Show HN: Domcomp, a price comparison site for domain registrars - <AUTHOR> http://www.domcomp.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> If you've ever bought a domain then you'll know that there are a number of providers, each with their own prices and pricing structures. I was surprised to find there isn't a price comparison website for domains, so I built one.

Hopefully it's something that would be useful to people on HN. Whilst building it, I realised I could have saved $20 on the .io domain I bought recently.

Any feedback would be much appreciated. The immediate plan is to show the prices for domain renew and transfer.

<comment><USER2> Is this data scraped via an API or something or are you managing it manually?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's automated. With around 500 TLDs and 7 providers, manually maintaining it would be a nightmare.

<comment><USER3> not sure if this is the case for all domain providers, but at least for name cheap: transfer and renew price are quite different from the new price. Also, different contract will have different prices. Longer terms will normally be discounted. It will be nice to display prices based on different use cases.

Anyways! Great work! I wish this can be maintained up-to-date. So many bullshits / price traps on domain registration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I didn't even know so many tlds existed

</comment><comment><USER3> nice, it's good to know .io domain can be bought by $39.

There are quite a few big ones not on list though. Like 1and1?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1&1 are just as bad as GoDaddy, in that they advertise $1.99 domains... Where you have to buy for 2 years and the second year price is much higher.

I take your point though, I should add them anyway, even if they're not the cheapest.

Are there any other providers that you think are worth adding?</comment></comment>


People for the Ethical Treatment of Reinforcement Learners - <AUTHOR> http://petrl.org/ <comment><USER2> Is this site supposed to be satire? I genuinely can't tell.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm honestly not sure. I think it's serious (they seem pretty cautious in their statements which you wouldn't do in satire). But I did find it interesting regardless of it's seriousness.</comment></comment>


House Passes Measure to Repeal and Replace the Affordable Care Act - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/04/us/politics/health-care-bill-vote.html <comment><USER2> How, specifically, is this going to improve health care while making insurance cheaper and more widely available?

This should be easy to explain, right?

<comment><USER3> It isn't. The Republicans dislike the ACA for largely different reasons to why most of the American public dislike the ACA.

<comment><USER4> Most of the American people dislike the ACA (well, "Obamacare"; the ACA has much better support, despite the two being different names for the same thing) for reasons unrelated to it's actual content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Seems the Republicans will achieve their only real goals fairly quickly: large tax cuts for high incomes and getting rid of Obamacare.

</comment><comment><USER6> This vote is important procedurally, but no one knows what the Senate is going to do.

It sounds like this bill won't go anywhere in the Senate, but the ability to make changes to Medicaid and Medicare is a rare thing (need both houses and presidency), so there is a lever for the Senate leaders to lean on.

<comment><USER7> The Senate has the constitutional authority to make and change its own rules. It is possible that if Senate Democrats filibuster this legislation the Republican majority might eliminate the filibuster by rule change.

<comment><USER8> Certainly that's possible but both parties rely on the rule to block poor legislation, or so this article from The Hill claims.

[https://www.google.com/amp/thehill.com/homenews/senate/33166...](https://www.google.com/amp/thehill.com/homenews/senate/331668-gop- senators-dismiss-trump-filibuster-change%3Famp)

<comment><USER9> If there's one area where I trust the GOP, it's to use procedural and spoken inconsistency for political gain.

Donald Trump in this regard is an exemplar of the Republican party.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Organized feedback for videogames - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamersuggestions.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Any form of feedback would be great!</comment>


Rising rural BMI is the main driver of the global obesity epidemic in adults - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1171-x <comment><USER2> As the article states, once automation hits a rural area, people there spend less energy than in cities.

Very much observable in the US, where rural and suburban population never WALKS. You need to supply artificial sources of movement (aka sports) to make up for the delta.

In cities, you walk more by default - your baseline energy expenditure is higher. Take the stairs to the subway, walk to work, get out for lunch ... all of that counts.

Driving around in your F150 and have everything as a drive through? You're the slob from the movie "Up".

<comment><USER3> For whatever reason, I was struck watching the special on PBS, "Woodstock: 50 Years Later".

Everybody was thin. It was sort of amazing when you stopped and really noticed it, then contrasted it to what you see on a day to day basis out on the streets. There just weren't any overweight people to be seen, at least nowhere near approaching the magnitude you see walking around today.

There's got to be some cultural component to all this too. I'm not sure the built environment is really all that much different than from what it was when I was a kid in the suburbs. It's as if people just collectively stopped using their bodies and started consuming more calories.

<comment><USER4> The demographics is worse than what is seen in the streets, because of the correlation between overweight and outdoor activities. The CDC facts are that 39% of the American adults are obese and 75% are overweight (including obesity). So overweight is the norm, and thin people are the exception. As the tendency is stable, I wonder if a "hidden minority" lobby will emerge in a few years, claiming that TV speakers and movie actors are too thin to represent the average citizen.

<comment><USER5> Young people still tend to be significantly less overweight. [https://www.stateofobesity.org/obesity-by- age/](https://www.stateofobesity.org/obesity-by-age/)

However, you do see more overweight people on modern films than in the 50's. What's really odd some characters where supposed to be noticeably overweight, but they don't seem that way to modern eyes.

<comment><USER6> Curious - do you have examples handy of characters like you described who were "overweight for the time" but don't seem so today?

<comment><USER7> Even going back just to the 90s, characters like George Costanza were meant to look noticeably overweight but look fairly typical by 2019 standards. And Homer Simpson weighed a very specific 239 pounds, a weight that seems much less extreme now.

<comment><USER8> On the extreme end there was John Candy ([https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001006/mediaindex?ref_=nm_phs_m...](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001006/mediaindex?ref_=nm_phs_md_sm)), he used to be "the funny fat guy" but if he were to cameo (and be alive) today I don't think he'd stand out like he used to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _" Data on how BMI in rural and urban populations is changing are needed to plan interventions that address underweight and overweight."_

Specifically in the U.S., isn't it true that the population landscape is rapidly shifting from Rural => Urban? I intend to read more to see how this may/may not be a confounder in this type of temporal analysis.

Tldr: If the rural population is decreasing, then your denominator is smaller and estimates of disease proportion would increase over time.

These confounders are commonly addressed in systematic reviews - just haven't found it specifically in this one.

<comment><USER10> Agree with this observation. This might simply be a burn-off effect. Consider a simple model. Fact one: Obesity is disproportionately concentrated in the less-educated. Fact two: Urbanization is disproportionately concentrated in the highly-educated.

Well, what we would see over time is faster rising obesity in rural areas than urban areas. But that's simply a manifestation of the sorting effect. The underlying populations (the educated vs. uneducated) have not fundamentally changed, just relocated.

Without considering this we might be spuriously fooled into misunderstanding the causality of obesity. Under this model, rural living itself has absolutely nothing to do with rising obesity. It's merely serving as a proxy for a more important variable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I just moved from the middle of a walkable city to the country and indeed I've put on some weight. Key factors:

* I used to walk and cycle as my only means of transport (well, 99% of it at least).

* This is kind of a desert for decent food. The local shops have candy, chips, cakes, beer, and some almost-rotten bananas and apples.

* .. well actually that's about it. Though everyone else being heavier probably hasn't helped on a subconscious level.

<comment><USER12> I think when everyone is heavier, it sets a lower bar for attracting a partner. That's a big factor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The food in those areas is also insanely sugar and fat oriented. It made sense back when people were doing hard farming work 15 hours a day and needed the calories. But the cuisine didn't change, if anything it got sweeter. When I'm traveling, I run into difficulty finding low calorie dishes when passing through rural areas and now basically simply don't eat there. It's infectious: the asian cuisines found in rural areas has nothing to do with actual asian food. Expect deep fried chicken drenched in actual sugar syrup in most dishes. Because nothing else will sell so the restaurant owners adapt. It's not surprising to look around and see so many people that are waddling around, driving around stores little electric cart things, with pasty acne riddled skin, thin hair falling out in clumps, and generally looking like they are at death's door despite being under 40.

</comment><comment><USER14> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4sRsb0a30Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4sRsb0a30Y)

The hacking of the american mind.

</comment><comment><USER15> It keeps being said: you must eat only what is needed to fuel your body for the activity you are doing in an average day.

By the time someone acquires the maturity to accept this, their lifestyle has been too deeply established for change to be possible.

</comment><comment><USER16> We need a study to tell us that _increasing average body mass_ drives obesity averages more than urbanization?

In related news, eating too much too often is more a cause of weight gain than how much screen time you get.

<comment><USER17> The very second sentence of the link:

> This has led to a widely reported view that urbanization is one of the most > important drivers of the global rise in obesity

The study's findings are that the rise in overall weight is attributed primarily to rural areas, contrary to the current consensus that it's driven by urbanization. Let alone not reading the link before commenting, it seems you didn't even read the full title of the post.</comment></comment>


Devpressed is now OSMI - <AUTHOR> https://forums.osmihelp.org/t/devpressed-is-now-osmi-forums/1026 <comment><AUTHOR> I don't suffer of depression myself, but I think this initiative is worth supporting.

