New Mac OS X Lion features announced: Version Control, Instant Resume - <AUTHOR> http://www.apple.com/macosx/lion/?

<comment><USER2> Note that what they refer to as "Versions" isn't really version control. It would more accurately be referred to as snapshots, as it simply performs a backup when opening a document, then an hourly backup while it's open. This is a bit to arbitrary to be considered version control. Nonetheless, it might be useful to undisciplined users, if the snapshots are easy to access and the feature isn't well hidden. Also note that apps must be updated for Lion in order to take advantage of the feature.

<comment><USER3> It may not be 'real' version control, but remember that huge percentage of people have no idea that such a thing even exists. If you've ever explained version control to a non-developer the second they actually grok what it is, they instantly see the value.

This seems like a great way to introduce your average user to the powers of version control.

<comment><USER4> Hopefully it works better than XCode snapshots

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Both of these require the application to specifically support them (per the asterisk after the features).

I'm assuming they'll be supported by Apple's first party programs, then sporadically by 3rd party developers, as it is with Time Machine, QuickView and Spotlight document helpers support.

</comment><comment><USER6> I found this interesting, apparently Dino A. Dai Zovi (<http://twitter.com/dinodaizovi>) and Stefan Esser (<http://twitter.com/i0n1c>), two security researchers (hackers) have apparently received invitations to try out Mac OS X Lion with some strings attached that they can't talk about the as of yet unreleased OS:

<https://twitter.com/dinodaizovi/status/40903620438269952>

<https://twitter.com/i0n1c/status/40905883584180224>

Question related to this:

<https://twitter.com/bertjwregeer/status/40906705118175233>

<https://twitter.com/bertjwregeer/status/40906796650471424>

<https://twitter.com/dinodaizovi/status/40909480342331392>

If indeed Apple is moving forward and opening up dialogue with external researchers this is a good thing. Hopefully that means that Mac OS X Lion will finally join the ranks of Windows 7 and Linux in having full ASLR available and more sand-boxing of the various components so that it becomes a much more hardened target.

<comment> X-Istence Ha, that's me asking those questions!

Yeah, I was honestly really surprised as well that Apple is doing an outreach, it definitely makes me extremely happy to see that Apple may finally be getting it concerning security!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Resume is something I've wanted from an operating system for a long time. Nothing is more frustrating than leaving your computer for an hour, only to come back and realize updates demanded that they restart your computer and you need to relaunch all your applications, videos, etc.

<comment><USER8> I 'verun into this on Windows XP, but never on Mac OS X. Actually, I don't think Windows 7 forces reboots either, it just installs updates when you shut down or restart.

<comment><USER9> OS X definitely starts to nag if you dont update in awhile.

<comment><USER8> …but it doesn't install updates and restart your computer without permission.

<comment><USER10> Unless I'm misremembering, unless you ask for detailed information about the updates, it doesn't tell you ahead of time if it's going to ask to restart your computer. It just says basically, "There are updates available. Do you want them?"

<comment><USER11> you're probably misremembering -- there's a little arrow next to the update items which require a reboot, and even after installing everything, you can still choose to reboot later. I still have a system running Tiger so I don't think it's changed since then.

<comment><USER10> I just checked. The standard Software Update screen in 10.6 doesn't have a list of items. It just has three buttons: "Show Details", "Not Now" and "Install" — the list you're talking about is revealed by "Show Details." You do still have the option to wait as long as you want to restart, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The primary focus here (understandably) is "we make your laptop look / work like your iPad". Versions, AirDrop, etc are tacked on at the end and given much less focus.

The problem with making my laptop work like an iPad is that the laptop is a general purpose computer and the iPad is not.[1] The genius of the iPad was that it was a specialized device built for a single purpose: consuming media anywhere, anytime. It has long battery life, sunlight-visible screen, and does not require mouse or keyboard. It is very good at its purpose -- you can use it as a book reader or movie viewer while riding a bus, sitting in a park, etc -- and it sucks for anything else (e.g. anything that requires typing more than a few characters).

My laptop, on the other hand, was designed to be an all-up computer that could be used anywhere that there was a flat surface, but mostly indoors. I can use it at home, at the coffee shop, etc. It's also fine for consuming media as long as I'm not in direct sunlight or away from power for more than a few hours.

So. What exactly am I gaining by adding these iPad features? Sure, I bet they're handy and I'll probably learn to use them. But I can't help but think that a bunch of guys as talented as Apple could have produced something really impressive in the time they took adding these iPad features.

[1] No pedantry, please.

<comment><USER13> Well, I think the ipad style of app is intriguing--they differ from a current desktop app in a few significant ways:

      1. There's no notion of save.
      2. There's no notion of quit.
      3. There's no notion of filesystem.

Those are all interesting tweaks.

Having the app save things automatically and always present you with the most up-to-date version of your document is kind of cool actually. But, you say, "I don't want it to save my document sometimes--what if I want to experiment and then throw away the changes?" I think that is where the new "versions" feature fits in. It seems designed to give people exactly that. I suspect that ⌘S will change from "Save" to "Snapshot".

Having the app suspend itself, save its state and unload at the appropriate time is interesting too. It gives the app a sense of persistence that doesn't exist in most desktop apps currently. I've already subconsciously switched to this style of thinking. I like my Firefox set up to restore the windows from last time. I do a similar thing with my Emacs so that all my buffers get saved and restored (emacs-desktop).

I think I'd have a hard time letting go of my filesystem. I don't see anything in Lion that seems to indicate they are moving that way. But I kind of understand it. It'll probably start moving that direction eventually. But who knows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The official marketing message is bring the "magic of iPad" to the desktop. Apple knows how to ride their own wave. The glossy pictures give Grandma the impression that the UIs will merge and everything will be better _because of the new interface changes._

The substance behind this hype are the improvements toward ubiquitous computing. No single improvement is revolutionary. Auto Save and Versions means less worry about losing work. Google Spreadsheets has these. Resume is similar to Session Manager for Firefox. It is useful for single computers now, but will be even more handy when we move around between computers and resume from anywhere. AirDrop and even iPad File Sharing over WebDAV on Lion Server are efforts to integrate services like Dropbox into the core of the OS.

Management of these menial tasks and concerns fades to the background. Google is artful in bringing such improvements to their web apps, and Apple is beautifully skilled at integrating new functionality and paradigms into their devices and OS platforms.

So we have saving, versioning (of sorts), resuming, and sharing. All we need is a humongous data center to store all the data.

The writing is on the wall, just past the glossy pictures.

</comment><comment><USER15> Full screen apps! I've been waiting for this since the DOS days.

</comment><comment><USER16> Versions and Resume look cool, but Launchpad? Do people really need a full view of all the (dozens) of apps they have installed? I thought we were getting away from that with Quicksilver and other 'find as you type' tools.

Launchpad seems like Program Manager from the olden days of Windows.

<comment><USER17> By "we" do you mean the geeks that read HN and write code, or their typical consumer?

I have never seen my mom type to find a file she was looking for, let alone launch an app. Every single person I know that isn't in technology or consider themselves technically competent uses and explores their computer solely with the mouse. Even editing a word she just typed, my mom would leave the keyboard, mouse over the previous word's characters, and then retype it.

<comment><USER18> At least it's better than pressing backspace until she gets to the word and then typing the whole thing again. ;)

<comment><USER19> If you type pretty quickly, that can actually be faster than using the mouse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is there any news on the invisible parts of Lion? Snow Leopard brought us OpenCL, Clang, Grand Central, and these other cool technologies. Will we finally have resolution independent displays??

<comment><USER21> Resolution independence - IMO that's never gonna happen. Apple will do the pixel-doubling thing, I reckon.

Netkas has confirmed the following about Lion: (<http://netkas.org/?p=609>)

>Lion requires hardware with a Core 2 Duo processor or better. A lot of apps are sandboxed. OpenGL 3.2 support

<comment><USER22> OpenGL 3.2, huh? Well, I guess it's better than nothing, but had a faint hope Apple will skip ahead to 4.0 or even 4.1. Next time around it seems.

<comment><USER23> Intel's HD 3000 seems to only support OpenGL 3. NVidia's 320M and 330M are likewise limited to OpenGL 3.3 (according to wikipedia, NVidia's own spec pages only talks about 2.1[0]). I'm not sure it makes as much sense to support that.

[0] <http://www.nvidia.com/object/product_geforce_gt_330m_us.html>

<comment><USER5> Apple has used LLVM in the past to run more advanced OpenGL implementations on lesser hardware - their Intel 950 graphic driver was one example of this:

[http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2006-August/00649...](http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2006-August/006492.html)

Of course, this only covered vertex processing and other compute-intensive tasks, and thus wouldn't apply to many other OpenGL features.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Yah it only took OS X what.. some 13 years to get what KDE has had with "Resume". Year after year I pondered why other desktops didn't implement this. A pretty basic and killer feature that is hard to let go once you have it.

<comment><USER25> Faulting Apple for having different priorities about which features to implement first? I used to use a a Linux (Fedora) laptop but I got tired of opening the lid, only to find out that it didn't suspend properly. I bought a Mac so I could run Unix and have the basic stuff "just work."

I'm still hopeful that someday the Linux community will finally produce a polished desktop solution on par with Apple.

<comment><USER24> Same here, when I discovered that OS X was solid enough that I rarely rebooted combined with suspend that always works the requirement to re-launch on boot like KDE went down for me. It is still a cool feature.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm scared of what they'll do to Exposé in Lion... they already butchered it with the grid style in 10.6, but at least that could be undone with an easy little hack: <http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=869611>

<comment><USER27> Installing beta versions of Dock.app is highly not recommended for system stability.

<comment><USER26> It's fine. Using Snow Leopard's version of Expose is highly not recommended for mental stability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Wow. My next computer might be a mac...

