LearnGitBranching now has lessons on git fetch, push, and pull - <AUTHOR> http://pcottle.github.io/learnGitBranching/?remoteDemo&defaultTab=remote

<comment><USER2> I really like the approach and the visuals. I almost never think of Git visually and this opens a whole new dimension for me. I'm looking forward to discover techniques and workflows outside of my everyday patterns. Thank you for sharing this with the world.

However, the interface is often confusing. For example, I'm not sure what to do with the avalanche of dialogs at the beginning. So I just navigated to the earliest '1' button and pressed that. Also, the "goal" graph at the beginning of each exercise disappears, and I don't know how to recall it. Finally, the goal objectives can't be displayed at the same time that the console is active, and "help level" restarts the entire level description. It would be nice if both the goal graph and the list of objectives were both visible during the exercise. (If this is indeed possible, I obviously missed it.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback asciimo -- there are definitely some tough UX challenges with this type of app. Some comments:

0) you should only get one dialog with the link above, and that's the dialog that shows the new levels 1) the avalanche of dialogs at the beginning are the "lesson" for each level. They basically introduce the concept and describe how to solve the level -- sorry maybe it's not clear that every lesson comprises of "slides + solve" 2) the goal graph only disappears if you click it -- you can bring it back with "show goal" (which is a command in your history when the level starts) 3) you can view just the objective again with "objective" 4) when the goal graph comes up, you can still type into the console. it just might be a hard to see the results of your commands (this is the biggest issue and I haven't found a way to resolve it... :-/

Anyways, let me know if you have ideas on how to make the app more usable / newcomer friendly. It's hard for me because I don't have a pair of fresh eyes...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I beat the main game and now you guys are adding more levels! Argh, I'm trying to get work done here!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Joe, took me a while since some of the remote commands get some obscure / complicated. And testing them means setting up random repros and pushing / pulling.

The two highlights for me are that "git fetch origin :foo" actually just makes a new branch named foo, and "git push origin :bar" deletes the branch bar on origin. It basically means "push nothing to bar" and "fetch nothing to foo".

Why git has that as a valid command... who knows

(btw I love gitignore! I recommend it all the time, especially for big web frameworks like django)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> i feel like my flow is always different than these types of tutorials:

      git checkout master
      git pull
      git checkout -b my-working-branch
      git add <files>
      git commit -m "some description"
      git add <files>
      git commit -m "review comments or other changes"
      git checkout master
      git checkout -b my-working-branch-squashed
      git merge --squash my-working-branch
      git commit
      git checkout master
      git pull
      git cherry-pick <hash from squashed commit>
      git push

this way i can push a single commit that may have been comprised of multiple commits on my working branch. i haven't come across a tutorial that does it this way. am i doing it wrong. this flow works well for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> No this is totally fine. I'd say the slightly more rare thing about this workflow is the fact that you squash multiple commits for a feature together. At least at larger companies it's nice to maintain a series of commits that lead to a feature (rather than getting a giant commit that plops the feature down with no sense of how it slowly developed).

I added support for merge --no-ff since a fair number of people like that workflow: [http://pcottle.github.io/learnGitBranching/?NODEMO&command=g...](http://pcottle.github.io/learnGitBranching/?NODEMO&command=git%20commit;%20git%20checkout%20-b%20foo%20C1;%20git%20commit;%20git%20merge%20master;%20go%20master;%20git%20merge%20foo%20 --no-ff)

but maybe --squash should be next

<comment><USER5> In that case, I just pop into the reflog and undo the squash.

<comment><AUTHOR> True, although ideally reflog is just a backup in case you make a mistake (and not an integrated part of your workflow).

What I've found surprising is just how different workflows can be from project to project (or company to company). Some developers are die-hard about preserving history at the expense of the graph, whereas others are straight- line purists (and don't even accept merge commits on the remote).

I actually have some limited support for "git checkout -" to go back, but I should get around to making a legit reflog...

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


Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995) - <AUTHOR> http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirvana-185306 <comment><USER2> Priceless! Cliff would not doubt have a good laugh at what he got wrong.

I was involved in a discussion this weekend that had a similar tone around people becoming _too_ future aware. Specifically when you know a lot about the underlying technology (as Cliff does (and did) about networking) you tend to extrapolate what you know, but when you don't know anything about the underlying technology you tend to extrapolate your imagination.

People can imagine wondrous things. And when they tell an engineer to go build it, that engineer starts working backward from what would have to be true in order to have that amazing capability, and starts working on the pre-cursors.

Of all the things he got wrong I think there is a lot of resonance in the online education thing. I've done a few Coursera and MIT-X courses and while it could be my previous experience clouding my expectation, I personally learn better when the teacher is in the room and I can ask questions as they arise. Too often I start trying to answer a question to get clarity and get distracted into a whole new train of thought. That makes the learning process much slower and less satisfying for me.

<comment><USER3> Agree on education - it's not just the teacher, it's also about being part of an actual class - the social dimension if you will - you learn as much from your classmates as you do from your teachers and indeed as many opportunities arise through the network you develop there too. Another benefit is that being part of a herd forces you to keep moving briskly through the material without getting to stuck on any one thing. There is a lot to be said too for the social support that is available when you have direct access to teachers and classmates. Doing any challenging course of learning is sufficiently taxing in this regard. I do see many online and distance learning approaches trying to tackle some of these confounding "emotional" aspects to education but I don't think they're quite there yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > _Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we > 'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure._

Link to "Get Newsweek on your iPad" directly below the article. I love it.

</comment><comment><USER5> Alas, this Cliff Stoll's essay doesn't hold up well.

If you haven't read Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg, you really should. It recounts online life in the 1980's and Stoll's own real involvement in uncovering an online espionage ring.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg)

</comment><comment><USER6> I feel like hitting a paywall on an article that shows the irrelevancy of the old media is somehow very fitting.

<comment><USER7> PDF mirror: [http://blogs.sfu.ca/departments/continuingstudies/wiredrepor...](http://blogs.sfu.ca/departments/continuingstudies/wiredreporter/wp- content/uploads/2012/12/Clifford-Stoll-Why-Web-Wont-Be-Nirvana-Newsweek-and- The-Daily-Beast.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Semi-OT: Kind of an odd metaphor to use, the year after the band Nirvana "ended" with the death of the lead. The web won't end with a shock to its head?

I see this problem a lot: even if you know what a metaphor refers to, it can be unclear how its use is intended:

arms-length transaction: so wait, _within_ arms length, or beyond arms length? (The term is used for the latter.)

sanguine: sang ... blood? So you feel bloody about this? What does that have to do with optimism? (I know, the four humors thing, but it's still weird.)

<comment><USER9> > arms-length transaction: so wait, within arms length, or beyond arms length? > (The term is used for the latter.)

Actually, its usually used to mean _at_ arms-length, _neither_ closer _nor_ farther: maintaining a distance that is close enough for the contact necessary to perform the transaction, but no closer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I welcome these kind of bold predictions, and unfortunately we see this less and less nowadays. Perhaps it's because it's easier to get called out than before with all the claims you make online nowadays being pretty much be set in stone.

Anyways, I would enjoy reading bold predictions about the future that's falsifiable rather than wishy-washy useless articles titled "7 reasons why Uber is winning." or "Why less users are joining Twitter."

</comment><comment><USER11> Amazing how much everything has changed in 20 years as to make nearly every single sentence of this article wrong to a hilarious extent.

Thank you for sharing this. It didn't tickle my intellectual curiosity, but it's a nice reminder of how bad humans can be at predicting even short-term changes. :)

<comment><USER12> He was right about at least once major thing: tele-presence is largely a failure. It's 2015 and most of the Internet industry is concentrated within the Bay Area because people need to be near one another to interact richly. This is a direct demonstration of the failure of the Internet to permit truly rich long range human communication; the very people who build it can't use it to escape their local rent bubble despite strong economic incentive to do so.

<comment><USER13> I don't think it's a failure, it's just not ubiquitous. We have huge tele- presense units in most of our offices to facilitate meetings that used to require plane rides and hotels.

<comment><USER12> They also had hypertext in 1969:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv- zdhzMY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY)

It's a failure in the sense that it's not generally available or in general use. I've also used tele-presence rooms before and they're not that great. Better than Skype or Google Hangouts, but not by much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> vezzy-fnord Well, Stoll was correct about the governmental aspect at least. Of course, his experiences pursuing Markus Hess made that quite evident, I'd assume.

</comment><comment><USER14> I wonder what the equivalent of this is today. What are people saying will NEVER happen? Maybe self-driving cars?

<comment><USER8> Passing the Turing Test. Understanding consciousness.[1] Communicating human values to a computer so that it doesn't produce absurd judgments. VR simulations indistinguishable from reality.

[1] Edit: people have different standards for this, of course, but something like, "where have a global, working model of a large domain in which predictions of consciousness aren't a special case, and in which people who study it feel like it makes sense and is less mysterious".

<comment><USER15> Computers that can make ethical, legal, and moral decisions. Or ones that can do all three better than humans can.

<comment><USER16> Sure computers can make such decisions, be it with /dev/random or some sophisticated classifier. But we'd want justifications, and it's difficult to define what that entails. Moreover, what does it mean for a computer to be "better" at this than humans? The whole problem is ill defined.

