Linux Distributions Archives - <AUTHOR> https://www.linux-distros.com <comment><USER2> Wow, I remember the days of the late 90s early 2000s checking out every distro I could get my hands on. I ordered so many from Cheapbytes and Linux Central. (I feel like there may have been a Linux Mall in there somewhere too). I just couldn't believe that these complete distros were free to install and use! RedHat 6.0, Debian Slink. NetBSD 1.4, Slackware.... Getting these things set up and then installing something like Enlightenment with some gorgeous theme.... only to tear it all down days later and try something else. What an incredible time.

<comment><USER3> I used to buy Linux magazines that contained a CD. TurboLinux, Storm Linux...

<comment><USER2> YES! TurboLinux from Utah! I loved that one. And I still have my Storm Linux CD in the garage. Nice packaging. (Florescent green I think)

Yup, went and dug it out of the garage: [https://ibb.co/PM4GTkt](https://ibb.co/PM4GTkt)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Redat 3.0.3 was my first linux distro back in 96. It came on a set of 6 CDs from Walnut Creek. Together with Slackware & something else i dont remember.

<comment><USER5> Yeah I had that CD set as well. I think there was Debian on there as well, but I believe the installer was broken at that point so it was difficult or impossible to get a booting Debian system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Metro-X Server

I have never heard of this! I have always used XFree86 (later forked to Xorg) as far back as I can remember. From what I can find, this was a commercial/closed source server that shipped for $99. There doesn't seem to be much info it.

<comment><USER7> [https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2299](https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2299)

[http://ictbanking.com/LJ/035/1374.html](http://ictbanking.com/LJ/035/1374.html)

Actually Metro-X server sounds quite cool for its time. Multi-display support, X-based GUI for configuration (anyone remember xf86config stuff?)...

I actually bought the Red Hat Linux 3.0.3 (and used it and its successors Until Red Hat 7) but the Metro-X didn't support my video card so I was stuck with the XFree86.

Does anyone know if the later Redhat versions (than 3.0.3) offered Metro-X? Probably not in the free, downloadable ISOs but was it bundled in the sold CDs or was this one time thing only?

<comment><USER8> > anyone remember xf86config stuff?

Wow, yeah. I also remember the YaST X configuration tool that shipped with SuSE.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The ISO images are compressed with RAR. What a bizarre choice.

<comment><USER10> It is weird, in part because iso has directory entries, and so does rar. Iso.gz or iso.xz seems like it would make more sense, eg. a block compressor.

But something like OS install media I would expect to already have compression applied to payload. Eg. Rpm and deb files probably use gzip. That wouldn't compress too well. So maybe just .iso would be fine.

Rar itself seems to be pretty common in certain enthusiast communities where people tend to use windows. For example I still see it when people are passing Android ROMs and unlocking tools around on web forums. And very few other places.

<comment><USER11> I'm curious because I'm trying to convince people to switch from .rar to .tar.gz at work, wonder if you know the benefits, what does it mean that one is a block compressor?

<comment><USER12> Generally speaking, there's two large categories of archivers in competition with one another:

1\. Efficient random-access storage. If compression is supported, it is done on a per-member database.

2\. Efficient all-at-once compression (block/solid compression). This is either handled explicitly by file format (RAR and 7z, for example), or the archive doesn't support compression (tar) and itself is processed through an external compressor.

On the first category, I would argue Zip has clear superiority over most other file formats. It supports all metadata fields for both DOS/Windows and Unix operating systems, and has very wide support amongst everything. Zip does not support the second category of archival formats.

In the second category, 7z (I don't know about RAR, but I suspect it holds true) only supports DOS attributes and modified dates, making it totally insufficient for backing up a lot of kinds of Unix file trees. tar is generally the de facto standard for Unix and naturally supports all metadata. I would argue gzip is long obsolete; zstd is much faster (it can nearly compete with xz too for file size).

tar files don't really support random access for individual members, lacking a central directory, though uncompressed files can be seeked rather rapidly anyway as the tar program just skips over members (each member encodes its length). Compressed tar files make this worse, since the entire archive must be uncompressed in memory just to find anything. This is a large reason that tar is mostly restricted to being used when extracting individual members is not a generally useful operation. If that is a useful operation in your datasets, go for Zip.

<comment><USER13> RAR also has built-in forward error correction, something I sorely miss with 7z :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> My first Linux distro was SLS Linux: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softlanding_Linux_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softlanding_Linux_System)

I first installed it in late 1993, back in the kernel 0.99.10 days, eventually moving on to Slackware...

</comment><comment><USER15> That brings back some memories. I'm disappointed they don't seem to have any Yggdrasil archives, as I remember liking that and can't find any of my old disks.

<comment><USER16> Found this with a search. Is this close to what you are/were looking for?

[https://archiveos.org/yggdrasil/](https://archiveos.org/yggdrasil/)

<comment><USER15> Yes. Thanks! I'm going to fire up a VM for some nostalgia.

<comment><USER16> Awesome! Glad to help, have fun :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Retro-innovation: Features we miss from long-gone tech products - <AUTHOR> https://insights.hpe.com/articles/retro-innovation-features-we-miss-from-long-gone-tech-products-1708.html <comment><USER2> The Amiga 1000 "keyboard garage".

Hell, the Amiga.</comment>


Over 20 percent of Harvard undergrads do not intend to enroll in Fall 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2020/8/7/harvard-coronavirus-fall-enrollment-numbers/ <comment><USER2> This is going to be common across almost all institutions.

If you have family that are entering college this fall that had hoped to attend a more prestigious college or university or who thought a prestigious college was out of reach and did not apply to one, or perhaps even thought that college in general was out of reach then please take a moment to re- evaluate things.

I _strongly_ recommend that they reach out to the admissions departments on their wish list. With foreign enrollment curtailed and domestic enrollment way down and seeking to deffer, institutions are scrambling for students and this is a once in a century opportunity. Remember that many institutions will be offering online classes and extra safety measures this fall so it might be the case that in-person instruction is very limited.

I am in the business of prepping, coaching and helping to place the children of the affluent into the top 100 colleges and universities. I was talking a few weeks back with a director of admissions for a masters program with incoming enrollment off 50% as a result of a lack of foreign applicants. They told me they would probably "do whatever they needed to do to accept a domestic applicant at this point". I have never seen an opportunity like this before. I only with my own kids were old enough to take advantage of this.</comment>


Hi-Ten Bomberman - <AUTHOR> http://randomhoohaas.flyingomelette.com/bomb/arc-hiten/ <comment><USER2> There's a version of bomberman here that supports unlimited players. You connect to wifi via your phone and your phone becomes a controller. I've had up to 89 people play at once although pretty much everyone dies before they can figure out where they are.

[https://github.com/greggman/hft-boomboom](https://github.com/greggman/hft- boomboom)

There's also a browser version that supports USB controllers, as many as you can connect (I think some browsers only allow 4 but another a browser has no limit except whatever the USB limit is)

[https://greggman.github.io/hft-boomboom/](https://greggman.github.io/hft- boomboom/)

Warning: Music. Also it won't start until there are at least 2 players.

You can see it run with 125 players with random inputs here

[http://greggman.github.io/hft- boomboom/?settings=%7BnumLocal...](http://greggman.github.io/hft- boomboom/?settings=%7BnumLocalPlayers:125,forceScale:true,scale:1,bombStartSize:10%7D)

Actually it's better to look at if you crank up the number of players so there's less dirt and increase the starting bomb size

[http://greggman.github.io/hft- boomboom/?settings={numLocalPl...](http://greggman.github.io/hft- boomboom/?settings={numLocalPlayers:500,forceScale:true,scale:1,bombStartSize:100})

If you zoom out to say 25% in your browser you can bump up the number of players to 1000s. It's not optimized at the moment for 1000s of players.

You could easily extend it to use some other types of controllers.

It also points out what appears to be a bug in MacOS. Even with the OS volume at the lowest setting the game will be very loud when all the explosions start. On the one hand this is probably a bug in Chrome's audio system but on the other hand an individual app should arguably not be able to make loud sounds if the OS is set to it's quietest setting.

<comment><USER3> Thanks. Going to check it out. Bomberman on the Sega Dreamcast, especially with 4 people, was some of the most fun gaming I've ever had. Also, I'm old.

<comment><USER4> I loved the Dreamcast's Bomberman Online. It had multiple play modes, two of which (submarine and ring match) I have never seen in any other incarnation of the game.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Bomberman is the original Battle Royale: Lots of players starting distributed around a map, farming and gathering powerups and making their way to each other until there's one person left standing. (Even including the map constricting in size as time runs low like the 'storm' in Fortnite and PubG.)

<comment><USER6> Curiously, the article has a screenshot that clearly displays the words "Battle Royal" in the 10-player mode; that would push the earliest use of this term in video games back to at least 1994.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I became a programmer because of this game.

