CS Degrees Are Mostly Just Signaling – An Interview with Economist Bryan Caplan - <AUTHOR> https://triplebyte.com/blog/bryan-caplan-interview <comment><AUTHOR> "Most of what you study in school you are highly unlikely to ever use in a job—if you even remember it."

I wish I had asked Bryan about the value of universal education for society in terms of creating opportunities for specialization: Most kids will never use their high school biology, higher math, history, and physics in their future jobs. But some will. And those doctors and scientists and engineers are really important for society. Given that, is it worth the cost of exposing everyone to these subjects because we don't know in advance which kids will take to them (and later become highly valuable contributors to society)?

</comment><comment><USER2> "My strong guess is, in general no, because, especially in this society, when a person drops out of school, there's normally something deviant about them."

Yeah because people are immutable and the decision you made when you were 19 years old reflects on your permanent human condition.

</comment><comment><USER3> Isn't that also what people say about code camps?

So basically the whole idustry builds on "learn signaling, get a job with it, then learn what actually to do"?

</comment><comment><USER4> TL;DR: Economist conflates computer science with software engineering and random website attempts to capitalize with clickbait title...</comment>


Next Time Your Mom Says Don't Go Out in The Rain, Spray Yourself With This - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2013/02/07/171370893/next-time-your-mom-says-don-t-go-out-in-the-rain-spray-yourself-with-this

<comment><USER2> This is so rad. I like the idea of coating a boat with this stuff just to see what happens. Or the old greased watermelon in the pool scenario.</comment>


My Spaced Repetition App Failed Even Before Making It to the AppStore - <AUTHOR> https://neilkakkar.com/quickreps.html <comment><USER2> Too bad there's no application platform that's not owned by a corporation that you could have built this with. If only there were some kind of open standard that any computer could implement. Applications could even be linked together in a sort of "web". Unfortunately we live in the worst possible timeline where iOS and Android are the _only_ option.</comment>


Ask HN: Simple landing page or an informative one? - <AUTHOR>

We've changed our landing page to be super simple. What do you think, is it better now?
Current version: https://staply.co
Old version can be see here: http://web.archive.org/web/20141026193118/https://www.staply.co/landing <comment><USER2> I can't tell what the product does. Maybe the extra-simple approach works for dropbox.com, but you'd need to provide more information when the only next step is to ask users for an email address.

After the signup I don't feel comfortable to share files, even test files, with the founders. My inner fear is they'll message me while I just want to test out the product in private. It has the feeling of a shop clerk following my every move when I try a new product.

</comment><comment><USER3> In the current version, I can't tell what it does. The pic is way too small (I mean the text in the pic). May be bigger fonts might help.

You may still want to add "

A better way to share files and links Turn them into one easy to read feed and always know who sent what and why"

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Clickable links:

[https://staply.co](https://staply.co)

[http://web.archive.org/web/20141026193118/https://www.staply...](http://web.archive.org/web/20141026193118/https://www.staply.co/landing)

</comment><comment><USER5> I'd vote for the older version except making it a bit simpler, remove the first stock picture of the girl on computer, and skip straight to the screenshot.

P.S, your product is pretty much standard functionality that basecamp provides.

</comment><comment><USER6> While it's great to ask for opinions, you should really be goal setting and measuring results against said goal.

So if your goal is to have someone enter their email address, measure this and judge the pages from that and not opinion.

<comment><USER7> This.

'What we like' and 'what works well' might be too different things. This sounds like a good case for A/B testing. Tools like optimizely.com make this very easy.

<comment><USER8> Exactly. Test it out and see what works for your target audience. Opinion doesn't matter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think the old version would be better, on the condition that you remove the first "slide"—It's the first thing I see and it doesn't tell me anything about the product.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, it's an interesting idea. We'll definitely try it out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Old version is better and informative.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, we'll continue iterating then :)</comment></comment>


Face Masks Do Matter. The Scientific Evidence Is Growing - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/face-masks-really-do-matter-the-scientific-evidence-is-growing-11595083298 <comment><USER2> Most of the results are unfortunately either by association (like the linked study), or on the spread of droplets without checking for infectivity. This means that the evidence is still circumstantial. There are indications of efficacy, but not how large this efficacy is.

I don't think masks are useless, but I'd love some hard data on how effective they are.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> [https://archive.vn/iLixB](https://archive.vn/iLixB)</comment>


A filmmaker thinks he can turn Universal Paperclips into a movie (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://kotaku.com/a-filmmaker-thinks-he-can-turn-clicker-universal-paperc-1833676548 <comment><USER2> Paperclip maximizers have been around for a while in print, though rarely in exactly that form. If you want to read one, search for My Little Ponies: Friendship is Optimal. Yes, it's a My Little Ponies fan-fiction, or at any rate it is presented as one. It's actually a chilling story about an accidental paperclip maximizer.

</comment><comment><USER3> I should not have read that prior to finishing the game. Still hilarious to think about a movie based on a clicker game.</comment>


Admin of irc.lulzsec.org Arrested in UK - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/industry/2011/06/21/suspected-lulzsec-mastermind-arrested/?awesm=tnw.to_19Mw1&utm_content=spreadus_master&utm_medium=tnw.to-other&utm_source=direct-tnw.to

<comment><USER2> I'll believe it when LulzSec stops hacking things. Between the spanish police arresting the "leaders" of Anonymous, the FBI meeting with Aaron Barr to learn the identities of the "leaders" of Anonymous, and LEAs the world over generally not understanding this newfangled Internet business, I have precious little faith in their ability to actually get the people responsible. The only people who've been arrested so far were those who used LOIC.

It wouldn't surprise me if Ryan was hanging out in the LulzSec irc (hundreds did), or even if he was involved in a couple of the attacks. LulzSec has made no secret of the fact that they regularly get other people to do a lot of their attacks, and that they publish information given to them by others.

It's a lot sexier for the british police and the FBI to say they've captured a ringleader than "some guy loosely affiliated with", but I highly suspect he's the latter, if anything.

<comment><USER3> He ran the irc server for LulzSec. Not exactly loosely affiliated, but still not their mastermind.

<comment><USER2> They had a chatroom on his irc server. They also had chatrooms on efnet, 2600, anonops, and rizon. So to claim he's a big part of the organization is pretty disingenuous. Of course, the question remains whether the authorities are being deliberately dishonest, or if they actually think he's a "leading figure" in LulzSec. I'm not sure which outcome would be more depressing, although I suppose I'd take an incompetent government over an evil one any day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> 19 years old & English - this was kind of obvious, really.

In my experience, people interested in hacking and infosec over the age of 25 are more likely to know about 2600 and hold it in some regard, unlike those younger than 25. Hence, it was pretty clear that lulzsec was comprised of under 25 year olds.

They also engaged in some very unlulz-y personal wars with a few people, and didn't quite seem to know limits - very much a young person trying to prove themselves too hard sort of thing.

Similarly, they hacked a number of British sites, and something about their use of langauge sounded to me, as an former forum moderator, to be rather British. 2600 is also less well known over here.

<comment><USER5> Where are you getting the specific idea that they're ignorant of 2600? Is it something they've said, or just because of their general disregard for what one might hesitantly call tradition?

<comment><USER6> Under 25 here, what's the relevance of 2600?

