The Delpan Incident - <AUTHOR> http://blog.gittip.com/post/35314128322/the-delpan-incident <comment><USER2> Sounds like they're misusing the word "suspicious". Either that, or they're setting themselves for PayPal-esque issues at scale.

If your business model is "one suspicion means your account is frozen", once you are at a scale large enough to have false positives, you are destined for scandal. I guarantee that if you hope to have a million users and you retain this model, "Gittip froze my account and I can't get my money" is going to be on the front page of HN at some point.

As with other commenters, I applaud the desire to be responsible with others' money and I completely understand the need to be conservative if you want others to trust you with their funds. But scale does funny things to good intentions. You will wind up with insufficient funds to staff an adequate support desk. You will wind up with bogus users trying to do shady things with your service, and they will be very convincing and make you want to help them. And you will wind up with legitimate users who love your service and want to use it the way you've designed it but end up tripping your heuristic. And those users will not love you and will feel hurt and betrayed by you, and if you do that to the wrong user it will quantitatively affect your business and the public perception of your organization.

<comment><USER3> > But scale does funny things to good intentions.

This is great feedback, thanks! You really nailed the ways that fraud burns both good people and good companies. What's the right thing to do, then?

In publishing a detailed report about this incident, I hope to establish a pattern of adjudicating these things in public:

<https://www.gittip.com/about/fraud/2012-11-05.html>

Everyone who was affected by this incident is listed right there on that page. If someone wants to make the case that they're a false positive, they are free to do so, and we can all decide the case together.

I think that's different than PayPal.

> You will wind up with insufficient funds to staff an adequate support desk.

Gittip is a community-managed resource, not a closed product. Right now I'm the support desk. As we scale, the support desk will be staffed by members of the community, chosen by the community, as the community has need.

> You will wind up with bogus users trying to do shady things with your > service, and they will be very convincing and make you want to help them.

If they ask for help they'll be doing so in public, and I'll have you to help me spot them. Many eyeballs, etc. For example, here's a brand new GitHub account asking for details of Gittip's anti-fraud measures and making recommendations:

[https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/364#issueco...](https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/364#issuecomment-10186628)

[https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/357#issueco...](https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/357#issuecomment-10179510)

[https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/347#issueco...](https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/347#issuecomment-10186850)

[https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/357#issueco...](https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/357#issuecomment-10179510)

Waddya think? Fraudster? :^)

> And you will wind up with legitimate users who love your service and want to > use it the way you've designed it but end up tripping your heuristic.

This has already happened. Half the accounts I originally suspended last week, I ended up reinstating with an apology:

[https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/329#issueco...](https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/329#issuecomment-10000001)

Again, that was done in public, as is the matter of recovering stolen money that was passed off on innocent bystanders:

<https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/371>

> if you do that to the wrong user it will quantitatively affect your business > and the public perception of your organization.

Again, Gittip is a community-managed resource, not a business. The wrong user can say very little that I wouldn't welcome them to say publicly.

<comment><USER2> In my opinion, by linking a person's gittip account with their public persona (twitter or, worse, github) and then calling a person out as "suspicious", you are doing your user base a disservice. If I was trying to do the right thing by tipping someone I appreciated and then not only did you tell me I was suspicious but you also told the world, I would not be passionate about how great your service was. At the very least I would have a bad taste in my mouth, and at the worst I would likely flee entirely.

At a scale of a million people, 0.3% is 30k. Can you imagine a human trying to parse that page at that scale? I can't. You wave the magic phrase of crowdsourcing at the objections, but what person has the sort of energy, patience, and free time to sift through all that? Paypal can't _hire_ enough folks to do that sort of thing; what makes you think you can convince them to work at it for free, month after month, year after year? Oh, you might gittip me fifty cents if I do that for you? Well, OK then.

I understand that the last thing you want is for gittip to become a money laundering site. If news got out that your pet project is a great way to get funds out of stolen credit cards, that could easily destroy you completely. Perhaps avoiding that scenario makes the measures you've put into place worth it. But it feels like you've limited both the rate at which you can grow and the scale to which you can grow.

Every now and again you read about someone's Amazon account being closed because it gets caught up in their automated scam dragnets and the customer service drone assigned to their case is monumentally unhelpful. Do you think that a system similar to yours (aggressively flagging accounts, exposing presumed fraudsters, relying on community volunteers and public transparency) would make their system better, at their scale? Do you think they could have reached their current scale if they used such a system?

<comment><USER3> I'm open to alternatives. What would you suggest?

<comment><USER3> The primary goal is to keep stolen money out of Gittip. The secondary goal is to recover stolen money once it's inside of Gittip. There are other kinds of fraud to watch for but let's focus on this for now.

If Gittip does nothing, then stolen money gets into Gittip, and some portion of that is reported to the banks, and Gittip gets hit with chargebacks. Chargebacks are financially onerous, and if Gittip gets too many of them then we'll lose our privileges with the banks altogether. Moreover, chargebacks take months to hit. It's neither economical nor efficient to use chargebacks as the primary signal for bad accounts. Therefore, I don't see a choice but to try to predict which accounts are going to inject stolen money into Gittip before it happens.

Once stolen money is in Gittip, some of that goes to good accounts and some to bad. Either Gittip makes an effort to recover that money somehow, or we simply factor the entire stolen amount into our cost of doing business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> While I'm not truly clear on what gittip does, I applaud the message from the guy in charge. I like the approach and the intent---and above all the open- ness. Curiously that is combined with a sensible amount of 'quiet' with reference to exactly what they are doing to combat the problem. Insert applause here...

<comment><USER3> Thanks! :^)

Gittip lets you set up small anonymous weekly gifts between $1 and $24 to people who do good work. It ticks over every Thursday. Gittip is funded on Gittip and is trying to be an "open company:"

[http://blog.gittip.com/post/26350459746/the-first-open- compa...](http://blog.gittip.com/post/26350459746/the-first-open-company)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not sure if having a boolean value where "null" and "false" mean two different things is a good idea. Sounds like a source for a lot of bugs in business code and SQL.

<comment><USER6> naive but honest question -- _aren't_ 'null' and 'false' different?

<comment><USER7> They are, and that's where the bugs can come from. :) It leads to a situation where it's easy to come back to the code in the future (or have a new developer working on it) and see a field that's a boolean and make an assumption like "well, this is a boolean, so if it's not True than it's False." I like to make my booleans not-null so that they're, well, actually booleans, and leave stuff with three or more states to enum-like behavior.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, maybe should've gone with an enum. I end up doing "is_suspicious IS NOT null" etc.

<comment><USER8> Or you could just admit that it's lots of grays and use an actual number. [0..1] for a trust scale. Trust _never_ is binary. (It also rarely is one- dimensional. But that's a different story... You might get away with one dimension, since it's restricted to a very limited set of interactions)

<comment><USER3> Good point. I was trying to get something going quickly. I expect the system to continue evolving.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think this just means that I've had a long, tiring week but the fact that the amount of stolen money was 56789 was really messing with me. I kept scanning for the part where he said the numbers were made up or something.

That said, this is a great article and definitely educated me to a bit of potential fraud I hadn't considered before.

<comment><USER3> Got me, too. :^)

<https://twitter.com/whit537/status/266285523872657408>

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Holy unreadable contrast, Batman!

<http://contrastrebellion.com/>

<comment><USER3> Yeah, sorry. We have a new visual design waiting in the wings.

<https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/66>

Hopefully this fraud thing dies down long enough for me to implement it, and/or someone else steps up to the plate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> So now when you're "given" money through gittip you can't get it back out until their system decides you're trustworthy? Sounds like the first step on the road towards turning into paypal (and the incident gives you some insight into why paypal ended up like that).

<comment><USER12> I think one of the main problems with PayPal is that their procedures are opaque and when your funds get frozen there is no information as to why. It sounds like his intention is the opposite of that.

<comment><USER3> We shall see if this intention is ultimately realizable.

<comment><USER3> On another HN thread I learned about potential legal ramifications for "tipping off" criminals that seem to be behind PayPal's characteristic behavior:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4744371>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> You can't really solve this problem. It's why things like Stripe and PayPal cost so much money. The only way to solve it would be a la Google, where you need to have a certain account balance before withdrawl, but that opens you up to other regulatory issues.

</comment><comment><USER14> It looks like a great project and this kind of message is encouraging about its leadership.

Yes, you cannot get rid of fraud. However, 0.3% of suspicious accounts seem a reasonable number.

Great job but as others point out it looks quite hard for it to become profitable.

<comment><USER3> Thanks! :^)

Gittip is funded on Gittip, and isn't designed to be profitable per se. More info:

[http://blog.gittip.com/post/26350459746/the-first-open- compa...](http://blog.gittip.com/post/26350459746/the-first-open-company)

<comment><USER14> Oh, great but then, who is accountable for precisely these rogues? That is certainly a systemic problem or am I missing something? I like the idea.

<comment><USER3> Well, Zeta Design & Development, LLC is technically the legal owner of Gittip, and I'm the owner of Zeta Design & Development, LLC. The open company philosophy means that I'm managing it as a community resource and not a closed product. Am I answering the question?

<comment><USER15> I imagine the problem he's addressing is what you're going to do in any instances where a member lost money and you'd like to reimburse them.

In a traditional company, this might cut into your profits, but might simply be the cost of doing business. In your case, if you have no profits to cut in to, how will you reimburse people if that sort of situation were to arise?

I think Gittip looks really cool, and the concept of an "open company" is intriguing. I'll definitely be interested how you guys tackle these sorts of problems.

