American Nations: An attempt to hack (i.e., fix) American political gridlock - <AUTHOR> http://seantevis.com/american-nations/

<comment><USER2> A thing _is_ what it _does_. What you label it with isn't anywhere near as important as what it _does_.

In practice, these "nations" appear to be nothing more than special interest groups. Special interest groups already tend to expand well beyond their original goals in the political arena. That doesn't work because the active leadership takes over and speaks for the public; why these would avoid that, I don't know. So, the solution to too many special interest groups is more special interest groups.

Also, I think he uses "Tea Party" like bogeymen. To the extent the movement involves cutting government down, it will actually increase the scope of agreement within the government by cutting down the number of domains in which there is disagreement. In fact, my personal prescription for where we are right now is for a significant return of power to the states. Some things have to be national-scale policy, but the list is much shorter than you think. We don't need a national-scale health care plan. Many of our states are larger than European countries that manage. State plans already exist. We don't need national agreement on any given social issue. If we weren't centralizing all our power, we wouldn't have to spend so much time arguing what the central policy should be.

The other major problem these sort of idealistic ideas have is that it basically promises everybody that it will bring the world closer to their viewpoint, but that can't actually happen. Right now, for better or worse, our government is more liberal than our population, so if your plan is to push our government yet more liberal by empowering the population, err, well, you might want to rethink that plan.

<comment><USER3> _In fact, my personal prescription for where we are right now is for a significant return of power to the states. Some things have to be national- scale policy, but the list is much shorter than you think. We don't need a national-scale health care plan. Many of our states are larger than European countries that manage. State plans already exist. We don't need national agreement on any given social issue. If we weren't centralizing all our power, we wouldn't have to spend so much time arguing what the central policy should be._

I think you actually underestimate the complexities here. The problem isn't number of people -- you're correct, many states are as large as European countries. However, the states don't have nearly as much self-governing power (as granted by the Constitution) as European countries. In things like healthcare, this makes a big difference. For example, one of the biggest benefits to the federal government is that it can temporarily run a budget deficit during hard times. There are innumerable times (including now) when that would be necessary for a large swath of public services. It would require a rather huge change in federal law in order to make this work on the state level. Another problem you would get is massive problems with the full-faith- and-credit clause. All in all, it may be worth considering that, accounting for modern high-speed transportation and intercommunication and trade, strong states may be an antiquated idea.

 _Right now, for better or worse, our government is more liberal than our population_

That's difficult to argue. Notably, consider that one person's vote in Wyoming counts 67 times more than a Californian's in the US Senate and 1.264 times a Californian's in the House of Representatives.

<comment><USER4> For what it is worth Denmark runs a deficit now, and I doubt there is a single state in the US that is anywhere as tiny as Denmark.

Granted the Danish economy is more sound than, say California but still.

<comment><USER5> The population of Denmark is 5.5 million, which if it were a US state, would make it the 21st largest state.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Instead of donating $1 to some guy on the Internet who made a cartoon, how about running for local office in your township right now? You might be surprised how easy it is to get involved in government at the level where most real decisions are made (the school board, planning boards, etc). The overwhelming majority of people in your township pay zero attention to local governance.

Which "tipping point" is more interesting: the one where Internet cartoon guy gets $67,000 and a long list of names on a web page, or the one where several hundred people from Hacker News end up on school boards?

As I get older, I find myself making friends with more and more people who have gotten off their asses and actually done this. I promise, it's easier than starting a company, and it's a drastically lower time commitment.

<comment><USER7> Sean Tevis--the "some guy on the internet" I think you're talking about--ran for State Representative (Kansas) in 2008.

<comment><USER6> Tevis ran for the KS house, and lost, probably in part because he tried to make a national movement out of the KS house (I followed the race somewhat closely and his fundraising was definitely part of the negative package aimed at him).

My point is, forget about a national political movement. Engage with local politics, for local reasons. "Move" towards real engagement, not the feel-good merit-badge engagement that this article alludes to, where by giving a buck and signalling your support you might help create some sort of "tipping point" that will fix national politics.

Anybody who's telling you that you can fix dysfunctional national politics by giving up your credit card number online is, obviously, selling you something. I bet a lot of people on HN could easily get themselves onto township planning committees, where they can actually make a real difference.

<comment><USER8> So you're telling HN people to give up their time programming or doing startups to volunteer time for government planning, politicking against adversaries, and the like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> THE ROLE OF FIRST NATION

Mancur Olson suggested offering generic benefits to attract people to his large groups.

The difficulty in that is where do these benefits come from? Small groups don't have the resources to put that together. So we came up with First Nation - something large and stable enough to put together core packages of benefits for any other Nation to offer to their members.

Then there's the problem of what groups should be able to get them? A group of 10 people? 1000? 10,000? First nation would have to set some kind of criteria.

It's a non-profit. There are a dozen ways you can set it up to avoid it becoming a king-maker.

We realized we could also use First Nation as a Watchdog group. They're not necessary for this part of the system to work, but it could be effective.

Congress voted on a financial overhaul bill last week, for example. First Nation would have polled the other Nations to see how they felt about what needs to be done, what they'd like to see.

The financial industry had lots of lobbyists involved in the bill, but there were few, if any, representatives from consumer protection groups or similar. In this scenario, I'm pretty sure at least one or two Nations would propose some new ideas or have some comment on what was passed.

They'd try to convince other Nations to lend support. This "encompassing coalition" of Nations could sway the direction of financial overhaul to something that's beneficial to the larger public rather than the bank lobby.

SPECIAL INTEREST GROUPS

These aren't special interest groups.

I'd join a Science Nation, for example. What's their agenda in financial regulation? None. But I bet some of the people there might have some interesting and good perspective on what should be done. These are "general interest groups". If the bill being discussed were about funding a supercollider, on the other hand, then I think you could say they're biased. And the other Nations would know it.

GRIDLOCK

That's a terrible argument. If your car can only go 10 mph, then it might help you avoid fatal crashes, but it also makes it difficult to go anywhere. Take Immigration Reform. The system has been broken for 20 years. Did you see the bit in the comic about why negative campaigning works in a winner-take-all system? Immigration hasn't been fixed because right now all a politician needs to do is discredit an idea instead of proposing a new one. There is no "win" for anyone who proposes an idea.

WHAT'S THE 67,000 FOR?

Fair question. I'm running for office and using the campaign to pitch an idea that might help fix the system a little bit. Even if you don't buy Olson's ideas, the _worst_ that happens is that you end up with groups that offer benefits similar to AARPs. I do need to fund my campaign. I didn't think asking for a dollar was so onerous that it would raise suspicion of impropriety.

TEA PARTY

Well, they really _are_ bogeymen. :-)

<comment><USER10> I certainly _want_ something like this to work, but I still don't understand your explanation why these aren't special interest groups. I'm a member of the ACLU, which is already a large group that lobbies heavily to retain basic freedoms; what benefit would there be to them becoming "ACLU Nation"? I'm a member of NARP (Nat'l Assoc. of Rail Passengers), which is a somewhat smaller group that lobbies for better rail policy (both Amtrak and more local commuter rail and mass transit), AND they've negotiated a 10% discount on Amtrak travel. What would NARP Nation be able to do that NARP can't now?

<comment><USER11> >what benefit would there be to them becoming "ACLU Nation"?

I don't think there is one. The idea is to get far more people to join something similar and get them engaged (which I see as the biggest problem. Shallow engagement requiring no effort is easy, getting people to actually vote is apparently incredibly difficult).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Yes, it would start with lots of "Nations", each offering different benefits and having different ideas. Sounds great.

But then over time, the "First Nation" would start to think that every Nation should provide some obvious basic benefits. Obviously if a Nation doesn't provide healthcare benefits that's a pretty crappy Nation, right?

So First Nation would decide that all Nations have to provide healthcare benefits. Then there would be a big fight between the First Nationers and the Nations-rights-ers.

Then someone would come up with some crazy idea to end disagreement between the Nation's once and for all and ask everyone to donate a dollar.

</comment><comment><USER13> note, the following is from the curmudgeonly/cynical side of my personality.

Gridlock is a feature not a defect. Gridlock is what keeps politicians from running roughshod over the public. Have you really considered how much damage a government unhampered by gridlock could do? I mean yes, they might slip something good in there once in a while but really...

ask not what your country can do for you

nor ask what can you do for your country

ask instead what can you do to keep your country from "doing" to you.

vote gridlock!

<comment><USER14> I once heard someone say that the last thing people want is an efficient government. Imagine if, as soon as your vehicle registration expired, a state official drove up and put a boot on your car.

I heard someone else say, the best relationship you can have with government is one where their attention is not focused on you.

<comment><USER11> Imagine if, as soon as someone started robbing a bank, the police showed up and stopped them.

The second one I like to an extent. Its true if you have a government whose objective is to protect its citizens and nothing else. Democrats want a government that actively helps people. If implemented correctly I'd want that government's attention. As with most things, ideas are easy, good implementation is hard.

<comment><USER14> Why stop there? Government could monitor all potential bank robber's communications, or hell, even profile them, send in undercover agents to infiltrate their circles and provide them with fake bank-robbing tools, ideal target bank locations, and moral support.

