ARM founder says Softbank deal is 'sad day' for UK tech - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/business-36827769 <comment><USER2> And in Germany minister Gabriel is trying to find a European buyer, while the Chinese Midea makes offers to buy Kuka Robotics. Somehow I have the feeling that the minister doesn't realize that Midea already owns 76% of Kuka's shares.

In a global economy, is it really a risk for already global companies to be owned by someone who isn't in said company's original HQ nation? What difference does it make, given that the whole operation is already distributed over the globe?

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-02/midea- tout...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-02/midea-touts-kuka- robot-maker-deal-as-offer-hits-german-barrier-ioxs71nb)

[http://www.reuters.com/article/us-kuka-midea-group-stake- idU...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-kuka-midea-group-stake- idUSKCN0ZV0Z4)

<comment><USER3> >What difference does it make, given that the whole operation is already distributed over the globe?

It limits your potential job offers after your career as a politician.

<comment><USER4> foreigners are much more likely to hire people with local influence!

<comment><USER5> Indeed. IIRC Russians hired Gerhard Schröder for gas pipe pr...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Probably should have thought of that before he ran ARM into the ground the first time and sought foreign bailouts.

Under his leadership, "sad days" included sizable foreign investments from Olivetti, Apple and GEC.

<comment><USER7> In each of those not entirely relinquishing control.

<comment><USER8> How so if the company can be bought today without his consent?

<comment><USER9> I don't think he's been involved in the company for more than a decade[0].

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Isn't it a bit of a stretch for Hermann Houser to say ARM 'sold' 15 billion chips last year and compares ARM to Intel? Technically it was ARM licensees that sold those chips, not ARM.

Quote from the article: "The man [Hermann Hauser] who helped spin ARM Holdings out from Acorn Computers in 1990 also said the technology firm had sold 15 billion microchips in 2015, which was more than US rival Intel had sold in its history."

<comment><USER11> ARM has not sold a single chip in 2015 but 200+ partner companies that integrate ARM into theirs SoC together with quite sophisticated tech like modems, GPU's, accelerators of any kind etc. In many cases real estate taken by ARM is below 1/4 of total die area.

<comment><USER12> > real estate taken by ARM is below 1/4 of total die area

Yes, but perhaps it is the most valuable area of the die? The rest may be, for instance, taken by highly repetitive memory cells?

<comment><USER13> Most valuable? I doubt it. Each of these partners shipping major chip volumes have likely ran a cost/benefit analysis of an in-house CPU vs paying the licensing fee.

Here's a more sobering set of numbers to compare ARM and Intel on:

Intel Corporation _net income_ (2015): $11.4 billion [1]

ARM Holdings plc 2015 total assets (2016): $3.21 billion [2]

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

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

<comment><USER14> Intel is in a problematic situation though and is laying off 12,000 staff st the moment. I don't think the dollars tell the full story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Now that they got their country back, they can sell it off. :-)

Probably the lower value of the £ has probably contributed to this, or hastened it.

<comment><USER6> Turns out one of the largest corporate acquisitions in UK corporate history probably took more than a fortnight to put together.

But a weaker pound certainly makes the UK are more attractive target for investment.

<comment><USER16> > _But a weaker pound certainly makes the UK are more attractive target for > investment._

If only the UK wasn't going to leave the largest free trade group!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Interesting timing: we have the same debate rising up in France with the acquisition of Medtech (Rosa medical robots) by Zimmer Biomet [1]. CEO and founder, Bertin Nahum, said he had to sell as he couldn't find the right funding in FR/EU. Real shame and also a sad day for France (med)tech

[1][http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSFWN1A40EO](http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSFWN1A40EO)

<comment><USER18> It's simple. Europe has no money. The middle class has no savings and the investment sector is far too regulated, confined and incapable of looking at a multi-year timescale.

<comment><USER19> The investment sector is simply too conservative, for historical and cultural reasons. Regulation is mostly an excuse, a fig leaf for a spiritually-bankrupt upper class.

<comment><USER20> The English Upper Class does have a long and storied tradition of rent- seeking. If you can extract so much value out of something like housing, it's difficult to see why you would get involved in anything risky and technical.

<comment><USER21> Why is real estate investing 'rent-seeking' and buying a tech company an 'investment'?

<comment><USER22> The tech company wins or loses based on innovation (unless it goes the monopoly route, in which case it's back to rent-seeking).

Real estate is scarce, inherently exclusive by location, and limited in supply by planning law. The amount of money returned by real estate is totally out of proportion to the work involved in its maintenance.

<comment><USER23> > The amount of money returned by real estate is totally out of proportion to > the work involved in its maintenance.

And what is the work involved in building a housing unit? If you build one in most of the EU capitals today you can expect to get your investment back after 30-40 years if you rent it out. (that's why most just sell the housing unit)

Would you make an investment in a company expecting to get your investment back after 30 years? I certainly wouldn't because I want to make profit while I'm still alive.

If housing units would grow like trees without human interaction then you'd be right, but each one of them had to be built in the first place.

<comment><USER22> The returns aren't in the rent, they're in the capital gains. More gains than the stockmarket. This is why people are _buying_ the units, especially from overseas. Sometimes they're even left unlet.

<comment><USER24> FYI, the vast majority of rental real estate is owned by investment firms who buy and sell entire buildings, not people buying units.

In general capital gains in an otherwise depreciating asset are tied to outsized increases in the revenue stream that asset produces. To put it another way, the increase in value is fundamentally driven by an increase in the number of people who want to use the building or the neighborhood - it's driven by a real utilitarian value that the asset does provide, or has the potential to provide for people.

If you think that real estate always goes up in value (above inflation) I would wager you've spent most of your life in the big cities where an increasing number of people want to live. I also have some lovely properties in Buffalo and Detroit that you might be interested in.

Of course, sometimes, in a frothy market, both professional firms and random individuals speculate on real estate, looking for capital gains disconnected from any underlying fundamental increase in utilitarian value. There are plenty of half-finished subdivisions in rural Florida that show how real this phenomenon is. However, it's an aberration, and it's fundamentally unstable so it doesn't tend to last for long.

Drawing conclusions about real estate markets in general from speculative bubble conditions is similar to drawing conclusions about technology companies from day trading on the Nasdaq in 1999.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The sum almost feels low in the light of all the unicorn valuations.

<comment><USER26> And in light of MS paying $26M for a post-peak social network.

<comment><USER27> $26bn

<comment><USER28> Just to make the comparison more obvious, ARM is being sold for £24 billion (GBP) which is about $31.5 billion (USD).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> A complaint I've seen about the UK's tech scene is that it can't be like Silicon Valley because there haven't been enough acquisitions to spread the wealth and encourage further and more diverse investment. But now there's an acquisition, people are moaning :-D

<comment><USER12> That may be because the wealth is spreading elsewhere ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I would like to see some ARM chips that are competitive with x86 even if that still means they are only put in Chromebooks. The Tegra X1 is quite interesting but the dev board is too expensive for me ($599). It's kind of ironic that AMD's x86 cpus are actually the cheapest choice if you want relatively high performance because that is one of the big selling points of ARM.

<comment><USER9> > It's kind of ironic that AMD's x86 cpus are actually the cheapest choice if > you want relatively high performance because that is one of the big selling > points of ARM.

I'd disagree that that's the selling point. I'd say ARM's selling points have always been low cost and power efficiency. They have recently started trying to make inroads into the higher performance server market (with their selling point still being power efficiency), but their main market is SOCs.

That said, I'd also like to see ARM developing some higher powered chips at a lower price point, it'll be interesting to see how much they start to move into that market.

<comment><USER31> I think you meant low cost and low power, not power efficiency. In terms of computation performed per joule used, ARM isn't any better than x86, and is much worse on many workloads. They design their parts at a low power point, but they aren't terribly efficient.

<comment><USER9> Thanks, I had thought it was power efficiency, but this seems to have been the case historically, and currently only seems to apply to microcontrollers[0] (note, this is a cursory reading of a single article, please let me know if there is other information). I should probably update my information into the 21st century. :)

[0] [http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/188396-the-final-isa- show...](http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/188396-the-final-isa-showdown-is- arm-x86-or-mips-intrinsically-more-power-efficient/3)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Why a sad day? The UK has lost most of it's industrial base and the oil, that fueled the rise of the UK under Thatcher, runs out. Last thing I heard is that they want to make a free trade zone with China. So they wouldn't really need whats left of the industrial base anyway.

Probably they are trying to become an offshore business center with decent money laundering services.

</comment><comment><USER33> Can anyone express in none emotional terms what the sale means to UK business?

