Bitcoin, The Economic Singularity: From Holland with Love - <AUTHOR> http://bitcoinmagazine.com/7725/the-economic-singularity-from-holland-with-love/ <comment><USER2> _> there's a better chance that banks and governments of the world will start to get serious about cleaning up the global mess they've created_

Never gonna happen. Bitcoin is _the_ cleaning we need. There's absolutely no incentive for governments or banks (which are in bed with governments) to make things better for those, who are not in the club.

I don't think Bitcoin's gonna wipe out the very idea of government, but it certainly has a potential to give rise to free economic zones, where no government can have its way. And their success can, in turn, convince even more people that they don't really need anyone to _govern_ them.

<comment><USER3> Bitcoin seems to be a very good way of creating a new "club" of a small number of bitcoin-wealthy at the expense of everyone else. Being resistant to legal action is _not_ an advantage, it will create an environment rife with fraud and security risks.

<comment><USER4> Being resistant to legal action _is_ an advantage in many parts of the world with repressive government.

There are more advantages when you look outside the narrow view of utility in modern western society. Now anyone in the world can explore entrepreneurship and all they need is a computer. Computers are becoming more and more accessible (Raspery Pi's, $100 laptops etc).

Now people in poverty stricken countries can establish their own businesses and trade on a world wide scale. No bank accounts needed. Ability to accept micro payments without abhorent fees.

> Bitcoin seems to be a very good way of creating a new "club" of a small > number of bitcoin-wealthy at the expense of everyone else

Currently we live in a society where wealth disparity has reached sickening levels.

Bitcoin will significantly reward those who take the risk from an early stage if it does take off. The difference being that Bitcoin is not a fundamentally rigged system.

<comment><USER5> > The difference being that Bitcoin is not a fundamentally rigged system.

A fundamentally rigged system is any system which doesn't reward merit. That's BitCoin - it doesn't reward merit. Those who got in first, benefit if they convince everyone else to use it.

But those they convince do not benefit the same.

<comment><USER2> And what is merit? Does Satoshi who created it have merit? Or do those who started mining it back then because they recognized the true potential have merit? Or those who bought it at $2 and then a $10 and then at $100 have merit, because they understand why Bitcoin is important and what it can do to the world? It's not like those who got in are random people. They had some knowledge and experience that allowed them to understand Bitcoin, while everyone else was running around screaming "ponzi scheme"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What is Bitcoin's deeper significance? I don't know much, but here are some sketches.

1) Bitcoin has the potential to destroy the tools of monetary policy. 2) Bitcoin has the potential to hide taxable income from governments. 3) Governments with dwindling tax bases may react by printing traditional currency, hastening the flight to Bitcoin in a vicious cycle. 4) Traditional currencies may collapse as people rush to convert them into Bitcoin. 5) Unable to tax coercively, traditional governments may collapse.

What might replace them? Toll roads and kickstarter philanthropy in Randian democracies?

(Is this in the ballpark for Bitcoin's potential impact or not?)

<comment><USER7> I don't understand why people think Bitcoin necessarily leads to governments collapsing. Bitcoin can be regulated in many ways:

1\. If you buy a house you must show evidence that you earned the money. You can't earn all your Bitcoins Breaking-Bad (or Silk-Road) style and expect that the government will think your new-found fortune is ok. Thanks to the blockchain you kind of can't lie too much, unlike, say, cash.

2\. If the government wants to ban certain activities it can do so easily. Suppose that the government wants to keep its citizens from gambling or from using mixer services, it could declare that it won't recognize Bitcoins that passed through those services as legal tender. Good luck paying property taxes with your tainted bitcoins.

... and so on. Things are not that different. In fact the blockchain may mean that the government has more, and not less, access to information: for example governments generally can't access information from other countries except in rare occasions. With Bitcoins that information is accessible by default.

Now what the government can't do with Bitcoin is play games with the money supply. People in places such as Argentina could perhaps tell us why that would be a good thing.

<comment><USER3> Except that finite money supply in a growing economy with positive interest rates is both deflationary and a driver of increasing inequality.

Sensible active monetary policy and "lender of last resort" activities are vital to functioning modern economies. That's why they had to be enacted in Europe during the financial crisis despite not being properly provided for by the existing Euro framework.

<comment><USER8> ( I am rather trying the argument, rather than actually believing it myself.)

There are not only BTCs, but also forks and other crypto currencies. So if BTCs hording becomes a problem the incentive to adopt one of the alternatives will rise. Diminishing the value of BTC relative to some other currency and therefore suppressing ( at least to some extend) hording.

<comment><USER9> Hoarding (saving) will never become a problem because the value of currency is derived from all savers willing to hold it. Why would I store money in an altcoin if Bitcoin has bigger number of savers and I project that it will only increase (and thus increasing my own wealth)?

People want one money - the most marketable most liquid commodity to store their cash in. [http://blog.oleganza.com/post/54121516413/the-universe- wants...](http://blog.oleganza.com/post/54121516413/the-universe-wants-one- money)

<comment><USER10> Mencius Moldbug expands on this concept [http://unqualified- reservations.blogspot.in/2011/04/on-monet...](http://unqualified- reservations.blogspot.in/2011/04/on-monetary-restandardization.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The article is interesting in that it quotes Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem saying:

"Bitcoin is not electronic money… At present its eventual impact on the real economy seems negligible…Bitcoin is not a financial product as defined by law. (Mediation in) the purchase or sale of Bitcoins is not a financial service either, so the Financial Supervision Act does not apply."

Then the article goes on to say:

>ingredients are in place to make Amsterdam a city with a lot of Bitcoin in its future.

And the article then lists a lot of the benefits of having Bitcoin as an unregulated 'local currency', aka a commodity. This is a dangerous place for Bitcoin. If it grows too much, it will be recognized as a currency and regulated. If it grows only slightly, then it will not see any real use outside of the small group that already uses it. In the latter case, people like the author of the article stand to benefit a fair amount. In the former case, people like the author of the article stand be driven out of business, or have their business model impaired, by regulation.

If the point of the article was to convey that this is a golden age for Bitcoin in Holland, then it has achieved its purpose. If the point of the article was to make it seem that significant adoption of Bitcoin in Holland lay ahead, or that it would be a good thing, then it has not done so. In fact, that would be an entirely different article that would have to include more factual and historical analysis than this article even bats an eye at.

<comment><USER12> > If it grows too much, it will be recognized as a currency and regulated.

Honest, non-rhetorical question: How? (In the sense of both the goals of the regulation and the means of enforcement.)

<comment><USER9> See my answer below in sibling comment thread.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _When researchers and policymakers begin to have even an inkling of Bitcoin's deeper significance – more than "anonymous digicash created by evil hackers to buy contraband from drug dealers" – there's a better chance that banks and governments of the world will start to get serious about cleaning up the global mess they've created._

Can bitcoin's unregulatable nature really provide an example for how establishment financial systems should be better regulated? Bitcoin can be an alternative, it seems, but not a "city on a hill" to fiat currencies, and their financial systems.

<comment><USER14> What makes you think Bitcoin is unregulatable?

<comment><USER9> 1\. Politicians can't change the rules of the protocol.

2\. Politicians can't print more bitcoin as they like. Only according to the protocol and in competition with others.

3\. It's virtually impossible to censor Bitcoin transactions (unless you shut down the whole internet in the country).

<comment><USER14> 1\. So what? Politicians also cannot change the laws of physics that govern paper money transactions, yet paper money is regulated.

2\. That is not an issue of regulation.

3\. The same applies to paper money, and again, paper money is regulated.

<comment><USER9> I was just listing aspects of Bitcoin that are "unregulatable".

Regulation = laws = rules = instructions to cops when to apply rubber hose.

1\. Cash transactions require meeting in person. This makes people more vulnerable to meeting with rubber hose.

2\. The value of your paper cash is diluted when owners of rubber hose print more of it.

Bitcoin reduces these threats by more than 90%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Quote from article:

> This past June Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem gave a Bitcoin- > friendly report to Parliament. He said: «Bitcoin is not electronic money… At > present its eventual I'mpact on the real economy seems negligible…Bitcoin is > not a financial product as defined by law. (Mediation in) the purchase or > sale of Bitcoins is not a financial service either, so the Financial > Supervision Act does not apply.»

This is the same Dijsselbloem who said that deposit confiscation on Cyprus is not a template for similar confiscations in the rest of EU: [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-19/cypriot-bank- accoun...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-19/cypriot-bank-account-levy- unique-eurogroup-s-dijsselbloem-says.html)

This is the same Dijsselbloem who said that Cyprus _is_ a template for "haircuts" on deposits in the EU: [http://www.businessinsider.com/dijsselbloem-cyprus-deal- is-a...](http://www.businessinsider.com/dijsselbloem-cyprus-deal-is-a- template-2013-3)

When time comes, all these guys will change their minds 180º without blinking. Fortunately, it will be too late.

</comment><comment><USER15> Here's a mirror as it appears as though the site went down due to HN traffic:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://bitcoinmagazine.com/7725/the- economic-singularity-from-holland-with-love/)</comment>


Homejoy (YC S10) Raises $38M as It Looks to Expand Beyond Home Cleaning - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/05/homejoy-38-m/ <comment><USER2> YC partners make notes each time we meet one of the startups, to keep the other partners up to date. Six months ago I wrote:

      Have raised millions from angels but having trouble
      raising an A round, which is very surprising. Probably
      because Adora is understated and female.

How things have changed in six months. If you grow as fast as Homejoy has, investors eventually pay attention.

