Writing Your Last For-Loop - Beautiful Code - <AUTHOR> http://beautifulcode.oreillynet.com/2007/10/writing_your_last_forloop.php <comment><USER2> Before criticizing a language, understand it. In this case, the author can't even write a for loop correctly:

     for(int n = 0; n < size; ++n)
          sum += elements [n];

Leaving aside the stylistic question of declaring variables in the middle of a for statement, and trusting that the author knows that the variable _sum_ will never overflow and (if he's dealing with floating-point values) that rounding errors won't matter, the code should still be

     for(size_t n = 0; n < size; ++n)
         sum += elements [n];

An index to an array should always be declared as _size_t_ , not as _int_. Otherwise really bad things can happen on systems where size_t is 64 bits but int is 32 bits.

EDIT: Before someone accuses me of being overly pedantic: I've lost count of how many security issues I've fixed which have existed because someone used _int_ where they meant _size_t_ , but it's at least in the double-digits.

<comment><USER3> Pedantically you're correct, but on what archictecture/compiler is (sizeof int) != (sizeof size_t), and in what circumstances have you seen this become a vulnerability? (I'm not trying to be argumentative here; I'm legitimately curious.)

<comment><USER4> I was going to argue against this too because using integers to index loops is such a huge convention in C and then I realized that he's absolutely right.

On LP64, integers are 32 bits and size_t must be 64 bits (or you could overflow it with otherwise legal code).

Even when integer and size_t are the same size, using an integer as an array index is dangerous unless you make sure that it is not negative and can never become negative.

Here's what easily exploitable code looks like:

void pad_ten(char *array, size_t length) {

        if(length < 10) {
            error();
            return;
        }

        for(int i = (length - 10); i < length; i++) {
            array[i] = doPadding();
        }

}

It's exploitable by either choosing a 'length' which becomes negative when assigned to the integer or choosing a 64 bit 'length' which becomes an entirely different (and incorrect) value when truncated to an integer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sorry, but I have the same reaction to any "programming language" argument, no matter how eloquent: so what?

90% of your code should either be generated or copied from standard templates. I've put over 2500 new programs into the library in the past couple of years, yet I don't remember the last time I wrote a program from scratch.

I, too, am a stickler for details, but I let the compiler (or interpreter) do its job. Why worry about nanoseconds when I have users running the asylum?

<comment><USER6> I would argue a language that is eloquent, concise, and for lack of a fancier word, pretty, is important. Language features change how you view and approach a problem. I approach problems much differently in scheme given I have a macro system than I would in C. I _think_ differently depending on the language.

And it's usually not about performance for me. I like code that looks good and is dense.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Booste – Run apps in EC2, synced to your own text editor - <AUTHOR> https://www.booste.io <comment><USER2> I'm not trying to be snarky, but I genuinely feel like this could be implemented in less than 50 lines of code, maybe even 0 lines of code. You could just use bare ssh and rsync. Or you could use a remote volume mount. Or you could configure your docker client to connect to a remote docker server. There's a million different ways to do this and none of them are difficult, especially since this is targeted at engineers. I feel like I'm missing the point.

<comment><USER3> Not saying that this is what's happening here, but it's just so amusing to me how much this sounds like the response to the original dropbox post on HN.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863)

<comment><USER2> The obvious qualitative difference is that Dropbox is not a developer tool.

<comment><AUTHOR> One-liner: Dropbox for developers? ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

Still experimenting with how to pitch it. Dropbox for devs makes sense, knowing the details, but would be super vague for anyone who doesn't already know anything about booste.

Other pitches that fall into that "short but vague" pitch.

 _Filesync + SSH

_ Docker + Heroku

*Cloud IDE without the IDE

(edit: list formatting)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hi Erik. I don't have the "it works on my machine" problem often, because I mostly work on my own or with very few other people, so I may not be your target audience.

I do have the "my laptop's hardware is not enough" problem, and my current approach is simply spinning up an EC2 instance with the desired resources and ssh into it and then cloning the git repo I'm working on.

Normally, I set up the instance once (I have to add the ssh keys to my github account), and (if it's an expensive instance) start/stop it so I don't leave it running over night. Not a big pain point as of how I currently work.

I could see myself using Booste if it allowed me to, with a single command, spin up and sync bigger instances that would run for a short period of time (eg, for ML model training) and then intelligently stopping/terminating it. Also, if you integrate more than one cloud provider, I could switch to the cloud provider best fit for my needs (cost, spin up time, latency, cpu/gpu, etc).

A couple thoughts on the current implementation (you might be already addressing): \- I generally have more than one ongoing project at a time. Having everything in ~/Booste sync'ed with every box doesn't work for me (aside from the fact I'd use a different location) \- I sometimes do need to work with big data files, and even if I don't want them syncing all the time, I do want a way to retrieve them easily. \- I also often work with jupyter notebooks, so I'd need a way to tunnel (like I do with ssh)

Hope this helps and good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Super helpful, thanks for touching on what does and doesn't have an immediate need for you.

re: ~/Booste directory, just pushed and update yesterday that allows you to move your filesync directory around to wherever you want. It's not quite perfect yet, as I haven't built a way to clean old project files out of the codebox. But your new repo will overwrite anything that'd get int the way, so functionally, you're good to go there.

There's a "booste upload bulk" command, which takes a .boosteignored "bulk/" directory, for hefting code up to the codebox without bogging down filesync. Haven't get built a "booste download bulk" command, since customer pull recently has been more web-dev oriented, but I'll get on that once more ML folks play with Booste.

Codeboxes have auto-spindown. Default four hours live, but could make a command to monitor processes and spindown once done. Like a flag "booste --stop-when-done python3 train.py"

Nothing for Jupiter notebooks yet, and it's frankly going to be a tough technical nut to crack. Interested in exploring though.

(Edit: added below)

As for cloud flexibility, I'm sure more enterprise scale companies would absolutely require to host Booste on their own infrastructure. Like a bring- you-own-server model. Bring-you-own-server and multi-cloud not in the works in the near future, but perhaps mid-long term.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What does this have over vim in mosh?

For years the ssh type lag made a remote editor too painful. Now we have things like mosh (with local echo) or syncthing or even native vim scp url support. What makes this better? I can't tell from the website.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the website feedback. I'll do my best to rethink how I present this there.

Booste allows GUI code editors like VS Code and Sublime.

<comment><USER6> I guess one issue you'll run into then is that VS Code supports something very similar. Instead of editing locally and syncing, with VS Code, you can run VS Code "locally", but it can connect to a remote server over SSH where you edit files directly on the remote server _and_ it gives you terminal access to run your code there too.

I'm not saying your idea isn't viable, but there are multiple players moving in this direction.

To me, the main thing you'll have to convince me of is that this is better than editing code locally, but running the code in a local Docker container. For me, this solves the issue of "it runs on my machine".

From my perspective, your main value add is trying to make executing and testing code on a remote server frictionless (it's not quite there, but pretty good so far). And that you can edit on a low-resource machine, but effectively "develop" on a more powerful remote system. But these might be a tough sell if you're targeting the HN crowd (which I'm not sure you are).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tip. I've heard mentions of the VS Code tool, but never had it clearly explained until now. Definitely something to watch out for. The "pulling" aspect seems more elegant than the way Booste stores locally and pushes, so I can definitely take that as inspiration.

The docker point is fair too. Docker containers solve the machine problem, and are incredibly helpful teck. There are perks of cloud hosting (visibility by team, potential to monitor prod and have the codebox reflect it, performant hardware) that we can layer on top of docker container tech. Just hypotheses, to be clear. But to me, we're doing to Docker what Google Docs did to MS Word.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN, my name is Erik. This is my second Show HN for Booste – looking forward to your thoughts.

Booste is a command-line interface (CLI) that takes code written on your local editor/IDE and executes it in EC2. It runs remotely, in a pre-configured environment, but works with your local tools thanks to a background filesync process.

I want to fix the "it works on my machine" issue by bypassing personal machines entirely. As if Docker and Heroku had a lovechild.

How I came to building Booste:

Being a mechanical engineer turned software dev, there were countless times where my laptop (glorified tablet) couldn't handle the workload needed, so I made Booste v1: a tool to host full desktop apps on AWS and stream it over RDP (remote desktop protocol) to clients. Some may recall the Show HN of Booste v1 six months ago.

Booste v1 sucked. Unusable latency, crap unit economics, and an infrequent pain point.

Through it all, the most common customer request was for a hosted VS Code. Prospective users wanted the perks of a cloud IDE (namely no-setup environments) but wanted to use their own tools. Diving deeper, it seems that most large companies build out their own (usually buggy) version of remote "devboxes". The need seemed consistent and clear.

After the first Show HN and a failed W20 interview, I pivoted. I gutted the graphical desktop component, zoomed in on developers, and rebuilt as a CLI: Booste v2.

