Why Do People Who Need Help from the Government Hate It So Much? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/25/books/review/strangers-in-their-own-land-arlie-russell-hochschild.html <comment><USER2> I come from the heart of tea-party country. My impression is that people believe government handouts destroy any illusion that one might have of self- sufficiency and instill a sense of helplessness. There could be some merit to this idea. [1]

It's one reason I'm skeptical of basic income. Burying money and putting people to work "mining" it, as Keynes once suggested, might even be a better alternative. [2] :]

1.) [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.2202/1944-2858.1158/ab...](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.2202/1944-2858.1158/abstract)

2.) [http://quotes.liberty- tree.ca/quote/john_maynard_keynes_quot...](http://quotes.liberty- tree.ca/quote/john_maynard_keynes_quote_657c)

<comment><USER3> I thought one of the major benefits of UBI was that, because it's _universal_ , there's less stigma attached? If you're either "working" or "on the dole" then the latter makes you feel pretty useless. If everyone gets UBI then looking forward to yours is legitimized. It'd become no different to a tax return.

<comment><USER4> UBI does not solve the basic problem that a good percentage of one's sense of personal worth is tied up in work. Giving people a check is not the same as giving them something meaningful to do with their life.

Personally I find it hard to support UBI on any large scale without more understanding of the unintended side effects.

<comment><USER5> What if it's not payed work but meaningful activities that leads to self worth. Many activities may not be generating direct economic value but may still contribute to society. Different types of environmental or community work are examples of that category.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _"'Let me give you a lesson in practical politics.' Senator Burt looked at his wristwatch, leaned back and smiled. 'It is a mistake,' he said, 'to suppose that the public wants the environment protected or their lives saved and that they will be grateful to any idealist who will fight for such ends. What the public wants is their own individual comfort.

'Now then, young man, don't ask me to stop the Pumping. The economy and comfort of the entire planet depend on it. Tell me, instead, how to keep the Pumping from exploding the Sun.'

Lamont said, 'There is no way, Senator. We are dealing with something here that is so basic, we can't play with it. We must stop it.'

'Ah, and you suggest only that we go back to matters as they were before Pumping.'

'We must.'

'In that case, you will need hard and fast proof you are right.'

'The best proof,' Lamont said stiffly, 'is to have the Sun explode.'"_

There is always a tension between short term gains and long term planning. I think history, economics, psychology, behavioral economics all pretty much agree that most people are terrible at long term planning and they will consistently sacrifice long term gains for short term gains in exchange for a much worse future for all involved.

I'm not as optimistic as the author of that book. I don't think there is a way to crack this nut and get long term thinking to be the norm. When even people who have cancer because of the kind of environment they live in are voting to weaken the power of the EPA what hope is there?

<comment><USER7> I recognise that excerpt. _The Gods Themselves_ , by Asimov.

Of his works that I've read, "optimistic" is not the word I would associate with this particular book. It is cynical from the outset, with even the prologue making a point that scientific progress is mostly achieved out of spite.

As for the solution to the problem in the book ... IIRC it happens mostly by accident. The underlying tone in the story is that despite the importance of scientific advances, the driving force is always that of a personal vendetta. After all, in the story Lamont spends his career seeking revenge, trying to find a way to shoot the messenger of the uninformed and dangerous view.

Optimistic? I prefer jaded.

EDIT: originally I remembered it was a Heinlein book. Changed to Asimov.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The leading assumption of this book review (and many articles like it) is that it's hypocritical for poor people to both accept government assistance and be in favor of reducing it in general.

What a crock of shit.

Notice we never see headlines asking…

\- Why Do Tech Workers Who Need Software Patents Hate Them So Much?

\- Why Do Billionaires Who Need Tax Breaks Hate Them So Much?

\- Why Do Tenants Who Need Rent Control Hate It So Much?

…because it goes without saying that _those_ people are smart enough to vote outside of their short term economic interest. Anyone accepting a food stamp, though, how dare they vote for anything except more food stamps!?

I consider myself pretty progressive, but come on. How would you feel about being told you "need" any law which happens to benefit your bottom line and being treated like an idiot for opposing it?

<comment><USER9> Your point is well taken. But how can the state redistribute wealth to the needy without paternalism?

<comment><USER10> This is arguably one of the main points of UBI, which should, by construction, solve paternalism. One of the main points is changing people's view on income.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was listening to Dan Savage today, and he mentioned that the racism of Trump is nothing new, we did it with Catholics, Irish, Chinese, Italians, it seems most every nationality got it's brief turn as the "other". His point was that the right will eventually look back with shame on this moment too, when they demonized Mexicans and innocent refugees from Syria.

His point reinforced sort of the opposite in me, something else that I have been feeling for a long time: we need to understand that many people, now and in the future will have significant problems with immigration. Whether it's right, wrong or just illogical, we on the left do ourselves no favor by writing off their feelings as racism and not at least attempting to address them. Furthermore, this is a democracy, where they should have their viewpoint at least somewhat addressed, they certainly have the numbers to warrant it. It doesn't mean we buckle to racism, but it means we accept that wariness and fear of immigration is something that has existed in this world for a long time, and these sentiments are tied to real feelings people have to feel secure.

True, the real solutions to these insecurities are based on education and economic growth, not limiting immigration, but perhaps it's time we on the left said loudly "We hear you, and we understand."

<comment><USER12> One problem people seem to skip over is that the current state of immigration is broken. Regardless of the number of immigrants you think should be allowed in, none of those should be illegal. The presence of illegal immigrants hurts everyone, especially those who have no legal status. They are removed from normal legal protections, this needs to be fixed. You can not have a large part of the population in such an exploitable position. Some people who agree with what Trump is say are swayed by this side of the argument and it's valid.

<comment><USER13> > Regardless of the number of immigrants you think should be allowed in, none > of those should be illegal.

The obvious technical solution is to greatly increase the number of legal immigration slots--boom, problem solved, everyone now has legal status.

Unfortunately this solution would not change the conversation. Why? Because most anti-immigration folks are not concerned about protecting immigrants from exploitation, they are concerned about Mexicans and Muslims. A bunch of legal Mexicans moving into their town is no better to them than a bunch of illegal Mexicans.

In fact they _prefer_ to keep the system the broken way it is now, because it gives them a "rule of law" fig leaf to place over their racism.

<comment><USER9> It's good that casting aspersions on large groups of strangers is limited only to most anti-immigration folks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Look, these people have missed out. No one cheated them, they are stuck in a time that says if you are white and not a complete idiot, you can get a factory job and make a good living. But those days are over and being white is no longer the only requirement to living a good life. They look around and no longer see a world where they are naturally at the top and they start to blame others.

<comment><USER15> Bit on the racist side there mullen.

<comment><USER16> It's a rephrase of the content in the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Before even reading the article (Hey, I'm a real blogger!): Perhaps because they (rightly or not) feel they have been pushed to the borders of society and rendered unable to provide for themselves and their families by government policies, such as for example free trade agreements that have destroyed factory jobs (for example in the Rust Belt in the US and in areas of the UK that voted in favour of Brexit). How did I do?

<comment><USER16> If there was no government, there'd be nothing to assign protective tariffs in the first place, and the market would be even 'freer'. As it stands the government still limits transactions to some extent (eg: embargos on hostile nations)

(of course, if there were no government, there wouldn't even be global trade in the first place, but I'm just talking about trade deals here)

<comment><USER18> people traded before governments and international borders existed. But, yes, certainly harder to have property without governments protecting property rights.

<comment><USER16> Yes, they did. But long trade routes were expensive, and there was nothing like the current globalisation of labour. People making cheap garments in China weren't undercutting the European makers of clothes, for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> There is soup of things there, but at the very bottom is really the fact that those in power always manipulate those are not to fight amongst themselves so they don't interfere with the dealings upstairs. For example people are told to the hate mythical welfare single mom queen, because she is going to drive up in her Lexus and steal all the benefits.

Not to say that there aren't real issues, there are, but they are mixed in with racial rhetoric, hate for other groups, corporatist agenda and a heavy sprinkling of American Civil Religion and you get "Take your government out of my Medicare!" craziness.

Sometimes I like to imagine ridiculous scenarios -- in this case I imagine that Tea party is supported and funded by ultra-liberals, because crazies like birthers and so on are really effective at demolishing the conservative agenda by making them look insane and unstable by association.

To be fair, I also like to imagine that say some liberals are hidden ultra- conservatives and so they promote a steady stream of refugees to Western Europe. And there is no better way to turn people to nationalism and conservatism today that than.

So in my imaginary scenario each side is actually a false flag operation for the other side.

</comment><comment><USER16> How about: In the US where there are effectively only two parties, people don't feel like the choices on offer suit their desires? 310M people and only two parties for general elections?

After all, the 'liberal' party in the US would be considered 'far conservative, but not extreme' in other western democracies. Not a lot of choice there.

<comment><USER20> If you think there are only two parties then your observational skills are lacking. There are multiple factions within the parties that are ascendant/declining due to support on specific issues and the candidates of these factions compete among each other for the party nomination at all levels of government. This is why third-parties in the US are only found at the extremes and tend to burn-out quickly, the factions and interest groups which have a nominal chance of actually governing are within one of the two major parties. Free-trade proponents in the Republican party get trade deals done, Libertarian party voters whine from the sidelines. Environmentalists within the Democratic party pass pollution control laws, Green party voters speak earnestly to each other about how more should be done.

<comment><USER16> Oh, cool! So, how do I vote for a green-faction president?

How do I vote for a federal republican faction that won't bloc-vote to strangle legislation? You know, for those conservatives out there who want actual conservative governance, not fearmongering?

