Google Apps Loophole, Let You Access Other's Domain Login Details - <AUTHOR> http://jajodia-saket.sjbn.co/2012/07/google-apps-loophole-let-you-access-others-domain-login-details/

<comment><USER2> This is quite exactly why I would never consider using the Google cloud, or any customer-facing Google services for our business. Google is set up for B2B, not B2C. Their job is to minimize customer service calls. We use Google Apps at our business. The absolute only way we've been able to get useful support when something breaks was to either call up a VP-level contact, or call up a colleague who works at Google, and ask for a personal favor. This does not scale.

I also know of the number of serious Google bugs we've run into that we just didn't report because, quite frankly, we gave up on any bug reporting process having any effect.

Contrast this to Amazon where our rep can put us in contact with engineers in a few minutes, and who are of the caliber that they can e.g. help us recover a database where the RAID volume Amazon hosted it on was damaged in a power outage.

<comment><USER3> I've had the same experience as well which is why we canned Google Apps during the trials for our business. We had a show stopper when doing a test exchange migration and we never got an email reply and never found a human to talk to that could help. That failed the risk mitigation criteria of the trial so we binned it.

I have absolutely no faith in them to actually sort something out in a reasonable amount of time.

Conversely, we used Office365 in the end and it blew up(ironically with a similar issue) during the trials. We had someone useful on the phone helping us in under 20 minutes!

I've not had much luck with Amazon, particularly S3 as we had a number of issues with the .Net client and they weren't very helpful. Stackoverflow was far more useful but I don't want to trust stackoverflow as a long term support option!

<comment><USER2> With Amazon, we have a business support contract. The first-line phone operators are pretty bad -- they're neither technical nor fluent in English -- but we've been able to work up to competent people pretty quick in the one emergency we've had since launching. Both organizations are courting us pretty hard, so we may be a special case.

Google is a little weird. They've insisted on e.g. a conference calls with a half-dozen guys from Google, including one executive-level. That call was entirely one-sided. They told us about all sorts of features they were building because they thought our market segment needed them (zero of which were actually useful to us, and which they could have discovered with even very minimal market research). In that conference call, they didn't listen to any of our bugs or feature requests. Whenever we've submitted support requests through official channels, they went into what was effectively a black hole (sometimes, we'd get a slightly derogatory response from someone clearly powerless and clueless). Things we submit to through high-level contacts get handled -- roughly as well although slightly slower than normal, paid contacts at Amazon. The culture at Google is a little weird, at least with respect to dealing with large customers.

We do use Google Apps internally. It's imperfect and has showstoppers, but in my experience, corporate IT departments are even more imperfect, and have even more showstoppers. Based on our experiences, I'd be absolutely terrified of using Google for anything customer-facing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Either way, this is a fairly noob error - confusing authentication with authorization. I'm very surprised that business critical G Apps team hasn't caught on to this before.

They should probably give him the maximum reward just to attempt to save face on this.

Anyways, from now on (from <http://www.google.com/about/company/rewardprogram.html>):

>If you have found a vulnerability, please contact us at email@example.com. Feel free to be succinct: the mailbox is attended by security engineers, and a short proof-of-concept link is more valuable than a video explaining the consequences of an XSS bug. Oh: if necessary, you can use this PGP key.

<comment><USER5> Ya it is a kind of noob error but as its a human made thing so mistake can happen..

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I panicked initially thinking this issue was not yet resolved by Google!

Well done Saket, thanks for waiting for the bug to get fixed before posting your article.

<comment><USER5> Even when I show this bug 1st, I was totally shocked how this can be possible..

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It really does feel that video demonstrations of bugs are the way to go, if you're trying to convince teams of a problem.

<comment><USER8> I think he reached out to the support team instead of the security team. Pretty stupid of the support team to not take security bug reports seriously.

<comment><USER9> I'm not very surprised. If he told me about it, I would find it quite hard to believe that Google's programmers made such an error too.

<comment><USER10> It's always the assumptions that get you.

<comment><USER11> This. A thousand times this. Especially when investigating security issues, assume everything could be vulnerable or broken until proven otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This bug seems glaringly obvious. Any page which has the user login and password credentials for Enom Domain Manager page would initially have someone like me who is more security conscious looking at things like the URL and also noticing this type of bug.

Then again, you'd need to buy your domain through Google Apps to notice this. Maybe not many people buy their domain through Google Apps?

I'm interested to know how long this bug was out in the wild before it was found. Months? Days?

Good find Saket and great story.

<comment><USER5> Ya not many people buy domains through Google Apps.. And I am not sure about from how long this bug was there because I soon as I show it I reported about the same.. Thanks.. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> He should have asked for their names and added them to the blog post. That's pretty lame to be laughing at someone, most likely because english is his second language and the explanation technical in nature.

He's a better man than me. I probably would have hung up and posted directly to here instead.

</comment><comment><USER14> There was a similar and recent vulnerability in google webmaster tools as well.

Very scary. But what stellar alternatives exist for startups?</comment>


ML model predicts chemical reactions with much higher accuracy than chemists - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/09/190903111250.htm <comment><USER2> > The algorithm developed by Lee and his group uses tools in pattern > recognition to recognise how chemical groups in molecules react, by training > the model on millions of reactions _published in patents_.

While I am excited for the potential machine learning to improve retrosynthesis, patent literature would seem like an especially unlikely source for reliable information on reaction-condition training data.

Actual paper appears to be accessible here: [https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/acscentsci.9b00576](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/acscentsci.9b00576)

</comment><comment><USER3> >The algorithm developed by Lee and his group uses tools in pattern recognition to recognise how chemical groups in molecules react, by training the model on millions of reactions published in patents.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias)</comment>


Would you pay $62 for a Wikipedia article? - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/6130373856/

<comment><USER2> What's really worrying is if you search for the "Editors" of the book there are over 17,000 book by them: [http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search- alias%3D...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search- alias%3Dstripbooks&field- keywords=Lambert+M.+Surhone,+Miriam+T.+Timpledon,+and+Susan+F.+Marseken&x=0&y=0)

They must have made an automated system that creates these books and sells them on Amazon using print on demand.

<comment><USER3> Curious. I thought of getting numbers to check rate of growth, if any.

With the default 'Relevance' sorting, it's 17,761 (as of 18:44 WET, today).

With any other sorting, it's 13,962.

<comment><USER3> Aaaaaand ... 23 days later (April 04 01:16:55 WEST)

         Relevance: 21,590 Results
         Others:    17,807

An increase of nearly 4k in a tad over 3 weeks, about 170 per day.

By date, they seem to land in batches - Mar 19, Mar 14 ...

<comment><USER3> Another 11 days (Apr 15 12:22:48 WEST 2010)

         Relevance: 21,589 Results
         Others:    15,039

Curious, seems halted, with the second number down nearly 2800

<comment><USER3> Seems Amazon put a stop to it (Fri May 7 10:34:58 WEST 2010)

        Relevance: 21,589
        Others:       154

Huh, 154 ? Checking small print at bottom of results:

 _This search may have been filtered to remove less relevant results. Click here to include these items in your results_

OK, clicking now lists 21,589, but nearly all of them say:

 _Currently unavailable_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Books > Children's Books > Characters & Series > Barney:

[http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pepsi-Carbonated-Pharmacy- Oldfield-T...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pepsi-Carbonated-Pharmacy-Oldfield- Talmadge/dp/6130452772/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268333884&sr=1-1)

</comment><comment><USER5> Save your money for Land of Lisp by Conrad Barski, coming out this month. [http://www.amazon.com/Land-LISP-Learn-Program- Game/dp/159327...](http://www.amazon.com/Land-LISP-Learn-Program- Game/dp/1593272006/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268328493&sr=8-1)

<comment><USER6> It _might_ be. I've been on the pre-order list for that book since last October and it was supposed to be shipped in November 2009. I wouldn't necessarily count on it being released this month. Hopefully it'll be worth the wait..