<comment><USER7> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2600:_The_Hacker_Quarterly>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Don't quote me on this; but someone [a professional contact] better placed to speculate on the details than the media (or dare I say; more likely to know the truth) just told me this is not related to LulzSec but an older investigation.

This rings true with a lot of the details of the arrest FWIW.

</comment><comment><USER9> Actually, it looks like he was only the ircop of their channel, and wasn't actually involved: [http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/i568z/19yearold_s...](http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/i568z/19yearold_suspected_of_being_mastermind_behind/c20zhi1)

</comment><comment><USER10> How about that: Seems the glorious leader of LulzSec got arrested, it's all over now... wait... we're all still here! Which poor bastard did they take down? <http://twitter.com/#!/LulzSec/status/83164092998758400>

:D

<comment><USER11> It's just as likely that LulzSec wouldn't admit any of them has been captured as it for the government to say that they have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Unless Wickford is a hot bed of hacking this must be Ryan Cleary: [http://www.thehackernews.com/2011/05/anonymous-irc-hacker- ry...](http://www.thehackernews.com/2011/05/anonymous-irc-hacker-ryan- cleary.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> The LulzSec site is down too: <http://lulzsec.com/> (though <http://lulzsecurity.com/releases/> is still there).

<http://lulzsec.org/> seems to have an FBI take-down notice with the LulzSec logo on it.

Edit: as DarkShikari mentioned, lulzsec.org has been like this for a while.

Link to the Met Police post: [http://content.met.police.uk/News/eCrime-unit- arrest-man/126...](http://content.met.police.uk/News/eCrime-unit-arrest- man/1260269113895/1257246745756)

<comment><USER14> _<http://lulzsec.org/> seems to have an FBI takedown notice with the LulzSec logo on it._

This dates back a number of days; it was a joke (by Lulzsec?) in response to a (false) rumor about an FBI takedown notice.

<comment><USER15> Yeah ... FBI doesn't have the lulz to make a logo like that!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Ryan Cleary, an alleged member of the hacking group behind the claim, LulzSec, was arrested in Essex this morning by specialist cyber crime officers from Scotland Yard."

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8589078/Hackers-s...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8589078/Hackers- steal-entire-2011-census.html)

</comment><comment><USER17> It's actually Wickford, Essex. Early reports suggest it is a former Anonymous member, although this cannot be confirmed.

<https://twitter.com/#!/y0ug/statuses/83138188570394624>

<comment><USER18> > I don't want to name an innocent person, but will link to someone who thinks > they know who it could be: [link]

That makes as much difference as "I'm not hitting you, this stick I am holding is hitting you".

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I would say "That's a shame" but it isn't. Well done Ryan, well done indeed!

</comment><comment><USER20> Scapegoat. The evidence will appear as and when they need it.

This whole thing (this and the supposed census leak) stinks of a false flag operation.

</comment><comment><USER21> Darn I guess he was not Anonymous afterall..

Like I said before attacking a decentralized system with lots centralized stakeholders at some point in time makes you their bitch..

</comment><comment><USER21> ahem people..

1\. Chinese and other criminal hackers do not engage in describing activities on irc, web, etc..ever wonder why?

Its because when un-encrypted data flows through a central IP hub such as AT&T NSA has access to it in real-time.

Now think real hard, is this the real anonymous or lulzsec?

I assure you the read bad actors are spurring both anonymous and lulzsecf on in irc to do their dirty work from them than laughing their asses off when they get arrested..

Look at the irc transcripts that have been posted for yourself..that pattern is there..

Think for yourselves people do not let media do your thinking for you

<comment><USER22> I'm sorry: I cannot see a pattern, only somebody asking me for deep thinking and to avoid the media all while pedaling an unsubstantiated conspiracy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Yeah , Its Ryan , who arrested : UK police arrest Suspected LulzSec 19 years old Mastermind : The Hacker News ~ [http://www.thehackernews.com/2011/06/uk- police-arrest-suspec...](http://www.thehackernews.com/2011/06/uk-police- arrest-suspected-lulzsec-19.html)

<comment><USER23> UK police arrest Suspected LulzSec 19 years old Mastermind : [http://www.thehackernews.com/2011/06/uk-police-arrest- suspec...](http://www.thehackernews.com/2011/06/uk-police-arrest-suspected- lulzsec-19.html)</comment></comment>


Hard Puzzles - <AUTHOR> http://www.insightrequired.com/

<comment><USER2> crypto puzzles are boring.</comment>


Show HN: CuriositY - <AUTHOR> https://shark.fish/curiosity <comment><USER2> This is interesting. However, I seem to have hit a roadblock at level 6 (layer). I tried changing the z-index (thinking it might reveal something, because - layers), but in vain. Scanned through the HTML and css. Nothing, still. Hints?

<comment><AUTHOR> You are on the right track with that initial thought :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm stuck at the shape.csv. I've tried converting it to a KML, but I can't seem to get it to display on anything.

<comment><USER4> This plotter worked for me: [http://bl.ocks.org/phil- pedruco/9913243](http://bl.ocks.org/phil-pedruco/9913243)

I'm stuck on 11, it's a real headscratcher..

<comment><USER5> Github Commit history..

<comment><USER6> Yeah. That's what I'm headscratching about. It's not base64, not ceasar cipher. There seems to be something simple that I'm just overlooking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Actually quite interesting.. But frustrating as well ;)</comment>


Google apps ending support for IE6 - <AUTHOR>

I just got this:
<comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-
Dear Google Apps admin,
In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology.  This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5.  As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.
We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010.  After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.
Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.
Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser.  We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.
In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience.  We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.
Thank you for your continued support!
Sincerely,
The Google Apps team
Email preferences: You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your Google Apps product or account.
Google Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043 </comment><comment><USER2> This was posted earlier this week ;)</comment>


Your Flip-Flops Are Grossing Me Out - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/life/a_fine_whine/2013/07/against_flip_flops_put_a_shoe_on_you_slob.html <comment><USER2> Couldn't agree more</comment>


Self Healing Code with clojure.spec - <AUTHOR> http://blog.cognitect.com/blog/2016/12/9/works-on-my-machine-self-healing-code-with-clojurespec-1 <comment> jw- This seems like a very simple concept when compared with other systems using software transplants [1]. The most important thing I gleaned from this is the benefit of having 'type information' (clojure specs) available as first class data. The reason why this is so simple, which isn't a bad thing, is because clojure (and lisps) makes it easy to get metadata and work with it.

[1] [http://crest.cs.ucl.ac.uk/autotransplantation/downloads/auto...](http://crest.cs.ucl.ac.uk/autotransplantation/downloads/autotransplantation.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER2> The article clearly explains how self-healing code works. However, what I don't understand is _why_ this is a good idea in the first place. If you can't correctly write a function that meets a given specification, what makes you think that some random recombination of code you've previously written will meet the specification?

<comment><USER3> Machine learning algorithms do exactly that--they "write" a function that humans couldn't write by hand. What makes you think we couldn't eventually do the same here?

<comment><USER2> There's a qualitative difference between tuning parameters that are real numbers (exploring a continuous space with a meaningful notion of "marginally better") and coming up with code on the fly (exploring a discrete space of syntax trees, which can only be done by enumerating them). Topological considerations can give you an idea of what kinds of things are worth trying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wouldn't want self healing code in my codebase. Especially if I am on call.

