Cyc - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc <comment><USER3> I worked for Cycorp for a few years recently. AMA, I guess? I obviously won't give away any secrets (e.g. business partners, finer grained details of how the inference engine works), but I can talk about the company culture, some high level technical things and the interpretation of the project that different people at the company have that makes it seem more viable than you might guess from the outside.

There were some big positives. Everyone there is very smart and depending on your tastes, it can be pretty fun to be in meetings where you try to explain Davidsonian ontology to perplexed business people. I suspect a decent fraction of the technical staff are reading this comment thread. There are also some genuine technical advances (which I wish were more publicly shared) in inference engine architecture or generally stemming from treating symbolic reasoning as a practical engineering project and giving up on things like completeness in favor of being able to get an answer most of the time.

There were also some big negatives, mostly structural ones. Within Cycorp different people have very different pictures of what the ultimate goals of the project are, what true AI is, and how (and whether) Cyc is going to make strides along the path to true AI. The company has been around for a long time and these disagreements never really resolve - they just sort of hang around and affect how different segments of the company work. There's also a very flat organizational structure which makes for a very anarchic and shifting map of who is responsible or accountable for what. And there's a huge disconnect between what the higher ups understand the company and technology to be doing, the projects they actually work on, and the low-level day-to-day work done by programmers and ontologists there.

I was initially pretty skeptical of the continued feasibility of symbolic AI when I went in to interview, but Doug Lenat gave me a pitch that essentially assured me that the project had found a way around many of the concerns I had. In particular, they were doing deep reasoning from common sense principles using heuristics and not just doing the thing Prolog often devolved into where you end up basically writing a logical system to emulate a procedural algorithm to solve problems.

It turns out there's a kind of reality distortion field around the management there, despite their best intentions - partially maintained by the management's own steadfast belief in the idea that what Cyc does is what it ought to be doing, but partially maintained by a layer of people that actively isolate the management from understanding the dirty work that goes into actually making projects work or appear to. So while a certain amount of "common sense" knowledge factors into the reasoning processes, a great amount of Cyc's output at the project level really comes from hand-crafted algorithms implemented either in the inference engine or the ontology.

Also the codebase is the biggest mess I have ever seen by an order of magnitude. I spent some entire days just scrolling through different versions of entire systems that duplicate massive chunks of functionality, written 20 years apart, with no indication of which (if any) still worked or were the preferred way to do things.

<comment><USER4> Two easy ones for you:

1) How did they manage to make money for so long to keep things afloat? I'm guessing through some self-sustainable projects like the few business relationships listed in the wiki?

2) What's the tech stack like? (Language, deployment, etc)

<comment><USER3> 1) The money situation has changed over the years, and they've had times where things have boomed or busted - it's been a while since I left but I think they're still in a "boom" phase. There are a lottt more projects with different companies or organizations than the ones listed on the wiki, but they tend to be pretty secretive and I won't name names.

The categories of projects that I was familiar with were basically proof of concept work for companies or government R&D contracts. There are lots of big companies that will throw a few million at a long-shot AI project just to see if it pays off, even if they don't always have a very clear idea of what they ultimately want or a concrete plan to build a product around it. Sometimes these would pay off, sometimes they wouldn't but we'd get by on the initial investment for proof of concept work. Similarly, organizations like DARPA will fund multiple speculative projects around a similar goal (e.g. education - that's where "Mathcraft" came from IIRC) to evaluate the most promising direction.

There have been a few big hits in the company's history, most of which I can't talk about. The hits have basically been in very circumscribed knowledge domains where there's a lot of data, a lot of opportunity for simple common sense inferences (e.g. if Alice worked for the ABC team of company A at the same time Bob worked for the XYZ team of company B and companies A and B were collaborating on a project involving the ABC and XYZ teams at that same time, then Alice and Bob have probably met) and you have reason to follow all those connections looking for patterns, but it's just too much data for a human to make a map of. Cyc can answer questions about probable business or knowledge relationships between individuals in large sets of people in a few seconds, which would be weeks of human research and certain institutions pay a high premium for that kind of thing.

2) Oh god. Get ready. Here's a 10k foot overview of a crazy thing. All this is apparent if you use OpenCyc so I feel pretty safe talking about it. Cyc is divided into the inference engine and the knowledge base. Both are expressed in different custom LISPy dialects. The knowledge base language is like a layer on top of the inference engine language.

The inference engine language has LISPy syntax but is crucially very un-LISPy in certain ways (way more procedural, no lambdas, reading it makes me want to die). To build the inference engine, you run a process that translates the inference code into Java and compiles that. Read that closely - it doesn't compile to JVM bytecode, it transpiles to Java source files, which are then compiled. This process was created before languages other than Java targeting the JVM were really a thing. There was a push to transition to Clojure or something for the next version of Cyc, but I don't know how far it got off the ground because of 30 years of technical debt.

The knowledge base itself is basically a set of images running on servers that periodically serialize their state in a way that can be restarted - <USER2> ontologists can boot up their own images, make changes and transmit those to the central images. This model predates things like version control and things can get hairy when different images get too out of sync. Again, there was an effort to build a kind of git-equivalent to ease those pains, which I think was mostly finished but not widely adopted.

There are project-specific knowledge base branches that get deployed in their own images to customers, and specific knowledge base subsets used for different things.

<comment><USER5> "certain institutions pay a high premium for that kind of thing"

Applications in litigation support/e-discovery?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Knowledge bases should work in principle. There are many issues with filling them manually: a) the schema/ontology/conceptual framework is not guaranteed to be useful especially when done with no specific application in mind b) high cost of adding each fact with little marginal benefit etc. But I don't think it outweighs the issues of "pure" machine learning that much: poor introspection, capricious predictability of what you will get, and if you want to have really structured and semi-reliable information you will probably have to rely, at some point, on something like Wikipedia meta-information (DBpedia). Which is really a knowledge base with its own issues.

I think what really stopped Cyc from getting a wider traction is its closed nature[0]. People do use Princeton WordNet, which you can get for free, even though it's a mess in many aspects. The issue and mentality here is similar to commercial Common Lisp implementations, and the underlying culture is similar (oldschool 80s AI). These projects were shaped with a mindset that major progress in computing will happen with huge government grants and plans[1]. However you interpret the last 30 years, it was not exactly true. It's possible that all these companies earn money for their owners, but they have no industry-wide impact.

I was half-tempted once or twice to use something like Cyc in some project, but it would probably be too much organizational hassle. Especially if it turned out to be something commercial I wouldn't want to be dependent on someone's licensing and financial whims, especially if it can be avoided.

[0] There was OpenCyc for a time, but it was scrapped.

[1] Compare [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20569098](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20569098)

<comment><USER7> > if you want to have really structured and semi-reliable information you will > probably have to rely, at some point, on something like Wikipedia meta- > information (DBpedia).

Wikidata is also worth considering for that task. It is:

* Directly linked from Wikipedia [1]

* The data source for many infoboxes [2]

* Seeded with data from Wikipedia

* More active and integrated in community

* Larger in total number of concepts

Wikidata also has initiatives in lexicographic data [3] and images [4, 5].

On the subject of Cyc: the CycL "generalization" (#$genls) predicate inspired Wikidata's "subclass of" property [6], which now links together Wikidata's tree of knowledge.

\---

1\. See "Wikidata" link at left in all articles, e.g. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_base](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_base)

2\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Infobox_templates_usi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Infobox_templates_using_Wikidata)

3\. [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Lexicographical_data/...](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Lexicographical_data/Documentation#Introduction)

4\. [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Wikimedia_Commons/Dev...](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Wikimedia_Commons/Development#Statistics)

5\. See "Structured data" tab in image details on Wikimedia Commons, e.g. [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mona_Lisa,_by_Leonar...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mona_Lisa,_by_Leonardo_da_Vinci,_from_C2RMF_retouched.jpg#ooui- php-1)

6\. [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property_talk:P279#Archived_cr...](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property_talk:P279#Archived_creation_discussion)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The the following utterance, sort of looks like the triplet data structure used in graph/knowledge databases:

"Alive loves Bob"

What do you know? Nothing. Was it Alice who said she loves Bob, or was it Bob who said it is Alice who loves him, maybe Carol saw the way Alice looks at Bob and then conclude she must love him. What is love anyway? How exactly is the love Alice has for Bob quantitively different than my love of chocolate. It might register similar brain activity in a MRI scan, and yet we humans recognise them as qualitatively different.

A knowledge base is useless if you can't judge wether a fact is true or false. The response to this problem was for the semantic web community to introduce a provenance ontology, but any attempt to reason over statements about statements seem to go nowhere. IMHO you can't solve the problem of AGI without also having a way for a rational agent to embody its thoughts in the physical world.

<comment><USER9> Agreed. Human thinking is arbitrarily high-order -- we use statements about statements about statements with no particular natural complexity limit. This seems to me the big limitation of knowledge graphs: The majority of real-world information, just like the majority of natural-language sentences, are highly nested relationships among relationships.

