Students: Why You Should Start Up and Inspire the World – Medium - <AUTHOR> https://firstname.lastname@example.com/students-why-you-should-start-up-and-inspire-the-world-a9961d4ea654#.2z90oilgq <comment><USER3> I've done this (and successfully exited a startup) and I think you should wait. A bit.

Startups generally take a lot of capital, and you do want to make sure you are building up to some level of savings. If you can do something as a side project and have it grow to start making money, that is super great - <USER2> be prepared that there is some risk in terms of seeking outside investment (and that this also takes a large amount of effort).

As such, work in a couple of startups as well as at least a medium size company (several hundred people or so) and get a feel for how they do business. Learn what works and what doesn't.

Finally if you do decide to go through with it, be aware your life and company are going to pretty much merge, which can be more mentally challenging than I can prepare anyone for - which will affect you even after you're done with everything.

I think the most important skill you need to learn is instinct, which comes from seeing a lot of things happen in both good ways and bad ways.

Keep your idealism - build amazing side projects, hone your craft and have fun. There is no timer that says you have to start something only in your 20s and software development in the wild is a lot more different than college.

Keep those ideas going, but don't feel rushed if you don't want to do something right away.

Try to find some cool startups to work for, and learn from them. That may be enough for you creatively. If you still think you have some revolutionary idea, go for it. But don't approach it as "I want to do a startup", you should have some idea that you really really like and want to do for a very long amount of time, and have a lot of ideas around.

A lot of the attempts to start startups fail because the idea is principally around "I think this could make money" because we glamorize startups, when we should look at many of them as just risky ventures between a handful of people.

That's ok, but you need to eat. And you need to have hobbies and live your life too.

There's plenty of time.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice one :)</comment>


Zenhabits: Focus Book - <AUTHOR> http://zenhabits.net/focus-book/

<comment><USER2> Discussions on these topics is often not very nuanced. I think before talking about problems of distraction and/or the inability to maintain deep concentration we should dissect the premise of the original problem.

For me, for example, it is being socially self-conscious that hinders deep concentration in what I'm trying to study or work on. E.g., if my classmate is trying to help me and somewhere in his helping me I am lost, I will become increasingly more lost because my brain is then a) concerned about making me look stupid, b) afraid of disappointing the helper, etc. The other distraction for me is one where I'm thrown off a tangent in thoughts by a certain hook -- e.g., thinking further about a 'thing' that was just passively mentioned in a lecture, and just wandering very far off with it.

I can very well analyze my problems, at least I think so -- but it's damn hard to come up with a strategy to get at them. I think I _am_ capable of maintaining deep concentration -- I think most people are, and I think that's verifiable by doing something that you already _are_ good at -- you'll notice that if you do do it you won't be distracted as easily; you will maintain deep concentration.

This concludes the problem with me (and I think, for most people) to not be with deep concentration, but the will power.

</comment><comment><USER3> I can recommend the book. I've read it the day it came out. Of course, it's some kind of compilation of the stuff you could already read on Leo's homepage. But anyway: it can't be wrong if you read about the same thing twice.

I love Leos work. Along with Tim Ferris, Randy Gage and George Leonard (wrote the great book "Mastery") he has been one of my most important teachers as an adult.

<comment><USER4> Tim Ferris is too pretentious for my taste.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like how the freemium is the book and the premium stuff is stuff you would expect to find free on the internet as promotion material.

Very interesting reversal of expectations.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think the "uncopyrighted" statement could be misleading.

Does Leo really intend to mean that the free version of the book is being released into the public domain or is he simply highlighting the fact that it's not locked down with DRM. No DRM does not equal no copyright and works shouldn't have to be in the public domain to be shared by people.

<comment><USER7> On page 2 of the free PDF it clearly states "public domain".

<comment><USER6> Thanks for pointing that out. Skimmed right past it.</comment></comment></comment>


Looking for a place to stay tomorrow night (Tuesday) near San Jose - <AUTHOR>

I'm going to be at NVISION'08 for the Programming CUDA track on Tuesday and Wednesday. I'm looking for a place to crash Tuesday night, preferably somewhere with easy access to San Jose (ie. close to Caltrain).<p>I figured this might be a good opportunity to meet some members of the community. Also, if anyone is up for getting a beer Tuesday night, I'll buy the first round. <comment><USER2> <http://www.couchsurfing.com/>

<comment><USER3> New members with no prior references may find it hard to get a couchsurfing host immediately, especially on short notice.

Simply becoming a member of the site doesn't guarantee a place to stay...so here are some helpful guides to get started in the CS community and culture.

<http://www.couchsurfing.com/mission.html>

[http://wiki.couchsurfing.com/en/Searching_and_requesting_a_c...](http://wiki.couchsurfing.com/en/Searching_and_requesting_a_couch)

<http://wiki.couchsurfing.com/en/How_to_write_a_CouchRequest>

<http://wiki.couchsurfing.com/en/Cheat_Sheet>

(I'm heavily involved on CS)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I've been a member of CS for a while although I've never actually looked for a host. I was more interested in offering others a place to stay if they happen to be in my area. I've been considering looking on CS but decided against it since I really wanted to try and meet members of this site more than I cared about finding a place to stay.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> can't help you there, but i have to say i'm very curious about CUDA. the "billions of little cores" parallel architecture seems good

i think it's because it gets straight to the heart of parallelism. when you only have two or three cores/threads you might be worried about how to apportion some task to each core/thread, and worried about things like thread safety, whereas having to deal with hundreds of cores cuts that out completely and encourages purer parallelism/collective/emergent/"natural" algorithms

my thinking is that maybe instead of starting with RISC processors and trying to control some number of them, we can instead start with a full parallel architecture (perhaps like what CUDA uses) with millions of cores, and "emulate" RISC/x86/etc on top of that, wherefrom it would be natural to add parallel opcodes and whatbeit

these are just notions though

</comment><comment><USER5> Just get a hotel room instead of trying to leech off of the News.YC community.

<comment><USER6> At the last conference I attended, I didn't receive confirmation that I would be attending until one month beforehand (also, the delay was not something that was my fault, it was Apple for being unusually late and taking a while). I spent the next week trying to look for a short stay apartment or a hotel room that wasn't $500/night that was also in a neighborhood where I (as a woman going alone) would feel okay about being alone and would not have to commute upwards of an hour to attend said conference. Having a sold out conference (if you haven't guessed already, it was WWDC) on top of multiple other busy conferences in the same area at the same time meant that there was a huge shortage of available hotel rooms.

Then a friend (that at that point lived across the world from me and that I only knew from IRC) found out about the situation and offered to let me stay at his and his friend's hotel room since it had two beds and a sofabed and they were also attending WWDC. If he didn't offer to do that, I would have been stuck with a HUGE hotel bill or the possibility of not being able to attend the conference because I didn't want to be stuck with a huge hotel bill (think literally $500/night times 6-7 days). Instead my trip was fun, I felt safer being with guys I knew over being alone, and my trip was affordable because of their generosity in sharing.

Sometimes things happen and it's not easy to find a place to stay. Other people in this community may be willing to let this guy crash on their sofa for a night in exchange for something. Calling him a leech is unjustified if you don't know why he's asking for a favor like this.

<comment><USER5> If a friend offers to let you stay with them as happened in your case, that is one thing and they are being generous. You have a good friend there.

However, when you post to a public forum asking strangers for a place to stay while you're visiting somewhere, it's just trying to take advantage of the generosity of others you don't even know. This really should not be considered acceptable behavior for such a forum as this.

<comment><USER6> I'm torn. On one hand, you do have a valid point, but on the other hand...it depends on the person.

That friend that let me crash in his hotel room was then at most an acquaintance I knew from IRC. I mentioned my problem on an IRC channel and he offered to help out for the entire 9 days I was planning on staying. I did not go to him and ask if he had a place. After we met up in person, our friendship really developed. You could say it was just a smaller version of the HN community, as that now-friend was pretty much someone I've never _met_ before, just another person I said hello to on IRC on a semi-regular basis.

