Are mobile web apps really slow? - <AUTHOR> http://danbricklin.com/log/2013_06_19.htm#jsspeed <comment><USER2> Dan is too humble when giving his credentials in this article. Reading the comments already, it seems some may be unaware that his first claim to fame was VisiCalc: the software from which all modern day spreadsheets are direct descendants.

He's got years of accumulated wisdom that make his comments about programming natively vs. in the browser worth some careful thought. As you read his post, remember he developed a functional, useful, modern spreadsheet package on 1979 hardware.

<comment><USER3> Maybe he could provide a quick sample/prototype of VisiCalc ported to iOS as a web-app? After all 2013-1979 = 34 of innovation, so HTML5 and JS _must_ be a pinnacle of programmer's productivity, right? An if-it-compiles-it-is-correct kind of thing?

<comment><USER4> Actually, it's been some months and my memory is vague on details, but I seem to recall that someone has done this in the browser. Perhaps/probably via an emulator.

Hmm...

I'm in a bit of a hurry, but this sounds familiar:

[http://www.metafilter.com/122001/Visicalc-on-your- iPhone](http://www.metafilter.com/122001/Visicalc-on-your-iPhone)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _So, one argument in favor of web apps is that many of the common, tough-to- program operations are carefully coded by top programmers who are devoting their careers to fine-tuning that operation. Browsers are constantly being upgraded more and more of this important functionality built-in, including rich-text editing_

Many tough-to-program things like rich text editing have also been implemented for you in native frameworks. For example see the source of TextEdit[1], it does not implement a rich text editing control from scratch, it uses NSTextView and the other NSText* classes.

 _Only slowly has Objective-C been seeing strings and hash-tables becoming more than libraries accessed like other objects. This means that handling of modern cases (e.g., characters taking up more than one byte) happens naturally, efficiently, and hopefully more bug-free_

NSString has supported NSUTF8StringEncoding since OS X 10.0 (and I imagine since before that). Dictionaries and arrays did recently get some syntactic sugar, but strings have always had the @"" syntax, so I'm not sure what the author is referring to here.

[1] [https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#samplecode/TextEdit...](https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#samplecode/TextEdit/Introduction/Intro.html)

<comment><USER6> In these type of discussions they tend to selectively ignore all what the desktop has brought to the development and what is possible in native code frameworks.

<comment><USER7> As do the people on the other side of the discussion; it is really best to just ignore these discussions ;P.

<comment><USER6> I do work on both sides, and my experience with web just makes me wish for native projects every time I change customer, but it does not always happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a post responding to the following article that was posted on HN yesterday-ish: [http://sealedabstract.com/rants/why-mobile-web-apps-are- slow...](http://sealedabstract.com/rants/why-mobile-web-apps-are-slow/)

The point of that article was to specifically call out lazy surface-level discussions of HTML5/js apps by throwing out some benchmarks, and trying to have a practical fact-based discussion. I found the article very convincing actually, and what I wanted to see was both browser-app proponents and detractors testing out the limits of what the browser is capable of, so we can determine what is and is not viable to program in the browser stack.

This piece is simply not an answer to that article in any way. It does not attempt to answer the question posed in the title, nor does it address any of the points of it's parent article. I think we need to step up the level of discussion here if we want browser tech to be more viable for general use.

<comment><USER9> Oh, but it does step up the level of discussion, because there are more important matters involved than mere performance gains. Also, the author of yesterday's article pinned a good deal of his "thesis" on some hand waving about how pocket-sized computers won't increase in performance and memory. He stated that ARM is incapable of keeping up with Moore's Law and will have to be replaced by x86. His statements about the likelihood of vendors being capable of shipping hardware that continues to improve is based on nothing but his opinion. It is not in any way supported by some cursory emails with hardware engineers. The MHz limit has nothing to do with Moore's Law, it merely pushes us Ina multi ore direction... So lets say we have 80 cores... Well, one javascript run time could potentially use an entire core! Also, his one engineer quote admits to having an 'incredibly biased opinion'. Really guys, this kind of stuff is what convinces you?

The reason a veteran like Dan take issue with the hardware and performance side of things is that is what originally held back dynamic interpreted languages in the first place. There were a zillion arguments about how Smalltalk and Lisp were just too damn slow and would never be capable of the performance present in languages closer to the metal. Thought the 90s and the 00s these opinions were clearly rendered moot.

Also, lets think about where are problems are actually bound. With games, 3D rendering and graphics are a big pain point and developers spend a lot of resources to cordon off and optimize this code. And then they frequently use a language like Lua to do everything else. This is basically the approach of APIs like WebGL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If I open iTunes on Windows and scroll through my music library (~20,000 songs) then move over to Google Play in chrome 28 and scroll through the same library, I notice very quickly that the native experience is undeniably better. I would estimate the total lag (between spinning the scroll wheel on my mouse and seeing the ui begin to scroll) is about 10 times as long on chrome.

Another example: try using any web based spreadsheet software after using Excel for a while. I guarantee that you'll be immediately frustrated with the web apps sluggishness.

Web apps are getting better, but anything that uses both the HID and graphics stacks is still way faster if native.

</comment><comment><USER11> It is a little disappointing that this doesn't directly address the issues with the original article's claims. Instead it continues focusing on CPU execution timings. Like many responses to the original article, the elephant in the room is javascript performance on DOM manipulation/UI. To take an example on the desktop, if I gave you two options a) language a which is about 2 times slower than C in doing some math operations b) language b which is about 15 times slower than C in doing some math operations. Both are GC languages with large memory footprint (3-8x) that of C. Which language would you choose to write your UI? If you chose a. you chose WRONG!. a) is java with its horrible AWT/Swing libraries and b) is Visual Basic.

Nothing specific to Java though, the .NET guys have spent about 15 years optimizing their GC. Yet every UI framework on that platform seems like a turd compared to Visual Basic (WinForms, WPF, Silverlight). Looks like they are throwing the towel and asking everyone to move to HTML and javascript. I wish javascript guys spent more time benchmarking UI performance than making it look like C++ (asm.js and other things). Take a paper draw circle on it. Push it on a smooth desk. That's your use case and how things should perform. No jitter, no flashes. Don't care about some fancy assembler optimization for matrix multiplications.

Of course that is only one part of the problem with javascript. The other big problem is lack of tools for putting UI's and writing large programs. On top of that you have to add in all the libraries (jQuery, Angular etc.) now you are totally hosed. You don't know where your performance issues are. In any case, mobile apps today have really two platforms - iOS and Android. They have quite different use cases (paid vs advertising). Most UIs are thin wrappers on services. Porting to the next platform is not some huge rewrite.

<comment><USER12> > Most UIs are thin wrappers on services. Porting to the next platform is not > some huge rewrite.

I beg to differ. In my current project, the client (written in JS) has about 10x as much _non-UI_ code as the server. Currently this app only targets desktop platforms through a thin wrapper. When it's time to target mobile platforms, the UI will need to be native, or at least a mix of native and Web. I have no plan to rewrite all the non-UI code twice, once in ObjC and once in Java. So we need a way to have a common, memory-safe language for non-UI client code, that can be shared between the major mobile platforms _and_ the Web platform. I'm going to take another look at Titanium Mobile, though I don't like the way it attempts to provide a greatest-common-denominator API for the UI. I'd rather use the platforms' native UI APIs, in their native languages if necessary, while using a common language for non-UI code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Huh. It's like he's saying (because of libraries in the web browser) that we should be benchmarking HTML5 the way that we would a C64 or an Amiga 500... not as a general purpose machine that can implement arbitrary algorithms, but as a crummy machine where all the magic is done in hardware (or, here, libraries).

Part of me wants to resist that frame. The whole point of browsers running (sandbox safe) arbitrary code is getting the benefits of arbitrary code, right? Who wants to distort their problem solving to conform to the ad hoc details of the current state of browser vendor libraries? Isn't that what we're trying to get away from?

But then a part of me thinks... we do that with GPUs too, right? If you benchmarked a modern game that didn't use the GPU (and didn't distort what work was done to accommodate the particularities of the how the GPU expects computation to happen), its performance would be relatively speaking even more dreadful. Just like a web app that doesn't lean heavily on the browsers' libraries.

Obviously there is a difference in that browser constraints are mostly social (and thus kind of arbitrary), and GPU constraints (and those of the C64, for that matter) seem to be responses to certain physical realities.

I guess in the short run, he has the right attitude if you want to make code that actually performs well today, but wrong if you think that putting political pressure on standards bodies and browser vendors by offering up critiques like the original article is likely to improve things.

</comment><comment><USER14> _This means that handling of modern cases (e.g., characters taking up more than one byte) happens naturally, efficiently, and hopefully more bug-free._

This isn't true at all, right? JavaScript is missing fundamental Unicode support, like normalization or testing for canonical equivalence.

<comment><USER7> JavaScript doesn't even handle "characters taking up more than one byte" once you abstract to "more than one X" (or, alternatively, "more than two bytes"): JavaScript strings are really binary 16-bit numeric arrays, which frankly is even worse than using 8-bit numeric arrays as developers are much more likely to throw up their hands and claim "those characters don't happen often enough for me to dirty up my beautiful code" (the response I seriously got when I started working on patches to support UTF-16 for ACE; it was really annoying and horribly disappointing: they seemed to believe they could just ignore the problem in general and solve it at the edges, which is a total misunderstanding of the scope of the issue).

In essence, JavaScript's string is no better than C++11's std::u16string, and in fact is even worse as the language doesn't provide anything similar to std::codecvt, so you are stuck implementing UTF-16 conversions yourself in a language that doesn't even have an integral data type :(. (Incidentally, Java's String also sucks at this, so it isn't like the "native applications" side of this argument is doing so well, with C++ and Java both down for the count; only Objective-C has a real Unicode-compliant NSString class.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> For me, it is not just that web apps feel slow. It is that they feel _clunky_. I can often see the UI elements being drawn one by one, the animations are rarely smooth, and the gestures (if I'm on mobile) never register as well as they do in native apps. The seams are showing.

