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Facebook has hired the Patriot Act's co-author as a general counsel - Jerry2 https://boingboing.net/2019/04/22/mass-surveillance-r-us.html ====== javagram “Jennifer Newstead helped craft the Patriot Act, a cowardly work of treasonous legislation foisted on the American people in the wake of the 9/11 attacks;” Source seems a little biased. Treasonous? That’s gotta require a lot of cortortion around the definition of treason. Patriot Act provisions have been repeatedly reauthorized by the democratically elected legislature since it was originally passed. This isn’t a case of foisting anything upon the people, the people are perfectly happy to vote in supporters of the Patriot Act. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act#Reauthorizations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act#Reauthorizations) ~~~ thundergolfer It's well known that many members of congress passed through the act _without having read it_. Given the enormity of the act's effects on the country, this is quite a problematic thing. I don't it was democracy that saw that bill through. It was crisis politics. Democracy requires a well-informed public, and capable representatives. With the USA PATRIOT act there was neither. ~~~ foxyv With the current state of campaign finance, congress is essentially two corporations with congressmen/women as employees. If you don't vote the party line or you don't secure funding for the party you get defunded on your next election. Surprising they don't bother to read the bills they are told to pass. ------ canada_dry A perfect fit really. This guy figures it's ok to allow personal records like telephone, e-mail, financial, and business records to be surreptitiously captured without full due process/transparency. Facebook would love to push the (no-)privacy envelope much further: a complete data free-for-all for their commercial gain. ------ Jerry2 It's unfortunate that mods decided sink this story. Any explanation as to why? ------ tuxxy What exactly... do they think is going to happen when news outlets hear this? ~~~ joshmn The 30 minute news cycle we've had for the last 3 years of course. ~~~ isoskeles Yeah unlike when the Patriot Act passed, and the news media spoke truth to power or whatever, and saved us all from that treasonous law. Apologies for the snark but it’s been like this for more than 20 years. ~~~ thundergolfer To add to your comment. _Manufacturing Consent_ came out in 1988, 31 years ago. That book manfully built the case that this stuff has been going on for well over a century, but that it really kicked up in the post WW2 era with the erosion of labour-class news media. Today 6 US media companies control 90% of US media, and any hope one has of the internet disarming them dims more than a little at the sight of a P.A.T.R.I.O.T act author crossing over into the arms of a tech giant.

Ask HN: How to approach two competing job offers - is bidding war an option? - mbord I studied Computer Science, and I recently graduated as a bachelor. I went on to apply to two major Silicon Valley companies, let's call them A and B, and aced the interviews.<p>I got an offer from A, which I would have happily accepted had I not had another company still contemplating their offer. Now B contacted me, not yet ready to give an offer, but they mentioned that their offer would likely be significantly larger if they would be able to see the offer from A in writing.<p>I got my offer from A both verbally and in informal writing to my e-mail. I find it clear that if I asked them for the offer in writing now, they would certainly know what's happening (given that I've kept them waiting for some time now). I told this to B already previously, they understood, but it would certainly benefit me if I had it in writing now.<p>How should this game be played in your opinion? I actually prefer A, and if B's offer were roughly the same size, I would be very happy to take A. However, I am wondering whether I am a wussy if I play it safe now, and take no action, and should I instead try to get some competition between these two. There's also a small chance that A is trying to lowball me with their offer, since I might be too humble analyzing my own value. All this leads me to think that I might just want to get the offer in writing, not caring what they think about it, but I am very very open to other ideas.<p>Also, I know that I should probably never try to bluff, and that's my intention, too - I'll never try to inflate my offer if I am not really willing to take the competing one. These both are great companies, and B can become better in my mind if their offer triumphs on the financial side. ====== gvb _Now B contacted me, not yet ready to give an offer, but they mentioned that their offer would likely be significantly larger if they would be able to see the offer from A in writing._ I see nothing but red flags here. It also sounds like you are already dabbling with a bidding war... you are holding back on A, B knows about A, B is "offering" to out-bid A. Now you are wondering if you can leverage a questionable offer from B to up A's offer. If you escalate this further into a full out bidding war, the probability is high that it won't turn out well. If B wins, you work for a sketchy company just for the money... or they don't come through with a _real_ offer, A drops out (note that you do not have a _formal_ offer from A yet), and you are screwed. If A wins, the person you work for knows what you did to them and resents it. Sorry to be harsh, but from the outside looking in, B sounds pretty sketchy and your line of questioning doesn't reflect well on you. ------ antidoh "I recently graduated" "aced the interviews" "I got an offer from A" " I actually prefer A" "B can become better in my mind if their offer triumphs on the financial side." I believe that last is the only untrue thing you've said. You're young, capable and have a lot of years in front of you. Work where you want and enjoy it. ------ helen842000 I think B only want to see the letter in writing so that they can go slightly above what A has offered.It makes no sense to go largely over. Why not ask B to make a blind offer based on the value you can bring and what you're worth, tell them you're not interested in them upping A's offer, just formulating their own based on value not competition. You want to hear what they would have offered without company A in the picture. Not only do you come across less money-motivated but I think you're more likely to get a higher offer from B this way. Plus if you do get company B's offer in writing - maybe you can take that back to A. After all if you prefer company A, you should be going with them regardless. ------ ggk IMO, there is no harm asking for formal offer letter (probably a soft copy). But I would suggest choose the job which is of your interest. Salary should be the second factor. If you choose a job of your interest, you will perform well there and your career growth will be much faster there. ~~~ pmtarantino That's my opinion too. I worked in two different jobs in the last years. One of them was in company A, which I always wanted to be part of. The salary was not amazing (in fact, after of some talk with friends, it was low), but I was happy. Then, I worked in company B. The salary was superb, it was higher than average, but I was not happy. That was not what I wanted. I quit. ------ lsiebert ask for offer in writing, explain why, and that you'd prefer A, see if they are open to matching B's offer. If so, you might want to take their initial offer to B. Get B's offer in writing and go to A. Tell A if they match it, you'll work for them. Do so, that is, if they match B's offer, work for A. Explain to B, but invite them to contact you sometime in the future to see if you are happy at A. Use B's contact to either move to B if A isn't great or to negotiate from position from strength at A. But work at A to start with.

CIA bought an encryption company and used it to spy on clients and countries - edu https://www.businessinsider.com/cia-secretly-bought-encryption-company-crypto-ag-spy-countries-report-2020-2 ====== ekimekim Original Washington Post article discussed here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22297963](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22297963) ------ cryptos The same could happen with Threema. As much as I like and want to trust Threema, but the story could be repeated, even if I think, that it is not used by governments or military large-scale. Essentially every closed source crypto application isn't trustworthy. Same is true for operating systems. ~~~ bangboombang Exactly my first thought. I like Threema and one of the reasons I was an early adopter is that the founder worked on m0n0wall before, an OSS firewall that I used for a long time, in contrast to it being just some guy I never heard of. It made me accept the closed source nature. Another big factor was that I indeed consider Switzerland to be a more trustworthy/neutral party in general when it comes to global politics, but this obviously doesn't have to apply to every single individual in that country. ~~~ _-___________-_ Why use Threema when there are alternatives that are not closed-source? You had to begin to use Threema, which presumably carries the same difficulty as beginning to use something which isn't as questionable. ~~~ mmPzf A big plus for me was the option of using it without mapping the user account to a phone number, something that e.g. Signal doesn't allow. ------ fit2rule The free world needs to realise that no matter what systems of enormous value to the world we build, others will attempt to usurp that power for their own needs. It happens with all technology. The reason is, all technology can be weaponised. Some simple facts .. The institutions covered by Crypto AG's technology products, were attempting to maintain their own secrecy. They were, thus, usurped by their own technology - and the CIA merely exploited this fact. This case with the CIA directly addresses the lynchpin in the military- industrial-surveillance states' armour - the ability to keep secrets. From a certain perspective, one might say that .. the Vaticans .. inability to keep secrets is a blessing and a curse. This is also true of many of the other clients. Would that we had access to all the things the CIA knows, as a world people, mmm.. These groups weaponised their own technology, against themselves, by using it to keep secrets. It also happens to be the spooks' biggest weakness too: the light of truth melts any and all justification for these peoples existence, and it whither them. Let us try a thought experiment: If the Vatican applied its vast resources to providing a "Peoples Internet" a la Starlink, instead of using its billions to hide heinous secrets, would the technology of communication have been so easily weaponised? All secrets are weapons, because you cannot have a secret without technology - and all technology can be weaponised. So this is a foot-bullet on the part of Crypto AG, the Vatican et al., and a big win for the CIA - because it means these institutions will now be making _more_ commitment, alas not less - to the keeping of secrets. ------ jo-m A lot of this has been known for 25 years: [https://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-9088423.html](https://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-9088423.html) ------ lallysingh Is this why US export encryption had to be 40 bits? To push countries to a vendor that was compromised? ------ jokoon Is the leak coming from wikileaks? I've heard Assange will soon go to trial. I was still wondering about that "dead's man switch", although I'm not sure it will activate if he get convicted. ~~~ _-___________-_ I read about this quite a while ago, and while it's a revelation, it doesn't seem big enough to be Assange's dead man's switch. Most people are just going to shrug at this. ~~~ fit2rule I have heard it from the crypto cognoscenti circles I know, that this is the calm before the storm and that there will be many, many more leaks to come during the actual trial period. The idea is to point out to the world that Julian isn't the only leaker. This terrifies the spook establishment, and they are therefore preparing for their own campaign of controlled releases, designed to dull the general publics' appetite for the subject. I mean, this is all conjecture and hearsay, but it sure is an interesting time to be watching the show. I do believe we are seeing a cyberwar, like legitimately, underneath all the battle reports ..

ZURB Tavern - jacobwg http://zurb.com/tavern ====== pepsi By the name, I thought that this was going to be a MUD.

Is there a ProductHunt without the “selection process”? - hoodoof i.e. a site that actually shows what&#x27;s new, not just what ProductHunt thinks we should see is new? ====== ledil [http://www.produktfang.de](http://www.produktfang.de) I'm the author of produktfang. We aggregate new apps and show them on the front page ... there is no "community" that decides what should be shown or not like in producthunt. ------ getdavidhiggins [http://urli.st/](http://urli.st/) Lots of products can be found on URLIST. It's basically product hunt, except not sabotaged by trends and a karma system

Dear Facebook, It Could Really Be This Simple - ezdebater http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/02/zucks-karmas-bitch/ ====== salman89 While I don't feel Facebook is doomed, this article really lacks meaningful content. "And, if it can leverage the physical goods loophole on iOS, it can become the social shopping platform. So buh bye lame “Social stories” and buh bye Amazon (which currently has a $100b market cap, around twice that of Facebook)." Really, Facebook's save is social shopping... and that would upend Amazon? ~~~ mtgx Sounds like a pie in the sky theory, like the one that floated around a few years ago that Facebook only needs to introduce search, and it could kill Google. ~~~ majani Time's clearly up for selling investors on the future of Facebook. Investors want to see results now on these tech companies. ------ Freestyler_3 What is the last thing facebook implemented that 10% or more of the users are now using? ------ mariusz331 I wouldn't advise this guy putting money into facebook just yet. A stock's price is supposed to reflect all information pertaining to a company (including a lock-up expiration). However, as with Groupon and LinkedIn, the price before their lock-ups expired didn't correctly reflect the value of the stock with all the 'unlocked' shares flooding the market. I speculate that facebook's price will continue to go down post lock-up. Insiders aren't ignoring the poor news or outlook and I think they'll sell for more reasons than those. That's not necessarily because these insiders don't trust their company. They may have to pay off expensive things (maybe a nice home?) they bought when the company IPO'd and can't risk the uncertainty of facebook's future value. Also, if you ask any investor, they'll tell you that diversifying your portfolio is important. Another interesting thing to think about are tax implications. I know a lot of facebook insiders were happy that their IPO was pre-July because otherwise, the lock-up would have crossed into 2013. This is when taxes on capital gains are expected to rise and it can cost them a lot of money. I'm curious to see the performance of the stock in the coming months. Especially with the uncertainty of growth, possible tax increases, and the implications of the lock-up expiry, this will be an interesting journey for facebook. ------ redwood It does feel like FB could rake in enormous amounts of cash quickly if it really wanted to, but then doing so would kill its long-term viability. Trouble is it's current approach seems death by a thousand pokes. I suppose the execs who've already cashed out already had their payday. Sorry the saps who bought... ------ jgroome Not quite sure what they're suggesting. A wishlist system, whereby I have a bunch of products in which I've expressed an interest? Some kind of digital gifting system where people pay money to buy virtual "presents"? In the case of the former, we already have Amazon wishlists, or I suppose someone could go through my Pinterest and see what I like. In the case of the latter, if anyone actually bought me a digital gift then they'd probably get unfriended. If Facebook can come up with a wishlist system to rival Amazon's then people will absolutely flock to it. ------ bitdiddle What the "I don't trust Zuck" means to conservative investors (senior programmers, parents, and other fossils) is that management counts, in fact to old fogies like Buffett it's a major league concern. The same thing that holds true of a YC company is true of large corporations. To channel Lombardi, "management isn't everything, it's the only thing" ------ paul9290 Recently there was a shower curtain with the design of a Facebook profile/users wall. It was being widely shared throughout FB. Why isn't Facebook attaching an affiliate link under these types of photos to where I can buy the product or service? ~~~ majani There are other apps that have been built on the Facebook platform for that. Facebook has to stay out of their way in order to remain a true platform. ~~~ paul9290 Are they built into users' news feeds? ------ brador It gets interesting when the giants start competing. Facebook moves into real goods, to compete, Amazon then needs to start a social network. If Google starts gaining market share on Google Plus, Facebook will step into the search space. ------ ahi She want's to give monetization advice, but doesn't even know how to buy stock? ------ parbo Wrapp does this, but with gift certificates. Multiple friends can chip in to the same gift certificate. <https://www.wrapp.com/> ------ se85 I'm glad I stopped reading Techcrunch. ------ maked00 farcebook seems intent on pulling a "Digg" crash and burn. Same kind of swamped in hubris jerk pulling the strings. Notice the Zuck, cashed out quite a bit recently. What does he know that we don't? Maybe that the site is a fad and the bubble is bursting in slomo. ~~~ xSwag Except, this time, there is no Reddit to fall back to. ------ mser Why is this nonsense being voted up?

Passive solar glass home: watching the sun move - kirstendirksen http://faircompanies.com/videos/view/passive-solar-glass-home-watching-sun-move/ ====== jbrun If you are keen on this, see Amory Lovins talk on buildings: Short version: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvmHJNeif24> Long Version: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5txQlEI7bc&feature=chann...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5txQlEI7bc&feature=channel) ------ electromagnetic Rather impressive, but genuinely simple. He maximized sunlight in the winter while minimising it in the summer and increased the buildings connection to the earth below frost level where the ground stays a constant 14C/57F year round. ------ timmaah My dad built the house I grew up in like this in the mid 70's. Big south facing windows with large overhang. Brick wall sucks up the heat for the night. Our greenhouse had huge 20ft high cylinders filled with dyed black water. Worked great. What happened in the 80s and 90s to make this not as popular? ~~~ kirstendirksen Passive solar used to be the way everyone built... at least before way back with the Ancient Greeks and Chinese. But when we stopped relying on sun for energy, most of us stopped building this way. I would guess passive solar gained popularity in the seventies due to more attention to energy conservation (oil crisis and all) and then when oil got cheap again, it wasn't so trendy. Hope that's not that case now. Though cheap oil and global warming aside, I'd still prefer to live in a home heated by the sun and cooled by the earth. AC gives me a headache and I much prefer the feel of sun through a window than the blast of central heating. ------ kjell Earthships are worth a look for anyone who wonders why the average modern house is so wasteful.

Atomic Scala - blearyeyed http://www.atomicscala.com/book ====== thebluesky Glad to see Bruce Eckel involved. It's interesting to see just how many Scala books have been cranked out in the last 6-12 months or are currently in progress. ------ Toshio <p>You can download the first 25% of the book&nbsp;<strong>here</strong>.</p> Ummm ... where? ~~~ thebluesky Seems he forgot the link. Another excellent book for learning Scala is Scala for the Impatient. The first 9 chapters are free: <http://horstmann.com/scala/> ~~~ michaels0620 The link is now working.

Only 25% of Internet Users Trust the Cloud – Survey - pain_perdu https://medium.com/@intelligentvox/we-live-in-the-big-cloud-and-we-hate-it-is-it-time-for-hipster-it-1f130a44d2b8#.axo45awhb ====== flukus Judging by the conversations I've had on HN, a lot of people here will be surprised by this. Personally I'm slowly moving away from the cloud, it simply doesn't give me enough options to do what I want with my data. The most likely effect phrases like "cloud based" and "web app" have is to make me lose interest.

The 25% Discount that Cost Us $12,000 (Plus, a Big Announcement) - ph0rque http://www.groovehq.com/blog/discounting ====== eterm I'm confused, the article starts with "Don't do heavy discounting, don't give away your stuff too easily" then ends up "Here's a load of discounts!". What was the message you wanted to give? ~~~ mcintyre1994 They did say extended free trials did work for them, and while I struggle to believe long-term free users convert better than discounted users, that's what their data says. Most of their offers seem to be very extended free trials. ------ timje1 These article titles are very link-baity, regardless of their relevance to HN.