<comment><USER34> The UK has seen several large / important companies being taken over in recent years. In nearly all cases it has lead to a reduction in investment, value being extracted from the business and taken overseas, lowered quality, job losses, and - in some cases - the companies collapsing.

In addition, with our currency tanking, there is the speculation that our national assets are being picked up too cheaply.

<comment><USER35> How is ARM "our national asset"? It was owned by pension funds and institutions, both at home and overseas. It's now owned by a different, but also publicly traded company, which is also owned by pension funds etc etc you get the idea.

Many people work at ARM, some in Cambridge UK and some abroad. Those people - some of the smartest people I know - are still around, and even if ARM were to dramatically collapse under the new management, they would get jobs elsewhere very quickly. Perhaps they'd join start ups developing RISC-V chips, which would be a net benefit to everyone.

<comment><USER34> > How is ARM "our national asset"?

It is UK based. The profits it makes, and people it employs, have a direct effect on our national and local budgets.

It attracts high-class talent to the UK, further increasing its national importance.

The services it creates acts as an excellent advertisement for the UK's technology industry.

As you point out, many UK pensions schemes are invested in it.

Personally, I'm not entirely comfortable with the phrase "national asset" \- but that's the common term used.

> if ARM were to dramatically collapse under the new management, they would > get jobs elsewhere very quickly.

Tell that to those employed by Nokia.

<comment><USER35> None of this stuff about "national importance" moves me. If ARM was based in France then people from Cambridge UK would still be able to work there, either by moving house or remotely. For a company which is purely based on IPR and software it's completely unnecessary for the networks to be colocated. (Hardware is of course quite a bit different, but maybe that will change in future)

FWIW I work, from home in the UK, for a multinational software company which is largely based in the US.

<comment><USER36> > If ARM was based in France then people from Cambridge UK would still be able > to work there, either by moving house or remotely. //

People may not be able to work in France after Britain leaves the EU so a company relying on moving those people would be on shaky ground at the moment.

<comment><USER35> That's merely another reason why Brexit is such a bad idea.

My point is why is ARM a "UK national asset" when if it were located only about 200 miles away it could be a "French national asset", and really it would make hardly any difference to anyone. The ownership would be the same (pension funds etc). The people working for it would be the same. If it does make a difference at all, that's just because we (humans) make it difficult for ourselves, not for any real reason.

In fact ARM has several offices in France ([http://www.arm.com/about/company- profile/locations-around-th...](http://www.arm.com/about/company- profile/locations-around-the-world.php)). It's only a "UK national asset" because the company is registered in the UK, for historical reasons. For all I know there are some employees in France who are so pivotal to ARM as a company that if they left the thing would collapse. If that hypothetical was true why wouldn't you call it a French national asset already?

The whole thing of nationalities and borders is based on very minor and arbitrary distinctions, so any argument that we try to derive based on those assumptions quickly descends into "ex falso quodlibet".

<comment><USER37> It's a UK national asset because it's _not_ located about 200 miles away. I would certainly apply for a job at ARM in the UK, but I wouldn't in France, because I don't want to live in France and I don't want to work remotely.

The fact they're in the UK means that a lot of the money they make ends up here, which means more money in the economy near me and more money for the government to spend on things that benefit me.

Nationalities and borders may well be arbitrary (I agree), but that doesn't mean they don't matter.

<comment><USER35> Sure, you (and I) have a preference to live in the UK and speak English and drink proper beer and so on. The good news is that a hypothetical ARM company registered in France wouldn't prevent you from enjoying all that _and_ working for them, since in this reversed situation ARM has offices in the UK and even if it didn't you could work remotely.

When you and your friends work remotely from the UK, you pay income tax and VAT and all the rest. (Corporation tax is both very hard to collect and has just been reduced, yet again, by the outgoing chancellor)

Now I'll grant that for some software/IP-based companies you cannot work from where you choose, but those companies are broken. Also you say you don't like to work remotely, but I think if you worked for a company which was organized around this (as I do) you really would prefer it, as there is hardly any down- side.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I'd rather have my ARM devices backdoored by another country than my own (as a FIVE EYES resident). I know this is not a popular choice, but consider the threat profile: if Japan knows my secrets, are they sharing with Britain or Canada? Likely not, as the agreement is not in place. ARM was hamstrung for me and my corporation (Canadian medical marijuana industry) due to its ties to government. With this sale, that is no longer the case.

If I could, I'd buy 100% Russian and Chinese (especially gonkai'ed) gear, but that's not feasible yet. Hopefully sooner than later.

</comment><comment><USER39> To think 2 weeks ago I was put forward there for an interview, and I just heard back that they are outsourcing it to a different team...

I can't help but feel this is not coincidental, and that I probably won't be hearing about any new roles any time soon.

</comment><comment><USER40> Considering that 1) the revenue base of ARM is predominantly in USD licensing fees, and 2) that the British pound has lost ~20% against he dollar. The ~41% premium is really a 21% premium. No chance a global leader like ARM could have been snatched for a 21% premium a few weeks ago.

Run a list of companies listed in London with predominantly non-GBP revenue base and you have a great list of takeover targets.

</comment><comment><USER41> I wonder now if Softbank/Japan is going to be brought into the "five-eyes" agreements somehow, now that they'll have control over all the ARM processors we'll be using on the planet, and thus will also inherit all the backdoors put there for that bastion of British Pride, the GCHQ ..

</comment><comment><USER42> That's nothing compared to all of 7-Eleven being Japanese owned. Also, Sapporo owns Canada's Okanagan Springs beer brewery. :)

</comment><comment><USER43> Developing technologies for the future of mankind is not inherently compatible with Nationalism.

</comment><comment><USER44> Is this all because of brexit or why to sell such successful business?

<comment><USER45> Seeing how the pound has fallen, I think it's cheaper for foreign investors to buy Britisch companies.

That is a bit ironic if you keep the surge of nationalism in mind.

<comment><USER6> Brexit was partly about the EU's sclerotic lack of democracy and partly about failure to control immigration. Since this touches neither of those, I don't see the irony.

<comment><USER46> Except the EU isn't undemocratic and immigration is good the economy.

<comment><USER47> Haha, what EU are you talking about?

When did you vote for Juncker or anyone else on the commission? The commission where all the power of the EU is concentrated?

It's got better than when it was at its worst, but the EU is still incredibly undemocratic and unaccountable for a Western institution.

And let's not even start on how Germany suddenly seem to be in control of the Euro and seem to be essentially dictating monetary policy in Greece, Italy and Spain.

<comment><USER48> Juncker was a leader of the party that won European Parliament elections. The rest of the commission is appointed by the elected Parliament as well. Let's compare this to let's say House of Lords.

Germany was the main opponent of lowering the interest rate to 0 and launching QE, they obviously failed, no Germany is not suddenly in control of the Euro.

I am myself not a big proponent of the EU, but let's keep criticism where it's due and don't raise conspiracies about sudden german control of the Euro.

<comment><USER49> > "Let's compare this to let's say House of Lords."

Yes, lets.

For the most part, the role of the House of Lords is to refine the work that is done by the House of Commons. In other words, they act as an advisory body. It's the House of Commons that makes the decisions on what laws to propose, that sets the political direction for the country. The House of Lords proposes no laws themselves, and aside from exceptional circumstances they cannot block legislation that is proposed by the House of Commons.

Compare that to the EU. The European Parliament, where the bulk of the elected representatives sit, cannot propose new laws, they can only refine what gets proposed by the European Commission. In other words, it's the inverse of the UK system.

<comment><USER50> [http://www.europarl.europa.eu/aboutparliament/en/20150201PVL...](http://www.europarl.europa.eu/aboutparliament/en/20150201PVL00004/Legislative- powers)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> aha, they intend to keep the ARM HQ in the UK. Well ... let's see what they say in 10 years because you know, once a company is sold, the buyer can do whatever the fuck he wants with the thing he just bought.

<comment><USER46> See also: Cadbury's.

Fuck you, Kraft.

<comment><USER52> It's one thing to shit over the workers Kraft, but to shit over the product is another (They changed the recipes, sizes, and generally turned the best chocolate in the world into shitty American chocolate (no offense to Americans)).

<comment><USER53> I've lived in the UK my whole life and I think you've got rose-tinted spectacles. Cadbury chocolate has always been terrible.

<comment><USER39> If you had traveled, your opinion would hold more water.

<comment><USER53> I've been all over the world. I still think Cadbury's chocolate is shit.

<comment><USER39> I was pointing out why your previous comment was not being taken seriously, it was not a challenge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Knew before clicking that it would be "Herman the German"

<comment><USER54> Downvoted by people who weren't there...