That was my motivation for writing Hode[1], the Higher-Order Data Editor. It lets you represent arbitrarily nested relationships, of any arity (number of members). It lets you cursor around data to view neighboring data, and it offers a query language that is, I believe, as close as possible to ordinary natural language.

(Hode has no inference engine, and I don't call it an AI project -- but it seems relevant enough to warrant a plug.)

[1] [https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/hode](https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/hode)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is it possible For a non-academic to get a ResearchCyc license? I've used OpenCyc in the past; now that I'm retired I'd like to look deeper into Cyc.

</comment><comment><USER11> last time I looked at OpenCyc's knowledge base, the information encoded was all strangely specific academic stuff - like very fine classifications and relationships between species of tapeworms and of fungus. There was very little daily-life common-sense knowledge, even though that's often the hook in interviews and articles about Cyc's purpose. I'm not sure why that's true - maybe it's hard to decide what the 'facts' are about normal human life, but the more academic something is, the more there's a consensus, rationalized 'reality'

<comment><USER12> Employee of Cycorp here. A few thoughts:

\- At least right now, we have a good amount of common-sense information about the world (I don't know when "last time" was for you).

\- That said, we have _a lot_ of highly specialized knowledge in various domains, so if you took a random sample of the knowledge base (KB) it may not be as common-sense-centric as you'd hope. But the KB is also incredibly large, so that doesn't mean we _don 't_ have much common-sense, just that we have even more other stuff.

\- Often for contracts we get paid to construct lots of domain-specific knowledge, even if the project also uses the more general knowledge, so this biases the distribution some.

\- Information that's already well-taxonomized is low-hanging fruit for this kind of system; its representation doesn't take nearly as much extra thought and consideration, so it's a faster process, which also biases the distribution some.

<comment><USER13> OpenCyc hasn't been a thing for something like a decade, so even if "last time" was yesterday, it'd still be on outdated information (because Cycorp keeps things proprietary, hidden and unauditable). Do you know when they last pushed it out? It's been a while.

<comment><USER14> It has indeed been a while, unfortunately. I don't know the exact date. Some of us here are trying to push for a revival of OpenCyc or something similar, to democratize things and get third-party developers playing with the system, but for now OpenCyc is not really supported.

<comment><USER13> Good luck! That's a really genuinely exciting prospect. I hope you succeed!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I am familiar with prolog and know what it takes (ish) to make an old school expert system. I have heard about this project. Are there any demos of this system? Like a video sales pitch. I have always wanted to see it in action.

</comment><comment><USER16> I can't find it but I distinctly remember that there was part of an episode of 3-2-1 contact in the 80s about what must have been an early version of this system. It was the exact same thing as brundolf mentions* about the common sense system and how they set up the system to ask questions when contradictions arose. An example they used was it had asked if a human is still human when shaving. It is interesting that the system still exists.

Of course, I don't recall them mentioning any of the more dystopian things it could be (and sounds like has been) used for :/.

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21784105](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21784105)

On second thought, it might have been an Alan Kay presentation. I couldn't find that either but looking I did find this interesting Wired article from 2016:

[https://www.wired.com/2016/03/doug-lenat-artificial- intellig...](https://www.wired.com/2016/03/doug-lenat-artificial-intelligence- common-sense-engine/)

<comment><USER17> Amusingly, or sadly, depending on your perspective, in practical settings the default behavior of that question depends on exactly what you want human to mean in the vocabulary of the local use case, because continuants are a very leaky abstraction if they are used to type biological systems, and while to our 'common sense' the type of human and human shaving should obviously be the same, when you get to questions about whether seemingly insignificant numerical differences in rates of catalysis constitute differences in type, then suddenly the distinction between "protein" and "protein wiggling slightly faster than usual" or "protein binding molecule a" (think "human holding shaver") becomes very much not obvious depending on exactly what question you want to answer. In the protein example if you black box the system, they can be fundamentally different. If human means predator, and your question is how dangerous is this human, then "human" and "human holding razor" becomes "agentous thing" and "agentous thing with sharp edged object" practically different things in very important ways if you are trying not to be filleted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> in my experience, most people dismiss cyc as a failed science experiment. this shouldnt be! after all, many important deep learning concepts have their roots in the 80s, and it is possible that cyc could be revived too.

<comment><USER19> CYC effectively died the day OpenCYC died. There is no way that an entity that tries to catalogue human knowledge in this way will thrive on a closed set of data, there are only so many people working there.

Just like the Encyclopedia Brittanica has found its match in WikiPedia so CYC will find its match in something open. The engine - if the comments here are to be believed as still currently relevant - is a core that may be relevant and a huge number of domain specific hacks. Let's hope sooner or later CYC management comes to their senses and revives OpenCYC.

<comment><USER20> That is SUMO Ontology ([http://ontologyportal.org](http://ontologyportal.org))! It is open, in GitHub and people can contribute.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> 1) What do you think about hybrid approach: hypergraphs + large-scale NLP models (transformers)?

2) How far we're from real self-evolving cognitive architectures with self- awareness features? Is it a question of years, months, or it's already solved problem?

3) Does it make sense to use embeddings like [https://github.com/facebookresearch/PyTorch- BigGraph](https://github.com/facebookresearch/PyTorch-BigGraph) to achieve better results?

4) Why Cycorp decided to limit communication and collaboration with scientific community / AI-enthusiasts at some point?

5) Did you try to solve GLUE / SUPERGLUE / SQUAD challenges with your system?

6) Is Douglas Lenat still contribute actively to the project?

Thanks

<comment><USER22> Doug Lenat is very much still active in the project. He doesn't do as much work building the ontology, but he plays a role in how various projects develop and provides a lot of feedback.

<comment><USER23> How do you compare with SOAR and opencog/atomspace?

Which6is the most promising AGI project according to you?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I've always thought that being able to model the physical world at multiple levels of abstraction was pretty essential for trying to interact with it in a less brittle way.

Moreover, having models of things that are interesting and relevant to humans seems pretty important for any system that interacts with humans.

And it always seemed reasonable that any system that aims to use natural language should be able to represent the meaning of the sentences it uses in a clear and understandable format.

Also "organizing the world's information" should make it usable in an automated fashion based on semantic models.

</comment><comment><USER25> I immediately recognized the headline even though its been 15 years since I last read up on Cyc.

I still think the potential of lambda calculus in knowledge representation and logical deduction is high and under-represented in research.

Just theorizing, but I think a large part of the problem is the difficulty in interfacing this knowledge base with manual, human entry. Another pitfall is the difficulty in determining strange or unanticipated logical outcomes, and developing a framework to catch or validate these.

<comment><USER20> I have been working on that direction with Lean Theorem Prover ([https://leanprover.github.io](https://leanprover.github.io)). There is also works using Coq ([https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-35786-2_...](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-35786-2_11))

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Cyc was the last holdout of GOFAI in the 90's, its premise being that the traditional symbolic AI paradigm wasn't wrong, but that it was just a matter of scale.

<comment><USER23> Almost all AGI projects use symbolic AI. It is a misconception to believe that connexionism has won, it only leads narrow tasks that help to build the higher level thing that is AGI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> My 2 cents is that I can ask just about any question I can think of and absorb and internalize an amazing answer in 5 minutes of reading. Many of those same questions can be automatically asked and answered too. The web and search engines are realizing the promise far better than anything else.

<comment><USER9> God I wish I felt this way. It's true that I can get an amazing amount of information in a short time, but I don't know how accurate or complete it is, and I don't even know how to find out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> How does this compare to wolfram alpha?

</comment><comment><USER29> I used to read about cyc here [https://www.cyc.com/cycl- translations](https://www.cyc.com/cycl-translations). But it says now "coming soon". Since we have folks from Cyc here, any ideas how soon?

</comment><comment><USER30> While this approach might seem dated and strange, at some point something will begin to approach the ability to do general learning like a human. I just wonder how long we have to wait.

<comment><USER31> What if general learning is uncomputable?

<comment><USER32> General learning is uncomputable, it's called Solomonoff induction. You don't need general learning, you need something at least as powerful as the mess in a human brain.

<comment><USER33> Can you provide some references on "General learning is uncomputable"? Thanks.

<comment><USER32> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIXI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIXI)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> For me it would be helpful with some more examples of how to formulate the query and how the reasoning would look. Could someone share some examples of "common knowledge" that they think are cool?

Here are some common knowledge in English that I would love to see the system answer.

\- Is a dog owner likely to own a rope-like object? (Yes, they likely own a leash.)

\- Does the average North American own more than 1 shoestring? (Yes, most people have at least 2 shoes, and most shoes have shoestrings.)

\- Is it safer to fly or to travel by car?