<comment><USER3> Gittip doesn't have profit, but it does collect a fee, and that fee needs to cover reimbursements and chargebacks. Here's the ticket:

<https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/152></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tell HN: Make HN UI larger so that we don't need to zoom in all the time - <AUTHOR> I like HN's UI. However, it's too small on some machines such as MBP 13in. +125% looks fine tho.<p>@dang, is it possible to make the whole UI a bit larger?<p>On a side note, it's very cumbersome to work with the UI on mobile devices. At least for me, I always have to pinch in to tap on the right links, and often times, I still can't click on the right link. I guess using buttons instead of plain text could help with that, esp. cause the borders would be shown and UX would improve. The buttons don't even have to be objects; just some border around the clickable text (e.g. Windows Phone buttons). <comment><USER2> If you think the interface is unreadable on a 13" MBP, try viewing HN on a 7" tablet! [AKA 'The device Configuration That Time Forgot'] I'd estimate the pre-zoomed fontsize to be about 3px on that.

Mind you, HN isn't alone here. Without Yandex Browser's built-in text-reflow, allowing me to zoom in and still keep everything framed in the window, I'd need a microscope to read most websites on my 7" tablet.

</comment><comment><USER3> A good example of when people need to be told No.</comment>


Millennials Slammed by Second Financial Crisis Fall Even Further Behind - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/millennials-covid-financial-crisis-fall-behind-jobless-11596811470 <comment><USER2> You know, the longer this pandemic goes on, and the more I see the pain, suffering, and hardships around the world, along with the richest companies in the world being able to stay afloat while small businesses are shuttering closed permanently...

Maybe old and immunocompromised people should just stay home period. Everyone else should just open up and deal with the consequences as they arise.

<comment><USER3> Maybe we shouldn't inflate stock/land by pumpig fake money and basically stealing from poor/young?

IMO there needs to be some fix for this or people will get pissed off if pandemic will impact economy more.

If I put my saving in FAANGs stock in 2016 I basically wouldn't need to work as gains would be better than what I earn. I doubt that this is sustainable.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Non-paywall: [http://archive.is/0f8A6](http://archive.is/0f8A6)</comment>


Put order on your ElasticSearch and save money with VRR - <AUTHOR> https://looking4q.blogspot.com/2018/09/level-up-logs-and-elk-introduction.html?rgr4alberto <comment><AUTHOR> A friend of mine wrote this article serie to prove the VRR strategy is good both for Dev and for Ops. It's cost saving and puts order in Elastic when used for logging...

<comment><USER2> Good PoV, +1 for the ORDER and for OPS!</comment></comment>


Show HN: A social platform to record and debate predictions of the future - <AUTHOR> https://www.predibly.com/ <comment><USER2> The problem with this is that predictions should, ideally, be clearly specified, offer a percentage estimate (0-100% likelihood), and have some reliable method of validating the outcome.

The Good Judgement Project does all these things: [https://www.gjopen.com/](https://www.gjopen.com/)

This website, on the other hand, seems to encourage none of these epistemic virtues. It's people making more or less precise verbal predictions on twitter and then assessing themselves.

</comment><comment><USER3> Suggestion: require "skin in the game" ie. make predictors risk something of value (with commensurate chance of gain if their prediction manifests).

This would likely increase prediction quality/accuracy.

<comment><USER4> Who will validate the predictions? Manual validation will not scale.

<comment><USER5> Who will determine the odds of predictions?

<comment><USER6> People can offer bets, those with differing views can take the bets. You can even make a market with floating odds like BetFair used to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My favorite prediction from a similar site:

[http://longbets.org/601/](http://longbets.org/601/)

Jeremy Keith bet that "The original URL for this prediction (www.longbets.org/601) will no longer be available in eleven years."

He looks set to lose, which is great news for him, honestly.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi there, My friend Nathan and I recently launched Predibly.com: a social platform to publicly share your predictions of the future and have interesting conversations about them. Nathan had the idea last week, I build the MVP and we'd love to know your thoughts!

<comment><USER8> It's cool. Develop an abuse flagging policy early.

<comment><USER6> I predict this will be difficult.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A relevant episode of EconTalk[1]. If I remember correctly, Philip Tetlock is running a continuous betting project to try to determine what characterize good forecasters.

[1]:[https://www.econtalk.org/philip-tetlock-on- superforecasting/...](https://www.econtalk.org/philip-tetlock-on- superforecasting/?highlight=\[%22tetlock%22,%22on%22,%22superforecasting%22,%22%22\])

<comment><USER10> Direct link to the project: [https://www.gjopen.com/](https://www.gjopen.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I like it! Love that you can sort by time of prediction or by time of post/popularity. Sort by "controversial" could be nice.

As soon as you have more than a dozen you will need tags or category. Tech, science, politics, sports... will cater to vastly different people and foster different discussions.

I don't like the fact that Twitter is required to sign up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you like the idea! Categories are on our list of features to implement. We're thinking about hashtags like Twitter does. Yeah, Signup with Twitter was mostly to accelerate the development time but an email signup will be introduced in the future as we're aware that some people prefer this way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have a similar site I've been working on, although ours is more focused on betting and quantifying accuracy. It's [https://hunches.app](https://hunches.app)

<comment><USER10> Note for US users, this is buried in the TOS:

> If the User is a U.S. Person, User represents that user is an accredited > investor

[https://hunches.app/terms-of-service](https://hunches.app/terms-of-service)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nice idea! In case you haven't seen it, this site uses a similar concept:

[http://longbets.org/](http://longbets.org/)

<comment><USER4> Jeff (AWS) funded this one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I really like the design!

I would like a filter for controversial, having people add: The earth will still exist in 2020, is not so interesting.

I normally don't like leaderboards, but in this case, it would be nice if and only if it was weighted by how controversial the prediction is.

</comment><comment><USER15> Nobody suggest having a "prediction reputation" that keeps track of the quality of people's predictions? Like, after the even should have taken place, open it up for up/down votes or such?

</comment><comment><USER16> Is there an API? Could I build a betting site around it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not yet sorry :) Maybe one day!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you haven't seen it, I recommend predictionbook.com.

Honestly, not as nice as what was shared from a UI perspective. However, the user experience on predictionbook.com appears better.

[https://predictionbook.com/](https://predictionbook.com/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Interesting, but there is no legal disclaimer, about page, corporation, cookie usage information, etc

Does that mean you don't log in anyway any information about visitor, and that you share all gathered information by contributors with the public ? For example, where can I download the whole database of prediction, with votes, comments and history ?

If I can't, I'm assuming this is not fully public and you potentially use my data as a visitor and/or contributor to make money, and you therefore need a legal entity to represent the website.

<comment><USER19> C'mon, it's a side project. Let the person develop some functionality before expecting him to add all this useless legal mumbo-jumbo.

<comment><USER18> Sorry, but I care about my rights, even if you are only experimenting ideas.

<comment><USER20> It isn't your "right" to demand that he follows your countries local laws, especially if he isn't from your country.

He is well within his right to make the website exactly how it is, and you are well within your rights not to visit it.

<comment><USER18> True, and I made my decision. I only wanted to warn about it to other people who might browse here. The intent of the website is not clear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Nice. Imagine with a BTC betting api on top.

<comment><USER22> There's such a system built on Ethereum: [https://www.augur.net/](https://www.augur.net/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> How about infinite scroll?

</comment><comment><USER24> Nice design.

</comment><comment><USER25> I can't wait for all the STEMlords and edgy kids from r/futurology to blabber about Elon bringing them to Mars.</comment>


A one-year Nextcloud bug can lead to Data loss if you use a Google Pixel Device - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/nextcloud/android/issues/3301 <comment><AUTHOR> This issue is the reason why I left Nextcloud this February. Nextcloud is a great software and i like the feeling of freedom and privacy. But, if I have to choose between data consistency and data privacy, then I choose data consistency.

Losing important photos and memories is something that must not happen. The worst thing is: The user may not notice the problem.

* In my case 15 of 23 photos were uploaded (In other words, I would have to count the photos after uploading them)

* Nextcloud does not report an error to the user

I was lucky that my smartphone has a trash bin and I even noticed the problem.</comment>


Machine Learning can tell what you're typing just by listening - <AUTHOR> http://theswimmingsubmarine.blogspot.com/2011/01/ai-system-that-can-hear-what-youre.html

<comment><USER2> I'm disappointed that this summary doesn't touch on the actual results; the system recognizes 19/20 characters in the best of cases, and 9/10 is an optimistic number otherwise (so many different trials make naming one number impossible). I am glad to discover this awesome, extremely impressive work; but including numeric results would have ensured that I saw this as a information security problem. Instead, I imagined that I could unplug my keyboard forevermore :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I wrote this post - you're right that I should have emphasised the application in security/espionage. With regard to the results, it's very difficult to judge, because in natural language text, even with a low accuracy rate per character people would still be able to deduce the message (see <http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/cmabridge/>) With regard to password cracking, even a low accuracy rate could make a previously impractical brute force search possible,

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Leave that on your phone which you 'leave' somewhere and you have an instant key logger?</comment>


Ask HN: Legal to stream music online in India ? - <AUTHOR>

This may be applicable to certain markets only. I am in particular more interested about India.<p>There are plenty of websites bollyfm, smashhits, songs.pk, etc offering streaming for all Indian Movie Songs. Some even offer download. phulki.com also seems to be aggregating music but they store the MP3s on their servers. Is all this legal ? If not, what part is ? <comment><USER2> Almost all music streamed and played in India online is illegal. PPL India (<http://www.pplindia.org/aboutus.html>) cracks down on such websites.

One needs to obtain specific license from PPL for streaming music online and such a license is quite expensive.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't know about other websites you mentioned, but raaga.com looks legal.

