More Bitcoin Regulation Is Inevitable - <AUTHOR> http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/02/03/more-bitcoin-regulation-is-inevitable/?_php=true&_type=blogs&smid=tw-share&_r=0

<comment><USER2> > Bitcoin has fluctuated wildly in value, highlighted by a chart from Coinbase > showing that it increased over 400 percent in November and then lost nearly > half its value in December. That type of volatility is an invitation to > unscrupulous dealers and merchants to overcharge or underpay.

> To protect consumers who want to use Bitcoin for legitimate transactions, > the government may adopt reporting requirements on virtual currency > exchanges so that there is a public repository of information about prices. > Although the government cannot control the value of a virtual currency, it > can make the currency more transparent to users so that they are not > defrauded.

\---

Ehhh, really? In one paragraph they point out the price history of Coinbase, and then in the next paragraph they say "the government outta do it".

And yeah-- the government is technically unable to control the prices of virtual currencies but government also _should not_ be in the business of controlling prices anyway. That leads to a distortion of market prices and a bad deal for one side or the other.

</comment><comment><USER3> I agree. I think every bitcoin transaction should be reviewed by finely trained employees of Finance Security Agency (FSA). Amongst other things they should make sure:

1\. Correct amount of bitcoins were withdrawn from source bitcoin wallet.

2\. Correct amount of bitcoins were deposited into target wallet.

3\. Both target and source wallets are valid.

4\. Etc.

AFAIK, bitcoin is currency and FX market is in generally way less regulated compared to securities market. Thus any regulation introduced would be targeting money transfers between individuals, rather than exchanges[1].

[1] We probably should regulate exchanges, as of right now it is super simple for exchanges to make profit on their customers. Consider following strategy, whenever bitcoin order comes in that moves market exchange would execute small order in same direction before customer order, reverse order as soon as larger order moved market. Instant profit.

<comment><USER4> I really want to believe this comment is a joke...

Everything that you mention that needs to be "regulated" is already regulated by the bitcoin protocol itself. In fact, the whole point is to replace regulation with strong cryptographic proof.

<comment><USER3> Good sir, surely you jest, how else we will maintain security of this nation if FSA will not monitor and double check every single transaction? What if some bitcoins will go missing in transit from source to target wallet?

First part of the post is indeed a joke, I am pretty sure comments on FX markets and strategy that exchanges could use to game the customers are accurate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "FinCen went a step further in its guidance by including any person who puts into circulation a virtual currency, which means that the so-called Bitcoin miners are also subject to the regulations."

This is out of date. FinCen issued vague guidance months ago suggesting miners might be regulated, but recently clarified that they are not.

[http://www.coindesk.com/fincen-bitcoin-miners-investors- mone...](http://www.coindesk.com/fincen-bitcoin-miners-investors-money- transmitters/)

</comment><comment><USER6> > The idea that Bitcoin could be an alternative to traditional money that > would allow users to conduct transactions anonymously beyond the pale of > intrusive government regulators has proved to be little more than a pipe > dream

That statement is incredibly ignorant. Regardless of what any government decides to do, people will always be able to conduct unregulated transactions. The subject at hand is the regulation of money transmitters, such as exchanges.

</comment><comment><USER7> Regulation where it's necessary (like exchanges) is understandable. Regulation of transactions between individuals and vendors for example is not reasonable. And virtual currency should prevent such regulations by its own design - i.e. there simply should be no technical way to regulate that.

<comment><USER8> Seeing as the ledger is public, regulation of transactions through aggregate means is inevitable. It's just a waiting game right now.

<comment><USER5> Worth noting there are several projects working on making crytocurrencies much more private. Matthew Green's zerocoin and zerocash are the strongest, providing provable anonymity.

In principle, zerocoin could be added to bitcoin, but the bitcoin devs aren't up for it yet. Zerocash is so different it pretty much has to be an altchain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Any business opportunity, currency, financial instrument, etc. that makes enough money is absolutely 100% going to be regulated for two reasons:

1\. Consumer Behavior Requires It

2\. Large Companies Thrive On Regulation

To point one, if you have anything that is making people a lot of money one way or another, there will be scams and fraud. Once there are scams and fraud, the government gets involved and has to clean up the mess. Then laws are made to stop the problems from happening in the first place. Eventually you need business licenses, certification, etc. to transact business because too many people got ripped off.

To point two, regulation and rules actually end up favoring the entrenched companies. Usually regulation creates barriers that reduce competition. For example, to trade securities, sell insurance, or sell real estate you need to get a license. To get a license you need to take exams and pay money to be certified. Most people won't go through that effort and so the larger companies make a lot of money from the lack of competition.

Rules and regulations might be annoying, but they are a sign of maturity and growth in many cases so it's not all bad.

<comment><USER10> That's an interesting way to put it. You're basically saying that Bitcoin _will_ be regulated, either because the regulations will be good for society (in which case society will advocate for them) or bad for society (in which case society may not advocate for them, but those with political power will).

<comment><USER11> I think the (2) has an unnecessarily biased phrasing. The capacity to deal with regulation, whether that regulation is good, bad, or otherwise at the macro level, is just one of the many economics of scale that can be harnessed by large companies. Because of (1), regulation is inevitable, and once you have almost any regulation at all, a competitive benefit accrues to larger companies, who can consolidate the regulatory compliance function in a way smaller companies cannot.

This is a perspective that is often overlooked on HN, understandably, but the fact is that startups are in many ways extremely inefficient businesses. Most business functions, from accounting to training to regulatory compliance, simply don't scale down very well, for reasons that have nothing to do with politics.

<comment><USER12> It is not just that large companies are more efficient at dealing with regulation; Large companies actively lobby for regulation as a way of protecting themselves from (smaller) potential competitors.

It may be that regulation for the public good is inevitable and desirable, but one cannot assume a priori than any particular regulation exists for that reason.

<comment><USER11> I don't think, on the net, large companies lobby for regulation more than they lobby against regulation.

<comment><USER12> Appeal to authority and all that, but..

"the pressure on the legislature to license an occupation rarely comes from the members of the public . . . On the contrary, the pressure invariably comes from the occupation itself."

Milton Friedman

"…as a rule, regulation is acquired by the industry and is designed and operated primarily for its benefits."

George Stigler

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There's an important distinction between the "regulation of bitcoin" and "regulation of businesses's or people's use of bitcoin".

You could, for instance, say "use of an unregistered wallet is a crime", but it would be very difficult within the protocol to prevent bitcoins from flowing to unregistered wallets.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm not surprised to see this "threat" angle approached by NYT. Most of their articles on Bitcoin have been negative so far, and about how awful Bitcoin is whether from an economic point of view or from an "enabling crime" point of view.

Normally, you would see "real journalists" try to balance the views, and insert opposite views and quotes in their articles. But not here, it seems.

<comment><USER15> One of the things you can say in favor of the NYT is that they never bought into the TV news balance fad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> As long as there is cash, there will be a way to get bitcoins outside of an exchange and outside of any regulation.

Even if this were not the case, the more regulation added to bitcoins, the more people move to alternative crypto currencies. I don't see people seeking to regulate litecoin, dogecoin, coinye, etc.

<comment><USER17> I imagine most regulation to bitcoin would be more vague and instead be written to apply to all cryptocurrencies.

People aren't calling for the regulation of other cryptocurrencies mostly because they don't have the same kind of usage and economy surrounding them that bitcoin has. If people start trading coinye in the same way and it reaches similar volumes as bitcoin, you'll see the same sort of talk. It just makes more sense to treat cryptocurrencies the same under the law, unless there is something about a particular one that made it most different than all the other current variations.</comment></comment>


Why VC is killing innovation - and what to do about it - <AUTHOR> http://venturecompany.com/videos/sovc/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is an amazing exegesis of how venture capital works, how deeply broken it has become and why an entrepreneur needs to be educated before taking VC money.

I wish I had seen this before I took institutional money, as it would have saved me so much angst. It's slow, but the insights just blew me away.</comment>


Top 10 Most Annoying Facebook Status Updates From My Silicon Valley Friends - <AUTHOR> http://hiad.am/2011/07/top-10-most-annoying-facebook-status-updates-from-my-silicon-valley-friends/

<comment><USER2> Translation: I have a lot of friends who run startups in Silicon Valley and am very important because of that.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just because you're a nerd, doesn't mean you aren't a douchebag. Most of my friends are in startups and they don't pull any of that crap, except when one actually sold their company (and why wouldn't they share that?)

</comment><comment><USER4> Loved it. Everyone needs a sanity check from time to time.</comment>


Mumble – Open source, low latency, high quality voice chat software - <AUTHOR> https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Main_Page <comment><USER2> I still use mumble with friends for general voice chat.

I really wish more games implemented its MumbleLink API for positional audio between clients. [https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Link](https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Link)

For example, GW2 implements so people sound relative to where your characters are if they are on the same map. [https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/API:MumbleLink](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/API:MumbleLink)

The API has also allowed for other tools such at GW2 Tactical Overlay ([http://www.gw2taco.com/](http://www.gw2taco.com/)) to present additional positional information.

<comment><USER3> Happy to see people using that! :) I implemented that Mumble integration while I was at ArenaNet.

<comment><USER4> Awesome, thanks for that! By the way: that integration has been co-opted for use by a bunch of overlay software, like gw2taco [1].

So, even if not used for Mumble, it's now a pretty big feature for other 3rd party software. I use it regularly myself.

(For the unfamiliar: gw2taco et al use position/viewport data, I guess, from the GW2 Mumble API to draw an overlay on top of the game with navigational markers/aids.)

