Laissez Faire Leadership for Startups - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cadencework.com/3-benefits-of-laissez-faire-leadership-for-startups/ <comment><USER2> Interesting approach to management. Does anyone have any experiences of this in practice and care to share?

More generally, I've started managing recently and would love to hear any recommendations from y'all

<comment><USER3> This post details famous laissez faire leaders, if you're interested: [https://futureofworking.com/5-famous-laissez-faire- leaders/](https://futureofworking.com/5-famous-laissez-faire-leaders/).

By any chance have you worked at startups/in the tech industry? Every single startup I've ever worked at seems to have had a laissez-faire approach to leadership.

<comment><USER2> Yes, have worked in startups, tech (as SWE), and academic research (computing), and found the article posted above to resonate with my experiences: take it easy, trust your team, build and get results.

Having said that, I've recently started managing and have no idea how best to do it. I'm emulating what I have experienced (laissez-faire it seems), but wanted to read me.

Thanks for the link!

Edit: just realized you're the author of the blog post, oh hai! I've read most of the posts on the site following this HN link and I really enjoyed the style of writing. Great work!

<comment><USER3> Haha thank you, I appreciate that!

And got it. Congrats on your new management role -- I think a lot about similar questions too...maybe once you learn some best practices, you could write something up and share it with HN :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Animating a cube using only CSS3 - <AUTHOR> http://www.fofronline.com/2009-07/animated-css3-cube-interface-using-3d-transforms/ <comment><USER2> It's very nicely done. Movement via keyboard is done by JS (not surprising), though all animation is done by CSS. JS just defines where to stop.

</comment><comment><USER3> > Supported browsers: WebKit Nightly r46042+

<comment><USER4> Also works with the current version of Safari, no Nightly needed. Doesn't work with Chrome. You should still try, though. Looks funny.</comment></comment>


Red Hat's new patent counterclaim: GPL violation - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/storage/295325/red-hats-new-patent-troll-weapon-gpl-violation

<comment><USER2> I think the blog title is a bit sensational here. 'Patent trolls', at least as I understand the term, do not produce products. That's the whole point: they're trolls because they do nothing but sue people, without adding any value themselves. Twin Peaks does produce products, so they aren't a troll. Red Hat has just found an interesting way to counter-sue in a fairly ordinary patent dispute.

The fact that Twin Peaks clearly waited until Gluster had been acquired by Red Hat before filing doesn't make it a troll.

<comment><USER3> It is the examples of prior art that make it patent trolling.

<comment><USER4> Nope, not patent troll (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_troll>):

Patent troll is a pejorative term used for a person or company who enforces patents against one or more alleged infringers in a manner considered aggressive or opportunistic with no intention to manufacture or market the patented invention.

<comment><USER3> I reject that definition and suggest that it should instead mean, "a pejorative term used for a person or company who enforces one or more patent(s) that do not fullfil the requirement of being non-obvious and inventive against one or more alleged infringers in any manner, especially if considered aggressive or opportunistic, or with no intention to manufacture or market the patented invention".

When I say patent troll, I mean someone using patents to delay innovation instead of using them to encourage innovation (as they were intended). In this case, there's clear prior art and they are suing after the company responsible was acquired by Red Hat. I'm not going to accept that someone is not a patent troll if they happen to have an application or framework that, e.g., redirects users to a online store for purchase of the full version of an app after tapping a link. Everyone in the field, the companies starting the lawsuits included, know that these patents should not have been issued.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Intellectual property" as a socially and legally recognized concept is nonsensical and harmful, even in instances like the GPL where it's intended to increase freedom.

<comment><USER6> If we could live off of a handful of ideas and had no want of food, shelter, or clothing, I'd be in complete agreement.

<comment><USER7> This is the point where you demonstrate with evidence that a lack of recognition of IP would cause such problems, right?

As someone who gets paid for developing software that can be freely shared, I'm particularly interested.

<comment><USER6> If there's zero protection for "intellectual property", it becomes a lot harder for the majority of the software industry to even function.

Apple, as an enterprise, has been very successful by building a profitable operating system platform and channeling those profits back in to both hardware and software engineering. That kind of enterprise would not exist if Apple's software could be used by anyone for anything.

Any hardware vendor of any consequence could use that as they see fit, resulting in a stew of mis-matched standards and rampant confusion, not unlike the Android tablet market. While there are good products in this space, they are often difficult to differentiate from superficially similar yet technically inferior alternatives. This is not helping people on the whole.

Personally I like the choice between a premium product which is commercialized and free, open-source alternatives that are, for many applications, good enough. I would not want a market that's locked in to one model at the expense of the other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> That's great, except it would be totally ineffectual against a real troll. If you're not making anything, you're likely not violating the GPL.

<comment><USER9> You could use it against the patent troll's masters (eg. Mosaid)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is not going to be effective _unless_ Red Hat really pushes for damages. Shutting down Twin Peaks products is not a big deal, they will just release the source of their mount.mfs and/or rewrite the mount, and then push out a new version that doesn't violate mount's license.

<comment><USER11> Except that GPLv2 doesn't work like that. Once the license is violated you permanently lose the rights granted by the license. So even if Twin Peaks fixes their stuff and comes back into compliance, they do not get their rights back automatically -- the copyright holders have to explicitly give them back these rights.

This is one of the important differences between GPLv2 and GPLv3.

<comment><USER12> Wait, so when you're dealing with GPLv3 stuff, you do get the license for redistribution back automatically?

<comment><USER11> Yes. See [1] and [2].

[1] <http://www.fsf.org/news/android-termination-upgrade-gplv3> [2] <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#section8>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> >Since both of Twin Peaks' products are released under a proprietary license, there was no source code of any changes it made to mount released, which is a violation of the GPLv2.

Seems like Twin Peaks could resolve this by just releasing the source code to their version of mount. Maybe Red Hat will be able to get damages out of it, but if Twin Peaks releases the code in a timely fashion, I doubt Red Hat will be able to get an injunction against their product sales. (IANAL.) Meanwhile, the patent suit goes on.

<comment><USER14> The GPL has a clause saying that if its terms are violated, all rights granted to the violator by the GPL are terminated. So if Twin Peaks did indeed copy Red Hat's mount code as alleged, they would never be allowed to distribute that code again (without specific permission).

<comment><USER15> Term 5? All that says is if you don't accept the terms, you don't get to use the software. There's no irrevocable termination of rights.

At worst, all they have to do is download a new copy of mount and presto, they have a new license.

[err, that's for gpl2. gpl3 has a more complicated termination procedure.]

ok, so in light of gpl3, they just need to go back and get a gpl2 copy of mount. It's not like mount has changed all that much, I'm sure the 2007 version will suffice. Or they could just write their own. How many lines of code are we talking about here?

<comment><USER14> Term 4 in GPLv2. "Any attempt otherwise to copy ... will automatically terminate your rights under this License."

<comment><USER15> Read right over that. But I suspect they can still just download another copy, as the second download would be a new offer, and they can then agree and comply with that one.

<comment><USER16> It's not that simple. Relevant reading in this context:

<https://lwn.net/Articles/455013/>

<comment><USER15> "Each kernel release is a different work; the chances that any given piece of code has been modified in a new release are pretty high. One could argue that each kernel release comes with its own license; the termination of one does not necessarily affect rights to other releases."

That is the argument I am making.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> My only hope in this double-case is that if TPS offers an even settlement, RedHat refuses it.

Fighting GPL violations is the "good" side, patent trolling the "bad".

</comment><comment><USER18> >Since free software is so pervasive these days, it might not be very hard to find something within a company's product portfolio that depends greatly on free or open source software. Once discovered, all it takes is a claim of license violation like this one to shut down that software

That paragraph actually makes it sound scary to even use open source software when they actually mean only GPL'ed software and that too only when modified _and_ distributed/sold.

<comment><USER19> > That paragraph actually makes it sound scary to even use open source > software when they actually mean only GPL'ed software and that too only when > modified and distributed/sold.

No, you have to comply with the GPL regardless of whether you've modified the source that you're distributing. (As in this case: I'd be surprised if Twin Peaks modified mount -- I don't see why they'd need to.)

<comment><USER20> You completely missed the point.

There's a lot of open source code that isn't GPL. Many licenses don't require the code to be distributed, even if it's changed.

The sentence from the article makes it sound like all open source code is GPL.

<comment><USER21> Yes, but the poster 'recoiledsnake' made a separate mistake, stating that modification to GPL code is required for it to be vulnerable to lawsuits. As cjbprime stated, that isn't true; using the code is enough for it to be covered.

<comment><USER22> Distribution not use is required for the GPL to restrict you. But you are right that modification is irrelevant.

<comment><USER21> thanks, funny that I also made a mistake

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Could we (as in, everyone) please stop referring to programs in general as "apps"? It's retarded. An "app" is a specific kind of program for a smartphone. mount isn't such a program.

Sorry, this just bugged me.

<comment><USER24> Could we (as in, everyone) please stop referring to something we find stupid or dumb in general as "retarded"? It's offensive.

Sorry, this just bugged me.

<comment><USER5> If your best argument for why someone should stop doing something is that "it's offensive," I will have trouble taking your side.

<comment><USER25> When given a choice between two otherwise equivalent options, most non- sociopaths will choose the option that is less likely to offend their audience.

<comment><USER26> Fuck the audience. If they are so easily offended they should get therapy instead of calling others sociopaths. Offence is taken, not given.

<comment><USER27> However, if you're attempting to get a point across, you generally do better by keeping social norms in mind. Offending your audience instantly makes them think about whatever "horrible" thing you just said and not on whatever point you're trying to communicate.