<comment><USER11> Now you're talking. Do you have a newsletter I can subscribe to?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This loss of common ground has happened before, in the mid-1800's. Some of these issues were resolved at the end of the Civil War (e.g. states' rights [0]). But not all of them: when some state legislatures were unable to choose U.S. senators, the vote had to go to the people (the 17th amendment to the U.S. constitution) [1].

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War#States.27_ri...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War#States.27_rights)

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventeenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventeenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution#History)

<comment><USER16> His contention of "common ground" in the '60s is utterly fatuous as anyone who lived through it or like me came of age just after it and studied it knows.

In fact, it bears more than a little resemblance to the current period: what was pretty close to an effective super-majority due to LBJ's political skills that resulted in the enactment of vast swathes of the liberal agenda ("The Great Society"), the first since the time of FDR, and a fierce counter- revolution that started inside the Republican party that resulted in Goldwater, Nixon and finally Reagan (who as I recall did his first big thing on the national political scene in an item he did for Goldwater's campaign).

(Not very parallel to today, but also a sign of a serious lack of "common ground" was the foundering of the great Democratic Party crusade to "contain" Communism, which led to the party's smashup in 1968 and its eventual radicalization on many fronts.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I invoke something similar to Greenspun's Tenth Rule (any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.)

This would be an inferior implementation of a concept of 'leave everyone the fuck alone' aka libertarianism/minarchism/what have you.

</comment><comment><USER18> I think it's sort of interesting that the solution for the problem of all of these virtual groups splintering or again becoming polarized against each other is essentially an autocratic one. But what's to stop "First Nation" -- our virtual group philosopher king -- from becoming biased or corrupted by partisanship?

</comment><comment><USER19> This was on HN a couple of months ago; see <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1436101> to read the previous discussion.

</comment><comment><USER20> This cartoon is loose on the details, but I think he's just suggesting coalition governments. Lots of countries have coalition governments, and have many problems with their politics. The UK election this year resulted in a coalition government and the large parties badmounthed the idea of a coalition, claiming it was weak and unstable government. Trying to make the same thing in the USA would probably result in the same campaigning against the idea.

<comment><USER21> Yet so far the UK coalition government has been (in my and most of my friends view) quite alot better than either Conservatives or Labour would have been alone.

<comment><USER22> The advantage of a coalition between two parties that have been traditionally opposed is that they have to try to resolve their differences rather than simply using them as a stick to beat each other with.

The political system in the UK is somewhat different in that its tending towards three major parties who are converging on the political centre (complicated and fragmented further by the popular regional parties in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland). Not sure it works the same when it's a straight fight between the red corner and the blue corner.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> _There is no second place in the current political system._ That's where I see the problem. The best ideas in the world don't mean squat if you don't get elected. So if I really believed that I could make a difference I would have to beg, borrow, steal, promise, and backroom deal my way to the finish line or the other guy will. Highlander: There can be only one.

If I had a magic political wand, I'd make it so the top two people win with everyone getting to vote for two different people-- double sized districts represented by two people and the Senator races are for both at once. Make primaries be all party inclusive with the top four moving on to battle it out for the two winning spots.

More political hubub at once would compel voters to pay more attention. Extremists on both sides would look ugly in comparison to the sensible ones. And third party people with a mix of ideas might actually have a shot of getting a word in because voting for one doesn't mean risking a complete loss to your party of choice.

Now where did I put that magic political wand again?

</comment><comment><USER24> Can I join more than one group? If not, does that force me to support either a Science Nation _or_ a Business Nation _or_ a Coffee Nation, when all might balance my opinion?

If I can join more than one group, does that impact the democratic principle [1] of one person - one vote? And what's to stop this becoming like the 'Like' feature on Facebook, where everyone has 100 pages they clicked to like but never think about again?

[1] It's a principle, though it's tough to create a level playing field in practice. For instance, in Presidential elections small states have a minimum of 3 electoral college votes, so a vote in Wyoming is worth more than a vote in Texas or New York.

</comment><comment><USER25> Didn't we have a discussion on the dangers of tribalism just the other day <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1561607> ? Why should it be a good idea this week just because your tribe comes with a cheap data plan and a fancy credit card?

And how big should these nations be? Should each be able to keep modern society running on its own, which according to some numbers cites here recently would put a lower bound of 100 million on them <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1541795> .

</comment><comment><USER26> there was already a war about this.

non-geographical based governance doesn't work unless respect for property rights is uniform...in which case the motivation to do this will be nonexistant since that is the biggest issue.

</comment><comment><USER27> Can someone explain why his early point about having lost common ground has come about?

Seems likely to me that a lot of political parties might tend to come closer together over time, because they will always have the support of the extremes (ie. if the Republicans move a bit closer to centre, the hard-right conservatives might grumble a bit but won't ditch them and vote Democrat) but by shifting to more centrist policies they can potentially pick up more middle-of-the-road voters. What is happening in the US that makes the reverse true, that the parties are becoming more polarised?

<comment><USER28> they're only polarized from certain viewpoints. over here off to the side, they're basically in lock step about everything except for a tiny handful of issues. the amount of smoke and noise being produced by those issues keeps going up, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> So um, what 67,000 dollars actually do?

<comment><USER10> $67K is irrelevant (to his argument). $$$ from 67K supporters is relevant---it would mean he can claim more donors than the tea party, and hence that he is significant.

At least, that's his argument. I'm not sure that it would work out that way; as it stands right now, tea party rallies can get media coverage even when they're much smaller than some other kinds of rallies that can't, for a whole bundle of reasons that are mostly not very rational.

EDIT to make clearer where I'm restating his argument and where I'm arguing with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Does he really think that getting 67k people to sign up makes his proposal more significant than the tea party?

If so, he's too clueless to be allowed to vote. If not, he's another con man.

</comment><comment><USER30> Gridlock is fine. It's not a bug, it's a feature. The American political system is designed to make it difficult to get anything done. In theory it works out to a limitation on the power of the government and on slim majorities.

</comment><comment><USER31> In general when the gov't passes a bill it tries to maximize spending and minimize taxation. This generally results in a) more gov't and b) higher deficits, as long as that is the direction that congress as a whole is taking I say that gridlock is a good thing.

"No man's life, liberty or property are safe while the Legislature is in session." - Gideon J. Tucker

</comment><comment><USER32> So far, to fight "Special Interest Groups" we have:

The Bulldawg Nation.

The No Kill Nation (human treatment of pets)

Drunk Nation

LGBTQ Nation

Netroorts Nation

Outdoor Nation

A Woman's Nation

Elevation Nation

Basically Sean has created Facebook, but you give him money for his political campaign fund first.

That said, at least he's trying _something_.</comment>


Why the U.S. President Needs a Council of Historians - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/09/dont-know-much-about-history/492746/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> Historians probably sabotaged their relevance when they decided to wade into the frigid waters of propaganda.

</comment><comment><USER3> Please...this 10000x</comment>


True Social Software - Part II of Social Network Services of 2010 - <AUTHOR> http://socialstrategist.com/2008/02/19/true-social-software-snss-of-2010-part-ii

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello fellow Hacker News readers! I wrote this submission myself, and decided to submit it because I thought the community here would find it interesting. Several others in #startups on irc.freenode.net thought it wasn't a bad idea to submit my own material, and as far as I know news.YC doesn't have a policy against self-promotion.

If the community feels differently, that's worth discussing and perhaps noting somewhere.

Otherwise, I hope you find my article interesting. Another article(so I'm not spamming with separate submissions) startup founders may be interested in is:

The Importance of Taking Your Startup Global - [http://socialstrategist.com/2007/08/20/go-global-or-lose- one...](http://socialstrategist.com/2007/08/20/go-global-or-lose-one-hundred- million-dollars)</comment>


The End of Labor: How to Protect Workers From the Rise of Robots - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/01/the-end-of-labor-how-to-protect-workers-from-the-rise-of-robots/267135/

<comment><USER2> What a dim and false view of people!

People can learn new things. I'm not saying it's easy for them, or anyone else. But constant learning and engaging your mind fully is what a good human life requires. There's no divine right of stagnation.

</comment><comment><USER3> There was a time where the idea that people would be able to work less due to robots and machines was thought to be the way of the future - what happened to that?

<comment><USER4> I think we realized that if we work less, we also get paid less--except for the person who owns all the robots and machines.</comment></comment>


The expense of a Javascript line of code compared to a Java one - <AUTHOR> http://www.theserverside.com/feature/The-Expense-of-a-Line-of-JavaScript-Code

<comment><USER2> I think the article favors the authors bias, I helped architect and write possible the largest JavaScript code base in production, it was for an IBM project and was well over what the article cites as a large Java app. After writing large Javascript apps for several years, I would say in my experience the difference is negligible on a line of code basis. But what can be accomplished with JavaScript is not.

The reason that developers are abandoning, JSP, ASP, PHP for JavaScript apps is because the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks and those benefits would still exist even if JavaScript was double the cost per line (which is the worst way to measure the cost of development).

JavaScript allows us to reduce the technology stack from a bunch of proprietary server languages that are not portable among server, to the browser which is very portable. When a JavaScript front end is designed to communicate with a REST facade, it makes the front end portable among any of the back end choices, further it provides a way to allow a front end to utilize completely disparaenent back ends (think Facebook and twitter integration).

JavaScript forces you to look at your business as a set of services forcing you to develop a service based platform. The advantages of this are becoming more and more apparent.