[1]: [http://www.gw2taco.com/](http://www.gw2taco.com/)

<comment><USER3> Cool, that was actually what I had hoped would happen! It was fun creating public APIs; the ArenaNet leadership was extremely supportive.

<comment><USER5> I don't use Mumble for voice chat, but I do really appreciate mumblelink api being implemented in GW2 for things like gw2taco, so thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really appreciate Mumble's dedication to lowering latency.

Latency is a silent killer of conversation quality. When it's relatively small, you don't notice it's there, but it makes conversations more stilted because everyone's responses are just a bit less immediate. You chalk it up to the person or situation, rather than the software.

I'm not seeing anyone make significant attempts to solve or reduce this problem. To my ears, 2010-era Skype had lower latency than any VOIP software in mainstream use today, including Skype. And of course, latency over POTS was fantastic, albeit with terrible audio quality.

<comment><USER7> > To my ears, 2010-era Skype had lower latency than any of the modern VOIP > systems in use today (including Skype).

Yeah! What happened?

<comment><USER8> Skype went from point to point systems to routing through a server backend.

<comment><USER9> Any idea why? Sounds stupid, considering latency losses and increased server costs.

<comment><USER10> Hole punching through routers. It's hard to generically connect two NAT'd devices directly. It's simpler to route through a central server.

<comment><USER11> Skype's original USP was that it resolved the NAT issues that plagued SIP based VOIP implementations, exactly by performing hole punching through routers (I suspect just UDP hole punching)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It looks like voice packets are intended to be OCB2 (CryptState.cpp, cryptstate go package in Grumble). I haven't read the code through to figure out how to mount it (and it looks slightly funky), but if it does what it says on the tin there's a trivial, one-encryption-oracle-message forgery attack for that.

Also: I don't think that means you shouldn't use Mumble. I just think someone should see if they can exploit that bug and then get someone to fix it :-) I went on their IRC and someone talked to me within 5 minutes, which is a Good Sign(TM).

(I wish I had more time to just do random audits of open source projects, but the incentives aren't really lined up for that to happen, and I do more than a bit of open source work already.)

[cryptstate]: [https://github.com/mumble- voip/mumble/blob/4976c1ad2e0802755...](https://github.com/mumble- voip/mumble/blob/4976c1ad2e0802755c15d051783403afc440b173/src/CryptState.cpp)

[ocb2-go]: [https://github.com/mumble- voip/grumble/blob/master/pkg/crypt...](https://github.com/mumble- voip/grumble/blob/master/pkg/cryptstate/ocb2/ocb2.go)

[ocb-forgery]: [https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/1040.pdf](https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/1040.pdf)

<comment><USER13> Is it the last step of the encrypt function which would need an additional XOR operation added (XEX va XE for the encryption of the tag) to mitigate this attack? [1]

      S3(delta);
      XOR(tmp, delta, checksum);
      AESencrypt(tmp, tag, &encrypt_key);

[1] - [https://crypto.stackexchange.com/a/63642](https://crypto.stackexchange.com/a/63642)

<comment><USER12> The cryptographic answer is: yep, that sounds about right (with low confidence because the model violation is subtle).

The cryptographic engineering answer is: use OCB3 instead which doesn't have this problem :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Discord has pretty much completely eaten Mumble's market. Free servers and a way better chat system ate Mumble's use case.

TeamSpeak is still used by milsim/flightsim communities because it support plugins which integrate the in-sim radios with the VoIP system.

EDIT: Got Vent and TS mixed up

<comment><USER15> I refuse to use Discord because I don't know how or to whom they are going to sell my data yet. It's possible they go to a subscription model but I doubt it, it seems more likely they'll be acquired by one of the big data brokers at some point.

<comment><USER16> Discord already has a subscription model (nitro).

They tried to pivot themselves into a game store, but that appears to not have gone particularly well.

Not too sure on the privacy front. I don't believe they sell any user data, yet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hopefully they won't provide chat data or metrics to others. If Discord were acquired or partnered with anyone shady, they are certainly in a position to Big-Data-AI (and other bs bing words) everyone. They brag about storing all messages. [1]

[1] - [https://blog.discordapp.com/how-discord-stores-billions- of-m...](https://blog.discordapp.com/how-discord-stores-billions-of- messages-7fa6ec7ee4c7)

<comment><USER17> Getting acquired is their business model.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> We live and die by Mumble in Eve Online. The hierarchical chat room setup is essential for large fleets.

<comment><USER19> That sounds like a really interesting feature! Trying to find some documentation on this specific feature but it's hard to find exactly what you're talking about.

1) Can you elaborate how "hierarchical chat room" works and how fleets in Eve Online use this?

2) Do other game chat apps like Discord implement anything similar?

<comment><USER20> Mumble's channel system allows nesting channels, in addition to that, each channel allows specific access control list that could be both inherited from top-level channel or be inherited to a lower-level one. In addition to that it has the possibility of creating groups of users to whom the permission applies. It's really sophisticated. Discord has only role-based rooms, but nothing hierarchical.

<comment><USER19> I don't have any experience with gaming so this is a bit hard for me to understand. Are nested channels used as a way of grouping channels in a hierarchy in the UI? Or does the hierarchy affect what people hear? In the latter case, I'm imagining something like: "Everyone in subchannel can hear everything said in parent channel, but not vice versa".

<comment><USER21> The hierarchy can be set up to affect what people hear, and where they can speak. This is invaluable when you need to coordinate dozens or hundreds of players in real time. You can set up overlapping rooms where team leads hear their team member's voice chatter and their superior's voice chatter, and have the option of communicating in either direction. I usually had the two side buttons on my mouse set to push-to-talk, one that for talking up the hierarchy, one for talking downward. The exact setup everyone uses varies, but at minimum you can have a room for higher-level voice chat among team leads, while each lowest-level team is isolated to their own channel and can focus on the tasks given to them by their team lead. Mumble is also flexible enough that you don't need to strictly adhere to a hierarchy, you can have your lower-level players also be able to communicated laterally to groups of specialists who are handling specific support tasks.

This is all a difficult communication problem, but it's doubly difficult because decisions need to propagate up and down your communication hierarchy in seconds. Being able to manage this level of communication without it being a hopeless clusterfuck is a defining feature of effective organizations of players.

<comment><USER22> How do you configure where your push-to-talk transmits? I installed it but can only find one PTT function, and the documentation didn't really help...

<comment><USER20> You transmit in the channel you're in usually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I still regularly record podcasts via Mumble. It's got solid built-in recording with decent options, such as whether to record users individually or as to record the entire chat as one audio feed. Because we have users drop from time to time, having this built-in capability makes it easy for us to have at least two people on recording duty at any given time.

I do take mumble.com up on server hosting, because it's so dirt cheap, I mostly forgot how few dollars I spent on a multi-year subscription for a server. It might cost me a month of Netflix for a year of Mumble.

<comment><USER24> Do you have guests on your podcast? Does Mumble have a one-click web client for the session? Interested in this as I had an idea about remote-recording interview app, but I don't really know the space as of now.

<comment><USER25> No, it doesn't. We have self-hosted mumble server, and guest set-up is quite easy. Enter couple parameters and you're good. But again, it's a techie podcast, so may be it is harder than click here and start talking Discord's approach.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I use Discord now since most of my friends are on it, but I've always been a fan of Mumble (and murmur server) since it's high quality software and open source.

I also made [https://guildbit.com](https://guildbit.com) years ago for gamers that want to just quickly spin up a temporary server with their friends. I still operate it today since there's still a few users out there.

I think it would be cool if someone were to create an open source Discord clone using Mumble/murmur.

<comment><USER27> I'm a huge fan of guildbit, it makes it really easy to get a quick temporary server. We use it all the time.

<comment><USER26> Thank you! I'm glad you like it! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm always amazed how many video games have shitty built in voice chat when they could have just embedded mumble.

<comment><USER29> no one uses in game voice chat, literally no one. even the friendliest most inclusive games with really amazing voice chat systems(all 3 needed to belong to this list) like overwatch had players use voice chat for maybe 3 weeks after launch and then go back to their private discords.

<comment><USER30> I play Overwatch and CS:GO and in competitive matches it is the norm to use in-game voice, if you don't - you'll get flamed about it.

Casual game modes - that's different.

<comment><USER31> Yeah but in fact almost no one solo Qs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> For over 10 years I've been running a semi-public Mumble server. It's pretty much zero effort, low CPU and low bandwidth usage.

These days mainly just as a backup for when Discord lags, which over the past few weeks has been often. It's so nice to have a very good, open source, self- hosted, encrypted communications app as an alternative to yet another Electron app.

<comment><AUTHOR> That also makes the server requirements very simple. I have a tiny VM that can handle a lot of users.

[edit] removed e2e, the clients are not using pfs yet.

<comment><USER20> It's not end-to-end encrypted?

It's only encrypted going to server, I'm quite certain of it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I stand corrected. [1] I will see if I can find a way to replace a voice stream. Perhaps I am thinking of a forum thread about PFS.

[1] - [https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/58568/is- mumble...](https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/58568/is-mumble- encryption-end-to-end)

<comment><USER20> Even PFS doesn't really work well with Mumble due to the fact that most clients are using Qt4.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I've managed to keep a group of friends using Mumble instead of Discord, and I think we've all benefited from it. My privacy-focused friend appreciates the encryption and everyone else appreciates the ability to locally mute people if they walk away with their headset hot-mic'ed. We use discord for text communication, but when people are online for games or just to chat, we use Mumble.

<comment><USER34> I mean, you can locally mute people in Discord too so I'm not quite sure why that is in the "pro" side for Mumble.