Back in the mid to late 90's the only thing that could run on our high school PCs was DOS based programs. We had Windows, but everything was locked down and we couldn't install games.

So once we learned about QBasic, everyone suddenly became a pro at nibbles and gorillas because that was the only thing available. That is until I found a shareware site with the source code for a bomberman clone.

But the new excitement brought new demands and my best friend and I spent many afternoons hacking changes into the code. Reverse engineering bomberman was my first experience with coding.

You can download the source here on this wonderful site. Just do a search for bomberman.

[http://www.antonis.de/qbdown/qbspiele.htm](http://www.antonis.de/qbdown/qbspiele.htm)

You'll need to find an intepreter, obviously. Not for the German, for the code.

</comment><comment><USER8> If you love the idea of a 10 player "huddle around the same screen game" consider Killer Queen:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ii69y58Ks5g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ii69y58Ks5g)

</comment><comment><USER9> Atomic Bomberman supported 10 players. Two on keyboard and the rest on gamepads. Or AI. Letting 10 AI players smash themselves was the best "screensaver".

<comment><USER10> I was OBSESSED with this game when I was a kid. Always bummed that it was never ported to anything else, the design style was a lot of fun.

Fun fact: Billy West (Fry from Futurama) did some of the voice acting for this game!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I would have never known that plaid is the absolute worst background for readability if not for this website. I felt like a robot trying to parse a CAPTCHA.

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't normally ask about things like this, but does anyone know why this page scrolls so jankily (for me at least) in Safari?</comment>


Recalculate counter cache columns in Rails - <AUTHOR> https://www.krautcomputing.com/blog/2015/01/13/recalculate-counter-cache-columns-in-rails/

<comment><USER2> Why not just use Rails' `reset_counters` method?</comment>


What to know about encodings and character sets - <AUTHOR> http://kunststube.net/encoding/ <comment><USER2> Something they should have mentioned: put a

        <meta charset="utf-8" />

in all your HTML documents that are in UTF-8. Note that this has to be in the first 1024 bytes of the document. Otherwise, the browser has to invoke the "encoding guesser"[1], which will sometimes guess wrong. (W3C: "The user agent may attempt to autodetect the character encoding from applying frequency analysis or other algorithms to the data stream.") The result will be occasional users seeing random pages in the wrong encoding, depending on browser, browser version, platform, and page content.

I recently saw the front page of the New York Times misconverted because they didn't specify an encoding, and the only UTF-8 sequence near the beginning of the document was in

       <link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" sizes="144×144" ...

The "×" there is not the letter x, it's the Unicode multiplication symbol. This confused an encoding guesser. Don't go there.

[1] [http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/syntax.html#determining-the- chara...](http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/syntax.html#determining-the-character- encoding)

<comment><USER3> You can also add "; charset=utf-8" to your Content-Type header instead.

<comment><USER2> Yes, but then it's separated from the document. If someone saves the file, they lose the charset info.

How reliable are CDNs and caching servers about preserving Content-Type headers?

<comment><USER4> While this is true, I find the meta tag to be a horrible pain in the ass.

If you have to parse some HTML that you get over an HTTP connection - you're writing a crawler, say, or you want to extract RDFa metadata, you have to deal with the following, surprisingly common case: both the header and the html document contain encoding information, and they disagree. The RFC states that you should trust the header, but in practice, that's certainly not always the case - nor even, in my experience, is it the case the majority of the time.

If you decide to use the meta tag, that means that you have already strarted decoding your byte stream, get the encoding, then need to re-interpret the bytes you've already read. I have seen a lot of pages that declared their encoding _after_ the title tag.

What's worse, you can't know whether you have a meta tag until you've parsed the whole head, which can be huge with hundreds of kilobytes of inlined javascript and css.

The argument that you should just read the first 1024 bytes and assume utf-8 if nothing is found is just not satisfactory - I want the encoding of the documents I'm parsing to be correct all the time, not when the remote host follows the rules. If I'm writing a crawler, the remote host cares nothing about my needs and I'm the one suffering from my unwilingness to be flexible.

So, yeah. Don't use the meta encoding tag, and trust your user agent to save the html code in a sane (utf-8) encoding. There is no reason to store encoding information in an html file, just like I doubt your source code always starts with a preprocessor instruction declaring the encoding that the compiler should use.

<comment><USER5> Hang on isn't this argument basically: "lots of people don't follow the standards now so no one should bother?"

<comment><USER4> Well, not exactly. If people truly followed the standards, there would be no need for the meta charset element: the RFC clearly states that encoding should either be specified in the header or default to iso latin 1. I can't recall whether it makes provisions for media type specific default charsets, but either way, if you follow the HTTP standard, you should not specify content encoding in your text document (this of course does not apply to binary formats that migh encode text).

So, to be a bit pedantic about it, my argument is that you should follow the standards and ignore / work around the hacks used to make life easier for people that don't know / don't care about encoding.

Note that I do not mean that as condescending - at some point, a lot of designers were writing HTML manually, and I don't expect them to know about encoding, just the same as they hopefuly don't expect me to know about... design stuff I'm really terrible at.

<comment><USER5> Fair enough. Not condescending. I don't know much about HTML tbh.

However, if I were faced with your situation I would try to use whatever logic is used by firefox or chromium to work out encoding. After all designers are going to (should) test if things work on one/both of these right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We work with a lot of multilingual text, and for "what to know about encodings and character sets" we have a very simple answer to that - a guideline called "use UTF8 or die".

It's not suitable for absolutely everyone (e.g. if you have a lot of Asian text then you may want a different encoding), but for our use case every single deviation causes lot of headache, risks and unneccessary work in fixing garbage data.

In simplistic terms what we mean by this guideline:

* in your app, 100% all human text should be stored UTF8 only, no exceptions. If you need to deal with data in other encodings - other databases, old documents, whatever - make a wrapper/interface that takes some resource ID and returns the data with everything properly converted to UTF8; and has no way (or at least no convenient way) to access the original bytes in another encoding.

* in all persistence layers, store text only as UTF8. If at all possible, don't even provide options to export files in other encodings. If legacy/foreign data stores need another encoding, then in your code never have an API that requires a programmer to pass data in _that_ encoding - the functions "store_document_to_the_mainframe_in_EBCDIC" and "send_cardholder_data_to_that_weird_CC_gateway" should take UTF8 strings only and handle the encodings themselves.

* in all [semi-]public API, treat text as UTF8-only and _document that_. If your API documentation mentions a text field, state the encoding so that there is no guessing or assuming by anyone.

* in all system configuration, set UTF8 as the default whenever possible. A database server? Make sure that any new databases/tables/text fields will have UTF8 set as the default, so unless someone takes explicit action then user-local-language encodings won't accidentally appear.

* Whoever introduces a single byte of different encoding data is responsible for fixing the resulting mess. This is the key part. Did you write a data input function that passed on data in the user computer default encoding; tested it only on US-ASCII nonenglish symbols; and got a bunch of garbage data stored? You're responsible for finding the relevant entries and fixing them, not only your code. Used a third party library that crashes or loses data when passed non-english unicode symbols? Either fix the library (if it's OS) or rewrite code to use a different one.

</comment><comment><USER7> From the article: "Overall, Unicode is yet another encoding scheme."

It is more than that - for instance, it includes algorithms as well... for instance, dealing with RTL languages with ordering and shaping rules (i.e. Arabic), how to know what to do when RTL languages are mixed with LTR (is that '.' at the end of '123' a decimal point, or a period? (determines if it goes to the right or the left or the sequence)) and how to know when data is equivalent despite being normalized or not, etc...

</comment><comment><USER8> The linked article by Joel Spolksy is also great:

[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html)

<comment><USER9> It's a great article indeed. I think it was after I read this one that I really started to understand what was going on with all that encoding stuff that I was already used to doing. Funny to look back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I hate that I have to know this stuff. Working on implementing a spec today where handling character encoding is a requirement.

</comment><comment><USER11> > _It basically defines a ginormous table of 1,114,112 code points that can be > used for all sorts of letters and symbols. That 's plenty to encode all > existing, pre-historian and future characters mankind knows about. There's > even an unofficial section for Klingon. Indeed, Unicode is big enough to > allow for unofficial, private-use areas._

The private use areas only encode about 137,000 codepoints (U+e000 to U+f8ff & U+f0000 to U+10ffff) and are running out quickly. Most of U+e000 to U+f8ff is used by many different private agreements, and some pseudo-public ones like the Conscript registry which encodes Klingon, linked to in the article. Conscript also uses a large chunk of plane F to encode the constructed script _Kinya_ , i.e. the 3696 codepoints in U+f0000 to U+f0e6f, see [http://www.kreativekorp.com/ucsur/charts/PDF/UF0000.pdf](http://www.kreativekorp.com/ucsur/charts/PDF/UF0000.pdf) . It takes up so much room because it's a block script like Korean Hangul and is encoded by formula just like Hangul. Each Korean Hangul block is made up of 2 or 3 jamo: one of 19 leading consonants, one of 21 vowels, and optionally one of 27 trailing consonants, giving a total of 19 * 21 * 28 = 11,172 possible syllable blocks, generated by formula into range U+ac00 to U+d7a3. Kinya also uses such a formula to generate its script, and I'm sure many other constructed block scripts will make their way into the quasi-official Conscript Registry. I'm even working on one of my own.

