Removing malware from a Wordpress blog - Case study - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sucuri.net/2010/02/removing-malware-from-wordpress-blog.html

<comment><USER2> FWIW, this blog was running WP 2.8, which is about 6 months old. Current is 2.9.1. Upgrading is trivial.

If you're not keeping Wordpress updated expect this to happen to your blog too.

</comment><comment><USER3> Replacing eval with alert/echo is a nice technique, one I hadn't thought of.

Thankfully I haven't had to think of it in years; their conclusions (basically, more logging and keeping up-to-date) would be valid if it weren't Wordpress itself which is usually the attack vector. It's better to use something else entirely.

<comment><USER4> I'm not convinced that using Wordpress is what directly caused this. From the article, this was a "quite popular website". If someone from, say, Google, got a keylogger on their computer, especially one that directly faces the internet, I would be considerably more inclined to assume it was a targetted attack, rather than just a random infection.

Just telling someone to use something else doesn't help at all. Telling a user to stop using Windows because they get infected often may help if they were simply downloading stuff they shouldn't, but if they were actually being attacked, moving to Linux, since they will know much less about keeping it even remotely secure, would lead to a potentially far more dangerous infection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It really says something about Wordpress that it has its own ecosystem of malware, like an OS or browser. Except unlike an OS or browser, it just does blogs. The sensible solution is probably what people get told when they use a browser with a poor security record - 'don't use that'.

</comment><comment><USER6> Wouldn't it make sense to let Wordpress host your blog? Lately there seems to be one too many security updates for Wordpress. Why let the customer distract themselves with Wordpress upgrades etc. Was the cost-benefit of this looked into during this removal?

</comment><comment><USER7> I've had this happen to 3 customers. I read somewhere that the cause could be a compromised FTP password found via malware on the user's PC.

<comment><USER8> I found a similar problem on one of my own hobby sites. I don't think the problem was with a compromised PC, but with a bug in an old version of WordPress. IIRC, there was a weakness with WebDAV that provided a back door.

Anyway, the solution was both more obvious and easier to fix than this article describes. Every PHP file had a line injected at the very top. It was simply a matter of stripping this extra line from each of several hundred lines -- a little time consuming, but not a big deal.</comment></comment>


Human Brains Connect Via Internet - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/08/30/217178528/dont-call-it-a-mind-meld-human-brains-connect-via-internet

<comment><USER2> this could go so wrong if someone figured out how to intercept and change the packets to make the receiver do something else

<comment><AUTHOR> I like the way you think.

Or do I?!!?!?</comment></comment>


OCaml for scientific computation [Tutorial] - <AUTHOR> http://www.soton.ac.uk/~fangohr/software/ocamltutorial/all.html

<comment><USER2> Ocaml is rapidly becoming my language of choice. Great guide, and an interesting read.</comment>


Startup Challenge. Amazon Web Service. - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=377634011

<comment><USER2> Having checked the T&Cs, this is US only

<comment><USER3> That totally sucks, but it's no surprise really...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Probably worth filling out the form just to get the free $25 in Amazon Web Services credit.

</comment><comment><USER5> We are thinking about entering. We are already built on top of AWS. We have been incredibly happy about our uses of AWS (except SQS which was way to slow).

Definitely not counting on the challenge in anyway but could make for some nice publicity and give us good reason to post about some of the work we have been doing.

<comment><USER6> What are you using instead of SQS, if you don't mind me asking?

I've looked at Starling (Twitter's message queue written in Ruby) but not much else (besides SQS).

<comment><USER5> We looked at Starling but it wasn't as fast as Beanstalk. We ended up using Beanstalk and the Ruby client for our queues. I recommend it, but it doesn't persist to disk it is memory only, so if you have to guarantee jobs complete it not work for your situation. In our case if beanstalk goes down all the jobs are useless anyways so we can just restart.

Starling was a close contender, but it looks like twitter won't be working on it anymore as they are going to be moving to a different system. The beanstalk group is pretty active and has been very helpful.

Stomp also looks interesting, but we didn't try it out...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why are these competitions always restricted to the US? I'm in the UK; Amazon sells European-based S3 storage and they have offices in the UK. What's the problem?

I'm working on a cracking idea that I'm sure would arouse their interest. It's so disheartening when I see these kinds of competitions and then realise I'm disqualified for being a dirty European.

Perhaps there's somebody who could demonstrate trustworthiness on here who would allow non-US residents to enter this competition (and others) by proxy through them?

pg - Would you be interested in doing this?

<comment><USER8> blame the lawyers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why does the cash prize halve in size by the end of the article?

<comment><USER10> It doesn't. The first line is "The grand prize is $100,000 in cash _and_ AWS credits and a potential investment offer from Amazon."

The $100k amount is split between those two.

<comment><USER11> At the beginning its a bit ambiguous. It could be either $100,000 in cash. With some undefined amount of AWS credits, or, $100,000 worth in cash and AWS credits.

Nevertheless, they didn't contradict themselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Not a bad deal - a lot of big companies are really starting to embrace startups and openness. Hopefully this isn't just a trend.

</comment><comment><USER8> how messed up is it, that Amazon's contest gets you more benefits than a TC50 finalist. And I'm not talking about the money.

How hard would it be for techcrunch to throw in some free hosting for people? Or how about a few counseling sessions from one of the judges?(i.e. like apprenticeship)</comment>


Ask HN: How does twitter allow multi-byte messages - <AUTHOR>

I posted a test message on twitter to check if it accept multi-bye chars and posted "信" 140 times, which it accepted.
How does this work? Looking up wikipedia, I realized that GSM accepts 7-bit characters, and for multi-byte it uses USC2 (UTF16)
Wouldn't this message be double the size in this case(70 16-bit characters)? <comment><USER2> UTF-8</comment>


The iOS and Android App Economies - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/2010/12/ios_android_app_economies

<comment><USER2> I do feel that Google is sending out the message, that "your" app will do better in sales, if it's provided for free. I don't think it's healthy for a developer who wants to start a company writing Android apps. This is what gruber is saying (at-least a bit). Every app we write has a value to it. I don't think 99 cents is the right price but free is definitely wrong. What happens when someone writes an app that blocks ads on the Android phone. Now, the developer is not making any money from his free apps. If giving things away for free becomes the norm in the Android app store, then it will end up hurting the developer and Google in the long run.

There is a safety net to selling an app for a price (not free), because the sales give an indication if the users like it or not and where to direct the energy.

Also, 37 signals doesn't believe in giving away apps for free.

<comment><USER3> _What happens when someone writes an app that blocks ads on the Android phone_

Already exists. AdFree. Requires a rooted phone. Blocks ads system wide. I actually found out about this because of people complaining about the obtrusive video ads in Angry Birds. I don't think the average person is going to root their phone just to block ads but as more people are driven to use alternative ROMs it may be an issue worth considering for developers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Eh, better than the last go around on the topic. There is a cultural difference between the two. iOS does get a boost from the Mac culture: users tend to be affluent and very engaged in their devices. And those people are more likely to plunk down cash for apps. Gruber himself caters to and makes his money off this audience (funnily enough, from advertising more than selling product, but that is off topic). But I am with Wilson. The app ecomony is going to be like the web's. Cause paid software does not work for the masses. It works for enterprise, it works for the niches like gamers and Mac users, but it will not scale. You can already see this in the App Store's pricing race to the bottom. And if the iOS line is going to be more like the iPod than the Mac, the paid app ecomony is going to be seen as an amusing relic in a few years.

Also, I do not get why Gruber plays dumb about Angry Birds' profitablity on Android when that report about Rovio hitting about $1M/month on Android was on every tech site over the last few days.

<comment><USER5> > Also, I do not get why Gruber plays dumb about Angry Birds' profitablity on > Android when that report about Rovio hitting about $1M/month on Android was > on every tech site over the last few days.

Gruber has a very specific audience that he targets his blog posts towards, and he tells them what they want to hear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "If Instagram were an Android exclusive rather than an iOS exclusive, would it have picked up 100,000 users in its first week and a million in its first month? No way, I say."

The Android version of Angry Birds got a million downloads on it's first day. Its existing hype and fandom obviously had a lot to do with that, but still don't see why the _No way_

<comment><USER7> if angry birds were an android exclusive would you have seen 1 mil downloads the first day?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am so tired of these lengthy nitpicking posts about why in his opinion iPhone is simply better than Android. Really, who cares? Both platforms are great and have their advantages and problems. The market is certainly large enough for a couple of players to compete and innovate.

