Postman delivers 'somewhere in Sheffield' parcel - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-52395609 <comment><USER3> There used to be a printed magazine called "Spy" in the 80s and 90s that did various pranks and experiments with the U.S. mail. One of them involved sending mail to people across the country with missing elements like zip codes, street names, and states and seeing if it arrived. I remember that mail with just a name and zip code tended to get to its destination, even if the street was not included.

Other Spy pranks included sending out bogus catalogues to freshmen congressmen to see who would order coffee cups and T-shirts with ridiculous government- themed slogans, and the famous expose of which billionaires would go through the trouble of cashing progressively tinier checks ("Who is America's cheapest Zillionaire?").

[https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/08/trump-files- spy...](https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/08/trump-files-spy-magazine- prank/)

<comment><USER4> > mail with just a name and zip code tended to get to its destination

Is that unexpected? In Britain a (real but random) address like

      36
      B30 1QR

is sufficient. This format is most useful for a return address. Adding the street name would be helpful to the postman.

Addresses that receive a lot of post usually have their own postcode. "SW1A 2AA" is a minimum complete address for a letter to the Prime Minister's office (10 Downing Street).

<comment><USER5> I'm aware that "house number + postcode" is often sufficient to uniquely identify a property -- it works for my house, for example -- but I've wondered if this is always the case. When I enter a postcode into my satnav, it sometimes offers a choice of several street names, which seems to imply there might be duplicate house numbers within the single postcode. But I've never tried to confirm this -- do you know?

<comment><USER4> By "number" I meant "name or number", since some buildings don't have a number. A flat number is obviously also necessary if applicable.

A previous discussion on this, in 2013, tried to give some examples. None of them seem to break the rule, since "Pleasant Cottage" and so on are building names. If there's a counterexample, Wikipedia should be updated.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5625027](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5625027)

<comment><USER6> In the US, that's actually kinda surprising to me. Even in the suburb where I grew up, where there's no obvious overall grid system and instead the streets tend to meander around, parallel streets in the same neighborhood tended to share a lot of numbers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> An item from China got a wrong postal code and was shipped to Northern Ontario by accident. We got a phone call from a nice lady from a very rural post office saying that they think there's a mistake, our package is targeted to a long closed quarry.

We confirmed it was a mistake but that the package was literally a dollar of baby safety latches and not to bother. Her response was an eager, "no! This is the most exciting part of my week!"

<comment><USER8> Also the volume of material to be delivered is phenomenal. There's a completely mercenary reason to try to deliver everything you can - <USER2> things costs money and you aren't in the storage business.

This is why I don't pay merchants for any sort of expedited delivery. I live in a major port city. Any self-respecting delivery business has a depot in this city - some have several, which means any products destined for me aren't going via the far end of the country, or to a city I've never visited, they are definitely coming here ASAP.

And once they are in that depot they are taking up space that the company pays for. The sooner my package is on a truck and delivered, the less it cost to store it, and the more profit they keep. Now, if I paid for the most expedited delivery, perhaps my package would make it onto the very first truck and I'd be the first stop and I'd be woken by an anxious delivery worker buzzing me. If I ever need something for 0800 the next day I'll keep that in mind. But if I'm a little bit more patient the next truck, or the one after, will have some space and my package goes in that truck. Maybe if I'm unlucky the product arrives at midday. Good enough.

<comment><USER9> There's another reason for postal services to go the proverbial extra mile: they are absolutely in the trust business.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, I once had a package go missing in a postal hub that was known for that (as in multiple people arrested multiple times) and it kinda put me off wanting to use USPS for a while after that. The trust is super important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Back in 1995, my buddy and I were on our post-graduation Great America National Parks trip (17 of them, and 7000 miles of driving, in 3 weeks.)

We sent a whole bunch of postcards to the home front in Belgium.

One of them was sent to a friend who lived with his parents at a farm in Schepdaal, a tiny hamlet close to Brussels.

The address was:

John Smith

Dear postman, we don't know the address but it's a farm at the end of the road somewhere.

Schepdaal

Belgium

Of course it arrived.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm still very much a pen & paper kind of person; if there's something worth communicating, I prefer to break out the fountain pen and the writing paper. I've got a drawer full of envelopes and stamps and I keep resupplying. I'm also one of the few people who still sends (sent) postcards when travelling (travelled) —all duly adjusted for the current state of affairs, of course— mainly because sending a tangible item with a postmark and perhaps the GPS coordinates of where you're sending from is now a novelty.

Anyway, I have to say, my experience with flawed or incomplete addresses has been very disappointing. Many people probably just pick up the unsolicited commercial mail that drops into their inboxes in industrial quantities and just discard it _en masse_ , probably with that tiny proportion of actual 'valuable' material inside.

The postal system really is quite amazing. We tend to think of it as archaic but in reality it's an enormously powerful, flexible, and efficient logistics system that spans the planet. What never ceases to boggle my mind is how it comes down to _people_ : when envelops go through the sorting facility, those that are hard to parse with OCR are read by people (and it depends on the legibility of your handwriting!), that last mile depends on a person, and again, in this case, an anomaly was (successfully) managed by a person. It's all very touching.

<comment><USER13> A lot of the angst against the post office is fueled by various political motivations. It's one of the few remaining federal-ish organizations governed by merit based civil service, which is the root of a lot of objections in certain quarters. Exams don't really care who you are or what you look like.

You also have other entities with their eyes on potentially lucrative contracts for first class mail and other mandated carve outs like delivery to Alaska. Similarly to how certain Senators from Pennsylvania are always concerned about the National Weather Service giving away data that Accuweather would like to sell, shippers would love to 10x the cost of delivering mail.

<comment><USER14> I wonder how much less wasted paper I would get if the cost went up 10x... I would hazard a guess that 95-98% of my mail is spam, and usually not for local businesses.

<comment> dan-robertson The issue is that spammers will just have someone who is not a post officer deliver their spam.

There was a similar method for email spam, hashcash where you needed to include some string derived from the message and recipient and some random characters you choose such that it will gag to some number with some amount of 0s at the start. Like bitcoin, the idea was that the cost of computing all the hashes would be prohibitive for mass spamming. It never caught on and I guess webmail would have been more expensive to set up if it had.

A system I would like would be one where there is a mechanism to return post if you don't want it (rather than if it was sent to the wrong address) and the sender must cover the cost of recycling the material and some extra fee to make them not want their post to be unwanted. This would have to apply regardless of how the post was delivered.

<comment><USER15> If you live in a major city, you probably already get gobs of that friggin spam rubber-banded to your front door knob anyway. I find it in my mailbox, on my doorknob, on my door step, sometimes on the windshield wiper of my jeep.

Every now and then you'll find a super ambitious realtor or whatever that fedex overnights you something too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I had an uncle who was famous in our family for his desire to test various systems. It was only a matter of time before he decided he had to test the postal service.

He picked up a postcard, wrote his initials and his last name and his zip code, and dropped it off at a mail box when he was traveling.

The postcard found it's way to his house in Bangalore, India in the 1990s (if I recall correctly).

<comment><USER17> Delivering to Bangalore might be easier though. In a lot of places in Rural India, house numbers simply do not exist, and addresses are of the form

Mr. ABCD S/O Mr, XYZ, Village <Village_Name>, postal code, city, state

The Village_Name part encompasses a very large area. The good thing is people in rural areas know a lot of people by name, so asking a small number of people for Mr. ABCD S/O Mr, XYZ turns out to be sufficient. But I often wonder how challenging it is to deliver stuff with so much ambiguity.

<comment><USER18> [https://www.worldpress.org/Americas/592.cfm](https://www.worldpress.org/Americas/592.cfm) claims _"From where the Chinese restaurant used to be, two blocks down, half a block toward the lake, next door to the house where the yellow car is parked, Managua, Nicaragua."_ was a valid address at some time, and claims that works, in Nicaragua.

Looking at Apple or Google Maps, it seems at least the major streets do have names (¿nowadays?), though.

(Via [https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers- believe-a...](https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe- about-addresses/))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I feel like being a postman is a pretty sucky job nowadays (it's essentially the same time-pressured "throw the parcel at the door" service that FedEx and UPS insist on, but for the government.)

But there's a lot of _potential_ for it to be a good, rewarding job full of community-building. And it used to be! Postal workers used to provide all sorts of informal, impromptu community services, since they were one of the few people in a town that would visit everyone in town, or in an area of town; and so one of the few people in town who would know literally everybody. Postal workers were asked to check up on people no one had seen in a while; asked to escort people's children to their relative's house (which tabloids called "mailing your children"); and many other "little" services that nowadays have no real locus-of-responsibility on which to fall.

Maybe the problem is that there's more mail to be delivered than there are postal workers to deliver it; and we can't afford, through our taxes, the number of postal workers that would actually be required to deliver all the mail while _also_ going above-and-beyond in all these other ways.

I wonder whether, in a world with Universal Basic Income, being a postal worker would be seen as a vocation, like being a priest. Not something you do for money; rather, something you do because you like the effect it has on your community, and want to be a part of that effect. I have a feeling that there'd be a lot more stories like this in such a world.

<comment><USER20> A friend used to deliver for usps, it's way less pressured than UPS/FedEx. My understanding is they were given a block of paid time to deliver mail for a physical area, but no real expectation on total time taken. So you could get your route done in whatever duration you please and benefit accordingly. An interesting comparison can be made from my front window: USPS truck parks in front of my house, postman talks on phone for 10-15 mins, finally gets out, walks the residential neighborhood delivering mail all the while talking on phone, eventually returns to truck dicks around and leaves to next waypoint. UPS guy drives up, almost screeching to a halt, hops out, typically jogs up front walk with package, jogs back and takes off. Those guys are under a lot of pressure to deliver. I know the USPS guy who delivers to work office downtown, he's super chill and pretty chatty (zero hurry). IOW, I think being a USPS delivery guy is still a rewarding, community focused job if you have the personality to handle the routine and like to get your steps in. Nobody's looking over your shoulder, it's Union, and with seniority you can choose your routes.