Some people wouldn't take offense to the idea of sharing a couch like this. Others may. But it's only due to the generosity and openness of certain people that an idea like couchsurfing is even possible. And well, if anyone did maybe feel like letting this guy crash on their couch, they can get to know him better beforehand, and in person. The HN community isn't totally strange..yes, you don't know everyone personally, but people here most likely share some interests. I know that if someone here asked, we had lots of interests in common, and they didn't mind sharing a couch at my house and I didn't mind them staying over that I would most likely not mind them crashing for a day or two. Especially if they did some chores around the house or something small...doing the dishes after dinner, taking out the trash. :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to unhide stories? - <AUTHOR> I'm on mobile and accidentally clicked hide for a story I wanted to read. There's no way to undo this? <comment><USER2> Well, you can click on your username and click on hidden section. That will give you all hided items.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> We're getting this complaint a lot and I'm beginning to think of getting rid of that feature, or maybe restricting it to /newest only. Any thoughts?

<comment><USER4> I think the problem isn't the feature, so much as the unintuitive way the user interface is implemented. The link to unhide items could show up in the top bar (maybe next to the username) instead of yet another link in the users' profile, and give some visual prompt (maybe with a counter or something) telling the user that there's a relationship between one action and the other.

<comment><USER3> IMO the top bar needs to stay simple and only show the most important things.

<comment><USER4> I think it might be more important that people find the features they want to use, than that the top bar remain 'clutter' free.

<comment><USER3> That's an argument for putting everything up there.

<comment><USER4> It's an argument for not letting simplicity get in the way of functionality, and designing the interface around the actual usage of the site. Hiding the added complexity of the new features and hoping people just figure it out doesn't keep things elegant.

Although I suppose it's also an argument for having the unhide link in the user profile be a bit more obvious somehow. Either way, it seems like a UI problem, for which the solution may be to either deal with the complaints in order to keep things simple, or else to change the UI to be more intuitive.

I suggest moving things to the top bar because I'm assuming people pay far more attention to it than they do their profiles.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Cloudbase.io for the enterprise - <AUTHOR> http://cloudbase.io/blog/2013/08/cloudbase-io-for-the-enterprise/

<comment><USER2> Always nice to see a company offering a free service with specs adequate enough to actually test anything for a novice like myself dabbling in cloud service delivery!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Our pleasure. Get in touch if you need any help getting started!</comment>


Jumpcut: macOS Clipboard Manager - <AUTHOR> https://snark.github.io/jumpcut/ <comment><AUTHOR> Jumpcut has been around for a very long time. It does what it should very reliably, is open source, and there is no feature you don't want to be there. Perfect!</comment>


WordPress site in 24 hour for $1000 - <AUTHOR>

I'm curious about peoples thoughts on such a product. There would have to be clear requirements, like content already created and use of an already existing template with a little customization.<p>Anyhow is this a ridiculous idea? <comment><USER2> Elance would deliver in shorter turnaround on 1/10th of that amount (or even lesser). I am not trying to spoil your idea but this is the reality. If you can surmount that possible hurdle, then your idea might just be great. But until then...

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, that is a serious concern. Its hard to compete with people who can live for a week on what I need in a day.

<comment><USER2> But you know that, on the right market, many companies are willing to pay $1,000 for that kind of service. I'm sure there is a market for such service.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> We regularly do 800-1600 dollar WordPress sites in a similar timeframe (assuming 24 hours = 3 business days).

These sites are fully customized, and include design.

<comment><AUTHOR> I meant a 24 hour period, so 1 pm on Monday to 1 pm on Tuesday. The idea would be the quick turn around, I assume we'd need to give service on par with you and your company.

<comment><USER3> For a 24 hour turnaround we'd charge a 100% markup, so 1600-3200.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why would I choose a $1000-solution when I can use wordpress.com for free or a minimal fee for more customization?

<comment><AUTHOR> We obviously have to offer much more then the free solution.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is why I like Hacker News, its a good way to quickly evaluate an idea.

</comment><comment><USER5> Seems expensive for existing template and little customization.</comment>


Turns out Amazon buying Eero wasn't the startup success story we thought - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/5/18297619/amazon-eero-price-fire-sale-mesh-wi-fi-buyout <comment><USER2> I hope Eero has better luck under Amazon than Blink which seems to have stalled out after the Ring acquisition and is constantly having "sales" which makes me suspect they are just cleaning out inventory.</comment>


Project Xanadu - <AUTHOR> http://www.xanadu.net/ <comment><USER2> Always interesting to see Xanadu bubble back up. This Wired profile from 1995 (!) is required reading on the history of the project: [https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/](https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/)

<comment><USER3> And this, Ted's response, is also required reading. [http://xanadu.com.au/ararat](http://xanadu.com.au/ararat)

<comment><USER4> Related: On April 15, 2019, Ted Nelson published a video on Youtube with the title 'Pre-Final Reply to "The Curse of Xanadu" by Gary Wolf / Gory Jackal' [1]

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_-5cGEU9S0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_-5cGEU9S0)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Alan Kay on Ted Nelson: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnrlSqtpOkw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnrlSqtpOkw)

Steve Wozniak on Ted Nelson: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl0Wfs70rV4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl0Wfs70rV4)

</comment><comment><USER6> Awful landing page for what seems to be a rather neat idea. Once I dug in and figured out what Xanadu actually is about, I like it a lot.

<comment><USER7> "This post cost you $.02 to download and read"

^^ this is the crux of "project xanadu". They wanted a copyright money speedometer to assess every possible transaction. And there was a promise that individuals would have things to say that would go viral as well.

I'm glad we got the 'default free' internet, rather than paywall hell for everything.

<comment><USER8> it's much more than just micro-payments

<comment><USER9> Micropayments are bad enough, there's no need to go into more details.

<comment><USER8> I think they are an afterthought on the attribution/quoting mechanism. It's very well worth to look at the rest too.

After all it's about the Idea, not the decision to use this specific product (as it's still not in a usable state as far as I can tell).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Previously on Hacker News, only 4 months ago.[1]

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18635123](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18635123)

</comment><comment><USER11> So to summarise, from what I can gather by browsing the various links, it is essentially the web but with a built in payment system for document publishers, and mechanisms for publishing new documents using sections of existing documents. What did I miss?

<comment><USER12> The links never go bad because you should never delete data. Also old versions are kept forever.

<comment><USER13> How do you reconcile this with the reality of systems breaking?

To make it work then you just can't rule out by fiat a hard-disk breakage as one of the simplest adversarial conditions to the model.

<comment><USER12> Presumably by replicating extensively? How this was supposed to work in 1960 tech (and storage prices), I have no idea.

Xanadu is full of missing pieces like this one. There is a reason it never took off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As a resident of New Jersey, I initially thought this was going to be something poking fun at the never-ending construction project formerly known as "Xanadu": [https://www.nj.com/bergen/2018/06/american_dream_how_did_a_s...](https://www.nj.com/bergen/2018/06/american_dream_how_did_a_swath_of_land_in_the_mead.html)

<comment><USER15> There are several other options, if we're discussing what this post isn't about.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Ted Nelson recently did a series of videos on the important ideas in Xanadu. Start here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMKy52Intac](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMKy52Intac)

Also you can buy his classic 'Computer Lib' book here: [https://computerlibbook.com/](https://computerlibbook.com/)

</comment><comment><USER17> The thing which always puzzled me about Xanadu is that all the attempted implementations seem to have been written by other people. Drawing from Wikipedia:

* "In 1972, Cal Daniels completed the first demonstration version of the Xanadu software on a computer Nelson had rented for the purpose

* "While at Autodesk, the group, led by Gregory, completed a version of the software, written in the C programming language"

* "Then a newer group of programmers [at Autodesk] used the problems with this software as justification to rewrite the software in Smalltalk"

From the Xanadu website, regarding their demo XanaduSpace: "The enthusiastic and talented programmer, Rob Smith, of Manchester England, did a beautiful job combining a lot of our ideas [...] John Ohno and Jonathan Kopetz, in Connecticut, spent several years trying to refactor it, but it's beyond fixing-- though as a demo it works just fine."

