Announcing Fuse Open - <AUTHOR> https://blog.fusetools.com/announcing-fuse-open-free-ea289bbf32d0 <comment><USER2> Please don't let this badly introduced blog post scare you away, because Fuse is actually _surprisingly_ great tech for something so little known. In short, it's a React Native competitor. You can write cross platform apps using reactive-style JavaScript code. It ships with its own UI toolkit which is all (compiled down to) native machine code (mostly GPU code, actually), which makes apps perform fast because nothing that takes serious CPU/battery is done in JavaScript.

The key selling points of Fuse over React Native are, I think:

        * Fully "write once, run everywhere" (both a plus and a minus)
        * Excellent support for all kinds of animated UX patterns
        * High level included components for many common use cases
        * Declarative XAML/JSX-like UI language easy for designers
        * Fast, highly GPU-optimized.

The dev tools are pretty amazing too, with instantaneous app reloads when you make changes in your favourite editor, both when using a simulator and on a connected device. It's like editing in the browser devtools and immediately seeing your changes, but then on mobile. I know that React Native does this well too, but many others don't and you might not expect stuff like this from something you've never heard of before.

They are a VC-funded startup from Norway that lost the hype race to React Native. I'm sad to read that they're going to mostly stop developing this because I doubt anybody's ready to suddenly take over the cost of doing so. Still, great that they're open sourcing it all instead of just effectively discontinuing it and keeping it closed and unmaintained, which is what many pivoting VC funded companies do.

I've never used Fuse in anger (only tinkered) and I'm sure it has its share of downsides but it's a world-class contender in the world of mobile app development toolkits, and deserves to be treated as such.

<comment><USER3> FuseTools is a great product, it is what InVision's Sketch should be. Hopefully Fuse goes the way of Lucene and Solr, supporting two different companies (LucidWorks and ElasticSearch) that effectively consult to larger organizations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ah, so not related to Filesystem in User SpacE[0] that has existed for much, much longer time?

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

<comment><USER5> 2nded. That's exactly what I expected as well.

<comment><USER6> 3rded. And not sure how good the name choice is anyway for them: an open fuse is usually an indicator of something went wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> OK, so I've gotten a little way into this annoucement and still none-the-wiser as to what Fuse Open is. The most I can work out is it's nothing to do with filesystems (the incorrect assumption which drew me to their announcement).

<comment><USER8> Fusetools (fusetools.com) is a cross-platform app development platform/toolkit with a GUI builder. They just announced that their Pro plan is getting free and open source, making it easier to make beautiful and functional mobile apps.

<comment><USER9> Your comment gave a better and much shorter explanation of what Fuse is than the blog post did, and confirmed for me that it's not related to the identically-named filesystem tool. Thanks for the explanation :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> And I was expecting something great about filesystems...

<comment><USER11> Or something about JBoss Fuse..

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> For everyone confused: [https://fuse-open.github.io/](https://fuse- open.github.io/)

> What is Fuse?

> Fuse is a cross-platform mobile app development tool suite, supporting > building Android and iOS applications.

> With Fuse you can build native mobile user interfaces using the easy to > learn UX Markup language, and use JavaScript to add business logic.

</comment><comment><USER13> > Let Fuse build and maintain the mobile app front-end of your service, at a > fixed price, leaving you to focus on your core business.

A fixed monthly price, but you have to signup to learn more. Like what that fixed prices is...

</comment><comment><USER14> Not mentioning what fuse is in first paragraph is epic PR fail.

<comment><USER15> All they had to write is "Fuse, the blahde blah blah blah is now ..."

<comment><USER16> Well. If I'm a regular reader of a blog I definitely don't want to read such an explanation again and again and again...

On the top of the page i read "Create better native apps for iOS and Android with a new..." (iphone se and accoring screen resolution, might look different elsewhere).

So i know the rough subject it's about.

I agree that the first / every mention of the product name can be a hyperlink that shows me more details/full product Website. Thats unintrusive for regular readers and gives full info at a click for new readers.

As it is now i have to read multiple paragraphs until getting to such a link, that can be optimized.

<comment><USER17> Could be as simple as showing an on hover tooltip above the words that not everybody might know about (e.g. products they offer / projects).

<comment><USER16> How/why is a tooltip (that can only contain a few words / one or two sentences with the same info already written above as i describe it) better than a link to the full webpage?

<comment><USER17> That works too, it's early in the east coast :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think Fuse is a mobile application framework ... ?

<comment><USER19> yes and?</comment></comment>


Life expectancy for American men drops for a third year - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbsnews.com/news/life-expectancy-for-american-men-drops-for-a-third-year/ <comment><USER2> This drop is largely caused by deaths of despair [1], partly related to a lack of affordable health care in the US. The fact that (at least [2]) 78% of Americans live from paycheck to paycheck [3] underscores the relative poverty many people experience in daily life. I think it is fair to say that a majority of Americans live with a scarcity mindset, likely affecting mental health negatively.

EDIT: As a Norwegian following American politics, I am surprised that this topic is so rarely talked about by the democratic nominees. The only candidate I have seen talking about the causes of the drop in life expectancy is Andrew Yang. Not even Pete has worked this into his talking points as far as I have seen.

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

[2] The number is increasing fast; it was 75% in 2016 and rose to 78% in 2017.

[3] [http://press.careerbuilder.com/2017-08-24-Living-Paycheck- to...](http://press.careerbuilder.com/2017-08-24-Living-Paycheck-to-Paycheck- is-a-Way-of-Life-for-Majority-of-U-S-Workers-According-to-New-CareerBuilder- Survey)

<comment><USER3> >This drop is largely caused by deaths of despair, partly related to a lack of affordable health care in the US

I'm curious whether you believe lack of affordable health care in the US _causes_ a lot of death from diseases of despair; and if so, why you believe that.

I always thought that health care is relatively ineffective at preventing death from those diseases -- addiction in particular, but also suicide. In other words, I always thought that the solution to this particular epidemic will require more than just allocating more money to health care.

Also I always thought that most of those dying from diseases of despair do not suffer from other chronic illness, e.g., diabetes, that health care is effective at treating. And I always thought that among those Americans without a pressing current need for health care, simply not having access to good affordable health care, although bad, is not bad enough on its own to drive a significant fraction to suicide or substance abuse. In other words, I always thought that the despair has another source, e.g., a lack of friends or a lack of feeling integrated into a community.

<comment><USER4> Mental health is health care too.

<comment><USER5> This is true but mental healthcare can not solve systemic issues that contribute to isolation like a lack of social opportunities or sexual partners. These things can be entirely related to economic factors that a healthcare professional can't address.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A lot of people are having a difficult time. I don't pretend to know anything about psychology or depression, but I do know that between the elbow of exponential growth in all things good and bad, and our increasing awareness of it, that it's good to reach out to friends and read between lines, and ask if we're all ok. Sometimes flipping a stone over to check in can really make a huge impact in someone's life, even just a random coffee that wasn't normally meant to be.

<comment><USER7> > it's good to reach out to friends and read between lines, and ask if we're > all ok

Will this actually reach the people that need it? I mean, just having _friends_ (and/or people you're regularly in contact with) is probably quite helpful in preventing these situations from arising... I imagine the path towards suicide / serious life & mental health issues is quite gradual, rather than a cliff... so people would become negative, unpleasant to be around (hence lose their friends) _way_ before coming anywhere near suicide... by then it's already too late.

I often think, in terms of my life (highly privileged, smart & well educated, upper class, rich or at least high-earning, programmer, young, healthy, lots of career options, career resistant to automation, first-world citizen so easy to migrate, ...) I'm really quite isolated from "normal", "average" people... I don't actually even _know_ anyone who's poor, or not in a _career_ (i.e. just has a dead-end job like a bartender or truck driver)... just by virtue of the education system, I've been kept away from people like that since I was 15! How am I to even _imagine_ what they're going through?! Sure not everything is rosy in my life, and even rich people can get sick and depressed, but I sometimes consider this viewpoint for some perspective...

<comment><USER8> I salute you for having the humbleness to see it. There is horrific pain and suffering out there, one has only to hang out a bit with people outside the tech bubble to see it. Talk to your mechanic, the waiter, the landscape guy, the aging bro at the gym, the broken vet. There but for the grace of god is any one of us. It is unspeakably shameful that we dismiss their suffering because of their supposed male white privilege. As if that made them less worthy of empathy and respect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Men who are among the richest 1% of Americans live almost 15 years longer than those who are in the poorest 1%, the Harvard analysis found."

15 years is a tremendous gap!

<comment><USER10> The poorest 1% is an extreme outlier cohort in America. Some sources from a cursory search suggest it's something like less than $2 a day.

<comment><USER9> Yes it would be interesting to see if it extends to poorest 5% at least.

However I would assume the poorest 1% would be covered by social security.

<comment><USER11> Covered by != having effective access to.

The first is a legal and regulatory status. The second requires knowledge of, access to, capability of negotiating system(s), having a sufficiently fixed address, documentation, and numerous other factors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Men are risk-takers by nature. When we feel lost, we take risks, for better or for worse That's why the military still has great recruitment rates. It's also why many of the self-made wealthy are men, and the ones who aren't are often people more like JK Rowling.