<comment><USER15> At the same time, I get annoyed at people getting so offended over the idea. Why should everyone have to work like the UPS guy? It sounds like the UPS driver's job is unsustainable and will either lead to an accident or injury at some point.

I don't know why everything has to be run down to the wire in the name of minimizing cost and maximizing profit.

<comment><USER19> > I don't know why everything has to be run down to the wire in the name of > minimizing cost and maximizing profit.

There's no real "why" to it. It's not like any individual in a corporation chooses to run the corporation that way. It's rather an emergent effect of how corporations are legally structured (= shareholders electing/firing directors from the board based on quarterly results.) Directors are incentivized to pursue short-term profits during their tenure (such as by overworking employees), to enable them to enjoy the spoils of their positions for as long as possible.

A corporation can be "designed" intentionally to do something other than this (by e.g. choosing to create a benefit corporation; or even just by the founder retaining majority ownership and thus effectively "being" the board) but if you don't explicitly make a choice, being driven by quarterly profitability is what you get.

<comment><USER20> No - it's a natural product of competition, the pressure of which exists regardless of your legal structure. A sole proprietor running a courier service will need to differentiate himself relative to the other courier services, and the potential customers of such services place immense value on timeliness. Even if the courier were a non-profit, for it to be selected in favor of a competing service it would need to choose the basis upon which it wanted to compete and excel at it. USPS is sufficient for many things (e.g. 70% junk mail), but it's not a market competitor. Where it matters, there's a need to differentiate to survive. When our business needs something overnighted fast and reliably, it's always a private carrier for a reason that doesn't involve its legal structure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> globular-toast When I was a child I wrote a letter addressed to "Wallace and Gromit Ltd" and a few weeks later I got a reply from Aardman Animations. I didn't think much of it as a child but someone clearly did a bit of manual work to get that to the right destination.

<comment><USER21> Where do all of the letters mailed to "Santa Clause, North Pole" get sent?

<comment><USER22> In the US, at least, a lot of them get forwarded the town of North Pole, Alaska (postal code 99705).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Pole,_Alaska#In_popular_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Pole,_Alaska#In_popular_culture)

<comment> kube-system Maybe if you specifically address it there, but I think the USPS has a more formalized process to handle those in Anchorage now:

[https://about.usps.com/holidaynews/letters-from- santa.htm](https://about.usps.com/holidaynews/letters-from-santa.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The Wikipedia page for Mojibake [0] used to have this image: [https://soup.lithen.de/post/286150021/An-image-of-a-post- env...](https://soup.lithen.de/post/286150021/An-image-of-a-post-envelope- with) (sorry, one has to click "ignore the SSL security issue"), someone got a Russian address to post a package to, but their email program decoded it using the wrong charset. The Russian post managed to re-encode the address anyway.

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

</comment><comment><USER24> My grandmother once sent a letter to my parents, where they lived at the time in Southland, a district of New Zealand. Unfortunately, Granny's writing was never the clearest, and the letter was directed ~20,000km out of its way to _Scotland_ , despite having insufficient stamps. The posties in Scotland were unable to deliver it, unsurprisingly, but figured out the mistake and sent it ~20,000km back again, and it eventually reached my parents.

</comment><comment><USER25> Postal Experiments:

[https://www.improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume6/v6i4/p...](https://www.improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume6/v6i4/postal-6-4.php)

</comment><comment><USER26> Reminds me of the famous case of a letter addressed solely with a drawing of Alfred E. Neuman being successfully delivered to the offices of Mad Magazine!

<comment><USER27> These sorts of things were once common.

Fans would send letters to Rip Torn by simply putting a little tear in the envelope.

Chicago had a Sherman Hotel where the Thompson Center is now. People from the south refused to write the name "Sherman," so the post office got used to delivering letters addressed to things like "That hotel whose name must not be written, Chicago."

Large post offices had entire departments of people to decode addresses back then. Today the letter either gets bounced, or sent to the dead letter office.

<comment><USER28> > Large post offices had entire departments of people to decode addresses back > then. Today the letter either gets bounced, or sent to the dead letter > office.

The costs of automation. Instead of communicating with a human who can be flexible enough to joke with, you communicate with a machine you have to rigidly and humorlessly conform to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I worked as a mailman last year and a lot of packages from China had incomplete addresses -- but they all had mobile phone numbers. So a I'd send a picture of the package to the number explaining the situation and asking for the rest of the address.

<comment> em-bee chinese package delivery companies generally won't accept a package for sending without a phone number. on delivery the number is used to call the recipient for personal handover. i am not happy about the privacy implications but it does help to make sure that the package arrives

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> A few years ago, I placed an order from a small company on the east coast, to be shipped via USPS parcel post (ie, the cheapest and slowest option possible, though the company does pay the extra for tracking). In a rush, I fat-fingered the zip code. To compound the error, after submitting the order, their shipping software helpfully "fixed" the bad zip code by adjusting the city and state to match.

The next day, when they sent the shipping confirmation and tracking email, I saw the error. Of course, contacting them was too late; they did ask that I give the post office time to sort it out but were happy to send another one if it was time critical. I opted to wait as the initial mistake was mine, not theirs.

The package arrived a day later than expected, having gone to the small town in the wrong state, been kicked back as "no such address", sent to some big USPS facility in Chicago where they apparently figured out where it should go, manually crossed out the bad city/state/zip and wrote a correct one in and then came straight to me via the local post office, skipping the nearby sorting center that most packages go through.

I don't know how they pulled that one off, especially in a pre-christmas shipping glut, and without the package ever having had the correct address on it until someone working for the postal service figured it out and fixed it. Having a unique name probably helps, as does having a fairly unique street address, but I'm still impressed it didn't just get tossed into the dead- letter pile.

Living in the middle of the country, the post office's abilities are almost magic. Need to send a letter anywhere in the US? Two or three days, for a few cents (no idea what it costs now, I bought a few rolls of "forever" stamps at 40 cents apiece). Need to ship a package? USPS is often cheaper than UPS ground, nearly always cheaper than FedEx ground, and faster than either of them at still only two or three days. Same goes for receiving mail or packages.

Quality of service of all three, I recognize, varies with location and people involved. Around here though, it is damn hard to beat the post office.

<comment><USER31> This reminds me of a similar experience I had recently, except with a different outcome. A friend of mine in Chicago mailed a package to me in Minnesota, but the post office accidentally entered his address instead of my address on the shipping label (with my name).

So the package had my correct address handwritten on it, with the printed shipping label bearing his address as both the return address and the delivery address.

Should have been easy enough to figure out, but it was delayed for almost three weeks while they figured out what to do with it.

Just proves your point about QoS really varying depending on the people/locations involved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I once had a UPS driver deliver a package to me where my entire name and address were so badly mangled that I had no idea how he did it. It was almost random, looked like a base64 encoding, but wasn't. But he got it in one try.

It was about the same size as a few other recent deliveries I'd had, so maybe that explained it. But I decided it was UPS ESP.

<comment><USER19> Perhaps the UPS logistics backend was fed a photo of the recipient address, and did a likelihood analysis of what the text in the image could potentially be OCRed to, given the places the sender usually sends stuff, the mass+volume of the box, the content-type customs declaration (if any), etc.; and it ranked your address as the first one to try.

Is that within the current state of the art—metadata-assisted OCR like that?

<comment><USER33> Who knows. I recently ordered a 12 foot long rug. It got delivered by fedex to a lady across town. Neither the address nor the lady had anything to do with me. Wasn't like a one letter off thing.

Called fedex and they were like that's weird. Let me call the driver. Like 4 days later the driver went to the ladies house, got it back, and brought it to me.

<comment><USER34> I have a PO box in Poulsbo, WA, 98370.

I received something addressed to the box with the same number in Cleveland, TN, 37320. That's off by 2600 miles.

The address was a printed label, not some badly scrawled barely legible handwritten mess, and so poor handwriting recognition does not explain it.

<comment><USER35> I think most postal routing does something akin to (initial read) -> (write machine readable code) -> (internal mapping of code to location) -> (physical routing).

And if it falls off the fast-path, remote human transcription is used at the origination tagging step.

Expect even with error-tolerant encoding, sometimes the codes themselves get corrupted (smudged, misread, etc). In which case mail ends up at (corrupted code location) instead of expected. E.g. one bit-flip, which may or may not be physically adjacent.

<comment><USER23> Where I am it seems like online shops already have an API to work with the post (surely UPS/FedEx too?). They would say using the API "I would like to register a package addressed to [netsharc's address]", and the endpoint would probably do that and respond with a barcode that the shop would print and stick to the package. Then the postman would just scan the barcode when picking up the package, take it to the sorting office where there'd be more barcode scanning and automatic sorting based on the ZIP code stored in the database entry identified by the barcode...

So the only reading of the actual typed address would be when the mailman double-checks to confirm he's delivering the correct packages for my address.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Sometimes people working at big name services do the most remarkable things, even in our increasingly automated and impersonal world. I also love that in some countries, children can write to Santa before Christmas, and an "elf" will get their letter and write back. It gives me hope for humanity. :-)

</comment><comment><USER37> I am the only person in my country that has my name. I have a few times received letters addressed to: First name, last name, country together with a friendly message from the postal service to tell people to use my full address next time.

