How the Supermarket Tabloids Stay Out of Court (1991) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/04/news/how-the-supermarket-tabloids-stay-out-of-court.html?smid=tw-share <comment><USER2> What's ironic about Thiel attacking Gawker for, supposedly, being bad tabloid journalists is that as a Trump delegate he is supporting someone that has frequently polluted our highest political discourse with tabloid-level internet conspiracy theories. To Thiel personal smears are more troublesome than a well functioning democracy. But then he has in the past already expressed his contempt of democracy so I guess it should not come as a surprise.

<comment><USER3> Thiel's approach is scary. He is basically proving that he doesn't have to win - he just has to consume enough of a media company's money to force them out of business.

Many major stories that made it big in the national news start off as a local or small paper doing the initial reporting. (For example the Flint, Mi lead water) These papers have such tiny budgets that they can easily be silenced.

<comment><USER4> > He is basically proving that he doesn't have to win - he just has to consume > enough of a media company's money to force them out of business

That's theoretically true - after all, it's the same way patent trolling works. But he hasn't actually proven that yet, since he _did_ win a juried verdict (with punitive damages, on top of that).

That's about as clear-cut a decision as our legal system can provide (before getting to the appellate level).

<comment><USER5> To be fair, this is the only one of his suits against Gawker that he's disclosed having funded, so it's quite difficult to judge their overall merits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The tabloid CYA trick that jumped out the most to me -- sometimes directly visible on the covers -- is to attribute an allegation to "Source" (often in much smaller print than the allegation itself, unsurprisingly). For all I know, that "source" could be an anonymous letter from one of their own employees.

<comment><USER7> I think another trick of longstanding tabloids like the enquirer is that they almost deliberately undermine their reputation by publishing a lot of crap (aliens, etc) while mixing the better sourced stuff that causes celebrities fits. I think this is how they have been able to exist for so long - celebrities with thicker skin can laugh it off, hah, those crazy tabloids - and far less often we see someone actually try to sue the tabloids for an article.

example of "real" news being broken by a tabloid:

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

With regards to the Gawker case - I'm of the opinion that it doesn't matter that Peter Thiel funded the lawsuits. If it were a more "noble" cause (litigation against polluters, cigarette manufacturers, civil rights etc) then no one would question massive outside funding. And, Gawker did lose the case in court, on the case's merits. Gawker seems to be hoping they can have it overturned on appeal if they change the subject to Peter Thiel instead of their own scummy behavior. Not to mention Nick Denton's shady tax evasion while criticizing tech businesses for the same:

[https://pando.com/2014/07/25/gawker-no-longer-even-trying- to...](https://pando.com/2014/07/25/gawker-no-longer-even-trying-to-pretend- its-not-grotesquely-hypocritical-on-tax/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can't believe the standard for libel is so high. You can publish anything you want as long as you are stupid or ignorant enough to believe it?

<comment><USER9> That's NOT exactly the legal standard. Before the separation of the American colonies from Britain to form the United States, there was already a defense of truth to libel claims. Say what is true, and libel is not much of a worry to you. (But you can say true things and still be civilly liable for disclosure of trade secrets, or for harming a person's "right to publicity," depending on the facts of a case, and you can be criminally liable for espionage or the like.)

After the independence of the United States, United States law on defenses against libel claims developed some more, so that press reporting about public officials (especially) and even "public figures" (people who are already well known in public activities) can be protected even if reporters make false statements by mishap. For public officials, since my early childhood, the standard has been that "actual malice" (which doesn't exactly mean malice, but complete disregard for attempts to check the factual statements) has to be shown for a journalist to be liable for libel. In some other countries (notably Singapore), libel law can be used to suppress dissent. United States courts have not wanted libel law to work that way.

The practices of tabloid journalists, of course, are despicable, and they are examples of abusing legal precedents originally meant to protect more factual and more fair journalism.

[http://www.medialaw.org/topics-page/defamation- faqs](http://www.medialaw.org/topics-page/defamation-faqs)

<comment><USER10> My very limited experience with regular journalism and tabloid journalism is that tabloid journalists are scrupulously factual and accurate, while regular journalists more or less write whatever they want without much regard to whether it is true or even coherent. This makes a great deal of sense if you think about the environment of legal risk in which the respective categories of journalists exist: regular journalists are essentially engaged in stenography for the powerful, flattery for everyone, and providing readers with the cheap illusion that they understand things they don't; meanwhile, tabloid journalists are engaged in viciously attacking the famous.

In short, where you write "protect more factual and more fair journalism", you should have written "protect less factual and more favorable journalism".

<comment><USER11> >tabloid journalists are scrupulously factual and accurate, while regular journalists more or less write whatever they want without much regard to whether it is true or even coherent

Do we exist in the same universe? When I visit the National Enquirer website, the current headline is "Hillary Clinton Caught With Lesbian Lovers". Meanwhile, the headline on the New York Times is "Cam Trump Win? Here Are the Decisive Battlegrounds".

<comment><USER12> In the span of about 3 weeks the National Enquirer said that Prince died of Suicide, Accidental Drug Overdose, Aids, and Suicide because of Aids. The Same publication declared 3 separate causes of death for the same person in back to back to back issues, and yet people still read and believe this fucking garbage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I suppose the notion of press freedom has changed between 1991 and Gawker's case.

<comment><USER14> there's a difference between publishing gossip and publishing someone else's sex tape.

<comment><USER13> "Mr. Chieffo, a veteran entertainment lawyer, usually responds with what he calls "the facts of life" in the never-ending battle between these publications and the famous people". Why

1\. That Hogan had sex with his friend's wife

2\. That he was taped

are not "facts of life"?

<comment><USER15> Don't think the issue is that Gawker reported that Hogan was taped having sex with his friend's wife.

<comment><USER4> No, the issue is that they literally wrote a headline bragging about ignoring a court order to take it down[0].

Whether or not the lawsuit itself was justified (though the jury ultimately did thing so), it's pretty stupid to ignore a court order. It's even more appalling to brag about it the way they did. Quite frankly, they kind of got off easy, since the consequences could have been a _lot_ worse. People literally go to jail for behavior like that. Look at Kim Davis, who was jailed for contempt.

[0] [http://gawker.com/a-judge-told-us-to-take-down-our-hulk- hoga...](http://gawker.com/a-judge-told-us-to-take-down-our-hulk-hogan-sex- tape-po-481328088)

<comment><USER16> I don't understand. Why did gawker fight for this? Was there any big ideal behind it or just for the lulz? I can understand if it was the President instead of hulk Hogan, but it's just a private individual in his private premises doing perfectly legal things. Why would you publish this and then fight the judicial system over it?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A short criticism of Amazon SQS - <AUTHOR> http://abeautifulview2011.wordpress.com/2011/07/16/a-short-criticism-of-amazon-sqs/

<comment><USER2> I looked at the API for SQS a long time ago after writing this:

[http://www.rockstarprogrammer.org/post/2008/oct/04/what- matt...](http://www.rockstarprogrammer.org/post/2008/oct/04/what-matters- asynchronous-job-queue/)

I really felt like I must be missing something. This made no sense to me. The linked article suggests the author is also missing something, or Amazon just did it wrong. I don't know where I'd actually use SQS.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm glad I'm not alone in making this observation. From where I stand, it sure seems like your could build a functional equivalent (or better) by just using a database table for the queue and be done with it.</comment>


MTV VHS Recordings 1981 to 1989 [video] - <AUTHOR> https://archive.org/details/mtv-80s-vhs-full-recording-collection/ <comment><USER2> I am old enough to have watched the first few hours. The cable came into a box on the TV. I think it was a 25 inch tube as my Dad liked to watch the NFL games. The cable box was a dial with ~60 channels on it and a A/B switch (so there was channel 60A and channel 60B). The TV had a remote but of course that did not work with the cable box so my job as the kid was to change the channel when my parents asked!

There was not a ton of videos so they replayed them a ton. I remember seeing The Buggles, Go-go's, Toto, Prince, etc. A lot of the videos where just the band on stage playing with various camera views. I also remember watching the premiere of Michael Jackson's Thriller (1983) with my parents. It was pretty cool.

</comment><comment><USER3> I remember there were no 'alternative' radio stations around me at the time, so I looked forward to every Sunday night to watch and listen to MTV's 120 minutes to hear all the new stuff (or new to me anyway). Thanks for sharing these.

<comment><USER2> Dave Kendall (one of the host of 120 Minutes) does a show every Friday on XM First Wave on Friday nights - Party 360 with Dave Kendall. There is also Dark Wave on Sundays. Between those 2 it covers anything you would have heard on 120 Minutes.

<comment> cbm-vic-20 Our modern era of algorithmic music programming (or the "four hour playlist" format) makes be pine for the days when actual humans did music programming. SiriusXM has a lot of stations with really good on-air talent. Not sure how much leeway they have on what actually gets played, but they're at least knowledgeable. Some college radio stations are also really good. (Shout-out to John Richards at KEXP!)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This collection has 8 videos from 1990 and 3 from 1991. There is a few others from MTV's 90s on other collections at archive.arg: [https://archive.org/details/movies?sin=&and%5B%5D=MTV&and%5B...](https://archive.org/details/movies?sin=&and%5B%5D=MTV&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221999%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221998%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221997%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221996%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221995%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221994%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221993%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221992%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221991%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221990%22&sort=-downloads)

</comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone know where to _buy_ good quality music videos from the 1980s?