Looks like fewer of those risks are paying off than usual.

<comment><USER13> This vague generalization of men is exactly the issue. "Why haven't you gotten a job yet, you should be a risk-taker". Men aren't a monolith, and this exact thinking boxes people in.

<comment><USER14> I won't be so quick to say that the kind of overgeneralization the comment you're replying to is guilty of is clearly a factor in this issue, but it does indeed undermine their point and "explanation".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Some advice I've found helpful is to quit Twitter and Reddit, while also unfriending particularly misandrist and racist (yes, anti-white racism is still racism) Facebook friends. I've found myself a lot happier when I cut out people who would constantly try to demonize me for various physical traits. If you have the mass media constantly telling a group of people that they're inherently evil, of course it's going to cause suicides.

<comment><USER16> As if this is the cause of the life expectancy drop for American men. I think learning how to deal with this type of criticism is a quality one needs to have nowadays. I'm white and I have no problem with twitter or reddit. They are actually great platforms.

I think the root of the problem with American men is that inequality in America is increasing. Also the culture and education system needs a reform, a lot of kids are growing in an environment where drug abuse is cool, doctors don't want to hear patients and just prescribe medicine etc.

There are a lot of wrong incentives. Hopefully the next president focuses on addressing them.

<comment><USER17> >They are actually great platforms.

With incredibly toxic userbases.

<comment><USER16> I have no problem there, people are very friendly on every reddit sub I enjoy visiting. The same is for twitter.

What those platforms have in common is choice.

If you are toxic and think it is fine to openly argue and make socially awkward comments the whole time, then you will view it that way. You will likely also get attracted by subs and communities that this happens.

<comment><USER18> >I have no problem there, people are very friendly on every reddit sub I enjoy visiting. The same is for twitter.

The only way to have a good time on those platforms and to a lesser (but increasing, in my unscientific observation) degree, HN is to only express opinions that toe the party line (party line being relative to whatever the mainstream opinion is on the platform or subset of it in question). Those platforms have features designed to amplify consensus and quash dissent.

<comment><USER19> It's good you mentioned HN. I also find it to be an extremely reasonable forum. Radical opinions pop up every once in a while, but somehow they still manage to cause little outrage and hatred.

Kudos to the team (and all of us too!)

<comment> non-entity > Radical opinions pop up every once in a while

Is it just me, or are they becoming more common. I could have sworn when I browsed HN several years back there was next to non of it, but theres a good chance I'm just remembering incorrectly

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Something has to change, radically, when it comes to mental and medical healthcare in this country.

I am very, very, fortunate.

In 2018 I was suffering from the effects of PTSD: social isolation, anxiety, hyper-vigilance, poor physical health, and depression.

Many men are experiencing some of these issues, not brought about by PTSD but by other factors and they turn to drugs and alcohol to cope.

Luckily, instead of coping with PTSD brought about by deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan through drugs and alcohol I turned to food and extreme isolation.

But I make money. Lots of it. I also have persuasive parents, and a great job with awesome co-workers who spurred me into action.

With my money I hired a registered dietician, therapist, and a personal yoga instructor, and have completely changed the trajectory of my life. I meditate daily, go to yoga six days a week, have lost 50 lbs (22.7 kg) in eight months. I have had more, positive, social interactions in the last year than I have had in the last 10. My daughters say I am a completely different person, and I feel healthier at 40 than I did at 20.

I am tapering off the industrial quantities of anti-depressants I was on, and no longer eat anything that came off an assembly line.

There are very few social problems that lead to shortened life expectancy that cannot be overcome.

And while "diet and exercise" seems to be met with derision on HN, it's not just about that. It is about the mindfulness and care one puts into themselves when dieting and exercising. The slow changes that are barely noticed from day-to-day but hit you like waves, like when I was brushing my teeth and some toothpaste fell from my mouth and instead of landing on my belly, it landed on my feet. Or when you struggle for months with sitting still and focusing on your breathing while meditating and then one day your timer goes off and you are amazed because it feels like you just started your timer two or three breaths ago.

It is unacceptable to me that just because I used the GI Bill to get a degree in Computer Science and now make lots of money that I can save myself from a downward spiral of isolation and addiction (to food), while most other men cannot.

Because of my limited ability to effect change, the only thing I can propose is that we collectively throw the stigma associated with depression and isolation in the trash and look out for each other as best as possible, talking openly and candidly about those things and trying to support each other with low-cost evidence-based self-improvement methods like diet, exercise, and positive social interactions until access to the same resources I used to save myself of are attainable by everyone.

</comment><comment><USER21> Society doesn't care about men's issues. 57% of undergraduates are now women yet every resource makes it seem like men are way ahead and tries to bring them down because.001% most powerful are mostly men. It's okay to mock men constantly and anyone responding back gets demonized.

<comment><USER22> "Society doesn't care about men's issues."

Please. My wife recently had some health issues due to a condition that primarily affects women, and I went with her to her medical appointments. The level of casual dismissal I saw regarding pain and symptoms from numerous (male and female) doctors was absolutely shocking. While I've certainly had doctors fail to resolve a medical condition before, nothing like the lack of respect I saw had ever accompanied my interactions at a doctor's office. If you genuinely believe that "society doesn't care about men's issues", at least compared to women's issues, you're living in an absolute fantasy world.

<comment><USER23> Your anecdotal dismissal supports the parent commenter's point.

<comment><USER24> It's fairly well-known that there is more medical knowledge about men, and women are affected in different ways by diseases, about which more knowledge is needed.

See for example this article: [https://www.ft.com/content/7864ae80-9597-11e8-95f8-8640db906...](https://www.ft.com/content/7864ae80-9597-11e8-95f8-8640db9060a7)

<comment><USER23> Indeed. And yet life expectancy is still lower for men, and is getting worse. Can we not talk about that for a moment?

<comment><USER24> Sure we can, but I don't think it's very productive to start arguing that society doesn't care about men's issues. I don't immediately see what society has to do with the lower life expectancy:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Sex_difference...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Sex_differences)

<comment><USER25> > and is getting worse

You missed a pretty important part. I don't see how that could be the result of anything other than society?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This starts being pretty similar to what happened in the USSR immediately after the Perestroika failed, in a span of 10-years (1990-2000) life expectancy for men fell by 5 years (from 63 to 58).

That was a pretty big societal crisis which among other things helped bring to power an autocrat like Putin (and especially helped him stay there, as life expectancy shot up again starting with the early 2000s), I'm wondering when will the present situation in the States be treated like the real societal crisis that it represents? In other words, guys like Trump are not merely the causes for much that goes wrong in the States, they're merely the effects, take him down and a new Trump-like character will probably emerge in his place, unless you fix the problem at its very roots.

<comment><USER27> And what's the root cause in case you know it?

<comment><USER26> Increased inequality (both economic and social), crippling debt, horrendous health system, lack of hope (this one especially stings) etc etc. I personally am not from the States, I lived and grew up in Eastern Europe back in the '90s, and saw the same thing happening here, only that we used cheap alcohol instead of opioids in order to dig up our own early graves.</comment></comment></comment>


Proposed law to stop items for men and women from being priced differently - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-47448623 <comment><USER2> This is dumb, because price controls are dumb. The items are not the same. And if they are, why would women not simply buy men's items, if they think they are cheaper?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Do economists have any explanations for why the market doesn't do the right thing here and regulation might be necessary?

<comment><USER3> The market doesn't optimize for fairness, but for profit. If they can sell a product to women for more money if you color it in pink and write "Lady" on the packaging, they will (if those really are the only differences as suggested in the article). It's similar to that story where travel sites charged more if they identified people as Mac users - because they can.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's no shortage of plausible explanations but I would like to know what's really happening. I wonder if some of the vendors have confidential internal reports that explain what's going on.

Perhaps a significant proportion of women don't even look at the price, thereby encouraging shops to concentrate on exploiting those people rather than providing good-value products for the rest of the population. If that's the case, why does that group exist and why is it female? Is it because they are innumerate? Or because they're spending someone else's money? It's all just speculation until someone provides some evidence.</comment></comment></comment>


Why posting to Reddit gives me anxiety - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/adventures-in-consumer-technology/why-posting-to-reddit-gives-me-anxiety-90d7f207326a?source=most-recommended

<comment><USER2> "The social pressure of being accepted and liked by your peers exists on Reddit, and it feels like highschool all over again."

The reason it feels like highschool is because most likely, the people responding to your posts negatively and down voting at every chance are high school students (or sometimes younger) or early twenties (many still have this mentality).

