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Comment by sanoli | Hacker News Reader

There's probably a lot of this going. Comes to mind right now the way the Navy had about two seal teams in the beginning, and then decided to name the next one 'Team 6', to make it look like they had more. I've read about other examples, but can't remember right now.

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As a cashier when I was a teenager, I was told to ID and call in anyone with a check # under 500 with the assumption that low check numbers were less likely to be reliable. When I ordered my first book of checks a few years later, I started with # 1550 and was never bothered.

as recently as last year when opening another checking account, the bank clerk told me to start my check numbers at atleast 500 (you can specify when ordering checks). I asked her why, and that was also the same reason given. I laughed at the silliness of the idea, but took her advice anyways.

It's not completely silly: a check number under 500 is still highly likely to be a newish account. The test is cheap and has low false positives, so the fact that the it is easily subverted only diminishes its effectiveness but doesn't make it useless.

But who's actually rejecting low number checks? It seems more common to see businesses reject accepting checks altogether.

Yeah, most businesses seem to use a check verification service these days.

Wow what country still uses cheques? Most stores won't take them anymore, here in New Zealand.

While no stores take checks here in the US either, it's far more common to use for settling personal debts. Also, many utility bills are most commonly paid by check here as well (for those who don't pay online), as people do not mail cash.

> While no stores take checks here in the US either

My mother still routinely pays for nearly everything (groceries, pizza, hardware, etc.) using personal checks. She lives in a small town though.

I probably should've specified 'most'.

If you haven't been stuck in queue behind a check-writer recently, presumably someone else does your in-store shopping for you. Or maybe you only shop late at night, after the old ladies have gone to bed? That demographic just loves to write checks, and most USA stores accommodate that preference.

I can't think of any stores in the US that don't take checks.

Most major retailers (e.g. WalMart) have electronic check acceptance, where they scan the check, print all the details on it, then hand it back to you. It's faster than a debit card, if a bit awkward at first.

France, the US, among others.

First thing I got when I moved to France (admittedly 12 years ago) was a checkbook. Hadn't heard of them since the 80s in Sweden.

In France they are still very common. In particular, checks cannot be refused by members of small-enterprise associations recognized by the fiscal authority.

Italy as well, even if with more and more restrictions and difficulties.

Israel, for long-term monthly payments, mostly rent. Thanks to checks, I pay rent every month, but see my landlord once a year.

I pay monthly rent but see my landlord once a year too, but because of internet banking :)

If local banking market wasn't under oligopoly of a couple of banks who lock down regulation to forbid any new competitors, it would've happen a long time ago :( Sadly, although the start-up scene here is second only to SV, all of them are targeting world markets first, local just isn't big enough to grow.

Still widely used in the the UK for person-to-person transactions. Also for paying single-person businesses like plumbers, painters, etc. Almost all shops and larger businesses refuse to accept them.

Widely? I'm pretty sure that it's one of the least used methods for person to person transactions in the UK. If I had to guess I would put Cash, Faster Payment/BACS, and PayM (the mobile number thing) as more commonly used these days.

I used to pay my milkman with a cheque, but he's online now.

Grandparents sending money to kids and grandchildren is pro ably their number one use.

Unsure if it's totally related to cheque acceptance, but as I understand it NZ fares much better in the card payments realm because of EFTPOS [1] adoption. EFTPOS in NZ is independent of MasterCard/Visa/other credit card companies (but processes transactions for them). For a very long time in NZ bank-issued debit cards on the EFTPOS network have required PIN identification. The cost to a merchant of accepting a bank-issued (read: not MasterCard/Visa/Amex/Diners etc.) debit card on the NZ EFTPOS network is much lower than the cost of accepting a card from one of the big credit card companies. I presume this is because fraud is lower as card-not-present transactions are not allowed. I further presume this is the reason for the far greater rate of acceptance of card payments in NZ than in any other country I've visited.

I thought cheque books were a relic of the past until moving to the UK.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFTPOS

I actually had a clerk at a local county court tell me they have to refuse checks if the number was less than 500 (and they already didn't take cards without a 5% fee). Thankfully, I had just ordered new checks and had number 501.

"Delta Force" is not what it's called, either. The Army cycles through bureaucratic sounding names -- "Combat Applications Group" for example -- in order to keep it confusing. "Delta" comes from one of these names -- "Operational Detachment: Delta." This sounds like an unimportant support team for a Special Forces group. "OD: Alpha" is the main team of green berets (aka, "ODA" or "the A-Team"). They are supported by 'OD: Bravo" and "OD: Charlie" (logistics support, etc.). So "OD: Delta" sounded meaningless to an uninformed listener. By the time Chuck Norris made "Delta Force" a known name for the pinnacle of Army Special Ops, they weren't actually called that anymore in reality.

