistake. Fixed now.</comment></comment>


Writing Your First ES2015 Module with Babel - <AUTHOR> http://www.polyglotweekly.com/2015/11/29/writing-your-first-es2015-javascript-module.html <comment><AUTHOR> I'm relatively new to Babel + ES2015 myself and would love to hear about how other people structure their projects: do you transpile your ES6 code before running tests on it, what suite of tools do you use for transpiling? What are other caveats folks should keep in mind when using Babel?</comment>


UnCSS: Remove unused styles from CSS - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/giakki/uncss <comment><USER2> Have used tools like this before, and invariably end up accidentally stripping styles from an <insert JS UI lib> component with a dynamically assigned className or something equally silly.

It's such a hard problem to solve and the Stylesheet Snowball is one of the most frustrating pieces of technical debt a large site can pick up.

It makes me wonder if scoped CSS modules, despite fundamentally breaking CSS with their hyper specific hybrid BEM-class-ids might be the best preemptive solution even when you're not scaling up to massive SPAs.

Edit. Meant CSS modules, wrote CSS components. I am not a clever man.

<comment><USER3> _> with a dynamically assigned className or something equally silly._

How is that silly? Assume e.g. a very simply dynamic list, where you just want highlight rows after clicking on them. Should it set the CSS properties of the <tr> directly? It makes more sense to dynamically add/remove a CSS class such as "selected-row". However, since initially no row is selected that class does not appear in the initial HTML.

 _> scoped CSS components_

Not sure if this is the same, but I had very good experience with component- oriented frameworks where each component has an HTML snippet and CSS snippet attached to it. The CSS is written in a way that it affects only the responsibility scope of the component, nothing outside the component, nothing inside child components.[1] Then, these CSS snippets are simply collected into a large (and perhaps compressed) CSS file.

[1] This is usually done be either prefixing all CSS rules with a component- specific class name, or by using a component-specific custom HTML element and selecting on that. Stepping into children is avoided by using only child selectors ("a > b > * > * > c" instead of "a b c"), so the rules don't reach deeply except for the cascading properties of CSS itself.

<comment><USER2> Oh dynamically setting class isn't silly, but the times i accidentally removed the 'unused' style because it's not explicitly coded into that app and was flagged by the tool, I felt pretty silly!

I got as far as starting to build us a tool to traverse our raw jsx to identify these programmatically generated classes, but my implementation was a bit flakey for various reasons and required too much config to make it worthwhile so I binned it off.

<comment><USER3> _> Oh dynamically setting class isn't silly_

Oh, so I misread your sentence. Thanks for the clarification. Sorry for the noise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been hoping someone would write a similar tool, but using a browser, so that I could run a webapp, click around (using a checklist, to cover all of the views) and get a resulting list of used CSS rules from the browser.

That would have the advantage of supporting complex webapps written in any language/environment.

<comment><USER5> There's a "Coverage Support" experiment in Chrome DevTools which does css + js coverage in a way you describe it. The CSS part was shown on Chrome DevSummit 2016 [1]

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HF1luRD4Qmk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HF1luRD4Qmk)

<comment><USER6> Starts around the 18min mark in the video.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder what the performance increase would be of loading one big CSS file on the first page load and serving from local cache from then on, vs loading a smaller but different CSS file for each page you visit.

My impression is that number of requests is a more critical optimization than file size (at least when serving CSS sized files)

<comment><USER8> It's going to depend a lot on the type of site you're building.

Thankfully frontend pipelines like React + Webpack makes it fairly easy to test this out. We spiked out generating individual JS + CSS for each view but ultimately found it wasn't worth it - individual views amounted to very little code with the bulk of the filesize taken up by the common 'core' of our application, and dependencies. We scrapped this specific idea.

What we did end up doing, however, was create a seperate stylesheet just for things required on the very minimal landing page and inject that straight into the <head>, which gave us significant speed improvements.

<comment><USER8> Just to clarify (after I've re-read my comment) - we didnt explicitly create a landing page stylesheet, instead we were able to use Webpack to automatically create a seperate stylesheet at build time containing just the styles used in the dependency tree of the landing page.

Webpack is super handy like that - no need to be aware of this and manually keep track of a seperate stylesheet :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> AFAIK, this could also be written as a transform in AssetGraph [[https://github.com/assetgraph/assetgraph](https://github.com/assetgraph/assetgraph)], which does all of the loading, parsing and traversing for you. At least the given description reads like the internals of the population/loader-system in AssetGraph.