They've an advertisers page which looks genuine - I've seen ads for new movies show up on raaga.com (I'm guessing if movie producers don't have a problem buying ads on that website, they're probably legal?). <http://www.raaga.com/channels/home/advertise.asp>

</comment><comment><USER4> Read their TOS and policies, may be they mention something.

Google "their name" + legal issues, may be you find a blog post or a forum thread about them on the web.

</comment><comment><USER5> Dude 99.99% of them are illegal and run in either Pak/US.</comment>


LI2: Lego Institute for Lego Investigation - <AUTHOR> http://norvig.com/LI2/ <comment><USER2> A few of the images on this site make it clear that LI2 is fudging its diversity numbers. That's concerning; if I were Hogwarts or Stark Industries, I'd pull out of the partnership.

<comment><USER3> The diversity numbers are accurate. The numbers are for employees; some of the images depict non-employee visitors, some of whom are people of non-yellow color.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Peter Norvig has too much time on his hands!

Although the following is sadly too personally familiar

"The original proposal had several of the classic grant application mistakes. It was too ambitious, the investigators had few recent papers, they needed a more senior collaborator, and there was no preliminary data to demonstrate feasibility. In addition, it is well known that one does not simply walk into Mordor."

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't get it, is this some sort of parody / satire?

<comment><USER6> It's a jab at Paul Allen's AI2 [https://allenai.org](https://allenai.org)

<comment><USER7> Do Paul Allen and Peter Norvig go way back?

<comment><USER3> I admire Oren, and AI2, and the other institutes mentioned in the Director's Statement. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If anybody has contact information for the principal researchers I would be very happy to donate some more processing power.

<comment><USER9> For newcomers who don't recognize jacquesm and why the idea of him donating Lego is ... interesting (in a scary way, depending on how much living space Mr Norvig has I guess), please see [https://jacquesmattheij.com/sorting-two- metric-tons-of-lego/](https://jacquesmattheij.com/sorting-two-metric-tons-of- lego/).

At the moment I'm not seeing images on that page, but perhaps it's my problem.

<comment><USER10> > At the moment I'm not seeing images on that page, but perhaps it's my > problem.

The images are broken because e.g. [https://jacquesmattheij.com/sorting-two- metric-tons-of-lego/...](https://jacquesmattheij.com/sorting-two-metric-tons- of-lego/IMG_0031.JPG) is actually at [https://jacquesmattheij.com/IMG_0031.JPG](https://jacquesmattheij.com/IMG_0031.JPG)

They just need a forward slash in <img src="IMG_0031.JPG"> to make the path root-relative.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The funding estimates seem a bit low. Lego projects can easily run into the billions of microdollars.

</comment><comment><USER12> I love that this demonstrates the level of play Peter Norvig still brings to his life and work (also obvious if you read some of his blog posts).

<comment><USER4> I'm just highly amused that there is a little Lego Peter Norvig running around...

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The bananas inspector seems very focused on his work

[https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/Bananas_I...](https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/Bananas_Inspection_Instructions%5B1%5D.pdf)

Serious bussiness

</comment><comment><USER14> Still a better website than many actual research institutes.</comment>


Cut the Crap out of your internet diet - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@phil_tower/cut-the-crap-b5b7505e827b?source=linkShare-29229a005328-1488979628 <comment><USER2> > my head is a lot clearer and I feel more present in the situations I'm in > throughout the day.

Exactly. This is why I stick to quality sources of content such as HackerNews and blog feeds of reputable, reliable thought leaders. Over-consumption only leads to cloudy, confused thoughts – I could fill my brain with trash from Reddit, but then I'd end up just another intellectual couch potato.

If I really feel the need to consume mindlessly, I prefer sources that I know are well curated, like Jason Kottke's blog [1] or sources that are crafted to get my mind back on track, like Zen Habits [2].

[1] [http://kottke.org/](http://kottke.org/)

[2] [https://zenhabits.net/](https://zenhabits.net/)</comment>


Donald Trump Secures Electoral College Win, With Few Surprises - happy-go-lucky http://www.npr.org/2016/12/19/506188169/donald-trump-poised-to-secure-electoral-college-win-with-few-surprises <comment><AUTHOR> The electoral college needs to go. It's broken and this just cements it in my mind. Why have a popular vote if the majority winner doesn't determine the outcome? Why have the electoral college if they can't vote their conscience?

<comment><USER2> > They can't vote their conscience.

Surprisingly, four electors for Hillary didn't show up, and another four didn't vote for her. So in addition to the two that didn't vote for Trump, it looks like they might vote their conscience indeed.

EDIT: Oh, I see, the votes for Powell were an attempt to move Rep. electors off Trump. Makes more sense to me now.

<comment><USER3> Why would a person think Powell would be seen as an alternative for a Republican. He burned his bridges. Strange thing is he could have ran and won at least the nomination before.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Anyone got the story on what was going on in Washington? Those are some odd votes.

If someone does try to influence electors in the future, the whole threats of violence didn't work, and personal appeals should know the sex of the elector before making the video.

<comment><USER4> > ... the whole threats of violence didn't work...

Good. That's _not_ how politics is supposed to work here.

> ... and personal appeals should know the sex of the elector before making > the video.

In other words, that didn't work either. Also good.

Whether the _result_ is good... we'll see. But at least we're not doing politics by violence yet.

<comment><USER3> I too am happy threats and personal appeals didn't work. An elector needs to represent the rules of the election for their state absolutely. Some states give discretion and some don't.</comment></comment></comment>


Do We Need GraphQL? - <AUTHOR> http://kellysutton.com/2017/01/02/do-we-need-graphql.html <comment><USER2> > In the world of GraphQL, HTTP is an unfortunate transport mechanism rather > than something to be embraced. Rather than using the standard semantics, we > ignore them completely by treating HTTP like a dumb pipe.

Yep, this seems to be the nub of it. Whether this is good or bad depends on your perspective. On one side, REST is about transferring representations of particular objects. If you're in the graph query world, you're not looking at things an object at a time. So maybe side-stepping what HTTP provides in order to build a higher-level abstraction is good, and HTTP should just be a dumb pipe.

On the other hand, HTTP has this entire world of primitives you can use, and treating it like a dumb pipe throws away many years of software and architecture advances, in order for HTTP to provide something that really any transport could probably just as easily.

If graph query really catches on, we'll have to deal with the mismatch between __what graph query is trying to do, and what HTTP was built to do __.

Personally as far as graph query goes, I'm partial to the Cypher query language ([https://neo4j.com/developer/cypher-query- language/);](https://neo4j.com/developer/cypher-query-language/\);) I'd like a true declarative query language rather than a way of shoe-horning similar ideas into a JSON format. But if the web goes in a direction of making any kind of graph query more easy and available, that's not going to be a loss as far as I'm concerned.</comment>


Patreon Hacked, Gigabytes of Data and Code Leaked - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/05/patreon-hacked-gigabytes-of-data-and-code-leaked/ <comment><USER2> Oops:

> The data seems to have come from a debug version of the site that was > visible to the Internet. The debug version included a "snapshot" of the > production database.</comment>


Google's revamped Cloud Source Repositories in beta - <AUTHOR> https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/application-development/introducing-new-cloud-source-repositories <comment><USER2> Being able to search code so efficiently across the whole company's code base is a huge productivity gain. But I found people who hasn't worked in Google or other companies that have this capability generally don't believe it's a big deal.

<comment><USER3> Well, you need to have a fairly large codebase with a fair amount of in-house infrastructure and interdependencies before you have both the need to find code that you're not working on and have a dense enough source tree where search makes more sense than just learning the organization and navigating to where you need to go.

<comment> joatmon-snoo Honestly, it's not even the monorepo and tooling. Simply the ability to navigate our code IDE-style in the browser, and move back and forth between different revisions, makes a huge difference.

I've been mucking around with some code in javac recently and was trying to show someone something I'd found, and browsing the openjdk mercurial repo was just so painful compared to hunting around google3.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very nice. Reading that makes me miss Google's internal dev environment. I may not much use anymore Google Search and gmail, but Google's paid products like GCP (and Google Play Music, Movies, etc.) are awesome. Also, amazing permanent free tier levels. I need to use github for the repos for my books because they are already linked, but for my personal private repos I think I may switch.

<comment><USER5> Could you share why as a former Google dev you no longer use Google search and gmail? I'm curious why you mentioned that in response to a post about cloud source repositories. Thanks.

<comment><USER6> I'm not OP, but I'm also a former Googler. I switched to DDG and Firefox after I left because I think it's important that alternatives exist. Google may be a better actor in monopoly situations than some other companies, but they're still a company trying to make profit for shareholders.

(As a bonus, I find ddg+Firefox snappier than Google+Chrome)

<comment><USER7> > Google may be a better actor in monopoly situations than some other > companies

That made me think, so thank you and yes I agree.

<comment><USER6> I'm glad you quoted me after I edited "Google is" to "Google may be". I am willing to contend that it's not a settled point :-)

<comment><USER7> I think I would have agreed even if you had said 'has been ... so far'. Monopolies rarely behave well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nice. Is the code search the same as what Google has internally? I do miss that.

(Though honestly, the value from the internal code search was that _everything_ was in there. So if you got an error message from a service you were a client of, you could just search for the error message in their code and see what it actually meant. "Aha, this 'optional' field that's marked 'deprecated' isn't actually optional or deprecated," most of the time ;)

<comment><USER9> You might also want to check out [https://kythe.io](https://kythe.io) and [https://github.com/google/kythe](https://github.com/google/kythe).

<comment><USER10> It's great that they opened Kythe but as someone who deployed it from scratch I say it's like ordering a DIY aircraft carrier kit. Many steps before you get something useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sounds great but at this point I've been burned by Google EOLing products that I use too many times.