The auto-versioning got me thinking of how to do this with git. You could have a cron job come by while you're working and if anything has changed, add and commit it to $CURR_BRANCH/auto. Then, when you're ready to do a real commit, you `git merge --squash`

I know that real git users commit about as often as they save, but would this make sense as a workflow for those of us who are still used to committing only when it works? Or would all of the autocommits make things overcomplicated?

</comment><comment><USER26> A long-time Windows advantage is finally being added: windows can be resized from all edges and corners.

<comment><USER29> That's also present on countless window managers for X11 (Linux, BSD).

What both Macs and Windows seem to lack is a modifier for holding to drag windows: most X11 window managers let you hold Alt to drag windows, regardless of where you click. That would have saved me from several situations in Windows where the titlebar of a window is out of the viewable area, and I therefore could not move the window.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I sure hope the auto-save "feature" can be disabled...

<comment><USER31> It's up to apps to implement it. But why, do you honestly think it will get in the way anywhere besides IDEs (and maybe not even there...)? This is an honest question because I can't really think of instances where I wouldn't want something like this.

I'm spoiled by Notational Velocity, which saves automatically, and by iPad apps for same. I have Coda and TextMate set to save when they lose focus so I don't lose work...

<comment><USER10> Some people actually do use a large percentage of their hard drives.

<comment><USER32> Those people are exceedingly rare. And I'm sure applications won't autosave huge files; if they do there would be large performance hits. Most files that need autosaving are basic documents, maybe pictures. 99.9% of the time autosaving is a good idea.

If your autosave makes you run out of disk space, you're probably "doing it wrong".

<comment><USER10> It seems pretty small-minded to blame the user for "doing it wrong" because an application used up all his hard drive space with no way to disable it. What would "doing it right" consist of? Just not using the application at all?

<comment><USER33> I suspect "you" in the last sentence was meant to refer to the application developer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> So this version has:

\- an ubuntu netbook remix clone (OMG A SCREEN FULL OF ICONS!) but with even more blur,

\- built-in F11 key

\- Compiz ring switching plugin

\- a trackpad, but rebranded!

\- automatic saving, but rebranded!

\- time machine, but rebranded!

\- "suspend" instead of "shut down", but rebranded!

\- thunderbird's default email layout

\- gmail's threads, but rebranded!

\- ripoff of giver (a Novell engineer's 2007 hack day project, see <http://code.google.com/p/giver/> )

\- ripoff of LUKS

\- a "server" control panel program

Why do people pay for this?

<comment><USER35> "Why do people pay for this?"

Cause the implementation of a feature is more important than the feature itself. Apple rarely comes up with new tech on its own. They rebrand existing tech and work on the experience to create a product and a platform. Seriously, who in the general public knows what LUKS is?</comment></comment>


Tesla wins over outdated Michigan franchise laws - <AUTHOR> https://www.autonews.com/commentary/tesla-wins-over-michigans-outdated-franchise-laws <comment><AUTHOR> I live in KY, which has some of the same anti-dealer legislation as MI. I've been trying to get my mother interested in a Tesla but it's difficult when the closest "dealer" is two hours away in Ohio. Hopefully this win will roll over to other states and allow Tesla to expand.</comment>


Why We Should All Stop Reading TechCrunch - <AUTHOR> http://www.thegorgonlab.com/blog/why-we-should-all-stop-reading-techcrunch

<comment><USER2> This post is 11 days old and the ship has already sailed. There's no need to 'hasten the end's arrival' anymore. Arrington is gone, Carr is gone, and we now know just how editorial is going to run over there. Sadly (IMHO).

<comment><USER3> if apple can survive without steve jobs, techcrunch can continue without arrington.

and, just out of curiosity, why do you say sadly? whats your HO?

<comment><USER2> I was a TC subscriber from not long after its launch and continued to see it as "Michael's blog" (with all the bias and personality that entails) and not the media behemoth it has become. Admittedly, it's like lamenting Wozniak 'leaving' Apple in 1987 ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would like to keep up on startup news without the bias and the literary slap-fighting that is going on over there. I'd start the site myself but I'm in the midwest so I don't have the access I'd need.

Please, someone make a better TechCrunch and keep the journalistic standards high, please. I'll even pay a nominal fee for a subscription.</comment>


BioEngineering Methuselah (Humans Living To 150) - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903461304576522682469695342.html

<comment><USER2> Very good to see this getting more attention. Aging sucks and we should fix it, for the same reason that we should cure any other degenerative condition. Also, doing so would in one shot solve the impending Medicare fiscal train wreck. Health care is really expensive when you're trying to take care of 80 year olds, but really cheap if they're as healthy as 25 year olds.

And I wasn't aware that Larry Ellison was involved in anti-aging research. Opinion revised slightly upward.

</comment><comment><USER3> My comments on Arrison's book:

[http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/08/changing-the- myth...](http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/08/changing-the-mythology- thoughts-on-sonia-arrisons-100-plus.php)

"The latest book to emerge from the longevity advocacy community is entitled "100 Plus: How the Coming age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family and Faith", and is penned by Sonia Arrison, whom you might have heard of. The foreword is by Peter Thiel, whose name you should certainly know by now - you might recall his $3.5 million funding of the SENS Foundation's program of rejuvenation biotechnology, back when it was a branch of the Methuselah Foundation. Thiel makes a point in the opening pages, and it's one to keep in mind when reading the rest of the book..."

</comment><comment><USER4> 150 years is still far from 969 years ;-)

<comment><USER5> Well, sure, but 150 years gives you about 75 years of extra research time.</comment></comment>


Help prevent a startup from failing by saving its domain name - <AUTHOR>

On February 3rd 2015 a Chinese Hacker broke into my friend's US based Registrar's account and transferred his primary domain name to a Chinese based registrar.  The governing agency in this matter is ICANN but they contract a number of responsibilities to a private company called Verisign.  To get the domain back we need to get some attention so the folks at Verisign will help.
Would you be willing to join our campaign?
https://www.thunderclap.it/projects/22164-help-stop-a-domain-hacker <comment><USER2> clickable:

[https://www.thunderclap.it/projects/22164-help-stop-a- domain...](https://www.thunderclap.it/projects/22164-help-stop-a-domain- hacker)

And the more public version, stating the domain is ShadesDaddy.com

[https://medium.com/@PabloPalatnik/chinese-hackers-hack- large...](https://medium.com/@PabloPalatnik/chinese-hackers-hack-large- american-internet-retailer-shadesdaddy-com-domain-b6ad7abf7af0)

And past time for you to initiate an alternative domain, and migrate all of your affiliated assets to point to the alternative domain name, and keep your business operating. Why are you still pointing, via Twitter, and Medium to a non-controlled and lost domain weeks later? You have a business to keep operating!

Retrieving the domain name take months and years to resolve and may never be successful--move on to a new name--you cannot wait that long.

New names? Many businesses have a different name than their trademark. Move on. How about "getshadesdaddy.TLD" and shadesdaddy.us, and the like.

</comment><comment><USER3> I can't help you return the domain name, but I'm curious to know what registrar the name was stolen from. I reported a serious vulnerability to a registrar recently that made a lot of headlines. I'm wondering if this vulnerability was used before it was patched.

</comment><comment><USER4> commenting in support, tweeted this out a few hours ago also.</comment>


Minecraft augmented reality app announced for iOS - <AUTHOR> http://mojang.com/2012/11/announcing-minecraft-reality-for-ios/ <comment><USER2> So creater of Minecraft rejects Microsoft's platform (Windows RT/8) because it's closed, moves on to develop for iOS.

Yes, I remember the idea, being that Windows used to be an open platform, so closing it down is bad. But so was Mac OS.

This is still hypocritical as heck.

<comment><USER3> PCs need to be open, cell phones less so. PCs have ever been so, cell phones have not. That's not actually hypocritical however dischordant it may sound to some.

<comment><USER4> I'm not rejecting your statement here, I'm simply interested in hearing your rationale:

> PCs need to be open, cell phones less so

Why is it more important for PCs to be important?

I'd argue that, because PCs and smartphones were open and closed respectively when they gained popularity, we've been conditioned to assume those states are permissible. I think if those initial conditions did not influence our perception of the products so strongly we would value openness equally across both. Since we are influenced though, we seem to be inclined to focus on the negative of the each's alternative option (anti-competitive PC market places and virus-ridden cell phones, respectively).

<comment><USER4> > Why is it more important for PCs to be important?

Woops, meant to say why is it more important for PCs to be open.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "You could put an exploding creeper in your school..."

I am not sure the placement of an explosive thing in a school was the best example they could have come up with. It's not that big of a deal, but it is just generally better to stay away from it.

<comment><USER6> Interesting observation, I didn't even notice that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Been using this on iPhone 5 for a few minutes. It works really well. The UI is well put together. 3d tracking is pretty spot on. I'm in a low-light room and it works fine. They seem to be having some server load issues at the moment, as I frequently am getting network connection errors from the app when it's looking for new models. That's a minor issue that I'm sure they'll get fixed.

</comment><comment><USER8> I have a group of friends that were thinking about doing something similar, unfortunately for them, they were just starting to shape the idea, while Mojang seems very ahead in development.

<comment><USER3> Plenty of room for more alternate/augmented reality worlds. See Gibson's Zero History for more examples (though not actually live and available, as in this case).

<comment><USER8> Thanks for the reference, I'm going to pass it to them, and yeah, there is still plenty of room in the AR worlds, but they are really dissapointed with this as they were pitching their game as "A minecraft but in the real world".

They are now looking for an alternative, I hope they find one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wow, anyone have the app? Is the tracking that good? That's way better than I tend to see.