In fact, rather than filling up U+f0000 to U+10ffff, such conscripts only need to fill up the first quarter of it (i.e. U+f0000 to U+f7fff) for Unicode to run out of private use space, because the remainder (U+f8000 to U+10ffff) is needed for a second-tier surrogate system (see [https://github.com/gavingroovygrover/utf88](https://github.com/gavingroovygrover/utf88) ) to extend the codepoint space back up to 1 billionish codepoints as it was originally specified by Pike and Thompson until it was clipped back down to 1 million in 2003.

So Unicode is not "plenty to encode" or "big enough to allow for" all known, future, or private-use characters.

<comment><USER12> > see > [https://github.com/gavingroovygrover/utf88](https://github.com/gavingroovygrover/utf88)

This is the most stupid way to extend UTF-8 I've seen. The only acceptable solution is to remove the restriction of using only four byte per sequence which would allow to encode these easily keeping all the advantages of UTF-8.

Doing it like they does add an additional layer of encoding and so a lot of complexity a room for bugs.

It was probably made for compatibility but a lot of software will do bad thing with these new "surrogate" pairs so this solution is not really more compatible in practice. And updating software to handle UTF-8 sequence longer than 4 bytes is a lot more easier than updating them to handle such encoding.

<comment><USER11> > The only acceptable solution is to remove the restriction of using only four > byte per sequence which would allow to encode these easily keeping all the > advantages of UTF-8

I agree. Extending UTF-8 with surrogates like this is intended to be temporary, only used until the pre-2003 2.1 billion codepoint limit for UTF-8 and UTF-32 is reinstated by the Unicode Consortium. Then any software using UTF-88 can easily swap the encoding to the 1 to 6-byte sequences in "reinstated" UTF-8. This surrogation scheme is actually intended for UTF-16 to use as a second-tier surrogate scheme so it can encode the same number of codepoints as UTF-8 and UTF-32. I wrote all this under "Rationale" at the bottom of the linked page, did you read that far?

Hopefully, though, UTF-16 will be on its way out when pre-2003 UTF-8 and UTF-32 are reinstated so this surrogation scheme wouldn't even see much use there.

<comment><USER12> But "temporary" is a thing who exists only in theory. In practice its always never or (almost) forever. As soon as a few applications start using this "new" form of UTF-8, some of them may have to keep supporting it forever.

Why not directly going for the pre-2003 UTF-8 encoding ? It would even put a bit of pressure for restoring them and would show that this is the good way. It is also the only way I think to convince people to start implementing it.

<comment><USER11> > As soon as a few applications start using this "new" form of UTF-8, some of > them may have to keep supporting it forever

Not if it's used through a 3rd-party library such as the Go-implementation of UTF-88 I've provided.

> Why not directly going for the pre-2003 UTF-8 encoding ? It would even put a > bit of pressure for restoring them

Because it's not a valid encoding under the current scheme, whereas using surrogates with UTF-8 _is_ , using as it does the 2 private use planes to implement the surrogates. The goal is for restoration by the Unicode Consortium, but based on their public utterances it's not going to happen easily or quickly, and in the meantime we need an encoding that's valid under the current scheme because it may need to be used for 10 or 20 years. Of course I could have used UTF-16 with a doubly-directed surrogate system but that would be even more error-prone, and I expect whatever 2nd-level surrogate system is eventually provided with UTF-16 will be legally available with UTF-8 and UTF-16 anyway.

UTF-88 is an attempt to showcase both a surrogation scheme implementable in current UTF-16 _and_ the fact that UTF-8 is the best encoding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Interesting that I actually don't need to know this stuff. I think you'll find that MOST developers actually don't need to know this stuff. People seem to forget that the vast bulk of developers are for corporate and in house development, single language, being English.

I know this stuff because I like to understand how this works, but for all the dev's under me, there are probably a thousand concepts that I want them to understand before they start tackling encoding beyond knowing when to call the correct function.

<comment><USER14> As being from a non English speaking country I have had to deal with many instances of issues caused by this way of thinking. Before unicode happened to be widely applied, using Linux was 100% harder for us. So sometimes it may see that some things aren't fundamental but they might actually be, you simply don't know it yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> One thing I'm still confused about. What exactly is happening when you copy paste some text from one app to another? What encoding will the copied text be in?

</comment><comment><USER16> Good, gentle introduction that goes through everything step by step. Turns to php at the end.

</comment><comment><USER17> ...never assume one byte per glyph

</comment><comment><USER18> Sorry, but now I reflexively flag-on-sight any instance if this clickbaity, obviously overstated "every programmer needs to know about semiconductor opcodes/mainframe architecture/etc".

</comment><comment><USER19> PHP devs are so slow they just adopted utf8 and see its glory.

I myself "UTF8 or die!"d a long time ago and discovered it was not a good idea.

I will forget the problem of the parsing of the nth character, the string length vs the memory used, the canonization of strings for comparison. And go directly to 2 problems:

* There exists cases in which latin1 & utf8 are mangled in a same string. (ex http/SIP headers are latin1 and content can be utf8 and you may want to store a full HTTP/SIP transaction verbatim for debugging purpose), and it can store in iso-latin3 (code table for esperanto to be sarcastic), but will explode in utf8 unless you rencode it (B64)

* tools are partly UTF8 compliant: mysql (which is as good as PHP in terms of quality) is clueless about UTF8 (hint index and collation), and PHP too [https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=18556](https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=18556) <\--- THIS BUG TOOK 10 YEARS TO BE CLOSED

The whole point is developer don't understand the organic nature of culture, and especially of its writing and the diversity of culture.

They think that because some rules applies in their language it also applies in others: BUT

* PHP devs: lowercase of I is not always i (it can be i without a dot). It took 10 years to the dev to find where their bug was! * shortening a memory representation does not always shorten its graphical representation (apples bug with sms in arabian) * sort orders are not immutable (collation not only can vary from language to language but also according to the administrative context (ex: proper name in french)) * inflexions are hell and text size for error varies a lot (hence the unstability of windows 95 in french because error message where copied in a reserved page and the fixed size was less than the whole size of the domain's corpus... hence any contiguous block in memory (lower xor upper bound) would have its memory potentially corrupted)).

My point is UTF8 is not hell. Real world is complex. And it becomes hell when some dumb devs thinking that by manipulating strings that represents any language they know about any language.. and apply universal rules that are not.

Some problems can be solved by ignoring them. But with culture it is not the case.

And actually, unicode SUX because it is US centrics

* computers should be able to store all our pasts books and make them available for the future, even in verbatim mode. But unicode HAS not archeological character sets like THIS [https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/S_long](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/S_long) I don't care about the USA lack of history. I see no use in the computer if it requires to sacrifice our histories and cultures, * [https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of...](https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of-poo-but-i-cant-write-my-name) some people cannot even use it in their own language

Unicode suffers a lot of problem plus a conceptual one; it is has immutable characters AND directives (change the direction of the writing, apply ligatures)... that not only will create security concerns (one of the funniest being the possibility by adding a string to reedit silently text in on an effector (screen or printer))... We are introducing type setting rules in unicode.

For those who have used tex since a long time, the non separation of the almost programmatical typography and the graphens is like not separing the model and the controller.

Which actually also calls for the view (the effection) and thus the fonts. Having the encoding of the Slong does not tell you what it looks like unless you have a canonical representation of the codepoint as a graphem.

And since we are printing/creating document for juridical purpose we may like to control the view that ensures that the mapping of the string representation will not alter graphical representation in a way that can compromise its meaning. If someone signs in a box you don't want the signature to alter the representation anywhere or worse without notice.

The devil lies in the detail. Unicode is a Babel tower that may well crash for the same reason as in the bible: hubris.</comment>


Ask HN: How does Circle app get away with spamming your contacts? - <AUTHOR>

This app called Circle is featured in app store and Google Play.
Yet it automatically pulls your facebook friends and messages them.
On top of that, if you connect with phone book, it texts all of them to install Circle.
How is this allowed and not caught by the review teams? <comment><AUTHOR> The reviews: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/circle-whos-around- you/id488...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/circle-whos-around- you/id488720081?mt=8)

Many friends have been tricked as well.

by Lifsvr __*update to previous review. Since posting the review below, I have continued trying to get any kind of customer support. It has been entirely absent. I am still denied access until I log in through Facebook. I have, however, found another option... BuzzE!! Evan, thanks for not helping. It allowed me to find an entirely different and useful chat environment!!