<comment><USER12> I was going to make this same joke. It's hard to put faith into a product when Google keeps killing them off. Wave and Google Code are two top of mind products that I missed when they were gone.

Conversely, I think it's important for Google engineers to be able to try new things and publish products without having to worry about supporting them forever. Is there some sort of happy medium? Like a Google labs of products that are in various states of whimsical testing?

Cloud source looks nice, and for GCP projects I'm sure it will have a nice tie in, but for now I'm 100% more likely to push code to Gitlab until it makes sense to do otherwise.

<comment><USER13> I know that is the meme, but are there any examples of Google dropping enterprise (i.e. paid) offerings? I can think of a few free services that they have dropped, but that's a different story than dropping a commercial service that you're selling to enterprise users.

<comment><USER12> I don't know. A quick perusal of the graveyard[1] shows what I would consider mostly free services.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discon...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discontinued_products_and_services)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This looks interesting but impractical for me to mirror hundreds of repos here just to get better search.

Has anyone played with this or similar tools that can provide search by indexing at source. It's a little surprising that Google doesn't just index everything public in Github, gitlab, etc.

I would like a good code search solution especially because I have projects across lots of different repo servers but want developers to be able to find code regardless of repo home. A colleague indexed it with solr and that was ok, but had limited semantic ability and definitely nothing like what Google describes where your recent search history and activity is displayed to each user.

<comment><USER15> Author of the blog post here.

Thanks for taking a look. I'm glad you find Cloud Source Repositories interesting. We'd love to Cloud Source Repositories more practical to use. Can you explain what is impractical for you? Is the initial process of setting up multiple mirrors? Or the routine of having to go to another site for search?

(Disclaimer: I work at Google and am the PM on this product)

<comment><USER14> Thanks for responding. I work in an organization (happy to PM) with a few Github orgs and about 300 repos. Dozens of project teams work in them and use various GitHub features.

I have no easy insight or overview into code across these repos without scripting. The impractical part is in cloning mirroring all of these repos to get insight from your new function because user behavior is baked into all the workflow around the Github repos.

The go to another site isn't so bad as this is a new function and not available in Github, so programmers will likely check it out when they need.

But manually forming everything and syncing. It would be neat if I can import an org in one fell swoop.

That being said, I do have scripting forking everything over on my list of things to do when I have cycles on the weekend.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> For those that haven't used Google's code search before, I believe this will be very similar to Chromium's code search[0] (which is based on Google's internal one).

[0] [https://cs.chromium.org/](https://cs.chromium.org/)

</comment><comment><USER17> > For Java, JavaScript, Go, C++, Python, TypeScript and Proto files, you'll > see result suggestions indicating whether the match is an entity such as a > class, method, enum, or field.

Apparently they forgot about Flutter users.

</comment><comment><USER18> One nice thing is how trivial it is to mirror a repository from Bitbucket or GitHub. I wish it was as easy to mirror a repository from Bitbucket to GitHub or GitHub to Bitbucket.

<comment><USER19> It would be nice if it was so easy to mirror bitbucket server, or gitlab, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Quickly glanced through the blog post and the docs but didn't find any mention of Git LFS. Does Cloud Source Repositories support mirroring LFS content?

<comment><USER15> Author of the blog post here.

Cloud Source Repositories currently supports very large repositories. The same backend scales to the needs of the Android open source project, which regularly checks in massive binary files. There are many APKs and VM images in the Git repositories we host. However, Cloud Source Repositories does not support LFS or the mirroring of LFS content.

LFS is not deeply integrated into Git, creating usability problems. Because the content is not part of the object graph of the repository, you have to decide in advance to use Git LFS. You don't get the benefit in existing repositories with large files. You also can't back out --- once you're using Git LFS on a medium-sized file, you can't change your mind and instruct Git to send it inline in fetches, without rewriting history, which breaks existing clients that have cloned the repository.

For the same reason, history mining commands like "git blame" and "git log -S" don't have access to the object.

In addition, it complicates migrating to another host. Usually in Git, you can take out your content by running "git clone --mirror one-url and then "git -C directory.git push --mirror another-url". With Git LFS, this copies over the pointer files but not the underlying large file content and you must remember to take extra steps to instruct the new host about where the blobs are stored.

Google's Cloud Source Repositories team believes that Git itself needs to deal better with large files. The first step of this work within the Git project has been partial clone, which is supported in Cloud Source Repositories and in the public Git 2.17 release (for best results, please use Git 2.19, released September, 2018). If you run "git clone --filter=blob:limit=512M <url>", files larger than 512M will be omitted from the initial clone and fetched automatically on demand when needed (for example during checkout operations). See [https://crbug.com/git/2](https://crbug.com/git/2) for more details about this feature. We are continuing to work with the community on adding other features related to large file support into Git.

(Disclaimer: I work at Google and am the PM on this product)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why would someone move from bitbucket?

<comment><USER15> Author of the blog post here.

We've generally heard that developers move from Bitbucket to Cloud Source Repositories because they want to use other Google Cloud services and it's simpler for them to manage their source in the same place where they debug, build and deploy that code. Developers often mention that they appreciate the unified identity, IAM permissions, and integrations that Cloud Source Repositories has with Cloud Shell, Cloud Build, Cloud Debugger and others Google Cloud services.

However, developers don't need to move from Bitbucket to take advantage of the utility provided by Cloud Source Repositories. You can mirror any number of your repositories into Cloud Source Repositories and take advantage of the code browser, code search, and various integrations with Google Cloud Platform.

(Disclaimer: I work at Google and am the PM on this product)

<comment><USER3> FWIW, it'd also be great to have mirroring with Gitlab (especially since I think Google Cloud has a deal for users with them?).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Google code is back? They really do indicate they can host your repo in the post!

<comment><USER23> GCP has been able to host your repo since before the turndown of Google Code. In fact, the original GCP Source Repo team and the Google Code team were the same team (though the current product has a different backend and team).

<comment><USER24> Yep, I used to work on the Google code specific features but there was a lot of collaboration between the devs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is pretty cool. What can we expect in terms of additional language support?

<comment><USER15> Author of the blog post here.

I'm glad you like it. Which languages would you like to see support added for?

Note that search works today across all languages but the semantic understanding of source which enhances search is limited to Java, JavaScript, Go, C++, Python, TypeScript and Proto files.

(Disclaimer: I work at Google and am the PM on this product)

<comment><USER25> Thanks for the post Russell. Our SaaS application is running on Rails / Typpescript frontend. We're patiently waiting for App Engine to add Standard support for Ruby before we go all in on GCP. I would be most excited to see Cloud Source support Ruby. Hope your team will consider it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Similar to OpenGrok, I'm assuming?

</comment><comment><USER27> Why would I want to host code on Google's Cloud when they shut down Google Code? What's to stop them from shutting down Google Cloud in a few years?

<comment><USER28> I believe the difference is this is part of GCP and their terms for GA products are that they will support for at least one year on deprecated versions / products and not just instantly remove something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> They should list expected months until closure on the product page so people can plan accordingly. I kid, but not really.

<comment><USER30> how many gcp products has google abandoned in total?

<comment><USER31> I know we deprecated the prediction API with a year's warning while bringing out Cloud ML Engine. And Cloud SQL changed a bit when the second generation came in and supported MySQL, PostgreSQL and more.

Can't think of others off the top of my head, so that is two if we want to consider major upgrades "abandoned." Perception often doesn't match objective fact.

(Disclosure: I work at GCP)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are the laws for practicing online Therapy in US? - <AUTHOR> I want to make an app for online therapy from another country and provide cost-effective therapy services(the current app's charges are too high as the therapists are based in US). I am looking for the online therapy laws and regulations in th US and its legality. <comment><USER2> I might be able to help. What's the best email to reach you?

<comment><AUTHOR> please contact at firstname.lastname@example.com</comment></comment>


The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences - <AUTHOR> http://oeis.org/ <comment><USER2> The way I think about it is less as an encyclopedia of sequences per se than it is a kind of projection of mathematics onto sequence-space. The point being that an integer sequence, because it often has so many mathematical interpretations, acts in some sense like the _intersection_ of those interpretations. There are of course many ways in which two or more mathematical concepts are linked, but a shared integer sequence is among the most useful, precisely because it can be browsed and searched like an encyclopedia.

<comment><USER3> That's a pretty thought

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've used OEIS a number of times for obscure mathematical problems in programming competitions. It's a pretty useful resource!

<comment><USER5> Could you please elaborate to a less mathematically inclined dev how to spot a problem the would fit the bill and then how to use this encyclopedia properly?

It's one of these things I seem to have been born blind towards.

<comment><USER6> Well, the last time it helped me was as a "reverse lookup" for math knowledge I never got the "right" way through education.

For example, one of the Google-Foobar puzzles involves how many ways you can order a line of different-height elements so that only a certain number are "visible" if you stood at one end of the line or the other.

First I tried to figure out how I would solve it for small numbers by hand, creating a spreadsheet of inputs. At one point, I got a grid of numbers where the "simpler" rows/columns had a sequence like 1, 1, 1, 2, 3, 1, 6, 11, 6, which, through random googling and OEIS turned out to be "Unsigned Stirling numbers of the first kind"

[http://oeis.org/A008275](http://oeis.org/A008275) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_numbers_of_the_first_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_numbers_of_the_first_kind)

Alas, I'm still no math-major... the comments in my solution contain: "I'm extremely proud of this boiled-down end-result... except that I'm not sure I can fully explain _why_ it works."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting profile of the founder of this site: [http://www.theguardian.com/science/alexs-adventures-in- numbe...](http://www.theguardian.com/science/alexs-adventures-in- numberland/2014/oct/07/neil-sloane-the-man-who-loved-only-integer-sequences)

</comment><comment><USER6> Speaking as a non-mathematician, it's one of those resources you didn't know you needed until that one time you have some sequence of numbers and wanted to figure out if they meant something special.