Downloading a file regularly - how hard can it be? - joeyespo https://adblockplus.org/blog/downloading-a-file-regularly-how-hard-can-it-be ====== sophacles A common solution to this problem, is to make a 2 stage process, where step 1 is a request of "should I download?", where there are 2 possible replies: "no, check again in N time" and "yes, here is a token". Step 2 is then presenting the token to the api point for download, and getting the file. On the server side, you don't even need specific instance tracking, just a simple decision based on current resource usage, and a list of valid tokens (optionally, they can expire in some short time to avoid other thundering herd type issues). Say, you set a max number of file transfers, or bandwidth or whatever metric makes sense to you, and you simply reply based on that metric. Further, you can smooth out your load with a bit of intelligence on setting N. Even better, you get a cool side-effect: since the check isn't so resource intensive, you can set the time between checks lower, and make the updates less regular. Now that I think of it: it seems that this would be a nice nginx plugin, with a simple client side library to handle it for reference. Anyone want to collaborate on this over the weekend? Should be relatively straight-forward. ~~~ masklinn > A common solution to this problem, is to make a 2 stage process, where step > 1 is a request of "should I download?", where there are 2 possible replies: > "no, check again in N time" and "yes, here is a token". Step 2 is then > presenting the token to the api point for download, and getting the file. You don't even need two steps, just have one step with previously known data. That's how HTTP conditional requests (Last-Modified/If-Modified-Since and ETag/If-None-Match) work: the client states "I want this file, I already have one from such moment with such metadata", and the server replies either "you're good" (304) or "here's your file (200). Issue is, that only works when the file changes rarely enough, or you need additional server logic to reply that the file is still good when it's not. > Now that I think of it: it seems that this would be a nice nginx plugin, > with a simple client side library to handle it for reference. Anyone want to > collaborate on this over the weekend? I'd be _very_ surprised if nginx didn't support conditional requests already. edit: according to [0] and [1] — which may be outdated — Nginx provides built- in support for last-modified on static files, it does not provide ETag support (the developer believes this is not useful for static files — which is usually correct[2]) but [1] has apparently written a module to do so [3]. The module being 4 years old, it might be way out of date. [0] [http://serverfault.com/questions/211637/what-headers-to- add-...](http://serverfault.com/questions/211637/what-headers-to-add-for-most- efficient-file-caching) [1] [https://mikewest.org/2008/11/generating-etags-for-static- con...](https://mikewest.org/2008/11/generating-etags-for-static-content- using-nginx) [2] There are two situations in which it is not (keep in mind that this is for _static_ content, dynamic is very different): if somebody willfully touches a file, it will change its Last-Modified but not its checksum, triggering a new send without ETag but not with it; and ETags can be coherent across servers (even in CDNs), the chances of last-modified being exactly the same on all your servers is far smaller. On the other hand, no etag is better than a shitty etag, and both Apache and IIS generate dreadful etags — which may hinder more than help — by default. [3] <https://github.com/mikewest/nginx-static-etags/> ~~~ sophacles Yes, this work for cache updating, and it is fantastic for that purpose. It does not solve the actual stated problem, which is that periodic checks in an attempt to smooth server loading away from peaks don't usually drift towards extremely bursty behavior. When the file does change, you still get a large number of clients trying to download the new content all at once. The solution I was suggesting is similar to what you are talking about, but also has the feature of smoothing the load curves. _Issue is, that only works when the file changes rarely enough, or you need additional server logic to reply that the file is still good when it's not._ My algorithm is that logic -- albeit implemented with client side collusion rather than pure server side trickery (this allows better control should the client ignore the etags). ~~~ masklinn > The solution I was suggesting is similar to what you are talking about, but > also has the feature of smoothing the load curves. It has no more feature of smoothing the load curve than using Cache-Control with the right max-age. > My algorithm is that logic It is no more that logic than doing what I outlined with proprietary behaviors. > this allows better control should the client ignore the etags by making the whole client use a custom communication channel? I'd expect ensuring the client correctly speaks HTTP would be easier than implementing a custom client from scratch. ~~~ sophacles You still seem to be missing the point. Cache-Control as implemented commonly, and by your description, will instantly serve every request the new file as soon as a new file is available. It takes into account exactly one variable: file age. The algorithm I describe takes into account variables which affect current system loading, and returns a "no, try again later", even when the file is actually different, because the server is trying to conserve some resource (usually in such cases it is bandwidth). Like I said, this can be done with etags, but a more explicit form of control is nicer. Which brings us to this: _> this allows better control should the client ignore the etags by making the whole client use a custom communication channel? I'd expect ensuring the client correctly speaks HTTP would be easier than implementing a custom client from scratch._ A client speaking proper http would be perfect for this. So point your http client to: domain.com/getlatest if there is a token available, respond with a: 307 domain.com/reallatest?token=foo If no token is available and no if-modified headers are sent, reply with: 503 + Retry-After N if there is not a token available, and the requestor supplied approrpiate if modified headers respond with a: 304 + cache control for some scheduled time in the future (which the client can ignore or not) Of course that last condition is strictly optional and not really required, since then it would be abusing cache control, rather than the using 503 as intended. (also note, a request to domain.com/reallatest with an invalid token or no token could result in a 302 to /getlatest or a 403, or some other form of denial, depending on the specifics of the application). edit: Strictly speaking, the multiple url scheme above isn't even needed, just a smart responder associated with the 503 is needed, however the url redirect method above was there because there may be a larger application context around system, in which getlatest does more than just serve the file, or in which multiple urls would redirect to reallatest, both easily imaginable situations. ~~~ masklinn > If no token is available and no if-modified headers are sent, reply with: > 503 + Retry-After N That's cool. There's still no reason for the second url and the 307, and you're still getting hit with requests so you're not avoiding the request load, only the download. You're smoothing out bandwidth, but not CPU & sockets. ~~~ sophacles This is sort of true. I don't know of a way to simply limit the number of incoming sockets without getting a lot of ISP level involvement or just outright rejecting connections. It does limit the number of long-lived sockets for file transfer. On static file serves, I am assuming the cpu has plenty of spare capacity for doing the algorithm, so I am not worried about that. Finally I am assuming the limiting factor is bandwidth here, so bandwidth smoothing the main goal. ------ moe I assume changes are usually small, you may want to try serving diffs? I.e. have the clients poll for the md5 of their _current_ list-version. On the server store the diff that will upgrade them to the current version under that filename. If a client requests an unknown md5 (e.g. because he has no list or his list is corrupted) default him to a patch that contains the full file. This requires a little logic on both ends (diff/patch), but would probably slash your bandwidth requirements to a fraction. A little napkin math: 25 lists * 150kb * 1mio fetches = ~3.75T vs 25 lists * 1kb (patch) * 1mio fetches = 25G (0.025T) ~~~ pjscott This is probably the Right Way, but it would be more work than minor tweaks to the delay logic. ------ K2h call me oldschool, but having a huge peak demand is the perfect application for distributed source, like torrent. I know it is much more complicated to introduce P2P and way more risky if it gets poisoned, but it seems to me this underlying problem of huge peak demand was solved 10 years ago. ~~~ nitrox but there is a problem with bittorrent. Most Schools and works places block bittorrent. We would need to fallback to http or any other method that works in restricted places. ~~~ skeletonjelly I wonder if there's a market for Bittorrent over HTTP? Node.js, websockets...surely it's possible? ~~~ icebraining All of those are strictly client-to-server, not P2P. You could in theory proxy bittorrent over it, but you wouldn't gain anything over just serving the file from the server. You can probably write a true P2P client as a Firefox extension, since its API gives you very low level access (raw sockets, for example), but certainly not for e.g. Chrome. ~~~ AntiRush WebRTC[1] seems to be the perfect platform for these sorts of things. It's in Chrome dev channel / Firefox Alpha right now. [1] <http://www.webrtc.org/> ------ fleitz I love random numbers for distribution. I had a similar problem with a set of distributed clients that needed to download email, but only one client downloading at a time. The email servers also had an issue where a large number of emails in the inbox would cause the server to slow down exponentially. (eg. it didn't matter how many MB of email were in the inbox but it did matter if there were more than about 1000 emails) The downloaders would download the list of inboxes to be fetched, randomize them and then lock the inbox when they started downloading, then the downloader would randomly pick a size cutoff for the max email size it would download, 10K, 1 MB, unlimited with a n inversely proportional maximum email count so that about 100MB could be downloaded at anytime. We even had an issue with one server behind an old cisco router that barf'd on window scaling, so a few machines in the pool had window scaling disabled and that account would naturally migrate to those servers with window scaling disabled. It worked wonders for distributing the load and keeping the Inbox counts to a minimum. ------ fromhet I know it's overkill for a browser extension, but wouldnt this be easily solved by having built-in bittorrent for updates? The publisher would always be seeding the latest version, and the clients would connect maybe every other day. It would lower the preassure on the publishers servers and make sure everyone could always have the latest version. With theese fancy magnet links, the publisher would only have to send the magnet and the actual file a couple of times, and then the peer to peer swarm would do the rest. ------ kogir I would just sign it, stick it on S3, and forget it. Did I miss why that wasn't considered? ~~~ nitrox It is too expensive. 1TB of bandwidth costs about $120. A project like adblock plus will be consuming about 3 - 4 TB a month which will add up to around $450 a month. Adblock list subscriptions are maintained and hosted by individual people who do at their spare time. They mostly pay for the servers out of their pockets. As one of the co-author of popular adblock list, I wouldn't want to break my bank to pay for S3 hosting. Our current solutions works out and when we reach our bandwidth limit, we could just simply buy addition TB of bandwidth at a much cheaper price than S3. Btw, i just made a rough calculation using AWS simple monthly calculator. So correct me if I am wrong about S3 pricing. ~~~ tedunangst Terabytes per month? That's insane. That's a million users (I can believe) downloading a megabyte (I can't quite believe). It appears my patterns.ini file is 600K, or about 150K compressed, so if I download it 30/5 = 6 times a month, that's... a megabyte. Wow. ~~~ tripzilch Wow, that suggestion elsewhere in the thread, to serve diffs instead seems rather important now :) ------ antihero Why not assign people a day and time, and then if they regularly miss that time, assign them a different one? ------ tantalor > with the effect that people always download on the same weekday What's so bad about that? ~~~ rmc Server load goes really high on that day, and if you get more popular, you'll need more servers and hence more money. ~~~ rb2k_ Isn't that something that nginx/varnish should easily be able to handle? It is just a static file download after all... ~~~ ComputerGuru CPU and bandwidth are entirely different issues. Sure, nginx can handle the processing. But do you have the piping to match? A run of the mill dedicated server has a 100mbit uplink. Do the math. (Hint: it's easy to saturate in no time). ~~~ prostoalex Has anybody tried <https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/service> for this? ~~~ oconnor0 This is just downloading a single static text file so there's nothing to optimize.

Google is completely redesigning AdWords - uptown http://searchengineland.com/adwords-redesign-first-look-246074 ====== eggy In Dart and Angular 2. I have to take a look at Dart again. I thought it was going to be left to wither and die, but with Flutter and now this, I have to go back and take another look. The tooling was fun, and they are developing or have developed a 'strong mode' for stronger typing. ------ rylest14 Love the new interface - going to make Adwords much more user friendly!

Pornhub handing out free premium subscriptions to help Italy fight coronavirus - ignaloidas https://thenextweb.com/shareables/2020/03/12/pornhub-free-italy-coronavirus/ ====== paul_milovanov Who said the civic spirit is dead? Thank you MindGeek for your service!

Ask HN: Minority Report with NSA data? - klasdfakaf Just a thought experiment. Can we prevent crimes from happening with NSA backed data? Can we use AI to predict the actions of individuals and then take action before they do? Like using browser history patterns and linking it with suspicious phone calls and online posts etc. ====== w_t_payne In a sense, yes, but it will not look like the highly accurate oracle that the film presents. What you will be able to do is to, for example, rank people by how similar they are to specific examples. Say, for example, you were a dictator that wanted to cement his authority on the nation. You could rank your entire population by how similar their behaviour appears to be to known dissidents, and then implement strategic discrimination based on that ranking: targeted imprisonment, punitive taxation, barring from positions of power & property ownership etc... etc...

How to market my NoSQL technology - tom_andersson I have been developing a technology which best can be described as an object oriented / graph NoSQL database, and I need some ideas on how to market it. Check out my web site at: http://www.clear-objects.com/clearodb<p>The end users would be software developers who writes distributed applications. I haven't thought to much about it's use for web site development, but maybe that could work too.<p>I am a bit lost as to what approach to take to get this out. I think, the best way is to somehow find individual users who can see the value and that way step by step build up a customer base. I don't think open source is necessarily the way to go (in my life as a professional developer, I have never made a decision to use a technology based on whether it is open source or not, but rather whether it will save me time). I guess the main problem is to convince people that this technology will save them time.<p>Questions: - Anyone who has launched products to a similar market who has any experiences to share? - Any thoughts on whether an open or closed source approach is better? Would I be more successful in making money long term, if I have a large number of users who use it for free? - I don't really want to sell this as a database technology, but rather a cost saving tool for creating distributed applications (that was really the problem I tried to solve in the first place, it just turned out to be a graph database). Any thoughts on this? ====== opendomain There are over 100 different NoSQL databases - so you have to definately show something on how your software is better. Most NoSQL are open sourced and are free to use for limited installs, so it will be very hard to make money with licensing. Some offer a base version for free, but offer clustering or other advanced features at a cost. Some charge money for consulting. Where does your db sit on the CAP spectrum? How is it the best for a specific use case? ~~~ tom_andersson Yeah, I realise there are quite a few nosqls around. But only a few have just recently started to gain momentum. It is still very easy to find developers who have never heard of anything but traditional relational databases (not sure if I would dare to say the majority of all developers). In most cases relational databases is the best option for what they are doing, but I think there are many situations where people choose the old sql just because they don't know better. So, although there might be a point in comparing and competing between different NoSQL technologies, I think all within the NoSQL movement can gain from better marketing to all these relational database users. Anyway, I think what you are saying is I need to be very good at describing why my technology is better than others, which as a developer I find very difficult. It is easy to be technical about it, but how to describe something at a level that makes sense to the average guy is something I am still trying to learn. What my solution does very well is integration with object oriented languages and where the data is described by complex inheritance structures and ownership relations (say a financial model with different types of financial instruments, different types of market data, static data, deal data, etc which would be described by a number of class hierarchies; and all linked together). With the risk of getting too technical, if you are building a C++ application for example, you only create your C++ classes (with any inheritance structure which can be single/multiple etc), and you can use pointers to other objects (polymorphic pointers and cyclic graphs are ok), use standard collection classes etc. Basically what you would normally do when designing a C++ application. You use a minimum amount of declarative code as C++ doesn't have built-in reflection. You send your C++ classes to the database and receive the data as your C++ classes. It traverses your objects to find all linkages to other objects prior to sending and links objects together upon retrieval. In short, the solution tries to make life as easy as possible for an application programmer. What my solution does in terms of CAP and ACID: Atomicity - A transaction is either committed in full or not at all. A transaction may consist of one or multiple objects. Consistency - No consistency checks in the sense that there are defined constraints on the member fields. However, all objects are versioned, and if two clients are trying to commit the same version of an object, the second client will fail and it would have to retrieve the most recent version before updating the object. Isolation - All transactions are processed in isolation, i.e. all objects in a transaction are locked prior to being updated Durability - Transactions are never overwritten, i.e. new transactions are always added to the end of the data store. If a transaction has completed successfully, you can be certain that the transaction will be completed even after a server crash. Availability - Concurrency is handled by locking objects. Many clients can read simultaneously, but if you try to read an object that is locked for writing by someone else, you will have to wait (there is room for improvement here). If you try to write to an object that someone else is writing to, you will fail. I have not looked into performance of a large number of clients, however the simple answer is that consistency is prioritised above availability. Partition Tolerance - None at the moment. I have not looked into distributing the database yet. ~~~ opendomain Please contact me - I would love to discuss. [username] at NoSQL dot com

In 5 Minutes, He Lets the Blind See - laex http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/08/opinion/sunday/in-5-minutes-he-lets-the-blind-see.html?_r=0 ====== Elte My mom used to tell me about a similar procedure she would perform to help people with cateracts in Africa 30 years ago, so I'm a bit confused. I'm not saying this isn't awesome or special, just a bit curious what has changed to make it particularly special _now_. EDIT: So I asked her, it seems the main difference is the new lens they're putting in. With a cateract the lens is clouded and the essence of this procedure is cutting out that lens so that light reaches the retina once more. 30 years back they did not have new lenses to put in though, so (quote) "we would send everyone home with +10 glasses". She also recalls the expeditions into Nepal going into the mountains to operate cateracts 14 consecutive days full time even back then (takes a while to get up to 100.000 I suppose :]). So it used to be they were getting people who saw nothing to see something. Now they get people who see nothing to see really well, which is of course huge. ~~~ eps Lower cost, probably. But if your mom is around, perhaps just ask her instead of HN? ~~~ Elte That e-mail went out before I posted here, and I fully intend on providing the answer myself ;). Should've probably made that more obvious. EDIT: Updated with the answer! ------ stevetrewick Quite a few things bug me about this piece. >I’m on my annual win-a-trip journey, in which I take a university student with me on a trip to the developing world to cover underreported issues. Firstly, I don't think this is 'under reported', I've seen at least two full length documentaries about this procedure in Nepal, the project has its own Facebook page [0] and a Google search for 'Nepal cataract' turns up lots of trad media results. Secondly, if the author has taken a student to cover things, why aren't e reading the student's piece ? Lastly, the author - like most people who haven't undergone this type of surgery - falls into the trap of breathlessly hailing this as a miraculous cure for blindness. It's not. While the restored sight is absolutely better than having cataracts and will indeed cheer you up in the immediate term, the vision provided by the replacement lenses is a far cry from a person's natural vision, for one thing these lenses have a fixed focus. Another issue is the limited life span - eventually they fur up, but don't go hard like UV induced cataracts - which necessitates replacement or laser surgery. Humans - particularly the kind that live up mountains in Nepal - are adaptable and can cope, but as someone who has had this surgery (and the follow up laser surgery) it annoys me that reportage routinely fails to mention these kinds of things. In this particular case, it is also quite peculiar that the author fails to point out that handing out a $5 pair of sunglasses would prevent the cataracts in the first place (these are pretty much all UV induced). Education and prevention in this respect _are_ very much under reported. [0] [https://www.facebook.com/cureblindness/](https://www.facebook.com/cureblindness/) ~~~ IkmoIkmo > handing out a $5 pair of sunglasses would prevent the cataracts in the first > place (these are pretty much all UV induced). I've also heard that vitamin sufficiency prevents UV induced cataracts, is this true and on what scale would vitamins be sufficient? Introducing a particular crop with the particular vitamin to the local farmers, potentially a GMO crop, or selling supplements or adding vitamins to food (e.g. in the Netherlands I know virtually all bread has government-encouraged iodine to prevent iodine deficiency illnesses and effects, not sure if it's a worldwide standard, but iodising table salt is common practice for the majority of the world, too) might be a practical alternative. ------ curiousAl Modern (science-based) medicine is a miracle of biblical proportions. ~~~ fasteo Cataract surgery is not exactly modern medicine. There are records [1] of cataract surgery as far as 2500 BC, that is, more than 4000 years ago. [1] [http://cdn.intechopen.com/pdfs/42710/InTech- The_history_of_c...](http://cdn.intechopen.com/pdfs/42710/InTech- The_history_of_cataract_surgery.pdf) ~~~ afsina Removing the infected lens is something, replacing it with an artificial intraocular lens implant is something else. ------ pmontra Bypass of the NY login: original text from [https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=es&sl=en&tl=es&u=h...](https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=es&sl=en&tl=es&u=http:%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2015%2F11%2F08%2Fopinion%2Fsunday%2Fin-5-minutes- he-lets-the-blind-see.html%3F_r%3D0&anno=2&sandbox=1) ------ rokhayakebe This guy needs a kickstarter, or GoFundMe, or some other easy way to give him $25. Imagine a "LET'S FREAKING END CATARACT BLINDNESS" movement. ~~~ _mgr [http://www.hollows.org.nz](http://www.hollows.org.nz) The Fred Hollows Foundation has been doing this since at least 1992 around the world including Nepal where Dr. Hollows and Dr. Ruit worked closely together. Unfortunately Dr. Hollows passed away years ago but the foundation continues his work. ------ Kiro I can recommend "Inside North Korea" (National Geographic) where he's treating cataracts in NK. ------ ck2 I'm curious what $25 per eye translates into American healthcare prices? $1000? $2500? ~~~ psykovsky $25,000 probably.

