Moxie Marlinspike Makes Encryption for Everyone - <AUTHOR> http://www.popsci.com/moxie-marlinspike-makes-encryption-for-everyone <comment><USER2> Not for people who don't want Google on their device.

He only wants distribution via Google, and even went as far to demand that free/libre Play-alternative F-droid removed their build of TextSecure.

See: [https://fdroid.eutopia.cz/](https://fdroid.eutopia.cz/)

<comment><USER3> Here is moxie's reply in that matter [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10665520](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10665520)

<comment><USER4> He's doing great and useful work, there's no doubt. But requiring a phone number for an internet instant messenger is still a deal breaker even with Chromium as an alternative.

<comment><USER5> _The_ most useful piece of metadata available to anyone harvesting user profiles for surveillance or profit. Governments must love phone numbers. Getting an anonymous phone number for each separate service you register with is practically infeasible.

I worry about how influential people like Moxie Marlinspike are seemingly turning the modern 'mobile-first' development paradigm into a 'mobile-only' mindset. I don't believe in secure and private computing when you are making it very hard for people to use your tools on (or via) anything but the two dominant mobile operating systems.

<comment><USER6> Here I copy the "dead" message from "uola":

"Yes, phone numbers are public enough that they are shared everywhere, but unique enough to lead to a single person not to speak of that persons movements. And "just use twilio" isn't a motivation for using phone numbers in the first place.

If he had said "the benefits of finding friends are greater than the privacy implications" or something like that there would at least been a case for a discussion, but now he's seemingly saying "oh, if you really care about privacy you could/should use a fake phone number"."

\---

Personally, I don't know how "a fake phone number" setup can be implemented, especially in the countries where each phone number is assigned to one ID at the time of purchase, so to me "use a fake phone number" sounds like "let them eat cake."

<comment><USER7> > If he had said "the benefits of finding friends are greater than the privacy > implications" or something like that there would at least been a case for a > discussion

This has already been discussed at length many times. Perhaps uola hasn't seen this blog post yet:

[https://whispersystems.org/blog/contact- discovery/](https://whispersystems.org/blog/contact-discovery/)

<comment><USER6> That post still goes from the starting point of "social graph" and "5000 users in the contact list." It's completely the opposite of what's the most reasonable need: say if I want to communicate using the encryption only with my girlfriend, I don't want any of other contacts be ever seen by any server, and I can agree with her how we'll identify each other, but we surely don't need real phone numbers transferred to any servers, and we don't even have to use always the same real numbers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Moxie's been a huge inspiration for me in tech, i first discovered him through his blog post Career Advice: [https://moxie.org/blog/career- advice/](https://moxie.org/blog/career-advice/)

<comment><USER9> I've read this blog post multiple times over the past few months and I wish I knew about it before I went to college. His career advice has so much clarity that I can't find elsewhere (so far).

Thanks for sharing the link. I'm about to do a career switch and reading this again is certainly reassuring. He is right. We are what we do for a living.

I find his work very inspirational and I hope I'll be able to personally thank him one day for all the work he has done.

<comment><USER10> If you don't mind me asking, what career are you switching from and to? I'm about to graduate but I'm not looking forward to any of my default career options. I'd be curious to hear about your experience and plans.

<comment><USER9> I'm about to graduate from medical school in a few months. Once I get my medical degree, I'm going for an undergraduate degree in Computer Science. I've always wanted to do computer science since high school but I equally wanted to become a doctor. At one point I decided being a doctor was more important. I valued autonomy highly and I figured nothing is better than the freedom to operate my own small private practice in the future. I didn't want to end up being employed as a programmer and I expected that being a freelancer is no where near as stable in terms of job prospects as being a doctor, especially on the long run. Add to that the fact that I was fascinated by how the human body works for the same reasons I was fascinated with computers. I think any hacker-minded person would. I wanted to know the ins and outs of the human body. I wanted to know how it breaks, and how to fix it. Also, to be honest, I was very tempted with the extra income that comes with medical practice, but autonomy was ultimately the primary motive.

6 Years later, here I am, graduating with a decent GPA but having 0% interest in pursuing clinical practice, although i have performed very well clinically and in terms of my medical knowledge. I simply realized that the practice of medicine (specifically diagnostics and treatment decisions) is nothing but a classification problem. We are literally trained to memorize 'algorithms' (flow charts) for diagnosing and managing hundreds of different illnesses. That's about it really. It boils down to asking a standard set of questions (the patient's history), examining the patient, and trying to guess the diagnosis. Often, lab tests are needed (you order them based on the flow chart you memorized for the presenting symptoms). Once they're available, the diagnosis is usually clear, or further testing and imaging is required, and the cycle continues. Even for the complicated medical issues, this whole process can be represented by a simple flowchart that easily fits on an A4 sheet). The majority of modern day work done by doctors can (and will) be automated in the near future. The biggest hurdle was never the technology; it's the laws and regulations. I've seen papers published in the 80s where AI bested human doctors in diagnosing many diseases, and recently I've seen more impressive results in radiology and pathology diagnostics, where the diagnosis purely depends on vision, which is a very complicated problem when you try to solve it with computers. The results are very promising and some papers have shown results where human pathologists and radiologists were outperformed by computer vision.

Humans are obviously still needed to deal with patients. It takes some clinical skill to know how to extract information from patients, how to examine them, and how to look for clues, but that does not strictly require a doctor to be done properly. In fact, most of our medical training, even in residency, is concerned with learning more and more 'algorithms', guidelines, and staying up to date with the latest medical evidence.

Computers won't replace doctors in surgical specialties, but they certainly will replace primary care physicians, as well as doctors in other fields like internal medicine (including its subspecialties like cardiology, Pulmonology, etc), emergency medicine, oncology, and others. These fields purely depend on memorizing and recalling flow charts of diagnosis and management. Humans are fallible when it comes to memory and recall, computers are much much less fallible in these cases, and virtually infallible in some cases (100% diagnostic sensitivity and specificity was reported in some studies, which is impossible to achieve by humans)

By the time I realized what I mentioned above, I was already close to finishing med school. I decided to graduate first then see what I wanted to do next. I no longer saw any inherent joy or value in being a doctor. There is no room for trying to be creative, smart, or efficient. You just have to follow the official guidelines and policies, and hope you don't get sued when you, inevitably, make a mistake. I see no meaning in a career like that.

I love coding and I love learning CS in my free time so my decision for what to do next was easy. There are some interesting studies utilizing AI for diagnosing cancer metastasis on CT scans using computer vision, and that's an example of a topic I might be interested in. I don't necessarily want to do medically related research all the time though. All I want to do is to be a software engineer working on very interesting projects. Even the most mundane coding projects are easily 10x more mentally stimulating than clinical work in my opinion.

In retrospect, I have no regrets. I know a lot about how my body works and I leanred a lot from dealing with hundreds of patients over the years. I also learned a lot about who I am and what I really want, and to me, this knowledge is invaluable. I also realized how much I appreciated computer science.

I guess that's enough rambling. Apologies for the late and long reply. I hope you found it useful, and I wish you the best of luck in your future career ;)

<comment><USER11> This was very interesting and insightful to read, thanks!

<comment><USER9> You're welcome :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> With people like Moxie the future doesn't look that bleak anymore. The guy is really dedicated to what he is doing and, quite honestly, it is pleasing to see someone in the tech community who is not egocentric around creating his online persona. I'm not trying to insult anyone, just expressing gratitude that there's people who care about code, not striving to become rock stars.

</comment><comment><USER13> Watch his documentary "Hold Fast" to get a glimpse of just how unique and interesting a character he is. Anarchists yachting? Yes, more, please

<comment><USER14> [https://vimeo.com/15351476](https://vimeo.com/15351476)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've respected Moxie Marlinspike ever since he made sslstrip, a simple illustration of the fundamental insecurity of browser-based HTTPS.

However I do question his premise that criminals already have the wherewithal to opt in to "clunky" strong encryption before engaging in criminal activity.

In fact there are many scenarios where criminals simply go with the default security configuration in consumer devices, either because they (a) did not plan the crime in advance or (b) aren't as smart about opsec as you might expect.

There are many good arguments to make strong encryption the default for consumer devices, but here I feel he was attempting to take an easy way out by pretending it's orthogonal to investigating crimes. In fact it is a tradeoff, granting us security from cybercriminals and bad state actors (if there's even a difference), while making it harder for law enforcement in some scenarios.

<comment><USER16> Right, not _all_ criminals can choose secure defaults. But those who can't are unlikely to be all that secure in other ways either meaning that it won't change the threat landscape much.

Besides, it wouldn't kill our LEOs to work for their supper. This reliance on dragnet tactics means that'll soon be all they're able to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> To be honest, I don't understand what substantial benefit end-to-end encryption actually brings in an environment of (almost-)mandatory updates.

\- If someone from Facebook/Telegram/Signal/etc wants to know what you're writing, they can just instruct their app (via update) to send them your key. For closed-source services, you'd theoretically have to decompile and audit each update to make sure they are not doing that.

\- If they want to know what you have written in the past, they can instruct the app to send them the conversation log.

\- If Google (or Apple or Microsoft, respectively) want to know what you're writing, they can instruct the OS to send them the data. (Google's "Android Backup Service" for example also backs up "third party settings and data" [1]. I don't know about the details of the backup service, but this shows to me it's quite possible that your key or conversation logs might even land accidentally on some providers' servers without them having any bad intent.)

\- If (three letter agency of your choice) wants to get the data, they can just force any of the above companies via NSLs to get it for them.

\- If any of the US strategic partners want to get the data, they can likely make a deal with an intelligence agency.

\- Lastly, if the messenger company wants to mine or sell user data, they still have a lot of stuff that cannot be encrypted for operational reasons (such as your contact list and the phone numbers of all your contacts).