Do you want reliable software? Fail fast, design with failure in mind and keep it tested by injecting failures every now and then.

I think the Erlang approach is very good and it doesn't need esoteric approaches

</comment><comment><USER5> Good idea. I get that it was a demonstration of the application of spec but for a real implementation of self-healing code, in my opinion, there needs to be a way to verify that the problem the matched functions are supposed to be solving is the same instead of relying on some sort of statistical confidence via IO sampling.

<comment><USER3> Why? What's wrong with inducing the function?

(Genuinely curious.)

<comment><USER5> What's wrong with quantum mechanics? Same thing. If the problem isn't exactly the same then the outputs will actually differ in"edge" cases. And the problem is when trying to induce the problem we don't at first know to what degree of exactness we can make confirmations. So we either need to (a) take a long time to learn or otherwise know exactly what the problem is or (b) have the degree of wisdom (eyesight) to already be able to confirm that the problem-function will have no unexpected outputs at a glance by checking key features despite the wise person not having directly sampled/computed all possible outputs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is probably a reflection of my own incomplete understanding of Erlang & BEAM, but doesn't Erlang have the capability to achieve this same end? Hot- loading new code etc?

(This comment is not meant as a criticism of the blog post btw, just a slightly related question)

<comment><USER7> Any programming language that can do metaprogramming has this capability, even C, but it's more pleasant to implement in certain languages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's still difficult for me to imagine a future where programs are organic instead of specific and dry machine instructions. I caught myself thinking of alternative solutions that doesn't require clojure.spec (e.g. why don't we make sure to never write candidate functions that isn't correctly "typed"? Then we can simply forget about checking the specs), but I think that defeats the spirit of this exercise - that tools like clojure.spec enables us to create more intelligent programs.

</comment><comment><USER9> Interesting. Is there a way to do something like this in Python?

<comment><USER7> Yes. You can get pretty fancy with decorators, and there's always eval/exec if you need it. The stdlib has plenty of power tools for introspection.

The leg up that lisps have over Python is that Python's eval/exec operates on strings whereas lisps can easily manipulate the AST. (I'm not sure if I should call it abstract for a lisp.) Directly manipulating Python's AST can be done with the aptly named ast module, but personally I find it easier to do string templating and eval.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't think I'd want code to self-heal on the fly, even less in anything safety critical.

But maybe a similar method could be used as part of static analysis to help programmers. It could look through your functions and search for library functions you could import to replace them with. Or it could look for functions that do very nearly the same, but handle edge cases differently.

<comment><USER2> How can this be used as a part of _static_ analysis, when it works by _running_ your code?

<comment><USER11> Because you can divide your runtime in to multiple stages: if program A runs and outputs program B, then from B's point of view A was able to perform a static analysis of B's behavior.

You can always view the term and type levels of a programming language as two separate but intertwined languages. In this case, both the term and type level would be identical instead of the type level being specialized with logic programming-esque constructs as usual.

<comment><USER2> That's not what's happening in this case. You're fixing a program that _has just run_ if it doesn't pass certain validations. This is pretty much by definition not possible in a static analysis, whose purpose is to determine whether a putative program is in fact worth running in the first place.

On the other hand, in a typed language, when you check whether a term "t" has type "T", it's a precondition that "T" is a valid type. If you haven't established that "T" is a type, you have to establish it first.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Haven't we been there already? Systems that would run code, no matter what? The result was, that systems could be hacked by committing flawed code- which would execute completely different then intended without ever throwing a error message?

The Error this was, brought forth the fail early, fail loud approach?

<comment><USER13> Did you happen to read the article _and_ have basic knowledge of spec at the same time?

<comment><USER12> Yep, read it and its flaw is the assumption of "correct" code transfer from another application to the error region, resulting in "correct" code. In other words, it ignores the context. And such self healing systems have been around. I worked with "syntax-healing" compilers and code that linear interpolates upon error to a approximate solution of nearby earlier results. So dividing by zero is basically- nearby is 1 - the identity operator, with a minus in front if you divide a neg number. And that is just a solution for flawed code that returns numerical results.

You can not switch context that easily, without erecting a whole system of Meta-Information for every function. So instead of debugging, we start to fill out forms again, hoping- not knowing for certain that the result will be self repairing. And then the idea dies, to be reborn again, one generation into the future. Because self-repair system even in nature are often flawed and kill the repaired organisms.

If time and resources wouldn't matter- you would stand a better chance of solving this, by having a result fitness function (aka unit test) and a genetic algorithm, modifying the code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Not intending to detract from the elegant and progressive thrust of the ideas here, when we consider software failure in context of distribution and higher level systems, we note that both CAP & impossibility results in that domain are applicable here and at best we can hope for episodic health checks and healing of distributed software systems. Specifically only at AP consensus points or CP system downtime for off-band repairs.

<comment><USER15> Is this what happens when self-healing code starts to post on Hacker News :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> So basically, error handling code? I apologize, but I don't see what's new in this?

<comment><USER17> All of your error handling code re-writes functions in live code to replace failing function calls with calls to function that would succeed?

<comment><USER18> No, because that would be stupidly expensive. Besides, it would introduce a second problem: fixing the healing code - more specifically the parts that validate the candidate functions, which can be bugged as well as anyone who as written automated tests knows.

But I guess that saying that your system died from autoimmune disease is way more "exciting" than saying that it died from a segfault.

<comment><USER19> "system died from autoimmune disease" \- this is gold!

I can't imagine why would anyone want to have an untested set of semibuggy functions just to replace them at will. However, I can imagine the tinkering code approach, not "self-healing", when we are expecting ALL functions to be good, it is just we don't know which one fits better to the situation. People actually do this all the time since the beginning of the history, but perhaps the discussed approach can introduce more abstract framework for that.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


NSA leaker Edward Snowden's story isn't holding up - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/5-ways-nsa-leaker-edward-snowdens-story-isnt-115500971.html

<comment><USER2> This is actually the most accurate article I've read about the NSA over this last week -- this is as a former NSA programmer/linguist. The good majority of posts about the topic have been great for a few laughs between my former colleagues and I, but the assertions made in this article actually made me lift my eyebrow a little in that someone actually got it right.

-1. Snowden overstated his salary... by a lot

Well folks, it goes without saying that 200k is an obscene amount of money for anyone working as a government contractor. Booz Allen employees are ironically some of the least paid employees in intel, because they follow a tiered structure of "rank" similar to the military (they are probably one of the largest contractor employees of military veterans). In order to get into that 150k+ range, you'd have to be hustling about winning contract after contract, and if you started to slow down then you'd eventually be shown the door with their "up or out" policy. The average contractor (as stated in a previous comment of mine) makes somewhere between 60k-110k. The higher end of that would be for employees with special skill sets such as programming abilities, languages, etc.

-That claim is "absolutely outrageous," former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden tells The Daily Beast. Snowden "was not a collector," and no low-ranking contractor like him would have the authority to access anyone's phone calls or read anybody's emails.

In the government world, contractors are second-class citizens with very little authority to do anything at all, let alone start collecting on the president. That aside, Snowden was a CIA contractor working at an NSA facility, not an NSA employee. That translates to Snowden having the equivalent of read-only access to things related to his duties, besides being able to browse random stuff on the NSA internal network.