Feedback wanted: Any demand for 18x24 Business Model Canvas posters? - mgav http://aintnojive.com/ ====== mgav @rman666 - Thank you! Yes, I wanted to print the free PDF on Friday last week, so I looked on the Kinkos website (and a host of others) and all showed $45- to $50- for one 20x24 poster, which seemed ridiculous and made me think there might be something here. Based your experience, it's now obvious there isn't. I'll zip to Kinkos, spend $4 and be on my way. THANK YOU AGAIN! ------ mgav Thank you for generously sharing your feedback about whether anyone wants these or not (better to find out now, before buying inventory) ------ rman666 The BMC is a free PDF. I took it to FedEx (Kinko's) and they printed it 18x24 for $4.

FBI director: Cover up your webcam - grej http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/295933-fbi-director-cover-up-your-webcam ====== 6t6t6t6 From all they ways I can be spied, the webcam is the one that concerns me the least. At the end, all they will see is a bearded man staring to the front. May they be able to see me naked? Well, probably, but I honestly don't think that they will make a lot of money by selling my naked pictures... My wife tells me that I still look good, but I suspect that she is being nice to me. What would scare more is that they manage to capture what is on my screen, or install a keylogger, or activate the microphones to hear my conversations, or that they access my hard disks and steal data, including my private keys. Hey, but putting a sticker on your webcam is a way to show how 1337 your are! I prefer not to have to bother removing stickers every time I want to do a Skype call. ~~~ matt_wulfeck You're displaying a common trope I see sometimes with security: > "because this particular thing does affect me personally, it doesn't matter. > And because it doesn't matter to me it doesn't matter at all" Blackmailing people with pictures taken from webcams is not theoretical. It happens[0] and it's good advice to tape up your cam. It may not affect you personally, but it may affect your wife, daughter, or sister in a much more sinister way. Believe it or not this kind of thing can ruin someone's life. [0] [http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240209018/US-teen- hacker...](http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240209018/US-teen-hacker- pleads-guilty-to-webcam-blackmail) ~~~ iceman99 I know someone whose camera and microphone were taken over. A window showed on her computer where the person watching her chatted with her and told her things that he only knew because he was watching her. It scared her to death and made her cry. Beyond blackmail, it is probably close to the psychological equivalent of a stranger just suddenly appearing in your home watching you. I think that every electronic camera and mic device should have a hard switch/button that physically disables both the camera and mic. Having to use tape or a cover does not keep you from being spied on; it only eliminates the visual spying. The attacker can still listen. ~~~ zyngaro Smartphones represent a bigger security risk in that regard. Front facing rear facing, mic all ones personal data, pictures and so on. ~~~ JohnStrange Hardly. You put your phone on the desk and it's going to show the ceiling. In contrast to this, people do all kinds of weird things in front of laptops. I've even heard once of someone who allegedly masturbated (!) in front of a laptop. Of course, that must have been an extreme outlier ... ------ janvidar Isn't this really just a sign of flawed hardware design? In my opinion hardware should be designed so that the camera LED lamp should always be lit if the camera is used. If there is a malfunction with the LED, then the camera should also not work. Also there should be a hardware LED for when the microphone is being used which should work in the same fashion for laptops with built-in microphones. In the webcam drivers I have looked at the LED is controlled independently of capturing, although drivers do enable the LED when the camera is used. This essentially means that hackers can record and disable the lamp. I've been considering hacking together some piece of software that will continuously use the camera (/dev/video) in order to block it for other applications, and have it fail with visible alerts if unable to block the camera. Not sure if the same thing can be achieved for the audio recording devices due to multiplexing. ~~~ awesomerobot >If there is a malfunction with the LED, then the camera should also not work. Many would argue that this is the more flawed design. ~~~ Kadin It seems like a "fail safe" to me. The current design is a bit closer to a "fail deadly" in that it creates a mode that's the worst-case from the user's perspective: the camera works but the indicator doesn't. It is probably worse to have an unreliable indicator light than it is to not have any indicator light at all. ------ _Codemonkeyism "The head of the FBI on Wednesday defended putting a piece of tape over his personal laptop's webcam, claiming the security step was a common sense one that most should take." One needs to ask why is the head of the FBI telling you this? Cui bono? This is a red herring. The FBI has no interest in filming you through your webcam. They want to listen to your microphone, watch your screen, get the keys you've typed, see the websites you've visited, read the emails you've sent. Watch you on video? Nah. This is a red herring. That is the reason the head of the FBI tells you to cover your webcam. I wish the The Last Psychiatrist would come back. ~~~ tingol The FBI isn't telling you this so you could protect yourself from the government. They are telling you this because they know how easy it is for someone else to take control of the camera and make your life hard. So it is a common sense step for you to take if you're concerbed about security. You took a pretty huge jump from that to the FBI listening to your mic. ------ ipsin If you're so concerned about having your webcam subverted, it seems like the first step would be to insist on a hardware LED that can't be subverted in firmware. If nothing else, it would serve as a canary, indicating that your machine has been thoroughly compromised. ~~~ gkoberger And who do we trust to do that? More importantly, is it even possible? ~~~ krastanov In terms of electronics it is fairly trivial and it can be inspected by eye (or microscope) if the manufacturer decides to not encapsulate everything on a chip (which presumably would be the point of such a feature). Just have the only positive voltage rail going to the camera be the same one that is directly powering the LED. The firmware will be turning this rail on and off, hence turning the camera and the LED on and off simultaneously. ~~~ 1_2__3 Idle though on possible attack vectors: Convince the firmware to use a lower voltage, one that doesn't hit the breakover voltage on the LED but still powers the camera. Strobe the line, get snapshots without the LED doing more than very faintly glowing. ~~~ umanwizard LED activation voltage is less than what cameras typically require. ------ white-flame I said it then, and I say it now: \- Encryption is our webcam tape. That tape cannot be thwarted by any remote attacker, legally warranted or not. It's perfect, unbreakable security from webcam visuals being exfiltrated, exactly the security features that Comey says we shouldn't be allowed to have for our data. ~~~ pdkl95 "What if everyone believed that law-abiding citizens should use postcards for their mail? If a nonconformist tried to assert his privacy by using an envelope for his mail, it would draw suspicion. Perhaps the authorities would open his mail to see what he's hiding. Fortunately, we don't live in that kind of world, because everyone protects most of their mail with envelopes. So no one draws suspicion by asserting their privacy with an envelope. There's safety in numbers. Analogously, it would be nice if everyone routinely used encryption for all their email, innocent or not, so that no one drew suspicion by asserting their email privacy with encryption. Think of it as a form of solidarity." ~ Philip Zimmermann, "Why I wrote PGP" [https://www.philzimmermann.com/EN/essays/WhyIWrotePGP.html](https://www.philzimmermann.com/EN/essays/WhyIWrotePGP.html) ~~~ drvdevd A brilliant point and a salient quote. Why must we continue to live, collectively, with our heads in the sand? ------ meowface I know this thread will probably get politicized, but I see nothing wrong (or necessarily hypocritical; he's law enforcement, not IC) with his advice here. ~~~ waterphone It's not a bad thing to do, it's just hypocritical of him to value his own privacy but tell everyone else they need to give up theirs and let the FBI and NSA have access to everything they want to keep private. ~~~ nathancahill Why would you be concerned about the FBI or the NSA knowing about the content of your digital communiques if you have nothing to hide? Even the most ardent supporter of personal freedoms will admit that the government observing you over a network is the same as taking pictures of you with a telephoto lens on a busy street. The truth is the same: there are too many people and you aren't special enough to deserve personal surveillance. ~~~ anexprogrammer > there are too many people Oh _please._ They can probably harvest the lot. It'll be some algorithm that deems you worthy or otherwise or gets you on an "of interest" list. Let's keep "personal surveillance" for '50s spy movies and Banksy murals. More generally, what about the chilling effect on legal and legitimate conversation? ~~~ jeremysmyth _It 'll be some algorithm that deems you worthy or otherwise or gets you on an "of interest" list._ ...or your association with "Occupy" or some other political protest movement that someone in power disagrees with, or that your wife bullied some politician's wife for two weeks in school, or that your interfering neighbour with a petty dislike of how you landscape your garden works as a government clerk and can access your data. There are many reasons why some individual might want to know private things about some other individual. When individuals with some tiny (or vast) power want to wield it over _anyone else_ , especially when they can do it with little oversight, it's very tempting. That "the government" has access to my private information does not mean it's blind and faceless. It's made up of people with complex motivations. ------ sotojuan The webcam cover up is interesting to me because it's the only "weird privacy thing" I've seen regular, non-technical people do. A good amount of people at my university, most of which use social media liberally and don't care about encryption, cover their camera up. ~~~ pseudonymcoward This is only idle speculation but: A web cam resembles an eye staring at you all the time. This makes people feel weird, like something is staring at them. The threat to privacy is right in their face and on a gut level. That's the reason so many people cover them even when they won't take other basic online privacy precautions. ~~~ Sylos Also just in general, people understand what a camera does. It's much harder to understand the implications of abstract "data" going off onto the internet. ------ rdtsc This is like the coal burning power plant telling you to make sure to sort your recyclables into appropriate containers, to make the environment cleaner. Also people enjoy and feel good about accomplishing small things. Putting a sticker on your laptop is a small easy task. Do it and they feel more "secure" in an instant. ------ benevol Every electronic communication device (laptop, mobile, tablet, etc) should have _1 hardware switch per sensor_ (camera, mic, motion/acceleration, etc) which disables the sensor. Why manufacturers still haven't introduced this is beyond me. ~~~ pwg >Why manufacturers still haven't introduced this is beyond me. Expense and lack of demand. Some older laptops used to feature hardware kill switches for the wifi (this was prior to the advent of a camera in every laptop). The old Dell D820 model was one such laptop. Eventually they were dropped all around because from the makers point of view, the presence of the switch had no effect on the sales of the laptops. Anything you add to the BOM (Bill of Materials) for the device raises the final net cost, and there is still enough competition in the laptop/phone space that keeping the costs down is necessary to compete. Additionally, twenty-five cents per unit does not sound like much, until of course you multiply that by 10+ million units built (where a twenty-five cents difference per unit amounts to $2.5+ million difference in the end). So if having the switch or not having the switch made no difference in sales, the maker could either raise their profit, or lower their price (or more likely split the difference) by dropping the switches. The lack of demand is that not enough purchasers are telling manufacturers they want hardware on/off switches (the purchasers do this by buying only laptops with them, and by not buying laptops without them [which may be difficult to bootstrap now, given that almost no laptop has a hardware on/off switch anymore]). ~~~ jcadam I've found many of those supposedly 'hardware' wifi kill switches were software controlled (When I installed Linux on an old Dell, it completely ignored the state of the wifi switch). I want a switch that physically cuts power to a device, but no... :( ------ Hilyin I guess this is just as good place as any to bring this up. In current OS X, you cannot disable your mic. You can turn down the input volume, but never disable. All malware needs to do is raise the input volume and it can listen to you to its hearts content. And its worse with your iPhone. ~~~ the_common_man Can someone confirm if this is actually true? Sounds too far fetched that you cannot disable the mic (i.e not muting, I assume?). ~~~ Hilyin Just look around on the internet, you'll find the same thing. I researched this a few weeks ago and was amazed. You basically have to disable the audio driver in OSX to disable it, and doing that, means you can't play audio at all. And even that isn't enough, it technically can be hijacked at an even lower level. ------ ssebastianj I was looking for a way to cover the mics and webcam integrated in my laptop which doesn't require a tape. So, I grabbed a couple of those magnets stripes usually found on fridges and then , using a scissor, made two little rectangular stripes and a larger one. Next, I glued the little stripes on the laptop, near close the mics. The nice thing is that the large stripe covers both, the mics and webcam. For me, it's an easy way to cover/uncover fast. ------ boxkite I keep mine covered because I work remotely a lot and I don't want to accidentally shirtless video chat someone from bed when I meant to make a different type of call. ~~~ 3chelon It was unusually hot and I actually did that myself just the other day - embarrassing! ------ conradev I use a MacBook Pro as my daily driver, but I recently purchased a Lenovo ThinkPad to play around with. Sometimes I forget how awesome it is to have a repairable and modular computer. I didn't want the webcam or microphone in the ThinkPad… so I took 30 minutes and removed it. Easy as that. ~~~ csydas Well,to be fair you could just open the MacBook Pro and unplug the ribbon for the webcam. iFixit will have instructions. Removing it entirely granted is another matter, involving opening the screen, but you'd have to do the same on any modern laptop with an integrated camera wouldn't you? ~~~ wruza For my mac I just used a knife to open screen and shoved black paper strip before camera. ------ greglindahl I experimented a bit with an Apple laptop microphone, and it took 2 layers of electrical tape to block the mic. There doesn't appear to be any way to block an iPhone mic without blocking the speaker, too, and I'm not confident that it could be blocked at all. ------ mpetrovich But what about his computer's built-in mic? Unless he's pantomiming all sensitive info... ------ neom It's pretty sad that he used the word "authority" in this sentence: You do that so that people who don’t have authority don’t look at you. I think that’s a good thing.” ------ throwaway13337 It's relatively common to have access to private security cameras. Some are even google indexed. The software included relies on the users protect the web interface. Obviously, this is the vulnerability. Especially with things like default passwords. Here's an article about it: [http://www.networkworld.com/article/2844283/microsoft- subnet...](http://www.networkworld.com/article/2844283/microsoft- subnet/peeping-into-73-000-unsecured-security-cameras-thanks-to-default- passwords.html) A lot of these cameras are controllable and have speakers. People now do live video streams of pranking people through this means. Pictures: [http://imgur.com/a/0WImd](http://imgur.com/a/0WImd) ------ skybrian Back in the day, SGI workstations had a hardware shutter. I still think it's a good idea. ------ 24gttghh My Asus 1015PEM netbook from 6 years ago has a physical screen that slides over the camera; sliding the screen also turns on the camera. Why don't more laptops have this feature if this is such a 'big deal'? ------ throw2016 The hacker news readership is focussed on startups and technology. It's a career, a business and in some cases an interest in technology. So privacy as a social good may not be the primary perspective and it often devolves into how this affects readers personally rather than the society they live in or side tracks into technology nuances. Technology is enabling new negative possibilities but it does not follow that technologists can make a difference. There is no ethical code of conduct. Like everyone else they are another cog in the wheel and software engineers may not have an interest or priority on privacy, social and political issues. There are a large number of folks working in the nsa, gchq, google, facebook, palantir, hardware vendors and elsewhere actively enabling this. Like technology itself politics, liberty, privacy and the evolution of modern system from the time of feudalism requires interest and priority. From this perspective the need to tape up your webcam may have completely different ramnifications. ------ xcasperx I agree with what most people are saying on here, but I believe there's a bigger picture to it. Let's say that your computer has been completely 'pwned', and that you are currently reading an article with an ad for Cow Porn, or whatever, on the right hand hand side of the site. The hacker can write some code to check what your eyes, and eyebrows, did when you looked at the ad. If it peaked your interest, the hacker can maliciously add more 'Cow Porn' ads to sites you visit - via swapping out the regular ones. Now one day you get curious and click on it, and boom they take a screen shot and try to blackmail you. This is obviously quite outlandish but think about purposefully planting posts, lets say on reddit, by switching out posts. They then look at your head movements, and, or, eye movements then boom, you're added to some list that you wouldn't have be added to if it weren't for your eye movements. ------ dingo_bat I have never covered my Webcam because I trust the light to come on if the camera turns on. Is it possible to bypass that led? ~~~ Steuard In addition to the attacks that others have mentioned here, I've also heard folks comment previously on the possibility of turning on the camera very briefly, just long enough for a single still shot. If it was done fast enough, the brief flicker of the LED might not be noticeable. (Like you, I had always assumed that the power for the webcam was literally in series with the LED, so that disabling the LED would render the camera inoperable. That seemed like the obvious way to do it if you wanted to provide a truly reliable signal. But evidently that's not the case.) ~~~ abraae Perhaps you mean in parallel. An LED is driven by 20 mA, whereas a camera requires more like 200 mA, so it's not feasible to wire them in series - either the LED will burn out or the camera won't power up. ~~~ Steuard Yeah, I was pretty sure I was being a little sloppy by using the term "series" (for shame, physics prof, for shame!), but I was hoping to evoke the general sense of "if current doesn't flow through the LED for any reason, the camera can't turn on." Honestly, I'm not 100% certain offhand of a way to wire that (which is why I didn't want to be specific earlier, despite using a specific term: shoulda added some weasel words :) ). Do the LED and the camera run off of the same _voltage_? (If not, then parallel wiring won't work, either.) ------ pjc50 Previously: [http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and- tech/yah...](http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/yahoo- webcam-users-intimate-images-intercepted-by-gchq-spy-programme-snowden-files- reveal-9158140.html) ------ eosrei What about the cameras in your phone and the microphones in everything? Security theater isn't security. ------ krinchan I'm about to die laughing at the hoops people are jumping through in the comments to claim they've never pulled up some porn and enjoyed themselves in front of their laptop. Ever. _EVER_ ------ laurent123456 This article describes how to turn off the led light on Windows, which is surprisingly easy: [http://blog.erratasec.com/2013/12/how-to-disable-webcam- ligh...](http://blog.erratasec.com/2013/12/how-to-disable-webcam-light-on- windows.html) TLDR: Webcams follow the UVC standard and, according to this standard, the LED indicator light is controlled by the host software. So a simple hack is to find the webcam driver DLL, find the function that controls the LED (such as TurnOnOffLED()), make it return immediately, done. ------ tedmiston Does anyone feel the need to cover their iPhone front facing camera? ~~~ e1ven Yes. I cover both the cameras on my phone with tape, and only remove it when I want to take a picture. That said, I have a lot more faith in the security of a whitelist-based model like the App store, versus the blacklist model of a PC with antivirus. ------ foobarcrunch Unless you're using Prey[0] and want an opportunity to photograph would-be crooks. [0] [https://preyproject.com](https://preyproject.com) ------ markyc in this day and age how come we don't see laptops carry a physical on/off switch for the microphone and camera? ~~~ Shanea93 This is the day and age of removing headphone jacks to make a phone slimmer, taking away your disk drive, etc. Most companies care more about aesthetics than functionality at this point. ~~~ ojii can I have a laptop without a webcam/integrated mic then? ~~~ soylentcola How courageous of you! ------ awesomerobot Also remove your microphone and don't use a keyboard? If I were hacking you I'd _much_ rather log your keystrokes or hear what you're saying. The number of scenarios where having a visual would be useful would be incredibly low by comparison. Putting a sticker over your webcam is like putting a lock on a screen door. ~~~ maxerickson Most screen doors I can think of do have locks. Even quite home made ones often end up with a hook that kids can't reach. ~~~ awesomerobot That's my point. It does one thing, but it's by no means security. ------ piedradura I prefer to have a computer composed by parts, so I attach the webcam to the computer when I need to, same thing for the audio and many other applications. I only need 1k of ram to send a secret message, so no virus or malware could be in my tiny computer. ------ zelos Didn't all Sun webcams used to have little irises that you could close on them? It seems like a sensible precaution: makes it less likely I'll accidentally log into a company conference call in my dressing gown with my camera enabled. ------ whitenoice Just saw the prescreening of snowden movie with online live event with movie cast and snowden post movie, and this was exactly what was depicted in the movie and in the event talk. ------ andrewflnr So the guy who decries "going dark" when it comes to encryption wants us to literally go dark with our webcams. It's like a dystopian comedy setup. ------ JustUhThought At some of my house parties I require guests to check their phone at the door. Price of admission. (I keep a landline and am ok with giving that number out as an emergency contact number). Boy does this get the conversation started. I can tape my phn camera, but what about the other 20 phns in the room? I have no control over them to keep them from posting photos of me drinking or whatnot during a party, photos I do not want online. From the tin-hat perspective one must do (much) better than consider their personal devices. One must consider _all_ devices in their _personal proximity_. ~~~ GarrisonPrime It'd be amusing to have a little Faraday cage by the door for them to deposit into. :) ------ demonshreder Aren't these attacks primarily for Windows? Would using Linux (say Arch) mitigate these? Edit: Shouldn't we be more concerned about phones and tabs? ~~~ facepalm Nice attempt at humor :-) ------ codethief In case anyone's looking for something a little bit more sophisticated than a sticker to put on his/her webcam: [https://soomz.io/detail/webcam_covers_a10](https://soomz.io/detail/webcam_covers_a10) Been using it for a while and it works like a charm. (Though on a phone it does tend to attract a bit of dirt and the color wears off over time. If you keep your phone in the pocket of your pants, that is.) ------ chrischen Quick question for HNers: why isn't something like the camera insicator light implemented for the microphone? ------ SG- Anyone know what kind of laptop he uses? ------ wickedlogic Please cover your webcam, it is distracting while we are trying to listen to what you are clicking on. ------ listentojohan What I don't understand is why he has to defend it? (Yes, it might seem hypocritical.) ------ bobsoap Instead of a sticker, one could also use this clever, simple, magnetic gadget (not affiliated): [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1893116150/nope-20-live...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1893116150/nope-20-live- free) ~~~ bobsoap Seriously, downvoted without an explanation? That's quite poor. If something about my post offends anyone, I'd love to know about it. ------ mangeletti I swear this is a true story: I worked at Staples when I was 19, and when I first started I was a "front end lead" (read: the only full-time cashier), so I would work behind the service counter at the front. Once, I was standing up front while there were no customers when all of the sudden the voice of the general manager (we'll call him Bill) popped onto the phone's speaker, "Hey, Michael". I looked up and noticed the light next to "Manager's Office" was on. I instinctively replied, "Hey, Bill; what's up?", despite the fact that it nearly gave me a heart attack. Bill proceeded to tell me to run something he needed to the back, which I did, and that was the end of that. Then, one day I was helping a customer with some Cross pens behind the counter. I stood up to grab a key that was next to the register when I noticed out of the corner of my eye that the phone's "Manager's Office" intercom light was on. It made my heart jump because I hadn't talk to anybody through it, and I knew that Bill was in the back office. I immediately realized, 'oh my god, he's probably spying on me to see how my service is!'. It made me feel uncomfortable, until I realized it was an opportunity to be extraordinarily helpful and jovial with the customer and be "candidly" observed by my manager. So I did that. I rang the customer up and she left. The light went off after a few minutes of silence. After that, I noticed the light come on a number of times on different days, which surprised me. I even ran to the back after helping a customer once, while the intercom light was still on, sneaked around the corner, and looked into his office window to see if it was really him. He was sitting there looking at his phone. I looked for just a moment when I heard from the speaker above, "<beep!> cashier to the front". I ran. Bill was probably the greatest manager I've ever known, such a hard worker, a really cool guy to talk to, well respected by everyone, etc. In fact, if all managers were like him, Staples would probably still be a force to be reckoned with. So, it never bothered me the way it probably would have, had it been some creepy manager. This is necessary for the rest of the story, because had it not been the case, I would have probably called him out, etc. Eventually I started being extra jovial all the time, because I never knew when I'd miss seeing the light come on and miss the opportunity to impress Bill. Bill was so impressed with my service that I was given a raise and promoted to manager of the copy & print center about 6 months later, which eventually led to me opening my own print company and quitting Staples (after seeing how high the margins were), which led to me learning how to use Adobe Creative Suite and graphic design, which led to me shifting my focus to print design for clients (brochures, cards, etc.), which led to me meeting some guys who ran an Internet marketing company one day while trying to sell my print design services. They wanted to hire me full time, and did, so I began learning web design, then web development, then back end code, etc. I always tell myself, 'I was probably destined for this kind of work', but the reality is that my entire life might have been changed by simply knowing I was being spied on by my Boss. I realize that it probably worked out for the better in my case, but the fact is, knowing that somebody is watching you causes you to change who you are. It's a form of control in and of itself. In fact, it doesn't even need to happen to you. Now that we have all seen that the government does spy on people, it's hard to imagine all the tiny ways that it might change your behavior and the things you say (e.g., online). ~~~ repler I worked at Staples too (Business Machines!), the management was not shy about reminding us about mystery shoppers. My managers would always walk around the corner right at the instant I would sit down for a minute when it wasn't busy 5 hours into my shift. Never failed. Ugh. I know we didn't have surveillance cameras in the store at the time though, because it was a sore point (and against Staples policy at the time). ------ mmaunder I wonder if he covers front and back cellphone cameras. ------ caub Laptops have a LED showing when webcam is in use ------ stanislavb Hypocrite! ------ orthogon What about the part where we stop buying products with integrated cameras? What about the part where we stop buying devices that we have seeemingly no hope of control over? What about that? Is boycott a word too strong? Gee, you're right. We should all just give up, and accept that what we're sold, is that which we must buy. ~~~ deathanatos I think you're being a bit quick to judge people here… Having an integrated camera is obviously a lot easier to deal with, logistically, than lugging along an external USB camera. I think a lot of the people here would love to have hardware-level kill switches for their video camera. And mic. And WiFi. (I would; I used to own a Thinkpad with a hardware kill switch for WiFi. It was useful, even aside from the privacy benefits.) ~~~ orthogon I think you're neglecting a key detail: alternatives are hardly even on the shelves, and NO ONE QUESTIONS IT. > Oh, well, that's just supply and demand, of course! > Everyone just WANTS an always on internet connection! > Why would anyone ever remove the battery from their cell phone??? > It's more cost effective to build the device like that. Common sense! > Everyone wants a unique identifier, GPS and 911 service. It's safer! Yup, no one would ever want things any other way. It's silly to question why the invisible hand of the market works as it does. ~~~ derogator The really amazing part about the downvotes here, is that HN is unable to reconcile the realities of mass surveillance that tend to conflict with profit motives, and yet the collective overtone of HN professes itself to be a bastion of progressive futurist space exploring tranhumanism. Few seem to notice the cognitive dissonance. Sort of a cruel prank. Those in the best position to release the yoke, are only motivated to tighten it.