Unless you are looking for another platform to drag all of your Facebook friends over to, don't waste your time. Although the app "claims" you can use it without logging on to FB, it does allow you access until you do. Upon download you receive an email from the developer. In the email he suggests, "if there is anything I can do just email me." I've tried several times. he hasn't responded. In the meantime I continue trying to gain access and connect with people in my area (who are clearly able to see me). No such luck. I was really excited about a new, local, social app. Unfortunately, this one simply wants to run on the coat tails of Facebook and twitter.</comment>


The Surprising Path to a Faster NYTimes.com - <AUTHOR> https://speakerdeck.com/nytdevs/the-surprising-path-to-a-faster-nytimes-dot-com <comment><USER2> Improvements like that at Nytimes.com have had me happily paying for my daily news for the first time. The user experience is just orders of magnitude better than anything I've found that's available for free. Almost reminds me of when Google maps came out and completely changed expectations for a map site. The iOS app also impressed me: it's great at caching stories, so even in crappy network areas it feels like a "broadband" newsreading experience (kind of amazing how long it took for a news app to accomplish this).

<comment><USER3> I find the user experience on the new site to be much worse than the new site. When I'm reading an article I really don't care about navigating to the rest of the site. I have a small widescreen laptop, which means that the fixed headers at the top give me less room to read the article. I don't need gobs of white space to read the news article in print, so why is white space so important on the web that navigation has to be hidden in one of those awful hamburger buttons? The text is harder to read because it has lower contrast. The new comment system is totally unusable. I don't really appreciate large, useless images interrupting the flow of the article. And I don't need Javascript to read a newspaper article (the site loads like a pig with Javascript) because I'm going to be navigating to a different page when I read another article. It's faster to just open the home page and open each article in a new tab (with JS disabled).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The slides say there are 1 million pages, and "republishing" them would take 90 days. Maths -> 7.8 seconds on average to "republish" a page. Modern templates systems can convert a page constructed out of structured data in less than 1/4 of a second. ( and that is a high estimate ) That is ~30 times faster, meaning all pages could be "republished" in 3 days instead of 90 had a more efficient system been used from the start.

Focusing on shifting all "rendering" into front end JS seems like it will lead to more difficulty in the long run instead of using a more efficient structured page creation mechanism.

I am curious how the static pages were created. Others here are speculating that templating was not done. If not; what does "republishing" mean exactly?

<comment><USER5> Their source material here is 1 million pages of HTML, they don't have (on my reading) some separate source of "structured data" for the modern template system to use.

It seems reasonable (and possibly low) for a 90 days estimate to extract the content from the variety of versions of static page, structure it, and then publish it in a more modern fashion.

It's all very well to say they should have used a more efficient system from the start, but "the start" in this case is 1996, which is the wild west in terms of best practices.

<comment><USER6> In 1996 (or as late as early 2000s), many published texts were via tools like Dreamweaver, where the publisher would checkout / lock a file, make static changes, and save the file, directly on prod. Like you said, it's not surprising at all they have a large portion of their articles in static HTML files.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The point about elements on the page shifting around is huge. I've personally dreamed of a browser change that would make reflows that are out of the current browser viewport not change your position on the page. If you have a slow connection or view certain types of content (liveblogs, etc) this can become a huge pain.

Just thinking about it raises all sorts of questions about whether the browser/rendering engine can actually reliably know that information, but it doesn't mean I can't dream.

<comment><USER8> If you have fixed ad sizes and known locations you could make those spaces empty boxes of the correct size and then asynchronously fill them with data. I haven't tried it, but it seems like it should work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I can imagine static pages getting really annoying at this scale, and it also seems like a no-brainer to have your content in a database... but the nerd in me did think "page rendering can be trivially parallelized – why not throw some map/reduce at it?"

</comment><comment><USER10> I've been really impressed with the quality of new york times posts as of late. The post "Norway the Slow Way" posted here a few days back was impressive in its use of a variety of frontend display techniques to tell a single story. Even their web console output had some neat ascii art and a hiring call to interested developers.

<comment><USER11> [http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/09/19/travel/reif- la...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/09/19/travel/reif-larsen- norway.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hello Hacker News.

I'd first like to say that this is the deck from a presentation at Velocity NY last week. Like most other talks, separating the slides from the presenter can make interpreting the context difficult. I did try to make an effort to have my slides provide useful information without me presenting them, but I acknowledge that I may not have done enough in that regard. I also received feedback from people present that there were too many bullet points and my font was too small. Can't please everyone I guess. But if you have a link to what you consider the "perfect" slide deck where unambiguous context is maintained without video of the talk, I'd love to study it in order to improve.

Other replies will be directed at the specific comment thread.

<comment><USER13> Is there a video of your presentation? I'm interested in watching it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Static pages are a barrier to scaling _if you have a bunch of other stuff tied in with them_ Stuff like HTML macros, CSS, and so forth.

My physical NYT copy from 1980 is fine. It was "published" this way, and it stays this way.

What we're really saying is that if you want to go the static route, you can't go half-way: everything that _is_ the page gets deployed in one file. I doubt very many people who think they have static pages actually do.

</comment><comment><USER15> What is WPO?

<comment><USER16> Web Performance Optimization

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> What really strikes me here, aside from the technical aspects, is the note on p. 21 about how the project was supported from the top because SEO was lagging as a result of site load time, and this line especially: "NYT became an e-commerce site since the last redesign."

Once you are focusing on e-commerce and SEO as an executive team, are you still committed to journalism?

<comment><USER18> If you're selling subscriptions, wouldn't that leave you more committed to the journalistic quality readers want rather than letting advertisers dominate that discussion?

<comment><USER17> Yes, if you're selling subscriptions. SEO is not meant to maximize subscription revenue, but to get people to click for free, aka ads. Which will it be for them?

Two recent pieces are leading me to believe that NYT is floundering around, without a real cohesive online strategy, still:

[1][http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/the_new_york_timess_digital_li....](http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/the_new_york_timess_digital_li.php?page=all)

[2][http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/the_new_york_times_cant_abando....](http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/the_new_york_times_cant_abando.php?page=all)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Perhaps off-topic, but recently it's appeared that NYT pages have had some sort of JS memory leak when left open for a long time in Chrome.

</comment><comment><USER20> They were keeping a million static pages on disk without any templating?

Whoa.

</comment><comment><USER21> What was so surprising about the path? Wasn't clear from the deck.

<comment><USER22> Really? Each surprise gets a whole slide in bold text all to itself. #1. A lot of static pages are a barrier to optimization. #2. Performance increase demanded as part of redesign. #3. Sometime you have to slow down to seem faster.

#1 really did surprise me, because I had always assumed that serving static pages would be really fast. I guess I never thought about sites with millions of pages.

<comment><USER23> for #1, it _could_ be fast, but the problem they're running up against is that the data appears to be held up by a single bottleneck, similar to pre-sharded database setups. in this case, their filesystemdb is hitting the limits of too many connections saturating much of their disk's i/o.

a possible way of approaching that problem is a divide and conquer approach with a reverse proxy that assigned manageable chunks of their content across numerous machines each serving less than millions of pages. the nyt already has a /<yyyy>/<mm>/<dd>/<section>/<subsection>/<slug> url scheme which would make this less painful.

I'm not sure how inefficient this would be, though, certainly a time investment, but it ends up offloading your disk i/o/ issues by creating more and more s3 buckets (or what have you) and routing via a proxy. i'd be curious to see when s3+cloudfront-as-host becomes too slow simply because of disk i/o limitations, although s3 almost certainly has its own abstraction above the bucket i'm not aware of which mitigates that.

it still doesn't address the serious and complex frontend issues they were facing, which seemed _much_ more onerous to be honest. their server rendering seems to be pretty lean though, it looks like dom processing and client rendering make up easily 80% of their 3.6s pageload time.</comment></comment></comment>


Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2017/02/20/reddit-is-being-manipulated-by-big-financial-services-companies/ <comment><USER2> I'm not sure how anyone can think discussions on reddit are not manipulated at this point. If you watch carefully, you see the exact same verbiage used from multiple accounts on the same topic used to steer conversations. And as new responses come up, there will be a multi-hour delay, then new verbiage will get posted simultaneously to multiple accounts. There is clearly behind-the- scenes writing efforts going on, then being distributed to accounts. And if I see this just as a casual observer, I can only imagine what you would find if you really dug deep.

<comment><USER3> Do you have an example?

<comment><USER4> r/worldnews is full of divisive commentary that shapes discussion in stupid and toxic ways.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/5vwt2g/israel_de...](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/5vwt2g/israel_denies_human_rights_watch_work_visas_due/)

Top thread (minus auto-summary bot's) erroneously declares the title misleading.