<comment><USER20> You vote for the one closest to your views in the primaries. They didn't win you say? Too bad. Your faction is too small to actually win all the marbles. OTOH, you can work at the legislative level where a smaller, dedicated interest group can actually get someone elected. It does not have the ego stroking that comes with top of the ticket wins, but it actually does manage to accomplish something and while you may be forced to compromise your principles and actually work with other people who do not share your views once elected it is better to be on the inside than on the outside complaining.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The most cynical government haters I know fall into two categories: they either receive handouts from the government, or they receive paychecks via the government. It turns out that in order to benefit from the government, you have to deal with it a lot. We should learn to accept that they can see problems with something that they ultimately benefit from. And such critics might actually offer some very important criticism that tends to go unheard because we're too busy making fun of their "stupidity".

<comment><USER22> This makes sense. Going to the DMV makes me strongly want to privatize the entire operation.

<comment><USER20> And then dealing with a large private entity that has a major public-facing requirement like Comcast makes you want to nationalize the entire operation again. Round and round we go...

<comment><USER9> Umm, a company like Costco has a large public facing requirement and is great. You do realize that Comcast has been effectively been granted government status through its various federal and state grants of monopoly over cable infrastructure?

<comment><USER20> Costco gets to pick and choose who its customers are, Comcast and others really do not have that option. Neither does the government. There is a big difference.

<comment><USER9> Comcast can ban your account and refuse to do business with you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The answer is pretty simple. Most tea party members as well as most libertarians simply want the federal govt. to do what it was designed to do; no more and no less. They understand what happens when it gets too big and too powerful. It's what our Founders understood and the reason we have state legislatures and municipal govts..

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm writing a paper about optimal government reach. Any tips?

<comment><USER25> you need to define optimal. does it result in highest gdp relative to <x>, highest gdp growth relative to <x>, happiest citizenship, lowest incarceration rate, highest incarceration rate, lowest recidivism rate of criminals, best education, least amount of divorce, etc.

good luck on the paper. things are simple on an individual level and complex when looked at as a whole (think economics / behavior / incentives).

<comment><USER26> Such an interesting topic to meditate on. It is at the same time deeply pragmatic and philosophical. In order to find the most important criteria, we have to know what is the purpose of life.</comment></comment></comment>


Obama does not feel Americans' privacy violated - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/assets/print?aid=USBRE95F00B20130616

<comment><USER2> This is pretty amusing, but they've just made a classic apologists mistake.

Either they need all this access and funding to surveil a large number of dangerous people, or they dont need either to surveil such a small number of people. If it only resulted in 300 phone numbers to track, then sure, maybe the privacy violations weren't as bad (hypothetically). But that argument then puts the whole program at a ridiculous cost to threat ratio, and should be shutdown because it isn't effective at all and is a waste of taxpayer money.

Lose, Lose NSA - You're either violating our liberties or wasting our money.

<comment><USER3>
        But that argument then puts the whole program at a ridiculous cost to threat ratio.

Sorry but this is just nonsense.

Major terrorist acts e.g. 9/11 have a devastating impact on the economy. It results in a country-wide drop in consumer spending, consumer confidence, business spending, business confidence, hiring etc. As well as locally in areas like tourism. It alone accounted for a 1.1% drop in the third quarter GDP in 2011.

As an example in NYC alone 430,000 jobs and 2.8 billion in wages were lost in the 3 months after 9/11\. Which in turn results in a big drop in the tax collected.

Then finally there is the after effects. No 9/11 and there would have been no costly invasion into Iraq/Afghanistan which has cost trillions of dollars and an obscene number of lives. Major terrorist acts always demand a response by the public.

So out of all the things the government does protecting its citizens seems like something that will always be "worth the money".

<comment><USER4> There are many threats to human life. There is a cost associated with preventing each life lost. Obviously it makes sense to consider it.

We could have never allowed foreign tourists into the country. That has a cost associated with it, right? That would prevented Saudis from going to flight school and booking those flights, right? Shouldn't protecting lives be before every other consideration?

No, we have to balance things. Protecting life can not prevent us from living our lives. Not everything the government chooses to do is worth the price.

<comment><USER5> If we're going with a cost/benefit analysis, it should be noted that the NSA accessing data that AT&T, Google, Facebook, etc, _already collect_ is just about the cheapest sort of counter-measure you could have to terrorism. The "good old fashioned police work" that people keep suggesting would be far more expensive and invasive.

<comment><USER4> Then let people volunteer for it in exchange for lower taxes. If the impact is truly minor, there should be many takers and much savings.

<comment><USER5> That makes no sense.

<comment><USER6> What makes no sense is assuming that all of the data collection being discussed has prevented a single genuine attack.

<comment><USER4> Oh, they told us it has. Shouldn't that be good enough? They've been open and honest so far.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am reminded for an episode of The Simpsons in which Bart changes his grade from 'F' to an 'A+'.

       Homer: [incredulously]  A-plus?!?  You don't think much of me, do you boy?
       Bart:  [almost proudly]  No sir!
       Homer: You know a D turns into a B so easily.  You just got greedy.

300 phone numbers is a such low number it is completely unbelievable. I would expect a intelligence agency would be better at telling convincing lies, but I guess they don't think much of us. For future reference I might believe somewhere in the range of 15,000 to 50 million. Also 300 is a surprisingly round number.

<comment><USER8> >>300 is a surprisingly round number.

"[l]ast year, fewer than 300 phone numbers were checked against the database of millions of U.S. phone records gathered daily by the NSA"

>>For future reference I might believe somewhere in the range of 15,000 to 50 million

You think that there are at least 15,000 terrorists/foreign targets of interest that would have any reason to call a US number?

<comment><USER9> Obviously not the OP but I would give a definite yes to the second question, esp. considering what qualifies as a "terrorist" these days.

Let's take the Boston Bombers and make a low balling guess that each one of them has called 20 unique numbers in the last 6 month, each of which have in turn again called 20 unique numbers and we are already at 800 numbers under surveillance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you look at the growth of the no-fly list, 300 sounds like an implausibly low number considering the likelihood of adding-to-the-list whoever is on the receiving end of each call.

No Fly List Statistics:

In mid-December 2001, two lists were created: the "No Fly List" of 594 people to be denied air transport, and the "Selectee" list of 365 people who were to be more carefully searched at airports.

By December 2002, the No Fly List held more than 1,000 names.

60 Minutes reported on 8 October 2006 that the news program had obtained a March 2006 copy of the list that contained 44,000 names.

TSA officials said that, as of November 2005, 30,000 people in 2005 had complained that their names were matched to a name on the list via the name matching software used by airlines.

In April 2007, the United States government "terrorist watch list" administered by the Terrorist Screening Center, which is managed principally by the FBI, contained 700,000 records.

A year later, the ACLU estimated the list to have grown to over 1,000,000 names and to be continually expanding.

However, according to Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff, in October 2008 the No Fly list contained only 2,500 names, with an additional 16,000 "selectees", who "represent a less specific security threat and receive extra scrutiny, but are allowed to fly."

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

<comment><USER11> I don't know, maybe something happened around the 2008-2009 timeframe to cause the executive agency to start changing the policies regarding the usefulness of lists with millions of names on it... can't quite put my finger on what that change might have been though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's a bit like saying that they're going to install cameras linked to a spy agency into every home, but don't worry because only a few homes will be scrutinised closely.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Oddly, the Reuters article and headline changed (and then the moderators appropriately changed the HN headline). That's also why so many of the comments below, particularly those referencing the 300 number, don't make much sense.

Here is the lede of the originally linked article:

 _U.S. spy agency paper says fewer than 300 phone numbers closely scrutinized

WASHINGTON, June 15 (Reuters) - The U.S. government only searched for detailed information on calls involving fewer than 300 specific phone numbers among the millions of raw phone records collected by the National Security Agency in 2012, according to a government paper obtained by Reuters on Saturday.

The unclassified paper was circulated Saturday within the government by U.S. intelligence agencies and apparently is an attempt by spy agencies and the Obama administration to rebut accusations that it overreached in investigating potential militant plots.

The administration has said that even though the NSA, according to top-secret documents made public by former agency contractor Edward Snowden, collects massive amounts of data on message traffic from both U.S. based telephone and internet companies, such data collection is legal, subject to tight controls and does not intrude on the privacy of ordinary Americans._

</comment><comment><USER13> Yes, because they couldn't possibly have just made up a document saying a random, small number of people were "closely scrutinized". It's also a little odd that a document describing the allegedly tiny reach of still-classified programs is somehow unclassified. This doesn't sound like it was designed for the public at all.

</comment><comment><USER14> That's nice. The rest are only recorded for posterity, but not "closely scrutinized", right?

<comment><USER15> They also claimed to delete records more than 5 years old.

<comment><USER16> Plausible. They may have quite a lot of storage space, but it is finite.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I hate how the US Government says things after the fact that we have seen many lies come from them over the past 6 months. Seriously, what do they expect? For us to start believing them right away?

<comment><USER18> You're getting the word "fact" in your sentance confused with the word "speculation". They are not the same thing.

<comment><USER17> Fact. NSA has been spying on all Americans without their knowledge for years.

<comment><USER18> ...and now that the real facts are not fitting your narrative, you're starting to contradict and deny those facts using every emotional response and every fallacy you can think of.

<comment><USER19> What are those "real facts"? The Verizon Business court order alone is damaging enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> One has to wonder how they'll define data-mining for the purposes of (for example) credit fraud or insurance fraud, and whether that qualifies as "closely" scrutinized.

There are a myriad of other questionable uses that could come from their data set of _everything_ that don't require "close" scrutiny.