Currently some are available on YouTube, some on iTunes, some nowhere. Quality is very hit-and-miss.

Why doesn't Apple have all of these for sale? Is it an issue of rights? Do they think there wouldn't be enough demand? Is there is a lot already available in torrents and that would compete with iTunes?

<comment><USER6> Why do you want to purchase a music video??? Do you run a TV station and will re-broadcast it, or some other broadcasting strategy?

<comment><USER7> why would it be for rebroadcast purposes? not OP but I want to have such things streamed to my TV in my own home.

<comment><USER6> Because music videos are free.

<comment><USER7> I would pay money for original media because the data will likely be in it's "best" original encoding, metadata etc. And nobody other than the studio has meddled with it. You don't get that using youtube-dl or torrenting formats other people provide.

edit: Music production evolves over time and digital content distribution is very different in the mixing business. Older formats are not built with streaming in mind and so you lose a lot of quality during upload to streaming services: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHxMsawJsTc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHxMsawJsTc)

<comment><USER5> Thank you for explaining. Many videos on YouTube are low quality.

Also, if I buy it I expect that some decent percentage of my purchase price makes it back to the original artist. (I know, very naïve of me). If I get it off youtube then the artist might get just a fraction of a cent in the best case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've heard that MTV caused new fashions to become popular outside big cities first, because rural areas were more likely to have cable TV in the 1980s.

<comment><USER9> Well, urban centers had a choice of over-the-air (OTA) TV and FM broadcast signals. So suburban areas may have adopted cable faster because they had less choices.

For those too young to have experienced OTA, the TV signal was crisper (no bleed) than cable. FM is actually CD-quality if you're in a major city and have a $1000 receiver.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I prefer the commercials are left in.

</comment><comment><USER11> Getting:

This video file cannot be played. (Error Code: 224003)

On all the videos, tried Safari and Chrome.

<comment><USER7> archive encodes these files upon upload. you can click the torrent link and download the files it's only ~9GB. consider seeding it for a day or 2 so others can access it quickly too.

<comment><USER12> Any idea if the torrent might get updated to more than 5 of the files contained? I was quite disappointed after grabbing it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> All of the links on the site are now broken with the message "The item is not available due to issues with the item's content."

Was the content taken down because of copyright issues?

</comment><comment><USER14> Not a single video of Adam Curry's magnificent 80s hairdo? It's a bleedin' outrage!

</comment><comment><USER15> How can the uploader claim public domain for that?

<comment><USER16> Archive is classified as a library in the United States, as far as I understand it.

<comment><USER15> They put a public domain tag on the content, which is different than the library exception.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Can you access these through torrents?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. In the "Download Options" sidebar there is a link to the torrent manifesto file.

<comment><USER18> Every torrent I've gotten off archive.org has just been links to the http seed file and no trackers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Really really good proramming.

</comment><comment><USER19> Totally Rad!

</comment><comment><USER20> Back when music videos were awesome works of cinematography, production, visual, and musical art:

Dire Straits - Money For Nothing (complete with CG and 80's pastel graphics on live video) - [https://youtu.be/csje_Tb0U0c](https://youtu.be/csje_Tb0U0c)

Here's a playlist of 80's MTV videos, starting with the Space Shuttle and Apollo launches followed by landing the MTV flag on the moon:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NBhuf1g-rY&list=PLDHCLXs2vT...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NBhuf1g-rY&list=PLDHCLXs2vTkLK-Y7lCVSM5aC3wBYzAcyw)

Like most things on Internet Archive, individual videos are not annotated very well so you have no idea what's in the content. Digging through it would be, sadly, mostly a waste of time. It would be more useful with annotations.

<comment><USER21> this is interesting, don't you think music videos were good also after the '80s?

In my very modest opinion they peaked somewhere in the '90s: basically everything by Michel Gondry until "Let Forever Be"[0] is awesome and some artists (Prodigy, Bjork, Fatboy Slim, Korn, Marylin Manson) have made their clips almost as recognizable as their music.

It seems these days they have become fairly boring but then again, maybe I've just become older and uncool.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5FyfQDO5g0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5FyfQDO5g0)

<comment><USER22> I think you're right, but there's always the element that the older crowd gravitate towards what we grew up with. And everyone eventually becomes the older crowd.

There would be some people on here for which even this stuff is too "young"; those who grew up with 50's, 60's and 70's music of course.</comment></comment></comment>


Printing a wall-sized world map and what I've learned from it - <AUTHOR> http://www.dominik-schwarz.net/potpourri/worldmap/ <comment><USER2> I was formerly a cartographer with the military; I have lots of experience with large format maps, both of the world and of single countries (usually Iraq). It was fun to read an article about a map that wasn't hastily tacked up on a wall with nails or duct tape.

A few notes:

\- Paper sags over time. Good thing he mounted it to a board

\- We printed on tyvek for water/rip proofing, which was interesting. It's surprisingly hard to rip.

\- I would have chosen a different projection maybe, but only for purely aesthetics, not any scientific reason. If its hanging on a wall in your house because you want it, you have all the license in the world to do whatever.

\- I can't tell, but did NZ make the cut?

\- And I may not have used blue for areas in the corners that are not actually water.

What a great job though!

This reminded me of Colonels coming to me in the military saying - "I want all of Iraq on my wall at 1:50,000" and as a junior enlisted man saying something, very respectfully, like "Well, sir, Iraq is about 900km from top to bottom, so that's 900,000m, and at 1:50,000 that's about 18m from top to bottom. How high are your ceilings?"

<comment><USER3> Out of curiosity, what projection would you go with?

<comment><USER4> Dymaxion would be disorienting but it would certainly get you thinking

Example: [http://basementgeographer.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/05/uap...](http://basementgeographer.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/05/uapoK.jpg)

<comment><USER5> This is the projection I've been working on for the past few weeks, a conformal spinoff of Cahill's maps from the early 20th century:

[http://i.imgur.com/Y6ki0l9.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/Y6ki0l9.jpg)

I think it'll be great for a map where the triangular sections are each about a meter on a side (1:10M scale), or perhaps half a meter on a side (1:20M scale).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "OpenStreetMap... the additional work to custom style the maps would be extraordinary"

It absolutely wouldn't. Download TileMill or its successor, Mapbox Studio. Adjust the (Carto)CSS. Done.

Though for a map of this scale I'd probably work straight from Natural Earth[1] without involving OSM, to be honest.

Looks great, anyway.

[1] [http://www.naturalearthdata.com/](http://www.naturalearthdata.com/)

<comment><USER7> I'll be honest, I never really gave a lot of thought to whether or not I'm a "map lover" until this HN topic appeared in my feed, but your comment hooked me in...

...so much for this morning's priorities. /sigh

If you're familiar with the Natural Earth data set, do you know if it is possible to apply a transformation so a map could be printed of the World using the Cahill or Waterman projection?

I can envision a striking large-scale art piece that started from a "butterfly" representation of the World.

<comment><USER8> The data is stored as coordinates, so given software that supports a projection and understands the system used to store the data, it can be transformed.

(Much recently available data is stored using geographic coordinates - basically the latitude and longitude, and maybe the elevation, but a lot of older data, and especially government data, is stored in coordinate systems that are designed to limit the error in spatial analyses that are done on the data. This isn't really something that you would have to understand deeply to make a map in a given projection, but you might have to deal with it along the way.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is so brilliantly reminiscent of Borges' famous fiction:

On Exactitude in Science Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley. ...In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. —Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658

<comment><USER10> So was that map the territory, or not?

<comment><USER11> I guess cuz it's fiction then the answer is no, the map is not the territory. Or come to think of it, maybe yes. Or both. Or neither. I actually have no idea. That's why I hate lit-crit. I do love me some Borges though. Maybe best not to sweat it.

<comment><USER12> Borges is what actually got me interesting in literary criticism -- because of the nature of his output, it's actually possible to read nearly all of his major work (poetry and nonfiction included). This makes reading lit-crit about him infinitely more satisfying. If you're remotely interested, I'd highly recommend "The Narrow Act", "Invisible Work", and particularly "The Mystery To A Solution", though this last one also requires a lot of Poe and even more patience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This guy "loves world maps" but chose Mercator for the wall of his room? I guess there's no accounting for taste. There are hundreds of projections to choose from, why choose the one optimized for _navigation by compass_?

<comment><USER14> I can't believe I'm doing this, but I think I'm going to defend Mercator here.

The Mercator projection was indeed originally designed for compass navigation, but the reason it's still used for web mapping is slightly different. The Mercator projection is _conformal_. What this means is that angles (and hence in some sense shapes) are preserved locally. When we zoom in on a small section of the Mercator projection, we get a reasonably accurate representation of the actual shape of features. This is generally not true for most more fashionable projections, which will stretch and skew things, so they don't always look great when zoomed.

In general with map projections, you have to make a compromise between global properties and local properties. Choosing Mercator means going full-on for local quality, at the expense of the global map being quite distorted. This makes it great for zoomable web maps, because most of the time the global map is just used to find the area you're actually looking for.