Finally, in forcing the service based architecture it becomes easy for companies to rapidly produce front ends for platforms like the iPhone or IVR. Delivering to new platforms becomes a rapid development exercise because JavaScript web apps inherently force you to decouple the UI from the business systems.

There are a lot of advantages to developing applications with JavaScript few of them have to do with the cost of line by line code and more to do with total cost of ownership and technical debt. When those are factored in the value of JavaScript apps becomes apparent.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes of course you cannot accomplish exactly the same things with Javascript as with Java for the simple fact that Javascript is imposed as (almost) the only scripting language understood by the browser. To use Java on the client side (not as an applet) you need a generator like GWT or our own Strongly-typed Javascript (<http://st-js.sourceforge.net> ). I agree that the line of code is maybe not the best way to measure the cost of development but it's a simple way to compare similar languages (given that all the other costs of the project are the same regardless the language). Using multiple complex external and internal libraries, refactoring the code to adapt to new business requirements, debugging in Javascript seems very time consuming to me. The help of an IDE these days is extremely important. A simple syntax highlighter (even with some auto-complete support) is far from being enough. I'm still curious what IDE you used for your project and what was the cost, the size of a module where the requirements didn't change much. As a side question, how do you rename a method for example with the tool use (imagine that another method with the same name exists in a different class/module)?

<comment><USER2> _I'm still curious what IDE you used for your project_

I use Netbeans, it does not get a lot of press but they have been outpacing many of the dedicated JavaScript IDE's they have great JavaScript support.

 _how do you rename a method for example with the tool use (imagine that another method with the same name exists in a different class/module)_

I use Dojo for large JavaScript projects, there really is not an alternative when you get the the application sizes I deal in, as such everything is namespaced. Netbeans can refactor methods in JavaScript, so I use the built in functionality of the IDE to do so.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have a colleague who uses Netbeans for Javascript so I took a look. And yes it looks better than the default Eclipse editor for Javascript (the jQuery auto-completion is quite interesting). But still it's not working in many situations, unlike the Java support that works all the time.

<comment><USER2> Did you add jQuery support through the libraries? or did you just add it in your project, I have found auto-complete works a lot better when you explicitly add the project to Netbeans via the libraries mechanism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The only problem I see that this guy has is, "I don't know of any good tools for Javascript".

These tools exist. Emacs, Vim, Komodo Edit/IDE, ... Visual Studio might even have support for Javascript at this point.

</comment><comment><USER4> A line of Javascript might be two or three times as expensive as a line of Java... but maybe a line of Javascript can do as much as two or three lines of Java.

</comment><comment><USER5> tldr; some enterprise Java developer is intimidated by the rising popularity of JavaScript.</comment>


A-Painter: Paint in VR in Your Browser (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mozvr.com/a-painter/ <comment><USER2> Hey, we're most of the creators of A-Painter (along with Fernando Serrano from Mozilla). If you like A-Painter, check out what we're doing now with Supermedium (YC W18), a full VR browser. We're featuring A-Painter there, and may do more cool things with it! [https://store.steampowered.com/app/803010/Supermedium__Virtu...](https://store.steampowered.com/app/803010/Supermedium__Virtual_Reality_Browser/)

</comment><comment><USER3> A-Painter is great and was probably the inspiration behind several iOS AR apps like Paint Space AR ([https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/paint-space- ar/id1260267722](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/paint-space- ar/id1260267722)), Draw AR ([https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/world- brush/id1255729229](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/world-brush/id1255729229)) and World Brush ([https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/world- brush/id1277410449](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/world- brush/id1277410449)).</comment>


Returning Due Process to Campus - <AUTHOR> https://www.city-journal.org/john-doe-v-purdue-univ <comment><USER2> It's a moral panic, at least in part. Panic explains why due process is ignored and why accusations are considered unassailable. But questioning accusations is not the same as denying them. And while reliving trauma is a risk it can be mitigated by using an intermediary like a lawyer or therapist.

Another piece is the increasing insular nature of some institutions. Ideas ricochet within the walled gardens of higher ed, gain momentum, and lead to results that appear zany to the outside world. Focus is needed to study; but insular practices are creating campuses that are worlds unto themselves.

That's not to say we shouldn't agitate against bad practices in society. Real progress is being made in the real world to combat sexual assault and sex crimes.[1] But it's hard to see how campus protestors are having any positive impact outside their hallowed halls.

[1] [https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2019/07/nati...](https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2019/07/nationwide- epidemic-of-untested-rape-kits-atlantic-daily/594046/)

<comment><USER3> Glad to see that this type of thing is getting reversed. If you believe all accusations without the most basic of investigations, you are on the edge of a very slippery slope.

It's generally very simple to find out if someone is lying: just question them 5-6 different times about what happened. No one who is lying or exaggerating keeps their story straight.

I had a friend who was the victim of a false allegation but he fought very hard and people lost their jobs over it because they didn't follow basic investigative procedures. In the end, he was out time, money and peace of mind because someone was vindictive - he wanted to break up with her. It of course helped that he was rich enough to fund a multi-pronged attack.

The woman received no repercussions.

<comment><USER4> _It 's generally very simple to find out if someone is lying: just question them 5-6 different times about what happened. No one who is lying or exaggerating keeps their story straight._

I understand that the same can be true of people who are not lying or exaggerating. Every time we remember something, the memories change. I'd be surprised if someone managed the exact same story when questioned 5-6 different times.

<comment><USER3> That's why you don't talk to the cops, guilty or innocent

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I know a lot of people here already know this story, but it's worth mentioning: while in college, I was railroaded through the judicial system in political retaliation after winning the Presidency of the Student Body. This was 13 years ago now. Crazy story.

Here's a documentary that a bunch of us put together about it:

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL11F04BB4661C2CC3](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL11F04BB4661C2CC3)

Some aspects the Purdue case resonate with mine. Others not so much.

I did learn a lot about how little oversight there is over these processes and how much corrupt officials count on the qualified immunity doctrine.

<comment><USER6> Is this written up anywhere? I'm not about to watch an 85-minute (!) documentary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was nearly involved in a sexual assault case in college.

7 of us were in my dorm room, watching a movie on my computer. 3 girls, 4 guys, including myself. My roommate and I had our beds bunked, him on the bottom, me up top. The accuser was laying next to my roommate on his bunk, I was laying on mine, everyone else was in chairs.

The accuser, like halfway through the movie abruptly gets up and leaves without saying a word. Not a "no", "stop" or anything. Just silence and left. The 6 of us remain were like wtf? Then finished the movie and watched another.

The next week, one of the other girls told us guys something to the effect of: "you won't believe the shit I'm hearing. (Accuser) is saying she was sexually assaulted by you guys the night we were watching movies. And I know that didnt happen, I was right there."

We knew we didn't do anything, but we're scared shitless. One of the guys was an international student and was worried about being deported if expelled while on his student visa.

We nipped it in the bud by the lot of us going immediately to the Dean of Students to address it. He hadn't even heard the accusation yet. He believed us that the accusation was bullshit (the accusation was that somone unhooked her bra without her consent). 6 people vs 1 helped a lot. This was in 2000 and Universities assuming guilt was already prevalent then. We were pretty terrified.

I dont know what the accuser's thoughts were. Maybe she was seeking attention. I just dont know and nearly 20 years later, don't care. But she traumatized 6 people with a false allegation spread by rumors.

All of that said, it's important to investigate ALL allegations of assault/abuse, but it's simultaneously important to not rush to judgement and assume guilt. Due process is prescribed in the US Constitution for a reason. (Admittedly this might not hold for all private schools, but it should still be a guiding principle.)

<comment><USER8> There's always motive when someone does something. People don't do things for no reason or just because they are crazy. The question is why did she do the thing that she did. When I look at all realistic scenarios someone may have unhooked the bra.

But I'm also thinking it's not big enough a deal to report it either. I mean come on, my ex punched me (hard) on the shoulder before, that's enough to put her in jail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Maybe someday we can find the middle ground between railroading undergrads with no evidence and taking decades to stop predators like Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Cosby and probably countless others.

<comment><USER10> I wonder what the qualitative differences between Epstein/Cosby and college undergrads could be.

<comment><USER11> Do you really? You don't know what the difference between rich and powerful men and a bunch of mostly no-name nobody young adults?

<comment> 0-_-0 I wonder what the qualitative differences between sarcasm and a genuine question could be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It has always struck me as a very weird practice for colleges to be adjudicating criminal matters like rape.

<comment><USER13> Part of the problem is the abdication of most police forces and DAs to prosecute rape, date rape in particular.

The university system fills the gap, sometimes poorly.

<comment><USER14> I'm not sure it's an abdication - but rather the result of the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard being hard to overcome in a "he said she said" situation.

<comment><USER15> I'm sure that's part of it, but police departments have an atrocious record when it comes to investigating sexual assault: [https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2019/07/nati...](https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2019/07/nationwide- epidemic-of-untested-rape-kits-atlantic-daily/594046/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Here's the thing - universities can't compel people to testify. And there are no consequences for retaliating against witnesses.

Until universities can compel testimony and subpoena evidence from everyone, including non-students/employees, they can't have fair proceedings.

Until they have that power, they should be severely restricted in what negative negative findings they can make.

An accuser/accused who had to beg people to testify in their support isn't likely to get justice.