Running any shell command proceeded by the world 'booste' will trigger the CLI. The CLI tunnels that command through SSH to EC2, executes it there, and streams the stdout back down to your command line. Filesync makes sure EC2 is ready with your code.

Where "npm start" would run an app on localhost, "booste npm start" runs the same app in the cloud, visible to your team by URL. You can edit the code locally (VS Code, Sublime, Vim) and the save is synced and hot-swapped on the live URL within a second.

How the environment sharing works:

\- The creator of a "Codebox" (EC2 instance) gets a barebones Ubuntu VM, on which they can set environment variables, install interpreters and packages, or set up databases. (pre-built env templates coming soon).

\- Team members join the codebox by ID and password with a single "booste join" command.

\- Codebox members get repos placed next to each other on the directory tree, so code doesn't clash.

\- There is "booste clone" feature in the works, where you can clone someone's config without actually entering and messing with their codebox.

Under the hood:

-The CLI is built in Python using the Click library

-Codebox infrastructure is automated with the AWS SDK.

\---Currently, they are EC2 instances, for the sake of getting the beta live. I plan to migrate to a more flexible containerized setup in the near future. Containers make much more sense.

-I built a Dropbox-like filesync, inspired by the rsync.

\---It monitors a chosen directory on your local machine and syncs it with the codebox.

\---When files in that directory are added, modified, or removed, the codebox reflects this within a second. Only differentials are sent.

\---All communication is encrypted with frequently cycled keys, unlike rsync.

\---Bulky files (ML data, dependency packages), which would otherwise slow rsync to a crawl are ignored by a customizable .boosteignore file.

-Since files sync asynchronously (on edit), the only latency is from ssh. There's a 0.5 - 1 second delay on booste commands.

I've moving from closed to open beta. Fueled by covid and the now mandatory remote development teams, I made a free tier for you. Give it a try! Let me know what you like. Let me know what you hate.

<comment><USER7> > \---Bulky files (ML data, dependency packages), which would otherwise slow > rsync to a crawl are ignored by a customizable .boosteignore file.

Did you know rsync supports providing exclusion filters in files? See `--exclude-from` and `--cvs-exclude`. The latter uses .cvsignore files just like git uses .gitignore (and, I assume, you use .boosteignore).

<comment><USER7> UPDATE: Best option: Use .gitignore files directly: `--filter=':- .gitignore'`. See FILTER RULES in rsync's manpage for explanation.</comment></comment></comment>


Mixing Flash With Fashion – It's Soo Last Season - <AUTHOR> http://secretswede.net/seo/problems-with-using-flash-on-fashion-brand-websites/ Why do fashion websites insist on creating highly user-unfriendly and unaccessible Flash websites while there are many worthy alternatives widely available!? <comment><USER2> The same thing goes double for restaurants. All I want is your phone number, address and opening times guys and you bury it two menus back in a clunky and noisy flash site.

All that said are either of these business types currently reliant on SEO traffic to make a buck? The obvious answer is no, so some consultants could make a killing on this, especially if they built up the right connections.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, really hate that restaurants make you download their menu as a .pdf...

Re: "All that said are either of these business types currently reliant on SEO traffic to make a buck?"

I don't think you should look at this as "SEO traffic", but rather ask if it's problem when they are not found through search engines for relevant queries, eg. "brand-name + product-name". Same goes for restaurants, is it a problem if the official site is ranked below a long list of review sites?!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Solo developer successful startups examples? - <AUTHOR>

Maybe a solo developer can't do everything but with a bit good taste, social skills and a small niche, he/she can invent a sustanaible project at least to earn enough for himself.. or not? <comment><USER2> Absolutely. You'll find folks doing that over at the Bootstrapped forums or on the Chasing Product podcast:

[http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm/](http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm/) [http://www.chasingproduct.com/](http://www.chasingproduct.com/)

A better bet is to have multiple products that you sell to the same audience, not just one product. One product alone may only have small success, but if you have several small products all bringing in revenue it will add up over time. And while you're working on building them, it's safest to keep multiple revenue streams to fund yourself while doing it - be open to doing freelancing / consulting, or keep a part-time job. Patio11 worked at his day job for a long time while doing Bingo Card Creator.

</comment><comment><USER3> Plenty Of Fish: $575 million exit just a couple weeks ago

[http://betakit.com/plentyoffish-acquired-by-match-group- for-...](http://betakit.com/plentyoffish-acquired-by-match-group- for-575-million-usd/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Rob Walling did this and write/talks a lot about how to do it: [http://www.softwarebyrob.com](http://www.softwarebyrob.com)

</comment><comment><USER5> I did [http://www.facadesignage.com](http://www.facadesignage.com) ,solo developer, quite happy :)

</comment><comment><USER6> Lots of examples in the recurring threads about passive income and side projects:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9423592](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9423592)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7094402](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7094402)

</comment><comment><USER7> If I recall correctly Marco Arment started Instapaper all by himself and kept working on it all by himself until it was not feasible anymore, and that's when he sold it.

I think the solo-programmer startups are usually something among these kind of projects:

\- a webapp for simple or largely automated service

\- smartphone/tablet app

\- smartphone/tablet game

...

</comment><comment><USER8> I build GoReturnMe.com as a solo developer. It needs an update though. My last update of the framework caused some issues, now trying to find the time :(

</comment><comment><USER9> One popular inspiration is the user @patio11 - his BingoCardCreator site unexpectedly took off, going from side project to lifestyle to sold product.

<comment><USER10> I worry about describing BCC as "taking off" \-- it was a tomato plant, not a rocket ship. Put in water; get juicy fruit, turn into canned sauce; sell for money; repeat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Facebook? It's so obvious and I'm not sure if it counts...

I started a simple paid monthly platform for meeting new people a few months ago - if I would put even a little bit of effort into marketing then I'm pretty sure it would be a liveable monthly wage on 5h/week within 2-3months...

<comment> vision-chart Yeah but Facebook wasn't sustainable at the beginning

<comment><USER11> true (I'm assuming)...

I guess it depends whether we're talking about start-ups or small businesses/hobby projects.

I don't think I've heard of any start-ups which were sustainable at the beginning, whereas many small businesses/hobby projects are.

Drew Houston from Dropbox was also a solo dev at the very beginning of Dropbox, but I guess the very fact that by definition start-ups are destined to grow quickly means that new people need to be brought on board at some point...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay)

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

</comment><comment><USER13> @levelsio built 12 startups in 12 months as a one-man show AFAIK. Here is his website: [https://levels.io](https://levels.io)

</comment><comment><USER14> Patio11 seems to be the perfect example of what you describe - he's on HN and that's his handle.

</comment><comment><USER15> errorception, by rakesh pai (@rakesh314)

he has a bunch of big name customers as well on the home page [http://errorception.com](http://errorception.com)

</comment><comment><USER16> How is success defined? Profitable? X dollars in Rev?

</comment><comment><USER17> Minecraft. Braid. Flappy Bird. Rudy Hyunh</comment>


Ask HN: Any good open-source user management libs for web apps? - <AUTHOR>

I'm building a web site, and want to authenticate/authorize users, do password resets, and possibly link accounts to facebook/twitter.<p>Anyone make a nice library or web service that does this?  My gut feeling is that everyone just rolls their own since it's pretty easy to implement this stuff.  But was curious if anyone has implemented such a thing in Java, Ruby, Perl, or Python, or as a web service. <comment><USER2> For Ruby there's Devise (email/pass based user management) and Omniauth (facebook, twitter, etc). Omniauth can also be used on top of Devise. There are others too, but I mention these two because they are popular and sufficient for most people. - <https://github.com/plataformatec/devise> and <https://github.com/intridea/omniauth>

For Django, there is Pinax Project - <http://pinaxproject.com/></comment>


Google reinstates account of thomasmonopoly - <AUTHOR> http://www.twitlonger.com/show/bvqdos <comment><USER2> What is troubling about this is not that Google mistakenly removed the account.

What is troubling is:

1: This guy had to go to the fucking MOON to get his account back, ranting and raving on twitter like a mad man- and it took nearly a week!!

2: Google's support sucks- God help any of us who is in a similar position.

3: Even getting Google's attention is not enough. Since there is no formal appeals process, you have to harass Google employees in a informal method. Matt Cutts even said on a HN thread that "Google took the appropriate action" - So what is it? Did he break the TOS or not? This is the whole issue. Without a formal process, you just get knee jerk reactions. Any person other than this guy would have stopped trying after Matt essentially said he wasn't getting it back.

4: Even after all that, he did not even know why his account was deleted for a week.

5: For all Google's talk about data liberation, they suck with this. Takeout only gives you access to useless social crap and if you want to download your email its a long process that involves reading guides, using POP, IMAP, etc.. How about just giving me a link to download my mail?