</comment><comment><USER35> Is it possible that the inherent context dependent ambiguities of human language make knowledge-based inference so difficult since most current knowledge is stored in human language ?

tangential question: is there a standard language for "knowledge", like how we describe math for "computation" ?

Are a part of our brains essentially compilers from human language to an internal definition of "knowledge" that leads to consciousness ?

<comment><USER36> There are a bunch of "standards" for representing knowledge. E.g. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web)

[Edit] Here's a wider overview: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_representation_and_r...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_representation_and_reasoning)

<comment><USER35> Thanks for the link. It seems to talk about a knowledge graph type links between entities. It is however in a human language (here, english). I am interested in knowing if there's something analogous to "math" to represent knowledge.

<comment><USER36> The knowledge is represented in the links. Words don't inherently mean anything. The meaning of a word is how it relates to other words. The "math" of knowledge representation is in manipulating and searching the graph. The nodes can be named anything, because the names aren't knowledge, they're just tags on parts of the knowledge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> [http://conceptnet.io/](http://conceptnet.io/)

</comment><comment><USER38> This Wikipedia article is clearly not neutral in tone. It reads like the CEO wrote it.

</comment><comment><USER39> > require between 1000 and 3000 person-years [to input all the relevant facts > in the world]

Which is laughably small in retrospect. I wonder what current estimates are.

</comment><comment><USER31> Why is there never any fundamental research whether human intelligence is even computable? All these huge, expensive projects based on an untested premise.

<comment><USER40> Why wouldn't it be? It seems to me that at worst we would have to wait for computers to become as powerful and complex as a human brain, and then simulating human intelligence would be a matter of accurately modelling the connections.

Is there doubt as to whether a neuron can be represented computationally?

<comment><USER31> The mind may be nonphysical.

<comment><USER41> That's one position, but there are three problems with it:

1\. You have to solve the interaction problem (how does the mind interact with the physical world?)

2\. You need to explain why the world is not physically closed without blatantly violating physical theory / natural laws.

3\. From the fact that the mind is nonphysical, it does not follow that computationalism is false. On the contrary, I'd say that computationalism is still the best explanation of how human thinking works even for a dualist. (All the alternatives are quite mystical, except maybe for hypercomputationalism.)

<comment><USER31> 1\. No I don't. I don't have to explain how gravity works to know that it does and make scientific claims about its operation. Likewise, I can scientifically demonstrate the mind is non physical and interacts with our physical world without explaining how.

2\. If the world is not physically closed then physical theory and natural laws are not violated, since they would not apply to anything beyond the physical world.

3\. True, but if the mind can be shown to perform physically uncomputable tasks, then we can infer the mind is not physical. In which case we can also apply Occam's razor and infer the mind is doing something uncomputable as opposed to having access to vast immaterial computational resources.

Finally, calling a position names, such as 'mystical', does nothing to determine the veracity of the position. At best it is counter productive by distracting from the logic of the argument.

<comment><USER41> I wasn't trying to argue with you, I merely laid out what is commonly thought about the subject matter. Sorry if that sounds patronizing (it's really not meant to). Anyway, if you want to publish a paper defending a dualist position nowadays in any reputable journal, you'll have to address points 1&2 in one way or another, whether you believe you have to or not. It's not as if that problem hadn't been discussed during the past 60 years or so. There are whole journals dedicated to it.

> _if the mind can be shown to perform physically uncomputable tasks_

That's true. Many people have tried that and many people _believe_ they can show it. Roger Penrose, for example. These arguments are usually based on complexity theory or the Halting Problem and involve certain views about what mathematicians can and cannot do. As I've said, I've personally not been convinced by any of those arguments.

Your mileage may differ. Fair enough. Just make sure that you do not "know the answer" already when starting to think about the problem, because that's what many people seem to do when they think about these kind of problems and it's a pity.

> _calling a position names, such as 'mystical', does nothing to determine the > veracity of the position. At best it is counter productive by distracting > from the logic of the argument._

That wasn't my intention, I use "mystical" in this context in the sense of "does not provide any better understanding or scientifically acceptable explanation." Many of the (modern) arguments in this area are inferences to the best explanation.

By the way, correctly formulated computationalism does not presume physicalism. It is fully compatible with dualism.

<comment><USER31> Yes, I understand computationalism does not imply physicalism, but physicalism does imply computationalism. Thus, if computationalism is empirically refuted, then physicalism is false.

I know the Lucas Godel incompleteness theorem type arguments. Whether successful or not, the counter arguments are certainly fallacious. E.g. just because I form a halting problem for myself does not mean I am not a halting oracle for uncomputable problems.

But, I have developed a more empirical approach, something that can be solved by the average person, not dealing with whether they can find the Godel sentence for a logic system.

Also, there is a lot of interesting research showing that humans are very effective at approximating solutions to NP complete problems, apparently better than the best known algorithms. While not conclusive proof in itself, such examples are very surprising if there is nothing super computational about the human mind, and less so if there is.

At any rate, there are a number of lines of evidence I'm aware of that makes the uncomputable mind a much more plausible explanation for what we see humans do, ignoring the whole problem of consciousness. I'm just concerned with empirical results, not philosophy or math. As such, I don't really care what some journal's idea of the burden of proof is. I care about making discoveries and moving our scientific knowledge and technology forward.

Additionally, this is not some academic speculation. If the uncomputable mind thesis is true, then there are technological gains to be made, such as through human in the loop approaches to computation. Arguably, that is where all the successful AI and ML is going these days, so that serves as yet one more line of evidence for the uncomputable mind thesis.

<comment><USER42> > physicalism does imply computationalism

That's not true either.

There are plenty of materialists who think the universe is not computable, thus it's totally possible to believe that the mind is not computable despite being entirely physical.

<comment><USER31> It's possible, so I should qualify it as our current understanding of physics implies computationalism.

So, if a macro phenomena, i.e. the human mind, is uncomputable, then it is not emergent from the low computable physical substrate.

<comment><USER42> If the mind were found to be uncomputable, I think you'd find vastly more physicists would take that as evidence the universe is uncomputable than that the mind is nonphysical.

<comment><USER31> So they may, but that would not follow logically. If the lowest level of physics is all computable then the higher physical levels must also be computable. Thus, if a higher level is not computable, it is not physical. We have never found anything at the lowest level that is not computable. None of it is even at the level of a Turing machine, unlike human produced computers.

<comment><USER42> Any chaotic system (highly sensitive to initial conditions) is practically uncomputable for us, because we have neither the computational power nor the ability to measure the initial conditions sufficiently accurately. Whether there is some lowest level at which everything is quantized, or it's real numbers all the way down, is an open question.

I don't think your argument will seem compelling to anyone who doesn't already have a strong prior belief that the mind is non-physical.

<comment><USER31> I would argue it is the other way around. If people are truly unbiased whether we are computable or not, then they would give my argument consideration. It is those with a priori computational bias that will not be phased by what I say.

<comment><USER42> You're right, but people tend to have strong priors one way of the other, often unconsciously. This is one of those classic cases where people with strong, divergent priors will disagree more strongly after seeing the same evidence. So if you want to convince people you'll have to try harder than most to find common ground.

<comment><USER31> And that's why I'm not concerned with convincing anyone. The proof is in the pudding. If I'm right, I should be able to get results. If not, then my argument doesn't matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I can't believe this is still a thing.

Then again, I felt the same way when I studied it at university almost 20 years ago. It was pretty obviously a pipe dream then, too.

<comment><USER44> I thought so on first glance too, but from what I've heard from someone who worked there, it's working software and it makes a lot of money. That's the opposite of a pipe dream, even if far short of AGI.

<comment><USER31> Is it making real money, or speculative money on the moon shot premise that AGI will rule it all if successful?

I worked at an AI company before, and it was the latter.

<comment><USER45> My understanding is mostly the latter, but definitely also the former, but it's based off of "I worked there, but our customer list isn't public so I can't tell you who" type statements like you'll see elsewhere.

If I had to guess what it's been actually used for, I'd wager it's money laundering or counter-terrorism type stuff; it's fairly well suited to finding connections between people and entities given a large data-set, and unlike many ML models, it can tell you why it thinks someone is suspicious, which might be needed for justifying further investigation. This is a completely wild-ass guess though so take with a giant grain of salt.

<comment><USER31> Yes that was the sort of usecase for the AI company I worked at, similar data mining competing with Palantir.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I think that this particular topic is evergreen because people are perennially surprised that this technology, which seems so reasonable and advanced at first blush, has failed to be useful in practice.

<comment><USER47> I spent a year doing an ontology postdoc. I can't speak for Cyc, but from what I saw of the ontology world, there are a lot of charlatans and people who are using it as a buzzword to make grant proposals sexier. Whether or not there's real potential in the technology, that kind of environment surely isn't conducive to achieving said potential. An outsider trying to peek into the field is immediately swamped by vast oceans of garbage, and everyone in the field is an expert at marketing themselves so if there are legitimate researcher gems in the field, I don't know how you'd actually find them from amidst all the noise.