This is why we shouldn't take comments on the Internet very seriously: I seriously doubt many adults would take relationship advice or debate politics with a person still in middle school, but we somehow take criticism from those very same people.</comment>


The Inside Story of MakerBot and the 3D Printing Revolution That Wasn't - <AUTHOR> https://backchannel.com/the-3d-printing-revolution-that-wasnt-60b000c3a3ed#.rkcxgzdox <comment><USER2> 3D printing is very much like coding, promising a revolution for those with the mindset to work with it. My wife, a coder by profession, is extremely active in the 3D printing community, and her ability to research and stick to problems is why she is successful at it. This is not an accessible hobby, as is evidenced by so many of my friends who own 3D printers that started gathering dust the moment they learned it's not simply plug-and-play. You have to figure out your infill settings, watch your inclines, your print-speeds at various points in your prints, know what temperatures work well with what materials, know how to replace the parts that go bad every few hundred hours of printing, etc, etc, etc. It doesn't help that you will sometimes be hours into a print before you realize you screwed something up.

The 3D printing community, like Stackoverflow and coding communities, are very supportive and incredibly welcoming to beginners, but the skills we use in coding, the ability to research, experiment, and stick through extremely frustrating problems, are skills most people don't ever really learn. Our public education system is actively trying to address this with the much- misunderstood Common Core standards, but until such a mindset becomes more prevalent in our culture, things like coding and 3D printing will only continue to grow slowly in popularity.

In the meantime, nerds should see 3D printing as a still-uncharted territory for innovation and opportunity.

<comment><USER3> > community, like Stackoverflow [ ... ] are very supportive and incredibly > welcoming to beginners

I have never heard stackoverflow described like this.

<comment><USER4> It's all relative. Stackoverflow is clearly by an incredible amount more supportive and welcoming to beginners than LKML. :-)

<comment><USER3> Sure. The author framed it in a way where-- with SO as an example, I was waiting for something like:

The community is great for beginners who take the time to read the documentation and try solutions. 3D printing is complex and requires putting in the time and the community is happy to help those willing to learn. <joke>Beginners who are actually intermediate or experts with 1 or more CS/EE degrees are always welcome</joke>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was never able to get on board the 3D printing hype train for one very simple reason: who wants more plastic doodads cluttering up their life? I could never imagine anything I would actually want to own or use which could feasibly be created with a 3D printer.

<comment><USER6> I could definitely find uses for it but my problem is that it is expensive, not user friendly, and makes poor quality things.</comment></comment>


Bringing Down Millions of WordPress Sites - <AUTHOR> http://jeremyaboyd.com/that-time-i-brought-down-millions-of-wordpress-sites/ <comment><USER2> Back in 1999 when I was learning to code (PHP obviously), I was stoked to discover the mail() function. Up to that point I'd only been doing HTML and JavaScript coding so my newfound ability to send emails was a pretty big deal. I asked my friend what would happen if I put the mail call inside a while(true) statement. He said it would run until the server hit the 30 second timeout. I asked how many emails my server could send in 30 seconds but he didn't know. I decided to to find out, directing all the emails to my hotmail account. Little did I know, that my ISP & hosting provider had disabled the default 30-second timeout so the script kept running. A few hundred thousand emails later I was having second thoughts about my poorly planned experiment. The next day I got a phone call from my ISP. Turns out Microsoft perceived it as a DDOS attack and blocked all traffic from my ISP. And so for a day basically no one in my city could access their Hotmail accounts or any other Microsoft properties. Oops.

<comment><USER3> I was on a Cathay Pacific flight a few years ago and was looking at all the games they had in the in flight entertainment system. This was an older plane with really bad games, one of which was a number guessing game. I was bored and so wondered what would happen if I entered a negative number as my guess. The entire in flight entertainment system on the plane was down for a couple of hours until the crew figured out how to restart the system properly.

<comment><USER4> I think you mean Cathay Pacific?

Edit: Glad to help! I was going to delete after you corrected, but it looks like I can't :/ Interesting note: Google doesn't even give me the "Did you mean" option when I tested "cafe pacific". Must be a pretty common mistake.

I've always wanted to fly Cathay Pacific, as I've heard the service is fantastic. Never had the opportunity yet, though.

<comment><USER3> A lot of those big airlines are a mixed bag. If you get one of their newer planes they are world class, but we were on an aging 747, it creaked and groaned, had the aforementioned in flight entertainment system, and the toilets stunk up all the rows near them. But some of their planes are beautiful and the service is top notch. This was a few years ago but even in economy they gave everyone a little pack with toothbrush, ear plugs, travel socks, and those masks you put on to sleep when it's light.

I've had a similar experience on Lufthansa where one flight was an amazing plane with a bar downstairs, and all the mod cons, and then I had a flight from Frankfurt to LA which was 12 hours without any back of seat in flight entertainment (it just had a few screens hanging from the ceiling). This was only three years ago.

That's why I try and fly Air NZ wherever I can, it's not the best airline in the world but it's consistently good across the whole fleet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What I found horrible was kind of an opposite experience with a bug. There was a developer who built a really powerful project on an aging framework. You could do amazing things with this software; the results were always impressive, but the underlying framework and its tools made the experience a bit less than "slick" on modern computer systems.

So the very nice community that had risen around this software kept shrinking due to competing projects drawing people away. Eventually, things got really stagnant, but the developer just didn't seem to notice or care and kept shipping code, slowly as usual. Finally he pushed some big changes to the software, made an announcement, and members of the community _really_ woke up. "Finally, the features I've been waiting for!" "Wow, thanks for squashing all these bugs!" These people had been subscribed to the mailing lists for over a decade and thought it polite to reply and express appreciation and admiration at this recent--and huge--development.

Six months later, the developer posted to the general list. His message was brief and to the point. There had been a showstopper bug, he said, and today he was providing an updated release with the fix.

Looking closer at the announcement, I realized that the bug meant the latest version of the software _could not perform its intended function_. At all. Completely broken.

So: No one--not a single person (self included)--except the main developer had even given his big release a try. And _he_ hadn't even tried it for ~6 months!

This made me feel really awful for the developer. Fortunately, today people still use the software and have since shared their results & appreciation. But I will always wonder if the developer felt that experience as hard as I did, or even worse.

<comment><USER6> Well, if it was on Linux, it could have been that people were excited for the release, but it wasn't available on their distro's repo yet. I've definitely been really excited for a feature and then discovering it doesn't work once it's available in my repo 6 months later.

As much as I like the repo system (and C), I was pretty impressed by an experience I had a little while ago. I found a bug in Atom after a new release. I was able to track down the cause in about an hour, and the person who made the commit that caused the bug fixed it an hour later. The bug fix release was available within 24 hours or so. I don't know JS or Coffeescript, but it was verbose enough that I was able to track down the bug and get it fixed without having to wait for the bug to be accepted upstream, or download and compile the package. Compiling a package isn't hard, but I only do it for the software I _really_ want the most recent version of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Timthumb is how Wordfence came about because my own site was hacked via the vulnerability when it was an 0day and that's how I got involved in WP security.

[http://markmaunder.com/2011/08/02/technical-details-and- scri...](http://markmaunder.com/2011/08/02/technical-details-and-scripts-of- the-wordpress-timthumb-php-hack/)

Props to Ben. When I worked with him to fix timthumb I don't recall him mentioning that it was someone else who wrote the bug.

There have been plenty of vulnerabilities just as bad or worse since - and it keeps our site cleaning team busy. Besides Timthumb, the other top WP vulnerabilities/exploits are Revolution slider, Mailpoet and Gravity Forms.

You rarely see a site hacked via an old timthumb these days but it still shows up. Most hacked sites are from the other three newer remote code exec vulns I mentioned.

<comment><USER8> One big problem with Timthumb was that several themes came pre-bundled with it and to make matters worse, they often changed the name of the file, so that it wasn't enough to just scan for the filename but also for variants and file contents.

At the time it was the exploit that kept on giving, since you would suddenly find another timthumb related file on the server that was being targeted, followed by another, ... In the end, a lot of the hosts simply blocked requests to timthumb related files, in order to try and stop it on the server level and not the individual account level.

As you mentioned, these days the sites that I'm being contacted about that have been defaced or were hosting abusive content, are usually related to severely outdated plugins. I haven't seen a timthumb issue in quite some time, but had to restore a site that was affected by the original(!) Revolution slider exploit recently, due to having a several years old version of it installed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> My worst was probably when I rebuilt an old, broken recurring billing system. Unfortunately, in the real world, the retry on failure limit didn't quite work as intended. If a charge failed or was declined, it was supposed to try again a couple of times over the course of several days and send an email to ask the subscriber to enter new payment info. It worked as expected in testing.

Unknown to any of us, the code that triggered it on the production server was being triggered every few minutes by an outside system instead of once a day by the server (as it was supposed to be). So after deployment, thousands of failed transactions were being retried over and over every few minutes. People woke up to scores of emails about the transactions failing and called their banks to find out what was going on. Meanwhile the company that ran the system got some rather unfriendly calls from the banks as it must have looked like they were trying to do something nefarious.

The good news was that no one was overcharged, it was only failed transactions that were repeating (and repeatedly failing). Tripped a lot of alarms though. I added safeguards against the code being triggered by external systems and also explicit chronological limits that didn't rely on the server configuration. It was a learning experience.