<comment><USER3> It makes sense that it would be easier to raise some angel money than to raise venture capital, but is it typically much easier to raise millions in angel money than it is to raise an A round? Is social proof helping in the former and non-existent in the latter?

Separately, have you seen a case where investors completely failed to pay attention to a growing company due to some attribute of the founder?

<comment><USER2> The reason it was so surprising is that even 6 months ago Homejoy's numbers were already well above the threshold for raising a series A.

Investors are always influenced a lot by the founders. Which they should be. The mistake they make is to care about slightly the wrong things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Congrats to Homejoy, but a very frustrating part about following this industry (and I guess startups in general) is the media's blatant overlooking of competitors because they just aren't part of the valley's circle. MyClean is a company I've worked with here in NYC and am a customer of that have been in the online cleaning-on-demand space before EXEC entered. They're profitable, offer a great service, and yet time and time again articles come out framing the industry as if EXEC and Homejoy are the only two players. They're hardworking guys and to see them consistently ignored is disappointing.

<comment><USER5> And what about the fact that Homejoy got caught trying to buy Yelp reviews? Even still, their Yelp reviews are quite poor in many big markets (Yelp reviews are a major driver in this business)? In addition, their $20/hr price is unsustainable and will have to go up once they demand profitability. Two week wait times to book a cleaning may appear to indicate heavy demand, but it also indicates poor planning and resource management.

Apparently all that matters anymore is how much VC money you can raise, not the underlying business. "Journalism" in this sector is so incredibly lazy.

<comment><USER6> Homejoy and it's leadership are committed to trustworthy and fair business practices and reviews. Check out Adora's response from April 2013. [http://blog.homejoy.com/kfJh5xY8LOe3pJZtAG9J9RD2](http://blog.homejoy.com/kfJh5xY8LOe3pJZtAG9J9RD2)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Homejoy charges $20/hour and pays cleaners $12 to $15 an hour[1]. The business model is to undercut rivals[2].

Margin compression appears to be the trend in many of the saturated, highly- competitive personal services markets like home cleaning. Homejoy might have great growth, but investing nearly $50 million in margin compressed sectors seems like a stretch for venture capitalists who have typically invested in high growth, _high margin_ technology companies. The valuation math just gets crazy.

What's next? VC-led roll-ups of small, local house cleaning services a la the website roll-ups of the last boom/bubble?

[1] [http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/18/homejoy-behind-the- scenes/](http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/18/homejoy-behind-the-scenes/)

[2] [http://www.geekwire.com/2013/dirty-house-pathjoy-online- maid...](http://www.geekwire.com/2013/dirty-house-pathjoy-online-maid-service- aims-clean-seattle/)

<comment><USER2> Running a startup in a low margin business is one of those things that seems like a bad idea till it's not. In this case the definitive counterexample happened 19 years ago: Amazon.

<comment><USER8> The main difference to me is that Amazon has a massive moat (in the Buffet sense) to prevent other competition from building an identical service. What's to stop someone from building a HomeJoy clone and undercutting them even further?

<comment><USER2> As a retailer they do, but they don't as AWS, so a moat may not be necessary. It would still be nice of course. I can think of some possible ideas, but I should save that convo to have with Adora.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's pretty disingenuous to say "We're really sorry! We're fully booked right now in this area." when you don't even service the area yet. Just be honest and say you haven't made it to my city yet. I'd respect that a lot more.

</comment><comment><USER10> Congrats on the growth, but I certainly hope that they've found more scalable growth avenues than buying Yelp reviews and running misleading Groupons as described here: [http://www.reddit.com/r/EntrepreneurRideAlong/comments/1cyg0...](http://www.reddit.com/r/EntrepreneurRideAlong/comments/1cyg0v/homejoy_caught_buying_yelp_reviews/)

<comment><USER6> Homejoy and it's leadership are committed to trustworthy and fair business practices and reviews. See Adora's response from April 2013. [http://blog.homejoy.com/kfJh5xY8LOe3pJZtAG9J9RD2](http://blog.homejoy.com/kfJh5xY8LOe3pJZtAG9J9RD2)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> How do websites like this avoid getting cut out the deal.

I used a similar service to find a pet sitter. The first time I booked using the website. Every time after I went directly to the pet sitter.

<comment><USER12> Airbnb is a somewhat similar example. You can definitely make deals directly with a homeowner/tenant, but both parties are protected and there is insurance when you go through Airbnb. Peace of mind is worth a lot.

<comment><USER13> What sort of insurance? My wife booked an apartment in London several months ago. Got there in November and it wasn't anywhere near what was shown on the site - same location, but size, amenities, etc were all not as advertised.

<comment><USER11> He is talking about the insurance AirBnb offers to host in case a guest messes up the place.

A well publicized incident happened where someone trashed a person's place. The insurance AirBnb offers makes you try to use your existing policy first.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I live in Chicago and tried Homejoy a couple months ago to clean my apartment. The entire booking process was quick and smooth, and the cleaner was pleasant and did a good job. I'm glad to hear they are doing well.

</comment><comment><USER15> On one hand, it makes little sense to continue paying a middle man for a repeating service like home cleaning. On the other, there's some value in having a diversity of vetted providers and the easy ability to switch. $38m sounds like a lot, though, at this juncture. The novelty wears off pretty quickly.

</comment><comment><USER16> I've used homejoy 8 times so far. I'm shocked at how cheap it is. Every one of my cleaners has been nice. One seemed kinda cracked out but still did a decent job. Good to see homejoy continuing to expand.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is exciting, congratulations! I just booked my first Homejoy appointment for tomorrow morning--super excited to see the results :)

</comment><comment><USER18> wow congrats guys! unbelievable growth, I love homejoy and I can't wait to see how you use this capital to scale up.

</comment><comment><USER19> Have they been around since 2010, or 2012 like Crunchbase says?

</comment><comment><USER20> Nice! :)</comment>


Show HN: The Earl Grey language – pattern matching, macros, compiles to JS - <AUTHOR> http://breuleux.github.io/earl-grey/repl/

<comment><AUTHOR> I just want to preempt one criticism here. The reason why EG uses f{...} for function calls and [...] for grouping instead of parentheses is that it makes for simpler syntax. Conventional languages overload () for arguments and grouping, but it is more consistent to use different brackets for these roles. Since macros and code manipulation are an important part of EG, I figured that syntactic simplicity and consistency trump convention (and I did not want to go full Lisp either). I wrote up the rationale here, for what it is worth: [http://breuleux.github.io/earl- grey/repl/?eval=help.brackets](http://breuleux.github.io/earl- grey/repl/?eval=help.brackets)

 _This being said_ , the fact that parentheses are currently illegal tokens means their role in the future is wide open. I could make them into sugar for the other bracket types, s-expressions, strings, thunks, code literals, or I could put them into userspace so that you can do whatever you want with them.</comment>


Show HN: VSUAL, a museum-grade art print marketplace - <AUTHOR> https://www.vsual.co/ <comment><USER2> FWIW, "museum-grade" sounds great, but doesn't mean anything. The gift shops at the San Francisco, New York, and Paris fine arts museums have reproductions with noticeable and disagreeable color shifts, tonality inconsistencies with the original, and frequently look like they didn't even get a focus lock.

It might be good to highlight how you're aware of these issues and what you're doing to ensure high fidelity reproductions.

Educate your would-be customers to be more discerning!

<comment><AUTHOR> That's fair! On our products page we talk about the ink we use as well as the paper options, but ultimately, the point is that our prints are "high quality"—which hopefully speaks for itself! You bring up good points though (:

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> My partner Charlie and I built VSUAL because the other print-on-demand solutions didn't feel right for the fine art prints he was making: if they did sell prints, it always felt like those were an afterthought to T-shirts, mugs, and phone cases. Even then, the prints felt cheap and low-quality.

VSUAL solves that problem for artists by giving them a prints-only marketplace focussed on quality. Every print is made with archival ink on Hahnemühle Photo Rag, Canson Baryta, or high quality Epson Semi Gloss paper. It also enables artists to sell a large selection of prints without keeping any inventory on hand: we handle printing, framing, and fulfillment.

For buyers, VSUAL solves the problem of size: all too often, you can find a print the size you want, or of the art you want, but you can't find the right art at the right size. With VSUAL, it's easy for artists to list their entire inventory at multiple sizes, making shopping easy for buyers.

We're still just getting started—we have /some/ traction with artists, but haven't quite cracked the code on marketing to buyers. What do you think?</comment>


Email Marketing + Video Marketing - <AUTHOR> http://blog.involver.com/2009/03/the-view-from-stanford/

<comment><AUTHOR> disclosure, this is my company, but I think it's pretty cool the correlation we've found with increased response to email marketing when paired with video.</comment>


Apparently Yelp has a no-fly list - <AUTHOR> http://chriszf.posterous.com/apparently-yelp-has-a-no-fly-list <comment><USER2> If they had the guest list beforehand, they had a responsibility to inform you of this issue before the trip. Putting you on the spot forced you into making a crappy decision either way you went with it.

I personally would have yanked all the students out and explained why and exactly why you were all leaving to someone in authority if this couldn't be cleared up, further that it was going to go up on the Internet, but my personal bias stems from years of being excluded from things for no obvious reason as a kid.

<comment><USER3> Think about what benefit that would give the other class members, though. None. All they would be feeling is that they missed a lecture they wanted to be at and should be at.

It's sad for the student who could not attend, that is obvious. That's Yelp's fault. But these kids aren't kids. If they wanted to stand on principle and leave the presentation, they could make that call. But the decision to pull the whole class from the conference shouldn't be up to the teacher of a college class populated by adults.