The related ZigZag project: "The first prototype consisting of two character- graphical views was implemented as a Perl module by Andrew Pam in 1997", and there's a more current implementation by some other people( [https://sourceforge.net/p/gzigzag/_members/](https://sourceforge.net/p/gzigzag/_members/)) called GZigZag

If I had been trying for NEARLY 60 YEARS to get a software project out the door, I would have probably started trying to code it myself after the first decade or so! Every time Xanadu comes up, I'm consistently puzzled at how there's never any sign of Nelson actually doing the grunt work of implementation!

Edit: here's an interesting link from the ZigZag wikipedia page, where a GZigZag implementor talks about their experience ([http://lambda-the- ultimate.org/node/233#comment-1715](http://lambda-the- ultimate.org/node/233#comment-1715)):

> The GZigZag project did not materialize Ted's dream system as fast as he > liked, so he withdrew his support. At first it just meant that he wasn't > participating in discussions as much as he used to. At some later time he > asserted his trademark (he had earlier given his permission to use it), and > we changed the name to Gzz. Around the same time I was burning out, > partially due to Ted's distrust and a large part due to project internal > chemistry problems. I bailed out on the project in the end of 2002.

> Some time after my departure from the project, Ted asserted his ZigZag > patent. The project was forced to abandon all ZigZag related stuff; it was > reformed as Fenfire by salvaging those innovations that were not inseparably > linked to ZigZag and using RDF as the new core. I hear that's not the last > bit of trouble from outside parties the project has run to, but I cannot > discuss even the little that I know in public. Suffice to say that even > Tuomas burned out on the project eventually.

<comment><USER18> You omitted the first browser, Silversmith. From Wikipedia, "History of the Browser": "Another early browser, Silversmith, was created by John Bottoms in 1987.[9] The browser, based on SGML tags,[10] used a tag set from the Electronic Document Project of the AAP with minor modifications and was sold to a number of early adopters. At the time SGML was used exclusively for the formatting of printed documents.[11] The use of SGML for electronically displayed documents signaled a shift in electronic publishing and was met with considerable resistance. Silversmith included an integrated indexer, full text searches, hypertext links between images text and sound using SGML tags and a return stack for use with hypertext links. It included features that are still not available in today's browsers. These include capabilities such as the ability to restrict searches within document structures, searches on indexed documents using wild cards and the ability to search on tag attribute values and attribute names."

Silversmith implemented a portion of Ted's vision and I have discussed it with him from time to time. Ted developed Hypertext fixed links for books and we extended that to Hypertext links across the Internet, along with returns to multiple sources which was not done in books.

I was not able to get funding to continue the work. TimBL's innovation was in 1.) soliciting funding from the 10 large companies that funded the Web, and 2.) embedding advertising on web pages and in the content. But along with this was the funder's specification of how the WWW should work.

My descriptions of Silversmith were removed from wikipedia at W3c's request and Silversmith is now conveniently a "precursor" and most people believe Netscape was the first, when in fact it was released about 8 years after Silversmith The government was the early adopter and we released 4 different browsers in the first year, the last of which was a semantic browser for the U.S. Army Material Command. Silversmith included a browse-able index of each document, automatic markup of submitted texts, a parser to automatically check the page composition and it was a distributed system. The 5th browser was Erwise, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwise](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwise), which Tim looked at before he started on his browser, the W3c implementation (the 6th). He declined to pursue it because the comments in the code were written in Finnish. Our other browsers were for the DoD Computer Aided Logistics Support (CALS) documents, for DoD Tech Manuals, and one for Old Norse documents written in Old Norse.I designed the browser to aid in the development of ontologies for AI. We have been working in the field for 33 years. My hope is that our next browser will include Ted's vision of draft versions and payments.

<comment><USER19> Are there any links to silvesmith resources? It sounds pretty amazing, and it would be nice if it were written down somewhere. I'd be curious to see what was forgotten along the way to v6.

Also, I see the Erwise Wikipedia screenshot uses the phrase "world wide web" in the authors box, which is kinda funny, since the article goes on to say Tim Berners Lee later invented the world wide web.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Leo Laporte interviews ted nelson in 2014 [https://twit.tv/shows/twit- bits/episodes/199](https://twit.tv/shows/twit-bits/episodes/199)

</comment><comment><USER21> The longest-lived vaporware in history

<comment><USER22> I wouldn't necessarily label it as vaporware, but I would call it the most disappointing great idea in the history of computing.

<comment><USER23> A similar thing happened with Chiron: [http://maf.directory/misc/chiron.html](http://maf.directory/misc/chiron.html)

Quote from Donald Knuth for context: "[Floyd] was destined to be disappointed that his dream of a new, near-ideal programming language called Chiron was never to be realized--possibly because he was reluctant to make the sorts of compromises that he saw me making with respect to TEX. Chiron was "an attempt to provide a programming environment in which, to the largest extent possible, one designs a program by designing the process which the program carries out." His plans for the Chiron compiler included novel methods of compile-time error recovery and type matching that have never been published."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I wonder if Herzog's list of 'sane people in computing' would have jumped to 2 had he met Terry Davis.</comment>


Top bankers warn of risk of 2017 exodus from Britain - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-eu-city-idUSKCN12B10R <comment><USER2> Europe should close out the british banks form the market, but should not let the banks move in either.</comment>


Thousands of webcam images have been found in the school district being sued - <AUTHOR> http://www.philly.com/philly/news/homepage/20100416_1_000s_of_Web_cam_images__suit_says.html

<comment><USER3> I'm glad that somebody is still tracking this story, and it hasn't just dropped on the ground.

Too often, it seems, a news story outrages us, but the furor quickly dies down. In the end, nobody even notices the ritual scapegoat.

A little while back, somebody proposed here (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1183587> ) a web app that would allow us to follow a news story entire life. This reminds of that, and why it would be a good idea.

<comment><USER4> One reason the furor over this died down so quickly is that different stories reported the facts differently. My friends and I all debated what had really happened. The student believed the webcam had taken pictures of him acting inappropriate without his knowledge or consent (and no parents were notified of this 'feature' of school-provided laptops).

However, it was not clear in initial reports if the student had actually done something and was spied on, or if he had taken pictures and shared them in school. Some schools have policies where students can be disciplined for violations off school grounds in instances of bullying or disseminating "ssext messages" from their peers. It was not clear, from the reporting, if this was the case.

The fact that the media is now reporting the facts, and the schools thought it was actually a good idea to spy on high school students in their own homes, shows a kind of unparalleled stupidity in both a legal standpoint and technological one.

Also, considering the statistic on how many children of the ages 14-18 "sext" one another, this software, the school's servers, the IT staff and the administrators could all be considered to be part of a child pornography network, if in fact any of those kids decided to "privately model" for another student using their laptop. Aside from the civil aspect of it, I would be contacting my state's AG to investigate whether or not any of those laws were broken.

<comment><USER5> > the school's servers, the IT staff and the administrators could all be > considered to be part of a child pornography network

No, please lets not go to that silly place.

It detracts from the real child pornography issues.

We don't need CP laws to convict these people of a crime; the crime they have actually committed.

If the administrator was taking pictures of them nude or in sexual positions and then storing them; i.e. with the intent of viewing them sexually, then nail him.

But otherwise this is well covered by _voyeurism_ law. A much more appropriate charge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> where there is smoke, there is fire. Sounds to me like what initially was an ability to view students working in school quickly digressed into illegal abuse of the deployment. That district's insurance company must be terrified at this point, because lawyers are going to come out of the woodwork to jump on this one.

<comment><USER7> One nude photo of a student changing, and this is going to turn to a shitstorm.

<comment><USER8> If so there should be jail-time involved for the person administering this system.