<comment><AUTHOR> A very similar thing happened to me on my first payment processing system. Thankfully it maxed out at 3 tries then sent a final email that the account was suspended until the payment method was updated. The paypal portion worked as expected... they have better devs than I ever will be, but the Authorize.Net portion would fail out within 3 hours.

The bug was simple to fix, the production database's schema failed to update in the deployment. Once we figured that out it was 10 minutes to rerun the deploy script.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This might be considered along the same lines of "unintended use of code".

When I was around 13 I wrote a bash script that would automatically backup your browser data to an FTP server of your choosing. This included your the passwords database, and I made it work with just about every browser possible.

I released the script on some IT forum (I forget which) and it was a big hit for some reason, but then someone re-released it on hackforums and told people to hardcode the server credentials instead of using a settings file. Tricking someone to download a tiff, exe, whatever would upload their password databases from all their browsers in a matter of seconds.

It got quite a bit of attention (many thousands of views) and I've always felt bad about the amount of credentials that were possibly stolen.

</comment><comment><USER11> It was 1995, and everybody was excited about this new technology called BGP. I was a young sysadmin on his first job at a NOC.

...

Ten minutes later, most of Fairfax County is stuck in a routing loop, and we're getting angry phone calls from NOCs in California, the UK, and I think even Hyderabad. While I didn't _actually_ take down the Internet, it gave me a lot of appreciation for how vulnerable its glue is to human error.

</comment><comment><USER12> I get contract work from time to time about making a wordpress based site for customers. And they all have custom requirements on top. Granted I haven't done it for years - it's probably better now - but to me, it's just a shinier Joomla.

I couldn't help but facepalm at this article. I understand deadlines and all, but get a friend developer to overlook your code before releasing in the wild, because you know the caveat of "hey I haven't tested it properly" isn't going to make anyone itch.

<comment><USER13> I've found that the Advanced Custom Fields solves most of the custom needs I get from clients.

I'm not a fan of Wordpress' innards. I usually avoid themes or plugins (other than ACF and a few 'crucial' ones). I'm not a fan of the theming system to the point where I often override or circumvrent the out-of-the-box queries and templating rules. I use my own get_partial() function that properly isolates my template variables and have even used React for the view layer once.

But I still use Wordpress quite often because 1) so many of my clients need _exactly_ the features that wordpress offers, 2) they're familiar with WP and often insist on using it (and it saves me support), 3) I've found that the CMS-part of the whole thing is by far the most work, and building something as slick as WP' admin interface is just too much reinventing the wheel, and 4) there's still an advantage to being able to just run the site on 'typical' hosting (speed, pricing).

Furthermore, the inconvenience to me is a huge advantage to the client, because if they need small changes or additions they're now free to hire any (shitty) 'webmaster' to make css changes or install crappy plugins that magically offer them the features they need. These webmasters are a lot cheaper than I am.

All that said, I generally prefer the kinds of projects where I don't feel Wordpress is the right solution. But for a number of reasons the WP projects are still the most common and relevant ones right now.

<comment><USER14> You'll probably really enjoy Timber for themeing [https://wordpress.org/plugins/timber- library/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/timber-library/)

Integrates nicely with ACF as well.

<comment><USER15> I do a lot of WP work.

Personally, I like things like Timber, but IMO, you really want to avoid getting very far out from the most basic stuff if you ever want to hand the project off to rando WP folks... I stay away from anything even as complex as sage/roots for those reasons.

Though I don't even like ACF, as I have a bunch of snippets for building post meta interfaces and ACF is large enough that I haven't read all its code. I'd rather just write 200 lines into an MU plugin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> For me, the biggest Wordpress fail, is a file called xmlrpc.php. This file is just a menace and should not exist in the default installation.

My first two things I do when I install a new wordpress server is add this to `.htaccess` :

        Redirect 301 /xmlrpc.php http://127.0.0.1

Otherwise you will have a very easy DDoS vector that can bring your website down, immediately after some bot finds out this file exists on your host.

<comment><USER17> WordPress 4.7, due in a couple of weeks, includes a brand new REST API which means we can finally start removing some uses of XML-RPC and maybe even someday disable it.

<comment><USER18> One of the major issues with XML-RPC functionality in WP is that it's enabled by default and opens up a wide target for brute force attacks[1]. I'm assuming this will not change with their REST API. Let's face it, how many WP sites out there really need POST/PUT/DELETE endpoints to be enabled for their family blog?

[1] [https://blog.sucuri.net/2015/10/brute-force-amplification- at...](https://blog.sucuri.net/2015/10/brute-force-amplification-attacks- against-wordpress-xmlrpc.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I used to run random feed attacks on the aol/yahoo account fishers... basically feeding and submitting their forms with random names/emails, etc... so that they'd get so much bad data the good would be harder to sift through.

Then, iirc around 2001, there was some change in the law that made that action potentially a felony (regardless that my target was also probably illegal), I stopped doing it...

Overall more of a grey hat thing, but it was cool to play with... would set a new set targets almost every day, as I received fishing emails.

</comment><comment><USER20> I previously worked for a state government, and owned a project that served districting information. It was used by constituents to find their elected officials and to display different types of districts on maps.

I pushed out a bug that took down the mapping functionality. Normally this would not have been that interesting, but at the time the state was in the middle of a heated redistricting debate. Some newspapers around the state picked up on the outage and attributed it to shady dealings from the majority party at the time.

Slightly different, but it's not often that I have the opportunity to check in code that will lead to a conspiracy theory.

</comment><comment><USER21> Far smaller scale but this one still makes me giggle:

Worked at large enterprise, at small project team working on the successor for a dated customer support system running in production. Apart from that vision, we had little idea about the domain and about what we were doing. Another team, located in France, was running the existing system, and they were required to cooperate with us. In reality think that they were quite unimpressed with our efforts.

Anyway, we wanted to import their data into our system -- partly for indexing, partly because we saw this as the future -- and we managed to obtain credentials to use their SOAP API. There was a _lot_ of data, and it was paginated by the API, for obvious reasons. Hence, we wrote a script which, when our system was spun up, would import the data from the legacy system by querying all pages of it in rapid succession.

During development we imported from a test system of theirs which contained only a small amount of data but for alpha testing we wired it to their production system. After about 15 minutes we got a phone call from France demanding to know why on earth we were forcing the company customer support system to its knees in a DOS attack. By that time I think there was no doubt in their minds that they were dealing with clowns.

</comment><comment><USER22> This is the scary part about dependency-heavy projects. Sure, you trust the developers of Rails, but what about that gem 5 levels down your dependency tree? Maybe you've seen the name as you glance through your lockfile, but you don't know what it does, when it was last updated, who (if anyone) maintains it, how competent they are, or what processes they have in place to keep bugs out.

<comment><USER23> [https://github.com/rubysec/bundler-audit](https://github.com/rubysec/bundler- audit)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Anyone here ever checked in a bug that infected large numbers of users?

<comment><USER24> In fact I have. I hit Enter before completing the WHERE clause, and because I'm OCD I close parentheses and quotes before filling them in, and put the ; at the end of SQL statements before filling in the clauses.

Well, I _did_ a long time ago. Now I treat the semicolon key like I treat the Enter key. Lesson learned.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am also much more cautious now. When I write my UPDATEs I leave out the SET until after writing WHERE clause. And for DELETEs I actually write it as a SELECT first, then once all the rows I expect are accounted for, switch SELECT to DELETE.

Since I use MSSQL, the semicolon isn't required, only a new line, so I actually start every .sql file I write with 3 new lines and an open multi-line comment this way if I accidentally hit Ctrl-E without selecting the EXACT statement I want, it throws an error.

All of these things to combat my stupidity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> On a much smaller scale, I published a small change to a WordPress plugin I develop called Thank Me Later. Unfortunately, I had used a closure which was only supported by PHP 5.3 and above. At the time, there were still a large number of users using WordPress with PHP 4.something. Being such a small change that couldn't possibly cause any harm, I got on the train and was away from the computer. An hour or so later, I opened my email inbox full of messages like "Help! My website is down", etc. I estimated I knocked at least 100 websites offline.

</comment><comment><USER26> Reminds me last summer when I was working as a junior software developer in this rather small or medium sized IT company. We used our custom framework written in PHP, and the funny part was that the framework didn't have a single test. Everything had always done by testing manually and hoping for the best. Had I known this beforehand, I would have applied somewhere else.

Anyway, our customer was (and still is) one of the biggest wholesale in some part of the Europe. We had developed online store for them like ten years ago, and the project had become more or less a legacy project where everything was outdated and nothing ever worked. If the customer asked some changes or updates, they were always implemented without proper refactorization nor testing. So you can imagine, if everything is done like this for the past decade with this custom framework, the code base just becomes too complex to maintain, not to mention developing it any further.

So, I had worked in the company for about 3 months when I am given this project. The former developer had left huge changes unfinished without too much commenting nor even briefing me about them. Took me like 3 months to get myself familiarized with the project, finish up the changes and carry out the rest of the requests. The summer ended and everything seemed to work fine in the local as well as in the staging environment. It was Thursday morning I pushed the changes live and everything crashed. Quick rollback, some research, couple fixes and a new try. Same thing. New rollback, some research, some fixes and push. Still broken.