Google SSL Search - jamesbkel http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer=173733&hl=en ====== wladimir This was available for quite a while already, though in beta/labs. I'm not sure what is new. ~~~ JonnieCache Yeah, it doesn't seem any different to how its been in the past year. The _beta_ sigil is still under the logo. I wish theyd put the links to maps and images back in, maybe with some visual warning that theyre not encrypted. I have SSL search as the default search in chrome, and I hate having to manually jump back to normal google to do image searches. While we're here, don't forget SSL wikipedia! <https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Main_Page> ~~~ mike-cardwell If you're using the HTTPS-Everywhere Firefox addon (1), or the HTTPS- Everywhere Squid redirector (2), you don't need to know/remember about the SSL versions of Wikipedia or Google. You're just sent there by default. 1.) <https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere> 2.) <https://github.com/mikecardwell/perl-HTTPSEverywhere> ------ mahrain Been using this for a year now, there's also a hack to use it in the Chrome bar by entering a custom search engine. Very handy and works nice. Only miss is that I can't immediately click through to image searches, they're only available over unsecured HTTP. ~~~ lobster_johnson Unfortunately, you lose autocompletion (other than history autocompletion) when you use something other than the built-in Google search. ------ nodata Good, but to make this truly useful we need a really simple way to specify which country-specific google search engine we would like results from. ------ jamaicahest DuckDuckGo has been using this for many months, when you use the !g bang ~~~ rlpb Really? It doesn't seem to do it for me. Do you have some setting set somewhere? ------ lini Anyone that has the HTTPS everywhere extension (Firefox) is already using the SSL search in Google. As others noted it has been in beta for quite a long time and is missing some features like the image search or the doodles on the homepage. ------ buster Also, if you want to browse on SSL whereever possible: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/flcpelgcagfhfoegek...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/flcpelgcagfhfoegekianiofphddckof) Love this Extension! ------ RyanKearney The only thing I dislike about this is it hides the refer, screwing up my analytics. I'd have to completely convert all of my sites to HTTPS only to be able to make use of the additional headers for analytical purposes. Not really a big deal I guess, but kind of unnecessary to have to purchase wildcard certs if you have many sub domains. ~~~ dspillett The free certs from <http://www.startssl.com/> are apparently accepted by most browsers these days (the exception being IE6/7 users on XP who have not downloaded the optional CA cert updates): <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startssl#StartSSL> I've not used their cert for anything yet (I plan to test them on some personal sites when I get chance, before using them elsewhere), and wildcard certs are not free (but they do seem relatively cheap), but it might be worth looking into for someone in your position. ~~~ thepsi I've used them for a few personal sites and projects with no complaints. The fee for wildcard certs (~60USD) is a one-off to verify your identity - usually via a quick phone call to confirm details from your official documents. Once that's complete, you can generate as many certs as you need (incl. wildcards and Subject Alternative Name) from their control panel, subject to jumping through the usual hoops to prove that you have control of each domain. ~~~ RyanKearney I do use StartSSL but the problem just comes from having multiple sub domains. I get IPv4 addresses for $0.50/mo/each but I'd rather not setup each subdomain on its own dedicated IP for the sakes of using free SSL certs. ~~~ dspillett You don't need multiple IPv4 addresses to make use of a wild-card (or other multi-name) certificate. A wildcard certificate will verify any matching domain so you could have many sub-domains of the same domain (using a single certificate for *.domain.tld) on one address and browsers would not complain. Also you could run the distinct (sub)domains on different ports on the same address, though this is perhaps less useful. Also, with SNI you can use many single-name certificates on one address (and all on the same port) using SNI. Unfortunately there are a number of significant client combinations that won't play nice with this (most notably, if you can't guess, IE on Windows XP): <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication#Support> ~~~ RyanKearney I know that. I'm saying I don't want to have to pay for a wildcard certificate since you can get free certs for individual domains. The alternative for me purchasing a wildcard domain would be to get many different single domain certs for free and assign each one to a different IP address.

Ask HN: What is best email client (to replace Inbox) - clarky07 I love Inbox and I&#x27;m dreading Google shutting it down. I&#x27;ve tried several others in the past but haven&#x27;t found anything else I like as much. At this point I suspect I&#x27;ll just go back to gmail and be less happy but I&#x27;m hoping there is an alternative I could like as much.<p>Tell me what you use for email and why it&#x27;s awesome.<p>only requirements are works on iOS and Mac. Doesn&#x27;t need desktop app, web is fine (perhaps even preferable). ====== PaulHoule fastmail

Why primary care will soon only treat chronic conditions - tomohawk https://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2019/11/why-primary-care-will-soon-only-treat-chronic-conditions.html ====== mean_gene_1976 I want everyone on the team. I want the best my budget can handle. I have requirements for technical positions that are posted with factors on how the candidates will he judged. Attributes of all the candidates will not be looked at by the technical review team. They will score and the winner gets an offer. There is one more thing. If I pull data on my NAICS code and see that women or minorities etc are not apart of the workforce, you bet your ass I’m going to put them first. Disabled veterans are prioritized. I do not believe the actual data pull for the rate of return specified. Statistics is something I want all the details, or it is just fluff.

Show HN: Test and edit tilejson in the browser - andrewljohnson http://static.gaiagps.com/tilejson-tester/ ====== andrewljohnson This is a pretty quick hack we did, because tilejson is useful in our apps, and we started to get lots of support requests for help making/importing files. ------ detaro Error 404?

Simple example of machine learning in TensorFlow - jostmey https://github.com/jostmey/NakedTensor?bare ====== dbcurtis I like these kind of "Hello, world!" examples for TensorFlow. As a TensorFlow beginner, I need all the references I can get. Here is what I need right now: "Hello, we meet again!". I can build a neural net model, and train (albeit, often badly) a model, but saving and restoring the trained weights so that I can run the model again is giving me fits. I am clearly missing something fundamental about how to restore a TensorFlow NN model. For your next tutorial, may I suggest: 1) a list of do's and don'ts for constructing a savable/restorable model, and 2) a wee bit of example code. Of course, now that I have discovered Keras I'm moving away from low-level direct TensorFlow. But I suspect I'm not the only one a bit foggy about the whole save/restore work flow. ~~~ pmalynin As a person that uses TensorFlow for his day job: I find that saving and restoring are of the weirder things with TensorFlow, you can either go all out an decide to save out all the variables, or only the ones needed for the model. You usually don't want to save out gradients (which are also variables) since they take up a bunch of space and aren't actually that useful to restore. Now on the other, what are model variables -- do you want to save model variables + the moving averages ... or just the averages. But then when you're loading you'll have to "shadow" the moving averages to the real variables that actually run in your model. Good news though, most of the scaffolding code you can write once and re-use it over and over again. ~~~ minimaxir In Keras, it's just a simple model.save() [to a hdf5 file] and load_model(). This includes both the weights and the architecture. Models with a few million parameters result in a file around ~50MB, which is still reasonable for modern production use cases. ~~~ glial Keras makes using deep learning for simple-ish use cases sooooo easy. ~~~ matheweis I second this - I'm really excited about Keras being integrated into the core of Tensorflow (other than the chance it might lose the Torch compatibility). ------ pred_ That's nifty; I was looking for something like that just a few weeks ago for a work demonstration! Ended up doing [https://gist.github.com/fuglede/ad04ce38e80887ddcbeb6b81e97b...](https://gist.github.com/fuglede/ad04ce38e80887ddcbeb6b81e97bbfbc) instead. ~~~ rhcom2 Thank you to you and OP for both sharing these resources. Really helpful. ------ nemo1618 I wish there were more TensorFlow examples written in Go. I made the mistake of checking out TensorFlow as my first intro to ML and it flew about 10 miles over my head. Slowly learning now, but most of the documentation and tutorials are written in Python. This blog series was also helpful on a conceptual level: [https://medium.com/emergent-future/simple-reinforcement- lear...](https://medium.com/emergent-future/simple-reinforcement-learning- with-tensorflow-part-0-q-learning-with-tables-and-neural- networks-d195264329d0#.4znc3ulur) ~~~ make3 as a deep learning professional, the deep learning community is something like 99% Python. You'd probably better learn Python at least well enough to recreate the corresponding Go code in your mind instantly. ------ calebm >>> You are one buzzword away from being a professional. Instead of fitting a line to just eight datapoints, we will now fit a line to 8-million datapoints. Welcome to big data. LOL :) (Side-note: 8 million is still not big data) ~~~ mcrad Big Data is a reference to complexity of the data & underlying system that data represents, NOT the number of datapoints. lol ~~~ pyromine Big data is really just a buzzword that no one knows what it really means, because everyone's definition is different lol ~~~ happycube I always think in terms of Munchkin: "any data that is not Big is small" ------ JonathonCwik So I'm still wrapping my head around some of the math (I haven't had a math class in a handful of years)... I get the output of the model (y_model = m*xs[i]+b), it's the y = mx + b where we know x (from the dataset) and have y be a variable. The error is where I start to lose it, so I get the idea of the first part (ys[i]-y_model). It's basically the difference between the actual y value (from the dataset). I get that we want this number to be as small as possible as the closer to zero it is for the entire dataset that means we get closer to the line going through (or near) all the points and the closest fit will be when this total_error is nearest to zero. What I don't get is the squaring of the difference. Is it just to make the difference a larger number so that it's a little more normalized? How do you get to the conclusion that it needs to be normalized? Same thing with the learning rate? I believe these to be correlated but I can't tell you how... ~~~ cowabungabruce Squaring gets you guaranteed positive numbers. Remember, we are adding all the errors together to optimize the model: If we get sum_errors_A = 4 + -3 + -1 sum_errors_B = 1 + 1 + 1 B is obviously the better model, but it has a higher error than A when comparing. If we squared all the terms and then added, B would be the stronger model. ~~~ JonathonCwik Ah, gotcha! Makes a lot more sense now. ------ Kiro This is awesome! I currently have a small pet project where I think some simple ML would be cool but I don't know where to start so these things are great. Basically my use case is that I have a bunch of 64x64 images (16 colors) which I manually label as "good", "neutral" or "bad". I want to input this dataset and train the network to categorize new 64x64 images of the same type. The closest I've found is this: [https://gist.github.com/sono- bfio/89a91da65a12175fb1169240cd...](https://gist.github.com/sono- bfio/89a91da65a12175fb1169240cde3a87b) But it's still too hard to understand exactly how I can create my own dataset and how to set it up efficiently (the example is using 32x32 but I also want to factor in that it's only 16 colors; will that give it some performance advantages?). ~~~ nl [https://blog.keras.io/building-powerful-image- classification...](https://blog.keras.io/building-powerful-image- classification-models-using-very-little-data.html) is what you want. ------ cosmicexplorer What is the meaning of the "?bare" query string in the url? I googled around for the meaning of query strings on the github site but only found rnandom repos on github (not sure how to narrow the search). The first time I tried removing it I saw another folder named "to_do", but this is gone now so it might give a version which is cached for longer somehow? ~~~ cosmicexplorer OK, found out what a bare repository means and pretty sure that's what it refers to. Still can't find any documentation for the query string parameter and don't know how that makes sense for github's repository view page. ------ blauditore I'm not sure about the rules, but shouldn't posts linking to own, personal projects be prefixed with "Show HN:"? I've seen a lot such posts lately where the poster was clearly the author as well. ~~~ pvg No, Show HN is a different thing with its own (generally stricter) rules. You don't have to add it to things just because you happen to be the author. [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html) ------ kyleschiller I think you meant bare bones. ------ mediocrejoker I'm guessing english is not your first language, so I just wanted to point out that "bare bottom" is generally synonymous with "uncovered buttocks" ie. in the context of changing an infant's diaper. Perhaps you were meaning to put "bare bones"? Google's definition of the latter is "reduced to or comprising only the basic or essential elements of something." Don't want to detract from your point but I think your title is throwing some people off. I know I would be hesitant to click something at work that sounds like it could contain nudity. ~~~ dekhn I think the last example was a clASSifier, so it makes sense. ------ bencollier49 "Bare bottom"? I'm not clicking on this. ~~~ bencollier49 Downvoted! The title might have changed now, but the original one was completely indecipherable. As far as I could tell it was genuinely some sort of image recognition algorithm for naked buttocks. ------ BonoboBoner Simple example? Before finishing the first paragraph, it says "The slope and y-intercept of the line are determined using gradient descent." What on earth does that mean? Maybe they should teach mathematics in english at universities outside of english speaking countries. German mathematics does not help here. I wish there was a 4GL like SQL for machine learning using dynamic programming for algorithm selection and model synthesis like a dbms query planner. PREDICT s as revenue LEARN FROM company.sales as s GROUP BY MONTH ORDER BY company.region ~~~ sampo > _" The slope and y-intercept of the line are determined using gradient > descent."_ Slope and intercept are very standard names for the parameters of a linear regression model. Gradient descent is the name of the algorithm used.