That said, can't you define precise hardware requirements for apps? Why don't they restrict the sale of the app to exclude iPod 4th gen users, if it won't work on it?

<comment><USER10> Seems suspiciously good, especially the lighting. One shot in particular where the plane reaches out of the laptop screen is unimaginably impressive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The actual iOS app seems pretty buggy at the moment. Many of the ratings are exceedingly negative.

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/minecraft- reality/id57799155...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/minecraft- reality/id577991556)

<comment><USER12> "Note: Not supported for iPod Touch 4G or earlier. Most functionality is not available on iPhone 4."

... with many negative comments from iPhone 4 users who ignored that note. The video looked so good compared to Layar on Android - is the hardware in the iPhone 5 "better" for AR somehow? Or is the video just picking the best case scenarios?

<comment><USER10> That note is rather disingenuous considering the requirements on the left hand side state: _"Compatible with iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPod touch (4th generation)"_

<comment><USER13> That's because Apple doesn't have support for flagging specific devices. You can't for example click check boxes that enable an app to be downloaded for iphone 5 and iphone 4s but not iphone4. There are a variety of clever tricks you can use in some but not all cases. For example you can require a front facing camera to eliminate ipad1 but not ipad2.

Unfortunately such tricks don't give devs complete coverage. It's a major issue that many devs struggle with. Apple is entirely at fault here for not supporting a very straight forward feature.

<comment><USER10> Thanks, I wasn't aware of that. Seems rather ridiculous considering the marked difference between devices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm hoping there's some sort of flagging models as unacceptable. If anyone can put anything anywhere, then I expect a large number of trolling images like penises and schwasticas to be ... everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER4> Kind of funny that Microsoft, Sony, and Mojang all attempted to solve their market saturation based profit deceleration (Xbox 360, PS3, and Minecraft respectively) issues with computer vision supplements (Kinect, PlayStation Move, augmented reality app respectively). Any doubt that further integrating and improving computer vision in gaming will be the dominant industry move over the next few years?

</comment><comment><USER15> In the demo video the augmented elements seem to blend very well into the surrounding dynamic lighting. In the real world it never looks that good, especially in an outdoor setting where the lighting changes throughout the day.

</comment><comment><USER16> anyone curious what similar apps were available for android, <http://www.augmentedev.com/home.php> seems quite nice - i'm not entirely convinced by the process, it could use some streamlining.. but it is reasonably easy to upload your own 3d model and use a qr code to view/share and the result is pretty good.

I assume this mojang app uses markers too?

<comment><USER17> > I assume this mojang app uses markers too?

No! That's what makes it so awesome. It analyses the scenery and infers your position as you walk around.

<comment><USER16> that is awesome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Word of warning, this definitely did NOT work as well as in the video for me. I can not get any models to lay flat on my hardwood floor, or anywhere for that matter. Pretty disappointing.

</comment><comment><USER19> That tracking is amazing! Is there an open variant so that I can look under the hood? Or could anyone cite what their implementation is based off?

<comment><USER20> The implementation and developer SDK uses a SLAM-based algorithm: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_localization_and_m...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_localization_and_mapping)

Here's a link to the SDK: <http://developer.pointcloud.io/sdk/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is genius. It's like the art from William Gibson's Spook Country come to life, but made practical and tied to a huge fan base.

</comment><comment><USER22> There really is not much more to say about this than that it is very, very cool.</comment>


Dynamic languages have jumped the shark - <AUTHOR> http://swizec.com/blog/dynamic-languages-have-jumped-the-shark/swizec/6204

<comment><USER2> The criticism of ENV only allowing strings has no bearing on his argument. ENV comes from the OS environment. Code in any other language--strong or weakly typed--would have the exact same issue. And not being able to coerce arbitrary strings to booleans is fine because there is no principled way to do that except through convention. And everybody makes up there own convention: true, yes, YES, OK, TRUE, ok, ON, ENABLED, which just goes to show that there's no principled way to do it.

<comment><USER3> This.

Note that Java main methods start with public static void main(String[] args){}

The main method takes an array of String objects from the command line as an argument. You can't pass a boolean or anything other than a String in args any more easily in Java than you can in Ruby.

But Ruby and other dynamic languages give you _eval_ which, although dangerous, can have the effect of coercing your string into a boolean.

irb(main):001:0> a = "true"

=> "true"

irb(main):002:0> b = eval a

=> true

irb(main):003:0> b

=> true

irb(main):004:0> !b

=> false

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You have weak and dynamic typing confused.

</comment><comment><USER5> Ruby has strong types, you can and should use them.

If you want type checking, use it.

Also, if Rails has security problems, stop using it.

Scala and Haskell have their own flaws. There is no magic bullet.</comment>


Amazon's plan for Alexa - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614676/amazon-alexa-will-run-your-life-data-privacy/ <comment><USER2> It still baffles me that these things have taken off. I suspect that the people buying them are purchasing the spectacle of having a virtual assistant rather than any sort of useful functionality.

The last time I interacted with one was at a friend's place. We were talking over coffee and somehow Brad Pitt's age came up. Neither of us knew how old he was. My friend paused, and then yelled out across the room "OK Google, how old is Brad Pitt?" The answer came back almost immediately. "103 years old".

<comment><USER3> This is the NBU market - Next Billion Users.

India is the world's fastest growing consumer of voice traffic. At this point 30% of all google searches in India are voice and growing.

The fact that we have over 20 mainstream languages contributes to this. a lot of people now write Indian vernacular in Latin script which is highly unstandardised in spelling.

Voice is far far superior.

<comment><USER4> Voice is potentially superior only for a set of unambiguous questions - e.g. the temperature outside and that is assuming that the recognition part works.

<comment><USER5> Voice is superior when your language isn't Latin-based.

Billions of Chinese use voice as a main input for phones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > If you're one of the eight or nine people on the planet who has never > interacted with Alexa, you're both missing out and not really missing out.

I must be officially old, because I see no reason to give voice commands to things. If I did I'd just attach a microphone to the server I run at home and connect it to things.

<comment><USER7> I still don't find voice activation to be very good in the cases I've used it. The problem of transcribing what you're saying seems to be solved pretty well, but (at least in the applications I've used it in - which is just navigation via google maps on my phone) there still seems to be an inherent problem of discoverability.

It took me a fair bit of trial and error to work out the exact magic words to say to get google maps to launch navigation to a given address by car without requiring me to use the touch screen at all.

My natural inclination was to say "Hey Google, give me directions to 123 fake street" but this would bring up a route (or if you're especially unlucky a list of different places for you to choose from) but require you to press a "start" button with your finger, and often also require you to switch the navigation type from bus/walk/cycle to car manually too.

"Give me directions to 123 fake street by car" would skip the navigation type selection, but still require you to manually press a "start" button (various variations of "ok google, begin" or "ok google, start" etc didn't seem to do anything")

After a long period (months) of having to press a tiny button manually while driving to start navigation I finally discovered that if you say "Navigate to" rather than "Give me directions to" it would skip past the start button screen and jump straight to giving you directions.

So now it works great, but I hope I don't have to go through tedious trial and error with everything voice activated to work out the exact phrasing it wants.

<comment><USER8> I had to look up the voice command to cancel the current directions without touching the phone. It's "exit navigation," which is very similar to the command you found to start them.

All of these commands printed out on a list somewhere would probably be consistent, and make sense. But you don't get to see that list. Google and others want to present these systems as magical AI helpers that you just converse with, as if they had any more intelligence than a touch tone menu system circa 1990.

Knowing how these things work, it just strikes me as hubris. The UX isn't good because they can't admit that the whole system isn't as good as they say it is or want it to be, and this makes them opaque and frustrating to interact with.

<comment><USER9> I think that's because we're in the very early stages of a transitional period. The end goal is something like the Star Trek computer, free-form natural language queries ending in desired actions. I think this approach of filing off all the rough edges (namely, handling every possible unique way of phrasing a specific intent) is a dead end.

What we have nowadays is more like a voice-input command line, with all of the stiltedness and attention to detail when crafting your input that requires.

<comment><USER6> A voice input command line is exactly what we need.

Unfortunately people want to pretend that natural language parsing can be solved, which, at least, for English is impossible: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_flies_like_an_arrow;_frui...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_flies_like_an_arrow;_fruit_flies_like_a_banana)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There's a particularly good short story dealing with AI personal assistants shaping people's lives called _The Perfect Match_ by Ken Liu (who once worked as a software engineer at Microsoft!) It's in an anthology of his short stories called _The Paper Menagerie_. Check it out, they're all pretty great - he's also the guy who translated most of the Three Body trilogy into english.

</comment><comment><USER11> The question I always have is, _who asked for all of this_?

Do AI assistants actually make anyone's life easier? Serious question. I understand the novelty of shouting at your lightbulbs to turn them on and off, but it feels like that remains the epitome of the life-improvement that these systems can provide. I've never gotten a good recommendation from software outside of Pandora, which last I checked doesn't even use AI. I've never found a real use for Siri or Google Assistant. I briefly considered getting some Phillips Hues to go with an Alexa that I got for free, before stuffing the latter in a closet.

Please, for real, weigh in if voice assistants/AI suggestions have meaningfully improved your life. I'm genuinely curious.

<comment><USER12> I like being able to set an alarm without getting out of bed, and I'm extremely nearsighted, so I like being able to check the time and temperature before I find my glasses. Sometimes, if I can't sleep late at night, it is nice to put on some music or sounds w/o getting up.

It is handy when cooking, you can set named timers, ask for conversions with your hands full.

It is also fun at parties, guests can play whatever songs they want (there is a discount because I have the Amazon music just on that one device).

I listen to the radio on it, and I also get my news from it (I have it programmed to play the NPR news update and then the Fox News update. They usually cover the same stuff, but it is interesting to see how they emphasize different things.)