Now, you could argue that for a living-room wall, you want something that looks good globally. If it was my wall, I'd agree with you. However, this guy seems to be really interested in local detail. He worries about his four-point fonts becoming blurry, and about having as many small villages marked on the map as possible. If he's interested in that kind of detail, then I think he probably cares far more about local properties than the kind of global properties that would bother me or you.

<comment><USER15> If I understand correctly, Mercator is the only conformal projection where north is always up, no matter where you zoom in. That makes it nice for online maps. If you relax the "north is up" requirement, there's tons of conformal projections that look nice: [http://www.progonos.com/furuti/MapProj/Normal/ProjConf/projC...](http://www.progonos.com/furuti/MapProj/Normal/ProjConf/projConf.html)

I really like the "classic Guyou" projection: [http://www.progonos.com/furuti/MapProj/Normal/ProjConf/Img/Z...](http://www.progonos.com/furuti/MapProj/Normal/ProjConf/Img/Z1/mp2_Guyou-s80-z20.png). It mangles the ocean pretty badly, but the sizes and shapes of the landmasses are surprisingly realistic, and it's rectangular to boot.

<comment><USER16> I like the "classic Guyou" projection you linked to as well.

But referring back to the OP, notice the grid of books and curios along the entire neighboring wall, and the grid-like pattern of the wood flooring underneath. The Mercator projection seems of a piece with this grid theme in the room.

Your curvy Guyou projection would look great in this Lautner house: [http://cdn.cstatic.net/images/gridfs/53e53330f92ea16cd900340...](http://cdn.cstatic.net/images/gridfs/53e53330f92ea16cd9003404/LR%20overall%20full.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wish someone would have recommended him to tweak one of many available OSM styles in TileMill. He also could have exported the layer in any tile shape, projection, and resolution using mapnik. You can even render to vector trivially, which comes in very handy for any printable pdfs.

[https://github.com/mapbox/osm-bright](https://github.com/mapbox/osm-bright)

[https://github.com/mapnik/mapnik/wiki/MapnikRenderers](https://github.com/mapnik/mapnik/wiki/MapnikRenderers)

<comment><USER18> The project was started 1,5 years ago at the time of writing the article.

<comment><USER17> I've been using Mapnik for about 8 years now, I think, since it was the first alternative to MapServer. OSM has always been using Mapnik, with mapnik styles in CartoCSS for a long time too ([http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/CartoCSS](http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/CartoCSS)). TileMill beta ([https://github.com/mapbox/tilemill/tree/v0.5.1](https://github.com/mapbox/tilemill/tree/v0.5.1)) came out 4 years ago. So, I definitely would have made the same recommendation 1.5 years ago. It still came out pretty cool :)

Feel free to ask me any gis or web mapping questions as firstname.lastname@example.com, I'd love to facilitate more beautiful maps out there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "Even when the data quality is great the real challenge for a map service is to decide what they should and should not display. Google does an excellent job in always showing the right amount of information."

I used to work on tile rendering at Google and considerable effort was spent on this. Thank you!

</comment><comment><USER20> FWIW, a shameless plug for the company where I had my first programming job as a 17 year old: www.marketmaps.com. They will print and ship HUGE maps without a moment's hesitation. Choose a nice world map with a decent projection or send them a PDF and they'll overnight to you :-)

<comment><USER21> Oddly, they don't seem to have world maps advertised online. Everything else though!

<comment><USER20> Try here: [http://www.mapsales.com/world-wall- maps.aspx](http://www.mapsales.com/world-wall-maps.aspx)

I think marketmaps.com landing page is pretty focused on the US, but they have a pretty extensive catalog, and you could also design your map with QGIS from OSM data and send them the PDF.

<comment><USER22> Do you know of any UK / Euro companies that do the same?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This article's throwaway notion of glow-in-the-dark pins has got me thinking about how to make a surface with _light-up LED_ pins that can be stuck in arbitrarily.

\- You could use (cleverly-braided+insulated) regular LEDs if there was a breadboard or something behind the map, but that'd be both huge and inconvenient.

\- Maybe LEDs with inductive coils and a large backing induction mat?

\- Given a metallic backing, and a regular fridge-magnet-like magnet, is there some way to trade _some of_ the magnetic force the magnet is exerting on the backing for electrical power? Or maybe power a light using the normal force of the backing _on_ the magnet. Either way, this would probably have the side- effect of reducing the coercivity in a regular permanent magnet way faster than otherwise. (You can make the whole backing surface a weak electromagnet, though! I wonder if that's more or less energy-intensive than making an induction mat of that size...)

\- Maybe ignore conductive power, and try for radio power? RFID-powered LEDs? Crystal-radio-like LEDs? Or even just phosphorous-coated pinheads (not the matchstick kind; the CRT kind) with an infrared lamp or blacklight on the other wall?

\- Or maybe, if you don't care about the LEDs _only_ lighting up when on the wall, you could just make them "permanently" lit in the same way some exit signs are: put a tiny little bit of something radioactive in there, and then surround that with fluorescent gas in a glass shell.

\- A chemical solution would be very interesting for its own sake. If there was potentially chemoluminescent fluid in the backplane (which would then have to be a gel/sponge), and the pins could pull it in via capillary action somehow—maybe the heads on the pins could be squeezed, making them effectively into little bulb syringes—then fluid could end up in the pinhead and react with something inside.

<comment><USER24> Maybe put a strong light behind the map, and use a fiberglass pin? Kind of like a Lite-Brite.

<comment><USER25> That would be a reasonably practical solution with a lowish profile lightbox as the mounting.

Hmmm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This jumped out at me.

>I am now lucky enough to have the opportunity to travel to many different countries and I sadly realized that this planet is not nearly as big as I hoped when I was a kid.

Fly less. I find that my sense of how big the world is is related to how frequently I fly Vs traveling by train, bus, motorcycle or anything else really.

Hurtling from one airport to another at ~800km/hr gives you a false impression about the distances you are covering. I suspect the speeds are simply so fast that we don't have the ability to intuitively appreciate just how far we are traveling. When you take slower forms of transport you suddenly realize how freaking huge the world is.

Flying also isolates you from the area you are traveling across. When you don't fly you see that there is in fact a vast amount of stuff (cities, towns, farming areas, mountains, rivers etc) between the airports. When I fly a lot the world is reduced to a network of airports.

An example from my own life. My wife and I once flew to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia then traveled overland (trains and buses with the occasional ferry) through Malaysia, up through Thailand, around part of Laos, back into Thailand and then over into Cambodia.

Travel time => 8 months.

My impression of how big the world is => absolutely massive.

Then we flew back from Phnom Penh to Kuala Lumpur, where we started.

Travel time => less than 2 hours in the air.

After a few additional flights, my impression of how big the world is => tiny.

</comment><comment><USER27> National Geographic mural map is pretty decent (but yes, it's heavy on borders) [http://shop.nationalgeographic.com/ngs/product/maps/wall- map...](http://shop.nationalgeographic.com/ngs/product/maps/wall-maps/world- maps/world-mural-map--blue-ocean)

<comment><USER28> The Earth-toned version looks much nicer IMHO [http://shop.nationalgeographic.com/ngs/product/maps/wall- map...](http://shop.nationalgeographic.com/ngs/product/maps/wall-maps/world- maps/world-mural-map--earth-toned)

<comment><USER29> Seeing what he ended up with, I don't think he would have been happy with how much of these maps are graphic design, not map.

<comment><USER30> I think also the lack of smaller cities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I can't believe how negative the comments are here, criticizing the projection. I don't really like the term "middlebrow dismissal" but it seems to apply.

As an aside, have you looked closely at Greenland on a globe? It looks all wrong - long and skinny like someone messed up the aspect ratio.

<comment><USER32> There's an unbelievable amount of pretentiousness in this thread, it's ridiculous.

<comment><USER33> Imagine the roar if he'd used Comic Sans as the typeface for all place names. And made the frame out of re-purposed shipping pallets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Very cool. But I was surprised to see he chose Mercator.

See: [https://xkcd.com/977/](https://xkcd.com/977/)

<comment><USER35> I thought that too. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection)

Which map projections would you choose? A difficult decision: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_map_projections](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_map_projections)

<comment><USER36> Robinson or Winkel-tripel like National Geographic does.

<comment><USER37> Hammer retroazimuthal, back hemisphere. Which is, coincidentally, also my favorite skateboarding move.

<comment><USER38> This is really cool looking, and I have no idea what you'd use it for.

And this is just the neatest thing to play with: [https://www.jasondavies.com/maps/hammer- retroazimuthal/](https://www.jasondavies.com/maps/hammer-retroazimuthal/)

<comment><USER39> "As a retroazimuthal projection, azimuths (directions) are correct from any point to the designated center point." (-- Wikipedia, which knows everything and is never wrong.)

It looks like one retroazimuthal variant (the Craig retroazimuthal) is sometimes called the "Mecca projection", so you know which way to kneel at sundown if you're into that sort of thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Cool project.

I'm somewhat surprised that they didn't end up using an Open Street Map derivitive. If Google was good enough, then they'd probably find something from Mapbox or others that use OSM data acceptable, and many provide tools so that "the additional work to custom style the maps would be extraordinary" wouldn't be true.

It's also a bit wierd that the comparison screenshots are all at a different level of zoom from the one's that he wanted to use. Many online maps emphasis different things at different levels.