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Received a recommendation for this book this morning, because I had bought Peter Norvig's PAIP and other books on Lisp.

</comment><comment><USER7> I wonder what all is in there. Definitely not just the stack article, because that is nowhere near 144 pages.

<comment><USER8> It would actually be kind of cool if it followed the link graph for the article a couple articles deep, so you could get a customized book of concepts clustered around a main topic.

<comment><USER9> I think the book would definitely become a lot more interesting that way.

Chapter 1: Stacks

Chapter 2: Reverse Polish Notation

Chapter 3: Australia

Chapter 4: Penal transportation

Chapter 5: Slavery

Chapter 6: Prostitution

Chapter 7: Pornography

(and I wasn't even trying)

<comment><USER8> Stack (data structure)

Computer science

Internet

Pornography

Bam!

Regardless, the assumption that pornography would be in every book assumes that you don't cluster the data to topics with strong clique behavior and normalize the data to remove overly-linked (aka obvious) topics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't see any problem with this, it clearly states that the articles are from Wikipedia. As long as they don't change the license they can more or less rework and distribute it however they like. There are also others doing similar things.

[http://www.wissenmedia.de/wissenmediaverlag/verlagsprogramm/...](http://www.wissenmedia.de/wissenmediaverlag/verlagsprogramm/verlagsprogramm/titelinformationen/buch/320/16.html) <http://pediapress.com/>

</comment><comment><USER11> For $99 dollars you can have the whole thing (3 million articles) in a 2" square device:

<http://thewikireader.com/>

</comment><comment><USER12> I've never been tempted to type "LOL WUT" until now.

I have been willing to pay for printed copies of freely-available digital material. I bought Dive Into Python 3. I even bought a pair of Lulu-printed copies of Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby.

Repackaged Wikipedia articles, however, is pushing it a liiitle too far. Especially given the price. _Especially_ given how unclear the listing is about what's even in there (as Psyonic said, the stack article doesn't fill 144 pages).

</comment><comment><USER13> The great thing is they brand it "Content from Wikipedia" so you know to avoid it.

Some books (eg, Googled by Ken Auletta) require interviews with over 50 people - something away and beyond ripping off web content.

</comment><comment><USER14> If you do, then you can give it away free, because their book is under the Creative Commons Attribution/ShareAlike license, being a modification of Wikipedia.

<comment><USER15> The real question in my mind is whether the book provides attribution to Wikipedia as the source. If not, and if the book's contents are literal copies of the wikipedia article, then Wikipedia may be able to have the book(s) taken down because the attribution clause was violated (and thus the license). I've not looked into the Amazon listing enough to know whether that's the case or not.

<comment><USER16> The cover art for each of these books shows a "content from Wikipedia" badge, so it looks like they are probably conforming to the licenses.

It's a little odd that they'd state it so clearly on the cover, though, since it seems as though they're trying to exploit a knowledge gap in their target market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I thought one of the key points of wikipedia was that it didn't limit access to information by charging for it.

<comment><USER18> You are correct.

Amazon(book publisher in question) != Wikipedia

<comment><USER19> Amazon is not the publisher, Betascript Publishing is. Looking at their site, it seems that what they do is gather articles and bind them together (with or without permission, I don't know). Here is the text from their About page:

 _Annually, millions of works are written worldwide in the research industry. Enterprises and scientists would be especially interested in these ideas; nevertheless, up to today, most of this work is shelved as a result of high costs. Betascript Publishing specializes in the publication of such works and uses commitment and the latest technology in order to make the invaluable work of such researchers available worldwide, quickly and efficiently._</comment></comment></comment>


Buffett Loses To Desmarais As Power Exceeds Return - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601170&sid=am2tdSNHYLK4

<comment><USER2> A very interesting backgrounder on the Demarais empire. Lengthy but worth the read.

I wonder whether Putnam has/is/will be acquiring top talent made particularly available by current circumstances. Definitely worth keeping in mind.

And interesting to read about the Demarais' move into financials (including insurance in the term), but with a much more long-term management approach and while apparently eschewing the worst forms of leverage.</comment>


Hartman: Opposite of a Platform for DPL 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/Articles/813831/ <comment><AUTHOR> > Throughout my entire term as DPL, Debian has been subjected to a campaign of > harassment from a former project member.

What's that about?</comment>


Over 100 Million Americans Have Smoked Marijuana -- And It's Still Illegal? - <AUTHOR> http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/142556

<comment> daniel-cussen Here's the one that most hits in:

>Most importantly, the criminal laws are far more likely to result in having our children arrested, placed behind bars, and stigmatized with a lifelong criminal record than they are likely to in any way discourage them to try pot.

</comment><comment><USER2> This is not Digg!</comment>


Ask HN: How do you encrypt then sync files to ANY cloud storage as offsite bckup? - <AUTHOR> On a windows computer. But if you have a solution for Linux or Mac, I am happy to hear it.
I will pay money for it , as long as it works.
I need a solution to encrypt and then sync all my files to the cloud as offsite backup.
Here are my requirements:

    * Must have file versioning enabled in the cloud.

    * Must encrypt locally on my computer before being sent to the cloud.

    * Does not require me to create a virtual drive/folder on my hard drive and then drag and drop files to encrypt then back up. In other words, it encrypts current folders and files in my hard drive as I work on them. No drag and drop to a virtual drive/folder required.

    * Preferably open source.

    * Preferably no Java .

    * Preferably strongest encryption algorithm used --- Perhaps Truecrypt ? EncFS ? dm-crypt LUKS ?
 To quote another person: "I'd love to see a fully open-source, zero knowledge, roll your own-solution, allowing it to be hosted on offsite VPS! I think this would pretty much solve the problem of cloud storage."
What would you recommend?
Thank you very much.
* TL:DR
Please recommend a solution that can encrypt then sync to ANY cloud storage of my choosing , including Tencent or Kanbox (10TB free) <comment><USER2> JungleDisk ([http://jungledisk.com](http://jungledisk.com)) meets several your criteria and has Linux/Mac/Windows support, but its just too bad that since Rackspace bought them they've focused almost entirely on Rackspace's cloud storage offerings. It started with AWS support (and which I still use, but which is hard to buy from JungleDisk these days) and there originally were hints when they first added Rackspace support that they might continue to support arbitrary cloud storage backends and yet that never materialized. JD has nice sync engine and a good "shared source" deduped backup "vault" format. I just wish that JD would either Open Source their software or get back around to supporting more cloud backends. I get that Rackspace wants to focus on their own offerings, but I'd love to see the JungleDisk client get more capable, again.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much.

I found this one that supports 45+ cloud storage.

{So far, this supports the most number of cloud I have come across} Storage Made Easy [https://storagemadeeasy.com/cloud_list](https://storagemadeeasy.com/cloud_list) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_Made_Easy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_Made_Easy)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is the OP expanding on my own question.