Alexa seems smarter than Siri or the "hey google" character if you have random questions and don't want to get out your phone or you already have too many tabs open.

I've played around with some of the skills, but really only use the timers, alarms, news, weather, music, streaming radio, and sometimes ask it questions.

<comment><USER11> Yeah. It just seems like most of those things could be done with ever-so- slightly more effort without this technology.

Most new consumer technologies that end up in every home fundamentally change people's lives. I just don't see that happening here.

We talk about these companies destroying privacy, gaining power on the scale of nation-states, etc. And we put up with them on some things, because smartphones and social media are really useful and can be really important to living modern life. But I just don't get it with the assistants (and really, Amazon shopping too). We're giving up so much as a society for such a tiny modicum of extra convenience.

<comment><USER12> I really like it, and I'm not convinced I'm giving up that much -- and I don't think there are negative externalities with my use of the device (how am I hurting anyone else?).

At the end of the day its just a fancy clock radio with okay sound that can play anything I want to hear without me getting up. But the "assistant" part of it seems like it is smarter than Siri or hey google.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's not the hyperbole that I find a bit old and tiresome, it's the hubris and often utopian vision I come across from people in tech in statements like this. As though there are no possible downsides.

> Prasad's ultimate vision is to make Alexa available and useful for everyone. > Even in developing countries, he imagines cheaper versions that people can > access on their smartphones. "To me we are on a journey of shifting the > cognitive load on routine tasks," he says. "I want Alexa to be a > productivity enhancer … to be truly ubiquitous so that it works for > everyone."

<comment><USER14> That sounds too positive. It isn't doomsday enough for the culture here. An opt-in device you need to purchase, set up, and interact with: the horrors!

<comment><USER15> "Alexa", whoever TF that is today, can hear and see your neighbors.

<comment><USER16> And your guests, who did NOT opt in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The AI fear mongering is getting old. If you don't want an Alexa or Google Home, then don't buy one. Personally, I ask Google questions all day long and miss it when I don't have it around. It allows me to learn lots of little things all of the time, and I would be happy to have contextual suggestions as long as it was truly trying to be helpful rather than only sell shit.

<comment><USER18> Do you turn off your Alexa when visitors come over?

Should I ask if I visit, and how would you respond?

<comment><USER19> This is silly. Do you also worry about everyone's phone? It is not uncommon to see folks accidently activate Siri. Or Google. Usually to laughs. If someone is wanting to be nefarious... I'd be more worried about the people you have over to your house, than the people's houses you go to.

<comment><USER18> I do worry about people's phones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > From a consumer point-of-view, it's hard to imagine Alexa becoming so useful > that we'd come running when it summons us. But Alexa's primary mission will > always be to gather data. Simply put: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are all > trillion dollar companies because data is the most valuable resource in the > world, and Alexa is among the world's greatest data collectors.

I think the article misses the point here. Alexa is not supposed to summon you anywhere, it's supposed to be omnipresent like the "computer" in Star Trek. Being more proactive would just be similar to receiving smartphone push notifications. Maybe the real worry is about getting too many of those notifications from Alexa, which is obviously something Amazon needs to be careful with.

I also couldn't find any mention of Alexa being "among the world's greatest data collectors" in the referred infographic. I don't doubt that it collects a lot of data in terms of terabytes since it's all audio, but is there really so much information content in those commands people occasionally utter to it?

<comment><USER21> > but is there really so much information content in those commands people > occasionally utter to it?

You forget that those devices are always on, always listening.

<comment><USER20> Yeah, they're half-on listening for the wakeword, but they don't send the audio anywhere until you utter it.

<comment><USER22> This is not only something you largely have to trust Amazon's word on but a limitation that can be removed at any time via OTA update.

<comment><USER20> I don't think that's entirely true. People have analyzed the network traffic and found it to match the wakewords. The hardware and software architecture has also been analyzed and my understanding is that the wakeword functionality is implemented by secondary low-power hardware, which turns on the main system only after hearing the wakeword. Of course, anything is possible in theory and I wouldn't be surprised to see some targeted attacks happening occasionally, but that's pretty different from massive always-on 24/7 audio collection from all consumers.

Some related links: [https://www.iot-tests.org/2017/06/careless-whisper-does- amaz...](https://www.iot-tests.org/2017/06/careless-whisper-does-amazon-echo- send-data-in-silent-mode/) [https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.08696](https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.08696)

<comment><USER23> Do you think that people care about the difference between only detecting wakewords and actual continual listening? My understanding from people I've talked to with smart speakers in their homes is that they've accepted that it's listening all the time.

<comment><USER20> I'm sure people have different feelings about it. My personal view is that you can listen to anyone using the microphones in their computers and smartphones anyway (with a targeted attack) and nobody is unhackable.

At the same time I think people have become more privacy-aware in general and started to demand less bulk data collection. So they might accept certain risks of getting hacked but not necessarily submit to terms of service that allow bulk collection.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Can someone explain to me how we go from assistant that maybe tells me news in the morning and lets me know if the traffic is bad on my commute to omnipresence?

I mean sure Alexa skills are just Amazon letting other people figure out how to design the interface for interacting with Alexa until they lock that down. It also allows for wonderful ads for local news letting you know they have programmed an Alexa skill.

This is article is just description that as with every other large digital assistant team, it is much easier for them to learn how to design the user experience of the digital assistant by seeing what people do with it rather than designing literally anything.

I also tend to think that it is now becoming clear that the hard part of making a digital assistant is designed the user interface and interactions and not the AI part of it, not to discount the vast amount of work done by all of these companies.

<comment><USER25> > Can someone explain to me how we go from assistant that maybe tells me news > in the morning and lets me know if the traffic is bad on my commute to > omnipresence?

I've often thought about what I would like a virtual assistant to do for me, and it's generally along the lines of "alert me if there's something I should know about", similar to how a real, live assistant might go about it. I don't want to know the weather parameters, only if they changed significantly from yesterday. And delivered at the correct moment for me to do something about it, not too early, not too late. Same for a commute, but for that, the assistant would have to know how I commute normally, what my schedule is for today, when I'm planning to leave. All of this would be a lot more accurate with omnipresence, as scary as that sounds. The value add is great enough that in the long run, implementation is almost guaranteed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Going from passive to active interaction feels like the logical evolution of the technology. If Alexa can simply sense if someone is in a room and asks if they would like something to eat, that will dramatically change the food delivery industry. The question is: will people find it invasive or upsetting? My intuition says yes, but the existing popularity of the devices says no.

</comment><comment><USER27> I've been reading "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" recently, and this is totally the classic case for her argument. We've clearly reached the point where our utility to the technology providers has surpassed their utility to us. I have no idea why anyone would have one of those things in their home. It's no longer a matter of the technology itself, but who is behind it and what they are doing with it. I don't like the Bezos drives his warehouse workers like something out of a Dickens era factory horror show, but the notion that he'd like to turn me into a "consumption worker" is just too much to stomach.

<comment><USER28> They're game changing convenience items. "Alexa, play <music description>" "Alexa, set a timer for 90 seconds." "Alexa, what's the weather?" "Alexa, play 'price it right'"

I don't expect I'll order items via Alexa anytime soon, but "she" gets probably 50 interactions a day. I'm fine with the trade off.

<comment><USER29> Alexa, or as I say 'computer', really helps cook food with timers. I'm kind of fine with giving up privacy in exchange for useful tools.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > From a consumer point-of-view, it's hard to imagine Alexa becoming so useful > that we'd come running when it summons us. But Alexa's primary mission will > always be to gather data. Simply put: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are all > trillion dollar companies because data is the most valuable resource in the > world, and Alexa is among the world's greatest data collectors.

I know this has nothing to do with the overall theme of the article, but this is misleading, Microsoft is the only company in that list with a market cap over 1 trillion. As of the time of writing it is ~1.1T. Apple, on the other hand, has a market share of ~1.16T, and they have made clear their stance (or lack thereof) in users' personal data. Just don't like the author's use of market caps to explain the power of "data" when their argument falls apart rather quickly.

</comment><comment><USER31> In order for Amazon to accomplish the goal of Alexa becoming proactive, there's one major puzzle piece that's missing: an Amazon phone (unless by some miracle either Apple or Google gives Alexa tighter integration into their OS's)

I predict Amazon will make another attempt at releasing a phone within the next two years

</comment><comment><USER32> Alexa is banned from my house. No eavesdropping allowed.

<comment><USER33> No smartphones either then? Even when guests come over?

<comment><USER34> I would highly value a phone that had a physical kill switch for mic, camera, and sensors. The best would be a multi level level kill switch: one for that, another step to kill mobile, another to kill all networking. Not perfect, but better than nothing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Url changed from [https://thenextweb.com/artificial- intelligence/2019/11/08/am...](https://thenextweb.com/artificial- intelligence/2019/11/08/amazons-roadmap-for-alexa-is-scarier-than-anything- facebook-or-twitter-is-doing/), which points to this.

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm one of the 8 people on the planet. Simply because Alexa (and Siri) have real trouble understanding my accent. I don't fear something I'm at liberty not using and that's barely intelligent enough to make sense of what I say.

<comment><USER12> The other day Alexa asked if I wanted it to learn my voice, so it could understand me better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Amazon already invests a lot in this space, that's how you increase profit. You have to predict who's buying what and where and ship bulk depending on tendencies. This is just taking it to the personal level.

</comment><comment><USER38> For many years, I've claimed to some of my friends that the goal of Amazon is to get to the point where they can order things for us before we even know that we want them. So Amazon wouldn't even require a confirmation on our part. We'll just come home to the packages that Amazon has decided that we need or want.

