Ask HN: Fabricating a Resume - <AUTHOR> I've applied at a company a few times for a job I am well qualified for (15+ years of COBOL, RPG) but I heard that the company won't hire unless you have experience in a big bank. I have experience in small credit unions and smaller financial environments.<p>How bad would it be to test this theory? Make up some fake job experience and fake details to see if they ask this fake person to an interview because they worked at a big finance company versus a small company, same 15 years experience. <comment><USER2> If you're going to do something questionably legal, turn it into proper research, with multiple data points and a control, and publish the results. It doesn't have to be a formal paper. Something like a blog will do. You might also want to look into studying other factors - racism, sexism.

One guy did a study on this [0], but they got their methodology wrong [1]. Nobody actually criticized them on sending thousands of fake resumes to companies. People said they should have sent more.

[0] [https://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2019/03/07/race- more-...](https://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2019/03/07/race-more- important-than-skills-when-it-comes-to-jobs-study-finds/)

[1] [https://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2019/03/11/centgps- ra...](https://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2019/03/11/centgps-racial- discrimination-job-study-called-into-question/)

<comment><USER3> This was a very different scenario though. The intent was a legitimate research. I feel like OP is more looking for a justification for something he knows is wrong.

Even if it was conducted purely for research, the findings wouldn't really be interesting. Results for whether a company gives you a callback if you add experience they are explicitly seeking is hardly going to be surprising.

<comment><USER2> OP said they did meet the experience the company was explicitly seeking. Since there's no callbacks it has to be something else.

<comment><USER3> " the company won't hire unless you have experience in a big bank"

Seems like this is the requirement the candidate doesn't meet - although its unstated.

If the issue was sex, race or age it would me a legitimate "study" but in this case, it'd be just lying about experience to get the job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Its a very unethical approach. And if you're caught, it'll destroy people's trust in you (and thats something that's hard to gain back).

If you really want a job there, I'd say try to get in touch with the hiring manager or someone who's on the team. Usually it's HR acting as a gatekeeper without understanding the nuances of what makes a good candidate good.

Reach out to folks either through your personal network if you have a connection, or via LinkedIn.

</comment><comment><USER4> Well if you send the exact same resume with a few different thing, you're going to be caught and get bad rep. If you change lots of things (formatting of the resume, skills, education, description for positions etc.) then you are not testing anything because you change to manny variables.

And what's the point of it. Say you're right and they consider working at a big bank like necessary experience. That's not illegal or anything. Knowing that will not give you an edge, it's not something you can change.

So overall, you will probably learn nothing or get your real profile banned, potentially for multiple companies if going through a recruiter or in a small industry. And even if you manage to pull it off, and you're right, that doesn't give you anything. so just don't.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's fraud.

<comment><USER6> Is it fraud to just test their hypothesis with no intention of following through with it?</comment></comment>


Show HN: The FAT Band for FAT People - <AUTHOR> http://www.thefatband.com <comment><USER2> That's a terrible slogan.</comment>


Scott Adams: Your Next Gym - <AUTHOR> http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/your_next_gym/ <comment><USER3> My gym does just the MVP of this, where your RFID wristband gives you data persistence for workout results. Walk up to machine, swipe wristband, Good afternoon Mr. Mckenz lets try for 12 reps at 40kg today. ("Who ever heard of someone with a last name longer than six characters long? LOL" <\- Japanese programmers are as good on this issue as American ones are.)

A segment of their clientele -- and most at my gym are north of forty -- love it to death. There is at least one seventy something who brought me over to his screen to show me his fiftieth gold badge. One is earned for running a Tokyo marathon. You do the math.

Of course, their main business is still selling the notion of belonging to a gym.

<comment><USER4> Just curious, what is the name of the gym company?

<comment><USER3> Konami. Yeah, THAT Konami.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> No, no--what's coming first is farmville/foursquare style workouts and tracking.

"Poiesis is King of the elliptical trainer!" "Achievement unlocked: 200 pound club" "New badge: Power Hour" "Most consecutive workout days: Poesis (42)"

Add an iPhone app maybe for cardio workout tracking that's harder to cheat.

This would be totally awesome. Maybe stick a leaderboard up on one of the big screens. Only problem is that it would encourage people to visit the gym, which is a bit of a problem for the current business model. You might have to switch to pay per use. Or maybe charge extra for the frequent users? But then there's a monetary barrier to working out.

I have to ruefully say that if it weren't for the fact that this actually actively contradicts the current business model, it's a great idea.

It'd at least do well for retention I'd wager.

<comment><USER3> There are so many ways to improve, too. Leaderboards are an anti pattern in community design because they turn 99% of your customers into losers and losing is not fun. Instead, you either do leagues or publish individual successes within friend groups.

After you have achievements longevity awards are like taking candy from a very wealthy baby. (Only one more month until you get Bronze Boots of Buttkicking! Do not cancel now. Then next month, they are halfway up a new treadmill.)

<comment><USER5> _Leaderboards are an anti pattern in community design because they turn 99% of your customers into losers and losing is not fun._

Of course. I've always wondered about that. Do you have a source for this info? I'm not trying to lay on the wikipedia-snark but rather I'd like to see where to read on social media [anti]patterns.

<comment><USER3> I read about game design. It is sort of like the nicotine patch for the ex-WoW gamer in me.

See slides 27 ~ 33:

[http://www.slideshare.net/amyjokim/putting-the-fun-in- functi...](http://www.slideshare.net/amyjokim/putting-the-fun-in-functiona)

<comment><USER6> I actually feel that leaderboards are mostly bad only when there are too many people participating. With a small enough number of participants they can be motivating (although they might be better yet if they were opt-in). There are a subset of people that like to rank themselves and "see how they stack up" against others. As you mentioned, it can also degrade motivation for others which is why an opt-in method might work best for something like this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I maintain that Blizzard and 24 Hour Fitness could make a lot of money (or at least get a lot of attention) by installing WoW clients on treadmills, elliptical machines, etc. When you're logged into the game and using one of these machines, your player gets a buff that makes it stronger or gains xp faster. Stop walking on the treadmill and the buff wears off. If they made the buff valuable enough, they'd sell a lot of gym memberships to people that would otherwise never set a foot in one -- and maybe some people would lose some weight too.

<comment><USER8> Hmm, this is an interesting idea. Perhaps instead of making the buff wear off, make things available for the next time you are "in game" as it would be rather risky trying to play the game while walking on a treadmill, bike or eliptical machine.

<comment><USER7> That's a good alternative. Although I think the game would be easily playable at even a quick walking pace on the treadmill, they could trade each minute on the machine with a minute of the buff next time you login. Or charge up an orb in your inventory that you can use at will.

<comment><USER9> Just make sure that you can't make other people walk for you. (Or do make sure that you can?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have no interest, but my strength training doesn't use machines. And I use progress as my motivation.

But no gym would want to do this because it violates their business model.

Most gyms are not in the business of encouraging people to work out. Gyms are in the business of encouraging people to sign up. A person who signs up for a year, comes for a week or two, then never comes again is almost pure profit.

<comment><USER3> I agree with regards to the business model, but the question is whether World of Weightlifting brings in sufficient new customers or decreases churn. My LTV to my gym is over $6k. If they convert the MMORPG crowd, they make money hats.

<comment><USER11> > they make money hats

Where do you get these phrases? You're making me laugh at work :)

<comment><USER3> Money hats is a metric for profitability of video games created by Scott Jennings (Lum the Mad), but most phrases I use repeatedly are the result of trying out a lot of ways to say things and iterating on what gets smiles, laughs, or quoted back at me.

<comment><USER12> > most phrases I use repeatedly are the result of trying out a lot of ways to > say things and iterating

Wow, I knew you were into A/B testing, but damn!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As a distance runner, I'm more interested in increasing speed, VO2 max, and duration. I'd love gym equipment that could measure and help me improve in those areas.

Playing a MMO game in the gym as the article suggests? Not my style (distance running is an endeavor of solitude). It'll definitely appeal to some gym goers. You tend to have people who either do it alone, do it with a few select partners (weight lifting), or do it in more of a social way with lots of people (workout classes, team sports, etc...). The latter may be interested in something like this.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's interesting to see how this idea is being received. My startup (IActionable.com) actually provides a way to make this happen to a degree. We're mostly focusing on game mechanics for websites at the moment but I really like the idea of moving in to other types of areas as well (we have a few other ideas already). Our informal motto is "If you can record it we can reward it".