6: No warnings, no contact- This could have all been solved if Google asked first and shot later.

* Link to where matt_cutts looked into this and still decided he cant have his account back: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2795465>

<comment><USER3> It is absolutely true that Google has their support issues, and they should be criticized for them, but...

Do you seriously think there is any other US provider (i.e. subject to US child pornography laws) that would have behaved any better? Given the allegation, it probably was legally risky for Google to keep his data _at all_. There are laws that criminalize even the "innocent possession" of child pornography. Had things gone another way, I presume Google would have argued they were preserving evidence, but they have to be very, very careful regardless. I'm absolutely certain there are many providers who would have behaved worse (account closed, no comment, no investigation, no appeal, data given to the police then deleted).

In the alternative scenario, many of the things you want Google to do could easily be illegal. After an allegation, any warning, contact or access to data could easily have been construed as aiding and abetting a crime in progress and/or obstruction of justice (particularly by an ambitious, headline-seeking prosecutor). What you don't seem to understand is that, once the allegation was made Google couldn't do squat for @thomasmonopoly without risking _criminal_ charges until they determined the allegation was false. And that determination was going to take time no matter how you slice it.

Personally, I find it hard to think of what Google could do better in this sort of situation. My two suggestions (and I'm not sure they're practical):

1\. Commit to manually reviewing every automatic suspension for these kinds of potential criminal allegations.

2\. Be clear about when an account is being suspended and investigated versus suspended with a final determination made.

<comment><USER4> Why not remove/disable the offending material? From what I've read he didn't have any calendar appointments like "Friday 12:30pm Take windowless van to the candy store". Why kill access to completely unrelated services because an automated (possibly error-prone) process flagged a picture?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> (I'm totally speaking for myself personally here, not in any official capacity.)

As the post indicates, Thomasmonopoly's account wasn't disabled for something like misusing AdWords; it was an investigation of potential child pornography. Thomasmonopoly himself says in his write-up that "I too found the image bordering on the limits of what is legally permissible and hoped to highlight the fact that it is allowed to exist within a grey area of legality."

Google has a zero tolerance policy for child pornography. I am glad that Thomasmonopoly got his account reinstated after a full investigation, but it's also incredibly important that Google takes appropriate action on potential child pornography, and United States law compels companies to react to child pornography in certain very specific ways.

For what it's worth, I got a chance to do a question and answer session with some congressional staffers earlier this year, and one of the things I said was that (in my personal opinion), current laws on child pornography were suboptimal.

Here's a quick example from a few months ago: [http://www.winknews.com/Local- Florida/2011-04-29/Fla-Senate-...](http://www.winknews.com/Local- Florida/2011-04-29/Fla-Senate-expands-states-child-pornography-law) "The Florida Senate voted to extend the state's anti-child pornography law to include not just possessing but also intentionally looking at such images." Looks like the text of the bill is here: [http://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2011/0846/BillText/File...](http://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2011/0846/BillText/Filed/PDF) and I don't see any exemption for people who fight or take down child pornography. And that was literally the first link I found after doing a search on Google.

So in theory, looking at images in the process of trying to _fight_ child pornography could be illegal. You don't need to dig far to find similar brittle examples. That's why I'm glad that I work on webspam and not on trying to stop child pornography.

<comment><USER6> > Google employs an automated system to scan user storage for violations of > their ToS

So if I take pictures of my children in the bathtub with my Android phone, I am risking having my entire Google account deleted with no recourse except to try to 'make a stink on the internet'?

Because frankly, I would never take photographs to be developed at Walmart because they're well-known for calling the cops on parents who took pictures of their children.

Is Google the new Walmart?

<comment><USER7> What exactly is your complaint here? How do you expect a multinational corporation to deal with this sort of issue? How do they know that you're the parent, and not just some pervert who likes pictures of kids in bathtubs? I'm fully supportive of both Google and Walmart in this.

I'm a parent of four young kids, so I can appreciate that those tub pictures are adorable. If I really wanted that picture, I'll take the hassle of finding a smaller print shop willing to do it over enabling child pornography any day.

<comment><USER8> So as a parent I am forced to be fearful and jump through hoops to obtain pictures of my kids?

<comment><USER9> Yes. Welcome to US law. Take it up with your congressman, not Google.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> That's the trouble with child porn...when something is defined as "I know it when I see it", there's going to be a lot of cases incorrectly classified. This reminds me of Walmart child porn case [http://trueslant.com/KashmirHill/2009/09/22/in-defense-of- wa...](http://trueslant.com/KashmirHill/2009/09/22/in-defense-of-walmart-in- the-bath-tub-photos-a-k-a-child-pornography-controversy/)

To just highlight the difficulty of "what is child porn?" problem, it wasn't just Walmart's officials, but local police who took the complaint, prosecutor that initiated the case and probably a number of other officials in the pipeline who made incorrect determination

</comment><comment><USER11> I find it difficult to believe he did not suspect these images triggered the ban. In that regard, I find it disingenuous when he said he had no idea why his account was terminated.

<comment><USER12> Really? That slideshow is benign and I've never heard of someone having their Google account banned because of something like this.

I would have assumed AdWords a hundred times over.

<comment><USER11> The image in question was removed. His own take on the image: _I am not angry at Google about this, as some might suggest, only because I too found the image bordering on the limits of what is legally permissible and hoped to highlight the fact that it is allowed to exist within a grey area of legality._ I find that sentiment hard to reconcile with the "I have no idea" claim. I don't think he was outright lying, but I suspect he was in denial.

edit: Just realized I said "images" and not "image" in my original post. I was thinking about the image even he thought was a legal grey area.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm wondering what type of system all the naysayers would have in place that would properly balance the requirements of google, the law, the community, and the individual users - and how they would scale that to ten million+ users.

If you can describe it, design it, deploy it, and operate it - you might have the beginnings of a multi-billion dollar social network on your hands. Rather than rant at google/facebook for their inadequacies, go out and ship something that will truly demonstrate how wrong Google/Facebook are.

<comment><USER14> > _"I'm wondering what type of system all the naysayers would have in place > that would properly balance the requirements of google, the law, the > community, and the individual users - and how they would scale that to ten > million+ users."_

This exists - it's called paying for something you use every single day, and is a core part of your existence (both online and off).

Why more people aren't self-hosting or purchasing email hosting services (and yes, that includes SLAs and proper customer support) is beyond me.

<comment><USER15> Many people - like me - can't self-host email since they don't have a fixed IP address.

And paying for an host, why bother? Just get a domain and then you can change your DNS MX records in a hour or so if Google ever bans you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> _Additionally he has said that Google is proud of their zero-tolerance policy_

Seriously? Does anybody think this is OK? If there was a crime, shouldn't it be the legal system that dealt with it, rather than some corporate entity, like Google?

This sounds awfully lot like a witch hunt to me. The _least_ they could have done was inform that they had handed the case over to legal authorities.

<comment><USER17> > If there was a crime, shouldn't it be the legal system that dealt with it, > rather than some corporate entity, like Google?

Yes.

But corporate entities _must_ handle these situations carefully. If your web host botches the DMCA process, they are liable. If Google's support technician accesses child pornography on Google, that technician risks child pornography charges.

It's an absolute case of a corporation covering their ass, but absolutely needed in this legal environment, _especially_ around radioactive allegations like possessing child pornography.

<comment><USER16> I still don't understand why Google can't advise the user that the account is suspended for legal reasons and that it has been handed over to the authorities to deal with. Just closing it and go silent, is really not acceptable, as I see it.

<comment><USER17> In some cases, informing the user of the presence of a subpoena is illegal. These secret subpoenas are typically used in conjunction with the PATRIOT Act, but could be in use elsewhere.

For example, Nicholas Merrill (John Doe, of ACLU v. Ashcroft) was hit with a national security letter that barred him from disclosing _anything_ about the subpoena, even that he had received a subpoena: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doe_v._Ashcroft>.

As a response, some providers have started providing warrant canaries: <http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt>

They're obviously not infallible and have never been tested in court, but at least companies are trying.

<comment><USER16> OK. So are you suggesting that this might have been the case in this situation? I would suggest that unless it is, then the proper reaction from Google would have been to inform the user what was going on. I understand that Google are covering their backs - and I appreciate that they should do that. What I'm saying is that inasmuch that it doesn't pose a risk (in legal terms) for them to keep the user informed, they could be expected to do so.

<comment><USER5> troels, I completely agree with the sentiment that "inasmuch that it doesn't pose a risk (in legal terms) for them to keep the user informed, they could be expected to do so."

The issue in this case is that with a potential child pornography situation, the legal risks are much different and harsher in all kinds of unexpected ways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I would be interested in _how_ someone would develop an automated system for detecting child pornography, as has been said not only is the legal definition subjective, but it would appear that possession and analysis is illegal.