Throw a shitstorm at Yelp, yes, but if I were in that class and the teacher told me to get back on the bus, I'm under no obligation to listen to him. And I likely would have stayed, almost equally as upset at the poor behavior of the instructor. The way Chris handled the situation was about as good as you can get under the unfortunate circumstances.

<comment><USER4> If I was the teacher I would have just taken everyone for Ice Cream and use the time to teach the students.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hey guys! I am the student in question. As someone else said, we are all adults (in our 20's and 30's) and I wasn't hurt/isolated/crushed/etc. when our teacher didn't come with me. In fact he's a wonderful teacher and person, and instead of protesting against security (who doesn't care), he posted this, which gained a lot more attention.

It turns out someone causing problems at numerous Yelp events has the same name as myself and they were on the "no-fly" list. I'd say the security needs some improvement, as they couldn't tell the difference between us after checking my government-issued ID.

Thanks for all the discussion.

</comment><comment><USER6> > _But here I was, helpless. The only thing I could do was direct her to BART > and join the rest of the class inside_

... or pull the class out and refuse to attend it out of principle?

<comment><AUTHOR> I had another 9 students inside, and the talk was worthwhile for them. Furthermore, the problem was not with the organizers (who were generous and accommodating) or the speakers (who were similarly generous), but with the venue. Nothing would have been solved by protesting: I'm not important enough that anyone would have noticed.

<comment><USER7> You would have demonstrated that moral authority is on the side of the student who was wronged. It doesn't matter whether or not they change their policy, what matters is that you went along with excluding a student for no reason.

EDIT: Sorry, this came off a bit too personally. I'm a teacher too and I got angry when I read this story. I'll just say more generically that it is easily possible (and justifiable) for a student to feel alienated after a situation like this, especially if they feel like their educator didn't stand up for them. Whether or not "standing up for them" involves canceling the entire trip is a contextual issue, and I really don't know if it would have been a good idea in this case.

<comment><USER8> I don't get the teacher-blaming here.

Imagine you're a student in that class; you're stoked to see this talk, but one of your classmates can't get in. You feel terrible but you've been looking forward to this. If the teacher decides to "stick it to the man", you and 8 other of your classmates miss out and possibly become bitter towards the excluded one because of Yelp's security measures.

His having to direct her to the nearest transit might seem cold, but he was responsible for all of those students, and he was trying to offer them an experience they would grow from. I would have been incredibly bummed if I were her, but it wasn't anyone in her group's fault and they shouldn't have missed an opportunity to learn because the teacher decided he wanted to take some sort of personal, _"Yeah, well I'll show you!"_ stand.

<comment><USER9> What kind of students are we talking about here? I assume they're not explaining how Pinterest is scaling to eighth-graders. If we're talking about adults here -- and apparently just 10 of them --, why not let them quickly huddle together and figure it out?

<comment><USER8> Regardless of age, I'd assume they'd rather take notes [on her behalf] than not attend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why go on with the field trip at all? For all the talk about "you feel the pressure to be that authority", wouldn't the best move have been to abandon the trip and side with the student?

<comment><USER11> Not sure that would achieve much, except maybe make her feel (unfairly) guilty and the rest of the class potentially resentful (despite this not being her fault).

But sending her away makes no sense either. Why not ask her to wait outside, ensure the rest of the class finds their way, then attempt to find somebody with suitable authority to allow her in?

There's no point arguing with a security guard past a certain point; they simply do not have authority you're seeking.

However, even if you spend the entire session trying to find somebody and don't succeed, at least the student will respect and appreciate your effort and won't feel alone in her plight.

<comment><AUTHOR> The story was abbreviated: I talked to several people to figure out what was going on before they insisted we were blocking the entrance. By then she had decided it was not worth the trouble and wanted to leave.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Yelp reviews are a big point of anger from many business owners and there's some valid security risks. However a name based policy is rather dumb.

<comment><USER13> I guess that is the underlying issue. Yelp is fundamentally a protection racket. "Those are some real nice reviews you have there - it would be a real shame for something to happen to them." I imagine that there are lots of business owners that would be a security risk. I wonder if Yelp people ask themselves if they might be doing something bad if people want to do them bodily harm.

<comment><USER14>
      > I wonder if Yelp people ask themselves if they
      > might be doing something bad if people want to do
      > them bodily harm.

They don't have to be doing something wrong for people to want to harm them.

<comment><USER15> Most of the time, if people want to physically hurt you, you're either doing something really bad, or really good. I don't think Yelp falls into the "really good" category.

<comment><USER16> Or you might just be hurting business of bad people. Not every owner of the restaurant is a nice and smart person who can accept negative feedback (aka. bad review) as a sing that he/she needs to change something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I attended a meetup that was held at Yelp and I can confirm that entrance to the building is weirdly extra secured compared to meetups at other SF companies I've attended.

<comment><USER18> This entire story seems quite obvious, really.

AFAIK, the CONSENSUS is they run a racket. "Sures is a nice restaurant, would be a reeeel shame if some negative reviews happened to it, wouldn't it" is their business model. (not exaggerating here - Google startup extortion, this is the only company that comes up. They've been sued.)

If you're running an extortion ring, you're not gonna be letting a whooole lot of po'd people in your office.

I would be extremely curious about the specific name. I bet it is someone they have tried to illegally strong-arm by showcasing negative reviews.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder if you can pay them a fee to hide the negative security reviews of your name.

<comment><USER20> haha..being Yelp..probably!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't understand this point:

"I don't hold it against the security guy, he was just following instructions."

Why does everybody assume that while what he's doing is awful, he's just following instructions and that he wouldn't do anything truly f'ed up.

I would assume that a guy who is willing to take a job that involves excluding a kid from their class field trip based wholly on that kid's name being on some magic list is the sort to be willing to do all sorts of evil stuff if ordered to.

I'm not saying he IS the type to do evil things if ordered, but that is the safer assumption.

<comment><USER22> I don't think hypotheticals are particularly relevant.

What I would argue is that (unless you're the bouncer at a nightclub) it _is_ pretty shitty to refuse someone entry without explanation. If you don't know the reason, you should be willing to call your superior and find out, and maybe sort out the situation properly.

And if it's a company where that kind of information is "secret" and not disclosed to the people who are enforcing it, that's a sick culture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Important edit to the article: _My students are adults, which wasn't really the point of the article (and wasn't clear). Their ridiculous exclusion policy is. As smart as kids are these days, I'm not sure a "Pinterest scaling talk" is something I'd take kids to._

A lot of people here are making some assumptions based on the idea that these were children, which is pretty interesting in itself.

<comment><USER24> Especially since if they were kids "Direct her to the BART" might not be an appropriate response

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I work for Yelp, and it sounds like we screwed up. Apologies that we weren't able to get this woman into the MySQL event. We're obviously reviewing our security procedures to make sure they are more sane and sensitive for next time.

<comment><USER26> You're a mobile engineer at yelp, do you have authority to speak on this publicly? Is this Yelp's official response?

<comment><USER25> You can consider this an officially sanctioned response.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm confused - they had a guestlist and everyone else in the class but her was on it, or none of your students were on it and they decided to exclude her personally?

<comment><AUTHOR> They had a guest list and all my students were on it. This particular student was also on it, along with a note to exclude her specifically from entering the office.

<comment><USER27> That is not at all clear from your post. It sounds like she just wasn't on the list at all.

<comment><USER28> This. I think you may want to add that detail to your post. It's really important context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Interesting information about Yelp's building security from a Scala meetup group:

<http://www.meetup.com/Scala-for-Startups/events/71726662/>

They actually require government ID, which is a step above most building security I've encountered. Also, it says that Yelp "shares offices... in a building with security" - perhaps these stupid policies are more the building's fault than Yelp's?

<comment><USER30> Yelp has its own security team, and they do the administration of the guest list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> this is extremely common in a lot of meetups in SF - really the only reason they want your name on the list is so if you are a crazy homeless person looking for free booze and free food with a lot of expensive ass computer shit laying around you can't just waltz in

also, I am in that meetup group and yesterday was _insane_ email traffic w/the amount of people that couldn't follow the most simplest of advice -- "we need your name"

<comment><USER32> Name on a list, sure, fine. Pretty standard practice in big office buildings.

Running the guest list against some database of banned names, not so standard.

One reason it's not standard is that properly operating a list of banned names is very difficult, for the reason pointed out here in this post.

<comment><USER31> I didn't get this context from the post when I read it first - I guess this begs the question - was this a former employee of yelp or was it a true mixup?

<comment><USER33> It's a student, definitely not a former yelp employee or homeless person.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Go give yelp a bad review on yelp.

</comment><comment><USER35> "But here I was, helpless. The only thing I could do was direct her to BART and join the rest of the class inside. "

I'm a teacher, and if this happened to one of my students on an _official_ College trip (which, in the UK, would have been documented and approved in advance with a risk analysis &c, and yes even for adult students) I would probably be on the phone to the principal.

Given they way things sound in this case, I would have had to consider options. I'm assuming the teacher in this case was also driving the transport.

</comment><comment><USER36> Standard practice in Manhattan and Philadelphia at most office high-end office buildings. this is the world Americans live in. Yelp isn't in the business of protecting civil liberties.

edit: standard practice to deny entry to non-badged persons who aren't on a pre-submited event guestlist. i've seen this, for example, at every tech meetup held in a downtown office building i've ever been to in Manhattan and Philadelphia.

edit2: i've never actually challenged this, but i've been told that i would be denied entry if name not on list.

<comment><USER37> All three office buildings I've working in during the past 5 years would not let you leave the lobby unless you are escorted by a person from the company you are going to visit. The escort also has to have escort rights.