That leaves to me the only group for which "overlay encryption" brings an actual benefit political activists in a country not at all affiliated with the US - or highly knowledgeable individuals who carefully control which updates they get. Both groups are important to consider but likely had ways to protect their communication before.

To actually protect communication not just from "the government" but also from the private industry, we would at least need some independent party to vet app updates.

[1] [https://support.google.com/nexus/answer/2819582?hl=en](https://support.google.com/nexus/answer/2819582?hl=en)

<comment><USER18> I think the assumption is that any sufficiently motivated attacker will find a way to compromise their target. What e2e encryption accomplishes is the end of dragnet surveillance of entire societies, something that Snowden has exposed in great detail already.

<comment><USER17> But my point is that the way end-to-end encryption is implemented currently doesn't even accomplish that: Either you trust your messenger provider not to be complicit in any surveillance or data mining activities, then plain TLS (with key-pinning) is enough to save you from being snooped - or you don't trust them, then you're not actually protected as they could push an update at any time to sidestep the encryption.

There are certain cases were current end-to-end encryption brings more security - e.g. if a provider's data center is compromised but the provider itself isn't. But those seem like edge cases to me that don't justify the attention the feature is currently getting.

<comment><USER11> It's not perfect, but E2E crypto does make it significantly harder to get to the plaintext. A backdoor will always leave some kind of paper trail (if you know what to look for), whereas intercepting the plaintext on the server cannot be detected by users at all. Legally speaking, compelling a company to intercept messages that they have access to sounds different than compelling them to develop and sign a backdoored version of their product - that's essentially the Apple vs. FBI case.

I think this is a case of perfect being the enemy of good. If a state actor wants access to your messages, you're probably screwed anyway, unless your OpSec is top-notch. E2E crypto means that they'll have to _really want_ your messages, at which point they're probably better off just stealing your phone or using a $5 wrench.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Moxie makes encryption for the majority of people, not for everyone.

</comment><comment><USER20> Oh the irony of an article about encryption on a site sans encryption.

<comment><USER21> Huh? I'm connecting over HTTPS right now. Have you tried it?

<comment><USER22> When I try, I get a certificate that expired 5 months ago.

www.popsci.com uses an invalid security certificate. The certificate expired on 12/10/2015 05:59 PM. The current time is 05/11/2016 01:39 AM. Error code: SEC_ERROR_EXPIRED_CERTIFICATE

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > that has garnered praise by everyone from Snowden to filmmaker Laura Poitras

The idiom "everyone from X to Y" is supposed to demonstrate breadth of support, where X and Y are very different sources, but Snowden and Poitras are most certainly _extremely_ similar sources.

</comment><comment><USER24> Three cheers for Moxie!

</comment><comment><USER25> slightly OT: has anybody made a bot or alternative client for Signal (even basic functionality)? I'd love to see a code example and was surprised that I couldn't find anything.

</comment><comment><USER26> Not for everyone, their crypto is GPL only and GPL can't be deployed everywhere.

<comment><USER27> > Not for everyone, their crypto is GPL only and GPL can't be deployed > everywhere.

GPL code can be used anywhere; GPL code cannot be made proprietary.

<comment><USER28> Well, no. You could have a situation where there's a policy in place forbidding installing GPL-licensed products. (I don't have any info about it, but I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case at Microsoft a while ago.)

EDIT: I'm getting downvotes and don't understand why. I'm seriously interested, can someone explain the reason?

<comment><USER29> > You could have a situation where there's a policy in place forbidding > installing GPL-licensed products.

You might have situation with policies forbidding anything. Like, MS Windows. Or Macs. Or smartphones. Rarely, yes, but I'm surprised GPL looks that unique regarding this matter.

<comment><USER30> Weird that someone would prohibit installing GPL licenced software. It is a very different case than using GPL licenced code in development. Sounds like a dumb lawyer trying to hard cover his rear against reverse engineering accusations. Which you cannot do in this way anyway.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ericsson Asks 20 Innovative Thinkers About the Year 2020 (videos) - <AUTHOR> http://www.ericsson.com/campaign/20about2020/ <comment><USER2> curl -O <http://www.ericsson.com/blob/mov/campaigns/2020/[1-20].mov>

</comment><comment><USER3> this was produced by ericsson as a marketing effort. i wonder to what extent pessimism was edited out of the raw footage.

</comment><comment><USER4> the design of embedding a lot of videos in one page is very nice.

</comment><comment><USER5> two words: Erlang everywhere</comment>


Lenovo's SuperFish Removal Tool on GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/lenovo-inc/superfishremoval

<comment><USER2> I hate to collapse the high level of discussion on HN all the way down to the least common denominator "my computer doesn't work" discussion, but ...

There is no such thing as cleaning your PC or removing the malware or removing the virus(es).

You reload the OS, from scratch, with non-OEM (that is, generic) OS media. Otherwise you will lose.

This has been true for 20 years and it only gets more true as OS software becomes more abstracted and tightly coupled to hardware.

Do not remove superfish. Do not "clean" your PC. In fact, don't even upgrade your OS from one major revision to the next. Wipe your system, install from generic media.

Tell everyone you know.

<comment><USER3> I can see this NOT being an option for a lot of users—"Mom and Dad" types, people who travel, etc. Many would prefer nothing is done if it's an option between "full reinstall" and "live with the cert".

In this case Windows Defender and Lenovo's own tool remove the app + certificate. I think that's certainly "enough" as we're not dealing with malware which has trashed the system in other ways. Heck, they have to pay for a fresh copy of Windows first too.

TL;DR: "Clean install from a standard image" sounds like great advice on paper but it's not practicable for normal users.

<comment><USER4> > In this case Windows Defender and Lenovo's own tool remove the app + > certificate. I think that's certainly "enough" as we're not dealing with > malware which has trashed the system in other ways.

You don't know that for sure. Hence, reinstall. Also, why not use a Libre operating system? I've never had my GNU activation fail.

<comment><USER5> I guess you never mistyped a Red Hat Enterprise Linux installation number before then.

<comment><USER6> You mean that monstrosity from RHEL 5? I'm so glad they got rid of that in RHEL 6.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _> return ( (Issuer.ToLower().Contains("superfish, inc")) || (IssuerName.ToLower().Contains("superfish, inc")) );_

While in this case, it might be ok, please never do this in your own programs. Before deciding to act on something, make sure that you are as precise as possible before taking action.

In this case, as all machines had the same certificate, use the key fingerprint or the whole certificate for comparison. And failing that, do an equality match on the name. A case insensitive substring match is way too wide and you might be accidentally removing things you didn't want to remove ("pilif's Superfish, Including production" is an issuer name of a certificate that would be removed by Lenovo's code).

It's easy to be accurate when checking. It's hard to undo accidental damage. And no matter how much time it takes you right now to go the extra length, it will pale in comparison to the hell you will have to go through once the accident happens.

<comment><USER8> Let's also not forget the multiple 100+ line methods and try-catches which don't even bother to log or handle the error they catch.

There also doesn't appear to be tests, at least at first glance.

Edit... Taking a closer look there is clear copy-pasta and several potential bugs

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wow. Releasing the source to the removal tool might be the first right (rather than actively wrong and then merely a little less wrong) thing Lenovo has done in this entire disaster.

It feels like I can almost hear the screams of the engineers explaining why a black-box removal tool is nowhere near enough.

<comment><USER10> Their hand was forced. I'm sure this is going to cost some money, possibly by both sides.

The notion they were unaware of what Superfish was and did is simply implausible. This is damage control, full force.

<comment><USER11> > The notion they were unaware of what Superfish was and did is simply > implausible.

They certainly knew they were installing creepy adware for money, there is no doubt about that.

I don't think we know whether they looked close enough to see that they were MITM-ing SSL connections. I don't think they'd have objected either way, but I'm not certain.

I'm sure they didn't know about the security issues. (Mostly because they wouldn't have thought to look for them, but still.) Even after that disastrous CEO statement that called the security issues 'theoretical' I don't think they'd knowingly ship software as broken as that. (It might be different for government backdoors, but those are more likely in the hardware, firmware or hardware drivers just because the interesting enterprise and government customers would never use a Lenovo-provided image with Superfish anyway. And most likely Lenovo the company doesn't know about the backdoor either, only the single engineer that built it.)

<comment><USER12> _Even after that disastrous CEO statement that called the security issues 'theoretical'_

I think this is the real outrage here - that the company is run by an asshat who thinks that little of his customers. I refuse to recommend Lenovo or any of their products until this guy either demonstrates unreserved contrition (and by contrition, I mean a clear apology that acknowledges that the very concept of installing such an intrusive and obnoxious program on their customers' computers is wrong), or is sacked. Buying or recommending anything from Lenovo under the current circumstances is unacceptable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I just followed Lenovo's instructions [0] to uninstall SuperFish on a friend's computer (Lenovo Yoga 2, Win 8.1). These instructions are NOT sufficient. After uninstalling SuperFish through the normal windows uninstallation program, and the Root CA certs for IE and Firefox, suddenly none of the HTTPS sites worked! The browser complained (rightly), that the the certificate is wrong because it is signed by SuperFish.

I had to do some research to detect, that there is still a service called VisualDiscovery, which is activated on startup. Looking in the properties I can see that it starts "C:\Program Files (x86)\Lenovo\VisualDiscovery\VisualDiscovery.exe". I stopped it and now it works as supposed. But I still have to find a way how to uninstall this stuff.

I'm a Linux guy, but I find it crazy, that after uninstalling VisualDiscovery/SuperFish there are still executables and a service remaining on the disk. This is crazy.