<comment><USER9> The presence of a nude photo shouldn't matter. America has lost sight of intent as a critical component in crime. The administrators of this system _intentionally_ photographed minors in their bedrooms without their knowledge and without any consent. What the photos show is irrelevant. The obsession about the act over the intent is why we have highschool kids getting booked on child pornography charges for receiving naked pictures of their classmates while something like this hangs in the balance. This is a clear case of criminal privacy violation and misconduct towards minors, regardless what the pictures show.

<comment><USER3> _The presence of a nude photo shouldn't matter._

This is incorrect, because incentives are important. If we don't hold people responsible for their actions, even when their actions are due to negligence or incompetence, then we build a society that is intentionally negligent and incompetent.

When (hypothetically) some teenage girl's nude photos wind up on the web, I don't think that a "sorry, that was an accident" is going to make her feel much better. When people are injured due to the actions of others, the injured parties are owed some redress.

We don't want incompetents running things, so we need to make sure that they are weeded out. Now, it may be that "oops" is a mitigating factor, but it is in no way an excuse.

A friend of mine was doing a tax protest many years ago, handing out fliers in front of the post office. He was arrested for this. He later sued the town and the police officers for violating his civil rights. He won several thousand dollars from the town, but the police officers got off. The explanation was that it wasn't their fault because they hadn't been trained for this scenario. Now, knowing that this is a viable excuse, our police officers have every incentive to avoid training. If they get trained, they're liable for their behavior, but staying ignorant is a get-out-of-jail-free card.

Edit: I may have misunderstood you. I first read this to say that a hypothetical nude photo wouldn't be a big deal, because the school didn't mean to do that. Maybe you're saying the opposite, that it doesn't matter if there is NO such photo, because it should be obvious that it could easily happen.

<comment><USER10> > _Edit: I may have misunderstood you. I first read this to say that a > hypothetical nude photo wouldn't be a big deal, because the school didn't > mean to do that. Maybe you're saying the opposite, that it doesn't matter if > there is NO such photo, because it should be obvious that it could easily > happen._

I took it that GP is stating that we shouldn't _only_ consider this to be a big deal if nude photos show up. We shouldn't _have_ to hope that the 'child porn' card is played to have people suffer real consequences for what they did at that school.

<comment><USER9> This is correct.

Nevertheless, I am torn in how to response to CWuestefeld's point. I want to say that it would be just as bad to obsess over intent without worrying about act, but I'm not sure that's true.

Even in the cases presented (accidentally posting a nude photo and arresting someone who had not committed a crime), the crime is still not just in the act itself. The crime is also in the negligence involved. A negligent police officer should be punished even if no one is mistakenly arrested. If someone negligently handles nude photos (I'm not sure why you'd have them in the first place, but let's leave that aside for now), they should be punished even if the photos don't get leaked.

If social security numbers are leaked on a public website, those responsible should be punished _even if no one loaded the page_. If, however, a company is absolutely devoted to security but someone still breaks in and steals social security numbers, the company's punishment should be less, even though the act (social security numbers falling into the wrong hands) is less bad than the negligent company's act (social security numbers being mishandled but never falling into the wrong hands). I'd rather my social security number wasn't leaked, but I'd place greater trust in a company which handled it correctly and still got broken into than one that handled it recklessly but got lucky.

Really, I think that's the point I want to make above all: Luck should have no bearing on the law.

<comment><USER3> I can agree with that.

I guess it boils down to people needing to act responsibly. We must each fulfill those responsibilities that are incumbent upon us. If I'm entrusted with those SS#s, I'd better take care of them. If I took reasonable measures to do so but they're lost, I'm less bad then if I was irresponsible and just lucked out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _The district has said it turned on the camera in Robbins' computer because his family had not paid the $55 insurance fee and he was not authorized to take the laptop home._

This is puzzling. First of all, if he didn't pay the fee, why did he even have access to it to take it home? Secondly, if you already know where the laptop is and who has it, what's the point of turning on the camera? (Other than to satisfy your penchant for voyeurism)

</comment><comment><USER12> Absolutely disgusting. I'm happy this case is being treated seriously and that (as it appears) there's the hope of action being taken against these school administrators.

I've thought for years that parents place far too much trust in public-school staff.

<comment><USER13> It was a private school, wasn't it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Public school. Harriton High School in Lower Merion School District

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> how do you get a society where something like this is uncovered, and half of the comments are abusing the family that uncovered it?

oh, and the past tense of shine is shone :)

<comment><USER15> There is a tendency in society for people to blame the victim. You hear about rape crimes, and people ask what the girl was wearing with the idea that somehow she was 'asking for it.' I try to view the situation from both sides as much as possible, but I do not advocate blaming the vicitim in most circumstances.

In this particular case, it is stupid for the school system to even implement this policy in the first place. There are multiple issues with this other than the spying aspect.

(1) Why is the school letting the kids use laptops in the first place? What is wrong with desktop machines that are cheaper that stay at the school? Is there really a significant advantage given to learning or is it worth it to the taxpayer? I highly doubt a positive correlation exists between computer use and higher grades.

(2) They could simply have installed other tracking software or reported the IP address back to a server have the laptops found if stolen. They could have required some form of collateral or payment if a student lost a laptop or if the laptop was stolen. It does not make sense to justify such a method of tracking when other (better) solutions exist.

(3) The system was only 'activated' 42* times, but it took thousands of pictures? You only need one picture to identify someone. They were actively spying on these kids.

<comment><USER16> Besides all this, why the heck do they need pictures to track a device? A picture of a bedroom doesn't even tell you where the laptop is. A GPS reading does, and is far less invasive (though I would still insist on the students being notified about GPS tracking).

Their 'solution' is incompetent AND malicious.

<comment><USER10> I think they thought that they would get a photo of the thief and it would make it easier to prosecute. (And giving that photo to the police would put that person on their radar as well).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

<comment><USER18> Populus.

<comment> s-phi-nl Translation: Who will guard the guards? The people.

<comment><USER18> _Translation:_

It saddens me that this is necessary. It wasn't long ago that Latin was part of the standard curriculum in grammar schools.

 _The people_

For clarity: This is my answer, not the answer given by Plato (who argues that the guardians should guard themselves) or answer from Juvenal (who implicitly takes the position that this is an impossible problem).

<comment><USER19> Why should Latin be part of the standard curriculum?

<comment><USER18> Because learning Latin trains the mind in logical thought.

Because studying Latin helps people learn about the grammatical structures which they use in their native tongue without understanding.

Because understanding Latin makes it much easier to learn any of the many Latin-influenced languages, or even to guess at what text means without knowing the language.

Because knowing Latin is a prerequisite for learning much of European history from primary sources.

<comment><USER19> > Because learning Latin trains the mind in logical thought.

How? Is there something magical about Latin? Would other, less dead languages have the same effect?

> Because studying Latin helps people learn about the grammatical structures > which they use in their native tongue without understanding.

That's hardly unique to Latin.

> Because understanding Latin makes it much easier to learn any of the many > Latin-influenced languages, or even to guess at what text means without > knowing the language.

Why not learn another Latin-derived modern language, instead? You get some of that same effect, _and_ you learn a language that isn't dead.

> Because knowing Latin is a prerequisite for learning much of European > history from primary sources.

How many people are going to want to do that, ever? Consider the opportunity cost of learning Latin for those who won't. And then, _of_ the people who will want to read those primary sources, how many of them would benefit from being able to read them in Latin rather than in a translation?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Can someone make the title a little more grammatical? It's not really a sentence and it doesn't make sense unless you already know what it's referring to.

<comment><USER21> Titles have to be 80 characters or less. Plenty of times it takes more than that to make a title more 'grammatical', so bits are sacrificed to fit the limit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I continue to be amazed that people are not more outraged about this. While there is some outrage and certainly charges will be filed, in general the public's opinion of their right to privacy and anonymity has shifted by orders of magnitude in the last 20 years.

<comment><USER23> There are a number of facts that I can almost guarantee that anyone not outraged probably aren't aware of - I will list only a few because anyone who doesn't do research before posting or reading posts for opinions is kind of hopeless.

1\. Students were required to use these laptops for their coursework - <USER2> class and at home. No laptop - no going to class.