Copper - Data analysis toolkit for python - dfrodriguez143 http://pypi.python.org/pypi?:action=display&name=copper&version=0.0.2 ====== johncoogan Looks awesome, always love seeing my favorite tools wrapped up in new ways. Thanks a lot for posting. Quick note, since PyPi doesn't seem to parse markdown, the more information link to GitHub is malformed. I believe the plain link will hyperlink automatically. (See <http://scrible.com/s/2acQ2> for details). Thanks again for the package.

What’s up with ARM - pmjordan http://ldn.linuxfoundation.org/blog-entry/what%E2%80%99s-with-arm ====== edderly Some context: _Gaah. Guys, this whole ARM thing is a f-cking pain in the ass_ <https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/3/17/492> _Let ARM rot in the mainline. I really don't care anymore._ <https://lwn.net/Articles/441384/> It'll be interesting to see what direction this goes. Considering also the forks for the Android kernel and the different directions ARM development wants to go compared to Intel. ~~~ dochtman Yeah, this isn't really new to anyone who reads the LWN (which is edited by the author of the OP, BTW). The LWN is really very good, and subscribing is worth it for those hackers who care about the larger Linux/POSIX ecosystem. ------ zdw This is very welcome. ARM has tended to be somewhat difficult to port to - vendors have multiple versions of the instruction set out there depending on device size/power requirements, with different floating point units (NEON, VFP) etc. The result is we end up with situations like OpenEmbedded supporting multiple kernel trees in it's build engine just to take care of the wide range of hardware it supports. Hopefully this will make the situation somewhat better. ~~~ rbanffy Anything that increases functionality/LoC in the kernel is good. In any complex software project - and the Linux kernel is about as complex as sanity and present technology will allow - you have to do periodical codebase clean- ups. This is one case where the pain to maintain is forcing a cleanup. And, as always, it's discussed openly, so, whoever depends on it doesn't get surprised by the next release. ------ paines This biggest problem with ARM devices is, that the only devices out there for usage are embedded ones. Up to now there is only one Notebook out there (alwaysinnovating) which could be used as a computer on a daily basis. But IMHO 10'' is too small to do serious stuff. 13'' is minimum. Hope we will see them soon in the wild.

SF millennials won’t be able to buy a home for 20 years, says survey - rajnathani https://sf.curbed.com/2018/12/13/18139261/millennial-renters-homebuyers-san-francisco-apartmentlist-down-payment ====== pontifier Every dollar paid in rent increases the value of property in support of those who already own it. It's a double whammy. I myself benefit from this situation, but see it's vicious cycle. As long as people keep paying rent, rents will rise and property values will rise as well. It's not sustainable indefinitely, and I see problems on the horizon as people change their priorities. ~~~ rajnathani The only direct variable which has an inverse relation to the vicious cycle is the property tax rate, as higher property taxes increases the effective price for property ownership. In California due to Prop 13, the property tax rate (of ~1% of the initially appraised market value of the home) gets negated by inflation, and it's further countered in regions such as the Bay Area by the sustained increase in demand from the influx of residents and higher wage growth.

A Windows feature which can result in bypassing User Group Policy - miles https://medium.com/tenable-techblog/bypass-windows-10-user-group-policy-and-more-with-this-one-weird-trick-552d4bc5cc1b ====== gruez _yawn_ yet another case of an "exploit" that involves being other side of an airtight hatchway[1]. most/all of the important group policy settings are machine, rather than user. the user group policy settings are mainly with appearance/styling. Let's go through each of the "implications". >Single File Code Execution If you were able to drop that file, you're either that user, or an administrator on the computer. If you're that user, you could also achieve "single file code execution" by dropping a file to the startup folder, or creating an autorun registry key. If you are an administrator, you already own the machine. >Antivirus/EDR Bypass possibly, although your payload would still have to get pass behavioral analysis when it's executing. >Denial of Service yeah, but you can achieve the same thing by adding "logoff" as an autorun entry. [1] [https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/?p=100665](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/?p=100665), or search for that term on the blog, there are multiple entries. ~~~ wolrah > If you were able to drop that file, you're either that user, or an > administrator on the computer. If you're that user, you could also achieve > "single file code execution" by dropping a file to the startup folder, or > creating an autorun registry key. If you are an administrator, you already > own the machine. As I see it the biggest practical issue with this is that it provides a method for persistence that no user will ever find and even most Windows administrators will have no idea to look for. ~~~ gruez >As I see it the biggest practical issue with this is that it provides a method for persistence that no user will ever find This isn't relevant because if you're logged in as the affected user, nothing you see can be trusted because you're already pwned. For instance, the attacker could have replaced the regedit icon with a patched regedit, or attached a debugger to every process and patched any system calls. The only safe course of action would be to create a new profile. > and even most Windows administrators will have no idea to look for. AFAIK user hives aren't loaded until they're logged in, in which case they're subject to the caveats of the previous paragraph. Also, are administrators really going around and loading each user's registry hive to check for infections? The only real threat I can think of is antivirus vendors not knowing about this feature and not scanning the file as a registry hive. ~~~ throwanem As the article mentions, the threat model here is primarily an insider one, with a "rogue" user leveraging this method to obtain capabilities the domain administrator intends to deny. There are certainly more effective exploits for an outside attacker to use, but that's beside the point. ~~~ dfox User Group Policy isn't exactly a security mechanism, it exists to prevent users from unintentionally breaking their profile. There is multitude of ways how the user in question can inject arbitrary code into processes that are affected by user group policy as these processes are owned by that user. ------ jve Is this a real concern? I always treat User Settings overridable, because they happen either in security context of user or within user registry which lives in %userprofile% - the user has full access to ntuser.dat file. IMHO for real security stuff, Computer Settings are way to go. > Some exploits may be able to drop a file somewhere on the Windows filesystem > as non-admin. If the exploit dropped a “%USERPROFILE\ntuser.man”, with an > autostart registry key to execute a file off of a remote SMB share, then the > exploit now gained reliable code execution simply by dropping one non- > executable file. Well, if malicious guy can write your %USERPROFILE% folder, it's already no- go. You could potentially plant powershell profile scripts etc. > By dropping an empty ntuser.man file in %userprofile%, ProfSvc will fail to > load registry and thus prevent the user from logging in You've already got bigger problems if someone can write %userprofile% ~~~ ocdtrekkie I wonder how many sysadmins truly think about User Settings that way. They should, but I imagine when people are trying to apply a setting to a group of people, and they feel those permissions should follow them regardless of what PC they are on, they would just think to make it a user setting. ~~~ GordonS I work for a mega corp, and many security-related policies are indeed set at the user, rather than machine, level. Even ones that apply to everyone, no idea why. They also enabled the "disable registry editing" policy, but for obvious reasons this only prevent the official regedit app from running, so anyone with local admin can edit the registry using a different app. I feel like I'm pushed in the direction of wasting my time figuring out ways to bypass what I see as silly restrictions - why would you disable registry editing for a developer? Why would you force credentials to be entered _every_ time the UAC prompt is shown? The list goes on... ------ userbinator _Microsoft deemed this to be expected behavior and not a security issue._ For once, thank you for not caving into corporate pressure to make the work experience even more dystopian... those who have worked in such environments will known what I'm referring to. (I wonder if their developers themselves make use of this.) ~~~ Ididntdothis I rely on several of these “exploits” in order to be able to do my job on my work machines. I think even IT knows about these tricks but luckily they look the other way. ~~~ cosmie Besides the one referenced in the article, any tips (or references) about those tricks? ~~~ GordonS I got one I mentioned elsewhere here - if registry editing is disabled, just use a different registry app (there are some on Github that are better than the standard one anyway). Then you can undo group policy settings at will, as long as you know which registry keys to flip. A good site for this is: [https://gpsearch.azurewebsites.net](https://gpsearch.azurewebsites.net) Some settings are set in the local security policy file, rather than in the registry. From memory, if you have local admin rights you have to specifically grant your user account full control to the adm files, then you can use the local security policy MMC snap in to change settings. Once you change things, they will periodically be set back, which is annoying, but the tip near the end of the article might work to stop that. Another tip is to install a dual boot version of Windows on an encrypted partition, and use that instead of the "official" install. Of course, this only works if you don't need frequent access to resources on the domain. ------ Spivak This is actually one of those features that GNOME gets right with dconf lockdown. You can, on a per setting basis, decide whether users are allowed to override each setting. ------ amaccuish Agree with others, yawn. Unplug your computer during login to interrupt the profile load and be assigned a temporary profile (unless disabled) and you'll see no user policies applied.

Zebrello only delivers news which is tailored to your personal interests - zebrello http://www.zebrello.com ====== qsymmachus [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble)

Low-overhead rendering with Vulkan on Android - sam42 http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2015/08/low-overhead-rendering-with-vulkan.html ====== gulpahum It's great that Google Android will support Vulkan. Now, the support list seems to be: Android, Windows, SteamOS, Tizen, and many Linux distributions including Ubuntu and Red Hat. [1] It's sad that it doesn't include Apple, most likely because they have now their Metal API. [1] [http://venturebeat.com/2015/08/10/khronos-wins-support- from-...](http://venturebeat.com/2015/08/10/khronos-wins-support-from-google- android-for-its-vulkan-graphics-api/) EDIT: here's another list of hardware vendors: AMD, ARM, Intel, Imagination, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Samsung. [https://www.khronos.org/news/press/khronos-expands-scope- of-...](https://www.khronos.org/news/press/khronos-expands-scope-of-3d-open- standard-ecosystem) ------ sgrove I'd love to see a WebVulkan [0], as wrestling with WebGL's setup is really a slog to get it to work predictably in the way you want. WebGL is making progress via extensions with Uniform Buffers, instanced geometry, etc., but as most people end up using e.g. Three.js, it seems like exposing a sane, more fine-grained API would help everyone. [0] Knowing full-well that WebVulkan naturally won't magically solve any performance issues, and seems to be a very different beast [https://twitter.com/Tojiro/status/628660898756825089](https://twitter.com/Tojiro/status/628660898756825089) ~~~ gulpahum I think WebVulkan would be great with WebAssembly! The nice thing about those technologies is that they are low-level APIs, which means less rooms for bugs. WebGL, HTML, DOM, and most other web technologies suffer from not being consistent and they are full of bugs. How many graphics cards have been blacklisted from WebGL because the drivers don't have the required features or have too many bugs? [1][2] [1] [https://www.khronos.org/webgl/wiki/BlacklistsAndWhitelists](https://www.khronos.org/webgl/wiki/BlacklistsAndWhitelists) [2] [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Blocklisting/Blocked_Graphics_Drive...](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Blocklisting/Blocked_Graphics_Drivers) ------ StavrosK Can someone knowledgeable tell me if Vulkan is a good API? I've heard that OpenGL is a bit of a mess (maybe DirectX is too?), did they get it right this time? ~~~ flippinburgers Vulkan is still in development. I don't believe anything about the api is published yet. ~~~ caligastia But you can check out the SPIR-V IR spec which is almost finished: [https://www.khronos.org/registry/spir-v/](https://www.khronos.org/registry/spir-v/) Not only the Vulkan API but new programming languages will target this IR, so far it appears to be an innovative architecture for concurrent software, that integrates graphics and compute, not a bolt-on like OpenCL.

Dress to Profess: What Should Scientists Wear? - jawns http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2014_04_24/caredit.a1400104 ====== tedsanders I'm a scientist. I'm at conference this second, in fact. Plenty of people are wearing suits. Also, lab coats in lab make sense. You don't to spill acids or solvents on an expensive suit. You also want to be mobileoso you can reach into hard to access machines and spaces. A suit is not practical for mobility. ~~~ chrisBob Conferences are completely different. At a conference there is a 50% chance I will wear a suit, but back at work on a regular day I am in jeans and a T-shirt which makes me _very slightly_ underdressed compared to my peers. A conference is more similar to a job interview which is the one time that even scientists get dressed up.

Arch Linux – Best Distro Ever? (Update with Pacaur and Linux-Zen) - akitaonrails http://www.akitaonrails.com/2017/01/10/arch-linux-best-distro-ever ====== ake1 I love arch and would be using it if my hardware worked better out of the box. Having to tinker with blacklisted drivers and manual pulseaudio configuration is only fun the first couple of times. Nowadays I just install xubuntu and add bspwm on top and everything works.

MIT Fellow Says Facebook ‘Lifted’ His Ideas for Libra Cryptocurrency - espeed https://www.coindesk.com/mit-fellow-accuses-facebook-of-lifting-his-ideas-for-libra-cryptocurrency ====== paulsutter Oh come on, neither a basket of commodities nor a basket of currencies are original ideas. During the security token craze of 2017/2018 many similar ideas were proposed and we don’t see those folks whining about Libra. One example was a local currency based on a basket of goods such as real estate so that employers could pay a salary that adjusted as rents and other costs changed locally. Hundreds of these ideas were discussed freely in telegram groups. The article is just outrage porn. ~~~ blhack Hey that’s actually a great idea. ------ cameldrv Please. Even I had this idea in 2012 and I got it from being a user of Chaum’s digicash in the nineties and understanding parts of how the IMF works, etc. I even helped (not successfully) launch it in 2013. These ideas have been around for a good while by many people, it’s just that crypto is mainstream enough and facebook has enough clout now to take it seriously. If facebook ripped off anyone it was John Maynard Keynes. That’s not to say that it is even that good of an idea or that facebook will be successful with it. ------ vitno I know people who were working on, what is now called, Libra at FB more than a year ago though. The paper was published a year ago. This just looks like a case of multiple people having the same idea. ~~~ yodaml It may just be another case of the "adjacent possible" principle at work. ~~~ TeMPOraL "Adjacent possible" is the case of one of the weirdest possible definition for a very simple concept. I see people quoting this: "The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself." (Whatever the hell that means.) Even though the concept is much simpler: "adjacent possible" is the set of things within reach. Or: all the things on the border between what we have, and what we could have. ------ ejwessel In science, the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to whom the idea first occurs. \- Francis Darwin. ------ BubRoss This is just like when Google stole my idea to run fiber optic internet to people's houses. I totally had that idea a long time ago when I was trying to download a gif with a 28.8 modem. I'm not sure which of the neighborhood kids told Google about my idea but they sure screwed me over. ~~~ jboles Yeah, I once had an idea for auto-scrolling based off tracking eye gaze through the webcam. I never told Microsoft or Samsung about it, but they totally stole my idea!!1eleventyone ~~~ dmihal Even worse: Google stole my idea for self driving cars. I was like " it would be cool if cars drove themselves" and sure enough, Google copies me. Do you think I have grounds for a lawsuit? ------ rdl The idea of a market-basket currency goes back to at least 1976 and Hayek. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denationalization_of_Money](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denationalization_of_Money) ~~~ m-i-l The idea of a supranational currency goes back to at least 1940 and Keynes - see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bancor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bancor) . ------ anbop MIT is supposed to create ideas that are “lifted” by others. Produce your patent or shut up. ------ compsciphd cry me a river. It happens Docker did the same thing to me. Compare these two papers (published in 2010 and 2011 in conferences that docker and everyone else in the space are regular participants at, for reference Docker was announced in March 2013) [https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/atc10/tech/full_papers/P...](https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/atc10/tech/full_papers/Potter.pdf) [https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/lisa11/tech/full_papers...](https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/lisa11/tech/full_papers/Potter.pdf) It was then patented (patent filed in 2011, issued in November 2013) [https://patents.google.com/patent/US8589947B2/en](https://patents.google.com/patent/US8589947B2/en) This was also my "job talk" to IBM Research and it got me a post doc, but didn't get much traction in support of continuing to pursue / refine the ideas within IBM Research (which I find sort of ironic in retrospect with their recent strategic moves) ------ Animats It's certainly not a novel idea. Arguably, it's "E-Gold 2.0".[1] [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-gold](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-gold) ------ codegladiator > this paper was published as part of this free-for-all part of the Free > Science part of the Royal Society effort But but ... can facebook not "lift for free" ? ------ quotemstr Nobody owns ideas. ~~~ csallen If only more people understood this. Not only does nobody own an idea, but we really don't want to live in a world where the opposite is true. ~~~ allana Right to Read is a good piece on this topic: [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to- read.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html) ------ 0xC0FFEE The paper was published 18 July 2018. The public inital commit of libra was on 18 June 2019 and had 1,063 changed files. That could be a coincidence or not. Fact is, only one has realized the idea. ------ xwdv No sympathy for this guy at all. Think just because you’re an “MIT fellow” your claims to an idea carry more weight than people from other institutions or organizations? Get out of here with this entitlement, tons of people come up with exactly the same ideas all the time. ~~~ gibba999 Plus, 9 times out of 10, it's the MIT types who lift ideas from others and promote them with MIT's increasingly well-polished hype machine. Within MIT, Media Lab is central to this problem. ------ malicioususer11 mark zuckerberg stole something? call the Police! :3 ------ doctorpangloss Facebook's faithful copying is the large tech corp _standard operating procedure_. Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple will start product lines based on accurate rumors about what the others are doing, and then cancel them as soon as their competitors do. This form of "copy thy neighbor" just happened with something like three major R&D products/features, one of which was cancelled and another leaked in the tech press. Sandy Pentland cares a lot about these things and it's too bad Facebook just ripped this stuff off. But he will have the last laugh: People already don't want to work at Facebook. It didn't matter so much that all those supposedly smart people aren't really capable of meaningful innovation. There will be a lot fewer of those smart people now. ~~~ skybrian Which products/features do you mean? ~~~ petre Google+? Personal assistants? Self driving vehicles? Cargo drones?

This Week in HN podcast – our first episode - ThatMightBePaul https://soundcloud.com/thatmightbepaul/this-week-in-hacker-news ====== jaywunder You guys really need better quality microphones. I appreciate the idea that you have, and I think you're generally a funny bunch, but I can't hear what you're saying if your laughing overcomes that one quiet guy's audio. Other suggestions would be to introduce yourselves at the start, and keep topicality more. I enjoyed listening though!