Right now, for your information , I am aware of these back up clients and the cloud they can sync to. Unfortunately, None of them can sync to any cloud storage of my choosing:

SyncBackPro Arq for Windows and Arq for Mac Syncovery Duplicati BitTorrent Sync Strongsync ExpanDrive CloudBerry CloudBacko Filement GoodSync Boxcryptor

I think it has something to do with the necessary use of the REST API from cloud storage. See this post.

[http://support.2brightsparks.com/knowledgebase/articles/4495...](http://support.2brightsparks.com/knowledgebase/articles/449543-limitations- to-the-rest-api-of-cloud-storage-servi)

<comment><AUTHOR> Someone has asked me to check out git-annex .

Seems promising.

Will look it up down the track when I am much better at programming.

But in the mean time, I would be happy to find more for dummy solutions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You will most likely have to compromise on a few of your requirements. Is there a reason you don't want to create a virtual drive?

I would suggest you use VeraCrypt ([https://veracrypt.codeplex.com/](https://veracrypt.codeplex.com/)), or the last full version of TrueCrypt ([https://www.grc.com/misc/truecrypt/truecrypt.htm](https://www.grc.com/misc/truecrypt/truecrypt.htm)). Both are free and open source.

Encrypt your files locally then upload the encrypted file.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much for your comments.

I have thousands of folders and files that I work on and I really don't want to drag every single one of them to a virtual drive on my computer after I am done with them.

The folders and files themselves are already sitting inside a virtual drive that was created with Truecrypt as I work locally on my computer.

I just don't want to create a Dropbox or Boxcryptor like virtual drive on my computer and drop and drag files into them before uploading.

I want those folders and files automatically encrypted and uploaded as I work on them.

<comment><USER3> You could write a program which automatically encrypts all the files in a specified directory and then uploads them every hour or so.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much for this tip.

Here is my question .

If I am using Truecrypt now, how can I use Python (or any language) to create such program?

How do I go about using Google to find such tutorials?

Any advice would be very much appreciated.

Looking for all the help I can get.

Thank you very much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> For your information , I am aware of these back up clients and the cloud they can sync to : \</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-

SyncBackPro [http://www.2brightsparks.com/syncback/sbpro.html](http://www.2brightsparks.com/syncback/sbpro.html) Google Drive, Office 365 (OneDrive for Business and SharePoint), OneDrive, Box, Dropbox, SugarSync , Amazon Glacier S3 , Amazon Cloud , Google Storage and Microsoft Azure support

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>- Arq for Windows and Arq for Mac [https://www.arqbackup.com/pricing/](https://www.arqbackup.com/pricing/) Amazon Cloud Drive, Amazon Web Services, Dropbox, Google Drive, Google Cloud Storage, or OneDrive account

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>- Syncovery [https://www.syncovery.com/matrix/](https://www.syncovery.com/matrix/) \--- features comparison Supports various Internet protocols, including FTP, FTPS, SFTP/SSH, WebDAV, SSL, HTTP, as well as these cloud services: Amazon S3 and compatible services, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace Cloud Files, Microsoft OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive), Google Drive and Google Docs, DropBox, Box.com, and more....Sugarsync

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>- Duplicati www.duplicati.com/ [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplicati](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplicati) Duplicati supports not only various online backup services like OneDrive,[1] Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud Files, Tahoe LAFS, Google Docs but also any servers that support SSH/SFTP, WebDAV, or FTP. Duplicati is a backup client that securely stores encrypted, incremental, compressed backups on cloud storage services and remote file servers. It works with Amazon S3, Windows Live SkyDrive, Google Drive (Google Docs), Rackspace Cloud Files or WebDAV, SSH, FTP (and many more). Duplicati is open source and free.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>- BitTorrent Sync [https://getsync.com/](https://getsync.com/) Sync easily moves anything, anywhere - all the benefits of the cloud, none of the limitations. Available for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>- Strongsync [https://secure.expandrive.com/store](https://secure.expandrive.com/store) [https://www.expandrive.com/apps/strongysnc/](https://www.expandrive.com/apps/strongysnc/) Control your data. Strongsync lets you connect to your own SFTP server or Amazon S3 account so you stay in complete control of your data. Strongsync is a Mac/Windows app providing Dropbox-like sync and backup to DreamObjects......

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>- ExpanDrive [http://www.expandrive.com/apps/expandrive/](http://www.expandrive.com/apps/expandrive/) ExpanDrive creates a virtual USB drive that connects to all major cloud storage providers such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, OneDrive, Openstack Swift, Amazon S3 or your own SFTP, FTP or WebDAV server.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>- CloudBerry [http://www.cloudberrylab.com/calc.aspx](http://www.cloudberrylab.com/calc.aspx) Online cloud backup and storage management solutions powered by Amazon S3, Glacier, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and designed for SMBs and MSPs. \--- Avoid Cloud Vendor Lock-In With Cloudberry you are free to choose optimal storage for your backups. Don't be locked in with a backup service and paying 2x times more for the backup storage. With over 20 supported cloud storage destinations, CloudBerry Backup give you freedom of choice, ensuring data accessibility and portability. Featured Cloud Providers Amazon S3 Amazon Glacier Microsoft Azure Google Cloud Storage Rackspace Cloud Files OpenStack HP Cloud IBM SoftLayer Google Drive Other Cloud Providers Google Nearline Storage Eucalyptus Clodo Scality Cloudian DreamObjects Cloud Storage Aruba Cloud Hitachi Content Platform ThinkOn IDC Frontier LeoNovus CloudWatt HavenCo Tiscali SFR Lunacloud CenturyLink Enter Cloud Suite QNAP Google Drive HP Helion

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>- CloudBacko [http://www.cloudbacko.com/en/cloudbacko-advanced-cloud- local...](http://www.cloudbacko.com/en/cloudbacko-advanced-cloud-local-server- workstation-amazon-S3-google-backup-software-benefits.jsp) "Backup all servers, databases, virtual machines & workstations Need a cloud / online / offsite / remote / local backup solution for backing up Microsoft Exchange Server (EDB and mail level backups), Microsoft SQL Server, VMware vSphere ESXi (both Paid and Free versions), Hyper-V, Lotus Domino, Lotus Notes, Oracle Database, MySQL, Windows System, Windows System State, as well as Files in desktops and laptops? CloudBacko supports them all."

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>- Filement provides you with secure and direct access to your ... [http://www.filement.com/users/use- cases](http://www.filement.com/users/use-cases) Filement provides users with the ability to manage all their devices (PCs, Macs and Linux, Smartphones, Tablets, Smart Routers), cloud and remote services (Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Rackspace, FTP ect.).