2\. Despite the software being designed to track stolen property. The school district pursued a student for eating candy (drug suspicion) while is laptop had not been stolen. The software company has come out against the school and disabled the functionality the school used.

3\. There's a video on youtube showing a systems administrator messing with the students on the laptops while in school (reading over their shoulders and what not). Keep in mind these are mandatory for classes.

<comment><USER24> I think the latter item (#3) is from a PBS show on another school district. Which doesn't change the general point of "where's the outrage"?</comment></comment></comment>


Apple and iOS hacker Comex part ways after unanswered e-mail - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2012/10/18/3523862/apple-comex-ios-hacker-email

<comment><USER2> Flagged. Link-baiting, inaccurate title. Sure, it's the source's title, but linkbaitiness is commutative.

<comment><USER3> (Do you mean "transitive"?)

<comment><USER2> Somehow, I knew I'd be called-out for this :)

I'm not sure either quite applies, strictly; but my dictionary defines "commutative" thusly:

> _adj. Mathematics: involving the condition that a group of quantities > connected by operators gives the same result whatever the order of the > quantities involved, e.g., a × b = b × a._

So, I don't care who first made it link-baity; the product is the same.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Docute – Fast way to create a documentation site - <AUTHOR> https://docute.org <comment><USER2> I don't get the point. Why is javascript required for this? Static site generators are a thing that exist, and solve this problem a lot more reliably than this will.

<comment><USER3> All though I agree with the JS comment. It's still an interesting idea to generate a document hub from markdown. This makes a lot of sense. I do agree again that the JS is a bit overboard but I'm not that turned away by it.

<comment><USER2> What regular SSG wouldn't let you do the same? A SSG is ridiculously simple to hookup to a CI/CD chain to publish changes once pushed to the repo.

<comment><USER3> If I knew what the acronyms meant, maybe I could tell you. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSG](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSG)

??? I know what markdown is.

<comment><USER4> Static site generator?

[0] [https://github.com/myles/awesome-static- generators](https://github.com/myles/awesome-static-generators)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thanks for making this, it looks very nice and I'm always looking for things like this.

> renders them as a single-page application.

The problem with SPA's is that unless there's server-side-rendering with routing, they will not be reliably crawled by search engines.

One of the benefits of having published documentation is that each page gets indexed by google and so each page is essentially a hyper-targeted marketing page with specific keywords.

Just wanted raise a concern I've experienced with hosting websites as SPA's. I see in your comparisons you list other tools that render static HTML. Do you think in your roadmap you would have an option to export a directory of HTML pages?

<comment><USER6> > If you care about SEO, you may like using tokio [1] to prerender your > website.

[1]: [https://github.com/egoist/tokio](https://github.com/egoist/tokio)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've found mkdocs to be _fantastic_ for this, especially when paired with its material theme:

[https://www.mkdocs.org/](https://www.mkdocs.org/)

[https://github.com/squidfunk/mkdocs- material](https://github.com/squidfunk/mkdocs-material)

There's a docker image that makes getting started with both quite easy:

[https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/getting- started/...](https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/getting- started/#alternative-using-docker)

<comment><USER8> It seems that mkdocs is a generator that requires a build step. Docute does all of that work clientside at render time, according to TFA. That makes it compatible with ipfs with no additional build step, which I think is super cool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Alternatively, this is much, much better: [https://docusaurus.io/](https://docusaurus.io/)

<comment><USER10> How is it better? Does it do the same thing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you write your docs in RST or Markdown, readthedocs is also a great choice. With a GitHub webhook they'll automatically build and publish your docs. Point your own domain at it and it couldn't be easier.

</comment><comment><USER12> Wow, this is beautiful and so simple to start using, I will give it a try.

</comment><comment><USER13> Not having a build step makes life 100X easier.

We use a similar system (based on UI kit) but I've found Docsify and Docute to be much easier/cleaner.

One really cool thing is we added a "interactive coding tutorial" system to the MD renderer, letting you do some pretty powerful documentation demos (see [https://gun.eco/docs/Todo-Dapp](https://gun.eco/docs/Todo-Dapp) for example).

This should be able to be packaged up as a plugin for docsify/docute, anybody interested in helping, so other projects can use it out of the box?

</comment><comment><USER14> HN hug of death ?

</comment><comment><USER15> Just a heads up, website is down for me.</comment>


Show HN: Alpaca, a Compiler for Alfred Workflows - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jclem/alpaca <comment><AUTHOR> I have always wanted to be able to write Alfred workflows exclusively in a text editor. In order to do that, I built Alpaca, a compiler for Alfred workflows.

Instead of using the Alfred GUI for authoring workflows, an Alpaca project defines the workflow in an "alpaca.yml" file, and then the Alpaca command line interface is used to compile the project to a working Alfred workflow.

Only a tiny bit of Alfred functionality is implemented at this point, but I wanted to release something simple for v1.</comment>


Macy's and the Plain Text, Unencrypted Password - <AUTHOR> http://threetwelvecreative.com/blog/bid/185656/Macy-s-and-the-Plain-Text-Unencrypted-Password

<comment><USER2> Am I the only who is crazy surprised this still happens? New startups have absolutely no excuse since every framework/language has some helpers for users and passwords. Old companies have no excuse because its trivially easy to upgrade users passwords to the new encrypted format.</comment>


Airbnb launching its own apartment complexes - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2017/12/19/airbnb-niido-branded-apartments-investment/ <comment><USER2> That is literally a hotel. An "apartment complex" that is rented by the day is functionally identical to a hotel. Everything old is new again. Next up, Turo announces they will buy a bunch of white of Chevy Malibus and rent their own "shared" fleet.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, serviced apartments now have a pretty website. Cool /s</comment>


Lewisville Dam: The Dam Called Trouble - <AUTHOR> http://interactives.dallasnews.com/2015/lewisville-dam/ <comment><USER2> It's interesting and sad to me (here in the UK) that both the US and UK seem to be so short-sighted when it comes to repairing/maintaining and improving critical infrastructure.

I get that they aren't big flashy projects but you would think that when you have infrastructure that affects the lives of literally millions of people we could do better.

The Victorians here celebrated public infrastructure projects so much that they often organised tours of new projects after completion, which is one of the reasons why when you go look at Victorian stuff (even sewage works) they are often so beautifully finished, it was infrastructure as both art and statement.

[https://thelondonphile.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/img_4714....](https://thelondonphile.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/img_4714.jpg) that's from a pumping station/ _sewage_ plant.

Also I can genuinely recommend [http://thelondonphile.com/](http://thelondonphile.com/) I'm a Northerner in the North but it's a fascinating look at London and it's heritage, lots of places I want to visit.

</comment><comment><USER3> >But what the Corps tells itself about the Lewisville Dam is different from what it tells the public. "We want to get the message out that there's a potential for something bad to happen, but we don't want to unduly panic the public," says an official involved in the communications. "So we sugarcoat the message a bit."

It may be time to change strategy. Is it the politicians holding the purse strings of the Army Corps of Engineers? It may be time to light a fire under their asses. Panicked constituents can do that.

</comment><comment><USER4> With estimated damages on the order of billions and a "high risk" classification, I wonder why it apparently is hard to get the necessary millions for repairs.

<comment><USER5> Particularly when they have a downstream population at risk that includes the city of Dallas - population 1.25mm+

<comment><USER6> Most of Dallas isn't in the flood plain for the Trinity River, but the most expensive bits (Downtown, Uptown, some parts of the Park Cities) are. Those places are, somewhat, protected by the Trinity River levees...the same levees that the occasional person who doesn't understand how levees are supposed to work wants to build a toll road inside of.

Trinity Parkway: [http://transportationblog.dallasnews.com/2014/12/10-things-t...](http://transportationblog.dallasnews.com/2014/12/10-things- to-know-about-trinity-parkway.html/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Glad I don't live there anymore (for many reasons).</comment>


How to make fun of Google Bot (PicoLisp Wiki) - <AUTHOR> http://picolisp.com/5000/-2-1i.html <comment><USER2> I once made a similar (but less real language-like) site to fool spambots on my now-defunct web consultancy's page (<http://www.resolution.nl/food> if you care). The idea was that if a crawler that searches the internet for email addresses to spam would fill its DB with bogus, after which, hopefully, the spammer would simply dump that day's result in annoyance, including our real email address. Never figured out whether that really worked but it was fun to make.