As an added benefit, you'll get de-duplication, minification, inlining (with fallbacks) and, with a little work, image-spriting thrown in almost for free.

If you want to play around easily, take a look at [https://github.com/assetgraph/assetgraph- builder](https://github.com/assetgraph/assetgraph-builder)

</comment><comment><USER10> I've done something similar nearly two years ago[1]. The problem is rather difficult, especially with all the JavaScript frameworks in existence right now. I've tried to build a state machine for handling those frameworks but never got around to finishing it. There's basically and endless amount of combinations one can do, thus you probably want to limit depth or something. You also have to be able to detect ::after and similar kind of selectors, which isn't always straightforward with querySelector and needs quite a bit of cleaning. I ran into a few other (edge) cases, which I cannot remember right now.

Nonetheless, it is a challenging and fun problem to solve.

[1]: [https://github.com/Kevin-A/css-detector](https://github.com/Kevin-A/css- detector)

<comment><USER11> My naive opinion is that this should be done by the browser, perhaps in the developer tools. You would be marking a session as "integration tests" and at the end it would give you a simplified css file without the unused rules during testing.

<comment><USER10> I wholeheartedly agree with you. That would be the ideal solution, because the browser is already doing the passes over the CSS rules.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is a problem I thought would be solved by 2017

</comment><comment><USER13> Clutch timing! Been working on several projects amassing a multi-purpose stylesheet (currently ~600 lines) having already conceded that a tool which accomplishes exactly this would be needed.

Edit: seems overkill, the theoretical solution I had in mind would just take a few arguments;

ie:

trimCss mybloated.css mypage.html > mytrimmed.css

</comment><comment><USER14> I've been wanting to tie this up with Casper automation in order to get coverage on dynamically generated content. The hard part is just ensuring the content path is adequate. We do something similar with PhantomCSS already, but it's definitely a tighter scope.

</comment><comment><USER15> Finally! I've been wanting this for a decade - but not badly enough to try to build it myself.

</comment><comment><USER16> I made a similar tool, although it doesn't load the page in a browser to remove unused styles.

[https://www.npmjs.com/package/uselesscss](https://www.npmjs.com/package/uselesscss)

</comment><comment><USER17> How easy would it be to get this to work with something that spiders a site, so it generates a CSS file dynamically for a whole site instead of manually feeding it URLs?

</comment><comment><USER18> This is great! I'm happy to see PostCSS proving to be a creative platform for web development.

</comment><comment><USER19> Would this work if you print classnames with php?

<comment><USER20> Sure, you'd need to point the files argument at your website on a server, though - you couldn't just target a .html file.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Am I missing something? UnCSS has been for about 3 years now. [http://bit.ly/uncss](http://bit.ly/uncss) by addyosmani

<comment><USER22> I guess this is being downvoted because he links to the wrong repo (i.e. the grunt edition of the same project) but the point seems fair. I've been using unCSS about 2 years so it is interesting that this discussion is happening now and that people seem surprised by its existence. Perhaps just a symptom of too much JS everything.</comment></comment>


Soon, Bloggers Must Give Full Disclosure  - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/06/business/media/06adco.html?hpw

<comment><USER2> The "it exists, lets regulate it" mentality scares me. Here are the likely results of this move:

1\. Yet another step away from laws made by elected law makers. Over time, the accumulation of these can threaten democracies. (Of course, each one in isolation is "no big deal".)

2\. Another cost of doing business for companies providing freebies. Another junior lawyer on the payroll.

3\. A few bloggers will be singled out and ruined federal style, while the vast majority will skate on by living with the low but present risk of being among the unlucky hanging over there head.

My wife had lunch with a guy who works at the FCC on Saturday. You know what the big issue they are battling internally is? On Friday they banned accessing Hulu.com because so many people were streaming instead of working that it was killing the bandwidth for all. Is this who gets to tell society if a blogger is on the level or not? Why am I as a blog reader less trusted than an FCC/FTC/Any Other Agency employee?

I'm reading YCombinator at work because it pays to be educated and up to date. This is where the smart people are so this is what I read. I doubt watching "Glee" at work provides FCC employees the same benefit.

<comment><USER3> Aside from that, they _do_ realize that the internet is an international medium and the vast majority of it isn't subject to FCC rules, right?