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>- GoodSync: File Sync & Backup Software [http://www.goodsync.com/features](http://www.goodsync.com/features) Backup and sync your files with ease using GoodSync. Our simple and secure software will ensure that you never lose your files. Download GoodSync Free ... \--- Supports: Cloud Server Folders Amazon S3 Dropbox FTP Google Drive (Docs) OneDrive by MS OneDrive Pro (Sharepoint) by MS Office365 by MS SkyDrive by MS SFTP (SSH) WebDAV Windows Azure by MS (Source: [https://discussion.dreamhost.com/thread-145071.html](https://discussion.dreamhost.com/thread-145071.html) January 2015 3rd party backup software options)

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>- Boxcryptor [https://www.boxcryptor.com/en/pricing](https://www.boxcryptor.com/en/pricing) With Boxcryptor you can encrypt your files on Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, SugarSync, Box and many other storage providers. It also supports all the clouds that use the WebDAV standard such as Cubby, Strato HiDrive, and ownCloud.</comment>


What Apple's quiet failure can teach you about your business - <AUTHOR> http://www.eno8.com/blog/what-apples-quiet-failure-can-teach-you-about-your-business/ <comment><USER3> I don't call this events failures, I call them _tries_. And many, many tries are required to learn and create a single success.

But maybe that is why I'm no _analyst_.

<comment><USER4> I can't help but see this as a post hoc rationalization.

When Steve Jobs was at its helm, did Apple have failures that it needed to rebrand as "tries"?

<comment><USER3> Don't get me wrong, there are failures, Ping, or MobileMe being some examples, but I think that is the result of not _trying_ (and learning) enough.

For example, it is said when designing the iPhone they tested (tried) two different operating systems, one based on OS X and the other one based on Linux. Even the hardware itself was first started as an iPad like device and was later decided to shelve the original project and do the iPhone instead. When you _try_ an idea you learn, and you might even learn that it is a bad idea. I don't think of that as failure, the only failure is to not use what you learned. I'd be worried if they, despite the knowledge gained and to not be thought of as a failure by pundits, decided to be _courageous_ and go to market anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not sure why this is being called a failure when there was never an announcement about its efforts. How many skunks works projects were attempted and quietly folded in history?

<comment><USER6> They were quite public and arrogant about it

<comment><USER3> Based on the last earnings call, they still are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> a seemingly rare defeat for a company that has done little-to-no wrong in the last decade (save for maybe the Apple Watch depending on how you look at it).

\--> Google Maps vs Apple Maps?

<comment><USER8> Took 3 years to turn that around

> Apple Maps is now used three times as often as its "next leading competitor" > on iPhone and iPad

[https://9to5mac.com/2015/12/07/apple-maps-usage- numbers/](https://9to5mac.com/2015/12/07/apple-maps-usage-numbers/)

<comment><USER9> It's still inferior to Google Maps tho. It's not outright bad, but for directions/traffic Google Maps is still miles ahead (at least in random European countries).

<comment><USER10> Shouldn't it be kilometers ahead in random European countries?

<comment><USER11> I'd say that Google Maps is streets ahead of Apple Maps still. :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Apple's quiet failure has more to do with forgetting key values than the fact that the car market is incredibly difficult. (Of course it is, but that's not even the main issue.)

Jobs era Apple had a clear focus on user benefits. They were part imaginary - look and feel, styling, status - but part real, in the sense that when you bought an Apple product you were getting a specific set of experiences and possibilities which you probably felt were exciting, novel, and cool.

Cook era Apple has lost that. Apple Maps was me-too, the hardware is me-too - competing with the old Apple against itself - and the new projects don't have the old vision.

What's the novel, exciting benefit of Watch? Er...

Apple has missed some important markets, including home automation (currently a mix of competing products that barely work together, and often barely work at all), the indie content creation market (which it half-owned with podcasting, but then gave away to YouTube), and social networking.

But the biggest difference is the shift from an Apple that tried to make products to empower and delight people, including creators, to an Apple that encourages passive consumption of its products/objects/services, because "we make stuff and market it to you, and you buy it."

It's a lot easier to do the latter than the former. It looks like a subtle shift but it's really a complete change in direction. And it has made Apple a much less interesting company.

</comment><comment><USER13> > I would rather commit seppuku than fail -- Elon Musk on failure

Project Titan is not a failure but it has suffered major setbacks, the credit or blame for which lies with Tim Cook. It takes unrelenting passion and fanaticism to wield the fortunes in your favour. Jobs had this and Musk has it too.

If project Titan is not about building a car then it's just about components. Apple has historically owned the vertical and there is little exciting about being a component supplier. It's a losing bid. Google does mapping better than Apple. It does voice recognition and AI better than Apple. The car manufacturers desire a steely grip on their UX and design so Apple's strengths there won't come into play either. Ive's own ambitions seem to indicate the poor state of cars:

> "There are some shocking cars on the road," Ive said. "One person's car is > another person's scenery." To his right was a silver sedan with a jutting > lower lip. Ive said, quietly, "For example." As the disgraced car fell > behind, I asked Ive to critique its design: "It is baffling, isn't it? It's > just nothing, isn't it? It's just insipid." He declined to name the model, > muttering, "I don't know, I don't want to offend." (Toyota Echo.) [1]

I for one would have loved to see an Apple Car and disruption of the auto industry. Am hoping Apple hasn't conceded on the bigger vision but it does seem bleak at the moment.

       [1]: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/23/shape-things-come

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm not sure it can be classed as a failure. Pivoted maybe, but failure? In what sense?

<comment><USER15> In the sense that they started out wanting to build a car and later on they decided not to build it anymore after having realized what it actually entails. I'd call that a failure, as in "failure to build a car which I wanted to build". Pivoting doesn't change anything, we all move on after our failures.

<comment><USER16> How can a company with literally mountains of cash plus the engineer power Apple has, fail to make a self driving car? I'm not saying at all that is something easy, but Apple is a beast in terms of resources. I confess that I don't get it.

<comment><USER17> Afaik, Apple starts lots of development projects and a lot of them gets "Steved". If the new product isn't enough better than the competition or won't have enough profit margins... axe.

(Point is, the project might have been doing well and following the plans -- but Apple might have found that the target market niche was too small. Or the margins might have been too low for Apple.)

<comment><USER18> Very low margins generally in the car industry. It would have been a money pit for Apple

<comment><USER19> Premium is very premium in the car industry. It is one thing to find $3000 to buy a laptop. It is expensive for a laptop, but it is in the realm of purchasable by a large chunk of the population.

It is quite another endeavour to find $100K+ to buy a car, no matter how you can rationalise it. The total market size for car at that price is probably in the 6 digits cars worldwide and shrinking in the western world.

That falls quite far from Apple business model and expertise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Still better "failure" then Googles "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks" with its products (or even multiple similar existing at once - <USER2> messaging) that year per year slowly eroded the trust in the company.

<comment><USER21> "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks" \- Is this really a bad thing? You have to try things in the real world to get anywhere. Are there any companies that can see into the future to see what works?

<comment><USER22> > "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks" \- Is this really a bad thing?

If you're one of the people who pay real money for a product that doesn't stick, yes.

<comment><USER23> But that can always happen to any product.

<comment><USER22> Absolutely. So when I'm looking at a product, one of the things I ask myself is, "does this company have a history of releasing immature products, or dropping support for their products quickly?" Obviously it can't be foolproof, but if either of those is a company's general MO, then it's more likely to happen to a new product of theirs, than a company which rarely does that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "given that computers are much better drivers than humans"

I can't tell if the author agrees with this premise or not. Clearly they are not better drivers than humans or there would already be fully autonomous cars on the road.

</comment><comment><USER25> > Rather, it's paring down its ambitions to focus on autonomous navigation and > in-car entertainment — two things that make perfect sense for the market > space as well as Apple's existing expertise.

Entertainment, yes, but autonomous navigation is not really within Apple's existing expertise. With so much competition in this area, including from Google which as way more experience, I wouldn't expect cars to run Apple's auto-navigation application (if they ever release one) any time soon.