<comment><USER15> Yes, it is ill defined _right now_. Are you willing to bet that it _can 't_ be properly defined? Or even that is currently _is_ properly defined, and you just haven't been exposed to the definition?

<comment><USER16> I am saying it's not a technological problem, it's a social problem.

<comment><USER15> You're certainly not saying anything _useful_.

I have personally made some headway on this problem, and I wouldn't be saying it was possible if I hadn't. Your inability to find a workable framework is more evidence to me of your lack of imagination than it is that the problem is fundamentally unsolvable. There's a finite number of consistent models to explore, and one of them will give us what we want.

It doesn't matter if you want to call that a technological problem or a social problem; the world isn't actually divided in those terms. So saying "social problems" strikes me as starting with a shitty model of what we are capable of. It's also just corporate-talk and there's no reason to expect it to be valid in this domain. The best that distinction has ever done is prime somebody to employ an actual problem solving technique.

<comment><USER16> Are we talking about the same thing? You have made a definition of morality that philosophers and other people will all agree on? Where do you get this "finite number of consistent models" from?

<comment><USER15> >You have made a definition of morality that philosophers and other people will all agree on?

No, I have one that works. I really don't care what any philosophers have to say about it. And if you think everyone has to agree to something before it can be useful, then I can see why you'd think this is a social problem.

>Where do you get this "finite number of consistent models" from?

There's a finite number of people, a finite number of configurations their brains have been in, and thus a finite number of models provided by those configurations.

<comment><USER16> Again, I could hand-wavingly claim that /dev/random "works". What does "one that works" mean? You may not care for philosophers, but making claims about morality is definitely within their territory, plus it's a philosophical claim in itself to state that philosophy is not relevant.

The argument about finite brain configurations is not compelling. There's no reason why only brain states that have occurred would be relevant. Morality deals with hypotheticals and counterfactuals: what would be the moral judgment in this or that situation. I think it would be uncontroversial to claim that there are an infinity of such hypothetical situations, and each model of morality can deal with them differently, ergo you get an infinity of possible models.

<comment><USER15> I wouldn't claim that philosophy is not relevant, I would claim that our current batch of philosophers are. _I 'm_ a philosopher in as much a sense as it matters to this question, and I don't need others' approval to reach a conclusion. I'm not trying to run a popularity contest, after all.

>What does "one that works" mean?

It means it is both consistent with reality and useful.

>There's no reason why only brain states that have occurred would be relevant.

The reason those ones are relevant is because those are the only ones available for analysis. Those are the brains that determine what "human" currently means. We could evolve into toads in 100B years, but you'd hardly aspire to create a toad brain and call it a good human brain.

>I think it would be uncontroversial to claim that there are an infinity of such hypothetical situations, and each model of morality can deal with them differently, ergo you get an infinity of possible models.

You are confusing the multitude of possible moralities with the multitude of counterfactuals they model. More importantly, you or forgetting that we are only concerned with _relevant_ moralities and _relevant_ counterfactuals, and that we have to make our developments _incrementally_ , and in finite time, which massively constrains the possibilities.

There are an infinite number of ways to skin a cat, but that doesn't mean we can't have a useful notion of the "right way" to do it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Trollable Self-Driving Car - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2016/03/google_self_driving_cars_lack_a_human_s_intuition_for_what_other_drivers.html <comment><USER2> I feel like the author of this article is placing altogether too much trust in human intuition and being very selective with their examples of which human qualities are beneficial to safety of the roads.

A self driving car will never distract itself. It can't get drunk. It won't be able to lose it's consciousness or mental acuity as it ages. It has access to huge amounts of real time information from sensors more accurate than any humans intuition ever could be and can act on that data in an instant.

If the only hurdles we have to this becoming a reality are edge cases like the ones listed in this article, then I am very optimistic for the future of self driving cars.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the whole point of the article is that the strengths and weaknesses of human and AI drivers are _different_ , and that the differences are exploitable by adversaries, and may in fact be so easily exploitable that "adversaries" could include bored teenagers.

<comment><USER3> Bored teenagers can (and sometimes do) "exploit" real drivers. I've seen kids throwing rocks, and bricks off of overpasses, walking on the sidewalk lunge as if they are about to jump into the road as a joke, etc... I've also seen people slam on their brakes and/or swerve into other lanes to avoid empty plastic shopping bags blowing around, etc...

<comment><USER4> The invisible rope prank comes to mind.[0] I think there are a whole class of pranks to which AI will not be susceptible to. I assume the LIDAR can or will be able to clearly detect no such obstruction in the roadway (perhaps even if it does exist). However there are certainly many other hacks that will consistently fool AI, at least for a while.

[0]: [https://youtu.be/G_pAcIjqcuY](https://youtu.be/G_pAcIjqcuY)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The linked article [1] is actually far more worrying than Slate's concerns about bored 12-year-olds. If a $60 setup can do a rather precise spoof of lidar readings, we are open to scenarios such as:

\- Causing the car to collide with other vehicles. E.g. getting into a fender bender to avoid the illusion of an impending frontal collision.

\- Causing the car to stop where it shouldn't. E.g. imagine armed robbers or kidnappers waiting on a deserted stretch of the road with a lidar spoofing device.

\- Causing the car to run people over. E.g. spoofing away a pedestrian on a crosswalk.

What's even worse is that all of these attacks would be difficult if not impossible to detect or track down. With zero risk you can acquire valid insurance claims, put victims in positions where they're easily robbed or kidnapped, or cause your enemies to be run over.

[1] [http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that- think/transportation/self...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that- think/transportation/self-driving/researcher-hacks-selfdriving-car-sensors)

<comment><USER6> Couldn't you just shoot human drivers from a distance with a sniper rifle? I don't see why everyone is scared of new technologies being exploitable. Our civilization is built in the basis that most people are not assholes most of the time.

<comment><USER7> Sniper rifles are not easy to get and use.

<comment><USER8> Laser pointers are easy to get and point at helicopters and airplanes.

The FBI successfully arrests and prosecutes those who do. Why would this be any different?

[https://www.fbi.gov/newyork/press- releases/2014/westchester-...](https://www.fbi.gov/newyork/press- releases/2014/westchester-man-charged-with-aiming-high-powered-laser-pointer- at-police-helicopter-deferred-prosecution-agreement-reached)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't know, a lot of these things seem to have analogs to human drivers.

I can cause emergency braking on the road outside my house by behaving like I'm about to run into the street while never leaving the sidewalk.

I could get on an overpass and shine a bright spotlight in drivers' eyes at night.

I get what the author is saying, and there will be a continual need to improve self driving cars. Sure there may be different ways to troll them, but I don't think he makes a strong case that they will be particularly more troll-able than humans.

<comment><USER10> Really, the only question that differs usefully is whether self-driving cars are deterministic enough to be _reliably_ trollable.

Which if they take off, we'll probably find "Yes, until the machine-learning algorithm at the top aggregates the metrics from multiple cars on the road, devises a new rule, and pushes that rule via auto-update."

<comment><USER9> It's more than just deterministic, but deterministic and stupid enough to make do some really undesired behavior. Using the same example as before, if I run a full speed toward the street, almost every car is going to screech to a halt. Doing this a rush hour, would be incredibly disruptive and probably cause a small traffic jam if no one made me stop.

The question with self driving cars will be, for example, can a group of people "herd" one into a garage to steal it, or perhaps get it to do something crazy like drive into a lake. My guess is at some point the car will just sit there, just like you would if a huge group of kids were trying to do this to you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Imagine New York City -- where unless a car _appears as if it is ready and willing to kill pedestrians_ people will jaywalk directly in front of it.

Now imagine New York City clogged up with self driving cars -- frozen at each intersection in fear of hitting someone. It'd be a disaster.

Humans will quickly understand that these cars are easily bullied, and many will take advantage of that. Why wait for your turn when you can just cut off a driverless car?

<comment><USER12> I'd like to work on Artificial Road Rage. There are some great opportunities, especially for networked vehicles. You cut off one Taxy™? Now there are 50,000 tons of mobile neural net wandering the city looking for ways to make your life miserable.

<comment><USER4> This has been a free market dream of mine. There's no need for a state to enforce minor traffic violations (and who knows what else) when "the network" is willing to do the enforcement. However this poses a huge problem when the rules are dictated by a central coercive entity rather than by consensus.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think the trollable driver is significantly more difficult/dangerous. Humans have moods and anger issues and vengeful reactions to things.

As has been said repeatedly, accidents like running into a bus are innocent and could've happened to anyone. While the car was technically at fault, this likely wouldn't have happened had the bus driver been driving more defensively or even if the bus driver had been an AI too... lol

<comment><USER14> This is sort of the thing though - people can experiment and test the limits of a driverless system with little to no consequences. Once they know those limits, they can abuse them, knowing when it's always safe to cut off a driverless car for example. I can picturing all the videos on youtube now about how to fuck with these things.

With human drivers, that unpredictability factor adds to a level of fear which often prevents this sort of behavior.

I think there's also a primed number of people who would do this out of open hostility to self-driving cars, "took our jobs" types, etc and a lot of people who would do it just for fun or to make their own trips quicker.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Still, people have an intuitive fluency with this kind of social > negotiation.

Apparently, the author has never arrived at a four way stop at the same time as another car.