<comment><USER9> This supply-side opacity is definitely a problem. There seems to be a corresponding demand-side problem, that clients often don't know quite what they want. If there was an easy way of generating hard tests with clear-cut answers, maybe there would be an easy way for a winner to distinguish themselves.</comment></comment></comment>


The Failure of ActionScript 3 ? - <AUTHOR> http://ncannasse.fr/blog/the_failure_of_as3

<comment><USER2> Quote:

 _"I must admit that I'm biased in that review, and I haven't been using so much AS3 myself."_

Yeah, not knowing _foo_ is definitely the ideal starting point for writing an article about how much _foo_ sucks...</comment>


Adobe is spying on users and sending the data to its servers – in clear text - <AUTHOR> http://the-digital-reader.com/2014/10/06/adobe-spying-users-collecting-data-ebook-libraries/

<comment><USER2> I think people have given up.

The NSA spies on them, the Chinese try to hack their computers, Sony tries to load Rootkits on their computers. Between Heartbleed and Shellshock and 'goto fail; goto fail;' their systems are like swiss cheese to determined hackers. Just last week we learned that hackers stole info from Chase on 83 million accounts. Nude pictures of celebrities are floating around the Internet.

Normal people (not computer nerds) are virtually powerless to do anything to protect themselves. So they have stopped caring.

<comment><USER3> I once spoke to a privacy lawyer who said that normal people are highly offended when their expensive Apple device fails to protect their privacy. It's good that Apple is using pro-privacy rhetoric, independent of any technical or legal facts that may conflict with that rhetoric.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> These allegations seem pretty serious offhand. Has anyone been able to determine the veracity of this?

<comment><USER3> One commenter on the article confirmed some logging and used the hosts file to stop it.

If vendors keep up this behavior, they will find their apps confined to third- party sandboxes that permit network access under very controlled circumstances.</comment></comment>


Tesla Falls After Anticipated S&P Inclusion Fails to Materialize - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-04/tesla-falls-after-anticipated-s-p-inclusion-fails-to-materialize <comment><USER2> Tesla makes far less money than Ford but has a far larger market cap. What competitive advantage does Telsa have over Ford to justify the market cap?

<comment><USER3> Haha, speculative market cap machine goes "brrrrrr".

The red pill here is that people think they'll be able to sell non-dividend stocks, e.g. TSLA, to yet-greater-fools (at fundamental price of "it's worth what people are willing to pay"), at better ROI than Ford's more traditional growth+dividends. Do people believe Tesla might start paying a dividend?

Not that you can do much about it! It's worth what people are willing to pay!</comment></comment>


How to get a career in open source - <AUTHOR> http://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-to-get-a-career-in-open-source-939324?artc_pg=1

<comment><USER2> In my experience, by far the simplest way to get jobs in open source is the direct way -- work on projects that companies are interested in.

For example, there are probably at least 100 times more companies looking for "ffmpeg developers" than there are actual ffmpeg developers in existence.</comment>


A Better Scala REPL? [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP5tkmWAhjg <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10068058](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10068058)

</comment><comment> ludicast<AUTHOR>
you are an absolute madman. I hope typesafe can woo you from dropbox. it would be insane to see what you get done if scala became your dayjob.

</comment><comment><USER4> +1. I use this nearly every day.

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you use it for?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Link to the code?

<comment><USER6> Code: [https://github.com/lihaoyi/ammonite](https://github.com/lihaoyi/ammonite)

Docs: [http://lihaoyi.github.io/Ammonite/](http://lihaoyi.github.io/Ammonite/)</comment></comment>


Why would-be engineers end up as English majors - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/05/17/education.stem.graduation/index.html?hpt=Sbin <comment><USER2> _"We need more supportive programs and less sorting"_

We don't need _less_ sorting, we need _better_ sorting. It's obvious that some fields have a cognitive threshold.[1] Some people just aren't smart enough to succeed as a math major (and there's nothing wrong with that). Current "sink or swim" classes weed out students that students that are poorly prepared or unmotivated, as well as those that aren't smart enough. We can do something about the former, but not the latter.

1\. Steve Hsu has published some research on cognitive thresholds for different college majors. He found that such thresholds exist in physics and math: [http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2010/03/cognitive- thresholds.ht...](http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2010/03/cognitive- thresholds.html)</comment>


Taking The Hard Way Out: Software entrepreneurs seek fun problems, not lucrative ones. - <AUTHOR> http://www.advogato.org/person/apenwarr/diary.html?start=147 <comment><USER2> I'm sure that once you got deep into, you'd probably find banking software pretty difficult. Since it has to work. All the time. 100%. No compromises. That sounds pretty hard.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps depressingly, much banking software _doesn't_ work 100% of the time. Or at all, occasionally. I've worked on a few large financial apps, and the general quality level of the industry is pretty disturbing. They aren't architected much better than a _good_ consumer webapp - more buzzwords, more heavyweight process, but the actual quality of the code isn't any better, nor is the developer's understanding of what they're doing.

I've noticed the same problem from a consumer's POV too. I was just on IM with a friend last night whose online banking account just stopped working for her. I can't log in online with my BankNorth account, and I get some weird error code whenever I try a "forget my password" or "reset my PIN". My dad notices that a couple cents disappear from his bank balance every month, and no matter how much he checks his arithmetic, there's no way to make it balance. Several people he's talked to have noticed the same thing.

I've heard that the industry used to be better, that people actually took "100% uptime" and "don't lose money" seriously before Java and Y2K and all these newfangled development practices. I knew a developer that was an early employee and later VP at Stratus, and she really did know her stuff. But she seems to be a dying breed - everything now is moving towards J2EE and outsourcing where nobody really takes responsibility for the quality of the software anymore.

Sometimes I think that all the top-notch engineers at Google and Facebook should quit their jobs and start financial software companies instead. Because they really are more highly skilled than the folks who build the software that manages your life-savings. Facebook manages 3 TB of data in _memcached alone_ without a hitch - that's more than we have on disk at the financial software company I work for.

<comment><USER2> Hm. Well, my Bank of America account has been flaky and they redesigned it in some terrible way recently. But I imagine convincing a bank to use your software is probably harder than getting your code adopted by the mobile handset carriers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _banking software has got to be some of the least technically difficult software in the universe_

Breathtaking idiocy.

<comment><USER5> From a computer science perspective isn't that mostly true. What challenging technical problems does a banking system pose?

<comment><USER6> I suppose security and fraud detection can be quite time-consuming, if you take it seriously.

<comment><USER5> Yeah those are good points. There are probably quite a few challenging problems.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The DARPA inspired - Radio Resilience Competition - <AUTHOR> https://www.rtl-sdr.com/introducing-the-radio-resilience-competition/ <comment><AUTHOR> Build interference-resistant, high performance waveforms.</comment>


8 Google Products Larry Page Should Kill - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/google-products-2011-1 <comment><USER2> All on one page: [http://www.businessinsider.com/google- products-2011-1?slop=1...](http://www.businessinsider.com/google- products-2011-1?slop=1#slideshow-start)

</comment><comment><USER3> The products are:

* Knol

* Orkut

* Buzz

* Google Health

* Boutiques ( like U.S. patents and academic research papers )

* Self driving cars

* Chrome OS

* Google TV

</comment><comment><USER4> Slideshow fail. Please put everything on one page.</comment>


Hey HN: Check out my first Muse - <AUTHOR>

Hey HN, I finally got around to figuring out how to implement Tim Ferris's muse concept for myself. I'd like to get your feedback on how to make it better.
Address is http://miraclefruitstand.net/
Let me make this clear: I'll be grateful if you just throw some advice my way on how to take this to the next level. Don't feel obliged to purchase anything; my desire is not to spam (but I will say I enjoy the products myself).
For the curious lurker, here's what I did:
>Contacted the warehouse rep.
>Arranged to be a distributor for the product (which isn't hard - basically just reviewing their policies and getting familiar with how they operate).
>Found out their dropshipping rates; calculated the margins for myself.
>Registered the domain with NearlyFreeSpeech.net - saved a bunch -  11 or 12 bucks.
>Built the site with wordpress and customized it in a day. Theme, plugins, etc...
>Plugged it in to paypal.
>Tested out the payment system.
>Set up an Adwords campaign which began this morning, using a 100 dollar promo coupon from Google + 10 dollar activation fee. Spending 3.33 a day on advertising, testing the system out using google's cash instead of my own. From that I garnered 3 clicks, 1985 impressions, for a %.15 Click through rate. (Here's a question: is that good or bad? The campaign literally started at midnight.)
Basically if the site fails, I'll have lost around 20 bucks. I also have the option of repping wholesale to retailers in the area, so I'm not entirely dependent on the site, thought I would like for it to be an automated source of income.
Haven't had any "real" sales yet. Processed two orders, one from family, one from a friend, and the company later informed me they'd just send it to my family for free - essentially I've earned back my 20-something dollar investment back already.
So - What do you think HN? How can I make this better and improve sales quickly? Anything I should be aware of from your own muse-creation experiences?
Thanks much! <comment><USER2> One thing I would do is make the Visit our shop button a different color entirely than the background is. Dark blue on light blue is not screaming "click me to shop for the awesome product that I am selling you!"