<comment><USER11> Here's the thing, too: sexual assault is a crime. Universities shouldn't even be investigating crimes at all. That should fall to law enforcement. And, if a conviction is obtained by the appropriate authorities (who do have the power to compel testimony and such), then the university should impose appropriate punishments, up to, and including expulsion or revocation of degrees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Not sure why the article had to bend into politics. There was more than enough evidence to support their position without going into a Democrats versus Trump/DeVoss angle to make a claim that this was somehow Democrats doing. I think it's fair to say that _any_ time you're having an adversarial process it's going to be difficult on both parties, there's clear cases of abuse that are missed, cases of poor/missed communications between people, cases of anger, cases where both parties were in a bad state to make adult decisions. College campuses in particular are, in America, the first time that real responsibilities of the world are levied at many young adults.

When it comes down to it, in cases of date rape, awkward sexual encounters, spousal/lover abuse, and all the messy areas of humanity in between, there's no way to get every bad actor, sometimes there's not enough evidence, and that's a terrible place to have to be. Sometimes the courts and tribunals are going to get it wrong, and that's another terrible place to be. That doesn't mean that we don't do everything within our power to make places of learning, both inside and outside the classroom, as safe as possible. That doesn't mean we ignore our responsibility to each other to attempt to make right cases of provable injustice. That also means that we don't destroy lives without evidence. Difficult decisions are the cornerstone of adult lives.

</comment><comment><USER18> There's two double-standards at play:

\- victimhood hierarchy - prioritizing obscure identity attributes over the person.

\- elite apartheid - celebrities, rich, popular, beautiful don't have to play by the same rules or receive the same punishments as everyone else. Also, the very bottom of society receives far more punishment than the middle.

Furthermore, there are several ambiguous, likely unknowable by anyone else, situations in the case of rape, because it's often a s/he-said situation due often to a lack of unbiased witnesses or solid evidence:

\- Whether there was force or not

\- Whether there was explicit, implicit or no consent

\- If there was consent, was it later revoked or not, explicitly or weakly

\- Is the allegation for actual harm or ego-/guilt-/remorse/-alleviation/revenge/enjoyment/attention

Actual rape isn't good, but an unfair/unnecessarily unpleasant process to suss-out what may/may not be possible to discover doesn't help either. It's very tricky.

</comment><comment><USER19> At least public universities have some accountability to the law.

<comment> barry-cotter Any university that takes federal funds is amply exposed to the law of an administration wishes to so expose it.

<comment><USER19> However, a state university is also bound by the laws of the state, and are responsible to the voters at some basic level.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> According to the policy, I'm going to interpret this in the most generous light, but:

1\. At 15:12 MT, this had 11 votes and was on the front page 2\. Almost immediately after, this was flagged 3\. The comments that say "56 minutes ago" where already there 4\. It is now 16:54 MT (1:52 ago)

I think there is a bug in HN timestamps, and also (subjectively) the moderation.

<comment><USER21> We turned off the flags on the post and rolled back the clock on it by about an hour, since that's about how long it was flagged.</comment></comment>


Z-Quads, a spatial coordinate system - <AUTHOR> http://blog.quenta.org/2014/08/z-quads-construction.html

<comment><USER2> Great job on taking the time to do a writeup! Last year, I designed a similar algorithm from scratch one weekend to implement some complex spatio-temporal visualizations. I was ecstatic because it was faster than Quadtrees. I thought that I had invented something new. Later, I read somewhere that a mathematician had invented that algorithm close to 200 years ago! Not only did that burst my bubble, but it also made me feel stupid for not having found it. Anyway, using this approach I was able to implement a Linear Quadtree in Javascript using Typed arrays that could accommodate 1 Arc Second resolution all the way up to 60 Arc Minutes if you wanted to. It is extremely performant and I ended up using it to do some really neat animated heatmaps. I went through the invention process myself only to realize someone had thought of that problem ~200 years ago. No idea why that person did it though. I suppose mathematicians did that back in the days....wonder what the application was!

This process is known as Z-Order Curve ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-order_(curve)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-order_\(curve\))). You can quickly get to an index in memory or a cell/location on the map using Morton-Encoding. It is also known as a Linear Quadtree.

Foundations of Multidimensional and Metric Data Structures is a great resource! Check it out at [http://gisandscience.com/2009/08/21/award-winning- book-by-ha...](http://gisandscience.com/2009/08/21/award-winning-book-by- hanan-samet-details-spatial-data-indexing-processes/).

</comment><comment><USER3> I think rather than using decimal numbering system lots of your logic (like finding the parent square, or all its children), if not all of it, really calls for a binary scheme: like this: First two bits defines which quad you are in (relative to root square), then the second two bits represents which quad within the quad you are in, and on down recursively. The number of bits in your system is perfectly determinable based on the granularity, you go for. Then bit masks, can be used for determining what are all the children of a given block (as integers), and what are all the parents. So the definition of your bit sequence IS 1) as efficient as possible with storage, 2) provides actual "free functionality" by bit masks, and so forth.

<comment><AUTHOR> Given a value how do you determine the granularity? How do you tell whether a leading 00 indicates a lower resolution quad or a higher resolution one in the 0th corner?

<comment><USER3> If you take a square, and split into 4, that has 2-Bit indexes. If your square has been split twice, it has 4-bit indexes for each of the tiniest sub- squares. So 'granularity' is a function of 'number of splits'. Quadrant a=00, b=01, c=10, d=11. So a bit sequence like 0110, would mean subquadrant 'c', within subquadrant 'b'. Each additional pair of bits added onto the right side "zooms you in" deeper by choosing which quadrant to jump to within a given square. Each time you zoom in, that requires two additional bits. Upper right hand corner would be an infinite series of 01010101010101 repeating. Top right quad of top right quad of top right quad, etc.

<comment><USER4> But most of the time these numbers will be represented in fixed size integers (64 bit words for example); there is no easy way to represent the bit sequence 0110 without making it at least 00000110, but more likely 64 bits, which becomes ambiguous; is this the top left of the top left of the top left of the top right of the bottom right (or whatever those coordinated might represent)? Or do we only look at the last two pairs? how many bits are significant? When sequential integers are used as described, there's no ambiguity; you can always figure out what where a value's quad is positioned from its magnitude.

<comment><USER3> There are many times in software development where you have an array of bits. By definition, an array doesn't have anything "in front" of it. Implementing an array of bits in a computer is a different matter. Normally you store bytes (8 bits at a time), but that's just an implementation detail, and only because computers handle bytes as the fundamental unit. Each two contiguous bits in a bit array can be used to "pick a quadrant" to zoom into a square, recursively. There is no limit or definition of how long the array needs to be unless you want to pre-specify that. You are basically confusing the concepts "Bit Array" with "Two's Compliment Integer storage". These two things are completely separate concepts of storage.

<comment><USER4> But the point of the representation is that locations can easily and unambiguously be stored in a single number, say a 64bit integer. A bit array necessarily has some overhead to specify the number of bits; something unnecessary in this proposal. Yes a standard using two bits per sector and specifying how many bits have been used in the actual representation is easier for a human to start to decipher, but it requires more information to be unambiguous and doesn't have as nice a binary representation (I'd rather have a fixed sized larger representation that the more complex one needed for an arbitrary sized bit array).

<comment><USER3> I was talking about pure arrays of bits, as a theoretical construct, but you are right to notice that if not all your arrays are the same length, then each array needs to specify a length. 64-bit integers are like bit-arrays where each array is pre-defined to be 64-bits long and therefore doesn't need to store its length. You could define all your bit arrays to be 8 bytes long each and accomplish the same thing. Your better tact at shooting holes in the bit- array approach is not from memory consumption (you loose on those grounds), but you from a 'performance' standpoint, you can make the case the integer comparisons all take one clock cycle, and operations on bit-arrays are slower, because you have to check each bit individually to do logic. Summary: For storage size, bit-arrays win, and for performance integers win. So based on system needs you'd choose a solution, weighing the pros/cons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The PYXIS spatial indexing scheme takes a similar approach, with a few interesting advantages (and undoubtedly some consequent disadvantages to go with them).

[http://www.pyxisinnovation.com/pyxwiki/index.php?title=How_P...](http://www.pyxisinnovation.com/pyxwiki/index.php?title=How_PYXIS_Works)

Once you get past the inexplicably florid and fervent language (it's a spatial indexing scheme, guys—not a holy revelation!) there are a couple of cool qualities that stand out to me:

\- The distribution of indices is very even over the globe. Yes, this scheme is specifically suited to indexing space on a globe, and not much else.

\- You can be arbitrarily precise by specifying a longer index. Truncating that index just makes it less precise. A major benefit that springs to mind here is the ease with which you could then query for overlapping indices.

\- Subdividing space by placing child indices at both cell vertices and centroids means there is always overlap between cells at neighbouring resolutions. Whilst this does make the scheme a tad inefficient in terms of storage (which may or may not be the most important detail depending on your application) it has the really neat consequence that any area smaller than a continent is guaranteed to fit wholly within a single index at some resolution. Schemes that avoid overlapping indices or coordinates for the sake of efficiency can never have this property.

(I stumbled upon PYXIS while looking for an addressing scheme to rip off for a game project I was working on years ago. Ultimately I decided that PYXIS was not well-suited to my needs and took a much simpler approach, but its novelty stuck it firmly in my mind anyway.)