This talk might be relevant: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFIa- Mc2KSk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFIa-Mc2KSk)</comment>


Google+ Photos Replaces Picasa Web in the Navigation Bar - <AUTHOR> http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/10/google-photos-replaces-picasa-web-in.html <comment><USER2> And Reader as been replaced by Sites in the Nav bar.</comment>


Show HN: An easier way to manage beta tests & get insightful feedback  - <AUTHOR> http://www.userdiary.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi there. UserDiary was conceived about a month ago at the Box.com hackathon. We won the Parse API prize. That was the initial encouragement to keep pushing forward.

Our mission at UserDiary is to break down barriers between product people and their users. Our goal is to make the process of qualitative user studies painless for the researcher and the participants, so that feedback can be shared freely and data is organized to yeild the clearest insights. The end result, we hope, are better designed products and happier users.

Right now we're in closed alpha with a very raw MVP. But I'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback. Thanks HN community!

<comment><AUTHOR> If you are getting 404 issues with the Launchrock sign up, just email us at email@example.com. We'll manually add you to the beta list. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Nicely done, I have no idea what it has to do with user tests though. Could one not simply get the exact same functionality by having user send emails, and then viewing them _in your inbox_? Don't get it.

<comment><USER3> "Communicate with users from an integrated dashboard Free your inbox. Forget BCC & mail merge." The other two benefits are not so clear to me... "No messy onboarding required." what does that mean?

<comment><AUTHOR> "No messy onboarding required" - it means that your testers don't have to signup or login to send feedback. Their interface is purely email. You pose questions from our dashboard, they get sent an email secretly on the backend. When they reply to that email, it comes back into their feed (which is the third benefit).

Think of it as if you wanted each user to use Posterous to send feedback, except their blog is already private, and they just reply to an email prompt from you to post to it.

Does that make more sense and seem valuable? How might you rephrase the last 2 benefits to make it more clear?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I actually watched the demo video without sound and saw an email client-like experience with a bunch of pictures of the same dog.

It didn't look bad, but wasn't particularly relevant to feedback management either.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. Seems like we're missing the mark a bit with our story telling. Maybe the audio might have helped. The demo showed a study where the reseracher wanted understand the user behavior of rescue dog owners, maybe to launch a community website for these owners.

The target right now is for people who want to collect a lot of qualitative feedback over time from a select user group. Use cases include beta tests or a screened users from a particular segment (new users, freelancers vs. enterprise, etc.). The goal is to understand user behavior so you can solve real pain points or tweak your value prop to reach them better. One powerful reserach technique is user diary studies (which is where we got our namesake).

We think that user diary studies can be pretty powerful, but they take a lot of time and effort to run. All methods out there are a trade off between ease of use or high maintenance. We want there to be free communication (more qualitative data) yet preserve organization (each user gets their own feed). That way, over time, you get a rich story about Jane, the freelance designer in the midwest, versus John, the cupcake shop owner in Manhattan. Then you can really understand what's driving user behavior for each, and you can take those insights and focus your product accordingly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Got the following when trying to sign-up:

      405 Method Not Allowed
      The method POST is not allowed for this resource.

Typed in an email and clicked Go.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hrm, just tested it on Chrome on my Mac and it worked. We're using Launchrock to collect signups. Maybe they were down temporarily? Try again or email us directly at firstname.lastname@example.com. Thanks for your interest!

<comment><USER5> Tried again just now - same problem. Looks like some sort of a persistent issue with Launchrock, I mustn't be the only one hitting it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hrm, that is weird, we got a lot of other sign ups on Launchrock. Pls email us at email@example.com. Can you give some details on your browser too. I'll report to Launchrock. Sorry for the inconvenience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I want to find out more about your service.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great! Sign up on our landing page or use the contact us link at the bottom.</comment></comment>


What Happened to Web Intents? - <AUTHOR> http://paul.kinlan.me/what-happened-to-web-intents/

<comment><USER2> Look at the history of protocols and software patterns. The ones that survived are never by design - they happen by accident. It's worth throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. I'm sorry to hear you're disappointed with web intents. Your marketing might be wrong. The Wikipedia says a "experimental framework". Firstly:

Why experimental? You are either running with your own ideas or not.

Secondly: Why is it called a framework? It seems more like a software pattern, or UX pattern than a framework. It could even be pushing the protocol level, but I don't think it has reached 'protocol' status yet.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> A beautiful case study in how and why standardizing ([https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/web-intents/raw- file/tip/spec/Overvie...](https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/web-intents/raw- file/tip/spec/Overview.html)) an idea before thinking it through in practice is a waste of time.

<comment><USER3> We did think it through.... I just think we could have listened a lot more, collaborated a lot more and, well, yes think it through a bit more.

I am buoyed by the fact that we know we still need to solve this problem.

<comment><USER4> And now you know more about how to do it :)</comment></comment></comment>


Former Air Force captain to expose UFO threat - <AUTHOR> http://www.news.com.au/technology/former-air-force-caption-to-expose-ufo-threat/story-e6frfro0-1225928480574 <comment><USER2> More nonsense. I do believe such encounters happen. The conclusions these people jump to are unwarranted: ETs, threats, etc. I know the technology exists from various individuals, former military, who have seen it first-hand. They had no idea where it came from. I am convinced it is domestic, and derived from technology originally acquired during or following Project Paperclip. I am also fairly convinced that there were indeed aliens in the Roswell crash -- the human, non-US citizen type -- who had violated our airspace, and were shot down.</comment>


Improving Ruby Fibers - <AUTHOR> https://www.codeotaku.com/journal/2018-06/improving-ruby-fibers/index <comment><USER2> we are using libco[1] in our project[2]; it provides a good abstraction for architectures and provide different backends using ucontext, setjmp and native register management for x86 and x86_64.

[1] [https://byuu.org/library/libco/](https://byuu.org/library/libco/)

[2] [https://fluentbit.io](https://fluentbit.io)

<comment><AUTHOR> I like `libco`.

The API is a bit more heavy weight than what I submitted to Ruby. That's because `libco` tries to avoid an assembler and instead dynamically loads binary data into an executable section. In my opinion it's an unnecessary performance cost. The benefit is to avoid an assembler at compile time.

I think it's better to use natively compiled code by the normal toolchain. I think it's a simpler design.

<comment><USER3> It's a very tough tradeoff. You're not the first to take aim at it, and that's fair.

Visual C++, GCC/Clang, and Intel C++ have quite different syntax for declaring inline assembler. I did not wish to burden libco users with having to use a specific compiler. Further, GCC/Clang can prove ... challenging to produce "naked" functions (without stack BP/SP adjustments), which is critical for libco's co_switch routine. I recall having trouble with a less popular OS. Using an external assembler like yasm or GNU as adds further dependencies on specific tools.

It is a _very_ minor performance penalty to have the co_swap thunk, but it is non-zero, so I respect your decision. But do note at least that libco supports many architectures (without going pointlessly obscure.) It'd be a shame to miss out on cooperating in supporting architectures by duplicating our work over something like this.

With or without this, coroutines will always be _slaughtered_ compared to a simple stackless state machine function, but they really shine and (in my opinion) are worth their overhead when you need to switch tasks in the middle of nested function calls.

...

        # Put the first argument into the return value
        movq %rdi, %rax
        # We pop the return address and jump to it
        ret

So if you look at libco: [https://gitlab.com/higan/higan/blob/master/libco/amd64.c#L26](https://gitlab.com/higan/higan/blob/master/libco/amd64.c#L26)

You'll notice that I get the return address into RAX as soon as possible. Believe it or not, this makes a real difference in performance. It allows the CPU to start fetching instructions after the JMP/RET even sooner than if you have it at the bottom of the function as you do.

The choice between push/pop and mov [rsp] for handling the non-volatile registers isn't really important. I found the latter slightly more performant on Athlon 64 CPUs, and a wash on Intel CPUs.

Preserving signals isn't so critical, but SSE is probably quite important, and only necessary on Windows. Again, your decision, but I would preserve it in your case. Can lead to really nasty surprises if you don't.

<comment><USER4> >You'll notice that I get the return address into RAX as soon as possible. Believe it or not, this makes a real difference in performance. It allows the CPU to start fetching instructions after the JMP/RET even sooner than if you have it at the bottom of the function as you do.

The "execution" of the jump happens well before the pop rax is executed.

The real difference is using a jump insted of a ret. The latter will be always mispredicted as the CPU return address predictor (the stack engine) will always get it wrong, while the indirect predictor used by jmp has a chance to get it right.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you both mind elaborating a bit on this? I have to admit CPU instruction scheduling is not really my area.. I'd love to hear more.