[0] [http://support.lenovo.com/us/en/product_security/superfish_u...](http://support.lenovo.com/us/en/product_security/superfish_uninstall)

<comment><USER14> (Apologies if the formatting is problematic, my first post).

1\. Stop the service:

        sc stop VisualDiscovery

2\. Open up your favourite process manager and remove any superfish processes (containing the word superrfish).

3\. Perform the uninstall via Add/Remove Programs (under superfish)

4\. Confirm %ProgramFiles%/Lenovo/VisualDiscovery is deleted.

5\. Open System32 and confirm there are no files beginning with VisualDiscovery

6\. Open AppData and confirm that no files start with VisualDiscovery

7\. Remove certificates (Firefox and Global).

8\. Remove from Registry: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\VisualDiscovery.

After that, VisualDiscovery should be fully removed.

<comment><USER13> Thank you, I'll try this.

But why is it not in Lenovo's instructions? After following only their instructions, you are in a worse state than before, i.e. SuperFish still working, but without root CAs, browsers shouting (good so), and users panicking.

<comment><USER15> There's also these instructions from Ars Technica: [http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/02/how-to-remove-the- su...](http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/02/how-to-remove-the-superfish- malware-what-lenovo-doesnt-tell-you/)

<comment><USER13> Thanks. But it omits the step of how to uninstalling the service, that is still running when following all the steps. Maybe it is something just limited to the Yoga 2?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> They should have also registered rmvr.io and added "Fork me on github" and all that. Then they'd be hip.

</comment><comment><USER17> Well, that's nice, but apparently Microsoft already pushed a Windows Update that deletes Superfish and its stupid cert, so...

Go Microsoft!

... That was weird.

</comment><comment><USER18> As I see many people complaining about the code quality and the lack of tests et cetera:

You have to cut the developers some slack considering the time they had to develop this.

They clearly intended to finish it while the issue was still hot and in 2-3 days you can't easily build good software with a plethora of tests.

<comment><USER19> My sympathy is limited given this malware was bundled by Lenovo.

When are laptop vendors going to stop shovelling crapware on laptops?

</comment></comment><comment> w-ll Is this project really from Lenovo? The github profile has just this 1 project?

<comment><USER20> Yes, Lenovo link to it themselves [1].

[1] [http://support.lenovo.com/us/en/product_security/superfish_u...](http://support.lenovo.com/us/en/product_security/superfish_uninstall) "Automatic Removal Tool Source code"

<comment><USER21> Also possible that a Lenovo employee was at a coffee shop using wifi connected to the corporate CMS using http"s" and someone unrelated to Lenovo linked their fake repo on his/her behalf.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> From [1]:

      Joined on 20 Feb 2015

Welcome to Github Lenovo!

[1] [https://github.com/lenovo-inc](https://github.com/lenovo-inc)

</comment><comment><USER23> Why would you trust Lenovo on this?

</comment><comment><USER24> So this is Lenovo's first github repo. Please don't tell me that it is their first free/open source project developed by their own.

</comment><comment><USER25> Better install Linux.

</comment><comment><USER26> The last thing I would advise any non-technical (and even technical!) person to do is to go to github and download a bunch of executables and see what happens.

Zero kudos Lenovo.</comment>


Data Without Borders logo contest - <AUTHOR> http://datawithoutborders.cc/2011/08/logo-contest/

<comment><USER2> <http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/datawithoutborders.cc>

seems down at the moment

edit: 'not found' now, but seems to be here [http://jakeporway.com/2011/08/data-without-borders-logo- cont...](http://jakeporway.com/2011/08/data-without-borders-logo-contest/)

<comment><USER3> thanks for catching that! our servers weren't ready for ycombinator :P will have the original url back up soon

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How patronizing. This is a great way to alienate all but the worst designers. No professional would ever validate such an insult with a response.

"Plumbing contest!! Fix our leaky sink! Do all the work upfront, IF we like it, you'll get a gift card worth 10% of the price!"

<comment><USER5> Seeing that the project in question is mostly aiming at NGO's and non-profits I'm assuming that 'data without borders' is not a commercial enterprise. In which case it's not uncommon to have these sorts of contests where the 'reward' is meant as a 'thank you' rather than a full compensation.

From a purely economical/business perspective you're (kinda) right, but from a human/charity perspective it seems rather harsh to consider this an 'insult'..

<comment><USER4> >NGO's and non-profits I'm assuming that 'data without borders' is not a commercial enterprise

Not-for-profit doesn't mean no-profit, doesn't mean no-income, doesn't mean no-expenses. You can get a crappy logo for $500, I doubt that's beyond their operating budget.

>but from a human/charity perspective it seems rather harsh to consider this an 'insult'..

Spec work is spec work, it will always be insulting. "But the guys doing the insulting are really nice!" is not an excuse.</comment></comment></comment>


A critical analysis of the latest cellphone safety scare - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/03/a-critical-analysis-of-the-latest-cellphone-safety-scare/ <comment><USER2> A news site explaining its reasoning for not covering a scientific study, while still managing to cover the study. Well played.</comment>


The Selfie and the Self: In Defence of Duckface (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4321-the-selfie-and-the-self-in-defence-of-duckface <comment><USER2> Tangent... the title mentions the duckface, but that is a clear soyface (males "expressing surprise or excitement with their mouth agape")

[https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/soy-boy- face](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/soy-boy-face)

I personally don't believe it's soy, its just the meme. Don't hate the messenger.

</comment><comment><USER3> The OP and apparently the book following Goffman make a huge leap in stating that selfies somehow give insight in a persons back stage behavior as opposed to front stage behavior. There is no reason given why a conscious act of performance completely controlled by the subject itself is now somehow an insight into back stage.

I would say taking a selfie is a form of front stage behavior, albeit a more egalitarian one.

On the other hand I am someone who thought a selfie-stick was a tool for punishment for people taking selfies at inappropriate moments.

<comment><USER4> _> I would say taking a selfie is a form of front stage behavior, albeit a more egalitarian one._

I think this hinges on whether the person taking the photo is aware of the people around them at that point in time. If they really aren't thinking about them at all, it's essentially "authentic" back-stage behavior. If you don't realize someone is looking in your bathroom window while taking a shower, you probably can't be honestly claimed to be making a social performance in there.

If they are deliberately considering the people around them when taking the photo is part of the audience for their act, then, yes, it's clearly front- stage behavior.

In practice, it is probably some shade of gray between these two extremes. The line between front stage and back stage is always somewhat blurry.

<comment><USER3> Sorry, there seems to be a disconnect here. Yes the difference between back stage and front stage is a gray-scale. However that was not my point: Making selfies is an act of front stage, not because there might be other people around, but by the mere fact you are making a photo of yourself with the purpose of it being seen by others. The performance is that what we see on the photo, not the conditions it is made under.

The conditions it is under might make it into more of a front stage, but given that the selfie itself is front stage the fact that you are not hiding making it is very hard to see as "authentic" back stage behavior.

People might use selfies to practice (back stage behavior), but you will normally never see those and what they do present is obviously fit for front stage.

Yes you might walk into someone practicing with selfies, or accidentally see some practice selfies, but that in itself does not provide better or more reliable information than any other incidental back stage information like seeing someone in the shower.

Now if your point was that selfies invite us to perform too much and practice too little than we are in agreement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I thought about the "sculpture taking a selfie" when I read this article: [https://observer.com/2016/01/this-viral-image-makes-a- bold-s...](https://observer.com/2016/01/this-viral-image-makes-a-bold- statement-in-defense-of-selfie-culture/)

>The thing about this is that sculptures like these in art history were for the male gaze. Photoshop a phone to it and suddenly she's seen as vain and conceited. That's why I'm 100% for selfie culture because apparently men can gawk at women but when we realize how beautiful we are we're suddenly full of ourselves.

<comment><USER6> Isn't a third party admiring/honoring someones beauty independently an inherently different act than publicly proposing that ones own beauty should be admired?

agree there can be a double standard, but if there is, it can go both ways

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hmmm this article says a lot without really saying anything. It concludes with implication that we should stop shaming people for posting selfies, without tackling the question "why do people publish selfies in the first place?" or managing to refute the idea that it's narcissistic.

This paper [https://www.ntu.edu.sg/home/linqiu/publications/selfie.pdf](https://www.ntu.edu.sg/home/linqiu/publications/selfie.pdf) shows...

> " that selfies reflect their owners' personality traits. We identified a > number of personality-related cues. For example, emotional positivity > predicts agreeableness and open-ness, duckface indicates neuroticism, and > private location in the background indicates less conscientiousness. These > cues reflect the characteristics of their corresponding personality traits"

Meanwhile the article focused on the Oxford dictionary definition of selfie. I'd argue it's far more interesting to look at the urbandictionary definitions - there are over 70 definitions here - [https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Selfie](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Selfie) some of which are over 10 years old like this one from 2009...

> A picture taken of yourself that is planned to be uploaded to Facebook, > Myspace or any other sort of social networking website. You can usually see > the person's arm holding out the camera in which case you can clearly tell > that this person does not have any friends to take pictures of them so they > resort to Myspace to find internet friends and post pictures of themselves, > taken by themselves. A selfie is usually accompanied by a kissy face or the > individual looking in a direction that is not towards the camera.

Duck face was called "kissy face" back then apparently. Anyway it's interesting to see how a definition on urbandictionary has evolved over time and I'd argue the urbandictionary is a better gauge of groupthink on a topic like this than the Oxford Dictionary.

<comment><USER8> We should not shame people - that should be enough on its own IMHO :)

<comment><USER9> Completely disagree. Shame is a very potent society shaping factor. Without it humans wouldn't be as civilized.

So we should just use shame appropriately.

<comment><USER8> Intuitively, I agree with potential shaping factor. But shaming making people civilized - that certainly deserves a citation.