Took me about 10 hours with the help of 2 developers to find out what was wrong. The framework was fundamentally broken in one part, it somehow didn't include files correctly. Still to this date, we don't know why it worked both in local and staging environments but not in production. When I got this fixed, new problems arose: customers had lost products from their carts, logins didn't work, the site was slow... After banging two weeks my head to the wall, everything finally worked. I was so relieved.

These problems affected thousands of users throughout Europe, and I can imagine how pissed some customers might have been. I was so ashamed on behalf of our company, our "framework" and how things were done that I quickly left my resignation.

If I learnt something, discuss the tools and how things are done in the company before applying for the job.

</comment><comment><USER27> Does anyone have a good guide/article on hardening wordpress from an hosting perspective? What is listed at wordpress.org is too thin for me. What tools are available that can be run on the server instead of in wordpress (WordFence alternatives that I can run on the CLI via cron etc)?

For example I have fail2ban rules to catch break-in attempts etc.

<comment><USER28> From a hosting perspective you want to isolate Wordpress as much as possible - i.e. putting it in a namespace with php-fpm (easiert way is using firejail) and running PHP as a seperate user. You also want to only give it the minimal required access rights to the database.

You also need to keep up with security updates and run a supported PHP version - there are still crazy amounts of PHP < 5.6 installs out there :(

From Wordpress.org own stats: [https://wordpress.org/about/stats/](https://wordpress.org/about/stats/) [http://php.net/supported-versions.php](http://php.net/supported-versions.php)

That's 70% of Wordpress installs that run on EOL and unsupported software!!!

Besides that update your kernel as soon as possible (reboot or hotpatch e.g. ksplice) and keep userland up to date. There are tons of local root exploits for Linux that help an attacker to attain some serious persistence.

Some other ideas I've read is keeping most of Wordpress readonly for the PHP user and use wp-cli ([http://wp-cli.org/](http://wp-cli.org/)) or similiar tools that update from the shell. You can do this some group membership trickery.

It's also possible to almost completely forbid access to web clients to wp- content/plugins and wp-includes if your plugins don't do something stupid. But that's error prone and something you should test. For a simple site with a theme you control and few or none plugin it should work fine through.

As a general rule be very conservative regarding plug-ins and themes and spend some time to look at what comes with them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Spin it: how I created more IT jobs than the Obama administration.

<comment><USER30> I like that idea, at our Job we sometimes Joke that "Taskrunner" should be a Job description for some people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Disclaimer: Title is misleading. This is not a 0-day nor a new vulnerability on WordPress.

The author is just talking about some old stories that happened years ago.

Everything is fine. There is no emergency and no need to go update your wordpress setups ASAP. :D

</comment><comment><USER32> Apparently this years theme was for everyone to keep telling me database IDs are unique that aren't unique...</comment>


Modern Robotics - <AUTHOR> http://www.modernrobotics.org/ <comment><USER2> Does anyone have a review of this book? Just wondering why it was posted? Looks pretty cool but wondering if I'm missing something.

<comment><USER3> Recent discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19123506](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19123506) and top comment explains why this book is useful: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19124052](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19124052)

something related to robotics also discussed recently: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19125858](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19125858)

<comment><USER2> Awesome, thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why are people upvoting robotics a lot recently... getting tired of web dev?

<comment><USER5> I have zero experience with web development except for some basic html stuff and hacking around with java-script of third party websites. I am an electrical engineering undergraduate. Mastering java-script is indeed in my wish list, but it lags far behind robotics and control systems.

<comment><USER6> Step one to mastering javascript: drop the hyphen!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Shouldn't it contain a chapter on reinforcement learning?

<comment><USER8> Robotics is an enormous field. This book is heavily steered towards kinematics (ie how stuff moves). There's another book on their recommended list which details how to drive motors and use sensors. That doesn't begin to cover machine vision for perception and navigation, general control theory, or the sorts of algorithms in probabilistic robotics. Let alone machine learning!

If you want a fairly all-inclusive reference, look at the Springer Handbook of Robotics. You'll need a pickup truck to carry it home though. It's more an encyclopaedia than a textbook, but it is surprisingly comprehensive.

Also, most robots don't use reinforcement learning (and most people don't have a basement full of robot arms learning to grasp things). That's a nice research area, but in practice it's not needed for a lot of tasks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > check out the free preprint version below

I was looking for it the last time around as well, but just couldn't find it. Has anyone got a link to it?

<comment><USER3> Printable version with 10pt font and margins [1] Tablet version [2]. Both with hyperlinks. [3], [4] for without hyperlinks.

FYI, these links are in the Book section [5]

[1] [http://hades.mech.northwestern.edu/images/7/7f/MR.pdf](http://hades.mech.northwestern.edu/images/7/7f/MR.pdf) [2] [http://hades.mech.northwestern.edu/images/4/4e/MR- tablet.pdf](http://hades.mech.northwestern.edu/images/4/4e/MR-tablet.pdf) [3] [http://hades.mech.northwestern.edu/images/8/81/MR- largefont....](http://hades.mech.northwestern.edu/images/8/81/MR- largefont.pdf) [4] [http://hades.mech.northwestern.edu/images/b/b2/MR-2up.pdf](http://hades.mech.northwestern.edu/images/b/b2/MR-2up.pdf) [5] [http://hades.mech.northwestern.edu/index.php/Modern_Robotics...](http://hades.mech.northwestern.edu/index.php/Modern_Robotics#Book)</comment></comment>


Gradually, Then Suddenly - <AUTHOR> https://ma.tt/2020/05/gradually-then-suddenly/ <comment><USER2> Remote working can be great for companies that are large and/or in the development/web service sector. In large companies most people already interact remotely (i.e., emails and calls). With all that this entails: clear communication, well documented processes, etc. So a good part of the work is already remote, in some sense. You only need to understand what part of the rest can be made remote.

Companies that work primarily with development/web service probably already work in good part with (remote) software. So working remotely is an easy step.

In short, I think that basically companies like Facebook are the one that have it easiest in being remote-first companies. And the ones that would get the most benefit from it. So, it is great that they adopted a remote-first approach, when they literally had no alternative.

However, we should remember that there are still lots of companies and people that will never thrive in a remote-first environment. And these might very well be the majority.</comment>


For Jessica - <AUTHOR> http://jenniferlawler.com/wordpress/?p=747

<comment><USER2> Our almost three year old son was born with a severe "expressive language disorder" which means his IQ and motor skills are normal, but he can't really talk.

And yet he tries so hard to communicate with us, but even after several years, it's still often impossible to determine what he's trying say.

It makes me very sad to know how trapped and frustrated he must feel, to lack the most basic mechanism of human interaction, but at the same time, it feels so great to love him in such an unconditional way - a way that he will likely not even know or experience until he has children of his own - that it makes me feel both very free and very lucky to have him in my life.

One of my most cherished goals in life is to simply live long enough to see him have this same opportunity I have received, and hopefully be able to reciprocate this love to his own children.

A scenario of which, I am also very lucky to still have my parents around and know that they have had the same chance to witness in me.

Very touching story, indeed.

</comment><comment><USER3> Holy. Fucking. Shit.

As a father of two wonderful, intelligent and amazing little boys who have never been required to endure anything close to what the author's daughter is faced with, I say:

This is probably the most beautiful thing I have ever read. It not only highlights 3 wonderful yet perfectly "normal" people in a way that sums up what it means to be human, it addresses the study brilliantly, mirroring exactly as I feel.

</comment><comment><USER4> Site seems to be down. Google cache here: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:UAKJTH0...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:UAKJTH0TocoJ:jenniferlawler.com/wordpress/%3Fp%3D747+jennifer+lawler+for+jessica&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=in)

...

cheald: "That was one of the most poignant, beautiful, moving expressions of a person's heart and soul that I've ever read."

Yes.

</comment><comment><USER5> That is so moving I actually had to stop reading it a couple of times to stop the tears that were forming in my eyes. Thank you for sharing it.

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't see how that has any relation to HN, but wow. That was one of the most poignant, beautiful, moving expressions of a person's heart and soul that I've ever read.

<comment><USER7> The article/study she is responding to was highly upvoted on HN a couple weeks ago:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1494011>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What a strong human. I poked around her site and found another very special essay of hers that, if you enjoyed this one, you will like:

<http://jenniferlawler.com/after_dakota.html>

</comment><comment><USER9> Wow. Thank you for posting this

</comment><comment><USER10> Seems like the story of a brave woman. I am not sure how this addresses the NY article however.

</comment><comment><USER11> Yes! This is the pain and joy of truly living!

</comment><comment><USER12> I am not sure if it's a virus or not but the site is trying to install something and my symantec just complained and I closed the browser. I think it was the article.</comment>


Former NSA lawyer: the cyberwar is between tech firms and the US government - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/04/nsa-cyberwar-stewart-baker-cloudflare-snowden <comment><USER2> >"Baker said encrypting user data had been a bad business model for Blackberry, which has had to dramatically downsize its business and refocus on business customers. "Blackberry pioneered the same business model that Google and Apple are doing now - that has not ended well for Blackberry," said Baker.