The thread under that amplifies some seemingly very flakey accusations a different employee at that organization maintains ties to a terrorist organization renounced decades ago.

Derail accomplished! Threads about Russia being bad usually lead with how the US is bad. Threads about Syria often debate whether Bashar al-Assad is not so bad. I am usually annoyed I read the comments in that subreddit.

Look at this awesome 2 day old account's comments -

[https://www.reddit.com/user/Supercootur](https://www.reddit.com/user/Supercootur)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's a shame this has happened. It used to that aggregated news was the best news because it wasn't opinionated. It also didn't need to focus on the big ticket items (murder, sex, drugs) like newspapers, as sales weren't a concern, so you have science, tech, and I kid you not, actual good news to read about!

But now with the pay-to-get-upvotes scams going on, we get utterly biased and even ridiculous stories constantly on the front page. And how to even start on the comments, which just read like blurbs to the title. A great example on the front page at the moment:

 _" Donald Trump's war on media is 'biggest threat to democracy' says Navy Seal who brought down Osama Bin Laden"_.

I almost feel like this stuff is AI generated at this point, just throwing together keywords that get clicks. As someone across the pond looking in, the bias is laughable obvious. I just hope that more people realise that manipulation is present, and remember not to believe everything they read.

<comment><USER6> > "Donald Trump's war on media is 'biggest threat to democracy' says Navy Seal > who brought down Osama Bin Laden".

What is this an example of? This sounds like exactly the kind of thing that I would expect on the front page if there was no vote manipulation.

<comment><USER7> It comes from the politics sub, which - to put it mildly - is one of the most suspect subs for manipulation on Reddit. They let that sub appear on the homepage, yet they ban a lot of other similar subs that are on the other side of the spectrum. It's one of those issues where I look at Reddit and think... something isn't right.

<comment><USER3> >something isn't right.

Is that a pun? Because obviously reddit has a leftist bias.

<comment><USER8> According to the right, basic concepts like logic have leftist bias

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Link to this post in three years and ponder in its prescients... Web 3.0 will be born in the death of the heavily botted social networks. Reddit, Facebook & Instagram, Twitter... are all basically pay-to-win schemes at this point, benefiting greatly in terms of adoption from the grey market pay-for-likes botnets, where marketers and propagandists know they can make their content highly visible if they're willing to pay.

People pay very little attention to the fragility that has arisen in the Web 2.0 economy. Once there is widespread understanding of the gaming, cheating, and botting, these social network institutions will crumble. There will be piecemeal attempts to reduce botting, but they will annoy end users, and annoy investors and shareholders as they come to realize XX% of their user base never existed.

Web 3.0 will be the death of anonymity, with social networks and APIs that are, by design, hard to automate, and even harder to hide your true identity from. There will be CAPTCHA-like systems (possibly tied to hardware) that facilitate this. This will of course promise to fix the problem of botting, while heavily benefiting surveillance, for state, and for advertisement. There will be a new breed of social networks built around ensuring the content you are seeing is genuine or "organic", and yet the incentives will be much more perverse, and their networks, much more invasive.

<comment><USER10> I think strgrd must be from the future, I strongly agree with your prediction of the future.

There feels like there is an analogy to our civilization. We existed as very primal beings operating in a world of high anonymity. A real world with high anonymity meant a more dangerous environment (theft, murder, assault, etc). In order for us to congregate & live a collectively improved life, we decreased anonymity. We did this with the idea of names, roles (sheriff), & printed records.

New complexity emerged from this. We needed to collect funds via taxes, make and enforce rules. We needed to know who each other were in order to give the rules some repercussions. Eye witnesses were crucial because of their "ability" to remove anonymity.

These steps of stripping anonymity were done with the intention of improving society. This point here is debateable, feel free to challenge.

We're at a unique moment in time where there's a highly dense "locale" that has full anonymity. What's even more interesting about this locale is that it's permeated across our "real world" society. The implications of this reality are immense, we live in two worlds that are interwoven — one that has little anonymity & the other with abundant anonymity.

As technology increases in power & importance (it will) this is tipping the scales. In general, I don't have much faith in humanity's ability to live within an anonymous world without devolving into very primal pre-civilization behavior (see: 4chan /b/).

I'm not sure this is a stoppable (or advisable to stop) process.

<comment><USER11> > I don't have much faith in humanity's ability to live within an anonymous

I can imagine being comfortable with an anonymous free future. This future would require much strengthened privacy protections, and even a very different looking government before I'd be comfortable however. I don't see those institutions giving us the protections we'd need.

I suppose this thread has made me realize that an anonymous world is only required when our laws and institutions don't fully protect us as individuals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> rm_-rf_slash I can only see one cure to this pervasive issue that affects every website on the internet that allows for user comments:

First, verified accounts, like Twitter, are visually separate from non- verified accounts. The distinction has to be visible on every place the username is displayed or when their post is displayed.

Second, only verified users have upvote/downvote privileges. To me it is downright foolish to allow any jackass or botnet to make a ton of accounts and up/down vote the conversation as they please.

I have seen this forum management all over the web and it's turning me off from social media more and more by the day. Newspaper comment sections used to be insightful, and now they are generally cesspools of shills and bots. Double or more for forums like Reddit. I even see it on Hacker News.

We can have open discussions and we can have discussions free of paid influence, but I do not believe it is possible to have both.

</comment><comment><USER12> Trend to watch in next few years: Phony Actors

This same thing happens on all social networks - facebook, instagram, reddit, twitter, etc all have accounts on them that may have naturally grown and are now paid to post / influence content on their respective platforms. I've seen this first hand on Instagram how large of an effect it can have in promoting apps, products etc. Previously disclosing affiliations / paid promotions was limited to a much smaller set influencers. Now, these platforms give anyone from a kid with spare time to a professional marketing agency a means to build accounts and leverage the vast reach of these networks for their own gain. Facebook is _starting_ to realize this and clamp down on it for fake news. But there are many more avenues and it'll be interesting to see how this really gets solved if at all.

<comment><USER13> This is a lot more serious than most people think. And a lot farther along technologically. Most of what has been exposed in the wild so far just falls under Level 0 Character.

If you asked me how we could potentially combat this coming information implosion? I would say you fight fire with fire.

[http://wiki.project- pm.org/wiki/Persona_Development#Persona_...](http://wiki.project- pm.org/wiki/Persona_Development#Persona_and_Content_Development)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'd noticed something like this on HN a few years ago. A negative comment about Apple might be voted up at first. Then, about an hour after posting, there would be many negative votes. The timing on this was consistent. After that, no more negative votes, and the rating would float up again.

<comment><USER15> I'll often see a similar pattern: I'll post something which disagrees with the common wisdom here on HN, it'll get a flurry of downvotes, then over time it'll get more upvotes. I figure that it's _probably_ just the result of a few folks who are HN addicts, and that over time more reasonable heads prevail.

<comment><USER16> I think it is human nature. When I see a comment being downvoted, and I think it does not deserve that, I would upvote it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you were designing Reddit today what would you do to prevent this kind of stuff?

<comment><USER2> Tiered subreddits. You would need to earn credibility in open discussions, and earn your way up into more serious discussions. So there would end up being multiple layers of credibility, with only vetted accounts participating in the highest levels.

<comment><USER18> This approach is probably the most reasonable. Stackoverflow seems to have implemented it fairly well.

<comment><USER19> I can't agree. Stackoverflow does some things well, but there are reasons that it hasn't caught on outside a certain cohort who were either there first, or who are very dedicated to cultivating their karma.

HN user jfc said it better here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7650975](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7650975)

<comment><USER18> I have to disagree. Those invested solely in cultivating karma are the reason to institute systems like "earned privileges". Any forum with a voting system will always be misused and abused by those who don't have the priority of the community in mind.

Moreover, jfc has valid points about negativity and unhelpful responses, but it remains anecdotal. As a counter, my own anecdotal experience has largely been positive on SO, and I rarely run into those problems. I am definitely not part of the cohort that was there first, and think it's a rather fair system. For example, preventing downvotes until a certain level of reputation is reached is a small check on those looking to farm karma by blanketing out competing answers. Obviously it isn't foolproof, but it at least ensures that you have actually contributed to the community at least a few times.

Perhaps his comment speaks more to the quality of the userbase than to the efficiency of the voting system?

<comment><USER19> I'll grant you that there are many high quality answers / discussions at SO. I also have no problem asserting that SO is infested with karma whores. They also have terrible moderation, and chippy pithy users with all manner of unproductive discussion habits. In other words, they suffer the same types of faults as other forums. I'm glad for you that you that you've had a positive experience on SO, obviously some users do; so have I, to the extent that I don't bother engaging in discussion, but rather just use the place to find the answer I want, and then just leave as soon as I am done with my research. As far as the anecdotes in that HN thread I posted earlier go, jfc isn't alone, there are pages of similar anecdotes in the same thread in addition to plenty of similar criticism elsewhere in the internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Reddit is awesome for tons of small game communities, I hope whatever happens on those apparently more important subreddits won't ever affect that

<comment><USER21> Niche interest subreddits are about the only thing Reddit is good for anymore as far as I'm concerned. I don't subscribe to a single default sub and never check the front page.