That is different than an escort coming down to the lobby and saying, "ok you, you and you can come up. You over there have to leave the building". That is something I have never seen happen.

Edit: all three have had metal detectors and airport style scanners, really annoying getting stuck in the security line if you forgot your badge and were running late.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I don't see the issue with businesses having a list of people who should not be admitted to a building no matter who guests them in. Certainly, fires were on a list of "do not enter" in a call center I worked at years ago, to avoid reprisal. My local Yelp seems to attract a different sort of troll considering the large amount of in-person interactions of its members and the psychopathic small-business owners who can't tolerate a bad review, or a series of bad reviews that reflect their attitude. This situation seems to have worked out poorly for all involved, but the policy of exclusion isn't necessarily the problem.

I don't understand why they couldn't have the desk find someone in HR or other related department (whoever issues the order) to confer with regarding this particular guest.

<comment><USER39> What is with phrases like "psychopathic small-business owners"? I don't understand why we are villainizing people who run small businesses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> So the teacher decided it was the best overall to let the students in, abandon the one student, it's best for him to listen to the talk (!) and go with the policy. I know it might just be me, but with this behavior I have the feeling he is supporting this policy.

</comment><comment><USER41> I realize these decisions are hard to make on the spot, but it's important to grab everybody and pull them out on the spot. As a teacher (or me in a previous life, as a manager --- also of adults), when you disagree very strongly with the ethics of actions of others, I found it both personally and team-wise rewarding to react decisively in front of my team so they'd get the message.

This applies to not only strange security, but harassment, unethical behavior, and other inappropriate actions.

Trust me from personal experience, you'll never regret it, and as you get older, the retelling will only get _more_ enjoyable, both for you and those who were there to see you blow up. On both sides, so long as you keep it professional.

</comment><comment><USER42> This sounds like a lazy (likely contracted) security "officer". Call the company he works for and relay this story. There simply cannot be a policy that does not account for people sharing the same name.

If so, then THAT'S the story here...

</comment><comment><USER43> Ultimately, a private company should be able to ask anybody to leave their property for any reason.

The checks and balances against abuse of this power are basically that, if Yelp's a jerk, they get bad PR, as is happening in this case.

</comment><comment><USER20> I hate Yelp and the Security there, worst place to organize any meetup events!

</comment><comment><USER44> I think there is only one thing you can do: Leave a negative review about the place on Yelp.

<http://www.yelp.com/biz/yelp-san-francisco>

<comment><USER45> The results may vary. If Yelp pays ridiculous amounts to itself for an advertising campaign, the review probably won't show up. If Yelp didn't pay for an advertising campaign, then it will show for sure.

It's not like we are talking about a particularly ethical company!

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> _I pressed further, and they informed me that she could not be let in because she was an "undisclosed security risk."_

Y'know, it might just be some poorly-paid security drone reading blindly from some poorly articulated status message on some crappy security desk app.

So instead of something tactful and polite like "Not on the guest list", the applicable field got set to NULL, which bubbled up as "Reason: Unknown".

</comment><comment><USER47> Yelp.com is blocked from my home Comcast connection in San Francisco (18.104.22.168). I just get "403 Forbidden". I assume somebody else in my neighborhood on Comcast tried to crawl the site and they denied access for the entire IP block.

I tried e-mailing them, no response.

</comment><comment><USER48> You seem to think it had something to do with her name? Was it a Middle Eastern name?

<comment><AUTHOR> It had everything to do with her name: she was turned away by the person with the guest list, but not by the security guy checking for fake IDs. That was the only piece of information they had.

And no, she's got a down-home 'good old American' type name, if I've ever heard one.

<comment><USER49> It didn't have to do with the name in and of itself, but the fact that it wasn't on the guest list.

Did you ever get to the bottom of why it wasn't on the guest list?

Did you ask the security guard (or did the guard offer) to get someone with authority to rectify the situation?

<comment><USER50> I'm curious, why is everyone in the comments assuming (contrary to the article and chriszf's comments) that this student wasn't on the guest list?

<comment><USER49> chriszf says nothing to the contrary in the article. We are given the facts: 1) You may only get in if you are on the list (of names) and 2) Student X did not get in.

<comment><USER50> There are certainly more than two facts in those 500 words. Some relevant ones:

1\. chriszf wasn't aware of the guest list requirement at the gate

2\. No one at Yelp told him of this in response to his inquiries

3\. Yelp was provided with a guest list

4\. The security guard said "undisclosed security risk", not "not on the list"

5\. Everyone except this student got in without a hitch

6\. chriszf came to the conclusion that, since the only information Yelp had on her was her name (due to the guest list), that that was why they had barred her.

Fact 6 implies that chriszf did check the guest list (as later confirmed here). I'm just wondering at how, especially in spite of facts 2 and 4, so many people decided that the most logical conclusion was that chriszf is an idiot that is unable to confirm whether a student's name appears on a guest list.

<comment><USER49> _chriszf is an idiot_ Your words, not mine.

There are many reasons for a name to not be on a guest list. I never implied anyone was an idiot. Not one of the items listed confirm whether or not student x's name is on the list.

chriszf was able to come to the conclusion you state because chriszf had more information than was written in the blog post.

<comment><USER50> But _why_ did _you_ come to the conclusion that _only_ possible problem was that she _absolutely must not_ have been on the guest list, when the entire point of the post was that Yelp was excluding people based solely on their name?

I am genuinely curious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> As far as I can see, the problem is with the Yelp organizers, not the security. I have attended quite a few tech talks by banking and finance firms in Chicago. Quite often they're also in some of the most high-profile buildings in the United States. On the listing of their events they always say in massive font at the bottom: IF YOU'RE NOT REGISTERED YOU WON'T GET IN.

There's nothing wrong with this policy. The problem is that the Yelp event organizers didn't sufficiently _publicize_ this policy.

Edit: Apparently there was a guest list, everyone's name was on it, and hers was marked as not allowed for some unknown reason? This is not clear from the article, but I gather from the comments.

<comment><USER52> Re-read the story. The student was registered, but denied entry at the last moment for undisclosed reasons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> "Wait here. After I get in I'll find the event organizer and clear this up."

Am I missing something? Why did you not do this?

</comment><comment><USER54> tear her for her bad homework!</comment>


Introduction to Compressive Sensing - <AUTHOR> http://puzlet.com/m/b00cv

<comment><USER2> The question arises: what is the scope of compressive sensing? What you show is l1 regularization. This has been around far longer than the term 'compressive sensing'. Even the theory underlying it pre-dates 'compressive sensing' [1]. I think the 'compressive' 'sensing' aspect comes about due to the possibility of literally, 'compressively sensing', not just in using 'l1-regularization'.

Further, an ambiguity arises in the concept of the interactive graphics in the OP website: the graphical explanation shown holds not just for 'l1' regularization, but also for say, 'l2' regularization (and other regularizations). The 'bar' could also represent a scaled version of the l2 norm. It is not easily apparent why it should only be 'l1'.

When it comes to graphical intuition for compressive sensing, I find the 'l2-ball' (intersects 'low-dimensional measurements' at dense points ) vs. 'l1-ball' (intersects 'low-dimensional measurement' equations on sparse points in the plane, thus 'promoting sparsity', see for example, [2]) to be more lucid.

Since you already have the excellent interactive web-site, can you possibly include the l1-ball vs. l2-ball [2] graphic?

[1] R. Tibshirani, "The Lasso page "Regression shrinkage and selection via the lasso". Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B 58 (1): 267–288.

[2] R. Baraniuk, "Compressive sensing." IEEE signal processing magazine 24.4 (2007).

Edit:

Another suggestion: The OP website format is a great way to demonstrate the utility of regularizations in optimization, which has wide applications in machine learning, data interpolation, etc.[3]

[3] [http://www.mit.edu/~9.520/spring07/Classes/rlsslides.pdf](http://www.mit.edu/~9.520/spring07/Classes/rlsslides.pdf)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your insightful comment. Our objective in this blab (= Web Lab) was a simple view into CS for the non-specialist, and so we were wary of getting in too deep with the various norms. And, frankly, a toy problem such as this omits a lot of important details. However, representing the l2 norm on the bar plot is a great idea. I'll look into that (BTW, you are free to edit, save & share the blab yourself if you wish.).

For more detail you are welcome to visit "Intuitive Compressive Sensing" [http://www.puzlet.com/m/b007z](http://www.puzlet.com/m/b007z) and "Compressive Sensing Primer" [http://www.puzlet.com/m/b0080](http://www.puzlet.com/m/b0080) (these aren't blabs, and rely on server-side computation). In particular, there is an interesting plot in the first link showing the difference in norms.

<comment><USER3> This comment was meant to be a child of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7513252](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7513252)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice intro! If you're up for it, you should consider contributing to the compressed sensing article on Wikipedia. It's a bit of a mess, in my opinion.

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

Side note to everyone on Hacker News: Contributing to Wikipedia is a great way to spread ideas because Wikipedia is a searchable platform that everyone looks at. An informational article that you write for Wikipedia is likely to have far more impact than if you write on your personal blog. So if your goal is to educate, consider contributing!

<comment><AUTHOR> We are big fans of Wikipedia, and so appreciate your comment. However, even though I am straying from your (valid) point, I think it worth emphasizing that not all types of knowledge are encyclopedic, and encyclopedias do not suit every purpose. Blogs, for instance, can convey a casual interaction and experience with a topic that would not be suitable for wikipedia.