Put another way, if nobody is getting your point, perhaps the problem isn't with the audience :)

(I am, however, going to steal that "offense is taken, not given" line for future (ab)use)

<comment><USER5> > _However, if you're attempting to get a point across, you generally do > better by keeping social norms in mind._

And if everyone followed that principle, society would never change. The perfect fourth would still sound dissonant, rape victims would be under even more pressure to keep the crime secret, etc.

<comment><USER27> You know, i did say _generally_. Did you just miss that or..?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Owner wins court battle against feds trying to seize his Tewksbury motel - <AUTHOR> http://www.boston.com/metrodesk/2013/01/24/owner-wins-court-battle-against-feds-trying-seize-his-motel/E6rc64A4bEtLY0m1v1f7lM/story.html

<comment><USER2> Discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5117707></comment>


Bill Gates vs. Steve Jobs on Platforms - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-vs-steve-jobs-on-platforms-2015-5 <comment><USER2> > Bill Gates was late to the smart phone game

Unlike what this article says, Bill Gates wasn't late to the smart phone game. They had windows mobile. Microsoft simply didn't innovate quickly enough. Basically, like IE they simply let things rot once they'd achieved a level of industry dominance.</comment>


Reducing Docker Image Size - <AUTHOR> https://www.ardanlabs.com/blog/2020/02/docker-images-part1-reducing-image-size.html <comment> yjftsjthsd-h Seems to be a pretty decent overview; covers the usual suspects (multi-stage builds, FROM scratch, non-scratch minmal images, ldd to check libraries), with some nice bits that I'd not seen before (busybox:glibc). I would be curious to see how these base images stack up against Google's "distroless" base images ([https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless](https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless)). I also appreciate that they call out Alpine's compatibility issues (on account of musl) but still leave it as a thing that can be good if you use it right. (Personally I'm quite fond of Alpine, but I don't bother when using binaries that expect glibc.)

<comment><USER2> One important thing missing from BusyBox:glibc is the SSL certificates that's almost always needed if you are writing things like crawler etc.

As for Alpine, at least for packaging Python code, avoid as much as possible. It cannot reuse manylinux packages on PyPI and have to recompile C modules.

<comment><USER3> With Alpine, the size advantages of musl sometimes come with hidden overheads as well.

Musl's malloc() seems to be a fair bit slower than glibc's when you start to throw in more threads at it (fragments faster?).

And then if you try to replace that with jemalloc, you'll quickly find out that jemalloc does not actually get used.

At some level, the difference between a 1Mb docker image and a 9Mb one isn't that significant (& I asked for some things like strace, ping and nslookup to be in it, because it gets impossible to debug the container when it obviously caches a DNS record or at least, looks like it is doing that).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> While such articles are usually helpful, I'd caution that making individual image sizes as small as possible shouldn't really be your goal.

As a simple example - if you have 100 unique images in your system, having an image size of 1 GB each where 99% of it is derived from a common layer is going to be a lot smaller overall than "optimizing" the size down to 100 MB each but taking away the base layers.

<comment><USER5> In my experience you 100 unique images might still have different base images. So you end up with too many layers. Especially with interpreted languages those python, ruby or node runtimes add up quickly

Also depending on usecase (e.g running a CI system) you might end up with high storage costs (caching) or high bandwidth costs (no caching)

Depending where your datacenter is, coworkers with slow connections might suffer as well. Hey, let's just download 12GB of my everylanguage-and- Tex:latest every workday.

But I agree, docker golfing to have minimal images is not always needed, but don't let your images grow like a wildfire. They are part of your architecture.

<comment><USER4> A standardization for base images, OS etc. is just something that has to be enforced at the organization level.

<comment><USER6> But if you do that you're giving up all public images. It makes sense in a large organization but there are plenty of other use cases for Docker.

<comment><USER7> If you are using public images, then you are already giving up on optimizing image sizes anyways.

<comment><USER6> But if you are making a public image you are doing your users a favor by minimizing the size.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why is image size important? Should we instead optimise for speed of build?

If storage is cheap. And CPU costs Co2 does it make sense to spend longer time and more energy to save disk space?

<comment><USER9> It's not just the raw size of the image, but also about what the image includes; a smaller image often reduces the potential attack surface because vulnerable things _just aren 't there_.

That's one of the major rationales behind the distroless images. Being space optimized is just a really nice side effect.

<comment><USER10> >> a smaller image often reduces the potential attack surface because vulnerable things just aren't there

By the way, the article proposes blind download of artifacts from someplace on the internet, on every build. Not only that can cripple your builds when the source is down (which happens all the time), it can (and that has happened) send you arbitrary infected crap instead of what you wanted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's worth noting that golang builds can be smaller than that with `GOOS=linux go build -ldflags="-s -w" .` (assuming a build on macos for linux.) From there I usually run `upx --ultra-brute -9 program` before dropping it into a `scratch` docker container (plus whatever other deps it needs).

<comment><USER12> Does the UPX help much on top of Docker's layer compression? I can imagine it might (special purpose vs general purpose) but haven't tried it.

<comment><USER11> Just saw this reply, yes it does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is indeed a good overview.

It would have been _a great_ overview had it started with briefing readers about why (or when) image size should bother us at all.

</comment><comment><USER14> Are containers really the best abstraction for providing application isolation / portability? What about snaps/nix/guix instead?

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h They're probably not _best_ at any of portability, isolation, or security (they probably lose to full VMs on all counts). But they're good enough _and_ way more convenient / easier to use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Strange advice to not use Alpine, but then recommends an empty image or busybox...

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h I'm pretty sure that's 100% a glibc/musl thing.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Just launched new version of Hypejar. Looking for feedback - <AUTHOR>

Hello, we had launched the private beta version of Hypejar (http://www.hypejar.com) in October 2012. We have done a lot of learning since then. Recently, we quietly released the new version of the platform.
We were hoping some you may be awesome enough to provide feedback as to what sucks and/or what rocks.
I can't thank you enough in advance. Our users thus far have had HUGE say in the direction we go and we plan on keeping it that way.
Thank you HN! <comment><USER2> I click these links with a "what can I hate today" attitude (I know I know, but there's so many bad implementations of bad ideas), but I'm surprisingly fond of this. I could actually see myself using it. If not just because it feels very modern and looks great.

I do agree with the hover comment made by RossH though. I found myself having to put my cursor in a "crack" while I scrolled down. Perhaps put the votes on the bottom half of the tile instead of over the image?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi xauronx,

Thanks for the feedback. What you say actually confirms what we've been hating ourselves! What we're gonna be doing is making the pics less dark when hovering over. We're also gonna be pushing the buttons to the top left so that you don't have place your cover in a "crack."

Thanks so much for your observation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Love it. Really interesting content, have bookmarked.

One thing I would say, is that hovering over the items to show the voting buttons covers to much of the image, can get a bit annoying as your scroll down, maybe it should be more transparant? or the voting buttons appear without the black background?

Anyway, love this site design, logo and content. Nice work. I've also just signed up ;)

<comment><USER4> Agreed with this hover comment. Maybe slightly more translucent, only covering a fixed height at the bottom of the image, push the two buttons slightly closer together. I reckon that would do the trick nicely! :)

<comment><AUTHOR> horyd, thanks for the feedback. We'll definitely be making it more translucent. We realize the need to make the pictures speak for themselves. Thanks so much for this. If you have any other observation, I would love to hear about them. Feel free to email me at grant(at)hypejar(dot)com.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is this something like Pinterest but for men? It looks cool, but its a bit confusing to navigate (for me).

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, thanks so much for the feedback.

We're not trying to be Pinterest for men. While the frontpage may seem similar to them, our content really centers around future products. In the process, what we're trying to do is to get a good sense of how much others are anticipating the products. (for example, what is the lineup for the next iPhone gonna look like)

I do understand that it is slightly confusing. It's a quiet launch so that we can tweak it and make it as best as possible. What part of the navigation more specifically do you find is a bit confusing?

<comment><USER5> It just looks like a bunch of stuff cobbled up together. Reminds me of my socks drawer. Its interesting the fact that you are focusing on future products. Will people be able to pre-order them right there?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey buddy,

Thanks for the feedback. We've gotten a lot of the feedback. What we did was make the frontpage more clearer. It used to be images/videos on the frontpage, but they were now replaced by Product Boxes.

Pre-ordering is currently being contemplating. What do you think?

<comment><USER5> I do think it is much more readable. I bookmarked it, and showed it to the SO. She liked the site, too (which tells me it is good).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


QBasic game programming - <AUTHOR> https://balau82.wordpress.com/2015/01/18/nostalgia-trip-qbasic-game-programming/ <comment><USER2> It basically has zero value now, but perhaps my only claim to "fame" in the 90s was writing the first (at least popularly known) raycaster in QBasic which then spawned a ton of clones (the comp.lang.basic.misc community was strong then). It was absolutely hideous and naive but getting credited in far smarter people's larger creations as their inspiration was an eye opener for me :-) (And a feat I have not repeated, alas!)