</comment><comment><USER26> Failure is the path to success

</comment><comment><USER27> The crux of Apple's big success was built on the back of the music industry. Obviously iPods gave birth to the iPhone. In any case, the fact is, Apple needed a desperate victim, if you will, and without that situation to boost it, it's commonness is showing through.

<comment><USER28> How is it obvious that the iPod gave birth to the iPhone? It is a completely different operating system with a completely different user interface.

<comment><USER29> If anything, the Mac gave birth to the [concept of] iPad, which gave birth to the iPhone, which in turn led to the real iPad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is what happens when you're a design company masquerading as a tech company.

Do they design beautiful products? Abso-freaking-lutely!

Can they develop complex software/systems? The evidence strongly suggests a resounding, no!

They struggle enormously at providing solid cloud services, their websites suck (particularly their developer portals), they can't write a functional USB stack, macOS has more bugs than ever, even iOS' stability seems to be going downhill.

Don't get me wrong, they have top-notch product designers _and_ UX designers. But engineering has been second fiddle since the iPod launched. Self-driving automobiles is entirely an engineering problem, design doesn't even come into it.

<comment><USER31> Come on. Are you seriously suggesting that Apple is not a tech company? Have you seen their chip designs? Do you know of any company that ships in volume that has successfully migrated from two chip architectures which is still around today?

<comment><USER32> If Steve Jobs hadn't returned to Apple, we would be talking about the Macs the same way we talk about Amiga and Atari nowadays.

I clearly remember the not so good situation Apple was in around 1994, with Copland failing to impress.</comment></comment></comment>


Is Earthly life premature from a cosmic perspective? - <AUTHOR> http://phys.org/news/2016-08-earthly-life-premature-cosmic-perspective.html <comment><USER2> For some context, Avi Loeb has a certain ... reputation in the astrophysics community. He's a super smart guy, but he has a habit of writing a ton of short, very speculative papers. One gets the impression that he's throwing a lot of ideas out there and seeing what sticks. It can be as valid a strategy in astronomy as in the startup world, but the downside is that it can be hard to believe anything he writes.

As far as this paper goes, the most interesting implication isn't mentioned in the phys.org article. It seems to me that main idea of the paper is to connect the development of life to the cosmological evolution of the universe. We find that we live in a somewhat special time, when the universe is just starting to be dominated by dark energy after having been dominated by matter since ~300,000 years after the big bang. Anytime you see that we live at some sort of a special time, the Copernican principle leads one to wonder if there is some underlying reason for this.

The main argument of this paper is that as the universe becomes more dominated by dark energy, the expansion of the universe accelerates and this shuts off the flow of gas onto galaxies. As galaxies stop accreting matter, star formation slows, making it less likely that life will develop in the far future. However, low mass stars are more abundant and have a longer lifetime, so even if it takes a longer time for life to evolve in that environment, it's still, on balance, more likely that life evolves around low mass stars in the near future ("near" still being tens to hundreds of billions of years). So we would expect that the typical life form will evolve around a low mass star, far in the future. Thus, life on Earth seems to have developed early, but maybe not unusually so, and it's maybe not a coincidence that we happen to live a little after the time at which the universe became dark energy dominated. I would file this away in the "interesting if true" category.

<comment><USER3> _We find that we live in a somewhat special time, when the universe is just starting to be dominated by dark energy after having been dominated by matter since ~300,000 years after the big bang. Anytime you see that we live at some sort of a special time, the Copernican principle leads one to wonder if there is some underlying reason for this._

I will propose such a puzzle. The moon has been moving away from the Earth at a certain rate every year. Yet it is only in the time frames of the humans that we find the moon and the sun roughly the same size, so they can form full solar eclipses etc.

Is this a coincidence? Surely there can't be any physical explanation for this.

<comment><USER4> The moon just has to be bigger than the sun to form a total solar eclipse. So it's not very coincidental as far as I can see.

<comment><USER5> The moon causes both annular and total solar eclipses. That is, it is precisely far away enough to both completely cover the Sun, and to incompletely cover it.

<comment><USER3> Exactly! How do you explain that it's happening during the time of homo sapiens?

<comment><USER6> Coincidence?

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The big argument against intelligent life being common (and us not being unique) is the existence of stars. No civilization more advanced than us is going to let stupendous amounts of energy go to waste in the form of star light. If you assume von Neumann probes and Dyson spheres are possible, then star light is incompatible with the existence of advanced technology.

While life appeared very early in the history of the earth, technologically advanced life took billions of years to evolve. You require a planet with an extraordinarily stable climate to allow a technological society to evolve and I predict this is the filter.

Just one factor contributing to this stability is the need for a very large moon to keep the axis of rotation stable over billion of years. If the Earth didn't have its moon the Earth's axis would tip over creating massive climatic change. The more we look at the universe the more unlikely the stability of Earth's climate looks.

<comment><USER8> What if they've got something more-convenient or powerful than going around messing with each star?

I just imagine an intelligent beaver: "There can't be any other intelligence out there, just look at all these rivers and streams!"

Meanwhile, humans are enjoying fusion-power and will take a little while to notice suspiciously-well-engineered beaver dams showing up everywhere.

<comment><USER7> I hate to break it to you, but we have already dammed most of the rivers. Any beaver who thinks that there are no dams around is just one that hasn't tried to swim far downstream :)

The argument is really more why is there only one technological species on the planet - the answer is the first one to arise will displace all the other potential competitors. This is exactly what has happened on Earth and why any other species that has a chance of creating a technological civilisation is not doing so well.

The same argument applies to the universe where the first civilisation that chooses to take over the universe will displace any competitors that choose not to. All it takes is one civilisation to spread and the whole universe goes dark.

<comment><USER9> Population of apes on Earth:

         Orang-Utan: 50,000
         Chimpanzee: 200,000
         Bonobo: 35,000
         Homo Neandertalensis: 0
         Homo Habilis: 0
         Gorilla: 100,000
         Homo Sapiens: 7,500,000,000

Yup. "The first civilisation that chooses to take over the universe will displace any competitors that choose not to."

<comment><USER10> How many zeros would you need to use to count the ants in the world?

<comment><USER7> No species the size of ants can ever smelt steel. They are not competitors for humans to become Earth's technological primary species.

<comment><USER11> Have you read _City_? (Not that it's seriously making an argument the other way.)

Arguing that smelting steel is the key thing is the typical, we're good at this therefore this is what matters argument we've been making since time immemorial.

Humans can't sneak into other organism's bodies and take over their DNA (yet, to be sure) but viruses can, so humans just don't have a real shot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I was idly looking at "age of universe", "age of earth", and "age of life" numbers and wondering something like this just the other day. The universe is only about 3x as old as life on Earth, and we've just _barely_ gotten to the point where we can make noise nearby worlds can conceivably hear. Radio's a hundred years old. That's _nothing_ on those time scales.

Look at this diagram of the size of the space that could pick up on our radio broadcasts with regards to the Milky Way: [http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily- lakdawalla/2012/3390.ht...](http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily- lakdawalla/2012/3390.html)

If we get at _all_ pessimistic about the likelihood of life happening, it doesn't feel like much of a stretch to imagine that we are some of the first ones. I would _love_ to be proven wrong in this by having some advanced Elder Race show up and try to help us get out of this short-sighted, self- destrictive capitalist spiral we're in, but I'm not gonna hold my breath.