-Robert Deitz, a former top lawyer at the NSA and CIA, agrees that Snowden's boast is a "complete and utter" falsehood. "First of all it's illegal," he tells the Los Angeles Times. "There is enormous oversight. They have keystroke auditing. There are, from time to time, cases in which some analyst is [angry] at his ex-wife and looks at the wrong thing and he is caught and fired."

Everything you do is logged and audited by third parties to ensure compliance with FISA. An NSA employee could probably sexually harass 10 people before getting fired from their job. Collect on 1 american without proper approval, and they're done. If you think I'm exaggerating, I've seen both cases.

-"I don't know if Snowden's claim is accurate," says Marc Ambinder at The Week. But "as a systems administrator, he certainly is entitled to the benefit of the doubt when it comes to an assessment of the NSA's internal information security."

Again, a CIA contractor at an NSA facility. That's like having a Microsoft employee go to an Apple Developer conference and be put in charge of organizing the guest speaker list. All agencies are very compartmentalized, and while most have implemented some anti-stovepiping policies, they still remain very "this is mine that is yours" as far as their own systems go. So tell me again, why would you need anyone from the CIA to administrate your systems, when you have thousands of your own employees, military personnel, and readily available applicants to do so?

</comment><comment><USER3> Without comment on the ethics of his actions, is it at all surprising that such an egotistical and narcissistic person would overstate things about themselves?

</comment><comment><USER4> As predicted, shoot the messenger.

</comment><comment><USER5> Snowden?</comment>


99 Life hacks to make your life easier - <AUTHOR> http://siriuslymeg.tumblr.com/post/33738057928/99-life-hacks-to-make-your-life-easier

<comment><USER2> I like re-purposing the various plastic bottle. This reminds me of early lifehacker when it was all Gina.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> There around 10 in there that I regularly apply myself.

</comment><comment><USER3> Don't forget ice soap!</comment>


How to Build a Subscription Service on Rails: A Noob's Guide - <AUTHOR> http://www.joelhooks.com/blog/2013/10/30/how-to-build-a-subscription-service-on-rails-a-noobs-guide/

<comment><USER2> Wow [https://github.com/andrewculver/koudoku](https://github.com/andrewculver/koudoku) is amazing. Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER3> Folks interested in using Recurly.js for subscriptions (which I personally love) will also be interested in the sample app I'm starting to push on GitHub (work in progress, but will be updated this week):

[https://github.com/thbar/rails-recurly-js-sample- application](https://github.com/thbar/rails-recurly-js-sample-application)

<comment><AUTHOR> I gave recurly a long look. It has some great features (specifically the dunning). In the end, working with Stripe was cheaper and less hassle, though I've just pushed out the dunning hassle.

Thanks for the sample app, I'm looking forward to seeing what you've done.

<comment><USER3> What originally pushed me toward Recurly was that they support VAT (and I run a french company) - plus Stripe wasn't available back then in France either :-) Currently adding VAT support to Stripe is fairly complex (based on what people who implemented it told me), you basically have to do everything yourself and add custom line items via invoice callbacks.

I hope they will support more VAT at some point!

I will try to make a more educated comparison later on though.

Really wanted to thank you for the link to the Koudoku gem and for sharing more online; the more we have information on how to implement SaaS services, the more developers will be empowered to start businesses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm glad to hear the RailsApps project was useful to Joel Hooks, and I'm glad he mentioned Giles Bowkett's ebook, which is an excellent code review of one of the RailsApps example applications. But do us all a favor and make it clear that RailsApps is an open source project. It is only as good as its pull requests. There are hundreds of smart developers who could contribute code to make it better. Giles decided to write an ebook instead of forking the project in the open. I'll recommend that people buy his ebook (really, I will) but I'd much rather have pull requests to improve the RailsApps examples. That'd benefit everyone.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is true, to some extent. You're directly charging for materials related to the code. I gave you 2x as much $$ as I did Giles. I'm glad to do it, but his stated purpose wasn't to improve RailsApp, it was to take common general issues and refactor them. RailsApp just happened to be a convenient example.

Hopefully some of the hundreds of smart developers that can contribute will apply some of the code review to RailsApp.

It gets into murky waters though.

I'm assuming contributors don't get a cut of the monthly subscriptions to RailsApp Pro.

I think what you're doing is awesome, and love the approach you've taken.

<comment><USER4> The revenue generated by the tutorials goes to the open source project. That includes paying contributors. If ANYONE wants to be paid to contribute open source code or write tutorials, just contact me.

<comment><USER4> Here's a link to the project:

[http://railsapps.github.io/](http://railsapps.github.io/)

And if you want to support the project with a subscription:

[https://tutorials.railsapps.org/](https://tutorials.railsapps.org/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Anyone have questions about real estate investing? - <AUTHOR>

I look at buying real estate like starting a business. You have costs, revenue, customers (tenants), suppliers, contractors, etc just like in any business.
A year out of college (2010) I bought a rental property with a good friend/ investment partner and I want to write an article sharing my experience.
If you have any specific questions ask them here and I'd be happy to address them in the article. <comment><USER2> i would like to know how you searched for and chose the property. did you spend a lot of time searching for the right neighborhood? was the property in the city where you lived, or did you seek out a city with the economic circumstances to make your investment work? is this something that you will be able to replicate over and over again or was it a sweetheart, once-in-a- lifetime deal?

</comment><comment><USER3> Is the "no-money down" method of investing even possible these days?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good question, I'll address it in the article. No institution will let you get away with that, but if the seller is financing it then maybe. You can, though, put down as little as 3.5% today.</comment></comment>


UK 'biggest spy' among the Five Eyes  - o0-0o http://www.news.com.au/technology/uk-spying-more-extensive-than-in-us/story-e6frfro0-1226667900434 The Guardian cited British intelligence memos leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden to claim that UK spies were tapping into the world's network of fibre optic cables to deliver the "biggest internet access" of any member of the Five Eyes - the name given to the espionage alliance composed of the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. <comment><AUTHOR> Original story: [http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jun/21/gchq-cables- secret-...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jun/21/gchq-cables-secret-world- communications-nsa)

</comment><comment><USER2> This shouldn't surprise anyone - thanks to our colonial heritage Britain has always contributed disproportionately to SIGINT gathering as we have lots of locations dotted around the world that are well placed for data gathering.

Given the Royal Navy like to think they have the most skilled submarine service in the world, and we have a long history of maritime charting, it shouldn't be a huge surprise that if any country is tapping undersea cables that it is Britain.

There are also plenty of stories from years ago about undersea cables being tapped. So that is hardly a revelation.

<comment><USER3> I've talked with RN submariners who visited our homeport. I would certainly call them more skilled than the average USN submariner; they have a much smaller cadre and spend a lot more time on sea duty since they don't have to follow U.S. DOPMA requirements.

However they don't have enough spare submarines lying around to just convert one like the U.S. did for _Halibut_ , _Parche_ , or our current special projects boat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's weird that people are surprised by this considering it's the stated mission of GCHQ to monitor all communications.

I genuinely don't care that GCHQ monitors and stores all this stuff. I'd prefer that they didn't; I think it's mostly a waste of money.