</comment><comment><USER41> Just want to know if someone will be interested in such a kick starter project if "someone" was to build this commercially?

<comment><USER42> My wife would love it, so I'd buy one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Back in the day when Google Maps first came out, I got a bit.. obsessed with it. I wrote a bit of code to download map tiles (they had an interesting, recursive spiral indexing scheme) and stitch them into large images, and printed poster-sized satellite imagery on a 4' plotter I should not have had access to at work. Such beautiful imagery..

</comment><comment><USER44> A very inspiring story of what can be achieved with talent, determination and resourcefulness. It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be good.

It also makes it very evident how odd it can be to project the surface of a sphere over a flat surface. The distortion of some shapes leaps to the eye.

</comment><comment><USER45> I printed 4x1.2m night sky panorama for my living room. I worked on Skyview fork (astronomical image stitching library), after some processing I got 5GB JPEG with 60K to 20K resolution. 6 hours of work and 80 euro printing fee.

</comment><comment><USER46> Not sure of the resolution but the easiest solution would be wallpaper. Googling "world map wallpaper" returns quite a lot of results, eg:

[http://st.houzz.com/simgs/31e1e6fa0fd87c96_4-7734/contempora...](http://st.houzz.com/simgs/31e1e6fa0fd87c96_4-7734/contemporary- wallpaper.jpg)

<comment><USER47> The picture you linked is clearly a 3D rendering and not an actual photo.

<comment><USER46> Yes it is, it wasn't obvious on my phone...

Another one: [https://www.walldecalcompany.com/product_images/x/995/world_...](https://www.walldecalcompany.com/product_images/x/995/world_map_wallpaper_zimmer__00851_zoom.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> It looks really nice, but it seems a shame to me that the ocean appears featureless.

If I were printing all that blue ink, I'd want ocean trenches to stand out in the same way that the mountain ranges do :)

</comment><comment><USER49> Since it was stitched using a number of smaller images printed from Google maps, wouldn't you end up with a bunch of "google-maps" watermarks all over the map?

<comment><USER8> The watermark is per screen, so you just have to crop off the watermarks (and account for the cropping as you set the view for each screenshot).

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Why do people feel like they can just edit Antarctica out?

<comment><USER51> At least Antarctica is practically uninhabited.

[http://worldmapswithout.nz/](http://worldmapswithout.nz/) on the other hand...

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> > There is a profession called »plasterer«

Maybe it is a German thing, in Australia a plasterer is anyone who installs plaster boards on the interior of houses by nailing them directly to the stud work (the wooden tresses).

</comment><comment><USER53> It would kill me to stick pins in something that nice looking.

<comment><USER54> Ugh, that was my first thought when I got to the end too. After all that work and expense, I was hoping he'd installed a ferromagnetic backing and was going to use tiny magnets as markers.

<comment><USER55> Well, once he killed it with his pins, he can print a new one with a different projection.

<comment><USER56> Yes, the printing was the easy part. In a few years, when the ink fades, he can print it again and remount on the same surface.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> For more fun, check out this raised relief map of California: [http://www.worldmapsonline.com/hs951californiamaprr.htm](http://www.worldmapsonline.com/hs951californiamaprr.htm) (discussed at [http://redd.it/34azy8](http://redd.it/34azy8))

For a CA transplant who does a lot of driving up and down the state, this map has been fascinating.

</comment><comment><USER58> My dad has a more low-tech approach: he buys a bunch of maps from the National Land Survey, cuts away the margins with scissors, and tapes them together with scotch tape. Rather than world maps, he likes large-scale maps of particular locations.

It's really very cool to a have that kind of wall-scale high-resolution information display. When I get a more permanent place to live, I'm tempted to do the same thing.

</comment><comment><USER59> Too bad he chose Mercator projection. Gall–Peters or Robinson would be my choice.

</comment><comment><USER60> This is awesome. I've always wanted a massive dymaxion project and never thought of going about it this way.

Now I need to figure out how to convert open-street-map tiles into a dymaxion projection, which I can then print and mount on triangular boards.

[http://www.learnwebmapping.com/2012/01/dymaxion-web- mapping/](http://www.learnwebmapping.com/2012/01/dymaxion-web-mapping/)

[http://indiemaps.com/blog/2011/04/dymaxion-projection-in- ope...](http://indiemaps.com/blog/2011/04/dymaxion-projection-in-openlayers/)

[http://www.gislounge.com/dymaxion-map- projection/](http://www.gislounge.com/dymaxion-map-projection/)

</comment><comment><USER61> Does anyone know how to achieve this for individual states of India? I would like to have huge maps printed for individual states which shows even the big villages.Is this possible? Or atleast can we do this for big cities like Mumbai, Chennai, Delhi?

<comment><USER62> Look into the openstreetmap based tools mentioned in other comments. They allow to customize a lot about the presentation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> I am so conflicted about the "pins on a map" practice of marking your travels.

On one hand I totally buy the article's explanation: "Putting pins in a map is something I've loved doing for many years. They inspire me and remind me of great experiences."

But on the downside, I'd be really afraid that the completionist in me would be motivated to visit exotic places _because_ of the pin I'd be able to add to the map. ie. going to a place just so I could say I've been there.

I'm sure I'd never book a trip _solely_ for that reason, but I'd be afraid it would be more of a factor than it should.

<comment><USER64> That actually sounds like a fantastic way and reason to experience the world. It's far better than most systems people use to pick travel spots: speak the language, major capital city I've heard of, etc etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> I read through and couldnt help but think of a video about Perter Bellerby i watched a few years back who makes some of the most beautiful globes I've ever seen. [https://vimeo.com/103263135](https://vimeo.com/103263135)

I really like Domink's project but I would have liked to have seen more diy trial and error.

Watching this video of Jimmy Diresta's would have made mounting on a timber french cleat a breeze.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y65tH4iMbg4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y65tH4iMbg4)

</comment><comment><USER66> Amazing. I have always been somewhat obsessed with maps since I was a kid. My light up and quite massive globe was one of my most prized possessions when other kids were more concerned with their Gameboy's and lego.

A full-scale wall map has always crossed my mind, not making one, but buying one. I did try and find one once and came up empty handed. I am probably in the minority here, but I like the Mercator projection and I think it looks great on a wall in that size (at least North is always up) even if it isn't exactly well-loved by that many.

</comment><comment><USER67> Clicked through thinking the "what I've learned from it" would contain some rousing geopolitical epiphany. Alas no, stuck some paper on a wall, put some pins in it, cool, cool.

</comment><comment><USER68> I used to do this all the time in the military. We would glue together and laminate smaller maps into one big map (That was then used in a control point for real time planning).

<comment><USER23> I was about to say—isn't this sort of thing (fine-granularity topographic surveying/GIS) exactly what the Professional version of Google Earth is for, marketed to governments/militaries/etc.?

<comment><USER69> Which is now free, and lets you save images at 4800x4800 pixels, if you adjust your window just right. Not much use for flat projections though

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> So it looks like xkcd isn't _always_ on the money. [http://xkcd.com/977/](http://xkcd.com/977/)

</comment><comment><USER71> This is really cool. Thanks for documenting and capturing the meticulous process of creating this, it was an enjoyable read. I'd love to see a really high definition photo that captures both the scale of the map and the amount of detail in it, preferably in a format that makes it easy to zoom around on different locations to see the detail. Not sure how feasible that would be though :).

</comment><comment><USER72> I love that the small details are preserved; that's gorgeous. But the omission of Antarctica would unsettle me every day until I redid it.

</comment><comment><USER73> Such a tragedy that he used Mercator for this :(

</comment><comment><USER74> His idea for overlaying the map with a projector reminded me of the giant globe covered in OLED screens, installed in a museum in Japan:

[https://www.miraikan.jst.go.jp/en/sp/tsunagari/geocosmos.htm...](https://www.miraikan.jst.go.jp/en/sp/tsunagari/geocosmos.html)

</comment><comment><USER75> Or you can just buy this big ass one from Ikea for 129 bucks:

[http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/70119430/](http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/70119430/)

<comment><USER76> Or this one: [http://shop.nationalgeographic.com/ngs/product/maps/wall- map...](http://shop.nationalgeographic.com/ngs/product/maps/wall-maps/world- maps/world-mural-map--blue-ocean)

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> Nice project. BTW the guy also made a trip to Chernobyl and shared some nice pics:

[http://www.dominik-schwarz.net/reisen/tschernobyl2015/](http://www.dominik- schwarz.net/reisen/tschernobyl2015/)

</comment><comment><USER78> a long time ago, like, in the early years of google maps, I used some _perl_ code someone published to pull down the tiles necessary to print off a 16 page map that I could tape together and put on the wall. I think the code was taken down shortly after because of a legal claim. Google obviously doesn't want their service/tiles being used for that....data/imagery owned by them and whatever map data company... Whether you can easily download the tiles or not due to browser caching, doesn't make it legal to use in stuff.

But all in all, hats off, fun project/good results

<comment><USER79> Well, the poster is in Germany, so German laws apply and section 53 of the copyright law (which is referred to in the post) clearly states that this is allowed use:

> It shall be permissible for a natural person to make single copies of a work > for private use on any medium, insofar as they neither directly nor > indirectly serve commercial purposes, as long as no obviously unlawfully- > produced model or a model which has been unlawfully made available to the > public is used for copying. A person authorised to make copies may also > cause such copies to be made by another person if no payment is received > therefore, or if it involves copies on paper or a similar medium which have > been effected by the use of any kind of photomechanical technique or by some > other process having similar effects.