What did work, however, was fool a searchbot: The whole thing got me a very angry mail from a Dutch search engine team (ilse.nl) whose bot had been stuck on it for an entire day. I had no robots.txt (didn't even know what it was), which the search engine team decided was a really nasty case of lack of netiquette.

<comment><USER3> _The whole thing got me a very angry mail from a Dutch search engine team (ilse.nl) whose bot had been stuck on it for an entire day._

So, somehow their ill-coded bot crashing was your fault? It's not like you forced them to crawl your site.

<comment><USER2> Correct, which is why I laughed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> see here for a spec how the robots.txt is parsed

[http://code.google.com/web/controlcrawlindex/docs/robots_txt...](http://code.google.com/web/controlcrawlindex/docs/robots_txt.html)

the robots.txt of <http://picolisp.com> (found at <http://picolisp.com/robots.txt>) allows the indexing of <http://picolisp.com/21000> and all follow up pages.

why? see the spec:

The disallow directive specifies paths that must not be accessed by the designated crawlers. When no path is specified, the directive is ignored.

see here <https://github.com/franzenzenhofer/robotstxt> for coffeescript implementation of a robots.txt parser

<comment><USER5> so what should his robots.txt look like? at the moment it is:

User-Agent: *

Disallow: /21000/

<comment><USER6> It's _mostly_ sufficient. /21000/ will not match "<http://picolisp.com/21000>, which is the first URL in the sequence, but the remaining URLs look like "<http://picolisp.com/21000/!start?*Page=+2>, so Googlebot will likely only continue to download a single page once it has re-read the robots.txt.

Which is what you deserve for using non-standard URL formats.

<comment><USER7> Hold on, slash at the end is not standard?

<comment><USER6> No, I'm saying /21000/ will match a path with a directory named /21000 but not a file named /21000.

When I say "non-standard", I am saying am saying that if the website's URLs looked like "/21000/foo" and "/21000/foo?page=2", it would have been easier to craft a "Disallow" rule that would have successfully blocked all of the desired pages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The vast majority of the time when I see a complaint like this about robots.txt, it's usually because the site has missed a character here or there, or because they're not putting a robots.txt file on the right hostname.

Google has a free robots.txt checker that lets you test your robots.txt files. Given a robots.txt file, you can enter specific urls and check whether that url would be blocked or not. Here's a link for more info on that free tool: [http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en...](http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156449&from=35237&rd=1)

</comment><comment><USER9> Another incorrect assumption in the article is to assume that every bot with the Google UA is originating from Google. There are plenty of other (often malicious) bot sources that simply copy Google's signature to make themselves less obvious. He needs to check the IP block to make sure the bot with the observed behavior was really from Google.

<comment><USER10> I just took a look at the last offending Googlebot IP and it seems to originate from Google.

<http://www.ip-adress.com/ip_tracer/22.214.171.124>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> That reminds me of this page in which the author created a large binary tree of pages and watched how various crawlers walked the tree.

<http://www.drunkmenworkhere.org/219>

</comment><comment><USER12> Very interesting experiment, and suprising that the Google bot appears (in this instance at least) to be ignoring robots.txt.

<comment><USER6> The problem is not Googlebot.

robots.txt on ticker.picolisp.com says "Disallow: /", but ticker.picolisp.com redirects to picolisp.com/21000, and the robots.txt on picolisp.com says "Disallow:". If he wants Googlebot to stop crawling those URLs, he needs to add "Disallow: /21000" to picolisp.com.

<comment><USER12> Hmmmm, maybe he just did: <http://picolisp.com/robots.txt>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Dumb bots are dumb</comment>


Ask HN: How do you handle UGC when deleting a user from a group? - <AUTHOR>

Building a group photosharing service and trying to figure out how to deal with users being deleted from a group, and their content. Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated! <comment><USER3> It depends on your target audience and the expectations your design gives user; some ideas will work in some situations, others will work in others, but there is no general solution. Some ideas:

1\. Content belongs to the group; once a user is out of the group, they can't get to it, even if they contributed it themselves. Possibly good if your app will have a corporate focus (former employees losing access to confidential company materials even if they created them is the norm). 2\. Users own content, but grant irrevocable rights to access and modify the content to the group. The rights persist even after the user has been removed. 3\. Creating users own content, and can always get to it, even after they are removed. Users can grant groups rights to access content. This permission can be revoked even after the user has left the group, at which point the group can no longer access the content. Revocation of rights is a separate action to deletion from the group. 4\. Content is associated with the creator, and when the creator is deleted from the group, their content is assumed to be uninteresting and so is no longer part of the group. Perhaps good if you have big groups, and expect spammers to try to join; deleting users from groups is an anti-spam measure.

Note that users could save content outside of your site if they wanted to; if you really needed to, you could fingerprint all images and detect if they were later re-uploaded with a different purported creator.

Whatever you do, you should make sure to make users agree to grant you a license to do what you want to do - UGC may be copyrighted by the user, and if you don't let them retract content from groups they are no longer in, for example, you had better have ensured they agreed to grant you an irrevocable license. Getting an experienced lawyer to check the language would be a good idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for this - so priority number 1 would be making sure users are agreeing to whatever content policy I adopt. In terms of the options you present - <USER2> provides the optimal user experience in your opinion?

Option 1 works well for corporate groups, for photos however I'm thinking option 3. My reasoning is that if an admin rejects a user, for whatever reason, they should by default be rejecting the user's photos. In addition, the user, if expelled from a group, should be able to deny the group access to his/her photos. Does this make sense - you think this is coherent?</comment></comment>


Ethiopia criminalizes VOIP - <AUTHOR> http://stream.aljazeera.com/story/ethiopia-skype-me-maybe-0022243

<comment><USER2> I wonder if the Ethiopian government runs any Microsoft software? I know that the article referred to the law that covered all forms of VOIP (assuming Asterix PBX software would be banned as well), but since Skype is now part of Microsoft I find it hard to believe that there wouldn't be some level of lobbying at some point in the future to reverse this legislation.

Perhaps the government knew that this was just a vanguard action and are hoping to buy some time to get their national communications ministry in shape (read: evaluate & implement VOIP DPI/monitoring solutions) before they were pressured to overturn the law.</comment>


Keeping America's Edge - <AUTHOR> http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/keeping-americas-edge <comment><USER2> Manufacturing didn't go away because of anything other than the rise in unskilled labor costs in the United States. At the time it was cheaper to manufacture overseas and ship to this country. With the falling cost of robotics, and the rising cost of foreign labor and shipping, it's likely that manufacturing will return to this country in a highly automated way. If your job can be replaced by a robot, human or otherwise, that doesn't bitch about his pension and threaten to strike, it will be.</comment>


ImpactJS Game Engine is Now Opensource - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/phoboslab/Impact <comment><AUTHOR> ImpactJS is a complete, well-written, modular game development engine. I've personally used it to make a half a dozen games or so. The Ejecta project (already open source) makes it easy to Port these games and apps to iOS and the App Store.