I'd actually wish for one or two other, even more open platforms such as Meego to get some traction.

<comment><USER9> Personally I am perplexed why Gruber's opinion of Android or the Android ecosystem has _any_ relevance. He can wax poetic about new iOS features and iOS brilliance, singing to his choir, but he has no perspective or relevance to preach about Android. His overwhelming bias (and years or snark) has eliminated his ability to play the voice for any other platform.

No one should take that as anti-Gruber. It isn't. It's just that Gruber made his "iOS or nothing" bed over the past couple of years, leaving him looking a bit clownish when he tries to play peacemaker.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> _I don't know how the purely ad-based Angry Birds is faring on Android. Perhaps Rovio (Angry Birds's developer) will make even more money from ads on Android than they do from sales on iOS. We shall see._

We shall see indeed: "By end of year, we project earnings of over $1 million per month with the ad-supported version of Angry Birds" [http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/03/angry-birds- android-1-milli...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/03/angry-birds- android-1-million-advertising/)

<comment><USER11> Does anyone know how much they make from the paid for iOS version?

<comment><USER12> up till now about 4 million download from iOS ( in the same article mentioned). so about 4 million

<comment><USER13> Wow, I thought they had sold a lot more on iOS. So in one month of ad revenue on Android has brought in 25% of total iOS sales. If this ad revenue is consistent that's pretty incredible news for Google. It will have made clear that ad revenue on mobile devices is where the money is (and with Google being an advertising company, this is great news).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The numbers for android are appealing as a third party developer, but how much money is being spent in the android app store? Ads are viable, but hardly ideal for all types of apps.

<comment><USER12> mostly android app earn income via ads , sales in google app store are really bad. no body is buying.

<comment><USER15> This is at the heart of the problem. Nitpicking at Gruber specific points is one thing, but the fact is that paid apps on the Android store are getting nowhere. Arguing that "this doesn't matter because free is the way to go" is a reasonable opinion to hold, but misses the point. Android developers don't get to make a choice about that whatever their opinion, while iOS developers do. The counter argument is that as these platforms mature and become more capable the apps will become more functional and sophisticated, with attached services and customers will be more willing to pay for them. iOS developers have a shot at making that future happen, unless things change Android devs don't.

<comment><USER16> Do you have any basis for your _fact_ that "paid apps on the Android store are getting nowhere"?

I've seen a few things suggesting lower sales rates on Android, but since almost none of them adjusted for installed base, I'd be wary of drawing any strong conclusions. But even if they are correct in their inferences, they were still suggesting simply lower sales (e.g. a third or half iOS) not that no-one was buying apps at all. It's hardly a black and white picture, particularly with the introduction of iAds by Apple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Probably one of the better articles written by Gruber in a year or two. Well balanced, hit on the strengths and weaknesses of both platforms, and definitely chose his words carefully to not try and seem biased to either camp.

Nicely thought-out and researched pieces are what we need more of, with less argument re-wording and throwing numbers around to try and play up your favorite platform. I hope Gruber's posts continue in this direction.

<comment><USER13> Definitely one of his better articles. But I think he still has on his Apple blinders. He asks the wrong question still.

He asks, "Why doesn't Android have X, Y, Z?". Rather the question should be, "At what rate is Android picking up X, Y, Z?"

Furthermore, he hints at the cultural divide, but misses the big motivator. Android exists to get you on the web. iPhone exists to get you to buy Apple product(s). I'm sure Google would be just as happy if every app moved to the web, and app stores disappeared. I'm less certain Apple would be as happy.

<comment><USER18> He doesn't miss it. Perhaps you didn't read till the end.

 _The economy for Android apps may well trend toward resembling the economy of the web. I think that's the mindset with which Android was designed. But I don't think the iOS App Store resembles the web economy at all. Isn't that the whole point, the reason Apple created the App Store in the first place? Apple's pre-App Store "just write mobile web apps for Mobile Safari" developer story for the iPhone in 2007 was unsatisfying, both for users and developers.

....

The differences between the iOS App Store and Android Market are a microcosm of the differences between Apple and Google. Apple is a retailer, a purveyor of well-crafted goods that people will line up to purchase. Google is an advertising company that builds popular services that command large audiences._

<comment><USER13> You're right, I missed this. Gruber should really front-load his articles with punchline, rather than expecting people to make it through his text... and while this was better than most of his articles, I think he's expecting too much for any non Apple fanboy to make it through to the end of even this ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> No one seems to remember that a good part of the reason why iPhone had good developer support from day one was that it was a new start for developers with obscure skills on a dead-end platform.

Yes, I know Cocoa and Objective-C are cool _now_ , but Mac OS X has rebounded partly because of the success of the iPhone. At the time those developers were getting squeezed by Apple themselves on one side with high quality, bundled, often free apps and free web apps on the other side.

 _That_ is why the web apps only message got boo-ed by an audience of Cocoa developers, it wasn't an unbiased appraisal of what was best for either Apple, the iPhone or its customers, it was the sound of people having a potential escape hatch slammed shut in their face.

<comment><USER19> > obscure skills on a dead-end platform.

I seem to remember the buzz on the mac platform in 2006 being about it's high rate of adoption in hacker and web-development circles, not to mention surprise about how quickly it was being adopted on college campuses. In 2007, the campus tech purchasing board I was on was seriously considering chucking their Compaq licence to dual-boot mac-minis. This was coming from senior IT staff, all of who were anti-Apple to the point of blocking Mail.app from wireless networks.

The mac was doing well before the iPhone came out.

<comment><USER16> Yes, I bought a Mac for similar reasons in 2001 but you have to remember that these people were buying it for programming Unix, Java and Web Development rather than Cocoa apps.

Similarly, the college campus users were buying it for Web access and Microsoft Office without worrying about viruses (plus they look cool and/or expensive). Again, native Cocoa wasn't really a factor.

I wasn't talking about the Mac doing well (though I'd argue with that as well), but about _Cocoa developers_ doing well.

<comment><USER19> Wil Shipley used this image in a 2005 WWDC talk to rebut the claims that Cocoa developers weren't doing well:

<http://i.imgur.com/Q9c13.jpg>

[http://wilshipley.com/blog/2005/06/student-talk-from- wwdc-20...](http://wilshipley.com/blog/2005/06/student-talk-from- wwdc-2005.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "It's highly doubtful something like Rage HD is even possible on any Android device today." - Can someone explain why an iPhone is more powerful than "any Android" device?

<comment><USER21> I don't think iPhone hardware is more powerful than Android hardware, but games support in the Android SDK is lacking.

Currently you need to use their weird NDK and wrap it with Java code. For example, there's no way to play audio without using the Java SDK.

Many of these problems have been fixed in Android 2.3, but it takes ages for updates to ship out to the majority of devices (a good chunk of devices still don't have Froyo).

<comment><USER22> The other issue is that there is no "Android Hardware" -- the older or lower- end devices might not be able to power it. Then, though, it would only support a subset of the devices, and the more expensive ones at that, and Id is blamed, not the device itself.

<comment><USER20> I don't have a problem with the author commenting on fragmentation or API issues increasing dev time. Does Rage HD run on all iPhones?

My comment was due to the way it's stated, "even possible on any Android device today", meaning that even with excess dev time, the application could not run on the newest Android device.

<comment><USER22> Good point. I misread that.

RAGE works on all the iPhones that support iOS 4, which excludes the original iPhone and iPod touch. However, the hardware on those are reasonably identical to the second generation of devices, so that restriction is an arbitrary one by Apple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I want bolded headings to guide my scanning.</comment>


The rectangularness of countries - <AUTHOR> http://pappubahry.com/misc/rectangles/ <comment><USER2> For people who like complex borders

[https://www.google.be/maps/place/Baarle- Hertog/](https://www.google.be/maps/place/Baarle-Hertog/)

This is a Belgian city enclave within the Netherlands with enclaves of the Netherlands within its borders

<comment><USER3> Wow. I feel like there should be a CGP Grey video about this. He has one about London vs the City of London and the weird US/Canada border.

Someone also tried to tell me Norwood, Ohio is the largest city within a city (an enclave city), but I can't find a source on that anywhere.