[http://home.kpn.nl/nebula/articfls%5Carticle1.html](http://home.kpn.nl/nebula/articfls%5Carticle1.html) [http://www.o-bizz.de/qbdown/qbcom/files/txtreng.bas](http://www.o-bizz.de/qbdown/qbcom/files/txtreng.bas)

<comment><USER3> I do believe you are (indirectly) the reason that I got into graphics programming, which led to the low-level skills I now use at my job every day. Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I managed to dig up one of my old 3d demo projects:

Source: [https://gist.github.com/dhotson/686036fb771fbbca8c48](https://gist.github.com/dhotson/686036fb771fbbca8c48)

Screenshot: [http://i.imgur.com/4fpaYtO.png](http://i.imgur.com/4fpaYtO.png)

.. it's not as embarrassing as I expected. :)

<comment><USER5> Actually that's a cool screenshot. It looks retro-cool rather than old. Nice work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> IIRC the version bundled with DOS6.22 was severly limited: it couldn't generate executables and the built-in help was only for IDE, without help on the language at all. That's because MS was also selling QBasic "pro" version. It was basically impossible to buy any software then in my country, so I was stuck with normal QBasic for a few years, until I got Internet connection and pirated a full version (it was still impossible to buy software here - no one bothered selling it at all here until a bit later).

Still, bundling a quite capable IDE with an OS was a very nice practice, but it basically ended then, probably because MS also sold Visual Basic. Without QBasic I wouldn't have started programming at all - I wonder how it would be if I was starting right now. Is there any ubiquitous, simple language available basically everywhere and with a nice IDE by default? JavaScript almost fits the bill, but as a beginner who doesn't know any better you're likely to use Notepad, while with QBasic you had a real IDE from the beginning.

<comment><USER7> The version that came with MS-DOS definitely had extensive help on the language as well as the editor. It was an interpreter though, and couldn't generate executables like the commercial version which was called QuickBasic IIRC.

<comment><USER6> > The version that came with MS-DOS definitely had extensive help on the > language as well as the editor.

Are you sure about that? I may be wrong of course, but I remember pressing "F3" (which I think was meant to invoke help?) and getting nothing. That's actually why I bought a book, I think this one: [http://www.amazon.com/Crash- Course-Qbasic-Greg-Perry/dp/1565...](http://www.amazon.com/Crash-Course- Qbasic-Greg-Perry/dp/1565299396) (quite a nice one! I remember reading it cover-to-cover during summer break on a beach, without any computer in at least 20km radius...)

But it's absolutely possible that I either had some ripped version or just couldn't find the right options. I mean, I was 8 at the time, knowing very little English, so that wouldn't surprise me at all :)

<comment><USER7> Yes, I'm pretty sure. That's the way I learned, from the included documentation. I just checked in a Windows 3.11 VM I have laying around and it's definitely there, though it's shift+F1 to access the help, or just F1 if the cursor is on a keyword.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In the late 90's there were several great QBasic communities (NeoZones was one I would frequent the most). I think these more than the fondness of the language/IDE were what kept me interested in learning software. Most of the communities seemed to die along with popularity of the language in the early 2000's.

<comment><USER4> Oh wow.. the community is still going: [http://www.neobasic.net/](http://www.neobasic.net/)

Marcade, Alias, Chaoticmass, Sciolizer.. any of you guys hang out here? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm wondering what impact to future programmers the current state of programming will have. Back when i was using qbasic there were very few distractions, as a self taught programmer if you wanted to build something you had to figure out how to do it yourself. No frameworks, no google, no stackoverflow noise just a couple of libraries and infromation from a couple of books I had access to as a kid. I remember for my first PC I knew the purpose of every single file on its 21mb of hard disk, try doing that today..

</comment><comment><USER10> Shout-out to QB64 - An attempt at a modern version/compiler for QBasic code, as well as updated features. I used to do a fair amount of programming in QB64, and the design of the language hampers it as a general-purpose language, it's a fun language for learning and writing in.

<comment><USER11> There's also FreeBASIC, which is largely compatible but with some shiny new features on top (even macros and tail-call optimization O_O).

<comment><USER10> The QB64 community is aware of FreeBASIC, but a big feature of QB64 is that you can literally drop QBasic code into QB64 and it will work without _any_ modifications. This won't work at all for FreeBASIC, it's much to far away from QBasic. FreeBASIC is still a nice language, but it does have different goals then QB64.

<comment><USER11> They've moved away then, since I last used it, earlier versions were pretty compatible. QB64's aims are good, but it's still incomplete itself, and I had stability issues with it (and to be honest, wasn't particularly keen on still using the old QB IDE anymore either).

<comment><USER10> FreeBASIC definitely has moved away from QBasic compatibility, I don't think it's considered a focus at this point. The last SDL versions of QB64 are fairly impressively compatible IMO, a large chunk of QBasic programs work without too many modifications. You can also now use the compiler via the command-line if you're interested. Back when I was doing some more "serious" QB64 development, I use a regular IDE and shell'd out to QB64 to compile, rather then typing in the QB64 IDE itself. It has it's share of rough edges though, so it is what it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I remember using basic during my demo coding days to find the optimum algorithms. When everything is running at 0.5fps it's easy to sport which implementation is the fastest. So after trying a few methods I would determine the fastest and implement it in asm1.

I miss those days, that was fun.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is fantastic. My first game was in GW-BASIC, but I quickly upgraded once I discovered QBasic on DOS 6.22. I also loved the MS-DOS Shell ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_Shell](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_Shell)) found on the supplemental disk of v6.22. It felt like multitasking...but wasn't.

<comment><USER14> I started with the basic of Oric-1, then the fabulous locomotive basic of Amstrad. When I got a PC (1986), I ditched quickly GW-basic in favor of turbo pascal, turbo prolog and later turbo C. QBASIC was not bad, but really too late for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> My whole fascination with computers and ultimately my career in programming started with QBasic. When I was 7 years old we had a 286 with DOS and running Norton Commander. I knew all the games I played, ran by selecting the ".EXE" file so I started looking for other "EXEs" when I ran across "QBasic.exe", I thought it might be a game so I ran it and started digging around. I came across some sample applications and more importantly the Help menu (QBasic had the one of the most incredible help systems ever). I started copying the samples for each command, then chaining them together to see what I could do. I can still remember the thrill I felt the first time I typed code and had the computer do what I wanted, it was life altering! My dad later bought me a book called "101 BASIC Computer Games", that's when I discovered that all flavors of BASIC are not equal and I then taught myself debugging.

</comment><comment><USER16> Great memories. It inspires me to locate an old DOS version of Turbo Pascal. TP was my absolute favorite IDE in the DOS days.

</comment><comment><USER17> Having started with ZX Spectrum BASIC (Timex 2068), followed by hexdumps, and moving into GW-Basic/Turbo Basic and Assembly after getting my first PC, I never coding anything meaningful in QBasic.

For me, those were the days to start learning Turbo Pascal, and QBasic was used mainly to run nibbles and gorillas, when I got bored of a coding session.

<comment><USER18> I can relate to this. I started with ZX Spectrum 128K's Basic and then moved to GWBasic on a Nec V40 (80186 compatible), my first PC.

When I got a computer good enough to run QBasic (or anything newer than DOS 3.3), it could compile C as well (with DJGPP) so I completely skipped QBasic.

<comment><USER19> In my case, would be : ZX Spectrum +3 -> TurboBasic/QBasic -> Visual Basic & Delphi -> PHP -> C, C++, Java, Javascript, Python, D, Assembly

I really miss the simplicity that have old computers of 80's and early 90's.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> QBasic was also how I started programming. When I found out you can edit the code ...

I printed programs on the school printer. Then typed it in when I got home, as we did not have any Internet. Sometimes I got banned for printing non-school- work.

I've heard similar stories from people printing machine code, so I guess it wasn't that bad writing QBasic.

</comment><comment><USER21> I learned QBasic from a Boy Scout magazine when I was in 4th grade. It was a letter jumble game and my dad helped me on our old Windows 3.1 machine. Never looked back.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is it me or is he doing the input and rendering in the wrong order?

<comment><USER22> Not necessarily wrong. Let's say it's inverted with respect to what you would normally expect. Since PUT writes pixels with XOR, it doesn't make a difference after the two PUT are executed. But since the graphic mode doesn't have double buffering, the screen could refresh while the PUT are executing. If the sprite is erased and then the next sprite is drawn, it might happen that you see no sprite or a partial sprite for a split second. If the next sprite is drawn first, and then the previous sprite is erased, you might see something like two slightly different sprites at the same time, and this gives a better (still ugly but better) movement effect in my opinion. That's why I inverted those lines.

<comment><USER7> I was talking about input and rendering. If you do rendering before handling input, you add at least an extra frame of latency.

<comment><USER22> I'm sorry I don't know why I understood the other thing. You are right, the input effect is delayed in this way.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Technology's Role Changes Comic Books - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/13/arts/comic-books-computers-dc-marvel.html <comment><USER2> I do comics with a process _radically_ different from the assembly line the superhero factories use. Their pipeline is script>pencils>inks>colors>letters, often done by different people at every stage; mine is script>pencils>letters>colors, all in Illustrator by me except for the script, which is largely written by my creative partner. By freeing myself from the need to look like What Superhero Comics Always Look Like, I've dropped an _entire phase of the process_.

I'm not producing work anywhere near as fast, in part because I'm a slacker compared to the work schedules most people working in superhero mills take on. I also spend more time per page because I'm doing it almost all myself. I _think_ I'm spending less time per page on my three visual stages than the total time of 2-4 people doing four separate visual stages. But working entirely in Illustrator and leaning on some of its more esoteric capabilities lets me produce work where every panel is a gorgeous little painting, with surprisingly high speed. Full control over the whole process is a nice bonus, it's very definitely _my_ art as opposed to the work of a team.

([http://egypt.urnash.com](http://egypt.urnash.com) if you are curious, Parallax is the fully painted project, Decrypting Rita is much more visually constrained and done before I figured out a lot of the techniques I'm using on Parallax.)