Even when native apps are slow, they can have a feeling of cohesiveness and polish that web apps lack.

<comment><USER16> This really feeds into npalli's point above. Comparing native vs. web by simply comparing JS execution performance is a red herring.

The average native app doesn't really _do_ that much app logic. I'd wager you can take almost any app in the App Store, rip its non-UI code out and replace it with JavaScript equivalents, and no one would be any the wiser.

We're talking about software that needs to respond in human-time. Taking a couple dozen milliseconds is not the end of the world.

What _is_ the end of the world for these apps is laggy, unresponsive UI, and that's where hybrid web apps fall apart. Users are _very_ timing-sensitive when it comes to visual elements. When I touch a button it should visually respond _immediately_ , within at most a few milliseconds. Most web apps can't reach this level of performance.

Which leads to something from the article itself:

> _" many of the common, tough-to-program operations are carefully coded by > top programmers who are devoting their careers to fine-tuning that > operation"_

The problem with the web, as it pertains to UI, is that _this isn 't true_. Take the dreaded carousel - that things _needs_ to animate and scroll smoothly, but the code to do this isn't natively built into the platform, so everyone ends up rolling their own (or using what someone else has rolled) non-natively. And now you have shitty, laggy scrolling performance.

This goes double for webapps that pretend to be native. Now they're basically reimplementing all of the platform's native UI widgets _in Javascript_ without the benefit of the legion of native platform developers who've smoothed out all the kinks.

<comment><USER17> Isn't one of the reasons that a web app won't respond immediately to a button click is because of a built-in delay on the browser level on touch devices? The one in place to allow for some time to know whether the user intended to do a touch event versus a drag event?

For instance, I've made a simple tic-tac-toe app that I have on my phone through Phonegap that uses nothing but canvas for rendering. It doesn't seem to have this built-in delay and the buttons are quite responsive.

I don't think your example of the carousel works because the article, I believe, was referring to the programmers that are working on the browser itself. You can't necessarily hold them responsible for performance issues derived from what other programmers are doing on the platform that may or may not be a good idea. Besides, I would imagine you could build a rather snappy carousel these days on modern browsers using CSS3 features as the bulk of the animation as they are native to the browser.

You are also comparing today's Javascript endeavors to those of native developers that have already had their issues worked out, as you say. It would only be fair to wait until current Javascript issues are worked out before doing a proper comparison. It would be like saying your car is the obvious choice for the race because it outperforms my car even though I've yet to put the tires on my car.

Native is the proper choice today, but who knows what tomorrow may bring?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > _For most of what we are talking about, JavaScript does not execute in a > vacuum. It runs in a browser. That browser environment brings a lot to the > table. The applications you are coding are often ones that lend themselves > to what a browser is good for: Presenting information._

We already covered this too. Apps that are just about "presenting information" (your typical CRUD stuff, or glorified CRUD, from Gmail to twitter clients), are plenty fast.

Mobile web apps are really slow for those OTHER uses. Anything with multimedia for one.

<comment><USER19> At heart, arbitrary distinctions like that end up just being "apps that run well" vs "apps that run badly". And no matter how good the system, there will always be some apps in both camps.

<comment><USER18> > _At heart, arbitrary distinctions like that end up just being "apps that run > well" vs "apps that run badly". And no matter how good the system, there > will always be some apps in both camps._

What's "arbitrary" about the distinction? Any app that depends on CPU intensive work, with high memory overhead, that doesn't want to be interrupted by GC pauses, will be slow as web based mobile app.

It's a technical distinction. The only reason it's somewhat generic, is that nobody can tell in advance which app belongs in which camp, until we know what the app needs to do.

For a specific app, with known requirements, whether it'll be slow as a web app or not, is anything but arbitrary. E.g "Can I write an image editor as a mobile web app, editing 5MP images with filters etc?", "No, you can't, it will be dog slow".

Sure, you can write a slow native mobile app too. But that's beside the point. We're talking about apps written properly in both cases here. That is, what are the limits of an app in each case.

<comment><USER19> My point is mainly that there is a middle ground, like spreadsheets and word processors and vector drawing programs and tons of useful every day programs, that are not "just fancy CRUD" but that are also not generally going to be CPU bound.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The CTO of a company which makes a web platform for mobile development ([http://www.alphasoftware.com/products.asp](http://www.alphasoftware.com/products.asp)), thinks mobile web apps are good enough?

What a surprise...

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure the cynicism is warranted. Dan does a bunch of native iOS development. He's got more experience than the vast majority of people who read this site. This isn't some random brogrammer writing a post about JavaScript. Dan Bricklin's resume rightfully could include the line "1979: Invented the spreadsheet".

<comment><USER21> > 1979: Invented the spreadsheet

Not to diminish his accomplishments, because I consider him one of my heroes, but he didn't invent spreadsheets. That honor would go to Richard Mattessich 18 years earlier.

<comment><USER2> Fair enough, I stand corrected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Speed is only one of the tradeoffs. You also lose access to the native interactions, controls, transitions etc.., which makes a lot of the mobile web apps be very alien to the users since they don't really quite fit with the rest of the apps.

I am curious, can anyone point to an well-done mobile web app? The best way to shut up all of us yelling "js is worthless for mobile development" is to point to such apps and explain how they were made.

<comment><USER23> See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5953345](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5953345) for a discussion of a well-done performant mobile web app.

<comment><USER22> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Anyone interested in optimising their mobile web applications should watch Apple's Safari tracks from this year's WWDC.

They have plenty of advice on improving general performance and how to use the WebKitInspector to measure performance problems.

Some key take aways:

Avoid using libraries (like jQuery) unless you really need them - It will reduce memory consumption significantly.

Be careful how often you're invalidating style/layout info and forcing recompilation.

Avoid using onscroll events to do layout. Especially when you're likely to inadvertently invalidate styles/layout at the same time e.g. accessing element offsets and positions

</comment><comment><USER18> > _Browsers are constantly being upgraded more and more of this important > functionality built-in, including rich-text editing_

I don't see any "rich-text editing" widgets built-in in browsers.

And even if that was the case (that they are available in some) it has been 18+ years we've have had to put with BS solutions like the common "rich-text editors" found in most Content Management Systems: slow, buggy, crappy output AND brittle.

<comment><USER25> What do you consider contenteditable=true if not a rich text editing widget?

<comment><USER26> I think typically "Rich Text Editing" includes controls for presentational aspects: fonts, colors, weights, etc. Contenteditable only lets you change the text itself.

<comment><USER27> No. It is possible to bold and such. With some code to hook things up you have pretty much everything you need for a "real" rich text box.

<comment><USER26> Can you point me to an example of being able to click on the contenteditable div and make some text bold without extra code? I've never seen something like that. Thanks!

<comment><USER27> Ctrl+b or eqivilent selected text iirc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Mobile performance has to do more with the expectations of multi-touch interaction for the user and less about the whole application simply being "slow". Very marginal differences in performance can have massive effects on the usability of apps on a mobile devices. For example - imagine the lock screen slider didn't follow your finger as you swiped, but slightly lagged behind. Would you know initially that it was even swipe-able if that were the case?

</comment><comment><USER29> A lot of your article goes on to talk about development time speed up. The original article discussed performance where it is critical, like a game. You can't have compensate on performance even if it comes at the price of higher development time.

</comment><comment><USER30> "Any programmer ignoring JavaScript is doing themselves a disservice."

Not really. You get to work with a buggy language and you loose competitive edge on the work market. Management's/business's point of view could be different though.

</comment><comment><USER31> If you want your code to run as fast as possible, don't add needless bloat.

I guess I am failing to see where the argument lies? Isn't this still the first rule of Programming Club?

</comment><comment><USER32> > __ _Are mobile web apps really slow?_ __

Do you have Sprint?

</comment><comment><USER33> The problem again is not really javascript, it is DOM manipulation. You can have the fastest javascript engine ever,if the bottelneck is the DOM , there is little you can do about it. And everybody doesnt own a quad-core mobile.

I like Titanium approach where the ui is native and the code is javascript,so you are basically using javascript with a specific API,not the DOM. I'd like to see more frameworks like this , or even , i'd like mobile os vendors to faciliate the use of their native framework with javascript, instead of having to use HTML5 in a webview for development. I believe that's what WP is doing. As much as i h*te MS , it is a good move.

<comment><USER34> Do you have any proof that DOM manipulation is slow? This is a common refrain that I've never seen proof of (other then anecdotally). There are folks saying that the DOM is fast, and how the JS we use to manipulate it is slow. [http://blog.korynunn.com/javascript/the-dom-isnt-slow-you- ar...](http://blog.korynunn.com/javascript/the-dom-isnt-slow-you-are/)

<comment><USER35> To be fair, I'm not sure I would endeavor to make a mobile-only web app load 10000 elements to the DOM all at once. When I set to 2000, for instance, I can get below 200ms on Android 4.1.1 in chrome.

<comment><USER18> Below 200ms? Still nowhere smooth enough to get to 60fps.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What We Can and Can't Learn from Copenhagen - <AUTHOR> https://gehlinstitute.org/dialogue/can-cant-learn-copenhagen/ <comment><USER2> It's worth mentioning that most of the cities in Denmark are similar. Nearly every town that isn't tiny has pedestrian/bike only streets, and the trend seems to be to expand these areas rather than making them smaller.

I live in Odense which is across the other bridge (the one that doesn't go to Sweden) and it is by far my favorite city in Denmark. Relatively recently, the busiest street that goes through the very center of downtown was closed in order to expand the pedestrian downtown.

Copenhagen is really charming with its canals and such, but it's incredibly busy and noisy and trafficked in comparison. Too much for me.