<comment><USER9> I would assume people downvoted because your comment didn't add anything of any value, and comes off as sounding quite racist. (In addition, he's austrian[0])

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

<comment><USER54> I know he's Austrian, and I can't help that it sounds "quite racist".

It's how people referred to him at Acorn, then ARM.

I worked with a number of them at Tadpole during the early-mid 90s, and got to meet Hauser once, at the Oveletti lab.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Not sure what will hap happen, the ways of running businesses in both countries are very different and not really compatible often.</comment>


Show HN: DocuShow to search and read PDFs on mobile - <AUTHOR> http://docushow.com <comment><AUTHOR> Working on extracting images, tables and math formulas now...</comment>


Dylib hijacking on OS X - <AUTHOR> https://www.virusbtn.com/virusbulletin/archive/2015/03/vb201503-dylib-hijacking

<comment><USER2> This is a very long-winded way of saying that libraries that are loaded via @rpath are vulnerable to having a malicious library inserted earlier in the rpath order than the actual library it wants to load.

But so what? That's not at all interesting. The given examples involve inserting the library into the application bundle (because the examples of @rpath-dependent loads are for frameworks embedded within the application). This is trivially detectable for any codesigned application (as the inserted library won't be part of the code signature), and for non-codesigned apps it should be just as easy to detect this at it would be to detect an attacker that simply swaps out the expected library with a new one.

Performing this sort of attack also likely requires administrator privileges, and an attacker that can get administrator privileges can perform all sorts of mischief on the system.

This also doesn't subvert the app store sandbox in any way, because malicious code injected into an application is still subject to the same sandbox restrictions that the application is normally subject to.

<comment><USER3> They built a DMG with a "fake" Flash Installer that doesn't verify codesigning or trigger the Gatekeeper warning.

<comment><USER2> Their "fake" installer is a copy of an existing codesigned app (Instruments.app) and a directory structure that causes the app to load a library from outside its app bundle when launched.

In this case, since it's loading a library outside of the app bundle, the code signature is intact. But beyond that, it seems no different than just writing an application that explicitly loads something from outside its bundle. The only benefit here is it can use someone else's codesigned app instead of having to get a certificate to codesign the app themselves. But that doesn't seem particularly meaningful.

Assuming the library itself isn't codesigned, this does suggest an issue with Gatekeeper, wherein it doesn't validate all the libraries that are loaded by the application. If that's true, it seems like something that should be relatively easy for Apple to fix without affecting legitimate functionality (because any codesigned app has no need to load non-codesigned libraries).

The results are also _wildly_ overblown. The entire attack requires the user to open a downloaded DMG and run a contained app without copying the app. This is not something people do very often, and if this really is a serious threat, then a simple rule of "don't launch apps from DMGs" suffices (merely moving the app out of the DMG neuters the attack).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As far as I can tell, this is not a particularly interesting finding.

Basically, if an application tries to load a library and it isn't there, you can create the library and it will load it.

On Windows, this may be a vulnerability because the program will look in the application directory and current directory for the library, which may not be secured locations.

On Linux, and I believe OSX too, the program will only look in system- specified locations (/lib, /usr/lib, etc) which should be secured at the same or higher level than the applications themselves. If you have access there, you can just overwrite the executable.

[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2006/05/08/59235...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2006/05/08/592350.aspx)

The paper points out that security software may inspect the binary or its signature. However, such security software must also inspect the libraries; otherwise, one could simply modify a library (e.g. libc) to accomplish the same task with less effort. If the security software is going to inspect the libraries anyways, it can check whether any unauthorized libraries are being loaded.

<comment><USER3> While OSX will verify a bundle hasn't been tampered with, but (apparently) will scan a folder _next_ to the bundle for shared libraries _automatically_.

This bypasses a number of security features (code signing, gatekeeper warning, network firewalls) and doesn't require the user click any unusual buttons or type LD_PRELOAD into a terminal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Note that you were always able to easily inject/specify which DYLIBS were loaded into the invocation of an executable. However, the OP describes a way of doing this that is difficult (impossible in a general sense?) to detect.

Second, this would probably be the most effective attack against the sandbox of the Mac Store. It effectively allows injection of arbitrary code into an arbitrary child process.

Third, to my understanding, this does not allow user-bound privilege escalation (e.g. no root) because those are bound by the process, inside of which the code is loaded and run.

Honestly, though, shouldn't be too difficult to patch.

<comment><USER6> There are some mitigations for this already built in. "Sensitive" processes are disallowed from linking libraries relative to @rpath and friends. Excerpt from dyld.cpp:

      else if (sProcessIsRestricted && (path[0] != '/' )) {
          throwf("unsafe use of relative rpath %s in %s with restricted binary", path, context.origin);
      }

A cursory glance suggests that sProcessIsRestricted is true for setuid binaries and processes with restricted entitlements. Which makes sense: these would otherwise be privilege escalation vectors.

<comment><USER7> Or a __RESTRICT,__restrict segment/section. ;-)</comment></comment></comment>


Brazilian underground: Beaches, carnivals and cybercrime - <AUTHOR> https://securelist.com/analysis/publications/72652/beaches-carnivals-and-cybercrime-a-look-inside-the-brazilian-underground/ <comment><USER2> There's nothing to do with carnival or beaches, the headline doesn't make much sense, but yes there's cybercrime!

<comment><USER3> Stupidest title I've seen in a while. I thought there would be underground beaches and carnivals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "in 2012 local banks lost around US$500 million for fraud perpetrated via Internet banking, by telephone, or through credit card cloning"

To put in perspective:

"In the U.S. the total annual fraud cost was $20.6 billion in 2012" [http://www.tdbank.com/bank/security_identitytheft.html](http://www.tdbank.com/bank/security_identitytheft.html)

<comment><USER5> Identity theft is still uncommon in Brazil. Also, people are used to filling out long forms because of our national bureaucratic mindset (it's not just the government, private enterprise is also very bureaucratic).

The result is that nobody blinks an eye at giving away _all_ their data. If you ask a complete stranger for his CPF (a number given by the Tax Service, a common Primary Key in many databases), they will give it to you.

We're lucky that most of our criminals just aren't very sophisticated (yet).

<comment><USER6> True. In many job interviews, people ask for your CPF (which is akin to a Social Security Number on the US, I guess) and even your parent's name. They probably check your (and your parents'?) criminal and debit history or shomething like that, but still, there goes all our data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a global market. Brazilians can buy fake ATMs from Russia, rent botnets to Nigerians and commission computer trojans with Serbians.</comment>


AI Can Predict Future Criminals Based on Facial Features - <AUTHOR> http://agrater.com/a.php?a=6582 <comment></comment>


Google Fi Patent - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/patents/US20120036035 <comment><USER2> It's painful reading these things. Companies like Google file thousands of patents gobbling up all kinds of fairly obvious ideas and by doing so create a minefield of inovation stifiling lawyer fodder. Many people forget that the original intent of the patent system was to give inovators a leg up not to create a market for buying and selling IP.

<comment><USER3> I thought the actual _actual_ intent was to make sure innovations are accessible to the public (and competitors once protection expires), helping society as a whole.

Yet, it's hard to find any instance where someone would have used a software patent for its supposed purpose: to replicate the innovation. They're utterly useless.

<comment><USER4> I don't support the existence of software patents at all. That said, I also don't think the benefits of patents should be interpreted so narrowly, or that we should judge patents by the single criterion of their "actual" intent instead of these other benefits.

The other benefit is that it enables companies to do innovation where they would not have been able to keep the idea secret in the first place. E.g. a pharmaceutical drug whose chemical composition would be trivial to reverse engineer. In that case, the patent does not serve the purpose of making the knowledge public in exchange for a monopoly. What it does do, though, is incentivize innovation be rewarding the inventor with the "rights" to that idea.

The real problem with patents is when patents are of trivial things that anyone could have thought of without much effort. That is why I don't support any software patents, because it's so much easier to patent trivial things in the software world than the physical world.

<comment><USER2> The argument for actual intent is based on how it was sold to voters when the laws were first enacted. I think it's perfectly legit to judge patents on these terms.

<comment><USER5> Patents are in the Constitution, so they weren't "sold to voters" per se. In any case,like a lot of old legal things, they were conceived at a time when we didn't understand economics. It's perfectly legitimate to reinterpret old legal concepts in light of advances in economic theory.