Speaking of which, as a non-US citizen, I'd like to invite companies to send me free products so I can say nice things about them on my blog!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I agree, MikeD... typical big government thinking: expensive, intrusive, & ineffective...

"For bloggers who review products, this means that the days of an unimpeded flow of giveaways may be over."

Really? Does anyone actually think bloggers who review products PAY for the stuff they review? Did Kirstie Alley pay to enrol in Jenny Craig? Does Roger Ebert pay to see movies? C'mon...

I'd rather see the FTC spending taxpayers money to teach people about naivety: "And remember, when someone blogs about their breakfast and tells you that 'Super Sugary Maple Pops are part of a well balanced diet' you might want to question their motives."

What's next? Maybe the FTC should tackle Buzz marketing.. When a stranger strikes up a "random" conversation about "these new shoes that stimulate your chakras as you walk," should the FTC be monitoring the conversation? Good luck (and good night).

O - one last rhetorical Q: what was the FTC doing when this stuff happened? [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_administration_payment_of_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_administration_payment_of_columnists)

</comment><comment><USER5> What I really want to know is, where in the constitution does it say they can do this? I know where it says they _can't_ , but they seem to have found some way to twist that so as to get away with it.

<comment><USER6> Where does it say you can't shout "fire" in a crowded theatre? Where does it say you can't advertise your new wonder drug by claiming it cures cancer and has no side-effects? Free speech is not an absolute right, and commercial speech is the most regulated type of speech act; when you take a payment for what you say then you are obligated to disclose this fact.

If bloggers want to be treated like real, grown-up journalists then they have to start living by the same rules that these journalists live by.

<comment><USER7> "real, grown-up journalists"

Where does the rule say anything about "journalist"? The rule appears to apply to anybody who says anything on Facebook to their friends. It appears to apply if you got a free ticket in your cereal box for a movie, then talk about it on Twitter. At all. $11,000 if you don't "disclose" in an unspecified manner. It appears to be incredibly broad.

Even in the journalism case I consider it dubious, but you seem to be doing the same thing the government is, assuming that all Internet traffic is "journalism" and must be regulated as such. That's not even remotely true. It is as true as saying all spoken words should be regulated as journalism, for pretty much the same reasons; sure, some vanishing fraction of spoken words are journalism but trying to regulate it all as if it were is an enormous category error.

<comment><USER6> If bloggers and twitterers want to hide behind shield laws that protect journalists then they get all of the baggage that comes with that label. They don't get to decide that they are journalists one day (when they want the protection that comes from that label) and are not journalists on the next (when they want to chat up the movie they just saw for free without mentioning that they were paid to do so.)

I would be more than happy to proclaim that nothing mentioned on the internet is journalism unless it came from someone that would have been classified as such before the internet came into existence, but I think that a vocal minority would bitch and moan about such a distinction. The internet's chattering classes created this problem in the first place by proclaiming blogging to be journalism and worthy of the protections provided to people working in this field and I am enjoying the prospect of watching them being forced to live up to the responsibilities that come with these rights.

<comment><USER7> You seem to have it out for "bloggers". That's a class distinction so worthless I'd say you should discard it; it's just people, talking, as silly a classification as "phoners". You want to talk entirely about journalism, then go pressure the rule makers to limit this to journalism. (The fact that you can't work out a definition of journalism, which you allude to, is your problem as someone who wants to regulate it, not mine. I'm underwhelmed by the need for this law even in old media.)

Meanwhile, a Facebook user who doesn't give a shit about whether you consider them a "blogger" and wouldn't know what an "A-list" was if you hit them with it, and ultimately isn't worth your derision for the mere fact that someone somewhere thinks it should be called "blogging" instead of just "talking", is going to incur liabilities for a crime they have no reason to believe is a crime. Again, this law isn't limiting itself to "journalism" anywhere that I can see. (I say "liability" because clearly the government is not going to be able to perfectly enforce this, but I consider a poorly-enforced bad law worse than a well-enforced one; a democracy has ways of dealing with the latter.)

Letting someone split your world into "bloggers" and "nonbloggers" is a terrible move. It's just people, talking. Some use the phone, some talk over the air, some post comments on Hacker News. There isn't a separate division of people called "bloggers" that are some sort of separate species that should have special restrictions placed on them. It's just a power ploy by people who want you to let them impose their power trip on just folk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Disclosing a conflict of interest is always a good thing.

I think some people are misinterpreting the rule. For example ..

>>The rule appears to apply to anybody who says anything on Facebook to their friends.