Broadly our goal is to bring code and knowledge together in exciting ways. In this case to attempt to bring an "Aha!" moment to a non-specialist audience. In other cases, people may be served better to get involved with the code: [http://puzlet.com/m/b00d3](http://puzlet.com/m/b00d3) . Anyway, those are the kinds of areas we want to explore.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's the difference between a theory and a fact? - <AUTHOR>

Can a theory ever become a fact? Or are they in two completely different areas, so one can never become the other?<p>For example, was gravity ever a theory (assuming it's a fact now)? <comment><USER2> First of all, gravity is not a fact; it is a theory. To be more precise, it is a fact (only in casual terms) that "on the surface of Earth in free air, if I drop something it will fall to the ground." (Note this statement is still not always true.) However, WHY this occurs is a theory. So by "gravity" here I am referring to this why -- the "theory of gravity."

Theories are abstract and conceptual, and they are never known to be correct or incorrect. Rather, we build a corpus of evidence for or against them -- we never know their validity 100% for sure. For example, at any point in the future, we may find some piece of evidence which disproves gravity as we know it. Then, we will be forced to revise our theory of gravitation (e.g. when general relativity was discovered).

A fact is something that is 100% true. If I say that "Sacramento is the capital city of California," then this is a fact because we defined it that way.

It could be that the theory of gravitation is 100% true and hence a fact. However, we will never know this, so to us it will always be a theory. Sometimes, people feel so sure about a theory that they go ahead and call it a "fact" or a "law" -- but this just indicates that a lot of evidence supports it and hopefully no evidence (yet) invalidates it; it is still a theory. (So to be precise, my original "fact" about dropping something is really a theory with LOTS of evidence!)

So to answer your question, a theory can be correct or incorrect. If it is correct, then it is also a fact. However, we will never know 100% whether it is correct, so to be precise we should continue to call it a theory.

<comment><USER3> If this is how you define theory, how would you define hypothesis?

<comment><USER4> A hypothesis is any testable, falsifiable conjecture. I can hypothesize that gravity is negative at one particular spot in your back garden.

As I understand it, a theory is any hypothesis that is believed to hold (at least for now, under the conditions it's thus far tested under, or based on the evidence we already have). In other words, a theory is a hypothesis that is _provisionally_ considered true.

Thus, my hypothesis about your back garden could turn into a general theory of conditions under which gravity turned negative, if observations were made which supported it (which is, admittedly, unlikely!).

I'd agree with the Sacramento example above, i.e. that the only things we can consider facts are things that we've agreed upon/defined. This is a smaller set of things than people normally call facts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Please don't take this in an offensive way, but there are other communities where such a question would be more appropriate.

As a starting point, I can recommend you check out lesswrong.com, you can find their "introductory reading" here: <http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences> the first item on the list deals exactly with the question you have posed:

<http://yudkowsky.net/rational/the-simple-truth>

Happy reading!

</comment><comment><USER6> A theory is a suggestion of some truth (in the logical sense). A fact is a theory that has been "proven".

How a theory can come to be (or needs to be) "proven" to become a fact is more of a philosophical question than anything else, and if the schism between religion and atheism is any indication, it's a contentious one that I generally prefer to stay away from arguing.</comment>


Generate the Topic to your next Dissertation with PseudoAcademic - <AUTHOR> http://pseudoacademic.com/#

<comment><USER2> Is there something like this available for software patents?</comment>


Report: Chinese phone comes preloaded with spyware - <AUTHOR> http://finance.yahoo.com/news/report-chinese-phone-comes-preloaded-spyware-153543708--finance.html <comment><USER2> Of course, if you buy an iPhone in Europe, and you want to use it any significant manner, you're getting spied on by US agencies as well:

\- GPS: the wifi and celltower db queries that optimize the service are transferred into a foreign country.

\- use Siri: uploads your whole address book to US servers before use

\- use iCloud tabs: every URL you visit it uploaded to Apple's US servers

\- turn on the only cloud backup solution available on the device, and all your data, including every SMS, every call and all your most private notes and photos are also transferred into the foreign country of the US, with a chance of it being analyzed by certain agencies.

In other words, this might qualify as getting spied on as well.

<comment><USER3> \- use Safari: everything you type in the address field gets sent to a US company.

<comment><USER4> Same with Chrome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wouldn't try to minimize this issue - it's terrible that the Chinese are trying to fit spyware into unbranded phones like this. Perhaps the bright side here is that when the Chinese do try to commit electronic espionage, they're pretty clumsy about it.

BUT...

Given the way smartphones everywhere are made - China and elsewhere - it's impossible for even technical users to know that their phones aren't spying on them. While most of the software running on your smartphone's application processor is now open-source (if you're in the Android majority), the software running on the baseband processor is 100% closed source and secret. We don't know anything about the horrible agreements that have been made between shady government agencies and the baseband manufacturers like Qualcom.

<comment><USER6> False. The software running on your Android phone's application processor is not open source.

A significant fraction of it is based on a closed source fork of AOSP. The rest (both the Google Mobile Services layer, and the manufacturers customizations) are all closed source and have never been open.

<comment><USER7> > False. The software running on your Android phone's application processor is > not open source.

You're skipping over an important practical distinction: The precise software running on the application processor may not be open source, but it is closely related to usable software that is. Given that, it's possible to learn quite a bit by comparing the behavior of the closed-source fork and the open-source base.

Is that as good as "open source all the way down"? Of course not. But it is a hell of a lot better than the "opaque binary blobs all the way down" offered by most of the alternatives.

<comment><USER8> > _Is that as good as "open source all the way down"? Of course not. But it is > a hell of a lot better than the "opaque binary blobs all the way down" > offered by most of the alternatives._

I fail to see how. It's not like a partial binary blob is better than a full on binary blob. The opaque part might do anything too...

<comment><USER7> Well, consider the example of Carrier IQ.

The Carrier IQ software was installed on some Android phones, some iPhones and some Blackberry devices: [http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9222319/AT_T_Sp...](http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9222319/AT_T_Sprint_confirm_use_of_Carrier_IQ_software_on_handsets)

Where was Carrier IQ found first? Why?

<comment><USER8> > _Where was Carrier IQ found first? Why?_

The link doesn't say. And if anything it was not because there was an open- source part of the phone OS.

For one, on active, sold, phones, the device code is compiled anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Am I the only one to find this article really thin ? Where is the disassembled code ? To whom the public key that signed the software belongs too ? Which server it sends the info to exactly ?

If you start to get as paranoid as the entire forum is at the moment accusing blindly Apple, Google, Qualcomm etc. Why nobody asks for a simple piece of evidence for _anything_ ? This could really be a cheap manipulation ...

Edit: grammar

</comment><comment><USER10> Um, why is there a running assumption that this is the Chinese _government_?

A Chinese manufacturer has even _more_ incentive to steal information and sell it given the razor thin margins on making these phones.

</comment><comment><USER11> More info here, this has been known for some time already:

[http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=53391745](http://forum.xda- developers.com/showthread.php?p=53391745)

[http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2395007](http://forum.xda- developers.com/showthread.php?t=2395007)

Fortunately the solution is pretty simple, as these generic MTK devices are all easy to root and reflash with new firmware.

</comment><comment><USER12> The entire american telecom infrastructure is rife with spyware. Why should chinese telecom be any different?

</comment><comment><USER13> There's a ton of these generic MTK-processor-based phones available online; I bought and played with a few a year or two ago. They range from "really crappy" to "pretty nice", but in most all cases you're stuck with the version of Android that they ship with, as there's no ongoing support, no upgrades from the vendor, etc.

</comment><comment><USER14> To the surprise of no one.

</comment><comment><USER15> How are we doing for FOSS cell phones again?

<comment><USER16> I think that there may be ONE option. RMS probably has it...

<comment><USER17> It really depends on how FLOSS you want to go?

On the software side of things the closest you can get is a phone running OsmocomBB. That only runs on some dumphones and is not useful from a user perspective, it is only for research. For smartphone software, the closest you can get is a phone running Replicant. That still has all the embedded proprietary software; baseband OS, bootloader, wifi/bluetooth/camera firmware etc.

On the hardware side of things, we have no ASICs with libre designs. I think there have been some cases with libre designs but none manufactured in large quantities. There are myriad patents covering various hardware processes, instruction sets, CPU stuff etc. See bunnie's talk about layers of openness and the Novena laptop for more on this.

RMS uses other people's phones, he doesn't have one himself, mainly due to the network side of things though.

<comment><USER16> Wow, I guess that there aren't really any "fully open" phones in that case.

For the truly paranoid (with or without reason), I guess that they would have to go the RMS route -- or find a payphone that isn't within sight of a security camera.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm currently using an offbrand Chinese Android phone, so this news has made me very very nervous.

<comment><USER19> Why you think this is true?

<comment><USER18> Well, I just don't know. I don't have the same phone this but it's made me wonder.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The NSA deliberately weakened crypto keys/code. How is that any different?

<comment><USER21> Even if it were the same, it would still be news.

<comment><USER20> Agreed. But my question is still valid (and not deserving of the down votes) given that so many Americans do not react to their government's privacy and anti-democratic intrusions with the same disdain they have toward China's.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Read this as "Chinese people come preloaded with spyware". Was disappointed when my brain debugged it's sensory input.</comment>


What I Learned from Four Years Working at McDonalds - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@katenorquay/what-i-learned-from-4-years-working-at-mcdonalds-f278ad27faee#.k94eytuly <comment><USER2> This is really on point.

One thing I've noticed is how different brands 'impute' values by the type of person they will hire. The "cheap and nasty" brands hire people of colour, with disabilities, etc. Possibly a toxic effect of this is we then go and associate _those_ brand values back to the people who work there.