Tort law, for example, predates the U.S., but today we have an economic understanding of what purpose it serves (addressing the negative externalities of risk-creating activities). It's perfectly legitimate to look at those modern economic models to decide how we interpret (and evolve) these existing laws. With regards to patents, we can understand them as a solution to free- rider problems. Regardless of what intuitive understandings motivated them in the first place, the laws should be interpreted with the economic model in mind today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The reality is that any public company that does not file a patent related to a major service launch is foolish. The most important purpose is crosslicensing as well as using it as a licensing hook for compliance, i.e. ensuring compatibility. Aggressive litigation is usually a question of corporate culture, but patents need to be defended to remain valuable for licensing agreements.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is actually just the pre-grant publication of the application. The actual issued patent is available here: [http://www.google.com/patents/US8238965](http://www.google.com/patents/US8238965)

(Yes, it's pretty similar. But no reason to be looking at the pre-grant version.)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's an interesting patent. I'm not sure how defendable it is though, since there seems to be prior art in existing network switching and routing mechanisms, but it might keep competition away initially, and allow Google to get a strong foothold in the market (unless Google states that it's a purely defensive patent.)

<comment><USER8> The patent appears to be about selecting a network carrier using a bidding process. The device can choose a network based on price and quality of service. What prior art is there for this?

<comment><USER9> Apple has one about selecting a network carrier using a bidding process.

[http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H...](http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch- adv.htm&r=5&f=G&l=50&d=PTXT&p=1&p=1&S1=%2820110208.PD.+AND+apple.ASNM.%29&OS=isd/2/8/2011+and+an/apple&RS=%28ISD/20110208+AND+AN/apple%29)

<comment><USER10> Why the downvotes?

<comment><USER11> I think it's because it had the word Apple when responding to a post about Google.

<comment><USER12> That's a prior patent not prior art i.e. Apple hasn't used it in a product yet. Moreover Apple having a patent suggests Google applied for a patent for their own implementation to avoid getting sued by Apple. Apple has a history of litigation to stifle competition.

<comment><USER9> It appears patents can serve as prior art.

[http://www.ericksonlawgroup.com/law/patents/patentfaq/what-i...](http://www.ericksonlawgroup.com/law/patents/patentfaq/what- is-prior-art/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Google is gradually becoming the IBM of the 2010s

</comment><comment><USER14> Doesn't Republic Wireless have prior art here?

</comment><comment><USER15> Google filed a patent! LET'S RAGEPOST ABOUT PATENTS!

</comment><comment><USER16> >>A method of initiating...

Can you really patent an idea?</comment>


Fake popup study: Users are idiots? I don't think so... - <AUTHOR> http://www.geekzone.co.nz/foobar/5800

<comment><USER2> A good retort to the ArsTechnica write-up.

In Hacker News' defense, I seem to remember that a lot of the comments to the ArsTechnica HN submission made a similar point as this guy.</comment>


Show HN: Eventhandler, a game where you play by triggering browser events (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://arkt.is/eventhandler/ <comment><USER2> I'm either really bad at this or the game is too fast.. i fail after 4-5 events. its flappy bird all over again.

nice game though. i like the graphics.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't have this working on chrome (Arch Linux, chrome Version 34.0.1847.132). Works on firefox though. Also mouse wheel doesn't fire when I try it :(

<comment><USER4> Works on Chrome 34.0.1847.131 on OSX.

<comment><USER5> Works on Chrome 28.0.1500.52 on Windows 7, but not firefox 24.5

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Very cool and addictive. Reminds me of "z-type" which already killes hundreds of my working hours. :-)

</comment><comment><USER7> Couldnt get it working with chrome/firefox.

</comment><comment><USER8> Works fine for me on Chrome. Neat idea! :)

</comment><comment><USER9> What a nifty idea, and surprisingly fun!

</comment><comment><USER10> beforeunload? how the f do I trigger that?

<comment><USER11> Click refresh (ctrl/cmd+R in many browsers) and then press cancel in the dialog box that pops up asking if you want to leave the page.</comment></comment>


Web emulator for DCPU-16 - <AUTHOR> http://0x10co.de/ <comment><USER2> This one is a 1700+ line _operating system_ (AtlasOS, a multi-process capable DCPU-16 Operating System):

<http://0x10co.de/ghekp>

just amazing. The code is apparently available at <https://github.com/Noxer/AtlasOS>.

<comment><USER3> Things like this make me feel so stupid. :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> One of the cool things about the website is the ease of forking snippets.

When the Word of Notch gave information on how input would work, previous code written using alternative schemes broke.

The snake game, <http://0x10co.de/cdbk1>, was one of these programs. However, it wasn't too long before people started hacking on it and started forking the code. Here's a version at the bottom of the fork tree:

<http://0x10co.de/hbcdo>

One draw back is that the newer versions don't show up on the top programs page (since people find out about the original first, and the fixes later) and give the illusion that website doesn't work properly.

</comment><comment><USER5> (Not to get too meta, but..) I really like the domain name. It looked like "0x10 code" when I first saw it.

<comment><USER6> That's the point. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_hack>

<comment><USER7> This website <http://domai.nr> help finding such domain names.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was going to suggest that you add a quick reference, but then I saw that it was on the right. It would be cool if the quick reference had stuff about the [addr] and :jmplabel and PC crash use, but other than that I am highly impressed with this site!

</comment><comment><USER9> Great work on the web emulator!

So--and forgive my ignorance here--is there actually a spec up for things like hardware interrupts, IDTs, trap vectors, whatever?

This all seems of limited utility until we know how the machine is actually structured.

<comment><USER10> This is the only spec that we have to work with: <http://0x10c.com/doc/dcpu-16.txt> . Notch said he's reviewed quite a bit of feedback on the spec and to expect revisions although it may be a while.

The rest of our information comes from Notch's tweets. Interrupts are unlikely. IO is memory mapped. There's been some guessing about display and keyboard but nothing set in stone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> shameless self promotion: i also wrote a dcpu emulator pastebin at <http://dcpubin.com/> as a weekend exercise to learn heroku and mongodb. it's definitely not as pretty as 0x10code, though. i've also decided not to implement some features (like keyboard input) until an official spec is released for them. maybe that's the wrong choice, not sure. anyway, it's a fun project to hack on. the code is here: <https://github.com/jazzychad/dcpubin>

</comment><comment><USER12> It would be really cool if there was a link to the spec[1], some examples or a tutorial with this.

[1] - <http://0x10c.com/doc/dcpu-16.txt>

</comment><comment><USER13> <http://0x10co.de/ylv5v> \- useful map of screen color codes if you are going to draw.

As I see most of sketches are related to printing on screen ;)

</comment><comment><USER14> I had to send the author some Bitcoins; he made it feel like the most natural thing in the world!

</comment><comment><USER13> Feature request: ability to vote up

Views counter is not very useful really: sketches from top are getting more views, random view is adding chaos. Voting up would be very good tool to identify interesting programs.

</comment><comment><USER15> Also, the founder is an 18-year-old that applied for ycombinator. Hi.

</comment><comment><USER16> At this point, I'm just waiting for people to start releasing games centered around the DCPU-16 before Notch even releases his.

<comment><USER17> Is it open source, I mean, are others free to use it in their games?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> neat. I took a look at the code base and there is a number of files with a jade extension. Anybody know what language/framework that is?

<comment><USER19> Jade - robust, elegant, feature rich template engine for nodejs: <https://github.com/visionmedia/jade>

<comment><USER20> Ugh, what a crappy description. What about "Jade: Haml-style, indentation- based, interpolation template engine for Node.js"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is actually quite entertaining :)

</comment><comment><USER22> The debugger is great! Until this came along I was really struggling to figure out how to write any kind of code for this DCPU thing. I don't have a background in assembly or really any sort of low level programming. The debugger makes the code a lot more approachable for someone like me!

<comment><USER15> However running stuff in it locks up the browser a little bit. I will definitely improve on that, but I'm glad it is at least useful.</comment></comment>


SimCity's 2.0 Patch Adds Tons Of Bugs - <AUTHOR> http://www.uproxx.com/gammasquad/2013/04/simcitys-2-0-patch-adds-tons-of-bugs/

<comment><USER2> Wait, why was this killed off the front page? There's been discussion about SimCity before.

</comment><comment><USER3> You have to wonder if there is any QA being done on SimCity. I haven't played it, but it sounds like the original release was buggy almost to the point of unplayable, and now it hasn't gotten any better. Is there no one there who's telling them the product sucks and they need to fix it? Or are they just getting so pressured to release that they don't care if it doesn't work?

<comment><USER2> QA for video games is a much different beast than QA for software development.

Penny Arcade does a web comic about video game QA, along with tales from the workplace such as this: <http://trenchescomic.com/tales/post/let-slip-the- dogs-of-war>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't normally post jokes on HN, but this is just too spot on: <http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2001/06/18>

Also, it's funny how this sort of thing has been going on for a very long time.