Just like how quickly DNS-based website blocking expanded beyond simple and straight-froward "think of the children" child-pornography hunting turns into "decency" enforcement, this NSA data warehousing program could quickly turn unpleasant.

</comment><comment><USER10> I wish somebody would ask whether computer-transcribed conversations are considered to have been "listened to".

</comment><comment><USER21> > "As everybody who has been associated with the program's said if we had this > before 9/11, when there were two terrorists in San Diego - two hijackers - > able to use that program, that capability against the target, we might have > been able to prevent 9/11"

These politicians believe it's worth invading everyone's privacy in order to prevent an attack on American soil. That's insane. A surveillance state is far more of a danger to people than terrorism.

<comment><USER22> I would say surveillance at this level is almost a form of terrorism. I don't not feel safe using phone and web applications. I'm also fearful to post libertarian-leaning comments or comments that could be deemed "anti- government" for fear of being targeted in the future. It may be irrational and slightly paranoid, but I think history has shown us not to trust people with extraordinary power like this.

<comment><USER23> Well, I'm still overtly anti-government, anti-NSA, pro voluntaryist, pro market-anarchism, pro libertarian, pro anarcho-capitalism, etc. If they're listening to this conversion, well... fuck it, I refuse to be censored. The worst they can really do is kill me. _shrug_ I wasn't planning to live forever anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The key word there is "closely".

<comment><USER25> #leastuntruthful

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> You can write all phone conversations to storage and still only closely scrutinize 300 numbers.

</comment><comment><USER27> But how many phone numbers do they have the _capacity_ to closely scrutinize?

<comment><USER28> Soon, they will apparently add yottabytes of storage with their Utah's data center ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center)).. that doesn't say how much they can analyze but probably many more then 300.. (1 yottabyte = 1,000,000,000,000,000GB)

</comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 Where is the title stated in the linked article?

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm a little offended that as a non American, this invasion of my privacy is apperantly a non issue.

</comment><comment><USER30> 300 people of interest seems reasonable to me...but that number must not include all the first-degree and second-degree contacts that each person-of- interest has...if you saw that Alice was talking to Bob and Carla and suspected Alice to be a terrorist, why wouldn't you also follow the rabbit holes of Bob's and Carla's records? And when do you know to stop?

In this way, unhindered surveillance is a lot like torture...sure, you may think it's _perfectly justified_ when you _just know_ that Alice is a bad person. But when the dragnet brings in many non-guilty people, it's not just about whether it's ethical to torture/warantlessly-spy on someone (guilty or innocent), it's _also_ about whether you're actually accomplishing anything by bringing in all this irrelevant noise.

So that's why 300 closely-inspected people (plus their network, but to a limited degree) _seems_ reasonable...the NSA has finite resources and finite analysts and can only conjure up finite investigations. Call me naive, but I think it's possible that a good chunk of NSA staffers believe their main role is to protect the nation from evil threats...(just like most military staff joined for the "good of country", initially) and if any of them are half-wise, they'd probably realize that wantonly spying for the hell of it doesn't get them promotions nor serves their country...the NSA is still a bureaucracy, after all.

Of course, that doesn't mean that the NSA won't evolve the technology to the point that thoroughly analyzing someone's network and extended network is trivial... _and_ , that all the good-hearted idealists who work for them don't see the true nature of their work, due to the layer of technology and bureaucracy...but...we know of the current controversy because Snowden was able to walk out undetected with the files in a USB drive. So we're not _there_ yet, so hence, it's possible this report is legit.</comment>


Sure, we do that - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2004/02/11/71307.aspx <comment><USER2> Very interesting, as always (although old (2004)).

But wouldn't it have been more useful to test the capability rather than ask? Once you know the driver's lying ("yes card"), what do you do? How do you find out what it's actually capable of doing?

If you have to test then, why not test earlier is my question.</comment>


A Review of Ed Milliband's Presentation Skills - <AUTHOR> http://mindfulpresenter.com/mindful-blog/a-review-of-ed-milliband-s-presentation-skills

<comment><USER2> Nice blog, _really_ nice site design.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, I really appreciate the comment.</comment></comment>


Track Donald J Trump's Electoral Promises with Trump Tracker - <AUTHOR> https://trumptracker.github.io/ <comment><USER2> I like the idea but it is obviously biased with "promises "such as

>"If I become president, we're all going to be saying 'Merry Christmas' again."

<comment><USER3> I can't imagine someone making this site without some bias.

But that doesn't change the fact that he _did_ promise these things.

I think some of his ideas are good, some are disastrous, and some are crazy. But it'll be interesting to see which get fulfilled and which don't.

For the record, some people already say "Merry Christmas", so I'm assuming he thinks we can somehow talk retail stores into offending their customers again, which I seriously doubt will happen.

<comment><USER4> > so I'm assuming he thinks we can somehow talk retail stores into offending > their customers again

How is it offensive? If a Muslim were to wish me a happy Ramadan I'd be cool with it, or if someone of Chinese descent wishes me a happy New Year on their New Year's date, that's ok too. When did people become such wimps that they think a well-wish is an insult?

Do people also get offended when someone says "bless you" after a sneeze?

<comment><USER5> OK. So it's not offensive to you. Is there no one who would be offended by being told "Happy Ramadan"? I think it's clear that some people would be offended.

Walk a mile in their shoes and maybe you'll understand why some people get offended at things you don't get offended at. Is there anything that offends, disgusts you? Is there anything that causes you to react with anger, sadness, fear, or any other such emotion? If so can you imagine someone that would not be similarly offended? Can you imagine that person saying, "Why is Mikeb85 such a goddamned wimp?"

<comment><USER6> >Walk a mile in their shoes and maybe you'll understand why some people get offended at things you don't get offended at.

In the western world we're incredibly tolerant to other people's religion, lifestyles, etc. If someone is intolerant to the point that they get offended from hearing "Merry Christmas", then it's clearly time to re-examine their own lives.

<comment><USER7> > In the western world we're incredibly tolerant to other people's religion, > lifestyles, etc.

You might need to update that opinion now that the US has elected a man who pledged to roll back LGBT rights and stop Muslims from entering the country.

<comment><USER6> > who pledged to roll back LGBT rights

You mean the man who will likely have a homosexual man (Peter Thiel) lead his transition team.

> stop Muslims from entering the country

I don't agree with this, but I also don't agree with what's going on in countries like France. There has to be a middle ground somewhere. The unfortunate fact is that if you even mention immigration in a less than positive light, you're labeled a racist or a xenophobe. And now the other side has fought back. They've elected someone who gives them at least somewhat of a voice. Had the left not been so aggressive at trying to pin those with a dissenting voice (both on the left and the right really), I suspect we would be in a very different position today.

Trump has flaws, and I take issue with many of his positions, but this anti- gay and racist argument just doesn't hold up. I look forward to the day we can start debating policy again.

<comment><USER7> I didn't say that Trump was anti-gay or racist. I'm saying that electing a man who pledged to roll back LGBT rights and stop people of a particular religion from entering the country is evidence that we might not be as incredibly tolerant of other peoples' lifestyles and religions as we previously thought.

Including a gay person on Trump's transition team does not negate campaigning against gay marriage and transgender bathroom use. There being a good explanation for why people are intolerant of Islam does not negate the fact that they're intolerant of that religion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder if people actually think he's going to do what he said. The guy has a history of talking bullshit to get what he wants. He just said all the right things and made a bunch of promises to become president. He doesn't care about following through. Why would he? His promises were a means to an end. Trump has a history of fucking people over and now it's our turn.

<comment><USER9> On the other hand, the guy is obsessed with winning. He pulled off the craziest victory in a presidential election that anybody can remember. Now that he's there, I can totally imagine that he's thinking "not good enough, now let's be the best f-ing president! I'll show them!".

He got the keys, might as well try to do some of the things he promised and win again.

<comment><USER10> This is insanely optimistic but it's all we got.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This may be satire, but I actually like this idea. In all fairness, I was very surprised to run into his "contract with Americans" only _after_ the elections. A lot of people attacked him on the basis that he didn't have any proposition other than building a wall. You may disagree with some or even most points (I certainly do), but they are there.

</comment><comment><USER11> This was very likely inspired by [http://www.trudeaumetre.ca](http://www.trudeaumetre.ca), which so far has done a great job watchdogging the Canadian government.

</comment><comment><USER12> Trump was full of flaws, failure, and fraud as as a businessman and it went ignored by his supporters. It's naive to think that his performance or his earnestness as a president will mean anything to them.

This is thinking from the era that was still at least ostensibly about truth and facts. Future elections need be about no more than who can give poor people the loudest, simplest explanation for why they're poor.

<comment><USER13> Trump's supporters were on average better off than Hillary's supporters.

<comment><USER14> Comparing economics between states and even locations vs. how they voted I don't think that's accurate. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox) makes this stuff harder to calculate than you might think.

Look at VA income: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_locations_by_per_capi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_locations_by_per_capita_income) vs. [http://www.politico.com/2016-election/results/map/president/...](http://www.politico.com/2016-election/results/map/president/virginia/) Poor areas are vastly more likely to vote republican.

Arlington county median income $101,000: 77.0% Clinton vs 16.9% trump.

Lee County $50,014 income: 17.4% Clinton vs. 80.6% trump

Trump was very popular with the rural uneducated and thus poor.

PS: DC get's a bad rap, but once again top 5 income compared to state and was only beaten by other heavily democratic states. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_income](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_income) 4% of DC voted for Trump.

<comment><USER13> Wait you chose a few locations that happened to be richer that voted for Clinton and used that as proof?