However, I'll agree that Mumble is great if all your looking for is somewhat privacy-forward low-latency voice chat with minimal bloat.

<comment><USER33> Oh, fair enough, I didn't know people could local-mute in discord, when I used it I didn't notice the feature. The low-latency and lack of bloat is still a major plus though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'd add "difficult to use" to that list. Difficult even for an engineer to use. Terrible.

It works great once you figure it out, but it could use a better user and admin experience.

<comment><USER36> Interesting, used to be in a clan of over 100 people that used it no problem, very few of which were engineers. Not sure what particular functionality held you up?

<comment><USER37> Setting up the automatic transmission is notoriously causing problems. The lack of echo cancellation and no normalization of audio levels are interfering with discussions as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> The 1.3 snapshots have echo canceling and normalization.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The only thing that's annoying about mumble is the `mumble.com` namesquatting, distributing outdated clients to people I've tried to get to use Mumble.

</comment><comment><USER38> Ah, mumble!

In a former online life of mine, this was one of the key components for my clan to advance into the Eurocup finals of 2006 (or maybe it was 2005?) in Rocket Arena for Q3A =)

All the other teams were on (I guess) teamspeak2, and latency was noticably higher for them due to the inferor audio/voice codec employed. I originally considered mumble and murmur attractive due to the fact that the client and server were both proper FOSS, but it proved a secret ingredient to our success back then.

I still use it to this day, but since most games include a voice chat thingie of their own these days, I can understand it isn't more popular. Awesome piece of software, and very polished for a FOSS desktop project!

</comment><comment><USER39> I still prefer to use Mumble over Discord for its low latency, low system requirements, simplicity, free software license, and voice activity options / wizard. I created a Discord server to fill the void of a Slack-like chat for our group, but even after we had created the Discord, we still preferred Mumble for VoIP.

We ended up replacing the Discord chat with Riot.im eventually anyway.

</comment><comment><USER40> Purism ([https://puri.sm/](https://puri.sm/)) uses Mumble for all-hands staff meetings. Works pretty well and, of course, is free software. :)

</comment><comment><USER41> One of my favorite features that Mumble has that Discord doesn't is the ability to suppress a keypress you're using for push-to-talk. For example, I use Caps Lock for my PTT, as it is right there and not used in most games anyways. With Mumble Caps Lock will not toggle at all with that option, allowing me to type or do other things fine.

</comment><comment><USER42> I used to run a gaming server(s) for about four years, we peaked at about 3500 registered users, with 200 concurrent users.... We used Mumble in the community before I came along, we ran Mumble, after I came along, I took over the server and hosted it on a 1 core, 512mb memory linux server.... never went above 2% cpu and... I forget, probably 150MB memory usage with no restriction on quality (users can transmit CD quality audio)... this worked great, I set it up in about 10 minutes with little experience at the time, and the mumble server ran for years without issue until someone dictionary attacked the password.

Big advantages:

1\. Free

2\. Very low resource requrements, even for hundreds of users. Probably runs great on a google micro-f1 (Free forever) instance

3\. Crystal clear audio

4\. Lots of in-game plugins, such as positional audio in game (Battlefield: Bad Company 2, you could hear your teammates talking as they came up the stairs behind you, etc)

5\. Cert based identity management. Used private key auth to verify you were you; no other user could sign in and impersonate you. Certified users had a big yellow C next to their name.

Probably the biggest thing for me, is that there was never, ever an audio glitch where the computer was not able to send/receive audio. We regularly run in to audio problems in Meet/Hangouts where audio does not work properly.

When I looked in to online gaming a couple of years ago I was stunned to see that everyone had moved to Discord, I didn't see the advantage of "upgrading" to something with a web client, but I suppose there's less friction to using a web client, even if mumble is a very easy install on Windows.

</comment><comment><USER34> Mumble... What a blast from the past. Used to use this for gaming alongside Vent.

If I'm not mistaken, the last update was in like 2017? Is it even in development any more?

<comment><USER43> > If I'm not mistaken, the last update was in like 2017? Is it even in > development any more?

A 1.3.0-rc1 was tagged 9 days ago (17 March 2019): [https://github.com/mumble- voip/mumble/releases/tag/1.3.0-rc1](https://github.com/mumble- voip/mumble/releases/tag/1.3.0-rc1) But it does look like the previous stable release was in January 2017.

<comment><AUTHOR> They update the the 1.3.x branch every couple months. It is quite stable. My semi-public server has been running on 1.3.x latest without issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I remember our transition from ventrilo to mumble. Everyone kept talking over each other because of the low latency, we were used to start talking before others finished. Jumped the ship to discord on day 1 though, mostly for the chat features but also different communities you find there and easily can keep track of.

</comment><comment><USER45> I went from Teamspeak->Ventrilo->Mumble. Never got onboard with Discord just due to life timing when that was on the rise.

I would probably just use Steam voice chat for 1:1 gaming sessions or in-game today. I know League of Legends has voice chat for parties now, which is the only use case that I could have.

</comment><comment><USER46> Mumble has been the highest-quality group voice chat system for many years now. It's unfortunate server is such a pain in the ass to get running properly. I'd rather pay for a commercial Mumble server than go through that troubleshooting nightmare again.

</comment><comment><USER47> Mumble definitely works, and the voice quality is very good, exceptional maybe, but the user interface is atrocious.

Don't expect non-technical users to be able to figure this client out.

I know Discord isn't open, but it's a lot easier to figure out by most people.

</comment><comment><USER48> I used mumble with friends years ago. Mumble was a pretty nice experience for gaming with friends back when I could do that kind of thing more often.

I see that there is a mumble client for iOS. Has anyone here used it? If so, is it any good?

</comment><comment><USER49> i prefer discord, imo. Ive tried most of the popular voice chat clients out there, including Mumble, Ventrilo, TeamSpeak, RaidCall, Google Hangouts, and Skype. Discord is (so far) the best out of all of them in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER50> Huge fan of mumble. Me and my friends still use it over discord. It barely beats discord for us but that small improvement over quality and latency is enough to keep using it

</comment><comment><USER51> Low Latency makes it ideal for voice trading.

</comment><comment><USER52> Ah, good old mumble. I had contributed a patch to it a few years ago, made it sometime in 1.2.9

The community I was in all moved to discord though. Explaining new users how to use mumble was also too hard as I recall. And it didn't have such a great user interface but I don't remember vent/TS being super great too.

</comment><comment><USER53> funny that they rolled their own license, where the terms seem compatible more well-known licenses. Maybe the project started before convergence to standard permissive licenses?

Would it even be possible for them to change it at this point? I'm guessing it would be difficult at the least.

</comment><comment><USER54> Anyone tried this? How is it on echo cancellation, VOX, and conference noise rejection?

</comment><comment><USER55> Is there a Mumble with video feed?

<comment><USER56> [https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Planned_Features#Video](https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Planned_Features#Video)

Posted in 2011, lol. I wouldn't hold your breath.

<comment><USER57> "However, I don't really want to know what a 2mbit/s commercial hosting is going to cost. I doubt it's cheap."

reading on that page is like time traveling :)

<comment><USER58> Unless you live in about 80% of the US where ISP monopolies still only get you 2-3mb upload at best.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Looks so 2000s to visit this website.

<comment><USER29> for some reason all the open source wikis look really bad in their base state, i dunno why they try to look like v1.0 wikipedia

<comment><USER60> Wikipedia's software is open source. They literally are Wikipedia without the design customizations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> /

<comment><USER62> Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best book to read about the energy industry? - <AUTHOR>

I want to learn more about the state of energy in the world.  I'm fascinated with energy.  Particularly why we're not using more renewable resources to supply our consumption.  I'd love to do something energy-related with my life, but it's probably crucial to know why we're here before trying to 'affect change'.<p>What should I read? <comment><USER2> [https://www.facebook.com/abundancebook/photos/a.247979011910...](https://www.facebook.com/abundancebook/photos/a.247979011910149.57626.247977011910349/361390760568973/?type=1&source=11)</comment>


The Top 6 Non monetary Features I Want In An Employer - <AUTHOR> http://www.codeodor.com/index.cfm/2008/3/31/Top-6-Non-monetary-Features-I-Want-In-An-Employer/2091 <comment><USER2> I agree with some of the comments that blog post received, the 20% personal time for ideas is fine as long as the ideas/work you come up with is a potential money maker for the employer. If you are going to work on your startup idea during that time :-), then I'm not sure how many people would be willing to let you do that. I only have 3 things I need from an employer: 1. good co-workers 2.challenging work. 3. Salary worth the time+effort.

</comment><comment><USER3> #2 is interesting. I don't know what might happen if you ask to see your potential coworkers' code during an interview, but it could be a great way to avoid landing on some train-wreck of a project.</comment>


[Brief critique of Go error proposal] Golang, how dare you handle my checks! - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@mnmnotmail/golang-how-dare-you-handle-my-checks-d5485f991289 <comment><USER2> You can always use `if` to handle errors like now. Handle/check is a addition to error handling but not replacement.

Function arguments can be placed on multiple lines, that would make `check` expression more readable.</comment>


Is the HTC Eye the Nexus 6? – Is RE Camera a New Category? - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkworld.com/article/2824721/opensource-subnet/how-htcs-new-re-camera-and-eye-smartphone-will-compete.html

<comment><USER2> The nexus looks promising. But the camera is a flop for sure.</comment>


Turn Vim into Excel: Tips for Editing Tabular Data (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://alangrow.com/blog/turn-vim-into-excel-tips-for-tabular-data-editing <comment><USER2> Since no one mentioned it so far: Emacs has a mode built-in called Org Mode which has fantastic table support: [https://orgmode.org/manual/Tables.html](https://orgmode.org/manual/Tables.html)

I'm using it every day for so many things, importing and exporting of data, calculations, writing offers to clients, there's an infinite amount of good things to be done with spreadsheets within your text document.