</comment><comment><USER38> In 1986 I was traveling through Europe after my senior year in college and met an Irish girl in Munich named Fiona O'Reilly. She gave me her address. It was something like:

      O'Reilly
      The house by the big tree
      Glenbrook
      County Cork, Ireland

She told me if I was ever in town that I could find the house by stopping anyone on the street and asking where it was. So I did: I hitchhiked to Glenbrook (you could do that in the 80's), stopped a random person on the street, and asked where the O'Reilly house was. They knew.

Good times.

<comment><USER39> Good skills. I trust you were both lucky. Eire does have postcodes. [https://www.eircode.ie/](https://www.eircode.ie/)

Now where is that big tree:

[https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-8.3330293,3a,75y,...](https://email@example.com,-8.3330293,3a,75y,169.45h,86.25t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sgcEKFbJgaAKO0YD_TpZvdg!2e0!7i16384!8i8192)

<comment><USER38> I made up the "big tree" part. It was something like that but it wasn't that. I don't remember what it was.

But it was Glenbrook. I wrote that part down in my journal. So yes, her house was around that street view scene somewhere. I doubt I could find it again, but the scene looks familiar even 35 years on. Not much seems to have changed there.

<comment><USER39> It's a lovely story. I hope you have some great memories.

Sometimes I take a virtual wander around places I used to live courtesy of Mr Google and his mapping thing. It is quite nice to see how places have moved on after you knew them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> My father told me that his Uncle Bill once got a letter that was addressed to "Bill James, Wales".

Uncle Bill was a reasonably well-known rugby player at the time ('50s?), so the post office knew it was most likely him!

</comment><comment><USER39> Graham and Heather BFPO 40

Granny's Christmas card was delivered. Back then Rhein-d had quite a few people in it. Wacky old West Germany, with Brits in it.

</comment><comment><USER41> The craziest postal delivery I ever saw was a letter sent to a person on a different continent, addressed only with a bang path.

</comment><comment><USER42> I wonder whether there were any negative repercussions for the postman? I'd be surprised if there isn't a policy against personally contacting mail recipients.

Surely it'd be some sort of data protection violation for him to have used the data printed on the envelope to find the guy on Facebook and send him a personal message?

Or is ad-hoc sleuthing allowed to a reasonable extent to ensure delivery of mail?

This is cool though, maybe I'm just boring. :)

<comment><USER43> A policy against contacting mail recipients? They're already allowed to knock on the doors of our homes to deliver something that doesn't fit through the letterbox, or requires a signature...

<comment><USER42> I mean a policy against contacting them outside of their duties of work. This is fairly standard practise for anybody with access to personal data as part of their job.

I'm sure there's all sorts of problems, ranging from simple nosiness to people snooping on previous partners or crushes, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> This actually is the normal for me growing up, except it was UPS and, occasionally, FedEx[1]. USPS doesn't deliver, ever. You rent a PO Box and that should be good enough. If we knew it was UPS, we would have an address like "House 311 Behind the School Loop". So, USPS delivers to PO Box and UPS would find your house or just drop it off where you worked because they knew that too. If a college won't accept applications from a PO Box then you don't get to apply to that college[2].

This in the modern, internet era, has become a true pain in the rear. So, somehow, somewhere, there is a list of street names for 911. This might or might not correspond with the utility company's idea of location. There are often no signs. To fix this, it seems a lot of websites and vendors are starting to use a USPS website[3].

I seriously think we need an article in the spirit of the name article[4]: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Addresses[5]. I would like to contribute one: "The USPS Address Lookup Tool only shows addresses that the USPS itself delivers and not all valid addresses for delivery."

So, all that work to find out a real address doesn't really matter if the USPS doesn't actually deliver to that address, but UPS and FedEx are just fine. Never mind the fun practice of handing off the package to USPS for final delivery (looking at you DHL[6]) when the deliverable street address for UPS/FedEx turns into an undeliverable address for the USPS who will send it back unless you can convince your vendors to put the PO Box on line 2 of the address.

Now, a normal person would think it might actually be an ok thing to get the real address added to the USPS system, but that is currently a bit of an exercise in phone tree spanning.

Can you guess what I have been doing during this current unpleasantness?

So, my fellow developers, please allow an override of your address checking.

1) oh, by the way, do not confuse FedEx and FedEx Ground when talking to employees of said companies, they are quite hostile.

2) almost as good as the old "we don't accept money orders" for weeding out those pesky poor people back in the day before debit cards and online applications.

3) [https://tools.usps.com/zip-code- lookup.htm?byaddress](https://tools.usps.com/zip-code-lookup.htm?byaddress)

4) [https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods- programmers-...](https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers- believe-about-names/)

5) I guess [https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers- believe-a...](https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe- about-addresses/) is it.

6) ah DHL, who somehow shipped a printer intended for North Dakota to another tribal college in South Dakota (different tribe, different state) then had it go to Chicago and then Compton CA to be handed off to USPS.

</comment><comment><USER45> Hahaha, I thought it was going to be something fancy but it's freaking Kvikk Lunsj. If you don't know what that is, it's Scandinavian Kit Kat. That makes this even better.

<comment><USER46> I think this is wildly inappropriate. To label something as "vital survival stuff" puts a moral burden on the postman to figure it out.

<comment><USER45> Oh I wouldn't sweat it. That's just British for "not vital for survival".</comment></comment></comment>


Company creates bicycle airbag to replace helmets (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/autos/story/20140626-no-helmet-no-problem <comment><USER2> "We're sorry but this site is not accessible from the UK as it is part of our international service and is not funded by the licence fee."

Bizarrely UK users ie. those who have to pay for the BBC have to use a cloak to access this content. At least the charter is up this year. Hopefully all the BBC will be 'not funded by the license fee' soon.

<comment><USER3> If you want to see what things will be like if they're "not funded by the license fee", look at America's media.

Appreciate any form of actual journalism while you have it.

<comment><USER4> BBC's standards of journalism are going much the same way I'm afraid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My sweetie ordered one of these for me for Crimblemas. They didn't ship to the US so she had a friend get it in the UK. Then they shipped it to the US.

It never arrived.

We did some digging and apparently US customs seized the explosive device I was being shipped and destroyed it.

And that's how the US Gov't blew up my crimble present.

<comment><USER6> I'm not too surprised - automotive airbags contain explosives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "No helmet at all" implies it's safer not to wear a helmet. I think that puts this title in the misleading/linkbait category. Plus it's basically an ad for this company.

<comment><USER8> If anyone can suggest an accurate, neutral title, we'll change it.

<comment><USER9> "Company creates bicycle airbag to replace helmets"

<comment><USER8> Done. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Worldwide, more than 25% of road traffic deaths are pedestrians and bicyclists. Improved active safety, like head protection, collision warning, and automatic audible and visual warning for drivers are badly needed. And cars should be required to have autonomous braking that looks for bicyclists and pedestrians ahead and in the "right hook" zone.

<comment><USER11> Is the "right hook zone" referring to making a right turn into someone crossing an intersection?

Just curious, have you seen any research on the efficacy (and cost efficiency) of those features you say should be required?

<comment><USER10> Hard numbers seem to be hard to come by, but this article gives at least a qualitative balance of costs and benefits: [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/road-and-rail- transpo...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/road-and-rail- transport/11070680/Autonomous-braking-biggest-safety-improvement-since-seat- belt.html)

What's interesting is the case for a subsidy based on reducing government costs when people are killed and injured. reduced insurance costs could also make the time-to-payback for individual purchasers very short.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's tough to convince people (in Europe) to wear helmets without a surrounding culture of jokes about killing vulnerable road users. Maybe if they really want to sell helmets in Europe they need to import American drivers.

<comment><USER13> That's a pretty unfair criticism. Fatalities per 100,000 vehicles, the US ranks #24 best (lowest) in the world among nations not the size of Maldives.

To put it into perspective, Russia and Mexico are four times worse; Brazil is five times worse; Colombia is six times worse; the Philippines and China are ten times worse; India is 15 times worse; Venezuela is 20 times worse; Nigeria is 30 times worse.

Adjusting for miles driven per capita, the US comes out ahead of about 18 European nations, and is comparable to France and Spain.

<comment><USER12> It's not about the outcomes it's about the attitude. Which is only held (acted on) by I'd guess less than 1% of drivers, who think when they see a cyclist that they should "teach her a lesson." This attitude doesn't show up in the European countries I've cycled in.

It's the existence of that attitude that keeps parents from biking / walking their kids to schools merely blocks away. I've never cycled in countries without basic infrastructure, it would be interesting to see how closely cycle danger correlates to car danger.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> These have been around for a few years, I remember seeing a video of the "helmet" inflating. Here's the one I could find, which is a lot more annoying than the one I recall: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tDy4InLcXU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tDy4InLcXU)

<comment><USER15> This looks like a better video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7Oud3iGXWY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7Oud3iGXWY)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I can't help but imagine this thing malfunctioning and completely strangling some poor biker.

</comment><comment><USER17> "sorry British Broadcasting Corporation worldwide, cannot be accessed from Britain because this part isn't supported by the license fee"

pretty arrogant of them to assume someone from Britain is paying a TV license.

</comment><comment><USER18> riding both motorcycles and bicycles I never have felt as safe on the bicycle as my motorcycle. Part of that might come from wearing a full face helmet and protective gear on the motorcycle but even if I had the same protective gear regular bicycle helmets just feel wrong. The sensation of speed is wholly different, speeds over the mid twenties on the bicycle feel as dangerous as speeds on the motorcycle over a hundred.

Still nothing disappoints me more than the number of children I see riding everyday without any protection

<comment><USER19> OK, but your perception is wrong.