<comment><USER16> Driving 101. In the US, the car to the right has the right of way.

<comment><USER17> <Driving 101. In the US, the car to the right has the right of way.>

Law 101: driving laws are state-specific.

Law 101(a): Maybe I'm not understanding what you are trying to say here, but for CA and taken literally, it's incorrect. See, for example, CVC $21753.

[http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.xh...](http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.xhtml?lawCode=VEH&division=11.&title=&part=&chapter=3.&article=3).

<comment><USER16> I think you've misunderstood me. I was responding specifically to the case pointed out by the OP in which 2 cars get to a stop sign at the same time. Here's the relevant CA code, and I haven't heard of a state that does it differently:

21800\. (a) The driver of a vehicle approaching an intersection shall yield the right-of-way to any vehicle which has entered the intersection from a different highway. (b) (1) When two vehicles enter an intersection from different highways at the same time, the driver of the vehicle on the left shall yield the right-of-way to the vehicle on his or her immediate right, except that the driver of any vehicle on a terminating highway shall yield the right-of-way to any vehicle on the intersecting continuing highway.

[http://law.onecle.com/california/vehicle/21800.html](http://law.onecle.com/california/vehicle/21800.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> We should pick an easier problem to solve for now. Let's have a few dedicated roads where we assist the technology either electronically or physically. We could automate major transport truck freight routes, for example.

[http://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/freight/freight_analysis/freight_sto...](http://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/freight/freight_analysis/freight_story/major.htm)

This system would pay for itself and provide immediate benefits. Convoys of trucks traveling at 75 mph, drafting to save fuel.

<comment><USER10> Arguably, that's already being worked on---semi-automatic cruise control that factors in signals about local traffic flow and the curve of the road has already been deployed in some luxury vehicles. Applying it to freight hauling probably has more to do with the entrenched cheap solutions we have now than with missing technology.

("Why don't we have both?" as the meme says)

<comment><USER18> So, in another decade or two we'll see convoys of 10 or 30 trucks cruising down the road sat 75mph, driving close enough to aerodynamically draft behind the other vehicles?

No, what you are saying isn't the same thing. People aren't going to be comfortable driving next to this. The risk on a separate "driverless" road is much less. And like I mentioned already, other redundant assistance can be added.

<comment><USER19> Building useful parallel infrastructure is expensive though and would probably be to slow. If current Autobahn construction projects here in Germany are any indication, building a parallel long-distance network would take longer and cost more money than waiting for automation to be reliable enough to share the roads. Even if we assume that there is space for that, which in many important places there is not.

Maybe some changes to make roads more robot-friendly (e.g. by adding robot- only exits, navigation infrastructure, ...).

I think the first step in that direction we are going to see on public roads are autopilots for trucks. Follow a human-driven truck, or maybe drive simple long-distance highway routes automatically. At the end, have a human take over again and do the city stuff. Either have the human on board but resting (which means they could at least take over with a few minutes delay if necessary), or have driver hop-on/off parking places at highway interchanges.

<comment><USER18> No one said that you have to build an entire parallel infrastructure. You simply find a section with a lot of traffic and duplicate that. It could be a long-haul section or it could connect a port to a train, for example. 68% of all freight is carried by trucks. The United States is big. Find somewhere where is makes financial sense.

[http://selectusa.commerce.gov/industry- snapshots/logistics-a...](http://selectusa.commerce.gov/industry- snapshots/logistics-and-transportation-industry-united-states.html)

The automation technology can be further developed in a "real system". At some point it'll be ready for public roads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> People forget that humans used to own the road. Sure there were horses and carts, but the horses were self driving and went around you if they weren't going too fast. Children used to play in the street, or at least the less busy back streets. It has really only been since the 1920s or so that humans got shoved over onto the sidewalks, or left out of the road planning entirely. A return to road traffic that deferred to pedestrians would simply put us back where everyone was in the zeroth through nineteenth centuries.

</comment><comment><USER4> There are some places in the world that I'd hate to have a self-driving car, e.g. South Africa, Brazil, or West Oakland. In such areas, I'd assume it would be trivially easy to stop the car and rob the presumably well-to-do occupants.

How would a self-driving car react to situations like these? [https://youtu.be/2VAlyDXl3LY](https://youtu.be/2VAlyDXl3LY) [https://youtu.be/9RzeRlhhprw](https://youtu.be/9RzeRlhhprw)

These are situations that you'd presumably want to run through the roadblock. Whereas in others, e.g. an undercover cop with a gun to your head, that you'd want to stop for.

<comment><USER21> > presumably well-to-do occupants.

Eventually, it should be cheaper to get a ride in one of these than a taxi.

<comment><USER4> Absolutely. I was just picturing something more like a Tesla Model S (which AFAIK is the closest thing to a self-driving car now available for purchase) but I'm aware of the push by Tesla, Uber, and others to make affordable AI transport practical.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> " if you put a foot out into the road you might trigger a nemergency stop" .. you might trigger a similar painckey reaction in a human, that might include but wont be limited to , pressing brake, pressing throttle, steering suddenly... just let them develop it, and if you dont like it, dont use it. ^^ personally im glad people are working on this, especially for older people who get their licencces revoked due to bad eye sight etc., it can mean the world to them to be able to 'drive' somewhere.....

</comment><comment><USER10> It's a possibly interesting question with a bad example case. In the specific crash cited, the human driver stated that they reached the same conclusion the car did. So to the extent that the car's algorithm was "gameable" here, a human was gamed the same way.

(Besides, since the "win" here was "Get the car to crash into your vehicle," I wouldn't call it "winning" precisely ;) ).

</comment><comment><USER23> One thing I like about the self driving cards is that you can count on them to let you merge and not be aggressive jerks like some human drivers. I imagine this will cause lots of people to just cut them off though..

</comment><comment><USER24> I really think that we often overestimate human intelligence. We may be able to infer what another person is going to do next but I don't think there is any magic going on.

PS: Try trolling humans, it works.</comment>


Building Container Images Securely on Kubernetes - <AUTHOR> https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/building-container-images-securely-on-kubernetes/ <comment><USER2> We have a separate build cluster due to concerns about security and stability -- neither mounting the docker socket into a container nor docker-in-docker are comfortable solutions for our cluster managers. Having the ability to run container builds safely will be a huge benefit for my company.

We've looked into something like Bazel for its container builder, but that's a significant change that has to be made in every single project, most of which have perfectly fine build systems now.

And with all the FaaS systems which are continually building containers to host functions, this will be a godsend.

</comment><comment><USER3> Huge topic at the moment for many really big applications, I believe. If you work in bigger setup you can't really avoid building new containers on the fly at some point or the whole container concept stops making sense.

</comment><comment><USER4> ... Or build the directory tree you want manually (Shell script, Makefile, ansible, whatever) and use skopeo to push it to a registry.</comment>


HTTP Status Code Poster - <AUTHOR> https://www.steveschoger.com/status-code-poster/ <comment><USER2> Thanks for this. Just checked it. It seems useful. I didn't even know there were more than 5 HTTP status codes.

btw You are the person who tweets about user interface design, aren't you? I've learned so much from your tweets. Thanks! :)

</comment><comment> tony-allan Well done for including 418!</comment>


Flaw found in online encryption method - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/15/technology/researchers-find-flaw-in-an-online-encryption-method.html?_r=2&hp=&pagewanted=all

<comment><USER2> This is not about some new vulnerability. It is a survey of collected public keys. The main security-relevant conclusion is that some key generators are not using enough entropy.

Dr. Lenstra is a co-author of the paper (so it shouldn't be dismissed on the weakness of the reporting). The NY Times and Markoff should both be ashamed for publishing such a misleading article, particularly the title.

<comment><USER3> _This is not about some new vulnerability._

A more accurate statement is: the thesis that "when hundreds and thousands of RSA keys are generated, the entropy of _each_ key (given the remaining keys) is still large" is shown (in this paper) to be empirically false because people in practice use weak pseudorandom generators.

This is important because when working with the security of RSA, we assume that N=pq for random looking primes p and q. In isolation this is true, but when there are tons of other keys out there, p and q no longer are random.

I also fail to understand why you mention Lenstra being a co-author of the paper.

<comment><USER4> I take him to mean, "it is understandable that the NY Times would write up a story on RSA vulnerabilities when one of the authors is Arjen Lenstra, because Arjen Lenstra is a giant in the field".

I agree with you (and not the parent) about the importance of the study.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This seems similar to the length-extension property of Merkle Damgaard hashes like MD5 and SHA-2, in that it is something bad that happens in the real world with RSA that isn't a flaw in RSA _per se_ , but is an attack that would ideally be foreclosed on by the algorithm.

In other words, all things being equal, you'd want to select the algorithm where the fewest number of implementation flaws could prove devastating in the future. The ability to conduct large-sample GCD collision surveys _and_ the fact that common CSPRNGs mean that survey generates results is an argument against using RSA.

I don't see anything specific to SSL or X.509 here; this seems like an issue with every PKI. If you publish public keys to the whole world, people can survey them.

</comment><comment><USER5> So out of 6.4M RSA keys they found 12K where for the modulus n = pq, p or q (or both) were used for creating modulus for other key.