<comment><USER3> It's been about ten years since I made that code change, so I'm a bit fuzzy on the details, but in my mind, I really don't see how "pop rax; jmp rax" is going to be faster than "ret". I really feel like it was important to get the return address into rax as soon as possible.

And that, plus the ability to save/restore the xmm registers for the Win64 ABI (there is no push/pop xmm#), is why I used mov/movaps[] instead. I do recall it also testing faster on Athlons as well, but that was so long ago as to be irrelevant now, most likely.

Nostalgic! :3

In any case, I'd recommend benchmarking both under an application that tries to do as many cothread switches as possible per second. Theory's one thing, seeing the results in practice is always another.

<comment><USER4> > I really don't see how "pop rax; jmp rax" is going to be faster than "ret".

As I mentioned earlier this is due to jump predictions. jmp rax (or any register really) uses the indirect jump prediction, while ret uses a special dedicated predictor that uses a stack (the Return Stack Buffer or RSB), populated by call instructions, to predict the return address. In the coroutine case, the ret does not jump to the address of the last call so it will be mispredicted many time. The general indirect predictor, while not guaranteed to get it right, has at least a chance to predict the target especially when you have a small set of fibers calling each other in a deterministic sequence. In the general case with dozens of fibers calling each others from random locations, there is no chance of successful prediction in any case.

In principle a CPU could have a meta predictor that would chose between the general indirect predictor and the RSB, but this does not appear to be the case for current CPUs (the only switch to indirect when the stack buffer underflows).

Fibers are generally problematic for the return call predictor, even if the pop/jmp sequence is used, the call into the coroutine switch function will permanently damage the RBS, so any subsequent ret will be eventually mispredicted. For example:

        Fiber 1:
            call foo:
                call coro_switch
                   jump fiber 2
        Fiber 2:
            call coro_switch
                jump fiber 1
        Fiber 1
                ret // return from foo call, always mispredicted

In my coroutine library I have been experimenting with writing coro_switch in inline assembler, so there is no call to it (this only works if your target language support inline assembler). So if a fiber switches to another fiber (from any function nesting depth) which then switches back from the same nesting level, the predictor is not damaged. I think this is worth doing to optimize for coroutines used as generators.

BTW, I measured these effects multiple times.

Regarding populating the register well ahead of the jump, it is an interesting idea, but I do not think it matters much in practice. First of all, jumps and call are 'executed' at the fetch stage in the pipeline, this is about 10 clock cycles earlier than the stage that would execute the pop; because of OoO execution this might even be much earlier. Also performing a jump never has a dependency on anything as it is always executed under speculation, so 'pop rax' being completed or not has no impact. The register is only used much later to confirm or rollback the speculation.

<comment><USER3> I gave this a try:

[https://hastebin.com/raw/ipodigizey](https://hastebin.com/raw/ipodigizey)

There's no difference between an inline assembler call function and a fully unrolled, inlined thread swap that avoids any calls at all. There's only an infinitesimal difference between these two versions and the libco method of using a byte array and a function thunk to invoke it in a compiler-independent way.

Further testing in bsnes (where tens of millions of thread switches occur per second) reveals absolutely no observable difference in performance.

It's a fun idea to toy around with this, but in the end any of these methods are going to be almost identical. You might as well pick whichever you like and go with that.

<comment><USER4> One (but not both) of the coroutines need to do a return after invoking coro swap to see the advantage of avoiding the call, otherwise the additional call instruction is pretty much 0 cost.

Inline assembler does have another advantage though: you can use extended asm clobbers instead of saving registers manually. At the very least the compiler can do a better job of scheduling the instruction around (which is admittedly marginal on an OoO CPU), but in some cases (like this specific artificial test) can completely omit them. You should be able to see a coroutine jump every other cycle this way (i.e. the theoretical limit as most CPUs can only perform a taken jump that often).

At the end of the day depends on what you are aiming for: if a task is doing some reasonable amount of work between coroutine jumps (i.e. 'just' light weight threads), the canonical implementation is perfectly fine. My end goal is to make coroutines usable as generators, so probably even inline assembler is not enough there as ideally you would like the compiler to optimize, inline and vectorize across coroutine calls.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> IMHO Ruby was better off in 1.8 with green threads; one Ruby VM per core and using MPI for message passing.

<comment><AUTHOR> There are two proposals on the table to return to such as design:

[https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/13618](https://bugs.ruby- lang.org/issues/13618)

[https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/14736](https://bugs.ruby- lang.org/issues/14736)

I'm not sure green threads are a great design for primarily concurrent IO. Because they have all the cognitive overhead of threads but it's simply not necessary for primarily cooperative workloads. Unless you have several network cards, IO is going to be serialised at the hardware level.</comment></comment>


Blow up: how half a tonne of cocaine transformed the life of an island - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/may/10/blow-up-how-half-a-tonne-of-cocaine-transformed-the-life-of-an-island <comment><USER2> I sometimes wonder about the psychology of people who try this sort of money- making venture, ie smuggling vast quantities of illegal drugs across the ocean.

Do these "entrepreneurs" understand the risk they take, or do they pretend to themselves that there is no risk? Excepting where there is coercion, is it big balls or small brains?

I'd love to hear from a smuggler to hear how they manage psychologically the huge downside risk of being caught. Do you have to be a neurological outlier to undertake this sort of project?

<comment><USER3> I'm not a smuggler, but I know one. Let's call him George. He's not currently available to tell his story so let me give you the abridged version.

George ran a (very) successful business here in NL and in Belgium, made a lot of money and was doing just fine. Then in a short period of time his wife died and his business took a hit both from competition, regulation and because he wasn't paying as much attention to it as he did in the past.

One thing leading to another the business failed. George panicked a bit being left behind with a child to take care of and a huge drop in income so he figured what's the harm in taking a boat filled with pills into Australia. That didn't work out too well and George is now on an extended visit to Australia, I don't think we'll meet again in this lifetime, that's how long his sentence was.

Now, before you judge: George was in every sense of the word a start-up type, serial entrepreneur with a lot of hustle and in general doing just fine. All it took was a couple of cards dealt from the bottom of the pack to turn him into a criminal.

So no big balls, no small brains, just plain old desperation and momentary lapse of judgement. If not for that you'd all be proud to swap places with him. The really sad person in that story is the kid, first to lose mom and then dad effectively too.

<comment><USER4> But you could just suck it up, get a regular job and do 9 to 5 5 days a week. If you lived in those countries, they have a great social network. It's not like he was living in Somalia and this was his only way out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice article. But the title is a bit misleading since it's hardly mentioned how life in the island got transformed.

<comment><USER6> That's fair. It's unfortunate that The Guardian's editorial has been slipping. The TLDR is that half a ton of cocaine is 453 kilos, which at a conservative estimate of 20k/kilo is (according to Quora wholesale values so take w a grain of salt) $11M street value of product if not more. So you take that and put it side by side by the economic day to day flow of the Azores. What do you get? For a 20k gdp/capita across a 250k population well...it's a lot. I dunno if it would result in narcocapital, and i dunno enough to comment but that's a gigantic shipment with an equally gigantic potential outcome.

<comment><USER7> but the effect wasn't primarily economical! After reading the headline I also assumed that the story would be about the economic changes resulting from the infusion of such a 'valuable' resource i.e. I assumed the islanders would become smugglers/distributors themselves with the accompanying violence and risk such an occupation usually carries. The police quickly found and isolated the gang that lost the cocaine so there wasn't the usual violence from the owners coming to reclaim their product. Also the article says the islanders sold the found cocaine locally AND the street value plummeted:

> Before Quinci's cocaine had washed up on shore... the flow of drugs was > usually small and predictable. Often when the police made a seizure, they > would make such a dent in the drug supply that local prices would skyrocket. > But now police faced an unprecedented situation. As well as the 500kg of > cocaine they had seized in the previous two weeks, Lopes thought that at > least another 200kg were still unaccounted for... that summer, [the village] > became a hub for the sale of the missing cocaine. "People from all over the > island came here to buy drugs,"... A product so valuable in the rest of the > world was rendered almost worthless through abundance. "They had gold, but > they didn't know how to work with it,"... Other Azoreans "were selling beer > glasses full of pure cocaine"... Each one of these "copos", which were about > a third of a pint, contained about 150g and cost €20 (£17) – many hundreds > of times cheaper than what it would cost in London today... [a] man had > apparently paid a friend 300g of cocaine just to charge his phone...

The effects were mostly cultural and affected mostly public health. There were some economic capital accumulated (used to "build coffee shops") but I thought the article did a good job with the subverted expectations and providing an overview of some long term effects

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "The stories they told of how the drugs changed the island were by turns bizarre, thrilling and tragic. No one expected in early June 2001 that they would still be talking about the effects of the cocaine nearly two decades later."

Reminds me of when a copy of the New Testament reached the Inuits on Belcher Island...