<comment><USER3> I second this - the 'call to action' does need to be stronger. On the other hand 'not looking like a shop' makes it less likely that your window will be immediately closed and that people might have a click around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Definitely agree that it doesn't look like a shop. Checkout my friends dropshipped-powered site <http://seriouslyscuba.com> \- also inspired by Tim Ferriss' muse concept. If I were you I would quickly move away from wp- commerce into a real e-commerce solution (seriouslyscuba is on shopify by the way, so I guess you'd have to justify spending money on their high fees to go that route). The design looks good overall, I guess to me, its just that wordpress doesn't make for a good e-commerce solution. I'd hide the Categories block, RSS links, 'Comments are closed' text, i.e. anything that makes it looks like a blog-converted-to-store. Good luck nonetheless.

<comment><USER5> Where does your friend get all his products? Are they from the same supplier? Is drop-shipping something suppliers normally engage in?

<comment><USER2> It depends on the industry but there are a lot of suppliers that will drop ship for you. Blind drop shipping is a whole different beast since you might not want to have the supplier advertise his wares or include an invoice for what you paid so be careful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good luck to you! It's inspiring to hear about starting a company on pocket change!

I'm wondering if you're allowed to use those "New York Times", CNN, etc logos... sometimes companies can be protective of their branding.

Do you plan to form an LLC or sole proprietorship?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure yet. I'd imagine LLC down the road for it's tax advantages, but I'd have to look in to it more later. In other words... I'm not incorporating until I have to.

Also for the images - they're links to particular articles. Do you really think they'll have a problem for linking like that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd say up your Google adwords spending a little bit, maybe up to $5 or $10 a day, and see how it fares with more traffic.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I'd probably want to double what I'm doing now at least, once things got serious. I figured I'd just burn through google's cash before I burned through mine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> First your website looks nothing like a shop to me. Spend some time looking at www.amazon.com and convince yourself that my chances to buy anything are much higher if your site looked like it.

</comment><comment><USER9> Can you (or someone) explain what Tim Ferris' muse concept is?

<comment><USER4> its where you build something that can make you money after setting it up, with little or no extra work involved. if more work is involved, it can be done by hiring someone cheaply (in another country more-than-likely) so you can focus your time on things you would rather do, while having the muse continue to work for you.</comment></comment>


How to grow into technical lead role? - <AUTHOR> Dear all,<p>I will be starting a new role next month and I have the ambition to grow into a technical lead role. I have little over three years experience now and I consider myself as a mid level software engineer (definitely not senior yet). What are the skills you believe that a good technical lead should have and any tips on how one can obtain these skills? Since I will be joining a new team/company, do you also have tips how can I get up to speed with the projects as quick as possible? <comment><USER2> To start, please read this excellent article.

[https://allarsblog.com/2018/03/16/confessions-of-an- unreal-e...](https://allarsblog.com/2018/03/16/confessions-of-an-unreal- engine-4-engineering-firefighter/)</comment>


Home of Strategic Command and Some of the USAF's Most Prized Aircraft Flooded - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/26991/home-of-strategic-command-and-some-of-usafs-most-prized-aircraft-is-flooding <comment><USER2> I've noticed an almost complete lack of coverage of the flooding in Iowa and Nebraska - I have a lot of family there and the amount of damage has been astounding[1]. Nebraska has more miles of rivers than any state in the US, and many of them are flooding or close to it. It's a complete disaster there.

[1][https://weather.com/news/news/2019-03-17-flooding-before- and...](https://weather.com/news/news/2019-03-17-flooding-before-and-after- images-midwest-nebraska)

<comment><USER3> Its not on the coast or in Chicago or Denver, so it really will only get regional coverage. The book about fark.com "It's Not News, It's Fark: How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap As News" has a section illustrating this with a crane collapse in Manhattan and then one in St. Louis.

A few years back with that winter storm hit South Dakota and killed a lot of cattle (the cattle were mostly in the summer fields and the weather actually went from freezing rain to blizzard), it wasn't really reported and people wondered what the heck was going on with steak prices. I sometimes wish there was a "trend news" website that reported supply to consumer news.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just to give my experience: I'm from Nebraska, and was back there this past week. When I arrived home (in Lincoln), there was still 4-6 inches of snow on the ground, following the snowiest winter they've had in decades. It turned about 60 degrees on a rainy day and all that snow melted, but the ground was still frozen and had nowhere to go. We didn't have bad flooding in my area, but my parents yard was ankle deep in water for about 24 hours. The interstates were closed, and I got detoured twice driving out. It really is something.

</comment><comment><USER5> I just heard about the flooding yesterday. Sometimes I don't get the news. I'll see wall-to-wall coverage on some inane thing, but only learn about huge, destructive flooding from random people I follow on Twitter.

Maybe we're just sleeping in the bed we made, but how do we get out of it?

<comment><USER6> Well, some people think that we can't, the only thing left to do is to brace for impact.

The one getting most media visibility recently is Jem Bendell's "deep adaptation". This is not a new invention though. It was preceded by various resilient communities/resilient cities approaches, post-societal crash prepper books and prepper forums in general, and so on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow. Why have this much critical infrastructure near flood zones? Given that climate change is increasing the frequency of major floods, why hadn't they hardened their protections?

<comment><USER8> To be fair, The Pentagon has repeatedly listed climate change as one of it's biggest threats for a number of years, but it's currently too politically touchy to do much about.

One report in particular...

> The 22-page assessment delivered to Congress on Thursday says about two- > thirds of 79 mission-essential military installations in the U.S. that were > reviewed are vulnerable to current or future flooding, with more than half > vulnerable to current or future drought. About half also are at risk from > wildfires, including the threat of mudslides and erosion from rains > following the blazes.

<comment><USER9> Yes, but concerns about building air bases in locations that flood predate the Pentagon's relatively recent concerns about "climate change", which is little more than political spin.

The truth is that the location of military bases is a political decision and the wisest decision-making processes (e.g., one that included good flooding estimates) are not always used. Of course, reality has a way of intruding into political thinking and decision-making but usually only long after critical decisions were made. But the crows eventually come home to roost.

IOW not everything is driven by the political topic "climate change". Sometimes its simply flooding, flood zones and extremely capitalistic local land developers.

<comment><USER7> Frequency of extreme flooding is increased by climate change. It's not political. It's climate science.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The Cooper nuclear power plant 59 miles from Omaha is also shutting down temporarily due to flooding:

[https://www.omaha.com/news/iowa/cooper-nuclear-station- still...](https://www.omaha.com/news/iowa/cooper-nuclear-station-still- operating-but-preparing-for-shutdown- as/article_f0edca08-0454-5795-8622-3646e954ae5e.html)

The Fort Calhoun nuclear power plant 18 miles from Omaha was shut down permanently on October 24, 2016 due to flooding:

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

<comment><USER2> The river isn't necessarily going to reach the 45' point that CNS requires for shutdown - it might, but no guarantee.

FCNS shut down due to budgetary concerns - its operational costs were too high to justify keeping it open. The flood was just the last of a long series of issues they had down there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm actually a bit worried about the Red River in North Dakota. 1997 really was not very fun (well, the 96-97 winter was horrid). This rapid melt with too much snow and frozen ground is hitting a lot of places. My parent's place in MN had water coming in the basement apartment. It looks like the Twin Cities (MSP) have a large amount of flooding given how backed up the work crews and insurance adjusters are.

<comment><USER11> > It looks like the Twin Cities (MSP) have a large amount of flooding given > how backed up the work crews and insurance adjusters are.

I'm from ND originally and remember that flood, and yeah, it floods here in the cities a lot. This was more due to the super: zomg cold+snow, to... zomg its 40F and the entire streets a river cause nobody cleans out the drains in the fall prior to winter so that thaws are ok.

I'll just say in St Paul, rapid thaws means almost everyones basements flood. Even on the hills, its insane how easily it happens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Offutt AFB isn't too far from GCP us-central1. Anyone know if Google Cloud has said anything about the flood?

<comment><USER13> [https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/144691/historic- flo...](https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/144691/historic-floods- inundate-nebraska)

See the interactive slidable map. A google data center that is probably us- central1 is just above the lake above the 'e' in Detail. The waters appear to still be a ways off. Google says it is in Council Bluffs, Iowa and there's a large google data center there you can find on google maps. A link to the location on google maps: [https://goo.gl/maps/xEJt83kKoe22](https://goo.gl/maps/xEJt83kKoe22)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is the national emergency that you hear about on the news, right?