</comment><comment><USER6> Here is a good explanation of the Quad-Key system used by both Bing and Google maps. [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/bb259689.aspx](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/bb259689.aspx)

Similar, but without sacrificing accuracy for built-in zoom information. Due to it's layout, they also support using bit -wise operators for all of their operations (since in reality these systems are all just interleaved x/y bits)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the link. I was familiar with google's system from when I worked there but couldn't find a good description of it so I assumed it was purely internal.

<comment><USER7> The S2 library is here: [https://code.google.com/p/s2-geometry- library/](https://code.google.com/p/s2-geometry-library/)

It's based on the hilbert curve.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _Unlike the existing coordinate systems I could find described on the web, a z-quad doesn't represent a point but a square with an area_

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

<comment><USER9> Also, MGRS: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGRS](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGRS)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Very neat. For more on this check out the wikipedia article on Morton order curved ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-order_(curve)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-order_\(curve\)))

<comment><USER11> I was thinking "why not a Hilbert curve?" but (from your link):

"As an alternative, the Hilbert curve has been suggested as it has a better order-preserving behaviour, but here the calculations are much more complicated, leading to significant processor overhead."

<comment><AUTHOR> I did give Hilbert curves a try at one point, what made me go with z-order instead is that there's an elegant way to convert between coordinates and z-order quads (which I'll describe in a later post) and I couldn't find something similar for Hilbert quads.

<comment><USER4> Really looking forward to this post! It's fascinating just how simple this system is; maybe I'll make a simple Haskell library implementing it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Here it is: [http://h14s.p5r.org/2014/09/z-quads- conversions.html](http://h14s.p5r.org/2014/09/z-quads-conversions.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As I mentioned in the comment section on the link, I think splitting into 16 and represented as a sequence hex digits would be amazing. It would vastly simplify operations since 123 contains 123(anything else) and is only contained by 12 and 1. Tada.

0xDEADBEEF would represent about a .14 mi^2 area. I wonder where it would be... Guess I'll have to implement it to find out! :)

</comment><comment><USER13> This is neat, but I can't believe the author managed to get through that entire explanation without ever using the word "heap". Perhaps he doesn't realise that his numbering is essentially using the same trick that we use with heaps to implement them within arrays?

That doesn't mean it isn't nifty, of course.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the pointer to d-ary heaps, there's some overlap there. You're right -- I simply wasn't aware of how those work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wonder if existing mipmap algorithms and hardware could be used for this kind of representation?

<comment><USER2> This can be done using an Array, so yes you can.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> i worry that this is only applicable to one map projection. (the map is not the territory.)

</comment><comment><USER16> what are the pro/cons compared to TMS z/x/y system?</comment>


Removing Shadow DOM boundaries from text editor elements - <AUTHOR> http://blog.atom.io/2016/11/14/removing-shadow-dom-boundary-from-text-editor-elements.html <comment><USER2> So, does this mean the shadow DOM is a bad idea, in general, or is there something special about Atom that makes it a bad idea for Atom or maybe even text editors in general? If so, what's the criterion to use to decide whether one should use the shadow DOM?

<comment><USER3> I don't think they're saying it's a bad idea in general, the issue here seems mostly related to the shadow dom making it difficult/complicated for people to theme atom/re-use components etc...

I'm not a web developer but I'm sure there are valid use cases for it, as well as use cases such as this one where it's not ideal

<comment><USER4> Which is strange given than shadow dom is supposed to make this easier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I still feel like using web technologies to build an editor was a strange choice. (Though I don't mean to disagree with the reasoning here, which sounds OK to me.)

<comment><USER6> Have a look a Visual Code for the proper way of writing an Atom like editor. Performs just like native.

<comment><USER7> I would love to see some analysis on this written up.

Having used VSCode for a while I'm always incredibly impressed with how snappy it is.

<comment><USER8> Is Atom not snappy for you? I've used both and I honestly can't spot the difference on Linux; both are enough snappy for me.

I know Atom lags with huge files sometimes, or when I place a lot of multiple cursors and then edit something, but I haven't tried either with VSCode.

<comment><USER9> Irony here is, I just opened a 290k file in vim... and... well, let's just say it was about 30 seconds before I could do anything. So I thought, "let me open this in Atom". Almost immediately it appeared, AND I could scroll through it! (with vim-mode obviously)

<comment><USER10> Eh, when this happens to me I just hit ^C, since it's likely trying to apply syntax to the whole thing. At least I can do something in the editor immediately after.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder if there will be any performance benefits from removing Shadow DOM in Atom.

</comment><comment><USER12> So Atom just discovered BEM? To be fair, I only just started getting into it too; it is incredibly useful for organizing CSS.</comment>


Ask HN: Best tools for large code base documentation? - <AUTHOR> We are grappling with code documentation at work (large Django application).
We use Python's docstrings and JIRA's confluence but they are not enough. Confluence is not very easy to maintain and as somewhat distant from developers' daily workflow -- rarely gazed upon. Docstrings are all right -- but we don't do much with them. I know of Sphinx and that is a tool we are thinking about, but we want to do a proper research first, so here is my question for you today: what documentation tools do you use? What's your favourite and why? <comment><USER2> Here you are some links: [https://github.com/bodiam/awesome- asciidoc](https://github.com/bodiam/awesome-asciidoc)

</comment><comment><USER2> Check out AsciiDOC. Github and Gitlab use the newer and better Markdown natively. I use it for everything. Enjoy.</comment>


Americans Paying Three Times More for LTE Service - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/15/technology/americans-paying-more-for-lte-service.html

<comment><USER2> Verizon LTE is significantly better than the competition. I was able to get 40 Mbit/sec downloads in Manhattan on my iPhone 5. The phone switches to WiFi when it is available so use is not so bad. But it is true that the data sharing plans charge $10 for each 2 GB increment.</comment>


Formula for an ellipse in 12 dimensions? - <AUTHOR> Do we have such a formula.  Anyone know what it is?  Feel free to over explain, I'm not highly studied in math. <comment><USER2> (x_1/a_1)^2 + ... + (x_12/a_12)^2 = 1

It's the obvious generalization of an ellipse in 2 dimensions.

<comment><USER3> Here's an example of the extension to 3 dimensions, along the lines that vortico proposed:

        x^2/2.0 + y^2/5.0 + z^2/3.0 = 10.0

or in the form closer to what vortico used:

        (x/sqrt(2))^2 + *y/sqrt(5.0))^2 + (z^2/sqrt(3.0))^2 = 10.0

Here's a plot: [http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=x^2%2F2.0+%2B+y^2%2F5.0...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=x^2%2F2.0+%2B+y^2%2F5.0+%2B+z^2%2F3.0+%3D+10.0) .

Vortico used a common text notation where "x_1" means "first dimension", "x_2" means "second dimension", and so on up to "x_12" which means the 12th dimension.

The "x_1" is an alternate way to type x₁, "x_2" denotes x₂, and "x_12" denotes x₁₂. In practice it's easier in a text-only forum like HN to style the notation as "x_2" than reach for the Unicode "x₂", and there aren't enough Unicode characters for all of the things that might be in subscript.

My example used the first 3 dimensions, which are often named 'x', 'y', and 'z'. You could say that 'x' by itself is an alias for 'x_1' (which is a notation for for x₁), 'y' is an alias for 'x_2' (that is, x₂), and 'z' is an alias for 'x_3' (that is, x₃).

(Sometimes people will use 'u', 'v', and 'w' for the next three dimensions, but you can see that eventually you'll run out of letters. That's one reason why people switch to the 'x_123' notation.)

The 'a_1', ... 'a_12' are similar. The 'a_1' (that is, a₁) is the constant for the first dimension, so 'sqrt(2.0)' in my example. 'a_2' as the constant for the second dimension, which is 'sqrt(5.0)', and 'a_3' for the constant 'sqrt(3.0)'.

You'll notice that my equation ends with '10.0' instead of the '1' that vortico used. This is a scaling factor. I could divide both sides by 10 and get the right-hand side to be 1.0, in which case the full equation would be:

        x^2/20 + y^2/50 + z^2/30 = 1

or in the form closer to what vortico used:

        (x_1/sqrt(20))^2 + (x_2/sqrt(50))^2 + (x_3/sqrt(30))^2 = 1

where a_1 = sqrt(20), a_2 = sqrt(50), and a_3 = sqrt(30).

Mathematicians prefer this form because it removes the otherwise arbitrary and meaningless scaling factor from the analysis, and because the a_1, a_2, etc. value give the minimum and maximum values along the x_1, x_2, etc. axes.

Mathematicians also prefer to write integers without the ".0" as I did, but as a long-time programmer I tend to write things like "3.0" to emphasize that it's a floating point number, where "3" would mean integer.</comment></comment>


Google Apps Botches Domain Renewals, Websites Go Dark - <AUTHOR> http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.730915.0 <comment><USER2> As others have said, never ever ever use google as your domain registrar. In general, you usually don't want to buy a domain name "bundled" with other services such as google apps or hosting. (Note: Dreamhost is a terrible host, but a decent registrar.)

Always always keep control over your DNS. If this guy was hosting with Slicehost or Linode, he would've had the option to point the MMX records anywhere he liked, and problem solved (or at least, temporarily contained.)