So when I give them my public key, they can just scan their database and with chance 0.2% find a key with a modulo that is divisible by mine p or q? Is that how it works?

edit: The K9 business looks very dodgy. When analysing the keys they found "9 primes each of whose 36 pairwise products appears as n". So next time you're factoring an RSA key your best bet is to start with primes from this K9...

</comment><comment><USER6> As far as I can tell, the researchers are describing features of particular Key Pairs that have been generated by Users of the RSA algorithm. The 'garbage-in, garbage-out' rule applies. If your RNG sucks, you're going to get weak keys out of it.

Is it harder to generate weak Diffie Hellman parameters using a bad RNG?

Update: Yes, apparently. From the paper: "Cryptosystems such as RSA that require, during key-setup, multiple secrets are more affected by the apparent difficulty to generate proper random values than systems such as Diffie- Hellman (cf. [8]), ElGamal, and (EC)DSA that require a single secret."

That's (mercifully) pretty intuitive.

</comment><comment><USER7> As I posted to the other thread:

Somewhat disappointing, but not surprising that they did not describe their actual calculation technique for finding the connected primes. It strikes me that there isn't a good excuse for having bad random numbers with the computation power we now have. A simple bitwise addition of various sources of supposedly random numbers is strictly stronger than any subset of its components. So we can combine lots of questionable strong sources and get a very strong source.

Generating the primes locally with insufficient independence seems more understandable than that the same primes are used by independent parties. That hints at a more severe problem with random number generation. Regardless, assuming this is confirmed, it is a significant problem that needs to be hunted down.

<comment><USER8> They didn't describe the technique, but the fact that the paper has the keyword "Euclidean algorithm" makes it pretty obvious--they just gathered a list of public keys, took the gcd of all the pairs, and whenever they found a gcd not equal to one, they'd cracked both keys out of that particular pair. See my earlier comment.

<comment><USER7> I took the 'the straightforward approach would require about ten core-years and would not scale well' to mean they had a more efficient method.

<comment><USER4> They do, but does it matter? Ten core-years is not a forbidding threshold.

<comment><USER7> Not really - it does make a difference between amateur attackers and professional, but the potential value is high enough that there will probably be plenty of well funded attackers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Oh these researchers don't understand PR (public relations). Here's an amusing way they could get one hundred fold the publicity that they're getting now without (technically) lying.

They cracked 12720 RSA keys. They could reveal the secret modulus in half the cases (6360 RSA keys) without giving away any indication of how they're doing it.

What they could have done is set up a website titled _"RSA Cracker"_ which reveals one key every 3 minutes over a 2 week period.

At the end of 2 weeks, they could shut down the website without explanation.

Can you imagine the media frenzy that would ensue?

</comment><comment><USER10> Amateur question, but is it possible that the weak numbers are ones that pass some primality test which can give false-positives? Like Miller–Rabin I believe is only a probabilistic test - if it was run with not enough iterations, there would be some specific numbers which need more than N iterations (where N is an arbitrary threshold in some software). Would those number be in the "weak" subset found in the paper?

</comment><comment><USER11> interesting that they were able to identify that there was bug without being able to say what it was or how it happened.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, and I think they did not do a very good job explaining it in the paper. Perhaps they assume more familiarity than I have.

But as far as I can tell, the result is that, of public keys collected "in the wild" show more duplication than should be expected, so the random number generation schemes used are not "random" enough. Is that it, or is there more to the story?

(Edit) No, there's more. I don't quite understand (and don't think they really explain), but somehow they use the fact that there's lots of keys to find ones with common factors, which allows you to factor both of them. This sounds basically like the Euclidean algorithm but I couldn't tell what method they're using to find them.

<comment><USER8> As far as I can tell, this is what they're doing: if two different keys have a factor in common (i.e. A=PQ, B=PR), then you can use Euclid's algorithm (which just requires repeated subtraction, and is thus really easy) to find P (=gcd(A,B)), and then just use division to find Q (=A/P) and R (=B/P) easily.

So what the researchers did, apparently, was to gather all the RSA public keys they could find (6 million or so) and then calculate the gcds of all pairs of keys. (Presumably they were slightly more clever than this, but it doesn't really matter--doing this is still vastly easier than factoring even a single public key). Whenever they found a gcd that wasn't equal to 1, they'd cracked (at least) 2 keys. And it turns out that roughly 0.2% of the keys could be cracked in this way (for a total of 12720 1024-bit moduli).

As far as I can tell, the problem isn't with RSA itself, but with whatever algorithms are used to pick two random primes to multiply and produce the key (or moduli, whatever)--they don't have high enough entropy and output duplicates ~0.2% of the time.

<comment><USER13> Is it possible/likely that many of these bad pairs are from this debian/openssl bug?

<http://taint.org/2008/05/13/153959a.html>

<comment><USER14> None of the newly found a ected moduli are blacklisted (cf. [24]). Based on this brief analysis, we conclude that the problem reported in the main body of this paper persists and that the 99.8% security level of 1024-bit RSA moduli is further reduced.

pp. 15 <http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/064.pdf>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Would it be valuable to set up a service that could check your public keys against a database of others checking for common factors? Or just better to fix the entropy problems and assume the problem doesn't exist anymore?

<comment><USER6> I think the original article alludes to this but doesn't say it explicitly:

If they built such a service to let people test their own public keys, the service would actually provide a much bigger service to attackers than it would to users.

Public keys are public, right? There are huge LDAP databases out there just brimming with certificates (i.e. signed public keys) just waiting to be harvested. And most of the people whose certificates are in these databases would not be paying attention to this news, but an attacker certainly would.

You probably see where this is going.

<comment><USER16> Couldn't the service allow you to check your private keys, rather than check a public key, without transmitting the actual key.

You know (pub,priv). They know either (pub,priv) or (pub).

Essentially, make use of your unique (probably!) ability to sign something with your private key.

There's the issue of traffic analysis which needs to be solved - they have to reveal to you whether the key is compromised, and there's only two possible answers, so they have to be careful not to reveal it to in the traffic metadata.

<comment><USER16> Better yet, they can just publish something encrypted with every compromised public key. Only people with the corresponding private keys can ascertain if they're compromised.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


It's Not About Assange, It's About Press Freedom - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/dialogue-and-discourse/its-not-about-assange-it-s-about-press-freedom-e46cbc26e117 <comment><USER3> Its not about press freedom, its about impunity from war crimes. The free press is being attacked by the military-industrial-pharmaceutical complex, because it has a lot to lose when people wake up from the agitprop funk and start investigating the crimes of their state, again.

Basically, whatever the circumstances regarding Assange - who is now essentially a dead agent who can no longer be trusted - the most important thing that must happen, is for there to be more leaks, with real evidence, so that the war crimes investigations can begin.

The US and its coalition partners have been getting away with murder. Press freedoms of the participating states have never been in worse shape - so now its time for the whistle-blowing to step up a notch.

<comment><USER4> Here is the thing about war crimes, they are mostly meaningless unless the military that committed them, agrees to be prosecuted for them.

None of the permanent UN security council ever will, and without their crimes are on the scale of genocide, nothing will be done.

I mean Russia, literally just took over Crimea, and nothing was done.

Do you estimate that some leaked documents, or videos will do anything?

Has a single war crimes case resulted from the manning dump?

At this point, these dumps are just political tools, masking as something more IMO.

<comment><USER3> I find this to be a highly irrational, disturbing and very, very dangerous line of thought.

Yes, revealing war crimes - regardless of whether they are prosecuted by legal entities with the responsibility to do so - is vital to the health of society.

It must be done in order to live in a just and fair way - covering it up leads to escalation, as we have seen time and time again in recent history.

Do you really think that 'waiting until its at genocide scale' is the appropriate action to take?

The people must not be lied to about the crimes committed in their name by their state - because they, ultimately, will pay the price.

Cheney and Bush may not be in irons in The Hague, but certainly a large portion of the Western world, having educated itself on the reality of our criminal wars, has a right to know what is being done in our names - <USER2> cultural justice does result from these secret crimes being revealed.

<comment><USER4> So I have to disagree about revealing war crimes being vital to the health of a society, historically people don't care, they may initially act like they care, but they take no action, our societies are built on destruction, exploitation, and suffering of others. Which is the logical reason you don't see public protest or change for any of these crimes.

The reason that war crimes aren't stopped isn't because people don't know, it's they don't care.

So some video may get 15 minutes of face, but it doesn't change anything is my point.

It's just annoying to see people keep acting like wiki leaks and it's figurehead are doing noble work and must be protected.

Perhaps my view point is jaded, but it's based on first hand seeing how regardless of the slaughter the first world is, and it does nothing without material motivation.

I

<comment><USER3> If it were really the case that people don't care, then D-Day wouldn't have been a thing.

People do care - but are led into apathy by those around them who choose to remain inactive. We are a social species, and this is _precisely_ why we must always work to uncover the crimes of those who would use the destruction of other nations to profit.

Please stop enabling criminal behaviour.

I urge you to take your opinion and re-assess it. Should we not report crime in our own neighbourhoods, because "people don't care"? If that is the case, you are enabling criminal behaviour.

<comment><USER4> You should probably study history a bit better, the US joined the war after the attack of pearl harbor, for months before that the American people wanted nothing to do with the war, commonly referring to it, as a European problem.