[http://www.medicine.ox.ac.uk/bandolier/booth/Risk/transportt...](http://www.medicine.ox.ac.uk/bandolier/booth/Risk/transporttrav.html) Motorcyclists are 3 times more likely to die per kilometre.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> They have recently announced a newer version of this:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHIOD67PKCY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHIOD67PKCY)

<comment><USER21> It is really big. Notice how the people shown wearing it in still shots, also wear bulky or winter clothing. I don't see how could you wear the helmet in the summer along with a t-shirt and shorts and not look ridiculous. A backpack variant, even if larger, would be better for social acceptance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Not much in the way of face protection. In the linked video provided by another HNer I see the face gets some protection from the "visor" but not all falls are perfect faceplants on flat surfaces.

In the "culture" of racing/biking - a biker with a "bucket" helmet is a sure sign that the rider is more concerned with vanity than safety (is is just a noob)

<comment><USER23> Sounds like you're talking about motorcycle helmets instead of bicycle helmets.

<comment><USER24> Depending on the type of biking you do, bicycle helmets have face protection: [https://www.google.com/search?q=downhill+bike+helmet&espv=2&...](https://www.google.com/search?q=downhill+bike+helmet&espv=2&biw=1341&bih=897&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=kSBWVf_GIIGayASTt4FQ&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAg)

They _look_ like motocross helmets, but are much thinner and lighter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> June 26, 2014

</comment><comment><USER26> How do they detect the need to unfold?

Also, I'm wondering about a full-body version for motor riders.

<comment> d--b There are sensors in the device. They're activated by a battery that starts when you put the thing on and clip the zipper. You have to charge the battery every 3 weeks or so. I've got one and have been using it for a month. So far I didn't fall, and the stuff hasn't been triggered by any of my jumps on and off the sidewalk. It's much more comfortable than a standard helmet. It's very expensive though.

<comment><USER27> Is it reusable, or is it a one time deploy?

<comment><USER28> One time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Old news.

</comment><comment><USER30> Dangerously misleading title.

It does not establish that no helmet is better, but only that helmets might be improved by technology into a form that is more like an airbag (there when you need it) and less like a traditional helmet.</comment>


Show HN: Bootstrap 5 Admin Dashboard with Vanilla JavaScript [MIT License] - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/themesberg/volt-bootstrap-5-dashboard <comment><USER2> Very cool! Thank you for this!! We've been using AdmLte for a long time now but I've always been very frustrated at annoying it was to set-up and use due to the structure of it and all the dependencies that used jQuery.

This looks way more elegant and easier to use for implementing admin interfaces fast. I love the look too!

I'll probably recommend that get the Pro version after playing around with it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome! You can get in contact anytime through our website. We're happy to help.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks neat!

<comment><USER4> I also think it looks neat, but I'm struggling to figure out what it is. Bootstrap, as in the CSS framework[0]? Latest release appears to be 4, what does 5 mean? Admin? Admin of what, a website? Some other platform? Is this a website template, with some built-in asset management mechanic like Wordpress?

> Volt is a free and open source Bootstrap powered admin dashboard with > components, pages and plugin that you can use to create an awesome admin > interface.

Components? As in, web components[1]? Or is it terminology from some other web framework, maybe React or maybe some language feature in e.g. TypeScript?

I suppose my question would be, what problem should I be having to look for a "Bootstrap 5 Admin Dashboard"?

[0]: [https://getbootstrap.com/](https://getbootstrap.com/) [1]: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/Web_Components](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/Web_Components)

<comment><USER5> Admin themes are common in theme marketplaces. As a convention, they usually always list out all the package UI elements (buttons, spinners, etc) as "components", which is a bit different than in the framework sense.

[https://wrapbootstrap.com/category/templates/admin- templates](https://wrapbootstrap.com/category/templates/admin-templates)

[https://themeforest.net/category/site-templates/admin- templa...](https://themeforest.net/category/site-templates/admin-templates)

Note the "component" terminology has been used in Bootstrap for a long time: [https://getbootstrap.com/2.3.2/components.html](https://getbootstrap.com/2.3.2/components.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Or newcomers like us :)

[https://themesberg.com/templates/bootstrap/admin- dashboard](https://themesberg.com/templates/bootstrap/admin-dashboard)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Wildebeest – Track the Evolution of Your Code Over Time - <AUTHOR> https://www.wildebeest.app/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone, OP here. Let me know if you have any questions or feedback. It's an early MVP, but I wanted to get some more people trying it to see how well it works for real repositories. Back at my old job we had a big spreadsheet for tracking all the in progress code migrations (such as moving from Angular to React) which we would update manually by running grep commands, etc. to find the number of remaining instances. I thought there might be some demand for a product solution.

Right now it updates once an hour and uses the Github API for searching. The next step to make it much more powerful is to build an engine that clones the repo and allows the user to run arbitrary grep or other commands, and run it as a Github hook when new code is merged. This would also allow us to build historical graphs by checking out previous commits.</comment>


Speaking out against government malware - <AUTHOR> http://ccc.de/de/updates/2012/state-trojan-proposal

<comment><USER2> Forget Disclosure — Hackers Should Keep Security Holes to Themselves

BY ANDREW AUERNHEIMER (weev)

[http://www.wired.com/opinion/2012/11/hacking-choice-and- disc...](http://www.wired.com/opinion/2012/11/hacking-choice-and-disclosure/)

<comment><USER3> What does that have to do with anything? Spam much?

<comment><USER2> An editorial from a few days ago that implores security researchers to not contribute zero days to governments that use them to invade our privacy has nothing to do with "Speaking out against government malware"?

Maybe the part of the puzzle that you're missing is that 90% of the zero day market is nation states buying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think the bleep up is that law enforcement are there to protect and uphold the law not breaking the law itself.

I.e. hackers are not allowed to hack other computers, but the government own agencies suddenly are. Now you have a segregated law, it's a different law for the government agencies than its own citizens/hackers.

If we should have a fair society the same law should apply to all citizens, or it's no longer a law but special rights to privileged people in the society.

The big question is do we want a spy society were as soon as you have different opinion than those of the government officals they can attack you with small petty crimes they have observed you doing from your own private sphere. I mean the general thing is that even government officials break the same laws they not hunted, but if you do you will get attacked.

The big question is that of fairness which is what the law should be about or they are no longer true but false.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's nothing new for the CCC.

Germany already has the _Bundestrojaner_ ("Federal Trojan")

<comment><USER6> the CCC published an in-depth analysis of the so called bundestrojaner in which they for example proofed that many of the techniques jused are unconstitutional (for example intercepting skype calls).

I dont know if there is an english version of the paper (short english summary and link to the german paper here: <http://ccc.de/en/updates/2011/staatstrojaner>) but it was a very amusing read. Especially because it becomes clear very fast that from a technical standpoint, the software is horrible. Unencrypted communication with the remote, no auth or integrity checks and so on. Also, a lot of data is sent over a proxy in the US.

The results were published in various newspapers, among them the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ, a very big and well known newspaper) who printed one page of the trojans source code. The headline was something like: "You cant understand this language but this is what controls your everyday life".

Im very glad that we have an institution like the CCC here in germany. Its the closest you can get to a computer/tech/hacker lobby which argues from a very pragmatical point of view for example when it comes to things like voting machines.

edit: if you want to see the pages from the FAZ with the code, you can find it here (warning - big pdf): [http://www.faz.net/dynamic/download/fas/FAS_09_10_2011_S41_S...](http://www.faz.net/dynamic/download/fas/FAS_09_10_2011_S41_S47_Staatstrojaner.pdf)

It's titled Anatomy of a digital vermin. The code is introduced with: "A text we dont understand but it nevertheless rules our lifes"</comment></comment>


They're Back Adobe Flash Media Server and RTMP SDK Are Not Done Yet - <AUTHOR> https://www.streamingmediablog.com/2019/05/adobe-media-server-lives.html <comment><USER2> I have to admit I was a bit surprised myself that RTMP is still alive and well. After the internet bust of 2002, Adobe (and the rest of the industry) focused on one-way, broadcast media. Today RTMP is the dominant protocol for live streaming (still used for YouTube, Facebook, Twitch, etc.) In addition to all the companies actively using Adobe Media Server in production, there are a lot of interesting applications for this tech that are growth markets today.</comment>


FireCrystal - "rewinds" web page interactions & shows code - <AUTHOR> http://stephenoney.com/firecrystal.php

<comment><USER2> it would be nice, in theory, if we had an all encompassing data model of some kind that would be able to FF & RW the whole of everything. things like ZFS and message oriented middleware show the power of such things, but perhaps this is something for the far distant future

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Cool idea but my first attempt at using it on a heavy AJAX page locked up Firefox for 10+ minutes (100% of one CPU core).</comment>


Ask HN: Why most big websites aren't using EV SSL? - <AUTHOR> I recently found myself wondering, why big sites such as Facebook, Google, Github etc usually aren't using EV SSL certificates? It probably would make non-technical users trust the website more and perhaps make them more aware of phishing (eh, I don't believe in that myself, but it's still nice to dream...), and it's not like they can't afford it. <comment><USER2> Scott Helme, a security researcher has an article on EV certificates and some of the issues with them in an article from December 2017 ([https://scotthelme.co.uk/are-ev-certificates-worth-the- paper...](https://scotthelme.co.uk/are-ev-certificates-worth-the-paper-theyre- written-on/)). There was some discussion on this when it was originally submitted to HN at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15850837](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15850837).