Look here: [http://edition.cnn.com/election/results/exit- polls](http://edition.cnn.com/election/results/exit-polls) All four different exit polls clearly show Trump winning in all the higher income brackets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Great stuff, my only recommendation would be to link to sources where he said these things.

</comment><comment><USER16> Great idea. The list needs improvement, though, and editing. Check out the erroneous entries on the unsorted tab, for instance.

A lot of these items are subjective, as well. What, for instance, qualifies someone as a "great legal scholar?"

</comment><comment><USER17> God, I hope Trump does not fulfill any of the promises he made, even the favorably liberal ones. I am hoping it was all for the show and he is not serious about doing any of it.

</comment><comment><USER18> Some seem hard to track:

> Global warming is real, but it's not man-made.

And quite some are bound to be broken:

> The wealthy should pay more.

> Cut taxes for the wealthy big time.

<comment><USER19> > The wealthy should pay more. ($ amount)

> Cut taxes for the wealthy big time. (Percentage)

Not necessarily. If he lowers tax percentage for the wealthy and they evade less, the $ amount payed will be larger.

<comment><USER20> positively whimsical.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I can't tell if this is meant to be satirical or not, but if it isn't, you forgot a _yuge_ one that I'd like him to keep and for everyone to pressure him to keep it:

[https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press- releases/donald-j.-trumps...](https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press- releases/donald-j.-trumps-five-point-plan-for-ethics-reform)

<comment><USER9> These are literally the first ones listed on the tracker.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Has anyone done something like this during Obama's administration?

<comment><USER23> Yes. He did pretty well. Compromised on some stuff, was obstructed in many. Some fell by the wayside.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> What about his promise to make america great again?

<comment><USER9> I think that's the epic.</comment></comment>


Is it time to quit your day job? (by Ali Davar) - <AUTHOR> http://entrepreneur.venturebeat.com/2010/01/13/is-it-time-to-quit-your-day-job/

<comment><AUTHOR> Excellent article, a good read for anyone who is thinking of starting. My own experience is that succeeding in startups took more than just quiting my day job, I also need to change my mindset as well. For example, if you are a lawyer, a doctor or an engineer, you can quit and become an entrepreneur. But you cannot succeed if you continue to have the mindset of a doctor, a lawyer or an engineer. First of all, there are always more than two sides to an issue and often the right place is to be is in the middle - an option that a lawyer does not have. Also, in startups, there is not always an answer to every question; or if there is an answer, it might not be unique. So waiting for perfect data to arrive at a perfect solution is a luxury that I don't have as an entrepreneur. If that bothers you, then you should go back to being an engineer. Finally, as an entrepreneur, I often have to shoot my patient (and I have).</comment>


Introducing GNU Guix - <AUTHOR> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnu-system-discuss/2012-11/msg00000.html <comment><USER2> Debian's dpkg and apt are both GPL2+. What's the reason they are reinventing the wheel here? Is there some kind of licence incompatibility that the GNU project cares about? Is there some kind of major architectural difference? Why is it important enough to fragment Free Software developers over?

I feel that this should be answered in an FAQ, but I can't find the answer anywhere.

<comment><USER3> Those things are never going to be adopted by Fedora, Arch, Gentoo, or any other non-Debian based distro. That is reason enough not to use it.

<comment><USER4> Why? Because you predict it won't meet your definition of popularity? Once upon a time, Arch and Gentoo were dismissed in exactly this way.

<comment><USER5> Arch and Gentoo are still tiny fractions of the linux install base (which is itself a tiny fraction of users), and are mostly irrelevant.

<comment><USER6> Unless you feel that those that write software have more influence in the direction of the community than those who just apt-get/yum install it.

Then they are a small fraction of users but are _not_ irrelevant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > A distribution built by GNU hackers is a great opportunity to improve > consistency and cohesion in GNU!

Because the existing fragmentation of GNU package management is too confusing, so we need a new standard for everyone to rally round.

[<http://xkcd.com/927/>]

<comment><USER8> That particular Xkcd comic has been posted 79 times in the past year or so† and has quickly become a cliché. The authors' stated goals are to make a "purely functional" and "practical 100% free" package manager.†† They don't mention competition, proliferation, or winning market share. A vague hope of consistency and cohesion accompanying the announcement of a program "approaching its first alpha release" isn't a rallying cry. I think they made this announcement simply so that people interested in this sort of thing might take a look.

† [http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=http%3A%2F%...](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=http%3A%2F%2Fxkcd.com%2F927%2F&sortby=create_ts+desc&start=0)

†† <http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/ROADMAP>

<comment><USER9> Hah. Your post made me curious which xkcds are the most popular on HN. This is the top10 (caveat below):

         48 http://xkcd.com/927/
         48 http://xkcd.com/386/
         33 http://xkcd.com/538/
         28 http://xkcd.com/378/
         24 http://xkcd.com/810/
         23 http://xkcd.com/327/
         22 http://xkcd.com/323/
         21 http://xkcd.com/605/
         19 http://xkcd.com/936/
         17 http://xkcd.com/552/

You can easily reproduce the results by using the hnsearch API via

      curl  "http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?q=http%3A%2F%2Fxkcd.com&limit=100&start=<iterate>

and

      grep -ohE "http://xkcd.com/[0-9]*/" | sort | uniq -c | sort -n

Unfortunately, I could only process the first 1000 entire list of ~1500 results because the API refused queries with _start > 900_. I have sort of a bad conscience because I'm polluting future queries by posting the top 10 list above, but I think I can live with it.

<comment><USER10> > I have sort of a bad conscience because I'm polluting future queries by > posting the top 10 list above, but I think I can live with it.

Relevant xkcd: <http://xkcd.com/688/>

(Sorry, couldn't resist)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It seems everyone reinvents package management poorly again and again. Some things that obviously stand out to me:

* Why utilize scheme? It's declaritive utilize a markup like yaml, don't go off the deep end because you can.

* Utilize OS specific features such as jails, bind mounts, namespaces, you can have the same NIX style separation without destroying FHS.

* Parse the config files for options, it's easy cmake, autocrap, etc all have parsable formatting this way you don't need to mess with adding build time options.

* Parse the source for dependencies, there are lots of white papers of people doing this and beating human made spec files.

* Utilize machine learning for classification of options, dependency resolution (utilizing previous data).

<comment><USER12> _Why utilize scheme?_

If emacs has thaught us anything, it is that when you give people a fully featured language to fool around with, things you could never imagine can start happening.

Why _not_ scheme? It's liberally licensed and already has mind-share. It's a simple, no fuzz language with little obfuscating magic and great expressive power.

It allows you to build your solutions as bare-bones as you like or go on full architect should you need to. Sounds like just what the doctor ordered.

<comment><USER13> Might as well use python because of greater?? adoption and ease of use?

<comment><USER14> I suspect the fact there's GNU Guile, an entirely in-house Scheme ecosystem, has a lot to do with it. Use Python and be beholden to the Python community (outsiders!) Use JSON (as someone else suggested) and be beholden to the Javascript/JSON community (outsiders! oh and that awful JSON license!) etc.

<comment><USER15> > Use JSON (as someone else suggested) and be beholden to the Javascript/JSON > community (outsiders! oh and that awful JSON license!) etc.

JSON is just a file format. A simple one too. There are plenty of parsers available, with various licenses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > it's not a bootable distribution yet, but rather one to be installed on top > of a running GNU/Linux system.

For a moment there I thought the GNU Hurd had been finished, I misread it as GNU Unix :(

<comment><USER17> GNU Hurd finished? Good one :)

<comment><USER18> It is finished, in the sense like WebOS is finished.

<comment><USER19> I use WebOS in two devices (a pre2 and a touchpad) every day and am pretty happy about it. I think Enyo rocks and is available everywhere and that WebOS is more user friendly than iOS and Android.

Now, how does that compares to GNU Hurd?

<comment><USER18> I'm not saying WebOS is not good, or that it worse than any of the high-volume platforms out there. The same goes for Hurd.

What I am saying is that both missed their shot and will never see high volume pickup and large marketshares, in the way Linux, Android an iOS do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's "based on Nix", but what's the difference, and why fork?

<comment><USER21>
      Guix & Nix
      <comment><comment><comment>~

      Nix is really two things: a package build tool, implemented by a library
      and daemon, and a special-purpose programming language.  Guix relies on
      the former, but uses Scheme as a replacement for the latter.

      Technically, Guix makes remote procedure calls to the 'nix-worker'
      daemon to perform operations on the store.  At the lowest level, Nix
      "derivations" represent promises of a build, stored in '.drv' files in
      the store.  Guix produces such derivations, which are then interpreted
      by the daemon to perform the build.  Thus, Guix derivations can use
      derivations produced by Nix (and vice versa); in Guix, the cheat code is
      the 'nixpkgs-derivation' procedure.  :-)

      With Nix and the Nixpkgs distribution, package composition happens at
      the Nix language level, but builders are usually written in Bash.
      Conversely, Guix encourages the use of Scheme for both package
      composition and builders.

[http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile- user/2012-07/msg0000...](http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile- user/2012-07/msg00006.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Can someone explain what benefits do I get for using this rather than the package manager offered by my distribution? And do you need root access to install guix? Because if you do then

> _unprivileged package management_

seems quite, well, useless imho. If on the other hand everything in guix lives in the userland, I can see myself using it in the servers I don't have root- access to..

<comment><USER23> No, you do not need root access in order to install guix. Put it in your home folder, there, done. For ease of use add it to your $PATH.