Dday happened in June of 1944, the concentration camps weren't discovered by the US until 1945.

So the idea that Dday was related to the US people knowing of the war crimes of the nazi isn't really accurate.

America knew of the Khmer RougeKhmer Rouge and did nothing as countless were slaughtered, the same with stains actions in Russia.

We are a social species, but part of that is localization we care about our selves more than strangers, and unless our government has a political motivation, we don't go to war over it.

I'm not enabling criminal behavior I'm just stating the reality of the world today.

As for the reporting crime in our. Neighborhood feel free to read many of the past accounts, or studies show that for the most part show that if reporting a crime that doesn't directly effect them, but will cause them a minor inconvenience, that people typically dont.

I encourage you to reevaluate your perspective after studying a bit of history and studying sociology.

I'm not advocating we sweep these crimes under the rug, but that we stop pretending that they are changing the world.

<comment><USER3> I don't share your fatalist view, nor do I think your 'realism' is anything more than a justification for continued bad behaviour.

The world doesn't change when someone says "that's how its always been". It hasn't always been the case that the US can get away with its war crimes - however I believe this argument would be better executed if either one of us had actual experience with being the loser in a war crime situation.

My experience with refugees from America's illegal wars has definitely prompted me to take a look at what I've been ignoring about my own culture. I have to wonder if you would be so flip about America's war crimes, if you'd had any experience with the results themselves. It would be a pity if that's the only way your apathy would be moved.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Investing in Pirates - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/africaCrisis/idUSGEE5AS0EV

<comment><USER3> "'I am waiting for my share after I contributed a rocket-propelled grenade for the operation,' she said, adding that she got the weapon from her ex-husband in alimony."

<comment><USER4> I can't imagine how you go about getting a divorce in a country with no gov't and thus no court. Do you draw a line in the sand and say everything on this side is mine?

<comment><USER5> Large parts of Somalia are governed by local Muslim groups. While divorce is not common in Islam and is generally condemned, it is possible in certain circumstances none the less. I imagine that the local religious leader can arrange a divorce, according to the Shari'ah.

<comment><USER6> The triple talaq is a mechanism for divorce which exists in some forms of Islam. It simply consists of the husband saying the phrase I divorce you (Arabic:talaq) to the wife, three times.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_talaq>

I definitely like the idea.

<comment><USER5> The "triple talaq" is not as simple as just saying "talaq, talaq, talaq". First, it is generally condemned. Second, there must be a month between each "talaq", so the whole procedure takes up at least two months. For more info, see <http://www.religioustolerance.org/mohd.htm>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What I don't understand about investing in criminal activities is what's stopping them from taking the money and running. It seems to me that once you've done one job, you'll have plenty of money to continue your activities. Is it that other pirates will come after you, or is there just an insane amount of overhead that I don't see?

</comment><comment><USER8> I say let anarchy in Somalia run it's course. Notarized contracts will need to be drawn. A system of jurisprudence will need to be set up to enforce them. Pretty soon they will arrive to a social contract with a state (or something resembling a state backed by the big fish in that pond).

<comment><USER5> Don't be so naive. A "social contract" can only exist if there's a large enough middle class, which is something Somalia (and East Africa in general) lacks. Unfortunately a more likely outcome will be the emergence of a few local warlords and a particularly bloody tribal war and a total humanitarian disaster.

Don't forget that things have changed since the creation of "social contracts" in modern Western nations; genocide is a lot cheaper and simpler to execute than it used to be. These days all you need is to put four men equipped with cheap Russian-made machine guns into a jeep and they will exterminate a dozen villages in the course of an afternoon without breaking a sweat.

<comment><USER8> I stand corrected. I failed to take into account the effectiveness and efficiency of modern weapons. They assign disproportionate power to the top of the thugocracy (Saddam Hussein being an extreme example). Such a thugocracy can propagate itself brutally, suppressing the trickling down of wealth and development.

The question that follows (and that I honestly don't know the answer to) is whether the invention of modern weapons was a historical tipping point that obliterated previous routes of national economic development. What if mechanized warfare had been invented before the rise of the West by a non- Western civilization and transferred (via trade) to the medieval European feudal lords. Would they have allowed the rise of the middle class in the West the way it did?

"The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do" -- Samuel Huntington. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, p. 51.

<comment><USER5> Hard to tell. If you ask me, I think that if the invention of modern warfare happened before the Thirty Year's War and the subsequent Peace of Westphalia (which created the modern West as we know it) then the Thirt Year's war would have been a lot bloodier and more violent, not unlike the current tribal wars in Africa but on the scale of the World Wars. Eventually someone would have won it but the West would have became a lot weaker than it is (due to the destruction and death toll), making the world a lot more multipolar.

This is, of course, worthless crystal ball history, but that's my two cents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Thus far, it seems like most of this piracy has affected commercial shipping and civilian vessels. It seems likely that eventually, somebody is going to hijack the wrong boat and the owners will turn out to be willing to retaliate with excessive force, at which point innocent bystanders - for example, anyone else living in Haradheere - will get dragged into the conflict and lose their lives as a result.

<comment><USER10> > somebody is going to hijack the wrong boat and the owners will turn out to > be willing to retaliate with excessive force

It's been known to happen: [http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/e/roman/texts/plutarch/l...](http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/e/roman/texts/plutarch/lives/caesar*.html#2)

<comment><USER11> I talked with a shipping guy a while ago - they are used to paying "fines" of 25K up just to pass through. He also said that they never arm the ships - <USER2> would just lead to escalation and he did not want his crews harmed.</comment></comment></comment>


What Would The End Of Football Look Like? - <AUTHOR> http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7559458/cte-concussion-crisis-economic-look-end-football <comment><USER2> I doubt football will end anytime soon, but it should.

Especially thinking about universities -- to me, college football is not much more than a tragic exploitation system. Kids are recruited from age 14 and get promised the moon by coaches/staff, spend 5 years getting banged up (concussions etc) for life, and most wind up scraping through with a useless degree if they graduate at all. A tiny percentage go pro and the rest are left out to dry with few career prospects having missed out on their education. Most pros don't make _that_ much during their career and don't have great quality of life after it's over (run out of money, lack of marketable skills, head damage).

The big media companies love it, and heads of universities like the "school spirit" and brand appeal (even though most schools lose money on football). But for the players involved, it's basically a scam. Even though they're getting a free education.

You might make similar arguments for other college sports (not sure how I feel about that having been part of one), but for football I think it's the most clear-cut.

<comment><USER3> I don't think it's as dismal as you make it look. My brother just accepted a football scholarship at a highly academically rated BCS school. I think there are 66 BCS schools and each one gives out about 20-24 scholarships each year. It's a huge opportunity to get a free education, play a sport he loves and make lifelong relationships with his teammates. A football locker room at the highest levels is about as exclusive a club as there is. I don't know how much tuition is or the other things the scholarship includes, but I wouldn't be surprised if it approaches $200k.

He can be a fool, get beat up and leave without a degree or he can take advantage of an opportunity many people only dream of. The coaches aren't telling him what classes to take. He can take whatever he wants. He can choose a useless program, a great program or anything in between. He can choose to meet the minimum requirements to stay on the team and keep his scholarship or he can choose to excel academically.

On the field, he can choose to hide a concussion or take some time off. He won't lose his scholarship over it. Most players feel pressure to play through injuries, and although it can come from peers and coaches, they often place most of it upon themselves. They are incredibly competitive and don't want to be sidelined for anything.

My point is all the choices are his to make. The same applies to other players. There are few victims in this who aren't victims of their own decisions. If a kid washes out of some dumbass cake walk program for kids who don't give a shit about school, sustains injuries in a sport he would play with or without a scholarship and has zero career prospects is that the fault of the system? I don't think so.

There are ways to twist it around to make it look like a scam, and it's true there are plenty of things wrong with college football, specifically the BCS. It's a feeder system for the NFL, a bunch of people make piles of money and the kids don't make anything. It may be all of those things, but it is also an opportunity for the lucky recipient of a football scholarship to change his life, either for good or bad.

<comment><USER4> Sorry to be a Debbie Downer but much of what you say is completely inaccurate, some of it factually, the rest logistically.

First, scholarships aren't guaranteed. They are only for 1 year and renewed at the team's discretion. A team can cut you if you get permanently injured. They typically don't because that would look bad to future recruits but if you can't continue with school they aren't going to keep you on scholarship. They can move you to a medical scholarship but that happens less often than you'd think.

Second, I don't think you realize the amount of time it takes to play a college sport. There's a reason a lot of athletes take something like General Studies, and it's not because they are all 'dumb jocks'. The college and university will be accommodating but the fact is that there's a lot of practice time (4+ hours a day) and travel. The football season is longer than most, even longer if the team is good (bowl games). Any hard science that has a lab or field work is probably out.

I just don't think you are realistically looking at what your brother is getting himself into and your expectations seem way off. He'd have to be one of those rare individuals to get a high-end degree and play a scholarship sport. Choosing to be a scholarship athlete is choosing to work on a sport instead of working on a degree of 'substance'.

<comment><USER3> Completely inaccurate? Are you speaking from experience or pretty much making this up based on what you think happens?