That would make building a training set hard ....

I can only imagine those responsible for developing such systems would require serious therapy as well.

</comment><comment><USER19> Wow, Google couldn't just tell him, "dude, you got kiddie porn in your album". I commend this person's frankness but it still comes back to the lack of communication happening with Google support.

<comment><USER9> That could be construed as assisting in the commission of a federal crime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> tl;dr version, anyone?

<comment><USER21> Google mistakenly flagged a legal image he uploaded as child pornography.

<comment><USER22> They have an automated system for this. If your account is flagged they don't talk to you about it for legal reasons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Looking at the link to the pictures... they aren't even remotely 'risky'... except maybe in a Church or extremely conservative home.

<comment><USER24> He explicitly states early in the post that the image in question is no longer uploaded to the picasa album.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I guess I'm still not sure why a questionable photo in Picasa means a total ban from all Google services.

Or, couldn't users get a warning that they're about to be perma-banned? E.g... "The Google Gods have banned you. You have 48 hours to save any data you wish to keep. Afterward you will be unable to log in & access any Google product." They'd still have backups of everything regardless of what the user does in that 48 hours if they'd like to initiate legal proceedings or whatever.

<comment><USER26> "The Google Gods have banned you. You have 48 hours to collect your child pornography."

Yeah, that would be _fantastic_.

They should, however, tell you precisely which part of the TOS you violated - down to highlighting the specific words.

<comment><USER27> >"The Google Gods have banned you. You have 48 hours to collect your child pornography."

This is completely a non-issue. If the user already potentially committed a crime, Google already has the evidence. Whether or not the user is able to go back and redownload images _that may or may not be illegal_ that may not have been saved is completely inconsequential. The issue is for the false-positive cases or the borderline cases. Google is not the law; let the judicial system determine guilt.

<comment><USER26> > Whether or not the user is able to go back and redownload images that may or > may not be illegal that may not have been saved is completely > inconsequential.

With all due respect, unless you're a lawyer, your comment has zero weight.

If I rent a hotel room and use it to store a barrel of cocaine, and a cleaning lady discovers it, I'm fairly certain they are 1) under no obligation to me to allow me to retrieve my cocaine, and 2) are probably legally prohibited from allowing me to collect my coke barrel.

<comment><USER27> Point taken, but these situations are much more fuzzy. If I understood correctly, this was an automated detection of possible child pornography. In such a case it would seem likely that Google acting proactively has no culpability. The only legal requirement (from the many articles I've read on the subject) is to remove illegal content once the company is made aware. Automated detection based on heuristics likely would not fall under that category.

If specific pictures are under question and a human deems them likely to be illegal they can disable access to those pictures. They have no legal responsibility to prevent access to legal data.

Edit: downvoting without a rebuttal is cowardly at best.

<comment><USER26> > downvoting without a rebuttal is cowardly at best

I didn't downvote, but I disagree. I don't have to justify every decision I make.

<comment><USER27> Well that goes against HN etiquette, which I guess is also your choice to ignore :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Before It Was Hacked, Equifax Had a Different Fear: Chinese Spying - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/before-it-was-hacked-equifax-had-a-different-fear-chinese-spying-1536768305 <comment><USER2> The article is about Equifax, but based on the histories and subsequent employment of other suspect individuals they are far from the only target. Any FI or related should be concerned.

The common goal seems to be to get their foot in the door within a subset of 3-5 American financial verticals (the "b-b-but I just work in marketing!" excuse as an _obscenely_ common insider position that doesn't attract any scrutiny at all, unlike someone working in engineering or R&D. Seriously-- you want to find the spies in your company? Start with marketing), exfiltrate everything they can access and retreat to China for a cushy job and enjoyment of immunity against extradition. By the time the target catches on and law enforcement gets spun up, they've already finished their tour of duty with two to three other companies and are on a plane halfway across the Pacific.

It's hard to do anything about it without either implementing literal racist policies or comprehensively overhauling an entire industry's security posture, but it is what it is.

<comment><USER3> Special treatment against specific nations isn't necessarily racist (depends on motives). I don't think treating Chinese immigrants differently wrt private business information is racist, as long as the same rules _don 't_ apply to ethnically Chinese US citizens

<comment><USER4> I am not sure why this comment with such blatant discrimination against nationality is not immediately down-voted or flagged.

This is the same line of argument as the Muslim ban.

<comment><USER5> Not quite. The so-called Muslim ban involved countries may have little ability to discern who's who in their own country. Most Muslim nations did not fit this criterion.

But others actively try to place spies in other countries. It's not wise to treat them as we treat allies, especially given the way they treat their own minorities and political dissidents and neighbors and debtors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow. China holding over 1mm Muslims in "re-education" camps, forcing them to eat pork and drink alcohol. China steals everyone's IP and knocks it off. China bullies the Philippines, a relatively poor country, out of some natural resources that might actually help it. Now China tries to steal the information of hundreds of millions of Americans. And today, the US proposed trade talks with China, rolling over for its money. Economic pressure stopped the Soviet Union, and we should try it on China too. Money is the only safe method of pressuring China into ending it's atrocities. We should use it.

<comment> dis-sys > Money is the only safe method of pressuring China into ending it's > atrocities. We should use it.

surely your congress can double the debt ceiling to borrow another 22 trillion USD.

[http://www.usdebtclock.org/](http://www.usdebtclock.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Some have suspected that a state actor may have been behind the breach, given the sophistication of the attack and the lack of reporting about fraudsters using the stolen data.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-09-29/the- equif...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-09-29/the-equifax-hack- has-all-the-hallmarks-of-state-sponsored-pros)

</comment><comment><USER8> Paywall bypass: [http://archive.is/Visq4](http://archive.is/Visq4)

<comment><USER9> thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The same goes for every other company in that line of business, in the US as well as in Europe. The data in their databases has immense value for state actors and allows them to help identify those that could be easily compromised.

</comment><comment><USER11> Didn't seem to make them tighten their security any.

<comment><USER12> Exactly; seems like they fell prey to a sort of decision paralysis (perhaps due to revenue lost in implementing protection). A lot of companies are having this problem. Regulation is inevitable & required.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I guess they must have had really good security protocols in place if they were worried about being hacked by state actors.

</comment><comment><USER14> I wonder if this has to do with Jack Ma stepping down?

<comment><USER15> Curious...can you elaborate?

<comment><USER16> It is very suspicious that someone as motivated as Ma would just up and quit on his baby at such a young age. It is not outside the realm of possibility that he stepped over a party line and is being forced to retire as punishment.

<comment><USER17> Ha, you may need to read more about him. Jack has been doing hand-overs for a long period (longer than 5 years actually). The personality of him is more close to Larry Page rather than Elon Musk. He seems to like doing less ground- crunching management, focusing on long-term visionary things. And for the last few years he even not spoke often publicly for Alibaba and his social media account is full of NGO activities. Maybe it's just time for a new journey.

Also Jack IS the god in Alibaba forever, no one can really change that.

<comment><USER14> In fact, I have read his book. I'm not suggesting he is a part of some conspiracy. But it would be irresponsible to not notice one of the top 10 biggest CEOs of recent history stepping down at a noticeably young age within a week of one of his cornerstone companies being implicated in a breach of one of the largest owners of American financial data.

>Also Jack IS the god in Alibaba forever, no one can really change that.

Cmon, man.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is € 4.700 gross per month a good salary in Amsterdam? - <AUTHOR> I friend have received a proposal from a company there and I would like to help him. We are already aware that company hold 30% until it check if you has a degree and stuff and can hold it forever if it concludes your degree is not enough. But what about cost of living and taxes? What would be the net salary after taxes? Any advice? <comment><USER2> You might consider "good" to be "relative to what other people at your level might be earning", but relative to cost of living and taxes to support a single person, €4.700 is very good, and your friend should be able to easily get by.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, he is a senior developer with wife and son.

<comment><USER2> I'm not quite sure what the going rate for senior developers is (but perhaps check Glassdoor?), or what the cost of living for three people would be. If his wife is also employed, however, I still can't imagine that to be a problem. (But even if not, my guess would be that it would still be totally manageable.)</comment></comment></comment>


Shoes 2 Makes Its Debut - <AUTHOR> http://shoooes.net/about/raisins/

<comment><USER2> I think I'm the only one not cool enough to know but what is this?

<comment><USER3> It's a framework for creating simple desktop apps in ruby with inspiration from Processing.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Anyone know why it's also referred to as Raisins?

<comment><USER3> Every release is called by some word and a number. I don't know if there's a pattern to it. But for that particular release, it happened to be called Raisins, as far as I could tell.

_why (the author) is using it as a platform to write hacketyhack, a set of libraries and tutorials to help teach kids how to program, but letting them build blogs, downloaders, etc. in a couple lines.