"The hunting was poor in Canada's Belcher Islands in the winter of 1941, and a meteor shower led some Inuits to suspect the world was coming to an end. It was around this time that a 27-year-old tribal shaman named Charlie Ouyerack proclaimed himself Jesus Christ, and anointed his pal Peter Sala—the tallest man on the island who also happened to be the best hunter and ice navigator—as God..."

[https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vvvm44/how-two-men- used-t...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vvvm44/how-two-men-used-the- bible-to-unleash-mass-murder-in-the-arctic)

</comment><comment><USER9> > "The paradox of the Azores is that you are always wanting to leave when > you're here, and always wanting return when you're not," Tiago Melo Bento, a > local film-maker, told me.

I felt that while spending time in the Azores but I can feel it anywhere. Now I think it's quite lucky if a person never wants to leave and feels content.

</comment><comment><USER10> [https://www.litcharts.com/lit/freakonomics/chapter-3-why- do-...](https://www.litcharts.com/lit/freakonomics/chapter-3-why-do-drug- dealers-still-live-with-their-moms)

</comment><comment><USER11> Wu-tang forever? Sometime I wonder about the full extent of privilege.</comment>


VC runs for Congress in farm country; opponent makes 'Silicon Valley' an insult - <AUTHOR> https://www.recode.net/2018/9/20/17870648/josh-harder-jeff-denham-modesto-california-midterm-elections-venture-capitalist <comment><USER2> Of course they did. I would consider it, if I had nothing positive to out sell my opponent with. And look around at the political carnage. Lots more negative politics out there than positive politics right now. Ugly sauce.

Not sure why this is some sort of headline. Outside of tech circles, SV can be a mixed bag. Rural people may have a very different set of priorities and or entities of interest. And it's not like the locals are going to feel like giving any ground. Why would they? So again, expected.

That it happens isn't a big deal. How it's handled is.

The answer to an insult of this kind is to take the platform right to the people. Get a ground game running, hire organizers, and go canvas the district. Do some town hall, rally type events, and speak right to them. Be sure and pick a venue ANYONE can attend. Flash is not the right approach.

Defusing that insult potential is all about platform ideas that speak right to their concerns, coupled with accessible interactions. Canvassers can do this work, particularly when they are from the district in question.

The candidate would do well to just spend some time in the region, doing events, and their best to pick up on what rural people relate to and why. Then act on that.

I suggest the candidate mean it enough to get past the "slicker" type BS filters many of these people operate on without even thinking about it all that much.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER3> A Democrat who isn't a lawyer could be a great thing.</comment>


Why Is This Matzo Different from All Other Matzos? An Unintended Side Effect - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/opinion/sunday/why-is-this-matzo-different-from-all-other-matzos.html <comment><AUTHOR> An unintended side effect of kosher law: better tasting food. (rest of title)</comment>


US Supreme Court strikes down federal law prohibiting sports gambling - mark-ruwt http://www.espn.com/chalk/story/_/id/23501236/supreme-court-strikes-federal-law-prohibiting-sports-gambling <comment><AUTHOR> From the ruling:

> Congress can regulate sports gambling directly, but if it elects not to do > so, each State is free to act on its own. Our job is to interpret the law > Congress has enacted and decide whether it is consistent with the > Constitution. PASPA is not. PASPA "regulate[s] state governments' > regulation" of their citizens.... The Constitution gives Congress no such > power.

[https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/16-476_dbfi.pdf](https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/16-476_dbfi.pdf)

I don't quite understand what they're saying here...I guess the idea is that Congress can regulate gambling -- assuming some constitutional justification like the commerce clause -- but they can't restrict what laws states pass? (Of course, per drinking ages, they can tax states citizens and then release that tax money back to the states conditional on state s enacting certain laws.)

Here is extensive coverage on the excellent SCOTUSblog

[http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/murphy-v- national...](http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/murphy-v-national- collegiate-athletic-association-2/)

Other HN submission (Bloomberg article):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17065652](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17065652)

<comment><USER2> The main idea is that Congress can decide if it is legal or not, but to say it's illegal everywhere except for Nevada makes it a non-federal statute as they are arbitrarily deciding that some state gets an exception, making it non constitutional.

That is why it was stricken. If it said it was illegal everywhere, then the supreme court would have upheld that.

<comment><USER3> I don't think this is correct. As I read it, the issue was that, as others have said, the federal government attempted to regulate what laws a state could pass (which is related to a broader body of law about federal laws that _compel_ states* to enact certain laws or to implement federal laws). Note, however, that this not to say that congress can't make its own laws and that, if it does, they would override state laws.

Maybe one way of summing this up that makes more sense of the distinction is this: Congress can make laws that regulate behavior as a general matter (subject to other constitutional restrictions), but cannot regulate directly the behavior of state governments themselves.

It's unusual for congress to do the former but not the latter, but that appears to have been the case here.

<comment><USER4> Why would Congress do this? Is it because there is some other constitutional requirement they would be in violation of if they just made it illegal at the federal level?

<comment><USER5> Yes, the Tenth Amendment reserves powers not explicitly given to the federal government to the states and the people. Local sports and poker betting is already regulated by the states and a federal interstate commerce claim to regulate it is fairly weak.

<comment><USER6> Pursuant to Gonzales v. Raich, which ruled that Congress could criminalize the production and use of homegrown marijuana for personal use, the interstate effect of gambling in any form on any activity is almost certainly sufficient for Congress to regulate or prohibit any or all gambling activity.

In addition, the Ninth Circuit has held that Congress has Commerce Clause authority to criminalize possession of homemade machine guns.

Congress has chosen to allow states to regulate gambling to a certain extent, which explains its legality in various forms in the various states.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Does anyone know if this means for general predication markets?

The only reasons I've found blockchain at all interesting is for the creation of combinatorial prediction markets. If gambling laws are getting lax enough in some states to allow centralized prediction markets, my interest will wane to zero.

<comment><USER8> Prediction markets are already legal in the USA.

[https://iemweb.biz.uiowa.edu/](https://iemweb.biz.uiowa.edu/) [https://www.predictit.org/](https://www.predictit.org/)

<comment><USER9> That's not exactly accurate. The government has gone after and shut down prediction markets before. They made an agreement with PredictIt not to, but PredictIt's $850 limit was apparently a big factor in that.

I hadn't heard of IEM before. Not sure what's up with that.

<comment><USER10> IEM has received multiple no-action letters, and also has limits. So basically the same situation as PredictIt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is super interesting. Seems like the real ruling is that the federal government can't compel states to implement/enforce non-federal laws. I wonder if that will affect things like the drinking age...

<comment><USER12> > Seems like the real ruling is that the federal government can't compel > states to implement/enforce non-federal laws. I wonder if that will affect > things like the drinking age...

(IANAL).

IIRC, that's done by allowing states to set their own drinking age, but withholding federal funds for highways unless the drinking age is at least 21. So any state _could_ set a lower drinking age, legally, but they'd be on the hook for making up the difference in funds from their own budget.

That said, the combination of this decision and the ACA ruling that the federal government couldn't withhold funds from non-participating states may provide ground for a challenge to that law.

<comment><USER13> What does IANAL stand for? I don't dare to google for it at work.

<comment><USER14> I am not a lawyer

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> FiveThirtyEight's non political year value just skyrocketed

<comment><USER16> It's not like sports betting wasn't already widely common across the United States. The only difference is that money (and taxes) will be going to US companies directly now instead of off-shore online gambling companies...

<comment><USER17> It was already common enough in the US, but it's downright rare compared to how common it is in the UK or other places where it's legal. Hull, Stoke, West Ham, and Manchester City come to mind -- all big soccer teams who have/had bookmakers emblazoned on their uniforms as the main sponsor.

I'm sure that if the US makes sports betting legal we'll see a huge influx of betting companies, apps, etc. Like you said, most of it was handled by foreign companies, but now they'll be able to advertise and grow in the US in earnest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I am curious what that means for fantasy sports companies like DraftKings that ran into issues with gambling laws in the past.

<comment><USER19> It's super bad for them. The vast majority of people who play the daily fantasy sports would much rather just bet on the games themselves.

<comment><USER20> Huh? What's stopping these companies from simply integrating new gambling features enabled by this decision into their existing product?

<comment><USER21> Nothing, assuming states pass laws legalizing sports wagering in which Draft Kings and the like operate.

The major problem I see is that while the current DK business model must be extremely profitable (just hosting contests that you don't have a stake in and taking a rake), running a sportsbook is an entirely different business. One that typically brings minimal profits and can sometimes bring enormous losses because now they are taking the action themselves. Sportsbooks are not typically profit centers for casinos but loss-leaders to bring in people to buy drinks and gamble on more profitable games.

I'm sure they must have been worried about this happening but probably will try and get out in front of it to become an online bookmaker. My own hot take is that this cannot be viewed as anything but a negative for them. I have to believe it would be very difficult to compete with huge casinos that can build their own platforms and bundle betting with their rewards programs. I also agree with the OP's assumption that most people currently using daily fantasy sites would much prefer to simply bet on games.