I read through the paperwork for the scholarship that was provided to my brother by the university so I understand how it works. He's spent the past year visiting schools and talking to various people about this. People have visited the house and his school to go over it all. I've been hearing all about it the whole time. This is exciting for the whole family. It's not like a letter showed up in the mail out of the blue one day saying he could go to school for free. I understand the year to year thing and how it works with injuries. In practice, it is uncommon to lose a scholarship unless you are a screwball.

I also realize that it takes time to play a college sport. Four or more hours of practice every day is nothing new. My brother has been doing it for the past four years at a school that demands a high academic level. He also has his own personal coaches that he works with. Half of the games he played in required travel-- quite a few of them three or four hours each way on a bus. This is all piled on top of hours of homework that always got done. Hell, his days are longer than mine and I have a full time job and a toddler. Granted, he never had to stay overnight anywhere, but playing football was still a huge time commitment. He made many sacrifices to do it.

My brother loves playing football and also places a high value on education and future career opportunities. I think it's every college football player's dream to play in the NFL, but he is realistic about the possibility and planning to make his money doing a regular job like everyone else.

There are plenty of kids that make this work. There are also many that don't. For some of them it's too difficult. Others didn't care much about school in the first place.

In the end, I'm just not buying the argument that the whole system is a scam designed to make a ton of money off the hard work of these kids that get nothing. Both sides benefit. One side gets the money. The other gets the opportunity of a lifetime. Besides, no one is forcing these kids to accept scholarships, and if they are playing at the kind of level to even be considered for one they know damn well how hard it is.

<comment><USER4> I'll give you the short answer. I did NOT play D1 football, I didn't play football at all. I did do IT work for a D1 university and talked with the athletic administration folks many times. I know a lot about the athletic scholarship process. But don't just take my word for it:

[http://www.ncaa.org/wps/wcm/connect/nli/nli/document+library...](http://www.ncaa.org/wps/wcm/connect/nli/nli/document+library/athletic+scholarship)

I'm sure your proud of your brother, I get that. And I'm sure he's a smart individual. But how many of us skated through high school? I played 3 sports in high school and graduated at the top of my class without even trying. College ain't high school.

Take the money out of the equation. Let's talk about time because that's all that matters. The coach will come by the house and tell you you can be pre-med and play football. Consider them as car salesmen. They need to sell you a product and will say just about everything to make that happen.

But one of two things will happen with a heavy class load AND a season of D1 football: either grades will suffer or the sport will. Do you think the coach is going to tell you to skip a couple practices to catch up? Nope, he's going to ask you to take some easier classes and you'll have to to keep your scholarship, otherwise you'll get replaced by someone who will.

Here's a great article about the athlete turnover even at a school like Stanford:

[http://paloalto.patch.com/articles/stanford-football- players...](http://paloalto.patch.com/articles/stanford-football-players- trading-game-time-for-good-grades)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting read. But the authors assume that most people would move from obsession with football to watching no sports at all. It seems more likely to me that people would simply replace football with some other sport.

I saw this firsthand in Seattle when the Sonics left for Oklahoma City. Several of my friends who were lifelong fans swore they would never watch NBA basketball again and became hardcore MLS (Major League Soccer) fans.

<comment><USER6> The authors cover this twice. Once when they briefly mention soccer, may perhaps, take more prominence among Americans, and much more thoroughly, when they posit that the collapse of football would most benefit basketball, as it would be the next substitute.

But regardless, their points about the potential resulting benefits outside of the sporting world still has merit in my eyes. For example, there are large universities that derive much of their funding and student enrollment based heavily on the marketability of their football programs. Schools like Ohio State, Oklahoma, Alabama, and LSU come to mind. Without the marketing strength of their football teams, perhaps the schools would be forced to put more effort into enhancing and promoting academic achievement.

<comment><USER2> The schools you named have it good -- the football revenues in some cases help fund academic programs.

But for most universities, the opposite is true. The football team runs a big deficit and is subsidized by the university (as are most sports, but football is by far the most expensive). Those smaller or less successful schools are the ones really hurting themselves by devoting so many resources to football.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The authors mentioned CTE but didn't spell it out, so I looked it up: Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_traumatic_encephalopath...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_traumatic_encephalopathy)

</comment><comment><USER8> The US would finally pay attention to soccer, like the rest of the world? That's practically the only other thing we can use the stadiums for, and since we've collectively invested billions of dollars in public funds to build the damn things it wouldn't make much sense to just demolish them.

Maybe without football, we'd be closer to finally decoupling youth sports from the education system.

<comment><USER9> _Maybe without football, we'd be closer to finally decoupling youth sports from the education system._

Going off track, but by _finally_ are you saying that's a positive thing?

I'm a nerd. I've always been a nerd. I had the absolute minimum mandatory participation in sports during school. That is one of my biggest _regrets_. Sports have incredible importance in so many ways.

<comment><USER10> I feel the same way except that I changed my ways in college.

How old are you, because you probably have time to make sports a part of your life.

My mother, never having run more than five kilometers at once, ran her first marathon at 66 -- <http://joshuaspodek.com/redefining_possibility> \-- and she talks about running more. Plenty of other sports are available to people of every age.

I'm proud to have inspired her. I'd love to inspire others!

<comment><USER11> Totally off topic, but what about team sports? I played teeball when I was six and flag football in the 5th grade, but other than that, I totally missed out on organized sports as a kid. (I played a lot of "unorganized" sports in the back yard though). I run, but that's an individual thing.

Where would an adult go to learn to play baseball, basketball or football? I know there are after-work adult leagues, but do they let people with no talent and experience play? What about coaching?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I live about 30 minutes from Clemson (the football town mentioned.) Football is huge in the south. I'm not used to it, and have, in fact, never been to a football game. Except maybe once, but that was for the girls.

It's quite crazy though how much these football towns rely on a sport. The rivalries, the competition, and the booze. I always said if you wanted to rob a house, a friday night would be ideal because literally 50% of the town is at a football game. I really think it's just something everyone can relate to. In these towns where textiles and industry are prominent and there isn't much innovation, looking forward to that friday night football game with the guys is something that gives peoples lives meaning. I'm not sure my point, but I figured I should but in and say that there are such things as these towns and football is very real in the south and without it I would be very interested to see what people cling to next.

Basketball is big-ish, but most schools either have one or the other. I'm a big fan of Kentucky basketball, but everyone knows their football team sucks. That's usually how it goes. So maybe it would go like the article said and basketball just gets huge and more rounded in all towns.

<comment><USER13> I was just about to say the same thing about Basketball here. I'm in KY and our local high school team always does well, and our college team, while never great, had a good season last year, as well, and has a few bright stars amongst its roster. March is crazy here. It's nothing but basketball, basketball, basketball, and my Facebook and Twitter feeds fill up with commentary every time there's a game. The local community gets behind it, even at the high school level. The school district closes school for the day if the team has an out-of-town game in the state tournament, so people can attend, etc. (As a parent, I don't agree with this action, but none the less, it is interesting from a social perspective).

I'm not a huge fan of the sport, but even I find it hard not to get sucked in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Concussions aren't going to cause the "end of football". A lot of people forget that football used to be a MUCH more dangerous sport. Take for example that in 1905 there were _18 football related deaths_ with 20 times fewer players than there are today. If it weren't for Teddy Roosevelt pushing for rule changes and the use of leather helmets then we probably wouldn't have football today.

Football is a dangerous sport, I'm not denying it. But the players know the risk when they start playing. The risk is why they make as much money as they do.

Source: <http://www.theodoreroosevelt.org/kidscorner/football.htm>

<comment><USER15> The risk isn't why they make so much money. It's the crowds. If tomorrow everyone started watching soccer in America instead of football, then the players would make a lot less money, despite the risk to bodily injury.

<comment><USER16> The crowds and risk might actually be linked, though, i.e., it's more fun to watch because it looks riskier. I think the reason sports are popular is because they provide an outlet for warlike instincts, and football provides an exceptionally good war simulation, short of paintball or airsoft.

<comment><USER17> Wars tends to be a tad more dynamic than gridiron. Out of the major ball sports it's by far the most dragged out: 5 seconds of mayhem, 60 seconds of faffing about. Repeat for 3 hours.

Soccer, god rot its socks, is probably a better model. Hours of furious sprinting and jogging, lots of posturing and almost nobody ever wins convincingly.

<comment><USER18> _Wars tends to be a tad more dynamic than gridiron. Out of the major ball sports it's by far the most dragged out: 5 seconds of mayhem, 60 seconds of faffing about._

I have never been to war, but I have friends who have, and your description of gridiron sounds just like their description of war. 2 month faffing around at base, 2 hours all out mayhem and intense fire fights, repeat for 12 month.

<comment><USER17> I was thinking more at the top level, rather than a private's "Hurry up and wait" perspective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The thing that American football provides that is absent in most other sports is the strategic match up on every down between offense and defense. That strategic part adds a whole other level to the game which adds huge depth to the analysis that fans can dig into. The game that the coaches are playing by selecting plays against each other is more involved than in any other sport. Any replacement sport that I know of would be missing this important element.

<comment><USER20> The thing that American football brings that is absent in other sports in immense flexibility and opportunity for advertising between every down.

<comment><USER21> Futbol has continuous scrolling advertising along the boards in the stadium and often advertising next to the score when broadcasting. And of course there is advertising on the player's jerseys and other apparel - something which is anathema to American football.