<comment><USER5> Windows 98, Rockman EXE and Tribes 2, thanks for the nostalgia trip.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> what is new?</comment>


Show HN: A new way to explore your local area through games - <AUTHOR> http://www.sparrowzapp.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> We have built this Cordova based mobile app which helps you to play treasure hunts on your mobile.

</comment><comment><USER2> Can we create a game on our own?

<comment><AUTHOR> We have a DIY platform which is available only to our partners at this point of time. We'll make it available to all customers very soon.</comment></comment>


Amazon Admits Alexa Voice Recordings Saved Indefinitely - <AUTHOR> https://threatpost.com/amazon-admits-alexa-voice-recordings-saved-indefinitely/146225/ <comment><USER2> This was oblivious imho. You have an open mic in your house. Of course they will keep this data, and maybe sell it to the CIA who amazon is already hosting.</comment>


NASA Gives 99-Percent Probability of 5.0 Earthquake in LA - <AUTHOR> http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2015/10/20/nasa-gives-99-percent-probability-of-5-0-earthquake-in-la/ <comment><USER2> I feel like the timeline of the prediction is important in that subject line... no?

</comment><comment><USER3> So is the fact that the movie San Andreas came out before this potentially happens considered Inception?</comment>


Windows 10 shaves off gigabytes with selective system file compression - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/03/windows-10-shaves-off-gigabytes-with-selective-system-file-compression/

<comment><USER2> Nice, maybe it will fit under 30GB space, becoming installable for disposable virtual machines.</comment>


Epoll is fundamentally broken - <AUTHOR> https://idea.popcount.org/2017-02-20-epoll-is-fundamentally-broken-12/ <comment><USER2> The article explains how to use epoll() correctly to solve all the problems he raises. That's not 'fundamentally broken,' because it works. The worst you can say is _confusing and painful._ Maybe that doesn't make good headlines, though.

When you're dealing with shared resources (like a listening socket), and you are using threads, and you are trying to maximize performance with networking, _confusing and painful_ is kind of the nature of the problem.

<comment><USER3> The linked interview with Bryan Cantrill gives a good explanation of why it's broken: a straightforward implementation behaves in a way you never want, with bizarre behavior where the kernel can wake up a thread with an accept() on a fd that has already been closed. linux should just have adopted kqueue or an IOCP model instead.

[https://youtu.be/l6XQUciI-Sc?t=3643](https://youtu.be/l6XQUciI-Sc?t=3643)

<comment><USER4> I believe at the time there was concern that Microsoft would sue for patent infringement relating to IOCP.

Source: at the time I worked on high-performance server products and had discussions with various people active on the kernel side of the problem and encountered much head-shaking and muttering about patents, when I mentioned implementing IOCP.

<comment><USER5> Didn't Linus said that all he cared about is getting code back, with no concern over patent grants such as the one in gplv3? Head-shaking and muttering is all good but the kernel developers has had a long time to take an active stance against software patents and has consistently chosen not to do so. As a project they have chosen not to get political about patents, so this is the reality they have embraced.

<comment><USER4> I think we're saying the same thing.

fwiw there was an IOCP-like capability added to AIX, again supposedly because IBM did not have fears about patent infringement (likely due to cross- licensing arrangements).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is this actually the case?

> Waking up "Thread B" was completely unnecessary and wastes precious > resources. Epoll in level-triggered mode scales out poorly.

In the analysed situation thread B was already in a wait state and there aren't enough incoming connections to immediately accept the next one. Of course the resources (CPU time) were wasted, but does that impact the performance in any way? (Assuming one "main" application on that host)

<comment><USER7> Because the time wasted by all the threads trying to accept() or read() on the ready socket introduces latency for all other sockets. And since throughput is bounded by the number of threads divided by inverse of latency, increasing the latency makes you lose in scalability.

In addition, because a single "readiness event" has to wake up many threads, it can introduce lock contention and cacheline bouncing in the kernel's data structures.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't feel like this was given enough time:

> One option is to use SO_REUSEPORT and create multiple listen sockets sharing > the same port number. This approach has problems though - when one of the > file descriptors is closed, the sockets already waiting in the accept queue > will be dropped

Yes, it's a problem if you use it across processes... but if you have a single long lived process with each thread listening on a separate queue, isn't that the simplest solution?

<comment><USER9> That process isn't allowed to fork, I assume, which is problematic.

<comment><USER8> I'm not proposing a fork either. Each thread would open a separate socket with the SO_REUSEPORT set. The kernel would then have a separate queue per socket.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

<comment><USER9> I'm saying that none of those threads can start any programs. That may or not be required by your use-case, but it's certainly a disadvantage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> You probably shouldn't share epoll FDs across threads for performance reasons. A shared nothing design is likely to perform better with a simpler implementation in both the application and the kernel.

I don't see sharing FDs across threads as a useful thing to aspire to.

The common design I see these days is load balancing FDs across shared nothing threads. The thread that receives the notification via the selector is the thread that does the IO (no other thread has that FD). Keep adding threads as makes sense and never block let them block.

A combined queue makes sense when task sizes are large. For small tasks the performance is poor. I see the queuing decision as something you make after you have already retrieved the message from the network and presented it to an application layer which makes a decision on how to dispatch.

It would be cool if the kernel would do this for you under the hood! That would be amazing. Just making it correct is not enough though.

<comment><USER11> If no data are shared, what is the point of having threads, as opposed to processes?

<comment><USER12> One example is in NGINX. They mostly follow a "no threads" pattern, but specifically for Linux, they support "some threads" to get around issues with Linux aio.

[https://www.nginx.com/blog/thread-pools-boost- performance-9x...](https://www.nginx.com/blog/thread-pools-boost- performance-9x/)

That's not "shared nothing" threads, of course, so it doesn't answer your question at a high level. It does highlight, though, that Linux is especially challenging in this space as compared to FreeBSD. And not just because of epoll().

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm curious if you can really design a practical API that avoid all the issues the author talk about.

Even on something as simple as interrupt delivery to a single consumer, you MUST be prepared to handle merged and spurious interrupts -- I would argue that any driver that is not prepared to do so (in the general case) is buggy.

Maybe it's easier to do perfectly with an epoll/kqueue API for some reasons, but, without having tried to think much about it, I can't imagine why it should be. I have the intuition this is way harder. Actually I'm not even sure if I can have any intuition about the difficulty to achieve the behavior wanted by the author of that article, because the author did not actually specified the behavior he desires...

</comment><comment><USER14> > The best and the only scalable approach is to use recent Kernel 4.5+ and use > level-triggered events with EPOLLEXCLUSIVE flag. This will ensure only one > thread is woken for an event, avoid "thundering herd" issue and scale > properly across multiple CPU's

Exactly use EPOLLEXCLUSIVE for accept, that seems to work and has been in the kernel for more than a year.

For reads, how reasonable is to even share the file descriptor with multiple threads. Just hand it to a thread and let that thread (possibly bound to a CPU core for possible more performance boost) handle it from then on.

Am I crazy to be surprised by that architecture choice?

</comment><comment><USER15> Anecdatum: I work with a guy who is pretty scary brilliant when it comes to programming; He programs on windows and his software is of a really good quality- I asked him why he used Windows and he gave two reasons:

1) Windows is mandated by HQ as the only supported desktop. You're not getting anything else to run on your desktop so you either write Windows software locally or use a VM (which is cumbersome0

2) Epoll is trash.

I have successfully convinced him to make some software on freebsd because kqueue is fundamentally better. But it's shocking that epoll is so bad even compared to windows :(

<comment><USER2> Windows has no right to trash-talk: WaitForMultipleObjects() is one of the most depressing select-like APIs out there.

<comment><USER16> Not being familiar, it looks pretty standard. What're it's negative attributes?

<comment><USER2> Conceptually, select() can wait on anything that's a file descriptor. WaitForMultipleObjects() can only work on things that were specifically added to its capability list.

Practically, MAXIMUM_WAIT_OBJECTS is set to such a low number (64) that people resort to this kind of hack: [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/ms6...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/ms687055\(v=vs.85\).aspx)

<comment><USER13> IIRC there are even advanced Win32 API that, so that you can go above MAXIMUM_WAIT_OBJECTS, ... automatically handle a thread poll!

That kind of "solution" to such a problem is way more insane than epoll() eventually providing the correct flags to fix most of its own issues, even if we had to wait during a decade for it...

So praising NT because epoll is "trash" is uninformed at best, malicious at worst.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The least broken modern OS when it comes to async I/O is Windows.