This situation raises a whole host of issues, and I'm not claiming it'd be a good thing. It just seems to me like the obvious endgame for Amazon, and I think it perfectly fits the modern ethos of reducing friction and pursuing convenience at all costs, including losing our own agency.

<comment><USER39> Amazon patented this idea years ago

[https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/18/amazon-pre- ships/](https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/18/amazon-pre-ships/)

<comment><USER38> Ha! Of course they did. Thanks for the link.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> TLDR; Alexa will be proactive rather than just reactive but doesn't give any realistic examples of what that will look like.

</comment><comment><USER41> > We know how dangerous it is to let bad actors run amok with AI and our data > – if you need a refresher, recall the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Maybe I'm missing something, but what does the Cambridge Analytica scandal have to do with AI?

> Rohit Prasad, the scientist in charge of Alexa's development, recently gave > MIT Technology Review's Karen Hao one of the most terrifying interviews in > modern journalism

Is the hyperbole really necessary?

> Rohit Prasad, Alexa's head scientist, has now revealed further details about > where Alexa is headed next. The crux of the plan is for the voice assistant > to move from passive to proactive interactions.

So Alexa will make suggestions or remind you that you need to order toilet paper. Much like Google's Android greets me with the time it would take me to get to work every morning without any prompt.

Its really sad that the state of tech reporting is full of this hyperbole and fear mongering. You can have a real discussion about the dangerous of technology and erosion of privacy, but this isn't it.

<comment><USER42> >Maybe I'm missing something, but what does the Cambridge Analytica scandal have to do with AI?

I also missed all the bad things that happened because of Cambridge Analytica. Even if we take their extremely dubious claims about their effectiveness at face value them running amok resulted in politicians being better able to target ads. That's not exactly the stuff of nightmares.

<comment><USER43> Did you watch the Channel 4 report[0]? The CEO of CA clandestinely advertised far more than just ads for the reporter posing as a potential client. They are in the business of winning elections, through whatever means necessary. He openly talked about things like targeting and entrapping political opponents with blackmail via "honeypots". His deputies made some really interesting statements during that report as well. I highly recommend watching the report, it's a fascinating watch.

Based on what he was caught saying on camera, in addition to his deputies, and the reporting around their political campaigns in Africa using propaganda that claimed AIDS would come back if so-and-so were elected, it's not a stretch to imagine those people doing everything the can, legally and illegally, to sway an election.

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

<comment><USER44> But this has always happened in politics. CA just optimized it

<comment><USER45> -people always travelled, automobile just optimized it -people always produced goods, factories just optimized it -people always used weapons, nuclear energy just optimized them

... never underestimate the impact of "just optimizing" something

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Nothing that's actually quoted from the real source in that article is even 1% as scary or egregious as that clickbait garbage article makes it sound. I'm not a fan of corporate America or anything like that, but this garbage writing on HN and front page is sad.

</comment><comment><USER47> Reminds me of Silicon Valley S06E02, where _Gates of Galloo_ shows you ads based on what you're talking about. For instance, a Domino's ad pops up when it hears/overhears you talking about pizza. Now imagine Alexa doing that without a wake word; seems like a blessing and a curse -- more of a curse.

</comment><comment><USER48> While the technocracy is busy trying to convince us that what matters is smart light bulbs and the prospect of living on Mars the world's ecosystem is on the point of collapse and a significant percentage of the worlds population have nowhere decent to live. Wake up, human race! Ask yourself, HN crowd, how many of the AI jobs you routinely see posted on here are doing anything significant? Alexa is just a toy.</comment>


Was History Fair to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Owners? - <AUTHOR> https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/was-history-fair-triangle-waist-factory-owners-180971019/ <comment><USER2> Historical inflection points are often interesting. The outcry that leads to widespread change is often triggered by things that are actually substantially better than the status quoa, but the timing works out very badly for those involved.

Reminds me these days of Google. Google isn't even operating in China in any real capacity currently, and a lot of western companies are, but Google is taking a huge amount of heat.

What seems to matter in these cases isn't the actual facts of the particular instance, but the widespread issues they become a symbol of.

Consider the theory that revolutions often happen not when things are going from bad to worse, but when things are getting better, but insufficiently fast enough to satisfy the populace. The newly wealthy merchants of the French monarchy system were one of the key drivers of the overthrow of the monarchy, and newly wealthy landholders the key mover in the American revolution.

</comment><comment><USER3> In summary, the workers probably started the fire, other factories were worse, they weren't found guilty of manslaughter, and the workers didn't even want a safer factory. At most you can say that contemporary factory owners should be judged similarly, not that we should blame workers.

</comment><comment><USER4> > Today few realize the role that American consumerism played in the tragedy. > At the turn of the century a shopping revolution swept the nation as > consumers flocked to downtown palace department stores, attracted by a wide > selection of goods sold at inexpensive prices in luxurious environments. The > women in the factory made ready-to-wear clothing, the shirtwaists that young > women in offices and factories wanted to wear. Their labor, and low wages, > made fashionable clothing affordable. Seeking efficiency, manufacturers > applied mass production techniques in increasingly large garment shops. > Entrepreneurs prospered, and even working-class people could afford to buy > stylish clothing. When tragedy struck (as happens today), some blamed > manufacturers, some pointed to workers and others criticized government. In > a paradox of action, Americans pushed for both lower prices and safer, > better-regulated factories, throughout the 1900s. Today attitudes have > largely changed.

Have attitudes largely changed though? I feel like these sentences are pretty applicable today, too.

<comment><USER5> Yes, Americans have stopped pushing for better-regulated factories because they're largely all overseas.

<comment><USER6> But the NFPA and the NEC are frequently updated. Modern buildings built to code are much safer. The problem now is mostly inspection and compliance. There should not have been field modifications of the structural steel at the San Francisco transit center and the fuckwad "artists" in Oakland built their ghostship deathtrap without a care for any lessons the previous 150 years of tragedies had taught us.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Fires really scare me. They are one of the things that rapidly can get out of control, have devastating consequences, can happen in everyday conditions (as opposite to eg flying).

Lots of highly flammable particles in the air is really a recipe for disaster, see eg [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jg7mLSG- Yws](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jg7mLSG-Yws) (sfw)

Locked or blocked exit doors is evil, see eg the Station fire, or the fire in Gothenburg disco fire of 1998: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothenburg_discoth%C3%A8que_fi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothenburg_discoth%C3%A8que_fire)

A year back, I was eating breakfast with my 4-yo daughter, and we came up with the question of "what happens if we put hard bread in the toaster?". Don't do it. The fire started quickly, and the flames were surprisingly large (under a cupboard too). Luckily, despite the small fire extinguisher not working at all, I managed to put the fire out without any damage to anything but the toaster.

Edit: Station nightclub fire (warning: scary, pretty graphic), [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bknYdprA9ug](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bknYdprA9ug)

</comment><comment><USER8> Yes.

<comment><USER9> If I were being charitable, the article is saying "Yes, they were grossly and intentionally negligent, but it was only because they were rationally maximizing profit given the market and regulatory environment."

<comment><USER10> Regulation makes things safer. It destroys competition and raises prices.

Seems like it was a reasonable trade off in this case.</comment></comment></comment>


Empirical: A platform for computational experiments - <AUTHOR> http://empiricalci.com/ <comment><USER2> Experiment framework seems a big need in research community. However, focusing on scalability rather than reproduciblilty might be a better strategy.

Reproduciblilty often comes naturally with scalability.</comment>


Invisible Ink "Tattoos" Could Be Used to ID Vaccinated Kids - <AUTHOR> https://futurism.com/neoscope/invisible-vaccine-ink-tattoos-kids <comment><USER2> I get it, and the idea is super interesting and pretty cool.

But did the researchers not give the sociological aspects of this any thought? We've not had a good history as a planet when governments decided to tattoo individuals to identify them as a specific class. It has never worked out well and this seems tone def to those issues. And governments are who mandate vaccines (rightly IMO), so this seems like a good idea in one aspect, but seems highly tone def on another.</comment>


NSA-style backdoor in Huawei laptops found by Microsoft - <AUTHOR> https://www.scmagazineuk.com/nsa-style-backdoor-huawei-laptops-found-microsoft/article/1580647?_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_qxEmmizNitJJhfiZVUhUFzBcCpckx0qp3FVFgtxqvB-oI6VMakcjZyItsxSy4F3pbJkQWc2KzjwrTLAEzbxo3DIXFrA&_hsmi=71312471 <comment><USER2> For the record, this is the article from Microsoft Security:

[https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/2019/03/25/from- aler...](https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/2019/03/25/from-alert-to- driver-vulnerability-microsoft-defender-atp-investigation-unearths-privilege- escalation-flaw/)

<comment><USER3> Where they don't describe it as a "backdoor." Simply what it is: A local privilege escalation in a driver.

Privilege escalations aren't that rare unfortunately. Kind of cool that ATP might be able to detect some of them going forward, particularly in drivers that are often black-boxes.

<comment><USER4> I have no expertise in security. Why could nation states not just build their backdoors this way? What's the difference?

<comment><USER3> This isn't a backdoor, nation state or otherwise. LPEs are super boring and common, there's often several a month discovered on Windows (inc. third party services/software/drivers/etc).

For it to be a backdoor it would typically need to facilitate the ability to access the system itself (e.g. Remote code execution, hidden credentials, etc), but even then intent is implied with the word which we simply don't have here.

Plus it LPEs aren't as powerful as they once were. Most of the good stuff is now running in userspace, the only thing a LPE grants you is persistence.

To give you an idea of how overblown this is: HP used to run a local webserver as SYSTEM (highest priv) which any webpage could call via iFrame to execute local commands. I don't consider that a backdoor either, even though that issue is ten times more serious than this one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >Upon investigation, researchers found a driver containing components that run with ring-0 privileges in the kernel.