<comment><USER15> It's not getting a lot of coverage on the news, but it will absolutely get state and federal emergency funding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Related to this base, if you want to see the F22 fly up close, go the day before an airshow there to the east end of the runway and you will only be hundreds of feet away. [https://www.google.com/maps/place/Offutt+AFB,+email@example.com...](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Offutt+AFB,+firstname.lastname@example.com,-95.891636,754m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x879477c2e10f0c3d:0xd7d7cf14fa470392!8m2!3d41.1242718!4d-95.9145568)

</comment><comment><USER17> George Carlin used to criticize people living in flood planes back in the day, catastrophic flooding is such a regular occurrence it made its way into his stand-up routine.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUUbItrDjKw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUUbItrDjKw)</comment>


No encryption was harmed in the making of this intercept - <AUTHOR> https://risky.biz/bannedmath/ <comment><USER3> > _Do we believe that law enforcement bodies should have the authority to > monitor the communications of people suspected of serious criminal > offences?_

I actually believe they should not. They should have the authority to _attempt_ to do so with proper oversight, but that in no way implies that they will necessarily succeed.

I do not, however believe that they should have the authority to compel others to actively aid them. They should not, as the author suggests have the authority to compel Apple or Google to install malware on users' phones. If the police can do it themselves, with proper judicial oversight, or convince a software maker that spying on Osama bin Satan is worth compromising their principles, so be it.

The idea that the ends justify the means tends to lead to some dark places and I submit that we should not start down those paths.

<comment><AUTHOR> We've already gone down those paths. Societal expectations and legal precedent have been building for this since the 1880s where registers of telegram metadata were kept. I don't understand why everyone is so naive with respect to the internet.

The Government's main argument is "Why should the internet be different from the 'real world'?" Telephone companies have had to comply with these kinds of government requests since telegrams were around. No-one I have heard has had a good serious argument against this.

Saying no-one should have this power is great and all, but its waay to late. These powers to get access to this information with a warrant have been around in some form or another since before WW1.

<comment><USER4> Certainly tracking telegrams is a far reach from today. Metadata tracks user's physical moves. Depending on web activity, it can even comes close to reconstructing what they are thinking.

Who draws the line of what laws a commercial communication platform must follow and under which jurisdictions? There is no line because complying with the laws of one country your users are in will break the law of another.

I believe he problem is the centralization of communication. There is no reason that these platforms can not be distributed networks running open source software. Any government, which does or does not respect basic human rights, would be free to attempt to intercept the communication and anyone else would be free to try to prevent it.

<comment><AUTHOR> The Australian Government has asked tech companies to support them getting legal access to devices, specifically the Prime Minister called out for the ability to get plaintext versions of WhatsApp, Telegram and iMessages. These are arguably the telegrams of today.

Yes, given the centralised nature of these services it is a concern that foreign government's demands could be unreasonable. However, the nature of operating in a country is to comply with their laws and regulations. What the Australian Government has asked for is that these communication methods be treated equally, and for tech companies to get on board with that.

If Google and Apple don't want to support the operations of authoritarian governments then perhaps they should actually take a stand and not operate in those countries, and not have their products made in those countries.

I value my privacy and my freedom, but honestly I think that as an Australian the Australian Government does have the right to be able to access my devices during an investigation, provided their are appropriate checks and balances involved. Just like if I had a safe in my house, they have the right to get it opened with a search warrant. If I refuse to open the safe, they have methods and tools that allow opening it. I fail to see what makes iPhones any different from a safe conceptually.

I understand that technically it may be very difficult or potentially impossible to provide a secure mechanism to provide that support to the Government, and that is where my greatest concern for these laws come from.

<comment><USER5> > I value my privacy and my freedom, but honestly I think that as an > Australian the Australian Government does have the right to be able to > access my devices during an investigation, provided their are appropriate > checks and balances involved. Just like if I had a safe in my house, they > have the right to get it opened with a search warrant. If I refuse to open > the safe, they have methods and tools that allow opening it. I fail to see > what makes iPhones any different from a safe conceptually.

Warning: you are relying on analogies to pre-digital technology to make sense of digital technology.

I'll try a lightning round in ten minutes:

1\. A physical safe generally must be _physically_ opened by officers coming to your location and opening it. Typically a warrant is served to the person who owns the safe, who then reads it, and can often watch the officers physically enter their property and possibly even watch them open the physical safe using the combination they give to the officers. After the officers leave the person can have the lock changed with a fair amount of certainty that the officers didn't change the physical makeup of the safe in such a way that they can remotely access the contents of the physical safe in the future.

2\. Under certain circumstances officers could access the safe without the person present. But, generally, they have to physically enter to the person's dwelling to do that. Neighbors may see them enter because officers are conspicuous physical objects that travel well below the speed of light.

3\. Officers can compel people to open the safes under certain circumstances. But some safes are expensive often because their design makes it difficult to open them without the key. I'm unaware of previous situations where law enforcement made a public awareness campaign about the difficulty of opening expensive safes under the rare circumstances that such safes held vital evidence to time-critical investigations. I'd love to read about such a campaign of "Our Safes Going Dark" if you have a reference to such a campaign.

4\. Law enforcement cannot outsource the physical opening of safes to an Italian safe-opening company that installs proprietary software at the station that allows the officers to do remote and clandestine opening of many types of physical safes. (Where _remote_ means opening _and_ viewing the contents of the safe without having to dispatch a physical officer to a physical location.)

5\. Law enforcement cannot leverage the same type of Italian safe-opening techniques in an automated system that checks the metadata coming across the internet for certain selectors and then automatically and secretly opens certain safes, storing pictures of contents of those safes for later perusal or even changing the substance of the safe so that the safe itself will report certain data back to law enforcement just in case it turns out this safe belongs to someone who turns out to be a criminal.

6\. Nation states could not indiscriminately store the data about the sum total of all the places you traveled and people you interacted with on your way to and from the safe, store that data about you, and then redefine the word _collection_ to mean what happens when someone reads one or more of the pieces of data that were collected.

 _Bonus_ 7\. If nation state #1 wants to embarass nation state #2 by releasing some of state 1's secrets, those secrets cannot easily be leveraged to make digital ransomware appear on a large number of safes of nation state #3.

Essentially, everything I can think of in ten minutes that is important about digital security/privacy/surveillance is lost when you use analogies to physical pre-digital objects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> FTA:

(a cop could) _ask them to devise a way to retrieve the requested data from that device. Like, say, pushing a signed update to the target handset that will be tied to that device's UDID (Unique Device Identifier). That way there's no chance the coppers can intercept that update and re-use it on whomever they want_

I'm amazed at the naiveness of this approach. Sure, it looks good on paper: "Cops can't use wiretap for user X against user Y".

But using _technical means_ to prevent _illegal behavior by police_ seems to be entirely the wrong approach. How about instead not giving the police the means to break the law?

Or, why stop with device-specific checks? Why not just force the APP to do a UDID lookup to a police-controlled server, where it can control who gets wiretapped? If the companies don't comply, throw the executive in jail for "contempt of court"! After all, we're out to get the bad guys!

Apple and others are right to fight this nonsense. They _should_ take every possible step to ensure that they themselves can't help the police side-step the law. It not only protects their users, it protects themselves, too.

<comment> luke-stanley Remotely installing apps works fine with Android. What stops Google from being compelled to deploy an app for a user or millions of them? Probably not much, and the user probably has no control over it, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What about being forced to hand over passwords?

[https://9to5mac.com/2017/06/01/fifth-amendement-passcodes- pa...](https://9to5mac.com/2017/06/01/fifth-amendement-passcodes-passwords- law/)

 _The Miami Herald reports that a child abuse suspect was jailed for six months for contempt of court after failing to reveal the correct passcode to his iPhone_

Why is he being forced to incriminate himself?

1) the information on the phone _will_ change the charges against him and/or sentence. It would seem that a fifth amendment defence is appropriate, and legal

2) the information on the phone will _not_ change the charges against him and/or sentence. In which case the information isn't needed.

This whole debate for me can be summarized into one idea: _Do you want other people to be able to watch everything you do?_. If so, all bets are off. If not, the government shouldn't have the right to watch _suspects_ , or to force people to incriminate themselves.

<comment><USER7> Sounds like the contempt was due to deliberately handing over the wrong passcode and playing innocent, rather than a principled refusal to self- incriminate. Being held in contempt for such shenanigans is entirely appropriate. Of course if it really was a mistake that's hugely problematic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> And when it is publicly known that the Apple, Samsung and Google compromises their operating systems, the adept criminals will flash their own operating system onto their phones.

Apple and Samsung need to provide a worldwide infrastructure for handling requests from law enforcement all around the world (also in the less liberal regimes). How secure can this process really be by now. It doesn't matter that the coppers cannot reuse the exploits, they will just request and receive a new one instantly.