<comment><USER8> Like the very known sequence? ;) [http://oeis.org/A104101](http://oeis.org/A104101)

<comment><USER6> Heh, no, but two that I did "find in the wild":

[http://oeis.org/A195581](http://oeis.org/A195581)

[http://oeis.org/A008275](http://oeis.org/A008275)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One of the best OEIS sequences in terms of user comments is surely A000027 (the positive integers, sure to be filled with silly 'explanations'). My favorites:

a(n) is also the number of permutations simultaneously avoiding 213, 231 and 321 in the classical sense which can be realized as labels on an increasing strict binary tree with 2n-1 nodes. See A245904 for more information on increasing strict binary trees. - Manda Riehl

Number of n-digit numbers the binary expansion of which contains one run of 1's. - Vladimir Shevelev

<comment><USER10> A000012 is the all-ones sequence: [https://oeis.org/A000012](https://oeis.org/A000012). It even has a subreddit: [https://www.reddit.com/r/A000012/](https://www.reddit.com/r/A000012/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Written in Go. :-)

<comment><USER8> Where did you find that? The service existed a long time before Go was created.

<comment><USER12> That's because Russ Cox (rsc) is the very person who has rewritten a decade- old software for OEIS, as seen in the OEIS foundation page:

> It took us over a year to resolve this problem. In the end, Russ Cox > completely rewrote all the programs needed to maintain the database and > answer queries - a huge task! NJAS's colleague David Applegate has also been > of enormous help in getting the new system working.

([http://oeisf.org/index.html#HISTORY](http://oeisf.org/index.html#HISTORY))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My favorite sequence I learned from this:

Decimal expansion of (7^(e - 1/e) - 9)*Pi^2, also known as Jenny's constant.</comment>


Lies About Logs - <AUTHOR> https://honeycomb.io/blog/2017/04/lies-my-parents-told-me-about-logs/ <comment><USER2> This is a great article. A lot of people treat logs as something you write and never read. Therefore, the only "cost" is the storage. The actual VALUE is in the retrieval, the analysis, etc. That's bandwidth plus software development, which is by far more valuable than a hard disk on a server.

It would be hilarious if people replied to this blog post with comparisons of Honeycomb's monthly price to the price of a DO drop or a EC2 host with the equivalent amount of storage. Those people would be showing their complete and total misunderstanding of logs.

Someone should write a blog post about misconceptions about logs to help educate such people... oh wait... she did!

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, really, 600$/month for 5GB storage? Even a 8 GB GPU RAM costs less than that for GPU instances. Not trying to undermine the work, but it really does not have that much utility to justify such a huge price for such low capacity.

<comment><USER4> Cheaper than Splunk:

[http://splunk.force.com/SplunkCloud?prdType=SplunkCloud](http://splunk.force.com/SplunkCloud?prdType=SplunkCloud)

<comment><USER3> Splunk is far more superior to this startup.

<comment><USER5> In what ways?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "They're just logs, they can't possibly impact my code efficiency." More bad news: oh yes they can, particularly in the critical execution path. Lots of people seem to think that there is no cost to dropping DEBUG statements around their code willy-nilly. This is usually true on your laptop,

Haha - this happened to me last week and I found out the hard way. My log had grown so quickly that the code was taking 15 seconds just to append to it.

<comment><USER7> > My log had grown so quickly that the code was taking 15 seconds just to > append to it.

How is that possible? Opening a file with the O_APPEND flag automatically seeks to the end of it.

<comment><USER6> The log itself was a 2.7Gb file sitting on a slow SD card on a Raspberry Pi.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > "They're just logs, they can't impact production reliability." See also, > "Logging to disk is awesome!" You can take down nearly any production > database or I/O intensive workload just by sharing a filesystem with its > logging.

I hope nobody reads this and decides to stop logging to disk instead of diverting those logs to a separate device. Disk-buffered logs are essential for high availability: they loosen the otherwise-too-tight coupling between the log consumer and the log-producing application.

</comment><comment><USER8> I am really dumbfounded by the pricing. $600 a month for 5GB storage and 50 writes per second?? Meanwhile, a DO droplet is 5$/Mo, has 1TB traffic and 20GB SSD. Am I overlooking something? I agree with most of the points this article makes, but leveled logging has always served me well, with the exact levels she* mentions in the article. And of course logging is expensive if you pay 600$ per month for 50 writes per second. Also, there's no be-all-end-all logging solution, it always has to be tailored specifically for your needs.

*EDIT

<comment><USER9> The author isn't a "he", and the hardware cost of running 512MB of RAM infra doesn't capture at all the cost of running a logging solution. By expensive, the article mentions the word in the context of performance overhead, which is absolutely right.

Their pricing seems a bit high for the write throughput but the equivalent cost in engineering time, for equal capabilities, is way in their favor.

<comment><USER10> >The author isn't a "he"

Historically, "he" has been a gender neutral way of referring to another person when gender is irrelevant to the conversation (such as it is now). "They" may be more politically correct, but "he" is still a completely valid gender-neutral term. There's no need to correct that, gender is completely irrelevant to this discussion.

<comment><USER9> Using "they" makes gender irrelevant. It's not politically correct, it's precise. Meanwhile, using "he" is a statement of assumption, or a statement of not caring about changes in society. I think this was involuntary by OP. Yet, I also think those need to be corrected. What was seen as the norm historically is not an argument for what we should make the future from. If gender is irrelevant in a sentence, then let's correct that by using and encouraging gender neutral pronouns.

If anything, this struck me enough in the OP's paragraph to wonder if I had misattributed the article, which is why I raised the point after verifying that the author was indeed who I thought it was. To a sample size of at least 1, the usage of the gendered pronoun was noticeable. Maybe that's just me.

<comment><USER10> "They" is possibly more precise on gender, but adds a new layer of ambiguity about how many people you're talking about. If the OP saying "he" led you to second guess the gender of the author, saying "they" may lead you to second guess how many authors had contributed to the article. What really stands out to me is how quick some people are to correct the gender of someone when a comment may misrepresent them as if the content of the article was somehow altered by the word. The OP "involuntarily" wrote "he" because _" he" is completely grammatically correct_.

But you're right, since what was seen as the norm historically is not an argument for what we should make the future from, I propose we just use the word "floobity" to represent the singular, gender-neutral pronoun. Floobity wrote a great article, no matter what gender floobity happens to be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's not apparent how this (Honeycomb) is different from, say, ELK (ElasticSearch-Logstash-Kibana).

We aggregate logging from all nodes, where the log entries/events are json- payloads with a bunch of JSON metadata. This makes searching/slicing/etc. in Kibana easy.

It feels like the website brushed over this a bit too quickly, dismissing ELK as dumb string-logging.

<comment><USER12> We've been using Honeycomb at Nylas for 6+ months at this point and love it - the product keeps getting better and better, it's fast and reliable, and it's given us new debugging capabilities that make investigating outages and digging into system performance easier than they were before.

We've also built our own ELK cluster (three times!) and can attest that it takes very significant engineering effort to get a scalable, reliable, high performance cluster, and the ongoing cost in hardware is easily hundreds of dollars a month or more.

Three things that we can do with Honeycomb that we can't do with ELK (or at least not easily):

* Quickly iterate on questions to explore datasets. It makes a huge difference in how you approach a tool when the time between question and answer is milliseconds, not seconds. * Compare trends in data - Honeycomb can easily group data by field and display many lines on the same graph. As an example: easily break down your API traffic by endpoint to pinpoint a spike in traffic to a specific endpoint. (Or by endpoint and customer, etc.) * Calculate percentiles, averages, etc. on our data in real-time - without having to set up the calculated metrics beforehand. This makes honeycomb a better tool for performance monitoring than ELK imho.

There may be ways to do some of these things with ELK, but not out of the box and, given the indexed data store behind the stack, it's just not architected to have these same capabilities.

I suspect if you dug into some of Honeycomb's other blog posts, this difference would become more apparent. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> 600$/month for a SaaS "Basic" plan is questionable, to say the least. Get your pricing right. For 600$/month I can easily allocate resources within my company to come up with a tailored solution for my needs. Maybe check what the competition is doing:

[https://papertrailapp.com/plans](https://papertrailapp.com/plans) [https://logentries.com/pricing/](https://logentries.com/pricing/) [https://www.loggly.com/plans-and-pricing/](https://www.loggly.com/plans-and- pricing/)

<comment><USER14> One company was paying $35k/ month in _just ec2 hardware costs_ to run an ELK cluster, and we were able to slash that substantially, while still making money. Not to mention the savings in core engineering time.

Just goes to show you, people have no idea how muych their shit costs. And/or don't value their own time.

<comment><USER15> That seems like a _lot_ of money. Can you give a really high level breakdown of where it was spent?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The blog post says strings are expensive but then the product is marketed as begin built around JSON. A pretty expensive way to serialize log data.

Generally, launching your startup with a passive-aggressive blog post full of false information and economically presented half-truths is..... I'll leave that one open :)

There may well be a technical use-case for this type of logging system but I'm not sure the way it is being presented is going to reach that audience.

<comment><USER14> It's modeled after the way Facebook does their own internal analytics, with Scuba.

Go ask them how they like it.

<comment><USER14> Oh yeah, I wrote the blog post. And it had nothing to do with our launch. It was supposed to be _funny_ , not a comprehensively detailed argument.