<comment><USER3> Yes tables in org mode are very nice

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you want to use a spreadsheet with vi key bindings, most linux distros have sc (spreadsheet calculator) in their repositories. It's kind of a cross between vi and the DOS version of Lotus 1-2-3. A newer, improved version of sc with features including undo/redo and csv/tsv export and import is sc-im ([https://github.com/andmarti1424/sc-im](https://github.com/andmarti1424/sc- im)).

<comment><USER5> Vim keybindings are not Vim. The same claim is made about Vim emulators in IDEs. IntelliJ has the best Vim emulator I've ever seen, and it's still useless to a Vim power user.

<comment><USER6> While I don't know IntelliJ's emulation, I have to say that I find Evil-Mode for Emacs to be nothing short of amazing.

<comment><USER7> As a user of both (I use IntelliJ for Scala development and Spacemacs for everything else), I'd say Evil is way way better. The IntelliJ vim plugin is awesome, but it will never feel as integrated as Evil does. Emacs is way more extensible.

<comment><USER8> I think that's the most important differentiator evil has.

Embedding vim-style editing in an IDE or less extensible editor might get you 90% of what you want from Vim, but that 10% can be a dealbreaker depending on your workflow. Without easy extensibility, you might not be able to get that last 10% at all.

I'd say evil starts out a little better, maybe 95% out of the box, but now you have all the power of emacs to make up that last 5% and then start to go even further if you're not content then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been finding visidata ([http://visidata.org](http://visidata.org)) the perfect vim-inspired spreadsheet tool.

<comment><USER10> Seconded. I enjoy using this software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I found that for most problems where people use Excel I prefer CSV, various command line tools (awk, perl and the awesome xsv) and Vim. I'm regularly faster that way. When data manipulation is involved my solutions are robuster, more reliable, work well even for huge data sets and most importantly: they are reproducible.

That being said, there are two features that Excel - or any other spreadsheet software for that matter - provides, which are missing from any Vim solution I have found:

1\. Hiding overly long cells.

In most tables I see most of the cells have reasonably short lengths, but almost always there are a few overly long outliers. What I want is a way to manually set the column width and then all outliers cut-off. When vim's conceal feature came out I hoped someone would make a plugin to that effect, but as far as I know no one ever did. Looking into the problem myself a while ago, I found that it's not trivial to do.

2\. Quick and easy filtering.

I find the column filters in Excel pretty useful. The first value they provide is that they give an overview what values are actually used in the column. Second value is to temporarily hide all the rows one is not interested in. They are also very easy to use. I would like to have some easy way to do that in Vim just for viewing and without actually manipulating the file.

<comment><USER12> xsv is great -- as is csvkit, which preceded it and is probably a bit slower, but has a few extra utilities that I find essential:

\- in2csv: extracts Excel worksheets into CSV

\- csvsql: produces (and executes) the SQL needed to create a table and insert the data from a CSV

I found these scripts to be profoundly useful when working with govt data and needing to provide a automated workflow that collects and collates their Excel spreadsheets and converts them into CSV and SQLite databases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm not convinced. Excel is used predominantly used to evaluate formula's that are based on values in other cells. While I'm not a fan of Excel, vim simply does not have this capability and really can't replace Excel for most reasonable use-cases.

<comment><USER14> Exactly.

Excel is so much more than tabular data. It is a directed acyclic graph, a functional, reactive programming lanaguage with immutable data structures, and a display layer for the results of your computation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The filter command in vim allows you to use any external program to manipulate the contents of the buffer. So, if you have a CSV or TSV and want to do something like compute the sum of numbers in a column, you could write a awk or perl one-liner with the appropriate field-separator parameter and do it.

So, for a CSV, you could do something like this in perl

        :% !perl -F/,/ -ane '$total += $F[3] if $F[4] =~ /Merchandise/; END {print $total;}'

This command will filter every line in the vim buffer through the perl one- liner. The perl one-liner splits the line by comma, and adds the amount in the fourth column to the total amount if the fifth column contains the word "Merchandise". The lines in the vim buffer are replaced by the computed total. I actually use this to determine how much I spend for each category in my Discover Card statement after downloading it as a CSV.

<comment><USER16> This won't work if there are commas within fields, as permitted by CSV quoting rules.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Checkout sc-im([https://github.com/andmarti1424/sc- im](https://github.com/andmarti1424/sc-im)) if you are heavy vim user, you would definitely love it

</comment><comment><USER18> Why is tab separated value format superior to CSV? I understand why CSV is a poor choice and commas are more likely to be needed in cell contents than tabs, but there's not a standard format for TSV anymore than there is for CSV.

</comment><comment><USER19> There is also SC ( [https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/10699](https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/10699) ) and the similarly named [https://github.com/andmarti1424/sc- im](https://github.com/andmarti1424/sc-im)

But I'm happily reaching out to gawk most of the time for CSV processing.

</comment><comment><USER20> Why use Tab separated values instead of Comma separated values?

Is it possible to just use some random character, maybe even from different charset, to act as delimiter for importing/exporting tabular data?

<comment><USER21> There's a bunch of ASCII characters (28 - 31) specifically meant to be used as delimiters, but they never caught on.

But even if they did, you still always need to handle the case where one might legitimately want to use the delimiter character inside a field value.

<comment><USER22> Wow, TIL this actually exists. Mind is blown on how they never got adopted outside of folks thinking (foolishly) that these characters were not "plain" text.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's VS Code + the vscodevim extension for me lately and it's been great. I am not a first-rate Vim user anyway, so the convenience and ecosystem of VS Code won me over easily.

<comment><USER6> Well... I'm using the same extension in VS Code, and I find the experience rather... meh. It works, it makes VS Code _usable_ , but if you're accustomed to the performance of the _real_ Vim, it's still underwhelming (especially if you're used to macros).

<comment><USER23> I have tried previously to switch from vim to other editors (IDEA and sublime text). It felt painful. But this time (to VS Code) it has been smooth so far. I think it might be the result of me forcing myself to forget about the vim way completely. For example I have been deliberately using mouse more often, and supressing the thoughts and longing of registers and macros etc. I am not a vim power user to begin with so It's not that difficult. Losing vim power but gaining the benefits of VS code, so far so good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This sounds fun but honestly reminds me of all these emacs folks who've turned a text editor into a byzantine operating system with email, RSS, microwave cooking, and laundry folding.

<comment><USER25> Well technically emacs being a lisp interpreter gives you infinity possibilities.

I have heard that there was a saying that the only job of a Mac air was to open emacs.</comment></comment>


GCC Developers Look at Transitioning Their Codebase to C++11 - <AUTHOR> https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GCC-Transition-Codebase-Cpp11 <comment><USER2> > There is, of course, some concern still of not over-using C++ code within > the GCC code-base given its increased complexity for an already complex > compiler code-base.

"Of course"... That's absurd. The more C++14 they can get into the codebase, the less complex it will get. The bizarre, hackish apparatus needed to work around weaknesses in the old language may be washed away, leaving only the irreducible complexity of the compiling problem itself.</comment>


One more reason to love Open Source, issue solved in just a few hours - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/twain47/Nominatim/issues/66

<comment><USER2> Or, as seen on HN

the seven year old MySQL bug

[http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=20786](http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=20786)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, MySQL flew the scene a while ago ... :-)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: API to fetch blood work details? - <AUTHOR> Does anyone know of a API that can be used to pull blood work details based on user approval from their blood work companies like(Labcorp,Quest) ? <comment><USER2> HL7 is the industry standard for medical data.

However you'll have to write an HL7 interface and then become a HIPAA covered entity under your physicians or be a covered provider to legally receive electronic medical records.

Now if your physician has a Patient health record system or sometime referred to as a patient medical record system PHR/PMR Connected to their electronic health record EHR/EMR system they can release records to the PHR. In which you could create an account in and view your results if the provider does that.

Under HIPAA you are entiled to copies of your medical records with some restrictions, and you can request that from your provider a electronic copy of your record within 48 hours of the request. all EHR systems that are HIPAA complient have to provide this feature. However most cases the records are exclusively sent to a PHR and your account in that system.

Please note you do not own your medical records and things like physicians notes and impressions do not have to be released to you. Other types of records not released typically are psychological records or substance abuse records as that they are mostly subjective observations and impressions style notes and documents.

Are you looking to enter the EHR/PHR market? If so you're about 15 years late and will have tons of competition in and overly saturated market. Now I'm not saying don't try, but you'll have a steep learning curve to climb and tons of laws and regulations you'll have comply to. As well as tons of other standards like loinc, XDS-b, X11, etc... you'll have to be experts in to even receive and then decipher the electronic medical records.

Now for the answer to your question; no there are not normally consumer/public API's available to access lab results for the average off the street developer.

</comment><comment><USER3> AFAIK, Labcorp and Quest don't provide public facing APIs. EMR vendors do provide Lab APIs (with user approval): Epic, Allscripts, drChrono, etc. They use a framework called FHIR. You can go to the EMR vendor websites and find out how to gain access to these APIs. It's time consuming but not difficult.</comment>


Ask HN: Best ultrabook for Linux? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Chromebook Pixel has been an awesome sometimes-Linux laptop for me. I'm still spending most of my time in ChromeOS, but the crouton project/extension allows me to have another linux chroot running for when I need to do work. There's a number of supported distros, although I've stuck with Ubuntu and XFCE, mostly because it stays out of my way.