<comment><USER4> Ubuntu calls its releases "Hardy Heron" and "Intrepid Ibex"

OGRE3D calls its releases "Eihort" and "Shoggoth"

I assume they're following the model of attaching a name to each official release.

To reply to the rest of your comment, I think it would be more exciting for beginners to learn how to program games. There is a much higher effort:reward ratio, though. You can't write Pong in 2 lines of code quite yet.

<comment><USER5> _You can't write Pong in 2 lines of code quite yet_

The included Pong weights in at 62 lines (36 after removing comments and blank lines).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You could probably add a bit of readability by making the follow paragraph bullet points:

Compare... "This release adds a built-in manual, an error console, RubyGems integration, simple asynchronous downloads, an in-memory and database-backed image cache, support for external fonts, and, most prominently, its own unique library for packaging apps into little executables. OS X support is significantly better, as we switched from Carbon to Cocoa."

To...

"This release adds:

-A built-in manual

-An error console

-RubyGems integration

-Simple asynchronous downloads

-An in-memory and database-backed image cache

-Support for external fonts

-Most prominently, its own unique library for packaging apps into little executables

-OS X support is significantly better, as we switched from Carbon to Cocoa."

(Sorry if I mis-spaced it, I'm not sure where all the commas should go with my ultra-limited technical experience... but yes, bullets typically add a lot of readability in a paragraph with tons of things going on)

<comment><USER6> I'll add: I'm not sure how much of these are really simple for most hackers, the way "The U.S. flag is red, white, blue, rectangular, contains 13 stripes horizontal stripes, and 50 white stars on a blue background as a separate rectangle in the top-left corner" is simple for an American - but as someone far more business-inclined than technologically inclined, I can piece together 90% of the changes when reading in bullets, whereas the paragraph is overwhelming. If it's all super-simple things for a decently skilled hacker, then never mind the input and congrats on the new release :)

<comment><USER7> This just makes me chuckle. Apparently you have not seen _Why's other docs, particularly the epic entitled _Nobody Knows Shoes_.

You're lucky (and I, who have different tastes, am unlucky) that the list wasn't delivered as a napkin scrawl that could only be read by printing it out and folding it into a Moebius strip. Or as an illuminated epic poem. Or in musical form.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The product look pretty cool, but the marketing sucks.

You should get a business type!

<comment><AUTHOR> _why is one of the most amazing, creative hackers out there. I get the sense that his goal isn't to take over the planet with Shoes, but he'd rather get Ruby programming into as many hands as possible.

<comment><USER9> I think his style alienates as many people as it attracts. Ruby also need a more "normal" advocate.

<comment><USER10> Who does it alienate? Certainly not the mainstream. I've linked his (poignant) guide to friends who aren't big programming types, and they all fell in love with it. Isn't that the more important audience as it is? The people who _want_ to fall in love with programming but _haven't_ yet?

<comment><USER9> Some people like it, some people say "WTF is this!?" and never look at Ruby again. I'd show WPG to friends but never to "serious" work colleagues.

<comment><USER10> Hmm. That's a shame. It's well-written, easy to follow, and teaches well. I'll never understand the programming mentality that says hard is better just because it excludes people.

<comment><USER4> Because a macho programming position will pay you more than one where you can be more effective with less work and less possibility of error.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Man hoping to cross Atlantic with cluster of balloons lands in Newfoundland - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/hundreds-of-helium-filled-balloons-being-used-in-attempt-to-cross-atlantic-ocean/2013/09/13/d108fc24-1c31-11e3-80ac-96205cacb45a_story.html

<comment><USER2> Which reminds me of this Monty Python short:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qvk2wNWmB20](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qvk2wNWmB20)

</comment><comment><USER3> last time a priest tried this from brazil. Never to be seen or found again. Had all the proper tracking gear too and beacons. When you land in the middle of the Atlantic most of that is no good unless you have a raft.

<comment><USER4> FTA - "For his trans-Atlantic crossing, the basket in which he was riding was actually a lifeboat that could have been used if he ditches in the ocean."

<comment><USER5> When I read the title I thought "not another lunatic", but it does sound like he planned it quite well. He is an IT manager after all.

I thought maybe he should have worn an immersion suit, but perhaps that is unnecessary with the lifeboat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> When people attempt to do these things, I hope search and rescue bills them for their expense.

<comment><USER7> He's going to hike out under his own steam.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Apparently this guy just got rescued by the CBC, of all things:

[http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland- labrador/story/20...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland- labrador/story/2013/09/13/nl-balloon-crossing-newfoundland-landing-913.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> Whilst I generally applaud people wanting to do crazy stuff just for the hell of it, there's a downside to this particular project

[http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/mar/18/helium- party-...](http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/mar/18/helium-party- balloons-squandered)

<comment><USER10> Yeah, this is a silly argument.

The downside to posting on the Internet is that you're using energy resources, whose production destroys the environment.

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the heads up. Stopping now.</comment></comment></comment>


Mechanical Keyboard Simulator - <AUTHOR> http://sdbr.net/mks-mechanical-keyboard-simulator/ <comment><USER2> There must be a research paper somewhere looking into the reasons why we like the sound and feeling of mechanical keyboards so much.</comment>


NASA's New Horizons Plans July 7 Return to Normal Science Operations - <AUTHOR> http://www.nasa.gov/nh/new-horizons-plans-july-7-return-to-normal-science-operations <comment><USER2> Ever since I was a wee kid I wondered what Pluto looked like. When the news came that there were issues with New Horizons just DAYS away from finally coming close to Pluto my heart sank.

It's very good news to hear it's back and will be good for the fly-by. I'm so excited to finally see pictures up close to this planet / dwarf planet!

<comment><USER3> You can already see some of the recent pictures they've taken here: [http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/Pluto- Encounter/index.php?page=1](http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/Pluto- Encounter/index.php?page=1)

<comment><USER4> That is an awesome link, thanks. It is really mind blowing to look at the target distance for each of them and see how fast it is approaching Pluto.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As someone who loses sleep whenever he submits an app update to the App Store, I can't even imagine... Good luck to everyone working on this mission -- it's an awesome one.

</comment><comment><USER6> Looks like this story supersedes [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9834278](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9834278), which was on the front page most of today.

</comment><comment><USER7> Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society has posted a summary of the press briefing held about the New Horizons Anomaly [ [http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily- lakdawalla/2015/0706140...](http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily- lakdawalla/2015/07061400-new-horizons-back-in-action.html) ]. Her summary:

\- The anomaly related to the main computer being asked to do two computationally intensive tasks at once, and they were more than the computer could handle, so New Horizons switched to the backup computer, entered safe mode, stopped science, and called for help from Earth.

\- On Earth, engineers quickly understood the problem.

\- It is not a problem that can happen during the encounter.

\- Mission leadership chose to suspend science activities to focus on recovery efforts.

\- Science activities will resume on July 7 at 9:45 PT / 12:45 ET / 16:45 UT, Earth received time (so, about 12:15 UT, spacecraft event time).

\- 30 planned science observations were lost between July 3 and 7, none of them required for the top-level science goals of the mission.

\- The anomaly is no reason to doubt that New Horizons will perform its encounter science as planned.

</comment><comment><USER8> Holy hell, talk about a high-stress debugging situation. And then you have to wait 9 hours to see if your fix actually worked...

</comment><comment><USER9> Thank goodness! Looking forward to the Pluto close-ups, which will hopefully include the dark spots.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm getting a plain black page from this link in both Firefox and Chromium. For the people that the link works for -- is there anything else of interest in the post beyond what's in the title and the previous story posted earlier today?

<comment><USER10> The key paragraph is as follows:

"The investigation into the anomaly that caused New Horizons to enter "safe mode" on July 4 has concluded that no hardware or software fault occurred on the spacecraft. The underlying cause of the incident was a hard-to-detect timing flaw in the spacecraft command sequence that occurred during an operation to prepare for the close flyby. No similar operations are planned for the remainder of the Pluto encounter."

Also, try this link (content is same): [http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News- Center/News-Article.php?page=20...](http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News- Article.php?page=20150705)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> _cause of the incident was a hard-to-detect timing flaw in the spacecraft command sequence_

Concurrency problems?</comment>


The Crop Software Behind Your Daily Cup of Coffee - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-20/crop-app-cropster-wants-to-save-coffee-and-the-global-food-supply <comment><USER2> > _If Jamie Lanister and Brienne of Tarth had a son, he would look like [the > guy]_

Okay :) I had expected to hear more about crop science which seems like it would be applied in coffee production with the climate challenges mentioned, but actually am not sure if it really is (even though I'm currently working on a project which has to do with it).