<comment><USER4> What's weird about US/Canada? I thought it was pretty straightforward. Was this about the "Angle" on Lake of the Woods?

<comment><USER5> There's the exclave Point Roberts, Washington ([http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0408/feature7/](http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0408/feature7/)), which falls ever so slightly south of the 49th parallel.

<comment><USER6> I once visited Port Roberts just to see the border crossing. I drove in from the Canadian side, parked my car, and walked across the border into the U.S. without being challenged. No one asked for my passport. As far as I could tell, no one even noticed that I had crossed the border. But when I tried to walk back into Canada the Canadians gave me a pretty hard time and almost didn't let me back in. It was an interesting experience.

<comment><USER7> I've visited there too. Drove in both directions, seemed like not a big deal.

I heard that kids there go to school in Blaine, which means 4 international border crossings every day!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's a good metric, but I do feel there's something slightly different being said in human terms when we say a country is "rectangular." Turkey seems to have sharper, closer to 90 degree angles than other countries that may overlap a rectangle more.

I suspect what's really going on, psychologically, is that Turkey looks much more like a rectangle than it does any other basic shape: I would never described Macedonia as rectangular, despite its considerable overlap, because it's "oval." Kenya's a pentagon before it's anything else, and so on.

<comment><USER9> right. Côte d'Ivoire in particular has a very high score while "looking" nothing like a rectangle

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm surprised Portugal didn't score higher. One day in the car I randomly asked myself the same question of "which country is the most rectangular", and Portugal was the first one I thought of. Is it because the Azores were included? Would like to see the rank if they had only the mainland.

<comment><USER11> Including Azores definitely affected the final result. It's weird that other countries didn't have their islands include though

<comment><USER12> Others are also affected by islands and territories, see France with French Guyana etc, Norway with Svalbard etc. France is quite a square country if you only consider its mainland so it is an odd choice to include non mainland areas but I guess it is a difficult greyzone on what to include and not.

<comment><USER13> The French themselves refer to metropolitan France as l'Hexagone so it probably still would not be a square.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> 509 Bandwidth Limit Exceeded

Here's an archived copy: [https://archive.is/cRkgb](https://archive.is/cRkgb)

</comment><comment><USER15> I was kind of disappointed that this post isn't about artificial borders that look like straight latitudinal or longitudinal lines.

Those kinds of borders are quite common and I've always thought they say a lot about a country and its past.

<comment><USER16> What do they say?

<comment><USER17> Long, straight lines for borders usually imply that the territory through which they are drawn was neither well explored nor terribly important to the people drawing them. Sometimes that's because the territory is mostly uninhabited and nobody really has a strong claim to want their particular patch of land to be on one side or the other, but frequently its because the mapmakers either don't know or don't care about the cultural affinities and loyalties of the people who live on or near the proposed border.

This is one of the main reasons why a lot of central Africa is a shit show politically. Most of the modern borders were drawn during the colonial era without much consideration as to which tribes and city-states ended up in which countries, so there's not a strong relationship between "nations" (i.e. culturally similar groups of people) and "countries" (i.e. demarcated stretches of land) like there is in most of the rest of the world.

<comment><USER18> How does this reasoning apply to the US-Canada border?

<comment><USER19> It applies perfectly. The 49° N section of the border was set in the Treaty of 1818 [1], at which point all affected regions were still populated by native americans.

You can see on this territorial expansion map [2] of the United States, how the lay of the border differs between the first-settled east and the later- settled west.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_1818](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_1818)

[2] [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/UnitedSt...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/UnitedStatesExpansion.png)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The site has run out of bandwidth allocation, so I'm only guessing what the metric is from the comments here...

I'd like to see it compared with a "parallelogramness" measure, based on rotating calipers. Rectangularity would be a special case.

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

</comment><comment><USER21> Neat!

To me, Egypt doesn't look very rectangular at all. The very deep concave section, and the sharp convex portion at the bottom right completely break rectangularity for me.

I'm also curious as to why Nauru seems to have such sharp, straight borders - it looks more like the Vatican than a Pacific island.

<comment><USER22> The measure is how much overlap there is with a rectangle of the same area, which means that a narrow but deep deviation is weighted the same as a shallow but long deviation along the border. I'd think that an intuitive notion of "rectangulareness" (rectanglosity? rectangularity?) would better match some sort of RMS measurement, where the penalty for a mismatch is proportional to the square of its distance from the ideal rectangle. It would be really interesting to see what changes with that sort of measurement.

Regarding Nauru, I think that's just poor resolution in the source data. It's only a couple of miles across, and the plot looks like it attempted to approximate the coastline with points roughly 1 mile (maybe 2km?) apart.

<comment><USER23> There's a couple of different scoring rules that would be interesting, I think.

Another one might be: What's the ratio between the area of the country and the smallest rectangle which bounds the country. This would "punish" countries with protuberances more than ones with "in-cuts", which "feels right" to me.

<comment><USER22> For some reason, your use of "'punish' countries" made me imagine a world where improving this score gets taken seriously by the peoples of the world, leading to countries gradually becoming more rectangular over time, and many terrible wars along the way.

<comment><USER24> This reminds me of Paradox's strategy games, where players routinely complain about "bordergore" and fight wars to make the map look neater...

<comment><USER22> That's great, never heard of that before. When I search for that term, the first hit is a Reddit thread where the first commenter expresses his desire to "drop-kick" people who do it. Strong emotions! Maybe we can create this world after all.

I wonder how many actual wars in the past have been started because someone didn't like how the border looked on a map. It has to be non-zero.

<comment><USER25> > I wonder how many actual wars in the past have been started because someone > didn't like how the border looked on a map.

Plenty, though it's less about rectangular shapes per se but borders being drawn by former colonial forces with a ruler, splitting ethnic groups and forcing them to live under a new, foreign government. Under colonial rule every unrest was simply stopped by brute force, after "liberation" and division of countries according to some arbitrary border created by drawing a line along a ruler on the map there was no "moderating" force anymore and ethnicities that had ignored/evaded each other for centuries were forcibly mixed and the former colonial force usually decided who was the new government, based on their interest. A great example is Western Sahara:

Spain left and decided "this part goes to Mauritania, this part goes to Morocco". The Sahawri managed to beat the Mauritanian forces and to claim some land, then Morocco "invaded" (in quotes because Moroccans fought the Spanish in the 50s from as far south as Aoussard). Also, officially the border between Morocco and Algeria is closed because of Algerian support for the Sahawri. But in the north of Morocco, in the Rif area, people feel more connected to the Rif than to Morocco and cultural exchange with the Algerian Rif people is much more vibrant than cultural exchange with the south of Morocco.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I wonder how many of those are due to pairs or rivers or mountain ranges that tend to lie parallel to each other, or to rivers that tend to be at right angles to a coastline?

</comment><comment><USER27> this metric is kind of poor. What about something like the area ratio of the biggest inscribed rectangle to the smallest circumscribed rectangle that has edges parallel to the selected inscribed rectangle.

<comment><USER28> That measures nothing but outliers: consider that changing anything between the two rectangles would leave that metric unchanged.

<comment><USER29> It seems like it would be an excellent method if you could address the outlier issue though. One approach would be to relax the rectangles, so the outer one only has to circumscribe 95% of the country's area.

A similar approach is used in biology to define animal territories: A kernel density estimate is taken of historical animal positions and thresholded, rather than a minimum convex polygon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> These are not rectangles though. The projection has severly stretched many of the countries. Combined with the tilted angles, that should mean the corners of these "rectangles" aren't really 90°.

<comment><USER31> Site is currently down, please tell me they used locally fitted projections, not Mercator?

<comment><USER32> They used an equirectangular projection, because rectangles. But that means that some of these rotated rectangles are more like parallelograms when you look at them in another way.

Mercator actually would have been a good choice because it preserves local angles. Not sure why you'd be so opposed to it in this case. For this purpose, relative sizes don't matter at all.

And I don't think a local projection would clarify anything. Countries can get pretty big and non-local. If you strive for complete geometric accuracy on the scale of, say, Canada, the idea of a "rectangle" breaks down because there are no parallel lines on Earth, and four right angles don't bring you back to the orientation where you started.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I have a theory that newer borders more rectangular, whereas older borders follow natural wiggly features like rivers, similar to newer cities' roads being more rectangular, whereas older roads are more higgly-piggly organic.