Adam Caudill also has some insight here: [https://adamcaudill.com/2017/04/09/looking-value-ev- certific...](https://adamcaudill.com/2017/04/09/looking-value-ev- certificates/)</comment>


Ask HN: Tools of the trade, 2014 edition - <AUTHOR>

Last year Sharjeel Qureshi started this thread on HN for discussing hosted useful services: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5235137
The contribution in thread introduced many interesting SaaS services which can immensely help in deploying services as well as development.
A year has gone by. What do we have today? <comment><USER2> Scott Hanselman did a nice one last month for Windows folks: [http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ScottHanselmans2014UltimateDev...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ScottHanselmans2014UltimateDeveloperAndPowerUsersToolListForWindows.aspx)

The only one I really took away from that list was Agent Ransack. I love it!

Good list - check it out.

</comment><comment><USER3> The big contributors then were garrettdimon, espeed, netshade, and cmadan. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5235137](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5235137)</comment>


GNU grep-2.17 released: 7x to 10x times faster with multibyte locale - <AUTHOR> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnu.grep.bugs/5154

<comment><AUTHOR> I know people here usually complain about minor release announcements. But

> This release is notable for its performance improvements: we don't often see > a 10x speed-up in a tool like grep.

So I think it's quite noteworthy.</comment>


Knyle Style Sheets - <AUTHOR> http://warpspire.com/posts/kss/

<comment><USER2> I love this; I've needed this on nearly every project I've ever worked on for various reasons. Either someone doesn't remember what a class looks like or doesn't apply it properly or the designer named things ambiguously on accident. You end up with some styles applied properly and others ignorantly thrown around because no one really understands how the CSS is laid out besides the designer.

Adding it to a project will put some more work on designers, but it's nothing they probably shouldn't be doing already.

</comment><comment><USER3> Duplication is probably the easiest mistake to make with CSS, and using authoring languages like LESS and SASS won't necessarily help. Duplication not only causes bloat, but it can lead to specificity wars and poorly performing selectors. Worse yet, it becomes more difficult to trust the code already in place, and easier to write your own styles to perform tasks that some other code already handles.

This is the death spiral of CSS, and it's refreshing to see someone take on this problem directly (aside from teaching a methodology for writing CSS).

Automated documentation for CSS is a fantastic idea, and this looks well executed.

</comment><comment><USER4> CSS is almost too flexible to be able to stick to some sort of convention. I find myself trying to code in one style, and then doing it differently or disliking it on a different project.

I try to make some of it self-documenting, so will only class out a particular element then, through CSS, enforce a strict order of child elements by using the direct descendant/sibling selectors, etc. I'll usually include the element hierarchy in the definition where necessary. But then I don't like it because there's so much repetition.

        body > header { ... }
        body > header > h1 { ... }
        body > header > h1 + small { ... }

Or

        div#sidebar > form#login-form input,
        div#sidebar > form#login-form select
        { ... }

Why is there nothing (without Less/Sass/some other package) like

        div#sidebar > form#login-form (
            input, select { ... }
            label { ... }
        )

That KSS attempts to better document CSS is great, and I'll certainly look into that more. But in some ways I think the difficulty comes from CSS itself being pretty flat when a DOM tree is anything but. And for the sake of easy re-use and documentation, sometimes you'd rather not just have a huge list of styled classes and IDs to wade through when you really don't need that many.

<comment><USER5> The issue with doing it this way is that you're making the CSS processor doing unnecessary work. If you are writing:

        div#sidebar > form#login-form input

then you are actually searching for input, then #login-form, then form, then #sidebar, then div. It adds up on a really big site. If you had just written

        #login-form input

you get the same selection without the additional processing. Even if you want to track the full "stack", don't use those extra tag qualifiers.

        #sidebar > #login-form input

is much better than what you've got.

Good source: <http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/rendering.html>

<comment><USER6> Why the hell doesn't the lookup code work left-to-right, like you write CSS? Is there a good reason, or is it just there to make you eschew best practices after you learn them?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This seems complicated, it would be cool to have something like this for non- ruby guys. If I understand correctly, I need to write a ruby parser myself in order to use this. Much easier would be a binary which just takes all files in a directory by default, and creates an html with a default template. If I want to customize it, let me customize it by comment syntax, not ruby code.

<comment><USER8> I would love to see someone add that to the library. Personally, all of the applications I work on are Ruby, so including a gem is the easiest way to generate a styleguide.

I would suggest though _not_ to customize the comment syntax. That's the entire value of KSS — the ruby library is just a means to access the comment syntax.

<comment><USER9> I think he meant that he should be able to customize the output using special comments, instead of needing to write Ruby.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Great idea. My one issue with it is that it seems kind of difficult to use. Ideally, using this would consist of passing the files I wanted a style guide generated for to KSS and it would take care of the rest.

I'm definitely going to keep my eye on this project over the next few weeks. Something like this is badly needed and I can't wait to see where KSS goes.

<comment><USER11> So you want something to be well-documented without having to write any documentation?

<comment><USER12> Can't a developer dream? :p

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I had a similar idea - a living styleguide derived from the css. I envisioned it in 3 parts:

* A way to transform css into html (<https://github.com/aglemann/css2html>)

* A simple webserver that would detect a stylesheet, run it through the transformer and serve up the html styleguide (<https://github.com/aglemann/instant-styleguide>)

* A methodology for architecting your css for use with the two technologies (coming soon?)

All the pieces work, I need to do a blog post about it ;)

</comment><comment><USER14> Yay, I'm glad it's happening.

I've been saying this for a while now (yes, I should be doing more than saying)... CSS needs a modern agreed-upon community standard for implementation.

This is really important at the front-end development layer when you're doing CSS inside of an application. There's too much variance in style between projects and frameworks. We need to commit to a general guideline, especially one that incentivizes good standards.

This is a step in the right direction.

I was supposed to do a presentation on this very topic but then a hurricane got in the way (magma rails).

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm upvoting this simply because of the author's statement that "few people truly comprehend" CCS and that "CSS is complicated". So true.

</comment><comment><USER16> What makes this any better than SASS or LESS?

<comment><USER8> Sounds like you didn't read my post or the README. Check it out. This is intended to work _with_ things like SASS & LESS. There's a lot more to CSS than buzzwords :)

<comment><USER16> You're right, I did miss that. I saw nested tags and assumed this is another CSS compiler (or whatever you'd like to call them).

I guess you could say this is like Doxygen for CSS?

<comment><USER17> > Doxygen for CSS

That's my understanding; a good analogy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> 10 points to Griffindor for the Knylefile.

</comment><comment><USER19> Who names shit after themselves anymore?</comment>


CD-Loving Japan Resists Move to Online Music - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/17/business/media/cd-loving-japan-resists-move-to-digital-music-.html <comment><USER4> I feel almost guilty admitting it, but these behaviour seems completely natural to me. Paper books, music on CDs. Seems to me much more rational to buy something like this, than buying (heck, it's not even buying, it's more like renting by some weird license!) array of bytes, that can be deleted by some Apple or Amazon from your device, and doing so for nearly the same money as if you buy real book or CD! It's not japanese who are crazy, it's more like western people are totally irrational and insane!

And, well, I'm a bit missing these times when you could exchange CDs with your friends and all that kind of stuff. But dismiss it. However ability to not have CD-ROM in your notebook is major bonus. And size of portable music players as well.

I wonder if paper books are as expensive in Japan as in the western countries.

<comment><USER5> Amazon and Apple both sell DRM-free audio files, which is no different than buying and ripping a CD, minus having the superfluous physical disc lying around. They can't be deleted from your device.

<comment><USER6> For random songs, I use the amazon store, which I am very happy with - <USER2> ability to download a plain old, DRM-free mp3 file is a consumer-friendly environment that I would not have predicted in this day and age.

However, if I want an album, I always buy and rip the CD to WAV/PCM. It's the real, unprocessed, uncompressed (lossy or lossless) bits of the CD, and I know of no other way to get those.

In my opinion, unless you have the PCM of the cd track, you _will_ buy or rip that song again. This way you have it for good.

<comment><USER7> Why the hell would you rip it to WAV/PCM and not FLAC? You'll save on the order of 80% space without losing any quality; you can always convert the FLAC right back to WAV without anything being different.

However, there are other ways to get those as well. Bandcamp offers downloads in flac, mp3, ogg, and others. If the album isn't on bandcamp, or some other site that offers flac copies, then you can illegally pirate flac content from some-of-a-few audiophile websites.

I'm quite a fan of bandcamp and I'd highly recommend seeing if you can find good music there.

<comment><USER6> Not every use case involves a system that can play FLAC files, but just about _everything_ can play a WAV file. For instance, one of my desktops is Irix on MIPS which I can play WAV files on, but not fancy things like FLAC.

Again, having the WAV file means I never have to touch that music again. Ever.

<comment><USER8> I used to play flac files on my Octane (300 MHz,1 CPU). Given how little load it caused, I'd expect it to work well on a O2 180mhz r5k. Perhaps you are using an older still iris machine though?

While just about any device can play .wav, many devices have so little storage that I find myself ripping on flac, the re-encoding to something lossy and lower bit rate to get a reasonable amount onto a mobile device.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Being from Japan, I have a few thoughts in this area:

* A significant percentage of music is still only available on CD, and not in digital media. Until recently, music from one company (say Sony) was only available from their digital music store, which had their own player app with their own DRM. These things create significant inconvenience to the consumers, hindering the adoption of digital music.

* The music industry in Japan came up with a brilliant business model that enabled them to sell the same CD multiple times to the same consumer, basically by bundling a ticket to each CD. Sometimes a single ticket grants you one vote, sometimes you get one piece of (say 12) tickets randomly and you need to complete all 12 pieces to get something. This forces loyal fans to buy 10s and sometimes 100s of the same CD.