For example, in New Zealand, we have two supermarkets owned by the same company. New World, and Pak'N'Save.

New World is where our version of the "soccer mom" goes to shop. It's the most expensive supermarket, it features large delicatessens, etc. When you go there, as a soccer mom, the type of person you see working there reminds you of your daughter's friend.

Pak'N'Save, the cheap supermarket, _embodies_ cheap. The supermarkets have bare concrete floors, their advertisments feature stick figures because "we're so cheap, we can't even afford good advertising." What type of person works in Pak'N'Save? People of colour, people with disabilities, etc.

I don't really know what my thoughts are here, yet. I don't think this is a conscious decision on the part of the brands or the managers, but it seems like people are used to impute brand as much as advertising or anything else. And nothing seems to impute that more by being served by a person who looks like they can only afford to shop here.

I'm not putting a value judgement on this: but it seems like something that's important to notice.

<comment><USER3> I wonder if it's more the other way around... the brands that want to woo the moderate to higher wealth / suburbanites / what-have-you will hire more able bodied whites. Effectively shutting the other candidates out to work at the not so nice chains.</comment></comment>


Identifying North American Phone Switches - <AUTHOR> http://thoughtphreaker.omghax.ca/switchid.txt <comment><USER2> I miss my phreaking days (the early to mid 90's). Me and a couple of buddies would drive out into the middle of nowhere late at night, find a convenience store with a COCOT, beige box off of it, and use my shitty 486 laptop to dial into the telephone switch for the local telco (which we found via trashing). We eventually worked out the password for an account that had the equivalent of "root" privileges and for a while basically owned the switch. The problem was, we didn't know how to _do_ anything fun. We tried to do the thing we'd read about in that one Kevin Mitnick book, where you turn someone's home phone into a pay phone (that is, configure it so that when they pick up the phone and dial, they get the "please deposit $4.75 for the next 5 minutes" message) but never could get the exact right commands down. Well, so far as we know anyway. If it worked, we never heard about it. I won't say who the target was, to protect the guilty.

Those were the days... a 20+ foot phone cord stretched across a parking lot, and we'd sit there nervously looking for cars that might be cop cars, and try to figure out what we'd tell the cops if they stopped and asked what we were doing. But it was a rural area in the mid 90's, so we figured most of the cops were so technology illiterate that they would have no clue about hacking/phreaking or anything. At any rate, it (surprisingly, in hindsight) never came up.

There was a BBS we spent a lot of time on back then as well, from the 303 area code. I don't remember if the board was named Voyager, or if that was the nick of the guy who ran it. Anybody remember them/him?

Edit: Found it. The board was "Hacker's Haven" and the sysop was Voyager.

</comment><comment><USER3> > * 5ESS line cards are pretty distinct sounding. They'll make weird noises > whenever you go offhook, have a slightly higher noise floor then most line > cards, and a very strange frequency response. This doesn't necessarily apply > if you're using a line served out of a channel bank or something, but the > line cards can give a very different experience on the phone network > sometimes.

5E analog line cards are (as far as I know) are all concentrated at one level or another (think 4:1, 10:1, etc) - which means there is an analog cross point switch to tie your line up to a codec - when your line goes into permanent signal, you'll be linked up to what appears to be an analog announcement trunk, as to avoid tying up any of the TDM bandwidth on the switch.

Whereas DMS100's are codec per line, and are not concentrated in the same way. I think GTD-5's are also similar to the DMS and codec per line.

When you go off hook on a 5E you can her tick-ta-tick-tick-dialtone as it sets up the link thru the analog switching fabric - this seems to be universal to all 5E's - the 5E2000 sounds different, and I believe uses different ckt packs to do the switching, but fundamentally appears to work the same way (I've not had a chance to sit on a 5E2000 line to get permanent signal to confirm that).

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting! Sounds like you're pretty well versed in this sort of thing. The 5ESS analog line cards seem to roll off frequencies before 3100 hertz like on most switches (a fair bit too - like, maybe anything above 2950). Do you know if this is a byproduct of the analog switching stage? I always just assumed that was a bad design decision on someone's part.

As for the announcement trunks, I think the 13A/15A announcement machines, like the one on that 202-986 number, tend to break channels out into analog pairs. Sometimes you get crosstalk between the announcement pairs too - it's absolutely fantastic. For the longest time, I could've sworn the playback mechanism itself was analog between all the hiss, crosstalk, and analog source material you'd hear.

For the hell of it, here's some better examples of that system. That 202 number doesn't do it justice;

512-371-3337 (listen for the weird sweep crosstalk at the end)

425-433-0021

<comment><USER3> I know of no difference in the performance of the line card once the call is set up (as in I can't hear any), I do know what the subscriber hears from whatever announcement trunk generates permanent signal does sound fuzzy as hell (think ringing/wooshing S's).

If you wanna hear an interesting recording call 425-226-0000 - notice the lack of supe at the end of the call.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha, nice. They still haven't made the AIS report default to disconnection? When they first installed it five years ago or so, they never migrated the database over from the old unit, so pretty much everything said that. Makes me wonder how easy it'd be to get an operator asking for a number to key into that trunk.

As for the announcement trunk though, there are some 5Es equipped with other machines that sound pretty good;

503-632-1064 - ETC Digicept?

248-200-0015 - Lucent 17A (flash based replacement for the 16/-A. Lots of fun too. 0010 is the remote administration number)

By the way, someone mentioned a while ago that most of the relatively recent 5ESSes encapsulate everything over ATM. The few printouts I've seen from 5Es seem to show they're capable of speaking it, but haven't sent data over the interface. Do you know if there's any truth to that?

<comment><USER3> Yeah, it rings reorder, then busy, then after like full min after the recording is done it hangs up, it does hang up seem to hang up correctly when calling from inside that switch.

I don't think so on ATM - I have some documentation for it (training manual, system architecture processor, SM/CM), and ATM isn't mentioned anywhere in it, when you consider that the 5ESS architecture was designed in the 1978-1982 timeframe, ATM would make no sense at all, it'd be a backward forklift upgrade to retrofit it.

Do you have email or something, I'd love to converse further?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure! thoughtphreaker <at> shady <dot> tel

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The details about being able to dial 0XX on some switches sounds scary. If I recall correctly, numbers starting with NPA-0XX and NPA-1XX were reserved for what essentially became network administrator functionality. These were ways to reach special telco operators, as well as testing equipment, either locally or across the long distance network.

Being able to reach this stuff is akin to bring able to talk to your ISP's internal IP network. Given the continued restriction of this special prefix (your telephone number still cannot start with a 0 or a 1 after the area code) and the persistence of legacy systems on the PSTN, I would not be surprised at all if these codes were still in use.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's a lot of access tandem codes that use 0xx numbering. A lot of the really juicy stuff hides on toll networks though, and requires fairly specific trunks to reach them.

Overall though, I think most of the really sketchy stuff today hides in regular numbering ranges.

EDIT: I should qualify all that by saying nobody I know has actually gone through the trouble of rifling through all 10,000 (1,000? In some, the last digit seems to be ignored) numbers in an ATC before.

There's definitely stuff on there, but for whatever it's worth, Sprint's DMS-250 network will redirect the last four digits of an ATC destination to whatever number it thinks goes to the inward operator for that exchange. It's been like that for years, so maybe there's just nothing critical in there; else someone would've complained. Or on the other hand, maybe that's their way of locking it down.

<comment><USER5> Back in the day all the DATUs and SASS stuff were on regular exchanges, so I don't see why that would change. People like dec0der were indicted for rifling through all the carrier's "special" COs with wardialers to find them. And different providers would have different ranges for admin functions, maintenance, customer support, etc. It doesn't take long for a bored teenager with a modem to cycle through most of them (remember, only 540 COs per NPA, and while each CO had up to 10k subscribers, you could guess which ranges had something interesting on it)

<comment><AUTHOR> Considering his text files, I'd think he went through the exchanges by hand. Typically faster and more accurate if you're just looking for test numbers.

[http://oldskoolphreak.com/tfiles/phreak/ex_scan.txt](http://oldskoolphreak.com/tfiles/phreak/ex_scan.txt) [http://oldskoolphreak.com/tfiles/phreak/espt2.txt](http://oldskoolphreak.com/tfiles/phreak/espt2.txt)

<comment><USER5> Oh sure, a lot was done by hand, but if you're looking at an exchange without knowing anything about the carrier and can't find whatever specific range they're using for op stuff, a wardialer looking for a 400hz tone will save you time sitting at a dialpad.

These files are from 5 years after I had started phreaking, which was 10-15 years after it had become popular. The only significant change I noticed was inbound dtmf tones being blocked, which really eliminated a lot of the fun you could have without finding your way into an admin line, an unsecured modem, or using social engineering.

Bellsouth-specific exchange scanning by hand: [https://web.archive.org/web/20010311195935fw_/http://fl2600....](https://web.archive.org/web/20010311195935fw_/http://fl2600.hypermart.net/780changex.htm)

If you'd like to listen to what idiotic phreakers' podcasts from the early 2000s sounded like, here you go: [http://audio.textfiles.com/shows/binrev/](http://audio.textfiles.com/shows/binrev/) [http://audio.textfiles.com/shows/defaultradio/](http://audio.textfiles.com/shows/defaultradio/) (you'll notice default radio has fewer episodes, because decoder went to jail....)

There are some funny things though like Episode 84 of BinRev Radio, where Lucky225 finds out his voicemail number was found in Paris Hilton's phone's notes [after they were hacked], and social engineering their way through gated communities, which of course still works. Back when hacking was about fucking with systems, and not bug bounties and CTFs. (Get off my lawn!!!)