Now criminals also have access to these services, since we now police corruption is a thing.

</comment><comment><USER9> > Let me put this bluntly: If [weakening of encryption] is what the government > winds up suggesting, then by all means hand me a bullhorn [...]

well how else would you interpret the statement that Australian law supersedes math?

\- - -

That aside, "We do not share customer data with 3rd parties, as it is not possible due to end-to-end encryption, except when we send things in plaintext, because of our moral obligation to the Australian government" is going to be a greaaaat addition to privacy policies for Australian companies. Going to go real well for international business.

</comment><comment><USER10> Just as spying through eavesdropping on plaintext was defeated through technical means, pushing malicious updates will also be defeated.

Tech companies will have to declare that their update mechanisms contain no means to apply updates without user consent, and when updates are sent they will publish the hash. Security researchers will independently verify such claims by reverse engineering.

Then whoever some government wants to spy on cannot be tricked into installing a malicious update, as suggested by this blog post.

Governments are just going to have to accept that fact that their ability to intercept private communication and recover private documents will be reduced to zero in the near future, as it should be.

</comment><comment><USER11> A very good point. We've been obsessing over the security of the pipes - <USER2> rightly so - with the real assumption that our access to them is our own. The recent border holding phenomenon in the US come to mind when thinking about how much you really own your technological property. Maybe it's time to make free hardware the next major project.

</comment><comment><USER12> Excellent article. Nothing irritates me more than hyperbole about politicians and law enforcement. Already we have people saying "Macron wants to ban encryption".

All that said, LE hasn't helped itself at all with over-zealous and blunt- edged approaches so far -- cf FBI cracking iPhones, the NSA dragnet with little oversight.

I don't mind the government being able to read my mail. I just want them to need a warrant first, that a judge has signed off on, and that's particular to me.

<comment><USER13> This article promotes the idea of companies pushing malicious updates to specific users. Malicious in the sense of circumventing E2E encryption without notifying the user and even doing this retroactively?

Suppose then, that we get deterministic compilation and an open-source client for E2E encryption. It would then be possible (or rather, much easier) to detect such malicious updates. Should such protection be made illegal?

I agree that there is no principled objection to access to communications provided there is a warrant. However, if this requires weakening security far beyond such points, it is no longer obvious that the trade of is worth it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> " _Australia passed a metadata retention law that came into effect in April this year. It requires telecommunications companies and ISPs (i.e. carriage service providers, or CSPs) to keep a record of things like the IPs assigned to internet users (useful for matching against seized logs) as well as details around phone, SMS and email use.

The PROBLEM is, people have moved towards offshore-based services that are not required, under Australian law, to keep such metadata. Think of iMessage, WhatsApp, Signal, Wickr and Telegram._ ...."

Wiretapping at its best. have not done historical analysis, but seems like much of the personal freedom reduction laws, start in Australia these days(if looking amongst English speaking countries). Closely followed by UK.

<comment><USER15> Australia has long been the petri-dish for the new globalist elite to test their social engineering tools. It is, after all, one of the most successful white societies to have survived the empire.

>Now look, I'm not advocating for these laws. I'm not. What I am trying to do is move the goalposts for this discussion.

To me the goalposts have to be moved back to the public sphere, and what we should be doing is addressing the devolution happening in the computer world that results in users having absolutely no clue how to use their computers beyond opening up a single app and pouring all content into it. There is a fine balance between usability and uselessness, and its the user who is the most difficult component in this line.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The alternatives proposed aren't any better. If we are to believe that law enforcement has Trojans that can bypass encryption, then we must believe that they aren't reporting the security flaws which allow the installation of these Trojans. These security flaws are not limited to law enforcement--terrorists can use them just as effectively as law enforcement can. So what the argument boils down to is: we shouldn't worry about law enforcement undermining security because law enforcement had already fundamentally undermined security? I don't buy it.

</comment><comment><USER17> I think Patrick Gray's essay actually adds more confusion. His effort to clarify the confusion by differentiating the layers between "metadata" vs "encryption" is _technically correct_ but the extra details ends up obscuring what governments want: _cleartext_

Yes, I agree with Patrick that framing the arguments on "math of encryption" is misguided. Yes, it leads to thinking that legislators are stupid similar to trying to pass a bill to redefine the value of pi.[1]

Let's be clear.... the lawmakers actually don't care if the most powerful supercomputers at NSA/GCHAQ can't crack WhatsApp's latest 2048-bit-quantum- elliptical-encryption used in conjunction with Apple iOS tamperproof enclave chip.

All that math doesn't matter. It's a mistake to think that government is retarded because "math is irreversible". That smugness makes people lose sight of the ultimate goal: the cleartext.

If getting that cleartext means new laws that require all Android/Apple phones include a software keyboard interceptor (the onscreen keyboard) to log keystrokes and send the cleartext to a government server, then so be it. Such a keystroke logger would then make the "irreversible math" a moot point.

Tldr: Don't frame the policy in terms of _" encryption"_. Instead, focus on the _" cleartext"_.

 _> The first problem actually has very little to do with end-to-end encryption and a lot more to do with access to messaging metadata._

This is true, but it's misleading because we know that _governments eventually want more than the just the metadata._

 _> Now it's all very well and good for WhatsApp to argue that it doesn't have the technical means to do so, which is a response that has lead to all sorts of tangles in Brazil's courts, but the Australian law will simply say "we don't care. Get them."._

This line dances close to what we really should be discussing (the cleartext). If you find yourself grumbling _" the government wants to weaken encryption!"_, it means you're thinking like a computer scientist. On the other hand if you imagine, _" if there was a new algorithm for _stronger encryption_ but it didn't matter because all the cleartext was available for monitoring"_, it means you're thinking like the government.

 _> Do we believe that law enforcement bodies should have the authority to monitor the communications of people suspected of serious criminal offences?_

This question is another way of framing it which is closer to the aims of the government. They want to monitor the cleartext.

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

<comment><USER18> Anybody who cares about the privacy of their communication can still use an open source stack. So yes it works as a tool for oppression and for catching extremely inept criminals, but it doesn't do much else for national security.

<comment><USER19> When using an open source stack to do illegal encryption leads to XX years in prison, not many people will use it.

<comment><USER20> There's something in cryptology called "plausible deniability" that addresses this.

<comment><USER21> Plausible deniability only works if any doubts are actually interpreted in your favor (which, as history shows, isn't guaranteed in practice even in legal systems where it should be in theory), and it's easily possible to make laws that turn most practical options into crimes.

Yes, it's plausible that the non-approved software stack on your phone isn't doing any illegal encryption, but that fails if having non-approved OS on your phone a crime by itself.

Yes, it's plausible that the TrueCrypt volume you have doesn't contain anything bad, but that fails if mere possession of TrueCrypt tools is a crime by itself.

Yes, it's plausible that the encrypted traffic sent to/from your phone didn't contain anything bad, but that fails if having any encrypted traffic not going through state-approved MITM https is a crime by itself.

Etc ad infinitum. Don't underestimate the coercive power of gov't if they actually want to restrict something. Technical means can protect you only if you physically live outside of their reach.

<comment><USER22> They may as well ban all files of random data of unknown origin. If it passes diehard tests with flying colors, confiscate it and arrest all known possessors of it.

<comment><USER21> And they may actually do just that eventually.

The point I'm trying to make is that in an oppressive regime the _only_ thing that actually provides plausible deniability is having and using the exact same hardware/software as everyone else uses; a rooted phone with an opensource OS, unusual chat apps or cryptography tools won't give you any plausible deniability but actually make everything even more risky for you.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Replicating Douglas Lenat's Traveller Trillion Credit Squadron Win? (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://lesswrong.com/lw/iwa/replicating_douglas_lenats_traveller_tcs_win_with/ <comment><AUTHOR> Some more information on EURISKO

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


A National Food Policy for the 21st Century (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/food-is-the-new-internet/a-national-food-policy-for-the-21st-century-7d323ee7c65f#.rpyo9x6az <comment><USER2> The "ethonal bubble" has been created by regulations, which are really corporate welfare. Small farming does not scale as large agro-business does, and the population is increasing not declining. We get enough nutrients in our diet, and in places where that's not the case, attempts like golden rice have been attacked as being unnatural.

Local farming is not sustainable. It's going away for a reason because market forces favor scalability with food production. Cheaper food HELPS stave off the impact of wealth inequality, not create it (as this article implies with no real justification).

The stupidity and pretentious ignorance on display in this article (and masquerading as compassion and wisdom) is infuriating! It's like somebody took a wishlist of progressive political policies, and tried to tie it all together under one big umbrella of "National Food Policy." Yeah, some of these may be good ideas, but this is ideological hogwash, not a researched policy plan or even informed call to action.</comment>


Aberfan: The mistake that cost a village its children - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-150d11df-c541-44a9-9332-560a19828c47 <comment><USER2> I read the wikipedia article rather than the linked BBC article.