The army of Western Virginia.

The army of West Virginia.

They are currently called "1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta". They haven't changed their name in years (or ever, really).

What you are likely confusing is "Seal Team 6", which is now properly listed as "United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group" or DEVGRU.

Nope, that's not what I'm referring to. This is in the public domain:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/10/delta-fo...

I called them "CAG" in 2008. I'm willing to guess they're not even "ACE" anymore.

The Soviets managed to fool the US government into believing that they had many more strategic bombers than they actually did, using the same tactics.

> At the Soviet Aviation Day demonstrations at the Tushino Airfield, ten Bison bombers were flown past the reviewing stand, then flew out of sight, quickly turned around, and flew past the stands again with eight more, presenting the illusion that there were 28 aircraft in the flyby. Western analysts extrapolated from the illusionary 28 aircraft, judging that by 1960 the Soviets would have 800.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomber_gap

sometimes attempting to fool or convince your own people you get the side benefit of doing the same to a foe

I don't think the US had any desire to accurately measure the threat from the Soviets as reality would have contradicted what politicians needed - the curse of all intelligence activities.

Not the same thing but similar, a programmer wrote once how he made his software delay the answer to some user action to make it look like the program was hard at work. The process was actually very fast, almost instantaneous, so he added some message like " working - x seconds left ". Maybe it was on HN some years ago...

Reticulating splines...

I've also done this in some programs I wrote as a teenager to solve math / physics homework to make it seem like it was doing more than it was.

I used to do the same, I remember adding labels saying "Processing" inside a while and then adding a dot for every loop, just to make it look like a "real" program. Good old times.

I had to do this for a program I wrote for a study - basically it pretended to be a networked game with other users, which meant I created fake "Loading" screens that had a random-ish delay.

I did the same thing once for a dialog box on an iPhone app. The check would fail instantly if the phone was offline. It didn't feel "right" and we didn't really have the time to change the UX so I just added a random delay of between 1.0 to 1.5 seconds. Still in production today.

There were many such programmers, myself including. I don't even want to check if that software still lives, it was security theater abomination.

Now there's an interesting UX paper if it hasn't been done already. In UX we hear that a milliseconds long delay directly affects user retention rates. I wonder how users feel about search reliability, or data integrity when results are faster than expected.

I don't know about papers, but I've read writeups from companies adding a "delay", usually with a progress bar, for things that are actually near-instant to perform. For "large" seeming operations, sometimes users assume an instant response actually means a failure.

DigitalOcean's Create Droplet flow comes to mind. You get a progress bar indicating your droplet is being created, but in just a few seconds you can click "My Droplets" and go use it immediately.

I stated elsewhere that I introduced a delay for those very reasons. In that case the search functionality was reported as broken for the second search. Because the first and second test searches happened to have the same results in that particular case, but the fast response prevented an understanding that something was in fact done.

> Maybe it was on HN some years ago...

On HN there was this about Well Fargo "Establishing Secure Connection".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5305925

TurboTax's online tax prep software does this. You can just click the Next button as the slider animations slowly fill up. Maybe this comment will save someone else some time this year :)

Having sporadically just done my taxes last night, I've gotta' say, I'm a fan of TurboTax. Probably the best website experience I've ever had. I can't recall anything else that knocks it out of the park on aesthetics, function, latency, UI etc like it does.

I did this myself just a few weeks ago. The complaints was that search results would often come back fast enough that the user may not understand anything was done if the results happen to be the same.

Saw a form recently with search-as-you-type that included a fake button that when pressed would write "Search Complete" to the screen, but had no other function, for users who didn't comprehend search as you type.

I would have to link that up to analytics just to see how many people clicked on it.

Yeah, I'm not sure.

It was pretty hilarious.

I got a bug-fix from the form developer that his button wasn't working, and I kept trying to explain to him that it couldn't possibly work, it didn't do anything.

Finally he explained that if the user had clicked the fake button already, and then changed their search to a search that reported the same results, it wasn't pretending to search again, and this was causing a lot of bug reports from his client.

I helped him rewrite the fake button to make a bigger deal about (fake) searching again, and apparently the bug reports went away.

I wish I could find where I read this, but this used to be an issue with LED brake lights on cars, they would come on so fast that people had longer reaction times because they knew something had changed but couldn't put their finger on it instantly.

I did that with my strategy game Proximity. It takes a fraction of a fraction of a second for it to calculate what move to make next, but if it places it immediately, it feels aggressive and intimidating.

Just imagine if you were playing chess against an opponent and as soon as you made your carefully planned movement the other player immediately made his move and it was your turn again right away. It feels pretty aggressive, doesn't it?