But that's all besides the point. Judging by myself only of course, I seriously doubt people shame others because of the duty to higher purpose (making people civilized).

<comment><USER10> Shame is a way to impose social norms without violence. To me it is intuitive that shame is a fundamental tool used to organize groups, especially when thinking about the formation of more primitive societies. Not intended to replace a citation, just my two cents.

<comment><USER11> A sportscaster recently talked about how great public shaming is. Athletes who make dumb tweets learn better if they're publicly shamed rather than when they are suspended from playing.

That makes sense to me - do something dumb socially, the repercussions should be social as well.

<comment><USER12> This is definitely a position that is easier to hold in a position of privilege/popularity.

Shaming has rather drastic negative consequences, especially in communities that shame intelligence, education, gender, race, neurotype, etc.

<comment><USER13> I don't think anyone here implied shaming doesn't have [potentially negative] consequences.

It's a non-violent tool to shape societal or group norms. If you are in a shitty group (e.g. one that shames education), that doesn't change the argument.

<comment><USER12> Rule #1 with any weapon is to ask what it looks like when the tables are turned and someone uses it against you.

<comment><USER9> Every weapon is bad in the arms of the enemy. I won't be cutting any hands because they can form fists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I always thought it was odd the selfie stick was so hated. It seems like a clever solution for getting a better photo, and it's not like it bothers anyone else around.

But I feel that's why people hate it, it's _too_ clever. Seems to get derided the same way a nerd kid gets beat the fuck up in school.

<comment><USER15> Idk know about it being "so hated" but it is sure enough the object of mockery because it means you actually spent money on it/ bothered to carry it around for the purpose of taking photos of your face, which, without thinking people taking selfies are monsters, I personally don't understand the appeal. I have no interest in taking pictures of myself even more so sharing them. I kinda see it as I see that thing that you're supposed to grab ice cubes with or elaborate beer-bottle openers. Those object kinda of make you feel that some people feel that they don't fully exist if they don't own __things __.

<comment><USER16> > I have no interest in taking pictures of myself even more so sharing them

As an old git (45) it seems strange to me that today's youth have known nothing else but a world where sharing pictures of yourself on social media is the norm. It's like its part of the reason for living.

<comment><USER15> The problem I have with images is that it is so easy to __say __things with them without having to take responsibility for any speech. Just imagine an Instagram feed but instead of pictures, it would read "I am so much more wealthy than you all" or "Look at me, I am happy" or "Hey! See how many friends I have?!" or "I've got such a beautiful body"? That would be more fun.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


4G phone will quickly change things - <AUTHOR> http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2010/05/27/4g_phone_will_quickly_change_things/?p1=Well_MostPop_Emailed1

<comment><USER2> The building in Allston (a neighborhood of Boston) I work in has cellphone towers on the roof. A few a weeks ago, Sprint contractors working on the building told me they were putting in 4G equipment, so 'we' should be getting 4G soon.

My experience with 4G in Las Vegas was mixed. I did manage to get speeds just under the 3 megabit quoted in the article, however that during trade show setup. After the show opened, due to network congestion or wireless interference, throughput dropped to be closer to 30 kilobit. Ping times also skyrocketed to 10s of seconds. Sprint 3G wasn't much better, but AT&T's 3G service actually stayed usable.

<comment><USER3> About 5 weeks ago I saw contractors installing 4G equipment on an existing Sprint tower near LAX. LA is supposed to get 4G this year too. If 4G is just 3mbps, it's not too compelling for me, because EVDO rev A on my phone and MiFi averages about 1.2mbps most places in LA.

The hotspot feature would be nice but again, at $30 more per month it's not worth it. I have a WiFi router app for my Windows Mobile phone, but I'd rather use my MiFi than kill the battery in my phone by tethering.

<comment><AUTHOR> High monthly fees and add-on charges like the hotspot will be big for consumers, but business users who get these devices through work won't feel the pinch directly.

<comment><USER3> Technically, the extra charge for the hotspot is the same as for non 4G Sprint phones. They charge extra for phone as modem on most phones unless you hack it. I'll wait and see how long it is before someone hacks this to provide free hotspot use.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Free Headtracking for Microsoft Flight Simulator – OpenTrack and AITrack - <AUTHOR> https://youtu.be/6uhcg43o7tc <comment><AUTHOR> It is amazing both for this kind of equipment and how open source quickly get this in place. It involves Microsoft (allow infrared tracker), opentrack that take advantage of this with open source and udp. Then unlike those iphone user just try to earn a few bucks (which is ok but not that useful), the webcam with AI is used.

The niche is small, the AI is not that hard but it is the integration that is crazy made.

As like the first use of internet is to play a game, do not underestimate the importance of just help each other to play the game.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The program is in github.com/AIRLegend/aitrack and You can reach opentrack, also in github, from that page.</comment>


From a Hackathon in Silicon Valley to the Conflict Mines of Congo - <AUTHOR> http://pixelhose.com/2011/07/26/from-a-hackaton-in-silicon-valley-to-conflict-mines-of-congo/

<comment><USER2> The sections on perception are good, though I'd question the connection between wearing nerdy clothes and skills - always looks more like people desperately trying to belong.

</comment><comment><USER3> Kind of amusing take on perception of technology</comment>


Ask HN: What are you reading during the Covid slow down? and why? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> The Great Influenza by John Barry for some perspective on current events. A good read so far.

</comment><comment><USER3> Michael Crichton's Airframe. No reason other than it was lying around.

</comment><comment><USER4> The Right Kind of Crazy - For Positive Inspiration

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool and there is an audiobook for it</comment></comment>


Misconceptions about evolution - <AUTHOR> http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/misconceptions_faq.php

<comment><USER2> _For many of these people, science and religion simply deal with different realms. Science deals with natural causes for natural phenomena, while religion deals with beliefs that are beyond the natural world._

I think scientists are too quick to diffuse the religion vs science arguement. Maybe religious scientist can enlighten me on this. When one bases beliefs on essentially nothing ('gut feelings', apparitions, what someone wrote down 1000 yrs ago), how do you reconcile the use of evidence for establishing belief in one domain, and then not require this in another? We have absolutely zero credible evidence of a creator, an afterlife, or Santa Claus. Pick your religion, what method do you use to evalute it's 'factualness' vs some other religion? Usually the answer is that it's what you were first exposed to. This world would be much better off without the concept of an afterlife. Focus on the here and now, it's all we get.

<comment><USER3> It sounds like you feel there is an inherent conflict between science and religion (or am I misreading). I see no reason why this needs to be the case. Once you move beyond explanations for things that can make testable predictions, then you are out outside of science you have moved in to philosophy. At that point all explanations that don't contradict what is observed become equally valid/invalid.

Take for example the question more general question of whether or not there is a creator behind the universe. There is no real way to prove, or at least no one has come up with a way to do so, whether or not this is the case. As a result, either answer is equally valid/invalid.

<comment><USER4> Science is far more than "testable predictions" and covers an entire method that we have found to be the best and only way to understand reality with timid certainty. Science itself is basically a subfield of epistemology and it ties together both WHAT we know and WHY we actually know it instead of simply believe it. Science is dedicated to finding out what reality is (as best as mathematics or other abstract structures can describe it at least) and that sets up a class of rigor for certainty which religion can simply not touch. Also, built into science is a feedback loop that constantly reevaluates what it means to be certain and tries to tie that certainty to the real world through engineering, which, again, religion cannot even begin to attempt.

What we call science today is a formalization of what humans have been doing for tens of thousands of years: looking for patterns and relationships in cause and effect. The very act of making the first wheel, paper out of papyrus thousands of years before the lumber industry, or a calendar by looking at the stars is an act of scientific exploration that probes not just the natural world, but how we discover what the natural world really is. Over time that methodology has included into our cultural knowledge things like gravity and horticulture while excluding things like rain dances and homeopathic medicine.

In the end, you either accept the rigor and structure on knowledge and certainty developed by science and the scientific method (which, by the way, created modern civilization as you see it today) or you don't. If you accept it, religion by its very definition (supernatural and all that) conflicts with science. If you don't, then there is a basic difference in core assumptions and there really is no argument.

<comment><USER3> I agree completely with your first two paragraphs. I'll even buy the first sentence of your last paragraph. However, I fail to see why religion inherently conflicts with science. It is in no way clear that the scientific method can be applied to everything. Religion, or one of many other arbitrary philosophies, can fill in the parts that science does not cover.

If you start with the hypothesis that the universe was constructed by a conscious creator, how do you address that scientifically? As far as I can tell, the answer is, you can't.

<comment><USER4> You can't start with the hypothesis that "the universe was constructed by a conscious creator" until you have some clear evidence that such a hypothesis is warranted. This is where science conflicts with religion. If you're going to say something exists, or that a certain event or entity caused an effect, you have to prove it. Just because we do not yet understand multiverses (or whatever is out there) and what happened before the big bang, just because we do not yet have sensors to see beyond the scope of space-time, does not let any self proclaimed philosopher fill in the gaps with whatever they happen to read from the nearest religious text.

It doesn't matter whether you call yourself a theologian, philosopher, or scientist, if you're going to make an assertion or assumption, you have to back it up. If you don't, you operate outside of the human body of knowledge that can be confirmed as true, or even remotely accurate.

<comment><USER3> That doesn't make sense. Once you have clear evidence of something, it is no longer a hypothesis. You can start with any hypothesis you want. Of course if you expect something to be treated as scientific fact you need clear evidence. Until you get clear evidence, it is a matter of philosophy, and you can fill it with anything that doesn't contradict the known facts.