Windows 10 marks the end of 'pay once, use forever' software - aceperry http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/31/rising_and_ongoing_cost_of_windows/ ====== chmike I have my finger hanging over the mouse button ready to click install Ubuntu. I'm not a cash cow waiting to be milked. ~~~ Rockdtben I will be switching to Ubuntu as well. I have encouraged my friends to do the same. ------ teaneedz What will Microsoft be doing a year from now in regards to pricing and services? This really requires some clarity, because so far Win10 is not looking good from a privacy perspective IMO. It's not easy to recommend an upgrade right now with so much unanswered questions regarding data usage and price roadmap. What is their strategy after the first year? ~~~ matthewarkin Pricing for Windows 10 has been announced, $110 for Home and $199 for Pro. You have 1 year to upgrade for free, then you have a license for Windows 10 forever for that machine and you'll be supported for the lifetime of that device (as defined by Microsoft). If you don't upgrade within that year then you'd have to pay for the upgrade.

We are starting WebKit modularization - robin_reala http://markmail.org/thread/fkiibwrwv3xporxx ====== dhx _> We hope this will make it much easier to develop vendor-specific features._ DRM[1]? Flash/"ActiveX 2012"[2]? We've seen a great deal of recent discussion about the harm vendor-specific CSS properties[3] and X- prefixed application protocol header fields[4] are causing. No two parties can agree on proposals for the HTML specification. Microsoft, Google, Apple and Mozilla all tend to disagree and we're stuck with vendor-specific browser features. These are not good signs for the health of the Web. [1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3620432> [2] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3620537> [3] [http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www- style/2012Feb/0998.h...](http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www- style/2012Feb/0998.html) [4] <http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-appsawg-xdash-03>

Ask HN: Looking for few testers for my website & associated open-source darknet? - mikeliu8 I'm a dual-class programmer/lawyer who's decided to use my powers for good. I've made an open-source system to let you copy/lend/share files and media privately with friends. It plugs into a site where you can add friends and recommend stuff to them.<p>The website is called LibraryMixer. The open-source system is called the Mixologist.<p>Many have tried before to create software that builds darknets (decentralized, private networks that connect only to your friends). However, darknets have a lot of difficulties that have kept them from being user-friendly enough to gain traction.<p>I've designed a hybrid system where basic, non-sensitive information such as friends lists are handled through the website, and adding friends or notifying them of your activity is as easy as using Facebook, while all of the communications and file transfers over the Mixologist are direct, encrypted P2P connections and still fully decentralized and private.<p>The real benefits emerge when you add reviews and lists of what you have or want on Librarymixer, highlighting them for your friends. The world of media is oversaturated with interesting stuff out there, making the problem not how you should get stuff you want, but how you should find the wheat among the chaff. When used together, LibraryMixer and the Mixologist offer the integrated experience of recommending music or videos or books to your friends via your reviews, and if they're interested, the ability to immediately ask to get those from you using the Mixologist via a single click on LibraryMixer.<p>It's also possible to just drag-and-drop entire folders on your computer into the Mixologist, which your friends can then browse. Or, if you're purely interested in the media reviews and listings, LibraryMixer itself is a fully functional, independent website, and you don't even have to install or use the Mixologist at all.<p>Unlike past P2P file sharing services that have realistically only had minimal non-copyright infringing uses, this system provides a whole range of other functionality besides just sending copies of files, such as lending and borrowing files, responding with automatic messages (think: "Got your request, will bring it next time I see you."), privately browsing and downloading from your friends' personal collections such as their photos, etc. In this sense, like GMail or instant messengers that are neutral tools, it makes it possible to treat users as adults and place the responsibility of staying within legal limits on the users of the tool. In other words, like back when we had VCRs (if you guys still remember what those are), the VCR had the capacity to record ten thousand copies of that Blockbuster video tape you rented, but at the end of the day, it was only you that prevented yourself from doing that.<p>I'm hoping for a small group of tech-savvy volunteers to help test this before I launch. Testers would add each other as friends on LibraryMixer and also use the Mixologist for a week or so to give me some honest, substantive feedback.<p>If this goes anywhere at all in the future, you'll be sure to get some sort of special recognition for helping alpha test.<p>I'd be super grateful if any of you would be willing to help out, and I can set you up with an account if you email me at mikeliu@librarymixer.com. ====== nyellin Remove your html tags and add double lines for newlines. ~~~ mikeliu8 Thanks, fixed.

Why Startups Really Succeed: Strings of Luck - dennybritz http://blog.dennybritz.com/2015/09/13/why-startups-really-succeed/ ====== SQL2219 I agree, unicorn founders are not a bazillion times smarter than the rest of us, maybe 1.05X smarter and 10,000X luckier. But what is the formula for luck? Do we have some minor control over that? I think I read somewhere that luck=opportunity + preparation. Preparation we have control over, but we must be preparing for the right thing. I guess we have some control over opportunity, which might include building your network and getting out of the basement once in a while. ~~~ dennybritz Good question. The problem with "luck" is that you only know what's good or bad in hindsight. For example, if Google had been acquired for $1M the founders may have lived happily every after. Only in hindsight we can say that it was lucky the deal fell through. So I guess it'd be better to call them "random events" instead of "luck". ~~~ dkersten I do believe that we can influence our luck (increase or decrease the likelihood of said random events) but I think some people are better at capitalising on random events than others. But despite our influences or skills at making use of these things, at some point random chance does take over and we have no control over that. All we can do is influence the probability of random events, not control them completely.

Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums - ch_123 https://www.anandtech.com/show/13924/intel-to-discontinue-itanium-9700-kittson-processor-the-last-itaniums ====== q3k Mixed feelings. On the one hand, Itanium (as a platform) was batshit insane, impossible to write good compilers for and the pinnacle of Intel overengineering. Good riddance. On the other hand, Itanium was ugly, but had its charm and uniqueness. Itanium is what EFI was first developed for. Itanium is where the C++ ABI got started. Itanium being discontinued further reduces mainstream CPUs to the most boring, safe designs possible: IA32/amd64. ARM was kinda quirky (conditional execution, barrel shifter), but those were slowly neutered (by introducing Thumb), and then totally thrown out of the window with aarch64. SPARC is dead. PA-RISC is dead. RISC-V is new and promising, but is also the most pragmatic and safe design of an ISA ever. The Mill CPU is interesting, but is underfunded and I don't think it will ever be taped out. Similar as with OS research (think: Solaris, Plan9/Inferno), researchy and experimental CPU ISAs seem to be a thing of the past now. ~~~ pcwalton x86-64 is anything but "boring" and "safe". :) Real mode, Mod R/M and SIB byte encoding weirdness, REX prefixes, 80-bit floats, parity flag, hard-wired registers for shifts/multiplies/divisions, builtin CRC32 over the wrong polynomial, Pascal calling convention support, binary-coded decimal, high halves of 16-bit registers, MMX overlap with x87 floating point, etc. etc. ~~~ q3k Right, but most of these are just past crimes^W^Wlegacy that Intel has to deal with in the name of backwards compatibility. ~~~ Klathmon >most of these are just past crimes^W^Wlegacy This is completely off topic, but I've seen things like the "^W^W" a few times before, and I don't know what it means. Is this a weird encoding mismatch thing? is it from some editor/system that people instinctively type? Is it from some other forum which has a strange markup syntax for something? ~~~ q3k Emacs/readline bindings for Delete Word. Open up a bash shell, type in `foo bar baz`, then press ctrl-W twice. '^W' is what would appear instead if you weren't in a readline/emacs editor, but instead a dumb line terminal. Thus, leaving '^W' behind makes it look like you didn't realize what you just corrected is still visible. It's a joke. I've now explained and ruined it. ~~~ bluedino Slashdot posters would use ^H^H in their posts (backspace) ~~~ lscotte It goes back way further than that - probably to the dawn of IRC or so. ~~~ pjscott I believe it dates back to the unix talk(1) program, quite a bit earlier than IRC. ~~~ TheCondor It’s from the dec terminal emulation, VT100. I think specifically when you connected to like an ansi type system with dec mode. Or something like that, the memories are fuzzy ------ chx From almost exactly ten years ago: How the Itanium Killed the Computer Industry [https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2339629,00.asp](https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2339629,00.asp) > The MIPS chip, the DEC Alpha (perhaps the fastest chip of its era), and > anything else in the pipeline were all cancelled or deemphasized. Why? > Because Itanium was the future for all computing. Why bother wasting money > on good ideas that didn't include it? > The failure of this chip to do anything more than exist as a niche processor > sealed the fate of Intel—and perhaps the entire industry, since from 1997 to > 2001 everyone waited for the messiah of chips to take us all to the next > level. > It did that all right. It took us to the next level. But we didn't know that > the next level was below us, not above. The next level was the basement, in > fact. Hopefully Intel won't come up with any more bright ideas like the > Itanium. We can't afford to excavate another level down. ~~~ ghaff I'm not sure what point Dvorak is even making in that article. Yeah, a lot of ultimately wasted effort went into Itanium. But we ended up with x86-64 plus a somewhat diminished set of CPUs from some of the big Unix vendors. It's an interesting question but I'm ultimately not sure that the computer industry would look all that different today had Intel just done 64-bit extensions to x86 or something similarly evolutionary. AMD might well not exist. But, except for HP, the big Unix vendors mostly hedged their bets anyway. The large Japanese companies who also backed Itanium never were going to make the investments to break out beyond Japan. ~~~ codinger X86-64/AMD64 was solely developed by AMD and licensed to Intel. I'm stating this because I can't tell what you mean by: "wasted effort went into Itanium. But we ended up with x86-64" ~~~ ghaff Intel was independently developing 64-bit extensions under the code name Yamhill. I know there some legal settlements around the time so they may have cross-licensed technology. AMD came out first but Intel had much the same thing in its back pocket. What I last statement meant was we ended up by an industry dominated by 64-bit x86 anyway in spite of all the effort that went into an alternative 64-bit architecture. So we’d probably be in a similar place had Intel just decided Itanium was a bad idea from the start. ~~~ chx What ...? Yamhill was an _answer_ to AMD64. The first rumors appeared in 2002 where AMD announced AMD64 in 1999, released the full specs in 2000 and actually shipped the first Opteron CPU in 2003 April, Intel shipped the Nocona in June 2004. This trailing remained for a while -- LAHF/SAHF in 64 bit was shipped in March 2005 by AMD but only December 2005 by Intel. ~~~ ghaff Well sure. Intel much preferred Itanium to succeed. Absent AMD, it’s possuble Itanium would have muddled through in the end. (Or something completely different would have played out.) it’s safe to say that Intel has some sort of contingency plan going back quite a while. Some analysts even thought they saw features in Pentium that suggested 64-bit readiness. But it wasn’t until Opteron’s success and its adoption by esp. HP and Dell that Intel felt they needed to make their 64 bit extensions plan public. ~~~ FullyFunctional You are correct. What people don't seem to appreciate are the internal conflicts within large organizations. There were in fact massive internal conflicts at Intel between the Itanic and the legacy. Companies that large doesn't "think with a single brain". Random aside: Itanic was HP's brainchild that was adopted and refined at Intel (and far from all of Intel was excited about that). Having experienced a VLIW that _didn't_ suck (the internal engine of Transmeta's Astro 2/Efficieon) I'm sad that EPIC/Itanic gives VLIW as bad name. However, the future belongs to RISC-V. ------ johnklos They shouldn't have killed an excellent processor (the Alpha) which already had tons of software and history and was already being used in the fastest supercomputers in the world for a product that was never (and still isn't) proven. The Itanic was never best in its class at anything. ~~~ skynetv2 agreed, Itanium investment should have gone to the Alpha. Itanium was really good at raw performance as long as you could write hand tuned math kernels or kept working with the compiler team to optimize code for your kernel. Took me a while, but I got 97% efficiency with single core DGEMM. ~~~ shereadsthenews Hand-written code for Itanium was always smoking fast. One-clock microkernel message passes and other insanity. But nobody ever figured out how to write a compiler that could generate code like that for that machine. ~~~ zamalek > nobody ever figured out how to write a compiler that could generate code > like that for that machine Were a lot of people trying? It was a pretty difficult platform to get hold of and tinker with. ~~~ shereadsthenews I’m not sure how many people, but it’s all the compiler group at HP did for the last twenty years. ~~~ Something1234 HP has a compiler group. I wasn't aware there were all that many commercial compilers still around, and I definitely wouldn't have thought of HP. ~~~ ghaff Who else do you think would have developed the compilers for HP-UX, VMS, and NonStop? ~~~ Something1234 Present tense. The GP comment was in present tense, not a long time ago. ------ leetrout The end of an era and one of the worst technology bets / choices. Every time I hear Itanium I think of SGI going under. ~~~ tyingq The original RISC/Unix players were most of my career. Pyramid MIPS/OSX, then Sparc/SunOS, AIX, PA-RISC/HPUX, Dec Ultrix followed by Alpha, etc. I remember trying to tell my co-workers that Linux would wipe it all out, shortly after AMD rolled out Opteron. Most of them chuckled. ~~~ Theodores I chuckled. Which was silly as I missed the boat with Linux until Ubuntu came along. The versions of Linux I first saw were mere toys compared to the SGI awesomeness I knew at the time. ~~~ tyingq Oh, yeah. I did not see it with early Linux, and like you, thought it was a fun toy. It was specifically the 64 bit x86 thing that caught my attention. The memory ceiling for 32 bit x86 made it easy to ignore Linux. If I remember right, Linux was also still crashing pretty regularly under load just before that time frame too. ~~~ burfog Before that time frame, PC hardware vendors had little incentive to make stable hardware. It was easy to blame crashes on Windows. If the hardware itself made a few crashes per week, that wasn't going to be enough to be noticed. The early 64-bit PC hardware was server grade, intended for NT and Linux. That set a standard, and then gradually people moved away from junk like Windows 98SE and Windows ME. Hardware bugs no longer had such an easy time hiding in a flood of software crashes. ------ tyingq So HPUX finally dies. Doesn't leave much of the original commercial RISC/Unix players still on some level of life support. I guess there's still AIX/Power. ~~~ protomyth Last I looked, they were porting HP/UX over to x86. The port came up in the whole HP vs Oracle lawsuit. ~~~ ch_123 There was talk of this, but it went away. The last suggestion I’ve read about were some kind of ‘containers’ which emulate HP-UX [https://www.pcworld.com/article/3196353/data-center/hpe- offe...](https://www.pcworld.com/article/3196353/data-center/hpe-offers-an- escape-from-the-aging-hp-ux-os-via-containers.html) [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/08/hp_ux_on_x86_projec...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/08/hp_ux_on_x86_project_kinetic/) ~~~ greglindahl Novell Netware lived on for a long time running as a VM. Doing that makes it much easier to support new hardware. ~~~ Twirrim I didn't realise Netware had finally been discontinued. That's the server OS I originally cut my teeth on, dealing with IPX/SPX based networks. ~~~ pjmlp Me too. :) We used it for a Clipper based management application. My first task was bringing back to life our school labs network, so that we could use it for that application, got to love those coaxial cable terminators. ~~~ Twirrim > got to love those coaxial cable terminators. Man. So many memories of walking around the school with a cable tester trying to find where the ring had been broken _this_ time. I was so glad to see that ring network be retired. ~~~ protomyth We are buying a new iSeries and the IBM person was very specific that the terminal we have in the server room is NOT supported anymore without some weird interface board. I was kind of sad at the thought. Even sadder knowing I'm going have to load IBM's client access software on some poor PC. ~~~ Twirrim SNA? It's super fantastic fun. Honest. I worked for an egovernment company several years ago. A state (county?) agency built a service with us, and wouldn't expose the actual database to us, just an SNA supporting interface. We were essentially scraping the data. Messy, unsanitised data. I really didn't envy the developer who looked after that particular application. ~~~ protomyth I'm pretty sure what we are getting is a renamed Client Access on a small PC we need to set in the server room. Client Access is legendary for how bad it is from installing to using. I would rather have the terminal. ------ gumby I wonder what it’s like working on Itanium over the last decade (and perhaps earlier). I can see someone joining early on when the marketing buzz was exciting and reality had not set in. But now...you’re working on a product that is widely mocked and has no future, yet releases are still being made. How depressing...what causes someone to stay on? ~~~ ghaff A lot of people have good jobs supporting and incrementally enhancing legacy products and product lines of various kinds in software, computer hardware, and in many other areas. It’s mostly a Silicon Valley concept that if you’re not working on something ground-breaking you’re wasting your life. And how many people at some of those big SV companies are mostly just working on ad tech? ~~~ gumby True, my point is that itanium itself was a laughingstock, and clearly with no future, so must have been embarrassing to talk to your friends about what you do for work. Making spare parts for the B-52, or maintaining security fixes for Solaris (which has its fanatic fans) can be rewarding, no question. But to work on the Itanium any time in the last decade must have been soul-sucking. ~~~ achiang I was an HP-UX kernel engineer from 2002 til 2005, a brief interlude writing IA64 CPU diagnostics, and then and a Linux kernel engineer from 2007 til 2010, all on Itanium systems. In that time frame, it wasn't clear that horizontal scale out architecture (aka "the cloud") was going to dominate, and that scale up systems were going the way of the mainframe. The thinking was that there would always be a healthy balance of scale out vs scale up, and btw, HP alone did $30B+ revenue yearly on scale up with very slow decline, just like the mainframe market, which is still $10B+, even today. To put that in today's terms, if you pitched a startup with a $30B TAM, VCs will definitely be returning your emails. So no, it wasn't embarrassing to talk about working on IPF any moreso than it would be to talk about POWER today. It's just another CPU architecture with some interesting properties but ultimately failed in the market place. Just like Transmeta or Lisp Machines. What _should_ be embarrassing, but clearly is not, is to slag off entire industries not knowing shit about them. Edit: I think working on B-52 parts would be an amazingly fun job. ~~~ gumby thanks. ------ ithkuil OpenVMS port to x86-64 still work in progress: [http://www.openvms.org/node/111](http://www.openvms.org/node/111) ~~~ rocky1138 I was surprised to see this so far down the comments chain. What will OpenVMS do without Itanium? ~~~ ghaff As the parent indicates they're porting it to x86-64. I've been away from following HP proprietary systems for almost 10 years but they put a plan in place quite a while ago when it became obvious that Itanium had no future. Remember that systems in this space don't need to be the latest and greatest. They need a long support roadmap but it's mostly fine if hardware is on the older side. ------ pinewurst Back in 2012, Oracle published some interesting (and IMHO amusing) internal HP documents re Intel and ongoing Itanium development. [http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/features/itanium-346707.h...](http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/features/itanium-346707.html) ------ ttul I got to work with one of the first Itanium machines back in 2000 working as an intern. My job was to port Perl to IA-64. It was an amazingly fast machine - like living a few years into the future. I can see why it failed to gain mass traction, but that’s a shame. IA-64 was so innovative. ~~~ macintux HP paid my employer (Progeny) to help port Debian packages to an early Itanium system. I don’t remember thinking it was fast _at all_ , but maybe my memory is colored by later miseries. ------ arnon It's interesting that it was actually AMD that kept the Intel x86-64 architecture alive. Intel knew that the x86 architecture was limited in time, and tried to kill it off with the the 64-bit Itanium. AMD had a different plan, and released 64-bit capable x86 processors, obstructing Intel’s plans to dominate with Itanium. I think this is key to why Itanium never caught on, and why writing software for it is so hard. ------ kijiki Itanic inspired what is unquestionably the best graph-based trolling of bullshit marketing ever: [https://regmedia.co.uk/2004/09/19/itanium_sales_small.jpg](https://regmedia.co.uk/2004/09/19/itanium_sales_small.jpg) Wikipedia has an updated version as well: [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Itanium_...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Itanium_Sales_Forecasts_edit.png) ------ InclinedPlane Itanium represents a classic case of jumping architectures and committing too soon. Any mature system represents not just the sum of a huge amount of design work but also an untold number of hours (years really) of beta testing, bug fixing, and iterative refinement. A new system may be built on a better foundation but more often than not in its immature state it will still have shortcomings until it's been through a long period of "burn-in" and bug fixing. ------ ddtaylor It's x86 all the way down. ------ baybal2 People have to admit that "Itanic" was a just name for it. ------ tapland Well, guess we'll hope for that X86 OpenVMS to be released soon then. ------ paulie_a Honestly I thought they ditched the itanic a decade ago. ------ robk Goodbye Itanic ------ hestefisk R.I.P. Itanic.