[http://www.gesetze-im- internet.de/englisch_urhg/englisch_urh...](http://www.gesetze-im- internet.de/englisch_urhg/englisch_urhg.html#p0297)

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> Just found out about www.wallpapered.com, pretty relevant to this article.

</comment><comment><USER81> Did he share a link to the map file that he produced? I'm not seeing it, and it would be incredibly generous if he had made this available for others.

<comment><USER82> Unfortunately not: [http://www.dominik- schwarz.net/potpourri/worldmap/#fn4](http://www.dominik- schwarz.net/potpourri/worldmap/#fn4)

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> would be interesting to add 3d depth on it to show mountains height and depths. No idea how that would be done using paper.

<comment><USER84> Laminated object manufacturing [1]

Results look amazing [2][3]

Would probably be quite heavy.

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

[2] [http://www.gizmag.com/mcor-iris- paper-3d-printer/32903/pictu...](http://www.gizmag.com/mcor-iris- paper-3d-printer/32903/pictures#2)

[3] [http://www.gizmag.com/mcor-iris- paper-3d-printer/32903/pictu...](http://www.gizmag.com/mcor-iris- paper-3d-printer/32903/pictures#5)

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> nice. i love world maps too, i've created a graffiti art series of wall sized world maps. you can check them out here [http://www.saatchiart.com/account/artworks/323803](http://www.saatchiart.com/account/artworks/323803)

</comment><comment><USER86> Notes about projection choice seem to prevail, which is nerdy. Well, 400 euros for a wall map seems like a lot of money, but what isn't described very well is how the source file was created. It seems like the guy was manually stitching screenshots. God knows how much time did this take. There's little to no hacking in this project. Just the bit where he makes something custom.

<comment><USER87> I'm pretty sure the costs were not a running tally, i.e. they need to be added up for a total of over 1140 EUR.

<comment><USER86> I was also confused about that. Just assumed he incremented expenses with each step, but I think you're right, since 10 euros for framing doesn't sound legit. At over thousand of material/services cost the whole thing appears to be even less sensible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> another possible map that would have looked fantastic as a big wall map would be stamen watercolor [http://maps.stamen.com/watercolor](http://maps.stamen.com/watercolor)

</comment><comment><USER89> mercator is so ridiculous, why not [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%E2%80%93Peters_projection](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%E2%80%93Peters_projection)

</comment><comment><USER90> Great project and lots of followup info in the thread - thanks!

</comment><comment><USER91> amazing work, I always dreamt about having a world map in one of my future house walls, thanks for sharing, I will definitely come back to your article at some point.

</comment><comment><USER92> This is a very cool project. Turned out nice!

</comment><comment><USER93> www.mapworld.co.nz sells similarly sized wall maps, for those who don't want to go to such hassle :)

</comment><comment><USER94> > I've spent 1,5 years working on this project

So wouldn't it make more sense to just buy a huge display then? :)

<comment><USER95> Or a decent high res LED projector, would have cost less than the foam board he stuck the map to and he could have it done in a day.

<comment><USER40> Given his objectives specifically included high resolution enough to see details on the map up close, even a 4K projector would have fallen far short of this.

<comment><USER96> Yes, for 3mx2m at 300dpi one would need something like 35k projector

<comment><USER95> Projectors aren't limited to displaying static images, but I guess the format is a matter of taste.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER97> Greenland is fucking huge.

</comment><comment><USER98> Amazing work!

</comment><comment><USER99> I'm wondering why he has a skull for a bookstop :)

</comment><comment><USER100> awesome article!

</comment><comment><USER101> I don't really understand why OP decided to print it and glue it in separate steps. It seems rather expensive rather than finding someone to do all the work.

For example these guys would do the job for 142 euros [http://sprint24.net/go/29ul/](http://sprint24.net/go/29ul/) I'm not sure they'd ship internationally though (or at all, for an item of that size).

<comment><USER102> Cleaned link: [http://sprint24.net/buy/online/rigid- panels/panels/](http://sprint24.net/buy/online/rigid-panels/panels/)

Please don't use shortened URLs and don't sneak affiliate codes.

<comment><USER101> There was no affiliate code, the link only contained a bunch of query parameters to match the size and material of OP's map.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER103> I tried 5% of what you did and failed... Basically I would pay for one... I guess this one is saved on the project list backburner.

www.kayatilev.com most of my work is furniture. Finishing up a coffee table would love feedback.

<comment><USER104> This is an awesome project!

I get the projection issues. He wants to see the details and be able to roam them. For one who is going to spend a lot of time close up, this project is a home run. Well done, and I'm envious.

When I was a kid, I would collect the large size maps Nat Geo would produce. Had a variety of them on the wall, and for reasons very similar to the ones expressed by this guy. It's fun to think about the places in the world, and associate them in various ways.

Visits, reading about things, photos, whatever, can all be placed into context and having a big map helps one with a sense of the world and it's many features and people. The pins bother me, but I stuck pins in mine too, and since he can reprint, no worries! I wonder if drawn tungsten or something might serve as a very small diameter pin? Could get a length of it, sharpen the ends, and dip into something to form the heads...</comment></comment>


Space Force Logo - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1220821545746141187 <comment><AUTHOR> An awesome logo, in my opinion!

May you live long, and prosper, Space Force!!!

</comment><comment><USER2> Whats the significance of the 22 stars? Patches always aren't random</comment>


Microsoft Is Bringing Its BUILD Developer Event Back To San Francisco - chris-at http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/12/microsoft-is-bringing-its-build-developer-event-back-to-san-francisco-in-april-of-2014

<comment> chris-at Well, IMHO they won't get anyone back until they figure out where they actually want to be going.</comment>


What should I do now? - <AUTHOR>

After submitting this, I have yet to receive any replies, any advice? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8590395 <comment><USER2> Just commented on the post. Hope it helps.</comment>


Big Tech's Personal Data Trackers Lurking on Social Media, Websites, and Apps - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-report-exposes-explains-big-techs-personal-data-trackers-lurk-social-media <comment><AUTHOR> Behind the One-Way Mirror: A Deep Dive Into the Technology of Corporate Surveillance

"The most prevalent threat to our privacy is the slow, steady, relentless accumulation of relatively mundane data points about how we live our lives. This includes things like browsing history, app usage, purchases, and geolocation data. These humble parts can be combined into an exceptionally revealing whole. Trackers assemble data about our clicks, impressions, taps, and movement into sprawling behavioral profiles, which can reveal political affiliation, religious belief, sexual identity and activity, race and ethnicity, education level, income bracket, purchasing habits, and physical and mental health."

[1] [https://www.eff.org/wp/behind-the-one-way- mirror](https://www.eff.org/wp/behind-the-one-way-mirror)</comment>


Three quarters of people in the UK now do at least some online grocery shopping - vanilla-almond https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-53840920 <comment><AUTHOR> Waitrose is the most expensive high street supermarket in the UK. As an example, its basic own-store-brand called "Waitrose Essentials" has things like avocados, 'ironing water', and profiteroles. People write articles joking about it[1]. It's customers are very much the wealthy middle-class. I have no doubt that 75% of Waitrose customers do some sort of online grocery shopping, but I have _serious_ doubts that their poll was representative of the whole of the UK.

[1] [https://www.studentmoneysaver.co.uk/article/things- waitrose-...](https://www.studentmoneysaver.co.uk/article/things-waitrose- think-are-essential/)

<comment><USER2> > 'ironing water'

Ironing water is pure water and is needed in order to not destroy your iron in areas with very hard water, which is a lot of the southern UK where Waitrose has most of its customer base. No need for the scare quotes.

<comment><AUTHOR> I put it in quotes because 'ironing water' isn't a real thing. It's just distilled water with perfume in. You can use distilled or de-ionised water from a car accessory store instead which costs about 1/20th the price. My iron has a note in the manual suggesting the perfume chemicals are bad for the iron and that I should use plain distilled water instead.

<comment><USER2> If you think it's not a real thing because you can describe it terms of its components then does an iced bun not exist because it's just a bun with icing on? You can just buy buns in bulk without icing so I guess you think they're not a real thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> If iced buns cost 20 times more than ordinary buns, then yes, but I know that they don't. I've done extensive research at my local Greggs.

'Ironing water' is a marketing term designed to get people to pay far more for something than they need to. If it was sold as 'perfumed distilled water for ironing' I'd take much less issue with it.

I am genuinely surprised to see someone astroturfing for Comfort on HN. :)

<comment><USER2> > I am genuinely surprised to see someone astroturfing for Comfort on HN. :)

I just thought it was a bit snobby to have a pop at old ladies in Waitrose who just want to keep their iron working well and possibly aren't regularly in a car shop to pick up a bottle of de-ionised water. And they like things to smell nice - what terrible people!

I think calling it 'ironing water' is pretty frank and consumer friendly really. It's water. And it's for ironing. I wish more things were named like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The key difference between the US and the UK here is that all the major supermarkets do their own delivery service. You don't have to rely on third parties to get things delivered.

<comment><USER4> Where does Ocado lie in all this? Surely if everyone else offers delivery they become redundant?