If you haven't been woken up by any or all of these things, I wouldn't expect you to find it as amusing as those of us who have.</comment></comment></comment>


Ubuntu not planning to patch Rails remote execution vulnerability - <AUTHOR> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/rails/+bug/1097643

<comment><USER2> Nothing strikes me as unusual about that post. They said it is in the multiverse.</comment>


Don't Blame the Internet for New Slang - <AUTHOR> https://thewalrus.ca/dont-blame-the-internet-for-bad-slang/ <comment><USER2> For you language nerds: the author Gretchen McCulloch also hosts a podcast, Lingthusiasm! ([https://lingthusiasm.com/](https://lingthusiasm.com/))

<comment><USER3> Gretchen's book Because Internet, is fantastic. It was riveting and helped me get over a ton of personal grammatical hang-ups I have. The audiobook is amazing, go borrow it at your library!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What is the idea or purpose of TL;DR and TL;DW by the way? Both basically mean _summary_ , so it is not that there is a new meaning that we needed to express somehow. It still catched on.

So what _is_ its purpose? Should it give the author and audience a sense of belonging to the online world? Dissociating from people not belonging to the online world yet ("Neuland", anyone?). Just using it for teh lulz? Making things sound informal or less serious?

My experience is that I perceive articles preceded with _' Summary'_ instead of _' tl;dr'_ as much more no-bs-ty.

Edit: "Neuland" is referring to Ms. Merkel's "The internet is uncharted territory" comment by the way.

<comment><USER5> I always thought that TL;DR was a flippant statement that the post you have made was too long. This seems to have morphed into 'For those who think that this is too long...' often just the important parts, which is usually a summery. I'm sure someone could make a point about using FAQ, etc

<comment><USER4> Thanks! So it started as complaint and only then took on the role as label for a summary. That explains it somewhat.</comment></comment></comment>


Responding to iOS 7 - <AUTHOR> http://tapity.com/iphone-app-design/responding-to-ios-7/

<comment><USER2> Nice. Quite a well written article. I am especially interested in how Tweetbot is going to adapt to the iOS 7 interface. I love to use it on iOS 6 but as the OP points out the interface is very "heavy" \-- full of bevels, shadows, and gradients -- when compared to iOS 7.

<comment><USER3> Honestly, I think Tweetbot (and Tapbots' other products) are the greatest "heavy" UIs I've ever seen. They're basically the pinnacle of pre-7 iOS design, and I still think it's the most beautiful app on my phone.

My worry is that flat design will lead to less information density (because of the decreased emphasis on visual hierarchy and separation through 3D effects) and lead to a downgrade in functionality for some apps. Honestly, I wouldn't be bothered if Tweetbot stayed the same.

<comment><USER4> A good example of flat design in an app is Propellerheads' Figure.

[http://www.propellerheads.se/products/figure/](http://www.propellerheads.se/products/figure/)

If all flat design apps are like that, things won't be too bad.

Interestingly, their other iOS apps are totally the opposite, and are pinnacles of skeumorphic design:

[http://www.propellerheads.se/products/thor/](http://www.propellerheads.se/products/thor/)

[http://www.propellerheads.se/products/rebirth/](http://www.propellerheads.se/products/rebirth/)

<comment><USER5> Figure is flat but it is still skeumorphic. They are not opposites.

<comment><USER4> What is it supposed to resemble?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for all the support guys! Never had this many concurrent users... now I know what its like to be on the HN home page.

I am trying to resolve all the server issues. It should be mostly working now.

</comment><comment><USER6> Site's 500-ing for me, google cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?site=&source=hp...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?site=&source=hp&q=cache%3Atapity.com%2Fiphone- app-design%2Fresponding-to-ios-7%2F&oq=cache%3Atapity.com%2Fiphone-app- design%2Fresponding-to- ios-7%2F&gs_l=hp.12...0.0.0.234126.96.36.199.0.0.0.0.0..0.0...0.0...1c..18.psy- ab.NowsuDzpSaQ&pbx=1)

</comment><comment><USER7> This is echoing our experience. I think there's going to be some serve overuse of UIDynamics but hopefully that will eventually be refined in.

<comment><USER8> I think the people without the taste to use it properly are of the type to not understand the physics involved and therefore wouldn't be able to use it properly.

I'm not saying it won't be used wrongly, just look at [Write]([https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/write-for-dropbox- beautiful/...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/write-for-dropbox- beautiful/id587363157?mt=8)) for an example of a place where this'll be overdone to shit. But many of the UX people who intend to use dynamics stuff have probably had these ideas in their head or sketched out for quite a while.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm really sorry for the site errors. It was down for about 2 hours. Never had to deal with so much traffic before and my host shut it down. Should be back up for everyone now.

</comment><comment><USER9> branch here: [http://branch.com/b/how-do-we-respond-to- ios-7](http://branch.com/b/how-do-we-respond-to-ios-7)

</comment><comment><USER10> It's just funny seeing how everybody now claims that removing visual noise is making a better experience for users. How come nobody had that insight before apple changed the design?

<comment><USER11> No, the flat (anti-skeuomorphic) trend started well before Apple joined the party.

<comment><USER10> I am aware of that. Apparently iOS developers are just now finding it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I really like your new design!</comment>


Obama Administration Gives Up on Pacific Trade Deal - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/obama-administration-gives-up-on-pacific-trade-deal-1478895824 <comment><USER2> The "world order" will look very different by the time Trump leaves office. He wants to cede more of the Middle East to Russia, reduce our participation and leadership in NATO, reduce our military presence in South Korea and Japan, and cancel or renegotiate trade deals, including the TPP.

The result will be a world that is more clearly apportioned among 3-4 major powers. Small Asian countries, if they can't get a feeling of solid support from the U.S., will eventually ally themselves with China. And the EU and Russia will battle (hopefully not openly) over the lands between and near them.

It's essentially the end of "pax Americana". I think it's incredibly short- sighted. Trump looks at international relations as a quarterly balance sheet but almost certainly does not properly account for the value of the stability the U.S. provides throughout the world now.

<comment><USER3> This is an argument that Trump has been making for decades. He believes US is getting the short end of these deals because he sees the US almost as mob guys providing protection but forgetting to collect protection money. He sees the US as spending money protecting Japan, S. Korea, and Europe without getting proper return. I believe we've been getting peace and favorable trade deals in return. He thinks that isn't enough and that it's time to collect.

The same thinking has him arguing that we should get the oil fields after the Iraq war.

I don't agree with this reasoning but we're about to see this play out.

Edit: here's a video that I linked to in my other comments. It's an Opera interview from 1988 where Trump says Japan is "beating the hell out of this country" and "they aren't paying" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEPs17_AkTI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEPs17_AkTI)

This has been the most consistent part of Trump's platform. America is getting the short end of the deal.

Again, I'm not a Trump supporter but this policy is what Trump genuinely believes and will likely pursue.

<comment><USER4> But he's not aware of the whole story. Japan is paying us money (billions, I think) to keep those bases there. I assume the same goes with other countries. This isn't free protection.

<comment><USER5> In 1988, Japan loomed large in the American psyche, the same way China does today, if not more so. It was the unstoppable economic juggernaut that was destroying American jobs.

I doubt Trump would had the same views of Japan specifically, as he did then. He seems to have transferred his ire to China.

<comment><USER6> He took out a full-page ad in 1987:

[https://www.buzzfeed.com/ilanbenmeir/that-time-trump- spent-n...](https://www.buzzfeed.com/ilanbenmeir/that-time-trump-spent- nearly-100000-on-an-ad-criticizing-us)

And read it almost verbatim at the third debate. It was quite interesting how little his views have changed in the intervening years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> With a background in Economics - I've always been inclined to support free trade deals. Granted it's one thing to theoretically say they're great, and another to say it to the face of someone who's lost their job because of it.

Cheaper goods help the American people in aggregate - but they disproportionately hurt certain swathes of the population, primarily those who work in manufacturing and related fields. One has a large intangible benefit spread out - another has a very tangible human face to it.

<comment><USER8> The problem with this argument is that numerous studies have shown that trade is responsible for a small proportion of manufacturing jobs lost in America in the past few decades.

Increases in productivity and automation have been shown to be responsible for most of the job losses, and those would have happened with or without free trade agreements. In fact, the US manufactures more things than it ever has before -- it simply does so with fewer workers.

This means that restrictions on trade won't bring many jobs back. If US companies have to manufacture things in the US, they will automate their factories as much as possible to save money.

These articles cite the studies I mentioned, and are pretty good in general:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/29/business/economy/more- weal...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/29/business/economy/more-wealth-more- jobs-but-not-for-everyone-what-fuels-the-backlash-on-trade.html)

[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/07/opinion/sunday/the-rage- ag...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/07/opinion/sunday/the-rage-against- trade.html?_r=0)

<comment><USER9> Maybe the point is that an economic strategy that chases marginal cost savings only creates short term benefits for investors while selling out an industrious workforce that were otherwise poised to create the next big innovation.

<comment><USER8> What big innovation did you expect factory workers to create?

<comment><USER9> Well, in a Widget Factory there are all sorts. It's a hierarchy of workers with different skills. Typically though it is experienced/managerial/technical staff, who figure out how to improve things. Yes some of them do come out of the lower ranks. Pretty sure Henry Ford was just an engineer in someone else's company before he started making cars which lead him to inventing the modern assembly line as we know it today.

<comment><USER10> Ford used to work for Edison. (According to Wikipedia.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can someone explain to me why the sentiment on here has changed? If I remember correctly, when we first learned of this TPP, everyone here was up in arms that it was a secret cabal designed to infringe on innovation. I think there was an EFF blog post describing those sentiments.

<comment><USER12> I'll get down voted but it doesn't really matter. The sentiment changed because of identity politics. As soon as Trump mentioned he was against the tpp places like hn and reddit suddenly became very quiet in their opposition to it.

<comment><USER13> You know, it would make a really interesting study to follow up on theories (in the scientific sense) like this. The HN data is available, isn't it?