</comment><comment> open-source-ux For a time, the Wacom Cintiq was the only serious contender for drawing direct on screen with a stylus. But there are now affordable alternative brands (XP- Pen, Artisul, Huion, Parblo) that offer decent performance. Wacom is still regarded as the high-quality, premium choice but there's at least competition in the market where little existed before.

Additionally, the iPad Pro + Apple Pen + Procreate (drawing and painting app) has quickly become extremely popular among digital artists.

As for digital comics, it's worth checking out this fascinating experiment in trying to making comics more than just static pictures:

 _" Protanopia is a digital comic for iPad and iPhone. Created as an experiment into the possibilities of digital comics. Using elements from 3D and 2D animation in a realtime game engine, it creates an unique visual style, whilst still having a familiar feeling."_

[http://andrebergs.com/protanopia/](http://andrebergs.com/protanopia/)

<comment><USER3> > As for digital comics, it's worth checking out this fascinating experiment > in trying to making comics more than just static pictures: "Protanopia is a > digital comic for iPad and iPhone. (...)

Very nice.

Also check _Bottom of the Ninth_ , by Ryan Woodward if you are interested in creative use of the digital medium.

[http://ryanwoodwardart.com/my-works/bottom-of-the- ninth/](http://ryanwoodwardart.com/my-works/bottom-of-the-ninth/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://archive.is/k2ZpX](http://archive.is/k2ZpX)

</comment><comment><USER5> Speaking of Comics Books ... this morning I began the excellent treatise on Comics as a medium (some of you surely would know this): _Understanding Comics_ [1] by Scott McCloud.

The book itself is written in a comic book form, with black and white art. Thoroughly enjoying the "visual literacy" and the "mechanics of storytelling" by McCloud; a fine explainer.

(Looks like this is the book I needed to give me the push to try the World of Comics.)

[1] [https://www.harpercollins.com/9780060976255/understanding- co...](https://www.harpercollins.com/9780060976255/understanding-comics/)

<comment><USER6> I second this. "Understanding Comics" is actually about how the human mind works subjectively. It's mindblowing about every five pages or so. Scott McCloud is a genius.</comment></comment>


English Is The Toughest European Language To Learn - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1233-english-is-toughest-european-language-to-read.html

<comment><USER2> Press release on the same study:

<http://www.dundee.ac.uk/pressreleases/proct02/dyslexics.html>

(I looked this up to get a better idea which countries were considered, and which were not.)

Excerpt from a good book on dyslexia by some of the leading researchers in the field:

[http://books.google.com/books?id=OTMYM5ijMtMC&pg=PA383&#...
Here's another good link on dyslexia:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/l15r432m85775666/
Here's a link to a forthcoming book with practical advice to parents about dyslexia:
http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-047042981...
My overall comments on the submitted article and the claim in its title are:
a) Yes, the English penchant for preserving etymological spellings from multiple languages (especially Norman French) makes learning reading of English more daunting than learning to read a language with a reformed, consistent spelling such as Spanish. But linguists have applied thoughtful effort to improving reading instruction in English, and it is possible with the best materials, for example Let's Read: A Linguistic Approach by Leonard Bloomfield and Clarence Barnhart,
http://www.amazon.com/Lets- Linguistic-Approach-Leonard-Bloom...
to make great progress in reading English independently in less than one year of instruction. (It's regrettable that more schools don't use superior books like Let's Read for initial reading instruction.) Part of the difficulty that pupils have in school in English- speaking countries comes from suboptimal reading instruction rather than from inherent features of the current English writing system.
http://www.amazon.com/Early-Reading- Instruction-Science-Brad...
b) The study didn't test "European languages" exhaustively. It may be that there are some languages in Europe that present similar difficulties. Certainly there are languages in other regions of the world (including languages in the Indo-European language family) that present tougher challenges to primary-age learners learning to read, although those learners often overcome those challenges.
c) For overall adult performance in reading, exposure matters, and for second- language learners of English, the network effects of having huge numbers of users of English (both first-language users and second-language users) all over the world ensures that most second-language learners still reach quite an adequate level of reading proficiency in English, which indeed in many cases exploits the similarity of English spelling to spellings from foreign languages. English gains its position as the world interlanguage honestly and will not be challenged as the world interlanguage by any other language in the lifetime of anyone reading this message.

</comment><comment><USER3> I can't find the full paper online, but it does seem to be a very narrowly defined idea of language aquisition. It deals only with children learning to _read_ their native tongue. No allowance is made for any learning outside of the classroom. No consideration of the difficulty in learning the gender assignment to words in non-English languages. There are some valid observations too, but it's a pretty serious leap to draw the conclusion in the title.

</comment><comment><USER4> 'learn to READ' I want to point out, to help head off lots of needless argument.</comment>


Ask HN: Finding a partner for a unique request - <AUTHOR> I have a growing stack of various hardware concepts that I believe are patentable, potentially lucrative, and doable with existing technology and manufacturing processes.
These aren't 'business ideas' but are unique concepts in the fields of optics, microarchitecture, user interfaces, biotech and electrochemistry among others. Generally I spend a little bit of time verifying that nothing too similar has been patented but I'm trying to spend less time on the idea log and more time on my existing projects.
What I am looking for: an informal partner who I can send these concepts to - if they decide it's worth patenting, we split ownership of the IP in exchange for legal/biz dev services.
I wouldn't expect this partner to sign nondisclosure agreements or anything binding them legally unless we decided to move forward with a patent. I'm not too concerned about the risk.
I just want to send a few things along at a time and continue to do so as long as it seems like a good fit.
I don't have the time to work on most of these projects right now (I am committed to a startup at the moment), however I'd be okay with holding the patents until the right time. I wouldn't expect this partner to develop any of the ideas out but I would expect an effort in trying to drum up some interest.
If anyone is interested please reply and we'll connect. <comment><USER2> Hey, im interested in your idea. Where can i contact you?

<comment><AUTHOR> hey - you can send an email to email@example.com</comment></comment>


Dtrx: Intelligent archive extraction (2006) - <AUTHOR> http://brettcsmith.org/2006/x/

<comment><USER2> There's not a lot of things I miss from Mac OS X since moving to Linux, but StuffIt Expander's intelligent directory-creation is definitely one of them. It looks like dtrx is basically the same thing - thanks!</comment>


Ask HN: How to deal with losing personal email address? - <AUTHOR> So... I'm about to lose my personal email address because the organization through which I received it has recently changed their policy.<p>Beyond updating all of my various accounts is there anything else for which I should prepare? I expect that the email address will at some point be associated with someone else. <comment><USER2> Not directly related to your question, but before you have this happen to you again in the future, buy yourself a domain name, and use that domain name for your personal email. You can either run your own server, or have one of the commercial entities handle the actual email server part for you. But with your own domain name, you won't lose your email address again because "the organization through which [you] received it has ... changed their policy". If you use a provider, and they change their policy, you can just move to another provider, yet your address will remain the same.

</comment><comment><USER3> I can highly recommend migadu for a very low cost professional setup with a custom domain!</comment>


Show HN: Just another social network - <AUTHOR> http://www.bgrgndzdb.com <comment><USER2> I like people who dare to come up with another social network, but why is this better? If you say you're "just another" you're declaring you have no advantage.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just don't know why mine is better, I can lie for 3 hours straight about my site but I need opinions from users to tell why it is better.</comment></comment>


Toyota Electric Vehicles: Where Are They? - <AUTHOR> https://mondaynote.com/toyota-electric-vehicles-where-are-they-693862bb2241 <comment><USER2> Toyota announced their battery electric plans: [https://electrek.co/2019/06/07/toyota-electric-car-images- ac...](https://electrek.co/2019/06/07/toyota-electric-car-images-accelerate- plan/)

Lexus is said to be releasing a battery electric hatchback next year: [https://www.whatcar.com/news/lexus-readying-first- electric-c...](https://www.whatcar.com/news/lexus-readying-first-electric-car- for-2020-launch/n20002)

Toyota will show their solid-state battery progress during the 2020 Tokyo Olympics: [https://europe.autonews.com/automakers/toyota-pulls- forward-...](https://europe.autonews.com/automakers/toyota-pulls-forward- electrification-plan-eyes-solid-state-battery-next-year)

So that's where Toyota's at.</comment>


Navy's flawed technology set the USS John McCain up for disaster - <AUTHOR> https://features.propublica.org/navy-uss-mccain-crash/navy-installed-touch-screen-steering-ten-sailors-paid-with-their-lives/ <comment><USER3> In a panic people get tunnel vision. When you design HMI's for a living you have to consider. If my brother, sister, grandmother was using this system during an emergency could we guide them to make the right decisions.

The fact that the prop controls could be split but the UI would not gray out the sliders on the screens that did not have control is a poor user interface design choice. If the controls only appeared "active" on the screen they were transferred too this could have made things much more simple.

The fact that the mushroom button for emergency steering yanked control to wherever it was pressed- this should have displayed a red on black box. Emergency Override called from X Station.

The issues with the navigation system are a whole other bag of worms- who knows what the mess was there.

Disclosure, I have done HMI design and install in production systems for manufacturing, chemical and warehousing operations. I have never built anything for a ship or vehicle. So I may be speaking total stupid to someone in that industry. I would love to hear someone from that market sector drop in and talk about how or why the HMI was setup like this.

Sounds like this system was sub-contracted to the lowest bidder and pushed out without enough testing.