I/O completion ports are the correct solution when it comes to waking up one of multiple threads to handle I/O events.

</comment><comment><USER18> I have a question. The post states:

>"This is because "level triggered" (aka: normal) epoll inherits the "thundering herd" semantics from select(). Without special flags, in level- triggered mode, all the workers will be woken up on each and every new connection."

Isn't this behavior similar to disk I/O where the kernel wakes up(via wake_up()?) all tasks that are sleeping on a wait queue for disk I/O? I believe all processes sleeping on a disk I/O wait queue will be woken up regardless of whether their disk I/O is complete or not and will be put back to sleep in the whre it is not.

</comment><comment><USER19> So, the kernel is free to assign a connection to a new thread even if there is a previous thread working on it? Because the kernel has no idea when the previous worker will be done processing the data. So the user has to manually unregister and register the connection each time?

How about a concept like "transaction"? Maybe such as `epoll_begin` and `epoll_end`? One thread achieves exclusive access when entering the block, and releases it when leaving.

Does this flaw also exist in IOCP or kqueue?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think not, this[0] could be nice read.

[0] [http://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~sangjin/2012/12/21/epoll- vs...](http://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~sangjin/2012/12/21/epoll-vs- kqueue.html)

<comment><USER19> Well, just by looking at a glance, kqueue seems to pose similar problems. I mean, the problem mentioned in the OP:

      1. Kernel receives some data, and wakes up A
      2. A reads some data
      3. Kernel receives some other data, and wakes up B (cause A didn't call `epoll_wait` yet)
      4. B reads some data, leading to a race condition (out-of-order reading).

kqueue's `kevent` seems to be more or less similar to `epoll_wait`, in that it doesn't seem to provide a way to notify the kernel the "we're done" signal. Am I missing here? Does `kevent` also signal the end of the exclusive access?

<comment><AUTHOR> From Bryan's interview it's clear they've solved the problem like that. From article I linked, it doesn't indicate so.

Take a look here[1], at 'EVFILT_SIGNAL'. But does that mean that we have to manually attach signal to monitor, and then we receive "we're done". But that's kinda similar to what you have to do with epoll, the difference is that kqueue structure encapsulates functiona of 'epoll_wait' and 'epoll_ctl'?

[1] [https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=kqueue&sektion=2](https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=kqueue&sektion=2)

Edit: sorry for spamming with links, but I find these things really interesting, look here [http://austingwalters.com/io- multiplexing/](http://austingwalters.com/io-multiplexing/) specifically at 4 steps after kqueue code, I think that explains well. So it looks like we wait for signal 'done' after which we rewatch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It is pthreads which are fundamentally broken indeed, not epoll.

<comment><USER21> All of the problems outlined are relevant whether you pre-fork into multiple processes or use different threads. I don't see what it has to do with pthreads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> So what's the best way to multiplex then?

<comment><USER23> (Caveat: this is a contentious opinion on Hacker News)

(Caveat #2: I'm not terribly familiar with such low level programming. Take anything I say with a grain of salt.)

It's my opinion that IO Completion Ports on Windows are superior to the approach taken by *nix and BSDs.

Instead of having the usermode application sleep and wake up, do some checks, etc., the application provides an entry point when an event occurs or data is available. Essentially, a callback for the kernel to use. The kernel then jumps directly to this, and can manage the threads involved, using a thread pool to balance requests. This gives much better utilization of threads than with poll/epoll/kqueue, but does place some other constraints on how the code is written.

The fundamental difference is that the Unix-kin is a readiness based model. They wake up a thread to tell it that it is ready to read an event. IOCP on Windows is a completion based model, and wakes up threads with the data (or error) already present in a data structure provided to the thread.

<comment><USER24> > a completion based model, and wakes up threads with the data (or error)

Which means that in this model you have to allocate and provide a buffer for that data long before the kernel is going to fill it. It's going to just sit there waiting, wasting memory. While in unix model you don't have to allocate a buffer until you know there is some data to copy from the kernel, which is easier for the user and much more efficient.

Completion model makes sense if your entire networking stack lives in userspace and you can allocate memory on the lowest layer, but pass it as a reference all the way up. Or if you at least can do syscall batching, to make operating on very small buffers efficient.

<comment><USER25> This exact same problem is also present in the concurrency model provided by Go. To read from the network you need to provide a buffer to read into, which means that a buffer has to be allocated for every goroutine (instead of just the goroutines that actually have data to read).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What's it like to be an Octopus? (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n17/amia-srinivasan/the-sucker-the-sucker <comment><USER2> It's an old trope in Sci Fi that alien intelligences would be so different from us that we couldn't even begin to comprehend them. Octopuses belie that idea... although we share some DNA, our last common ancestors barely had a nervous system, so any similarities in cognition between us really are the product of paralllel evolution. And since their environments are also very different from ours, this parallel evoution clearly hints that there is something universal in this consciousness we share, something that seems to want to evolve to similar parameters given half a chance.

We don't know how common or rare sentience and consciousness are in the Universe, but because of the Octopus I believe that if ever we do encounter non-terrestrial sentience we'll have no trouble recognizing it and will find that we have enough in common to establish communications and a relationship. Although first we'd do well to do a better job at communicating with and respecting the many non-human sentient beings on _this_ planet.

<comment><USER3> Cephalopods are magnificent. I knew they were smart and curious but I was caught off guard the first time I realized that a curious cuttlefish was making eye contact with me. No other reef animals exhibit anything like this kind of intelligence; the dissimilarity is striking. When you start to doubt your interpretation they quite literally flash their emotional state through color changes that seem as telling as human facial expressions.

The article mentions [NSFW!] _The Dream of the Fisherman 's Wife_ [1] (erotic Japanese art from 1814) and the books _Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness_ [2] by Peter Godfrey-Smith and _The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness_ by Sy Montgomery [3].

[1] NSFW! [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dream_of_the_Fisherman%27s...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dream_of_the_Fisherman%27s_Wife)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Minds:_The_Octopus,_the_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Minds:_The_Octopus,_the_Sea,_and_the_Deep_Origins_of_Consciousness)

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

EDIT: added NSFW! warnings.

<comment><USER4> Semi-related: "Arrival" was a terrific movie adaptation of "Story of Your Life", an even better short story by Ted Chiang, featuring attempts at communication with advanced alien intelligence. Highest recommendation for both.

<comment><USER5> "Terrific" is not the word I'd use to describe the adaptation. Arrival was entertaining and had, to me, impressive visual and auditory direction, but it completely missed the point of "Story of Your Life" in the way it changed the ending.

<comment><USER4> fair point; shouldve worded it "terrific movie, based on the even better book"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The novel _Blindsight_ by Peter Watts considers the issues humans would face in contact with similarly alien aliens. It's an intriguing read.

Available under CC: [https://rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm#CC](https://rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm#CC)

<comment><USER7> The second book in the Children of Time series by A. Tchaikovsky deals with rapidly-evolved octopus intelligence. Similar vibe.

<comment><USER8> Somewhat off-topic, but I just couldn't get into the second book, whereas I loved the first book.

I think it's because Children of Ruin didn't have as much of the way relatable human (or Human, as the book goes into) characters to latch onto as an anchor while they explore the evolution of a different kind of intelligence. I was really rooting for some of the human characters in Children of Time, namely Lain, whereas Children of Ruin just felt a little too, uh, alien.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I would recommend these scifi books [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25499718-children-of- tim...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25499718-children-of-time)

And [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40376072-children-of- rui...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40376072-children-of-ruin)

Lots of fun reading them, great author :)

<comment><USER10> I've also read both books. It's a good exploration into the minds of spiders and octopuses, if given "uplift".

A recent study I read about shows that spider intelligence is ill-studied but actually holds a wealth of interesting facets. Jumping spiders plan, such as when hunting, and can be surprised. They are also doing elaborate planning when building webs, and make adjustments to strength/stickiness in webs based on failed catches. It's sophisticated tool use. And yet their brains are teeny weeny puny things.

Another novel that you might enjoy if you haven't read is "A Deepness in the Sky", it's similar to Children of Time (and predates it), but told in a different way. Both are highly enjoyable and packed with ideas.

<comment><USER11> If you're recommending _A Deepness in the Sky_ , you should also recommend _A Fire Upon the Deep_ by the same author (Vernor Vinge). A very different take on alien intelligence, and possibly more relevant to the octopus model in that it covers distributed selves, albeit over individuals rather than limbs.

<comment><USER12> rather than tell the OP what to do you should recommend things yourself. Or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Octopus intelligence is phenomenal achievement when you consider the restrictions they have:

1\. No social interaction or learning. Octopuses[1] live alone.