<comment><USER22> Thanks for clearing it up :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> That's one misleading name if you ask me - GUI+X

</comment><comment><USER25> Both GNU Guix and Nix seem like excellent steps forward in bringing sanity to package management. Does anyone know if puppet, chef, salt and similar configuration management tools were inspired by these projects? At a cursory glance, e.g., there are some striking similarities in the DSLs of NixOS and Puppet.

</comment><comment><USER26> What problem does it solve?

<comment><USER23> Does it need to? It's for hackers, not for every user. If you're bored and feel like hacking on something, this might interest you. If it doesn't, Mr. Ludovic is not trying to force you to use it.

For me, some of its features, specially non-privileged user package management, are interesting. I'm not so much interested in the distribution at the moment, more in the package manager. I imagine there aren't many supported packages yet, so it's a matter of writing scripts... eventually it can become a distribution. Not for everyone.

But I still see no problem in more package managers being out there - any one has a problem with yum / apt being two different package managers? Why is yet another package manager is a bad thing?

<comment><USER27> I principle you are right. However in practice there is a sane point where there are so many competing solutions that you have to question why people don't spend their time improving existing solutions instead of adding to the fragmentation.

<comment><USER28> I highly recommend reading over some of the Nix papers -- what the author is doing is totally divergent from nearly every other package manager in a way that's either insane or brilliant (I don't personally know enough to judge). I saw his talk at a software upgrades workshop, and it was pretty impressive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I hope this causes a surge of interest in gnu guix, nixpkgs, and package management systems with these nice features in general.

</comment><comment><USER30> Yet another package manager? :) I've yet to see something that does a better job than <http://paludis.exherbo.org/> And that is not to say Paludis couldn't be improved. But I don't get why people devote time to the community to work on stuff that has been thoroughly solved.

<comment><USER31> you have yet to give guix or nix a try. been using paludis in past and i can tell you that guix/nix is obvious evolution step :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Documentation ?

</comment><comment><USER33> The Linux community needed this around 15 years ago when Windows 98 came out. Now we've got .deb and .rpm which do the job perfectly well. It's even better nowadays, as well, since their existence is effectively hidden from the user thanks to package managers.

Too little, way too late.

<comment><USER34> I don't think package management is a solved problem. Most distributions fail at the simple task of installing multiple versions of the same package alongside each other. Also, lackluster dependency management (you install library X, it wants to install mail server Y and database Z).

There are many approaches that one would mistake as being "reinventing the wheel":

1\. FreeBSD ports system is barebones, but incredibly simple and transparent.

2\. Arch Linux's PKGBUILD recipes are also simple and, at times, a much better alternative to binary packages.

3\. Gobo Linux (<http://www.gobolinux.org>) solved binary packaging the right way by having each package in it's own tree. It's approach is similar to OS X, which also gets this right.

<comment><USER35> "you install library X, it wants to install mail server Y and database Z)"

Almost exactly what happened when I installed nmh. Wasn't at all obvious from the dependency list that I'd get qmail, didn't pay attention to the warning prompt and said Y, ...

Bonus, I have a bunch of new system accounts in my Display Manager's login screen. Bleah. Fortunately my scorched-earth reinstall is coming up, so I just leave them there to make it easier to hate what happened.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> This could turn out way better than current package managers if GNU doesn't screw it up.

<comment><USER29> Well there is already nixpkgs which has existed for a while with core features that I saw mentioned. I would be happy if there was increased interest in both and their feature set.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> How can I give it a try? F.e. if I want to install my own vim in my home directory?

<comment><USER31> havent try guix yet, but with nix you can simply do: nix-env -i vim or vimFull and it should install it.

look in documentation at <http://nixos.org/nix/> on how to install nix and drop on irc.freenode.org#nixos if having problems

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I suppose it's nice that GNU has a "GNU-branded" package manager... I guess...

</comment><comment><USER39> I love it! Please use it and add a ton of packges.

Because i'm too lazy :)

</comment><comment><USER40> Ill stick with apt and yum than you. They've proved themselves enough to me

</comment><comment><USER41> I like that this brings out a bunch of people who don't understand Scheme or why it's important to be purely functional. Oh you, startup kids.</comment>


The Color of a Mirror Is Not What You'd Expect (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://mentalfloss.com/article/67608/color-mirror-not-what-youd-expect <comment><USER2> Personal bugbear, but I _hate_ these titles:

        XXXX is not what you'd expect.

Invariably if and/or when I read the article I find that XXXX pretty much is _exactly_ what I expect. This is a particular case in point - having many times looked into the "infinity" of parallel mirrors, it's obvious that mirrors (or at least mirror glass) is green.

Annoying, disappointing, and a little depressing.

<comment><USER3> Anything in there about the actual colour of the mirror? Or shall I just keep calling them white because they reflect all colours incident upon them?</comment></comment>


BBC: Can drones appeal to the masses? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24762835

<comment><USER2> Two questions, what applications does this $90B market cover?

And does the cost of a camera (or even all of the hardware) make a significant contribution to the cost of data collection? That's what matters for adoption. Sticks are free and anyone can dig with them, yet professionals buy expensive bulldozers if they really want to dig a big hole.</comment>


Beedle offers 7 day free trial for their AI SEO - <AUTHOR> http://www.beedle.co <comment><USER2> Their site is broken and they're using cpanel.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Beedle has announced a 7 day free trial for their SEO services, providing analytics and their 90 day keyword prediction before a plan begins.</comment>


Show HN: Deleted, a safer delete UX for web apps - <AUTHOR> http://johnotander.com/deleted/

<comment><USER2> I gotta disagree with the entire purpose of this. We should completely abandon "Are you sure?"-style confirmations.

Instead, we should provide rich feedback for the delete action taken, followed by the opportunity to undo. Wrap that up into a re-usable library, and that'll be a real step forward.

<comment><USER3> _click_ Oh crap.. erm did I just delete my bank account? Without confirmation?!

Now sure, you won't find buttons that delete bank accounts often, but that's beside the point. Some objects hold greater weights than others, and it all depends on the context. Having a deleted folder with all of your previously "deleted" bank accounts makes it seem like your interface is one big fun game.

<comment><USER2> > you won't find buttons that delete bank accounts often, but that's beside > the point.

I disagree, because in UX, everything is contextual, and one solution doesn't apply to all problems.

This particular one is so serious, banks usually won't let you delete an account via the web UI.

But for the particular case you described, it'd be much better to have a secondary, full screen / red background display explaining the action the person is about to take, and its results. And no "Are you sure?" pop-up.

In this scenario, a bank would definitely do this anyhow, so adding an extra popup is just an annoyance.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple's iPhone Event Said To Be Happening Sept. 9 - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/05/apples-iphone-event-said-to-be-happening-sept-9

<comment><USER2> So much has been said regarding the bigger form factors and iOS8, but I'll just say what I've heard around where I live wand work: Lots of people are ready to buy the new iPhone. Apple is now ready to take back market share from Android, in a big way. Combined with the mixed thoughts about Google I/O and Samsung's poor sales outlook, we could be looking at a real shift back to Apple as the dominant mobile platform in more than just profits and hype.

Add in the app extensions, family sharing and the synching of passwords across apps and websites, lots of very useful updates.

</comment><comment><USER3> Really, the iPhone is tired already. As is Android. Nothing new under the sun. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Apple has done nothing really innovative in some time. Neither has Google.

Bigger screens mean nothing in the end.

Wake me when the holodeck is a reality.

<comment><USER4> Silly of you to say that, really. Apple, or any other company for that matter, can't just make something as huge and innovative as eg the iPhone every year. Things will slow down now.

<comment><USER3> Really? Then why do people line up like good little cult members every time Apple release a piece of hardware. I've never really understood the narcissistic behaviour of always wanting to have the latest and greatest. It all means nothing, to be honest. Really, it doesn't. I posted it because I'm tired of these companies spinning up huge marketing campaigns and nothing is really new. It's old.

<comment><USER4> Just because they make gigantic marketing campaigns about the new product doesn't mean it is as amazing as they claim. I love Apple and their products, but they sure do brag a lot and try to seem more special than they really are.

It's not something that can be helped, really. It sells and therefor it'll keep happening.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: CrowdWave gives your team its own free resume submission portal - <AUTHOR> https://www.crowdwave.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi folks - I'm the author of CrowdWave. I'm a software developer who pays the bills by doing recruitment for other companies and building my software passion projects at the same time. I've been doing recruiting for 14 years and I've been doing software development for more than 30 years.

So a few years ago a question popped into my head:

"Why isn't the most actively connected industry on earth - recruiting - connected?"

And I don't mean via LinkedIn, which is really just a bunch of individual connections, and not a social network of any extraordinary purpose.

Consider this - the lifeblood of the entire recruiting industry everywhere is the resume. All day, every day resumes are being sent from individual job seekers to recruiters and companies, and from recruiting agencies to employers and HR departments. Why isn't THAT connected? There's a real business network there, long lived business relationships, and it's all still being done via email.

So I wondered what would happen if I gave free resume submission portals to ALL teams at ALL companies.

And I wondered what would happen if all those recruiting portals were connected into a social network that models the real world connections between employers and recruiters.

That's the idea behind CrowdWave - to provide a simple and clean way to accept resume submissions from direct applicants and recruiters, and to form a social network that models the real world relationships of employers and recruiting agencies.

So CrowdWave has one single purpose - handling of resume submissions, from direct applicants to companies & agencies, from agencies to employers, and from HR people to their hiring managers.

And given that there seem to be about 10 bazillion recruiting SAAS applications out there, it is important to say what CrowdWave is NOT - <USER2> CrowdWave is NOT yet another applicant tracking system.

What CrowdWave is NOT

It's NOT Yet Another Full Featured Recruiting Candidate Applicant Tracking System.