<comment><USER4> Integrated bridges are being installed all across USN ships, including Mt. Whitney with MSC right now. They're filled with a hodgepodge of HMIs that are all linked to a control system filled with gyros, ECDIS, RADAR, propulsion, etc. etc. System integration is complex and the design work is done by contracted companies. You don't have the first party vendor doing the integration work. It's a recipe for disaster.

<comment><USER5> This is pretty typical of military contracts. They like to spread the work around, so different vendors provide different pieces of the system, and it ends up being a hodgepodge that doesn't integrate well and doesn't work well.

<comment><USER6> The Navy doesn't like to spread the wolk around. Congressmembers like to spread it around to get a piece of the pork.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >Immediate responsibility, the Navy ruled, rested with Sanchez, his officers and senior sailors. They had been lax, even complacent, in their training of the sailors steering the ship. Sanchez had made a critical error in not adding more sailors to stand watch as the McCain navigated the treacherous strait

From what I read consistently about the Navy, and hear from veteran friends, any sailors they could have asked to stand watch would have already been overworked and under rested. Everything I read about the U.S. military, and especially the NAVY, seems to indicate a broken culture of bloat and incompetence from the top down. I think we've been too comfortable as the premier unchallenged world superpower and the services have started to rot from within.

<comment><USER8> I can't find the source [0], but there was another expose'/interview on the _USS John McCain_ where they interviewed darn near the entire crew. My details are fuzzy, but from what I remember the crew has been _severely_ short staffed for years. To the point where 'normal' days were like 18 hours long and sleep for the captain was 2-4 hours a day for years on end. The internal email system for the ship was so broken that they resorted to just using free Gmail addresses, they had to tape over control knobs to keep them from being disturbed, training was completely abandoned, etc. It paints a hell of a bad picture of the Pacific fleet and it's command.

[0] I think it was propublica as well, but I can't find the article there.

<comment><USER9> Your google-fu failed you because it wasn't about the USS John McCain, it was Propublica's article on the _other_ fatal 7th Fleet destroyer collision in 2017, the USS Fitzgerald. The collisions were two months apart.

The article you are thinking of is here: [https://features.propublica.org/navy-accidents/uss- fitzgeral...](https://features.propublica.org/navy-accidents/uss-fitzgerald- destroyer-crash-crystal/)

<comment><USER8> Bingo! Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > In 2014, Navy officials discovered a flaw in the IBNS. One component could > not keep track of more than 150 ships at a time without malfunctioning, > according to Navy investigators. The Navy's solution? Sailors were told to > delete tracked ships before the total hit the magic number.

This blows my mind. Can anyone here guess what's going on under the hood? Is this a magic number that a developer came up during testing to avoid running of out memory/swapping?

<comment><USER11> Just a guess—probably designed using high-reliability / realtime principles. This might involve e.g. allocating memory only at startup, which would explain things. The limit has to be _some_ number when programming this way.

<comment><USER5> In a real-time safety-critical OS, you absolutely do allocate memory only at startup, but this kind of OS usually isn't used for any kind of GUI interface, it's used for much simpler systems. Another trait of these systems is that the CPU caches are all disabled, because those prevent determinism. But again, this isn't something you'd do on a GUI system; it's something you'd do on an ABS brake controller or an engine ECU, where the amount of memory ever needed is easy to determine in the design.

<comment><USER12> This is also done in the signal processors that power these systems. I don't know this system in particular, but the USN has been moving towards commodity computing hardware for these systems. Essentially, a rack of commercial servers (usually IBM) running stripped-down RHEL with a real-time kernel. The software for these systems is firm real-time, and generally uses the same principals as other real-time software (including, but not limited to, up- front allocation).

<comment><USER13> These are just PCs running Windows, and I don't believe there has ever been a thought of real time processing on them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Not to be overlooked: ProPublica actually constructed a 3D version of the navigation system's control board: [https://www.propublica.org/article/how-we- reconstructed-the-...](https://www.propublica.org/article/how-we- reconstructed-the-flawed-navigation-controls-behind-the-navy-worst-maritime- accident-in-40-years)

<comment><USER15> Couldn't find it in your article, but it looks like the 3D models are integrated into the story here: [https://features.propublica.org/navy-uss- mccain-crash/navy-i...](https://features.propublica.org/navy-uss-mccain- crash/navy-installed-touch-screen-steering-ten-sailors-paid-with-their-lives/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Something unclear from the article, but jumped out at me.

It seems that the Achilles heel of the IBNS system was that too much information tended to bork it, but what's unclear to me (as implied by the article) is if dropping incoming data was actually the sensible thing to do (as is often the case) and if incoming data was prioritized over existing data and that was dropped instead.

The other thing I would point out is that the technical failure is not that a system is complex, but that a complex system has a user interface that allows a sequence of actions to leave it in an invalid or unpredictable state. The transfer of throttle control being incomplete while other actions were taken, for example.

I think the thing lacking here was consistent and sound changes to the state, lack of fuzzing user input to observe this possibility, and the reliance on training to avoid the issues at all. These are problems that can be solved with design.

<comment><USER17> I haven't worked on any project anywhere approaching significant complexity, but the magic number of 150 supported tracked ships sounds insanely low to me. Is this at all reasonable, or does it indicate the design and implementation were shit?

Does anyone know how much processing is needed here? Is it just updating an internal model of locations and warning about impending collisions? Presuming constant speed and heading that sounds easy, not presuming it sounds not feasible even for just a handful of ships.

Also, if only 150 ships are supported, wouldn't it makes sense for the computer to automatically untrack them? Maybe allow manual prioritization of what to drop first, but surely within a few days of a competent vendor learning adding too many items borked their system they would put out a patch that does the absolute minimum by automatically preventing adding too many items?

> In 2014, Navy officials discovered a flaw in the IBNS. One component could > not keep track of more than 150 ships at a time without malfunctioning, > according to Navy investigators. The Navy's solution? Sailors were told to > delete tracked ships before the total hit the magic number.

> The navigation system could also become overloaded if too much information > streamed in from a ship tracking database used worldwide to prevent maritime > collisions. The Navy's second solution was similar to the first: Drop the > feed when it became too much.

> They were patches on top of patches that left the Navy's destroyers without > a full picture of the seas around them. But none of the problems was serious > enough to attract high-level attention. A Navy system designed to track > problems in major ship systems did not contain any reports that mentioned > the IBNS until last year, according to a Navy official.

<comment><USER18> 150 tracks without knowing the range of their navigation radar systems doesn't say much. It's hard to put more than 150 objects in a 5-10NM radius. Since it's a navy ship the nav radar is probably more powerful, but still, it's not like a 200NM range air-defence radar. I'm guessing they spec-d the system with incoherent requirements, and either the contractor that won went for the cheapest working hardware without asking too many questions, or maybe they took an old system's spec and asked for an incomplete upgrade... or nobody wanted to go to their boss saying the system didn't work because of some badly written spec or badly managed contractor and we need more money, please ? That would track with leaving the system badly working like this without even having some face-saving 'we're trying to work it out with the contractor right now'.

Or, most likely, normalisation of deviance. The system came at first with so many bugs and problems that when they got it in some stable state, they'd got so used to work around the bugs that they kept on doing that. Look we already put so much effort in this, what's a bit more? Yeah, we're quite happy with the system, at least it doesn't crash every hour like when it was delivered...

<comment><USER19> It sounded like it was "150 tracks since last reboot" which is absurd, since the workaround was to manually delete out-of-range tracked objects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Absolutely phenomenal reporting. Take the time and read the entire thing in detail. It's worth it.

Can any Navy vets comment or speak to these systems? I really worry about the proliferation of these digital interfaces. I'm curious to know how folks feel about them.

<comment><USER21> I can't speak to that specific system, but I can give you plenty of other anecdotes about the systemic unreadiness of the US Navy.

I was forced to be the on-duty electrician from time to time, despite not being an ship's electrician. One of the responsibilities for the on-duty electrician was to cut the right circuits in case of a compartment fire. Despite my repeated protests that I didn't know what I was doing and needed additional training, I was forced to be the on-duty electrician. Mind you, there were no other duties I had to perform, just that one, and just in case of a fire, so it's not like my every-day workload was increased. Determined not to get people killed in the event of an emergency, I asked the actual electricians what I should be doing. Turns out, they didn't know either. Their plan was, in case of fire, kill power to the whole ship. I don't think I need to tell you, this is exactly the wrong move to make.

There's an ever-growing number of electronic systems onboard ships, and an ever-shrinking number of sailors to run them. Qualifications are a joke in pretty much every department, at least in the surface fleet. Ships are in a constant state of disrepair, it's not uncommon for 30-50% of the communications equipment to be broken at any given time, parts taking months to receive (mostly due to budget restraints).

Sailors are routinely sleep deprived. It's not uncommon for a sailor to be up by 6AM, work all day, and then be steering the ship from 00:00 to 04:00, with no sleep, followed by maybe 2 hours of sleep before having to work again the next day, and possibly have another watch from 20:00-12:00. Rinse repeat.

<comment><USER22> That last paragraph screams of a massive failure in Crew Resource Management. There are acres of case studies about this subject throughout industry, and when people take them to heart lots of accidents are avoided.

Airline pilots are a prime example. How many airliners crash these days? CRM is one of the factors in making them so safe. Truck Drivers now have similar requirements and a much improved safety record as well. This is literally life or death, industries that ignore it are being unnecessarily reckless and unprofessional.

<comment><USER23> It would be cool if anyone has a source for the improved trucker safety record. It is just common sense, though. I don't know how this no-sleep system ever got traction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It strikes me that at least 16 seconds of screwing around could have been saved by changing the caption of the "Emergency Override - To Manual" button to say "Emergency Override - Take Control." The button's caption would then contain enough information for anyone pressing the button to know that they were responsible for all controls at the station after pressing.