But when I look at spying on citizens by factions of the UK government there are far worse examples of abuses. GCHQ just has a bunch of data stored on disc that they grep for data.

Local councils abusing their powers under RIPA actually affect people. people suffer as a result of the abuses of RIPA.

I would much rather we spent time and money fixing other UK government computing projects than sorting out GCHQ.

</comment><comment><USER5> Summary:

(1) GCHQ forces communications companies to allow them to install interception devices on land at international communications cable landing points "where they land on British shores carrying data to western Europe from telephone exchanges and internet servers in north America". (Europe is going to be pissed off!)

(2) NSA/GCHQ feared revealing the identities of those commercial "intercept partners" in this scheme would cause _high-level political fallout_.

(3) "Some companies have been paid for the cost of their co-operation".

(4) The companies themselves "are forbidden from revealing the existence of warrants compelling them to allow GCHQ access to the cables." (Not a surprise; Assange often points out that the UK is the world's biggest deployer of media gag orders... so why not here?)

(5) This mass tapping operation has been built up over five years, since 2008. _GCHQ set up a three-year trial at the GCHQ station in Bude, Cornwall. By the summer of 2011, GCHQ had probes attached to more than 200 internet links, each carrying data at 10 gigabits a second. "This is a massive amount of data!" as one internal slideshow put it. That summer, it brought NSA analysts into the Bude trials. In the autumn of 2011, it launched Tempora as a mainstream programme, shared with the Americans._

(6) Message _content_ is maintained for three full days in what is referred to as an "internet buffer" ... _Tempora allowed the agency to set up internet buffers so it could not simply watch the data live but also store it – for three days in the case of content and 30 days for metadata. "Internet buffers represent an exciting opportunity to get direct access to enormous amounts of GCHQ's special source data," one document explained._ It also details _a constant effort to build up storage capacity at the stations at Cheltenham, Bude and at one overseas location_ and ongoing technical work _to expand GCHQ 's capacity to ingest data from new super cables carrying data at 100 gigabits a second_.

(7) Suggestions that GCHQ now captures more signals than the NSA.

(8) NSA's General Alexander made a casual remark supporting the breadth of GCHQ's internet interception capabilities, in particular Menwith Hill's role, and his awareness of the situation: _Why can 't we collect all the signals all the time? Sounds like a good summer project for Menwith._ \- General Alexander, Menwith Hill, June 2008.

(9) UK legal basis for interception "is in doubt" ... _According to GCHQ 's legal advice, it was given the go-ahead by applying old law to new technology. The 2000 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) requires the tapping of defined targets to be authorised by a warrant signed by the home secretary or foreign secretary. However, an obscure clause allows the foreign secretary to sign a certificate for the interception of broad categories of material, as long as one end of the monitored communications is abroad._ Also states that _it would be impossible to list the total number of people targeted because "this would be an infinite list which we couldn't manage"._

The challanges mentioned for the project are predictable ... political fallout, global internet routes shifting away from the UK/US, ingestion-time filtering, and ongoing technical challenges regarding interception of ever- greater amounts of data.

<comment> mike-cardwell "global internet routes shifting away from the UK/US"

What's the point? Wherever data is routed or stored, it _will_ eventually be tapped. There is no government that can be trusted not to do this.

Encryption of everything, all the time. That's what we need.

<comment><USER5> The point, for their spying purposes, is that it's significantly more hassle to gain access to bulk communications that don't physically flow through your country. The point for us is that greater decentralization of internet infrastructure is confirmed - from the horse's mouth - as an actionable and reasonable, albeit partial, measure of resistance.

You are right, though. That's more like buying time than actually solving the problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A clever way to grab all those rare-to-find torrents.</comment>


New UK homes 'crumbling due to weak mortar' - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-46454844 <comment><USER2> > _The full extent of the industry-wide problem is hard to measure as some > homeowners have been asked to sign gagging orders to claim compensation._

It baffles me that this term is a legal part of settlement contracts. The victim doesn't really benefit that much from committing the event to the public record, society does - so they should not be able to negotiate it away (nor should corporations be able to "un-happen" things that they did).

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure of the fine details but it seems like something that should be kept with internal records to be binding just for the sake of enforcement alone - one has to tell what they were restricted from saying in the first place in case it comes up. That level of record keeping also ensures that it can't be used for malfeasance like covering up crimes because it means entering in records for evidence.

Privacy isn't a valid claim here because the whole point is government use of force - the right to oversight for everyone out-weights their non-existant right to secrecy in use of legal force.

An old and very sensible principle is that the law isn't required to enforce contracts involving breaking it. Prosecuting hitmen for taking the money and running off would be a use of resources for the exact opposite of their job.

I think ideally you should technically settle out of court but it won't be binding by definition but open for review. If you give someone $250 for bad mortar and it later causes more damage because of containing asbestos the settlement shouldn't block the clai.

And yeah it seems to be a 'guild' law artifact in that the legal principles are entirely based off of 'caste interests' instead of principles of rule by consent of the people or equality. The UK in particular has issues with valuing reputation over truth - they have already been banned from many countries over libel shopping and their laws helped cover up Jimmy Savvile's monstrous deeds - ones so bad that his family took down and sold his tombstone for scrap.

<comment><USER2> > _And yeah it seems to be a 'guild' law artifact in that the legal principles > are entirely based off of 'caste interests' instead of principles of rule by > consent of the people or equality._

Gag clauses are common in US corporate scandals as well. This seems like a frequent abuse that everyone always wants to do when they are about to be found out, a prime candidate for legislation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Exactly why the weaker building material may have been used is unclear.

Really? What's unclear with skimping on cement and pocketing the difference? It's not that that wasn't happening since the cement was invented.

<comment><USER5> Sure, at the first, proximate level of causation.

The deeper questions concern the regulatory failure:

\- Does NHBC possess the technical and budgetary wherewithal to adequately inspect?

\- What enforcement powers does NHBC purportedly have?

\- Why has it not exercised them against the bad actors?

\- Have certain homebuilders captured the NHBC?

\- Has NHBC captured legislators, or public employees?

\- Why has there been no legal challenge to the NDAs?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Do they do housing inspections in England? Or was somebody given a backhander to look the other way?

<comment><USER7> Unless you do detailed and somewhat destructive testing, bad mortar can look the same as good mortar. Most residential construction inspections are just visual.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I believe in the 80's here there was a rash of using coastal sand in concrete. The salt lead to very premature failure of the materials.

</comment><comment><USER9> The UK is running a large immigration program, but its cities are fundamentally limited in size due to restrictive green belts. As a result, any increase in population will lead to a direct increase in land values, incentivising corners to be cut on the actual building work in order to meet budgets.

The UK and other developed countries should set a population cap (they are all at or below replacement fertility anyway) and restrict immigration to ensure this cap is never exceeded.

We are seeing the same problems in other countries like Australia where heavy levels of immigration are pushing land values beyond reasonable levels and straining the construction and planning industry.

<comment><USER10> I don't intend this to be a personal attack but I think you need to take a step back and re-evaluate what you're saying because what I'm reading is that because of increasing populations, property is more valuable, which creates more opportunities for corners to be cut as land is developed; and then the solution to that problem is to ensure land doesn't increase in value by implementing strict population controls by the state. I don't even think immigration is a core element of your argument since logically you'd still want to limit the native population through some sort of dystopic state level program.