No, if you have no paid connections with the advertisers on your blog, the rule won't apply to you.

>>Taken to the extreme, this makes it more challenging for any private citizen to use any form of media, including blogs and social networks, to express an idea, opinion, or endorsement.

Why is is challenging for a blogger to disclose that his "review" was preceded by a payment from the company whose product he is reviewing ?

<comment><USER9> _Disclosing a conflict of interest is always a good thing._

Agreed. But this isn't about disclosing a conflict of interest; this is about the creation of a federal regulation that is both vague and unnecessary.

 _Why is is challenging for a blogger to disclose that his "review" was preceded by a payment from the company whose product he is reviewing?_

As I stated earlier, it's a hurdle just to become familiar with the regulations that exist and confirm that you are in compliance. Imagine that a person doesn't blog today but wants to get into it - that person may be deterred by knowing that there is a world of federal regulation out there that they don't understand.

<comment><USER8> "world of federal regulations" ?

if you take money from a company and review their products, disclose the conflict of interest. This is fairly simple. Most new bloggers can understand this and most new bloggers aren't going to get paid for writing reviews anyway.

Why do you see this as a problem ?

<comment><USER9> Many new bloggers (or social media participants) may not know that the federal government has created regulations that pertain to what they do. And if they did know that the regulations exist, they may not know how to find those regulations, and they may not know how to be confident they comply (see my other message speculating on what sort of disclosure is necessary - do you really want to be the one in court arguing that your disclosure was prominent enough?). Creating this regulation adds a layer of complexity that I don't think is necessary.

Perhaps we have fundamentally different views on the role of the government in regulating speech. I agree that disclosing conflicts is desirable, and I think that people should behave ethically when reviewing products. However, I'm not sure why you feel government intervention is necessary here.

<comment><USER8> Commercial speech is already regulated. (unless you're also suggesting that all commercial speech be unregulated) It is inconsistent for you to suggest that bloggers should be given an exception.

Anyway, I'm not worried about the regulation bogey-man here. New bloggers aren't going to be paid by companies to promote their products. If they are savvy enough to get a paid contract, it shouldn't be too difficult for them to publicly disclose their conflict of interest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think that savvy organizations are going to bury these disclosures in their Terms & Conditions (or perhaps a new "Disclosures" page will become common?) along with everything else they don't care if you read, but still want you to be 'notified of' and bound by.

<comment><USER10> With regards to how the disclosure should be made, the FCC are leaving it quite open ended, but it has to be, and I forget what the _exact_ word is in the FCC document but it's something like, "prominent."

<comment><USER9> Thank you for the clarification. I'm not sure if that makes things better or worse -- now, without specific case law, it will be impossible to know whether you are in compliance.

For instance, is a disclosure page enough? What if you link to it at the bottom of the post? What if the disclosure itself is at the end of the post? Does the disclosure need to be on top? Does it need to be on top and more prominent than the rest of the text?

In general, I'm very uncomfortable with the creation of regulatory hurdles for bloggers. The penalty for the infraction itself isn't the only regulatory hurdle - it's a hurdle just to become familiar with the regulations that exist and confirm that you are in compliance.

Taken to the extreme, this makes it more challenging for any private citizen to use any form of media, including blogs and social networks, to express an idea, opinion, or endorsement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There's a slippery slope here, and it worries me, particularly as the FTC can pretty much just make it up as they go along. I want to live in a nation ruled by laws, not one ruled by men.

<comment><USER12> What is the difference? Laws are created by men and women.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: SAFEs and Non-Cash Compensation - <AUTHOR> To give a discount on consulting work to a founder I'm working for, is a SAFE or similar contract a good way to take non-cash compensation when the business is too early-stage to have a valuation? Alternatives? <comment><USER2> My advice is just don't do this, the chances of getting any return are slim at best. If it is a friend and you are wanting to help him/her out but trying to get some upside that's different. With the friend in mind, just go into it saying I'll never see any money but I want to help so I am going to do it anyway. But if this is a stranger and they want you to work for stock, just don't do it. This is how devs get taken advantage of so easily and so often.