</comment><comment><USER25> Very sobering article. Makes me reconsider the proliferation of glass cockpits and fly by wire in aviation. Granted, there is no putting the genie back in the bottle, but failsafe and redundancy need to be a central design tenet from the start.

Back in the 80's, I was throttleman aboard a similar sized USN ship. There was no direct link from the bridge to the throttle. Throttle commands were communicated via an indicator and the throttle operator manually turned a big wheel to meet the command. I remember thinking at the time there should be direct throttle control from the bridge. Hindsight is 20:20.

<comment><USER5> Glass cockpits and FBW are great, in theory. In practice, I don't know because I haven't had to use it. However, don't make the mistake of assuming that just because the US Navy can't get a well-engineered system put together means that Boeing and Airbus are guilty of the same. (Their glass-cockpit systems come from other vendors, who also supply to smaller aircraft makers BTW.)

Also, how many foreign militaries have had problems like this with basic ship steering?

From what I can tell, the US Navy is uniquely broken here. UK, Australia, Japan, France etc. do not have have their ships plowing into slow cargo ships. Commercial aircraft are not flying into the ground left and right. (The 737MAX is pretty bad, but that's not even related to glass cockpits; MCAS was a Boeing-engineered component, not a glass cockpit sourced from some vendor like Thales.)

<comment><USER26> > Also, how many foreign militaries have had problems like this with basic > ship steering?

> From what I can tell, the US Navy is uniquely broken here. UK, Australia, > Japan, France etc. do not have have their ships plowing into slow cargo > ships.

Norway lost a destroyer last year after colliding with a tanker. Keep in mind the US Navy is larger than the next 13 largest navies combined. 2 of 3 of these events happening to the US Navy isn't statistically significant enough to say it's a uniquely US Navy problem.

Not to say they don't need to get their shit together.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This story's worrisome in that it makes the Navy sound very vulnerable to electronic warfare.

I mean, if overall operations are so hazard-prone that they're not reliable in the absence of hostilities, how could they possibly be resilient against an advanced actor?

Is the situation as bad as it sounds from the story?

</comment><comment><USER28> I find it a little ironic that for an article about unintuitive and broken electronic navigation system, the UX on mobile of this article breaks navigation in weird and unintuitive ways.

They value their narrative and slow animated exposition over my ability to scroll and read the article, meaning at multiple times I have to stop and wait for their painfully slow animations before I can continue.

<comment><USER29> I thought the visuals were well done, but I agree that they should have just scrolled normally on mobile instead of capturing the scroll to advance the animation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> > could not keep track of more than 150 ships at a time without > malfunctioning, according to Navy investigators. The Navy's solution? > Sailors were told to delete tracked ships before the total hit the magic > number

> "Usually when we have a fault with that system," Sanchez said, "their > resolution is to reboot the system."

Of course it is.

Software is going to kill us all.

</comment><comment><USER31> _He ordered Bordeaux to take over steering the warship while another sailor controlled its speed. The idea was to avoid distractions by having each man focus on a single task in the heavy maritime traffic._

I've not controlled anything that floats bigger than a small fishing boat, and I realise the timescales of reaction here are much larger, but that just sounds wrong to me --- changes in speed can affect direction, and vice-versa. Splitting that to two separate brains that are communicating only via a low- bandwidth voice channel seems like a recipe for disaster.

<comment> at-fates-hands >> changes in speed can affect direction, and vice-versa. Splitting that to two separate brains that are communicating only via a low-bandwidth voice channel seems like a recipe for disaster.

It's interesting you mention this. My uncle and cousins have been sailing for years on Lake Superior. They navigated some of the largest races on the lake for decades, including the Trans Superior in every imaginable weather conditions. They are, IMHO incredibly experienced sailors.

I just sent this very article to them and my uncle responded within the hour about how having two people doing these in tandem was a recipe for disaster because of the very issue you pointed out. He said you should have one capable person who should be able to do both since it can be a delicate balancing act. Too much speed and over correction with steering can have disastrous results.

<comment><USER26> The people with the controls in their hand aren't the people deciding what to put the controls at. They're told where to set them, and they do it or report that the mechanisms have failed.

The reason for this is that the people making the decisions have more important shit to worry about. Things are different when your primary concerns are getting shot at and shooting back. In war time it's not atypical to get your engine or rudder shot out, and if you have someone who has one job - <USER2> set the rudder - he'll notice and diagnose it a lot faster than someone who's tasked with avoiding incoming fire, bearing weapons on the enemy, etc. Distribution of responsibilities is incredibly important in war. Combat tends to break down careful, considered decision making.

Also keep in mind most of these people aren't seasoned. This dude was just out of high school. Information overload is a thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The only thing here that is worse than this shitstorm of a system design is the vindictive attitude of the Navy towards the sailors who have to cope with it. Flogging and hanging from the yardarm may be gone, but the spirit lives on.

<comment><USER32> Update: I have this suspicion that the Captain was charged with homicide in order to get him to take a plea deal, so that the problems with this system, and the Navy's failure to properly train crews in its use, would not become an issue in a court-martial.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Those look like Motif gui widgets from the 1990's on the touchscreen! [https://features.propublica.org/navy-uss-mccain- crash/assets...](https://features.propublica.org/navy-uss-mccain- crash/assets/images/ui-overview-9x7.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER34> These days we are so hyped on the cool shiny objects, but failing at the most basic concept, HSI = Human System Integration:

" Systems are comprised of hardware, software, and human personnel all of which operate within a surrounding environment. Too often, acquisition systems programs fail to consider the human capacity or requirements as part of the system. This leads to poor task allocation between hardware, software, and human users or supporters. To promote ideal task allocation, it is critical that the human element be considered early in system development."

</comment><comment><USER35> Any entry level UX designer would tell you that you can't pack more and more control into an opaque and confusing system and still lay all the responsibility on the user when something breaks down.

I really wonder, what does UX testing and iteration look like at Northrup- Grumman?

<comment><USER36> >>I really wonder, what does UX testing and iteration look like at Northrup- Grumman?

As someone who worked daily with two different NG-produced command and control systems, it's probably between "non-existent" and "flaming dumpster fire".

[https://www.northropgrumman.com/Capabilities/C2PC/Pages/defa...](https://www.northropgrumman.com/Capabilities/C2PC/Pages/default.aspx)

[https://dzone.com/articles/war-fighter-netbeans- platform](https://dzone.com/articles/war-fighter-netbeans-platform)

Agile Client is the better of the two apps UI/UX-wise, close to a clunky, old version of Google Earth. Newer versions of C2PC are a polished turd, advancing the app's interface from 1995 to 2005.....despite hitting the operating forces around 2017-2018. We had bug submissions on some key mission-critical visualization features in the new version with patch turn-around times looking like 9-12 months at best.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> The Navy has a serious, serious leadership problem. Their seals have also been fucking up left and right.

This would all be comical if it wasn't so tragic.

</comment><comment><USER38> touch screens are a horrible idea for this type of system. I also think they're a bad idea in cars. there is no muscle-memory with a touch screen.

</comment><comment><USER39> Tried scrolling article up and down. Animated images hijacking the mouse control randomly, showing some motion then freezing. A good illustration.

<comment><USER40> This is the latest innovation in "interactive story telling".

It is just the ultimate in irony: here is an article crying murder because a touch interface allowed a sailor to un-gang engine power, then slide a big fat green power slider for one engine to half of what the other big green slider for the other engine directly next to it showed.

Meanwhile here we are furiously scrolling to hit invisible "scrolled distance" breakpoints to advance a slideshow.

<comment><USER41> It's even worse if you're used to using spacebar to page-down.

<comment><USER19> Meh, I use spacebar to page-down, but am ready to fall-back at a moments notice because so many sites draw their header _over_ the body, so a spacebar will end up by scrolling by more than a page...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> This reminds me of "Pentagon Wars."

</comment><comment><USER43> DO NOT LET YOUR FRIENDS/FAMILY JOIN THE NAVY.

-ACTIVE DUTY SAILOR

<comment><USER44> Openly defaming your employer might have serious consequences.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I wonder was the system coded in Ada?</comment>


The Impact of Dropping the SAT - <AUTHOR> http://www.insidehighered.com/layout/set/print/news/2009/03/26/sat

<comment><AUTHOR> The submitted article says,

"These models suggest that any move away from the SAT or ACT in competitive colleges results in significant gains in ethnic and economic diversity. But the gains are greater for colleges that drop testing entirely, as opposed to just making it optional. (To date, only one institution -- Sarah Lawrence College -- has taken that step.)"