Sourcing a 3d Printer - ph0rque http://blog.reprap.org/2011/04/sourcing-3d-printer.html ====== sambeau The most exciting news from this project is that it has gone from costing $3000+ to just $400 in 3 years. If they keep innovating at that rate we could see some seriously useful kit in a few year's time. ~~~ rcamera Actually, the most exciting news from the project is that it has gone from a prototype with poor printing quality to a 3d printer of a great quality to its low cost. Not to mention that it has also inspired dozens of other printers design, including comercial ones like the Makerbot, and can easily be modified to support a lot more printing materials than just thermoplastics (you can even use it to print electronic circuits or food!). In the end, if you know what you are doing, with a couple of these you can print models as good as the ones from the expensive comercial printers.

Doom on GLium, in Rust - hansjorg https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1TjWba0CR9RHFm47rvW1nFUlmouaR55Xt235aHyLPf9U/edit#slide=id.p ====== outworlder Are my perceptions clouded from being inside the Hacker News echo chamber, or is Rust really picking up steam really fast? It seems to have more libraries and the ones it has are more advanced than what would be expected from a language this young. ~~~ swah [http://arewewebyet.com/](http://arewewebyet.com/) I always look for a SQL driver, and _then_ if it has connection pool support. If a language passes this second test, the language is ready ;) ~~~ killercup So, rust is ready? There are multiple database drivers and there is at least one crate for connection pools (r2d2) that also works with diesel (query builder). ------ xvilka Same user (tomaka) also wrote Rust bindings for Vulcan API - vulcano[1], which obviously can be used for creating modern games. [1] [https://github.com/tomaka/vulkano](https://github.com/tomaka/vulkano) ------ devishard God, Google Docs is really horrible for non-documents. They literally just scroll me way too fast through content when I try to go to the next slide, and worse, they hack my back button so that each slide is a new page, meaning I basically have to open a new tab. It's also bad for images; for some reason they thought the scroll wheel should zoom in and out instead of scroll, and the only way to scroll is to click and drag. It's like their UI devs are on crack. ~~~ bitmapbrother I don't have this issue in Chrome, but you can always use the arrow keys if your mouse is having issues. As for the back button - works fine for me and takes me to the previous slide. You can even download it as a PDF or Powerpoint if you like. ~~~ debaserab2 Ugh, the last thing I want is for my browser back button to be hijacked by a slideshow presentation. Help, I'm stuck in a powerpoint. ~~~ tracker1 If you think of each slide as a separate page, as some do, it makes sense. ~~~ debaserab2 I just wish there was a way to opt-in to it first. My instinct when I hit the site was to use my mousewheel to scroll down, because I didn't immediately realize it was a slide deck. So my mousewheel advanced the deck about a dozen slides and wrecked my back button. ------ vvanders +1 on glium as I've previously mentioned here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11620852](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11620852) As someone who spends a lot of time in OpenGL it's a really solid, rusty API that's quite a joy to work with. ------ Keyframe It says "Glium: Multi-threading... Send + Sync + Context Management (means it can be done)". Can someone explain a bit about this? I'm not familiar with Rust, but with C you have to run GL calls from one and the same thread or you're gonna have a bad day. Bonus question: Anyone that was/is C programmer (not C++) with opinions on Rust? ~~~ vvanders There's more details in the presenter notes: >I won’t get into much detail about threading, but imagine how the OpenGL skynet-state-machine interacts with multiple threads. GLium ensures only a thread-specific OpenGL context is used on any particular thread. >By making everything neither Send nor Sync, it prevents you from using resources created by one thread in another, enforcing OpenGL semantics at compile-time. Basically any type without Send+Sync traits will not work with existing threading APIs(since they require combinations of Send+Sync based on threading semantics) forcing API calls to be done on the right thread. ~~~ Keyframe Thanks! I was in presentation mode, for some reason, and didn't see the notes. ------ hansjorg There's more info and links in the speaker notes (on the options menu). ------ alex_duf I don't get why slides are popular. We're missing 50% of the actual content of the talk here. ~~~ lockyc I agree, but this one has the speaker notes ------ cm3 Right after slide 1 appearing, this redirects to [https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/32050](https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/32050) for me in Firefox. ~~~ Sarkie Fine for me? ~~~ cm3 It works in an unrestricted Chrome instance. I wonder if there's a Google docs downloader script that directly gives me the PDF without dealing with the wonky website. ~~~ qwertyuiop924 <rant> Google, take your browser team of the loony pills for FIVE SECONDS! Chrome isn't the only browser in the world. Having your website crash and burn one one of the most popular browsers out there that isn't yours is beyond unacceptable. Especially if you push web standards and make recommendations to other developers and sites to make their sites support all browsers. </rant>

US/UK news has been responding to Coronavirus since 2020 - massanishi https://public.tableau.com/profile/masatoshi.nishimura#!/vizhome/CoronavirusMentionedinNewsPublishers/ResponsestoCoronavirusby5MajorPublishers?publish=yes ====== massanishi I analyzed 46,601 news over the past 3 months from the major US and UK publishers (New York Times, CNN, Forbes, BBC, Guardian). It measures how often the word "coronavirus" is mentioned. The second graph shows how different countries are covered, mapped with the outbreak incidents. It demonstrates how our attention has shifted more to the virus and jumped among different countries based on the outbreak occurrences. I've used my project for the data source. If you like to visualize your reading, come check it out ([https://kaffae.com](https://kaffae.com))

The Interrobang, Symbol of WTF Culture - JamesLowell http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/07/the-interrobang-symbol-of-wtf-culture/60546/ ====== wglb Most judiciously used in discussing <http://cuiltheory.wikidot.com/what-is- cuil-theory>

Communication blackout is forcing young entrepreneurs out of Kashmir - amrrs https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/in-a-land-without-internet-how-the-communication-blackout-is-forcing-young-entrepreneurs-out-of-kashmir-valley/article30219792.ece ====== amrrs For some context on Internet Shutdown: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20701204](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20701204)

A short critique of the Khan Academy - edtechdev http://www.tonybates.ca/2012/03/14/a-short-critique-of-the-khan-academy/ ====== edtechdev There do not appear to be any instructional designers or learning scientists or faculty developers working with Khan Academy, Udacity, or Coursera. The closest is a 'course operations specialist' for Coursera: "As part of this multi-faceted role, you will train our teaching staff to produce video lectures". It's all just lecture videos. As a contrast, here are a few free, self-paced non-lecture-based courses from the Open Learning Initiative (the downside is they take millions of dollars and years to make their courses) <https://oli.web.cmu.edu/openlearning/forstudents/freecourses>

Verizon Has Never Challenged NSA, Exec Mocks Internet Companies For Doing So - opendais http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130917/17490324560/same-day-its-revealed-verizon-has-never-challenged-nsa-it-mocks-internet-companies-doing-so.shtml ====== skunkednoH2O2 How could they admit this publicly? ~~~ mschuster91 A clear case of "the company's PR rep was asleep/out of office and could not prevent the fool from talking about stuff he wasn't supposed to"

Text Recognition Simplified. Capture any text from your Mac's screen - twoperkg https://textsniper.app/ ====== twoperkg Hi HN, The idea to build TextSniper was born from my personal, trivial use-case. I was watching a YouTube video tutorial and on the video was a link I needed to paste into Terminal application. The link was quite long and the only option was to retype it. Then I thought, would not be great, if I just could draw a selection around this link on the video and turn it to typed text and then easily paste anywhere I need. No mistyping and the job is done in seconds.

“Not Safe for Brand” (NSFB) or How Reddit Will Censor Controversial Content - neverminder https://penetrate.blogspot.com/2018/01/not-safe-for-brand-nsfb-or-how-reddit.html ====== krapp I don't understand the conspiratorial language here. The premise that businesses "love leftist dogma" because it's "non-controversial" is farcical, and an API flag marking something as unsafe for advertisement isn't "censorship." The slippery slope arguments being employed by certain people in defense of "free speech" are starting to devolve into a swamp. I put free speech in quotes there because I have little doubt, judging from the site's content and my impression of the author's views, they would have no issue at all with censorship of "leftists" and their speech. ~~~ CommieBobDole One the one hand, as someone more or less on the left, I am a little concerned with the political orthodoxy I see on the left, where there's a package of "correct" ideas of varying quality, and disagreeing with or having varying levels of enthusiasm about any of them is seen as almost worse than rejecting them all entirely. On the other hand, nearly everyone I see these days who talks about being really passionate about free speech and preventing groupthink seems to be an actual goddamned neo-Nazi whose idea of free speech is the right to scream racial slurs at top volume into the faces of "libtard cucks" until they're driven out of public spaces and they can resurrect the Third Reich without interference. ~~~ existencebox I realize your statement may be slightly hyperbolic, but I want to reassure you there are many moderate/centrally leaning individuals passionate about free speech and the power of questioning any status quo as a tool to seek truth. (obviously not as many as I might desire, but...) This _cannot_ be an issue that only becomes provenance of the worst kinds, because then it becomes easy to dismiss. One need only be a student of history to see the importance of the above for _breaking_ oppression and tyranny. (Sorry, not to distract from the OP and the primary discussion, I just felt strongly enough about the above statement to wave a "I promise we're out here" flag.) ------ CommieBobDole This is literally a flag for "this thing is uncontroversial enough that we can display ads on it without the advertiser complaining". I don't see how this is a problem for a commercial enterprise that makes its money from advertising. I encourage anyone reading this to browse around the rest of the linked site and decide for yourself whether the authors are driven by a sincere desire to protect free speech for everyone on Reddit, or if maybe they have another agenda in mind. ------ freeone3000 So the insidious actions here are that certain subreddits are going to be manually reviewed, and marked as safe for large advertisers based on the absence of objectionable content. And reddit has yet to make a public announcement on this. Cool? Seems like a sensical approach to monetization for me. ~~~ paulddraper Choosing where to have your brand is really basic advertising stuff. \--- That said, it's a little weird to have a global NSFB tag. Safe for what brand? NRA? Ben & Jerry's? NFL? Chick-fil-a? Planned Parenthood? Hooters? Disney? Communist Party USA? It further coalesces a division between universally "acceptable, popular" and universally "unacceptable, unpopular" thoughts. ~~~ freeone3000 There is already a global "nsfw" tag (applied per-post) for users to flag content as potentially objectionable. I don't see this as a huge step beyond that conceptually, it's the same thing with a different purpose. ~~~ paulddraper But NSFW has a very well-understood definition: obscenity/gore. Obscenity is even a matter of legal interest and gets tried in court. NSFB is really, really mushy. It's a matter of marketing interest. ------ nazihunter1234 Umm ... if it wasn't already obvious, this guy is a nazi. See: "But if I tell that obvious truth about the ongoing program of genocide against my race, the white race, Liberals and respectable conservatives agree that I am a naziwhowantstokillsixmillionjews. They say they are anti-racist. What they are is anti-white." [https://penetrate.blogspot.com/2016/02/americas-race- problem...](https://penetrate.blogspot.com/2016/02/americas-race-problem.html) See also: [https://penetrate.blogspot.com/2016/02/why-europe-is- committ...](https://penetrate.blogspot.com/2016/02/why-europe-is-committing- suicide.html) [https://penetrate.blogspot.com/2010/01/racist-word- invented-...](https://penetrate.blogspot.com/2010/01/racist-word-invented-by- ussrs-leon.html) [https://penetrate.blogspot.com/2016/11/an-alt-right- search-e...](https://penetrate.blogspot.com/2016/11/an-alt-right-search- engine.html) [https://penetrate.blogspot.com/2016/10/anonymous-email-is- an...](https://penetrate.blogspot.com/2016/10/anonymous-email-is-anti- semitism-new.html) ~~~ paulddraper Where in those blog posts do you see that he is a member, ally, or ideological proponent of the National Socialist German Workers' Party? He's a nationalist, but explicitly rejects Nazism/neo-Nazism. > Why the Future of Nationalism is Far from the Mess that is "White > Nationalism" > To my mind, it's a mistake to identify as pro-white or neo-Nazi when what we > want is much simpler...That means that each nation rules itself, makes its > own rules, and does so through culture instead of the bureaucratic > governments that absorb infinite money, make crazy rules, become corrupt, > and kick down your door in the night because you said something socially > unpopular on Farcebook or Twitless. > In my view, those who want to be "pro-white" should shift to this > generalized nationalist program [https://penetrate.blogspot.com/2013/11/why-future-of- nationa...](https://penetrate.blogspot.com/2013/11/why-future-of-nationalism- is-far-from.html) EDIT: I definitely don't agree with his views; I'm just don't want HN to devolve into factless name-calling/labeling. I wouldn't call indiscriminately call anyone with far-left views "commies". We already have Reddit. ~~~ CommieBobDole Thank you for your pedantry - You are indeed correct that the author of the linked site does not appear to be a current member of a political party that ceased to exist some 70+ years ago. He or she does, however, appear to be a neo-Nazi, a white nationalist and a white supremacist. ~~~ paulddraper CommieBobDole, it's not pedantics; I simply saw his public denouncement of white nationalism/white supremacy/neo-Nazism (while still supporting general nationalism/cultural unity) and took it at face value. If you disagree, you might explain why. ~~~ CommieBobDole Here's an article from the site calling for less race-baiting because it's harmful to the public perception of white nationalism, thereby hindering white nationalists from reaching their goals: [https://penetrate.blogspot.com/2015/05/you-can-fight-for- rac...](https://penetrate.blogspot.com/2015/05/you-can-fight-for-racial- nationalism.html) Here's an article that suggests it's counterproductive to beat up gay people because again, it's unpopular, and instead advocates that they be segregated and their behavior outlawed as an unpleasant nuisance: [https://penetrate.blogspot.com/2016/03/a-word-on- homosexuals...](https://penetrate.blogspot.com/2016/03/a-word-on- homosexuals.html) Here's a link to a donation campaign being run by the organization "White Revolution" with the context that if white nationalist groups were more practical like this, the author would like them more. [https://penetrate.blogspot.com/2011/04/unbelievable-white- na...](https://penetrate.blogspot.com/2011/04/unbelievable-white-nationalists- do.html) Here is a link to a lighthearted funny meme about Anders Breivik, a neo-nazi who murdered 77 people. [https://penetrate.blogspot.com/2014/01/anders-breivik- king-o...](https://penetrate.blogspot.com/2014/01/anders-breivik-king-of-all- media.html) The general tone of the site seems to be that of a white supremacist and neo- nazi who believes that others who share his or her goals are not effective and should adopt other tactics in order to achieve their aims. If you're not able to see this, I have to question whether you've reviewed the material your commenting on, or if you're incredibly politically naive, or if perhaps your questioning is not entirely in good faith. ~~~ true_religion So the author is calling for less violence against minorities, wants to remove racist language from public discourse, but he must still be racist because he does not totally condemn racists who happen to want the same goals as he does? Not criticizing, I just want to know if this is a fair assessment. I do not know how I feel about this in general, but in specific, his short term goal of reducing violence makes him a more tollerable enemy. ~~~ krapp > but he must still be racist because he does not totally condemn racists who > happen to want the same goals as he does? Yes, because those goals are racist. He's racist because of his belief in and support for white nationalism and racial segregation, and the genetic and cultural superiority of the white race, and his definition of "western civilization" in purely (pun intended) racial terms. He's racist because he views the presence of non-white people as a form of pollution and believes in racist conspiracy theories like white genocide. Being racist and civil is still being racist. ~~~ paulddraper I'm not sure "genetic superiority" is in his list of claims. But in any case, going back to the original point, there's some real muddling of terminology here. Racist != Nazi My great grandmother was racist. Woodrow Wilson was racist. Neither one was a Nazi. ~~~ krapp >My great grandmother was racist. Woodrow Wilson was racist. Neither one was a Nazi. Fair enough. Racist but not full Nazi. ------ notatoad The mix of conspiracy theory and condescension in this article is really obnoxious. ------ John_KZ Reddit has already devolved into a forum for 15 year olds to post nonsense jokes. Those of us who knew how reddit used to be and still occasionally visit tend to stay away from the main subs and visit for very specific reasons. We should make another forum-aggregator to replace reddit and it's terrible moderation system, but it probably just won't get big enough. ~~~ Finch2193 I have been patiently waiting for an alternative to Reddit. In this time, I have been reading books, and hacker news. Going back to Reddit feels like an extreme regression. Should I give up on the hope that one day we'll see another, better Reddit? Digg died when they redesigned their site, I was hoping we'd see the same thing with reddit, rinse and repeat... ~~~ elektor There is an offshoot of Reddit that I frequent and enjoy, it was made by a former Reddit dev: [https://blog.tildes.net/announcing- tildes](https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes) I've got 2 more invites for those are that interested.

Time to Get Past Facebook and Invent a New Future - ryandvm http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/12/04/the-jig-is-up-time-to-get-past-facebook-and-invent-a-new-future/256046/ ====== AznHisoka Yes, it's time invent a Matrix, and finally make humans immortal. That's the next killer app. No more prettified digital pixels, please.

PostgreSQL Monitoring Cheatsheet - websec http://russ.garrett.co.uk/2015/10/02/postgres-monitoring-cheatsheet/ ====== dijit Reddit discussion; [https://www.reddit.com/r/PostgreSQL/comments/3nhcnh/postgres...](https://www.reddit.com/r/PostgreSQL/comments/3nhcnh/postgresql_monitoring_cheatsheet/) I actually met the author before, he's a nice guy and a good sysadmin- I'm glad he incorporated feedback from reddit (even if he was downvoted).