I wonder if this co-op mode would be better suited to teams within the same gym. Maybe it would work better without any teams at all? Individual competition through leaderboards could be interesting. The motivational factor, especially for new people could really be useful as well. I know a lot of people are saying that it is not in the best interest of the gym - <USER2> which gym would you rather sign up for? As soon as one big gym does it the others would have to follow just to keep up if it does well.

The co-op mode is still pretty interesting too though. It could lead to better camaraderie and feeling of belonging amongst gym goers. Any time you can get a group working towards a common goal I think you can accomplish some interesting things. I really like this idea and hope to be able to be a part of it someday.

<comment><USER14> "I wonder if this co-op mode would be better suited to teams within the same gym"

Definitely, this. Make it a cooperative group effort like skipping, not a competitive team sport. See my comment here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1687502>

<comment><USER6> Yeah I like the idea of a group working towards a common goal that everyone is contributing to more than trying to beat someone else. Competition works really well sometimes but perhaps not in this case.

<comment><USER15> On the other hand, a lot of people who are social/motivated by team psychology already have other motivating options, like team sports, group classes etc.

The interesting thing in this idea (which I agree with the comment that it would be great for home equipment) is that it allows you to tap into your motivation circuits even when you are engaging in a solitary activity.

<comment><USER6> The nice thing is that you can build around all of these with the same system and people can take what they want from them. There is no reason why any of these elements would need to be mutually exclusive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> After hurting my knee in a downhill skiing accident, I went through two months of rehabilitation at the Sports Medicine Center. A lot of it had to do with specific weight training for the damaged knee's tendons, and some of the machines were hooked up as controllers to computers, where each exercise would be represented as a simple game.

To keep the story short, the games forced you to focus not on the number of repetitions or mass your were working with, but on the precise motion required for the exercise.

</comment><comment><USER17> I wonder what the balance is for gyms between active members and non active members. I imagine most successful gyms have a relatively high number of non active members, and if use increased then membership could actually decrease because of crowding issues. I would think the gym's motivation is to increase the number of memberships while keeping actual use low, restricting this kind of investment to expensive specialty gyms. But this idea is successful only if many gyms with many active members are involved.

I'm sure this kind of thing will eventually happen, just doesn't seem like the economic motivation is there. But of course I have no actual knowledge about this industry so my ramblings really aren't worth much.

<comment><USER18> On the other hand, nothing sells gym memberships like more success cases, telling their friends how they got fit.

<comment><USER17> Or a free membership paid for by your employer in an effort to reduce overall health insurance costs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Reminds me of a DICE talk about how games will work their way into our lives providing us incentives to do all sorts of things like eat healthily, study, etc.

[http://g4tv.com/videos/44277/DICE-2010-Design-Outside-the- Bo...](http://g4tv.com/videos/44277/DICE-2010-Design-Outside-the-Box- Presentation/)

</comment><comment><USER20> I just want to add that at home I have a treadmill with a flat panel tv,dvd player, and xbox 360 hooked up right in front of it. That is the only way I can do 40+ minutes of cardio. It turns out that for me the multiplayer games like Call of Duty 4 are the most engaging. I can get so wrapped up in those kinds of games that I forget that I am working out. It helps that often I am "running" in the game at the same rate that I am physically running. I had to cancel my gym membership because it was just so boring to be there for any length of time. I think a first step will be to allow wifi in the gyms and have stands where you can pop a laptop in front of the treadmill to watch netflix or something.

With better UI I might try surfing the net or some kind of reading if the text were big enough.

<comment><USER21> Don't your arms get tired from being held up in front of you for so long?

<comment><USER20> I use a wireless controller for the xbox, so I just hold it up in front of me. It hasn't been an issue, my legs get tired first.

<comment><USER21> Hmm, depending on how fast you run, yeah... It's a good idea, but I can see Gorilla Arm becoming a problem. I'm thinking of buying a recumbent exercise bike to replace my desk chair with, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Right.

What he's describing is just like team rowing, or tug-o-war or a sport like american football, rugby, basketball, etc.

We've had this technology for thousands of years.

<comment><USER23> What Scott Adams is proposing is a system that would allow individuals to compete in team rowing or tug-o-war competitions with individuals from other cities/countries/continents via the internet, which would be new technology. It's sort of like the transition from local multiplayer on a game console to online play. Home multiplayer video games have been around since the 80's, but it's not until recently that they've made their way online. The internet is a great tool because it ensures that you never suffer from a lack of available teammates/competitors. In the olden days, your ability to partipate was dependant on those around you having the same interest. Scott suggests setting up gyms for this kind of thing, but the beauty is that with the proper equipment, anyone would be able to compete from home. This could be a boon for people living in more remote/rural areas who want to compete in team athletic events.

Plus, there's all kinds of other neat things that you can have the tech do with regards to scoring, like having a system to scale/normalize scores so that a team of 10 adults can compete against a team of 10 children and come out with roughly a 50/50 win ratio.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The local YMCA has a Fitlinxx system: <http://www.fitlinxx.com/>

I type in a code into the b/w touchscreen on each machine (could be RFID I guess, but that's stuff to carry/break), and it tells me what weight to set, all the other machine settings (how high to put the seat, etc).

End of the month I get reports via email that tell me how much I lifted or how much cardio I did in a somewhat clever manner - last month it was:

"Weight lifted this month: 159,840 pounds = 19.9 African Elephants"

These are actually pretty common, and I find it to be a great motivational tool.

I've seen the machine hardware reboot before - it's DOS based, on 486s hooked up with what looks like ethernet.

</comment><comment><USER25> This doesn't seem to be a particularly well thought out prediction in terms of weight machines.

First of all, it would be dangerous. Say I'm on a leg press machine and my contribution is some function of the weight I move and the number of reps I do per unit of time. If I wanted to win the game, I'd be trying to bang out as many reps as possible as fast as possible. Now say I've loaded on 200kg (440lbs) and I start trying to do this. Say I'm on a Smith Machine and I'm squatting as fast as I can. Say I'm on a bicep curl machine and I start trying to rep too fast. These examples would expose a person to the potential for a whole range of nasty injuries. Now imagine the kind of litigation implications that would arise if the gym members started looking for someone to blame for their injuries. In fact, these types of games (when applied to weight training) look like a perfect candidate for a class action lawsuit.

The games that Scott is suggesting seem to indicate that they would encourage poor exercise form. I challenge anyone to find a significant body of sports science literature indicating that the faster one completes their reps (set), the better it is for them.

The only way these games could be good for a person would be if they somehow encouraged good form. Even if they did, the games would have to encourage good workouts, e.g. appropriate exercises, appropriate rest between sets, an appropriate number of sets, and appropriate number of reps and an appropriate amount of weight. Even if this requirement was satisfied, the workout and all relevant parameters would have to be tailored to the individual.

In summary, Scott's suggestion, if applied to any sort of weight training machine, could be one of the worst things to happen to weight training since the Nautilus circuit.

</comment><comment><USER26> The idea in some form probably has merit but

 _You'd need strict supervision to make sure no one was so amped up by the game that he hurt himself on the machines. And the captain would need to coordinate when someone moved from one machine to another. For example, if you were being attacked and needed stronger shields, you might move your most buff teammate to the machine controlling shield power until the threat was over. If speed was most important, you'd put your speedsters on the treadmill. Or maybe at some point everyone would have to "lift" at the same time to get over an obstacle. The variations are limitless._

sounds a lot like it would actually get in the way of an effective workout. It's not a good idea to just arbitrarily jump from one kid of exercise to another, and if the game was any sort of actual game (as opposed to just a leader board)the emergent gameplay would mean just that

</comment><comment><USER8> Oh great, World of WorkoutCraft.

<comment><USER27> The thing is… achievements are what ultimately caused me to quit WoW. It completely sapped out the enjoyment of the holiday events for me.