How does Sarah Lawrence College

[http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/search/CollegeDetail.j...](http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/search/CollegeDetail.jsp?collegeId=2844)

78% Women 22% Men

<1% American Indian/Alaskan Native 7% Asian/Pacific Islander 2% Black/Non- Hispanic 5% Hispanic 71% White/Non-Hispanic 4% Non-Resident Alien 10% Race/ethnicity unreported

37% in top 10th of graduating class 84% in top quarter of graduating class 98% in top half of graduating class

39% had h.s. GPA of 3.75 and higher 25% had h.s. GPA between 3.5 and 3.74 14% had h.s. GPA between 3.25 and 3.49 16% had h.s. GPA between 3.0 and 3.24 5% had h.s. GPA between 2.5 and 2.99 1% had h.s. GPA between 2.0 and 2.49

compare with Harvard

[http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/search/CollegeDetail.j...](http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/search/CollegeDetail.jsp?collegeId=1251)

51% Women 49% Men

1% American Indian/Alaskan Native 19% Asian/Pacific Islander 8% Black/Non- Hispanic 7% Hispanic 41% White/Non-Hispanic 10% Non-Resident Alien 15% Race/ethnicity unreported

95% in top 10th of graduating class 100% in top quarter of graduating class

or Princeton

[http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/search/CollegeDetail.j...](http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/search/CollegeDetail.jsp?collegeId=4221)

50% Women 50% Men

<1% American Indian/Alaskan Native 17% Asian/Pacific Islander 7% Black/Non- Hispanic 7% Hispanic 49% White/Non-Hispanic 11% Non-Resident Alien 8% Race/ethnicity unreported

97% in top 10th of graduating class 100% in top quarter of graduating class

or MIT

[http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/search/CollegeDetail.j...](http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/search/CollegeDetail.jsp?collegeId=4075)

46% Women 54% Men

1% American Indian/Alaskan Native 25% Asian/Pacific Islander 9% Black/Non- Hispanic 14% Hispanic 34% White/Non-Hispanic 9% Non-Resident Alien 7% Race/ethnicity unreported

97% in top 10th of graduating class 100% in top quarter of graduating class

in student diversity?

</comment><comment><USER3> The point of the SAT in the first place was to increase diversity. Back then, it meant smart kids who weren't part of the establishment. Now, they want to get rid of it to increase diversity. Except, now it means stupid kids who aren't part of the establishment. The only group that remains the same are the losers, and that's the whole point.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure what you mean by "establishment" in this context, other than my guess that I'm not part of the establishment.

After edit: Quite a few scholars contend that for a long time the student characteristic that has set college availability even more than SAT scores is family income. Laura D'Andrea Tyson, one of President Clinton's economics advisors, called for taking student family income more into account in admissions back in 2003:

[http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_27/b3840045_...](http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_27/b3840045_mz007.htm)

Several studies and journalistic reports have shown that in previous years, student income limited college choices more than student test scores:

<http://www.tcf.org/Publications/Education/carnrose.pdf>

<http://harvardmagazine.com/2005/05/a-thumb-on-the-scale.html>

[http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200511/financial-aid- leveragi...](http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200511/financial-aid-leveraging/4)

[http://www.jkcf.org/assets/files/0000/0084/Achievement_Trap....](http://www.jkcf.org/assets/files/0000/0084/Achievement_Trap.pdf)

Now some colleges claim to have outreach to increase socioeconomic diversity on campus:

[http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2008/11...](http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2008/11/10/colleges_reach_out_to_poorer_students?mode=PF)

Based on what I have heard in anecdotes about this year's admission results, Princeton, which was the first college in the Ivy League to announce a no-loan financial aid policy, is in earnest about admitting more students from low- income backgrounds.

<comment><USER4> Establishment meant WASPs. Brandeis was set up as the Jewish Harvard because high-performing Jewish high schoolers were getting passed over for Ivy League admission for legacy WASPs. After World War II, the Ivies opened up considerably and the "need" for a Jewish school diminished although it maintains its identity (the same as HBCUs, for example).

The issue of the SATs still being a fantastic determinant of first year college success says _something_ , but I'm not sure what. Perhaps the colleges would let in more minorities, but they'd not perform as well? Would those minorities do better since more of them would get in and they wouldn't be as isolated as they are now?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love how diversi-crats treat college education as a fungible commodity - <USER2> we can just get more minorities into the Ivy League, we'll magically solve all of their problems. Putting someone into an academic environment which is too far beyond his capabilities is a bad idea.

<comment><USER6> Agreed. This is the fundamental flaw with the affirmative action and other diversity advocates.

Artificially increasing diversity is institutional racism which only serves to mitigate a symptom, not eliminate a cause. Rather than forcibly put more minorities through college, we should improve schools in poor and underprivileged neighborhoods.

Unfortunately, this real solution may take 10 to 20 years to see results... which is far shorter than the average term in public office.

<comment><USER7> Schools can only do so much. If by putting more minorities through college you can increase the average level of education among minority parents (when those students have kids), you may be able to improve their kids' educations as a side-effect.

<comment><USER6> I'd much prefer that everyone get a proper primary education than a few people struggle through a secondary education to bet on their children.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is the same kind of crap that started the housing bubble... social engineers doing what they just feel in their heart is right for society.

The results will be tons of mediocre graduates unable to pay back their loans. That's OK... we'll pick up the tab; no fucking problem!

<comment><USER9> Are you an iSteve reader? He talks about how affirmative action wrt getting minorities into law school does many no good when it comes to the bar exam. And by then they've wasted their lawschool time.

[http://isteve.blogspot.com/2006/09/sacrificing-smart- black-k...](http://isteve.blogspot.com/2006/09/sacrificing-smart-black-kids- on-altar.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> So there are at least two interpretations of this data (I'll admit I skimmed a bit torward the end).

1) The SAT is measuring things other than academic ability/achievement, particularly non-academic cultural differences between a significant portion of the cited minorities and those having more success getting into SAT- mandatory institutions. This seems to be implicit in many calls for diversity.

2) The SAT IS a good measure of academic ability/achiement/admissibility, and statistically speaking, the cited minorities just aren't as likely to have the requsite levels of whatever academic oomph the test is measuring, presumably for environmental reasons.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right. This is what I find puzzling about the submitted article's report about the soon-to-be presented study

[http://www.wfu.edu/provost/rethinkingadmissions/conference_p...](http://www.wfu.edu/provost/rethinkingadmissions/conference_program.php)

\--very little information about how much student characteristics would change along other dimensions besides ethnic diversity if the SAT were not considered at all as an admission factor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'd have felt a lot better about the article if it wasn't for the word "model" sprinkled liberally through the piece. It sounded an awful lot to me like they could have just _looked_ for the evidence of the effect they are claiming, and I find myself wondering if they used a model because it was easier, or if they did in fact look and failed to come up with the morally-correct evidence.

It's easy; go look at those colleges that didn't consider the test, then compare the statistical outcomes predicted by the SAT for those who took it and what actually happened. (There may be some correlations to sniff out ("I know I'm only applying to non-SAT colleges so I won't take the test"), but I bet it's managable.)

Diversity's great and all (though when I say diversity, I mean _real_ diversity and not a whole bunch of differently-colored people all believing the same thing, but that's a topic for a different discussion...), but it's evil to skew statistics to increase the number of "diverse" students taking out increasingly expensive loans who then do not end up with a degree just so you can feel good about how many happy rainbowed diversities your college has. If that is what is going on here. I admit I can't prove it but I don't like the smell.

(Yes, there are serious issues with educational opportunities that should be addressed, and I don't know what the solution is. I just know the solution _isn't_ forcing the already-behind to take on tens of thousands of dollars of useless debt.)

<comment><AUTHOR> _It's easy; go look at those colleges that didn't consider the test_

The submitted article says there is exactly one such college, which I think from other sources I have read is correct. And the figures for that college are already posted to this thread.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> well, duh. minorities and underprivileged individuals get lower sat scores. colleges that take into account sat scores prefer students with higher sat scores, all else equal. why did they need to do a "study" to come to this conclusion?</comment>


Revocation still doesn't work - <AUTHOR> https://www.imperialviolet.org/2014/04/29/revocationagain.html?radio <comment><USER2> It's the fatalism about fixing this is most discouraging in Langley's writings.

Why shouldn't someone who cares very much about security be able to tell their browser to get the full 30MB it would require today, or the 300MB Langley projects it will take in 5 years? That's not that much data!

(Google's hand-curated tiny CRLSet lifeboat is currently only ~308KB of blacklisted certificate data.)

Why can't the organizations with multi-hundred-million-dollar budgets for web projects design the privacy-preserving/space-saving/probabilistic systems that would make this work with much smaller overhead?

Once the original site, the CA, and a major browser vendor all know, via public info, that a certificate is compromised, why should any browser user have to wait days/weeks/months/indefinitely, while showing the false "lock icon", before warning users?

<comment><USER3> That's the thing I don't understand about this whole discussion: The SafeBrowsing blacklist bloom filter that Google itself made and uses is significantly smaller, is updated in real time, and doesn't have a big runtime overhead. Why not just have a bloom filter for revocations, with a Google server doing the false-positive elimination?

(Yes, there is a little bit of a chicken-and-egg problem when it comes to the Google server, but that's a much smaller problem than being unable to check if most certificates in the world are revoked or not.)

Edit: Looks like Adam (of course) already considered this: [https://www.imperialviolet.org/2011/04/29/filters.html](https://www.imperialviolet.org/2011/04/29/filters.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Do people still take GRC seriously?

Back in 2001-2002 people dedicated a lot of time to debunking his every statement, but he just sort of faded into the nether after TechTV blew up. He still however maintains his charlatan listing: [http://attrition.org/errata/charlatan/steve_gibson/](http://attrition.org/errata/charlatan/steve_gibson/)

</comment><comment><USER5> It seems like Langley and Gibson both agree that OCSP Must-Staple would resolve all this.

"If we want a scalable solution to the revocation problem then it's probably going to come in the form of short-lived certificates or something like OCSP Must Staple." \- [https://www.imperialviolet.org/2014/04/19/revchecking.html](https://www.imperialviolet.org/2014/04/19/revchecking.html)

"The case for "OCSP Must-Staple" \- [https://www.grc.com/revocation/commentary.htm](https://www.grc.com/revocation/commentary.htm)

<comment><USER6> Personally, I am for a hard fail OCSP option in HSTS or certificate plus OCSP stapling. Default to soft fail with a warning message for now. Remember captive portals can use OCSP stapling too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Best summary I've seen:

"If the bad guy can MITM your browser going to www.bank.com, they can break your browser going to the online revocation list."