<comment><USER13> To me the algae vs. alumnae solution to the Fermi paradox seems appealing. I.e. that life is common, but that intelligent life isn't.

Our sample size of one on Earth supports that. We have millions of species, but only one has evolved higher intelligence, and there's no reason to think that it's a successful evolutionary strategy v.s. say being a parasite.

        > [...]by having some advanced Elder Race show up
        > and try to help us[...].

Right, "help". I'm just going to let the history of how advanced civilizations have treated primitive civilizations here on Earth speak for itself.

<comment><USER14> We could also quote Blindsight by Peter Watts: [http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm](http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm) Search for "Once there were three tribes." and read 10 paragraphs :) The key quote is:

 _> Equidistant to the other two tribes sat the Historians. They didn't have too many thoughts on the probable prevalence of intelligent, spacefaring extraterrestrials— but if there are any, they said, they're not just going to be smart. They're going to be mean._

<comment><USER4> Even easier, it's the second occurrence of the word "historians". :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If I were reviewing this paper, I would be quite surprised that there is no mention of how long it took life to emerge on Earth after there was liquid water. While the earth is around 4.6 By old, my understanding was that liquid water was not present until about 3.8 Bya, and that life probably emerged in the by 3.5 Bya. So, 300 million years for life to emerge in on Earth with liquid water. I realize it's only one data point, but it seems like it should inform the probability calculation.

</comment><comment><USER16> _" So then you may ask, why aren't we living in the future next to a low-mass star?" says Loeb.

"One possibility is we're premature. Another possibility is that the environment around a low-mass star is hazardous to life."_

Wow that is some hardcore "anthropic" logic. Is the question really well-posed enough to lead to the latter conclusion?

<comment><USER17> This. Sometimes I feel like such out-of-touch-with-reality 'logic' is why a lot a people don't trust science anymore.

<comment><USER18> Just because something is non-intuitive doesn't mean it's "out-of-touch-with- reality".

Imagine if you go to a bus stop in a completely foreign city/country, and the bus shows up within 1 minute. There are 2 possibilities. Either

A) The bus usually takes a very long time to come (30+ minutes) and you just happened to get very lucky, or

B) The bus runs at a very frequent interval, so your 1-minute-wait is somewhat normal

Statistically, B is much more likely to be true than A. Which is pretty much what the author is alluding to.

<comment><USER19> You are using priors to decide that B is more likely than A, that is, you are saying that the frequent bus hypothesis is likely because buses with frequent intervals are common.

If the bus shows up within 1 second of your arrival then there can be no discussion of "frequent buses", you were definitely lucky, but only because the prior for buses with frequency of Order-of (1 second) is so low.

The analogy here is time-to-life and we have 1 data point for that, not enough to establish credible priors for minimum\mean time-to-life under any circumstances.

<comment><USER18> The point of the thought experiment is to avoid using any priors.

If you have a single data-point of an event E, taking time T to occur, then there are 2 possibilities:

A) Event E usually takes much much longer than T (>100T), and what you just witnessed is an anomaly, or

B) Event E usually does take roughly time T to occur, and what you witnessed is within the range of what usually occurs.

Both conclusions have an extremely high likelihood of being wrong, since the sample size is so small. But between the 2, conclusion B is more likely to be true than conclusion A.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> What seems to me obvious if one looks at: a) the age of the universe b) the age of the earth c) the age of life on earth d) the age of aware-enough-to- look-at-stars-and-wonder-about-aliens life on earth

Is that life itself is relatively "easy" and is likely to be common.

It seems more likely to me that the crucial "filter(s)" are for a species of lifeforms to cross the boundary into a global, technological civilization. There appear to be very unique, perhaps somewhat accidental set of circumstances that led to homo sapiens crossing that rubicon that aren't just evolution doing a "dial intelligence to 11", but more about an ability for intelligent individuals to share and store their thoughts and build shared abstractions and culture over periods much longer than individual lifetimes (e.g. capability for complex vocalizations and extremely precise control with hands and fingers; not living in water)

<comment><USER21> _Is that life itself is relatively "easy" and is likely to be common._

Life appears common, but multicellular life appears to be extremely uncommon and appears to have evolved only once on earth, at least according to Nick Lane's excellent (though inadvertently depressing) book _The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life_ ([https://www.amazon.com/Vital-Question-Evolution-Origins- Comp...](https://www.amazon.com/Vital-Question-Evolution-Origins- Complex/dp/0393088812?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&linkCode=as2&tag=thstsst-20)). I can't gauge the accuracy of his claims but the book does not appear to have been rebutted, at least from what I've found. Given all the discussion about biology on this thread I'm surprised no one else has mentioned it.

<comment><USER22> Also, as far as we know, single-celled life also evolved exactly once. This is one thing I haven't seen a good answer for -- if life came about so early, that would indicate that it is easy. But since it occurred only once, that would indicate that it is hard.

The common explanation is that once life evolved and began to spread, that it would prevent other life from appearing by out-competing it. But there is plenty of raw materials and sunlight to go around, so I don't buy that explanation.

The only thing that seems to fit, is that life is hard to evolve, but has extra-terrestrial origin. If that is the case then life should exist (at least in bacterial form) wherever a suitable habitat is found.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Wasn't there a time for some time after big bang when the space was on average a lot more warm everywhere and conditions for life were incredibly more abundant than now? I remember reading something like this here which would seem to be an antithesis to this article.

<comment><USER24> I think you must be referring to this:

> The "Dark Ages" span a period during which the temperature of cosmic > background radiation cooled from some 4000 K down to about 60 K. The > background temperature was between 373 K and 273 K, allowing the possibility > of liquid water, during a period of about 7 million years, from about 10 to > 17 million after the Big Bang (redshift 137–100). Loeb (2014) speculated > that primitive life might in principle have appeared during this window, > which he called "the Habitable Epoch of the Early Universe" .

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe#Dar...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe#Dark_Ages)

[http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPag...](http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=9371049&fileId=S1473550414000196)

Note that the other, Avi Loeb, is the same from the OP article.

The cosmological dark ages lasted from photon decoupling (when photons started free streaming and the cosmic microwave background was born) to a few hundred million years later when the first stars begin to form. Loeb's suggestion is a narrow window of a few million years when the CMB itself would be the source of warmth, rather than stars. I'm not sure how matter was distributed on small scales during that time period.

<comment><USER14> Does Loeb address whether there would have been oxygen and carbon 10-17 million years after the Big Bang? I thought that the heavier elements formed much later, and had to be forged in the center of stars. Our first generation of stars appeared 560million years after the Big bang. (Reference is the same wiki article you linked)

<comment><USER24> He talks about it in the paper. Basically, depending on your assumptions about nongaussianity of the primordial perturbations, there were at least a few stars simply by accident in the early universe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > Stars larger than about three times the sun's mass

> will expire before life has a chance to evolve.

Protip: if you are looking to hide the existence of your civilization, a good place would be in the vicinity of one of these.

<comment><USER26> Definitely. No need to be worried about what orientation you are in relation to a hypothetical observer either. Then again, you could sit in a molecular cloud, or near something really exotic like a neutron star of some variety to REALLY hide over longer time scales.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> "...chances of life are 1000 times higher in the distant future than now."