The current emphasis on achievements and worldwide leaderboards is discouraging for me. I recently took a stab at making an iOS game in an effort to get a development business underway, only for my game to be mostly ignored because I had no "itch to scratch" involving writing a game with such Darwinian mechanisms to drive community. (I'm an old school solo gamer.)

<comment><USER28> It's a tough balancing act. I participated a lot more in the WoW holiday events because of the achievements. I noticed that a lot of people did not like competing with the new horde of achievement go-getters making holiday events more frantic and overcrowded.

I eventually quit WoW because I could not keep it as a reasonable, casual attention sink. It would always end up as the dominant time and attention sink in my life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I _think_ (hope?) this might be exactly what it would take to get me going to the gym regularly. The team element would be a great source of peer pressure "You best be at the gym tonight, we've an important battle".

Here in the UK there is a trend of £9.99/month 24/7 Gyms - and this would complement them really well.

</comment><comment><USER30> cycling / rowing machines had this years ago. The little LCD screen shows a cartoon of you and the gym's best, your best, or some pro athlete at a set rate zooming off into the distance. I assume the screens and graphics have got a lot better in the last 10 years.

</comment><comment><USER31> We do not need all these gimmicks. We need people to know what is good for themselves, and start doing something about it. Call me oldfashioned, but I am of the impression that:

\+ No RFID chip in my backpack will make a mountain hike with 50lb weight added any more fun, any more useful, any more easy or anything else.

\+ No RFID chips in the my plates will make my sets of squats or deadlifts any more fun or easy.

\+ No RFID chip in my pants will make my hill sprints any more fun, easy or anything else.

\+ No RFID chips in my food or fridge will make eating fruits, veggies, meat, eggs, fish, berries and dairy any more fun than it already is.

<comment><USER32> Okay, here goes: You're old-fashioned.

Things are more fun when they're part of a game. Brushing your teeth or doing your homework was not fun at age 6, but if you got a gold star, it was worth it, just because gold stars had some value to you.

But, you say, you don't care about games associated with your everyday life these days. Okay, then. You don't have to play. Don't pretend that your preferences are a model of the way things ought to be. There are a lot of ways that that doing non-fun things can be made more fun with technology and games.

Putting RFID chips in your plates will make lifting more fun if it's tied to a fun, competitive game with teammates cheering you on. The fact that you personally don't want to play doesn't mean that making healthy things fun with technology is an insurmountable problem, or that people should give up on all this fun stuff and pull themselves up by their bootstraps as you've made it so very clear that you have.

<comment><USER33> _Putting RFID chips in your plates will make lifting more fun if it's tied to a fun, competitive game with teammates cheering you on_

What good are gym buddies who can't spot you?

And besides, lifting is _satisfying_ , but it's not "fun" if you're doing it right.

<comment><USER32> "Doing it right" by whose definition?

Why can't something be satisfying on one level and fun as it relates to other things?

<comment><USER33> By the definition of taking it to failure if you want to make progress. That's the only definition that matters - human physiology. Progressive overload leading to adaptation.

Aerobics with 5-kilo weights can be "fun".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> There is a similar thing called Nike Plus. It's a community web site with a database of the running data of runners/joggers using Nike+ sensors in their shoes (or Nike+ GPS App for iPhone).

And yes, I find it funny to be able to compare my running times, pace, total running distance, etc. to the people around the world, it's like a RPG game doing real things....

Of course, there are drawbacks. For instance, if the sensor isn't properly calibrated the results can be inaccurate. Not the case with the pure GPS tracking app, of course...

</comment><comment><USER35> Overall I love the idea of software improving the gym experience but I'm not too sure about this simultaneous team effort idea. Anybody who's tried to grab a cardio/weight machine or even a squat rack at peak usage hours before understands the pain in the ass that is swapping sets or having to find a completely different exercise to do.

</comment><comment><USER36> Sounds a fair bit like the hill climbing bits from "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?".

</comment><comment><USER37> Would be more useful, in addition, to have gyms generate power for the grid.

<comment><USER38> Except for the fact that humans are _really bad_ power sources. Tour de France riders generate about 500 watts. A quick googling turns up this article: [http://www.sportsscientists.com/2009/07/tour-de- france-2009-...](http://www.sportsscientists.com/2009/07/tour-de- france-2009-power-estimates.html)

Basically you wouldn't even be able to keep the lights on, let alone run the televisions, AC, fans, etc...

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Never do it. Who wants to sweat so the Captain can have all the fun?

</comment><comment><USER40> If this space is interesting to anyone shoot me an email.

</comment><comment><USER41> That's a completely stupid idea that will never work, as is obvious to anyone who's actually ever attempted to get people to do things. It fails on so many levels that it's not really even possible to write a concise, structured rebuttal of it. Off the top of my head:

\- Too weird, most normal people won't do it

\- Not everyone gives a damn about video games

\- Too much of a financial risk for gyms to sign up to such a system

\- Too much of a financial risk for someone to build such a system for gyms to sign up to

\- Too difficult to get everyone to agree on a game

\- Probably wouldn't make all that much difference to the total amount of exercise being done, as it would turn off as many people as it turns on

Basically, this idea could work, so long as it was effectively free to implement. So, by the time physical and informational resources are that cheap, do you really think that no one will have figured out something more efficient than gyms to work out?

Next: "How to make everyone happier: just get all the warlords to agree to peace."

<comment><USER42> I disagree. I think it sounds great. It deals with two of the key things I like least about my gym:

* It's a space with so many social possibilities, but 95% of the time everyone acts as if everyone else were invisible.

* All I get for entertainment is banks of TVs with mind-numbing rolling news coverage, mind-numbing sports, and mind-numbing (and slightly pornographic) music videos.

If I wasn't in the middle of a PhD I'd be tempted to have a go myself.</comment></comment>


Amazon user feedback used for censorship - <AUTHOR> http://www.marklynas.org/2011/07/the-god-species-withdrawn-from-amazon-censorship/ <comment><USER2> Running anynewbooks.com, this is only one of the abuses I routinely see happening on Amazon. Most of the other abuses are related to the review system. There are so many fake and spiteful reviews, that in many cases it's really hard to judge a book based on the reviews.

I absolutely love Amazon, but they need preventive measures against these forms of manipulation.

For example:

\- Prevent people who haven't bought the book from Amazon to leave a review. People may still abuse the review system, but it will be less people, and they'll make the author and publisher slightly richer in the process.

\- If you complain about a book not being as good as advertised, you need to provide proof. Explain in detail what is wrong with it, and provide photographic proof, a scan, or send the book back for inspection. Issue a refund by all means, but don't just trust them and pull the book from the shelves.

Right now, anyone could tank any new book published on Amazon with very little work on their part.

<comment><USER3> Amazon doesn't require a purchase to leave a review, but it's worth noting that if have purchased it through Amazon, they'll tag your review with a little "Amazon Confirmed Purchase" badge.

Requiring a purchase through Amazon would drastically cut down on the number of reviews they would get; lots of people own lots of books and movies and albums they purchased before Amazon existed and can give good reviews of them. I don't think it's reasonable to expect Amazon to shut those reviews out.

<comment><USER2> I meant it as a change for new books coming out, not for, say, your favorite Pink Floyd album. Existing products/reviews should be, for better or for worse, left in place of course.

<comment><USER4> Part of why Amazon is great is it being a place where you go to research things. I'd hate it if they close reviews to only people who have bought stuff at Amazon - it'll take away too many good reviews.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> On the bright side, he can now legitimately market the book as "The book THEY don't want you to read"

</comment><comment><USER6> OK, so 5 people returned the book as "not as described."

Here is a question. If you are returning a product to amazon because you don't like it, is the only way to get your shipping refunded and/or a refund at all to check the box that says "not as described"?

It sounds like some people bought the book and didn't like it so they returned it. If it's only 5 people it's not much of an organized conspiracy by "fanatics" as he suggests.

Perhaps the problem is with amazon's return policies, and perhaps they should not link "not as described" to cancellations with books from known publishers as they would be if it was sacks of golden coins sold by some independent vendor.

In a brick and mortar store, customers can evaluate more of a book than is possible on amazon. Therefore it would be reasonable for amazon to have a liberal refund policy.