(Implicit: the browser will fail open to connect to the website anyway in case it can't connect to the revocation list.)

<comment><USER2> If the revocation data is available from "everywhere", and the browser sees that it hasn't been able to get it recently from "anywhere", that's a suitably alarming situation that the user should get a blocking warning, as with any other self-signed/untrusted-CA certificate.

In the usual browsing situation, it also doesn't have to be a blocking verification before displaying the first bytes from a site (requiring subsecond checking). It could load the page but continue verification in the background, only becoming a blocking warning some number of seconds later, when the user enters form data or attempts other navigation.

In fact, even minutes into a session, the information that either – (a) it took a while but we now see that this certificate is definitely bad; or (b) you are currently so cut-off from the real "Internet" that suspicion towards all sites is justified – is useful.

That is, even a "delayed hard fail" would still be useful.

The alternative is that people chat, transact, etc. indefinitely at the mercy of attackers, because the browser isn't even trying to acquire good data via censor-resistant channels.

<comment><USER7> You have to keep the online revocation service up all the time. People will DDoS just for the lulz it causes when it being broken breaks everyone's browser.

While sitting in a meeting I realized there is one situation that online revocation helps: someone steals bank.com's DNS record. They can't necessarily MITM anyone with that.

But, TACK is probably a better countermeasure there.

<comment><USER2> DDoSing DNS would break everyone's browser for lulz too, but somehow the net manages to chug along. And if/when it happens, at least people know they're under attack and direct attention to fixing things.

A service with a clear single point to DDoS is obviously the wrong choice.

What if services all over the net could tell you the latest (<5 minutes old) root/summary-hash of the shared dataset? And, there are many places to either update yourself to that version, or receive a trustworthy proof a certificate is/isn't in that dataset?

If they're _all_ blocked, an alarm _should_ go off, letting the user know it's dangerous to proceed. The failure shouldn't be secret, with the confidence- inspiring lock icon still appearing, for indefinitely long periods.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This just reads as rationalization for why Chrome is the best browser. Nobody has come up with a perfect solution to the revocation problem, but if you want the ability to actually check with the OCSP responder and fail if it cannot be reached, then you should be using Firefox, not Chrome (also if you don't want Google controlling every single aspect of what you do).

</comment><comment><USER9> This is some of the most awful writing I've seen on the HN front page in a while. I'm sure if you're well-versed in the issues surrounding revocation the discussion makes a great deal of sense.

For the rest of us, it's a forrest of technical jargon, which is stunning to me given that the concepts at play here aren't insanely complicated.

>So I think the claim is that doing blocking OCSP lookups is a good idea because, if you use CAPI on Windows, then you might cache 50 OCSP responses for a given CA certificate. Then you'll download and cache a CRL for a while and then, depending on whether the CA splits their CRLs, you might have some revocations cached for a site that you visit.

<comment><USER10> _I 'm sure if you're well-versed in the issues surrounding revocation the discussion makes a great deal of sense._

I think you've summarized the traditional appeal of Hacker News: items for experts, written by experts, discussed by experts. Even if it's not a field that I understand (what better way to learn?) I'm always glad to see these articles on the front page, for it means the real HN is still alive, deep within.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Coding FFT in a tiny (25kb zipped) functional language - <AUTHOR> http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdaspeech/?view=lispology4 <comment><AUTHOR> As an old lonesome codeboy, I would appreciate feedback about this work, [http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdaspeech/](http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdaspeech/)

Please, don't be evil. Thank you.</comment>


We Still Let Harassers Participate in Our Community - <AUTHOR> http://kovalc.in/2015/08/12/harassers.html <comment><USER2> So:

In the writer's own words, she did not respond honestly to his advances as she hoped to advance her career through his acquaintance:

> While I tried to politely decline his advances, he was in a position of > power over me in this industry. He said he knew my bosses, he knew where I > worked, and he promised he'd help advance my career. I felt it best to stay > in his "good graces" and not be flat out rude.

She did finally realize her mistake:

> I now understand how wrong this dynamic is.

And responded as she should have first. With the result that he stopped pestering her:

> We haven't spoken for over a year, as the last time I saw him I finally had > the courage and support system to be direct, cold, and tell him to leave me > alone.

In my book, the guy's a bit of a thickie and a more than a little creepy. Eww. But she, by her explicit admission, did not let him know his advances were unwanted in a "direct, cold" way because SHE HOPED TO GAIN FINANCIALLY AND PROFESSIONALLY BY DOING SO.

In a nutshell: He clumsily tried to get laid and she strung him along for what she could get out of him.

Eww.

Running book on how long that post stays up before she edits it.

<comment><USER3> She turned him down, and you're saying she didn't turn him down firmly enough, and did so to string him along? Why does that sound like a variation on "she was asking for it, she didn't fight back hard enough" or any other kind of victim-blaming?

<comment><USER4> If people stopped pursuing people who "turned them down" at first, then half of the world's children would be unborn, and half of the marriages/relationships would have never happened.

Literally. Ask how many people's husbands or wives turned each other down a first, and din't have to ask a few times, and even do some stupid things (down to a serenade on a case I know, but there are far more involved cases), to earn each other's love. Or read 100 or 1000 biographies and note down how often this happens.

It might sound difficult for litigation and PC-heavy us protestants to hear, where everyone is a victim, everything should be regulated and people should only approach each other with laywers or gloves and full body armors, but it's the way of the world.

Except if you think that every relationship starts as "love at first sight".

Now, if she had turned him down "firmly" that's another thing. But a simple turndown that might sound like it might be overcome might not be enough.

<comment><USER5> >>He started to get angry with me and reply with things like "fuck you" and sometimes up to 8 texts in a row when I wouldn't reply or would decline.

Given the above section, does this situation sound "PC-heavy" to you? The guy literally texted abuse at a person because they didn't respond to his advances. The fact that this person was scared or didn't want to cut professional ties is evidence that something is wrong here with the situation, and not the person themselves. How do we live in a society where people fear saying no to a harasser, and people still seem to come in to bat for those harassers?

<comment><USER4> > _Given the above section, does this situation sound "PC-heavy" to you?_

No, such strong language + repeatedly declining to answer I think carries the message perfectly accurately. He should have got it.

P.S. Although, I can see how "fuck you" can be seen as a double-message by the guy (only joking).

<comment><USER6> It was the guy who texted "fuck you" when she didn't reply to his horrible comments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What is the right protocol? As a conference organizer I would like advice. Getting past he said she said is a delicate problem.

<comment><USER3> I have no problem with he said/she said, because I am willing to take a woman at her word when she says "he harassed me".

On the extremely rare occasions I've heard of men complaining of being raped by women, I don't think I've _ever_ heard anyone dismissing his complaint as she said/he said.

<comment> bro-stick Men and women both make up crazy stories all the time to attack other people. It's incontraverible evidence that makes it clear one side isn't lying. It seems like she has good evidence so it's not s/he said situation anyhow.

<comment><USER3> In the US, we have a long history of dismissing women's complaints about harassment or sexual assault with "she asked for it" or "she didn't fight back hard enough" or "she's making it up".

I'm simply taking the radical step of actually taking women at their word when they say these things, instead of carrying on with the tradition of assuming the woman's lying or embellishing a story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Moral of the story is HR is useless. They are not here to make you feel more comfortable. They are here to make sure nothing bad happens to the company.

</comment><comment><USER9> Reading this made me really sad. The organization's response was straight up unjust. They should've ejected the male speaker and prevented him from attending the conference at all.

<comment> bro-stick More often than not, organizers don't care enough about doing right and instead do what is expedient because "they don't have the time to investigate or take sides." It's real evil and wrong, but it's fairly common.

If organizers don't step up, crucifying them and perps in the media is another way to go. IANAL but in this instance, the victim may persue criminal sexual harassment charges if statue of limitations have not all expired and a permanent restraining order should be sought to end unwanted attention.

<comment><USER10> You're bieng more of a bully than the author's harasser.

Look at your language, you want to crucify people because they didn't destroy somebody's reputation and possibly their entire career when a member of your group asked them to? That's scary.

<comment><USER11> Are you saying that people whose career or reputation depends on not harassing women should be allowed to get away with harassing women more than others?

A great example of the right way to do things is how the BBC kicked out their biggest star, Jeremy Clarkson, due to a single case of assault when the victim didn't even make a complaint. It shows that they don't give license to abuse people to the more valuable employees.

<comment><USER10> > Are you saying that people whose career or reputation depends on not > harassing women should be allowed to get away with harassing women more than > others?

Not at all. I'm saying the only evidence provided from the author is a flirtatious text where the "harasser" was attempting to engage in consentual intercourse with another adult. Was it inappropriate? Apparently, but reaching out for human contact is a normal and healthy part of life.

The person I was responding to was fantasizing about destroying this person's livelihood and the livelihoods of others who refused to take part in this destruction. One person fantasized about a natural and healthy human activity and the other fantasized about crucifiction. There may have been some vague power dynamics in the (alleged) harassment but that doesn't measure up to active and aggressive threats.

The Clarkson sacking was the result of a police investigation and regardless of whether the ass-kicking was deserved or not there was a physical assault with evidence that it happened. Why we would even compare a woman having to say no in a clear and adult way to a man being physically assaulted is beyond me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A worthy post.</comment>