The older ones grew; the newer were planned.

You can see it east-to-west in the USA states' borders.

</comment><comment><USER34> I'm not sure this algorithm is the best fit for our natural intuition of a rectangular country.

</comment><comment><USER35> I read somewhere that manmade boundaries can be clearly identified. They are mostly straight lines on maps. It makes more sense after reading this article. This is the reason why so many African countries have such sharp boundaries. Colony masters divided them amongst themselves, ignoring natural resource division, people and ethnicity of new countries. This has led to so many conflicts among these countries as well. I might be wrong, but I think this happened to middle-east as well.

</comment><comment><USER36> Funny to see that France is only 134th while French refer to their country as "The Exagon" (metropolitan France) - 3 ground borders and 3 sea borders. The expression was coined in the 1860s by school reformists and got popular after the Franco-German War in 1870 when Alsace was lost. To my knowledge French are the only ones to define their country with a geometrical form

<comment><USER37> Portuguese people also generally see our country as a rectangle too. And no, the islands don't count.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> You mean xkcd hasn't covered this already?

</comment><comment><USER39> Wow, what's going on with the Netherlands

<comment><USER40> The Netherlands have two islands in the Caribbean that is technically no different than any other "county" of the Netherlands.

<comment><USER41> which are these? as far as I understood (I lived in Sint Maarten for a couple of years once) the Netherlands Antilles are colonies only, unlike the French islands (Martinique and Guadeloupe mainly, but St Barts and St Martin too) which are overseas departments of France, and also considered part of EU.

<comment><USER42> The kingdom of the Netherlands consists of 4 countries: Aruba, Curaçao, St Maarten, and the Netherlands.

In name, they are each other's equal within the kingdom, but there is a 'slight' difference in size.

Also, 3 other islands in the Caribean are part of the Netherlands, the country: Bonaire, St Eustatius and Saba (but, if I have to believe Wikipedia, those 3 are not in the euro zone; the US dollar is legal tender in (part of) the country of the Netherlands)

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

The French have more overseas areas, and manage to make things complicated, too, with overseas departments, countries, territories, and collectives ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_departments_and_terri...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_departments_and_territories_of_France))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> The site is out of bandwidth, so this might help: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://pappubahry.com/misc/rectangles/)

</comment><comment><USER44> Something doesn't seem right about this algorithm you used to draw the rectangles. If you used a similar algorithm to define circles, I feel like you would get a artificially high amount of circularness for countries that are not that circular.

<comment><USER45> Or probably just any kind of polygon from triangle to whatever you choose to find. The common property is probably rather convex shape than rectangularness or anything arbitrary like that. Maybe because convex borders are easier to protect or less threatening to neighbors or something like that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Would be nice to apply this to gerrymandered congressional districts.

</comment><comment><USER47> Huh, the US is 169 out of 208. I would've guessed it at a good bit higher but I forgot Hawaii and (especially) Alaska are kinda hanging out there screwing up the ideal rectangle.

<comment><USER48> The metric used doesn't really knock us for Hawaii though, because it's so small.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Correlate with economic development!

<comment><USER50> There's a fair amount of research in economic history on almost exactly this topic. Two recent papers [http://www.nber.org/papers/w12328.pdf](http://www.nber.org/papers/w12328.pdf) and [https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4s_WKe- US99LV9XVTNVNzFxYW8...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4s_WKe- US99LV9XVTNVNzFxYW8/view?usp=sharing) have looked at how measures of the artificial-ness of borders (how straight they are, how often they cut through the territory of ethnic groups, ratio of a country's area to the area of its convex hull) are correlated with various measures of welfare (e.g. GDP/capita, lack of conflict). The papers are often controversial because they often claim something approaching causality (see recent Twitter war [https://twitter.com/bill_easterly/status/753252113510268928](https://twitter.com/bill_easterly/status/753252113510268928)).

<comment><USER49> Who are these people discussing on Twitter? Are they the researchers who publish papers on the topic? (I do not mean these same papers you linked to, just asking if they are serious academics.)

<comment><USER50> Easterly is an economist at NYU (who published one of the earliest papers on the subject), I'm not sure about the others. However the discussion is a good representation of some of the debate that's gone on regarding interpreting correlations between regular-ness of borders and GDP (i.e. is it that having artificial borders was disruptive, or was it that borders were drawn artificially in areas that had fundamental characteristics which have caused them to have lower GDP today).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I wonder if the overall rectangularness of the African countries is evidence of a bias for retangualarness by the map making colonial powers.

<comment><USER52> Egypt and Equatorial Guinea are clearly on latitude/longitude lines, but the rest look pretty random. I am actually surprised that it's as nonlinear as it is - go take a look at a map of Africa, not much is actually rectangular! There are a lot of straight lines (which would be another interesting metric to study-the countries most closely bounded by an irregular polygon) in several interior borders on the Sahara, as well as Namibia and its neighbors. But none except Equatorial Guinea are really rectangular.

The state borders, on the other hand, are often quadrilaterals. Perfect scores to Wyoming and Colorado, and near-perfect for many others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Colorado wins

<comment> a-priori Another example is Saskatchewan, Canada. Like Colorado, its borders, on all four sides, are defined by latitudes and longitudes.

<comment><USER19> Saskatchewan actually has an unusual border on its east with Manitoba, in which a series of north-running meridians are interrupted by west-running jogs. This newspaper piece [1] reflects on the story behind this boundary.

[1] [http://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/why-the-zigzag- betwee...](http://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/why-the-zigzag-between-sask- and-man/article4202831/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_separatist_mo...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_separatist_movements_in_Asia#India)

</comment><comment><USER55> 169/208?

Reagan would never have let this happen. #makeamericarectangularagain

</comment><comment><USER56> I wonder how similar the result would have been with this metric:

Score = area of the symmetric difference between country and the rectangle maximizing the score.

</comment><comment><USER57> Eq. Guinea at #18 looks wrong...the rectangle seems too large. It is pretty rectangular, about as much as Egypt to my eye...

</comment><comment><USER58> It's interesting to judge conflicts based on this ranking as well. Check out #55 (Palestine) and #175 (Israel)

</comment><comment><USER59> What's wrong with New Zealand?

<comment><USER14> Longitude overflow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Dead already :\ hn effect in work

</comment><comment><USER61> The UK map, unlike France or Spain, doesn't include the oversea territories.

</comment><comment><USER59> What's wrong with New Zealand? Looks even tinier than usual in Safari on iOS.

</comment><comment><USER62> Love to see a world map tessalated this way!</comment>


Good Bubble, Bad Bubble - <AUTHOR> http://www.byrnehobart.com/blog/good-bubble-bad-bubble/

<comment><USER2> Very good, although you can have both at once, e.g. the 1929 crash had some aspects of an high tech equity bubble in radio. I suspect the credit bubble part of it was overwhelmingly dominant, though.</comment>


Tuning a Typewriter - <AUTHOR> http://hardmath123.github.io/crown-typewriter.html <comment><USER2> It'd also be interesting to explore other optimisation metrics, e.g. having common letters on the ends to allow the user to 'blindly' move the pointer to one end or the other without a need for precision.

I'm also curious if e.g. 10 shifts is twice as bad as 5 shifts, it feels to me like there's a drop-off in shifting cost after one shift.

<comment><USER3> The commonly used metric when talking about the time taken for a user to move a mouse to click on the button is log(distance/button size). So there's certainly an argument there to use the logarithm of the distance, rather than the distance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Optimisation: Make the character row into a ring.

It would also make it easier to find the optimal layout, as a few permutations are removed.

<comment><USER5> Done[1].

That is, you have just invented the classic Dymo label maker :)

[1][https://www.staples.com/dymo-organizer-express-pro- industria...](https://www.staples.com/dymo-organizer-express-pro-industrial- portable-handheld-label-maker/product_564523)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Such an interesting problem!

And still relevant -- at least for those of us who still have the classic Dymo[1].

Also, this pun in the article made me chuckle:

> The _ComfortablyNumb_ ered typewriter.

[1][http://juliastainton.com/2007/05/27/dymo-label-maker-cest- bo...](http://juliastainton.com/2007/05/27/dymo-label-maker-cest-bon/)

</comment><comment><USER6> It would be interesting to see a two-dimensional version of this.</comment>


Coronavirus: Security flaws found in UK NHS contact-tracing app - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-52725810 <comment><USER2> Regardless of whether there are security flaws or not, I wouldn't install it. The Blob already has waaaay too much info on me. There's no way I'm voluntarily giving them more.