The fact that you can have the entire chroot or an individual app run in a window under xiwi as though it were a regular Chrome tab makes it even better. I regularly have everything running in ChromeOS _except_ Sublime running in its own tab while I'm coding.

Someone else can probably chime in as far as how well it works if you want to go full-Linux on the thing.

FWIW, I believe Linus Torvalds uses a Chromebook Pixel running Fedora. [0]

[0]: [http://www.zdnet.com/article/chromebooks-biggest-fan- linus-t...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/chromebooks-biggest-fan-linus- torvalds/)

<comment><USER3> Can anyone comment on how difficult it is to put Linux on a chromebook? Is it locked down with a need to "root"/jailbreak or is it just a matter of some startup keys? I have avoided chromebooks because ChromeOS always seemed like a limiting factor and potential privacy issue. Can someone summarize the ChromeOS -> Linux process and pain factor?

<comment><USER4> For crouton, which is still tied to chromeos, absolutely not. All that's required is developer mode enabled. For a full, clean linux install, it varies device to device, but is in general a bit more of a pain. There's a full list of compatibility on the arch wiki I believe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's a year old but I'm still really happy with the ASUS Zenbook (UX305FA) I got:

[http://neugierig.org/software/blog/2015/07/linux-zenbook- ux3...](http://neugierig.org/software/blog/2015/07/linux-zenbook-ux305.html)

<comment><USER6> And updated UX305CA works great with a 4.5 kernel.

<comment><USER7> How do you get on with the CPU - is the Core M series much different in practice?

<comment><USER6> Well, I wouldn't run Gentoo on it. Compiling Chromium takes about a day, and I'm not a big multimedia user. But in day-to-day development work (both client-side and server-side) I've never had any issues. I had actually forgotten it's a Core M.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can endorse the Dell XPS13 9343: small, light, great battery life, great screen/keyboard. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good. Some folks decided to replace the Broadcom wifi with Intel, because it's not ideal for linux. I believe that the newest XPS13 uses Intel instead.

<comment><USER9> How is the build quality? I've had Dell laptops in the past given to me by my employer and the screen hinge has been a source of failure on two of them.

<comment><USER10> The touchpad on the skylake 13 is bad (not sure if it is broken).

<comment><USER11> Macbook touchpads are still a tier above the rest, but the Skylake XPS touchpads are pretty good (and better than the previous XPS 13) based on the reviews.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have to agree the XPS 13 is perfect for linux. I have been using the XPS 13 9333 for about 3 years now. I run debian, 7 but now 8, and it just works for most things. I had to install the firmware for the wireless card but that was simple enough. I just got the new XPS 13 9350 a couple of months ago and am using that daily running Debian 8. I had to add the firmware for the wireless, base broadcom controller, and it works great. USB-c works well too. I also have the Dell TB15 thunderbolt 3 dock but that does not work unfortunately. Once the thunderbolt 3 drivers for the dock are working I will have the prefect laptop. Right now I have to manually connect montitor/keyboard/power. Once the dock works its one cable to plug in at the office.

There are lots of posts on the dell forums with steps to get linux installed on the XPS. The current developer edition is not supported on the latest hardware, 9350. Once the thunderbolt drivers are done they are supposed to release a new developer edition with Ubuntu. The dell Sputnik team posts on the forums regularly so you can stay up to date on the progress. They are fostering a very good community for linux enthusiast.

<comment><USER13> The one problem I've had with the 9333 is with the fan, which has started acting erratically lately, causing the machine to come close to overheating. Other than that, I've had the machine for quite a while, and have been very happy with it up till the fan issues began.

If/when the developer edition of the 9350 comes out over here in Rightpondia, I'll certainly be getting it.

<comment><USER7> This is partly why I'm interested in fanless models now, such as the Asus Zenbook (CA/FA line afaik). Do we need moving parts in laptops any more?

<comment><USER13> For higher performance machines where heat issues are unavoidable, we do, but the vast majority of laptops really ought to be fanless at this point, not least because moving parts are a recipe for failure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The 4th Gen X1 Carbon looks pretty awesome [http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/x-series/x1-ca...](http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/x-series/x1-carbon-4/#SYSTEM)

$1857 gets you:

i7 6600U processor 16gb ram 512gb SSD 2560x1440 WQHD Screen

WiGig OneLink+ Mini DisplayPort™ HDMI™ 3 x USB 3.0 microSD™ Weight Starting at 2.6 lbs (1209 g)

Damn I think I might have just convinced myself here!

<comment><AUTHOR> I really want to get this one but have a few concerns -

> Malware in BIOS preinstalled by Lenovo > Is dual core processor sufficient?

<comment><USER14> I'm running a Lenovo S540 (the line has been discontinued but it is an ultrabook). It's processor isn't as good as the 4th gen X1 carbon you can check the comparison here: [https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp%5B%5D=2608&cmp%...](https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp%5B%5D=2608&cmp%5B%5D=2248)

My S540 has an SSD,16gb ram and the slower processor and it churns through work fine, I mainly do Java development and on top of that I use the Play Framework which compiles to both Java and Scala so it's more CPU intensive.

I can easily run one or two IDE instances alongside 10+ chrome tabs,several terminals and mongo/mysql db GUIs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've been using the Razer Blade 2015 and I highly recommend it. It's expensive, but the machine itself has Macbook-level build quality and internals. The screen is great and everything works out of the box with Ubuntu. While I do have dual-boot set up, I run Ubuntu 95% of the time and it's been basically flawless. (Caveat: I haven't tried the webcam or hibernate, and I don't use the Nvidia card.)

It's by far the best 14" machine I found when I was shopping around last year. While it's marketed as a gaming laptop it also happens to be a fantastic general-purpose or development machine, especially since Linux runs so well on it. IIRC they recently announced the 2016 model which is cheaper and lighter yet.

Downsides are 1) it's expensive; 2) proprietary parts means no DIY repairs, and Razer requires you to ship your machine in for their very expensive in- house repairs; 3) the black/neon-green color scheme is a little silly, though it's not nearly as bad as pretty much any other laptop marketed as a gaming machine. I bought a round matte black sticker to cover the logo on the lid and it fits pretty well.

<comment><USER16> Just in case others are looking at Blades...

My 2012 blade went in for repairs several times and has the worst keyboard I've ever used on a laptop.

I don't know if they've improved their quality control any, but AFAIK they're still using terrible keyboards. Be careful and try one out before you commit!

<comment><USER15> Personally I've found the keyboard on mine to be just fine, but I'm using a 2015, not a 2012. For those of you who are interested in a try-before-you-buy, when I was shopping around they were selling them at Microsoft stores and had a demo unit set up for people to play with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Here's my take on it:

\- Macbooks

overall good, decent battery(if you configure it right), but terrible wifi and broken cam(some fiddling required, possibly unstable hibernate), no sysrq

\- Thinkpad X1

Probably the best support good battery, but no thunderbolt 3, so no external graphics, 16gb ram

\- X260 Awesome battery, slower SSD than its competitors 16gb ram, good cpu, mobile broadband, only HD520 graphics(if it had thunderbolt 3 you could upgrade it with a discrete external GPU, shame really ...)

\- Dell XPS 13, overall good up to 16 gb ram, Iris graphics, thunderbolt 3, so you could use a razer external discrete GPU(priced at 500 USD though). worse battery than the macbooks

\- Surfacebook/Pro probably my favorite device, but linux support is flakey see:

[https://github.com/jimdigriz/debian- mssp4](https://github.com/jimdigriz/debian-mssp4)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/comments/48dly5/is_the...](https://www.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/comments/48dly5/is_there_a_guide_to_installing_linux_on_the_sp4/)

Personally i'm still holding off i have a macbook retina 2013 and an air mid 2013. the retina screen died and i'm aching for a replacement but i want both graphics and battery, but that seems to be a no go. I'm leaning towards the x260, unless surfacebook magically starts working by the time i'm getting a new device.....

</comment><comment><USER18> I use MacBook Air and Vagrant to run Linux (Ubuntu). Everything I need from Linux is a shell :) For other things OSX is enough.

<comment><USER9> What things do you do in Vagrant that you couldn't do in your OSX shell? I'm just curious.

<comment><USER19> I'm in the same boat, and I have to use Vagrant + VirtualBox for just about anything docker related.

<comment><USER20> Not anymore :) [https://blog.docker.com/2016/03/docker-for-mac-windows- beta/](https://blog.docker.com/2016/03/docker-for-mac-windows-beta/)

<comment><USER21> Nice! I just joined the waitlist.

Managing docker-machines manually on non-Linux platforms was really starting to get tedious. Hoping this works as seamlessly as I imagine it would.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Probably chromebook pixel 2,asus ux305 or xps13

<comment><USER23> I second Chromebook Pixel 2015 - quality tops macbooks.

<comment><USER24> I think the Chromebook Pixel 2015 suffers from the same HDPI problem with Linux distros that I've got with the 2013 version. I've got GalliumOS ([https://galliumos.org](https://galliumos.org)) working, but it's somewhat unusable.

Linux Mint supports HDPI out-of-the-box, so that's what I'm going to try next...

<comment><USER25> I'm running Arch + Cinnamon on a Pixel 2 and HiDPI is not a problem at all. The last problem application for me as the Arduino IDE, but that has recently been fixed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Try a MacBook Air or a Dell XPS 13

<comment><USER27> XPS 13 Developer Edition has been out for a bit and it comes with Ubuntu [http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-13-linux/pd](http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-13-linux/pd)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Not sure if it is an ultrabook but I am extremely happy with my Fujitsu Lifebook S904. Put Archlinux on it and it works fantastically well. Great battery life and performance. Only problem is its HiDPI screen which way too much software cannot handle (Hi Java!).