For NFL games, there are exactly three commercial breaks per quarter by broadcast contract - college is similar. After the contractual number of breaks, the broadcasters simply do not cut away.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> When reading the headline I thought for a second they were talking about the 'other' football...the one that 90% of the world are infatuated with. I imagine the end of that would occur roughly the same time as the extinction of the human race.

<comment><USER23> You mean that 'other' football where players kick a _ball_ with their _foot_ ?

<comment><USER24> Players kick footballs with their foot too. It's called a field goal.

<comment><USER23> I was thinking 'handegg' would be a more appropriate name.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Little known fact: Sweden has a bunch of American football (and cheerleading!) teams.

<http://www.amerikanskfotboll.com>

<http://www.cheerleadersofsweden.se/>

(That's right people: free money, blonde women, socialism, cheap Ikea furniture, cheerleaders, AND proper football. Paradise on Earth?)

If the sport can survive in a country where there is absolutely no tradition for it...

</comment><comment><USER26> Plenty of other contact team sports exist (Rugby, AFL etc) - how is American Football different? How does an American Football player get tackled differently to say a Rugby Union player?

<comment><USER27> Having played both, there are some key differences:

\- American Football allows blocking, whereas rugby does not. This means it's perfectly legal to blindside someone as hard as you can, often helmet to helmet.

\- Football allows tackling above the waist without wrapping your arms around the other player, whereas rugby does not. This means people can launch themselves at the other player as hard as they want without wrapping up, basically turning themselves into large projectiles. The goal, up until recently (since the league started cracking down), was to have a helmet-to- helmet collision in order to knock the other player out (most often happening to wide-receivers). Knocking out another player is a point of pride and a strategic advantage as well.

\- Football has armor, Rugby does not. This actually works against Football. It encourages harder hits and head-to-head collisions. Football helmets protect against skull fractures but not concussions. The brain moves independent of the skull in a high impact collision despite how shock absorbant the helmet may be. In rugby, players are a LOT less likely to crack each other's heads together because of the risk of fracture.

I played rugby for 7 years through high school and college, and Football 2 years in high school. I never received any concussions in Rugby (let alone any serious injury at all), but did receive them in my short experience playing football, and at the Junior Varsity level no less.

If I ever have a son, as much as I love the sport, he is banned from playing American football.

<comment><USER28> All great points.

For people that never played, it might be interesting to hear that at all levels, many programs institute reward systems for hard hits, amongst other accomplishments. It's mostly pride based, coming in the form of a sticker on the helmet, but it's part of the ethos of the game. When watching game film, coaches will replay hard sticks over and over to the great amusement of the whole team. Most embarrassing is being on the other end of one of those hits.

In pre-college football a certain class of players form their part of their identity around the ability to inflict and take hard hits, amongst their other duties. These also tend to be some of the most athletic kids. I'd assume just about any non-kicking NFL player has at some point in their life been one of those guys.

<comment><USER29> Hard hits are also glorified in rugby (or were where I played it), but you hard hit someone's legs with your shoulder.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7J-q6vCeus>

<comment><USER28> Oh I have no doubt it's endemic to almost all contact sports, I was just pointing out that programs across the country down to the ones that 12 year old kids start playing in, often will introduce formal reward systems for the behavior.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Wouldn't institutions just ask players to sign a waivers to indemnify them? Aren't there enough kids in the pipeline dreaming of stardom that will sign such a waiver without thinking twice?

<comment><USER31> Waivers still have to hold up in court. Just because they're waterproof doesn't mean they're legal. Any contract can be overthrown if it understates the risk or if there was gross negligence on the part of the coach.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Startup opportunity for accelerometers in helmets/pads/shoes and real-time data collection?

I imagine if you came up with the right visualizations, that fans would be interested, e.g., "omg, did you see how the LB lit up that receiver coming over the middle! 150 Gs of impact . . . "

And you know, since we are on HN, "Football Physics: The Anatomy of a Hit" [http://www.popularmechanics.com/outdoors/sports/physics/4212...](http://www.popularmechanics.com/outdoors/sports/physics/4212171)

<comment><USER33> There was also an interesting article in National Geographic that described collision analysis using accelerometers in football at the college level. [http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/02/big- idea/concussio...](http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/02/big- idea/concussions-text)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> An interesting article, but I can't understand why the author thinks the current football code would wither and die in quite the way he proposes when there are other codes with much better safety records and to which they could transition relatively easily; why would the asset holders voluntarily wind up rather than trying to maximise their returns?

* Rugby Union / Rugby League. USA already has a relatively decent national Rugby Union side - certainly not top drawer, but able to compete at World Cup level. The facilities could be relatively easily converted and while there are certainly game subtleties that are very different (a complete ban on forward passes, for example), it'd likely be an easier player transition than to soccer or basketball.

* International Rules Football. (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_rules_football>) An existing hybrid of Gaelic football (for which I'd be astonished if there weren't east coast teams...) and Aussie Rules Football. Again, American teams exist, the pitches would be relatively easily converted, the skills are based around ball carrying and throwing...

Universities make too much money from football to just kill it. Too many large franchises make enormous sums from it, too many towns have it as a significant percentage of GDP. No transition to a new code would ever be easy but, if the writing was on the wall, the financial incentive for (say) one of the large conferences to give 3 years notice of transition to a new code in preference seem enormous in comparison with simply shuttering.

(Now, speaking as a Brit sports fan, if North America could only switch from Baseball to T20 Cricket then.... ;-))

<comment><USER35> There are probably too many vested interests for that to happen from the top down. One issue the article raises is that the decline would be mostly from the bottom-up as insurance cost and perceived risk respectively diminish high school leagues, and participation. This decline would occur over a long enough timeline that, by the time such a drastic action could be contemplated, football would have transitioned from a cultural institution to an also-ran (as the current soccer and rugby leagues).

<comment><USER34> Probably, but....

Insurance and incidents of the sort outlined could push a turnaround in 2-3 years, quite easily IMHO. Insurance changes could make it extremely expensive in the space of a single year if they're on annual policies. If school boards are given the sudden option of running football at a substantial loss, pulling athletics programmes altogether and losing their value while mothballing their assets or trying to switch code, I'd bet on the latter.

Instinctively the elephant in the room is the different college conferences. Varied enough to go in different ways if push came to shove, big enough that they could impose a code change on their feeder systems. Plus, a big enough bottom-line contributor that if the numbers turned around fast enough I suspect administrators would try a roll of the dice rather than a mothballing.

(And I still want to see a greater uptake of cricket! :-))

<comment><USER8> The problem with cricket is, first, that it's absolutely beyond most Americans' comprehension, and second, that we already have an incomprehensible sport that involves throwing a ball and hitting it with a stick.

<comment><USER34> Oh, I know, I just think it's more fun than Baseball :-) ISTR that MLB had a lock-out a while back which ended up with Cricket filling some of the broadcast slots. Speaking as a cricket fan with any luck they can similarly shoot themselves in the foot in the future and T20, as a faster form of the game, can develop a foothold. One has to have dreams!

(Honestly, I've tried watching baseball and, well, incomprehensible covered it well. Trying to work out what was and wasn't a strike a) confused and b) bored me, what with the slowing effect on the game. Then, they keep doing hits which get easily stopped and they're out before even making first base! Gimme T20 every day.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I see basketball, baseball, and soccer gaining more traction before track and field ever becomes mainstream outside the Olympics.

</comment><comment><USER37> People would watch more Hockey!

I don't have much constructive to say about the issue, but this is a fun comparison I came across the other day: [http://proxy.espn.go.com/nhl/story/_/id/7550059/nhl-john- buc...](http://proxy.espn.go.com/nhl/story/_/id/7550059/nhl-john-buccigross- welcomes-back-nfl-fans-super-bowl)

<comment><USER24> I'm not so sure about that. I think they would watch more basketball and baseball first. It's part national pride, part familiarity. Basketball, baseball, and football are all "American" sports. Baseball and football evolved from cricket and soccer, and basketball was created in the US. There are professional soccer and hockey leagues in the US, but neither sport has really taken off. I'm not so sure that would change in the unlikely event that the NFL folds.

<comment><USER38> Professional soccer, true. But professional hockey is pretty big in a lot of northern cities. Not at the same level as football or baseball, but big enough. It's limited in cities where kids don't actually play the sport in any numbers though.

<comment><USER37> Definitely. I'm from the Northeast, hockey has become HUGE in every city from DC to Philly to NYC to Boston, as well as Pittsburgh. The Pens have been selling out every game for years, Flyers fans are rabid, Caps fans are new to the hockey scene, but still sell out games. Try getting a Wizards or Nationals game to ever sell out...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The auther should have also mentioned the fast rise of the waiver sport UFC, and the like.

</comment><comment><USER40> One of the main points from the author is that high school and college players will sue the school for injuries sustained in football, causing insurance agencies to not insure the school, causing the death of football.

This is not possible because if this started to happen schools would require you to sign a contract before being allowed to play. The contract will forbid you from suing the school for any injuries. This will then become standard practice.

Football is not going anywhere any time soon.