Lastly, I can say from personal experience that Google's support is _shockingly_ bad. It is a deep and twisted warren of blind alleys, misinformation, and a million different paths that all end in "fuck you". You will not contact a human. There _are_ no humans. Thousands of genius engineers engineered teh googelz to be perfect and human free for your utopian pleasure, and then they spent all day riding around on bikes and playing ping pong and eating free food and getting massages and inventing world-changing things. They're better than you. Google doesn't have problems. Ever. You must have done something wrong.

Please wait 5 days, and try again. If you continue getting this error, please contact support. Sorry, support is only available to Premium customers. Would you like to purchase Premium service? To purchase Premium service, simply log into your domain. Sorry, that domain is no longer active; if you have recently changed that domain, please wait 5 days, and try again. Contact support if you have any questions.

Their approach to customer service is to send their customers in circles until they give up. It's evil. Very extremely cruel and evil.

I use google apps for two of my domains. What can I say, their software is very well designed, and on the net balance, it's easier to manage than postfix. But the lack of support is a major down side, certainly. I wouldn't even consider paying a dime for any of their services without seeing some huge changes in their approach.

<comment><USER3> I do have paid premium and a good amount of users, and support also was frustating when it came to a certain fairly technical problem to do with DKIM/DomainKeys signed emails being silently discarded. It went on and on in circles and even when escalated to "engineering" they failed to understand the problem. Finally I ended up implementing a horrible hack to receive the email.

Mind you, we have a fairly esoteric mail forwarding setup, but still one that their support documents describe as possible.

Haing said that I've been happy with how Gmail has been compared to a traditional UNIX-based setup in administration and would not want any other email interface.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Holy crap, you mean I shouldn't use a company that isn't a domain registrar as my domain registrar?! This is like complaining when you get a dedicated server from GoDaddy -- they're a fine registrar, but a completely horrible host and many _employees_ will tell you not to order servers from them.

There's a reason that no company can truly "do it all" -- it's just too difficult and quality starts to suffer. Google does e-mail pretty well, which is really the only thing we use the Premier Apps for.

<comment><USER5> Actually Google makes it pretty clear that they aren't a domain registrar, and their sign-up process used to encourage you to get a domain before you get started. I am curious as to why they don't serve as domain registrar. I actually have my Google Apps domain through Yahoo, who used to host my mail....

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This must incredibly frustrating, but I don't think it has anything to do with Gmail, Calendar, etc. It sounds as though it's a domain registration problem due to Google acting as a domain reseller for eNom, or something. If anything, the lesson is, "don't use Google as a registrar", though I suppose you could argue that the bad support is an overall issue.

In general, I would avoid any of these reseller situations, since the error could occur in multiple places and both parties would probably assume that it's the other's fault.

</comment><comment><USER7> Counterargument: Obtaining the usually-excellent reliability and stability that Google usually offers would be time-consuming, difficult, and a distraction. Sure I could set up a server with Postfix et al, but there's no way I'd be more reliable than Google without investing a substantial amount of time, money, and energy.

I don't want to spend my time maintaining a mail server. Let someone else do that.

<comment><AUTHOR> I 100% agree with you, which is why I use them for email. But if they were to drop my business off the Internet for days at a time _and_ make it impossible for me to get in touch with them, I'd be a little more concerned with that than with sporadic email downtime.

<comment><USER8> Agreed. I was in the process of moving our small set of users to Google Apps Premier. The phone support and quick response time was crucial to convincing my boss to allocate the funds. I think such a change:

[http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Apps/thread?tid...](http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Apps/thread?tid=37b64a9f87c8f406&hl=en)

is a dramatic change in the product. Hopefully they will give me a refund.

<comment><USER9> I'm confused. The links and text in the page you link to all say that Phone support is still available, just you have to login to a support page and enter some pin and then you get the number. Is this not true?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've been usign Google Apps for the past year or so for my email host. Though I have my registration and DNS with GoDaddy, I'm terrified of Google shutting me off one day and having no recourse other than to reroute everything and suffer the downtime.

I realize this was a registration issue, but when I keep reading horror stories about people being shut out of their accounts and having no one to talk to at the Big G, I think it's time to look elsewhere.

Does anyone know of a good email-only host that has a good admin interface, support, etc?

<comment><USER11> If you're worried about it, I'd upgrade to the paid version, which seems to have at least a modicum of support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have a bunch of domains registered with them - it's so easy, isn't full of spammy ads like godaddy, and the extra stuff just makes it even better. Now I'm getting nervous, though... I wanted to sell a domain, and the Google 'support' guy was completely clueless. Luckily it was nothing important, but I am now looking for a way out:-/

</comment><comment><USER13> If you're running a serious business you should really be using a dedicated management company for your domains.

We use CSC (www.cscprotectsbrands.com) who bought the enterprise domain management business from Register.com

I also recommend using a dedicated DNS company like UltraDNS.

You get what you pay for.

</comment><comment><USER14> Yeah, the bottom line is that things go wrong with Apps from time to time, and there are no human beings working there that you can talk to without upgrading your service.

I can't log in to the Apps account for one of my domains, and their error page says that no domain exists by that name, even though they are hosting email for it. It's a 30 second fix for anybody willing to look at it. But since I'm not paying for the premium account, nobody will even respond to my support mail.

</comment><comment><USER15> We use a hosted exchange server, costs $8/mo per user. Gives free Outlook/Entourage, has pretty solid web access (similar to hotmail) and best of all, if something goes wrong, we can leave and take our MX records with us with relatively little pain. Oh wait, I lied, best of all is free ActiveSync.</comment>


The Forgotten World of BBS Door Games - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow/story/340587/the-forgotten-world-of-bbs-door-games/ <comment><USER2> In all the years of gaming and "internet"-ing since then, there is something intangible about the experience BBS systems and these types of games provided that hasn't been achieved since. I know some of it must be simply rosy-goggled nostalgia, but I can't shake the feeling that there is something material that made the BBS experience awesome that didn't quite translate over to the "internet" as we know it today. I remember that BSSs used to have "picnics" and stuff where everyone met up in real life (I couldn't go because I was too young, but I still appreciated the sense of community that grew around those.)

There was a sort of "liminal" phase of the internet that I've never seen anyone even mention in these types of articles, as well: the "Freenet" era ( [http://cfn.tangledhelix.com/history.html](http://cfn.tangledhelix.com/history.html) ). It was sort of halfway between local BBS and WWW. I wonder if the emergence of the Physical Web or the like might bring about a resurgence of some of this "local"-ness the web lost as it outgrew its origins.

<comment><USER3> I think I agree that it's the localness of the BBSes that made them so special for me. When I was in middle school, the BBSes were my social group. The games were a fun way to waste some time, uploading games for credits in bytes you could download, but the conversations were the best part. I went to BBS parties and hung out with the people-behind-the-handles in real life. It was always such a shock to see how someone differed from the way you imagined them to look. When I got to college, the BBS scene instantly created a whole new set of friends for me. I don't know how I would have gotten to know people in that strange place without it.

Then the internet came. Suddenly, all by favorite BBS boards were synchronizing their posts with other BBSes across the country. Our little conversations of 5-10 people suddenly exploded into hundreds. It was too much. My posts got lost--or worse, I once got the notice of some sysadmin in another state who didn't like my politics or my language and demanded my local sysadmin deactivate my account. I fled to some other locals-only BBSes, but things were dying. Then Gopher, WWW, and Usenet came along and the BBSes vanished as everyone rushed to build web sites and post comments for all the world to see.

I telnetted into the cavebbs.homeip.net and it was a nice brief bit of nostalgia. I'm not sure if this is something we can recapture, but I hope it gets a bit of historical footnote somewhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think door games have a lot of interesting similarities to modern mobile games. First, door games tended to limit you to X number of moves per day in order you to play a small bit each day. Multiplayer was sometimes much more interesting in door games (ala TradeWars) than some modern AAA mobile games that limit interactions quite a bit (such as Boom Beach). I'm surprised there hasn't been more of a renaissance of door games onto mobile devices already.

<comment><USER5> I think the audiences are mutually incompatible. The old-school folks who grew up on BBS door games are, by and large, not happy with the microtransaction model.

And the reasons for limited turns are diametrically opposed. In door games, turns were limited to prevent players with more spare time from dominating the game. In mobile games, it's to encourage players with disposable income to spend extra money so that they _can_ dominate the game.

<comment><USER6> > In door games, turns were limited to prevent players with more spare time > from dominating the game

And to prevent them from tying up what was very likely the BBS's only phone line.

<comment><USER7> I feel the limit on time you can spend per day would fit more with busy professional lives. For me, it always made me greatly anticipate the next day when my turns would be replenished. That would make actually playing it much more special.

Also, the reduced audience available for the BBS made cheating less of an issue (at least at my local BBS)

<comment><USER5> The MMORPG Kingdom of Loathing seems to be essentially a browser-based door game, complete with turn limits, and it was still running last I checked. Might be worth a look if that's what you're into.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm impressed they picked some of the best games for this. I paid for The Pit, the registered version had enhanced features, excellent game. Unfortunately, it wasn't popular on my BBS. I also liked OOii which had very unique graphics for the time, toxic wasteland theme. TW2002 was by far the most popular and I had people paying me subscriptions to play it. It was almost an exact copy of Yankee Trader, which makes me think maybe Yankee Trader deserves credit for the idea. But TW2002 had much better graphics. The fishing game was surprisingly fun and made with loving care, you could actually see the fishing line animated in ANSI! Also very popular (#2 behind TW2002) was Global Wars, not in the article, which was exactly like RISK the boardgame. The article doesn't mention MajorBBS at all, which is unfortunate, because they had their own unique ecosystem that had a loyal following, and although it was very expensive (pay by the minute) it was extremely addicting.