</comment><comment><USER3> That's exactly the stuff public health should take care to avoid.</comment>


McAfee: Nearly All New Mobile Malware In Q3 Targeted At Android Phones - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/20/mcafee-nearly-all-new-mobile-malware-in-q3-targeted-at-android-phones-up-37-percent/ <comment><USER2> What matters is how much of this malware gets onto devices. If the vast majority of Android users get their apps from the official store and Google Can prune the malware effectively, it may not really be a problem.</comment>


Great hacker story, way to make me cry at work - <AUTHOR> http://www.facebook.com/cainesarcade

<comment><AUTHOR> check out the video [http://boingboing.net/2012/04/09/9-year-olds-diy- cardboard-a...](http://boingboing.net/2012/04/09/9-year-olds-diy-cardboard- ar.html)</comment>


Coronavirus Funding for Your Startup - <AUTHOR> https://corl.io/ <comment><USER2> I'd like to know what percentage of revenues they request in practice (according to their press page [1], it is between 1-10%).

If you are located within the U.S., is the primary benefit of utilizing Corl over the US' SBA the fact that payback is via revenue-sharing versus interest on debt (the size of the loan)?

[1]: [https://corl.io/press](https://corl.io/press)

<comment><USER3> I'd love to see them stop posting this hucksters move every day

Obvious they are trying to take advantage of a crisis</comment></comment>


Disney's new image algorithm turns 2D photos into a 3D model - <AUTHOR> http://www.3ders.org/articles/20130729-disney-new-image-algorithm-turns-2d-photos-into-a-3d-model.html <comment><USER2> Wow tough crowd, this is actually extremely impressive if you're interested in the subject. The fineness and complexity of the reconstructed depth field is unparalleled.

<comment><USER3> I work in the field of Computer Vision based 3D Reconstruction. Although this development is "nice", it is hardly capable of the potential applications cited. Notice any 3D reconstructions used anywhere other than novelty? That's because they are mostly useless. In order to create useful 3D Reconstrucions, the underlying reconstruction system needs to recognize the object and use prior acquired references to supply information obscured from view, and/or identify transformations (damage, wear) to the "original" objects and scene being analyzed. The goal is to supply one image of an object, and receive back a correctly formed, rigged for correct motion, 3d geometry of nearly any common object. And it's coming.

<comment><USER4> Sometimes all you need is the geometry.

<comment><USER3> What if you can't separate the geometry you want from the geometry next to it, or the geometry it sets upon? That's the current public state of the art. Such systems become much more useful after they can identify objects so they can tell when two items are separate things, and when two sections of the same thing are in fact one object.

<comment><USER4> If you are making a robot that has to manipulate objects in it's environment, fair enough. If you are making a vehicle that just needs to know about the free "drivable" space in it's vicinity, the barrier is lower.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That's pretty awesome. I wonder if they will hook it up to google maps and start using real cities for game levels.

Also related, check out the work Japan has been doing for years

[http://www.engadget.com/2012/08/23/live2d-drawing- technology...](http://www.engadget.com/2012/08/23/live2d-drawing-technology- turns-2d-3d/)

[http://www.engadget.com/2009/06/04/video-sonys- motionportrai...](http://www.engadget.com/2009/06/04/video-sonys- motionportrait-turns-photos-into-3d-animations-wit/)

</comment><comment><USER6> This is pretty neat, although I would suggest perhaps of limited use. The whole point of a 3D model is that it can be viewed from any angle (also at any scale). The 2D scene lacks sufficient information to reconstruct the 3D scene. This can be seen with the toys on the sofa when the back of the hippo becomes visible and there is no texture or model data. You could extrapolate and assume there's a degree of symmetry in the object, but this would only work on a limited subset of objects.

<comment><USER7> It looks like it could be a tremendous time saver for camera projection mapping for matte paintings even if you don't circle all around set or geometry. I suspect that was their motivation.

<comment><USER8> Maybe it was to make a 3d versions of old 2d disney movies.

3d Aristocats anyone?

<comment><USER7> Makes sense, since camera projection is used to convert 2d to 3d (movies).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The title is a bit misleading, it's not from a single photo but from a video stream.

<comment><USER10> photos, not photo

<comment><USER11> The English language is ambiguous here. In computer graphics, this is commonly resolved by saying "image set", "video stream", "image sequences", etc.

Since this is computer vision topic, and it said "photos", and that this particular "2D images -> 3D" has been implemented double-digit times each year for at least the past 10 years, with so many research papers that you can choose between dozens of survey papers instead. I too felt the title was misleading.

<comment><USER10> How is it ambiguous? Photos is plural and model is singular. That would seem to be completely and utterly clear. Also, how does the fact that this area is heavily researched affect anything?

Could it possibly be that your desire for novelty over incremental improvement in an area heavily mined is what is colouring your expectations, rather than the headline itself being misleading?

<comment><USER9> I agree that it isn't a big deal but I was genuinely confused when I first read the article. That's why I made this comment.

Even now, I still think that it is a bit misleading because they cannot reconstruct the scene from _any_ photo(s) but only from a sequence of closely related photos which is better described by the word 'video'.

<comment><USER10> The last paragraph in the article states otherwise though.

 _" The photos were captured along a linear path; this geometry provided structure that the researchers could leverage to make processing the data more efficient. However, the researchers also generalized their approach so that it can be applied even to a set of images taken with a hand-held camera."_

Also, even the photos taken on the rail are not taken as video. You can tell this from the shots where someone is briefly in front of the camera. This is because to get the best data you want the camera to stop at a position on the rail while the shutter is open as otherwise you have to deal with motion blur or keep your exposure very short.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> [http://make3d.cs.cornell.edu/](http://make3d.cs.cornell.edu/)

<comment><USER13> That one is pretty neat. I remember it had interactive demos, but I can't find them in that site (skimmed over it while at work).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Other option:

Videotrace [http://punchcard.com.au/](http://punchcard.com.au/)

</comment><comment><USER15> ProForma 3d scanner using a webcam : [http://hackaday.com/2012/04/30/getting- a-textured-3d-scan-fr...](http://hackaday.com/2012/04/30/getting-a- textured-3d-scan-from-just-a-webcam/)

</comment><comment><USER16> Maybe I am missing the point - but this style of 3d I have never really found visually impressive or fun. I think it is because of the limited range of movement on display. Half the fun of this kind of 3d would be to find things initially hidden in the opening view. I can imagine my sun tilting his ipad to see behind things. But the affect only shifts very slightly. I know that masses more information would be needed for such an affect but to me at least this is what this 3d hints at and why i guess ultimately i find it disappointing.

<comment><USER17> You're disappointed because it's not magic or strong AI?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Imagine capturing footage on your phone/Glass and reviewing it on a large display that tracks your head movements and adjusts the camera accordingly.

Think of the Minority Report scene when Cruise is watching pseudo-3D footage of his family.

The history of media shows a trend towards 100% faithfully recreated experiences. Photos > Film > Video w/ audio > 3D. This gets us one step closer.

</comment><comment><USER19> This looks like it could be used as a replacement for 3d laser scanner.

</comment><comment><USER20> It turns a series of photos into a 3D model, which has been done to death.

Autodesk 123D (which is free) can create a 3D model from just two photos.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, very similar. However there is still room for improvement. Maybe Disney found a solution to make cleaner models, leading to a 3d-print ready solution. With 123D you need to spend time on cleaning the mesh.

ps. this seems to be an open source version of 123D [http://insight3d.sourceforge.net/](http://insight3d.sourceforge.net/) Interesting, but havent used it yet

<comment><USER21> Gahh! 9 out of 10 times, software made in academia has cool features but awful code/structure/packaging/younameit. In this case, the Linux (!) tarball contains Windows binaries and a handwritten Makefile that is not able to compile even the first source file. What a pity.</comment></comment></comment>


AI Scientist Andrew Ng urges all countries to develop strategies like Beijing's - <AUTHOR> https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/China-tech/AI-world-has-room-for-both-US-and-China-ex-Google-and-Baidu-insider <comment><USER2> AI technology has spread very fast in China because there is no regard for health, safety, or privacy.