<comment><USER19> >One that typically brings minimal profits and can sometimes bring enormous losses because now they are taking the action themselves. Sportsbooks are not typically profit centers for casinos but loss-leaders to bring in people to buy drinks and gamble on more profitable games.

While this is true for places with competition among sportsbooks, like, say Nevada or the internet, it's not necessarily true for the states. If they start running a sportsbook (either themselves or, more likely, through a contractor) with a monopoly in their particular state, then they'll be able to charge more per-bet than they otherwise could. Instead of the standard 11:10 line, they could charge 12:10 or even 13:10 and they'd still get gobs of bettors wanted to put money down at the only legal game in town.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Alito wrote for the majority, joined by Thomas, Gorsuch, Roberts, Kagan and Kennedy.

Breyer dissented in part.

Ginsberg and Sotomayor dissented completely.

<comment><USER23> Link to the opinion?

<comment><USER24> [https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/16-476_dbfi.pdf](https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/16-476_dbfi.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The article is a bit light on details, but it sounds like this doesn't automatically legalize sports betting. Rather, it allows states to legalize it, which at least 20 states intend to do.

<comment><USER26> Everything is legal unless there's a law against it. States would not legalize gambling, they would repeal laws against it.

<comment><USER27> I don't know why you're being downvoted. Your statement is factually correct.

<comment><USER28> IANAL, but I'm not sure that's exactly true. As far as I know, in 49 states (not Louisiana), if there's not a law about it we fall back on some system based on english common law.

<comment><USER29> California falls back on Spanish civil law. The most obvious example of this is the fact spouses cannot hold property individually in California, except for a few (constitutionally protected) items.

In general, each sovereign jurisdiction will fall back on the legal system that was in place at the time the jurisdiction gained its sovereignty. For California, the ancestor state was Mexico, and thus Spain.

[https://www.law.berkeley.edu/library/robbins/pdf/ca- legalher...](https://www.law.berkeley.edu/library/robbins/pdf/ca- legalheritage.pdf)

But to answer the larger question. Everything that is not specifically legislated against is legal. Some ancient laws may still hold, but most are probably going to be found unconstitutional. Although, there may be some exceptions that you could convince a court to enforce.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I think one thing not yet discussed much here is that state authorized gambling is generally akin to a regressive tax, that is the state gets the benefits of new funds, but mainly from the poor, not from the rich.

<comment><USER31> I know many rich people who love sports betting

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Just curious: were there odds published ahead of time on whether the SCOTUS would strike down this law?

</comment><comment><USER32> Ooooo, I hope the next federal law changes our countries name from "The United States of America" to "Russia"! P.S. please let's all stop supporting our government making more laws. They are shit at it, and we should have MORE freedom, not less. Then we can enjoy life and do stuff, ya know?

</comment><comment><USER33> Will this have an impact on bringing back companies like Intrade?

</comment><comment><USER34> Would this ruling potentially affect federal drug laws? I say this because some US states have chosen to legalize marijuana, despite it remaining illegal at the federal level. This seems like a similar kind of situation.

<comment><USER35> No, the Supreme Court didn't rule that Congress couldn't pass laws regarding the regulation of sports gambling and userp state laws. What they ruled is that Congress couldn't choose to not regulate an area and then tell states how they had to regulate the same area.

In the case of drug laws there are clear federal laws regulating drug trafficking, so this ruling does nothing to effect the status quo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> 9,984,535

</comment><comment><USER37> It's certainly an interesting judgement.. Whereas Congress can "regulate" and not at the same time. Long story short, it looks like more gambling is in.

And the longer view, is more people will be impoverished with more easy to obtain gambling. Sure, a few will win it big, and they will be flaunted out for the city/state/US to see. But on whole, more people will be harmed with this.

But I'm sure it shovels money around sufficiently, making the GDP look like it grew by a .1% Good 'ol "Parable of the Broken Window", at it again.

<comment><USER38> Gambling is fun.

>And the longer view, is more people will be impoverished with more easy to obtain gambling

As long as they are doing it out of their own choice it is nobody's business.

<comment><USER39> Addiction affects the lives of everyone around the addict. Whether we're paying for it in taxes, or we're being attacked on the street.

<comment><USER38> Not exercising and getting fat also affects lives of everyone around the fat person, does that mean we should force individuals to exercise every day ?

Also it is much better if the addicts are identified early and quickly so that people could stay away from them and shun them instead of a woman figuring out her husband is an addict after the marriage. After gambling addiction next what sugar addiction or netflix addiction ?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Passengers' terror as Airbus plane engine DISINTEGRATES mid-air - <AUTHOR> http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/passengers-terror-airbus-plane-engine-11265832 <comment><USER2> Mods: Duplicate, extra-clickbait title.

<comment><USER3> [not a mod]

Can you post the link to the previous submission? I can't find it. Here it is ok to repost if the previous submission didn't get too much attention. [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

I agree that the title is too alarmist.</comment></comment>


Tmobile.com is having some serious problems - <AUTHOR> T-Mobile's site has been having some major issues for several days now, bad enough to make the site unusable. 400 bad requests everywhere (among other things).
Even the salespeople in their brick & mortar stores can't order anything because their systems are only working intermittently.
They are apparently in the middle of rolling out a new site design - some pages are in their new modern looking theme and some are not.
As some one who is primarily a desktop and embedded developer, I can only wonder what causes this kind of thing. I admit it, the only sites I have been responsible for were  small and simple and just worked.
But I'd be interested in reading about some of the things that can go wrong in a more major rollout.  Anyone have any interesting stories, or speculation about what  went wrong in this case? <comment><AUTHOR> It's down completely now, just going to [https://www.t-mobile.com/](https://www.t-mobile.com/) gives you a 400.

</comment><comment><USER2> Did you try the app? I avoid it, but if it functions independently, it could be a stopgap.</comment>


Ask HN: What are your favorite long-form nonfiction websites? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> [https://www.currentaffairs.org/](https://www.currentaffairs.org/)

I didn't realize how many years I'd been looking for a serious, entertaining, well-written leftist perspective on news and the world until I ran across this magazine.

</comment><comment><USER3> The Digital Antiquarian: [https://www.filfre.net/](https://www.filfre.net/) Starts out focused on text-based games, but branches out to a history of computing in general. My favorite thing is that Kindle-formatted archives are available.

</comment><comment><USER4> [https://longreads.com/](https://longreads.com/) has a ton of long form writing and is very well curated.

</comment><comment><USER5> [http://zeihan.com](http://zeihan.com) Geopolitics kicks ass. Very fact based, provided lots of context to make strategic decisions, such as where to start your next company.

</comment><comment><USER6> I recommend [http://nautil.us/](http://nautil.us/)

</comment><comment><USER7> I like [http://slatestarcodex.com/](http://slatestarcodex.com/) a kinda pessimistic leftist who sometimes calls himself a libertarian, but wrote the best takedown of libertarianism I've ever read:

[http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on- moloch/](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/)

It's what finally pushed me out of libertarianism after it was straining under my increasingly long list of qualifiers. He has a bunch of other great articles too ranging from ADHD to bayesian analysis.

<comment><USER8> There's a podcast version of it. I find that it's a good way to consume it. [https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/jeremiah-2/slate-star- codex](https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/jeremiah-2/slate-star-codex)

Also it's worth looking for in person Less Wrong & SSC meetups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> [https://www.damninteresting.com](https://www.damninteresting.com) \- "A collection of fascinating true stories from history, science, and psychology. In text and podcast form."

</comment><comment><USER10> [http://slatestarcodex.com/](http://slatestarcodex.com/)

Amazing essays on rationality, psychology, science, all sorts of stuff.

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

Simple but deep explanations of technology(his Elon Musk series is a must read)

</comment><comment><USER11> [https://www.ribbonfarm.com/](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/) Truly great posts and book recommendations.

</comment><comment><USER12> Huge fan of [https://www.quantamagazine.org/](https://www.quantamagazine.org/)

</comment><comment><USER13> [https://www.quantamagazine.org/](https://www.quantamagazine.org/) [https://aeon.co/](https://aeon.co/) [http://nautil.us/](http://nautil.us/)

</comment><comment><USER14> Narrative journalism: [https://maptia.com/](https://maptia.com/)

Humanities & literature: [https://www.aldaily.com/](https://www.aldaily.com/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Lots of useful synthesis about the study of consciousness: [https://www.consciousentities.com/](https://www.consciousentities.com/)

</comment><comment><USER16> Let me throw this in - [https://booksummaries.me/](https://booksummaries.me/)

</comment><comment><USER17> [https://www.lrb.co.uk/](https://www.lrb.co.uk/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Not sure what long-form means, but maybe datagenetics.com matches.

</comment><comment><USER19> aldaily.com. The authority on essays and opinions of note.