<comment><USER7> I think this may be somewhat true. I've bought over 150 books now on Amazon, and have only returned 1. That 1 was a Packt Publishing book which had a fantastical description, but after I spent an hour leafing through it, it turned out they had literally copy and pasted 1/4 of the material from drupal.org. Thus, I returned it "not as described". However, this was prior to Kindle.

As to your last point, I would have agreed, until Kindle came out, in which case with most books I can now get a free preview, which is usually enough to evaluate if a book is worth purchasing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Amazon user feedback may sometimes be useful, though.

Last week, while browsing the Amazon page for Zed Shaw's "Learn Python The Hard Way", I noticed that the only review was a 2-star review with a comment along the lines of "I haven't read it, but since it's free on the learnpythonthehardway website, don't bother buying it on Amazon!"* I thought this was just wrong to "review" a book like this. Reviews should at least address the content of a book...

I noticed the "0 out of 4 people found this review helpful", and promptly added another "unhelpful" vote. I also decided to "report" the review (first time I clicked this button). When I came back the next day, the review had been removed. I have no idea whether other people reported it too, or whether an Amazon employee manually checked the review. But it sure seems to be effective, and I think it was useful here.

*: I haven't kept a copy of the exact comment.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm getting a "Forbidden: you don't have permission to access" error on this link.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think that private companies need to establish due process just like governments, especially when they are among the market leaders in their field.

That means that they need to check accusations first, before they damage their customers.

</comment><comment><USER11> The author s looking for media hype and doesn't even have the facts. Put simply, he's playing the martyr card and making a scene just to boost his own sales.

telling people to tweet his page isnt so much a protest against amazon as it is a Marketing Campaign. (a handful of re/tweets isnt going to suddenly incite action on amazons part)

That aside, I dont think i'll be buying the book of someone who cries censorship (/wolf) when he himself doesnt even know whats going on.

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't see how Amazon could possibly handle this better. Having somebody read every book before it goes on sale definitely wouldn't scale.

Perhaps they could offer to verify a book for a fee. Then again, the problem might not be widespread enough.

I think I would set up my web sites in the same way: as soon as users would push the red alert button for some item on my site, I would withdraw it from public circulation and mark it for reviewing. On the upside, once it is manually reviewed, it could not be flagged again. How else would you do it?

<comment><USER13> _How else would you do it?_

Leave it in place until concrete evidence is presented.

<comment><USER12> Problem is some stuff might actually be illegal. If you host a baby forum and somebody posts kiddy porn, keeping it around for too long is a bad idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> That's the problem with monopolistic/dominant companies... They just don't care. Neither about their customers, neither about their business partners.

G+ vs. FB FTW!

</comment><comment><USER15> Sounds like paranoia to me. Amazon is following their policies. Nothing to see here.

<comment><USER16> The complaint is not that Amazon are intentionally blocking certain controversial material, but that _their policies are fundamentally flawed and easily-abused_.

This also isn't the first time that one of Amazon's policies has been abused... [http://blog.seattlepi.com/amazon/2009/04/12/amazon-under- fir...](http://blog.seattlepi.com/amazon/2009/04/12/amazon-under-fire-for- perceived-anti-gay-policy/)</comment></comment>


Facebook Clarifies Rules on What It Bans and Why - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/blogs/bits/2015/03/16/facebook-explains-what-it-bans-and-why/

<comment><USER2> Page not found. Article pulled?

<comment><USER3> [http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/16/facebook- explains-w...](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/16/facebook-explains- what-it-bans-and-why/?rref=technology)

<comment><USER2> Thanks.</comment></comment></comment>


Random Solutions are Often Good Enough - <AUTHOR> http://www.sultanik.com/blog/RandomSolutions <comment><USER2> This seems to be a specific case of the more general principle of "concentration of measure". Terence Tao at [1] has some useful notes. From a quick scan of the paper at [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.0423v1.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.0423v1.pdf), Theorem 1 seems to essentially be a CoM result for the order statistics of symmetric RVs.

This same principle can be applied in other contexts [2] - e.g. Johnson- Lindestrauss is essentially a statement that random projections are "often" nearly isometries.

[1]: [http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2010/01/03/254a-notes-1-concen...](http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2010/01/03/254a-notes-1-concentration- of-measure/)

[2]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7971188](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7971188)

<comment><USER3> Where is those people "programming isn't math" God now, eh?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Offered the choice between mastery of a five-foot shelf of analytical statistics books and middling ability at performing statistical Monte-Carlo simulations, we would surely choose to have the latter skill." \-- Numerical Recipes in C++, 2nd ed. p.696.

</comment><comment><USER5> In the context of clever startup solutions, this brings to mind the quote from George S Patton: "A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan executed next week." Even if they didn't approach optimal solutions, the fact that generating random feasible solutions can be much easier and result in more tractable mental models (and therefore easier to maintain code etc.) means you can be 'violently executing' in the field of battle much earlier.

The fact that they approach optimality is gravy.

</comment><comment><USER6> Slightly worthless comment, but I think that is the first web site I've ever seen typeset in Computer Modern. Strangely, it looks rather nice to me (not that I think Computer Modern is particularly an attractive font, but my massive exposure to it over the years has given it a certain quality of reassurance).

<comment><USER7> It's not very readable but lends instant gravitas to the material, sort of like the anti-Comic Sans

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This page is _awesome_ , I love it. The author presents the material clearly and carefully. So many authors dealing with mathematical concepts are lazy and just throw up equations. Yuk! Here we see a careful progression of complexity supported with complete visual examples and numerical values, using the equations, worked out. I wish this were not so unusual, but huge thanks for having done it!

</comment><comment><USER9> Get the depth (distance from edge to deepest point) of an irregular polygon. At first I was doing all kinds of crazy geometry and the future looked bleak. Then I was "fuck it" and did a randomsample, reduce, randomsample, reduce thing. It's fast and precise.

<comment><USER10> I had a similar experience. I was writing a polygon intersection algorithm, heavily optimized for the domain of inputs, but kept having issues when vertices were coincident or when edges were colinear. I spent days trying to fix it, until I decided to just truncate the vertex values to some good-enough level of precision, and add a random unique jitter to each value (past the truncated precision). This made sure that there were never coincident or colinear situations. Then I just truncated the resulting intersection points again to remove the jitter.

It was trivial to add, and it was faster than all the extra checks I'd have to do for the edge cases. Also, it gave me peace of mind, since I knew it worked in theory, instead of my other feeble attempts which worked most of the time, but always failed in some new edge case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder about one statement in the article: he says that Sudoku is NP-hard. I wonder about this since Peter Norvig has written a Sudoku solver:

[http://norvig.com/sudoku.html](http://norvig.com/sudoku.html)

Of course, this solver is for the standard Sudoku game on a 9 x 9 grid. Perhaps the claim in the article refers to "Sudoku" in the sense of the generalized problem of solving n x n Sudoku, for any n?

<comment><USER12> As a general rule, when anybody refers to a problem being NP-hard or whatever, they're talking about a generalized version of the problem, with at least one "size" variable--the time complexity has to be polynomial/exponential/whatever in _something_.

9x9 Sudoku has a constant size, which means that it can be evaluated in O(1) time, if such notation makes sense.

<comment><USER13> Perhaps useful to add that Sudoku reduces to the more general exact-cover problem[0], which is indeed NP-hard.

Also, if you've never run across Dancing Links[1], do yourself a favor and go take a look. It's a method (by Knuth) for implementing an algorithm (ditto) for generally solving any exact-cover problem (including Sudoku of course). Basically it amounts to constructing a matrix that encompasses all of the game's constraints and possible inputs, after which all solutions can be found through mechanical operations on the matrix. It's both beautiful and very fun to implement.

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exact_cover](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exact_cover) [1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_Links](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_Links)

<comment><USER14> Now that you mention Donald Knuth, I can't resist sharing a really interesting answer he gave recently to one question from a set of twenty, related to algorithm design and analysis [1]:

15\. _Robert Tarjan, Princeton_ : What do you see as the most promising directions for future work in algorithm design and analysis? What interesting and important open problems do you see?

 _Don Knuth_ : My current draft about satisfiability already mentions 25 research problems, most of which are not yet well known to the theory community. Hence many of them might well be answered before Volume 4B is ready. Open problems pop up everywhere and often. But your question is, of course, really intended to be much more general.