It's not like people are carrying around portable CD players any more, so these factors obviously creates a rapidly diminishing music fan base. I still hope that eventually the decline in the CD business will force the industry to wholy embrace the digial music, but I'm not holding my breath.

<comment><USER10> >The music industry in Japan came up with a brilliant business model that enabled them to sell the same CD multiple times to the same consumer, basically by bundling a ticket to each CD. Sometimes a single ticket grants you one vote, sometimes you get one piece of (say 12) tickets randomly and you need to complete all 12 pieces to get something. This forces loyal fans to buy 10s and sometimes 100s of the same CD.

I don't understand what you mean by tickets and votes. It sounds really interesting, and I'd be grateful if you could elaborate.

<comment><USER11> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AKB48](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AKB48) Basically every "season", fans get to vote on their favorite member of huge roaster-pop group that J-pop has pioneered.

"The group has publicized special events to choose the promotional and recording lineups for some of its singles.[191] In 2009, the concept of sōsenkyo (総選挙?, "general elections") was introduced.[19] To obtain a ballot, voters must purchase the group's latest "election single."[192] Members who receive the most votes will participate in the recording of AKB48's next single[19] and are heavily promoted,[5] with the top vote-getter the centerpiece of the group's live performances.[191][192] Votes in the 2011 election exceeded one million, and the single "Everyday, Katyusha" (which contained a ballot for the election) set a Japanese record for weekly sales of a CD single.[193] The 2012 election had nearly 1.4 million votes,[191] and the 2013 election had 2.6 million votes.[194] Fans have reportedly bought hundreds (or thousands) of copies of singles to vote for their favorite members."

<comment><AUTHOR> What's interesting is that each physical copy of Taylor Swift's latest album, _1989_ , includes 1 of 5 possible sets of 13 polaroids[0], and it's set to have the biggest sales week (in the US, presumably) of any album since 2002[1]. I wonder if she didn't steal this idea from AKB48.

0: [https://twitter.com/taylorswift13/status/526459191826079744](https://twitter.com/taylorswift13/status/526459191826079744)

1: [http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/chart- beat/6304336...](http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/chart- beat/6304336/taylor-swift-1989-biggest-sales-week-since-2002)

<comment><USER12> Seems even closer to what Pearl Jam did for their 1996 album.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Code#Packaging_and_title](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Code#Packaging_and_title)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I live nearby in Asia, and local friends describe their reason for buying CDs as "something to collect" or, as having a piece of the artist's creation to actually hold. Even if online music is accessible, it doesn't give that feeling of "ownership" after spending money.

<comment><USER14> > local friends describe their reason for buying CDs as "something to collect"

Also japanese CDs generally bundle lots of extras, it's not just a plastic disc and a 1-ply cover art, they tend to get extensive liner notes, DVD extras, event tickets (e.g. "hand shake" tickets in jpop CDs), etc… And really neat collector boxsets tend to be much more common and normal than in the west e.g. this: [http://aap.blackaris2001.org/AlienHead/Alien25thAnniversaryC...](http://aap.blackaris2001.org/AlienHead/Alien25thAnniversaryCollection2.jpg) was their Alien 25th Anniversary Collection boxset

<comment><USER15> And do not forget mystical Obi!

<comment><USER16> The fact that people throw away the obi makes my blood boil.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's not just digital music downloads in Japan which are not taking off. Ebooks are still far from reaching any significant share on the market, and a large part is coming from the lack of cooperation of the publishers who refuse to have digital versions of their paper books. It's a completely locked market in many regards with decisions made by risk-averse companies and company presidents. I have never seen Japan as modern when it comes to Internet services / downloads and the like. They seem to be permanently stuck in old habits (Yahoo is still the main web page they use on a daily basis), registration heavy services (needing 7 steps from beginning to the point where you are able to log in) and web pages that still look like 1.0 era.

<comment><USER18> Part of the reason for this is that ebook formatting/typesetting tends to be terrible in logographic languages. I don't know why, but typesetting in the ebook world is much worse there. I have a Japanese friend who complains constantly about any ebook she gets.

<comment><USER19> Typesetting for English language ebooks is pretty dreadful too. And for older titles, they're usually littered with OCR errors too. I'd be surprised if they receive more than a couple of hours of QA.

<comment><USER20> I am pleased that someone else has noticed this. I recently purchased a copy of the Neal Stephenson book "Cryptonomicon" and it's full of errors where a word was hyphenated in the original text, but the digital text has replaced the hyphen with a space. You get words like "Pat tern"; I'm shocked at how little they bothered to proof read the digital versions before they sent it out. I'm inclined to ask for a refund.

<comment><USER21> I had the same problem when I read The Selfish Gene, it was littered with weird line breaks, OCR errors and general layout strangeness. So much so that I went through it myself and fixed most of it because it annoyed me too much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is something that really annoys me, as this kind of averse attitude to online distribution is also prevalent among Japanese indie (doujin) musicians. They release their albums only physically, first during doujin events and then to various shops. You might be able to buy the albums physically from some Japanese web stores, but then you get hit with damn expensive import fees (so better buy a lot of stuff at the same time), not to mention any potential customs fees (which are easy to get when buying a lot of stuff at the same time). And since the physical copies are also limited, trying to get older albums legitimately can be pretty much impossible.

What makes it all even more annoying is that it's not like the artists would be completely unaware of digital music services - they post samples to Soundcloud, and some might even sell an album or two on Bandcamp, but the vast majority of everything is just completely unavailable in any legitimate digital manner. Of course, most of it is available via less legitimate sources, but that has its obvious downsides, like not having any idea when new releases will actually become available. Just a week ago an album I'm really looking forward to[1] was released physically during a doujin event. If that was available on Bandcamp, I'd buy it in a heartbeat, but since it's not, I'm forced to wait for who knows how long before I even get to listen to the damn thing proper.

[1] [https://soundcloud.com/nachi_tt/supernova- crossfade](https://soundcloud.com/nachi_tt/supernova-crossfade)

<comment><USER23> Wow, that delights me. Finally some music that doesn't cater to "I want it now" consumer mindset!

<comment><USER24> Doesn't this music cater to the "I'm going to judge _music_ partly based on how the artists decide to distribute it" crowd? That has nothing to do with musicianship or sound.

It might be a psychological hack to cause more people to become superfans by drawing out the obsessive compulsive desire to collect rare artifacts (which happen to be music CDs in this case).

<comment><USER23> > _That has nothing to do with musicianship or sound._

So? Music is not just about musicianship or sound, and art even less so.

It's an experience, and how you approach that experience is equally important.

That's also why Joe Satriani or some poser like Yngwie Malmsteen are no "better" than someone like BB King, nor is a pristeen sounding acid-jazz Blueray better than some crappy sounding Alan Lomax recordings.

> _It might be a psychological hack to cause more people to become superfans > by drawing out the obsessive compulsive desire to collect rare artifacts > (which happen to be music CDs in this case)._

Even more common is the psychological compulsion to just download or buy stuff and amass a huge collection which you're never gonna hear more than 1-2 times...

<comment><USER24> I agree the reality is people judge music by the experience and not the sound, but isn't that silly?

Isn't it a bit circular if the best music in your or my opinion becomes the music that we most fervently collect or go to concerts of (possibly because friends do), and then we continue fervently collecting it or attending concerts because "it's the best music"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> While we in the West tend to think of Japan as futuristic in a lot of ways they are still stuck in the 90s:

They still commonly use fax machines [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/world/asia/in-japan-the- fa...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/world/asia/in-japan-the-fax-machine- is-anything-but-a-relic.html)

And at least when I was there in 2007 they were still very cash-based and many atms would be inaccessible after midnight (except in 7-11 stores?)

<comment><USER26> I seem to recall that various US agencies still require fax, because it is an approved legal document. I suspect something similar is in effect in Japan. Heck, South Korea is pretty much stuck on IE because they produced a national e-commerce solution based on ActiveX back in the day. Tech quickly outrun law, especially communications tech.

<comment><USER25> yes there are situations where faxes are needed in the USA. As I understand it mostly is in cases regarding legal documents. In the NYTimes article i linked in the previous post though they talk about individuals still buying fax machines and people preferring to fax their lunch orders to a restaurant instead of doing it on a website.

From the article: "The Japanese government's Cabinet Office said that almost 100 percent of business offices and 45 percent of private homes had a fax machine as of 2011. "

I would be surprised if 10% of private homes in the USA have a fax machine.

<comment><USER27> Keep in mind the marginal cost of getting a phone-fax instead of a regular phone for home here (Japan) is practically zero.

A fax machine (or a landline for that matter) in the home isn't for me, but they're still moving down the development curve, releasing new features, improving quality and lowering costs.

I have heard on more than one occasion the popularity of the consumer-level fax is tied to the importance placed on skillful handwriting. I have pointed out that there was no way the skillfulness of one's handwriting could be relayed via fax, and noted that there was a certain twisted irony in the fact that a once-new technology remained popular because of something so traditional.

In the last 12 months I have required to use a fax machine about four times here. Twice for a group booking (baseball, riverboat cruise), and twice to send stuff back to my own government in Australia. In all these cases a scanned PDF was confirmed not acceptable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> A couple of questions I have...does Japan also resist the movement towards online gaming purchases? Nintendo and Sony offer pretty robust online delivery services...are they as popular in Japan as in the U.S.?