Graceful Athiest – What If I Grant You That? (2016) - logicprog https://gracefulatheist.wordpress.com/2016/11/26/what-if-i-grant-you-that/ ====== logicprog I'm a Christian but this is a particularly well thought out and fair anti- apologetic piece. I thought it would be interesting to see what HN thought of it (as a long-time lurker :) ------ microwavecamera In fairness of disclosure I'm not a Christian or an Atheist but I think it's ironic every Atheist's argument I've read so far uses the exact same dubious logic, unscientific reasoning and cherry picking of facts that they criticize Christians for. ~~~ diehunde argument for what? ~~~ microwavecamera Check out the article. ~~~ diehunde I did but you said every atheist, not the author. So what argument are you talking about ~~~ microwavecamera I did not say every Atheist. I said every Atheist's arguments I've read so far which, so far, fall victim to the same logical fallacies they argue against. I'll try cover some of the broader points I keep seeing repeated without writing a book here. 1\. Assuming all Christians believe the same thing. I'm Irish-American, my father's side of the family are Catholic and my mother side are Protestant. I can tell you from first hand experience "Christians" don't agree on crap when it comes to Christianity. And the author leaves a telling clue to this towards the end when they mention most of their experience is with Evangelicalism. The Evangelicals are a small minority among Christians worldwide, and most mainstream Christians think Evangelicalism is way out in left field. The author makes no effort to address this issue but instead builds their arguments off assumptive axioms without explanation or clarification. 2\. Christians aren't the only people who believe in the Biblical "god" The author again homes in on specific cherry picked tenants of Christianity, specifically the question of the divinity of Jesus, as an argument against the existence of God. Jews and Muslims don't share that belief. Hell, not even all Christians agree on this point. In fact, the first schism of early Christian church was over the question of the divinity of Jesus. Why is this never addressed? 3\. Skepticism = Science This is another common fallacy I keep coming across. Skepticism itself is inherently unscientific and attempting to contort science to fit an opinion is equally unscientific. 4\. Science is an opposing view to belief in "God" The author attempts to make this same core argument I see used repeatedly. That belief in "God" comes from ignorance of science and rejection of rational thought therefor believing in "God" is unscientific and irrational. This argument is just illogical. If this were true, we should be able to deduce that most scientist are also Atheists but we know that's simply not true. Even Einstein believed in God. One doesn't negate the other. Again this is never addressed. ..... You'll have to excuse me if that was disjointed and doesn't cover everything. That's off the top of my head, I wasn't expecting to get into this today. And look, as I mentioned before, I'm not a Christian or an Atheist and if you're an Atheist, that's fine. I'm not criticizing you for what you think or believe, but as an outside observer, I don't see much difference in the arguments the author makes and the particular "Christians" they single out to refute. ~~~ diehunde That's fine. But you know, Einstein didn't believe in god. That is a lie spread out by Christians probably to refute the same point you're trying to make. Also most of the modern scientists (the ones that know or knew about big bang, evolution, etc) also don't believe in god. I bet they don't even call themselves atheists. Today we are reaching a post-theistic stage in which people don't want to waste their time thinking in religion or stuff like that. I personally hate the "atheist" title. Is ridiculous, just like it would be ridiculous to have a name for someone who doesn't believe in ghosts or goblins. Finally, any serious person that knows about science and philosophy of science knows that religion and science have nothing to do with each other. You can perfectly be both. What you can't do, is call yourself a person of science, and don't accept scientific evidence for something that was scientifically measured. ~~~ microwavecamera > Einstein didn't believe in god. "I am not an atheist" \- Albert Einstein > Also most of the modern scientists (the ones that know or knew about big > bang, evolution, etc) also don't believe in god. Who? Research it, their views pretty much run the gamut like anyone else's. For example: "Although I am now convinced that scientific truth is unassailable in its own field, I have never found it possible to dismiss the content of religious thinking as simply part of an outmoded phase in the consciousness of mankind, a part we shall have to give up from now on. Thus in the course of my life I have repeatedly been compelled to ponder on the relationship of these two regions of thought, for I have never been able to doubt the reality of that to which they point." \- Werner Heisenberg Pascual Jordan was Christian, Enrico Fermi was Agnostic, Max Born was a Jewish Lutheran but was just completely apathetic to organized religion while Niels Bohr, Richard Feynman and John Bell were self avowed Atheists. Schrödinger called himself an Atheist but had a strong affinity for Eastern spiritually and Oppenheimer was into Hinduism. And if you want to get into some _really_ weird stuff, look up Jack Parsons, founder of JPL at NASA. Scientists are just people like the rest of us and grapple with the same questions in life all of us do.

Love Is All You Need: Insights from the Grant Study - dankohn1 http://www.artofmanliness.com/2014/09/02/love-is-all-you-need-insights-from-the-longest-longitudinal-study-on-men-ever-conducted/ ====== lutusp A classic psychology study -- it discovers traits that successful, mentally healthy people have in common, but without being able to explain _why_ those traits might be important, or uncover any cause-effect relationships that might exist. Not having an explanation, only a description, means that the detected traits are mere correlations, neither causes nor effects. Like most such studies, the conclusion is that people are happy because they're in relationships -- or is it that people are in relationships because they're happy? Or is it that an unexamined variable, such as one or more genetic traits, produces a person who is both happy and in a relationship? Psychology can't tell us. But it can certainly pretend to. This is why work that relies only on description isn't science. _Science requires testable, falsifiable explanations_. Further reading: [http://arachnoid.com/science_of_mind](http://arachnoid.com/science_of_mind)

Namecoin - rfreytag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin ====== JacobAldridge At the risk of hijacking yet another cryptocurrency thread, this is an opportunity to note how valuable I believe HN to be when it highlights primary sources. Secondary sources - whether it's lazy journalism, blog-jacking, or Wikipedia, engages us here in a discussion already framed through another person's or group of people's editorial eyes. Is there no better overview of Namecoin than its Wikipedia page? ~~~ bachback [http://namecoin.info](http://namecoin.info) This is where it started: [https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1790.0](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1790.0) satoshi's comment on the matter, posted 4 days before he left the forum. "I think it would be possible for BitDNS to be a completely separate network and separate block chain, yet share CPU power with Bitcoin. The only overlap is to make it so miners can search for proof-of-work for both networks simultaneously. The networks wouldn't need any coordination. Miners would subscribe to both networks in parallel. They would scan SHA such that if they get a hit, they potentially solve both at once. A solution may be for just one of the networks if one network has a lower difficulty. I think an external miner could call getwork on both programs and combine the work. Maybe call Bitcoin, get work from it, hand it to BitDNS getwork to combine into a combined work. Instead of fragmentation, networks share and augment each other's total CPU power. This would solve the problem that if there are multiple networks, they are a danger to each other if the available CPU power gangs up on one. Instead, all networks in the world would share combined CPU power, increasing the total strength. It would make it easier for small networks to get started by tapping into a ready base of miners." "@dtvan: all 3 excellent points. 1) IP records don't need to be in the chain, just do registrar function not DNS. And CA problem solved, neat. 2) Pick one TLD, .web +1. 3) Expiration and significant renewal costs, very important." ~~~ baddox JacobAldridge asked whether there is a better overview of Namecoin than it's Wikipedia page. Having read the Wikipedia page and the Namecoin homepage you linked, I can confidently say that the former is a much more detailed and informative overview. ~~~ bachback strangely enough there are a million people who know about this project and 1-2 actually participate. it's a wiki and opensource project, so everyone in the world is free to contribute. same with bitcoin. roughly 5 active developers at the moment, working mostly in their spare time. ~~~ wcoenen Look at the list of contributors at the end of the release notes of the upcoming 0.9.0 release of the bitcoin reference client[1]. Or look at the activity of other projects, e.g. the bitcoinj google group[2]. There's a lot more than 5 people working on bitcoin. [1] [https://bitcoin.org/bin/0.9.0/test/README.txt](https://bitcoin.org/bin/0.9.0/test/README.txt) [2] [https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!forum/bitcoinj](https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!forum/bitcoinj) ~~~ bachback the number of people contributing is extremely small compared to the people who know about it/make money of it/are enthusiastic about it/could contribute. There is not a deep bench of developers. Many open issues which don't get solved because the 3-4 main devs (laanjw, sipa, gavin) are to busy. look at coinbase: they get rich of it, take 1% fees and add nothing back whatsoever. ------ Sanddancer I like the idea of namecoin -- uncensorability is pretty cool from a technological standpoint -- however the other flaws of bitcoin make me wary of basing any sort of serious DNS replacement on it. Given that there's no plans to increase the number of namecoins in circulation, and that creating a domain by its very definition destroys namecoins, that 50nmc cost to buy a domain becomes increasingly expensive over time as people buy namecoins, peoples' wallets get lost, fraud occurs, etc. I'd be more interested if they did something like dogecoin and reated some sort of inflationary method to counteract this, so that we don't end up with the same mess DNS is in, only with slightly different bad actors. ~~~ walden42 Namecoin is not controlled by anyone in particular. If it grows in demand and people want the inflationary feature (or anything else), it will be implemented by the network. ~~~ bachback no, money supply is fixed. changing money supply like doge did is possible, but risks destroying the network. ~~~ kushti Money supply is fixed but prices for database record insertion/update could be changed painlessly. ~~~ sillysaurus3 If the money supply is fixed, then people will have a harder time acquiring namecoin after all the namecoin is generated. People will have to buy it, and since it's a scarce resource, it may become extremely expensive. Especially if namecoin exploded in popularity. I suppose if it becomes expensive then the namecoin admins could lower the cost of database inserts/updates. But it seems like that would prompt the price per namecoin to rise accordingly, because the value of namecoin is a single database insert or update. ------ thefreeman I'm confused as to why this is suddenly at the top of HN? Were people not aware of one of the original "alt" cryptocurrencies? ~~~ bachback silicon valley found out about it. several tweets of major figures last week. ~~~ based2 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7401999](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7401999) ------ al2o3cr "On October 15, 2013, a major flaw in the namecoin protocol was revealed by the Kraken exchange COO, Michael Grønager. The exploit allowed any user to freely steal any domain from any other user.[34] A temporary fix was deployed which prevents fraudulent name transactions from affecting the name database without requiring miner intervention, and a long-term fix which rejects blocks containing such transactions is scheduled for block 150,000 if a majority of miners upgrade.[35]" Well, I'm sure stoked that we're building the future infrastructure of the Net on something that we're pretty sure doesn't have a ginormous security hole _anymore_... ------ FredericJ If you don't know about Namecoin here are too additional ressources you might want to check out: "OkTurtles + DNSChain" (working Namecoin + DNS implementation): [http://okturtles.com/](http://okturtles.com/) and "Providing better confidentiality and authentication on the Internet using Namecoin and MinimaLT" : [https://github.com/FredericJacobs/safeweb/blob/master/paper....](https://github.com/FredericJacobs/safeweb/blob/master/paper.pdf?raw=true) ------ bachback There are currently 1-2 developers working on Namecoin (mostly Khan, another core developer died recently). Namecoin itself has quite a few issues. The design is only the beginning. ~~~ appleflaxen Can you elaborate on the issues you allude to? The "criticism" section on wikipedia is pretty thin. ~~~ bachback well, at the moment there is not much reason to use the system. if you register a ".bit" then you have to get your users to install complicated software and in the end what you are getting is very similar to ".com". There are major benefits, which are not explored yet. rolling out a world wide nameservice is not trivial. at the moment it's not even used by the underground. onename.io is the first application I have seen. ------ teach This article has more citations per sentence than anything I have ever seen on Wikipedia. ~~~ jebus989 Citation spam is usually an attempt to prevent article deletion, especially pertinent as it's been deleted [0] and merged into bitcoin [1] in the past. [0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Namecoin) [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Namecoin_\(2nd_nomination\)) ------ jabgrabdthrow I'm working on an alternative to namecoin with the following features: * Profitable (what? profitable cryptocurrency? what?) * Powerful disincentives for squatting * Lots of funding for the project, which means we can actually push towards critical-mass adoption More will be available at domains.bitshares.org within ~2 weeks. ~~~ rictic Count me as interested. I've been trying to think of a distributed solution to squatting and fraud but I've had very little luck coming up with anything workable. ------ rumcajz I don't get why it doesn't use bitcoin's block chain. That would give it a strong existing infrastructure of users, miners etc. This way it is on its own. ~~~ aaron-lebo The Bitcoin devs don't really want the blockchain used for non-financial transactions. If makes sense if you think about it. The current BTC blockchain is gigabytes of data. Add text information to every transaction and you are adding even more bloat. ~~~ baddox Do you have a source for that claim? The official Bitcoin wiki certainly talks about non-financial uses of Bitcoin, and Script obviously makes such uses possible. ~~~ aaron-lebo Well, I remember reading something like that once, so it must be true. ;) In all seriousness, I did some Googling and the closest I can find is this: "One final reason is that Satoshi was opposed to putting non-Bitcoin related data into the main chain. As creator of the system, his opinion should carry a lot of weight with anyone serious about extending it." [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Alternative_chain](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Alternative_chain) I realize that is close to being useless, but I can't find the direct post in question by Satoshi that it is referencing. I seem to recall it not being Satoshi, however, but one of the current devs that I read a similar sentiment from. But again, I don't have any direct links. I apologize. ------ kushti I'm interesting in developing services on top of Namecoin / other p2p more- than-currencies (MasterCoin/Ethereum?). Please mail me (kushtech [at] yahoo (dot) com) if you want to discuss related things or join me. I'm Scala/Java/etc developer myself / entrepreneur also in past and future. ~~~ iterationx You might be interested in learning about Twister, decentralized microblogging (twitter) [http://twister.net.co/](http://twister.net.co/) ~~~ thisiswrong I can't believe how potentially disruptive Twister is! Haha and I love its system of mining for promoted tweets. As I have always said, bitcoin (the invention) means the end of FB, Twitter, and all similar centralized corporate entities. ------ mm0 keep pumping it op ------ RexRollman "Namecoin is a cryptocurrency which also acts as an alternative, decentralized DNS" So, finally, a cryptocurrency which serves a purpose aside from filling up HN's article listing. Cool. ~~~ atmosx The bitcoin protocol is an extremely important advancement as it solved the double spending[1] problem and can be used for all sorts of interesting community and business applications. Especially for systems used by organizations (e.g. DNS) that need to be public, uncensored and accessible from everyone (institutions, countries and individuals). Here are just a few ideas: [http://www.convalesco.org/#31](http://www.convalesco.org/#31) [1] [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Double- spending](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Double-spending)

Could There Be More To Google, Android, Chrome, & Gears Than Meets The Eye? - robg http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/09/could_there_be.html ====== bouncingsoul _My guess is that Google sees an offline technology like Gears as being so fundamental to the future of Web applications, that it can't not be built into the browser._ Unless that offline technology is based on the HTML 5 client-side storage recommendation and isn't named Gears. In that case it should be ripped out and replaced with Gears. ~~~ peregrine Google doesn't care that you use gears or not. They want you to use the internet to get to it. If your on the internet chances are your seeing their ads. ------ shutter Developers don't want to have to develop for multiple platforms. There are two ways to solve that: Either develop for a platform which has a monopoly share, or develop cross-platform. Web Applications' ability to work on every platform, combined with an increasing feature-set (thanks to Gears), makes it a very viable platform. The web is Google's domain: The better the web stack works in all platforms (including mobile), the better chance they'll have to beat out Microsoft, Apple, and all the rest. ------ vbhtngr I would add Google App Engine to the list and see it a direct competitor to Microsoft's Live Mesh.

Tag Clouds For Every App Store Category - dbachelder http://bustedloop.com/blog/2009/7/2/iphone-app-tag-clouds.html ====== andrewljohnson This is kind of fun to look at, but I wish tag clouds would die the innocuous death they deserve. They are basically a useless, and worse a distracting, UI element. If you have a tag cloud on your blog, you're not doing yourself any favors. ~~~ joshu I blame flickr. ------ jfno67 What would be nice now is a tag cloud of all the search the app store is getting... ------ pclark they missed the news category.. ~~~ dbachelder Nice catch. It's up there now. Thanks!

Why My MOOC Is Not Built on Video - minthd https://www.class-central.com/report/why-my-mooc-is-not-built-on-video/ ====== trisreed It's all well and good to be able to use IPython notebooks for math and CS related MOOC's, but I think it's a lot harder to translate practical activities from other fields online - I guess interactive features will be the best bet in this regard.

Project to Run RTL-SDR Dongle with Microcontroller Host - fallingmeat https://fallingnate.svbtle.com/portable-rtl2832-usb-dongle ====== fallingmeat I started this project a while back and am just now releasing the results piecemeal. If anyone has experience running SDR DSP operations on an MCU, I'd be very interested to hear about it! So far, this seems very feasible for at least small-ish bandwidth applications (ie ~100 KHz) and simple modulation schemes. Looking forward to pushing the limits of ~450DMIPS processor...

Merb ♡ Rails - qhoxie http://merbist.com/2008/12/02/merb-loves-rails/ ====== Locke Yes, it's clear that Rails blazed the path for Merb. At the same time, the Rails people really shouldn't be surprised (or feel badly) that their "opinionated software" has created a market for flexible, agnostic software. Both projects are great, and will probably appeal to different sets of developers. In a lot of ways I think of it like the dynamic between Python and Ruby. Both are excellent languages with very similar capabilities, yet they appeal to different developers. It's like there's an element of personality in there, and there's nothing wrong with that. ~~~ jamesbritt " In a lot of ways I think of it like the dynamic between Python and Ruby." I see more of that in the contrast of how Ramaze (and, previously, Nitro) approaches things and how it is with Rails/Merb. I've been trying to get my head around Merb, but it's still too Railszy to get me excited. Ramaze is to Merb (and Rails) as Ruby is to Python. ------ shabda And for the same reason, I use Django everyday, but I ♡ Rails. Rails, Django (and Merb, Ramaze)are not fighting each other for mindshare, but Struts and company. ------ gamache Yet another chirp from the echo chamber... ~~~ bk I will cautiously agree with that - cautiously because I don't want to become a part of it exacerbating the problem. To everybody wondering why there is such an echo chamber in the rails and (increasingly) merb communities: consultants. They all try to build a profile online to get better paid gigs (and to boost their egos). Resorting to the rules of (self-)promotion, these consultants write link-bait, (fake) flames/controversies, etc. They give noobs and hype sheep the warm feeling of "being part of something big" and enterprisey folks can point to the "wide adoption" and "active communities" around them. That does not make them great or better than other solutions technologically. (As an aside, they're still very good web dev tools, no doubt, but not the second coming of <deity of choice's son>). ------ mikeryan Anyone else notice that Ruby was actually 11th on the language list? ~~~ Locke Not that I follow it too closely, but I think Ruby _was_ in the top 10 until it slipped a few spots recently. ------ siong1987 I am a Rails. But, I am more a Ruby(Rubyist). ~~~ Herring I think you forgot the in that sentence. ------ jamesbritt "Without Rails, we would not have all the other cool Ruby frameworks" The author is delusional.