In general I'm looking for more focus on algorithms that work fast with respect to problems whose size, n, is feasible. Most of today's literature is devoted to algorithms that are asymptotically great, but they are helpful only when n exceeds the size of the universe.

In one sense such literature makes my life easier, because I don't have to discuss those methods in TAOCP. I'm emphatically not against pure research, which significantly sharpens our abilities to deal with practical problems and which is interesting in its own right. So I sometimes play asymptotic games. But I sure wouldn't mind seeing a lot more algorithms that I could also use.

For instance, I've been reading about algorithms that decide whether or not a given graph G belongs to a certain class. Is G, say, chordal? You and others discovered some great algorithms for the chordality and minimum fillin problems, early on, and an enormous number of extremely ingenious procedures have subsequently been developed for characterizing the graphs of other classes. But I've been surprised to discover that very few of these newer algorithms have actually been implemented. They exist only on paper, and often with details only sketched.

Two years ago I needed an algorithm to decide whether G is a so-called comparability graph, and was disappointed by what had been published. I believe that all of the supposedly "most efficient" algorithms for that problem are too complicated to be trustworthy, even if I had a year to implement one of them.

Thus I think the present state of research in algorithm design misunderstands the true nature of efficiency. The literature exhibits a dangerous trend in contemporary views of what deserves to be published.

Another issue, when we come down to earth, is the efficiency of algorithms on real computers. As part of the Stanford GraphBase project I implemented four algorithms to compute minimum spanning trees of graphs, one of which was the very pretty method that you developed with Cheriton and Karp. Although I was expecting your method to be the winner, because it examines much of the data only half as often as the others, it actually came out two to three times worse than Kruskal's venerable method. Part of the reason was poor cache interaction, but the main cause was a large constant factor hidden by O notation.

[1] [http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=2213858](http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=2213858)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Another angle: totally inefficient solutions can be useful too. I put this sample up a while ago, Ridiculous Adding, [https://gist.github.com/stephanwehner/11227766](https://gist.github.com/stephanwehner/11227766)

</comment><comment><USER16> I built my sudoku site using a pseudo random puzzle generator. I don't know the best algorithm to generate puzzles, so with some basic parameters for good puzzles, I let the puzzles fill out randomly. I generate, then test them for unique solutions and difficulty level. If the puzzle is invalid, I toss it. What I lack in algorithmic knowledge, I make up for with server resources :)

[http://sudokuisland.com](http://sudokuisland.com)

I'm not a CS guy so reading this article made me feel a bit better, especially since it mentions sudoku.

<comment><USER17> My gut-feeling is that building Sudoku puzzles shouldn't be too hard to generate, because every random choice you make reduces the space you need to pull from for the next choice.

Whether they're "hard enough to solve", though....

<comment><USER16> The difficulty comes from multiple solutions to your puzzles (which would force the player to guess). As it turned out, a purely randomly selected puzzle would 99.9%* of the time give you a puzzle with multiple solutions. I would have settled for 99%, but more was too much server resources to hog!

And then add the screening for difficulty levels.

*Not an exact figure =)

<comment><USER18> The sudoku difficulty can be very varied, but it doesn't rely on multiple solutions - a grid where multiple solutions are possible simply isn't a valid sudoku puzzle; a minimalistic puzzle is one where no numbers can be eliminated without losing uniqueness of the solution, but adding extra numbers to that minimalistic puzzle makes it easier.

<comment><USER16> All my puzzles have unique solutions. I said the difficulty of generating is from multiple solutions, not that the puzzles are difficult because of them.

<comment><USER18> Ah, I misunderstood you - true enough, the multiple solutions cases slow down a random generation as the candidates have to be checked and eliminated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> i'm currently working on a box-packing algo that attempts to find likely-to- be-used boxes to pack an order for shipping cost estimation. (variant of the knapsack problem [1]). "close enough" is the name of the game here :)

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

</comment><comment><USER20> The last line is priceless.

"So the moral of the story is: Sometimes quickly and mindlessly choosing a random solution isn't half bad!"

<comment><USER21> Actually, with the constant of approximation being two, its almost exactly half good.

<comment><USER22> As long as it isn't half-ass.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> a good reminder that the TSP optimization problem is only NP-hard, not NP- complete -- [http://www.nomachetejuggling.com/2012/09/14/traveling- salesm...](http://www.nomachetejuggling.com/2012/09/14/traveling-salesman-the- most-misunderstood-problem/)

<comment><USER24> "only" NP-hard? You know that NP-hard problems are equal to order harder than NP-complete ones, right?

<comment><USER25> Probably referring to the definition, not the difficulty.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Totally tangential but,

Marco points out in latest ATP how he randomizes the lists of podcasts every time the list is shown. Neat!</comment>


Show HN: Tagx.io – Create/share video highlights and annotations - <AUTHOR> https://tagx.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> The idea behind TAGX.io was to make it easier to share highlights of our football (soccer) video recordings. We have been recording and uploading our games to YouTube over the years and almost everyone that played watched it to see how well they/their team performed. It became an additional discussion point days after the game until the next one. However, it does become tedious having to sit through another hour until you find something special you want to share and discuss, usually this is in the form of "check out the goal 23 minutes in". I built TAGX to ease this process where someone would go through the video, tag the interesting parts and share it with the group. It was almost like a highlight reel, allowing you to skip through the tagged parts.

This was my winter holiday side project last year and I figured there would be a wider application of this service (conference talks, tutorials, lengthy videos in general) so I decided to polish it up and make it available as a service for others to use. You don't need to create any account to use it, it's all client-side and built using Vue.js. It's hosted on Cloudflare Workers Sites. I wanted to try out Cloudflare Workers/KV, so I ended up building a link shorting feature including authentication/authorisation flow. You can read more about the stack in support -> technology ([https://tagx.io/support/general/technology](https://tagx.io/support/general/technology)) section.

Here is a tagged video of the AWS re:Invent 2019 event which I shared with someone recently that highlighted some announcements that were of interest to us: [https://tagx.io/video/id/Nw- wisbyZPu0LCBk9Tzbn](https://tagx.io/video/id/Nw-wisbyZPu0LCBk9Tzbn)

Following are some development stats for those interested:

\- Client-side: ~80 hours (15th Dec 2019 – 7th Jan 2020)

\- Server-side: ~30 hours (19th Jan 2019 – 24th Jan 2020)

\- Node Experience: 5+ years

\- Vue.js Experience: 2+ years

Hope someone finds it useful and any feedback is much appreciated!

<comment><USER2> You might want to consider building a chrome extension. Users might have problems recalling your site.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea, that's always the issue. An extension would be ideal for desktop users and was considering that as a feature, however, for this initial release, I didn't want to alienate any mobile users that may not have the ability to install an extension. Appreciate your feedback and glad someone has the same idea, definitely makes it easier to prioritise features going forward.

<comment><USER3> With a plugin, people could bookmark/label/index videos themselves within YouTube in a way that is more powerful than what the playlists allow and without needing to resort to browser bookmarks.

Being able to distinguish between "my tags" and "public tags" would be necessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is the same tagged video I shared in my previous post but without the need for any server-side requests and you can amend yourself: [https://tagx.io/video/youtube/7-31KgImGgU/55:52-1:03:30@name...](https://tagx.io/video/youtube/7-31KgImGgU/55:52-1:03:30@name:Amazon%20S3%20Access%20Points,1:10:30-1:16:50@name:UltraWarm%20for%20Amazon%20Elasticsearch,1:38:14-1:40:10@name:Amazon%20SageMaker%20Experiments)

</comment><comment><USER4> I had this exact same idea in a political context. This could super useful for breakdowns of police footage. Might be wonderful for pro gaming too.

<comment><AUTHOR> These are pretty good use cases, thanks! I hadn't thought of it in a political context, I can definitely see it work there considering the lengthy footage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Love what this is trying to solve. If the UX could improve, it would be amazing. While watching it would be great to press a button to generate timestamps and to then compose tracks by selecting any two timestamps, with the ability to add tags to timestamps or tracks while the video is still playing or after. This way you could watch a video in one fluent sitting and work out how to organize with the timestamps you created while watching.