<comment><USER12> I agree it would be interesting!

This certainly isn't scientific at all but a quick search for tpp (all time popularity) shows the first page of results as posts that primarily took place more than a year ago. [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=tpp&sort=byPopularity&prefix&p...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=tpp&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

Trump mentioned he was opposed to the tpp almost exactly one year ago today.

If we search the popular 'tpp' posts from December 1st 2015 to today, we get results that show posts that are critical of the tpp but over half of the first page of results have less than 100 upvotes. [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=tpp&sort=byPopularity&prefix&p...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=tpp&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=custom&type=story&dateStart=1448928000&dateEnd=1478908800)

Like I said, not scientific but kind of interesting I guess?

<comment><USER13> Cool. Nice quick hack! How would you go about tying in identity politics?

<comment><USER12> My theory is that, and this totally based on opinion, most people don't want to show support for a specific idea or policy of the "enemy" politician out of fear from being persecuted by those who are on their same team. "I might agree with Trump on the tpp but I will certainly never say I agree with Trump about anything."

<comment><USER13> Working with what you've described, how would you go about supporting that with HN data? Selfish reason for asking: I've been thinking about doing something like this, but haven't yet spent much time thinking about it. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think as a somewhat meta-analysis of the outspoken HN crowd on this deal (based on current comments) - it's valuable to look at previous discussions on HN:

Top comment excerpt from this thread from a year ago [1]:

 _It is an awful document, with horrible policy, yes....What these leaders are pushing is not democratic, it is oligarchic._

Top comment excerpt from this thread from a year ago [2]:

 _Reading these things makes me angry. There are people in the world who uphold economic wealth and ownership over life itself._

And there are many others from this search: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=TPP&sort=byPopularity&prefix&p...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=TPP&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

Note that the EFF's stance hasn't changed:

[https://www.eff.org/issues/tpp](https://www.eff.org/issues/tpp)

What seems to have changed is the messenger only. That's worth closer introspection.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10363500](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10363500) [2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11037232](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11037232)

</comment><comment><USER15> Didn't Google openly support TPP? Seems to me that Google's was one of the biggest losers on Nov 8. Eric Schmidt openly supported Hillary, there were accusations of SERP manipulation, YT censorship and so on. I wonder if FTC [0] will finally be able to go after them for anti-trust since Google's lobbyists won't be able to stop them [1].

[0] [http://graphics.wsj.com/google-ftc- report/](http://graphics.wsj.com/google-ftc-report/)

[1] [https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably- close...](https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close- relationship-with-the-obama-white-house-in-two-charts/)

<comment><USER16> I strongly suspect you'll see a shift in how the US handles Google. At least a dozen or so Googlers work at the White House, and they'll need to find new jobs by January 20th. (Someone with more time on their hands than me will hopefully track whether or not they all go back to working at Google HQ instead of Google White House.)

Given their liberal slant and their strong support for Hillary, even a pro- business-leaning Trump probably isn't going to do Google any favors. And as the four antitrust cases in the EU are likely to go through within the next year, the FTC will probably at least feel some pressure to do their job.

Here's Google's open endorsement of the TPP: [https://blog.google/topics/public-policy/the-trans- pacific-p...](https://blog.google/topics/public-policy/the-trans-pacific- partnership-step/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The reason Obama wanted TPP so badly was that he saw it as necessary to contain China's growing influence in South East Asia. Trump, who also claims to want to contain China, seems uninterested or uninformed in this type of geopolitical struggle.

The part of the TPP that turned off most techies was the extending and exporting of our draconian Intellectual Property laws. Those laws were designed and pushed by Hollywood as a form of protectionism for the their industry, exactly the kind of protectionism for American companies that Trump claims to support. Hollywood politically is normally aligned with Democrats, but Trump's celebrity is a product of that same Hollywood, so I imagine Trump understands very well the desire for those IP protections.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is a shame. Globalism is good for people overall, and the US has almost instantly lost a lot of credibility and influence in the region (especially in contrast to China).

EDIT: I'm amazed to see all other comments so far are anti-trade.

<comment><USER19> Did you miss the part where the election was partially a referendum on globalism?

<comment><USER20> If you are assuming Clinton and Trump are proxies for and against globalization respectively, more people (aka popular vote) actually voted for continuing globalization.

<comment><USER4> Clinton also stood against TPP.

<comment><USER21> She only changed her stance because of pressure from Sanders. Given her "private and public policies", I didn't believe her.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> At least one silver lining to the GOP/Trump change in the wind. I hope that we are able to find more as time goes on. As outrageous as Trump is and as much as I find him personally reprehensible I hope for at least a few welcome policy changes.

</comment><comment><USER23> TTIP is probably dead as well: [http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa- election-eu-trade-idUS...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-eu- trade-idUSKBN1361UN) Only problem with that is that CETA is still on it's way, so there is still a possibility that the American corporations get what they wanted to have with TTIP.

<comment><USER24> With Trump wanting to end NAFTA, and CETA having no ISDS but a real court, and Canada being a lot more liberal, I actually don't see much of a threat in CETA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The TPP was a disguised corporate takeover of national sovereignty, with supranational TPP courts deciding trade policies.

<comment><USER26> I dont know why your getting downvoted. This is a serious problem. Also copyrights and patents. Think drugs that people need. This is more about protectionism than free trade from what I've been reading

"ISDS would allow foreign companies to challenge U.S. laws — and potentially to pick up huge payouts from taxpayers — without ever stepping foot in a U.S. court. Here's how it would work. Imagine that the United States bans a toxic chemical that is often added to gasoline because of its health and environmental consequences. If a foreign company that makes the toxic chemical opposes the law, it would normally have to challenge it in a U.S. court. But with ISDS, the company could skip the U.S. courts and go before an international panel of arbitrators. If the company won, the ruling couldn't be challenged in U.S. courts, and the arbitration panel could require American taxpayers to cough up millions — and even billions — of dollars in damages" [0]

[0] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/kill-the-dispute- set...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/kill-the-dispute-settlement- language-in-the-trans-pacific- partnership/2015/02/25/ec7705a2-bd1e-11e4-b274-e5209a3bc9a9_story.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> New trade agreements can be negotiated with a broader set of government, corporate and civil society stakeholders, with early public transparency when possible.

NAFTA 1.0 is likely to be re-opened. One outcome could be that sensible provisions in TPP find their way into NAFTA 2.0, while parts of NAFTA 1.0 are removed. TPP was a giveaway to a narrow set of special interests. If it is renegotiated, it will at a minimum include a larger set of stakeholders. This time around, there will be a high level of public scrutiny.

<comment><USER28> Trade deals and transparency unfortunately don't go well together. Trade deals are negotiations — the government can't just decide what to do, since they're dealing with other governments. There needs to be a give and take. If negotiated in public it is way too easy for carefully balanced deals to collapse in the face of opposition from small subgroups even if the net impact is moderately good for lots of people.

The flip side is that it is not great that this results in influential industry groups having way too much power. Not sure how to resolve this.

<comment><USER29> >The flip side is that it is not great that this results in influential industry groups having way too much power. Not sure how to resolve this.

Don't make multinational all-encompasing trade deals. If you want freer trade, the best way to do it is to make small agreements on a country-by-country basis to tear down some protectionist policies each party has against the other.

This allows you to pick and choose the deals the population wants.

<comment><USER10> If you want free trade, the best way to go about it is to just lower your own barriers to trade: just because other countries are banging their heads against the wall doesn't mean we should do so, too.

No negotiation required.

The classical parable uses the more topical `if that other country was putting rubble in all their harbours, would we do so too? If not, why does it make a difference if their barriers physical or political?'

<comment><USER29> > If you want free trade, the best way to go about it is to just lower your > own barriers to trade: just because other countries are banging their heads > against the wall doesn't mean we should do so, too.

Are you saying protectionist policies don't work? Because your idea would do nothing but hurt your own country by putting you at a disadvantage.

<comment><USER10> Protectionist policies are as a whole bad for the country enacting them. (But they can benefit certain special interests.)

This is basically the least controversial and most orthodox position in the history of all of economics. Basically all economists agree with this one, even if they disagree on a lot of other things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I think abandoning TPP is a mistake. TPP is for curbing China influence. I think many Americans underestimate China. They are a lot more powerful than they show.

<comment><USER31> And why should USA curb china?

<comment><USER30> They're eating our lunch. If you think China is a nice guy and compete fairly, you are wrong. China is dominating Asia, pulling away American allies, spreading its economic influence, fast. If we are ok, then we don't have to do anything.

<comment><USER32> That didn't seem to happen with the USSR, and that sentiment was very popular during the Cold War.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> It has been my observation that Free Trade / Globalization has typically benefited the weaker party in the deal or Corporations. The American worker has historically been the causality. Ross Perot use to say hear that sucking sound, it's your jobs going to Mexico and Canada.

As time goes on I suppose automation and AI will make cheap labor a non-factor in the cost of a widget. Countries/Corporations will want to trade to secure access to products and markets instead of using cheap labor to gain an advantage. Products will have to compete on their quality and technological advantages. The main factors determining the cost of a product will be clean and reliable power, good transportation network and access to raw materials.

Either way it seems likely now that in the future the Manufacturing worker in Asia or America will eventually be a casualty.

</comment><comment><USER34> I wonder if this would have helped Hillary if they did this a few months ago.

</comment><comment><USER35> Grant multinational corporate supremacy over government is wrong.

</comment><comment><USER36> Republicans are against free trade now.

<comment><USER29> Why do a suprising amount of people in this thread act like the TPP is "just free trade".