A good analogy would be the ability for a company to make a very fuel efficient car in record time..without having to deal with things like air bags, safety features, or regulations.

I don't really think we should be using China as an example of anything to emulate. It's an example of what can happen to our privacy and rights if we aren't careful.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does someone understand what's the strategy he's urging to develop? I've read the article but it's still unclear to me.

 _The U.S. still has the edge in fundamental research, he said, but Chinese companies have easier access to the consumer market thanks to Beijing 's national AI strategy, which promotes the spread of the technology._</comment>


Handcuffed to Uber - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/29/handcuffed-to-uber/ <comment><AUTHOR> What is the argument for AMT on ISO's? The Uber employees would own an asset which is not liquid, but a tax on them as if they were. And, if investors are buying preferred shares and not common stock which the employees own, how is the fair market value of the ISO's determined?

Just curious if someone can make an argument on the positives of AMT holistically.

<comment><USER2> Lack of AMT on ISO exercise creates a bunch of tax loopholes.

Imagine a family member transferring a large family asset to the next generation by treating the asset as a corporation which keeps issuing new shares. If shares are transferred as-is, the recipient would have to treat their value as income, so instead the corporation issues a bunch of ISOs and allows the recipient to exercise those.

If the shares are never sold, the recipient avoids income tax and estate tax on a fairly large wealth transfer.

> if investors are buying preferred shares and not common stock which the > employees own, how is the fair market value of the ISO's determined?

IRS code section 409a. Companies typically hire 409a evaluators who have data on companies with similar metrics. But from employee's standpoint it's basically the strike price of ISOs issued to someone who'd join today.</comment></comment>


How We Wronged Neo4j and PostgreSQL - <AUTHOR> https://www.arangodb.com/2018/02/how-we-wronged-neo4j-postgresql-update-arangodb-benchmark-2018/ <comment><USER2> Gotta appreciate the update - not many vendors would do that. It's also a shame that very few independent sources do thorough comparisons like these... I mean comparisons below the Gartner enterprise analysis level.

Also interesting to see that arangodb still performs better than Neo4J in typical graph scenarios, despite the attacks in another threat by the Neo folks.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just followed up on the previous benchmark results. Yes, vendor benchmark etc., but it is nice to see how honest and transparent these guys are. Will be playing around with arangodb soon.

<comment><USER4> Jan from ArangoDB here... true, and we know that it is a thin line to publish benchmark results when you're a vendor. But hope to at least provide a boilerplate for own tests and show that just because a db is multi-model, doesn't mean it has to be slow

<comment><USER3> Kudos. I am more of a relational world kinda guy, but good work.

<comment><USER4> Thanks a lot</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Nestle creates wrapper that degrades in the sea within six months - <AUTHOR> https://news.sky.com/story/nestle-creates-wrapper-that-degrades-in-the-sea-within-six-months-11755547 <comment><USER2> What are we actually talking about here?

Degradable != biodegradable.

Degradable just breaks up into microplastics quicker. But then it mentions paper near the end, so is it a paper plastic laminate?

<comment><USER3> Yes, I'd like to know what components it degrades into. Microplastics might look better, but they enter into the ecosystem very easily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's nice to see Nestlé (which has a long history of unethical and despicable practices) doing something nice for a change.

That said, I personally believe that revolutionary tech like this should be released for anyone and everyone to use freely for the greater good (sorta like how Volvo gave up the patent for the three-point seatbelt) but I doubt that'll happen in today's world.

<comment><USER5> When plastic wrapping conquered the planet, everyone thought it was great since plastic is recyclable. Today we know it's mostly a lie so we could send that trash to 3rd world countries who'd just dump it in the sea or handle it in other bad ways.

It's great that this packaging solves the problem of plastic staying around forever or turning into microplastics when floating around in the ocean and exposed to the UV light from the sun.

But the first thing I'm wondering is whether that new packaging really solves that problem too or just speeds the process up a lot, or maybe just has different bad effects. Towards the end it mentions "carefully wrapped in paper", so hopefully it's not actually a more hazardous variant of plastic that happens to degrade faster.

<comment><USER6> Cellophane is basically a form of paper but it looks and feels like plastic. It's been around forever and is completely biodegradable. I expect that this packaging is maybe just new form of that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I just hope it's not as LOUD as the Sun Chips biodegradable bag. This was actually a legitimate problem, I stopped buying Sun Chips for parties because of the obnoxious sounds of the bag.

[https://gizmodo.com/sunchips-new-100-compostable-bag-is- hila...](https://gizmodo.com/sunchips-new-100-compostable-bag-is-hilariously- ear-d-5616427)

<comment><USER8> "I just hope it's not as LOUD as the Sun Chips biodegradable bag. This was actually a legitimate problem"

A solution to the problem of man-made waste lasting potentially hundreds of years and causing damage to the eco-system at the cost of temporarily annoying a few people too lazy to decant the contents of the packet into a bowl or plate or just put up with the noise as they consume their junk food is pretty much a perfect solution, isn't it?</comment></comment>


Apple charging $279 for iPhone X screen repairs, $549 for everything else - <AUTHOR> https://support.apple.com/iphone/repair/service/pricing <comment><USER2> You would be a fool not to get AppleCare...</comment>


Website-Targeted False Content Injection by Network Operators - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.07128 <comment><USER2> Wow at first I thought I must have misread the title. Sounds overly alarmist doesn't it? Nobody would do something like this right? Well the piece is pretty explicit about what and where this is happening.

One way I could imagine to pull this off with little effort is if I'm in an unmanaged Ethernet segment with the targeted server. If you can cajole the switch to send you traffic destined to other stations, you can easily race their response. You wouldn't even have to crack any equipment that way.

</comment><comment><USER3> This race is also how QUANTUM is supposed to work:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tailored_Access_Operations#QUA...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tailored_Access_Operations#QUANTUM_attacks)

I wonder if we'll see kernel drivers/software purpose made for detecting those situations soon (duplicate responses to the same request) and logging the traceroute in some database to identify the bad actors.

</comment><comment><USER4> Yet another malicious activity that TLS prevents! It's quite wonderful.

</comment><comment><USER5> I am nearly certain that the majority of these injections will trace back to hacked routers, doing it without the network operators' knowledge.

</comment><comment><USER6> That's the legal status of this?

<comment><USER7> Probably legal due to various legalese in agreements we sign with our ISPs and the ISPs sign with other providers.

Still a dick move.

<comment><USER8> Are those enforceable? It seems like you could hide all sorts of nastiness in there.

<comment><USER9> I think it is enforcable because of terms of service agreements and hidden stuff in them.

Pushing advertisement is one thing, but if they push adware and other malware it starts to become out of hand.

It is like Soutceforge and CNet Downloads adding toolbars and adware to apps you download from them. It makes them unpopular, but they are trying to earn money.

Expect more of this sort of stuff as companies use it to earn more money.

Many network devices are old and don't have firmware updates and can be exploited.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't understand why people have a problem with this. It's sleazy, sure. But clients should never trust the network.

The fact that this is happening is due to protocol and software faults that need to be fixed.

Once your network client can no longer be fooled with rubbish inserted by someone who happens to own some wires, then fake responses become a simple matter of bandwidth and QOS agreement, like dropped packets.

The fault here lies with the developers of insecure network client software.</comment>


What I learned from sacking 100 employees and losing $1.5M - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2015/04/19/what-i-learned-from-sacking-100-employees-and-losing-1-5-million/

<comment><AUTHOR> Great perspective on volatility of ups and downs.</comment>


Reflecting on Haskell in 2015 - <AUTHOR> http://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/haskell_2016.html <comment><USER2> I really enjoyed this. Just wanted to comment on the author's brief comments on Elm.

> As of yet, there is no rich polymorphism or higher-kinded types. As such a > whole family of the usual functional constructions (monoids, functors, > applicatives, monads) are inexpressible.

I completely understand that this make Elm quite limited compared to Haskell as the author uses it, but these limitations are precisely what makes Elm accessible to newcomers. I think it's a great way to get people into Haskell syntax like partial application and into the functional way of thinking in general.

I have learned Haskell very gradually over the past 6 years, and I still find advanced Haskell with all the language extensions very daunting to get into.

<comment><USER3> For learning functional programming I find Racket to be the best for teaching functional programming. I think I took 4 tries at teaching myself Haskell and then learning Racket really helped me to get over the learning curve of Haskell though i still consider myself a beginner.