<comment><USER9> The UK fertility rate is 1.80. Replacement rate is 2.10. All of the increase to population is through immigration, and can be controlled through simple Government policies.

<comment><USER10> Currently</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Stop threatening game developers - <AUTHOR> http://oneofswords.com/2013/07/editorial-stop-threatening-game-developers/

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure what posts like this look to achieve. It's never going to change the main problem crowd: angry kids who get pissy about the tiniest things. They're the ones being abusive on forums etc. as well.</comment>


Amnesty research reveals the civilian toll of bombings by US-led forces in Syria - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/05/british-us-airstrikes-raqqa-civilians-killed <comment><USER2> _" We're dealing with real human beings who are suffering and dying and being tortured and starving because of policies that we are involved in. We, as citizens of democratic societies, are directly involved in and are responsible for. And what the media are doing is insuring that we do not act on our responsibilities, and that the interests of power are served, not the needs of the suffering people, and not even the needs of American people who would be horrified if they realized the blood that is dripping from their hands because of the way they are allowing themselves to be deluded and manipulated by this system."_

<comment><USER3> The most troubling thing for me, as a typical millennial, is that my little brother has lived his entire life with his nation engaged in some far off "war" that consists of carpet bombing an entire region - and yet here (in the US) there is absolutely no antiwar movement. Even the left wing media streams start getting pumped up when the drums of war start pounding. And here I am, paying my tax dollars to a government who spends half of their budget on lining the pockets of Raytheon and Lockheed Martin all in the name of "defense." I wish so deeply that this would change and yet I feel like all I can do is leave comments like these on various websites.

There was some commenter on here who claimed to me that the citizens of the United States vote on having a military like this, and I thought about it. What are my alternatives? Who am I going to vote for that is antiwar? Every candidate runs on a platform of less world conflict, gets into office, and continues these policies of needless destruction whether that person is Bill Clinton, George W Bush, Barack Obama, or Donald Trump. So, I'm not sure exactly what choice the US citizen has in the matter. Left or right, it seems like the entire spectrum is very much "pro war."

<comment><USER4> >my little brother has lived his entire life with his nation engaged in some far off "war" that consists of carpet bombing an entire region - and yet here (in the US) there is absolutely no antiwar movement

It's very weird to me that a society that currently has, for example, a huge anti-gun movement, based on ideas like "every child deserves to grow up in a safe community", would at the same time treat the deaths of 10,000 people as a rounding error. But that's literally how we are.

<comment><USER3> It is weird, but I think we deserve to be able to both want both a world without needless war and safe communities for our children. Note that I'm not necessarily anti 2nd Ammendment. But to your point, yes it is very weird. War has become so normal that even your father in law or whatever will make excuses for the Iraq War - even though we know now that it was started on false premises.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Bullets and missiles are like printer ink. They are consumables. They are subject to the economical laws of supply and demand. Well that's money changing hands, from one person to the next. I want to know who is getting all that money.

<comment><USER6> The military industrial complex. Those are publicly held companies, so shareholders make that money. As a bulk of the national debt is due to extracurricular military adventures, everyone who owns U.S. Treasury securities, including the Social Security Administration who bought securities with surpluses - literally every American is making some profit from this system.

USA Inc.

<comment><USER5> "Your either with us, or you're against us", Thats the confidence of Bush noting that nobody can ever do anything about it. The 'fear of the American' and the constant self inflicted antagonism by it's own media, has been so effectively monetised, that it should probably be described as a self full filling perpetual prophecy machine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Not all those hiding were Isis fighters. In fact, many were also hiding from > Isis.

I'm very far from this war, from both sides of it. And I feel sorry for those who are exactly in the middle, like a small creature between the sea and the rocks.

<comment><USER8> I would hope that those people left Syria.

<comment><USER9> To go where exactly? What countries are still actively taking in refugees from this region?

Even now, still 55,000 people are stuck in a no-man's land in the region after Jordan closed their border [0] (since June 2016).

[0] - [https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/news/2018/1/8/jordan- agree...](https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/news/2018/1/8/jordan-agrees-to- one-off-aid-drop-to-stranded-syrians)

<comment><USER6> Lebanon took the vast majority, nearly doubling their population. The U.S. has taken a fraction of 1% of those refugees, with the total number being less than the daily mean number of deaths. The world's melting pot, a nation of immigrants, has become one of the more anti-immigrant and anti-refugee in the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder if precision weapons actually increased proportion of civilian casualties by giving commanders an illusion that they know what they're bombing. Of course the nature of conflicts also changed completely.

</comment><comment><USER11> The idea that you can bomb military targets and magically keep civilians safe is terribly naive.</comment>


Teletext for Raspberry Pi - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ali1234/raspi-teletext <comment><USER3> My friend did something similar back in 2013, [http://hackaday.com/2013/07/07/raspberry-pi-learns-the- lost-...](http://hackaday.com/2013/07/07/raspberry-pi-learns-the-lost-art-of- teletext/)

This project seems to have gotten around the hardware quirk though.

<comment><USER4> I wrote the AVR code for that!

[http://github.com/ali1234/avr-teletext](http://github.com/ali1234/avr- teletext)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Mikefax anyone?

(Ha, seems I've mentioned Mikefax a while ago... [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4687527](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4687527) )

<comment><USER6> alexkus: off topic, but would you mind sending me an email about RM380Z Robot Arena? :-) gmail digital.wilderness

(sorry, I couldn't figure out how else to contact you)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> From the code, BCM2835 peripherals pdf and [1], I gather that this is writing to the pixelvalve1 region of the Videocore to change PAL resolution. But there's nothing about this in the Videocore docs. Anybody here knows where this is documented and what pixelvalve0 in [1] is?

[1]: [https://github.com/msperl/rpi- registers/blob/master/md/READM...](https://github.com/msperl/rpi- registers/blob/master/md/README.md)

<comment><USER4> It isn't documented. I figured it out by looking at the github you linked and then looking at register values and trying to guess what they mean.

About the pixel valves.

The chip has three pixel valves. One is for DSI0, one is for DSI1, and the final one (pixel valve 2) is shared between HDMI and composite.

<comment><USER7> Thank you for the info, Alistair! Nice work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why new tv can't handle it?

<comment><USER9> They can, just set them to analog TV (only works if you're in Europe, though).

<comment><USER10> "UPDATE: This demo will also crash modern LCD TV's teletext decoder. It's because the demo sends the same packet over and over and new TVs can't handle it..."

It has nothing to do with digital or analog, it't that most modern TTV decoders don't like the format that this app sends data in.

<comment><USER11> It's a bit more complicated than that - as with all matters pertaining to agreed broadcast standards, the demo is sending data in the correct format but in a way which you would be unlikely to see in 'normal' use, hence the code drives a truck load of edge cases through the various TV manufacturers' implementation of the spec, and some of them fall over and crash hard.

To explain it in a bit more detail:

Teletext works by sending 40-byte data packets in the unused screen lines of an analogue television signal known as the 'vertical blanking interval' \- basically a part of the TV signal where no picture is normally present, included only for timing purposes and to allow an old-style CRT monitor to drag the electron beam down from the bottom of the screen back up to the top again. (Oldskool console programmers will know all about this, also known as the flyback period.)