What struck me was the boneheaded greed of the National Coal Board. Pettily resisting things like 'move the giant pile which killed all the kids, away from the village' because it would cost so much. When the costs are not all that much on government scale, even adjusting for inflation. They initially wanted to compensate the families with £50 (!!) per dead kid. Eventually they raised that to £500 and called it "generous". None of the jokers in question suffered any real consequences for it.

Really shines a dim light on the UK government around that time.

<comment><USER3> Using an online inflation calculator, £50 in 1966 is equivalent to £873 today. £500 is £8,731. Wow. Still startling.

I thought the next sentence was even more shocking: "A more substantial sum, it was advised, would have destroyed the working class recipients not used to large amounts of money."

<comment><USER4> That was a common meme about the poor repeated by the rich. It still lives, sometimes in a more sophisticated form, eg. poor people don't know how to manage spending, not buying in bulk, not taking advantage of discounts, etc., when in reality, in practice, most things cost more when you are poor because you can't afford to wait for good opportunities, and people are actually doing the best they can it their circumstances.

<comment><USER5> Also, if anything, I find that people who are lower-middle class tend to be better with their money than many of the "elite" \-- not better as in taking advantage of unattainable economic tools, but perhaps more conservative with purchases, and such.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We read about similar disasters happening today in third world countries and we think "It's all due to the corruption in those places; such things could never happen in developed places". It is really thought-provoking to think about how not very long ago they did.

<comment><USER7> Indeed, and by pushing the production of goods far away from the people who consume them, modern industrial capitalism makes it easier for the consumer to ignore things like this when they do happen. After all, they're happening to foreign people far away, not to people next door, people Like Us™.

You can see that logic in action in this infamous 2013 essay by neoliberal pundit Matt Yglesias, arguing that "Different Places Have Different Safety Rules and That's OK": [http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/24/international...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/24/international_factory_safety.html)

<comment><USER8> Exporting production to less developed countries inarguably raises the standard of living in those countries. There is a cost in the form of increased risk from some sources; manufacturing accidents, pollution, etc. However, this is more than offset by the increase in food production, lifespan, medical care, and everything else that comes with being a production economy.

The fact that you can sit there on your computer and say "oh, those poor foreigners would be so much better off if they just let me decide for them so I could keep them in a third-world subsistence farming economy" just indicates that you are from a culture that's forgotten what it takes to modernize and improve. You can't build an industrial base off nostalgic dreams of agrarianism.

<comment><USER7> _> The fact that you can sit there on your computer and say "oh, those poor foreigners would be so much better off if they just let me decide for them so I could keep them in a third-world subsistence farming economy"_

Where did I say that, exactly? I welcome the opening up of economic opportunities to these populations. I just think that they deserve the same protections and pay for doing those jobs that Westerners would receive if they were the ones doing them, rather than just being pawns in a global system of labor arbitrage.

It's a bit rich to get up on a moral high horse and then declare from that elevated position that the life of a Bangladeshi worker is worth less than that of an American one. Companies aren't setting up in these countries because they are benevolent actors looking to help them develop their economies. They're setting up there because they can exploit the workers there in ways that they can't get away with doing back home anymore.

Workers in developed economies had to endure a century of bloody struggle to claw those protections into place; I would rather we construct an economy that allows this new class of workers to get them for themselves without having to suffer through that.

<comment><USER9> Nobody is claiming their lives are worth less: it's clear OP does not feel that way, and it's mean to imply otherwise. But very sadly their labor is currently worth a lot less, and regulations that try to force a change (like any other economic price floor) in that will severely reduce demand for their labor and limit their economic opportunities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I hat those layouts. Just give me a static page, maybe chop the article into separate bits and hyperlink them. But this... it's like it was made by tv people who hate reading. I don't know.

<comment><USER11> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9238739](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9238739)

<comment><USER12> When one paints the bike shed hot pink with pea-green accents and puts the bike rack itself on the roof, some discussion of it is to be expected.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I was almost exactly 1 year old when the Aberfan disaster occurred so I have no direct memories.

But what I do remember from the subsequent few years was the look of absolute horror and fear that came over my mothers face any time it was mentioned.

</comment><comment><USER14> "To reach an appropriate sum the Charity Commission proposed asking grief- stricken parents 'exactly how close were you to your child?'; those found not to have been close to their children would not be compensated."

I have no words for this...

Edit: My god, it just gets worse:

"Mercifully, the proposal was never acted upon. The NCB initially offered £50 before raising it to the "generous offer" of £500. A more substantial sum, it was advised, would have destroyed the working class recipients not used to large amounts of money"

</comment><comment><USER15> The tech developed by [https://shorthand.com/](https://shorthand.com/) has a small credit at the foot of this story.

This kind of journalistic work makes worthwhile all the labors of internet people. Browsers, Javascript, routers, servers, security, even JPEG, come together here to retell the story of that disaster, along with good writing and photography. Let's hope the right people see this history and learn from it

<comment><USER16> Surely there is a value in pretty presentations and from a technical point it is quite impressive.

Still I just couldn't stop myself from changing white to gold-ish (#c1af57) and found it much better then white text hovering over black and white photos with a darkened layer between them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is it just me or do the survivor counts make no sense in this article?

> 240 pupils of the Victorian red brick Pantglas Junior School

> The 10th and last child to be brought out alive, he was treated for head and > stomach injuries.

> A further 28 children were injured, many seriously.

> There are thought to be about 20 or so of the surviving children left in > Aberfan.

> They had registered the deaths of 116 children

So… only 10 were pulled out alive, but 20+ survived? 28 were injured, but not dead, but not pulled out alive? 124 weren't registered as dead?

<comment><USER18> There were 240 pupils, 116 of whom were killed. 28 were injured, 10 of whom had been trapped and needed to be brought out. So 96 of the pupils were not physically affected.

Only 20 of the (then-) children still live in Aberfan.

<comment><USER19> Small correction: "A _further_ 28 children were injured".

I read that as 38 were injured, 10 of whom were trapped, leaving 86 who weren't physically injured.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This from the article:

        "As if nature had realised that a
         tremendous mistake had been made
         and nature was speechless."</comment>


Rumprun Tutorial: Serve a static website as a Unikernel - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rumpkernel/wiki/wiki/Tutorial%3A-Serve-a-static-website-as-a-Unikernel

<comment><USER2> What sort of benefits does this sort of an arrangement provide? Is it aimed at stripped-down embedded environments or something?

<comment><USER3> My understanding about using unikernels is that it helps you optimize. Unikernels allow you to trade built in safety and portability for customization and performance.

If there is only one process, the webserver, why deal with a scheduler?

If you're not using the safety features of an OS why have them?

Why context switch if its not needed?

You're hosting a key value store on an SSD. Why deal with a file system abstraction?

Basically, as I understand it, unikernels are trying to democratize application deployment "on the metal" (or currently on xen) without the legacy fundamentals that drove the designs of OSes like Windows or Linux which were built for shared mainframes in university basements.

For more info here is Xen talking about unikernels, [http://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Unikernels](http://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Unikernels)

<comment><USER4> I think another aspect I recall reading somewhere is security: if you can do the job with a far simpler system, potentially you end up with less attack surface (assuming the fancy new simpler system is actually well built and tested, etc).

E.g.

      > Why use Mirage OS?
      >
      > The cloud has so far mostly been used to
      > consolidate existing operating systems and manage
      > them more conveniently. The interface between
      > guest kernels, applications and VMs are all
      > managed very differently, leading to serious
      > inefficiencies, unreliability and insecurity.

[http://www.xenproject.org/developers/teams/mirage- os.html](http://www.xenproject.org/developers/teams/mirage-os.html)

[https://mirage.io](https://mirage.io)

<comment><USER5> Further, you have less to lose if that surface is breached; If you penetrate a unikernel static content server, you can't really do much on that system; It won't have a shell, compilers, or any of the tooling needed to expand that hole. Because your OS is so much simpler, the cleanup is simpler too; Nuking the machine and starting over is much simpler when you've designed for lightweight unikernels.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Gaslighting - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting <comment><USER2> Just went through this and was forced out of a job once I became aware of what this term means. Good to get educated on this so you can avoid the suffering I have known

<comment><USER3> It's become awfully trendy recently to talk about gaslighting when the term is usually superfluous.

For example: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_dismissal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_dismissal)

<comment><USER2> I wasn't really paying attention or noticing until a couple weeks ago when I learned it. I cannot speak to trends, but it does not seem an uncommon topic right now. There's a lot of stress and anxiety in the world right now, more than usual. Maybe this partly explains the uptick.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> One does not know this is happening until you've distanced yourself from the person gaslighting you.

Source: experience

</comment><comment><USER5> Not related to technology

<comment><USER6> It's something many of us face in toxic work environments. Like RSI, it's good to familiarize yourself with the warning signs.</comment></comment>