<comment><USER4> I didn't say evidence of the hypothesis, I said "evidence that the hypothesis is WARRANTED" which is a very big difference. If apples don't fall from trees and matter is not attracted to other matter then the gravity hypothesis has no evidence for it to even be considered! We see apples fall and planets orbit and matter attracting other matter and so we think, there must be something there! So we investigate and only after much testing do we say that the hypothesis is scientific fact within the bounds it was tested.

>> Until you get clear evidence, it is a matter of philosophy, and you can fill it with anything that doesn't contradict the known facts.

NO YOU CAN'T. Why? Because the nonsense ("philosophy") you fill it with STILL REQUIRES EVIDENCE when you claim that something positively certainly EXISTS such as a creator of the universe. You can claim you HYPOTHESIZE that there exists a creator, but it is on YOU to prove that a creator exists, not on anyone else to disprove it, especially when the scientific body of knowledge, both theoretical and experimental, shows no evidence and no sign of a creator outside of humans projecting their own desires.

<comment><USER3> If a hypothesis doesn't contradict the known facts, how do you determine if it is warranted?

You only require evidence if you expect others to believe the same thing. I'm not arguing that anyone should believe in any religion. I'm arguing that a scientist can hold religious beliefs without conflict.

> the scientific body of knowledge, both theoretical and experimental, shows > no evidence and no sign of a creator outside of humans projecting their own > desires.

This seems like it would strongly depend on who you ask. I'm not even sure how you would come up with a criteria for this (although maybe that is just limitations in my own imagination).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Quite interesting. It corrects well the statement "Natural selection is about survival of the very fittest individuals in a population." to: Though "survival of the fittest" is the catchphrase of natural selection, "survival of the fit enough" is more accurate. [http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/misconceptions_faq....](http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/misconceptions_faq.php#b6)

I think that's a very important clarification, because we may look around and see very diverse population with very diverse handicaps - from mental to physical, and question how it could be that "survival of the fittest" let all this happen.

Information is also organized really well - short paragraphs, easy to consume, with links to more details in some sections. Target audience is probably someone who wants a few questions answered, but not a creationist or a biology scientist.

<comment><USER6> > Though "survival of the fittest" is the catchphrase of natural selection, > "survival of the fit enough" is more accurate

Would it make sense to turn it around and say "Natural selection is about unfit individuals in a population dying off"

<comment><USER7> The most accurate way to phrase it would be to say that "natural selection is about less fit individuals having a decreased chance of passing on their genes."

Evolution is really about which genes are passed on to the next generation. Most of the population at any given time is going to be less-fit than the fittest (by definition). That doesn't mean they don't pass their genes on. While totally unfit people may not be able to pass on their genes at all, many, if not most, of a generally less-fit population will pass on their genes at least one generation. Depending on the quality of the mate they are able to obtain, their genes may not go further than the one generation, or they may keep going for many generations. On average, the less-fit genes will "die off" but this isn't always the case, for many reasons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My favorite one is: Evolution and Creationism should be given equal time in education.

Not even the Catholic Church thinks Creationism should be taught (I'm Catholic if it matters) in school as science.

From Wikipedia: Here is viewpoint of the Vatican's chief astronomer, Fr. George Coyne, issued a statement on 18 November 2005 saying that "Intelligent design isn't science even though it pretends to be. If you want to teach it in schools, intelligent design should be taught when religion or cultural history is taught, not science." Cardinal Paul Poupard added that "the faithful have the obligation to listen to that which secular modern science has to offer, just as we ask that knowledge of the faith be taken in consideration as an expert voice in humanity." He also warned of the permanent lesson we have learned from the Galileo affair, and that "we also know the dangers of a religion that severs its links with reason and becomes prey to fundamentalism." Fiorenzo Facchini, professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Bologna, called intelligent design unscientific, and wrote in the January 16–17, 2006 edition L'Osservatore Romano: "But it is not correct from a methodological point of view to stray from the field of science while pretending to do science.... It only creates confusion between the scientific plane and those that are philosophical or religious." Kenneth R. Miller is another prominent Catholic scientist widely known for vehemently opposing Young Earth Creationism and Intelligent Design.

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure why "not even the Catholic Church" comes into play (is it the standards bar for forcing religious topics in schools?)

I'm from the bible belt of the USA, and I've only heard this from protestant christians (some of whom I'd use as the standards bar for the above).

<comment><USER10> It's only recently the Catholic Church has gone so nutso right-wing - in even recent decades they were _heavy_ on the social justice, relatively speaking.

<comment><USER11> >"in even recent decades they were heavy on the social justice"

They are still very active in social justice activity. At least that is very true in poor zones of Latin America

<comment><USER10> Yep. Even as an atheist and humanist, I am happy to commend Christians who do actual good for people :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I would point anyone who subscribes to any of the several current fad diets to this one: [http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/misconceptions_faq....](http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/misconceptions_faq.php#a8)

<comment><USER13> What fad diets are you referring to?

<comment><USER12> Any diet that is based on an unsubstantiated claim that "humans have not evolved to digest X" where X is something that humans have been eating for thousands of years. Paleo comes to mind, but there are others. The claim made by these diets isn't structurally invalid, but often the claims are made without any investigation and are substantiated by anecdotal evidence that people feel better when eliminating X from their diet. That's fine, but that's not the same thing as being incompatible from an evolutionary standpoint.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> None of the evolution deniers that I've met would have the slightest interest in reading this list, but I suppose it's useful to quickly look up counter- arguments to their claims. A similar site with a greater focus on creationist claims can be found at [http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/list.html](http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/list.html)

<comment><USER15> As someone who believes in both an intelligent designer creating the world, and micro (but not macro) evolution, I am extremely interested in reading this.

I just thought I would let you know :)

<comment><USER14> If you're genuinely interested in reading this and accepting facts that may challenge your beliefs, then I applaud you.

Here's some reading to get you started: [http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB902.html](http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB902.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> No matter how it's explained, I still can't wrap my brain around how evolution produces complex systems. How do systems with interdependent processes and parts get produced by a process that seems to proceed stepwise?

<comment><USER17> You're a programmer, right? A lot of people on here are.

You know how when starting something completely from scratch, there is so much foundational work to do, making frameworks, helper libraries, classes, etc. You have to do all that stuff before your program can do much (assuming no third party libraries).

Well, once your code base (or just your knowledge of existing libraries) is advanced enough, you can more easily combine pieces of it with relatively small changes to the code. You can mix and match parts and the result will be something very complex that may be based on person-years worth of work while only taking a few minutes to assemble.

Pieces of code can be removed from the final product with a one line change. While the code still exists in the final product, it isn't referenced anywhere.

These are a couple of analogies that help me think about it. They don't explain everything, but it should be enough to make clear that just because evolution works by "stepwise" changes that doesn't mean one step can't create huge differences.

<comment><USER16> Thanks, that's an interesting way of illustrating it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Yeah, but if humans came from monkeys, _why are there still monkeys_? I bet you can't answer me that.

(cough)

<comment><USER5> And the related question: If God made man from dirt, why is there still dirt?

<comment><USER10> O noes, you have just disproven biology!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> So, nothing exploded and created everything? How come?

<comment><USER19> You're at least asking the question at the right level. Most people get bogged down arguing about how the something that already was became different stuff that was. "Why is there something and not nothing at all?" is an excellent philosophical base to start building a cosmology on.

<comment><USER15> I was just thinking this when I read your comment. It is probably the largest thing that is holding me to my faith in an a God.

Whether or not evolution is true, it explains _how_ our world was created, but not why.

<comment><USER19> Just remember science is about what and how, when you get to stuff like why, it's philosophy. 90% of all of the ridiculous arguments that seem to happen around this subject appear due to the inability to keep these separate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The biggest misconception about evolution is shared both opponents and proponents.

Most often the discussion is about whether evolution is true or not.

Evolution is not true. It's not false either and any discussion about it being that is missing the point.

Evolution is the best model we have to explain how life and species interact and evolve.

There are no finite answers in evolution, only observations of phenomena. But those observations best describe the biological world.

<comment><USER21> _Evolution is not true. It 's not false either and any discussion about it being that is missing the point. Evolution is the best model we have to explain how life and species interact and evolve._

I think you mean that the " _theory_ of evolution via natural selection" is the best model we have to explain the observed phenomena of evolution. Analogous to the Newtownian theory of gravity explaining the mechanics of observed terrestrial and celestial gravity. Gravity and evolution are simply there, how they occur requires a theoretical explanation.

<comment><USER22> I wouldn't say it's observed; no one has observed billions of years of evolution. That's why there is debate. Please don't compare to the observation of gravity; it's not even comparable.

<comment><USER23> I think it is comparable. We do have the fossil record, after all.

<comment><USER20> That does not allow you to conclude that evolution is true the way that you can conclude gravity is true/factual.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I detest evolution. Beings suffering, trapped in limited bodies and minds, forced to kill for survival and plagued with diseases. It's horrible that a person's quality of life relies on the results of a silly genetic lottery. It's a cosmic joke, I tell you.

What have these creatures done wrong to deserve such ridicule?

[http://wtfevolution.tumblr.com](http://wtfevolution.tumblr.com)

</comment><comment><USER25> Publishing a long list of misconceptions is a really bad way to destroy them. Readers will skim and just remember the headlines, all of which are false statements.

Spread facts, not "myths"

<comment><USER26> > Spread facts, not "myths"

I think this guy [1], with his PhD thesis on the topic, would beg to differ.

Also, I don't think the website's sole purpose is to _destroy_ them (misconceptions/people?). Some of us lay people who are knowledgeable, but have learnt the wrong factoid, for one reason or another, could still benefit from it.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cY_o4A1wzsg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cY_o4A1wzsg)

<comment><USER27> Yeah. I haven't had time to read the list (I plan on reading it later, ) but the tone from the intro didn't seem to be concerned about destroying people.