</comment><comment><USER29> I have a System 76 Gazelle([https://system76.com/laptops](https://system76.com/laptops)), which I use as my travel machine. It runs Ubuntu 14.04. Very nice machine.

</comment><comment><USER30> the thinkpad t460s is amazing...and supports up to 20gb ram.

<comment><USER31> I'm surprised a lot of people are recommending the X1 Carbon, with little mention of the T-series. The T-series is a favorite among a lot of people I know, and the T460s is very similar to the X1 Carbon, offering a WQHD screen, similar internals, similar battery life, at a lower price point. It's just slightly heavier, but it also has a port for a docking station which the X1 Carbon does not have, if I recall correctly.

For a more low-budget option the Lenovo L-series thinkpads are also pretty cool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm using a Asus UX305L with Ubuntu/Gnome and very happy with it.

I went with 2015 model because I wanted the 1920x1080 non-touch screen to save battery.

Ubuntu on the XPS 13 was unavailable in the time period I made the purchase and I didn't want to deal with the wifi hardware issue.

One advantage of the XPS13 is a PCIe connection for the SSD.

You didn't mention cost, but the Asus will generally be a little cheaper.

</comment><comment><USER33> I was going to get the XPS 13, but decided to perform some upgrades on my desktop at the same time. So to save a few bucks I got an X250 from Lenovo, and I've been very happy with it. It's a little bulky since I also got the large second battery, but the battery life is absolutely phenomenal, and everything works great on Arch.

</comment><comment><USER34> I'm running Debian Unstable on a Macbook Pro Retina 13. Easily the best Linux box since the Thinkpad era.

<comment><USER35> How are your touchpad drivers doing? On every Macbook I've used with Linux, the touchpad was terrible, because it was missing palm detection and had awkwardness when using more than one finger.

<comment><USER34> Seems fine to me but I don't really use the touchpad much, just occasional web surfing etc. I did remember it being a pain to setup customised acceleration etc for it in X.org but apart from that not too bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The Asus Zenbook UX501. Great screen and specs. Runs Linux out of the box.

<comment><USER37> Have one. Support is a little flaky if you're on a distro that doesn't have >=linux 4.4 yet. Other than that, I agree

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> The T460s or the Thinkpad Yoga are brilliant ultrabooks. They are not as thin as the Carbon/Macbook Air, but they are definitely very good.

</comment><comment><USER39> Chromebook Pixel 2 users, i5 or i7?

<comment><USER25> i7, LS edition. And I still get >10hrs of battery life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Lenovo Yoga 900</comment>


Apple kill third party SSD support in Yosemite - <AUTHOR> http://www.eoshd.com/2014/11/apple-kill-third-party-ssd-support-yosemite/

<comment><USER2> Please don't upvote this article. It appears to be someone jumping to a wild conclusion.

I, like the other commenters, installed Yosemite on a third party SSD and it works great. If this were a common problem it would have affected many people and we would have heard about it months ago, back when Yosemite was in beta.

Maybe there is an issue affecting some users, but if so then it is far more likely a bug than some underhanded scheme. And given this blogger's problem solving abilities ("There's a problem... Apple must be trying to harm me!"), my bet is that it's simply a case of user error.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does this only affect certain drives? I upgraded my mac mini with an aftermarket SSD in it and it appears to work fine

<comment><USER4> Yeah same. My MBA has a third party ssd and it boots fine. I wonder what the circumstances are exactly that causes this behaviour.</comment></comment>


Help Needed - What Engineers Think of Developers - <AUTHOR> http://www.cc.gatech.edu/jobs/programmer-social-networking-start-company

<comment><USER2> Even more interesting: What Engineering Students Think of The Next Big Thing.

Do the comp sci students look for engineers to spend summers with them at Kill Devil Hill looking for the Next Big Thing in transportation?

</comment><comment><USER3> You know what I see? A couple of college kids who want to start seriously kicking around the idea of building something outside of their domain.

I don't put words in their mouths or thoughts in these Engineering majors head's. And heres why:

When I was at school and wanted to build something outside my wheelhouse, I would talk to the EEs or MEs. At first they could always see that I didn't know what I was doing when talking about their area, but it wasn't malice on my part or thinking less of them.

Luckily I had some good friends in those majors, and my shitty ideas helped me make more. You know why? Because we just _liked building things_. I would have shitty idea X, sometimes it was salvageable and we built something, sometimes we all just had a good laugh about it after they explained how terrible it was.

Maybe these guys have an idea for social networking that would work incredibly well as a facebook application and they just need 15 minutes of talking with a programmer to understand the domain a bit more and figure out how to go forward.

Its a startup and you're not gonna get paid? Well, duh. They're college kids (broke) and want to build something that they believe in and is instantly distributable to everyone in the world.

I know this is HN and everyone has the "oh, hes one of those 'idea' guys" mentality, but lighten the fuck up. Either move on from the job posting because they don't know what they're doing and let them fail, or go steer them in the right direction. What you don't have to do is call them out on HN for making a rookie mistake.</comment>


Voice-elements - <AUTHOR> http://zenorocha.github.io/voice-elements/

<comment><USER2> Nice wrapper. That said, the standard Web Speech API really is pretty straightforward if you want to play with the raw API.

I'm surprised Firefox doesn't support any part of the API. Granted, it's a Google-pushed spec, but they seem to have been working together on the now- defunct Text-to-Speech API. Plus, the speech synthesis aspect is merely handled by the OS (unlike the recognition aspect which is probably handled by Google for most users). I don't really follow web spec stuff though, so I'm pretty out of the loop.

<comment><USER3> I loaded the webpage then unplugged from the Internet and tried to play the demos. The speech synthesis was actually done over the Internet by default, and fell back to native platform only when offline, it seemed.

The speech recognition did not work offline at all, though we know it should be eventually possible thanks to Android's offline dictation download (iirc?).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Speech recognition is nice, but all of this is going through Google's servers. Besides not working offline, do we really want Google listening in on _every_ thing on the Internet?

<comment><USER5> Hey, you're that guy who always warns us about Google like we're all idiots.

If it's optional I don't see the problem. Some people are not capable using a keyboard and a mouse, for example. Let's not let our paranoia ruin it for them.

Others of us would simply like to kick back and surf the web without reaching for the keyboard or mouse.

As for not working offline, I usually prefer to be online when I'm surfing the web anyway.

<comment><USER4> I'm what guy? Are you implying I've made a comment like this before?

If other people have brought it up, it's because it should be brought up.

As for offline, Google likes to push things like Chrome apps working offline, so it does matter regardless of your snark.

<comment><USER5> No, it's just the standard comment made on HN. It probably doesn't represent the population in general and it doesn't add anything to the conversation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> On the iPad, the speech API is not available, the message should say "your browser does not support .." Instead of "your browser do not support .."

<comment><USER7> [https://github.com/zenorocha/voice- elements/pull/13](https://github.com/zenorocha/voice-elements/pull/13)

<comment><USER8> Thought for a second that was a work around for the iPad ;)

<comment><USER7> Would love to put that in when I'm less swamped. ;)

Would've taken more than the ~30 seconds of the above, though. :P

<comment><USER8> very cool. Take a look at this.. gives a hint on how to get it working. [http://stackoverflow.com/a/12569290](http://stackoverflow.com/a/12569290)

Apparently iOS starts with the web audio api muted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sounds works nicely for chrome, but the "there is sound on this page icon" is missing.

<comment><USER10> I was wondering which tab was playing audio as well. This sounds like Chrome bug however.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is it normal that the sound continues after I close a Tab (Windows 8.1 with Chrome 38.02)?

</comment><comment><USER9> Ok, so it broke down.. I tried refresh the page and buttons doesn't do a thing.

<comment><USER12> I was playing around with it and it's fairly unstable, playing a blank message ex: "", seemed to crash the engine, and playing large pieces of text also seemed to crash it, the only thing that resolved the issue was restarting chrome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does not work on chromium/linux?

<comment><USER14> Same here. It should work theoretically though. Chromium on linux is supposed to have speech synthesis support via festival. I have festival installed, and speech-dispatcher, and just checked chrome://flags but no luck. :-/

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Impressive voice quality.

<comment><USER2> The voices come from your OS' voice services, so it depends on what your OS ships with. That said, both Mac and Windows have been quietly improving their speech synthesis over the years.</comment></comment>


This 'small scratch' can make Internet 60 times faster - <AUTHOR> http://www.rediff.com/cms/print.jsp?docpath=//money/2008/jul/10net.htm

<comment><USER2> Holy Orders of Magnitude, Batman!

"except this switch takes only one picosecond to change tracks."

picosecond = one millionth of one millionth of a second (0.000 000 000 001 seconds)

"This means that in one second the switch is turning on and off about one million times."

Huh? I thought it only took a picosecond!

<comment><USER3> Time to switch is only part of the question you also need to send the data. If I where building a switch I would delay decoding the packet and just send the even packet's to one location and the odd packets to another and so you can double the time each location has to deal with a packet before it's got to decode the next one.

Edit: and keep subdividing the packets like this until you can use fairly cheep processors to handle the load.

<comment><USER2> Except that the next sentence talks about terabit capacity, which does require picosecond switching.