So I gave players the impression of the computer taking time to think by instituting a random delay (within a given range which I tested until it felt right) before it acted, and I think it felt a lot more natural and less aggressive because of that.

If people are curious about the game, it's easy to find and you can play it online.

I suspected that this was the case with Proximity, but the delay still served its purpose for me. I haven't played it in a while, so maybe I'll give it a whirl again. Thanks for putting together such a fun little game!

Thanks! The game is almost 12 years old now, which still feels weird to think about. I did have high ambitions to make it like the next timeless game (like chess), including making it a bit less tactical and more strategic, but my own ego and life got in the way and it kinda withered on the vine from me not keeping it updated, making a proper multiplayer version, not making it cross-platform enough, etc.

I even turned down a request from the Puzzle Pirates guys to include it as a minigame in their game (that was a mistake), and OmgPop almost paid me to make a version for their website (shortly before they made Draw Something and got bought by Zynga), but I was too busy trying to finish my degree at the time.

I've been tempted to start an open source version to get some help developing it, but I started getting more into board game design lately and I've been programming less and less in my spare time. Kinda hoping I get a reputation in the board game world and then get a board game version of Proximity published (it's an abstract, so it's a harder sell to publishers).

Anyway, I'm glad you enjoyed the game. Hopefully someday I'll put out a newer version of it.

The CEO at a very small company I worked for not too long ago made me do this when assigning phone extensions because "Having 4 digit extensions makes us look like a big company." The only people this would fool would probably need supervision to use a phone.

I also worked for a megalomaniac CEO who would go through a sales rep every two months and insist on leaving their voicemail and extension enabled in the company directory for the very same reason.

Giving random numbers to regiments and battalions isn't new it's done partially due to historic honor and to prevent the enemy from getting accurate strength numbers by simply counting unit numbers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem

This actually hit my previous company in a software context.

We would number hotfixes sequentially. Customers would be notified when hotfixes were to be deployed to their sites. One savvy client noticed the hotfix numbering sequence and worked out both that we had a lot of hotfixes (tens per week) and that they didn't get them all right away (if you don't ask for it, it comes to you in the next quarterly trunk release.) Many awkward discussions ensued.

Solution: new policy to number hotfixes randomly instead of sequentially. Whoops, now sometimes hotfixes that had dependencies would get deployed in the wrong order.

Solution: also name hotfixes by date. Whoops, now the client can figure out that two weeks elapsed before they got the hotfix. (For all your usual enterprisey red-tapey risk-aversey reasons.)

The solution should have been to append a random string to the hotfix number. Still sorts the same way, but unguessable.

That doesn't help anything. You can't guess the next hotfix number, but you can still tell what order they were in and, after seeing a few examples to figure out how long the non-random part is, tell how many were skipped.

The canonical solution that the Wiki suggests (which seems like a fairly good idea to me) is to make your "serial" number an encryption of the actual serial number; that way your tooling can still get the real ordering, but customers will find it computationally hard to get that information.

Why is it an issue for alerting about hotfixes? Wouldn't it make sense to get fixes out sooner rather than later? Or maybe I'm missing something here.

There may be a decision making process on the client's side about whether to accept the new hotfix, maybe they have a workaround for the broken functionality or maybe it's just not worth the risk to them.

Then you might create another hotfix while that decision making process is going on, and both you and the client need to evaluate whether it's possible and desirable to apply the first one, second one, or both.

It's why versioning, source control, build process automation, and client communication are so important to get right from the outset.

Why not add random increments to the sequence? This way order is preserved, but you never know how many hotfixes are between hotfix X and Y. Of course, you can still have rough estimate (as between #1000 and #2000 there is from 999 to 10 hotfixes) but for your case it may be enough.

Precisely.

Just because there private hotfixes that deliver custom tweaks to specific customers. in fact, that's exactly how Microsoft has had it set up for years.

small companies do this too, because it works great.

employee #63, invoice #51775. press 1 for sales, 2 for support. sure.

Oracle release 2, there was no R1

I once wrote a paper at university about the psychology of version numbers.

You must have had a bloody field day with all the moaning about chrome and firefox climbing the numbers.

Was it published? I'd be very interested to read it.

I would too! Do you happen to work for Microsoft now? Either in Xbox or Windows division?

No sorry, it was a.) philosophy b.) before the internet

Bump for paper if it's published.

Microsoft are at it too with Windows 10. Sneaky beaky ;)

This one is to workaround coders stupidity, despite winapi having functions to give windows version numerically, lots of coders just used regex on windows name... and the regex for "windows 9*" is extremely common

Well couldn't we further push that blame to MS' cockamamie versioning?

I originally wrote "versioning convention" but realized I had to drop convention.

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