I subscribe to subs like sysadmin, woodworking, ruby and bicycling. The front page and defaults are just horribly toxic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> We've seen this before. Usenet was killed from spam as it didn't have a defence against those seeking to profit from the audience.

This is today's equivalent of the same problem. The difference is it is now two monied interests battling for the audience.

I long for a modern usenet newsgroup equivalent that has some kind of protection from monied interests, I suppose a small audience is a guard.

</comment><comment><USER22> Previous discussion here.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13714159](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13714159)

(I would like to give a more substantive comment, so I'll leave the somewhat jaded perspective of rephrasing the title: "<social channel> is being manipulated by <anyone who participates in social engagement/growth hacking/perception management>". The question I contemplate is where we draw the line of what social engagement is above the bar acceptability. (To answer my own question, I typically consider "disclosure" the answer to that))

</comment><comment><USER23> I think it goes without saying that a social media site with millions of users and place 23 on the Alexa rankings is an interesting advertising platform, and that it happens on a regular basis and a large distributed scale across the platform.

The far more important problem in my opinion in this situation is to be able to differentiate a "normal" user submitted post from an advertisiement, a skill that is missing in 80% of today's youth:

[http://fortune.com/2016/11/23/stanford-fake- news/](http://fortune.com/2016/11/23/stanford-fake-news/)

<comment><USER24> It's not fair to call it a missing skill when the other side of that equation is a $500B+ industry of university-educated advertisers with decades of experience who are working to obfuscate the difference between ads and content, if not practice outright deception.

What exactly are "today's youth" supposed to know in the face of that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I don't understand why "financial services" are called out in the headline. They're being manipulated by shady digital marketing companies who have some financial clients among many others.

<comment><USER26> Financial services account for a substantial portion of the US GDP and some may argue has big sway in the way our laws are written, and now in steering conversation about them on a popular site.

<comment><USER25> I think that's a big assumption. Financial services firms are not usually savvy marketers and the big wall street firms everyone hates almost never try to appeal directly to consumers and would have little to gain from swaying opinion on reddit. I'd wager retail firms are far more active on social media.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is a fun subreddit to subscribe to: [https://www.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/](https://www.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/)

</comment><comment><USER28> This is a very old phenomenon called sockpuppetry[1]. Any online forum of sufficient size and popularity is bound to be a target of it. It's no surprise at all that Reddit would be targeted.

Most reputable forums try to deal with it somehow, but it's difficult to stamp it out completely -- especially if the site administrators are ever themselves compromised.

[1] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sockpuppet_%28Internet%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sockpuppet_%28Internet%29)

</comment><comment><USER29> Has anyone ever tried something like a captcha for upvoting? Upvoting isn't really something that needs to be done conveniently in rapid succession.

</comment><comment><USER30> A much more insidious spam but very common are fly-by-night 'news' sites that copy paste content from reputable sources and then get up-voted to the top of popular subreddits, generating adsense revenue for the webmasters. Adsense is such a pox on the internet. I know companies need to make money but it also gives rise to soooo much spam.

</comment><comment><USER4> If anyone wants to play a game of "how could HN be manipulated" ... [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718417](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718417)

</comment><comment><USER31> And I wonder which discussion forum isn't... the closer any site gets to money (example: stock discussions), the more is at worth with manipulative conversations.

</comment><comment><USER32> Ok, its manipulated but why by financial service companies? Are they trying to trigger stock price movements?

</comment><comment><USER33> IIRC didn't reddit use fake users and content when they launched?

<comment><USER34> I think that is a pretty standard and often needed tactic when starting a forum or community. A community is pretty binary; it's either dead or it isn't, so a it needs to be jumpstarted.

<comment><USER35> Yep, this is most communities are started. Either through literal fake users (sometimes set up by the staff, sometimes 'imported' from other sites) or by deals and exchanges with other communities (aka you use my site for a bit and I'll do the same on yours).

Not surprising at all that Reddit did the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> So that's why all my NSFW subreddits have started looking weird!

</comment><comment><USER37> And HN and other tech sites are somehow exempt from this phenomenon? With billions of dollars at stake at Uber and its various competitors, is it impossible to think, for example, that Susan Fowler had professional authoring help, or was offered compensation to publish her recent blog post? Or that paid/professional/fake commenters downvoted, attacked, and drowned out any voice who simply requested documentation, or cautioned that judgment should be reserved until both sides of the story were made public?

<comment><USER38> In Susan Fowler vs. 5.5 billion dollar company, why on earth would you suspect that Susan is the one contracting with reputation management firms?

<comment><USER39> Dowjones is advancing the conspiracy theory that The sinister BigTaxiCartel want to see Uber done in, so they pay for writers to create blog posts for disgruntled ex-employees.

(It's not something I believe).</comment></comment></comment>


Buenos Aires subway workers go on strike over asbestos claims - <AUTHOR> https://www.enca.com/world/buenos-aires-subway-workers-go-on-strike-over-asbestos-claims <comment><AUTHOR> The Madrid metro is in the same situation: [http://www.lavanguardia.com/local/madrid/20180307/4413291656...](http://www.lavanguardia.com/local/madrid/20180307/441329165618/trenes- amianto-madrid-asciende-90.html) (in Spanish)</comment>


Top Reasons to Work with an SEO Company - <AUTHOR> http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com/2011/03/15/top-seo-company/

<comment><USER2> Reasons not to use an SEO firm:

1) They don't want to understand your business, they just want to apply their cookie cutter approach and hope it works for your situation.

2) They make blanket statements like "you should only have 50 links per page!!" when you are an ecommerce company. The nature of your business means you will likely have more in order to deliver good usability to the customer.

3) They recommend no following a ton of your internal links to "sculpt page rank," even though Google changed the way page rank flows a year and a half ago so that doesn't work. Further, Matt Cutts has repeatedly said it doesn't make sense to nofollow internal links.

4) They write spammy articles created just for ezine and other article aggregators and tell you not to worry when the articles a) look spammy, b) aren't valuable content, and c) aren't 100% relevant.

5) They give you new h1, meta, and alt tags that have keywords for products you don't sell just because people search for them a lot.

6) I could go on. There are some real idiots in SEO. Maybe there are some good ones, but wow @ some of the firms we've worked with/are working with.</comment>


The Outrageous Cost of Skipping TDD and Code Review - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/javascript-scene/the-outrageous-cost-of-skipping-tdd-code-reviews-57887064c412 <comment><USER2> The article appears to assume what it is asserting about TDD (Test Driven Development):

Of course, this is a fictional example making a lot of assumptions. Your mileage will vary based on lots of factors, including your team's experience with TDD, the presence or absence of other quality measures (such as code review), etc…

Here are the assumptions made:

        Production bugs without TDD: 100
        Production bugs with TDD: 40 (60% fewer, middle ground between 40% — 80%)
        Average time to fix bug at implementation (TDD) phase: 1 hour (this number is only used to derive the production bug fix cost)
        Average time to fix a production bug: ~15 hours

The author does try to justify this by saying:

The relative results of this fictional example ring true to me based on my experience with real production projects, both with and without TDD.

BUT...

Where is the specific data and how representative is the author's experience of all or most software development?

Software development is enormously varied. Kent Beck initially hawked TDD based on a project to rewrite Chrysler's payroll system that was cancelled.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Comprehensive_Compens...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Comprehensive_Compensation_System)

Also see:

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10149798/how-tdd-is- rela...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10149798/how-tdd-is-related-to- extreme-programming)

The Chrysler C3 project is not the most convincing argument for TDD or other of Beck's ideas. But even assuming the C3 project was a roaring success -- a highly debatable proposition, one should ask how applicable the results are to many other quite different types of software projects.

Similarly, what is the author of this article's actual experience and how applicable is it to other types of software projects?

I don't question that automated tests can be helpful and indeed critical in some projects but I do question rigid orthodoxies like TDD or requiring unit tests for every function or class after implementation (many people promote unit tests everywhere while claiming they are not doing TDD).

Tests take additional time to design and implement and thus cost more. They also have maintenance costs. Architectural and other changes in the software as it is developed can and do result in revising or rewriting the tests as well.

Many successful software projects were designed and implemented in the 1970's, 1980's, 1990's, and even today without TDD and without unit tests -- or code reviews although I am focusing here on TDD and unit tests.

<comment><AUTHOR> While the example is fictional, the numbers used for it come from a meta-study of TDD research, and for the relative cost of fixing a bug in production vs implementation time, "Integrating Software Assurance into the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)" from the IBM System Sciences Institute. Original sources and raw data are available if you click through the links.