<comment><USER3> white papers vs a submarine PR article for cropster that aims to get a larger, mainstream audience on a tight deadline. They are two different things

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There are free software projects attempting to solve the same problem in another corner of the ag industry

[https://openthc.org](https://openthc.org)

</comment><comment><USER5> It really hurts to read an article with 10-minute intro. I can't even tell by the 20th paragraph what's going on.</comment>


On Chinese Writing: Evolution - <AUTHOR> https://al3x.svbtle.com/on-chinese-writing-2 <comment><USER2> Author here, I just discovered this was posted on HN. Please note that it's episode 2 of a "series", the first episode is [https://al3x.svbtle.com/on- chinese-writing-1](https://al3x.svbtle.com/on-chinese-writing-1)

Thanks for your interesting comments!

<comment><USER3> I think you misspelled Taipei in paragraph 2. "National Palace Museum in Taipeh".

Or is it Taipeh in other languages? Though the blog is in English...

<comment><USER4> If we are going by Hanyu Pinyin (漢語拼音), it would be Taibei.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure where the author is from (although it looks like he studied in Paris).

Taipeh is the German spelling of Taipei as far as I can tell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a great article but it leaves out what in my opinion is the most interesting part of this history. Li Si unified the script in the form of "Lesser Seal", but this script wasn't used much except for, if I recall correctly, official proclamations, engravings and whatnot.

At that time the first emperor purged the bureaucratic class, except for a small school of philosophers, and delegated most clerical tasks down to military officers and slaves. These people absolutely butchered the script and replaced its refined artistic regularity with a more casual free-form style. This is called Li Shu or "clerical script".

Fast forward a hundred years or so, the new emperor is kinder to Confucianists and the academics are out of hiding. Now the scholars have a choice: use the standard script of Li Si or adopt the messy free-form style of the officers and slaves. The amazing thing is that they chose to use clerical script and did a complete re-interpretation of the aesthetics of Chinese writing based on the characteristics of that script. The "refined" artists of the later eras appreciated how fluid and dynamic the writing of untrained scribes was and incorporated those qualities into a completely new standard. There's an absolutely mind-blowing history here in terms of the evolution of an art form.

</comment><comment><USER6> > and another example of the extreme weirdness of Chinese: why does a single > character mean three colors when you have 9353 characters available?

That's not an example of extreme weirdness; not only do different languages countries have different colors (international traffic conventions require that navigation signs be a pure green -- and define two, one use AFAIK only in Japan), those colors change over time. Remember the "wine dark sea?" British Prime Minister Gladstone, of all people, analyzed (before going into politics) why this was not metaphorical but actually how color was perceived (best reference I can find at this moment: [https://www.businessinsider.com.au/what- is-blue-and-how-do-w...](https://www.businessinsider.com.au/what-is-blue-and- how-do-we-see-color-2015-2))

Politics plays a role in color selection: we have 8 colors in the English rainbow (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet) because Newton insisted there must be eight for mystical reasons, who really uses indigo? Really most English speakers see six, the primaries taught in school.

And lets not get into the politics of language itself.

(My grandfather was named Gladstone, surely after the PM. He was born in the bush in South Australia so I'm pretty certain that the PM's early work on Greek had no influence on the choice)

<comment><USER7> _we have 8 colors in the English rainbow (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet) because Newton insisted there must be eight for mystical reasons, who really uses indigo? Really most English speakers see six_

You mean 7, right? If your quip regarding Newton is true, I would have assumed he was influenced by Latin. However, there's no evidence that Romans saw 7 rainbow colors either [1,2].

My next best theory is that the 7 rainbow colors are analogous to the 7 notes on the major scale.

For what it's worth, to a Russian speaker, the 7 colors are quite distinct. English blue maps to _light blue_ (голубой) and indigo to _blue_ (синий).

[1] [https://latin.stackexchange.com/questions/2116/colors-of- the...](https://latin.stackexchange.com/questions/2116/colors-of-the-rainbow)

[2] [https://latin.stackexchange.com/questions/275/what- colours-d...](https://latin.stackexchange.com/questions/275/what-colours-did- different-colour-words-mean-exactly)

<comment><USER6> Yes, a typo I can't correct. Good thing I enumerated them!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The movable-type printing press was invented 400 years earlier in China than Europe, but failed to take off due to the high number of characters (amoung other complexities).

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

> The world's first movable type printing press technology for printing paper > books was [...] invented in ancient China around AD 1040 by [...] Bi Sheng

> Around 1450 Johannes Gutenberg made another version of a metal movable-type > printing press in Europe

> The printing press may be regarded as one of the key factors fostering the > Renaissance and due to its effectiveness, its use spread around the globe.

> The more limited number of characters needed for European languages was an > important factor.

<comment><USER9> Would've been interesting if China adopted or developed an alphabet system to make it better suited for movable type printing earlier on.

<comment><USER10> That would be terrible.

There are[1] short story write with hanyu pinyin(a latin alphabet system) which all words with the same pronunciation.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion- Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion- Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've lived in Taiwan for almost 3 years, and tried many ways to learn to read. Studying characters is almost a distraction. Even if you can read half a character, you can't guess the pronunciation or the meaning. (but with my upcoming program, you will be able to find the combined character from the parts).

Words are much more important. Chinese has words, there are just no spaces. "如果" is a word. The meaning of the characters "如" (such as) "果" (fruit) is totally different to the word (in case).

Soon I'll be releasing a program to do automatic word spacing, literal translation of each word, bopomofo, and more. The code is finished, I'm just writing the documentation now, and then put it onto my Facebook. When I get simplified characters working, I'll release it here on Hacker News.

<comment><USER12> > The meaning of the characters "如" (such as) "果" (fruit)...

You shall not take the 'fruit' meaning for "果", as it also means 'just as expected' and 'effect' in 'cause and effect'.

<comment><USER11> The word spacing program is now uploaded here (but only works for traditional characters; I'll submit it to the main page when I add simplified).

[https://pingtype.github.io](https://pingtype.github.io)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> An interesting fact of Simplified Chinese not mentioned in the article is: the discussion and conversion of using Simplified Chinese started before 1949, during the time of ROC, while PRC just inherited the idea after the Chinese Civil War.

The ultimate goal of Chinese simplification was to destroy Chinese characters at all, and to use Latin characters instead, because people believed that Chinese was the reason why China was behind the western world.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_characters#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_characters#Before_1949)

<comment><USER14> To destroy Chinese characters is the ultimate goal of only a small part of Chinese. Actually, if Chinese characters die, Chinese die.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> One crazy idea I had to make Chinese less complex is to use the Korean alphabet while retaining some common Chinese characters that the Korean alphabet cannot reproduce in terms of sound. You could even use accents to indicate the specific tone.

我是韩国人。- wo shi hangguo ren can easily and concisely be written using Korean alphabet phonetically.

The two are a perfect match. One system to easily construct sounds and the other carrying deep compressed semantics with the minimal sound syntax.

It would be like like what Vietnamese language did using roman alphabets and accents.

<comment><USER16> > How can China expect the rest of the world to use Chinese when even they > themselves don't know it 100%?

And there goes Shakespeare. On average there's 15,000 words per play. I bet most readers do not have the education to know every single word in that 15,000.

"The Second Edition of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use, and 47,156 obsolete words. To this may be added around 9,500 derivative words included as subentries." [1]

[1]: [https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/explore/how-many-words- are...](https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/explore/how-many-words-are-there-in- the-english-language)

<comment><USER17> > And there goes Shakespeare. On average there's 15,000 words per play. I bet > most readers do not have the education to know every single word in that > 15,000.

In English (as I assume in Chinese) you can usually figure out what is being said in Shakespeare even if you don't know the exact definition of the word. You also can usually pronounce it correctly (at least for the modern pronunciation).

<comment><USER16> Absolutely. Chinese too. There are patterns among words. Also if you know part of the phrase not hard to figure out either. Once you know the language you will whether it is Chinese or Korean.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If you are interested in this topic and want something more advanced there is a lot of great stuff (although sometimes perhaps polemical and controversial) from scholars on pinyin.info

</comment><comment><USER19> The example ideophonogram should really include the tone of each sound, and whether it can be used standalone or only with certain other characters in words. As a foreigner living in China these are the characters I know how to read, mainly from noticing the radical with one eye and the phonogram with the other:

      青qing1 "blue/green"
      清qing1 "clear"
      晴qing2 "bright"
      情qing2 "feeling", mainly used in other words, e.g. 情况qing2kuang4 "circumstances"
      请qing3 "invite"
      睛jing1, used in 眼睛yan3jing "eye" where tone becomes neutral (don't confuse with 眼镜yan3jing4 "glasses")

Those 6, along with 精jing1 (in 精神jing1shen2 "spirit") and 静jing4 "calm", are really the only 8 common ideophonograms of 青 I come across. These other two I didn't know because they're used so infrequently:

      鲭 qing1, only used in 鲭鱼qing1yu2 "mackerel" (the 鱼 radical repeats)
      蜻 qing1, only used in 蜻蜓qing1ting2 "dragonfly" (and 蜻蛉qing1ling1 "damselfly") -- note the 虫 radical is used in each character

</comment><comment><USER20> Sadly yet luckily, no one really do handwriting Chinese anymore these days, with exception of their own signatures.