I'm personally in the camp of folks that picks up information about evolution as I go, since it's not really related to anything I do in my day to day, and I appreciate a concise description of possible misconceptions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > "Bacteria, HIV, malaria, and cancer have evolved resistance to our drugs."

Honest question... if HIV is a virus, and virus are not living forms [1], how can they evolve? In that case wouldn't be the host cell the one that evolved?

[1] [http://www.virology.ws/2004/06/09/are-viruses- living/](http://www.virology.ws/2004/06/09/are-viruses-living/)

<comment><USER28> > Honest question... if HIV is a virus, and virus are not living forms, how > can they evolve?

The requirements for evolution are a subset of the requirements for "life", so its quite possible for things that are not alive to evolve.

> In that case wouldn't be the host cell the one that evolved?

Viruses can be a source of variation in the genetic code of living things that contributes to evolution in the living things, but that's a different effect than the evolution of the virus itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Well, as far as I am concerned it is a simple matter of people not being intellectually prepared to understand the theory. I am not saying this to be elitist. Not at all.

I had a conversation with a guy at a xmas party last year. I don't have a clue how we went where we went but we ended up talking about how "human wizards" can figure out the position of the moon every day and write an app to show you. To this guy this was no different from magic. There is no way in the universe that anyone is going to make a good case in favor of the theory of evolution to this person until he elevates himself a few rungs in the educational ladder. That's just a fact.

What about scientists who claim to believe in creationism? For the most part I see it this way: If you are a nobody scientist with no hopes of becoming anyone at all, what is the easiest way to become someone? Thank you Jesus! I've met and have spoken to a few such "scientists" who, for example, teach at religious schools. You can see right through them. They are virtual gods within those organizations. They are elevated to prestigious standings within that community. They are held as proof that someone crossed the proverbial isle and, by the way, he is a honest-to-god scientist. No, they are not. They are business men. And quite smart if you ask me. If you don't see an upshot to your scientific career, go to a religious university and proclaim you've seen the light. They'll have you writing books in short order.

Then there are guys like Ben Carson, the ex-Johns Hopkins surgeon republicans are parading around. The guy is obviously very smart yet he is religious to a ridiculous degree. I like a lot of his ideas. The problem is that every third sentence is about religion. I don't know much about him so can't really opine beyond saying that people who are constantly praising god and talking about how everything is preordained and that they are god's tools, etc. scare the crap out of me. Not a huge step from there to Iran. Is he playing a mental game because of his political aspirations? Maybe. Republicans need to realize they are loosing a huge chunk of the population for putting the bible in front of everything they say and do. I digress.

I am looking forward to the lecture [0] at Caltech on the 20th given by Richard Dawkins and Michael Shermer. Should be interesting. Anyone going?

[0] [http://www.richarddawkins.net/events/2013/10/21/fall-book- to...](http://www.richarddawkins.net/events/2013/10/21/fall-book- tour-2013-cal-tech-with-michael-shermer)

</comment><comment><USER30> There are two funny things:

\- Evolution itself is pretty much outdated theory. Genetics, biochemistry and ethology are light years beyond Darwin. It is like discussing Copernicus while scientists are working on quantum gravity.

\- Evolution does not disprove creation and vice versa. God could use evolution as a tool. And God could also create Earth with all those fossils underground just for a joke. :-)

<comment><USER31> None of these things are funny or true for that matter.

 _> Evolution itself is pretty much outdated theory._

Evolution as an abstract model is pretty old, but it's not likely to ever be outdated. To this day, it describes accurately what is going on with any kind of adaptive system, not only in biology but also computer science and information theory, and one could make some convincing arguments for physics as well.

 _> Genetics, biochemistry and ethology are light years beyond Darwin._

It's true that Darwin didn't necessarily know much about the inner workings of what he was observing. All he could do is make the actual observations, and reason about them. This led to a key idea about how organisms develop, and it is this idea that became part of the basic tool set of any scientist, it's right up there with Pythagoras and Newton. Genetic and biochemical research didn't really exist in Darwin's time, but the principles he described are found everywhere you look in these fields. And if it hadn't been for Darwin, someone else would have found this out, it became gradually more inescapable the more data we gathered. In fact, today it wouldn't be called much of an achievement at all, since the mechanism is so obvious and ubiquitous whenever you look at bio data.

 _> \- God could use evolution as a tool. And God could also create Earth with all those fossils underground just for a joke._

Those two are actually somewhat mutually exclusive. Either you believe that some kind of deity "uses" evolution as a tool, at which point people should ask themselves what the point of having gods is if they're not actually doing anything measurable at all.

The second point, although you meant it as a joke, is actually harder to argue with - because it leaves reason so far behind it becomes difficult to have any meaningful discussion about it at all: there is nothing in principle to say against the argument that our whole environment and history could be manufactured. We would have no way of knowing that, in fact there would be no way of knowing the actual age of the universe. It could be 2 seconds old in that case. All we have to reason against this approach is an argument from plausibility and Occam's razor.

<comment><USER30> > Evolution as an abstract model is pretty old, but it's not likely to ever be > outdated.

But it is outdated. Survival of the fittest is gross oversimplification and it is holding back more complex theories, which could provide better results. Wanna explain how virus interacts with human body? Forget chemistry, you will have to butcher your theory with terms like 'fittest', 'parasite', 'species' and so on. Otherwise nobody will understand it and nobody will publish it.

Anyway, I do not live in America, I do not even believe in god, I just find this debate ridiculous.

<comment><USER31> When scientists today talk about evolutionary processes, that's very different from the way "survival of the fittest" is crammed down the public's throat with animal documentaries and the like.

 _> Forget chemistry, you will have to butcher your theory with terms like 'fittest', 'parasite', 'species' and so on._

I'm not sure what you mean by that. Like all fields of knowledge, bio sciences adhere to a certain lingo consensus to express ideas. In some cases, an eventual expansion of the original meaning is inevitable, but if anything I'd actually accuse many science papers of doing the opposite (creating new expressions where none were needed). There is no butchering going on in respect to evolution as a process, though of course there are ongoing conversations about the forces and sub-processes going on in nature. But just because our models aren't complete that doesn't mean we don't have a pretty good idea of what's going on in general. Especially in molecular biology, the theoretical advances and the amount of raw knowledge has been nothing short of staggering in recent years.

 _> Anyway, I do not live in America, I do not even believe in god, I just find this debate ridiculous._

That makes your original comment all the more puzzling, I guess. Your post sure seemed to have a religious background.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Shutting Down a VR Startup - <AUTHOR> https://theaccidentalengineer.com/shutting-down-vr-startup-elliot-godzich/ <comment><USER2> It's sad that companies won't shell out $2k so their employees can work in 3d.

"After developing it in 12 months—faster than any other hardware product in company history—IBM announced the Personal Computer on 12 August 1981. Pricing started at US$1,565 (equivalent to $4,123 in 2016) for a configuration with 16K RAM, Color Graphics Adapter, and no disk drives"

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

</comment><comment><USER2> Not sure why tracking time under different buckets seemed unusual?

maybe most companies don't go into details on why tasks or roles end up rolling up into "projects" and/or "maintenance" but the IRS makes a distinction and at larger companies you have lots of audits(internal and external) so they stay on top of it.</comment>


Leave me alone Can't you see I'm learning your language? - <AUTHOR> http://www.languageimpact.com/articles/gt/leaveme.htm

<comment><USER2> Wow! This article contains a lot of good advice for the hackers who want to learn another language. I've done some research myself on language learning,

<http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html>

and this article mentions a lot of significant issues with good citations to current research.</comment>


Visualizing Representations: Deep Learning and Human Beings - <AUTHOR> http://colah.github.io/posts/2015-01-Visualizing-Representations/

<comment><USER2> I cut the following sections, on user interface and machine learning, because they were too speculative. But they might be of interest here, so I'll post them.

===

Perhaps you are now persuaded that deep learning has something helpful to offer in visualization problems. But visualization is really about making interfaces for humans to interact with data. It's a small subset of the general user interface problem. I think that machine learning, and deep learning in particular, also has a lot to offer for the general problem...

[Remainder moved to notehub, to be keep comment to a reasonable length: [https://www.notehub.org/2015/1/16/perhaps-you-are-now- persua...](https://www.notehub.org/2015/1/16/perhaps-you-are-now-persuaded- that-deep-) ]

</comment><comment><USER3> I really like the figure showing the nearest-neighbour graph of MNIST being stretched as it goes through the hidden sigmoid layer. Really helps build an intuition for those of us who think visually or geometrically.

He quotes Bret Victor at the end:

"When Hamming says there could be unthinkable thoughts, we have to take that as "Yes, but we build tools that adapt these unthinkable thoughts to the way that our minds work and allow us to think these thoughts that were previously unthinkable.""

Great work!

<comment><USER4> This is a fabulous article in general, and I love the Bret Victor quote as well.

And while I love the analogy -- and I think is applicable to what we're calling data science -- thoughts, speaking broadly, are fundamentally different than sounds and smells and wavelengths of light. The essence of thought is that we think it (it is thunk?). All of those other examples are subjective representations of physical phenomenon, while constitutes a thought, again broadly speaking, is less well agreed upon (understood?).

Still a terrific article, my pedantic nitpicking aside.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> He makes an excellent point about the possibility of comparing word vectors trained on different corpora to make quantitative statements about differences in culture, either over time or between sub-cultures:

"I'd like to emphasize that which words are feminine or masculine, young or adult, isn't intrinsic. It's a reflection of our culture, through our use of language in a cultural artifact. What this might say about our culture is beyond the scope of this essay. My hope is that this trick, and machine learning more broadly, might be a useful tool in sociology, and especially subjects like gender, race, and disability studies."

<comment><USER2> Thanks! That was one of the most exciting parts of the post for me.