<comment><USER4> I've tried Haskell 4 times. No joke. I have no problem with currying, higher- order functions, foldl, etc., but Monads. Get. Me. Every. Time.

My brain just refuses to fully "grok" them. I still don't see why they're so awesome. I know I use them day-to-day - LINQ, the "List" abstraction (supposedly also a monad??) but I just don't see why it's important to understand them on this whole new fundamentally different level.

It's like - loops. I use loops every day. But if someone were to say - "Hey, did you know that loops are just the Andifuncsplursx abstraction applied on Crazofors?? This is why Crazofors in Haskell are so awesome" I still wouldn't "get" Crazofors or why I should care enough to attempt to "get" them.

I've just given up at this point.

<comment><USER5> Like Erik Meijer said in his course : there is nothing special or magic about monads. They don't deserve all the fuzz arround them. If you don't get why monads are so awesome, maybe that's a proof that you understood them. Because there is nothing special !!

A monad is just a type with 2 functions defined. Like an interface with two methods in OO langages. The 2 functions have to respect some laws but you can imagine whatever implementation for the 2 functions as long as the laws are observed (et type signature of course).

You could invent a total different implementation for the list monad, for the maybe monad, etc (if you respect the laws). There is no hidden ultra powerfull meaning which implies only one implementation.

The best paper on monads i ever read is an ascii art one, by Graham Hutton : [http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~pszgmh/monads](http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~pszgmh/monads)

<comment><USER6> > You could invent a total different implementation for the list monad, for > the maybe monad, etc (if you respect the laws).

Could you show such a different implementation for either list or maybe?

<comment><USER7>
        newtype HeadList a = HeadList { getHeadList :: [a] }

        instance Monad HeadList where
             return a = HeadList [a]
             m >>= f = HeadList $ fmap (head . getHeadList . f) (getHeadList m)

This is a list instance that only keeps the head of function result, so it's basically just a map.

But you could imagine putting any function that returns one result. min max avg normalize, etc

<comment><USER8>
        -- const [] for a HeadList
        quux :: a -> HeadList a
        quux = HeadList . (const [])

        *Main> HeadList "hello... no wait" >>= quux
        HeadList {getHeadList = "*** Exception: Prelude.head: empty list

Such breakage is verboten. This monad instance does not fly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I consider myself a functional programmer, and I also have an interest in logic and type theory, and have learned enough Haskell to write some student- level projects in it.

But when I try to dip my toe back into the Haskell community, a wave of despair washes over me. There's just too much. Haskell is changing too fast. There are too many language extensions, and more and more conceptually sophisticated features keep getting added to it. Every project uses a different set of GHC extensions.

I feel that without more standardization or stability, Haskell can never be more than a playground for PL researchers who can afford to spend all their time learning and implementing advanced language features.

<comment><USER10> For me all the extensions and abstractions induce a kind of choice paralysis, and fear that my program isn't abstracted far enough. I don't feel that when working in C, Java or Ruby.

<comment><USER9> That captures my feelings really well. And then I think that if I'm going to stick to the "meat and potatoes" of functional programming, I might as well just use a language in the ML family.

<comment><USER6> Except controlled side effects are a godsend, even for meat and potatoes.

<comment><USER11> Yes, indeed. Even with the 101 level haskell I write, it feels so right. I exactly know where the side effects are and the semantics of the program is so clear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Stack is absolutely wonderful. stack setup command works wonders, building is effortless, moving to new library versions is as easy as ever and ever since I've started using it I've been writing more and more code in Haskell.

Tooling is absolutely great, Atom plugins are very fine, really, it's very enjoyable and it all happened in a single year.

</comment><comment><USER13> I like Haskell but I see no future in terms of widespread adoption for it. It's simply too alien for your typical CS grad and for some projects one would like to use it for (let's say security critical), laziness (and non- predictable behavior in terms of memory use and performance) is a big problem.

We do however see some of its features being slowly introduced to other languages which is nice, I guess.

<comment><USER14> > It's simply too alien for your typical CS grad

In my university, Programming 101 (mandatory) was (and is) Haskell. For context, there is typically a mix of experience among the class - some will have programmed seriously before, but others will have only studied math.

I had already studied Java, but I found Haskell a delightful re-introduction (it was my first exposure to functional programming) and I see its value as an educational tool.

<comment><USER15> From what I've heard, MIT does the same thing with CS101, except in Scheme. Starting the curriculum that way seems like a good idea (in the long run, since internships and whatnot all want Java or C++/C#), between leveling the playing field and providing a foundation on a lot of the "math" that CS is based on.

<comment><USER16> I had a course in College that was taught in Scheme. It wasn't the "intro to computer science" class, but it was mandatory and at the Sophomore level.

That said, scheme never managed to feel like anything other than a toy language to me, and that we were being fed problems that happened to map neatly into the structure of the language. Write a RPN calculator! Write a Tree Parser! Stuff that really isn't that much harder (but admittedly more verbose) in imperative languages.

I couldn't help but to think "Sure, these problems are easy enough, but how would I blit pixels with this language? How would I process TCP/IP packets? What would a database interface look like? How am I supposed to do error handling?"

In the end I had no desire to integrate Scheme into my day to day programming.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've learned haskell at the university level, and really enjoyed it(and found it very easy to pick up), but find it puzzling where I should use it. It's very easy to say this problem requires a scripting language, and this problem is better suited for an object oriented language, but I don't quite understand what problems would be easier with a functional language. At least in terms of problems that I want solved.

<comment><USER6> > ...this problem requires a scripting language...

Cool, we have that in Haskell these days![1] Except, of course, it has all the good high-level stuff of Haskell, which reduces boilerplate and increases correctness.

[1]: [https://hackage.haskell.org/package/turtle-1.2.3/docs/Turtle...](https://hackage.haskell.org/package/turtle-1.2.3/docs/Turtle- Tutorial.html)

<comment><USER17> Nice to know. Maybe using it more often would lead to thinking about things functionally and finding problems that are better solved functionally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Speaking as somebody that dabbled around with a lot of programming languages, I believe that haskell is kind of an endpoint. Doesn't get better than this. Going back (to other languages) is harder than going further (improving on haskell).

But pure haskell might be too much for a begginer. For me, as an hobbyist, it was. Then I discovered a real world haskell, Elm that (for now) is 'married' to JS. Later, if I feel the need, I can always 'upgrade'. IMHO elm is for haskell, what meteor is for javascript. Even without support from purists, they conquered their market share. This irritated a lot of people.

</comment><comment><USER19> "Call-By-Push-Value

On the topic of evaluation methods there is interesting research opportunity into exploring an alternative evaluation methods for the lambda calculus under the so-called "Call-By-Push-Value" method. Surprisingly this technique has been around for 11 years but lacks an equivalent of SPJ's seminal "stock hardware implementation" paper describing an end to end translation from CBPV to x86. This would be an interesting student project."

Any idea which SPJ paper he is referencing?

<comment><USER20> He's probably referring to SPJ's work on the spineless tagless G-machine [1].

In truth, though, I think trying to incorporate Call-By-Push-Value into Haskell would radically change the language unless there's some research in type theory that allows for the implicit Call-By- _Need_ nature of Haskell to be extended into a form that can accommodate CBPV, which itself explicates a kind duality between Call-By-Name and Call-By-Value.

If advancements have been made here, I'd love to hear about it.

[1] [http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=6708...](http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=67083)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've been intrigued and frustrated by Haskell on and off for years now. But I think the open sourcing of Swift has, at least for now, iced my interest in Haskell. Certainly they are not directly interchangeable, but I think Swift brings a lot of the benefits of an FP language like Haskell or OCaml but is eminently more practical and applicable. Or at least it will be as the OS community behind it gains speed.

So Haskell is still on my radar but, for now, off my list of things I intend to learn.

</comment><comment><USER22> distance :: { x :: Number, y :: Number } -> Number

distance point = sqrt(point.x^2 + point.y^2)

The function application of sqrt shouldn't have parens.

And the type of distance should be

distance :: forall r. { x :: Number, y :: Number | r} -> Number

Otherwise, it's not row-polymorphic and you wouldn't be able to apply distance to a record of type Point3D.

</comment><comment><USER23> > Avoiding success at all costs takes time...

Uh?