<comment><USER41> They already make you sign those contracts, yet schools carry insurance anyways. Those contracts make it harder to successfully sue, but they do not make it impossible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> It would be interesting to see how this affected the MLS and therefore world soccer as a whole. The best players in the world could move to the MLS rather than the european leagues, and America could start to dominate at a national level.

The world club championships would be more interesting, that's for sure.

</comment><comment><USER43> I think that football has too much value to the American military-industrial complex to go away without a similar sport replacing it. Highschool football is the real ROTC, where students learn to obey orders and sacrifice their bodies for a common goal. In addition to being huge moneymakers, NCAA and NFL are aspirational advertisement for highschool play.

</comment><comment><USER44> Well, for 99% of the world, the end of American Football would probably go unnoticed...

</comment><comment><USER21> It would look like rugby sevens.

<comment><USER45> I would be interested to see a version of American football in which the total player weight per side was limited to one short ton (907 kg).

<comment><USER46> That wouldn't necessarily be safer; smaller players tend to be faster, which means the total momentum of an average collision might not drop much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I don't think football is going away. It's by far the most popular sport in the USA and it's gaining fans all over the world.

All my friends in the UK are obsessed with the NFL.

Concussions are a major concern. This will lead to better helmets and more rules changes to protect player's heads. It will not mean the end of football.

</comment><comment><USER48> "In the first half of the 20th century, the three big sports were baseball, boxing, and horse racing, and today only one of those is still a marquee attraction."

Which one?

<comment><USER49> The one that sold 73 million tickets last year, at the major league level alone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Rugby doesn't seem to generate the same types of severe head injuries as football. Is that true? If so, why?

<comment><USER51> Rugby rules are orientated around 'safe tackle' (eg no above the waist).

The defensive side of American Football is very much brute force orientated especially for the larger players.

<comment><USER17> That said, the whipsaw effect of hitting the ground still causes concussions and traumatic blows. Neither code of rugby is gentle; Union is particularly brutal.</comment></comment></comment>


How to Read 100s of Millions of Records per Second from a Single Disk - <AUTHOR> https://clemenswinter.com/2018/08/13/how-read-100s-of-millions-of-records-per-second-from-a-single-disk/ <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17492234](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17492234)

</comment><comment><USER3> Hard-disks aren't slouches when it comes to sequential throughput, but building around disks has some serious non-future-proof consequences.

Building things for spinning disks is a cul-de-sac, which has no exit over onto the faster characteristics of SSDs.

A significant part of Hadoop is built around the idea that "random = bad, sequential = good" and this is still arguably true when it comes to writes.

However, building around sequential reads gives you the wrong idea when the hardware changes underneath you.

I see a tiny sign of that in this post, where it talks about the smarter data partitioning.

For example, when dealing something like a join, a spilling sequential write join like Grace hash-join works much better than a memory mapped hashtable for spinning disks - however a grace join will be crushed by a better random IOPS driven SSD.

Also, if the author is reading this - Zlib isn't a slouch either (just like a spinning disk), the trick is to use the right combination of Zlib parameters. Compression will be slower with Zlib, but the read throughput of Zlib can exceed the performance of memcpy of the same data depending on your data conditions (look for inflate_fast and inflate_slow).

And if you're getting into the business of improving sequential reads, the next big trick for systems is vertical row partitioning of data (think of TPC-H, except now you stored L_COMMENT in a separate file).

<comment><USER4> Streaming is better for every technology, of course this might not be always true ... but RAM isn't really random access, that is an abstraction, it is much faster at streaming. Same goes for SSDs.

> However, building around sequential reads gives you the wrong idea when the > hardware changes underneath you.

If one is going to build a system tuned to the hardware, they can't ignore the hardware. What abstraction should the author be using?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This seems like a very clever way to accomplish this feat. I think I'm happy that to date I haven't the sort of problems that might require reading 100M records per second. However, I'd be all ears if someone wanted to contribute to my education by telling me what sorts of interesting things that this might enable.

<comment><USER6> Loading past unspent outputs for Bitcoin Cash; to validate new blocks, and when queried by lightweight mobile wallets.

<comment><USER7> This would be helpful to increase transaction speed.</comment></comment></comment>


Rap Genius founder Mahbod Moghadam gives interview while apparently stoned - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrEyxNqyw24

<comment><USER2> "It's better than facebook, it's better than Wikipedia"

Is he high?

</comment><comment><USER3> And nobody is surprised.</comment>


Ask HN: I'd like to start political blog under my name will it affect my career? - <AUTHOR> I'm really worried and afraid about direction in which things are going in my country and in the world. I'd like to write more about politics, however I feel like writing anonymously or under pseudonym makes people treat you less seriously. If I start writing under my own name will it affect my programming career? Potential employers will be able to find my political views in google. .. <comment><USER2> I have been unintentionally controversial as hell for a lot of years. I have worked hard at becoming less of a lightning rod for utter shit shows.

In my experience, how you say it matters at least as much, perhaps more so, than your actual point.

You should be trying to bring solutions, not complaints. If the entire point of your blog is to kvetch, then don't make it a "political" blog. Make it clear "this is me bitching into the void." It will be less likely to come back to bite you.

When you bring solutions, be incredibly careful to not point fingers.

The English bible says "The meek shall inherit the earth." My understanding is that the French version says "The nonchalant shall inherit the earth."

Try to be nonchalant. Try to be diplomatic. Try to educate people rather than lecturing them.

Many blogs are just noise anyway. Having big feels about something doesn't guarantee you will have anything of real value to contribute. But if you think you can make a difference, then, there are ways to be more Zen about it.

"If a tree falls in a forest and there is no one there to hear it, it makes no sound. Yet, it falls."

</comment><comment><USER3> The willingness to live with the consequences of one's actions can be a metric for measuring the importance of those actions in a moral/ethical domain. I mean what we refer to with morals/ethics are things that are done independently of personal gain or advantage because they are the right thing to do.

Depending on what you write and where you apply for work, it may or may not affect your career. It's ok if your career is more important than what you want to say about political topics...the average political essay is noise.

It's also ok if what you have to say is more important than your career. There's no right answer in the abstract.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for this wise and thoughtful comment, I really appreciate it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you expressing your opinions anyway do it in louder way. But keep in mind you can get in trouble anyway, there is a few stories about programers who got fired coz of SJW rage. Even CEO of Mozilla got fired. Jslint guy got disinvited from events for comparing strong maps to men.

But if your opinions strong, do it under pseudonym, you can get a reputation for a fake name, not a problem. There is bunch of anonymous YouTubers with millions views and nobody knows their name or seen their face

</comment><comment><USER5> Relevant: [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/snowflake- te...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/snowflake-test-silent- partner-marketing-weed-out-whiny-entitled-millenial-candidates-job- applicants-a7646101.html)</comment>


Ask HN: How do you motivate people in this environment? - <AUTHOR>

Here's a YouTube Video about motivating people that probably most of you guys watched.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc "RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us "
Ok, now to take this to the next level.  If you believe everything in this video, how do you do it in an environment that this Slashdot Link says (http://it.slashdot.org/story/11/12/18/2154224/how-to-thwart-the-high-priests-in-it).  Read the comments there.
How can the research on the first video be used in the world the Slashdot people talk about when it's obvious the two groups absolutely do not trust each other? <comment><USER2> Work on the trust and communication angle for starters. If IT is trying to restrict something, they better have a good reason and they better educate people as to what that reason is. If they can't defend it, then they need to be more flexible. We have a "no personal email" policy at work (ie I cannot log into my gmail account -- I can only use my company email address from work). This policy rose out of an in-house study that determined that 98% of the virii they picked up were from people checking personal email at work. It's a nuisance for me but I respect it 100% and frankly don't want to expose my email to such risks. I find that it's very common that when people at work are disgusted with some policy, it's because they think it has no purpose. If it's a good policy and you explain the issue, that goes a long way towards clearing up such conflicts and getting people on board.

But, really, it would work better to have specific examples of what you are facing than a generic scenario. It fosters much better analysis and is much more likely to produce suggestions that can be acted on.</comment>


Show HN: I made a scraper that finds the Best Remote Jobs Every Week on the web - <AUTHOR> https://blog.noicejobs.com/best-remote-jobs-in-the-world-between-sep-11-and-sep-18/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey people!

Some months ago I posted about a bot I made that scrapes 1000s of jobs every day and posts them on a bunch of Telegram channels [https://t.me/NoiceJobs](https://t.me/NoiceJobs)

Now I've made a blog so that people that don't use Telegram can see them too. The best jobs in 50+ categories every week will get posted on the blog, and people can also subscribe via email

What do you think, what's your least favorite part about it?

Cheers!

<comment><USER2> First off, I'm no expert on your product or looking for a WFH syadmin job ATM.

That being said, I wanted to compliment You for addressing the comments and or complaints from your post a few months back, from the people who could not access or would not access your product through Telegram.

You shared your creation with the community, asked for feedback, recieved feedback and based on that feedback, You modified your product to make it more appealing to potential users.

All in all, You did exactly what You should have done and for that I say...

Good job!!!

And good luck with your product, if you keep doing what you've been doing I am sure it will be successful!!!

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, thanks for your kind message!! :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I like it.

One piece of feedback: it's not immediately clear what are job listings sections and what are self-promo sections.

Everything blends together, so it's hard to see the jobs at a glance.</comment>