It's great to see that Dom opensourced this gem, and I can't wait to see how the community may improve this project.</comment>


Emoti: Windows Phone 7 meets with long waited Emoji. - <AUTHOR> http://windowsphone.com/s?appid=b3cc9c0e-3413-4255-ae61-4a13b1256973

<comment><AUTHOR> Here is my app for WP7 users that want Emoji like Iphone...</comment>


America Braces for Possible French Fry Shortage After Poor Potato Harvest - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-02/french-fry-squeeze-hits-north-america-after-poor-potato-harvest <comment><USER2> Maybe it's my Irish roots, but I find it funny that this is being billed as a "french-fry shortage" and not a potato shortage.</comment>


Composing Features and Behaviours in the Elm Architecture - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/foxdonut/adventures-reactive-web-dev/tree/master/client-elm#composing-features-and-behaviours-in-the-elm-architecture <comment><AUTHOR> I wrote this article out of wondering how to organize code that follows the Elm architecture. I wanted to divide the code for parts of a page (call them components, sections, blocks, etc., I'll call them features from here on out) into their own directories. I wanted each feature to be independent of the others, but find a way for them to communicate information with each other. Finally, I wanted to see if I could group some of these features together to assemble larger features, while still keeping the same pattern of inter- feature communication.</comment>


Show HN: Image Processing through HTTP, with ImageMagick and more - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/wsxiaoys/0b01e4bd5777c0dab1153c25d1346621 <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN!

Several of my side projects involves in processing images in a complex way(Composing text, formatting, transparent, bounding box, compression, ...). I always end up with bash scripts w/imagemagick as there's few solutions fill the gap.

I created this experimental service to demo the concept brining these bash utilities to web directly, and maybe grow it to an viable API solution.

I'm grateful to hear any suggestions & feature requests!

</comment><comment><USER2> Security story of ImageMagick is pretty awful. This service should be very careful.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're absolutely right :)

While thanks to the sandboxing provided by Cloud Functions / AWS Lambda, executing an external shell command(including ImageMagick) is not a nightmare any more! Safety burden transferred to these cloud container services.

<comment><USER3> Just be careful with container reuse in Lambda.</comment></comment></comment>


Using Hadoop to Measure Influence - <AUTHOR> http://www.cloudera.com/blog/2011/05/using-hadoop-to-measure-influence/ <comment><USER2> Interesting discussion (I wrote the reputation algorithm for <http://letslunch.com>). My main concern with computing online reputation is that you miss the 95% of the people who don't see Twitter as a goal. Is a Senior Vice-President at Apple influential? Klout would say no (no tweets). LetsLunch would say yes :-)

<comment><USER3> What data does LetsLunch use that allows it to score 95% of people?

On Twitter, if you are the Senior VP at Apple and---hypothetically---you only have 50 followers but they are all movers and shakers, then Twitter analysis should be able to determine that you are influential.

I guess your concern is that there might be many influential people who aren't even on Twitter, or don't have 50 influential followers on Twitter. What is your proposed solution to the problem? Your "How It Works" page (<http://letslunch.com/site/page?view=how-it-works>) says that you pull signal from LinkedIn and, optionally, Twitter and Hacker News. You arrange lunch dates, collect post-lunch feedback, and then tune people's reputation based upon the feedback.

What about the 99.99% of people who don't use LetsLunch? And why is a single lunch date enough to be able to determine someone's influence?

<comment><USER2> Yes, my concern is that a lot of influential people just aren't on Twitter. I would almost argue that the _really_ influential people have better things to do than tweet. And I agree they are not on LetsLunch either, that wasn't my point :-)

I gave a fairly specific example. I think it's pretty self-explanatory.

<comment><USER3> Are you talking about Scott Forstall?

Despite having 0 tweets, he has 40K twitter followers: <http://twitter.com/#!/forstall/followers>

It should be possible to determine from that information that he has influence.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


New wifi-minded carrier offers unbelievable $19 unlimited phone plan  - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/technology-blog/wifi-minded-carrier-offers-unbelievable-19-unlimited-phone-204810215.html;_ylt=AsYJ8EQO7QUiAIniyXC.n9RtzwcF;_ylu=X3oDMTRzaWthaWliBGNjb2RlA2N0LmMEbWl0A0FydGljbGUgTW9zdCBQb3B1bGFyBHBrZwNhMDc4MjQxNi0yNDYzLTM1YmUtOTRjNi0xODE1MDkwN2JkNjEEcG9zAzEEc2VjA01lZGlhQkxpc3RNaXhlZE1vc3RQb3B1bGFyQ0EEdmVyA2FhMWE1ZDRlLTBiMjktMTFlMS04N2YzLTFiMzE2MWZjMWJlOA--;_ylg=X3oDMTJsNHI5OTV1BGludGwDdXMEbGFuZwNlbi11cwRwc3RhaWQDMDBmODlkZWQtYTJhZi0zNDdhLWI4MGYtZDg3ZjFhNmUyN2YxBHBzdGNhdAN1cwRwdANzdG9yeXBhZ2U-;_ylv=3 <comment><USER2> I pay $78 a month for two Verizon phones with 700min voice. (no data or smartphone) I could stand to save $40 a month. But I have to cancel with probably $200 cancellation, plus $100 - $200 to buy the Republic wireless phone. So it would take me about a year to recoup. Or I wait almost two years to wait for the contract to expire (just signed the contract because AT&T had lousy coverage at my house, no landline)

</comment><comment><USER3> I have this phone as a spare, it's not amazing but for a phone it's perfectly fine and decent battery usage, signal quality etc.

</comment><comment><USER4> Interesting, but what happens if all the wifi networks in the area are password secured?

Can it hop on any cell network in the are, or will there be blackout zones?

<comment><USER5> It will fall back to Sprint's wireless network.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is awesome!</comment>


Usability Hell: London 2012 Olympics Ticketing Fail - <AUTHOR> http://usabilityhell.com/post/28410304040/london2012-olympic-ticketing-fail

<comment><USER2> It's actually even slightly worse than this article suggests.

The sales funnel for ordering tickets from the official website looks roughly like this:

      1. Search for tickets. Selecting "only available" actually means "show only those that we don't know are unavailable".
      2. Click on an event. Find out that
         a) the tickets are actually not available at all ("tickets  unavailable" or
         b) only the most expensive tickets are still available (£200+)
         c) there are still tickets you can afford
      3. Add tickets to your shopping list
      4. Proceed to check out and payment

The most infuriating part is that at any of these steps you may find out that the tickets were actually not available after all, __even step 4 __.

What's worse, the shopping list really is a shopping basket, not a wishlist. You cannot just add tickets to all the events you would potentially like to go to and then only pay for one pair of those that are available. If you do that, and in step 4, it turns out that of the 20 tickets you selected, 8 are available, you can only proceed by paying for all 8 tickets or cancel altogether (and probably lose the chance to buy tickets, as they are released into the pool again).

This means that in practice, you keep going through all the steps, adding tickets to your shopping list, proceed to check out, find out they are unavailable, go back to shopping list, remove unavailable tickets, rinse and repeat. It's terrible.

I finally did end up buying tickets, by the way, and I do want to point out some factual errors in the article:

      1. There are email alerts for newly released tickets. They are in the newsletter that you can opt-in for when you create an account on the ticketing website.
      2. While there is no clearly marked option "search all available tickets for all sports on all dates in all venues", there are other ways to search than just by sport. You have to specify one of sport, venue or date, which leaves:
        a) searching by venue or group of venues. Most of the sports are in the "Olympic park venues" or the "London venues", so searching by venue group is a LOT more convenient (see http://cl.ly/image/213p2f0r022p).
        b) searching by date. You can simply select the first day of the Olympics and the last day and it will search all sports on all dates in all venues.

Both things are far from obvious and the usability problems pointed out are real, but for the dedicated it's still possible to get tickets.

<comment><USER3> I've fallen foul (and from anecdotal evidence, many of my peers too) of the availability displayed not reflecting the actual state of things

I suspect the website uses a materialised view that only refreshes every hour or so.

<comment><USER4> You're completely correct, search results are cached.

This was easily verifiable when they released tickets while I was searching for tickets a few days ago. If I searched "Olympic Park venues" & "All days" I got very different results compared to search "Olympic Park venues" & "28th July -> 12th August". Clearly those two searches should always return the same result set.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Former Ticketmaster Employee here. I was a director of engineering & very much involved in the ticketing of the 2008 Olympics. I ended up leaving shortly afterwards for Google. So while I don't have any firsthand knowledge of the 2012 games, I thought I could share some perspective.