If anyone should be considering moving to denmark, Copenhagen is not the only place to be. Odense, Århus, Vejle, Ålborg and most other cities are built on the same principles, so if work doesn't demand you live in the capitol, expanding your search parameters is definitely worth it(and potentially very lucrative given the price of housing in Copenhagen).

<comment><USER3> Just to add a bit of info: Aarhus has a quite happening software development scene, while Odense is the place to be if you want to work with robotics.

<comment><USER4> Aarhus looks relatively car-centric overall on satellite images. But I guess that is partly because it is small. It seems like you would have to live inside the few km of the city proper though.

<comment><USER5> I've lived in Aarhus the last 10 years with just a bike. Living downtown or near a lightrail stop outside the city, is certainly preferable though.

<comment><USER4> I'm sure it's a decent deal for anyone who has a connection to the place. There are just a lot more competition in being able to bike into a smaller city (which is almost any university town) compared to being able to live in a smaller city, being able to bike into a larger city or being able to bike in a larger city. For someone moving into the area it would then be more a matter of cost, opportunities and other things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> From Wikipedia:

Copenhagen[a] (Danish: København [kʰøpm̩ˈhaʊ̯ˀn] (About this soundlisten)) is the capital and most populous city of Denmark. As of July 2018, the city has a population of 777,218 (616,098 in Copenhagen Municipality, 103,914 in Frederiksberg Municipality, 43,005 in Tårnby Municipality, and 14,201 in Dragør Municipality).[3][7][8] It forms the core of the wider urban area of Copenhagen (population 1,627,705) and the Copenhagen metropolitan area (population 2,057,737).

It's a fair bit bigger than 600k whichever way you look at it. Frederiksberg is entirely encircled by Copenhagen municipality, there's no difference in terms of cycling. There's easily 1M people who could cycle to work/school if they wanted. As a kid I could cycle, maybe 85% in bike lanes, all the way to the end of "the Copenhagen metropolitan area" from the centre.

My main gripe with the place is they seem to hate cars. I mean the trains, underground, bus, and bike lanes work for a lot of people, but not everyone. Say I want to bring my kids and my elderly parents somewhere. Realistically the only way to do that is to drive, but they're squeezing parking spaces massively.

<comment><USER7> If there was much demand for parking spaces, could there be a business opportunity to provide private parking options? I remember seeing tiny parking lots in Japan a lot where street parking in general isn't allowed.

<comment><USER8> [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/02/realestate/parking- spaces...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/02/realestate/parking-spaces-that- could-make-you-rich.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > School children in Copenhagen start bike safety lessons early..

When I lived in SF a few years ago, I bought a bike and asked the fancy bike store what hand signals to use when biking. They weren't sure...

In Denmark it's a 100 USD fine of you don't signal turns and stops on your bike.

<comment><USER10> Isn't it just sticking out your hand in the direction you want to go everywhere? I'm annoyed by people not doing that properly at home, so it'd be ironic to now find out I've been signing incorrectly abroad.

<comment><USER11> Yes, but also, if you wish to stop (including stopping on the right after crossing a junction in order to turn left), you raise a hand straight up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Bicycles (and related transportation such as electric scooters) are a really good mode of transportation between 0.5 km and 5 km; a lot of cities could benifit being more bicycle-friendly.

Copenhagen is not car-unfriendly given its size and history. Parking in the inner part of the city is expensive and getting around in car is slow because the city is not built for it (circa ++100 years ago). The newer parts of Copenhagen accommodates cars as any other modern city.

Another thing worth noting is that Copenhagen got is its metro quite recently (some 15 years ago) and it is not fully expanded. So the public transport alternative was busses and some trains.

<comment><USER13> Maybe the metro explains why there are so many more cyclists in Copenhagen than Stockholm: the daily ridership of the Copenhagen metro is 200k while the one in Stockholm has 1200k.

<comment><USER14> There is also around 350k that takes the S-train every day. I belive they think they will more than double the amount of passengers when the new line "city ringen" opens in the end of next month as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There are benefits and costs to diversity.

We invented jazz music and snowboarding. And the Internet.

They get social cohesion and political buy-in for (relatively) progressive transportation and health initiatives.

I, like the author, have urban envy when I visit Copenhagen (and Zurich and Tokyo). But if I had to choose, I'd choose inventing jazz.

<comment><USER16> Are you comparing the US to a single city? Why not compare the whole of Europe to Minneapolis and see who made most inventions?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I live across the bridge in Malmö, and visit Copenhagen infrequently. It really is quite a lovely city, and our proximity seems to create a faux competition for Sweden. Since Malmö enjoys many of the same benefits in transportation but without such population density.

People -love- their cars. And Denmark/Sweden try to dissuade people from owning them with heavy taxes and expensive parking.

But I've noticed if you ever try to take a car from someone who has one they with fight you until you're burger. To many people it means freedom, and until public transport and bikes are much stronger alternatives you're not going to make any friends.

Which is a catch-22. You need to limit cars because they consume a lot of space and make a lot of noise (and can be dangerous) but few have an appetite for limiting cars.

I think if there's a change it needs to be very gradual, over generations.

<comment><USER18> > But I've noticed if you ever try to take a car from someone who has one they > with fight you until you're burger.

I don't own a car, and never have. I live in Stockholm, a very car-hostile city. I commute the 20km each way by bus/subway or e-bike (in the summer).

And it's absolutely miserable.

The commute that would have taken 20 minutes by car instead takes at least an hour, if everything matches up perfectly.

Any large shopping is an exercise in misery, where you're stuck buying one thing, taking it home, and coming back for the next thing in the shop next door, because you have nowhere to store stuff temporarily (and your (/bike's) carrying capacity is tiny anyway). And of course each roundtrip, again, takes 3x what it would otherwise.

Want to meet up with friends? Take the hour+ trip to downtown, then as much again to get to their place, since the system was only designed for getting people to work and back. Oh, and add another 50% since you're in the weekend/evening where the traffic is reduced further.

And then you wonder why there is a loneliness epidemic, or why people get mad when you want to take away the least depressing mode of transportation that they have.

The same also matches my experience of Copenhagen. But of course you're not going to see that when you live in a hotel in the middle of the city for a few days.

<comment><USER4> I am not so sure Stockholm is that car-hostile. There is a congestion tax, but they just spent $3 billion dollars on the Stockholm Bypass motorway. It is just very centralized, made worse by the housing market. Rush hour traffic gets jammed quickly in bottle necks. They also haven't built much subway in the last few decades. There isn't for example really a ring line, which most other systems have. So going anywhere but the city center is hard. Stockholm also has very near suburb, there are single family homes just a few kilometers from the city center. Built for cars no less, but quite expensive. They sort of tried to complement that with the "job/housing/work-areas", but that idea is mostly lost to time. I think it is more that greater Stockholm just isn't very well planned these days. But I guess Copenhagen could be similar, because it isn't cheap either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> GuB-42 One thing you have to realize with Copenhagen, and Danemark in general is that it is flat. Another bike friendly country are the Netherlands, also flat. Bikes as an efficient transportation work better when it is flat, you can probably feel it in your legs.

Interesting that they compared it to Park _Slope_.

Another thing about Copenhagen and Amsterdam is that they are the ideal size. Bigger and a bicycle is not enough, smaller and you might as well be walking.

Maybe a more interesting city to study for its bike culture would be Tokyo. Huge city, not flat, and yet very bike friendly.

<comment><USER19> I think to would be better to say Toyko is 2-wheel-vehicle friendly. Some of those vehicles are powered by humans, some by an electric motor, and others by a 150 cc engine.

In my opinion it's better to focus on skinny vehicle overall than just bikes; just because the current motorcycle culture in the US is that of a mid-life crisis on wheels doesn't mean that the motorcycle can't play a role in the city of tommorow

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This article might just as well have been about the Netherlands, so for those interested in this, you might also like this lecture discussing the many small measures taken in Dutch infrastructure to make cycling a safe and pleasant experience: What can Seattle learn from Dutch street design? [1] It helped me find out that apparently I'm a public infrastructure geek.

[1] [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l0GA901oGe4](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l0GA901oGe4)

</comment><comment><USER20> I spent a week in Copenhagen a few years ago and, while it was incredibly expensive, I was very impressed.

But on further investigation I discovered it was almost impossible to get a long term rental there. I read that Danes would put their newborns on wait lists in hopes that they might be eligible for an apartment when they left home 18 years later.

Copenhagians, is that really true or just Internet Hyperbole?

<comment><USER4> I think the quality of life in the Nordic countries is somewhat overrated these days. It was really dependent on having a low cost of living, but now many things have been sort of left up to the market. Which means that property is quite expensive, and so is everything else. Social systems are less extensive. But there are high taxes, punitive taxes and somewhat low salaries for professionals. So the culture is sort of adapted for all this, but that only really works for those who have been grandfathered in. So regardless of the specifics it definitely isn't something to jump into without thinking. Unless you are aware and that is the idea.

<comment> a0-prw If you're planning on having kids, the Nordic countries are still a good bet. "Free" (tax financed), high quality higher education and "free", excellent medical care mean a _lot_!

Edit: I've lived in Denmark since '91, and I _never_ thought it was low cost of living, but definitely value for money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I live in San Francisco. It's hard to do things here, or in general in the Bay area.

One of my dreams is to bring together dozens or hundreds of people, and collectively buy and operate an entire block, making it using sound principles of "garden city" urbanism - vastly applied in Copenhagen, and also promoted by Jan Gehl himself.

</comment><comment><USER21> I heard Copenhagen turned all of their fire hydrants to permit car parking in front of them.

That would never happen in USA/Canada. We must continue to waste 5%+ parking capacity in the unlikely event that it could delay fire fighting and to continue using parking-space wasting valve orientation.

<comment><USER22> Where did you learn this? I'm not sure how that would work given the hydrant needs to connect to the fire pump/hose on the truck, which would be located on the street?