2\. Short life span. Most of them live only few years in the wild.

\----

[1] [https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/the-many- plura...](https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/the-many-plurals-of- octopus-octopi-octopuses-octopodes)

<comment><USER14> I can think of a couple more major disadvantages they have.

3\. Living underwater. Fire is the easiest way to extract energy from raw materials, and there's no real substitute. On land, there's a lot of local, controllable dynamism, but when you put things down they tend to stay where you put them, at least on short timescales. Water is exactly the opposite: lots of changes you can't control, but no way to get a lot of energy all in one place. Dolphins would have a hard time developing technology for the same reason, even if they had the dexterity.

4\. Not being apex predators. This is part of the short lifespan problem, but I think it goes beyond that. Not many animals are going to mess with a human if they can help it, which means that it didn't take much for us to get to the point of having some free brain cycles to spend on improving things. An octopus is comparatively small and squishy, and shares an environment with comparatively more large and toothy carnivores, which means that even when they do manage to survive for more than a couple years they're doing it by spending most of their time eating and hiding.

<comment><USER15> 3 seems to be the an argument from the anthropic principle. Oxidation happens in water too, in different forms. Perhaps not as rapid. I would imagine someone from Mon Calamari would have came up with a completely "easiest" way to extract energy.

<comment><USER13> > Perhaps not as rapid

The point of fire is rapid oxidation that provides enough heat to melt metals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder about the relationship between consciousness and Turing completeness. Although we don't have infinite tapes inside our heads, it seems that one could imagine a succession of progressively richer finite approximations to Turing-style computational universality. Perhaps "degrees on consciousness" as discussed in the article have to do with the depth of the approximation a creature with a given physiology can make to computational universality. I believe that the independent evolution of eyes resulted in surprising similarities, because of the underlying physics of photons, and the constraints placed on solving the same problems of interpreting streams of photons. It might be that there is some similar unifying computational phenomenon that drives evolution to similar mutually intelligible consciousnesses even via radically distinct evolutionary paths.

<comment><USER17> Turing Completeness is pretty mundane. You just need GOTOs and IF statements, and registers/variables. Thats it really. Its not hard to acheive at all.

The Emperors New Mind by Roger Penrose discusses the opposite idea, that consciousness has a non-computational element that could never even be approximated by a turing machine. I don't really agree with it but its an interesting book.

<comment><USER17> And for those who havent heard of him - Roger Penrose is a serious scientist and philosopher who did some of the key work on Black Holes with Stephen Hawking, so he's worth listening to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Fantastic article. Superb writing and makes me ponder about our species in general.

I do have a general take on how humans perceive or judge other organisms through a very human lens. We characterize organisms based on their social structure, longevity, 'cleverness' etc. While looking at how humans compare with octopuses at a meta level, octopuses seem to be not waging wars, more peaceful, seem to have survived for more than 600 millions years. I wonder if human beings would have a similar track record: looks like humans are well into destroying their own kind and the environment faster than most other creatures.

At the same time human beings seem ill equipped to judge or characterize 'alien' lives: we often want to 'make contact' or have a communication or social channel with aliens. As if a show of our mental power and social structure is the most important aspect..

Just looking at how octopuses are being measured by humans, it feels rather silly the kind of approaches humans use to evaluate other species let alone aliens.

<comment><USER19> > octopuses are more peaceful

female octopi like to eat male octupi

[http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150223-mysteries-of- canniba...](http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150223-mysteries-of-cannibal- octopus-sex)

<comment><USER20> Thanks for the interesting article. I didn't know their mechanism of mating really besides the specialized arm.

However, it is my understanding from previous reading that male octopuses die within months of mating and that female octopuses die after laying its eggs. I am surprised this article doesn't mention it because it puts the cannibalism into perspective. It seems the biologically triggered death after mating and laying eggs is an evolutionary strategy, so it makes the female eating the already dying male less cannibalistic and more strategic.

[https://www.sciencealert.com/mother-octopus-senescence- death...](https://www.sciencealert.com/mother-octopus-senescence-death-after- mating-eggs-reproduction-rna-sequence-optic-gland)

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1977/12/01/o...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1977/12/01/octopus- surgery-has-a-surprising-end-longer- life/a8fabbce-0d76-400f-a9b4-e95b8b93094e/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> For some reason I really expected this to be an interview with Danny Carey.

Parallel evolution is amazing. Developing complex communication between human and octopus would be an amazing feat and would likely answer some of our questions about the nature of consciousness.

</comment><comment><USER22> Does anyone know if there has ever been experimentation with training octopuses to use some kind of user interface (buttons, dials, sliders, joysticks) with a grayscale screen or some other kind of modulated output to solve problems for rewards?

Could an octopus learn to play Super Mario Bros or Pac-Man to beat levels for crab?

If we could find a reliable way to teach an input language to an octopus we could start probing what classes of problems are easier or harder for them solve. We could develop octopus input devices that maximize the size of the 'octo-bus', and find ways to give them an "immersive experience" by modulating their environment (temp, salinity, pH, etc) as feedback.

Anyone with me on this? I haven't found anything, but I don't know if my "dorking" is up to par.

<comment><USER23> The second book in the Children of Time series touches on this in the path of how octopodes get hyper evolved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Something that totally blew my mind is that octopuses seem to react to MDMA in ways similar to us - socially disinhibited, acting "cuddly": [https://www.npr.org/sections/health- shots/2018/09/20/6487881...](https://www.npr.org/sections/health- shots/2018/09/20/648788149/octopuses-get-strangely-cuddly-on-the-mood-drug- ecstasy)

</comment><comment><USER25> If anyone is else is interested in thought experiments on how other forms of intelligence / sapience may evolve, try to read "Children of Time" and "Children of Ruin" by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

Also if anyone else has other books that follow similar themes, please recommend!

<comment><USER26> Two Greg Egan stories come to mind.

Wang's carpets is a short story about life evolving within a simulation of a naturally occurring computer. (also part of the larger novel Diaspora)

Schild's Ladder is about physicists researching the fundamental 'geometry' of the universe and accidentally create a quickly expanding geometry that is more stable than a regular vaccuum, very unhealthy for all regular matter, but...

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This was a really awesome article! Very well written and utterly thought- provoking.

Also this blurb from the author's website is amazing[1]:

> _To research her books, films, and articles, Sy Montgomery has been chased > by a silverback gorilla, embrced by a Giant Pacific Octopus and undressed by > an orangutan. But she is perhaps best known for her 14 year love affair with > Christopher Hogwood, a runt piglet who grew to a 750-pound great Buddha > master._

[1] [http://symontgomery.com/](http://symontgomery.com/)

</comment><comment><USER28> The article is a good read. I was left with even more questions: How come that most documentaries explain the vibrant and undulating colors as some sort of communication, when in actuality there is no evidence that they can observe colors? Even more interesting is the question where do the chromatophores get their color "data" since there are no apparent color receptors in their eyes or skin so that they can mimic their surroundings for camouflage?

<comment><USER29> From what I've read elsewhere, an octopus's pupils isolate colors via chromatic aberration. They can see a range of colors, but only one color at a time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The opening of this article references Hokusai's "Great Wave" woodblock print. There's an easter egg in this print I never noticed, which is that Mount Fuji is nestled in the trough of the wave.

Learned this from a great NYT article on Hokusai focusing on another print from the same series: [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/08/07/arts/design/h...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/08/07/arts/design/hokusai- fuji.html)

<comment><USER31> > _There 's an easter egg in this print I never noticed, which is that Mount > Fuji is nestled in the trough of the wave._

It's literally part of the "Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji" series, so I don't really know if it can be regarded as an easter egg.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> The original 8X engineers.

<comment><USER33> By the logic of your own joke, they would be a 4x engineers.

<comment><USER32> Well technically if two handed humans can be a 10X then 8 tentacled octopus can be 40X!

Full stack octopus

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I strongly recommend both of these books. The Soul of an Octopus is more anecdotal and Other Minds is more academic; in sum they offer not just a fascinating picture of octopuses, but a larger discussion on consciousness and foreign intelligence.

</comment><comment><USER35> I've always been amazed and fascinated by octopuses. Their intelligence, the way they can manipulate their bodies. Most of all the almost instantaneous ability to change their skin color and camouflage with their environment. I highly recommend this episode of PBS 'Nature' I recently watched.

"Octopus: Making Contact" [https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/octopus-making- contact-y8dya...](https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/octopus-making- contact-y8dyan/20052/)

</comment><comment><USER36> Radiolab did a great "Octomom" episode that seems apropos here, definitely worth a listen.