None of the examples or figures presented rely on the Chrysler C3 project, or anything published by Kent Beck. I'm unsure why you'd mention them except to build a straw man argument. Straw men aside, this is all independent research with lots of 3rd party citations.

Yes, tests do take additional time and do incur maintenance costs as well, and that additional time is accounted for in the numbers presented. TDD still easily wins.

Yes, you can produce successful projects without TDD. You can also run a marathon with only 1 leg -- but maybe it would be easier with 2.

As for questioning my credentials, I don't blame you. It's certainly a lot easier to try to cast doubt on somebody's credentials than it is to come up with a valid argument or think critically about your own beliefs and bias. If you have any sincere doubts, a sampling of projects I've worked on are listed at the bottom of the article.

<comment><USER2> The linked article TDD: the Art of Fearless Programming by Ron Jeffries and Greg Melnik, IEEE Spectrum May/June 2007 [https://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/so/2007/03/s3024.pdf](https://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/so/2007/03/s3024.pdf)

cites Kent Beck's books Extreme Programming Explained (1999) and Test Driven Development: By Example (2002)

Kent Beck is Mr. TDD It is reasonable to question his claims about C3 as many have done.

The IBM article Integrating Software Assurance into the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/255965523_Integrati...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/255965523_Integrating_Software_Assurance_into_the_Software_Development_Life_Cycle_SDLC)

has the following section:

PROCESS TO SECURE CODE

In the event of a vulnerability finding, the software code may require redesign and implementation. This iterative cycle is costly in time and resources. To truly understand security threats to a system, security must be addressed beginning with the initiation phase of the development process. For an organization this means they must allow the IA controls and requirements to drive design and influence the software requirements. Therefore, any identified security threats found during the requirements and analysis phase will drive design requirements and implementation. Security defects discovered can then be addressed at a component level before implementation. The cost of discovery and mitigation can be absorbed within the review, analysis and quality check performed during the design, and implementation of our SDLC. The resultant product is one with security built in rather than security retrofitted. A study was performed by the IBM System Science Institute in order determine the relative cost in order to fix defects within the SDLC. Figure 2 displays their findings.

followed by a figure 3 (not 2) which is a simple graphic.

There is no identifiable reference to the underlying data which is presumably some sort of study for the US Department of Defense for security software issues presumably for military related software projects. This does not appear to be a general study, nor is it at all clear what was studied or how.

I am not questioning credentials but extrapolation from in Kent Beck's case a payroll system to general software development or in the IBM case from some sort of DoD software security projects to general software development.

DoD and aerospace projects often have unusually high costs for bugs in the production systems. A bug in a flight avionics system can cause a literal crash with loss of millions or even billions of dollars (Space Shuttle for example) and lives.

<comment><AUTHOR> The costs discussed are counted in development time, not the monetary value of rockets. That point is clearly evident with a cursory glance at the math. Just look at the numbers. The values all fall on the same curve. The cost increase from design phase to implementation phase is the same relative increase from implementation phase to testing phase, which is the same relative increase from the testing phase to the production phase.

If it were counting the cost of rockets in the production phase, it would clearly jump that value off that cost curve in a dramatic and clearly notable way.

The mathematical evidence of these facts is clearly visible in this chart: [https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*jOS7CZX-gWfOoKGPU...](https://cdn- images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*jOS7CZX-gWfOoKGPUU29kg.png)

Which is a reproduction of the graph that appears in the original paper using identical data.

Of course, the data I cited was not the only data available on the economic impact of software quality. There is a whole chapter on the topic of the economic benefits of reducing bugs in the book "The Economics of Software Quality" by Capers Jones, Olivier Bonsignour Addison-Wesley, Jun 3, 2011.

The book is packed with valuable references if you're looking for more data on why it's worthwhile to reduce production bug density using techniques like TDD and code review. I strongly suggest you have a look at it if you have any doubts about the value of reducing production bug density.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A post-truth thought experiment - <AUTHOR> https://diracdeltas.github.io/blog/post-truth/ <comment><USER2> So, it's interesting. When I think about lying in terms of "confidence" and an engineer's natural tendency to "analyze" things.

The waters get pretty muddy. Say we were headed into a battle situation and you ask me are we going to make it. I start "analyzing" well they do out number us but we do have a better tactical ... and you get more stressed and under perform(aka get us all killed). Shouldn't I have said "Hell ya, we're going to win we're the most powerful fighting force on the planet."

Same applies to interview situations, etc.</comment>


How technology could be destroying jobs - <AUTHOR>

I studied economics in college and I recently had a thought on how technological change could explain some of the current unemployment crisis and I want to hear your thoughts. Could some of the current unemployment be caused by the differences between the rate of technological change and the rate of people's ability to adapt to new technology? If the rate technology replaces jobs, is faster than the rate people can adapt to the new economic/technological landscape, could this explain a portion of unemployment? <comment><USER2> Technology doesn't "replace" jobs. It increases our productivity, meaning we can do more with less and sell better for cheaper. The net effect is positive.

That said, there is always a lag in how quickly society can adapt to new tech, which may result in unemployment temporarily above the natural rate. And during these times, people tend to hate on new technology:

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

<comment><USER3> One doesn't have to be a rocket scientist to see that technology _does_ in fact replace jobs. Just 50 years ago, it required a team of 25 to 35 men with sledgehammer & shovel and a grader pulled by horses to create a country road or driveway -- and it took an entire week to complete the job. Today, that same task can be done in just a day or two by ONE individual with a bulldozer. One can spout lots of meaningless catch-phrases and convoluted explanations to attempt to prove otherwise, but it doesn't change the fact that innovation deletes jobs. Just think about it for a moment... If a bulldozer _did not_ significantly reduce the time & cost of producing a road, then the bulldozer would have never been invented. There would have been no incentive for using one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Many companies are reporting a shortage of skilled labor (mainly in the IT sector). How can this exist alongside 9% unemployment? It exists because the American workforce is not trained for the changing job landscape that has been brought about by technology. Technology supplants some jobs, whil e creating others, this is what economists call "creative destruction".

</comment><comment><USER3> That is the core of the problem, yes. But, lots of luck to you if you get anyone in mainstream media or high academic standing to admit it -- let alone to talk about it or anything closely related.</comment>


How to get Visas to other countries to travel while doing a startup? - <AUTHOR>

There have been two recent discussions on the best startup cities in Europe, and the World. As an American I find it pretty hard to get Visas to those places for periods of a year or longer. Can you guys share any advice on that? <comment><USER2> Best shot is to enroll somewhere on a student visa, and do your startup on the side, or skip class entirely. Europe is too conservative to have open arms for entrepreneurs</comment>


The Global Bike-Share Boom: An Interactive History - <AUTHOR> http://www.citylab.com/city-makers-connections/bike-share/ <comment><USER2> I can't even scroll this page. (FF 40, using mousewheel)

<comment><USER3> Same. Disabling page styles and javascript makes it much more readable.

<comment><USER4> I find it a bit ironic that using noscript in this case actually makes a "fancy" website function _better_.

<comment><USER5> Fanciness is often the opposite of functionality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I see it as a story of success of an old idea through tech-evolution. The idea is so obvious. It is horrible that I have to lock my bike. I would much prefer not to! And I would be happy to share my bike with others. I could even tolerate some low loss rate. I love to bike, and I love when other people bike. But because people, you cannot simply buy 1.000 bikes and spread them all over the city. People will abuse every system, if it is too easy to abuse. So you need some kind of control. And this control came with GPS, mobile internet, mobile cellphones and magnetic cards. I don't even know if the bikes in our Hamburg sharing system are GPS-monitored. But it's possible. And sure, I could find a way to register with fake data - but there would be some chance to get caught. This feeling of everything-is-connected, everything-is- monitorable is a strong force to make antisocial behavior less likely. I realize that sounds somehow dystopian, but on the other hand, we now have bike sharing.

<comment><USER7> Wow. Yay NSA because, bike sharing.

Anyway, I doubt the utility of bike sharing because there can never be enough bikes. Lots of traffic is modal at times of the day (heading to work; going shopping; heading home) so bikes end up clumped. You can't depend upon there being a bike available, so you have to be prepared to walk. That's workable in dense cities only.

<comment><USER8> Why can't there be enough bikes to cover the spikes as well?

<comment><USER7> That would be, one bike per person. SO then what would be the point? We are no longer 'sharing' bikes.

<comment><USER8> Just because there are spikes, doesn't mean that no sharing can occur; e.g. people commuting from east to west at 0800, while someone else might commute in the opposite direction at 0900.

Also, the commuting bikes would be available at the city centre for most of the day, allowing people who need to move around during the day to reuse them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The Netherlands got a nation wide bike sharing program in 2003, started at 70 locations and since 2013 has had over 250 locations. _Every_ city in The Netherlands has these bike locations, all with the same system, so I'm not sure why they say Spain was the leader with 132 locations.