<comment><USER21> It was just a forum comment that couldn't seem made-up.

Search for Copenhagen here: [http://freakonomics.com/2006/07/26/parking-spots- and-fire-hy...](http://freakonomics.com/2006/07/26/parking-spots-and-fire- hydrants/)

I was trying to research which countries prohibit parking in-front of fire hydrants, because many don't, and don't burn down in 6 seconds.

I think the 90 degree turns with the hose are fine and can be fit between parked cars. It's the valve facing the street that can be a problem if it's obstructed, possibly needing to smash windows, because there isn't enough space to route around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Well, I guess if you tax autos at 100% of their value where most people can't afford them, that helps.

</comment><comment><USER24> _" a larger civic purpose: creation of a shared public realm. Copenhagen feels, in a way that no other American city does, like a group effort."_

George Monbiot emphasizes a similar idea: public luxury. [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/31/privat...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/31/private- wealth-labour-common-space)

 _" securing private space through private spending. Attempts to do so are highly inefficient, producing ridiculous levels of redundancy and replication. Look at roads, in which individual people, each encased in a tonne of metal, each taking up (at 70mph) 90 metres of lane, travel in parallel to the same destination. The expansion of public wealth creates more space for everyone; the expansion of private wealth reduces it, eventually damaging most people's quality of life."_

<comment><USER25> When someone gets older and starts staring death in the face they start thinking about their legacy. "What is the world going to remember me for?"

This is when the real philanthropy starts. In addition to buildings, charity, endowed academic chairs, etc. I think buying and donating land would be a great thing to do. If I had N millions to donate then buying a city block, turning it into a park, and putting my name on the gate would be a pretty nice way to be remembered.

<comment><USER26> Except it never happens at any reasonable scale. It just seems like an excuse not to do what is needed.

<comment><USER27> That's the question though right?

Is philanthropy the reason the state does not do what's needed?

Or is the state not doing what's needed the reason for philanthropy?

Or perhaps it's both?

In any case we can't really figure out how to get to a game theoretic local optimum of maximum state participation and maximum philanthropy, until we can dig into the real reasons a lot of these things are and are not done.

<comment><USER26> Or perhaps it's neither?

It seems obvious the state doesn't do enough when you have a government that doesn't believe in the state doing anything but the barest minimum that will get them elected.

On the scale of government spending philanthropy barely registers, it's only raised as an issue in an attempt to distract from the real question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> They did not build alternatives for people. They social engineered people to do what they wanted them to do. They slapped ridiculous taxes on cars and forced people to seek other means of transportation.

Then they made it difficult and unaffordable to park in the city and built those extensive bike lanes.

To me as someone who grew up in a communist country reeks of communism.

Dont take me wrong I am not saying cars are necessary but having a car to me equals having the freedom of choice.

Now I live in Seoul and I usually commute by taking the subway but If I need to go to a district that is not in the vicinity of the extensive subway network in Seoul I take the car. It's fast and reliable.

<comment><USER29> It's a great city, I still miss living there. I used to use public transport to go to work and it was awesome. Going to work by bike on large bike lanes is even better. Not to speak of the lack of car noise, which is the most annoying thing in cities - though you won't realise that until you experience a car- free day or zone for the first time.

I'm currently living in Lisbon, which also has a very good living quality, but I'd say that the living quality in Copenhagen is unparalleled. I'd move there anytime if I had a good job opportunity there. I still work in Academia and Copenhagen University does not have many open positions, so no chance for me. Not that I complain about Lisbon's sunshine.

You can still have a car in Copenhagen, if you really want one, you know. It's not a matter of choices, it's a matter of nudging people in the right direction and tax them in a way that improves living quality and society as a whole. However, living in a low/no-traffic area can only be appreciated properly once you've experienced it. IMHO, it's one of those things that need to be experienced before forming an informed opinion. That's why it can be hard to sell politically.

<comment><USER24> > the lack of car noise

This is one of my bugbears. Setting to one side the obvious GHG-emissions problems with moving people by cars, the noise they make and the visual impact they have are huge reasons why I prefer areas with as few cars as possible.</comment></comment></comment>


Quit Facebook Day is May 31. Will you quit? - <AUTHOR> http://www.quitfacebookday.com/

<comment><USER2> No. It's the best and simplest way to communicate with my family and relatives that I can't visit on a daily basis.

Yesterday I revised my privacy settings to remove some lame things like Applications being able to use my information. Even then, I have no personal info on Facebook apart from some wall posts (with no real useful information) and my friends list. No activities, interests, etc. listed

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Incidentally, Quietly Reinstate Your Facebook Account Day is June 1st.

</comment><comment><USER3> No, I won't quit. I only give it my contact information, which is private, and it's a useful networking tool. It's not a binary decision to either use facebook or quit, just decrease the amount of personal information you put on it.

<comment><USER4> Part of the issue is _facebook integration_ which doesn't give you the control of what sites are getting data about you from facebook, and which are giving facebook information about you.

Facebook is becoming what we always feared Google might.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've now seen this for May 14th (today), 10/10/2010, now 5/31... it's sort of getting old. If you don't want to use it, close your account.

This isn't a crack addiction, I don't think you need a group of 100 people to do it with you for support. Or is it?

<comment><USER6> Why do you assume it's for support? I think that doing it on specific dates is intended to make it a statement, a visible drop in statistics.

<comment><USER7> Considering Facebook has north of 400 million users, how big of a dent do you need to be noticed?

A few thousand people quitting on May 31st just won't matter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> No. I use Facebook for business and there's not another website that my startup will have 18k fans on.

</comment><comment><USER9> I won't quit Facebook for the moment. I'm second to none in trying to raise consciousness about Facebook privacy issues. (I always upvote such links here, and I share such links liberally from my Facebook profile, and on email lists I subscribe to.) But Facebook search

<http://willmoffat.github.com/FacebookSearch/>

and Give Me My Data

<http://givememydata.com/>

provide me enough spot checks on how my Facebook privacy is working. Consciousness-raising among my friends keeps their Facebook behavior in writing about me prudent. I like mash-up conversations among old friends and new about links I share--my main use of Facebook is to use it for social linking, like HN on all the topics I find interesting and would discuss with my friends anyhow.

But, yeah, I'll keep my eyes open for a reason to quit, and I do MUCH less "liking," "fanning," and "joining" on Facebook than I used to, since I found out how public those acts are. I still don't know if Facebook has a successful plan for monetizing its use by non-doofuses who refuse to read ads or play time-wasting games.

<comment><USER10> "I still don't know if Facebook has a successful plan for monetizing its use by non-doofuses who refuse to read ads or play time-wasting games." Why do they need that, when there are millions of "doofuses" to profit off of?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Their idea could use a little work. Of all the days in the year they could pick, they choose a national holiday when most people are going to be out and about and not at home using the internet.

</comment><comment><USER12> No. I considered it when the privacy issues first arose, but then I realized I'd miss the little things. For instance, my phone syncs profile pictures with Facebook, so when my friends or family call me, I automatically see a picture of them without me having to set (or take) pictures manually. Instead, I decided to take a more active role in my privacy on Facebook. Yesterday, I removed a lot of information from my profile and severely restricted my privacy settings.

Lastly, I added an activity ("Monitoring my Facebook privacy settings") to my profile and shared it with my friends on Facebook and Twitter (and even posted it here on HN) to raise awareness. I think if enough people added that activity to their profile, it would be just as effective at making a statement while still allowing me to keep in touch with my friends and family.

For those that are interested, the page for the "Monitoring my Facebook privacy settings" activity is here: [http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Monitoring-my-Facebook- priv...](http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Monitoring-my-Facebook-privacy- settings/122881171055820?ref=mf) Clicking "like" will add it to your profile as an activity.

</comment><comment><USER13> Nope. I'm not concerned about it. None of my Facebook data is private or valuable enough for me to care about privacy.

</comment><comment><USER14> Amongst all my friends Facebook is almost entirely the only communication tool save for cell phones. Any good alternatives which won't have the problems that Facebook does that I can work on switching them all to?

Right now I'm waiting for one of the open network projects to mature.

</comment><comment><USER15> No. But all the info I've been seeing on privacy issues did prompt me to update my privacy settings so that I share basically nothing.

Facebook is too useful a platform for sharing photos and the like to get rid of it entirely...

</comment><comment><USER16> No. Ask me again once Diaspora or OneSocialWeb or whatever provides a viable alternative.

I tainted my data long ago, and only log on every few months to PM a friend or something, so I'm not too concerned atm.

</comment><comment><USER17> Oh... I've been meaning to quit but I'm afraid of logging in and seeing what my profile looks like ;p Guess I'll support the movement on May 31st

</comment><comment><USER18> I won't quit because I can't take my data with me and use it elsewhere. If I could do those, then yes I'd leave tomorrow.

<comment><USER19> You may be interested in the Data Portability project: <http://dataportability.org/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is there a facebook group for that?

<comment><USER21> I want to be a fan. Just for for the sake of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Already did.

<comment><USER23> Same, but a long time ago (before it was cool to do so)

<comment><USER24> hipster.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> if you don't delete your account, use this to check that you have locked down all your Facebook info: <http://www.rabidgremlin.com/fbprivacy/>

<comment><USER26> No offense, but to test/verify our privacy settings on FB you want us to provide our FB login info to an un-trusted site.

Thanks but no thanks..

<comment><USER25> Yeah I know it seems a bit off but it's better then not knowing what you are leaking.

BTW the latest version also shows you what is exposed when you just hit a "like" button.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> No. I never ever used it for anything I would consider private.

</comment><comment><USER28> I never started.

</comment><comment><USER29> No but I've removed all information from my profile page (except for that information which is currently unedittable due to no one at Facebook thinking about Privacy, let alone testing their god damn releases), and I've removed all posts from my wall.