<comment><USER5> Not really, everyone's offered delivery for years. We've done home delivery for about 15 years, at various times using Sainsburys, Asda, Tesco, Ocado and Morisons

Ocado have recently changed to use M&S at the backend

<comment><USER6> > Ocado have recently changed to use M&S at the backend

what does this mean? when was this? I still see a lot of Waitrose products at the moment.

<comment><USER7> I think the full switch lands at the end of September, but already some of the Waitrose Essentials items are going out of stock a lot faster than they used to; the limited depth of stock for these items has served to remind me which items I purchase regularly that are Waitrose ones and for which I need to see if M&S has a suitable replacement, so far it has been mixed results for me. You can also find some M&S items entering the inventory if you scroll down past your favorites. I am expecting to see a lot more M&S items get pushed as discounted flash sale items at checkout over the next few weeks so that M&S can get some of these replacement items marked as favorites in your account.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> To think British grocery chains had been pushing online services for many years and consumer acceptance was growing at a snails pace until Covid hit.

I love using those services especially if it means I can avoided a crowded store on the weekend. But my wife and I are foodies and we also love browsing the aisles to see what's new and tempting. It's maybe one reason why packaged food brands are desperate to get onto supermarket shelves - for the exposure.

I wonder how many other societal shifts like that we're going to see?

<comment><USER9> _But my wife and I are foodies and we also love browsing the aisles to see what's new and tempting._

That is one advantage to going in person. Another is simply that you can check the quality of what you're getting to some extent before you commit to buying it.

For example, the "best before" dates on a lot of fruit and veg have been... optimistic, let's say kindly... during the recent hot spell. Shopping online, you just get that somewhat arbitrary indicator. In person, at least you can see that half the fruit in the punnet is looking past its best even though the date is still four days away, and perhaps you'll decide not to buy that fruit today and maybe to get something else instead.

The low-paid store workers rushing around with their over-sized trolleys trying to collect half a dozen different customers' orders at once while being monitored for performance are obviously never going to care as much about picking the fresh-looking fruit or the less fatty piece of meat as the customer who's going to be eating those things or serving them to their family.

<comment><USER10> One of the biggest problems with this is everyone always chooses the newest produce so even if something has plenty of time left it ends up being rejected. The fix is stock rotation but it takes a lot of effort to ensure older produce gets sold first while keeping the shelves full.

It probably caused a huge amount of food waste.

<comment><USER9> That is certainly a concern, though I am somewhat lacking in sympathy (with the economic cost to the supermarkets) given that I think this is a problem they have largely brought upon themselves.

People buy the newest stock they can get because the older stock on the shelves so often has a pathetic usable lifetime once taken home. When I was a child, we routinely did one family shop per week in my household. A few decades later, I consider myself lucky if vegetables I bought from a supermarket more than one or two days ago are still fit to eat, and in my household we probably average 2-3 large (but obviously not _as_ large) shops per week if we're only using supermarkets. For these among other reasons, we often now prefer to shop locally for fresh food from the specialists nearby when we have enough time to do the rounds.

Clearly vegetables haven't radically changed; those I buy from local farm shops and the like still last just fine. But the supermarkets have now implemented such complicated logistics, presumably because it saves them money, that there have been horrible consequences for the quality and longevity of the produce they sell.

I don't know enough about the industry to fully understand the motivations behind those complicated logistics, but if it's just a race to the bottom to shave a little off the supply costs and increase the profit margin accordingly, maybe it's time our government stepped in to regulate in the interests of avoiding all of that food waste and perhaps other environmental costs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There's still some innovation that can be done in this space. The websites for supermarkets are clunky and the UX could be improved.

When I buy things in a supermarket I use my spatial memory. I know the physical position of every item, when I walk through the shop I make a series of tiny decisions about whether I need such and such item.

Grocery shopping via a search interface doesn't do it for me. I always end up forgetting something because I don't have the experience of walking through the shop to jog my memory.

<comment><USER12> My supermarket suggests things when I'm about to check out that I buy regularly that aren't in my basket. In a sort of"have you forgotten this?" type thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The whole Corona hysteria caused the number of people to buy their groceries online to explode - government was pushing this message through every channel they had. "Stay at home, shop online, blah blah". Every online grocery shop was overwhelmed and had no delivery slots for weeks/months. Before that I was ordering my weekly groceries from Amazon Fresh for some 7+ years, because I live in central London and I don't have a car. I've been buying my groceries in physical store for many months now.

As of 2 days ago Amazon Fresh was still unusable. I tried ordering from them, but I couldn't check out, because they had no available slots. I was put in a "virtual queue" and they sent me an email next morning with 1 hour window to check out. I missed that because I was sleeping. I don't know how long it will take for online grocery shopping services to recover to what they were, if ever.

<comment><USER12> This was a problem for a while in my city too but its better now, either people are using the service less or the supermarket has scaled up how many deliveries they can do. I just created an order now for an 11:00 - 12:00 slot tomorrow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've been doing online grocery shopping since the pandemic started and it's been great.

Even once the pandemic is over I'll be sticking to online. I don't have a car so getting to my nearest supermarket was a 2 mile walk. THis was fine going but was a pain walking back 2 miles with lots of shopping, especially in the rain.

Now I can just choose what I want in 10 minutes at the computer rather than 90 mins I would lose on a shopping trip.

</comment><comment><USER14> We use to shop at lidls and Sainsbury's before the pandemic. We'd do the bulk at Lidl and top up at Sainsbury's. When it hit we physically went to Sainsbury's as we could get any slots. Lidls in store response was poor and the store often crowded at choke points. Now that lidl are launching their own cloud services and delivery in the next 2 years we'd probably start using Lidl again

</comment><comment><USER15> In Melbourne, Australia right now I think the majority of people are having their supermarkets deliver their groceries each week (we are in level 4 lockdown still), as someone else mentioned and similar to the UK the supermarkets here have their own delivery services - and the drivers seem a good bit happier or at least less stressed than Uber/Deliveroo drivers.

</comment><comment><USER16> This was already happening, but I think the pandemic will drive it through. Commodity/cupboard shopping will happen online, and fresh meat, vegetables, fruit, seafood shopping happen locally. Supermarket sites are also hugely tempting for housing redevelopment, that will happen as soon as footfall consistently drops below a threshold.

</comment><comment><USER17> Now if only the butcher did this.

<comment><USER18> Haven't been in the UK for a few years but when I did I used [https://www.musclefood.com/](https://www.musclefood.com/). The meat was high quality.

Depending how much you spend your local butcher may do delivery to if they have commercial clients such as cafes, restaurants etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Reasonably low quality article based on small sample poll by a supermarket chain, but I guess it sparks debate.

<comment><USER5> Annecdotally I haven't seen any more delvieries to my street than pre-covid, however we moved from 2 deliveries a week of about £75 to one of £150 with covid (Ocado guarenteed one weekly delivery)

I don't understand why people would want to waste time going to a supermarket. It's like people who go to shops to buy commodity things rather than just buying online.

<comment><USER20> I had this realization about 10 years ago when I had to do a shop in an unfamiliar London supermarket on a Saturday. In that circumstance I'm basically doing their warehousing for them with no knowledge of their layout at the same time as 100s of other people all moving in their own inefficient patterns around the space. This is pretty stupid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The title is misleading (of course). The article states _" More than three quarters of people in the UK now do at least some online grocery shopping, according to supermarket chain Waitrose."_</comment>


Show HN: YO egg-timer - <AUTHOR> http://yoyoke.herokuapp.com/

<comment><USER2> For the confused (and I have nothing to do with this app):

There's an app called YO, and all you can do is send and receive YOs. So, all this does is when you send the username (HardBoiledYo or SoftBoiledYo) a YO, it will reply with a YO X minutes later.

</comment><comment><USER3> This Yo app really is ridiculous. As if there aren't a thousand other egg timer apps…

</comment><comment><USER4> umm. is anyone as confused as I am?

<comment><USER5> Yo is, from what I naively understand, is a super simple app which you can say "yo" to someone. The analogy, I assume, is that someone so simple can still have a use?

And behold, here is a use for the Yo app...interesting...

<comment><USER6> The question is whether using Yo is more practical than using a Timer app, which is native to every smartphone released in the past 5 years.

It isn't.

<comment><USER7> It might be, if you can't remember how many minutes it should be. I have to admit I always have to look it up,

<comment><USER8> One could also build the same functionality into a Twitter account fairly easily.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why do most programmers work so hard at pretending that they're not doing math? - <AUTHOR> http://richardminerich.com/2012/01/why-do-most-programmers-work-so-hard-at-pretending-that-theyre-not-doing-math/ <comment><USER2> A seductive idea, but ultimately of stunningly limited use in software engineering. By far the most costly defects in software creation are due to incorrect requirements or poor systems design. Knowing with mathematical certainty that your software component does exactly what you have specified it to do helps little when what it does is still the wrong thing.

And that doesn't even touch on the fact that crafting components is but a tiny part of the work required to produce software.

<comment><USER3> Absolutely. Most of the code being produced around me is of the "When button X is clicked, send an XML message to service Y letting it know the contents of textbox Z."