<comment><USER3> I don't think we are talking about the same thing, 1 picosecond * the speed of light = 0.2998 millimeters so a lightly longer cable and your packet is time shifted a few picoseconds. Anyway, _The Switch 8800 has an impressive 1.44 Terabit-per-second backplane_ This does not mean it can route 1.44 trillion packets per second even if it can handle that many bits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> >sciencey_words/actual_content

ERR: Divide by 0.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, the article is a perfect example of what I call lolscience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> A little more content, still looking..

All-optical switching! Echoes of HAL2000.

[http://www.cudos.org.au/cudos/news/Jan08OpticsPhotonicsNews....](http://www.cudos.org.au/cudos/news/Jan08OpticsPhotonicsNews.pdf)

<comment><USER6> Found the paper!! Woohoo! Back to coding...

"Error-free 640 Gbit/s demultiplexing using a chalcogenide planar waveguide chip" (small but tantalizing paper pg.8-9)

> We have demonstrated, for the first time, error-free 640-to-10 Gbit/s > optical time-division demultiplexing with a chalcogenide waveguide. > Excellent performance is achieved with only 2 dB average power penalty.

[http://www.iceaustralia.com/aos2008/pdf/PDPProceedingsfinal....](http://www.iceaustralia.com/aos2008/pdf/PDPProceedingsfinal.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It doesn't take much to get way faster than Telstra's network.

</comment><comment><USER8> Patents and lawyers will never let it see daylight.

Or they will make our asses bleed to pay for it.

<comment><USER9> What, exactly, are you basing that on?

Do you know of any patents which cover this particular area of innovation, or is that just your default response to any invention?

<comment><USER10> I think he thinks this site is Reddit, where you get instant mega-karma for saying anything cynical.

Of course, the way to get karma here is to say something negative about Reddit :)</comment></comment></comment>


FBI Paid More Than $1M to Hack San Bernardino iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/comey-fbi-paid-more-than-1-million-to-hack-san-bernardino-iphone-1461266641 <comment><USER2> Same article on the FT:

[http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/af23e3ea-07f1-11e6-b6d3-746f8e9cdd...](http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/af23e3ea-07f1-11e6-b6d3-746f8e9cdd33.html#axzz46UpvC84n)

James Comey, director of the FBI, said on Thursday that the cost was "worth it", but added that an accommodation needed to be made with Apple and other technology companies in the future, as paying outside technologists to find ways to access highly-encrypted messages on phones used by terrorist suspects was not "scalable."

<comment><USER3> > was not "scalable."

This is the same James Comey that said they just were just asking Apple for access to just that one phone.

<comment><USER4> Indeed. Americans need to wake up to the fact that these spooks simply cannot be trusted. The very concept of trust is alien to their culture. Would be nice of we could count on congress to provide adequate oversight.

<comment><USER5> That won't happen unless American voters want it. They don't want it, as evidenced by their not voting for it, so they won't get it.

<comment><USER6> This absurdly reductionist view of participatory politics comes up again and again. What are you trying to add to the conversation? Do you think that this notion is new? Or that the rest of us haven't considered it?

Instead of a pithy but pointless HN comment, let me suggest a book for you that might expand your thinking on this topic:

[http://www.thriftbooks.com/w/do-elections- matter/1470236/?gc...](http://www.thriftbooks.com/w/do-elections- matter/1470236/?gclid=CjwKEAjw9OG4BRDJzY3jrMng4iQSJABddor1GnER5RdItcJl_5VbZKMKh_bNAFT8a-Fom5anrbW7MBoCGQXw_wcB#isbn=1563244462&pcrid=70112876352&pkw=&pmt=&plc=)

<comment><USER7> > absurdly reductionist view

> Do you think that this notion is new? Or that the rest of us haven't > considered it?

> a pithy but pointless HN comment

> might expand your thinking on this topic

Just throwing it out there: [http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html](http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html)

It would be more helpful if you expanded on why it's a bad argument. Off the top of my head:

> They don't want it, as evidenced by their not voting for it, so they won't > get it

Was there a vote on it? When exactly?

Here's a book about how election results can change people's opinions on topics. It applies here because X. I used to think Y, but it changed my thinking to Z. I'd highly recommend it.

Not that GP is any better, but hey... And to be fair, the guy is practically trolling, whether intentional or not.

<comment><USER8> You're right of course disagreement should be explained better.

But he is responding to a one-line meme whose only purpose is to establish learned helplessness and end discussion that massively oversimplifies a very complex issue and is essentially copy pasted in any article here that even touches on politics. It gets quite exhausting engaging, having long in depth discussion about how this view is overly simplistic on every single thread only to have it appear again tomorrow, exactly the same as before.

I think downvotes and silence is the correct move here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wish people who paid lots of government money for things were always forced to do so out of their salary. For example: we will pay you $X per year in exchange for giving you the responsibility to make up to 10 big purchases; each _time_ you purchase however, 1% of the proposed sum comes out of that $X salary; now then, how judicious will you be?

One thing Ron Paul did in Congress years ago, after one of those stupid "let's spend taxpayer money on a bunch of medals" proposals or something, was to rephrase that expense: he challenged Congress to simply donate a percentage of their own salaries to make it happen. After all, if it was so wonderful (echoing all the things other Congress members had stood up and said about the idea before then), and so worthwhile, surely they would _personally_ not mind chipping in something, right? Predictably, a very small number of congresspeople were suddenly willing to go quite that far.

<comment><USER10> Reminds me of Not Yours To Give: [http://www.constitution.org/cons/crockett.htm](http://www.constitution.org/cons/crockett.htm)

<comment><USER11> Thanks for that link. Great read.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> To me this raises a question about selling security vulnerabilities to state actors in general (in the context of the Facebook vulnerability thread where the standard discussion about value is being hashed out).

Specifically, I live in the UK and one of the complaints law enforcement has is that US companies can (and do) totally ignore valid court orders because they don't apply in the US (reddit being an arbitrary concrete example).

So, what would be the impact of GCHQ setting up a scheme where you can sell vulnerabilities to them (assuming they do the legwork to make it legal)? Would it violate some kind of trade agreement? I assume at minimum it would harm diplomatic relations given the pressure the big companies would exert on the US to push back.

<comment><USER13> > Specifically, I live in the UK and one of the complaints law enforcement has > is that US companies can (and do) totally ignore valid court orders because > they don't apply in the US (reddit being an arbitrary concrete example).

A US company (or individual) should absolutely ignore court orders from a non- US court; such courts have no jurisdiction. A "valid" court order necessarily must come from a court with jurisdiction.

Similarly, I'd expect a UK company to ignore US court orders.

(And in both cases, I'd ideally hope the court knows better than to take the case in the first place or to issue such an order.)

<comment><USER14> The thing is, companies like Google, Facebook and Apple are kinda companies of great britain or at least Ireland. They have bases in Ireland for tax purposes and to comply with certain data retention laws.

That aside, it is not really too much to ask that a company that does business in England abide by English law.

<comment><USER13> I'd certainly agree that a company with a legal nexus in a given country must obey that country's laws (or leave).

But "does business in England" and "has a legal nexus in England" are two different things, depending on your definition of "does business". For instance, if I sell a service online, and someone from England buys it, that might count as "does business in England" but it doesn't make either me or the service subject to English law or jurisdiction.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, but at the same time... If they want to reap the tax benefits of basing themselves out of a country, I would argue that they should be subject to that country's rule.

Really, calling themselves an "Irish" company seems like tax evasion to me, if it's in name only, with none of the negative ramifications.

Edit: speaking with regard to Apple, though other companies are in the same boat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> No paywall link: [http://www.cbsnews.com/news/fbi-paid-more-than-1-million- for...](http://www.cbsnews.com/news/fbi-paid-more-than-1-million-for-san- bernardino-iphone-hack-james-comey/)

</comment><comment><USER17> Given that they found no relevant information on his work phone, exactly as experts and reasonable amateurs and common men predicted, how was it "worth it" as he claims? Is it that wasting huge sums of taxpayer money while attacking civil rights and attempting to instantiate a police surveillance state with no privacy is simply "worth it" no matter what, even if pointless?

<comment><USER18> It was worth it because they didn't know that beforehand. Now the FBI are sure that the attackers weren't in contact with other ISIS members. The FBI thinks that information is worth the $1.2M+ they paid.

How could they possibly have known that without unlocking the phone?

<comment><USER19> > Now the FBI are sure that the attackers weren't in contact with other ISIS > members.

Umm, no - no they aren't. Not even close. The terrorists personal phones were destroyed before the FBI could recover them, this was just a 'work phone'.

Don't you think it's likely that a) there is a reason they destroyed their personal phones, and b) if they were going to communicate with other actors they'd be more likely to use the phone that's completely under their control?

<comment><USER18> Yes, you're right. I guess the FBI just confirmed that there was no info on the work phone, which seems a valid line of inquiry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I find it interesting that this entire issue is the same as the nuclear issue was in the cold war.

Government Technocrats: We need bigger and more powerful warheads to protect us from the Soviets.

General Public: OK we'll learn Duck and Cover.

Sensible Few: Is risking the destruction of everything we're trying to protect worth it?

Government Technocrats: We can't look our children in the eye ... yadda yadda yadda.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm trying to see what's around the corner for this argument.

Sure they can go to congress and push for increased funding or whatever for their top cases. Which gives congress a tangible budget number that could be "saved" by passing a law, but politics/congress doesn't really work this way - spending money _benefits_ the administrating critters, the FBI, and the contractors doing the work.

Furthermore, $1M is essentially a small amount and obviously "worth it" for the major sensational events that they'd use to push through backdoors. So it seems they're actually giving up ground by having to move the argument to the urgency for backdoors in cases that _aren 't_ worth $1M.

I can see the argument playing for fiscal-primacy authoritarians who would take this as an example of government waste, but they'd already support government backdoors and I don't see this riling them up enough to be worth it.