One usecase is the ability to link to a comedy sketch from a longer clip and send it to a friend with the link just playing between timestamp a and timestamp b.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback pknight. I'll address the points as follow:

(1) While watching it would be great to press a button to generate timestamps

This is already possible using hotkeys and documentation for it can be found here: [https://tagx.io/support/advanced/hotkeys](https://tagx.io/support/advanced/hotkeys)

(2) then compose tracks by selecting any two timestamps, with the ability to add tags to timestamps or tracks while the video is still playing or after

Just to clarify, do you mean the ability to add the current point in time of the video to different tracks? In which case, this is already possible using multiple hotkeys as outlined above. Please let me know if this is not what you meant.

(3) with the link just playing between timestamp a and timestamp b

You are able to create a loop between a tag or a set of tags, please see loop settings outlined here: [https://tagx.io/support/interfaces/video](https://tagx.io/support/interfaces/video)

With regards to autoplay, this is a bit finicky depending on the browser and is usually not recommended due to the negative user experience so I didn't include an option to enable this feature.

Hope this is clear, let me know if you have any more questions.

<comment><USER5> Thanks! It took me a while to digest how that tagging workflow worked with the hotkeys, but now I get it. That does work! I think one of the things that tripped me up was the lack of visual feedback on the second press of a key.

Am I right in thinking that the hotkeys don't work while the video is paused?

I guess the other thing I'd love to see is a more dedicated 'share' mode so that you can create a link with a simplified screen that starts playing the track section of a video when the user presses play.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great, glad this worked well for you. I agree with your point on the visual feedback. Depending on which tab you have active, it will always show the newly created tag on the list when created. However, maybe a short-lived toast message could work better here.

You're correct, the hotkeys won't create a tag when the video is paused, instead it will start playing the video on first press then you'd need to press it again to actually creat the tag. If you want to manually create tags without playing the video then this can be done on the tracks interface. The "+" button in each track will display the modal to do so.

With simplified sharing, would you expect to show only the video without any of the tags and tracks on display? There are existing layout options you can customise such as hiding the tag/track listing and the tagging controls, even resizing the video. However, the play button just plays the video as normal. I think what you're suggesting with the play button only playing the tracks when shared in "simplified mode" would provide a cleaner interface to the end user without the additional components displayed.

Thanks again for the feedback, if you do have any other ideas and this post gets locked for commenting after two weeks, then please don't hesitate to create an issue or drop me an email as listed here: [https://tagx.io/support/general/contact](https://tagx.io/support/general/contact)

<comment><USER5> Thanks! And yes, with simplified sharing it would be ideal to only have the player with just the track targeted and nothing for the person receiving the link to guess. So if you send someone a sports highlight, or a specific sketch from a comedy show, or a specific exercise explained in a tutorial, they only need to press play and it would only play the track, not the whole video.

Your app definitely has a lot of utility.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great, I think this is something I'd like to bake into the next release.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sweet project.. Is there any thought or plan to open source this project to contribute?

<comment><AUTHOR> It did cross my mind when I released it. I'd like to refactor the code and bring in more tests to make it "contributor friendly" first. Feedback has been great so far and I'll be implementing some of the features on the back of that. There is a repo ([https://github.com/cxam/tagx.io](https://github.com/cxam/tagx.io)) already that I'm using for issue tracking and I'll be able to push the code there when it's ready.

<comment><USER6> Nice, I came across the repo after I posted.

Even if the code isn't perfect it's of interest to me because you also used Vue.

With respect to tests, maybe the community can contribute.

Will keep an eye on the repo..!</comment></comment></comment>


Simon Peyton-Jones - A Taste of Haskell  - <AUTHOR> http://ontwik.com/haskell/simon-peyton-jones-a-taste-of-haskell/

<comment><USER2> I just never get tired of watching SPJ talk. He has an amazing ability to explain complex ideas in a meaningful way, not to mention his obvious natural enthusiasm for the subject.

It's also great to attend any talk where he's in the audience, because he always finds a way to ask questions which intentionally create opportunities for the speaker to look better by diving off into some interesting subtopic or area of technical detail that they've overlooked. A real talent.

<comment><USER3> SPJ also writes amazing papers. He always has a novel, practical idea, and he explains it clearly. For example, here's a paper he co-authored on Software Transactional Memory in Haskell:

[http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/simonpj/papers...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/simonpj/papers/stm/stm.pdf)

Notice the care taken to explain why STM is important, and its advantages over traditional locking (ease of use and composability). There's also two great new theoretical tidbits in this paper, the 'retry' and 'orElse' operators, which significantly expand the power of STM.

SPJ's good example has filtered throughout most of the Haskell community by now. I love programming in Haskell because it gives me an excuse to read these really cool papers (and it stretches my brain until I understand them).

<comment><USER4> Yes, Haskell's such an awesome language only partly because of the cool technology. The community and its leaders are the real secret sauce.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This was great. I just wished that more in-depth articles like this one would rise to the top just as much.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2429082>

ML may have lost the war, but from an academic and educational standpoint, folks in the ML community still have a lot to bring to the table.

<comment><USER6> Reports of ML's demise are somewhat premature. Now we call it F#...

<comment><USER7> Isn't that kinda like saying the C language still lives on in the form of Java?

<comment><USER8> Well, no. Because the distance, especially the idiomatic distance, between C and Java is much more than the distance between F# and Ocaml. The core languages of both are essentially equivalent. Ocaml and F# have diverged a fair bit in their fringes/exotic features (I can go into this in more detail) but if the bulk of your code use the more humdrum features then going between the two is trivial.

A more apt analogy would be to consider two languages that extend C in different ways but for which the core of C can be used in both with almost no modification (D & C++?). I suppose a python/jython/ironpython comparison would be more accurate.

p.s. with respect to grandparent, I don't subscribe to the philosophy of casting everything in terms of winner take all wars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Haskell is the world's leading purely functional programming language"

Why do people have to write stuff like this? What is "leading" and why would that be important?

And, BTW, I am quite sure there is a lot more Erlang code running on phone centrals around the planet than Haskell code.

<comment><USER6> Haskell is the language in which the lion's share of pure functional programming language research is done. So it is "leading" in the sense of "being the first place new ideas are tried".

<comment><USER10> > Haskell is the language in which the lion's share

But also more popular on:

* Tiobe; GitHub; Reddit; Transparent Language Rankings; IRC; Workshop size; Number of libraries...

Community matters.</comment></comment></comment>


Ode - a simple personal publishing platform for the web - <AUTHOR> http://ode-is-simple.com/home/

<comment><AUTHOR> Ode is largely inspired and influenced by Blosxom. It's a:

      single Perl script,
      with content generated from plain text files,
      and look/layout determined by standard (X)HTML and CSS.

<comment><USER2> Looks interesting! As someone who's been considering using Blosxom (when I finally get around to it), this is definitely relevant to my interests. Are there things in particular that you didn't like about Blosxom that Ode does differently? Put another way: if I were choosing tomorrow between Ode and Blosxom, apart from Blosxom not being (apparently) actively developed, what would be reasons to pick one or the other?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Any testimonials from anyone who's played around with it?

</comment><comment><USER4> I have not heard of either and am excited to check them out...

</comment><comment><USER5> fail</comment>


Thousands of UK Students Skipped Class to Protest Climate Change - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/j57jkg/thousands-of-uk-students-skipped-class-to-protest-climate-change <comment><USER2> This campaign, which is taking place in several countries, has to be one of the most idiotic I've seen recently.

Stay in school, study hard, make a difference.

You won't achieve anything by hurting yourself and your parents who pay for your education.

<comment><USER3> > Additionally, campaigners want the curriculum reformed to address climate > change as an educational priority, alongside a request to include youth > voices in policy-making and lower the voting age to 16.

This is one way to make a difference. And a few days won't really hurt them in any meaningful way.

<comment><USER2> Children in some countries still have no access to education, and here some people are in awe that children skip school for nothing.

This is a bad joke.

If they want to be taken seriously they should protest outside school hours, that'd show their grit and motivation, instead of wasting the good fortune they have to be in school in the first place.