Baker is incompetent. Blackberry's primary advantage was its encryption. It branded itself as a business device and supported enterprise use. As bring your own device became mainstream and as the app store markets grew, Blackberry fell behind, failing to deliver the diversity of apps that iOS and Android did. Sales of devices fell and hence they've had to lay off 1000s.

TlDr; Baker has it wrong; Encryption was a business advantage for Blackberry, until access to a diversity of apps mattered more.

<comment><USER3> Blackberry is suddenly the posterchild for encryption? I thought Blackberry is this service where all your mail and communication is routed in cleartext through their services, a workaround from the days of 1G that they simply never got around to get rid of before smartphones flattened their business.

That is not encryption, if anything it is the direct opposite.

<comment><USER4> _I thought Blackberry is this service where all your mail and communication is routed in cleartext through their services_

That's how consumer BlackBerry worked (while other consumer services at the time that had no encryption whatsoever) but the enterprise version was as secure as they could make it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As an aside:

"The crypto wars have about as much to do with the outcome of security as the Soviet-Finnish war of 1939 had to do with the outcome of WW2."

I've seen it argued that the Soviet-Finnish (AKA the "Winter War") actually had quite a large impact on the outcome of WW2:

\- The difficulties the Soviets had in fighting the Finns made them re- organize their command structure of the Red Army, re-instating traditional rank structures and reducing the role of political officers

\- It led Hitler to believe that the Soviets would be easy to defeat, underestimating both the size and quality of Soviet forces

So you could argue that if the Soviet-Finnish hadn't happened then Hitler might not have been quite so keen to invade the Soviet Union when he did and might have encountered a more poorly organized Red Army when he did.

NB The Finns put up an _incredible_ defence of their country against apparently overwhelming attacks, including Simo Häyhä who as a sniper had 505 combat kills.

Perhaps we should be concluding that a small, skilled and highly motivated defence can blunt the attack of even the most powerful of enemies?

</comment><comment><USER6> I've known Stewart Baker, the ex-NSA GC quoted in the linked article, for about 15 years--not incredibly well, but well enough that he'd show up at parties I held in my home when I was living in D.C. before moving to the SF bay area.

Stewart is extremely smart, should not be underestimated, and HN comments in this thread calling him "incompetent" reflect badly on the person making the comment. He's likely the single most capable adversary the HN/EFF/ACLU/Cato/Mozilla/etc. axis faces over encryption (if he ends up playing that role).

Stewart is correct that end-to-end crypto will "restrict [companies'] ability to sell" products internationally. And he is narrowly correct that "the market for absolute encryption is more limited than you might think" in a corporate environment. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ak4ZwLU3aX0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ak4ZwLU3aX0) [8:45]

But these are merely clever rhetorical devices. Of course Apple/Google/FB/etc. know that HTTPS will vex snoophappy governments; at this point I suspect their CEOs may view that as a welcome side effect and in any case know their business better than a DC attorney does. And of course banks and brokerage firms don't want end-to-end encryption for their employees; they have likely have FINRA and other legal obligations to preserve correspondence.

Okay, Russia and China are snoophappy and banks may want access to employees' email. Now can we go back to talking about the NSA's bulk surveillance of law- abiding Americans?

Stewart's comments at 12:56 about Silicon Valley companies "picking fights" with the NSA are also misleading. In reality, the NSA was "picking fights" by bulk-tapping Google's interdata center links, subverting encryption standards, and (in the 1990s) defending export controls that weakened American companies' ability to compete. I posted more about this here: [https://twitter.com/declanm/status/529804398457651201](https://twitter.com/declanm/status/529804398457651201) [https://twitter.com/declanm/status/529798596221095937](https://twitter.com/declanm/status/529798596221095937)

Today these companies -- and hopefully the startup founders here on HN -- are merely protecting their users by adopting encryption. At [http://recent.io/](http://recent.io/), which I founded after leaving CNET/CBS earlier this year, our forthcoming Android and iOS apps use only HTTPS to connect to the backend. Naturally.

TLDR: You underestimate Stewart Baker at your peril.

<comment><USER7> > Stewart is extremely smart, should not be underestimated, and HN comments in > this thread calling him "incompetent" reflect badly on the person making the > comment.

Incompetent may be the wrong word. What people (including you) are getting at is that his arguments are unpersuasive upon examination. It's all just fear mongering.

There are two plausible explanations for this. The first is that he doesn't see the holes in his own arguments; that would substantiate the charge of incompetence. The second is that he does but makes the arguments anyway in order to mislead others who don't. That appears to be the case you're making. But I'm not sure scoundrel is a lesser charge than idiot.

<comment><USER6> Welcome to the delightful world of Washington, D.C. realpolitik!

A third possibility is that he honestly believes his position is the correct one--or is holding out the possibility of returning to a .gov/.mil job in this or a future administration--and (a) is using the best arguments for his case, however weak or (b) is on a conference panel, not in a courtroom, and is aiming for entertaining one-liners rather than a point-by-point argument that you'd find in a legal brief or congressional testimony.

<comment><USER8> I didn't find his comments especially entertaining, and I don't think my sense of humour is faulty, so let's rule out the court jester theory.

That leaves "using the best arguments for the case he truly believes in, however weak". This I think would correctly fall under the umbrella of incompetence. At some point, rational people are supposed to evaluate their own arguments and change their beliefs if they can't sustain them anymore.

In this case he has strongly implied that "tech people" with a libertarian bent are naive and their beliefs crumble the moment they're faced with the real world. Insulting the people you need help from isn't a good start. But regardless, I don't know of any tech companies that have real problems complying with a robust, trustworthy process that includes many checks and balances to ensure only people widely agreed to be criminals get investigated. The whole problem has started because that system has broken down over time and post-Snowden been revealed as nothing more than a political sleight of hand.

<comment><USER9> It can't be called incompetence if he makes the arguments he has been paid (and likely will again be paid) to make. The world is full of highly competent people who do exactly that, many of them lawyers. They're not called 'advocates' for nothing.

But this begs the question why otherwise self-respecting panels so often give a soapbox to propagandists. Perhaps instead of using the mindless daily news formula of pitting two self-interested views against each other to see who has better soundbites we should try to put rational, thoughtful people on the stage.

<comment><USER10> That raises the question. Begging the question is arguing a point with the conclusion as evidence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's surreal reading what Baker is saying. Companies aren't generally afraid of their employees, and any competent IT department can manage BYOD. The reality is that privacy and security has become an extremely important differentiator, and I'm glad to see Apple and Google both capitalizing on it.

This was by far the scariest part;

      "But I've worked with these companies and as soon as they get
      a law enforcement request no matter how liberal or
      enlightened they think they are, sooner to later they find
      some crime that is so loathsome they will do anything to
      find that person and identify them so they can be punished."

Seriously? Yes, just advertise your complete contempt for following due process, because, you know, it's easier to catch crooks that way. Thank you for proving within the article exactly why end-to-end _cryptography_ is needed, so that we don't have to trust people like this to actually follow the law.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is a fairly evolved astroturf argument which will likely be enjoyed by all powerful interests (government and private).

The battle is between powerful interests and the masses. The powerful interests gain a lot by controlling information and dissent. Surveillance is a useful tool to help achieve that.

</comment><comment><USER13> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ak4ZwLU3aX0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ak4ZwLU3aX0) is the raw video. I'm obviously a bit biased here, but I've always wondered if Baker actually believes his arguments or not.

<comment><USER14> Thanks for the link to the video.

I think his argument makes sense (just speaking with regards to encryption - they brought up a couple of things in the discussion), but you have to keep in mind that he's arguing from a completely different perspective than most of the folks posting to HN. Whereas it's usually in the best interest for a private citizen to have all of the data on his/her device encrypted and only decryptable by him/her, it's not the same case for corporate or government data, which is a huge portion of the market.

Baker is arguing from the point of view that a large organization needs to be able to monitor what its employees are doing because they're legally responsible for anything that those employees may do. Imagine having to secure a network where you couldn't look at the logs due to privacy concerns; or figuring out which disgruntled employee is siphoning data off to a competitor; or responding to warrant/subpoena when one of your employees is suspected of committing a crime. You're not in a very good position if the only one who can decrypt the data is the end user.

Not to mention that there are also situations, particularly in government, where it's in the best interest of the public to be able to investigate a government official for wrongdoing. If their IT department can't get to their e-mails when the Inspector General comes knocking, what's to stop that official from just saying "Whoops, I forgot my password." ?

<comment><USER15> Why would these use cases need end to end encryption?

<comment><USER14> I'm sorry if I wasn't clear. I wasn't meaning to limit my argument to data in transit - I was also including data at rest.

To answer your question though, end-to-end encryption of data in transit will obviously interfere with an employer's ability to log transactions.

I think Mr. Baker's arguments were more directed at the recent ubiquitous iPhone encryption controversy (in fact, after doing a quick search, he made almost the exact same argument in the NY Times directed explicitly towards Apple[1], although I think his wording could be toned down slightly). Since the decryption mechanism on the iPhone is tied to chip inside it, it limits a company's ability to hand you a corporate iPhone and still be able to monitor what you're doing with it, hand it over to the cops, etc.