It would be really cool to have something, like the Google Books ngram viewer [1], which would allow you to see how this changes over time, using a huge corpus. I imagine a graph where the x-axis is year, the y-axis is a linear combination of word vectors that the user defines, and then the user can select words and see them plotted over time.

[1] [https://books.google.com/ngrams](https://books.google.com/ngrams)

<comment><USER5> Ha, I was thinking along exactly the same lines when I read that paragraph. Last week, I found myself reading a 1784 magazine article [1] about "Aerostatical Experiments" (the first hot air balloons) which referred to "inflammable air" which is what they called hydrogen in those days. Google n-gram viewer gives a beautiful illustration of when the name changed [2] -- this is an obvious switchover but I imagine many words change meaning and usage more slowly and in more subtle ways, so your proposal was quite exciting to think about. Let's hope someone takes up that line of research, either from the humanities side or the machine learning side.

[1] [https://books.google.com/books?id=lvsRAAAAYAAJ&lpg=PA29&ots=...](https://books.google.com/books?id=lvsRAAAAYAAJ&lpg=PA29&ots=krFkUZKv1t&dq=principals%20of%20aerostatical%20experiments&pg=PA31#v=onepage&q&f=false)

[2] [https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=inflammable+ai...](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=inflammable+air%2Chydrogen&year_start=1750&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cinflammable%20air%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Chydrogen%3B%2Cc0)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Colah, your posts are really inspiring and thoughtful. Your thoughts about visualising the space of representations by looking at the properties of pairwise distance matrix is quite illuminating. It might be a nice empirical way to get a glimpse of the model complexity: If "simpler" models cluster close to more complex models, the simpler models are more desirable.

I wonder if all over-fitted models cluster in one region in the meta-SNE space, or do they show up as noise?

Keep up the great posts!

<comment><USER2> Thanks, xtacy!

> If "simpler" models cluster close to more complex models, the simpler models > are more desirable.

Well, it would suggest you aren't winning very much for your more complex model, at the very least.

> I wonder if all over-fitted models cluster in one region in the meta-SNE > space, or do they show up as noise?

This corresponds to an empirical question: do models overfit in the same way, or different ways?

One small experiment I did, which might offer some intuition here, was training lots of extremely small networks on MNIST, with hidden layers of only 1, 2 or 5 neurons. What do they look like in meta-SNE?

Well, it turns out that when you only have a very small number of neurons, they latch on to random useful features! These randomly selected features don't tend to be the same, so you end up with the models horribly disagreeing on what is similar and what is different.

As you increase the number of neurons, the space of features they look at, if not the features of individual neurons, becomes similar across models. And so the models agree more, and cluster more tightly.

...

Another fun idea for using meta-SNE is ensemble models. We know that training a bunch of models and then averaging their results (ensembling) can improve results a lot. When is this helpful? My guess is that the farther apart compatibly good models are in meta-SNE space, the more ensembling will help, because they've learned different things.

<comment><USER6> Ensemble (and also boosted) models: Very nice idea.

I like the takeaway that meta-SNE idea is powerful to compare the space of models by through the lens of pairwise distances as a proxy for the distance metric. Are distances _the_ defining property for a vector space R^d? Could you have used some other quantity instead of pairwise distances?

<comment><USER2> There "the defining property" if you want to mod out isometries. :) They're nice, because they encode the geometry of the data.

You could very reasonably try things like cosine distance. And I did some experiments, to good results, with sqrt(d(x,y)), to emphasize really close together data points as special. But these don't feel as motivated.

Hm. It might also be interesting to try with the p_ij values from t-SNE, which model the topology of the data. Then you'd really be getting meta. :)

<comment><USER6> Interesting. IIUC, what you're implying is that defining a metric defines the topology and they're equivalent.

Isn't p_ij in t-SNE also derived from the distances themselves, where p_ij ~ student_t(d_ij, degrees_of_freedom) (I forget how the d.o.f. is actually computed in t-SNE.)

Which leads me to one way this distance based approach might be limited: It models similarities using distances, which are symmetric. If similarities aren't symmetric, then this visualisation could hide some information. For example: The specific entity "BMW car" is more similar to the more general entity "car" than the entity "car" is to "BMW car." It seems this asymmetry could capture things (such as the generality of concepts), not reflected in metric spaces (on first thought).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting stuff--it's worth mentioning some of the prior visualization work in this area, e.g.

Interactive data exporation: [http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/75818/cockburn- ComputingS...](http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/75818/cockburn- ComputingSurveys09.pdf)

Distance-based visualization: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multidimensional_scaling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multidimensional_scaling)

</comment><comment><USER8> A tangentially related question: why do the fonts look like computer modern? Do you write the article in LaTeX and have it translated into HTML preserving the font style?

</comment><comment><USER9> This page has some serious issues with JavaScript.

Edit: Or of course my browser has issue with it.

<comment><USER2> I have to load some non-trivial datasets for the interactive visualizations. It may take a minute for javascript to fully load.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Luastatic – Build an executable from a Lua program - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ers35/luastatic <comment><USER2> You can do this in Luajit with the following trick:

        for f in *.lua; do
            luajit -b $f `basename $f .lua`.o
        done

        ar rcus libmylib.a *.o
        gcc -o myexe main-stub.c -I/usr/local/include/luajit-2.0 -L/usr/local/lib -lluajit-5.1 -Wl,--whole-archive libmylib.a -Wl,--no-whole-archive -Wl,-E

Where main-stub.c looks like this:

        #include <lua.h>
        #include <lauxlib.h>
        #include <stdlib.h>
        #include <stdio.h>

        int
        main(void)
        {
            int status, result, i;
            lua_State *L;

            L = luaL_newstate();

            luaL_openlibs(L);

            /* load your lua entry point here */
            status = luaL_loadfile(L, "mainluafile.lua");
            if (status) {
                fprintf(stderr, "Couldn't load file: %s\n", lua_tostring(L, -1));
                exit(1);
            }

            result = lua_pcall(L, 0, LUA_MULTRET, 0);
            if (result) {
                fprintf(stderr, "Failed to run script: %s\n", lua_tostring(L, -1));
                exit(1);
            }

            lua_close(L);

            return 0;
        }

The executables produced are very small because you dynamically link to Luajit and statically link to your own Lua code. I have a full media scheduler running at 100 sites which is only 40k. And it runs like a demon on ARM too.

<comment><USER3> That's a neat trick! Is there any reason you can't do this with luac? I tried the equivalent to what you're doing with luac, but gcc complains that "member libmylib.a(luafunc.o) in archive is not an object".

What's the difference between the bytecode generated by luajit compared to luac?

<comment><USER2> Luajit detects the kind of output file passed to the -b option, in this case .o, and writes the data accordingly. It's actually writing compiled architecture-specific object code here which can be linked into a static library. You can also pass it a .c or a .h extension to get c source or headers.

I think luac compiles to bytecode only.

<comment><USER3> Ah, this explains why running a file on the .o file said it was lua bytecode. This feature of luajit makes it much more appealing. Thanks for the info!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For multiple lua files, you can first bundle them into a single lua file using squish.[0]

[0]: [https://github.com/LuaDist/squish](https://github.com/LuaDist/squish)

</comment><comment><USER5> Also check:

Bundle [1], using LuaJIT

Luvi [2], which is also able to generate a single file executable and you can include static resources.

[1] [https://luapower.com/bundle](https://luapower.com/bundle)

[2] [https://github.com/luvit/luvi](https://github.com/luvit/luvi)

</comment><comment><USER6> Similar project for Python: [http://www.pyinstaller.org/](http://www.pyinstaller.org/) Works with multiple source files and supports widely used Python modules out of the box.

</comment><comment><USER7> Pretty good size: 214K (on amd64 Linux):

      $ ls -lhd hello
            -rwxr-xr-x 1 admin admin 214K Oct 26 09:53 hello
      $ ldd hello
    	linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007fff5f5ff000)
    	libm.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libm.so.6 (0x00007f10611e7000)
    	libdl.so.2 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libdl.so.2 (0x00007f1060fe3000)
    	libc.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 (0x00007f1060c39000)
    	/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007f10614f6000)

(edit: formatting)

</comment><comment><USER8> This is an interesting project, thanks for sharing.

Did you explore the possibility to use LuaJIT instead? The ability to do this and also integrate with Terra [http://terralang.org/](http://terralang.org/) would create a great project!

<comment><USER9> I think this is targeted at the scenario where the developer works in Lua but is deploying to platform without any Lua dependencies. Not sure if it will pull in any used packages though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Lua binary modules are supported by referencing the path to the module's static library and any dependent libraries. Used packages are not automatically pulled in. LuaRocks integration would be interesting: [https://github.com/keplerproject/luarocks/pull/264](https://github.com/keplerproject/luarocks/pull/264)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Ha! I remember you from the G-Wan forum days (:

I'm so excited to see you're still active!</comment>


Amazon flipped a default and made me thousands of dollars - <AUTHOR> http://www.expatsoftware.com/Articles/amazon-flipped-a-default-and-made-me-thousands-of-dollars.html <comment><USER2> As a recently new customer to AWS. This service sounds really useful.

Quite possibly one of the best pricing pages[1] I've seen in a while too.

[1] [https://www.s3stat.com/Pricing.aspx](https://www.s3stat.com/Pricing.aspx)

<comment><USER3> AWS pricing is crazy complicated. I gave a presentation on this a few years ago ([https://speakerdeck.com/jpsingleton/aws- pricing](https://speakerdeck.com/jpsingleton/aws-pricing)). It may be a bit out of date by now but I could update it and write it up as a blog post if people are interested?

<comment><USER4> > AWS pricing is crazy complicated.