<comment><USER3> Those other children are irrelevant here. It's a "finish your dinner, the are children starving in Africa" type non sequitur.

If they went outside of school hours, they could be easily ignored. Now we're taking about them, because they did something more.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apple Developer Center still down - <AUTHOR> http://www.marco.org/2013/07/21/adc-downtime <comment><USER3> My money is personally on massive, unrecoverable data loss.

If you've ever poked around with the way that Apple's website works, you can see that the entire place is a huge mess. There's old servers running ancient (pre-2004) perl scripts alongside the brand new iCloud gear. I can't imagine how the authentication for AppleID is working as login details still work on the ancient pages (think pinstripes and glassy buttons). Depending what URL you hit, the webserver is using php3, php4, perl, python or maybe WebObjects (java).

At one point I wrote a scraper that was targeting one of their product pages, and kept getting random, unexplainable results. It turned out that one of their product areas was behind a round-robin load balancer, with three completely different apache versions on each server. The page was dying on one but not the other two. In the end I just had to repetitively scrape until I hit a good response.

Even the domain for the "maintenance" page for the developer section is telling. It's just a broken template system regurgitating a bit of the homepage.

[http://devimages.apple.com/maintenance/](http://devimages.apple.com/maintenance/)

[http://devimages.apple.com/](http://devimages.apple.com/)

Truly a hacked together system. Some engineers at Apple must be having a truly awful weekend, no matter the cause and solution.

<comment><USER4> Interesting; the [http://devimages.apple.com/](http://devimages.apple.com/) URL seems to return the underlying contents of the file, bypassing the SSI (I'm so happy they use SSI... seriously: I love SSI ;P). You can then see the raw <!--#include virtual=""\--> directives, and pull the individual parts. (It isn't quite then fair to say that it is a "broken bit of their template system"; it is more that it is a poor way to setup a static large-file caching endpoint, and may itself lead to a security vulnerability. To be clear: that's probably worse ;P.)

<comment><USER5> Might I ask what vulnerabilities exist for SSI, and why you describe SSI as a "poor way to setup a static large-file caching endpoint"?

I haven't used SSI before, but after researching various technologies, it looks like a solution for my own caching use-case, and I am planning on implementing it. I realize that it's a rather old technology, but as long as there's nothing _wrong_ with it, I think it could work for me.

Is there something _wrong_ with it? The only thing that I have seen is that the "exec" command is dangerous, but NGINX doesn't seem to implement it.

<comment><USER4> I did not describe "SSI" as a "poor way to setup a static large-file caching endpoint"; that description was for the way they setup "devimages." to overlap with the content for "www.".

Let's imagine that the code in question was not SSI, but instead PHP. You might have this running behind a copy of Apache and mod_php. Your website includes both code and images.

This website runs like this, but maybe the way you configured Apache is too slow to handle downloading all the images: these large-file static assets need to be handled by a different system.

So, you install a copy of nginx and point it at the same folder. You give this copy of nginx a new hostname, such as "devimages.example.com" as opposed to the Apache "www.example.com".

Problem solved, right? No. Now if you go to [http://devimages.example.com/index.php](http://devimages.example.com/index.php) you get access to the source code to the website (which is generally considered a big security failure).

That seems to be what's happening here: the "devimages." hostname is configured to bypass the SSI parser, and you are getting to see how the page is composited. This could be a problem.

However, it also might not be a problem: it largely depends, which is why I was just idly speculating; it certainly _feels wrong_ , though. As for SSI? I was serious: I _love_ SSI, all my stuff uses it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Could you imagine if the Linux Developer Center went down? It'd be nearly impossible to write Linux software, or download Linux development tools, or generate a Linux binary that a device was allowed to run. It'd be awful.

<comment><USER7> Could you imagine if people could make the kind of money developing things for Linux that they do developing things for iOS? It would make comments like yours kind of funny and relevant.

<comment><USER8> Android (Linux) has surpassed iOS in number of users worldwide.

<comment><USER9> More people drive Toyota than BMW. More people eat at McDonalds than Five Guys. More people stay at a Holiday Inn than The Ritz Carlton. The statement is worthless as it conveys no meaning, other than a factoid, as do my statements.

<comment><USER10> How is that smugness working out for you ? Windows users are fewer than iOS users. Would you now compare Windows phones to Ferraris by using the same analogy ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Apple's websites are among the worst corporate sites I've ever used. I don't say that just to be critical or cynical (ahem), I'm merely pointing out that they have tremendous room for improvement. As opposed to say php.net or stackoverflow.com which still give me that fresh air "why can't all sites be like this?" feeling every time I visit them.

Most of the time when I visit Apple's sites now, I just assume that what I need to find will either be buried in a convoluted maze, or simply won't exist, and I'll find myself on a "this has been deprecated" 404-style page which takes me someplace only loosely related to what I was looking for. So I end up back at google to try to find a copy of the information either cached somewhere or offsite.

Simply being an Apple developer is a chore. Keeping up with yearly certificate expirations is taxing when you are contracting for several clients. And they never really worked out an easy way to allow several developers to share certs. I just assume now that the other developers will invalidate whatever shared cert I made.

The situation is bad enough, and exacerbated by Apple stubbornly refusing to see the flaws, that I wish a startup would encapsulate the friction and just take care of all the minutia for me. I should never have to personally deal with provisioning. Anything short of a one click submission to iTunes Connect is reminiscent of all the TCP/IP details that we used to have to put in our modems in the dialup days, when all that should have been required was a phone number and passcode. I can't gently forgive them for it. So I think this downtime could be a wakeup call for them that the inefficiencies in their system are even costing them now.

<comment><USER12> Have you spent any time on the Verizon or Sirius XM sites? How about the average multinational insurance company? "Among the worst corporate sites" is a huge leap, considering the profound amount of crap. Spending 5 minutes using the average electronic medical records (EMR) web application would be enough to make your hair fall out. Forget about interoperability of EMR formats. It's a mess. I'm not defending Apple at all, I've spent many nights throwing iPhones over the provisioning and certificate process, but to me, the outcome of surviving that process is that I'm making money from the apps, so it's not ideal, but at least my iOS users are actually paying me money, as opposed to Android users that, as a group tend to expect something for nothing.

We ought to also look at the inefficiencies of the Android system while we're here. 35% of users are still on Gingerbread! You can't really expect to earn money as a developer if you ignore 35% of your target market, with iOS we have over 90% running iOS 6 and only about 6% running Android 4.2, which means that developers can't take advantage of a new Android feature without leaving behind the majority of their market, or creating multiple versions and then on top of that, having to test on a myriad of different hardware configurations. The fact also remains that Android users are generally cheap -- they don't like to pay for apps. So you have a highly fragmented OS environment, coupled with a user base that, in generally spends much less that iOS users and, on top of that, you have a royal mess in the copy-protection scheme used in Android -- which had to be disabled in Jelly Bean due to it breaking apps.

Of course, the security in Android is top notch! Great job on that Google.

If we want to talk inefficiencies with Apple, we certainly can, but to ignore the Google mess is disingenuous.

As far as the effect of Apple's "inefficiencies," is it really affecting them? Are people still buying apps and computers?

My last point is that the assertion of Apple "stubbornly refusing to see the flaws.." That's interesting, because unless one works for Apple at a level high enough to be involved in the conversation, that suggestion is merely conjecture. That's right up there with the pundits being disappointed that iWatch has been delayed, despite having no proof or any acknowledgment from Apple that even such a product exists.

There's an easy solution to not having to deal with Apple's "inefficiencies" \-- don't deal with Apple and go make your money with all of the people paying money for Android apps. Or, respond to one of the hundreds of job listings at Apple and do something about it.

<comment><USER13> Given that iOS users worldwide are less than 1/3 of Android users, ignoring Gingerbread would still leave you with roughly double the userbase...

I completely agree with all your other points though. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What's even worse is that we, the developers, their customers, will never get to know what happened. Because that's the Apple way.

I'd really love that Apple proves me wrong on this one and comes clean on the problem, the cause and prevention measures being put in place so this won't happen again, whatever it is.

<comment><USER15> Nope they won't say a thing and they will get away with it. Oh the things apple devs have to pout upon with.