I'm sure this can be modelled mathematically, but I'm not convinced this would help.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure. The OP raise the fact the SQL is modeled after set theory. I happen to have learnt set theory a very long time ago, and to use SQL as much as any web developper around. Then I read a book about foundations of SQL, and found out it can and should be seen as an implementation of the set theory.

And you know what? It was like a revelation to me. It is incredibly helpful. And, by the way, it make me laughing inside each time I query MySQL (because MySQL is sadly /not/ a correct implementation, while PostgreSQL is). The "dots connecting" between set theory and SQL made also much clearer to me the NULL "mess" and why it has to be like that.

So, on this part I'd push the same way as the author, and would go as far as saying that doing correctly a "button X pushed -> notify API Y + persist the action to Z" simple glue code thing /is/ requiring a mental activity that (probably) uses the same parts of your brain as any mathematics and the use them the same way.

However I don't get why the author seem to be ranting against Test Driven Development. In my experience it is unrelated to how you model you data and interactions, except TDD will do exactly as the author is advocating: it will force you to write stateless atomic functions, to make them testable.

NB: From all I have read about mathematics on HN, it seems to me possible that we are not talking about the same thing. Maybe you and many other refer to some "sin a + sin b = cos sin ..." memorization exercise, and some multiple choice questions one have to check as fast as possible in order to get some good enough ranking.

I am talking about a teacher spending around 20 hours a week during several years in front of young people, telling them step by step how the world can be described, analyzed, understood with their brain. It started with: first predicate, there is something, at least one thing. Let's take this thing in your hand, and nothing else: you have a set. In your other hand let's take nothing: you hold now another set, the empty one. Then you have two different things. And on this the teacher built the set theory. (I was educated in France, when math were still on their pedestal).

<comment><USER5> """because MySQL is sadly /not/ a correct implementation, while PostgreSQL is"""

Of SQL maybe, but of Relational Algrebra/Set Theory, neither PostgreSQL is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Imagine if physics was done this way._

But it is...

1) We _test_ theories with experiments to see whether they fail for that particular "input", we don't prove them correct.

2) One of our two best theories (QFT, the other being GR) doesn't even make sense, mathematically.

In fact the great challenge of physics today is that we have neither experiment nor mathematical rigor to stand on: [http://groups.google.com/group/sci.physics.research/browse_t...](http://groups.google.com/group/sci.physics.research/browse_thread/thread/197c7bd30c78e1c7/9bb83d11d54c5062?pli=1)

A theory that gives correct results for a limited range of phenomena but isn't absolutely correct or mathematically consistent is still useful. Same for programs, I would think.

</comment><comment><USER7> Simple answer - the vast majority programmers rarely see more than rudimentary math on most projects, unless those projects are specifically math orientated (actual sciences, for example).

The rest of us working on our sites, platforms, apps and what-have-you usually only see anything resembling math when dealing with things like UI and Interaction models, or typically soft-math areas like rating systems and segmentation.

Possibly inflammatory, but perhaps a better question would be: why do most programmers work so hard at pretending they're engineers?

<comment><USER8> Most programmers know about SQL statements... But rarely identify it with set theory and that difference has a big impact on how you design and program databases. Being able to get by without that understanding is no excuse.

<comment><USER9> I think you can learn SQL as SQL, without math background. OTOH just knowing mathematical model of SQL is not enough to write good SQL.

SQL in practice is not a purely mathematical construct: you have to know how to make use of spinning platters, indices, caches, locks, network connections, intricacies of data types and bunch of quirks and bugs of the RDBMS.

I've learned SQL before learning set theory properly. It turned out that I did understand (SQL-related parts of) it, I just didn't know it was called set theory :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _We work in an environment where heresay [sic] and taste drive change instead of studies and models. We are stumbling in the dark._

Another way to look at it is that we're making progress, but with lots of false starts, like most progress. Hearsay and taste are what happen when people are working with imperfect information. Probably not even Knuth has perfect information about all the studies and models that might be relevant to any nontrivial project.

The author's point seems to be not that programmers should understand the math behind their work, but that they should do work that's more like math. It's true this would mean fewer bugs. But there are a lot of problems that people in the real world would rather have mostly solved by a slightly buggy dynamic program with mutation and state hiding than not solved by a formally proven program.

A lot of programming is stuff like simple CRUD web apps. I'd rather do that in Python than Haskell for the moment. If the author wants to argue that Haskell could be made friendlier without giving up its advantages, that's an essay I would welcome.

<comment><USER11> Haskell's advantages lie in being pure. It can't be 'friendlier,' because friendly languages let you hack things up (and are impure) as opposed to the planning required to lay down some Haskell.

<comment><USER10> I find it hard to believe that Haskell could not be friendlier. And I say that as a fan of Haskell.

<comment> loup-vaillant Someone should define "friendly" at this point.

Haskell certainly seems friendly enough to me. It catches most of my errors before I even run the program, it let me hack things relatively quickly with very little code. Yes, there is that "purity" discipline, but I mostly think like that anyway.

Now, it certainly won't be friendly to one who routinely writes code like that:

      if (foo)
        if (bar)
          do_something;

      if      (foo) {} // OK, do nothing
      else if (bar) {} // OK, do nothing
      else          { do_something; }

(I saw that yesterday in production code!) Those people think too procedurally to be able to understand Haskell, or even ML. You have to fix that flaw first.

(For the few who don't see the code above as utterly ridiculous, here is the better version:)

      if (foo && bar)
        do_something;

      if (!foo && !bar) { do_something; }

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I like to think that CS is just a different approach to math.

Of course, I say this as somebody who likes Haskell where the programmers work really hard at pretending to be mathematicians :)

However, even when I'm writing in other language, I think about things in terms of math. Additionally, my CS courses so far have all been heavily influenced by math, except for systems that was much more heavily influenced by EE.

So, at least for me, programming is very much like math. Just shinier. And I do think that more math--or at least mathematical thinking--would help most programmers.

However, the rant against testing is just silly. Tests are not a replacement for math--they augment it. We need tests because, at heart, CS is an engineering discipline: math is just a tool we use very pervasively.

Haskell is one of the more extreme typed functional languages, and yet Haskell programmers are _very_ amenable to testing. In fact, Haskell programmers tend to go above and beyond normal testing: we use property-based testing (QuickCheck). Instead of just having unit tests, we actually _generate_ random tests.

Besides, lets look at physics: they have great mathematical models. However, as soon as you actually _apply_ physics--basically engineering--you need to test everything extensively. There is a reason we have exhaustive crash tests, after all.

So: math is good for programmers. Tests are also good for programmers. The two cannot replace each other.

<comment><USER4> Agree with the rest, but not with "math is just a tool".

Math here is not about answering a question like "what are the coordinates of the point in the middle of those two points here". It is not a tool helping to solve a restricted set of computation problems. Math here is the model for the deterministic handling of a data system and its evolution in time. The silliest glue code is still math: "if button.push('a') thing.do_action('a_action')" translates to "For any x in A_Button_Pushes, action = f('a_action')".

<comment><USER13> Exactly. Let me also add that math isn't so much a tool as it is a way of thinking. Learning (or should I say understanding) more math helps in all sorts of non-obvious ways. From thinking logically, to seeing intuitive shortcuts, to proofs (used nearly every time a program is debugged), to algorithms, programming is one of the greatest concrete implementations of the math abstract.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Walking is math too, it can be modeled in math, but that doesn't mean all people who walk are mathematicians.

Physics is math too, but the difference is that while Physics uses the same constructs as math, Programming has radically different constructs.

Math and Programming does not require the same mindset, in math you need to find the absolute truth, when programming, 99% is good enough.

Being good at Math does not make you a good programmer instantly, and vice versa.

> This is also why programmers who use typed functional languages frequently > brag about their low bug count yet eschew methodologies like test driven > development: tests pale in comparison to the power of actual models.

If I brag about something does that make it a fact? I think writing this in math context is silly to say the least. It doesn't matter what you program in, you still need to test most of the time, this has nothing to do with how you program, it's what you program, I highly doubt that you could model a video game, and get it right the first time, without ever testing it.

Overall this article is pretty confusing, it tires to raise some good points, but gets stuck on the details.

<comment><USER15> Your post reminds me of what xkcd says about it:

<http://xkcd.com/435/>

There's a truth to it -- CS is just applied math, that doesn't mean you _have_ to understand math to program, but it will be very beneficial.

</comment></comment><comment> buff-a "This is also why programmers who use typed functional languages frequently brag about their low bug count yet eschew methodologies like test driven development: tests pale in comparison to the power of actual models."

I've written complex systems. Games. Graphics modelling tools. Network game engines. I've seen a lot of code.

I've never seen anything that complex written in a functional language.

Why?

My hunch is that models are powerful, but brittle: they don't stand up against constantly changing requirements. A great quote I read the other day was "If it compiles, it works". Great. Now change the requirements. The "beauty" of imperative languages is that they continue to compile and continue to provide some value of "work" even while they are morphing from one requirement set to the next. Functional languages are cast-iron. Imperative languages are steel.

UPDATE: I should also be clear: I think in models all the time. I just don't have to get it down perfectly on paper for the code to compile. I used to hear, back in the day, C++ programmers opining that we should all use C++ because object-oriented programming is superior. Regardless of whether or not OO is superior, they completely failed to comprehend how one could do object- oriented programming in assembly language, or that we'd been doing it the whole time.