</comment><comment><USER20> Farnam street blog.

</comment><comment><USER21> gwern.net

</comment><comment><USER22> new york review of books ([https://www.nyrb.com/](https://www.nyrb.com/))

</comment><comment><USER23> longform.org provides a great curated selection of articles, including many older gems.

</comment><comment><USER24> longreads.com ProPublica.org</comment>


Dropbox: Fewer Than 100 Accounts Affected - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/24/dropbox-breach-fewer-than-100-accounts-affected-but-one-person-actively-exploited-it

<comment><USER2> I think the bigger takeaway from that article (for me) is that it was a really nice, honest letter to affected customers. I know they got somewhat of a black eye from their responses before, but this one was really good.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't think I'll be the only one closing my Dropbox account now. It's not just this event, but the recent series of privacy issues.

</comment><comment><USER4> That's the way to apologize, very impressive way to handle the situation in individual level.

Although the bigger issue is, how was this ever possible? Do they push code to production without any normal or security code reviews? Without pen-testing? And if that's the case what does it stop this problem to happen again?

</comment><comment><USER5> Already posted: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2693901>

<comment><USER6> When a duplicate post like this comes up, I usually flag it. Does anyone else do this?

It really fragments discussion having duplicate posts on the main page since people usually just comment on the first one they see.

I also noticed that the only difference in the URLs between the two was a trailing slash. Shouldn't that be included in the dupe detection? Probably the most frequent and easiest to catch cause.</comment></comment>


My Problem with Threat Intelligence - <AUTHOR> https://danielmiessler.com/blog/my-problem-with-threat-intelligence/ <comment><USER2> Sadly this article is a little light on details. I used to work in the threat intel space, there were vastly different qualities of TI and none of them were cheap. I agree that worrying about TI is pointless if you're hopelessly out of date for patches/etc, but its still useful as a defense if you deploy it properly.</comment>


Show HN: Fntags – JavaScript Instead of HTML - <AUTHOR> https://narcolepticsnowman.github.io/fntags/ <comment><AUTHOR> I've created this web ui framework where you write templates in javascript instead of html or any other templating language. It's written in es6, so it can be used directly in the browser.

The library is under 3kb when minified and gzipped, and around 9kb when minified alone.

The api was largely inspired by functional components and state hooks in react.

The dom is built directly by the tag functions, the tag functions are effectively equivalent to html tags. There's no virtual dom or other representations, and the dom is updated directly on state changes.

fntags provides the ability to bind any element to any state you have a handle to.

If you're looking for something light weight for your next project, try it out!

</comment><comment><USER2> Looks cool. Congrats. Really like the name. Enyo did something like it but this has state and is inspired by recent innovations like hooks as you mention. I was wondering what this would be good for but now I have a good idea. Get's down to the bare necessities and works directly on the DOM which I like. Don't over engineer instead work on explaining what this could be good for and the docs in general.

<comment><AUTHOR> You nailed exactly what I was going for. Less fluff, just the nuts and bolts.

Thanks for the input and advice :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm loving the documentation. It's way more fun to use than I expect and the colors aren't terrible _cough_ React _cough_.

Docs look to be work in progress, but I like the simple API. No fluff, no fuss. Just update on state and stop with the JSX hackery. Yes, please. I'm game.</comment>


Congressional Clocks Have a Secret Code - <AUTHOR> http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/congressional-clocks-have-a-secret-code <comment><USER2> "secret code" is rather linkbait-y. The code is not secret at all, except that it deals with obscure parliamentary procedure and thus it's not generally interesting to the general public. (Fine article though.)</comment>


Interns Get Fired En Masse After Protesting Dress Code at Work - <AUTHOR> https://www.yahoo.com/style/interns-get-fired-en-masse-after-protesting-dress-201632030.html <comment><USER2> Previous discussions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12020506](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12020506)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12001730](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12001730)

</comment><comment><USER3> Is there possibly more to this story? As it stands it looks like the interns made a polite request and fired for it. I understand the "intern is a guest" argument, but he/she is also a future employee playing that part and would like to be treated as such. If any polite request is countered by firing I can't imagine that will be a good place to work.

<comment><USER4> A polite request is asking their respective managers about the dress code and whether it can be relaxed. Creating a petition, circling it among the entire intern group, and essentially demanding change at a place that was generous enough to hire them for a learning experience is not a polite request.

I interned at four separate companies when I was younger. I would have never even conceived the idea of doing something like this. Besides the fact that it's three months (seriously, they couldn't wear dress clothes for three months?), a company is not a democracy. I think this might be a side effect of my generation being told they can change anything they want in the world just by signing a petition.

<comment><USER5> > demanding change at a place that was generous enough to hire them for a > learning experience

Oh what a load of crap

Generous? Companies use interns for cheap labour (sometimes free). There's nothing generous from their part

<comment><USER4> Perhaps you interned at the wrong places, but every internship I've had not only paid me well, but also taught me more real-world skills than I learned during my four-year degree. The world is not black and white; just because some companies use interns as cheap labor doesn't mean that's always the case.

<comment><USER6> To be fair, a place that fires interns for writing a petition about a dress code probably falls squarely in the camp of "exploiting cheap/free labor" rather than "well paying and educational career opportunity" camp.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Mad Men: I worked at IBM Office Products Division Headquarters in the 1970s. Dress code was full suit with a white shirt. I was a systems programmer on the IBM 360 Mainframe. One day I walked from my office, into the hall, to the print room 2 doors away without my suit jacket. I got "written up" (a very bad thing).

In those days even IBM Field Service Engineers who repaired Selectric Typewriters wore suits. Their shoes were so well shined you could see your face in them.

These days I work from home. Sometimes I walk the hall to the cafeteria (the kitchen) without my suit jacket. I expect to be written up sometime soon.

Here's a clue a very senior manager (Ralph Gomory, IBM Research Division President) once gave me...

Managers make decisions. Only go to management with your need for a decision and always present the options.

They went to management with what was, in essence, a complaint. Worse, it was a complaint that had nothing to do with the business. Clearly they were not keeping the business uppermost in their priority queue. So management made a business decision and fixed the problem.

We had a "mass revolt" among the systems programmers across all of the IBM internal sites. We would only get "upgraded processors" after the customer returned an old one. We were working on trailing edge equipment. Unfortunately our internal memos (the "Tandem Memos") got leaked to Computer World (the big newspaper of the day). I got called "on the carpet" by senior management. I expected to be fired.

Fortunately IBM Corporate management saw that we were complaining about the business, not about personal issues. They changed the policy and we got leading edge equipment.

Mass protests sometimes work but they need to focus on improving the business. Unless you're in the fashion business it is hard to see how dress code protests matter.

<comment><USER5> > Unless you're in the fashion business it is hard to see how dress code > protests matter.

Of course it doesn't have anything to do with the business

But some companies will see their good employes leave, old employees retire and then won't find out why they can't compete and can only retain the worse professionals.

<comment><USER7> I am unable to make payroll this month. The problem on my desk is how to either increase revenue or reduce expense. Banks don't loan money these days (try it) and they especially don't loan money to cover operating expenses.

You wander into my office with a "petition" signed by some employees stating that the "Free coffee needs a better quality bean" or "We want to wear jeans to work".

It looks to me that you've just solved both of my problems.

A few less employees who fail to focus on improving the business will help me reduce expenses and make payroll. It also gives me some spare cash to buy better quality coffee. Both problems solved by self-selection.

People seem to think that "being a good culture fit" is a new idea. But IBM used to "write up" employees who failed the dress code as "not a good culture fit". If the company wants polo shirts, wear polo shirts. If the company wants suits, wear suits.

Running a company is hard. Your suppliers demand immediate payment. Your retailers demand volume discounts. Your sales people want "promotion specials". Your landlord wants more money. Your employees demand "competitive wages". Your competition announced a new product. Your major customer threatened to quit.... And YOU want to argue about dress code? Will all those who don't focus on improving the business please step forward.

<comment><USER5> You are right about culture fit.

And yes, running a company is hard.

If you're so strapped of cash why are you wasting money enforcing a dress code (unless necessary)? Will that increase revenue or cut cost?

> And YOU want to argue about dress code?

I would probably be fuming as well if I got a complaint unrelated to the core business. But guess what, your employees are not robots. Sure, it's not inhumane to demand a dress code or the fact that the free coffee sucks. But it will make them think twice if another opportunity shows up and the first to move are usually the ones with more skills.

Do you know who was fired for being a poor culture fit? John Lasseter

<comment><USER7> IBM enforced a dress code as part of the company image of quality. Quality wasn't just a word, it was a culture. IBM's management had to go to "manager's school" and were sought after because everyone knew IBM invested time and money to train their managers and their employees. IBM's reputation for quality was so good people USED to say "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".

IBM "enforced" a lot of things beyond dress code. I got called on the carpet for answering a question at a conference because I was not an IBM official spokesperson. Everything (including dress) about the company mattered.