It's NOT for attracting and sourcing candidates

It's NOT for posting ads to job boards

It's NOT for onboarding new employees

It's NOT for building a careers website

It's NOT for scheduling and managing interviews

It's NOT for parsing resumes

It's NOT for timesheets

It's NOT for contractor management

The business model is that CrowdWave is free, but data is retained for only 90 days. Surely most companies complete applicant assessment within 90 days? Anyone wanting to save data long term can get a paid plan which is $30/month for each month of data stored.

So, my question to you: does your team need its own portal for accepting resume submissions?

If yes, then give CrowdWave a try!

It's brand spanking new and in beta right now so please give it a go let me know any problems or issues at email@example.com

thanks!

Andrew Stuart</comment>


Anyone knows what is happening with the Diaspora guys? - <AUTHOR>

I was reading an article about why a particular website was moving away from the Facebook Platform (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2549468) which got me thinking about the Diaspora guys (https://joindiaspora.com/).
The two biggest issues for me about Facebook and what keeps me from using them as ubiquitously as Google is:-
(a) I have no control over what happens when I upload stuff (pictures, status updates, notes, etc) to Facebook.
(b) The lack of ability to separate my family, friends and work social circles.
These 2 issues of mine with Facebook is apparently addressed by Diaspora which i signed up for an invite as soon as they announced themselves in April 2010. Fast forward a year later, i've yet to hear any updates from them.
So, has anyone heard anything? <comment><USER2> I have an account on joindiaspora.com, but last time I checked (perhaps a month ago, before what you would probably call finals) their login page was broken. The only way I could log in was through the password reset feature, which got old pretty fast. If they've fixed that I can send you an invite.

Edit: It's pretty good by the way, I would use it all the time if I could log in.

Edit2: I just checked and they fixed their login process, so if you give me an email address I can invite you.

<comment><AUTHOR> That will be awesome! I'll love to see how far they have gone.

Anyway i can contact you without posting my email add here?

<comment><USER2> I'm pretty new to HN; I don't know if there's a PM feature but I don't see one. If you have a reddit account you can PM me there, same username.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Pretty much everyone who's done a startup could accuractly predict what would happen to Diaspora. They were a bunch of young guys who hadn't been in the real world long enough to know they were up against. Funny enough, if they hadn't received any attention at all, and grew organically they might've had a chance with an open source platform. But as a tech blogger's wet dream they were doomed from the beginning.

</comment><comment><USER4> Looks like they're still going at it:

<https://github.com/diaspora>

<comment><AUTHOR> yea, i saw the github repository and even though they relatively active there, they have gone unusually quiet so was just wondering how their progress has been so far. 1 year in the tech industry is a fairly long time. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You can do (b) on Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER6> I got a t-shirt...</comment>


Post-it pixel art in Paris - <AUTHOR> http://business.blogs.cnn.com/2011/09/28/post-it-note-wars-rage-in-paris/?hpt=hp_mid

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been noticing this everywhere in the past few weeks, and am finally relieved to know what it is. I have a soft spot for pixel art...</comment>


Create a Corporate Explainer Video - <AUTHOR> https://www.meep-up.com/2020/08/i-will-create-corporate-explainer-video.html <comment><AUTHOR> Are you after an exceptional explainer video, one that harnesses the latest global illustration trends to showcase your organization's product, service or app?

Then, you've come to the right place.

I pride myself on crafting superb corporate explainer videos guaranteed to engage your target audience, boost conversion, and drive sales. No cartoonish animations. No one-size-fits-all approach. And definitely no templates.

My production services include:

Scriptwriting

Storyboarding

Voiceovers

Style Frames

Design

Animation

Audio FX & Music</comment>


An Unexpected Character Replacement - <AUTHOR> https://www.datafix.com.au/BASHing/2019-10-18.html <comment><USER2> These angle brackets are how R handles printing some Unicode to stdout on windows. In memory it should be regular Unicode though.

The mistake they made is a classic R footgun: the fileEncoding argument to write.table() controls the encoding of the filename, not its contents. You either have to control the encoding of the files by manually creating the connection through file() or ideally just use the readr or data.table libraries.

Base R makes a lot of Unixy assumptions when it comes to text, so it's not pleasant to work with on Windows. The package ecosystem has solved most of these problems though.

<comment><USER3> I'm willing to bet that this problem was actually caused by readr, as base typically doesn't do crap like this.

Completely agreed with the rest of your points though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I used to have a job that involved parsing large textual datasets. It was fascinating to me how far you could reconstruct a history of a dataset just by looking at encoding errors - and practically no dataset I've seen came without them. Sometimes I could be certain of several specific import/export steps, each introducing a new layer of encoding errors on top of the previous one. Other times I could correlate timestamps and see when specific data entry bugs were introduced and when they were fixed.

Strictly speaking once you lose the information about the encoding of a string you can't say anything about it. But given some heuristic, some contextual knowledge (like how the author of the post guesses that "M<fc>ller" means "Müller") and a large enough amount of data you can pretty much always work back through and correct the errors. Well, as long as someone didn't replace all 8-bit characters with question marks, but that was very rare in my experience.

</comment><comment><USER5> > The dataset started out as a Microsoft Excel file, presumably in > Windows-1252 encoding. This was converted into a CSV, then loaded into the R > environment for adding additional information required by GBIF, then > exported from R as a text file with the command option fileEncoding = > "UTF-8".

Quite a journey. The ultimate culprit was an R text cleaning function but I wonder why the Excel sheet was in Windows-1252 encoding and can't R import Excel files directly?

<comment><USER6> Much of Microsoft Office for Windows dates to an awkward period when it was apparent that ASCII isn't enough, but UTF-8 isn't yet the obvious winner.

In particular there's a period where you get "strings" that aren't actually text as we'd understand it but instead a sequence of glyph numbers for a typeface. So instead of ASCII's "A" or Unicode's U+0041 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A you're just encoding that you want whatever the typeface named "Typewriter Sans" has put in slot number 65. Maybe it's a capital A and maybe it isn't.

This works pretty well on one Windows PC, or even a LAN full of identically configured Windows PCs. You can see why it was at least superficially attractive to Windows application programmers. Got a niche that needs Bulgarian ? No problem, the software doesn't care what the glyphs "mean", just define how to type the codes in and you're done.

But then somebody tries to open the Excel file with the Bulgarian text in "Steve's Bulgarian" font on a Mac and it doesn't work, it's gibberish. Oh dear. You have to install "Steve's Bulgarian" on the Mac and it look better although it isn't quite exactly right.

Today this is obviously completely insane, but by then the problem is backwards compatibility.

<comment><USER7> Just some specific dates.

Microsoft Office was released in 1989 [1], and came out on the Mac before it was ported to Windows.

UTF-8 was designed in 1992, on a placemat [2]. It has been dominant on the web [3] since 2009, which seems like ages ago now, but is really quite recent.

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

[2] [https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/utf-8-history.txt](https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/utf-8-history.txt)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#/media/File:Utf8webgrowt...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#/media/File:Utf8webgrowth.svg)

<comment><USER8> That's a misleading date for UTF-dominance -- as the link notes, it's counting things as ASCII if they only have ASCII characters, no matter what the encoding was specified as, and ASCII is a subset of UTF-8.

I'd put UTF-8's real prominence with the popularity of XML (where it was the default encoding). That was specified in 1998, and ubiquitous within a few years. Nobody at the height of XML would have tried doing a non-UTF design for anything.

<comment><USER9> XML is almost UTF-8, but some characters were disallowed in XML 1.0, and it wasn't fixed until later. This still causes bugs where I work, here in 2019.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> By R should be in the title?

<comment><USER11> Where would the spoiler alert go if it's in the title?</comment></comment>


Memory consistency made simple(ish) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.feabhas.com/2016/07/memory-consistency-made-simpleish/ <comment><USER2> If this just got you excited, consider reading Bartosz Milewski's post [0] about it. It's not too hard to understand, but it helps if you understand everything in the OP's posted blog.

[0]: [https://bartoszmilewski.com/2008/12/01/c-atomics-and- memory-...](https://bartoszmilewski.com/2008/12/01/c-atomics-and-memory- ordering/)

</comment><comment><USER3> So... C++ got a memory model, like Java 5? How did they manage without one?

<comment><USER4> The only real issue was portability. On any given system you could do that already before C++11. Now C++ standard hides those implementation details below unified abstraction.

If interested check this SO answer. [http://stackoverflow.com/a/6319356](http://stackoverflow.com/a/6319356)

<comment><USER5> Thank you for the link. There is a couple of very nice answers.</comment></comment></comment>


The Spikerbox: First remove a leg from a cockroach, then visualize the signals - <AUTHOR> http://backyardbrains.com/Spikerbox.aspx

<comment><AUTHOR> I am speechless! Now that I read the description I understand that I've always wanted one of these. At $100, they're not that expensive either. The possibilities are endless. Of course they limited it to cockroach legs euphemistically, but no reason not to use this for your next brain-computer interface.</comment>


Researchers achieve 'holy grail' of battery design: A stable lithium anode - <AUTHOR> http://phys.org/news/2014-07-holy-grail-battery-stable-lithium.html <comment><USER2> Sure, this increases power density and lowers weight drastically... but the article doesn't mention if it also increases the number of recharge cycles it can survive. If it does, we have a serious winner.</comment>


The greatest Demos/screencasts you've seen - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> This one has actually been around for a while, but is still the coolest demo I've seen in years.