[https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.wnyc.org/radi...](https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.wnyc.org/radiolab_podcast/radiolab_podcast20octomom.mp3)

</comment><comment><USER18> One amazing snippet that is contradictory to human beings: octopuses are color-blind across their entire body (with their physical eyes as well as their "body" eyes) but they are excellent camouflage artists! How is that even possible. Don't you need to perceive color to be able to take it??

<comment> john-aj Hm, that is a good question. Evolutionarily, there is not necessarily any benefit for the octopus to being _conscious_ of color, but there has to be some way in which its body, if only mechanically, "perceives" color and imitates it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I don't think we'll be doing well with SETI until we have a better understanding of the animals around us. This planet is teeming with non- mammalian intelligence and mostly we either ignore it, are irritated by it, or try to eat it.

</comment><comment><USER38> Reminds me that this youtuber still is profiting from these animals:

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

<comment><USER39> Why would you _eat_ an octopus‽

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Being an octopus is intelligent and great until Korean people decide to pluck you as a baby out of the ocean and boil you alive for fun (and laugh as you struggle in unimaginable pain).

</comment><comment><USER41> When asked if I have any dietary requirements, I'll always respond, I don't eat octopus. Tales of Diogenes aside, this is why. I don't eat my peers.

<comment><USER42> Et moi aussi: I try not to eat anyone smarter than me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> [https://archive.is/UsRxB](https://archive.is/UsRxB)

</comment><comment><USER44> > Octopuses are the closest we can come, on earth, to knowing what it might be > like to encounter intelligent aliens.

Wow

</comment><comment><USER45> If I could I'd come back as an octopus. What awesome, majestic creatures.

<comment><USER46> Just try not to get eaten alive for YouTube views, I guess...

<comment><USER45> I'd come back as a cross between an octopus and one punch man ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I used to know someone whose favorite "are they kidding or serious" joke was that octopi were aliens.

This often lead to a discussion about how we'd be an aquatic civilization of octopi lived much longer than they do.

</comment><comment><USER48> It's handy.

</comment><comment><USER49> I can't read the article at the moment to judge, but going by some of the comments, the original famous essay of this ilk (exploring the idea of consciousness by imagining experiencing life as an very different species) might be of interest.

[https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3...](https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F)

<comment><USER43> [https://archive.is/UsRxB](https://archive.is/UsRxB)

<comment><USER49> Thank you

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Paywalled. Please will the OP or somebody provide a readable link.

Edit:

For anybody who had the same problem as me, try using a different device or privacy mode.

I can't access it on my PC due to the paywall but can on my phone (same, synced browser).

</comment><comment><USER50> Now do raccoons do raccoons!</comment>


Node.JS and Eclipse Support with eBay VJET Engine - <AUTHOR> http://jonathan-whywecanthavenicethings.blogspot.com/2011/08/war-of-worlds.html?spref=tw

<comment><USER2> what are people currently using for node dev. At quillu we are big fans of sublime, a terminal window and node inspector</comment>


The Risks – Know Them – Avoid Them (COVID-19 infection event case studies) - <AUTHOR> https://www.erinbromage.com/post/the-risks-know-them-avoid-them <comment><USER2> _In order to get infected you need to get exposed to an infectious dose of the virus; based on infectious dose studies with MERS and SARS, it is estimated that as few as 1000 SARS-CoV2 viral particles are needed for an infection to take hold._

As far as I know, this statement is somewhere between "completely wrong" and "very misleading". There is no minimum number of viral particles necessary for infection. Rather, there is a curve of probability of infection depending on the number of viral particles. Going by the definition in the link[1] the author provides, "The minimal infective dose is defined as the lowest number of viral particles that cause an infection in 50% of individuals (or 'the average person')."

Which is to say that there is no dose that is "safe", only doses that are less likely to cause an infection. Very brief exposures to 100 contagious people is just as likely to cause infection as a 100x exposure to one. Chance of infection is not a linear function of number of viral particles (since one can't be infected more than once) but can be approximated as linear at low numbers of particles. I feel like this makes most of the rest of the article moot.

Am I wrong? Is the risk of infection actually sublinear below some threshold dose? Is there thus some "safe" exposure time that can be relied on? Or is the article as wrong/misleading with regard to the risks to an individual as it seems?

[1] [https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to- questi...](https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-questions- about-covid-19-and-viral-load/)

<comment><USER3> I believe the theory is that if a virus multiplies with some exponential rate, say doubling every 6 hours, and the immune system takes some fixed time to respond, say 5 days, then the highest virus population in a person is directly proportional to the starting dose.

Obviously the above is highly simplified, but are a model which would explain any sublinear effects, if they exist.

<comment><USER2> This is a good point, and would explain how there could be a threshold effect on initial dosage. On the bright side, if this is true, it would make inoculation against the disease fairly easy: give a measured light dose, and reliably generate a mild case. On the not-so-bright side, while it is a theory, I don't think it is anywhere near proven. If you've come across it, I'd love to see more evidence that this theory is true.

I'm starting to double down on my "just plain wrong" interpretation. The author of this article says repeatedly that one can be safe by simply avoiding extended exposure: "Again, assuming every virus is inhaled, it would take ~5 minutes of speaking face-to-face to receive the required dose." "In these situations there is not enough time to achieve the infectious viral load when you are standing 6 feet apart or where wind and the infinite outdoor space for viral dilution reduces viral load." "You would have to be in their airstream for 5+ minutes for a chance of infection."

I think this article is full of bad, dangerous, and unproven advice. I think the author has confused population level statistical risk (where reduced exposure can reduce R0 below 1 thus preventing epidemic spread) with personal risk (where exposure to a deadly disease can be deadly).

<comment><USER4> > give a measured light dose, and reliably generate a mild case.

That's how it used to be done, eg for smallpox. Inoculation or variolation:

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This page keeps crashing on my phone. I can get down to the toilette flushing.

The idea seems solid, but a bit too alarmist, all told. Are there studies that show this has the right vectors? (For that matter, the paper to go on a toilette... There any evidence that is useful?)

<comment><USER6> There was a infamous spreading event in an apartment block in Hong Kong where due to faulty plumbing some sewage went "backwards" from the sewer to toilets and a single person infected dozens. That was SARS

<comment><USER4> There were suspicions of SARS-CoV-2 transmission as well, but don't think they've been confirmed.

[https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health- environment/artic...](https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health- environment/article/3075228/coronavirus-another-public-housing-estate-hong)

Here's a paper on the 2003 HK SARS toilet event, and applications to COVID-19. Gotta love science.

[https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-1...](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X\(20\)30112-1/fulltext)</comment></comment></comment>


Will people still buy the $999 iPhone? - <AUTHOR> https://email@example.com/will-people-still-buy-the-999-iphone-2fe4334c72a7 <comment><USER2> Short answer: Yes.

Medium answer: Yes, by the millions.

Long answer: Of course they will. There is a subset of people who will buy the most expensive thing available just as a status symbol. There will also be some that want the newest tech to play with, and there will also be those that need to have the latest devices for testing purposes. This phone will sell just fine. I'd actually be more concerned about the number of iPhone 8's that sell because the X may cannibalize initial sales numbers.</comment>


Ask HN: Coaching as my next career at 63? - <AUTHOR> I'm 61 and have 10 years experience as a scrum coach. I am a development manager and very part time developer for a team of 3 total at a University.
I have coached individuals ad-hoc successfully several times with many staying in close contact and thankful for my help. All pro-bono. I mentor high school students in STEM career choices on an ongoing basis also pro-bono.
I will have the chance to retire in two years and have been assured that I can find lucrative scrum coaching work as a contractor. But, I don't want to be coaching scrum all day.  I would rather be coaching the development of professionals. I have built and sold two small businesses, have been a successful systems integrator and business systems analyst and a bank compliance advisor. So I am not afraid of new things.  I'm told I have very good interpersonal skills for someone technical.
I'm planning on getting certified in some coaching disciplines like Gallops Strengths Finder (which I love SF) in the next two years.
What certifications should I avoid and what might be good to consider? What other advice do you have for me? <comment><USER2> > What certifications should I avoid and what might be good to consider?

Who exactly certifies the certifiers?

Best to be known by doing good work. Here's a great read by Josh Kaufman> [http://joshkaufman.net/alan-weiss-on-certifications-and- cons...](http://joshkaufman.net/alan-weiss-on-certifications-and-consulting/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I think you have a great plan.

I just accepted an offer to move to SF and management is something i have to pick up pretty quickly (been mostly at engineering / architecting side of things).

Lots of people will benefit from such coaching instead of learning on a battlefield.</comment>