In another world HN would be up in arms about how to manage downtime, how this is u acceptable and how they are going to switch to somebody else immediately. But not for apple because they have no choice...

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have received 6 "How to reset your Apple ID password" Email from Apple during the last couple of days, none of which was triggered by me. Could this be related?

<comment><USER17> This makes our best guess to be "security breach".

<comment><USER18> I receive similar emails from Gmail now and then. Does not me think that Gmail had been compromised.

<comment><USER19> right, but we don't have multiple people all confirming GMail password resets while GMail just so conveniently happens to be down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Just received following email- confirmed breach:

Last Thursday, an intruder attempted to secure personal information of our registered developers from our developer website. Sensitive personal information was encrypted and cannot be accessed, however, we have not been able to rule out the possibility that some developers' names, mailing addresses, and/or email addresses may have been accessed. In the spirit of transparency, we want to inform you of the issue. We took the site down immediately on Thursday and have been working around the clock since then.

In order to prevent a security threat like this from happening again, we're completely overhauling our developer systems, updating our server software, and rebuilding our entire database. We apologize for the significant inconvenience that our downtime has caused you and we expect to have the developer website up again soon.

</comment><comment><USER21> Let us compare:

World's premier closed-source shop: (presumably) gets hacked; goes down; stays down.

Github, Rubygems, Linux Kernel, etc. get hacked; restore from SHA256SUM'ed backups; keep moving.

Turns out what used to be called "hobby" projects matter, because code made without love has a smell, and no one does a "hobby" for anything but. (Remember the 'ama' in 'amateur') (ok ok so kernel.org was down for a while. But remember all the heavy lifting done by git to keep those commits clean. It was _just_ the server, not the data.)

<comment><USER22> You probably have better developers pushing live code over at those other places, I'd bet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This reminds me, yesterday i got an obviously spoofed phishing email from "apple" telling me to reset my passwords and reenter my CC info. Anybody else get that?

[http://imgur.com/hyta4bC](http://imgur.com/hyta4bC)

<comment><USER24> It never ceases to amaze me that such emails are carefully constructed in the graphical sense, but miserable failures in the grammatical.

<comment><USER25> The British spelling of "apologise" is also a giveaway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I just went to check on the dev center and got this e-mail:

Last Thursday, an intruder attempted to secure personal information of our registered developers from our developer website. Sensitive personal information was encrypted and cannot be accessed, however, we have not been able to rule out the possibility that some developers' names, mailing addresses, and/or email addresses may have been accessed. In the spirit of transparency, we want to inform you of the issue. We took the site down immediately on Thursday and have been working around the clock since then.

In order to prevent a security threat like this from happening again, we're completely overhauling our developer systems, updating our server software, and rebuilding our entire database. We apologize for the significant inconvenience that our downtime has caused you and we expect to have the developer website up again soon.

</comment><comment><USER27> Amazon bas been down for as much as a half day in recent memory — and not dev stuff but their customer-facing money-making site, and mid-week too.

<comment><USER28> Apple's customer-facing store was down last night for several hours.

<comment><USER29> Doesn't matter. People aren't going to decide, gee, I actually wanted a Toshiba.

<comment><USER19> people also aren't going to decide 'gee, i'm going to go to x store and pay more for something' anymore then they'll go to BB to buy their apple product of choice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Why is a mere unfounded speculation not backed up by any facts written to garner pageviews featured on the frontpage?

<comment><USER31> Because there are no facts, Apple hasn't said a word. The alternative is that we ignore this. At least with this article (which no one has to read), there's a place for HN Apple devs to talk amongst each other.

<comment><USER32> It goes very deep in meta territory, but hey, it's not as if there were any fact intersting to discuss.

I remember a lot of discussions a year or two ago when marco was very vocal about the reasons he didn't have comments on his blog, and would prefer to have all of these on HN for e.g.

 _slowdown_ 's comment goes the other way round, on why HN should care about commenting on marco's blog. There is another thread [1] with 138 comments and more quality opinions and speculations than anyone should need, Marco's speculations are also represented in the top comments. Agree or not with he's stance, it's a valid point IMO.

I think it's fun to see this kind of reaction on why some contents should be commented or not, and the motivations to push a site or another.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6071233](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6071233)

<comment><USER31> I've been checking on that post since it first came up looking for anything new, but old HN posts get to be hard to read for new stuff pretty quick, especially with no way to collapse a thread. If there was anything new, I'd be hard pressed to actually find it.

That thread is quickly sliding down the list and is already off the front page. I don't think a new one is out of the question.

<comment><USER33> [https://userscripts.org/scripts/show/138037](https://userscripts.org/scripts/show/138037)

A way to navigate to new _unread_ entries would be nice.

Sometimes I really wish NNTP wasn't quite so dead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Apple is set to report their earnings on Tuesday, July 23rd. If this isn't back up by Tuesday evening, it's going to be a very interesting earnings conference call.

</comment><comment><USER35> I would be _very_ interested to see what the implications would be if this had happened to iCloud.

I'm sure Apple are as unhappy about whatever has happened as the rest of us (likely much more so), but I think at least some communication from them about it would be in order.

</comment><comment><USER17> Instead of fighting about which platform is the best, I hope all of you will agree that Apple should not leave us in the dark for 15min, let alone 3 days, or not even "post mortem" to answer the question "what happened?".

</comment><comment><USER36> Apple just released an update (developers should be getting it in their inbox) but still no ETA on when it'll be up. Very unfortunate for those of us waiting to release apps before August.

</comment><comment><USER37> > or device provisioning and certificates (potentially very profitable)

Well, an `App'(, the name of which I would not like to identify, ) which was installed using Safari exploits and whose intended use is to help users search and install apps free of charge from AppStore, is still up and running.

I guess there exist various exploits up and down the App Store chains, till now.

</comment><comment><USER38> So… Did everyone get the email saying they had an intrusion and they're rebuilding the system?

<comment><AUTHOR> yep, I got it a few hours ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Forstall has the backups.

</comment><comment><USER40> If it weren't Sunday, I wouldn't speculate, but it is. My 2 cents: iOS7 updates galore. Just imagine everything that could be overhauled. Even the old gray textured background we see is not very much like iOS 7.

iOS is in a big transition here. You can't even update apps at all unless you now include 'widescreen' support, for example. If you don't, iTunes reports an Invalid Binary (no default 586 image, etc).

So I would guess a huge overhaul, and typical Apple, is taking care of that vs. arguing or commenting on theories.

<comment> grey-area _So I would guess a huge overhaul, and typical Apple, is taking care of that vs. arguing or commenting on theories._

A design overhaul wouldn't require the dev centre to go down at all - <USER2> could just prepare all the assets etc on testing servers and switch them over when they are ready.

Given the normal warning given on any maintenance, and the obvious negative consequences for Apple's business of any extended outage (extended in this case being over a day or so), this is unintended, and most likely caused by a security breach. I think we can safely rule out a design overhaul unless Apple are incredibly incompetent.

NB itunesconnect is still up (the bit which deals with app upload, itunes store metadata etc), only the dev center - dealing with certs/device registration/distribution etc - is down.

<comment><USER41> Keep in mind, this is the company which takes their whole store down when they need to add new products to it.

<comment><USER42> Did you mean when they have their WWDCs? In that case it might be a marketing reason.

<comment><USER43> They take it down during WWDC keynotes and other major announcements, yes.

But there are other instances where the store will go down outside of those periods. Sometimes it's for maintenance, but more often than not a new or updated product appears (e.g. a product line gets a speed bump across the board).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Gee, thanks Marco, we would have never known ourselves...

<comment><USER45> That sounds like "I just read the title so I could post a snarky remark". He does put some suggestions forward of what he thinks could be the root cause.

<comment><USER44> I read the whole article. The suggestions cover all the cases one would that thought himself.

He is being Captain Obvious.

Including the gem to "set some time aside" as developers, because we might have some work to do after the site comes back up.

Everything in the comment is what men wiser than us called "idle speculation".

<comment><USER46> If you don't like reading idle speculation then you should probably avoid 95% of tech blogs.

<comment><USER47> I think that comment is Quickmeme-worthy. [http://www.quickmeme.com/Captain- Hindsight/](http://www.quickmeme.com/Captain-Hindsight/)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>