<comment><USER24> "Avoid success at all costs" is haskell's unofficial motto (coined by SPJ), so this is a little joke.</comment></comment>


1M Women to Tech - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/1millionwomentotech/ <comment><USER2> The lack of women in tech has never been caused by discrimination. Even if there's been _some_ discrimination, spending time and energy trying to increase the participation of demographic X in field Y is something I have a hard time understanding. It's already been made abundantly clear in the West for at least a generation that if you want to pursue something constructive, you will receive welcome and support, regardless of your background. In my professional experience, I've never encountered even a whiff of anti-woman or anti-minority sentiment. I've worked at tech companies of various types and sizes occupying various niches, and the atmosphere has been unfailingly open and tolerant. I've spoken with colleagues who had no reason to hide their true feelings, and none of them has ever expressed a sexist or racist opinion.

I've read several ridiculous articles lamenting the obstacles that, supposedly, only women and minorities face when trying to get into computer programming. Sorry, but the only things stopping anyone who doesn't live in abject poverty from becoming a coder are (a) lack of interest, (b) lack of persistence, and/or (c) lack of aptitude, in that order.</comment>


Ten Years of Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> https://bitcoin.clarkmoody.com/posts/ten-years-bitcoin <comment><USER2> That's good Bitcoin PR but clicking the link I hoped for a more in-depth analysis of these ten years, the lessons learned and the way forward. This is mostly fluff.

>These past ten years might be the earliest days of a new golden era of human flourishing, built upon censorship-resistant, sound money.

Good thing they used "might" otherwise I might have scoffed at this grandiloquent and unsubstantiated statement.

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here.

Yep, it's definitely a message to Bitcoin insiders, but that's not a bad thing. Sorry to fail your hopes.

> grandiloquent and unsubstantiated statement

Once you've studied money from a critical angle, you start to see that unsound money is the root cause of many of the problems with society and government.

The first ten years of Bitcoin (plus history leading to it) and sound vs unsound money are both huge topics in their own right. Perhaps it would be useful for me to include a little box at the end of each article with links to books and lengthy posts about these topics.

<comment><USER3> Interestingly, I meet a lot of traditional banking folks who understand how Bitcoin works. It's very rare that I meet Bitcoin/blockchain folks who understand how traditional banking works.

<comment><USER4> Maybe the information asymmetry is part of the problem itself. Banking system is centuries upon centuries of arbitraty constructs. It does not make sense from the ground up.

<comment><USER3> Yes, there are lots of good Bitcoin/blockchain resources online, while the banking system is more complicated and has fewer easily digestible resources available.

<comment><USER5> _while the banking system is more complicated and has fewer easily digestible resources available_

I'd wager that the literature on banking and finance _far_ outweighs resources on anything crypto. Specifically compared to papers on crypto coming from a neutral perspective.

Your statement is just plain wrong.

edit : clarification

<comment><USER6> Ah, but it's not presented in a droning series of youtube videos that pander to the viewer's prejudices, so it might as well not exist! /s

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The text in the hex data seen in the article (part of the Bitcoin genesis block) was the headline of The Times to prove the block wasn't generated prior to the newspaper's date.

Bitmex (one of the largest exchanges at the moment) put an ad on the frontpage of the newspaper's issue exactly 10 years later as a tribute: [https://twitter.com/BitMEXResearch/status/108059040132345036...](https://twitter.com/BitMEXResearch/status/1080590401323450368)

EDIT: It seems there is a full page ad that goes with the front page one: [https://imgur.com/sVBZVfN](https://imgur.com/sVBZVfN)

<comment><USER8> How can a newspaper prove that the block wasn't generated prior to the publish date? If I were to hash the headlines from a 1969 "ON THE MOON!" article, would it prove that my block is older that the bitcoin's genesis block?

<comment><USER9> Including it only proves that it was not generated before a certain date. It can't prove that it was generated before something also generated after the headline in question.

You have to predict exactly what the headline is going to be though "On the Moon" is a fair guess but the chances you would get "Men walk on the moon" (plus "astronauts land on plain; collect rocks, plant flag" if we're using the subheadline too) exactly correct to fake it are really low. That's only possible on a very small number of dates where there's a known huge event coming up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was expecting/hoping for analysis, but it's more like an anniversary press release touting a bunch of success without reference and ignoring anything negative.

> For ten years, the world has known a decentralized source of truth. At all > prior times in human history, we relied on centralized third parties to > establish trust.

This is your periodic reminder that >51% of the mining is currently controlled by 5 large mining companies based out of China[0]. If you think these companies not entirely beholden to the non-democratic, highly centralized, Chinese government (or that this is a non-issue) then I'd really like to hear that argument.

I must admit I was surprised to see that 20.1% of mining is currently "Unknown", which was not the case last I checked.

[0] [https://www.blockchain.com/en/pools](https://www.blockchain.com/en/pools)

<comment><USER11> > or that this is a non-issue

I'd argue non-issue. Attack vectors could be to attempt a double spend (not worth it) or confirming empty blocks (why?).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This reads like a press release — I thought the puffery would be followed by something substantive but hit the bottom of the page instead. If you aren't a true believer before reading this you wouldn't leave having learned anything.

</comment><comment><USER13> There's almost no content in this post. I can't tell if it's intended as some kind of meta-commentary on bitcoin?

</comment><comment><USER14> No doubt, this is a rare achievement of technology, community and economics.

At the same time, if everyone abandoned the project today, it's tough to imagine a measurable impact on the world outside the cryptoscene.

Personally, I feel that everyone has been too obsessed with the desire to hoard assets to actually build shit that's useful to society. The fact that this rent-seeking desire is baked into the core of most cryptocurrency schemes makes me skeptical that the space will amount to much in the near term. I suspect that when it does, it'll come about in a way that avoids rewarding the squatters. Certainly nowhere near the ratio of dumb money to strategic investment we've seen in the past couple years.

</comment><comment><USER15> ... Ten years of scams and theft and damage to the environment from the abuse of electricity!

</comment><comment><USER16> I recall mining a Bitcoin back in early 09 or so, staring at it for a few seconds and then deleting it with a chuckle. Oh well.

<comment><USER17> If you did mine in 2009 you mined a block yourself, so it would have been 50btc.

<comment><USER18> And he likely wouldn't have those 50 BTC anymore, might've bought a pizza or something back when the price hit $0.30.</comment></comment></comment>


Thanks to Facebook, Cellphone Companies Are Watching You More Closely Than Ever - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2019/05/20/facebook-data-phone-carriers-ads-credit-score/ <comment><USER2> Not a week goes by without some terrible Facebook bit of news. When will it end?</comment>


Websites are over. One-page flyers are the new big thing. Here's an example. - <AUTHOR> http://power20app.com

<comment><USER2> Declaring that "Websites are over" is likely to make most people immediately stop reading.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you were right then our traffic wouldn't have increased five-fold in one hour, and you probably wouldn't have expended the effort to comment.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is there any reason not to install (and use) Google chrome on my mac? - <AUTHOR> I'm in general nervous about google siphoning my information and profiling me... is a default install of chrome (without any google account login) any worse for me than just using safari or firefox? <comment><USER2> Oddly enough on my blog I get a lot of Mac OSX users using Chrome based on my statistics.

There is an alternative web browser based on Chromium named Iron that claims to have taken out the Google spyware: [http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron_download.php](http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron_download.php)

The Mac OSX version if way behind the Windows version and way behind what Google Chrome is at.

[http://www.srware.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=8102](http://www.srware.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=8102)

[http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron_chrome_vs_iron...](http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron_chrome_vs_iron.php)

I think they need help working on the Mac OSX and Linux versions.

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe a better question to ask yourself would be "Is there something I want to do in a browser that I can't do with Safari"

<comment><AUTHOR> every now and then: flash

(because I don't want to install flash system-wide)

<comment><USER3> I used to do this - I'd install Chrome but use Safari for regular browsing an only switch to Chrome if I really wanted to see it.

Now I find Develop > User Agent > Safari (iPad) gives me a usable page on most flash-dependent sites.

Those that don't, I simply don't use.</comment></comment></comment>


Facebook banned Operation Payback - <AUTHOR> http://twitter.com/Anon_Operation/statuses/12620181117337601 <comment><USER2> Yes, but in this case it's true that the page violated the TOS. Just reading the text in the linked image makes it pretty obvious.</comment>