So its entirely possible that there's something I dont get about functional programming that means I don't understand what I'm missing. But its also possible that I understand the theory _better than you_ and so I don't see the distinction you are making because _there isn't one_. To discern which is true, however, I'm going to need concrete examples, not opinion pieces.

<comment><USER16> I think the point is that there's something intrinsically verifiable about a mathematical model since you're dealing with quantifiable output.

Other cases I can think of are systems where high-throughput or low latency are major requirements but there aren't many of those. Most of what we do is about getting more users or making more profit - good engineering performance and decisions are not directly related to these.

<comment> buff-a Video games are all about high-throughput and low latency. Nobody writing commercial games in functional languages that I'm aware of.

<comment><USER17> I believe the Jak and Dexter games were written in a Lisp dialect, although I'm not sure of the success.

<comment> buff-a Naughty Dog created their own version of lisp called GOAL to control game objects. Scripting languages are common in games, but the "heavy lifting" is done in C/C++, as is the case in Jak and Daxter and Crash Bandicoot. Naughty Dog don't use GOAL any more. Have their games gotten worse?

Also note that the effect on performance and throughput are cited as downsides of using GOAL.[1][2]

I met the Naughty Dog team back then and Crash was an awesome game. Their use of a custom scripting language for so much of a real-time game (as opposed to an RPG) was pioneering. They did other innovative things, like baking in radiance transfer to their models to get the lush levels in the game. But at the end of the day, when the Lisp evangelists left Naughty Dog, they stopped using it almost immediately. Apparently, despite using Lisp, and learning from "one of the best lisp programmers in the world", none of that rubbed off on what appears to be an excellent programming team.

The only explanations are:

a) In 7+ years of working with a foremost Lisp programmer, that knowledge did not transfer, or

b) It did transfer, and the other programmers did not see a net advantage.

The OP would like us to believe that the answer is (a). Subsequent games from Naughty Dog would suggest that it is (b).

[1] <http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LispInJakAndDaxter>

[2] [http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2985/postmortem_naught...](http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2985/postmortem_naughty_dogs_jak_and_.php?page=3)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Many modern web apps where many programmers are employed are simply IO glue (request in, database in/out, web page response out) and don't involve many algorithms other than sorting and using hashtables and trees.

<comment><USER19> There's interesting maths to be around proving the IO glue correct, though. Opa is an fun take on that problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> "We work in an environment where hearsay and taste drive change instead of studies and models. We are stumbling in the dark."

I completely agree. Programming became a lot less fun once I entered industry and realised most decisions are driven by fashion and office politics. It's not so bad when it's you and a couple of friends hacking all night on a project because you likely have closely aligned interests. Being an employee, however, means you're a slave to other people's ideals.

I suppose this is why most of us are interested in startups.

You may also be interested in this post by Zed Shaw: <http://zedshaw.com/essays/programmer_stats.html>

<comment>

Surely the first person to write an algorithm wasn't Babbage or Lovelace, but more likely to have been the middle-eastern mathematician the word was named after? [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu%E1%B8%A5ammad_ibn_M%C5%ABs%C...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu%E1%B8%A5ammad_ibn_M%C5%ABs%C4%81_al- Khw%C4%81rizm%C4%AB)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> > _In the early days programming was considered a subdiscipline of > mathematics_

But then the Electrical Engineering guys come and conquer, then CS evolve closer to EE than to Math.

And these days, well... your boss always look at you and say that does not want to now about math or performance, he want to know about accomplished deadlines and nice UIs.

</comment><comment><USER21> I just began work on a new project that was half modeled. I initially tried to understand the existing model and wasted quite a few weeks for understanding that incomplete model. My problem is had i spent that time understanding the system...testing it as i would test a black box, i believe i could have constructed a better model..Ofcourse, this doesn't say anything about pros or cons of either approach..

And am beginning to get annoyed at the boiler plate generated by OOPS style programming.

But, to be honest, creating a model without looking at data first doesn't appeal to me either. I guess models will have evolve in sync with tests.. i.e: generate model/hypothesis,test, refine model/hypothesis test, repeat.

</comment><comment><USER22> Yet another instance of content not set up to handle traffic. Anybody got the copypasta?

</comment><comment><USER23> >>> 1.1+2.2 == 3.3 False

Requesting the database with some SQL inner join should get you less lines than both tables ? No ! It gets you a deadlock exception because some other program locks you...

Doing a DNS query to get IP address of an host ? Getting an IP ? Yes ? Everything ok ? No because some bit flipped somewhere and caused the result to be the IP address of foogle.com

So yes you are using maths but you are not doing maths.

</comment><comment><USER24> There are a lot of famous people in programming that produce world-class output without using typed functional languages. Therefore I am going to interpret this as : typed functional languages are cool to work with, but not necessary to produce excellent software. And producing excellent software is probably the only thing that matters.

</comment><comment><USER25> An article is needed, On why programming is not mathematics.

</comment><comment><USER26> On everyday reality job, you often work to change a system, this is some kind of science besides the other common cs math fields.

</comment><comment><USER27> Because they're not doing math?

Seriously - what is the useful model for a router or malloc?

Oh, and Babbage was not the first person to write an algorithm.

<comment><USER12> Routing is heavily based in graph theory, as far as I know, and so is actually fairly mathematical.

Memory management can also require a good bit of math. A perfect example would be taking an existing algorithm and optimizing it to use fewer memory accesses. We covered this sort of optimization in my recent algorithms class (for some algorithms) and it figuring out how to do required a good bit of math.

Really, the issue is that a programmer who doesn't use math is much less likely to see how math would be applicable to any particular situation. This is just like the programmer who does not know about, say, hash maps--he would not realize what he is missing.

<comment><USER28> Modern IP networking relies extensively on graph theory. The Spanning Tree Protocol is a prime example of this.

<comment><USER29> Graph theory is a very complex, and broad field of mathematics. The routing algorithms are an absolutely trivial application of it in a minuscule amount. Anybody, without formal training in mathematics can understand routing algorithms, because they are so simple and _easy_.

<comment><USER28> Yes, that is true. But, how those algorithms happen, is based in graph theory; is what I meant. If you saw Jamis Buck's "Algorithms" talk, I believe there's a reference to a "spanning tree" graph in there.

That said, I do agree with your point.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A naughty CV hack - <AUTHOR> http://howlingmob.net/pblog/2010/03/a-naughty-cv-trick/ <comment><USER2> First, I'd get annoyed if I found you tried to bug a CV you sent me. I'd definitely tell you not to send something like that to my clients.

Second, I think that while HTML resumes are a fine thing to post on your website, they are a _terrible_ format for sending to a prospective employer. You are virtually guaranteed that it will be mangled behind comprehension by the time an interviewer gets it.

Don't send HTML resumes. Don't send DOC files. Send PDFs. Hiring managers expect to have to read PDFs, they will print reliably, and they won't launch MS Office when someone clicks on them. PDF. It's the way to go.

<comment><USER3> tptacek, would you consider that a 'bug' even if you noticed it and carefully traced it? I think I'd assume the guy previously referred to a CSS file but now included it inline and forgot to remove the old <link type='text/css'>. Maybe I'd be suspicious if python responded with headers that said, "hi this is a python web server!". But linking to an empty CSS (or getting a 404 !) would not ever raise my suspicions. That's part of its beauty!

Hmm, on 2nd thought, getting the server to send a 404 while tracking the resume's travels is even more elegant.

I'd only be annoyed if in the interview he bragged about bugging the resume!!!

<comment><USER4> it's easy to track 404s. They show up in your access logs. You can just post- process the logs.

<comment><USER5> You can return 404 with python as well.

<comment><USER4> but what's the point? you'll be taking up a whole bunch of CPU cycles on every request when you can just use a fraction of the total once a day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Was anyone else really thrown off by the strange choices in bold and italic?

<comment><USER7> Yes. At first I thought he was italicizing each mention of a programming language, which is a nice idea. Then python was bold and not italic, and I lost the thread.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> New startup idea: Google Analytics for Resumes.

<comment><USER9> <http://www.trackmycv.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> He's worried about embedded viruses in .doc files but has no qualms about adding tracking code to .html!?

<comment><USER11> Do you seriously think those are at all similar?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> While not as useful as this trick, I've setup analytics on my external facing resume site, and it's been interesting to see the results.

It's been great for finding out how recruiters use google to search for resumes, and to find out where open positions are in my area of expertise.

</comment><comment><USER13> In the past I've just sent a link to my resume and looked at my access logs. This has worked for me, but the printed results are often cringe worthy.

</comment><comment><USER14> Can't you trigger an "onload" type event in a PDF or simply attempt to load a hidden image into your page from a tracking URL.

<comment><USER4> it will ask the user for confirmation before attempting to reach out to the web

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is also a fairly common way to track people down. I used something similar, with an HTML email, to find an SEO shuyster who had defrauded a friend. It helped prove he was in the country (despite his claims). It gave us a good reason to try and setup a sting where instead of meeting a potential customer, he was greeted by a process server.

Also a good reason why to never read HTML emails.

<comment><USER16> I remember the time when bugged or, worse, malware-carrying emails were impossible. I even wrote an article on e-mail viruses circa 96.

Thanks, Microsoft, for making this too possible (by bundling HTML and scriptable Word processing into mail viewers)...</comment></comment>