Baker makes the further argument that while Apple can encrypt everyone's data to the chagrin of the FBI and the federal government is unlikely to enact any laws preventing it or hindering sales, Apple will have a much harder time doing the same in certain foreign markets. A country like China will likely have much more political will to push Apple out of the market if their cops can't decrypt people's phones. Maybe that will ultimately be a good thing, but by trying to send a message to the US government they might be opening up a much larger can of worms overseas.

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/09/30/apple-vs- the...](http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/09/30/apple-vs-the-law/data- access-shouldnt-be-up-to-companies-alone)

<comment><USER15> Unless that data is at rest somewhere outside an organization's control, that still does not require end to end Enron with key escrow/recovery.

<comment><USER14> I think I misunderstood your initial question - the I (well, really, Stewart Baker) was trying to make was that selling devices which are automatically encrypted with keys that can't be escrowed by the owning company (like the new iPhones) isn't going to be very welcome in a corporate environment.

> end to end Enron

I think you meant "end to end encryption". I'm guessing you're typing that on iPhone :)

<comment><USER15> That was Android's auto-incorrect. Evidently Google doesn't think I need end to end encryption either!

I understand your point, but key escrow and most corporate use cases don't overlap. You are better off not managing user keys, with or without key escrow, and, instead, securing your links back to your infrastructure with a VPN and encrypting your storage to secure data at rest. Key escrow gives you no more protection, or access. It's just more complicated.

Key escrow, therefore, is only useful for spying on individuals' interpersonal communication, and Baker knows this very well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Just from the timber of the comments, i had guessed this was Stewart Baker. The man does not, IMHO, deserve to be viewed as an expert on anything other than playing political games.

I'm not sure how he got to where he was, but i'm pretty sure it had nothing to do with competence (and that's something i'll rarely say).

If you want to form an opinion, he posts quite often on volokh.com as a blogger.

</comment><comment><USER17> this and the FBI's crypto wars redux both appear to be designed to divert attention and resources away from understanding and addressing surveillance- related abuses using the classic and surprisingly effective strategy:

controlling the debate by defining its terms

</comment><comment><USER18> I'd say what he's really saying is that it is between governments and their citizens.

</comment><comment><USER19> The disingenuity lies in the lack of context.

The emergence of the NSA as America's secret police did not happen as an aberration but within the phenomenon of shrinking rights that I've noticed since my political awareness began in 1980 or so.

Since then, I have not seen any expansion of rights for anyone, except maybe for those living in the former Warsaw Pact and non-humans (e.g. pets) in the US.

I have however seen a relaxation of controls for groups such as law enforcement.

It may have started with the belief that "criminals have more rights than victims" that found expression in movies such as Sudden Impact. Such sympathetic arguments missed the point that the power of the state doesn't target victims.

Regardless of origin, law enforcement lobbied for - and usually got - exception after exception to the bill of rights until we reached the point where an actual trial hardly matters.

While the rights of suspects and law-abiding people shrank, the scope of the term "national security" grew, fueled by another belief - that the survival of the state mattered more than its' intended purpose - the protection of the lives and liberties of its' inhabitants.

</comment><comment><USER20> Does all the protesting by security agencies actually mean much, in terms of a signal?

1) If these measures are effective and stop them doing what they perceive to be their job, they'd have to protest.

2) If they had access to the information by other means, they'd have to protest anyway, otherwise you'd be able to conclude we're in situation 1

My guess it's a bit of both, and they're mostly just losing their ability to mass surveil against low priority targets (e.g. populations), since cracking the encryption for absolutely all connections would be too much work.

</comment><comment><USER21> The internet moves much faster than government and so the government can't control it. Information moves like water. Everybody is exposed for who they are and nobody can fake it. The whole world is in a big room and everybody can hear each other. Wars will no longer be violent and fought with weapons, they will be fought with software hacks.

</comment><comment><USER22> I do wonder if Matthew Prince's faith may be a little bit misplaced here. I presume it was meant as a figure of speech, but mathematics is not an area where faith is especially dependable.

</comment><comment><USER23> "the easiest war to swim"????

Copy-editing fail.

<comment><USER24> probably autocorrect from 'swin.' 'S' and 'w' are very close.</comment></comment>


Busted Mythbusters Not Allowed to Talk About RFID Chips  - <AUTHOR> http://intellihub.com/2013/07/14/busted-mythbusters-not-allowed-to-talk-about-rfid-chips/

<comment><USER2> Mind you, that whole thing happend in 2008. And this article doesn't add any new information nor does it sum up the already known info all that well.

</comment><comment><USER3> This has less to do with some vast conspiracy pertaining to RFIDs and more to do with preventing proprietary technology (and their shortcomings) from becoming public. This of course prevents none of the amateur tinkerers from going out and doing some experimentation of their own and anonymously publishing the results in the true hacker spirit.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is indeed old news. Still interesting though.</comment>


A Feminine Computer? - <AUTHOR> http://haxel.ca/a-feminine-computer.html

<comment><USER3> Reminds me of what Dodge did about 20 years ago. They decided to try creating a car using only women - from design to engineering to construction to manufacture, the car was 100% created by female employees of Dodge - with the goal that the end result would be one that female customers would be excited to buy and drive.

The result was the Neon (Dodge Neon / Plymouth Neon ... either way, it was the same car) and by most accounts was an absolute success at achieving that goal. It may sound silly or sexist, but it worked, and the car was very popular (and made Dodge a lot of money).

The fact that it wouldn't appeal to men was not a problem for Dodge. Guy Kawasaki has often advised, "don't be afraid to polarize," which means if you offer a product that has a very strong flavor then yes some people won't like it, but the people who do like it will like it so much the product will be quite successful.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that women would appreciate and especially benefit from a more balanced computing experience, but I also think it would help everyone else too, including techies like myself and many here.

It seems to me that modern computers are already severely polarized and it's limiting our views of what they can do for us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think that there may be something to the idea of a gender binary as a way of viewing computer interfaces, and the idea that we've only accomplished the masculine.

At the same time, I don't agree with it, personally. For example, whenever I do sysadmin work, or watch other sysadmins, there is very much this sort of nurturing relationship--"What did you do? Where does it hurt? Have you tried this? Can you show me what your settings were? Poor computer. :("

Perhaps this is no longer true in the new cloud days of servers as livestock- not-pets where you summarily destroy a misbehaving instance, but there was a time where we'd treat sick instances like sick children.

In fact, one of the things I very much disagree with is this whole notion of how difficult computers are to work with--command-line based ones especially. In classes or meetups, whenever I'd work with people new to the shell I always make sure to point out that we're about to have a conversation with the computer: we're going to ask it how it's feeling (`top`, `tail /var/log/messages"), what it's doing right now (`ps -A`), who it's been talking to (`netstat -plant`), who else it's working with (`users`), and if it knows anything interesting today (`fortune`).

What _doesn 't_ help is treating it like some black box that needs to be dumbed down or referring to it as something which requires a special skill set to use, which is a common theme in this article. Another thing I disliked about this article is that while it handwaves a bunch about how masculine computers are and how feminine it could be, it never really describes what such an approach looks like nor why it would be attractive.

In fact, I rather resent the implication that femininity is defined as this sort of spaced-out, overly-intimate, scatter-brained, disorganized sort of thing. Contrast author's work, for example, with a mother running herd over several kids and keeping things on time, or a young woman making an evening date with a friend after dressing up and working on her appearance.

<comment><AUTHOR> Beginnings are, pretty much by definition, largely mysterious and chaotic, intimate, and disorganized. I have a tremendous respect for those qualities - without them we'd not have computers or even ourselves to talk to. We wouldn't exist.

Overall, in my view, the feminine represents the creative process - <USER2> ability to discover and establish new directions. It's the way to achieve any kind of change. Is there anything more valuable?

The idea though is that by making the beginning of a computing experience more closely align with where we actually are as individuals, the ramp-up is much less steep than it is now. I say it's steep because of my observations of people who are not long-time techies - just regular folk who are afraid of computers and abhor detail. People taking classes and using command lines are already well along their journey.

<comment><USER4> _just regular folk who are afraid of computers and abhor detail._

This is a good example of the sort of language that I think doesn't help us.

"Regular folk" somehow implies that it's normal and acceptable not to know how to use computers--it's not. In fact, it's no more acceptable nowadays to be ignorant of how to use a computer than it is to be ignorant of how to use a book or how to use a phone or how to use a lighter.

"abhor detail" is a _defect_ , not a common trait. Mankind is defined by our use of tools and our ability to pay attention to details _as well as_ the abstract.

I think the sooner we stop using language that lets people excuse themselves from being functioning members of a technological society the better we'll be as a civilization.

<comment><AUTHOR> Those are my observations, maybe I run in different circles than you do.

You seem to be saying there's only one way for technology to be - the way it already is - and that everyone had better get on board with it, or else.