<comment><USER6> Although they're silly, I learnt a lot from things like BinRev growing up.

Lucky225 also owns the number of the former Mojave Phone Booth [0] which is now a party/conference line.

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

[0.5]: [http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/mojave-phone- booth/](http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/mojave-phone-booth/)

[0.9]: +1 760-733-9969

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This book is a great read and gives an amazing overview of the culture: [https://smile.amazon.com/Exploding-Phone-Untold-Teenagers- Ou...](https://smile.amazon.com/Exploding-Phone-Untold-Teenagers-Outlaws- ebook/dp/B009SAV5W0?ie=UTF8&btkr=1&ref_=dp-kindle-redirect#navbar)

The group chats must of been so cool at that time.

<comment><USER8> It was fun. One of the interesting aspects of it (there were many) was the class of people who could share numbers via DTMF. They had build touch-tone decoders that could log the last 10-20 digits they heard. It separated the elite from the amateurs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think I hit the tail end of phreaking, most of the exposure I had was through text files downloaded from BBS/FTP sites that relayed the knowledge of building "boxes" with such colorful names as "blue", "brown", "rainbow", and "piss". The phreaking I knew moved from land lines (of which I only participated in 'beige-ing' from a neighbor's line, and I won a lineman's handset [thanks #303/cuervocon] ), to cell phone cloning, bridges, and the occasional digital switch. Less analog hardware, more software/digital systems. Nostalgic!

</comment><comment><USER10> Having been born in the late 80s, this is before my time. But there seems to be a lot of fondness in hacker culture for phone phreaking. Frankly it seems almost out-sized: it even got a cameo in Pirates of Silicon Valley. So, why was this such a big deal? My perspective on it was just a way to get free calls from pay phones; is there more to it than that? How important/expensive were these phone calls that it became such a widely known technique? Is it just admiration for an early, and neat, hardware hack?

<comment><USER11> It's sort of hard to grasp how much more difficult long-distance communication was back then. Phone calls were relatively expensive and charged by the minute; you generally wouldn't call someone across the country without good reason or special occasion, and you'd feel real pressure to try to "keep it short".

Phone phreaking let you talk to whoever you wanted, as long as you wanted, as often as you wanted. This was a big deal in the days before instant messaging and was looked on almost as a type of magic.

<comment><USER12> I remember running a BBS and being surprised at the 20 or so users I had from Germany. When I caught one of them online I asked how they could afford the bill and was told he had hacked a PBX and was connected, somehow, through that. I hadn't heard of that trick back then (and don't know the specifics of it now).

Long Distance was a horrible thing. In 1997, I was working for a CLEC/long distance provider that existed as a result of the 1996 "deregulation[0]". Times were _great_ for about two years.

The price for long distance was never perfect against cost, but when everything went flat rate/minute and that rate continued to drop (ultimately becoming flat rate, period), I remember sitting in an employee meeting hosted by the CEO of Frontier (pre-Global Crossing/Frontier and later Citizens/Frontier). He had a graph on the screen showing the cost of a minute of long distance and the price we could charge for it. The lines were converging and I asked the fateful question "what happens when they cross"? To which I received a political deflection[1]. The best part was all of the industry rags were, at the time, screaming that there will _always_ be a long distance surcharge since there will _always_ be call termination per-minute rates. I could see it was only a matter of time before those fellas were proven wrong. Younger folks, today, don't have any concept of domestic long- distance rates, but AFAIK (and I've been out of telecom for a little while now) call termination still has a per-minute cost.

[0] In quotes because it wasn't so much a deregulation as it was changed regulation. The goal was to get local carriers to start competing with one another and long distance carriers. I believe the local carrier had to have a CLEC in their service area in order to provide their own long distance service. The hope was more competition with similar kinds of services. The result was a bunch of CLECs that figured out the law opened up some interesting opportunities. I remember a friend of mine setting up an ISP for the cost of equipment. He'd received his local phone numbers from a CLEC that would hand out locals that would cover a huge geographical area at practically no cost. What I didn't understand, then, was because call termination _is_ the "cost" incurred by the LEC, inbound calls were pure profit. ISP lines were _all inbound_ so the CLEC made buckets of money in pennies/minute from Ameritech/AT&T for the hours that his customers spent online.

[1] The days after the 1996 telco bill were interesting. Competition opened up and a whole new set of operators started up doing things like offering lines to ISPs (most people were dial-up back then) practically for free since all of the calls would be inbound and result in a huge paycheck from Ameritech/AT&T or whomever was the major established local carrier.

<comment><USER12> Apologies - that second bullet point was supposed to be:

[1] The deflection was because his solution was to sell the company to Global Crossing -- at the time, a dot-com darling publicly traded on NASDAQ that lost heaping amounts of money. There really was no choice. Frontier was _doomed_ because of the costs of its new SONET network and Global Crossing was offering _way_ too much money so that passing up the deal would guarantee a shareholder lawsuit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Lucky225 and Evan Doorbell (two contributors mentioned at the bottom) are pretty legendary phreaks. Probably they all are awesome people, I just know of those two. Evan Doorbell has an amazing collection of audio, if you're interested in this kind of thing.

</comment><comment><USER14> Discussion is ongoing @ irc.2600.net #telephreak

Awesome write-up! thanks!!</comment>


Ask HN: Best Online Courses? - <AUTHOR> I searched but there hasn't been a thread about this in a while.
What is the best online course you've taken? Doesn't have to be confined to CS -- I'm personally interested in expanding my horizons and learning new things in different fields.
Thanks all. <comment><USER2> Sapolsky - _Biology of Human Behavior_ 25 lectures [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL848F2368C...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL848F2368C90DDC3D)

It's accessible to laymen, no prior knowledge needed. It covers so many different fields and levels of knowledge ("buckets" Sapolsky calls them), different ways of explaining human behaviour. By the signals in their brain, or the hormones in their blood, or what happened that day, or their childhood, or their genes, or evolution of humans etc. Also looks at other animals. A lot of touching/funny/inspiring/poignant stories about scientists in the field(s). Sapolsky is an amazing lecturer/raconteur.

Hamming - _Learning to Learn_ 32 lectures [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AD4b-52jtos&list=PL2FF649D0C...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AD4b-52jtos&list=PL2FF649D0C4407B30)

The famous "You and your research" is one lecture in this, but every one of them is fascinating. History of computers, AI, codes, n-space, digital filters etc etc. Mainly it's great seeing how his mind works, his thinking style. (I've since read a few of his books, and I love how they're soaked with practical experience, in the same way these talks are. It's all stuff he's _lived_.)

<comment><USER3> Nice question, ambivalents, and thanks for the recommendation, yesenadam. Very cool. I just started watching the first video of Sapolsky's lecture and found it to instantly capture my attention. I'm going to stick to this series. By the way, studying Sapolsky could also help with the forum question recently in Ask: HN about explaining things well to people.

His lectures look like a neat place to get a deep anthropological grip on things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've taken a few, and these two are my favorites:

 _Learning How to Learn_ by Barbara Oakley: [https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to- learn](https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn) Hands down the biggest return on investment for an online class. It helped my future learning _so much_. Highly, highly recommend it.

Harvard's _CS50_ : [https://www.edx.org/course/cs50s-introduction-computer- scien...](https://www.edx.org/course/cs50s-introduction-computer-science- harvardx-cs50x) Took this course when learning to program. It was difficult, but I learned a great deal. Fantastic professor, good problem sets, and great production value.

<comment><USER5> Was learning how to learn actually that useful? I kinda let off halfway through it ...

<comment><USER4> I would say that it wasn't watching the videos that was helpful, but more applying the concepts and techniques. I took general notes and reviewed them periodically (spaced repetition!), and I applied the general ideas to my classwork.

It's kind of like learning math. During a lecture, it's easy to think to yourself "OK, I understand this," but you learn so much when working through practice problems. I found myself saying "OK, that makes sense" when watching the LHTL videos, but I really saw the benefit when actively working on applying spaced repetition, diffuse vs focus mode, getting sleep, and other strategies to my studying. I was taking a few post-graduate CS classes at the time, and compared with my study skills and results from undergraduate, it felt like magic to study efficiently and get good results.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Previously:

[https://github.com/prakhar1989/awesome- courses#readme](https://github.com/prakhar1989/awesome-courses#readme)

[https://hn.academy/](https://hn.academy/)

</comment><comment><USER7> "The great courses" (google it) has a many well done courses taught by college professors on a variety of topics

</comment><comment><USER8> Udacity courses: Applied cryptography, Intro to Theoretical Computer Science

Coursera courses: Digital Signal Processing

and Khan Academy.</comment>


Ask HN: Why DNS resolvers don't use HTTP? - <AUTHOR> Can they simply use REST JSON API? Do you think it will slow down normal browsing? <comment><USER2> DNS predates REST, JSON, and HTTP. DNS gets great utility out of the UDP protocol, which would be lost by using TCP. Parsing the JSON would ruin DNS server performance (a DNS server can answer hundreds of queries in the time it takes to parse one JSON message).

<comment><USER3> Truncate forces TCP. DOH or DNS over https is in standards process as is DNS over TLS and DNS over quic

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There is a new protocol from Google to do this:

[https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/docs/dns- over...](https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/docs/dns-over-https)

The traditional reason that DNS doesn't use HTTP is (1) published DNS standards predate published HTTP standards by 9 years, and predate the mainstream popularity of the web by even more than that (so HTTP didn't even exist when DNS was created, nor was there any such thing as a firewall that only permitted HTTP traffic); (2) HTTP requires more roundtrips, which add more latency, while a UDP-based DNS connection can usually be answered in a single roundtrip.