</comment><comment><USER9> To this day, Barren Realms Elite is my favorite BBS game. I believe there are some boards still running (accessible only via the Internet) simply to participate in the interplanetary leagues.

<comment><USER10> I liked the "sequel" to it a little more. It had the acronym FE and was fantasy themed but similar otherwise.

<comment><USER9> Yep, Falcon's Eye. I played it every day as well but liked BRE more. Both of them were great games!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I ran a couple BBSes with a friend in the mid 90s. We got rid of file downloads and door games when we transitioned to an all message board system, but we always kept one door game around:

Barneysplat! by Bong Software

Interview with the author, who is also blind:

[http://breakintochat.com/blog/2013/05/08/austin-seraphin- cre...](http://breakintochat.com/blog/2013/05/08/austin-seraphin-creator-of- barneysplat)

Oh yeah, being snarky teenagers, we also kept Pimp Wars on the board.

<comment><USER12> BarneySplat was invariably the most popular door game on my BBS (mid-90s). Thanks for that interview link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> TradeWars 2002, The Pit, and Legend of the Red Dragon reminds me of many pleasant Friday nights, in high school. Thanks for posting this.

<comment><USER14> Dunno about the rest but TradeWars is still being maintained! As are some really nice helpers, like SWATH. One of these days, I'd like to maybe run my own server again. (I had no problems getting TWGS to run jailed under Wine/VNC/screen on my FreeBSD servers, and SWATH ran well under Wine on my Mac.)

<comment><USER15> Are there still any active servers? TW2002 is by far my favorite game of all time, but I had a lot of trouble getting a good reasonable-turns game (~750 - 1250) with high engagement humans.. or at least passable bots! :)

<comment><USER14> There are a few! Ice9 used to be pretty good, but I don't know how well maintained it is these days. Cruncher's is well maintained but sparsely populated.

[http://www.oregonsouth.com/ice9/](http://www.oregonsouth.com/ice9/)

[http://cruncherstw.blogspot.com/](http://cruncherstw.blogspot.com/)

Here's another list:

[http://wiki.classictw.com/index.php?title=Jumpgate](http://wiki.classictw.com/index.php?title=Jumpgate)

I think I might just dust off my copy of SWATH and go exploring. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Tradewars 2002 never caught my attention but I spent plenty of time playing Land of Devastation:

[http://www.smbaker.com/games/land-of-devastation- classic](http://www.smbaker.com/games/land-of-devastation-classic)

I still have a graph paper notebook with carefully laid out map of the world, with blank spaces that still need filling in. I dreamed of getting the GTERM client to 'properly' play the game.

<comment><USER17> Wow, I thought I was the only person alive who still remembered this. Tile- based MMO on a BBS... even if I ran into another player only about once a month. The gambling system was nicely exploitable, too :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I feel the main thing missing today is the locality imposed by area codes. BBSs hit a scope sweet spot where users were more than just your friends but still came from the local community. That aspect always gave me warm and fuzzies.

<comment><USER19> It also allowed you to compete in online games through the big fish in a small pond principle.

I used to dominate LORD, TW 2002 and Proving Grounds BBS games. First time I ever played Internet Quake or any other Internet game was a humbling experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> There's a wiki dedicated to them ([http://breakintochat.com](http://breakintochat.com)) and a blog with interviews with door game authors ([http://breakintochat.com/blog](http://breakintochat.com/blog)).

People are still WRITING doors, too. Musician Shooter Jennings of all people released a door game recently, and he offered a Bitcoin prize to people playing it. ([http://breakintochat.com/blog/2015/09/18/shooter-jennings- cr...](http://breakintochat.com/blog/2015/09/18/shooter-jennings-creator-of- from-here-to-eternity/))

There's an active mini community of folks writing new Javascript doors for Synchronet BBS software ([http://synchro.net](http://synchro.net)). These are still ANSI games but they are more action-oriented.

So yeah, not entirely forgotten.

</comment><comment><USER21> Of course LORD, but anyone here played Usurper? That sure was a dark game as a little kid!

<comment><USER22> Its been open sourced (copious amounts of pascal), [https://github.com/rickparrish/Usurper](https://github.com/rickparrish/Usurper)

<comment><USER21> I've seen it, and taken a look around in there!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I lot of nostalgia for me here. I ran a BBS for years, initially on WWIV and then on to Wildcat! 4.

Throughout high school, my buddies and I spent countless hours on TradeWars 2002. We even wrote our own door game, the little known Mercury Fighter, which had a modest installation base.

The Internet just isn't the same. A lot of memories come back looking at the list of games on this article.

</comment><comment><USER9> Door games are, in a way, what got me interested in reverse engineering. Being a teenager running a BBS for some friends in school, I didn't have any money to "register" the games (and was lucky that my parents ponied up the money for the extra phone line). I had some experience w/ 6502 assembly and Pascal (all self-learned), got a copy of a debugger (Soft-Ice?) and set to work figuring out how to "crack" the registration systems.

Eventually, my BBS got shut down because I was dialing into other BBS's all over the country to spread my "patches" (and racking up outrageous phone bills). :(

<comment><USER8> Two distinct worlds. PD and NPD. I was on the PD side but a couple of my classmates were NPD and there was some crossover. Seemed the NPD side was more serious about artwork and that got to be competitive, as far as login graphics, menus, logoff graphics. As an aspiring artist, I was impressed by the NPD ascii art and loaders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> You know what's interesting here, nobody mentioning MajorMUD. That was (and somewhat still is) the kinda-not-a-door-game door game serving as the engine of a lot of BBS use. Unfortunately, MetroBBS (the company that owns the IP) is still holding out for some kind of MMO or movie deal or something and the pricing for this game is silly. Also, being from the KC area, I have it on very good authority that some of the source code for MM was lost during an office move. And this is why (in addition to having lost their main programmer) there haven't been substantial updates in years.

<comment><USER25> Writing Telemate scripts to automatically play MajorMUD for me while I was AFK is how I got started with programming! I got to the point where I was distributing my scripts via a forum on a board I played on, and I even got contributions back from a couple people. Definitely a lot of fond memories there.

<comment><USER8> Yes, programming macros was exciting (too) because it gave you a competitive advantage and opened the door to a lot of creativity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I played a lot of TradeWars, but my favorite door game was a similar space conquest game called Dominion. To my dismay, I can't find any reference to it online today! :(

<comment><USER27> This[1] have anything to do with it?

[1][http://software.bbsdocumentary.com/IBM/DOS/DOMINION/](http://software.bbsdocumentary.com/IBM/DOS/DOMINION/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> A couple of these BBS games were easy to break back in the day: just head to the casino and keep gambling. One of the games had an easy higher/lower random number game.

</comment><comment><USER24> Forgotten _to you_ , PCMag. I've never stopped playing these bad boys.

</comment><comment><USER9> Jennie? Jennie Garth? Describe her.

</comment><comment><USER29> trade wars 2002.. legend of the red dragon.. global wars

tele-arena was me gateway to scripting

</comment><comment><USER30> man, I miss BBS'ing</comment>


Chi: Small, fast and expressive router/mux for Go built with net/context - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/pressly/chi <comment><AUTHOR> I found Chi while exploring trending repositories in Github. I share it because it looks good and it reminded me of my own take on HTTP routing tree with Medeina: [https://github.com/imdario/medeina](https://github.com/imdario/medeina)

Although, Medeina is based on httprouter, so it should faster than Chi or at least on par.</comment>


After 10 Years in Tech Isolation, I'm Now Outsider to Things I Once Had Mastered - <AUTHOR> https://forklog.media/after-10-years-in-tech-isolation-im-now-outsider-to-things-i-once-had-mastered/ <comment><USER2> > I had to ask my twelve-year-old daughter what a hashtag was. That was pretty > embarrassing. "Aren't you supposed to be a hacker or something?," she told > me, sending a final blow to my dying ego.

There's a bright side there, too: you get a fresh perspective and can see how much utter bullshit is taken for granted because "thats the way things are done". Plus the confidence of having mastered things as complex, to arm you for the challenge of wading through the modern rats nests.</comment>


Y Combinator pitch boosts Waterloo's BufferBox - <AUTHOR> http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/small-business/sb-tools/small-business-briefing/y-combinator-pitch-boosts-waterloos-bufferbox/article4492976

<comment><USER2> If I understand it correctly, DHL has done something similar in Germany for at least ten years now.

It is OK - especially useful to be able to send away parcels in the middle of the night (the stations are used for both sending and collecting). Other than that, I ended up not using them much. Neighbors work better for accepting parcels. But I suppose for other people they are quite popular.

Ultimately I think DHL's play is to reduce the number of human powered post offices, so in the end Packstations will be a step backwards for user friendliness.