And does this have any relation with Japan's reported affinity toward fax machines? ([http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/world/asia/in-japan-the- fa...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/world/asia/in-japan-the-fax-machine- is-anything-but-a-relic.html))

> _Yuichiro Sugahara learned the hard way about his country's deep attachment > to the fax machine, which the nation popularized in the 1980s. A decade ago, > he tried to modernize his family-run company, which delivers traditional > bento lunchboxes, by taking orders online. Sales quickly plummeted._

 _Today, his company, Tamagoya, is thriving with the hiss and beep of thousands of orders pouring in every morning, most by fax, many with minutely detailed handwritten requests like "go light on the batter in the fried chicken" or "add an extra hard-boiled egg."_

 _"There is still something in Japanese culture that demands the warm, personal feelings that you get with a handwritten fax," said Mr. Sugahara, 43._

<comment><AUTHOR> > Nintendo and Sony offer pretty robust online delivery services

I would say that they're both lightyears behind Microsoft/Xbox.

<comment><USER29> Here's a great article on some of the challenges.

[http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2014-secret...](http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2014-secret- developers-wii-u-the-inside-story)

"The discussion started off well enough and covered off our experiences with the hardware and (slow) toolchain and then we steered them towards discussing when the online features might be available. We were told that the features, and the OS updates to support them, would be available before the hardware launch, but only just. There were apparently issues with setting up a large networking infrastructure to rival Sony and Microsoft that they hadn't envisaged.

This was surprising to hear, as we would have thought that they had plenty of time to work on these features as it had been announced months before, so we probed a little deeper and asked how certain scenarios might work with the Mii friends and networking, all the time referencing how Xbox Live and PSN achieve the same thing. At some point in this conversation we were informed that it was no good referencing Live and PSN as nobody in their development teams used those systems (!) so could we provide more detailed explanations for them? My only thought after this call was that they were struggling - badly - with the networking side as it was far more complicated than they anticipated. They were trying to play catch-up with the rival systems, but without the years of experience to back it up.

As promised, (just) before the worldwide launch we received the final networking features that we required for our game along with an OS update for the development kits that would allow us to test. So we patched up our code and tried to start testing our game.

First up we had to flash the kits to the retail mode that had the Mii and network features. This was a very complicated manual process that left the consoles in a halfway state. In the retail mode we could test our features and ensure that they worked as expected, which would be a requirement for getting through Nintendo certification, but in this mode the debugging capabilities were limited. So we could see when things went wrong, but we couldn't fully debug to find out why. As developers, we had to make a choice and hope that any issues that you found were due to the (untested) OS code and wouldn't happen in the final retail environment. What should have been simple tasks were long-winded and error prone. Simple things like sending a friends request to another user were not supported in the OS, so you had to boot a separate program on the console manually, via a debug menu, so that you could send one. But if any error occurred there was no way to debug why it had failed, it just failed.

We started to ask questions about how they could possibly launch the console, which was a matter of weeks away, with a partially developed OS. How were they going to get the OS onto all of the consoles that had been manufactured up to that point? Was it just that we got it late, but they had pushed it into the production line earlier?

Launch day came around and the answer became clear: Nintendo was late - <USER3> late - with its network systems. In fact, the only way to access their systems fully was to download a big patch on day one that added all these missing components. Without that patch a lot of the release titles would have been only semi-functional."

<comment><USER26> >At some point in this conversation we were informed that it was no good referencing Live and PSN as nobody in their development teams used those systems (!)

No surprise there. Giri is still a very real thing in Japan, tho it is fading slowly with the generations.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giri_%28Japanese%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giri_%28Japanese%29)

<comment><AUTHOR> One of the funniest incarnations of _giri_ is _giri choco_ [0] and _honmei choco_ [1].

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

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I grew up in the 70's and 80's, and the first music I ever bought was on cassettes. Fortunately CD's came out when I was in middle school, so I was buying CDs when I really started building my own music collection.

I remember filling my shelves with CD cases, and I remember noticing that I wasn't listening to my full range of music because of the friction of having to switch physical discs. Then my friend and I each bought a 400-disc carousel player [0]. That thing was magical - suddenly we could listen to any song we had ever bought at the press of a few buttons. I remember using Access to make a database of all my music, so I could easily listen to anything I wanted to.

Around 2006 I bought a 30GB ipod, and I methodically ripped every CD in the 400-disc changer, which I had completely filled. I remember writing to my friend and telling him that every song in that changer was now in my pocket. It was another revolution in making all my music available with even less friction.

Fast forward to today, and what do I have? I'm still listening to music on my 2006 ipod. I'm stuck there because I don't use itunes anymore, but my old ipod still works. I haven't made the time to update my approach to organizing music. I had a dream just last night that my ipod burned up, and I had to figure out a new way to listen to music.

I'll dedicate some time in the next year or two to organize my music outside of itunes. I still have all my old CDs, so I could rip them again if there's reason to do so.

Music has been changing formats for the last 100+ years. It's a bit of work to keep up with the changing formats, but I am always grateful that we have easy access to our entire collection of music at the touch of a few buttons.

Edit: I also lived in NYC in the 90's, and I miss going to Tower Records and HMV and getting lost in there for hours at a time.

[0] [http://content.abt.com/image.php/big_cdpcx455.jpg?image=/ima...](http://content.abt.com/image.php/big_cdpcx455.jpg?image=/images/products/BDP_Images/big_cdpcx455.jpg&canvas=1&quality=100&min_w=450&min_h=320&ck=334)

</comment><comment><USER31> Two things I gathered from living with Japanese exchange students in the late 90's:

1\. CD's are much more expensive in Japan than in other parts of the world - typical prices are in the $25-30 USD range. The ~$1/song doesn't really work over there.

2\. Japan has (or had) CD _rental_ stores. Like the Blockbuster of yore, you can go and rent a CD, take it home, copy it to minidisc (this is late 90's japan, remember!), then listen to it forever. This was quite common - one of my roomies had a case of about 100 minidiscs that were all copies from rentals.

So, the market is really different over there - minidisc and laserdisc both caught on to significant degrees, whereas it didn't anywhere else.

<comment><USER32> The rental stores are still around, and still see business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Japan has made a lot of breakthroughs in certain areas of technology which, as a consequence, they'll probably be the last to abandon.

Their national broadcaster has a research lab into television technologies, it's figuring out how to encode 8K for terrestrial broadcast, among other amazingly cool projects. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHK_Science_%26_Technology_Rese...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHK_Science_%26_Technology_Research_Laboratories)

On the flip side, their national broadcaster has been really slow to invest in internet streaming, or push online access, with 60% of weekly Japanese NHK news consumers claiming they didn't even know NHK had a website: [http://www.nhk.or.jp/bunken/english/reports/pdf/10_no8_07.pd...](http://www.nhk.or.jp/bunken/english/reports/pdf/10_no8_07.pdf)

Maybe CDs vs. streaming is in some ways Sony vs. Apple, and there are factors like national pride, domestic market control, and local branding dominance that play a role in the choice of _technologies,_ rather than just products. Even so, always fascinating to see weird exogenous factors (beyond performance / capacity / etc.) tip a market.

</comment><comment><USER34> _array of bytes, that can be deleted by some Apple or Amazon from your device, and doing so for nearly the same money as if you buy real book or CD! It 's not japanese who are crazy, it's more like western people are totally irrational and insane!_

I'm wondering if it wouldn't be possible to have the best of both worlds here? What if there was a service that could act as a depository of your physical media? You could mail them boxes of stuff, which they'd keep someplace like a warehouse in Reno. The service could require that you use special packaging to reduce their costs. You'd also be able to request digitized versions, up to some fixed number of requests per month. Of course, the types of media would be limited. I would start with CDs, DVDs, and books.

</comment><comment><USER35> I remember when I was about 23 and anticipating moving out into my first apartment - in Manhattan no less! - I would go into Tower Records and browse for CDs to buy. It was a symbol for me of my independence and ability to select my taste in music, for my pad. There was a time when having a collection meant something. I missed the vinyl generation, but a few years after I had already bought probably $200 worth of CDs, Steve Jobs did that major thing - disrupting the music industry by introducing iTunes.

No one else had been able to pull it off before - the record industry knew it was a different businsss model, and this was one of Steve's massive business _coups_. Music was being shared as files online - this gave businesses a legal way to compete with that. Apple launched the whole "1000 songs in your pocket" industry.

Today, for most people, it's no longer about your song collection. Tower Records has closed along with and the disruption of the physical delivery continues apace, led by Amazon and its massive consumer power. The future is squeezing of publishers, which will need to find their own ways to collectivize. But this is the macroeconomics of it. I want to mention the social impact on the individual level.

I no longer download songs to iTunes, or rip them, except for the times I go traveling or on a cruise. Music has become a social phenomenon, and for that it is better to have a free legal music source IN THE CLOUD. I just had a house party and we used a simple web app I created a few years back called YouMixer ([http://youmixer.com](http://youmixer.com)) that uses the YouTube API as a source of free, legal music and lets everyone contribute to the playlist.

Facebook has since broke the login, and I have to recode that app. But creating a music mix works, everyone gets to add their songs and hear them at the party, and I think this is the future. Your preferences and songs following you where you go, so listenng to music is a social event unconstrained by downloading collections. I believe paintings will follow the same pattern in the next 5-10 years, and new formats for players - both audio and visual - will appear which will help usher in this social phenomenon.

</comment><comment><USER36> I've converted back to physical CDs from buying digital music and love it for a few reasons:

* A lot of music I buy actually ends up being the same price for the CD.

* I can still rip it at any quality I like into any format I like (I use abcde to rip to ogg). I keep all my music on Dropbox and sync it between my phone, home machines and work machine.

* I'm a collector and I like displaying my music in my house, and guests sometimes like to have a browse and borrow them.

</comment><comment><USER37> I agree with the notion that having CD's bring a more personal attachment to the product. For example i'm still looking forward to buying the dead tree version of TAOCP, though i agree that searching will be a bit faster on an ebook. Not sure if reading TAOCP requires you to move around too much or its more on reading it allows you to concentrate and focus on one chapter at a time.