<comment><USER37> The Fine Article:

The Obama administration on Friday gave up all hope of enacting its sweeping Pacific trade agreement, a pact designed to preserve U.S. economic influence in fast-growing Asia that was buried by a wave of antitrade political sentiment that culminated with Tuesday's presidential election.

The WSJ article we are here to talk about actually equates the treaty with free trade.

The article also basically describes an alignment with Congressional GOP with Trump on the subject:

Just over a year ago Republicans were willing to vote overwhelmingly in support of Mr. Obama's trade policy. But as the political season approached and voters registered their concerns by supporting Mr. Trump, the GOP reacted coolly to the deal Mr. Obama's team reached with Japan and 10 others countries just over a year ago in Atlanta.

There are reasons not to equate the treaty with free trade and not to equate GOP with Trump but the actual article points out the links.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Why Democracy is difficult:

There is a politician Who says they believe in an ideology Which tends to favor an idea Which may result in them voting for a policy/law Which leads to an implementation Which needs to be enforced Which is finally very difficult to measure ( because there is no 'control' country that is identical save for this particular law.)

And that is like the best case scenario without the analytically impenetrable layers of bureaucracy and politics which can derail and subvert the process.

</comment><comment><USER39> Good. One thing Trump will not have to do.

<comment><USER40> One could say he's already done it.

<comment><USER27> Yes, before even taking office.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Neither here nor there now, but would Obama or was Obama planning on giving up on it regardless of winner? If so, why wait till after election results?

Why not undercut one of Trump's platform items before the elections?

</comment><comment><USER42> I'm curious if they had left out the most objectionable parts of this deal it seems like it might have been approved without much fanfare.

</comment><comment><USER43> You don't need 3000 pages of legalese written by corporate lobbyists to have a trade agreement. Instead, you need to declare unilateral free trade with a single sentence:

      We hereby impose no tariffs, quotas, or restrictions on
      goods imported from _____.

Yes, free trade hurts some jobs at home. Yes, they may never come back. But for the vast majority, their standard of living goes up with the reduced cost of imported goods.

<comment><USER8> Life is not nearly that simple.

First of all, there is rarely a good reason to accept unrestricted imports from another country unless that country also allows unrestricted imports from you -- and even then, it might not be a good idea.

Second, trade doesn't just "happen" \-- it's not like someone shows up with a boat full of shipping containers and the port unloads it and starts selling the stuff to passers-by out of a booth in the parking lot. There are tons of safety regulations, customs laws, retail distribution agreements, etc. that need to be negotiated before it is legal to bring stuff from one country into another. That often requires coordination between governments to make sure their laws are compatible, applications get sent to the right departments and actually get processed, inspectors are hired and sent to the ports, etc.

So, before any corporate lobbying is involved or anyone even mentions copyright and IP law, a trade agreement is already extremely complex.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> So I read these comments in the Wall Street Journal and wanted to repeat them here. I was pretty depressed but David Van Wie's attitude has uplifted me and I believe that I will follow his example. I'm the opposition now.

>>>David Van Wie:

"It's different now," he said

You better believe it is. Now, Mr President-elect, you are entrusted with the hopes and dreams of 60 million people who made you president of all 320 million Americans. In spite of everything they knew about your shortcomings and character flaws, they still chose you.

You made many, many extravagant promises, Mr. President-elect. Lots of people were paying attention and now expect that the amazing people you appoint to replace the incompetent idiots there before will stand and deliver for the country. You talked a good game, and now you need to put up your best stuff under a white hot spotlight.

More people voted for your opponent. Remember that when you say, "I won" as if you came into town with the wind at your back instead of through the mysteries of the Electoral College. It ain't bragging if you got it. Do you got it? Time will tell.

The job requires absorbing constant criticism 24 hours a day for 1,500 days in a row, unless you are reelected. Then you can have 1,500 more days of unrelenting criticism. The rap on you is that you can't take criticism at all. Show us what you've really got! Show the world that you are better than your critics think you are.

>>>>Gustavo Luzardo

@David Van Wie At some point you have got to let it go man... take a deep breath, calm down, and enjoy the ride... ONLY in the western world, you have the fortune of having events like this, change left and right, within seconds, continuously re inventing the world, the peoples, the politics.

This victory, the unlikeliness, the teaching lessons, the change of course, the reversals that yes, will come with this, ALL OF IT, is the marvel that the West offers to its people, eternal, swift and deliberate change.

Or...

find a safe space, with hot chocolate, comfort dogs, full of kleenex for your "cry in", all the while you sooth with Play Doh... Live in fantasy, day dreaming

I suggest you embrace and help everybody plough thru the first choice

>>>>David Van Wie @GUSTAVO LUZARDO "take a deep breath, calm down, and enjoy the ride"

No. I'm the opposition. My job is to punch you in the mouth every day for the next 725 days, then kick you in the balls and stomp on your head. Figuratively speaking, of course.

I think I understand the West pretty well. Skip the guided tour of cliches. Go tend your own garden. Your little team of Western philosophers promised the country quite a bit. Get to work.

I got these comments from:

[http://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trump-willing-to-keep- par...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trump-willing-to-keep-parts-of- health-law-1478895339#renderComments)

</comment><comment><USER45> I hope he spends the freed up time doing more important things. I suggest he go as far left and oversweeping as he can in his remaining days.

<comment><USER46> There's this thing called "Congress" that is designed to prevent exactly that. (Granted, Congress has been pretty useless at that task for at least the last 12 years...)

<comment><USER47> Just about the only thing Congress has been doing for the last 6 years is preventing the president from doing anything. Seriously, that's it. So if that's your criteria for congressional success, mission accomplished.

However, pushing back against the president is only one of many things Congress is designed to do. Other things include governing the country and dealing with its problems. These are the tasks they have been useless at. Long on obstruction, short on governance. It's what their supporters elected them to do, so in some sense they are doing the will of the constituents, but it doesn't make it any more adult or responsible or constructive.

<comment><USER48> > Just about the only thing Congress has been doing for the last 6 years is > preventing the president from doing anything.

That is correct. And the electorate just validated them for their service at protecting the nation.

<comment><USER47> So, you're saying that Obama winning in 2012 was a validation by the electorate of the work he did during his first term? I can see that. Well, since by your logic the electorate has already validated the ACA, I'm sure that the incumbent won't do anything to change it.

Based on your username, you're clearly a thoughtful, mature, and rational person, who is constantly fretting over details and being their own worst critic and relentlessly playing devil's advocate with their own beliefs in pursuit of the truth. So by your logic, Clinton winning in 1992 and 1996 was clearly a validation by the electorate of Democratic policies in the '90s. I'm sure those policies will find a resurgence under Trump, since as you say elections represent the will of the country as a whole, and not something far more complicated than that. It's so refreshing living in such a black and white world, where everything's simple to understand.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Interviewing is broken - <AUTHOR> http://www.stilldrinking.org/interviewing-is-broken <comment><AUTHOR> >So, using whatever language you want, php, python, perl, javascript, program something that gets today's date and time, then writes it to a file.

Me:

$ date > today.txt

This cracked me up. :)

<comment><USER2> Good response to a good question. Next step is the interviewer saying "...in a 12 hour clock", "...in ISO8601 format", "...in France", etc.

In fact, you could probably do an 6 hour interview just asking time and date questions and it would probably find you decent candidates.

(Or i18n/l10n questions, if you're especially cruel.)</comment></comment>


"It costs about $40,000 a year for a homeless person to be on the streets." - <AUTHOR> http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/mar/12/shaun-donovan/hud-secretary-says-homeless-person-costs-taxpayers/ <comment><USER2> Great to see some attention going to this.

Speaking as a relative of someone who directs an inner city emergency room: Americans, a not-insignificant part of the reason why your health care costs are so high is because your legislators' refusal to allocate money for providing cost-effective care to people with mental health and substance abuse problems means that they instead end up getting cost-ineffective care from the caregiver of last resort - hospitals - instead. Of course they can't pay for that service, so the hospital gets stuck covering their costs by jacking up rates. In a nutshell, what comes off of your tax bill goes onto your health care bills, and then some.

America's approach to dealing with with the less-fortunate is, if nothing else, penny wise and pound foolish.

<comment><USER3> It is an evolutionary trade off due to how human beings instinctively handle cognitive dissonance.

It is very amusing and somewhat depressing on how the most intelligent of individuals can be reduced to a frothing reactionary if you know his/her life history and deduce their biases.

<comment><USER4> I can see the just world bias there, in the idea that "you should be able to afford it, tough luck if you can't". I don't see cognitive dissonance; how does that come in?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> what most people don't realize, some or most of the vagrant do not wish to have regular dwellings or homes. Usually due to mental illness or social irregularity, they feel more at home on the streets, than being provided housing by the state or city. I have heard testimony from the founder of Glide church in San Francisco on this very issue. "most of my people choose not to live in the beds we provide, because they simply want to be left alone."

There are so many levels of homeless, some by choice, others not. Help the ones that want to be helped, and find a solution for those who don't.

"We trip over them on the sidewalk every day. We curse, hand them a dollar, or don't. We feel pity, guilt and rage at their presence. The city spends $200 million a year trying to get homeless people off the streets and into a better way of life - but over 20 years, the problem has only gotten worse.

The more able of the homeless find their way into shelters, counseling and housing programs. But the most chronically indigent, called the hard core, steadfastly refuse most help and stay outside. These 3,000 to 5,000 homeless at the very bottom are the most visible, and they give the city its dubious distinction of having what many call the worst homeless problem in the country."

<http://www.sfgate.com/homeless/></comment>


How do you know an idea is worth implementing? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.eerlings.com/index.php/2012/08/25/how-do-you-know-an-idea-is-worth-implementing/

<comment><USER2> good stuff...it's pretty much the basis of the lean start-up model</comment>