<http://youtube.com/watch?v=1ftJhDBZqss>

<comment><USER3> Wow, just wow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's easy: Doug Engelbart's "Mother of all demos"

<http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8734787622017763097>

<comment><USER5> Huh. I just read about this, after following the track about "Magic Ink" to look for where the idea of GUIs came from. A lot of what's in Engelbart's demo looks surprisingly modern. Considering that it's been about 40-50 years, that's pretty amazing.

<comment><USER4> Absolutely! I'm amazed at how far ahead this man was thinking... slap some nice UI on top of his workflow and you've got yourself an amazing system that can run circles around modern stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey all, was wondering about the greatest screencasts/demos you've seen recently. Trying to get in touch with interesting startups with demos for an app we're building. Also if you have an online demo or want to help me find people with cool demos email me, appreciate the help: sumon [at] zintilla [dot] com

<comment><USER6> This one is easy for me: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1u3ekzwnYxw>

The screencast for Scrybe was truly amazing. Cnet described as the "Demo of the Gods."

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I made this screencast for Songbird: <http://songbirdnest.com/screencast>

I thought it was pretty decent. I tried to make it fast and to-the-point and respectful of the viewer's time.

<comment><USER8> Great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I thought Steve Jobs's NeXT demo from 1992-1993 was pretty impressive. <http://youtube.com/watch?v=j02b8Fuz73A>

It certainly would have seemed space-age in 1992.</comment>


It used to be a star.  Now it's a 10 billion trillion trillion carat diamond. - <AUTHOR> http://us1.campaign-archive2.com/?u=2889002ad89d45ca21f50ba46&id=08699f34de

<comment><USER3> The linked article seems to refer to an incorrect star. The correct one (which is also named in the BBC article linked from this article) is BPM 37093: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BPM_37093>

All in all, the linked article seems like a direct restatement of the BBC article (with errors added), so I recommend you read the BBC article directly: <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3492919.stm>

</comment><comment><USER4> It seems the universe wants me to know this. _Immediately_ upon loading the page, the coffee house I'm in decided to start playing "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds".

</comment><comment><USER5> And people say that colonizing space is a waste of money. I bet this one star would pay for the ship to get there!

<comment><USER6> There is actually a valid argument that investing in planetary / stellar exploration and exploitation is a net win for humanity. The 3He on the moon is probably the closest example, followed by the hydrocarbons in Titan's atmosphere. However there is the 'egg' problem of a viable industrial base off planet. I suspect that colonizing the moon has at least 'bonus value' associated with 3He supplies in the Chinese moon plans.

<comment><USER7> Is the Moon that good of a source for 3He? Wikipedia doesn't suggest that - <USER2> says that the Moon is thought to have 0,01 to 0.05 ppm on surface while natural gases contain up to 7% of normal helium with some of it in 3He form and the atmosphere itself contains 1.38ppm</comment></comment></comment>


Yak Shaving – Swift Edition - <AUTHOR> https://tirania.org/blog/archive/2020/Mar-24.html <comment><USER2> > What won my heart is just how simple it is to import C code into Swift to > bring the type definitions from a header file, and call into the C code > transparently from Swift. This really is a gift of the gods to humankind.

If you like creating wrappers around C libraries, perhaps this is the most overlooked feature in Swift, called the 'ClangImporter'. Compared with Rust's bindgen, bindgen looks like a more complicated bindings generator even at the C level with you tweaking the options and other knobs to 'get it right' for your specific wrapper project.

This is before you even start to write a higher-level and more idiomatic wrapper and ClangInporter binds the C part to generate Swift functions for you by default. Similarly, Zig also has this too which is "@cImport" with the path to the header file as the input IIRC.

It also looks like Swift is getting C++ interop for this too. [0]

[0] [https://forums.swift.org/t/manifesto-interoperability- betwee...](https://forums.swift.org/t/manifesto-interoperability-between- swift-and-c/33874)

</comment><comment><USER3> Miguel taking an interest in Swift is interesting on its own!

<comment><USER4> Well ... He and Xamarin had to due to the iOS ecosystem and the language/library bindings they have to do there for .NET/C#/F# usage.

But aside of that, I think Migual appreciates good language design on high level languages. His original pitch for Mono for usage in GNOME was about productivity I guess not about .NET fandom. And Swift as a productivity language to replace Objective-C is surely an interest for him.

Event as a .NET fanboy (like me) you have to look what other languages are doing. So much good stuff out there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5>
       > Yet, this prevents a bug where the base constructor can
       > call a virtual method that you override, and might not
       > be ready to handle. So eventually I just learned to
       > embrace and love this capability.

But this merely means that sub-classes cannot call functions (virtual or not) of their base class, since the base class is not yet initialized. It's not clear it is a net benefit. I have called base-class non-virtual functions a few times in the past, so this is not purely theoretical.

The correct solution would be for a language to have two-phase initialization. In the first phase you cannot call virtual functions, it would be a compile- time error. In the second phase, you can, as everything has been initialized already.

(You can have a poor-man version of this with static create() or make() functions and private constructors in C++ and similar languages.)

<comment><USER6>
      // This is valid swift:
      class MyClass: MyBaseClass {
         let someVar: Int
         init() {
             // initialize member vars
             self.someVar = 99
             // call base constructor
             super.init()
             // we are now completely initialized
             self.anyFunction()
         }
      }

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looking forward to the text-based UI framework inspired by SwiftUI alluded to at the end of the post.

Python's Urwid is fun to play with but I find it difficult to compose the interface I have in mind. Node's Blessed looks like a great improvement, and React-Blessed brings the declarative, state-driven model to the terminal. But I really prefer to not write system utilities in JavaScript.

Unfortunately Swift's cross-platform support leaves some to be desired, which probably leads me back to Urwid.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm curious how the ergonomics of String handling were for this task. Swift's String does extremely well to enforce correctness, and in isolation it's really nice to use, but I've found it difficult to work with APIs that couldn't care less about grapheme clusters or encodings. Or perhaps terminals are more Unicode-aware than I thought they were?

<comment><USER9> Terminals are definitely Unicode-aware. Grapheme clusters are very important to get right because the terminal emulator must be in sync with the app running inside it about where the cursor is located. Basically, this means you have to deal with combining marks properly, including Emoji stuff.

Very few terminal emulators go as far as attempting BiDi support. Egmont Koblinger has done some amazing work speccing this out and implementing it in VTE. More here: [https://terminal- wg.pages.freedesktop.org/bidi/](https://terminal- wg.pages.freedesktop.org/bidi/)

Some day I'd like to support this in iTerm2, but it's a breathtakingly large amount of work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does swift have a cycle collector? With the whole dance in the language manual of "unowned" and "weak" references, I couldn't figure out if the cycle detection (a) happens at all if all references are strong, and (b) happens deterministically if all references are unowned.</comment>


The Bad Board Member - <AUTHOR> http://steveblank.com/2011/01/19/the-bad-board-member/ <comment><USER2> This article is ostensibly about a bad board member, but in reality it is about a bad board. A bad board member is only one director out of many, and cannot, on his own, do much more than disrupt meetings. A good board will shut up a bad board member and not allow him to lead them astray. A bad board allows the bad board member to run amok and follows him there. A founder must manage the board and assume there will always be a rotten egg in the bunch. Herding cats isn't easy, but it must be done.

<comment><USER3> But my experience is that groups tend to follow the person who is loudest, not the person who is best qualified to lead them. It is very much possible for one rotten egg to ruin the whole batch.

I know nothing about managing a board, but how does one deal with this aside from being the loudest blowhard on the board?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> While I love Steve's blog, he doesn't share what advice he gave his former student. Mine would be this:

I don't know what the power structure and equity structure is in the organization, so I don't know how vulnerable your job and your ownership in your company is. But in general boards can't simply fire people without cause. I would strongly suggest that you start by documenting absolutely everything. Make sure all meetings are minuted and keep your own copies of those minutes. If the bad board member says something to you outside a meeting that has some bearing on your relationship or the company, find an excuse to get him to email it to you. You can even record phone calls in many states with only one party privy to the fact the call is being recorded. (IIRC California is not one of these states).

Secondly, get chatting to a great corporate attorney. Email me if you need a Seattle reference. You need to get a deep understanding of how vulnerable you are and what levers you have to protect yourself and your business. Then (and I say this again) keep records of everything in the context of knowing what will help your situation.

This quote suggests that you are kicking ass at your business:

"We went through the status of the company, and at least from the outside it sounded good. In fact it sounded great: three major versions of the product shipped, multiple iterations and a few pivots under their belt, revenue was growing even faster than plan."

The key here is "...even faster than plan.". You and the board agreed to a plan and you over-delivered. It's important that you document your own performance - get hard evidence of the success story above.

Other than that, keep doing the great job that you clearly are doing and save the war chest you're accumulating for the crunch if it ever comes.

</comment><comment><USER5> _"while a VC can remove a founder who misbehaves, there is no corresponding recourse when a VC is the source of the problem."_

Yes, there is. A board is decided upon by shareholders. There may be shareholder agreements (linked to term sheets etc) that grant Board membership or nomination powers to a minor shareholder, like a VC, but the power is retained at the Shareholder level.

The Shareholders nominate the Board. The Board instructs the CEO. If the CEO is strong and/or a Shareholder, this often makes alignment between those three roles easier, but of course it doesn't prevent the possibility of a situation like the OP describes. Still, claiming there's no recourse for a bad board member or VC is not accurate.

And founders don't forget - funding is always an option, with risks and rewards.

</comment><comment><USER6> Not a very useful article by Steve Blank standards... It's missing the critical parts about "What I did when this happened to me" and "What you should do if this is happening to you", as well as "What you should do to try to avoid this".

<comment><USER7> It seems that Steve's aim was to raise awareness to the problem so other VC start thinking about it.