</comment><comment><USER38> A bit off-topic, but a while ago I wrote a crossword clue

Japanese play CDS only? (3)

I'm gratified to find out that the surface was more accurate than I realised :)

</comment><comment><USER39> I visited the Sound Gallery* in Austin, Texas recently. The owner talked at length of the continual transition of lessening quality audio mediums in exchange for widespread. High-fidelity analog to vinyl to cassettes to cds to mp3s to.. streaming. Paraphrasing: "You don't own a stream. You can't hold it in your hands -- you can't drop it and break it. But it sounds like shit."

* [http://soundgalleryaustin.com/](http://soundgalleryaustin.com/)

<comment><USER40> Any claim which relies on the superiority of cassettes over CDs is inherently suspect.

<comment><USER41> Well there were DATs for a while, they never really caught on with the public.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Is it good to hear Tower Records lives on, even if not in the U.S.

</comment><comment><USER43> But..But...What about vinyl?

</comment><comment><USER44> Is piracy high in Japan?

<comment><USER45> No.

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

<comment><USER27> lol

"Not pirating like foreigners" is actually a source of pride for some groups. Japanese anime otaku and Japanese adult video enthusiasts have respectively criticised their (self-styled) western counterparts who tend to pirate the anime and adult movies instead of supporting the creators.

<comment><USER46> The entire anime industry is pretty much the worst thing ever, economics wise.

The companies behind the anime (And there are generally a lot - not just the production studio) invest the money to produce it, /and/ to book the slot that it airs on. Anime ratings aren't great for the vast majority of shows, and the TV networks would rather just pump out a cheap talk show or similar and get better ratings if they're left in charge of things.

So, now you've got the show produced, have booked a time slot, and start airing your show. You're not making money off of the advertising. Where do you make your money, then?

Merchandising and dvd/blu-ray sales. So this results in the ridiculous quantity of merchandise anime series have.

And then the blu-ray/dvd sales. These are what really drives the market, and it's completely ludicrous. A season will be released piece by piece, 2-4 episodes at a time, for $30-$60 each. Buying a copy of both seasons of Fate/Zero, for example, would cost you $591

The sales of these pieced out dvds/blu-rays basically determine the life of a show - at a time where only the domestic market is purchasing. Streams like Crunchyroll have basically zero bearing on how the committees running the show view it's success. If domestic sales are good, a sequel is likely to be made. If domestic sales are bad, even if it is an absolute runaway hit elsewhere (and I mean fairly universally - something could sell well in China, the US, etc etc etc and if it didn't do well in Japan, it's still dead)

Add all of that together, and there's really zero incentive for westerners (Or any non-Japanese market) to not pirate anime, outside of the whole "contributing financially [in an extremely diminished capacity] to the people who made the product you enjoy".

About the only time they take notice of international success at all is when it's a ridiculous runaway, like Bleach, Naruto, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> As a buyer of many games on steam, especially ridiculously expensive 20 year old games, I long to purchase the actual CD case along with manual, cover art, everything.</comment>


Whatever happened to says-it.com? - <AUTHOR> There used to be a really nifty site called says-it.com which would let you make realistic looking pictures of billboards, restaurant marquees, and similar. It was there for years then one day it stopped loading and soon after the domain expired. I've often hoped that the author might surface on Hacker News, Reddit, github, a blog, or an on-line resume but they never have. Does anyone here know who the author was and if they can be contacted? <comment><AUTHOR> I hate to answer my own question but it appears the author died in 2011:

[https://www.woot.com/blog/post/pouring-the-digital-forty- rip...](https://www.woot.com/blog/post/pouring-the-digital-forty-rip-ryland- sanders) [http://metatalk.metafilter.com/20519/Ryland-Sanders-has- pass...](http://metatalk.metafilter.com/20519/Ryland-Sanders-has-passed-away)

Leaving only elderly parents and an adult brother and sister behind. So it appears that the site is lost to history.

</comment><comment><USER2> Try the wayback machine?

<comment><AUTHOR> The whole site was protected by robots.txt unfortunately.</comment></comment>


An idea to get Michael Arrington's attention on twitter. - <AUTHOR>

I'm thinking of building a service to get the attention of famous people on twitter.
It works like this:
You go to my service to post a public twitter message to say @TechCrunch.
The service would embed a url for @TechCrunch's inbox in my service.
Example: @TechCrunch, check out my cool idea! http://url_for_@TechCrunch's_inbox_with_this_message_highlighted
You can click on the embedded url to upvote/downvote the message for @TechCrunch.  I could even have reddit-like comments discussing the merits of replying to a message.
When @TechCrunch looks at the message, he can click on the link to see how well it ranks in his inbox. He can also see who voted up/down.
At this point, @TechCrunch may be convinced to reply to the message or some other one ranked higher in his inbox.
If @TechCrunch agrees a lot with your votes about what is worth replying to, he may start following you on twitter.  And so this provides an incentive for people to help him sort out what's important in his inbox. <comment><USER2> Why would you even want Michael Arrington's attention. You should want the attention of real users, not a pseudo-celeb who only favors his friends.

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't you want to talk to famous people? How about having a policy discussion with Barack Obama?

<comment><USER3> You betcha! But I would darn hope Obama talks to me about policies because of my reputable expertise on such matters and not because I won American Idol.

<comment><AUTHOR> For the vast majority of people, chatting with Obama is not even remotely possible. With this idea, it is but based on merit.

<comment><USER3> Let's not forget, American Idol is based on merit too. So we're in agreement, there should be a version of American Idol with the prize of meeting Obama.

<comment><USER4> Well said. I think that, rather than attempting to make a system for attracting people's attention, it's better to try and learn to make interesting, well-informed comments and messages. That way you end up getting attention, but you do it the fair, honorable way, and everybody goes home happy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like this idea, although maybe not as much as the chatbot game.

The problem has already been mentioned. If you're going to make something for celebrities, it better be something that they are willing to pay for....and this doesn't seem to meet that threshold.

</comment><comment><USER3> Last time Arrington wrote a post about his email problem this was one of the solutions -- applying some kind of Digg methodology to his incoming messages -- suggested to alleviate his "problem" (I don't see how this is a problem worth finding solutions for, he's an edge case).

Here's the rebuttal: 1) you need a varied enough audience that actually cared enough about his life to sift through messages directed to him and 2) if you could amass such an audience it becomes politically, or money-wise, prudent to game it for your own benefit and 3) why would he trust audiences to judge or to even read his messages?

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea is that people doing this would build a reputation so that Arrington is more likely to follow them on Twitter.

So there's an incentive to do a good job here.

<comment><USER3> The more you say Arrington the more you peg this as an edge case.

That said, Arrington follows his existing friends or things he's interested in. If you @ reply him he will read it but more than likely he won't respond to it. That's two problems then, 1) trying to prove you can be his friend and 2) getting him to react. If you're trying to be his friend a Twitter-Digg app is a pretty lame way of doing so. If you're trying to get him to react the simplest way is to send him compelling content or proposition.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why is sorting out Arrington's inbox well a lame way of becoming his friend on twitter?

BTW, another reason why you might upvote a message is because you would like to see Arrington's reply (assuming he will reply to it in public).

<comment><USER3> The obvious privacy issues aside, that's pretty lame because you're not his real friend, you just want him to write or do something for you. How is moderating his messages going to establish some sort of friendship? That's creepy. Is he friends with top Diggers?

And why is seeing someone reply to something even considered an incentive?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it's an incentive in this forum. People sometimes vote up submissions because they would like to see Paul Graham reply.

<comment><USER3> I don't believe that is, or was, ever the intent.

I could be wrong. Get a copy of pligg and drop in tweets and users and see what happens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> i think it's an interesting idea. basically a public forum where everyone sees the messages and rates them.

you should build this, i think if someone "famous" got enough feedback/requests/traffic in "their" inbox they might bother looking to see what the public has deemed important enough for them to waste time looking at.

or something :D</comment>


Extreme Vectrex multicart - <AUTHOR> http://spritesmods.com/?art=veccart <comment><USER2> The hidden lede here is that he ported Bad Apple to a Vectrex. :D

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

Also Doom: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuVnoqFF3II](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuVnoqFF3II)

</comment><comment><USER3> > The vector drawing hadware is analog and uses a single 8-bit DAC

Even in that day and age isn't a 256x256 grid a little bit coarse? I know it draws smooth vectors between those points, so it isn't a jaggy problem. But there aren't many points to fit objects in.

<comment><USER4> Back then, that was pretty good. The best resolution of any other video game console was 320 by 192. NTSC can't show much more detail than that when using an RF or composite input. Higher resolutions didn't appear until the PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 in 1987 and the Super Famicom/SNES in 1990.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have a similar situation with the Oric-1/Atmos machines in my collection - they're all outfitted with a Cumulus disk-drive emulator. The CPU in the Cumulus is at least 10x more powerful than that of the Oric-1 itself, and has 4x the RAM. Its incongruous - but highly cool - that such an old machine is being paired up with such power .. so I often wonder what else could be being done with this expander ..</comment>


Ask HN: What do you think of web-based vulnerability scanners? - <AUTHOR>

Our small (but growing) startup thinks we've grown to a stage where we could start becoming a target. Rather than using tools like MetaSploit it seems a lot simpler to outsource this work to a 3rd-party solution like TinFoil Security, ArmorHub or perhaps McAfee Vulnerability Assessment SaaS. Has anyone used any of these or similar services? How do they compare? How effective are they? Any alternative suggestions? <comment><USER2> Automated scanners serve their purpose, but nothing beats a vulnerability assessment by qualified human beings.</comment>