However, Google has pointed out that their DNS-over-HTTPS approach can improve security and privacy. Presumably it will inherently be slightly higher latency because you need a couple of roundtrips for the TCP and TLS setup even before you can send a query.</comment>


Jeff Atwood asks for help restoring a site from Internet caches - <AUTHOR> http://superuser.com/questions/82036/recovering-a-lost-website-with-no-backup

<comment><USER2> I found about 200 of his pages (with images and other dependencies) in the Pinboard archives, and forwarded them along to the guy.

I wonder if there is a nice market niche for a 'panic button' recovery tool that scrapes web caches, internet archive and so on immediately after you lose a site.

<comment><USER3> So If I were to make a business out of this, would you sue me for stealing your idea ala TC? :)

<comment><USER2> Just give me a freebie when all my stuff disappears and I'll call it even.

<comment><USER3> So we have a legally binding contract then? Awesome!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I posted a solution here (<http://bit.ly/4AGCju>) (to get back the images), but looks like nobody likes it. May be that was a bad way to approach the problem.

Anyway I am looking forward to more news on how they are going to resolve the issue.

<comment><USER5> I saw this on superuser too ([http://superuser.com/questions/82036/recovering- a-lost-websi...](http://superuser.com/questions/82036/recovering-a-lost- website-with-no-backup)), i'm assuming it was you. fairly clever solution :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> it's easy to retrieve google caches with a ruby script. here's one i used in the past:

<http://pastie.org/739757>

edit: if you use this, add a sleep! whoops. i didn't get banned though, shrug.

<comment><USER7> Warrick works better for that, at least: <http://warrick.cs.odu.edu/warrick.html>

It sleeps in between queries, so you don't get temporarily banned from Google.

I think it's not currently working for Yahoo or MSN/Bing. Fixing that might be easier than doing everything else manually.

Edit: I've gotten a response from Frank McCown, creator of Warrick, that he's looking into it.

Edit 2: He'll try to update it next week.

<comment><USER8> Warrick looks like exactly what he needs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Old saying is "If it ain't tested, is is broken." Old corollary: "If it is tested, it might still be broken." And: "If it is a backup, it might still be broken."

Seems like a good idea to occasionally spend the time and totally fill a sparkley clean image with your backups and see how well it fares.

My sympathies.

</comment><comment><USER10> Yeah, time to double-check your own backup procedures, everyone. You don't want to be posting similar questions, right?

Remember the old saying: if you haven't tested restoring your backups, then you don't really have backups. (Not that I've ever been good about this myself.)

</comment><comment><USER11> sorry would help but I'm off to do a backup

</comment><comment><USER12> I guess no podcast this weekend.

<comment><USER3> This weeks podcast: How to empathize when someone screws up.

Edit: from his tweet -

"on the podcast this week (unpublished, because I suck) @spolsky and I discussed "worst case scenario" biz outcomes. prophetic!"

<http://twitter.com/codinghorror/status/6582023681>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> These seem to be up on archive.org through 2008. The rest are available through Google Reader.</comment>


Congressional candidate uses Tinder to attract potential voters - <AUTHOR> https://www.cityandstateny.com/articles/personality/personality/tinder-suraj-patel-pick-up-lines.html <comment><USER2> A candidate who proclaims "I'm deceitful, vote for me!"

</comment><comment><USER3> Surprise! He's a Democrat.</comment>


Dish opens up "Hopper" API to Devs - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57593918-93/dish-hands-over-hopper-dvr-to-mobile-app-developers/?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

<comment><USER2> Does this even matter? How big is the Dish user base? Dish needs to make a product everyone can use (w/o the dish hardware) before this could be successful</comment>


How Dodgeball Became America's Most Demonized Sport - <AUTHOR> http://priceonomics.com/how-dodgeball-became-americas-most-demonized-sport/

<comment><USER2> Dodgeball is very fun.

I'm not a fan of the hard rubber balls or volleyballs that are used sometimes, foam balls won't give you a bloody nose if you are hit in the face with one.

Would it be an issue to separate children and let parents choose which sports they play in gym class? I remember we had to play with scarves in elementary school because dodgeball was too "dangerous". SCARVES. THROWING SCARVES UP IN THE AIR, WTF.

If fun activities are taken out of gym class then kids will not want to be active, and that's much more dangerous than the occasional bloody nose or busted lip.

<comment><USER3> While i'd agree that it's not fun to get hit in the face with a hard rubber ball, all the foam balls I've ever used have a considerable amount of drag and are impossible to throw well.

<comment><USER4> Agreed, I'd like to see a kickstarter for a proper dodgeball (proper ballistic profile without risk of injury.)

Dodgeball is a tremendously fun game. The danger is that some children use it as an excuse to gang up on a child on the opposite side. Classic rubber dodge balls essentially allow students to deliver a pretty severe beating to that child, in a school sanctioned fashion.

This is why most adult dodgeball leagues used weighted heavily padded balls in lieu of the standard rubber playground ball. They suck to throw, but they won't hurt anyone.

We need a dodgeball that strikes a happy medium, in order to restore what I think is one of the most fun activities as kids. When we voted what to play in elementary gym class, dodge ball won overwhelming every time.

A safe properly throwable ball would do wonders for dodgeball.

<comment><USER5> Children being bullies feels like something to do with teaching and supervision, and not with the activity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Missing from the conversation seems to be the complete removal of all outlets for energy, anger, aggression or frustration for children today.

Maybe if the kid dealing with his parents divorce got to play dodgeball in second period he'd be able to calmly sit and pay attention in third and fourth.

Maybe if the victim could punch his bully once without fear of zero-tolerance policies suspending/expelling him, the problem wouldn't continue to build until they snap and do something drastic or more often, just develop lasting social/emotional issues.

Dodgeball was a fun part of grade school. We had a rule that you couldn't throw the ball at someone's head. I never saw an injury and the best players on the opposite team were more likely to be targeted than the weakest.

<comment><USER7> I was a timid child, and feared dodgeball. I think I could have overcome it if we'd just had a throwing drill, paired up and threw until we were comfortable with the process. Then I'd have enjoyed it.

The fact that some young people stress out over dodgeball doesn't mean its evil; it means they need to work through that fear. Much more valuable than just avoiding it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is perhaps indicative of the "wusification" of kids in America today. Virtually anything that could cause any (even the most minuscule) harm mentally or physically is now quickly out of favor. If kids cannot learn to deal with inequity, pain, rejection, competition, etc, they will be at a disadvantage living and competing in the larger world which is full of all these things. Also, perhaps they might develop entitlement mentalities whereby anything that is not smooth, perfect, and fair gets "reported" by them to central "authorities" for policy review and remediation. The underlying expectation is that they don't have to deal with anything they don't agree with or find unpleasant.

</comment><comment><USER9> For anyone interested in playing dodgeball as an adult, check out the World Dodgeball Society ([http://dodgeball4ever.com/leagues/](http://dodgeball4ever.com/leagues/))

They're not aggro-competitive and most of their leagues use very throwable, virtually pain-free foam balls.

</comment><comment><USER10> Kids need to learn basic survival skills somewhere. Dodgeball is a pretty tame way to do it.</comment>


Global warming of 1.5 °C: An IPCC special report - <AUTHOR> https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sr15/ <comment><AUTHOR> It's main highlight - global warming must be limited to 1.5°C rather than the previously agreed 2°C to avoid extreme heat, drought, floods and poverty around the world. This is especially alarming given that US (one of the major contributor to annual CO2 emissions) withdrew from Paris agreement in July 2017.

<comment><AUTHOR> Also, according to the report, following present trends the 1.5°C cap could be reached as early as 2030. It has been estimated that CO2 emissions would have to drop by 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030.

Needless to say, these difficult targets can't be met without cooperation between governments and technological innovations.</comment></comment>


Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt and Zuckerberg to Meet With Obama Thursday in SF - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2011/02/steve-jobs-and-eric-schmidt-to-meet-with-president-obama-thursday-in-san-francisco.html <comment><USER2> "will be among the attendees of President Obama's event with business leaders in San Francisco Thursday evening" is quite different from "to meet with Obama Thursday".

</comment><comment><USER3> Inaccurate linkbait headline... _sigh_</comment>


Ask HN: Interesting RSS Feeds to Subscribe To? - <AUTHOR> I realize I am very late to the RSS party but I just set up a feed reader and it's brilliant. I am looking for feeds to subscribe to, can you please share any interesting ones that might appeal to other HN readers? It doesn't have to be about tech.
I tried a couple searches but the resulting pages did not appear well maintained and many of the categories were uninteresting.
What do you read in yours? <comment><USER2> Seth Godin, who posts something positive every day at seths.blog ([https://feeds.feedblitz.com/sethsblog](https://feeds.feedblitz.com/sethsblog))</comment>


PySpread: A spreadsheet that accepts a pure python expressions - <AUTHOR> http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python.announce/browse_thread/thread/305d24b4e58a6980/4acf3fd8e95b2863?show_docid=4acf3fd8e95b2863 <comment><USER2> "a expressions"?

Anyway, yay for Lisp: <http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi- bin/wiki/SimpleEmacsSpreadsheet>

<comment><USER3> A builtin minor mode (M-x orgtbl-mode) in Emacs is worth a try too. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJTwQvgfgMM> (Emacs Org-mode)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think Resolver One is similar, but I haven't tried it yet: <http://bit.ly/a90m0></comment>