Edit: link to German DHL site about "Packstation" [http://www.dhl.de/content/de/de/paket/privatkunden/packstati...](http://www.dhl.de/content/de/de/paket/privatkunden/packstation.html)

Edit 2: English Wikipedia says they started in 2001 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packstation>

</comment><comment><USER3> Wasn't Amazon already doing this with their amazon lockers? [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087239639044354550457756...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443545504577567763829784538.html)

<comment><USER4> The argument is that Amazon controls 30% currently, so 70% is "fair game".

It's a pretty weak argument considering that Amazon has the infrastructure muscle out someone like Bufferbox, if there is no distinct competitive advantage for the startup.

<comment><USER5> Amazon lockers offer a solution for Amazon only products. This is an open platform all carriers to use, in addition to the other 70% of eCommerce sales in Canada.

<comment><USER6> For a long time Amazon fulfilled only their own products (and some large partners) from their warehouses. Now, it's offered to everyone as Fulfillment by Amazon service. No doubt Amazon will offer the locker service, if the market is there.

<comment><USER5> You're right. Their marketplace model has been built out. Amazon's use of the locker system is an incredible opportunity and as exceptional validation of the technology.

And of course, the open platform to all carriers.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


RetroChallenge 2017/04 Entrants - <AUTHOR> http://www.retrochallenge.org/p/entrants-list-201704.html <comment><AUTHOR> Retrochallenge is a friendly competition where people spend a month working on a retrocomputing project and posting updates about their progress. For most entrants it's more about working on something fun and enjoying the enthusiasm of the other entrants / the drive of the event, rather than anything seriously competitive.

I entered the last one but didn't get very far. Wasn't prepared to enter this one, unfortunately, but I intend to try again in the future. I like retro- stuff because I can focus on one particular machine, with no complex libraries and APIs, no cross-compatibility issues to worry about, etc... All the fun of programming without the fuss of practicality.</comment>


Russian Hackers Read Obama's Unclassified Emails, Officials Say - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/26/us/russian-hackers-read-obamas-unclassified-emails-officials-say.html <comment><USER2> I am under the impression that attribution is a very difficult and often impossible process. If that is true, what is the point of including "Russian" in this headline? I would guess the most probable response would be something involving "fulfilling a narrative." Even if that is true, what makes "Russian" hackers more exciting then just "Hackers?"

I am not trying to pose some profound question. I am genuinely confused by this.

<comment><USER3> > what makes "Russian" hackers more exciting then just "Hackers?"

It's all about what ultimately happens to the information harvested. If it's some kids in mom's basement doing it for lulz, that's not very concerning.

But, presumably, Russian hackers, even if not actual Russian government employees, would pass on useful information to their government. Even if non- classified, that could be very damaging to national security.

From the article, the attacks were relatively sophisticated. Which makes it more likely that "state actors" were involved. The article also claims that the two most common state actors are Chinese and Russian, and the fingerprints of this operation pointed more to Russia than China.

YMMV. As you say, "attribution is a very difficult and often impossible process".

<comment><USER4> In the US (and a few other places in the world), the NSA has capabitilites that private hackers don't, because they get to place their equipment on the backbone. The Russian version of the NSA has no special access in the US, so what Russian government hackers can do, any private hacker can do. Any private hacker can damage national security just as much (or more) by selling the data to the highest bidder(s) or releasing it publicly.

Because of this, there is no difference for national security whether Russian government hackers did it, or anyone else. The only piece of useful info is that the systems were hacked and how they were hacked. The attribution is just for show (and as always in these cases, not very reliable either).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just quoting some of the comments on NYTimes:

> Am I the ONLY one who has a hard time believing that these hackers ONLY got > "unclassified" stuff? Riiiiiiiiight. They just don't want us to know how > deeply in these folks got. Why would they just get "unclassified" stuff?

> Only unclassified emails. Right.

Do people even read articles these days?

<comment><USER6> >Do people even read articles these days?

I know what you said is a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but as someone running a news startup there are two types of news consumers:

1\. People looking to understand what's happening 2\. People looking for ammunition to reinforce their already-unstoppable notion as to how the world works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sounds perfectly alright to me. Remember that there are levels of classification. Unclassified (the lowest level) could be running through Gmail in plain text for all anyone at the White House cares. Anything of even _minute_ importance will get a classification status.

(Also, Re: the NSA—they do the government's _COMSEC_ , securing the classified data. OPSEC, the risk/reward policies regarding what data should be classified and so on, is a more distributed policy-making task, though they might have a hand in it. Requirements on a document's classification levels given its content are set by top-down Executive Orders.)

<comment><USER8> In today's political climate, it doesn't really have to be "classified" for it to damaging. All they need is an email of the president making some sort of offbeat joke about conservatives or something, and that would be a major crisis for him once the media gets their hand on it.

It's stupid, but that's just how it is.

<comment><USER9> Thats inescapable today, especially for public figures, so everyone must be very very careful what they email on semi-private channels. Especially to 3rd parties they don't 100% trust.

The president is no doubt instructed on the level of security he should expect from non-secure channels. I would hardly feel bad for politicians vs maybe some young teenager in highschool who doesn't yet know any better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In terms of root causes, this incident should cast a spotlight on NSA/IC strategy and the balance between "Information Assurance" goals and SIGINT goals: is the NSA going to deliberately leave everyone vulnerable (including, apparently, POTUS) to enable offensive operations of questionable value, or should NSA and its partners re-emphasize their IA mission and work toward securing the systems _everyone_ uses? I can only hope Obama is leaning toward the latter after being personally affected.

</comment><comment><USER11> I hope legislators, if anything, become more careful with foreign intelligence, not innocent citizens.

This unfortunate announcement is one of those things lawmakers love to use to justify exploitative and unethical policies.

Let's hope that's not the case

</comment><comment><USER12> The NYT article doesn't have many tech details. It would be interesting to know whether it was ineptly configured and managed. Was this a dusty old server in the cellar running unpatched Windows 2008 and an old version of Exchange, or was it a hardened and well-managed system?

Somebody on Computerworld said that the State Dept was spearphished, and that POTUS's system was breached from there.

</comment><comment><USER13> If only the government could create a honeypot network full of simulated traffic and meticulously faked communications designed to mislead the would-be snoopers... Then this article could be another step in the ruse.

That would probably too much money and effort, though.

</comment><comment><USER14> Hello, National Security Agency: Preventing this sort of thing is _your_ job. Once you're done snarfing up _my_ personal data, perhaps you could attend to it.

<comment><USER15> These networks would be under the white house communications agency, a subset of the defense information systems agency which is not affiliated with NSA. Supposedly his blackberry is run through NSA (See, e.g., the fishbowl project), and was not implicated in this breach.

<comment><USER16> Point missed.

It's not that it's the President's email that's vulnerable. It's that _all_ people's email is vulnerable.

Some of those people are key to national security, many aren't. But they all deserve privacy and protection.

And yes, one of NSA's mandates is to secure U.S. communications:

"The Information Assurance mission confronts the formidable challenge of preventing foreign adversaries from gaining access to sensitive or classified national security information. "

[https://www.nsa.gov/about/mission/index.shtml](https://www.nsa.gov/about/mission/index.shtml)

It's not just the President the NSA are failing.

<comment><USER15> You read my comment wrong. It wasn't making a point, it was stating a fact that there isn't just one agency responsible for network security in the Federal Government.

Your point is the more important one. The danger here is not the breach, since it was an unclassified system, but rather the universal surprise that it was possible. That demonstrates a dangerous level of ignorance in our society.

<comment><USER16> Fair enough, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I always wonder how these hackers know which IP range to attack. Is it just like a hit and miss kinda thing? Or do they have insiders who leak those info to them.

<comment><USER17> % dig mx whitehouse.gov

; <<>> DiG 9.8.3-P1 <<>> mx whitehouse.gov ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<\- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 26690 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 6, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION: ;whitehouse.gov. IN MX

;; ANSWER SECTION: whitehouse.gov. 9982 IN MX 110 mail6.eop.gov. whitehouse.gov. 9982 IN MX 105 mail2.eop.gov. whitehouse.gov. 9982 IN MX 110 mail5.eop.gov. whitehouse.gov. 9982 IN MX 105 mail1.eop.gov. whitehouse.gov. 9982 IN MX 105 mail4.eop.gov. whitehouse.gov. 9982 IN MX 105 mail3.eop.gov.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Woderful way to claim that russians did something very bad without any proof provided.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm sure he doesn't have anything to hide.

</comment><comment><USER20> Its only going to get worse.

</comment><comment><USER21> The world's hero Snowden is under russian protection, so take it easy...</comment>


Why Chinese Women Still Can't Get a Break - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/opinion/why-chinese-women-still-cant-get-a-break.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region&region=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region <comment><USER2> Yeah...no.

In China, women are treated like gold because of the 2-child policy (and the resulting gender imbalance between men and women). They have their pick of the men and in most cases, (as a man), if you aren't wealthy, smart, and have a good career, you will be cast aside and alone.

Now these spoiled women are going into the workforce and are coming to the cold, hard, reality that they are being treated just as unfairly as men and have to compete for the same positions.

Everybody suffers from discrimination in the workforce in China, because there are no rules against it. It's common practice to send along your picture with you resume. You will be rejected based on your looks or any other reason not protected by some of the great laws in the US.

I also find it disappointing that 'straight man' chauvinism is mocked and the answer is more chauvinism with narrow-minded and inclusive feminist groups.

Fighting discrimination with more discrimination is not really the answer and will not solve any of these issues.</comment>