There are only so many usable screen lines in that period - say around 16. So the maximum number of data packets that can be sent via teletext is 16 packets per field, times 50 fields per second (PAL) = 800 packets.

A teletext page is usually 25 lines of these 40-byte data packets - <USER2> it's not required to send every line, as a line that is not sent is assumed to be blank - quite common between paragraphs. This will become important later. But assume 27 packets per page, maybe a few more or less depending on page content.

That means a typical VBI period, at absolute top speed, can carry maybe 1.3 pages per frame. (A page is roughly 1K in size - 25x40 bytes, remember.) So this is all pretty low speed stuff, and the TV manufacturers generally have plenty of time during the course of each picture field/frame to process these pages and do whatever they want to do.

Something else which will become important later - the transmission protocol of these pages is such that a page is only considered to have been completely received, when the next page (or indeed any other page) begins transmission. So for example, in some implementations, the process of starting a new page will trigger some software in the set to start assembling the packets that have been received to form the completed old page.

As I said, all pretty low speed. Nothing too taxing. So all the TV has to cope with, on a typical broadcast teletext service, is responding to a stream of packets along the lines of:

I am starting page 100. Here is line 1. Here is line 2. Here is line 3. Here is line 4. Here is line 5. Here is line 6. Here is line 7. (one fiftieth of a second goes by) Here is line 8. Here is line 9. Here is line 10. Here is line 11. Here is line 12. (another fiftieth of a second passes). Here is line 13. Here is line 15. Here is line 16. Here is line 17. Here is line 21. Here is line 22. Here is line 23. (Another fiftieth of a second passes). Here is line 24. I am starting page 101. Here is line 1... and so on.

Plenty of time to process all that, typically very low speed. (I've only used eight lines per field there, to give a more realistic example of what a 'real' teletext service transmits.)

So, clearly, a regular teletext service obviously takes a certain amount of time to transmit each page, which gives a regular teletext receiver a good amount of time to process it all. And teletext services in general don't transmit blank pages. Not because they can't or shouldn't, but because there's no point in doing so.

So here's where it gets interesting. This proof-of-concept code is ONLY sending 'here is a page' commands (also known as headers, or row zero packets) - and because no page content is being transmitted, that single 'here is a page' command is all that is needed to describe a blank page.

TV sees 'Here is page 100. Here is page 100. Here is page 100. Here is page 100. Here is page 100. Here is page 100. Here is page 100. Here is page 100...' and so on.

So if these pages are being interpreted by a TV's code, rather than hard-wired hardware, suddenly it has a whole lot less time to process what it perceives as a completed page, than it had before. Where under normal conditions the TV would expect to be seeing maybe 10 or 20 pages per second, NOW every single line of the VBI is describing a new page, so it's now seeing (e.g. 16 lines x 50 fields) = 800 pages every second.

If the software in the TV can't turn all those pages around in a fraction of the time that it would normally have - something which it was almost certainly never designed to do, and never tested against - then soon the code has fallen on the floor with its pants down. There's either a massive series of race conditions and collisions going on, or there's a stack filling up and overflowing instantly, or whatever kind of showstopping fault can occur in a situation like this. In some TVs the decoding process will fail silently, in others there'll be other effects, and in some the various watchdog processes in the set will eventually shut the TV off completely.

It's a beautiful example from the olden days - your code might work against the generally accepted and agreed real-world usage of a specification, but can it stand up to legal inputs which 'nobody would ever send' ?

And of course in a modern context, it does raise interesting possibilities - could you compromise a TV just by having it tune to a 'specially crafted' video signal? It might not be as hard as you'd think.

<comment><USER12> Wonder if this can be used maliciously. Sounds like a major security issue to me.

<comment><USER13> If it's a simple stack overflow or buffer overrun, then given that they're plain binary data packets, it should be pretty easy to exploit.

<comment><USER9> 800 packets/sec x 40 byte/packet = 32 kByte/sec data throughput. Plenty of space for a nice exploit.

Heh, I wonder what happens if one could modify a DOCSIS modem to transmit on a DVB channel - in theory you could compromise an entire house, or worse, an entire block (depending on where the DOCSIS concentrator filters out uplink frequencies) by transmitting a fake DVB-C channel... it might even be better to look for problems in the DVB EPG code, because TV PC software can be better debugged.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> given that most TVs support this type of thing, I wonder if there's anything useful that could be built with the software.

<comment><USER15> sure, you could build minitel :)

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

Teletext was big in the nineties in my country, serving more Classified Ads than any other newspaper.</comment></comment>


Why Most young people prefer a fixed salary instead of undertaking - <AUTHOR>

my theory is the fear of failure <comment><USER2> But do we know most young people prefer a fixed salary instead of undertaking? How do we know that?</comment>


Politics in Games – All Media Is Political – Extra Credits [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryz_lA3Dn4c <comment><USER2> I am considering political life at the moment, not an easy choice to make, but I have also been working on a gamedev side project. Why? Because if things ever really do get dystopian, art is the last refuge of dissent. I at least want to leave a medium to express my thoughts on the subject. In the form of a living game world. You don't get a better absorption of the material than interactive participation, even it is virtual.</comment>


The Orbital Index: a weekly technical newsletter about the space industry - <AUTHOR> http://orbitalindex.com/archive/2020-05-26-Issue-66/ <comment><USER2> I would highly recommend this newsletter for anyone interested in space. I previously discovered it on Hacker News and have enjoyed it since.</comment>


Building and Running .NET's CoreCLR on OS X - <AUTHOR> http://praeclarum.org/post/110552954728/building-and-running-nets-coreclr-on-os-x <comment><USER2> > libmscordaccore is that. I've heard that it "helps debugging", but at 4KB, I > have my doubts. No, this is just an ugly wart growing off an otherwise > prefectly packaged piece of software. Best ignore it.

If it's anything like MSCORDACWKS (which "mscordac" alludes to), it's an absolutely crucial piece of code. Basically it's an abstraction layer over the way .Net lays things out in memory. It's aware of the .Net heap structure, threads, stacks, object headers, you name it: it knows how to abstract it and read it.

This means that if there is a production issue at a customer, you can grab a memory dump from them and this one tiny DLL - and then you can start digging into things (Microsoft actually now provides differing versions on their public symbol servers: so you only need the memory dump nowadays). I'm pretty sure it's also how Visual Studio interacts with .Net memory.

Unlike other environments where you have to have the same version as the customer, or at least a compatible one.

Microsoft ships it with the .Net installation package and you [Mac users] should __always __keep it next to coreclr, too. Literally, deploy it with alongside coreclr and mscordac. Never let them be apart, __ever. __Don 't just ignore it, having the correct version will save your bacon one day. 4KB that will wrangle gigabytes of dumped memory for you.

<comment><USER3> Sorry - I have a very client-side/consumer facing attitude and these low level debuggers just don't matter. But I acknowledge that it's certainly useful in the scenario you outlined.

Thank you for the clarification!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Now as .Net becomes more interesting again (for me), can someone comment on the state of GUI app development in .Net?

Can I write cross-platform GUI code, or would I need to re-implement the GUI on every platform?

Do Windows .Net GUI apps (does that mean Windows.Forms?) work just as-is on Linux (and maybe MacOSX)?

What would be the best supported GUI .Net framework? QtSharp? Windows.Forms?