>"We traced the anomalous behaviour to a device management driver developed by Huawei," researchers said in the post. "Digging deeper, we found a lapse in the design that led to a vulnerability that could allow local privilege escalation."

>Researchers who reported the vulnerability to Huawei said the company responded and cooperated quickly and professionally. A patch was released earlier this year on 19 January.

A rather clickbait-y title for what actually happened. Of course though, rehashed old news is great for harvesting karma when it's the right bogeyman.

<comment><USER6> I wonder what the lapse in design was. It'd be nice of Huawei disclosed what type of security vulnerability it was and how they fixed it.

<comment><USER7> Maybe they named the key _NSAKEY which created a namespace collision with a totally non-NSA key that Microsoft added years ago.

Just in case you hadn't already seen this:

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

<comment><USER8> Thanks for this new information.

It's especially hilarious that Mr. Campbell was accused of being a conspiracy theorist for thinking _NSAKEY would be exactly what it sounds like.

Even better, it turns out the key WAS for the NSA (!) "because the NSA is the technical review authority for U.S. export controls." How convenient.

Sorry I'm not buying it. I worked in .gov contracting long enough to smell a cover story.

<comment><USER9> Well then, get your disassembler out and find the evidence of this backdoor nobody else has managed to find in the past two decades.

The whole NSAKEY story is a laughable fabrication, nobody has ever described the mechanism by which the backdoor is supposed to work. This should be a trivial exercise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The title of this article is misleading. "Backdoor" implies a deliberate mechanism built into the software, but here there's no evidence that the vulnerability wasn't simply a mistake.

<comment><USER11> I believe any piece of hardware that is sold local or internationally has a backdoor of some kind for government access. There are no mistakes. No company will say this, due to "laws" or "NDA" from a government that prevents the company from discussing these "mistakes."

<comment><USER12> Do you have any evidence for this claim?

<comment><USER13> It's generally hard to come by, leaving lots of room for assumptions. There was evidence of NSA tampering with ordered hardware in transit in the Snowden files, next to indications / speculations around certain cisco routers and even more about Intels Management Engine. But despite the last two being probable candidates I can't recall hard evidence for them.

<comment><USER14> Targeted interdiction is a far cry from what the parent comment alleges. Targeting shipments to backdoor or bug an item quite obviously happens everywhere in the world and has since the dawn of time.

The Snowden files said nothing about Intel's ME. That isn't a backdoor either. It's a great place to put one, but there are lots of great places to put backdoors, and that doesn't mean that's what the manufacturer is doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The past few articles i've read about Huawei - (The British Code review article from the Register and this) make it sound like the US is dressing what is actually incompetence as malicious intent because

a) Trade war

b) Chinese boogeyman makes US companies look better?

The double-think of the rhetoric against Huawei is staggering considering US programs like Prism were state-mandated data collection at a massive scale against private citizens and a secret courts program to access private sector companies data on those same citizens.

<comment><USER16> Slight difference in that the Chinese government routinely disappears political dissidents while in the U.S. we give them talk shows.

<comment><USER4> Ok granted China is light years behind the US, but we also have some crazy stories.

A Dakota Pipeline Protests journalist was stopped at the US border, "raising press freedom alarms."(1) Laura Poitras, Greenwald, Ladar Levison have been obviously victims of ill will from US authorities. Of course, don't forget the "get Gary Webb team" of industry experts the CIA watched over, which set out to "we're going to take away his Pulitzer."(2) Non-radical political parties are swat raided, intimidated, and silenced by secret courts in the US(3).

Of course this is just the start to a very long list. But comments which suggest everything is fine in this regard really worry me, as someone who loves America and its values.

1-[https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/02/business/media/canadian-j...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/02/business/media/canadian- journalists-detention-at-us-border-raises-press-freedom-alarms.html)

2-[https://theintercept.com/2014/09/25/managing-nightmare- cia-m...](https://theintercept.com/2014/09/25/managing-nightmare-cia-media- destruction-gary-webb/)

3-[https://youtu.be/M31ZCh1VeX8](https://youtu.be/M31ZCh1VeX8)

<comment><USER16> Yes and I am glad to live in a country that publishes about such infractions wherever they are found to occur.

<comment><USER4> Me too. Point is, if you look at those examples, that line is in danger.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Fearmongering. They clearly state in the article that there is no evidence that this is a backdoor. There is no new information here compared to the detailed writeup which was already posted here last week.

<comment><USER18> Can you link to the article you are referring to?

Edit: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19567399](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19567399)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The real problem here isn't that this company is Western or from China, it's that all this stuff relies on trusting humans to have done due diligence on our behalf, without having means to verify. It's closed source junkware on a closed source OS.

</comment><comment><USER20> Flagged for title: there's no evidence it was a backdoor rather than some subtly insecure driver programming.

</comment><comment><USER21> Is this any different than any other jailbreak bug that has ever been discovered? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_jailbreaking#History_of_ex...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_jailbreaking#History_of_exploit- disabling_patch_releases)

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm shocked, shock to find all the hacking going on here!

Seriously, I'm not even surprised. Whether it's intentional or not doesn't matter. Huawei pays a lot for advertising to all popular laptop reviewers on Youtube. But I'm not even considering buying Huawei laptops because I'm pretty sure it's full of crap like this.

</comment><comment><USER23> What exactly is an "NSA-style" backdoor?

<comment><USER24> A click-bait phrase you insert in a headline when you want to be needlessly hyperbolic and have no idea what you're talking about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Amend US law so there is CIVIL LIABILITY for backdoors with substantial statutory damages. The Tort bar in the US will make quick work of this and the problem will diminish, possibly cease.

Also, while I'm at it, it would be nice if Unbox Therapy and other like it would make mention of the Botnet threat in their product reviews.

<comment><USER26> > it would be nice if Unbox Therapy and other like it would make mention of > the Botnet threat in their product reviews

Do you expect Youtubers to have a top-class security team to reverse engineer firmware? This was discovered weeks/months later after the product was released.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Is there any irony in describing it as an "NSA-style backdoor"? I mean, from a context of fearing Chinese espionage. Not sure what my opinion is, but that stuck out to me.

</comment><comment><USER28> This is why government should use open source.

</comment><comment><USER29> How many backdoor styles are there?

</comment><comment><USER30> I guess this is "Red Scare 2.0"? Is it? I'm not sure whether to worry about China or not, I feel like all my worry is driven by the political forces in the USA and Europe rather than facts. It seems so one-sided that "China is Evil" that I feel like I'm being duped. I love my Huawei watch, but I've stopped using it because of the fear of spying, even if I don't have facts to support the fear. I don't trust nearly any source to properly vet this information, how can I? Is this all a ploy to take down China as a growing world power to save the America-Europe hegemony? I feel like at this point, I don't see a ton of difference between the two, both torture people (America's war on "terror"), both are committing genocide (America's ICE separating families), both are spying like crazy on the other, etc.

<comment><USER31> Despite the fervor, I haven't seen anything that indicates that Huawei is necessarily malicious.

I have seen, though, many things that indicate that their dev practices just plain _suck_ \- and that alone is enough for me not to buy their products.

EDIT: Also, that's a major false equivalence.

<comment><USER30> Yes their watch was okay but their software sucked. I think it's more likely China has spies within Huawei rather than Huawei being a literal intelligence operation. American engineers generally balk at inserting backdoors, why wouldn't Chinese engineers?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> What's the difference between a vulnerability shared with China's intelligence agencies and a bug?

Deniability I guess. I guess US intel yelling at the top of their lungs this has and will happen isn't enough for some.

</comment><comment><USER9> NSA-style backdoor for LPE? Bullshit.

</comment><comment><USER33> I mean if the US government spies on us and we don't care, why would we care if China does? Same same?

<comment><USER34> The US government spies on you to prevent the next 9/11 so it goes. China spies on you to steal your IP to give to its native businesses. You should probably care about the later far more than the former.

<comment><USER35> > _The US government spies on you to prevent the next 9 /11 so it goes. China > spies on you to steal your IP to give to its native businesses._

NSA has also been caught spying for economic purposes. They were spying on Brazilian oil giant Petrobras:

[http://g1.globo.com/fantastico/noticia/2013/09/nsa- documents...](http://g1.globo.com/fantastico/noticia/2013/09/nsa-documents- show-united-states-spied-brazilian-oil-giant.html)</comment></comment></comment>


GNU Guile 2.0.10 - <AUTHOR> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2014-03/msg00006.html <comment><USER2> Guile is a great little Scheme. I found it to be a very welcoming environment to program on Linux and I'm having a ton of fun relearning Lisp with it. Having tried using SBCL as a "Unix-ing with Lisp", Guile was so much easier. It Just Worked the way I expected when touching the OS, compared to CL's crazy filepaths and time epoch.

I've also greatly enjoyed reading the compiler/VM backstory on [http://wingolog.org/](http://wingolog.org/) . It occurs to me that if you have an efficient Scheme VM, you could use it as a target for a lot of other languages and get something of an 100% OSS .Net or Java polyglot ecosystem going. Parrot was the previous hope but it seems to have fallen into being a mostly academic exercise.

And then there's "GuileMacs", which seems to get closer to a reality with every push. Not being a native Lisper, I think Emacs could use a boost from having a faster VM and lexical scope.

Really there's just a lot to love about Guile. I'm excited about all the activity and attention it's getting.

<comment><USER3> I'm hopeful for Rubinius w/r/t a long-term viable polyglot VM. It has _lots_ of languages built for it but Ruby is still its most popular and mature as far as I know.

[http://rubini.us/](http://rubini.us/)

<comment><USER4> I wasn't aware Rubinius was a polygot vm -- but are there _any_ usable languages ported other than Ruby? Both the Smalltalk and Python port appear to be unfinished and abandoned?