<comment><USER16> What constitutes handwriting Chinese?

With a pen/pencil? Every where. School? Memo? Sticky notes?

<comment><USER20> With a pen/pencil, yes.

<comment><USER16> Then don't worry, while there is a decline in handwriting, people still handwrite.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Note that there is a link to the rest of the story (1950-) at the bottom. A worthy read.

<comment><USER22> Although I feel the introduction is a bit narrow by only focusing on Mao and China. Japan adopted simplified characters at almost exactly the same time (during the American occupation). I wonder if this ties in to some kind of general modernist trend sweeping the world at the time.

<comment><USER23> Japanese change was just a codification of simplified forms already widely used in handwriting, and is rather limited in number (cca 370 characters).

Chinese switch was motivated by the desire to improve literacy in the country, which was to be achieved by making the writing system more accessible/simple. The changes were far wider than in Japanese, and total count of characters that were simplified is cca 3500.

<comment><USER22> I guess the point of codifying existing handwritten forms is probably true for the Chinese simplified characters also? Many of the simplifications were made by taking a cursive form and declaring it the "official" version.

<comment><USER23> Yes, the 'how' is similar between the two, but 'why' and 'to what extent' are not.

Like I said, in China primary motivator was improving literacy rate.

The number of simplified characters (3500 out of 7000) closely matches the number of characters necessary for almost-full literacy (most common 3500 characters cover about 99.5% of everyday written language).

<comment><USER24> > I guess the point of codifying existing handwritten forms is probably true > for the Chinese simplified characters also?

> Many of the simplifications were made by taking a cursive form and declaring > it the "official" version.

Wrong. While many simplified characters were modeled after their cursive forms, it's not simply taking these cursive forms and declared them "official". Per se, the cursive form is cursive, and the simplified characters are in regular script. The problem is, when you forcibly bend the curves into straight lines, many lost their artistic aspects and became ugly abominations.

> Like I said, in China primary motivator was improving literacy rate.

The funny thing: Taiwan uses the traditional set and has a higher literacy rate than China. People used to blame the traditional characters as too complicated and a hinderance to literacy. Apparently what really matters at all is the education itself.

<comment><USER25> The point is, simplified characters are easier to write, say, when they're leaving a note on the table before having to leave in seconds.

Why are the cursive forms invented in the first place? Are they only artistic? They got their use in real life as well. People are lazy and always in a hurry.

<comment><USER24> Are you comfortable with the thought of being forced to abandon the traditional Latin script and picking up a new script based on half- straightened squiggly handwriting form of alphabets, in everyday reading, on papers and screens? If yes, then I think you indeed made a point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Quick correction: it's `Kangxi Dictionary`, instead of `Kang Yi Zi dictionary`.

And the comparison between `本` and `未`. It makes more sence with `本`(root, origin) and `末`(tip, end).

In modern Chinese, `蚤` and `早` are distinguish well. Also, `蚤` is nine-stroke and `早` is six-stroke.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxi_Dictionary](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxi_Dictionary)

</comment><comment><USER27> > A project manager called Li Si makes an exhaustive list of all the > characters used in the six unified Kingdoms. Gathered, sorted, filtered, > this set is the first official Chinese writing system.

How could a "list" of Chinese characters have worked? They're logograms. How would anyone reading the list know what the meaning of the character is without knowing the character in the first place?

<comment><USER28> Characters can be grouped according to the stroke count of their radical and phonetic components. This allows one to have a list of characters, and enables one to look up characters that one hasn't encountered before (although nowadays you can also use a Chinese ocr app for that purpose).

<comment><USER27> Yes, I know there's systems for looking up characters. But once you've found your character in your dictionary, what can you do with it if you don't know the meaning or pronounciation? Nowadays there's of course pronounciation guides(through a phonetic script) but I would imagine in the 3rd century BC this didn't exist?

<comment><USER29> They had pronunciation guides back then.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The number four (四) is a confusing example of a "symbol". It is not self- explanatory at all, and it shares its history with the character that has later become 呬.

[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/四#Glyph_origin](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/四#Glyph_origin)

</comment><comment><USER31> Fascinating. Maybe a little off topic but Chinese writing system has a big impact on continuous revival of China as an ancient but united nation which seems to be a super life lasted much longer than any individual lives. (2nd answer)

[https://www.quora.com/Why-was-China-able-to-develop-a- highly...](https://www.quora.com/Why-was-China-able-to-develop-a-highly- centralized-bureaucracy-while-Europe-retained-feudal-government-for-more- than-1-500-years-until-the-Renaissance/answer/Jay-Chen-1)

<comment><USER18> The only answer I see when I click that says this:

> Biologically Asians are quite different from Europeans which results in > quite different cultures. However because of Political Correctness and lacks > of good methodologies, most sociologists ignore the fact that the brains of > Asians are naturally different from those of Europeans just like the brains > of females are different from those of males.

Which seems like total nonsense.

<comment><USER32> I mean Asians and Europeans are clearly biologically distinct in that there are physiological distinctions between them. I don't think that the brain is just magically immune from its linkage to your biology. It's entirely possible that there is some variance in the brains of pockets of people evolving in different places on Earth, in the same way that there is some variance in many elements of our biology.

I just think from a practical perspective, making sweeping assumptions about the way someone is based off of their appearance or race is going to lead to many inaccurate and racist assumptions. I think it's abundantly clear that in the end, we're all humans and share similar enough capabilities that the distinctions lead nowhere meaningful.

<comment><USER18> I think there is very little evidence to support such a claim and certainly by the time you're arguing that Asians are biologically disposed to favor certain kinds of government you've veered into writing total nonsense.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Can Family Secrets Make You Sick? - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2015/03/02/377569413/can-family-secrets-make-you-sick <comment><USER2> I work in a US urban charter school that's in danger of losing its charter because it fails financially and academically.

75% of its students are growing up without regular contact with their fathers, 25% without their mothers, and more than 10% are designated homeless (this means they've moved more than 4 times in a year; the state defines this designation).

The teachers are close with the students; we hear stories that tell us who has a _really_ hard childhood. I can emphatically tell you that the harder the student's life is, the more misbehavior they exhibit and the more unhealthy they appear. By "appear" I mean weight, smell, visible grime, cuts and burns, these sorts of things.

Here is a list of signs of child abuse:

[http://www.safehorizon.org/page/10-signs-of-child- abuse-58.h...](http://www.safehorizon.org/page/10-signs-of-child- abuse-58.html)

Here are signs you might not see as abuse when you come across them: thumb- sucking, fear of going home, body odor.

Each of those is easy to criticize or fix: "Get that thumb out of your mouth." "What do you mean you don't want to go home and watch [TV show they've mentioned]?" "[behind their backs] so-and-so stinks."

(put a ":)" after each of those criticisms to see how they could be jokes or a caring statements, depending on tone. Still, they don't go far enough in addressing the underlying problem)

Those criticisms identify the wrong signifier for their sign. The signifier is not sheer childishness (in the case of thumbsucking), but a coping mechanism for abuse.

<comment><USER3> > fear of going home

Anyone who doesn't see this as a sign of abuse is an idiot.

I could have sugar-coated that, but some things need to be said outright.

(It's not a surefire sign of abuse, but if it doesn't qualify as a strong piece of evidence to you, your brain is not working correctly.)

<comment><USER2> You don't have to be a superhuman listener to hear what's being said when a student looks you in the eye with tears and says, "I don't wanna go home."

But you _do_ have to be a superhuman listener when you have a thousand things on your mind, several students out of arm's reach yelling at each other, some students leaving the building without permission and without bus passes, etc etc--and then you see a marooned student who _looks_ like he/she doesn't want to go home.

Ultimately, if you're working one-on-one with a student who says he/she doesn't want to go home, _in theory_ all you have to be is caring and curious, to help.

But when you're in a public or charter school and you're _always occupied_ you'll benefit from training (in e.g. crisis prevention), and sensitization to those key phrases. Those two things plus experience lead to intuition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > "An association doesn't necessarily mean that one thing causes the other > thing," says Floud.

Does anyone else get tired of seeing this all the time? It feels like the standard, pat response nowadays of a smart person to basically any association whatever. Of course ice cream sales in the summer don't cause murders, but in turn, I seriously doubt anyone is saying that sexual assault somehow physiologically deforms breast tissue directly leading to carcinoma.