If you want a company image then dress code matters. FedEx people who drive trucks still wear uniforms. Airline pilots wear uniforms. Losing the company image loses a reason to work for the company. IBM today is run by people who forgot that. It seems to me that IBM will go out of business shortly based on that loss of "cachet".

IBM repair people wearing suits sent the message that IBM CARED about business, about perception, about quality. It showed they pay attention to their front-line workforce. It transmits the idea that this person is well- trained, not picked out of a lineup. IBM invested in that training (something most companies don't do anymore).

IBM people never complained that they felt like robots. They were universally proud to work for the company. IBM didn't fire, they retrained. (Not anymore, though. And you can see it on the IBM postings.) IBM people cared about quality. If something was wrong they worked to make it right and they were backed by management, even if it really wasn't IBM's fault. Robots, no. Workers who were proud of and cared for the company, yes.

Few companies seem to train employees, seem to care about quality, seem to care about a dress code as a corporate image. Starbucks seems to be "the new IBM" on those terms. They only recently allowed "visible tattoos".

I have "skills". The only thing that will make me want to move is a more "interesting" problem. If you show up with an interesting problem I'll wear Saran Wrap or anything else you want to work, dress code be damned.

<comment><USER5> Good comment

> IBM people never complained that they felt like robots.

I think this is a mix of the cultural context of that era (where people dressed more formally) and the other items you mentioned, especially the dress code being part of their image

But then IBM got "old", other companies did other interesting things and stopped caring for formality and that's where we are today

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I got a job recently that requires business formal dress code. It's was a little frustrating until I read somewhere that by wearing dress clothes your are allowing yourself to kind of be branded by the company and in that way I appreciated it because it allows me to partition my identity into work and nonwork. Part of me still thinks I'd be more productive and happier in my normal street clothes though.

<comment><USER9> My first couple jobs required dress pants, a long sleeve button down shirt, and a tie. Back then "casual friday" was a real thing, you could wear a polo and khakis. These days unless you're an attorney or in finance, nobody wears a suit.

I work at a place that has a dress code that harks back to the early 90s. After spending my 20's griping about dress codes, I actually enjoy it for the same reason: it's a physical reminder of my work identity vs my non-work identity.

I'm curious - how would you be more productive in casual wear? As an engineer, my main gripe was that I often worked in a lab and my tie and slacks would get snagged on the edges of the computer racks. Mostly that was an issue with ruining clothing. At the time, I remember the woman who worked full time running the lab was granted an exception to the dress code for that reason - she was constantly snagging clothing and ruining things from having to crawl around on the floor running cables and things, so they let her wear jeans and more generally rugged clothing.

<comment><USER5> > I'm curious - how would you be more productive in casual wear?

Usually by taking less time to dress up and having better thermal comfort (especially in places that don't have air conditioning - yes, these exist)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How is this newsworthy? Some company (not named) fired some interns? Oh I see, this is an excuse to have yet another commentary about how millennials are so self-entitled.

<comment><USER6> Yeah I'm pretty shocked this is high as it is. I'm skeptical, especially with the "a female veteran who lost her leg."

Almost like the "and that boy was Albert Einstein."

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> According to the article they didn't even disobey the dress code, or cause any real commotion. They just sent a letter just asking for a rule to be changed slightly for practical reasons.

Is it really ethical to fire an entire group of people for merely questioning a rule? Is this really evidence they are "entitled" as comments here are saying? Perhaps the letter was worded very rudely?

<comment><USER12> > Is it really ethical to fire an entire group of people for merely > questioning a rule?

Corporate America doesn't concern itself with ethics. Interns sending a common proposal (however polite) up the management chain is one step removed from unionisation, which is one thing Corporate America will shut down sites or states over.

<comment><USER13> You've gotten downvoted because of the tone of your comment, but I think the argument you're making is sound. The US work culture is very much against employees' rights, and expressing yourself is a right. They didn't stop working, they didn't harm anything, they just sent a letter that said "hey, these 10 people want X" and they got fired over it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Anecdote: When I was an intern in the 80s, at a large mainframe computer facility, there was no dress code. But at that time, there was a widespread rumor that people who dressed better, were treated better. I got a couple pairs of polyester pants and some button down shirts at a discount store. The other interns wore jeans, tee shirts, and sneakers.

Sure enough, I was treated better. While the other interns were crawling around pulling cables, I got to sit at a desk and program a computer.

Wearing business attire also got me better treatment when I needed it, such as dealing with some bureaucracy, or even retailers.

I'd be interested in knowing if this was still the case. If it's important enough to be fired for, I'd spend a few more bucks and dress nicer, as an investment, especially around performance review time.

</comment><comment><USER15> I really want to know what the field is and what the internship was.

Not sure why - maybe other HN commentators can help - but my attitude would not be the same if they were bankers, coders or meat packers.

Maybe because there are social expectations of what people wear for certain jobs.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm really surprised how many people in the comment section of this article defend the facist acts of this company. As if controlling how you dress is not a big deal, it's actually a very big deal. "Welcome to the real world kid", indicating this is somewhat a childish behaviour. Well if this is the real world it needs to be told that this is not acceptable.

So I'm a programmer and a transvestite meaning that yes I like to wear what is considered to be women's clothing. Basically I just like to wear whatever I like and makes me feel comfortable whether it was designed to be used by men or women. Most days I'm lazy in the morning so I put on very casual clothing but I decided that every Monday I would wear something extreme so I wear dresses, colourful skirts, stockings, whatever. I wanted to do this because of two reasons. First off Mondays can be very grey and boring. People return from their weekend holiday and generally feel a bit depressed having to start this weekly routine again. The other reason and the most important one is that we are to be accepted whatever we choose to wear. If a person cannot accept what I wear it's really their problem not mine. The company I work for is very flexible and open minded about these sort of things but if anyone would tell me to stop doing this I would quit immediately, no questions asked.

The company that you work for does not own you. Your boss is not your parent why should he/she get to limit your freedom of expression by telling you what to wear? Especially if you do not have to deal with customers (of course I understand that companies can have rules when their employees are facing customers that's a totally different story).

I don't know how your jobs are but I feel in mine I generally contribute a lot of time, effort and talent to it. A progress made in something I contribute to does not just happen because the company planned it. I can accept that I stay on the same wages while people higher in the hierarchy benefit greatly from something I achieved. That's just how companies work and I get paid well, I'm not complaining. However I will never accept someone trying to have affect on my appearance, not even as an intern. Sure interns have to prove that they are fit for the job but that goes for the work they provide, has nothing to do with what they wear.

And this has nothing to do with millennials or how they are self entitled. This is about basic human rights of all generations. Companies get 9 hours of our daily lives they shouldn't also get to choose what's in our wardrobe.

<comment><USER17> Fascist? really, have you ever lived under fascism or dictatorship?

This is welcome to the real world kid, infact this should never have happened I don't understand how would anyone over 12 would think that a petition at your workplace could or should work.

You don't know what circumstances was she working at, you don't know why they were ordered to wear dress clothes (uniforms are pretty damn good for instilling discipline). Now I understand you situation and you also need to understand that not everyone has to be accepting of your situation including your employer this is perfectly acceptable without being discriminatory. You work as a programmer which means that you can wear pretty much what you want as long as you do not meet business clients or customers but not everyone else is in the same position as you. Some employees end up handling people, some of them just end up being in sight of customers, I don't care what you wear when you code something in a cubicle, but I don't want the worker in a funeral home wearing some crap, or my lawyer in a courtroom.

And you are right the company you work for does not own you, but the same goes the other way, it does not owe you anything either. It provides you with an environment in which you can trade your time for pay under a set of agreed circumstances if you do not agree to follow those guidelines you can find another place that allows you to trade your time for money under more palatable or acceptable terms.

So yes this has everything to do with "millennials" or well considering that I am one, entitlement and more like it than not way too many years of pampering by her parents and the educational system that had it's balance of power turned upside down that led her to believe she can just do everything if she signs a petition no matter how passive aggressive her behaviour is in reality.

But overall good for you for not accepting anyone to have an effect on your appearance but with all due respect that's your personal choice you can't claim it to be more important than the company you might work for one day wanting to present a specific image of it's employees that conflicts with your own personal dress code. At that moment you'll have a choice how much does your external look and what you wear affect who you actually are, if they are that big part of your life that you can't simply change it well then you are at an impasse but please don't make it to be that you somehow are better than a company that has a dress code when you have one too.

<comment><USER16> Did you even read my comment? I said "Especially if you do not have to deal with customers (of course I understand that companies can have rules when their employees are facing customers that's a totally different story)"

And I mean that, it is a totally different story. If employees have to face customers then it's up to the company to decide what kind of image they want to display. The interns in thin case were not working with customers directly.