I'm setting my profile to read only and I'm going to hack together something that will allow people to use Facebook Connect to write on a self-hosted wall. A sort of self hosted Facebook page.

The only thing I'm leaving hosted at Facebook is my photos.</comment>


Ask HN: Any good math jokes? - <AUTHOR> I'm trying to come up with a good math joke for our math team t-shirts.  Last year we had "Know you limits, don't drink and derive."  The shirt included a fuzzy graph.
I'm thinking about using an xkcd comic if the author gives me permission, but the images are somewhat small for t-shirts, so I might have to throw my own together anyways.
Got any good ideas? <comment><USER2> An engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician go to a conference together, and split a room in the hotel. They check in and go to sleep. The hotel is old (they couldn't afford anything better on professors' salaries), so the room is heated by a fireplace. A spark jumps out of the fire and catches the rug on fire. The engineer smells the smoke and wakes up. He jumps out of bed, sees the fire, and looks around. The first thing he sees is the ice bucket, so he takes it, fills it up from the sink, and throws the water on the fire. He drops the ice bucket next to the fireplace and goes back to bed.

The fire throws another spark, creating another fire. The physicist wakes up and sees the fire. He calculates that, given the size of the fire, and amount of oxygen needed to be displaced to put out a fire of said size, a glass of water will be sufficient. He fills up his water glass from the sink, and while running to the fire, throws the water at the fire at the exact distance from the fire that gets the water to the fire earliest, putting it out. He drops the glass next to the fireplace and goes to sleep.

The fire sparks once more, and the mathematician wakes up and sees the fire. He looks at the ice bucket and glass sitting next to the fireplace, says "Aha! A solution exists!", and goes back to bed.

It's a math joke, but not one suitable for t-shirts.

<comment><USER3> While we're at jokes not suitable for t-shirts:

A mathematician, an engineer and a physicist were travelling through Scotland when they saw a black sheep through the window of the train.

"Aha", says the engineer, "I see that Scottish sheep are black."

"Hmm", says the physician, "You mean that some Scottish sheep are black".

"Nonono", says the mathematician, "All we know is that there is at least one sheep in Scotland, and that at least one side of that one sheep is black."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The first one orders a beer. The second orders half a beer. The third, a quarter of a beer. The bartender says "You're all idiots", and pours two beers.

more: [http://www.metafilter.com/76377/Two-mathematicians-walk- into...](http://www.metafilter.com/76377/Two-mathematicians-walk-into-a-bar)

<comment><USER5> Or its sibling: a genie grants both a mathematician and an engineer their greatest desire to be located at the end of the room given that each step they take towards it is half the distance than their last. The mathematician throws his arms up and yells "Impossible! I'll never reach it," and storms out of the room. The engineer just smiles and says to the genie, "I can get close enough."

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Q: What's purple and commutes? A: An Abelian grape.

Q: What's yellow and equivalent to the axiom of choice? A: Zorn's Lemon.

An engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician are riding on a train through the countryside. They look out the window and see a black cow. The engineer says, "Look, all the cows in this county are black!". The physicist sighs, and says "No, at least one cow in this county is black". The mathematician shakes his head sadly and says "There is at least one cow in this county that is black on at least one side".

Q: Why do Jewish mathematicians prefer complex analysis over many other fields of mathematics? A: because it is Cauchy'er.

I was never able to get this one to work out, but maybe someone smarter can do it. There was a line in a physics book I read once that said something like "electromagnetic fields can be described by anti-symmetric tensors of the second bank in four dimensions". I tried to set up a story involving Jewish industrialists who were elected to public office, and who owned farms, being attacked by a bunch of jew-hating males from a local choir, who also happened to work for the a small local bank, who had their farms surrounded and did coordinated attacks from North, South, East and West. The punch line was to be something "elected magnate's fields were defiled by anti-semitic tenors from the Second Bank in four directions". But I never could come up with a story that would end with that, and would bring to mind the corresponding physics so as to make that a groan-worth pun.

</comment><comment><USER7> Below is my favorite math joke (copied it from <http://www.onlinemathlearning.com/math-jokes-calculus.html> as I didn't remember the exact wording). It's a bit long for a T-shirt, but a simple comic strip version could be made.

\--

A constant function and e^x are walking on Broadway. Then suddenly the constant function sees a differential operator approaching and runs away. So e^x follows him and asks why the hurry. "Well, you see, there's this differential operator coming this way, and when we meet, he'll differentiate me and nothing will be left of me...!" "Ah," says ex, "he won't bother ME, I'm e to the x!" and he walks on. Of course he meets the differential operator after a short distance.

e^x: "Hi, I'm e^x"

diff.op.: "Hi, I'm d/dy"

<comment><USER8> I think I might have to add "Hi, I'm d/dy" to my mail signature collection. So random.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> xkcd comics are already licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial 2.5 license. That's probably all you need for a math team t-shirt.

<comment><AUTHOR> I saw that, but in the end some of the images are only about 700x400 px. At 200 ppi (which is what t shirts should be printed at, I guess), that just isn't a high enough resolution. And I'm not sure If I really want to make it larger since it will not look all that good.

<comment><USER9> You could load an xkcd comic into Inkscape or another vector graphics editor and trace it out by hand. It wouldn't take that long, and the end result would be a vector graphic that you could render to whatever size or resolution you need. (Creating a derivative work like this is allowed by the license.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not short enough for a shirt probably, but still good:

Three mathematicians and three accountants are traveling by train to a conference. At the station, the three accountants each buy tickets and watch as the three mathematicians buy only a single ticket.

"How are three people going to travel on only one ticket?" asks an accountant. "Watch and you'll see," answers an mathematician. They all board the train. The accountants take their respective seats but all three mathematicians cram into a restroom and close the door behind them.

Shortly after the train has departed, the conductor comes around collecting tickets. He knocks on the restroom door and says, "Ticket, please." The door opens just a crack and a single arm emerges with a ticket in hand. The conductor takes it and moves on.

The accountants saw this and agreed it was quite a clever idea. So after the conference, the accountants decide to copy the mathematicians on the return trip and save some money (being clever with money, and all). When they get to the station they buy a single ticket for the return trip.

To their astonishment, the mathematicians don't buy a ticket at all. "How are you going to travel without a ticket?" asked one perplexed accountant.

"Watch and you'll see," answered an mathematician. When they board the train the three accountants cram into a restroom and the three mathematicians cram into another one nearby. The train departs.

Shortly afterward, one of the mathematicians leaves his restroom and walks over to the restroom where the accountants are hiding. He knocks on the door and says, "Ticket, please."

<comment><USER11> my wife laughed. This one passes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Math team: like being star quarterback, except you have to wait ten years before you can order the football team around.

</comment><comment><USER13> If you do it in groups, you'd better be discrete.

(Related: Analysts do it continuously, and almost everywhere.)

<comment><USER12> Materials scientists do it with latex.

Biochemists do it with animals.

When civil engineers do it, the earth moves.

Software engineers do it all night long.

<comment><USER14> mathematicians do it in theory

(pretty old one)

<comment><USER15> Does that mean physicists do it in practice?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Q: Did you hear about the constipated mathematician?

A: He worked it out with a pencil.

This one _always_ gets someone to cringe. I love it.

Alternately:

Q: How many mathematicians does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: One. The mathematician hands the lightbulb to two blondes, thereby reducing the problem to a previously-told joke.

</comment><comment><USER17> There are two hard problems in computer science. Naming, cache invalidation, and off-by-one errors.

<comment><USER18> Make that 10 hard problems.

Similar to - There are 10 kinds on people. Those who understand binary and those who don't.

<comment><USER19> Every base is base 10.

<http://cowbirdsinlove.com/43>

<comment><USER20> I found this one particularly amusing :)

<comment><USER21> It took me a while to notice the aliens hands...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> A physicist, a biologist, and a mathematician see two people walk into an empty building. Five minutes later, 4 people walk out.

The physicist says "Obviously our initial observation was wrong."

The biologist says "They must have multiplied while they were in the building!"

The mathematician says "However you look at it, if two more people walk into that building it will be empty again."

</comment><comment><USER23> An engineer, a physicist and a mathematician want to catch a lion. The engineer goes to Africa, builds a cage and traps the lion in it. The physicist builds a fence around Africa and pronounces: "I've trapped the lion". The mathematician builds a cage, climbs inside and pronounces: "I am outside".

</comment><comment><USER24> In the fall of 2009, Mr. Apollinax discovered a method of simplifying mathematical expressions with profound, wide-ranging consequences. Mr. Apollinax has given it the name "indiscriminate cancellation". We see its power and reliability here:

      16/64 = 1/4 ;Cancel the 6
      19/95 = 1/5 ;Cancel the 9
      26/65 = 2/5 ;Cancel the 6
      49/98 = 4/8 ;Cancel the 9

Using his new tool, Mr. Apollinax quickly discovered and prove several surprising theorems, including the following:

      sin x / n = six ;Cancel the n

But the most celebrated application of this method of Mr. Apollinax is his amazing discovery of a deep, unexpected connection between the theories of complex numbers and trigonometry and the preparation of Mexican cuisine:

      sin / cos = tan ;definition of tangent
      i / co = ta ;cancel n and s
      i = taco ;multiply both sides by co

[Martin Gardner wrote a couple of April 1st columns about Mr. Apollinax. Worth checking out. Also, it's kind of a cool computer science problem to find number pairs like 16/64. I'll mention that if we generalize it to "abcd...x / bcd...xy = a/y", then there are seven nontrivial (where a,b,c,etc. aren't all the same digit) 3-digit pairs, including 484/847.]

</comment><comment><USER25> Math problems? Call 1-800-[(10x)(13i)2]-[sin(xy)/2.362x].