<comment><USER3> Fancy[0] is one of the most mature languages on the VM other than Ruby I believe.

[0] [https://github.com/bakkdoor/fancy](https://github.com/bakkdoor/fancy)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As someone who has merely dabbled lightly with Scheme, what's the main issue with Guile?

Looking on the outside it looks like its a decent Scheme and the problem is lack of use and adoption (like in Emacs). Is that a correct assessment, or is the lack of adoption caused by issues with the implementation itself?

Or am I just all wrong about the state of Guile itself, and it's quite widely adopted, just that nobody speaks too much about it?

<comment> muuh-gnu The main issue with Guile is the same issue as with any other Scheme, and that issue is that it is a Scheme. No single Scheme is widely adopted and the main reason for that is extreme balkanization. You dont write code in Scheme, you write Guile, Racket, Chicken, etc.

The Scheme philosophy, which was developed in opposition to batteries-included aka "bloated" Common Lisp, was to have a small core and emphasize simplicity, purity, etc. For years proponents of Scheme have emphasized how beautiful and simple the small standard of 50 pages is, compared with Common Lisps "bloated" 1000+ pages standard.

This had two consequences:

1\. It was extremely easy to write a scheme implementation, soinstead of writing code _in_ scheme, people wrote _schemes_. Hundreds of them. And while other people spent the last 20 years writing thousands of useful libraries in C, python, java, scheme implementors spent reinventing the wheel, over and over and over and over again. Today there are more implementations of scheme than libraries in scheme.

2\. The emphasis on "small core" might be cute for teaching SICP, but in order to be able to do anything useful with the implementation, it forced the implementors to reinvent the wheels for everything else. And each implementation did it their own way because standardization was considered "selling out" and aping the nemesis Common Lisp. This led to _extreme_ code unportability.

Nowadays they are somehow trying to standardize, but with the consequence that they are realizing that by doing that, they are becoming indistinguishable from their old nemesis Common Lisp, which went through the same balkanization phase 20 years ago, so the point of splitting off Scheme from Lisp is becoming questionable. Instead of wasting precious time writing 1001 scheme implementations, they could have spent the last 20 years writing useful common lisp libraries and competing with other batteries-included languages like java and python.

In short: Besides the social problems that every Scheme suffers from and the Lisp world suffered during the 80s, Guile on its own is doing quite well. Once it is integrated into Emacs, Emacs will become Guile's killer app, boost its popularity and set it apart from other schemes.

<comment><USER6> I concur, with sorrow. Scheme is such a nice language... I believe a standardised syntax to define compound data structures (aka _defstruct_ ) and a standardised C FFI would make Scheme language usable. If these existed, I'd implement a Leiningen-ish tool and a couple libraries for Scheme, to get going with web development.

 _(There is one more problem I have with Scheme, which is the name. It sounds identical to a vulgar Turkish word for "my penis"; resulting in awkward situations when talking about the language in Turkey, where I live. :))_

edit:

      - the Turkish word
      + a vulgar Turkish word

<comment><USER7> :-)

Do you say Sch-eme or Sk-eme? I think both are ok, but please correct me if you are a native english speaker.

<comment><USER6> Sk-eme, as in school, or scam, not as in schweppes, or Schrödinger. I'm not a native speaker, yet quite practised. And Sk-eme is how most pronounce the name, as far as I've seen. You can't know how much I wish it was called plan, plot or something :)

<comment><USER4> I'm pretty sure only /skiːm/ (as in skill) is correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A lot of good patches in this release. I'm glad that Guile finally ships the SRFI-64 testing API and the SRFI-111 boxes API.

I am the co-author of the cooperative REPL servers patch. This patch allows an interactive programming environment to be integrated into applications that are single-threaded and/or run an event loop. I am using cooperative REPLs for a 2D game development engine written in pure Guile.

I highly recommend trying out Guile. The community is really great. I entered #guile on freenode about a year ago when I knew nothing about Scheme and everyone was friendly and helpful. I've since authored 3 patches and written some pretty awesome programs with Guile.

To further entice you to give Guile a try, check out this post/screencast in which I demonstrate functional reactive programming in the context of game development:

[http://dthompson.us/functional-reactive-programming-in- schem...](http://dthompson.us/functional-reactive-programming-in-scheme-with- guile-2d.html)

Happy hacking!

<comment><USER9> What's up with Scheme naming packages "SRFI-some-number" instead of a memorizable and meaningful name like every other language? It's one of the things I find the most frustrating about Scheme.

<comment><USER8> It's not quite right to think of SRFI's as libraries, because they are specifications. They are numbered for the same reason why RFCs and other types of specifications are numbered. In addition to their number, they also have names. For example, SRFI-41 is named "Streams". SRFIs are API specifications with potentially many implementations. Each Scheme implementation may implement a SRFI a bit differently.

Talking about Guile specifically, there are a bunch of libraries with "memorizable and meaningful names". guile-sdl, guile-json, guile-2d, guile- compost, guile-ssh, guile-xcb, etc.

<comment><USER10> The missing link: [http://srfi.schemers.org](http://srfi.schemers.org)

SFRI = Scheme Requests for Implementation</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Adobe is giving away Edge Animate for free - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.adobe.com/edge/2012/09/24/adobe-edge-animate-1-0-is-available-now-with-a-surprise/

<comment><AUTHOR> What's interesting to me is no Windows XP support.

They are also giving away 500 webfonts here <http://html.adobe.com/edge/webfonts/>

but I think the fonts have been mentioned on HN</comment>


AI generated synthetic human audio and video - <AUTHOR> https://www.hourone.ai/ <comment><USER2> TBH I think I'd feel more comfortable with something like "Max Headroom" without the stuttering, or something similar to "Spitting Image". Why does some business need to fake being human, when it's just some UML/BON/ERIL executed all over the cloud in some containerized environments?</comment>


Show HN: Candidate Counter – A US Presidential Candidate News Scraper - <AUTHOR> https://candidate-counter.herokuapp.com/ <comment><USER2> I'd check the Clinton count on Drudge. He's constantly reporting on her, almost entirely in a negative light. Her number is showing 0, 0%.

<comment><AUTHOR> It scrapes the home page headlines so it won't include negative depictions in articles. It runs once a day and I just checked Drudge. It only mentions her once right now. Thanks for the feedback!</comment></comment>


Post Ghost Shutdown: An Open Letter to Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://postghost.com/Home/Shutdown/ <comment><USER2> Twitter has been shutting down API access to clients that don't honor deletions for years now. I don't know why this is news. Note: somehow deleted tweets get covered anyway. If someone is sufficiently public of a figure, Twitter's policy doesn't save them from being publicly shamed when they tweet something the world doesn't approve of.

In fact you could easily argue that European law _requires_ Twitter to disable this access. If I want to delete my online presence, surely being able to actually delete my tweets is as important as being able to delete things from the Google-cache.

<comment><USER3> >>>I don't know why this is news.

if you read the post by the company they clearly explain why this should be news. the fact that twitter allows at least one company to do this already IMO is enough to make ti news.

Why can Politwoops exist but not this site?

<comment><USER2> Because they're doing different things? Also clearly outlined?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why doesn't PostGhost just record tweets using the browser? I'm sure it can be done without much problem. This is blatant abuse by Twitter. Public tweets are public, and the readers should be able to record/screenshot/save them, without Twitter having a say in the matter.

If they don't allow using the API for that, use the browser directly.

<comment><USER5> Using a 'browser' from their base-of-operations in an automated manner would fit the definition of scraping, which is not allowed by Twitter's TOS.

<comment><USER6> What are they going to do if they break the TOS? It's not like the developer agreement where they'll shut down your API key - the best they can do is try and blacklist your IP Address

<comment><USER7> See Craigslist vs 3taps. It's not clear if scraping is legal either.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist_Inc._v._3Taps_Inc](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist_Inc._v._3Taps_Inc).

<comment><USER8> Wow, google must be on some pretty shaky ground then...

<comment><USER9> No, they're not. To quote from the linked Wikipedia article:

> the court held that sending a cease-and-desist letter and enacting an IP > address block is sufficient notice of online trespassing, which a plaintiff > can use to claim a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

If someone wants to block Google, they can simply add a robots.txt entry. An IP block would work too. (Sending a cease-and-desist letter might or might not also work, but it doesn't really matter - context and intent matters in court; Google accepting the standard robots.txt as a 'go away' signal should be more than sufficient.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What about a browser plugin where users could click and it takes a copy from their screen of the tweet they're seeing and sends it to the a project?

Having multiple users send in the same tweet could count as additional validation that it was not edited.

<comment><USER5> This could work, but there's two separate problems to solve: knowing when a verified account tweets, and capturing the tweet in a way that doesn't provably infringe on the TOS. A crowdsourced capture solves the second stage, but only if someone in the crowd happens to be browsing the right page at the time an update is made.

To make this work, someone can set up a 'shell company' that signs up for the Twitter API for a seemingly legitimate reason, and captures the actual events of verified accounts tweeting. Then, this service sends out events to all the crowdsourced clients to browse to the Twitter page and capture the content, and submit it to the project.

The behavior of the crowdsourced clients would be undetectable from a normal web user, and there would be a layer of indirection between the client signed up for the Twitter API and the curators of the submitted tweets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I thought the Library of Congress was archiving all tweets? Perhaps I'm mistaken, or perhaps they do archive all tweets, but this archive isn't available via API such that PostGhost could rely on it? Or perhaps deleted tweets are also deleted from the LoC archive?

<comment><USER12> They were planning too, but never actually did it. [http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/library-of-congress- tw...](http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/library-of-congress-twitter- archive-119698.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is what I make of the situation:

\- Foo tweets

\- Bar takes a snapshot of Foo's tweet

\- Foo deletes tweet

\- Bar displays Foo's deleted tweet on own website

Twitter tells Bar to shut up.