I still don't see this as a solution to the Fermi paradox, considering the billions (more?) of planets in our galaxy.

<comment><USER28> There was a discussion thread a while back about this on HN [1].

The first argument is a fairly weak argument/theory but about the same strength as most of the other common arguments/theories.

To me the strongest argument that there is a paradox is the idea of probes that can replicate. That it would be fairly easy with some sort of advance but not FTL technology to easily deal with the size and expansion of the universe (of course I could be full of it on this as I haven't looked into this idea in some time).

Basically why haven't we run into a probe yet?

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9916085](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9916085)

<comment><USER29> The Neumann probe idea has one flaw: it's assumed the probes will propagate and spread largely unimpeded. However, any interstellar civilization which encounters a probe is going to capture it and analyze/destroy it. They would not allow it to float though their territory and replicate. At the least they will intercept any that enter their territory; if the civilization gets annoyed they may embark on a campaign to wipe out as many as they can. Which leads us to two possible explanations, assuming a civilization has already sent out probes:

1\. The civilization was bordered on all sides by other interstellar civilizations, which stopped the probes from spreading.

2\. Our civilization is bordered on all sides by other interstellar civilizations (or perhaps is in a remote backwater of a civilization, like uncontacted indigenous tribes in the Amazon), which stopped the probes from reaching us.

There's even a third, somewhat stranger and less likely option:

3\. Some civilization is profoundly annoyed by Neumann probes, and has devoted themselves to destroying them everywhere. They made their own stealthy fighter probes, which wander deep space destroying any probes they may find. Perhaps they are keyed in to one specific model of probe that annoyed them, or perhaps will target any unmanned spacecraft with certain properties.

<comment><USER28> 4\. I would add an even stranger 4th option in that given the probes are sufficient intelligence they perhaps "evolve" into an uncontrolled state.

That could mean as simply as getting stuck like in local minimum in the hill climbing algorithm or something extremely complex as a probe like civilization (aka Star Trek 1 but in this case no longer cares about space exploration).

<comment><USER30> 5\. The von Neumann probes are microscopic and densely packed with a chemical structure encoding the information needed to reproduce in a variety of environments. Occasionally some of them mutate and get stuck in a planet's gravitational well, where they keep reproducing and mutating into who-knows- what. The urge to explore the cosmos is never completely lost, and eventually they reach a state where it's possible to continue the mission.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The universe may only be 20B years old. It takes our galaxy 250M years to rotate once. So the universe is only something like 80 galactic years (days?) old. It is still early innings.

</comment><comment><USER32> Very recent video profile on Avi -- [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKLMXdZNmZk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKLMXdZNmZk)

</comment><comment><USER33> I thought the very fact that complex organisms can be traced back to the Archean hints at cosmic origins of live on earth. Also no signs of a 'RNA- world' on this planet?</comment>


Unicorns all around - <AUTHOR>

1. Go to https://play.google.com/store
2. Click the search icon(don't enter any search term)
Why is that happening? <comment><USER2> It's funny. [https://play.google.com/store/search](https://play.google.com/store/search) behaves as [https://play.google.com/store/search?q=unicorns](https://play.google.com/store/search?q=unicorns)

</comment><comment><USER3> Oh wow, I thought it was going to be "unicorn" as in "unicorn startup". What a surprise ;D

</comment><comment><USER4> Google is just having fun :)</comment>


Worst Idea Ever: SSHKeygen.com - <AUTHOR> http://sshkeygen.com/

<comment><USER2> Oh dear god. I can only hope this is an attempt to crack idiots servers, rather than a serious service. I love the "it's your responsibility to secure your key in transit" disclaimer.

<comment><USER3> The "it's got what admins crave" line makes me pretty sure it's intended to be silly.

<comment><USER4> electrolytes, mostly

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Man. Where's the credit card field? I want to pay for such a sweet service.

<comment><USER6> Don't worry. You will. Sooner or later :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think it's actually a pretty good idea.

If your goal is to scam clueless people, of course.

<comment><USER8> New YCombinator startup idea!

Passwords are hard to remember. I can create a service to store their userIds, passwords and sites. That way people have to only go one place to get them. I'll call it a "personal ID agregator" during my VC pitches.

I could make all the data public and accessible from anywhere using a simple API.

Users could vote on which passwords are the strongest. The wisdom of crowds would lead us to the better security!

Man I need a cup of coffee to get going on this. No, wait, I've had 6 cups already...

<comment><USER9> It's been done. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claria_Corporation>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a really funny parody of the idea that all you need for a Web 2.0 startup is a cloned Unix command.

</comment><comment><USER10> reverse DNS points to 18.104.22.168.zipmath.com

Also hosted on the same IP: <http://cracks.n.hax.com/> and <http://portcode.com/>

<comment><USER11> This is probably a stupid question, but how did you find out what other sites were hosted at that IP address? Are you reliant on search engine data, or is there some other way of doing it?

<comment><USER10> I used <http://www.paterva.com/maltego/> to do it. I have no idea where the data comes from.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I just generated mine at Starbucks!

Is that bad?

<comment><USER13> As long as you didn't spill coffee and damage your keys in transit, it's fine :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I wonder if the server runs Debian.

</comment><comment><USER14> Domaintools shows they have 'private registration' and a established SSL cert even though they're not using one and on the site claim they're 'getting one soon'

<http://whois.domaintools.com/sshkeygen.com>

Pretty fishy.. or should I say.. phishy?

</comment><comment><USER15> Come on - if you are smart enough to know how to use ssh keys then you are too technically smart to fall for this. Grandma is not going to have her server hacked because she tried this. It's gotta be a joke.

</comment><comment><USER16> <http://cryptofile.com/yep.php>

</comment><comment><USER17> Heh "It is your responsibility to secure your new key pair in transit." it's not even https. Funny!

</comment><comment><USER18> On To Do page: buy a SSL certificate or self-sign so key transfer is not in the clear

Haha. I don't think the idea (if this is not a scam/joke) has merit because even if you forget your SSH passphrase, you have access to the server via a root password (stored somewhere safely in a fireproof-safe; and even if not physical access at worst). So the traditional key escrow should not be necessary.

</comment><comment><USER19> How did you find this site?

</comment><comment><USER20> Guh. It doesn't even send your private key back to you using SSL. Not that it would matter much. I don't want my keys escrowed!

<comment><USER21> It is secured by the pass phrase! :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The "best practice" bit is priceless.

</comment><comment><USER23> May be we should do something about it!?

</comment><comment><USER24> That's hilarious!

</comment><comment><USER25> This is funny. Reminds me of the chap who wondered on an online forum about how to hack his school's server, and forthwith acted upon the advice from the forum to send a "ping of death" to the i.p. address "127.0.0.1"! :-) Could just be an urban legend, but still amusing!

<comment><USER26> <http://www.bash.org/?742386></comment></comment>


Bitly News Tries To Create A Hacker News For The Rest Of Us - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/02/bitly-news/

<comment><USER2> Interesting stuff, but got knows what will happen to it without any early adopters or "real people". It's just API vomiting information.</comment>


Aaron Levie's answer to Box IPO (March 2014):  - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Box-IPO-March-2014/Aaron-Levie-is-down-to-a-4-stake-heading-into-the-Box-IPO-How-does-he-feel-watching-DFJ-and-USVP-laugh-to-the-bank-after-10-years-of-sweat-blood-and-tears/answer/Aaron-Levie?share=1 <comment><USER2> With a non-answer like that, he's going to make a great public company CEO :)</comment>


Making the Case for Feature-Rich Memory Systems (2016) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.cs.utah.edu/~rajeev/pubs/issc16.pdf <comment><USER2> Do folks have practical examples that would make development of alternative computational models worth it?