(From <http://www.math.ualberta.ca/~runde/jokes.html>)

<comment><USER26> This is by far the best t-shirt candidate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Math Overflow had a joke thread a while back: [http://mathoverflow.net/questions/1083/do-good-math-jokes- ex...](http://mathoverflow.net/questions/1083/do-good-math-jokes-exist)

</comment><comment><USER28> An evil dictator locks up all the academics in his country in a time of war. As the war worsens the army platoon left guarding the detention facility is called away to the front, and leaves the academics unattended in their cells bottled water, canned food and no can openers. When the war is over and the dictatorship is collapsed, the detention facility is opened up. It's found that most of the humanities and social scientists have survived, having opened their cans by throwing them randomly at the walls until the cans broke open. The physicists had figured out the optimum angle at which to throw the can in order to reliably open it. Several mathematicians have suffered severe malnutrition, having successfully proven that "there exists a unique optimal throwing angle theta ..." The cell of a topologist was found empty, though a muffled screaming could be heard from one of his cans. A can opener is fetched, and the topologist is removed, covered in food, mumbling about an error in sign.

</comment><comment><USER29> Years ago, three friends from Poland decided to visit relatives in the US they had not seen for decades. Since this was a once-in-a-lifetime trip, they did in grand style, on the Concorde.

Of course, there was trouble on the flight and of course the flight attendants asked if any of the passengers had experience with aircraft, and of course one of our friends did. He was taken to the cockpit to save the day, wherein he looked at the myriad dials and gauges and controls and turned to his friend and said... ...wait for it...

"I am but a simple Pole in a complex plane."

</comment><comment><USER30> One for HN:

Q: Why did the two vectors start an internet-based company?

A: Because they thought they had a good dot product.

One for a t-shirt (stolen off the Internet):

Math problems? Call 1-800-[(10x)(13i)^2]-[sin(xy)/2.362x].

<comment><USER31> In terms of t-shirt type statements, I think this is the best I've read on here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> There's always the classic, 'Snakes ⊂ ℝ²'.

<comment><USER33> Can someone explain this one?

<comment><USER24> ℝ² is the Cartesian plane; it is a reference to the movie "Snakes On A Plane".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Q: What do you get when you cross a mosquito with a mountain climber?

A: You can't cross a vector with a scalar!

<comment><USER34> I'm sorry, how is a mosquito a vector?

<comment><USER35> mosquitos are vectors for disease (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_(biology)>)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Why did the chicken cross the Möbius strip?

To get to the same side.

<comment><USER9> This joke might be funnier if the answer is:

To get to the other side.

(The mathematicians will know that the chicken's quest will fail. Then they'll feel sorry for the chicken...)

<comment><USER37> But the non-mathematicians will JUST give you a weird look, rather than laughing and then giving you a weird look.

<comment><USER9> I don't know. A cliche can seem funny if you add a little twist, even if the twist is incomprehensible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Surprised this isn't already here, pretty popular at my college:

I wish I was your derivative, so I could lie tangent to your curves.

<comment><USER39> And the companion bio-joke:

I wish I was mRNA polymerase, so I could unzip your genes.

<comment><USER40> Helicase is what unzips the genes, not RNA polymerase. RNA polymerase allows transcription (or creation of an mRNA molecule complementary to the given gene) to take place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Not sure you can copy it, but I've always wanted this shirt (not sure why, but I found it hilarious):

[http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts- apparel/unisex/generic/60f5...](http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts- apparel/unisex/generic/60f5/)

It reads:

2 + 2 = 5

(For extremely large values of 2)

</comment><comment><USER42> My all time favorite is "Find x": <http://www.ximnet.com.my/thelab/images/upload/findX.jpg>

"Be Rational" and "Get Real" is pretty good too: [http://media.photobucket.com/image/rational/CocaC0la99/be- ra...](http://media.photobucket.com/image/rational/CocaC0la99/be-rational-get- real.png)

</comment><comment><USER43> "Leibnitz > Newton" could provoke a fist fight. This would be hilarious to see.

edit: Better than xkcd, depending on your sense of humor (i.e., whether you have one) is smbc-comics.com. Dunno how he licenses his stuff though.

</comment><comment><USER44> An old one :

Why do mathematician mistake Halloween for Christmas ?

Because to them, 31oct = 25dec

</comment><comment><USER45> Front: (a^n) + (b^n) = (c^n) true only when n <= 2 if a,b,c are positive integers.

Back: I have discovered a truly marvelous proof but this shirt is too too narrow to contain it

<comment><USER46> Or, why I spent ten years in an attic on a silly proof.

It was something like ten years Andrew Wiles spent on it, wasn't it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Here's one but it's in French.

"Qui se cache derrière le nombre 1.09861228866811... ?" "Hélène de Troie. (ln 3)"

</comment><comment><USER48> There's always the old donut and coffee mug being topologically equivalent.

Or the integral of e^X (write it down)

Or Pi telling i to be real and i telling Pi to be rational.

Or your mom so ugly I had to use the Fourier transform to solve her (just made that one up, probably doesn't make any sense ;p)

<comment><USER18> +1 for Pi telling i to be real and i telling Pi to be rational

<comment><USER49> <http://roflcopter.pl/math-jokes.jpg>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> What's the square root of 69? Eight something.

</comment><comment><USER51> Good math jokes split into two groups: either they're funny, or they make you feel clever for understanding them, I think. The latter are more fun.

Simple Level:

What's special about plants in the maths common room?

They have square roots.

More Educated:

Why can't you plant wheat in the integers mod 6?

Because 6 isn't prime!

</comment><comment> alok-g "Life is complex is because it has both real and imaginary components."

Cannot recall the source.

</comment><comment><USER52> I love the people in this thread giving jokes that are aimed at five year olds, rather than a math team who's previous joke was "don't drive and derive".

</comment><comment><USER53> Q: what did the zero say to the eight? A: nice belt!

<comment><USER54> An all time favorite of mine! (:

</comment></comment><comment> alok-g A friend of mine once claimed that a specific celebrity couple had their ages as 88 years and 44 years respectively. All others said that they knew the age difference was big for this couple, but it couldn't be that big! Some more probing and my friend blurted "I remember exactly that when they got married, they were 44 and 22 respectively".

</comment><comment> alok-g Question:Whatz a PJ ? Answer: Obviously "a poor joke" Question: Whatz a (P + iJ)? Answer: "complex poor joke" But why don't people laugh on a "complex poor joke"? Bcoz the joke part of it is imaginary.

<http://www.akhilesh.in/life/fun/jokes/pj0061AComplexPJ.php>

</comment><comment><USER55> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Math_jokes>

</comment><comment><USER18> Love this one : <http://spikedmath.com/325.html>

<comment><USER56> I'd recommend digging through the spiked math "best of" list and looking for something that suits the math team's fancy.

(x,why?) can also be quite entertaining.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> There are 10 kinds of methematicians, those that count in ternary and those that don't.

(Not many people, even mathematicians and computer scientists, get that one. I think it's better than the usual crap binary non-joke, and wish I could remember where I heard it)

</comment><comment><USER58> There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.

</comment><comment><USER59> whats a chefs favorite triangle? isauceles

how did the abelian group get to work? it commuted

why do addition and the integers carpool? because theyre a commutative group

</comment><comment><USER60> At a party, all mathematical functions are having fun, except the exponential, which is standing lonely in one corner. Another function approaches it and says: why don't you integrate? And it: oh, because it's the same...

</comment><comment><USER61> Not sure if that can fit on the t-shirt, but here are couple of ideas

[http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2174/2268237733_cda4a1dbb3.jp...](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2174/2268237733_cda4a1dbb3.jpg)

[http://geektech.geektech.netdna-cdn.com/wp- content/uploads/2...](http://geektech.geektech.netdna-cdn.com/wp- content/uploads/2010/06/719a20f3a2e4.jpg)

(these are 'captchas' that require you to solve a problem)

Also, liked these (unrelated to maths):

[http://geektechnica.com/2010/06/10-craziest-captchas-out- the...](http://geektechnica.com/2010/06/10-craziest-captchas-out-there/)

</comment><comment><USER62> What is the par value of a zero-coupon bond with no maturity?

Pee dollars!

Did you see the SNL segment on options? It was put-call parody!

Complex analysis: it's as easy as pulling out an i.

Analysis, something, something. Balls! (I haven't quite finished that one).

</comment><comment><USER63> What do you get when you cross an elephant and a banana?

(Elephant)(banana)sin(theta)

</comment><comment><USER64> Maybe you could fit just the punchline on a T-shirt:

A sociologist, a physicist, and a mathematician are given 100 ft of fence and asked to enclose the greatest area.

-The sociologist makes a square. -The physicist makes a circle and says he can PROVE it's the best answer. Take that, mathematician! -The mathematician knocks off all but a few fence-links, wraps the fence around himself, and says "Define the outside of the fence to be the ground which contains me..."

(Say the punchline in a smarmy, nasal voice.)

</comment><comment><USER65> Physicist, pastor and mathematician on the top of a skyscraper. They are asked to jump precisely into the swimming pool on the ground. Phsycist calculates wind, distance, perspective, jumps and lands in the pool. Pastor meditates, prays, focuses, jumps and lands in the pool. Mathematician calculates a beautiful parabel, jumps and goes straight up to the sky. What happend? Oh well, he made a sign flaw :)

</comment><comment><USER66> An engineer and a mathematician went out for a drink. On the other side of the room, they spotted a gorgeous woman.

"I wish I could work up the courage to talk to her," said the shy mathematician.

"No problem," said the engineer. "Just walk halfway over to her, take a sip of beer, then walk halfway again, and do that over and over until you're next to her.

"But then I'll NEVER get there," said the mathematician.

</comment><comment><USER67> <http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Tell+me+a+joke>.

</comment><comment><USER68> A sahillavingia original:

Q: What did the difficult cartesian-coordinate system tell his problem-solver when he wanted to visit Antartica?

A: You should go polar!