If you still go through with it, have an attorney create/review any agreement to prevent tax and legal problems for you, stock grants can be taxable immediately to you, and restricted stock will likely never be worth anything to you. The "best" way to do this is not to take ownership (unless you are going to be a founder or paid employee and you get grants), and instead to invoice the company and hold the debt contractually for invoiced services. You can finance your work for them this way but the moment you take stock things become a pain in the ass, and your chances of getting paid will be even less then doing invoice debt. Also, the stock they grant you will be so diluted and after preferences etc you'll never see a dime, unless you force non-diluting and take a preference yourself but then investors might be hard on the founder for raising money which again, means you won't get paid. Also, don't forget you will have to wait years for the stock to have a private or public market, or you will need provisions for the founders to be forced to buy you out at a minimum price by a specific date etc, it is a mess.

So again, the "best" way is to finance the work for them contractually and you still may want to file a UCC lien to indicate you hold a lien on their software asset until they pay. This way when investors or creditors go through due-diligence they will see the company owes you money for the product and so they will force the founder to pay you. To be fair, some investors get turned off by liens, but the reality is most IME don't care as long as the founder doesn't try to hide it and is up front.

I can share plenty of stories about doing these types of deals when I was younger and getting hosed by people who I felt would always be stand up.

<comment><AUTHOR> He isn't a close friend. I'm asking for enough cash to make sure he is serious. In the same vein, I would like to have an agreement that, should he get an investment, would top me up to close to my usual rate.

The idea of a UCC lien is a very interesting idea, however, in this case, there is a very limited amount of work to do before a zero-stage investor is pitched. If that does not fly, I would of course lose all the non-cash compensation, and the limited amount of code existing would not be saleable or otherwise useful without a lot more work. No patents are involved yet, and even if they were, there would be the time and effort to go from a provisional to a full application involved.

If one were in a situation where compensation, over a longer time, is mostly in founder's shares and there is an asset sale at the end of an unsuccessful run, I can see such a lien being a really good idea.

To clarify and narrow my question: Is taking a SAFE fair? I'm pretty sure it can be fair to me. But is it fair to the founder? Fair to an investor who finds there is a founder-ish person in his same stock class?

Thanks for the very thoughtful response!

<comment><USER2> You're welcome. The obligatory IANAL.

If you are an accredited investor and meet the guidelines according to the SEC then by all means a SAFE is totally fine although I'd still advise against it for what you are doing. But if you don't meet the requirements as an accredited investor executing a SAFE is dangerous for you and the founder as it may (likely will) turn off other investors who are even more risk adverse now than in the recent past.

Just my 2 cents, but unless what you are trying to secure is > $100-120k in fees you are going about it in a way which will raise lots of questions for the founder when they do go to raise and have little benefit for either of you. A founder owing some consulting debt at their seed round is not abnormal and is seen often, but a founder owing debt with stock guarantees/promises to a non-accredited investor is an issue that will come up during any due diligence.

I think you can definitely do a deal here if you really want, just need to explore other options which are less likely to raise questions and stick with common patterns because investors are worse then a deer in the woods. If they see anything out of the ordinary on a cap table or diligence sheet it can at worst spook them for good or at best just leave a sour taste in their mouth which means everything else is an uphill battle of proof for the founder.</comment></comment></comment>


Inside the World of Big-Money Bridge (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://observer.com/2013/11/million-dollar-hobby-inside-the-world-of-big-money-bridge/ <comment><USER2> > While bridge is infinitely analytical, poker is more psychological: In high- > level matches, every player at the table can compute the odds > instantaneously, and what separates the best players from the pack is the > ability to pick up "tells," such as the furrowing of the brow as an > indication of bluffing.

This is largely incorrect, and I wish this stereotype of poker (esp. high- stakes poker) would not be propagated so often.

Pros playing against fish in a private cash game may get a huge advantage off of physical tells, but that's not the most consistent information that almost all players give away.

The consistent information that players give away is how they play specific kinds of hands in terms of position, frequency, aggression, and/or bet sizing. This extends even to very high levels of play. This type of information cannot be hidden, it can only be varied.

A classic low-stakes live tell is that players bet small on weak made hands and draws, but they bet bigger with their stronger made hands. Once a good player gets a sense of what those ranges are and what type of pressure (if any) can make the weak player fold, it just becomes a field day for the skilled player.

Highly-skilled players will have gears that they shift through such that their opponents have a tough time defining the skilled player's hand range. Once the skilled player shows down some unexpected hands and gets into the weak player's head, the game again becomes extremely easy for the skilled player.

Contrary to what the author says, I'm not actually convinced that the gaming skill set of high-level poker players and high-level bridge players is actually that much different.

If any high-level bridge players (I am not one) want to chime in and compare and contrast high-level strategies and tactics in these two games, I would love to extend the discussion.