I agree strongly with this. I've had clients before who would refuse to make the move up from VPSs despite numerous advantages because the AWS product descriptions and prices were incomprehensible to them.

<comment><USER5> It's not hard. Just figure out what your costs would be on dedicated or colocated hardware. Then multiply by 10.

<comment><USER6> Everything is hard if you try it for the first time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here are my 2 cents about the pricing page you have @jasonkester

"Cheap Bastard Plan" is both little too much slang, and unpleasant to look at if you are in a demo to show this service to upper management.

I am not saying that you should have a boring, enterprisey pricing page with formal words, in fact I really like what you did there with free plan. Just saying that you can rephrase it with little more easy-going words. :)

Great product, congrats!

<comment><AUTHOR> You'll want Upper Management to be looking at the Features Page[1] instead. Though I should probably add some more check marks to it just to be on the safe side.

[1] [https://www.s3stat.com/Features.aspx](https://www.s3stat.com/Features.aspx)

<comment><USER8> The fact that some of the 'features' are two lines, but there's no way to differentiate rows makes that page kind of hard to read, fwiw. Not that it really matters, because who actually gives a shit about those aside from the # of check marks!

<comment><USER9> Just wanted to +1 this issue, OP can fix this if they increase the width of the container of the page.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hey Jason congrats on your product. Really liked your writing style. Very funny and informative. Nice job.

Do you worry about amazon releasing something to analyse the logs and killing your business? They just released Amazon QuickSight in beta and I think you will probably be able to import logs from their services. Of course the user will have to create the reports themselves but I guess your audience is tech savvy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely. But it's been 10 years now, and the best they've come up with is a sort of stripped down Cloudwatch-style request count graph for Cloudfront usage. That did actually cause a bit of a dip in signups when it came out, but I think there's still a need for more detailed reports.

But yeah, the expectation is that they'll squash it dead any minute now. I'm hoping that the next thing I'm building will have replaced S3stat as an income stream by the time that happens.

<comment><USER11> Care to enlighten us on just what that is?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> EDIT: Well that will teach me to read more closely! Continue below if you want to see me make an idiot of myself. Turns out I missed the point

So as I type this the votes are charging up the ranks (about 10 votes since I started typing this comment), so let me start off:

I can't possibly see how this is Amazon's fault. You're arguing that you offer a service for free (for a little while anyway), and that more people are taking you up on that because they have logs lying around, because Amazon has prompted them in the past to save these logs?

I mean, shouldn't this help your service?

a) now people can try it out because they already have logs and don't have to wait (which you've already identified was an issue), and

b) now people will end up with a bucket full of logs, think 'how can I analyse and use these logs', and go looking for a product like yours!

<comment> m-app Although I mostly skimmed the article, I have to say that the feeling I got from the article changed a couple of times between positive v. negative. This left me confused and because of that I guess I missed the point as well.

<comment><USER13> For me, the words "amazon made me thousands of dollars" in the title rather set the tone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Such a shame that Azure Blob Storage doesn't support "default pages" i.e. index.html

Then it could be used for static web site hosting just like S3 :(

See also: [https://feedback.azure.com/forums/217298-storage/suggestions...](https://feedback.azure.com/forums/217298-storage/suggestions/1180039-support- a-default-blob-for-blob-storage-containers)

<comment><USER3> Wouldn't it be easier to use GitHub or GitLab pages for a static site?

<comment><USER14> Depends on the scenario really. If you want it version controlled, yeah sure. But there are other use cases that don't need that. You just want a "publishing target" that is low cost and minimal complexity. Plus GitHub/GitLab don't have the same number of availability-9's that Azure Blob Storage or AWS S3 can have.

<comment><USER3> True but if you don't have a billing account set up then SCM can be easier. I usually stick CloudFlare in front of it for availability (with multiple entries for the origin in the DNS). You can even add a page rule to cache the HTML in case the server does go down.

<comment><USER14> Yeah I've done the Cloudflare + GitHub pattern as well for a couple things. But not everything is suited to that, nor needs that. Cloudflare also isn't going to cache large static content for very long or at all. Or just having any cache in between at all might be the wrong solution entirely. Anyway... :) S3 supports this and AzStorage doesn't - this needs fixing!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Felt good after reading the story. That's a proper happy ending!

<comment><USER16> I really enjoyed the writing style :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The way everything is formulated it sounds like successfully exploiting people, but actually it's the good side of capitalism: Someone providing a valuabe service and getting paid well for it.

</comment><comment><USER18> Well, turns out your tool is exactly what we were looking for a few days ago.

</comment><comment><USER19> The cheap bastard plan seems like it would be great for SEO, any stats you can share with us jasonkester on how well it worked out?

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm actually quite amazed that a more fleshed out solution to AWS logging doesn't exist. I've worked on a small side project to pipe AWS logs to arbitrary locations for work purposes so that they could be visualized in whatever tool of your choosing

Mind if you could cover some broad details about how things are handled in the back end?

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been meaning to write that blog post for a long time.

In broad terms, EC2 is the perfect fit for a service like this, that needs to run something like 100 hours of computing each day, but needs that all to happen during a 3 hour window before Europe wakes up in the morning. It's even more fun when something breaks and I get to spin up 200 machines in one go. For like ten dollars.

I use something like 8 different AWS services for various bits of the thing. Everything from computing to storage to queueing & mail. I even used them for payment at one point.

I'll try to get that writeup out the door.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> @jasonkester Aren't you worried about attracting unwanted attention from Amazon's lawyers for using their trademark in the name of your business?

[https://aws.amazon.com/trademark- guidelines/](https://aws.amazon.com/trademark-guidelines/)

<comment><USER22> Why should he be? Where in the document does it say Amazon has "S3" as a trademark? His service isn't called "Amazon S3stat"

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Just came back here from this other HN thread (How many lines is Candy Japan code base) and your S3 stats seems like it'd be cool to learn about too. Have you ever published anything like this with some $$$ numbers?

</comment><comment><USER24> I really hope that Amazon will provide at least basic per-bucket monthly statistics for free or a small price.

It is unintuitive that you need to parse logs or pay $10 month to find out how much you are paying for each bucket.

</comment><comment><USER25> Jason's other blog posts are really great -- reminds me of patio11's writing style. It's a shame he's only blogging "semi-annually"!

</comment><comment><USER26> Funny to see the americans in here torn between loving or hating the blatantly capitalistic OP ;)

</comment><comment><USER27> Isn't a similar thing possible through ELK stack for those who are already maintaining one, the logs should be sent to Elastic Search for indexing. It might not be as customisable as this product.

<comment><USER28> Definitely possible but as is the case with most Saas products, It's much easier and convenient to just pay someone $10 a month to do it for you rather than hosting an entire ELK stack somewhere (And having to upskill to get it all working efficiently).

<comment><USER27> I agree. it works if companies are not already using an ELK stack. Looks like a great product!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Sounds a lot like [https://qloudstat.com/](https://qloudstat.com/) which I've been using for a while.

</comment><comment><USER30> What a guy. Way to be an entrepreneur or businessman.

</comment><comment><USER31> Very antifragile of you

</comment><comment><USER32> The cheap bastard plan is excellent!

</comment><comment><USER33> Off topic but about that blog: please make the text darker. I had to zoom it at 1 cm per line before being able to read it comfortably (some 400 dpi screen). My tablet is laying over a magazine and I can read its darker text at less than half the size.

<comment><AUTHOR> Excellent timing. I was getting a bit grey-texted out while proofreading it this morning, and actually made the code change on the dev side.

But the blog started seeing a dozen requests per second before I could push the change live, and I've been in "nobody touch nothin'!" mode ever since.

But I snuck that CSS change in just now.

<comment><USER34> I think the problem is the font-weight. I wasn't really able to read the page until I changed it from 300 to 400. I don't think anyone should reduce the font-weight of their body text, it just looks too greyed-out.

<comment><USER33> Some fonts work well only with some specific values of font-weight. Maybe this is the case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Please please make that site responsive. I do a lot of checking and things on my phone and if I can't read your site I will assume I can't use your project on my phone and go on with my life.

</comment><comment><USER36> Tangent:

> I'd much prefer to keep those minutes for things like blowing off work for > the day to go rock climbing because it's sunny and I can do that because I > run my own company. The less time I have to spend dealing with these > customers, the better.

This doesn't really instill confidence in the level of post-purchase support I'd get if I were to buy in. I can easily empathize with the mentality and can even appreciate it if it's intended as humor, but all I see here is "I just want you to pay me."

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, but consider the support lag you get for most products, and the person from whom you receive a reply to your email (and their ability to actually do anything about your issue).

So yeah, you might have to wait until the next day for a reply. But that reply will be to say that your issue has been fixed (by the guy who built the product) and that no further action is required on your part.

People seem to like that. (And a guy can only really climb hard a couple days a week without injury, so it's entirely possible you'll find me in front of the keyboard.)

<comment><USER36> I appreciate this reply a bit more, though it's worth noting that this approach doesn't really scale all that well.

As you add customers, you'll eventually be stretched thin as you try to cater to different needs (assuming that's your goal—it might not be!). Assuming you eventually bring on other technical folks, I'd argue that you'd want to prevent this same language and mentality from persisting as a part of company culture.

But again, your goal might only be to reach a certain size and live comfortably. If so, then you're probably fine. I suppose my qualm was more with the image conveyed by your language more than anything else.

<comment><USER37> >I appreciate this reply a bit more, though it's worth noting that this approach doesn't really scale all that well.

That's OK for personal businesses. Not everything needs to be a billion dollar company.

<comment><USER36> Right, hence my third paragraph:

> But again, your goal might only be to reach a certain size and live > comfortably. If so, then you're probably fine. I suppose my qualm was more > with the image conveyed by your language more than anything else.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>