Maybe it's the chauvinist in me but I felt like I should emphasize 1965 was not the last time we did something awesome related to sharing bikes :P

(Note it's significantly less convenient for tourists to rent these bikes, you need a 10e/year membership which you need to submit a photo and receive a card by mail for)

<comment><USER10> That's something slightly different; bikes can only be fetched from and returned to train stations (possibly with some exceptions; I'm too lazy to check that now). With modern bike-sharing [which I guess is what this is about; the site's UI is too awful to read it], the idea is that, wherever you are within the coverage area of the bike sharing plan, a place to rent a bike is within walking distance, and wherever you are on a bike, a place to drop it off is nearby.

The Netherlands doesn't do much bike sharing that way because most people own bikes. Those that do not, and are likely to rent one, will likely arrive by train, so having collection points at train stations only is deemed sufficient.

The one exception I know of is the national park the Hoge Veluwe, which has a truly traditional 1965-style bike sharing program (completely free)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Well done to my fellow Europeans in the Netherlands for thinking of that bike- sharing utopia some 50 years ago.

It's been implemented with massive success here in Paris and it's nothing short of awesome.

<comment><USER12> I just returned from Paris and was astonished at how much better the bike sharing was as compared to San Francisco's version. Clearly, they'd invested much more time and money into their program but it was so pleasant to be able to count on bikes no matter where you were in the city to get around.

A map of their locations: [http://i.imgur.com/5PkkmFL.png](http://i.imgur.com/5PkkmFL.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The only thing that concerns me overall about bike sharing is helmet use. It's so easy to casually walk up and rent a bike that riders rarely consider safety. In Chicago, I frequently see Divvy users riding around in traffic without a helmet.

Alternatively you're carrying a helmet everywhere you go for no reason. I'm not sure how to solve that.

<comment><USER14> As a frequent cyclist who chooses whether to wear my helmet depending on the type of ride I'm going on, I am so damn tired of people always dragging out the same old tired arguments about bike helmets. All you have to do is say the word "bicycle" and otherwise rational people suddenly turn into overprotective suburban soccer moms. The way people talk about helmets, you'd think the average person knows at least five people who've died because they fell off a bicycle and their skulls exploded.

Here are some facts:

In 2013, 32,719 people were killed in road accidents.

Also in 2013, 4,735 pedestrians were killed. The leading cause of injury to pedestrians is tripping and falling, but by far the leading cause of death is being hit by a car.

For cyclists in 2013, 743 were killed. The leading cause of cyclist deaths is, again, being hit by a car.

At this point, even though these numbers show that bicycle deaths account for only .02% of deaths in the US each year (which completely disqualifies cycling accidents from being anywhere close to a health epidemic) people will inevitably point out that not many people ride bicycles, so that 743 is actually quite a large number. Of course cars kill 20 times as many pedestrians as they do cyclists, because there are so many pedestrians, and so few cyclists, right?

While there's nothing wrong with that statement, the fallacy is in thinking that you can just extrapolate from there with simple multiplication. Cycling accounts for approximately 1% of all trips taken in the US. So the logic is that if cycling accounted for 100% of all trips, instead of 32,719 we'd have 74,300 people dying in road accidents! Terrifying!

Except it doesn't work that way. Remember that the leading cause of death to both pedestrians and cyclists alike is cars. So if 100% of road traffic were cyclists, there wouldn't be any cars to kill anyone.

Now is a good time to bring up The Netherlands, a country where cycling accounts for 27% of all trips, and in cities (where accidents of all types are much more likely) that number rises to more like 50%. Even worse, practically nobody wears bike helmets there! So clearly, their hospitals must be overflowing with people suffering from exploded skulls. One can only imagine the carnage on their streets... because it doesn't exist. In 2013, 184 cyclists died in The Netherlands, which is .001% of their population. Our 743 account for .0002% of our population, but if you multiply that by 27 (1% vs. 27% of all trips taken) you get .006%, which is 6 times as many deaths per capita.

In other words, it's much safer to be a cyclist in a country where nobody wears a helmet but everybody bikes, than it is to be a cyclist in a country where virtually nobody does it, but at least you have a piece of styrofoam strapped to your head.

Why? Because when more people bike, we build more infrastructure to support bikes. Drivers become more aware of bikes, and instead of just gnashing their teeth and dangerously swerving around them, they're familiar with how bikes move through traffic and see them as just another part of driving on a road. Cyclists are more visible, motorists are more prepared, and everybody gets along better. And bikeshare programs are exactly the kind of thing to promote more people riding bikes.

But wait, we still haven't trotted out everyone's favorite last-ditch argument when all else fails! "No matter what you say about big-picture statistics, you'd still be safer wearing a helmet."

Yes. This is true. Adding more shock absorption to the human skull can protect the brain from traumatic injury. In fact, it's so true that it applies to virtually every human activity. So let's really follow through, and make it mandatory to wear a helmet while driving or riding in an automobile. Let's make it mandatory for pedestrians to wear helmets. Why stop there? Let's make it mandatory to wear full body armor any time you leave the house, and let's make it illegal to sell or build anything with sharp corners. Let's spend our entire lives suspended in smooth carbon fiber tanks full of Jell-O, so that nothing is a danger to our well-being until a heart attack ends it all!

Incidentally, heart disease is the leading cause of death in the US, is a real health epidemic, and is preventable by putting your butt in a bike seat and riding a few miles every day.

Sources:

[http://www.pedbikeinfo.org/data/factsheet_crash.cfm](http://www.pedbikeinfo.org/data/factsheet_crash.cfm)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in_U.S._by_year)

[https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2014/04/25/traffic- fatali...](https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2014/04/25/traffic-fatalities- decreased-significantly-in-2013/)

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

[http://www.treehugger.com/bikes/why-dutch-dont-wear- helmets....](http://www.treehugger.com/bikes/why-dutch-dont-wear-helmets.html)

<comment><USER10> But even in the Netherlands riding a bicycle _is_ dangerous for some groups. In 2014, the age distribution of those killed in traffic on a bicycle was:

      -  0-15: 13
      - 15-20:  8
      - 20-30:  6
      - 30-40:  5
      - 40-50: 16
      - 50-60: 16
      - 60-70: 27
      - 70-80: 56
      - 80+  : 38

Yes, over half the people killed riding bikes were 70+ years old. That is a cause for concern for planners, and they don't know yet how to tackle it. As always, it likely will be through a combination of factors. For example, technical solutions are being developed that warn cyclists about traffic coming from behind, but e-bikes likely need a good look, too, as their rapid acceleration and (for the elderly) high top speeds seem to play a role.

It is not so much a cause of concern that elderly people are advised to stop cycling, though. The benefits of exercise and of the independence that cycling brings the elderly are thought to more than outweigh the traffic risks.

(Also, chances are that soon, fewer people will die in traffic in a car than on a bicycle. 2014 already was close, with 187 vs 185; see [http://statline.cbs.nl/StatWeb/publication/?VW=T&DM=SLnl&PA=...](http://statline.cbs.nl/StatWeb/publication/?VW=T&DM=SLnl&PA=71936ned&LA=en))

<comment><USER15> I think this distribution would work with any physical activity. It is not just a cycling thing.

The reason is easy to understand: an accident that would cause only minor injuries on a 30 years old person may cause life threatening injuries on an elder person. Bones are weaker after certain age, and recovering from injuries is harder.

<comment><USER10> For relative frequencies, sure, but these are absolute numbers. You won't find them in the states, for example, because Very few senior ride bicycles there.

Also, and now that I think of it, probably more important: the absolute number of deaths for younger people has decreased significantly, while that of seniors has not. Part of that is due to having more seniors and fewer children, but part of it also is that policy has worked in making cycling safer for juniors, but not so much for seniors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It would be interesting to see some data on usage levels, system operating costs and retail prices for comparisons across different bike-share systems around the world.

The only data I found from a quick search was a 2012 comparison of the retail prices[0].

[0] [http://www.wnyc.org/story/284552-what-bike-share-costs-a- com...](http://www.wnyc.org/story/284552-what-bike-share-costs-a-comparative- chart/)

</comment><comment><USER17> Timeline seems to be missing Vienna, which tried it as early as 2001 and had problems with theft. The second iteration (2004 or so?) was a great success.

</comment><comment><USER18> In 1993, there was an exciting weekend in Cambridge (UK) when there were freely available white-painted bikes all over the city. In a day or so they had all disappeared.

[http://www.iankitching.me.uk/history/cam/old/green- bike.html](http://www.iankitching.me.uk/history/cam/old/green-bike.html)

<comment><USER19> Cambridge is a really bike friendly city but the bike theft level is beyond silly. That's the next problem to solve.</comment></comment>