(Twitter would, however, continue to store the deleted tweet. It wouldn't display it, though.)

</comment><comment><USER14> I wonder how politwoops is allowed to function when postghost is deleted.

<comment><USER15> They address this in their open letter- the politwoops api credentials appear to have been reauthorized based on their tracking a political figures, whereas postghost tracks a broader range of verified users spanning journalism and media

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> What is this trend with Reddit, Twitter and Facebook suddenly going full gestapo and [REDACTED] everything? These kind of services are very important and if the companies don't want to play ball, then they should be circumvented to preserve the record.

<comment><USER17> The sad truth is (in the case of Reddit anyway) that allowing people to freely publish their opinions on your platform hurts your brand and your advertising revenue.

This is why /r/creepshots was taken down, despite being completely legal and within the Reddit rules. It damaged the brand.

Same reason why the "hate speech" against Islam was taken off of /r/news.

<comment><USER18> > _The sad truth is (in the case of Reddit anyway) that allowing people to > freely publish their opinions on your platform hurts your brand and your > advertising revenue._

They're a user generated site (UGC). Truth is that their brand was mostly in the hands of their users from day one. And it's extremely hard to wrestle that control out of the hands of your users without suffering some pushback. In come cases, this pushback can even kill a site by making community disenfranchised.

Reddit has been doing a lot of censorship lately and people are slowly leaving that site. By exerting more free speech restrictions, they're starting to alienate large swaths of their userbase.

Here's an example of Reddit censorship in action: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- intersect/wp/2016/06...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- intersect/wp/2016/06/13/redditors-checked-rnews-for-updates-on-the-orlando- shooting-instead-they-found-a-war/)

And then there's this: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- intersect/wp/2016/06...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- intersect/wp/2016/06/17/trumps-meme-brigade-took-over-reddit-now-reddit-is- trying-to-stop-them/)

And this is just creepy:

 _'We know your dark secrets. We know everything.' Boasts Reddit CEO Steve Huffman_

[http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2016/05/30/reddit-knows- yo...](http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2016/05/30/reddit-knows-your-dark- secrets/)

<comment><USER19> > they're starting to alienate large swaths of their userbase.

Alienating racists, woman-haters, and pedophiles! Heavens, what an awful thing to do!

<comment><USER16> I imagine he was referring to normal people who wanted news about the Orlando shooter but instead found thread after thread of [DELETED].

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

>Avoid gratuitous negativity.

<comment><USER20> Have you seen the threads before the deletion? There was a huge brigade of "DEPORT ISLAM" and "Yes all muslims" comments – over 90% of the comments were that, and /r/the_donald ensured they would be constantly upvoted, too.

If such a thread happened here, you can be sure @dang would nuke them, too.

<comment><USER21> If you have a significant % of the population screaming X, you don't have a problem. You have a population that believes in X.

of course, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_majority](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_majority) and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_\(Internet_culture\)) still apply.

What I am saying is, terribly as it may seem, hate can also be belief.

<comment><USER20> Yes, but belief is not something that is supposed to be on that subreddit. The subreddit is for a balanced discussion about news.

(And that belief is very similar to "The Third Wave" experiment – I recommend reading the books or movies to try to understand the right-populist movement in many countries today)

<comment><USER21> Thank you for the books, will look them up.

<comment><USER20> It's an experiment from the US from the 60s I think of a teacher trying to understand how the general population could support the nazis – the events really happened, but the book differs from the reality in most parts except the ending, while the movie differs only in the ending, but there it's very different from what really happened.

After all, though, it's well worth it, and should be standard material in all schools.

If you want a more technical view, there's also scientific writeups about "The Third Wave".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What's the purpose of going through the API? Why wouldn't someone just set up crawlers for public figures in countries outside of jurisdiction.

To be clear I'm not promoting that somebody do this, just wondering why there may not be a viable alternative that does it this way.

<comment><USER23> Because it would still be against the Terms of Service and you still could get very much sued.

<comment><USER15> IANAL but how would a foreign company get sued under US Law?

I understand that it would violate the ToS if they conducted this directly through Twitter, and that may or may not be a big deal depending on the local Jurisprudence and other factors- but say an application was using the Twitter API to reproduce the tweets of persons of interest, and prompting deleting them as required-- what then is to prevent our foreign fictitious company from scraping THAT service?

Twitter should not be asserting itself in this kind of overreach. Personally I look forward to it's continued decline in value.

<comment><USER24> As my first lawyer explained to me, "Anybody can sue you for anything. The question isn't 'Can they sue me?', it's 'Can you afford to go the distance?'"

Twitter has plenty of lawyers, and can afford to hire plenty more, including lawyers in whatever country you set this up in. They could go after owners, workers, hosting companies, ad providers, network providers, and anybody else with a significant connection.

Who knows if they'd bother. But I don't think anybody should expect a simple dodge to make them completely safe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Brings some questions into my mind:

Can the archive project or similar crawl twitter to save content?

What kind of checks and balances should social media networks have? Supone they be regulated?

<comment><USER26> Archive projects usually listen to robots.txt

<comment><USER27> ArchiveTeam on the other hand is a bit more aggressive:

[http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Main_Page](http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Main_Page)

Though they generally do last minute emergency backups of closing sites, so this probably isn't a job for them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> PostGhost might have been violating the european right to be forgotten. If this was the case then it was a good move on Twitter's part.

</comment><comment><USER29> Maybe it's time to give Sublevel a new try. It's not perfect, but it's orders of magnitude faster than Twitter.

<comment><USER30> Your comment history is filled with references to whatever Sublevel is, if you're affiliated you should be disclosing that in your comments. Additionally, a Twitter competitor has nothing to do with the current conversation unless it's also widely used by public figures to broadcast to millions of people.</comment></comment>


9 Year Old Mathematician and Programmer - <AUTHOR> https://repl.it/talk/announcements/high-voltageDEVELOPER-SPOTLIGHT-02high-voltagesimontiger/14788 <comment><USER2> Cool kid. Reminds me of myself before my curiosity and ambition were worn down from years of public school. This kid is clearly smarter than I was (am). It's good to see that he's being given so much support and encouragement.

<comment><AUTHOR> Anecdotal but I've been hearing about a lot of child prodigies that are homeschooled. Are there any studies on this?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Anybody here active on folding at home ? - <AUTHOR>

Folding at home is the example of a community effort.
Users are donating copious amount of CPU time (and power) to the Stanford University project in order to help with the study of diseases, I figure at this moment that value of that donation is roughly 250K cpus each consuming about 100 watts, at 10cts per KWh about $2500 every hour, or about $22 million annually (the 250K cpus is a 2008 figure).
At this moment the list of diseases studied is:
- Alzheimers
- Huntingtons
- Cancer
- Parkinsons
- general antibiotics
- Osteogensis imperfecta
Folding@home promises that the results and datasets will be made public:
"Moreover, we will make the data available for others to use. In particular, the results from Folding@home will be made available on several levels. Most importantly, analysis of the simulations will be submitted to scientific journals for publication, and these journal articles will be posted on the web page after publication. Next, after publication of these scientific articles that analyze the data, the raw data of the folding runs will be available for everyone, including other researchers, here on this web site. "
Currently there are 69 papers listed that use f@h results, according to http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Papers , quite a few of those are not accessible to the general public, of a small sample out of the 69 papers listed 7 were accessible and 10 were not.
There is only one dataset available for download:
https://simtk.org/home/foldvillin
So far it seems that Stanford is not living up to its promise to share the results of the folding at home project.
What are your thoughts on this? <comment><USER2> The difference in power consumption between an idle CPU and a maxed-out CPU is appreciable. I stopped doing Folding@home, distributed.net, etc when I discovered my old AMD 2500+ sucked an extra 30 watts when pegged. That was a desktop chip! I suspect it's even worse with the new mobile=>desktop chips these days. If electricity is free and you don't care about inhaling more mercury due to coal burning, go ahead and run it all you want.

</comment><comment><USER3> Whenever I go for a walk, I normally leave folding@home running. If you have a particularly powerful GPU you can run folding@home using your GPU, which yields better results. If you're interested in GPU folding, I would recommend checking out Bit-techs features on folding ( [http://www.bit- tech.net/hardware/graphics/2009/06/15/what-is...](http://www.bit- tech.net/hardware/graphics/2009/06/15/what-is-folding-and-why-does-it- matter/1)

[http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2009/08/03/how-to-build-the- bes...](http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2009/08/03/how-to-build-the-best-folding- rig/1) )

</comment><comment><USER4> I have been running <http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/> which has similar goals.

Some of its stats are - <http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/stat/viewGlobal.do>

</comment><comment><USER5> What exactly has Folding@home achieved in the time it's been running (about 8 years now)?

It's a nice concept (using idle CPU time to help cure diseases!), but the papers on the F@H site doesn't exactly inspire me - <http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Papers> \- quite a few seem to be about the F@H itself (like "N-Body simulation on GPUs"), they're hardly "Folding@home cures suchandsuch disease"..

Then again I'm not a molecular scientist, and I don't understand half of the words in those titles...</comment>


Show HN: Liner – Highlight and Comment on Your Favorite Quotes :) - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-only-webpdf-highlight/bmhcbmnbenmcecpmpepghooflbehcack <comment><USER2> It's cool.

I wrote a library like that several days ago [https://github.com/djyde/WebClip](https://github.com/djyde/WebClip)

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool~ Like the highlighting shade of green :) The world needs more highlighting services

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Love this, really clean UI and design. Is there hope of a Android version coming soon?

<comment><AUTHOR> We're working on the Android version as you speak :)</comment></comment>