</comment><comment><USER69> _i_ 8 √-1 Πs. (I ate imaginary pies?) You might have to play around with it, but I hope it's a good start. :)

</comment><comment><USER70> If you want to incorporate ideas from xkcd without using any of the published comics, you could come up with your own nerd snipe and put it on the front of your shirt. Then put something on the back like "You've been nerd-sniped!"

Make sure to hang out near busy streets and train tracks when you wear it.

</comment><comment><USER71> Don't know whether this fits as a joke, but:

        exp(I*pi) + 1 = 0

<comment><USER72> Thats not a joke its an import mathematical identity.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler%27s_identity>

</comment></comment><comment> alok-g "Spherical bastard: Someone who's a bastards from every viewpoint"

<http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/biography/Zwicky.html>

</comment><comment><USER73> Not sure where I heard this ...

Biology is really Chemistry. Chemistry is really Physics. Physics is really Maths. and Maths is really hard.

</comment><comment><USER74> Its not a joke but a series of punny things crammed into a catchy song:

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BipvGD-LCjU

</comment><comment> alok-g <http://www.math.ualberta.ca/~runde/jokes.html>

</comment><comment><USER75> Q: What the integral of (1/cabin)dCabin?

A: Beach Hut

(Log Cabin + C)

[Maybe just the formula would fit on a T Shirt, and you get to explain it to people who ask?]

<comment><USER76> Q: Integral dCabin/Cabin?

A: natural log cabin

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Eat the pie, I; my new swan is nothing.

</comment><comment><USER77> friend had a shirt that said

"be there or c squared minus a squared"

lol

</comment><comment><USER78> I've always wanted a t shirt that said "I love LAMP" with a picture of a computer on it.

</comment><comment><USER79> A mathematician got something stuck up his ass. He worked it out with a pencil.

</comment><comment><USER80> assume: x = y then: x _x = x_ y and then: x _x - y_ y = x _y - y_ y factor: (x+y) _(x-y) = y_ (x-y) cancel: x+y = y replace: x + x = x simplify: 2 * x = x therefore: 2 = 1 QED

</comment><comment><USER52> According to statistics, a normal person has one breast and one testicle...

<comment><USER81> I object! The average person has less than one breast and less than one testicle.

<comment><USER31> I object again! Statistics say there are slightly less men than women in the states. Therefore, the average person has more than one breast and less than one testicle.

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

<comment><USER16> I object yet again! Mastectomies surely offset the breast:testicle ratio to a statistically-significantly degree!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> Q) What did the Zen Buddhist say to the hot dog vendor?

<comment><USER82> A) Make me One with everything.

</comment></comment><comment> alok-g Not really a joke, but possibly good for a t-shirt:

"sec(C)"

<comment><USER83> What about:

"I'm too 1/cos(C) for my shirt"

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> here's one from the last decade.

Q. what did the math teacher say when she saw tennis star monica seles?

A. isosceles

</comment><comment><USER85> Why was 6 afraid of 7?

Because 7 8 9!

(7 ate 9)

<comment><USER79> I think you mean (ate 7 9). Don't feel bad, infix notation can creep up even on experienced Lisp programmers.

<comment><USER85> Those brackets were not for Lisp! God! They are also used for English.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> Real analysis takes balls.

</comment><comment><USER87> Let epsilon < 0

</comment><comment><USER88> Let ε < 0.

</comment><comment><USER80> assume: x = y then: x^2 = y^2

</comment><comment><USER89>
       Math Club

then put a picture of a hot chick, and some MDMA

then _Transcendental Numbers_

</comment><comment><USER90> There are three types of mathematicians. Those who can add and those who can't.

</comment><comment><USER91> 1i + 1i = 2i

Cannot have Magic without the i</comment>


Government/FBI hacked my MacBook Pro - <AUTHOR> The FBI hacked my MacBook with a firmware loader that I couldn't use chipsec to remove it because the firmware wasn't available to download to make a whitelist they used hacked exploited versions of dmproxy and windowserver. Use 4 shadow to detect intrusion. <comment><USER2> I'm not doubting in any way that someone hacked your PC, but just in case you are currently suffering from CO poisoning [1], please try to take a day off and go outside for a walk.

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

</comment><comment><USER3> What makes you think it's a state actor and not regular malware, or even just a bug?

I once got pretty noided by my hard drive reporting to be empty once, thought I encountered a cryptolocker in progress. Proceeded to hard shut-down the PC and forensically inspect my HDD, turns out the HDD's USB firmware was starting to fail but my data was fine.

Do you have a CO detector in your living space and is it working? Do you have any reason to doubt your judgement here? Your theory seems far-fetched to me and the way you mention details raise my paranoia/mental illness/troll alarm.

<comment><AUTHOR> See comment below. I have screen shots from the intrusion took me along time to detect it.

<comment><USER3> So why are you not posting them?

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://imgur.com/a/pbAbh](http://imgur.com/a/pbAbh)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Where is your proof? More importantly, why would the FBI want to hack your MacBook Pro in the first place? If that's the case, they know you posted this and they'll just have to find another way to spy on you.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll post screen shots tomorrow

<comment><USER5> > 3 hour old account

> No proof given to claims

I'm certain this is breaking rules, do a write-up and re-post tomorrow with proof under a new account (you'll likely be flagged for a dupe if under the same one).

<comment><AUTHOR> I have a new account because hacking and cyber security are new to me. I been in it and a programmer for 17 years so traditional methods of intrusion detection didn't work because I must of been rooted. I came here for help in fixing the problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Does anyone know how I can fix this problem? The notices started to go away I used express vpn only with option allow access to local devices unchecked. So this tells me they attacking me from a point on the local network and they are able to get past the nat on my personal firewall from hacker warehouse using open wrt

</comment><comment><USER6> quite improbable, unless you are a high target, which is doubtful.

<comment><USER7> Why not? there are so many people out there buying/selling child or necrophilia pornography in the darknet. I hope they get caught by the police.

But, please I'm not saying that @codeninjajosh is on target because of that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Read comments above

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What is 4 shadow? Tried googling without much success.

<comment><USER9> Seems to be this [http://4shadowapp.com/](http://4shadowapp.com/)</comment></comment>


Caste violence erupts in India over 200-year-old faultline - <AUTHOR> https://www.ksat.com/news/international/caste-violence-erupts-in-india-over-200yearold-faultline <comment><AUTHOR> I have read about the caste system and issue in India. I have lot of Indian friends in US, but I never feel that there is any caste system among them. Is that just my experience (maybe my ignorance)?

<comment><USER2> Indian-American born and brought up in the States.

We never discussed caste. It was a non-issue.

Prime Minister Modi is also Low Caste. That didn't stop him from being elected.

<comment><USER3> Having said that caste discrimination is a problem in the UK in fact I know one of the MP's that helped add caste discrimination to the Equality Act 2010.

Of course this is being opposed by "community leaders".

Interesting a woman from my home town was recently abused for being low caste. [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-38663143](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk- england-38663143)

It would be interesting to beak down H1B's by caste

<comment><USER4> [https://www.petition2congress.com/ctas/anti-caste- discrimina...](https://www.petition2congress.com/ctas/anti-caste- discrimination-legislation)

<comment><USER3> Interesting ill have to send that to Parmjit - doesn't seem to have got any messages sent yet unfortunately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Caste is a very complicated issue. It's not all black and white, oppressed against the oppressor. It's a major fault line in Hindu society today which has been used by politicians to divide the voters into fiefdoms. It is also one of the reasons why despite India having functional elections, has a under performing political class. Indian politicians flourish even when they grossly under deliver thanks to the caste divisions they nourish in the society.

<comment><USER6> > It's not all black and white, oppressed against the oppressor.

How's it not so? (Asking, not flaming. I know this is a complex topic and invariably leads to shouting matches.)

The idea of caste being used as a means and justification for oppression, violence etc is just plain wrong. I don't think it could be _more_ black and white - to borrow another loaded figure of speech.

<comment><USER7> Because of reservation and representation. Think about this - In US instead of having affirmative action[1] it was legally mandated to hire about 30-50% of non-Caucasian for any government job ie quota. What ramifications will it have on the society?

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Check this Advertisement in News Paper to hire Upper caste/Brahmin/Bania/Kshatriya to clean drainage/toilets in India to know about current status of Caste system in India [http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/ahmedabad/Xaviers- NG...](http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/ahmedabad/Xaviers-NGO-seeks- toilet-cleaners-from-gen-category/articleshow/52876770.cms)

</comment><comment><USER8> Why can't we all just get along?

If we disagree, let's agree to disagree without violence?

How can our increasingly global society grow robust to provocations?

</comment><comment><USER9> Didn't know that dalits fought with British to bring India under British rule. Interesting.

</comment><comment><USER10> Name me a 5000 year old society without these problems.

</comment><comment><USER11> It does not get emphasized enough, but the caste system in India is a very very complicated issue. Any effort create a simple mental model for it (say, by mapping it to racial apartheid) would not take one closer to real understanding.

For those interested, here is a good piece by Venkatesh Rao which touches upon this subject: [https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/11/10/king-ruinous-and- the-c...](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/11/10/king-ruinous-and-the-city-of- darkness/)

As to the specific incident in the news, I would only say that it is not hard to find a couple hundred men for Rs. 500 who would go about trashing cars and buses for a few hours, while the police would have instructions not to act too strongly against them, for fear of further conflagration. Once this is done, it is all up to journalists, op-ed writers to offer up (and amplify) their favorite perspectives.