"you can't claim it to be more important than the company you might work for one day wanting to present a specific image of it's employees that conflicts with your own personal dress code"

Yes I can, and I do. If I'm not working with customers directly the company should have no impact on my appearance. And this isn't about me thinking I'm better than the company, this is about mutual respect. I show my company respect by showing up to work each day and providing the work expected of me.

And if you really want to make this about millennials then yeah millennials are just realising how much bullshit things such as a dress code at work is. I said fascist because the suppression of expression is a fascist tendency.

<comment><USER17> The fact that you can equate dress code to fascism just show how out of touch with reality you are. A business has every right to mandate a dress code you have the right not to want to work for an employer who does, but it does not mean that employer somehow hurts your freedom. Like it or not dress codes and uniforms do have positive effects they also have some negative effects but the same goes for casual dress code.

And yes I have read your comment but it doesn't matter, your job description doesn't have to be customer facing to mandate a dress code, the image of the office especially if there is high foot traffic in it might be important to your employer, the ability to drag employees at will to meetings, pre-sale, video-confs etc which might include external people without needing to worry about what stupid shirt they might wear today is also a good enough reason and overall having an environment where everyone can pick fairly cheap office work/business attire without having to worry about what they wear also makes it comfortable for a lot of people.

Oddly enough the looser dress codes usually go against the direct benefits to employees they are a tool just like the beer fridge, ping pong table and video games room that companies use to remove the gap between your personal life and your work life, they want you to feel that the workplace is an extension of yourself and home is where your bed is when you aren't sleeping in one of the nice sleeping rooms at your work.

Work cloths on the other hand allow you to easily switch between work and your personal life, you put a suit in the morning you go to work, you take it off and boom you are in your saggy tshirt that says I'm with stupid doing whatever you want. So if you are against the workplace invading into your personal space during off work hours you might want to actually rethink what brining your own personal life into your workplace does and why some employers especially in tech encourage that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Where do they work that still has a strict dress code?

Maybe I'm just in the tech industry bubble, but this seems extraordinarily strange for interns, who likely weren't external sales or consultants or one of the few holdovers where suits and sport coats are still a thing.

<comment><USER19> Financial, banking. East coast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Hum Short sleeves and shorts have a positive impact on ecology and money savings. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Biz_campaign](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Biz_campaign)

I mean concerned citizens are hammered between increasingly enforced orders of being a good citizens (that don't pollute or be honest), while companies may make them do stuff that makes them bad citizens (pollution or tax frauds).

And the more a citizen does not comply with either one or the other role he gets more and more hammered down.

This world is crazy.

<comment><USER21> > Short sleeves and shorts have a positive impact on ecology and money savings

Yeah - short sleeves, short pants, and a mandated indoor temperature over eighty degrees Fahrenheit. Talk about enforced good citizenship!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The key here is signaling. The interns showed that either they don't understand the game or that the have an 'union' like attitude towards employment. Either way not atractive for an employer.

<comment><USER23> And the employer made themselves unattractive to a socially-connected group.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think they shouldn't have complained about something that everyone was following, and a formal code is not very uncommon. I also think that firing everyone point blank just because they wrote a letter is an extreme overreaction. They could have been lectured on professional behavior instead and I'm sure most of them would have understood.

<comment><USER12> > I think they shouldn't have complained about something that everyone was > following

> they weren't going to complain. That is, "until I noticed one of the workers > always wore flat shoes that were made from a fabric other than leather, or > running shoes, even though both of these things were contrary to the dress > code."

The interns were told that was a medical exemption… after they were mass- fired, but not when they initially inquired about the possibility of relaxed dress code:

> I spoke with my manager about being allowed some leeway under the dress code > and was told this was not possible, despite the other person being allowed > to do it.

> They could have been lectured on professional behavior instead and I'm sure > most of them would have understood.

I don't understand how sending queries/proposals up the chain is unprofessional behaviour. Ignoring the dress code and coming in not following it would be unprofessional behaviour.

They asked informally, they got shut down (rather than answered), they went with a more formal query, they were fired.

That's sounds nothing like "interns are guests" but it sounds a lot like Corporate America's reaction to union noises.

<comment><USER9> This is basically an article reporting on an advice column, so it's pretty light on details. Given that the incident was framed as a protest, I'd say that there was likely more to it than simply writing a letter. It could be that the letter took a disrespectful tone, or it could be that they backed up the letter with some kind of protest action. Or maybe the employer is just a douchey company. You can't really tell.

Personally I can't imagine a story like this even occurring in 1986. The whole idea of mass protest over something trivial is a very 21st century concept.

<comment><USER12> > Given that the incident was framed as a protest

The yahoo repost/clickbait framed it as a protest with no evidence I can see, the original source does not frame it as a protest: [http://www.askamanager.org/2016/06/i-was-fired-from-my- inter...](http://www.askamanager.org/2016/06/i-was-fired-from-my-internship- for-writing-a-proposal-for-a-more-flexible-dress-code.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've never understood the mindset in which something as trivial as what you wear to work actually seems like a big deal.

<comment><USER25> Can't remember if it's Seven Day Weekend or Peopleware were they talk about the furniture police. I don't understand it either. I think some people find it threatening that the employees are actually human, silly as it sounds.

<comment><USER21> Sorry, I think you've got the wrong end. What confuses me is that being expected to dress like a grownup is something a lot of people apparently find galling enough to get up in arms about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This story made me so happy. I am so sick and tired of the coddled very vocal minority that is taking over our colleges, so I say we all stand up and give these managers a standing ovation. Thank you ladies and gentleman I am so proud of fellow working Americans like me.

</comment><comment><USER27> call +13023650294 or email firstname.lastname@example.com for your university grades hack, pay-pal hack, whatsapp, bbm, telegram and viber hack, western union hack, social media hack, phone calls hack, mails hack, credit card hack and bank account hack, IOS hack and data recovery erase criminal records, delete employer's bad comment, we also tutor and give free ebooks on how to become a professional hacker.

</comment><comment><USER28> Unrelated, but Yahoo may be desperate for page views if they're auto- refreshing several times while I'm trying to read the article.

</comment><comment><USER29> I would fire them too, with these reasons:

1\. The interns saw a dress code violation and escalated immediately, without informing the out-of-line employee.

From the original blog post [0]:

"I felt the dress code was overly strict but I wasn't going to say anything, until I noticed one of the workers always wore flat shoes that were made from a fabric other than leather, or running shoes, even though both of these things were contrary to the dress code.

I spoke with my manager about being allowed some leeway under the dress code and was told this was not possible, despite the other person being allowed to do it."

I'm certain the interns did not ask this coworker why they came in wearing non-standard shoes, because management had to tell them about the disability after the fact. Going directly to management to censure a coworker without discussing the issue with the coworker is sometimes justified. Minor dress code violations are not an instance where that behavior is justified. If this isn't apparent to the interns, that raises questions about their judgment.

2\. The interns persisted in making it an issue after the first rejection.

Again, there are some workplace situations where it is appropriate to keep raising an issue after your first proposal is rejected. Minor dress code violations are not one of those situations. Again, from the blog post:

"I spoke with my manager about being allowed some leeway under the dress code and was told this was not possible, despite the other person being allowed to do it. I soon found out that many of the other interns felt the same way, and the ones who asked their managers about it were told the same thing as me. We decided to write a proposal stating why we should be allowed someone leeway under the dress code."

The proposal which led to their termination was not the first discussion of the issue. They asked, management considered their request and came to a decision. They then took more time (presumably out of the workday, though this is not clear) to write a petition restating the request. Continuing to focus on a very minor issue at the expense of more important things is another strike against their judgment.

3\. The interns asked for much more leeway than the original infraction.

The coworker who inspired their petition wore non-standard shoes, hardly a large violation of the dress code. In response, "[The interns] requested that we also be allowed to wear running shoes and non leather flats, as well as sandals (not flip-flops though) and other non-dress shoes that would fit under a more business casual dress code. It was mostly about the footwear, but we also incorporated a request that we not have to wear suits and/or blazers in favor of a more casual, but still professional dress code."

Seeing one employee wearing non-standard shoes is not an endorsement of a less-stringent dress code by management. It is odd that they take the dress code so seriously, yet take the example of one employee not wearing leather shoes as a sign that the dress code can be relaxed to exclude suits. That hypocrisy on the part of the interns is at least as bad as any perceived hypocrisy on the part of management.

All of these lapses in judgment are bad enough to warrant censure. If an employee did this, counseling would be in order. But interns are explicitly not full-time, salaried employees - it is a trial run. (I don't take Alison Green's view that they are guests, but they aren't full employees either.) If the company's goal in having internships is to evaluate potential employees, then a lapse in judgment like this might mean that the company's interest is to let them go before the official end date.

[0] [http://www.askamanager.org/2016/06/i-was-fired-from-my- inter...](http://www.askamanager.org/2016/06/i-was-fired-from-my-internship- for-writing-a-proposal-for-a-more-flexible-dress-code.html)

</comment><comment><USER30> Proto SJWs.</comment>