<comment><USER8> You mean people should develop their own problem solving skills instead of merely copy/pasting solutions from sites on the internet? Preposterous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> At least there are sites like <http://www.thefunded.com/> that lets you rate VCs.

<comment><USER10> The VC could of been great, but at least in this article was too busy to take a board seat so just put someone else in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Moral of this story: get a commitment from the VC team member you want to be on your board - don't get it shuffled off to someone else on their team who is just looking to prove what a hardass they are.

Or don't give up that board seat, but that's pretty much not viable once you take VC.

</comment><comment><USER12> Once you have board they're your boss. Remember those? Their most distinguishing feature is they can fire you much, much easier than you can fire them. Bob Dylan wrote a song about this. Upvotes for the correct title...

As for the other board members, they're not looking for these kinds of precedents to get set.

</comment><comment><USER13> > He [founder] said that Bob [board member] described him to others on the > board as the "crazy aunt you hide in the closet when the guests come."

Outrageous. This is why I hope I never have to take VC.

<comment><USER14> I think I've been described in a similar way, so the bright side is apparently VC funds crazy aunt types.</comment></comment>


GameStop's training video on speaking to women remains ridiculous - <AUTHOR> http://www.polygon.com/2015/2/12/8026313/gamestop-training-relic <comment><USER2> Not the best headline there .... at least the way I read it, the headline implies that their advice is currently ridiculous. The article is about an old video.</comment>


Windows $NEXT_VERSION will floor all comers - <AUTHOR> http://notnews.today.com/2008/09/16/windows-next_version-will-floor-all-comers/

<comment><USER2> It looks like someone got a hold of the PR template Microsoft sends out to the "journalists" with the beta software.</comment>


Swift Language Running on Raspberry Pi - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szWSM4WAn2c <comment><USER2> Any reason why this would not work?</comment>


Ask HN: Best solution for family remote support - <AUTHOR> My parents need my help on managing their computer constantly. I'm their IT guy.
The problem is we live in different countries.
There used to be an app called crossloop, similar to chrome remote desktop. Very easy to use.
Crossloop was acquired by another company and service was shut down.
Chrome remote desktop is a close replacement, we have used it for a while. but guiding my parents on the phone to go into chrome store and install it is already a painful process.
it also has many problems, for example, we have seen unmatched protocol version, unable to obtain access code.
remote support is too difficult for us. Is there any good solution?
Otherwise, this could be a good saas project I can do.
It's more difficult on the phone, I don't know if there is any remote support software for the phone. <comment><USER2> Have you considered the idea of just running standard VNC? I mean using some difficult solution one last time to get remote access, then configuring eg TigerVNC on the remote machine.

There are many different dynamic DNS services you can use to keep a hostname pointing at the right place; freedns.afraid.org is excellent.

There are a metric truckload of free and paid VNC apps for literally every mobile OS too.

If you wanted to go one step further, you could also look into Intel AMT, which provides hardware/BIOS-level VNC on (to keep it simple) pretty much all Core i5/i7 processors, but requires a Windows machine on the local LAN (for security) to run the proprietary app that establishes the connection. Random link with more info: [http://blog.michael.kuron-germany.de/2011/10/using- intel-amt...](http://blog.michael.kuron-germany.de/2011/10/using-intel-amts- vnc-server/)

As a headsup, remote desktop as SaaS immediately means Really Niiiiice™ bandwidth costs since you need to route data through PoPs that are as close to the middle of both ends as possible - and there's also the fact that routing between two of your own PoPs might be the fastest transport.

<comment><AUTHOR> This needs to be very easy to setup.

regarding bandwidth, I would use webrtc or other p2p options.

<comment><USER2> I'm going to go with an assumption that you're not familiar with VNC. If you are, my apologies; please let me know.

First of all, VNC servers are extremely _fast_ to set up deterministically, but I will concede that the server GUIs do suffer from "blury grid of knobs and switches" syndrome, so it'd be something you'd be doing once you had remote access via some other option (eg, GotoMyPC). (And of course you can test the VNC connection while the other remote system is still running.)

The only other bit of config required is doing the necessary port forwarding on your parents' router and/or modem. (I would recommend using a nonstandard port, and also using a port outside the range nmap uses, for added security. :P)

Once the VNC server is installed and the router configured, the setup will be rock solid unless the modem(&/+)router fail[s]; the dyndns setup glitches; or Windows itself loses it badly (for example with a virus), but AMT can cover that, which was why I suggested that solution.

FWIW, when I move out I fully expect I'll be doing GUI remote support via a combination of TigerVNC and AMT depending on what the situation calls for (I expect most things will be solveable via SSH, since everything uses Linux here, and I haven't needed to configure any VMs yet).

Finally, VNC predates the idea of things _not_ being peer-to-peer. The server runs on the destination machine. Everything is configured manually by you so there's nothing that will suddenly "go down" one day. I cannot recommend enough that you try this.

Remember that you can figure it all out locally if you have two machines available.

I'm happy to provide further info/pointers if you like!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I used Copilot a few times. It used to be free on weekends, but I'm not sure if that option is still available. [https://www.copilot.com/](https://www.copilot.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, this looks like crossloop</comment></comment>


How scientific group-think forms and grows - <AUTHOR> http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=2593

<comment><USER2> A related view is Aubrey de Grey's triangular logjam model of the state of aging research:

[http://www.longevitymeme.org/articles/viewarticle.cfm?articl...](http://www.longevitymeme.org/articles/viewarticle.cfm?article_id=19)</comment>


Gigwalk Product Design: The Power of Simplicity - <AUTHOR> http://perceptive.ly/post/44550619050/gigwalk-product-design-the-power-of-simplicty

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the kind words Nick, we take a lot of pride in the design of our site and our product. -email@example.com</comment>


Apple, Google, Microsoft Avoid Taxes By Keeping Billions In Profits Offshore - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/20/microsoft-taxes-profits-offshore_n_1901398.html <comment><USER2> Taxes don't have to be this complicated and loophole filled. Almost any scheme you can think of would be better. A flat tax would be fine and save us so much grief.

<comment><USER3> Since you likely don't mean a true flat rate tax (do you allow deductions and exemptions? is payroll tax factored in? and a flat tax ignores some fixed lower costs, like food, housing, and heat), then I don't see a flat tax as being any more simpler or less grief-ful than, say, a mildly progressive tax.

As for "don't have to be this complicated", I completely agree. Where I live now, the government does your taxes for you, sends you the paperwork, which you can verify, fix if incorrect, sign, and send in.

I think this doesn't happen in the US because 1) companies make money with having loopholes, so they push for loopholes, 2) politicians fund their campaigns with said money, 3) tax preparation companies would lose money, so they would also be against this scheme, and 4) various people are morally opposed to both a well-run government and taxes, so would rather throw the baby out with the bathwater than work on an improved system.

<comment><USER2> I'm not a anarchist, but I am a libertarian of sorts, so I also want small government, limited social engineering, and limited central planning. I don't care if it is flat or mildly progressive if it's simple to implement. There certainly are reasons others want to keep things status quo, as you pointed out. There is just so much wasted energy around taxes it drives me crazy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Microsoft has clearly stated that the Tax laws are outdated and needs to be improved. Till, then major corporations will keep taking advantage of its loophole.

</comment><comment><USER5> Another reason for govt to reduce tax and bring all the money into the country</comment>


Grub security fix destroys millions of AWS Ubuntu instances - <AUTHOR> If you haven't rebooted yet...don't. <comment><USER2> Details? References?

Here are docs on recovery (updated Feb, 2020) but the process sucks: [https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge- center/rever...](https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge- center/revert-stable-kernel-ec2-reboot/)

</comment><comment><USER3> This should be a pinned story for one week.</comment>


Ask HN: Visiting SF. Can I learn about internship opportunities at your company? - <AUTHOR>

Hi.
I will be visiting SF from the south in two weeks. I would like to visit a couple small-medium companies in the area, and learn about possible internship opportunities for the Fall 2013 or Spring 2014 semesters. I love coding, and I will have done 3 internships including one at Amazon by the end of the summer.
I would really appreciate if you could refer me to your company or a company in the area. Visit, grab some coffee, or get steak? I can email you my resume.
I have a lot of experience in front-end web development, and some Android development. I also participate in a lot of programming competitions (ACM-ICPC, Facebook Hacker Cup, Google Code Jam)
Thanks, bekt17[at]gmail.com <comment><USER2> Can you tell everyone a little more about yourself? It might help in getting some leads. Might want to include a fb/tw/gh link as well. Let me know if I can help. I'm @dpg on twitter or you can reach me at email@example.com</comment>


Paypal Trying to Ride the Bitcoin Wave? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bitcoinmoney.com/post/7542341527/paypal-digital-currency-challenge

<comment><USER2> Bitcoin has a wave? Really?

</comment><comment><USER3> "Hijack"?

I believe it's pretty intelligent for PayPal to integrate new potential currency exchange models into its continuum/plans. "Hijack" implies something stolen, which seems to me an incendiary overstatement of their actions here.

Just a thought.

<comment><USER4> Judging from the article title, the name of the publication, and the posters new username, they aren't exactly a disinterested party. Shrillness can be expected from True Believers, IME.

<comment><AUTHOR> There will be bias against PayPal from anyone but PayPal I would argue.

However just sticking with that article, the interest as far as social media and competing technologies is there I believe, and the hacker news people can see through that site's very obvious bias and see the numbers and information presented.

Edited title anyways, I was just reusing from other sites, agreed that could have been submitted better initially, apologies.

<comment><USER3> Agreed, and I hope I didn't come off harshly- no apologies required!</comment></comment></comment></comment>