<comment><USER12> Here's my simple mental model: People use bullshit reasons to be dicks to each other. Sometimes people are legit trashy, so fuck them, but other times trashy people are nice and it's the elitists who are assholes. The bullshit reasons originate from religious mythology (read: made up fiction that conveniently excludes scumbags born into shit, fucking them for life, and leaving their children to inherit the same mistreatment), but the crux of the matter is who gets to fuck bitches and why. Arranged marriages and dowry compensation come bundled with what amounts to a regional, cultural and thus religious form of brand recognition. Slutty girls get sold to scummy dudes on the cheap, but sometimes a scummy dude has the money, and still can't buy his way into the game. Compound this over generations and people get angry and stay angry when they die feeling jilted by the assholes they share daily life with. It gets worse when they watch it happen to their kids who are probably accidents anyway.</comment></comment>


All Chrome OS hack attempts fail at Pwnium 3 - <AUTHOR> http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-pick/all-chrome-os-hack-attempts-fail-at-pwnium-3-2013038/

<comment><USER2> Submitter is a spam account by Ziff Davis (geek.com / extremetech.com / pcmag.com / etc), one of a few they use to spam HN.

<comment><USER3> I've never understood why people care about this. Lots of people submit their own stuff. All I care about is the quality of the articles and discussion, which is orthogonal to the identity of the submitter.

<comment><USER2> Why would you not care if people are here to exploit you and the rest of this community?

Almost nobody unaffiliated submits their crap in spite of a year+ of spamming with about 8 different accounts so obviously their work is not even very relevant.

Systematic spam by these guys and a handful of other sites drowns out content real users find legitimately interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This website is horrendous. While opening the page, a overlay banner flashes across the content area at snail speed but high enough that I cannot accurately click the close button while it's moving (well i can try but I'm risking clicking on the actual ad itself). It took a total of 10 seconds for it to completely cross the page before I was able to start reading the content.

I think this kind of ad serves absolutely no purpose. Even if I wanted to read it before I wouldn't now, and it totally killed the website's credibility for me.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm not sure hackers brought their "A" game to this event. In contrast to earlier events, winners must disclose their methods to participate in return for only $150,000 per exploit. A black hat hacker could make much more from their methods, and a white hat hacker could as well--in consulting fees.

<comment><USER6> You're thinking of Pwn2Own. Pwnium has always required disclosure, while Pwn2Own only required full disclosure for the first time this year.

And $150,000 is actually getting quite close to what you could make for an exploit of a browser on the black market, especially with all those Java and Flash plugins still running all over the world, depressing exploit prices as long as they're available.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The fact that the total prize money is Pi million dollars is adorable.

<comment><USER8> That's irrational, sorry.

<comment><USER9> At least its not imaginary...

<comment><USER10> Technically Pi is a complex number that has the real number coefficient a = Pi and b = 0 resulting in a complex number of pi + 0j. This is because the set of real numbers is a subset of the set of complex numbers and Pi is an element of the set of real numbers.

<comment><USER11> It's still not (0) imaginary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> also, minix didnt get pwned.

<comment><USER13> This comment made me unreasonably happy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Plain Chrome in Linux faired similarly didn't it?

<comment><USER15> "Chrome was compromised using similar methods to the IE10 and Firefox attacks. MWR Labs bypassed Chrome's sandbox and used a Windows kernel vulnerability in Windows 7 to elevate privileges as well as execute commands outside of the sandbox. In addition to executing code, MWR researchers were able to read memory and find the base addresses of certain .DLL files."

[http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-pick/internet- explorer-10-...](http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-pick/internet- explorer-10-chrome-and-firefox-hacked-at-pwn2own-2013037/)

<comment><USER16> Since that page does not mention Linux, I cannot imagine what relevance it has to grandparent.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, my mistake, I meant it to be in response to mtgx</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Khan Academy: Greek Debt Recession and Austerity - <AUTHOR> http://www.khanacademy.org/finance-economics/macroeconomics/v/greek-debt-recession-and-austerity--part-1

<comment><USER2> Too long, don't watch:

-"Cutting salaries in half => cutting purchasing power in half" - politically unacceptable.

-"Printing money => doubling prices => cutting purchasing power in half" - that's actually OK.

Fuck logic!

What Greece must do is cut "bad" spending and encourage "good" spending. Let me define bad spending: Things like early retirement for dangerous professions like hairdressers, masseurs and trombone players.

[http://www.usatoday.com/money/world/2010-05-18-europeretire1...](http://www.usatoday.com/money/world/2010-05-18-europeretire18_ST_N.htm)

"They have to decide for themselves what to do, but they cannot have Swedish expenses and American taxes, that doesn't add up," Swedish Finance Minister Anders Borg told reporters in 2010.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Part 2: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkNArgNPI2Y&feature=relmf...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkNArgNPI2Y&feature=relmfu)</comment>


CIA's Latest Layer: An Onion Site - <AUTHOR> https://www.cia.gov/news-information/press-releases-statements/2019-press-releases-statements/ciagov-over-tor.html <comment><USER2> > ciadotgov4sjwlzihbbgxnqg3xiyrg7so2r2o3lt5wz5ypk4sxyjstad.onion

How does one store links like this? You'd need a bookmark file, which would sort of give the game away, I'd have thought. How do you make sure you notice when you visit a URL with the same readable prefix?

<comment><USER3> Password safe seems like a good idea, especially since you'll quote likely want to store credentials for the site anyway.

<comment><USER4> Rubber hose.

<comment><USER3> Surely that's pretty much valid regardless of how you store them?

<comment><USER4> Consider the case of carrying electronics (or storage) vs. shipping them, crossing borders, and implications for inspection.

If it's not on you, they can't beat it out of you.

Of course, they might decide to beat you anyway. Which raises the question of whether it's strong crypto or rule of law that matters more. I'm not sure which way I come dwn on that myself, though could argue for bits of both.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's interesting that US government is embracing Tor, while Germany is cracking down on it[1].

[1] - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19399576](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19399576)

<comment><USER6> To be fair, "embracing Tor" is an interesting phrase, considering the FBI was actively breaking it 5 years ago: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/11/07/how- did-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/11/07/how-did-law- enforcement-break-tor/#74586a9a4bf7)

<comment><USER7> Local and state LEOs and the CIA use it though, even if the FBI has done some attacks on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have a question for the HN audience. Many here have gone to top schools and studied crypto, ML, etc with the best. And are probably the best in their field.

Do you currently work for any three letter agencies? Did your smartest colleagues go to work at three letter agencies?

I am trying to gauge the quality of talent at CIA, NSA, FBI, etc. All of my best colleagues went to the private sector, usually tech or security companies. I know some of these companies contract for the departments / agencies (and many colleagues have clearances). However, they are not actually working at the agencies themselves.

So what is the talent pool at the CIA et al. like?

<comment><USER9> Do you realise that almost nobody working in this kind of job can disclose that?

<comment><USER10> Unless your an actual spy you could probably say you work at the NSA as an SE, linguist or something more mundane. I doubt you could talk about your actual work.

I've known people with clearances at Govt contractors. They could say what they do, EE/ME for X project but not many details beside that.

<comment><USER11> When you work at the NSA, you are not allowed to say that you work for the NSA. Full stop. (Contractors are a different story for some complex reasons, but are still at risk)

It's like this for many gov agencies working with intelligence because labeling yourself as an intelligence worker makes you a target for foreign intelligence agents.

That may sound a little strange if you aren't part of that industry, but it is the truth.

<comment><USER10> Where do you say you work? I've met a few linguist who said they work for the FBI or whoever but they were contractors on an as needed basis.

What do the folks in Virginia say to their neighbors? "Oh I work for the DOD. So your a spy right haha?"

<comment><USER12> "The State Department."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I do have an interesting story about going through the beginning of the recuitment process for a multi-letter agency within the 5 eye sphere (Australia), but I'm not sure I want to post it. It involved asking me point blank at the beginning of a face to face interview at their HQ saying to me "soo...what have you hacked?" along with other weirdness.

The year before I completed an aptitude test which predominantly focused on abstract reasoning. It was a strange experience and part of me wants to discuss it in a responsible/de-identified sort of way, but on the other hand, the take-away I got from the experience itself is kind of holding me back from following through with that desire to discuss it....I'm not sure if what I just wrote makes any sense to me now that I just typed it out.

It was still an interesting experience though which did have a positive impact on my life.

EDIT: Sorry, edited for a spelling mistake

</comment><comment><USER14> Some previous discussions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19852989](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19852989)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19853931](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19853931)

</comment><comment> DC-3 I don't know how onion links work but would they have had to brute force that URL?

<comment><USER15> Yep.

<comment><USER16> 13 letters too... do you think they also have another site for people who aren't social justice warriors?

<comment><USER17> ?

<comment><USER18> > ciadotgov4sjw...

cia.gov for Social Justice Warriors. Pretty sure he was just making a joke and only the first 9 characters were actually being tried for.

<comment><AUTHOR> Could it not be 4 "super-judicial wars"? haw haw haw

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> not sure why it's not a single onion site...its not like they want to stay anonymous too.

</comment><comment><USER20> It's a trap.

<comment><USER21> Paging #notacop</comment></comment>


US accused of 'modern piracy' after diversion of masks meant for Europe - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/03/mask-wars-coronavirus-outbidding-demand <comment><USER2> > 3M said Friday it "has no evidence to suggest 3M products have been seized. > 3M has no record of any order of respirators from China for the Berlin > police. We cannot speculate where this report originated." [1]

[1] [https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/coronavirus-2020-04-03/card...](https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/coronavirus-2020-04-03/card/CwH6JrHPWxTgmGUyw4uw)

<comment><USER3> The original German source, Tagesspiegel, has a good record, and Berlin's interior minister would hardly go public with such a drastic statement if he weren't damn sure an order had been diverted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Out bidding someone in an open market is now "piracy'?

<comment><USER3> Diverting an already purchased good while it is passing through a third country is not "out-bidding".</comment></comment>


Bill Gross Talk at Stanford. Business at the start, then energy and MVP. - <AUTHOR> http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2596

<comment><AUTHOR> I listen to a lot of business and startup talks and this is probably the best I have heard. Rapid pace and inspirational.</comment>