The GPU is the only recent example where I've seen people really willing to rethink how they work to get (very large) performance gains. But I'm not seeing that here. For the examples I can think of, it seems like it would be easier to install more servers with modest amounts of RAM, rather than having a smaller number of servers with lots more RAM and in-memory processing.

Of course, maybe I'm just not thinking of the right examples.

<comment><USER3> > Do folks have practical examples that would make development of alternative > computational models worth it?

This is the question to ask people when they say "the von Neumann architecture is a bottleneck".

That being said, I think a strong contender is the dataflow computing model. The advent of the GPU already heavily punishes control flow, and workloads are being increasingly constrained, hence the possibility of a real world success for dataflow machines.

<comment><USER4> Ok, I have seen dataflow as a model for writing programs. But such languages still have conditional constructs -- and I always assumed that once it gets down to the metal the cost of a conditional is going to be much the same.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I find it annoying that most of these jump straight from standard DRAM with a couple of tweaks straight to deep in-memory processing with memristors.

There are a lot of options for in-between options as well. For example, mallacc by Harvard modified to reside inside the memory itself could be very useful: [http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~skanev/papers/asplos17mallacc.p...](http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~skanev/papers/asplos17mallacc.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER5> "The march toward specialized systems" is an interesting slogan (if you will), since that's _exactly_ where we came from; we (as in: the industry) made a huge point out of doing as much as possible using general-purpose components (remember GPGPU?) and more or less open standards. It is of course obvious that the general purpose approach has inherent inefficiencies, but we gladly paid the price. I see some similarities here with the recent rise in popularity of lower level programming languages (better C++, Rust, even Go), after the move to VM-based highest-level languages (Python, Ruby, JavaScript, countless others, perhaps even Java).

We see the gains in productivity and the reduction in cost – at least according to some measures –, but it has inherent inefficiencies. Inefficiencies like simple applications using far more CPU and memory than they're due to.

This perhaps makes people think again what would be possible if all the abstraction (analogous to _general-purposeness_ of hardware) were wiped away and what has been possible in the past using far fewer resources.

<comment><USER6> The trend of finally adopting AOT on OpenJDK and .NET (NGEN is just for faster startup) kind of prove the point they should have offered AOT since v1.0 instead of leaving it to third parties.

Another example is the ongoing efforts to improve their support for value types.

A 20 years delay to catch up with what Common Lisp, Eiffel, Modula-3 and Oberon variants already offered in those days.

<comment><USER7> Well AOT even in OpenJDK is not necessarily about resource savings, just startup time. Native code is much larger than the equivalent bytecode, so compiling lots of cold code that's rarely used AOT to native can make things more bloated and slower, rather than tighter and faster.

I suspect we'll see the same thing for value types: it's not going to be quite the easy win it seems. Even in C++, it's easy to create accidental footprint explosions with templates and lose performance to excessive copying with value types. And C++ allows mutable values, which are out of fashion now so Java won't allow them ...

I was curious if the article would mention memory chips that knew how to do bulk memmoves by themselves. Does anyone know if memory subsystems can already do that? If you issue a memmove() for, say, 3kb of memory, does the CPU still have to read it all into the cache and then immediately write it out again, or is there some way the CPU can signal to the DRAM chips that they should do the copy themselves? Fast copying of memory would be useful for GCs.

<comment><USER8> 30 years ago we had blitter chips dedicated to moving memory around without using cpu, pretty sure most memory controllers would have something similar these days

<comment><USER5> memcpy is done by the CPU core, at least for x86. The IMCs don't process data.

The CPU core has more bandwidth than the IMC anyway, so there would be no speed-up from adding this complexity to the IMC (it would not only need to perform the operation, but it would also need a way to maintain cache coherence and communicate with the issuing CPU, none of which is a problem if you just do it in the core). It might not even save power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Forward Error Correction in hardware would, to my mind, be a nice and comparatively easy step up from simple ECC.

<comment><USER10> What are you proposing? ECC (classic SECDED for instance) is a form of FEC. What is it you want?

<comment><USER9> I must admit to not being an expert in these matters, and I therefore defer to this comment by JoshTriplett, where he talks about ECC as being inferior to FEC:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11604918](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11604918)

<comment><USER10> OK, so I read that, too. I'm still fuzzy on what is being asked for. Extrapolating based on my 20 years of experience as a CPU logic designer, and graduate work in error correcting codes, I'm guessing that what the author seems to want is to have uncorrectable memory read errors passed to user space as an exception that the application can handle as it sees fit. (I wouldn't call that FEC, but, /shrug ...)

The OS gets the exception. There are always (usually priviledged) instructions to read and set the memory check bits. It would be darn hard to write memory diagnostics without them, or sometimes even to boot a machine that powers up with random bits in the memory.

If I understand what the author wants, (and I have my doubts that the author understands what they want), then they are asking for an OS feature, not a CPU feature, and simply want the exception to bubble up to user space.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I can't believe it makes no mention of IRam [0] or Computational Ram [1]

[0] [http://iram.cs.berkeley.edu/](http://iram.cs.berkeley.edu/)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_RAM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_RAM)</comment>


Ask HN: What does a developer do when he doesn't have access to basic Internet? - <AUTHOR>

Hello HN,
I'm a web developer/designer based out of the Southern Part of India. I've been freelancing for a few years now. Currently, I have no access to good internet where I live, and I can't move to a better place because I don't have enough funds to do so, and without a good internet access, I can't make any dough. It's like I'm stuck in a Paradox.
I don't have a wired internet access in this place, I've approached all the ISP's in my city, and they have no plans bring in internet access in the near future. I currently use a 3G Dongle, which i highly unstable, to get things done. I've been using the same for 5 years now, and I've stayed in this place for 5 years, I don't know how.
Few months back I had signed up for a remote job, and they took me on board since they liked my work, but I got fired soon after because I couldn't communicate with them properly, as my internet was constantly failing.
I have Skype call scheduled in a couple of days time, with a company, but I'm not sure if i can do it on my connection.
A friend and I had a couple of ideas, that we were working on for a while, but then we couldn't continue to, as things got from bad to worse, we couldn't support ourselves, because we don't work day jobs. I've lost all hopes of getting anything done from here, because something as basic as an Internet access, which a lot of people don't have to worry about I'm sure, is proving to be quite a challenge to deal with.
I'm sorry if it sounded like a rant, but I'm just so frustrated about my situation right now, and if the mods feel like its inappropriate, please feel free to remove it.
Has any of you faced something like this? If so, how did you get over this phase? <comment><USER2> Any place you can go where you can use a good connection? You need to plan around it, but one can get along with only sometimes being connected as long as it is predictable.

</comment><comment><USER3> Get a cheap VPS somewhere and let it do all the Internet things like mail and stuff. Or use free services. You can communicate just fine using just text.

It all sounds like you are not living in the reality though. And the lack of good Internet is just mental excuse for the real problems, that you are too afraid to face.

</comment><comment><USER4> Relocate.</comment>