<comment><USER3> Your description sounds very psychological, which is exactly what the article is saying as well? In other words, you're not concerned with the specific cards (analytical), but what your opponent thinks about their cards.

<comment><USER2> I would characterize high-level poker playing as very analytical, much in the same way that bridge (or spades in my case) is analytical.

I would say that the psychological game — especially getting into someone's head — exists in bridge, spades, poker, and even games like chess and go (high stakes go games between a pro and a rich and skilled amateur often end with the amateur being brain-fucked and playing far below their actual skill level).

I will use spades as an example moving forward due to the fact that I have much more experience with it than bridge, and the gameplay is similar (as well as simpler).

A skilled poker player is always putting opponents on a range of hands, and the betting becomes largely very mechanical once the skilled player is dialed into a weaker player's range.

A skilled spades player is going to make a guess based on bids and cards played about how the bidder plans to make their bid — specifically, with what cards — and then discard accordingly to attempt to create the highest probability of setting the opponent. The same can be said of winning the bid and potentially choosing to play a specific gambit if the hand doesn't seem to be a sure thing.

The cards always matter to some extent in both games. That said, the analysis and mind games can be used in both as well.

Does that answer your question?

[edit: The author uses the term "psychological" to refer to physical tells. Online poker is played with no physical presence, so this form of psychological advantage does not exist. What about bet sizing info? They are called betting tells in the poker world. Is that psychological or analytical? What about learning about hand reading and playing tendencies?

My point is simply that I think that the skill sets of high-level players in each game are actually more similar than is widely believed and represented. Whether these similarities are called psychological or analytical is really just semantics in this particular context.]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a teen I worked as a caddy at duplicate bridge tournaments (moving the cards from one table to another, collecting score cards &c.). There were a lot of interesting people involved there.

I actually worked a qualifier for the Women's National Yeam once. At that level they placed a divider diagonally across the table to prevent partners from being able to see and signal each other.

Personally I think it would be _very_ hard to get to that level by cheating, as you end up with anomalous results (not only were they recorded, but pretty much any competitive player at the regional tournaments could rattle off every single hand and result after an afternoon of 26 hands of bridge).

It was good work, paid really well for a 13-15 year old, and I even learned enough bridge to play on the rare occasion I'm with 3 other like minded people.

side note: for those not familiar with duplicate bridge, you play the same hands as other players. The hands are scored similarly to rubber bridge, but your actual points for ranking in the tournament are based off of how much better or worse you do than other people.

In matchpoint play, many people play the same hands, rotating opponents and there is a formula for calculating the score.

In team play, 2 from your team play against 2 from the other team, and then you switch the hands so that you get the cards that the other half of your opponents team just had. Typically this is done in a sequence of rounds in a Swiss format[1]

1: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss- system_tournament](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss-system_tournament)

<comment><USER5> can you say any more about how cheating is prevented? I always wondered about that as the incentive is high and since teams enter as a team, it seems there is a lot of opportunity for planning communication. I guess I always assumed there was some kind of mixing of partners to prevent collusion (and judge the contribution of a particular individual rather than a team), but it doesn't seem like that is the case.

<comment><USER4> It is prevented through a number of mechanisms

Bids are no longer spoken, but signaled through cards

At higher levels there is a screen across the table (as I mentioned in my original post).

Players are not allowed to vary the tempo of their bids (to allow for longer thought in certain situations, some bids are defined as "surprising" and the next player is required to pause longer).

In terms of detection:

Records are kept both officially and by other players looking to improve their own game. Players are required to define their bidding system ahead of time, so any pattern of "psychic" bids will be noticed very quickly.

Defense play is considerably harder, but a single win after making the "wrong" (i.e. not playing the odds) decision will be memorable for the opponents, so in any given circle of players you can only do it so many times (particularly when it's just enough to win the match) before suspicions get raised.

In several years of my working at sectional, regional, and national tournaments there were two times total that players were caught cheating, and in both cases it was at smaller games (one was at a regional tournament, but not at a particularly competitive level; the partnership at that regional tournament weren't just cheats though, they were really bad cheats and the motivation is still unclear since they were nowhere near professional level).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Fun fact: actor Omar Sharif was a high-stakes Contract Bridge player and organized many international competitions[0].

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omar_Sharif#Contract_bridge_ca...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omar_Sharif#Contract_bridge_career)</comment>