Look, I know very little about medicine, I don't even know that much about statistics. But wouldn't the idea be more like these traumas could stress the body in some way that makes some of its subsystems perform in a degraded manner, which over time develops into illness? As I say, I'm out of my depth here. But that sort of response is starting to strike me as irksomely glib.

<comment><USER5> _> Does anyone else get tired of seeing this all the time?_

You're probably seeing it more often because more people have access to more data than ever before and are making lots of connections that aren't necessarily connected. Floud probably stated it this way because of the inevitable eye-rolling that occurs in reaction to the more common way of saying it: Correlation does not imply causation.

In this case, however, Floud is probably wrong. There is plenty of statistical evidence to prove links between traumatic childhoods and undesirable characteristics in adulthood. It isn't much further of a leap to assert that physical changes, as a result of unnatural levels of stress hormones etc., could occur.

<comment><USER6> This post could be the Wikipedia entry for "question begging". It is claiming that correlation implies causation because of the observed correlation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A lot of the data in the ACE study is actually pretty dodgy -- what people are comfortable admitting to changes over time, and also people forget things as they get older. So comparing responses from a 70-year-old to responses from a 30-year-old about things that happened in their childhood is kind of apples and oranges. I still think it's an important study and worth talking about, but I'm not sure I really believe that, say, people are 5x more likely to commit suicide or 4.5x more likely to get an STD than they were 20 years earlier.

</comment><comment><USER8> > Cancer, addiction, diabetes and stroke (just to name a few) occurred more > often among people with high ACE scores.

Pretty major known confounding here. Family-based, adoption, twin, GCTA or GWAS studies usually find low effects from shared environment but high heritability or specific hits, especially for addiction & diabetes (stroke and cancer are less well known but still plenty of GWAS hits for those too). And this is true of various aspects of bad parenting like physical abuse as well.

</comment><comment><USER9> > She thinks doctors and patients should take care not to overinterpret an ACE > score — it's not a crystal ball that predicts health or illness.

It's also a hell of a lot more depressing if true. We can fix biological issues a hell of a lot more easily than we can convince people to not be so shitty to each other.

</comment><comment><USER10> Smartphone with no plan for when you have Wi-Fi, prepaid phone for when you don't.

That's how we do it. Best of both worlds.

</comment><comment><USER11> Notice how the lone medical expert represented was skeptical of the findings.

That's because among serious psychologists and those who study genetics, the view advocated here is pretty much _exactly wrong_ : your childhood experiences have almost no effect on the adult you become.

The public and the media tend to believe otherwise, and regularly put out stories like this one, perpetuating the myth. But it's just not true.

We've known for years that the genes you inherit from your parents are far more important than whatever parenting they do. Adopted siblings raised in the same household grow up to be no more similar than strangers plucked off the street. And identical twins raised apart grow up to be ridiculously similar -- almost creepily so -- despite having no shared environment. When you run the correlations, genes turn up as a large factor in every single measurable outcome (education level, income, IQ, height, weight, personality, choice of college major, and so on), whereas shared environment -- where you grew up, how your parents raised you, your socioeconomic status -- begins as a moderate impact while you are a child and then slowly disappears in your teens, until at age 25, your IQ and personality have basically nothing to do with whether your parents read to you at night or spanked you or talked to you or ignored you completely, or what siblings you grew up with, or what house you grew up in, or what town you grew up in.

(Coincidentally, ACE is a relevant acronym here, but it stands for something different than from what it does in the article. Additive genetics, Common environment, and unique Environment are the components of the outcome of twin studies. Common environment is the factor of your parents and household, and unique environment is every other environmental factor. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_study#Methods](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_study#Methods))

Now, there is a small caveat to the above. If you were severely abused as child that can impact you later, but it truly has to be severe abuse. To lower a child's IQ, you'd have to really starve them or deprive them of key nutrients -- but this pretty much never happens in the US. A diet of only McDonald's is more than sufficient to prevent this kind of stunting. Likewise, the sexual or physical abuse would have to be pretty extreme to impact you later -- much more than this story let on.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>-----

So, the real story behind this NPR piece is that people with bad parents often grow up to have problems not because of bad parenting, but because their bad parents happened to pass them bad genes. In other words, the common cause was that both the child and the parents had bad genes. You should never trust a study about parenting or the effects of the environment if it doesn't take genes into account.

And this is where people get uncomfortable, because no one wants to believe that something you're born with, something you cannot change, is so important to who you are. The "truth" about the effects of genes and your environment does not fit in well with mainstream ideals of equality of opportunity and free will. Thus, the impact of genes are routinely downplayed everywhere you look, and environmental effects are raised up, like in this piece. There is broad, systemic bias at work, making the world out to be the way we want it, rather than the way it really is.

But we do ourselves a profound disservice in this (often unintentional) act of twisting the truth to fit our ideals. It causes grief when we blame fat people for being lazy or lacking self control, when in reality their obesity is largely a product of their genes and the modern phenomenon of cheap and tasty food. We praise smart kids with lucky genes who get A's, while putting down their less bright peers, even if they worked harder, because they only managed to get C's. We love beautiful people, but shun their less appealing peers.

So I ask you: Where is the compassion for those with unlucky genes? Where is the support for those who don't have the talent to live out the American Dream? Why is it that no one knows or cares about genetic luck -- probably the greatest source of inequality and unfairness in our world?

</comment><comment><USER12> Alternative Hypothesis (and there are many): People of a lower-socioeconomic demographic both have greater chances of a poor upbringing as well as poor health as they get older.

Lot of confounding variables you need to correct for here.

<comment><USER13> "The 17,000 or so patients in this study were mostly middle-aged white people, upper- and middle-class, from San Diego."

It's true that there are a lot of variables when asking broad questions like what causes poor health, but it seems like the majority of the participants weren't of a lower-socioeconomic demographic, as indicated in the article.

<comment><USER14> It is "adjusted for age, gender, race, and educational attainment."

84% where white.

59% of Americans identify as middle class, upper-middle or upperclass. So saying that the study used mostly upper- and middle-class doesn't really tell us anything.

<comment><USER6> Since the wealthier people call themselves middle class, 59% is approximately the 95th to 36th percentiles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Well, my God, this is the second incest case I've seen in [then] 23 years of practice"

I don't believe this. Either the doc has deliberately kept his eyes shut or hasn't spent much time talking to patients. Incest, a term wide than but inclusive of most 'child abuse', is far more widespread than laypersons realize. Docs see it regularly and geneticists debate the ethics of tests any test which might reveal family secrets.

[http://blogs.nature.com/spoonful/2011/02/qa_the_insidious_an...](http://blogs.nature.com/spoonful/2011/02/qa_the_insidious_and_incestuou.html)

<comment><USER16> And yet this very post describes incest as "relatively rare". Now maybe folks don't realize that still means it's more common than they might expect. But the article doesn't seem to support the claim that " docs see it regularly", unless I missed something (which is entirely possible).

<comment><USER17> I noticed this too. To give the benefit of the doubt, it's hard to know what that sentence means, because of some ambiguity over whether it's about a) only incest that results in a child, b) "routine genetic tests" detecting incest, c) "rare" as in, say, "only" 3% of babies are the result of incest, which would still probably surprise a lot of people. (I'm not even sure what percentage I would personally expect or be surprised by.)

<comment><USER15> Rare is a difficult term to nail down. I was taken aback by the statement that he had only seen two cases over 23 years.

To think of how not-rare it is, think of all the heterosexual child abuse that goes on within families. Child abuse is not considered rare. But how many of those abuses might result in pregnancies? Any doctor who deals regularly with young people, specifically young girls who might be pregnant, sees this regularly if they care to look. The pregnant teenager whose boyfriend "isn't around anymore" is a non-rare situation. Some subset of those are pregnant by their fathers/brothers. The problem is that asking, or performing tests that might identify the true father, may do more harm than good. So doctors don't push the matter. That doesn't mean they do not suspect what's going on.

What do you say to a girl pregnant by her brother? Termination is not a great option, the kid may well be healthy. Reporting the abuse, breaking up the household, isn't going to help either. From the doctor's perspective there isn't much they can do.

<comment><USER18> > What do you say to a girl pregnant by her brother? Termination is not a > great option, the kid may well be healthy. Reporting the abuse, breaking up > the household, isn't going to help either. From the doctor's perspective > there isn't much they can do.

This attitude, while understandable, is very damaging.

You report the abuse. You do so because your professional registration probably tells you to; there might even be mandatory laws requiring you to; and because you know that you do not have access to reports from other agencies (police, school, sexual health clinics, etc) and so you cannot understand the whole picture.

You're right that interventions for abused children are appalling and that looked after children have some pretty lousy outcomes (shorter life, lower quality of life, increased mental illness, increased risk of death by suicide, increased criminal behaviour, etc etc etc)

<comment><USER6> You advocate handing the matter over to government, even though you know government fails to handle it better than not? That's cruel.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>