I'm saying there's also another way for computers to be that lets everyone receive more value with less effort and, if they choose to take it that far, ease into the way technology is now. But they may not ever need to. This would accomplish the same goal you are espousing, but in a practical way rather than by decree.

I'm taking the beginning and moving it way back, to the point where an Uzbek villager seeing such a computer for the first time can use it as well as an expert within a day or two, because it operates on principles he's already familiar with and doesn't require classroom instruction.

As a SysAdmin, you have the keys to the kingdom, the world of technology is at your fingertips. You're in a position of power in a technological world. As a long-time software guy, the same is true for me. Yet our expertise only puts us on thick side of a power-law distribution; a fine place to be, but the vast majority of people have nowhere near our expertise and simply do not possess the comfort-level and skills to extract the value we do. Whether it is to pull down a nice salary or to change the world with software, at this point in time we are a minority.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Meet Summer: Pro cheerleader-turned-NASA aerospace engineer - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencecheerleader.com/2010/07/meet-summer-pro-cheerleader-turned-nasa-aerospace-engineer

<comment><USER2> Somewhat bizarre that they say pro cheerleader-turned-NASA engineer. It's really the opposite. She started as an engineer and became a pro cheerleader on the side, according to her profile on the Texans website. <http://www.houstontexans.com/news/Story.asp?story_id=3750>

<comment><USER3> I think more accurately, that she was a cheerleader who became an engineering student, and then a professional engineer and finally cheerleader.

It's good for science, and for any field, I think, to show that there's a diversity of interest within it :-) Also -- what a cool first professional project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Regardless of the order, stuff like this should really start making it into the press. It still amazes me in this day and age that we see so few young women in science programs in high schools/colleges. Obviously, we shouldn't necessarily tokenize people like Summer, but I feel that young girls aren't getting enough encouragement by our society to get into science and engineering.

<comment><USER5> How much encouragement is enough? What's so special about science and engineering? Why aren't young boys encouraged more to get into Nursing and Early Childhood Development? Why have all of my realtors been women?

What a waste of time. Wear what you dig. Get a job that interests you (not society or your parents).

<comment><USER6> Are you unaware of the shortage of engineers? Have you tried to hire a good developer or engineer lately? We need more, and women are an obvious underutilized talent pool.

<comment><USER7> There's no shortage. You just can't hire the ones you want at the price you want. Economics lesson: Lower your standards or raise your price.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Sand Cat - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_cat <comment><USER2> Adorable and fascinating, but hard to see why this is an article appropriate for HN.

<comment><USER3> It's appropriate as long as it is of interest to the audience is the policy, is it not? And this here member of the audience has just upvoted it, finding it more interesting then the rising inequality between Edward Snowden and Brendan Eich, which has _nothing_ to do with "hacking" and is perennially trending on HN because, well, every freaking thing is appropriate if upvoted!

<comment><USER4> > _every freaking thing is appropriate if upvoted_

That's not true—HN is a constitutional democracy. But I'd have thought a desert-dwelling cat would be intellectually interesting enough to satisfy the criteria of the guidelines, and once a story crosses that bar, pretty much anything goes.

Users who disagree are welcome to flag the story, and admittedly have some evidence to back them up in this thread.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can only recommend that the Sand Cat joins the millions [1] of cats world wide that have switched to JavaScript: [http://jsforcats.com](http://jsforcats.com)

[1] [http://jsforcats.com/#satisfied- customers](http://jsforcats.com/#satisfied-customers)

</comment><comment><USER6> [http://i.imgur.com/JkhcUtS.gif](http://i.imgur.com/JkhcUtS.gif)</comment>


Neural Networks making a come-back? - <AUTHOR> http://yaroslavvb.blogspot.com/2011/04/neural-networks-making-come-back.html <comment><USER2> The OP is including a lot of different concepts under the neural network umbrella. Things like restricted boltzmann machines and hierarchical temporal memory are technically neural networks, but many computer scientists would consider them to be different enough in approach to think of them separately. ie, you wouldn't say "let's use a type of neural network to solve this problem" you would probably say "let's use a restricted boltzmann machine".

It is true that these things are becoming more popular. I've found in practice that a modern computer scientist is still more likely to solve a simple learning problem with some form of regression, if only because it's faster than training a NN.

<comment><USER3> Restricted Boltzmann machines are as bonafide neural networks (NN) as you can get and has been around since the golden age of neural networks. You have the same layered structure, feed-forward connections, same "squashing function". The only "restriction" is that the unknown and the known nodes must live on different layers so that the connections are only between a known and an unknown node. It has been called different names and the theory explaining them has had different names too, for example "Harmony Theory" of Smolensky.

I think NN is a broad enough category that no matter what you want to use or describe, you will have to qualify your "lets use blah" statements with a particular kind of neural network. Similar in spirit to statements like "lets use a parser" vs "lets use a LALR parser".

But back to the topic of new found interest on NNs, part of the reason is that there have been new developments in training algorithms which work significantly better than what were used traditionally. With these methods NNs require far less baby-sitting. NNs traditionally really required a huge lot of that.

The other reason is that sheer scale and size of the data sets that are available now, have forced machine learners to move from powerful but batch optimization algorithms (quadratic programming for instance) to simple and online gradient based algorithms that have been the forte of the NN community all along.

Training a NN is no different than regression. It is another name/technique for (some what systematically) creating a tower of increasingly complex regression functions. If the simplest(linear) one works, its imperative that one uses the simplest one in the interest of good predictive accuracy on unseen data. Bundled together with the low training time that parent mentioned, its a win win.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Rather than using Google scholar, I would suggest looking at papers in ICML, NIPS and Journal of Machine Learning Research.

For vision based research I would suggest CVPR and ICCV conference and IEEE Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence journal.

<comment><USER5> Make these stats and I'll link them from the page :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have this impression that there are many more startups popping up that generally operating under the AI umbrella. Companies are doing things relating to medicine, finance, etc. There's even a couple on the May Who's Hiring post here on HN. Quite an exciting time. Seems like the AI Spring is in progress and we're coming up on Summer.

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't think this is significant at all because of the information boom. As the Internet and Storage has boomed and become more cheap and available, more content and data is hosted on the web. More and more is indexed by Google. May be we need to adjust the stats graph that are based on Google Scholar with the inflation of data in the last decade.

<comment><USER8> Maybe I missed something but I don't understand this criticism. The author states that 'The number of hits for each year was divided by the number of hits for "machine learning".' Wouldn't that control for the inflation of data in exactly the way you are proposing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is there much commercialization of neural networks going on? I own NeuralNetwork.com but am not suited to turn it into a business. If anyone is in the space and is interested in using the category killer name, I'd love to talk.

<comment><USER10> I work with NNs in a research context and am working on a startup commercializing some research-related NN technology. What price range were you thinking?

<comment><USER9> You don't have any contact info in your profile. Could you contact me via mine?

<comment><USER10> my email is jlehman at eecs dot cs dot ucf dot edu. the captcha on your blog wouldn't work for me -- I see a recaptcha in the html, but it wasn't displaying in either firefox or chrome for me

<comment><USER9> Your email bounced for me. Try my username at gmail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Interesting that the trend isn't replicated on the web... yet: <http://www.google.com/trends?q=neural+networks>

I wonder if there is a lag between academia and the web?

<comment><USER12> I also find it surprising to see in which countries the term is most popular according to g-trends. None of the top 10 is part of the G8. Also English is only the third most frequent language. I suppose they are lagging behind, but I might be wrong. At my Uni, the only course that had some focus on NN felt pretty outdated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Might this be due to the explosion on neuroscience publications that are not related to artificial neural networks? There haven't been major breakthroughs in ANNs lately

<comment><USER14> Are you sure about this? I'm not an expert by any means but when I participated in the Netflix Prize a few years, there seemed to be lots of investigation about different variations of neural networks.

For example, the Restricted Boltzmann Machine ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_machine#Restricted_Bo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_machine#Restricted_Boltzmann_Machine)), as far as I understand it, seems to be a variation of neural networks.

If you can post a link to an article that covers recent work in the area and explains why they none of them are breakthroughs, I'd love to read it.

<comment><USER15> The backpropagation neural network itself is a variation of many nonlinear, additive statistical models. The field emerged as an independent entity largely because it had "cool" neurological connotations and was largely ignored by statisticians. The Netflix prize was ultimately won using linear algebra with sensible starting values (the KDD paper that describes the winning method is remarkably easy to read).

<comment><USER16> backpropagation is just the chain rule of differentiation. each layer of an ANN is logistic regression, which statisticians have been and continue to be interested in.

i'm not sure your caricature of the netflix winning solution is correct: i believe it was a blending of around 25 different models (including, i think, the RBM someone pointed about above) each in themselves quite varied from one another. this is typically how these challenges are won.

<comment><USER15> A lot of the top teams had blended submissions, but my characterization was not incorrect: [http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=5197...](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=5197422)

<comment><USER17> I work on the cinematch team at netflix... I've reviewed all of the winning code... your characterization is incorrect.

The netflix prize would not have been won when it was without rbm.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>