It seems like a dead-end for propaganda purposes. What am I missing?

Maybe they're just trying to salt the earth so that their technical success in this case does not hinder them arguing for backdoors _next_ time?

</comment><comment><USER22> This really seems like a terrible market for a state to be so openly involved in.

<comment><USER23> So they should be clandestinely involved, instead? They're going to do it anyways, I'd rather know about it.

<comment><USER22> False dichotomy is false. They didn't have to do this, and by all accounts, received nothing of value for the money.

<comment><USER24> Don't they have a tool to get into other iPhone's now?

$1,000,000 doesn't seem too bad.

<comment><USER25> Not necessarily, they might not own the tool, just paid for someone to use it on the phone.

<comment><USER24> The subtitle quote indicates that the tool was bought outright.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Is that it? Had they found a way to do it internally it could easily have cost 10x more.

<comment><USER27> 5 people, 1 year = 1million. Likely a team of 4 devs and a PM. 10months to prototype, 2 months to clean up and release?

Sounds reasonable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Were they going to pay Apple if they had somehow forced them to do the deed?

<comment><USER29> Example: [http://www.cbsnews.com/news/verizon-att-get-most-bucks- from-...](http://www.cbsnews.com/news/verizon-att-get-most-bucks-from-feds- for-wiretaps/)

>AT&T, for example, imposes a $325 "activation fee" for each wiretap and $10 a day to maintain it. Smaller carriers Cricket and U.S. Cellular charge only about $250 per wiretap. But snoop on a Verizon customer? That costs the government $775 for the first month and $500 each month after that, according to industry disclosures made last year to Congressman Edward Markey.

>And while Microsoft, Yahoo and Google won't say how much they charge, the American Civil Liberties Union found that email records can be turned over for as little as $25.

<comment><USER30> So the only argument the FBI hears is how much? Disgusting.

<comment><USER31> An argument you could make is that by associating a cost with wiretapping it discourages frivolous usage.

<comment><USER32> Since when did the FBI care about spending money that they get from taxpayers?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> [https://archive.is/OfqcJ](https://archive.is/OfqcJ)

</comment><comment><USER34> To me this sounds like the typical "teachers and firefighters" government PR tactic. The best response is an equally ridiculous knee-jerk public reaction. We need to call to defund the FBI by 1 million dollars to settle the accounting. Clearly they have too much money burning holes in their pockets if they are able to make large purchases of this nature.

</comment><comment><USER35> Is that a lot or a little?

<comment><USER36> It's about par. Some security firms will charge $1M/year and over. Corporate enterprises involved in intelligence gathering for the government (i.e. ATnT, Apple, Google, Microsoft, basically any "free" and paid tech service) can make a lot of money depending on how many accounts they pass off to the FBI,NSA, etc... If you're using any service in the US and the "West", even the "free speech" stuff like ytcombinator, reddit, they'll pass of information and can charge for it.

edit: Apple's encryption fight, for example, is a bit of a wash. It's basically to lure in more users which they can charge more for. The more value the user has for their privacy, the more companies can charge for access.

They are all corporate enterprises, and their responsibility is to profit for their shareholders. When the government offers a legal profitable offer, they have a responsibility to take it. If they are found not to take it, and a group or party finds out and can prove it was a profitable venture, they can attack the company with the courts.

<comment><USER37> That's bullshit.

Management has wide-ranging freedom to define what they see as the best course of action and nothing short of fraud is actionable in a court: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_judgment_rule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_judgment_rule).

In this case, the obvious defense would be that for a company such as Apple, the fees they charge the government for access are completely meaningless, compared to the damage the brand could suffer if they're found violating their user's privacy.

At 25$ each as mentioned above, these fees probably don't even cover the costs of having a lawyer take a quick look at it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> $180k is a dangerously small amount to pay someone with James Comey's responsibility.

<comment><USER39> the fringe benefits and consulting/speaking fees post-FBI make up for it and then some.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Where did that $1M come from? If it's from tax I'll say that a big waste.

<comment><USER41> Where else does it come from?

<comment><USER42> legalized theft [0]

[0]: [http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240531119034809045765122...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903480904576512253265073870)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Paywalled for me here in the UK. I assume the title sums up the article?

Since I can't read the article, from anyone that can, how did they come to that figure? Is that just the cost of the exploit or..?

Cheers

<comment><USER44> > _The Federal Bureau of Investigation paid more than $1 million for a hacking > tool that opened the iPhone of a terrorist gunman in San Bernardino, Calif., > the head of the agency said Thursday._

> _Speaking at the Aspen Security Forum in London, FBI Director James Comey > didn't cite a precise figure for how much the government paid for the > solution to cracking the phone but said it was more than his salary for the > seven-plus years remaining in his term at the FBI._

> _His annual salary is about $180,000 a year, so that comes to $1.26 million > or more._

> _"[We] paid a lot'' for the hacking tool, Mr. Comey said. "But it was worth > it.''_

I wonder how exactly it's worth it, given that nothing of interest of relevance was found on the device.

<comment><USER45> Well now they have a tool they can use at any time.

<comment><USER46> On iPhone 5. Until Apple updates the software to fix the vulnerability.

<comment><USER47> If they know what to fix. FBI aren't idiots to tell them.

<comment><USER44> Apple could probably buy the same tool and analyze it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> If over $1M is reasonable, I wonder what Comey would deem as an "unreasonable" amount and the rationale behind the calculation.

</comment><comment><USER49> What evidence is there that the phone was actually hacked? Wouldn't saying "ah never mind we hacked it" be a convenient way out of a precedent-setting court case the FBI was losing?

<comment><USER33> Except the other cases haven't been dropped, and this case was perhaps the one most sympathetic to the government (terror).

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> If you consider all of the time and effort that they put into this case, they spent a hell of a lot more than $1M. We're focusing so much on it because it a single line item.

<comment><USER51> Exactly. Think about the resources they put on this case. It should worth way more than $1M and all that came from tax payers money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Ugh - total paywall on the article.

Seriously, we need to just ban domains that do that (full paywall after 1st paragraph) - it's not really sharing any content with the community.

</comment><comment><USER53> This is our tax money down the drain by scaring us to death for fear of non- existent terrorist threat. It is remarkable how such FBI directors don't get fired from their job.

<comment><USER18> I'm not entirely sure how you can call 14 deaths "non-existent".

<comment><USER54> 14 deaths out of 300 million people is close enough to zero that it's not worth thinking about.

<comment><USER18> Yes, I completely agree that terrorism is something that people shouldn't worry about. However that doesn't mean you shouldn't investigate the murders, just like you would any other murder.

You appear to be saying that 14 murders is something that shouldn't be investigated properly.

<comment><USER53> Law enforcement has limited resources and hence they should spend based on what they have. I feel they are spending too much of our money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Next time they should just bring the phone to RSA and have their pick of vendor-booth-magician to decrypt it.

</comment><comment><USER56> That's it?

<comment><USER57> a) The amount is nice since I think they apparently approached them after figuring out how to do this. So impossible to think anywhere near that amount of work was actually involved.

b) Establish and prove they can do the job. Will get other work like this and be able to charge more. Really no different than what the local handyman or plumber does in some cases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I still don't believe they've actually hacked it. There's no evidence that they have.

</comment><comment><USER59> Apparently $1 million is how much it costs to discover that no information was on the phone.

</comment><comment><USER60> I'm in the wrong profession!

</comment><comment><USER61> I'd like a refund, please.

</comment><comment><USER62> Why not www.iphoneasyunlock.com

</comment><comment><USER63> this money comes out off our pockets.. YAY. NAY

</comment><comment><USER64> What bothers me is they apparently had no better intel available to spend that money on. An iPhone really? This screams of the government having absolutely nothing to do if not being outright incompetent entirely.

</comment><comment><USER65> McAfee offered to do it free of charge. Should have took him up on that, rather than wast $1M.

<comment><USER66> McAfee's offer was a PR stunt. He admitted it a week later.

<comment><USER67> And he made a series of public statements which made it clear he had no understanding whatsoever of the technical issues involved.

First, he claimed that he would use "social engineering" to access the phone's data.

Later, he claimed that he could do it easily by clearing the area of flash memory containing the phone's password, apparently unaware of the fact that the password was used as a key to encrypt data.

Source: [http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/03/john-mcafee- better-p...](http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/03/john-mcafee-better- prepare-to-eat-a-shoe-because-he-doesnt-know-how-iphones-work/)

<comment><USER68> Social engineering could plausibly work against Apple employees.

<comment><USER19> Which is undoubtedly one of the many reasons why  didn't want to create the software necessary to unlock the phone.

<comment><USER69> ot: it's oddly satisfying to me that the Apple unicode is broken for my browser.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The British people preparing for the end of the world - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-34637377 <comment><USER2> Why? It is END. There is nothing after it.

<comment><USER3> Nah, it's just the end of the world "as you know it", but there'll be something afterwards.

It's like equality of citizens. Citizens, or people are NOT equal. Citizen are equal before the law. Only the LAW doesn't (should not) discriminate people, but treat all the same. (Of course, this in itself is dubious, given that laws can have increasing level of specific cases, just like a program, and finally provide a very personalised treatment).

It's like perpetual movement devices. There can be only increase of entropy, inside a CLOSED system. But as far as we know, the only system that is closed, is the whole universe (and EVEN! It's not that sure, there are theories of communicating multiverses). Therefore you can easily have a system (not closed), that will exhibit more energy output on one channel than input on another channel (since it's not closed, it obviously also has other input channels).</comment></comment>