\- The Olympic committees often have final say over design, but a lot of effort is invested. We all know the phrase of something looking like it was "designed by committee." Well, that's pretty much what happens here. You have a lot of individual people with great ideas, but many of they diametrically opposed, not to mention multiple levels of approval. Approval comes from multiple layers of the of the Olympic committees & the committees are often political appointees. They may have little-to-no experience with design (or ticketing), but may still offer "tweaks" and the like. Everyone has the best intentions, but, well...

\- CAPTCHAs suck, but it or something similar is needed. Scalpers _pound_ the site. I know fines have been raised, but all that really did was drive it underground, away from the everyday person. (Not to mention resulted in lots of empty seats.) Without it, almost every ticket would end up in the hands of scalpers.

\- To that end, most of his "This is bad" section doesn't apply. The vast majority of events sell out. The empty seats aren't because tickets didn't sell, it's because they're sold & people didn't show. I hope the 2016 Olympics learns from this & allows them be re-sold.

\- In 2008, we had a simple grid to show what events were & were not still available. I'm not sure why that was dropped. I disagree with only showing events that still have inventory. A common use case is people have their tickets, but want to hop online as the event nears to get more details. Having that data readily available is a good thing.

A lot of it is typical blog snark, so I may have missed some of other valid points.

However, the last thing I'd add is the that the technology behind ticketing is _hard_. Prior to Google, I'd worked at Yahoo. Those are the only two companies I know of that have both the technology & talent to build a credible ticketing system. Most people who people who tell me they could start a company that could crush Ticketmaster's technology and even have thoughts about the MySQL schema make me chuckle. They often just stare blankly when it's pointed out that tickets are not a fungile resource, not realizing what that means or scaling challenges it presents. And that's just the tip of the iceberg of the problems.

<comment> ldd- When I was in Germany in 2006 during the World Cup, they had an online system in place to allow people to return their tickets. They would then periodically re-release those tix into the pool . . . it was through that reissue process that I secured all of my tix.

Of course, the Olympics is a far more complex set of events, but I'd have to imagine it would have been easy to implement this year (6 years later).

<comment><USER5> I'm relatively certain people can already return Olympic tickets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's common practice to make tickets hard to buy. You might think they would set the price high enough that the tickets barely sell out, but there are good reasons to allocate some tickets to enthusiastic non-wealthy people. They make better live audiences. This is why people stand in line overnight to get those Pink Floyd tickets. Ticketmaster seems to have built the digital equivalent.

<comment><USER7> Wouldn't letting the tickets sell out almost instantly achieve the same result? You'd sell only to those enthusiastic enough to sit there hitting the reload button until the exact moment when they become available.

<comment><USER8> But in the long run you end up creating the perception that the ONLY way to buy tickets is camping the website at availability time. Which I suspect would likely result in people just not bothering in the end.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The worst part about all this is how much the company that built the site must've charged (I'm guessing somewhere between atmospheric and stratospheric).

<comment><USER10> Exactly. The olympics are all about maximum profit and spending as little as possible of the money stolen from the public.

From this point of view, none of the olympic shambles (e.g. g4s security) are terribly surprising.

<comment><USER11> G4S are a tier 3 sponsor of the Olympics. Thus, they paid £10m to be a sponsor.

G4S were also involved, before they got the contract, in the bid for the Olympics.

Pretty sleazy.

<comment><USER12> Tangent: G4S, and their predecessor Securicor, should win some kind of award for cyberpunk-esque corporate branding. A nebulous private security company named as an inscrutable 3-letter code (now), or as the very generic "Security Corporation" (then) are both pretty good. Also, the former slogan, "Securicor Cares".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> While people who try to make the process easier are being arrested

> London's Metropolitan Police said they had arrested 16 people since Friday > for illegal reselling of Olympics tickets

And then everyone is shocked by the empty seats.

[http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/timworstall/100019212/o...](http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/timworstall/100019212/of- course-there-are-empty-olympic-seats-our-victorian-government-is-arresting- anyone-who-tries-to-sell-them/)

<comment><USER14> I had tickets for the olympics and was unable to attend. I tried over several days to try and get the tickets reallocated, I wasn't even interested in getting any money for them, just wanted them to be used by someone else. Supposedly this can be done from the website but the expected link was replaced by a message saying my tickets were ineligible for resale. I then tried to phone customer support to see if there was any other way to let other people use the tickets (you have to have your name on the tickets so you can't just give them to family or friends). After hearing a recorded message I was then told that the call would now be disconnected. I then tried to phone the sales line, this time I managed to speak to someone but they told me that I needed to phone the customer support number to do anything about the tickets. When I told them that the line was just a recorded message they told me that the customer support line would disconnect if it was too busy... After several failed attempts to call the support line the event went ahead with 2 empty seats. Watching the coverage on tv it appeared that I was far from being the only person that had these problems...

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does anyone else think that the original article would have been better with a simple 'walk through' of the process, then an evaluative comment, perhaps referencing against UI literature?

(Ticketmaster = confusion and stumbling, we are used to that in UK.)

</comment><comment><USER16> While you have many valid points, some of them could be contended:

1) Searching by event makes much more sense than 'show me what's available'. It goes some way to help the tickets (mainly) go to the people who specifically want to see _that_ event.

At a guess, you just wanted to see a random event (and that's fine) and the UX sucked for you. But if you were dying to see the Fencing, you might be glad that Fencing tickets were 'randomly' offered to people who just wanted to see anything :).

2) Showing events that are unavailable, again, this makes more sense than the opposite. If the search didn't show these unavailable events, they would undoubtably be inundated with telephone calls from people asking to buy tickets to these events.

<comment><USER17> You can solve 2) easily by adding a simple "Fencing _(sold out)_ " label in the list. But it looks like they cannot really tell if an event is sold out.

<comment><USER18> Well it takes a while for the carrier pigeons to come back with ticket status. You can't have EVERYTHING.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Ticketing is just plain hard and anyone who disagrees is just wrong.

The site is getting a few hundred thousands users a day right now trying to ger a few thousand tickets mostly between 7pm and 10pm.

While I agree LOGOC could of got a lot of the copy and menus better, trying to display "real-time" availability and keeping ticket sales fair is very very hard and Ticketmaster are doing a fairly decent job.

<comment><USER20> No, ticketing is fairly easy.

Fairly allocating a severely undersupplied stock of tickets without allowing the price mechanism to arbitrate is very hard.

Thinking it's a technology problem, when it's an economics problem, doesn't make it any easier.

<comment><USER21> 'Fairly allocating a severely undersupplied stock of tickets without allowing the price mechanism to arbitrate is very hard.'

This is part of ticketing. This is a challenge. So ticketing isn't easy.

<comment><USER20> Plenty of events, in fact the vast majority of them, don't suffer from this undersupply.

<comment><USER21> That's very true. But it's true for many fields that most of the difficulty/challenge/complexity comes from a relatively small proportion of the cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Poorly thought-out websites seem to be a pattern with high profile sporting events.

The 2010 FIFA World Cup site was shoddier than the Olympics, with rapid time outs, and other instabilities. They also lacked any way of keeping bots out, and I suspect a few people made money by blasting the site with automated ticket requests.

</comment><comment><USER23> As a native Atlantan who was 18 during the 1996 games, I recall tickets being absolutely easy to get (many for below face value) pretty much anywhere you went in the Olympic village area. If you don't care which event you get into, the easiest hack is to just go down there and buy them in person.

<comment><USER2> The London 2012 Olympic tickets are not for resale. The terms and conditions for the tickets dictate that they cannot be resold and any tickets that are resold are considered invalid. Of course they cannot possibly check that for all tickets, but so far it seems to work because I haven't seen anyone trying to resell tickets.

<comment><USER24> There are also much stronger laws (and enforcement practices) around reselling sports tickets in the UK than in the US.

<comment><USER2> Yep, reselling tickets is actually illegal and can land you in jail (or at least a hefty fine): <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-19109747>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> You can search across all sports - just don't select one. Choose a from date and to date and search.

Agree with the rest of your comments. The "currently unavailable" and "these are not currently on sale" are particularly disappointing.</comment>