I found some overview here, but not sure if accurate / up-to-date: [http://www.mono-project.com/docs/gui/](http://www.mono-project.com/docs/gui/)

<comment><USER5> WinForms works on Mono (but looks like ass). WPF doesn't. The best way is probably Gtk#.

<comment><USER3> In terms of maturity and feature-completeness, GTK# is the answer. Unfortunately, it's no beauty either.

Especially on Mac it does its own control rendering and, while it tries to match the OS, has problems.

XWT was meant to replace GTK# and has some good underpinnings but it doesn't seem super active right now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really like how things are going forward. Being a .NET developer since 2004 and a Mac user since 2008 I can't wait to use my beloved tooling finally in production on Linux (and on OS X for development).

</comment><comment><USER7> I realize there is much yet to do (hand assembled bytes?!) but it's impressive to see this building and running already.

</comment><comment><USER8> If this can be used to open up more platforms, without crazy licensing fees as with Mono and mobile devices, I think it is a very positive step forward.

<comment><USER9> > without crazy licensing fees as with Mono

Are you confusing Mono for Xamarin?

<comment><USER8> No - Mono has crazy licensing restrictions and massive licensing costs for statically linking their framework. Xamarin offer a better option, but there is no "free" alternative using C#, nor could you create one with the Mono framework. The CoreCLR does have the possibility to get around this as the code required for creating a solution is not licensed in the same way. Xamarin's entire business model revolves around the fact that static linking is not allowed using the Mono Framework as a basis.

<comment><USER5> I think their business model revolves more around selling their proprietary bridges from Mono to mobile platforms' native APIs (MonoTouch and MonoDroid, now marketed as Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android).

<comment><USER8> No, that's not really true. Their business model revolves around licensing the mono runtime to end users (in this case Developers) along with some extra platform specific code. In the case of iOS that is a statically linked exe build from AOT compilation of the CLR code. For Android that is a runtime that sits on the device and is shared for each exe, and for Mac that is taking the Mono Runtime and moving it in to the App package.

Yes, iOS was a lot of work. Yes, if they want to make it a commercial venture, that is their right, but Miguel has gone on record stating that no one else can do this due to the way the Mono runtime is licensed. They refused to give a static linking exception, as some other libraries do, so basically your only option is their solution or your own written from scratch. This is why the CoreCLR is cool.

Also - did you notice Mac is in there too? If you build a self contained package using Mono (embed the runtime in the App Bundle) they want you to pay for that now. Even though this has about zero to do with static linking.... I had a 10 minute long argument with a Xamerin representative about how retarded this was, as people have been embedding the Mono Runtime in their Mac apps for quite a long time now. But no, apparently we now pay for that.

I was on the Monotouch Beta and it looked so good. It's a pity the initial pricing was so absurd and even all these years later, it is still impossible to build an app for iOS with the Mono framework without a fee on top of the Apple Developer license. This is why I stuck with Objective-C.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was expecting a "complete bootstrap", but even after the end of this article you're still using Mono to compile any further executables you want to run on CoreCLR, right?

I guess what I'm asking is, where's the open-source MSVS C# compiler core+build system+CLI tooling?

</comment><comment><USER11> > Rewriting bits of high performance assembly in bytes (not opcodes) as Mac's > as refused to generate the desired instructions.

Ouch. They should really look into using clang and its integrated assembler. All mnemonics should Just Work. as on mac is a patched up binutils 1.38 version.

<comment><USER12> We are using clangs integrated assembler. The issue is its always choosing to emit jumps in long form which is screwing the aligned of the imm's which are patched at runtime.

Near as I can tell there is no support for the short operator either. Am I missing something?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> i wonder if other languages can start targeting the CLR, and have a competing cross platform runtime to java that's got a big name behind it.

<comment><USER14> As a POSIX-loving, open-source-breathing guy: platform availability being equal, why choose Java over C#?

<comment><USER15> I would venture it's a ton easier to find Java programmers than C# ones (at the current moment), and the same story for libraries for likely the same underlying reason.

As a pragmatic issue, if you weren't already using Mono, then it would probably be wise to let the newly open-sourced CoreCLR stew for a while to find subtle kinks introduced by the process through which it was open-sourced and/or the pressures exerted upon it by full-time dev or test (or even prod!) usage on non-Windows platforms.

As a _much_ more subjective issue, Intellij versus every C# editor is an unfair matchup. It's possible JetBrains will get into the C# editor space now that they might have more marketshare who are not on Windows, but it's probably very far down their priority queue.

<comment><USER16> Visual Studio + ReSharper. Hardly unfair.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I just hope this doesn't reduce the overall quality of upcoming Mac apps.

Cocoa's AppKit is very powerful and provides a UI that has always been more consistent than what I've experienced on Windows. The last time I tried .Net/WinForms several years ago it was severely lacking in the functionality and flexibility of controls like tables and toolbars, and the UI of many Windows apps still tends to look and act slightly different from each other, with Microsoft being the biggest culprits in this inconsistency.

<comment><USER18> I think the focus of the CLR/.NET team at MS at this stage is on the server side (eg: ASP.NET).

So it's not going to suddenly open the floodgates of .NET apps running on a Mac. That's still a long long way away (if at all).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'll be impressed when WPF is ported to OS X.

<comment><USER20> Aren't you at least a _bit_ impressed now? Some proprietary software giant releases a bunch of source for a pretty nice piece of software and it builds and works on another proprietary giant's system. Not only the fact it works, but also the amounts of work gotten into making it work i.e. getting all platform specifics out of the way, and also the premises for the future it seems to hold (especially since it also works on yet another but non- proprietary giant's system) did impress me.</comment></comment>


15-Year-Old Student's Ed Reform Plan - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/02/13/a-15-year-old-students-ed-reform-plan-self-directed-learning/

<comment><USER5> Personally, I went to a very traditional private high school and received a great education. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with education. I think the three current problems are 1) education is expensive, 2) people are too poor, and 3) people of average or below average intelligence probably aren't served very well by the high school curriculum.

We should close all corporate tax loopholes and send the money to schools and require that school funding is not proportional to property tax.

We should institute a minimum wage of ~$12/hr tied to inflation to fight poverty.

The high school curriculum should have alternate vocational and tech skills tracks.

<comment><USER6> _There's nothing fundamentally wrong with education. I think the three current problems are 1) education is expensive, 2) people are too poor, and 3) people of average or below average intelligence probably aren't served very well by the high school curriculum._

Yes, it is, and it have nothing to do with our funding. The way we teach is extraordinary inefficient and outdated.

For example, spaced repetition is a learning technique that takes advantage of the spacing effect phenomenon that is present in all humans. You know why your teachers told you to study everyday instead of cramming? Well, cramming doesn't help you retain information in the long run! Computers can be used to track every answers and problem, what our weakness are, and to schedule when to review, allowing us to take spaced repetition to its logical conclusion. The computer can generate problems on demand, give out recorded lectures by the very best teacher, and so on.

Spacing effects also implies summer vacation is harmful to knowledge acquisition process unless we continuously practice. When we finish high school and college, decays begin to set in because we stop practicing. The result is that countless generation learned mathematics, history, language art, literature, only to forget upon exiting formal education.

That's why khanacademy is so powerful. They really do leverage computers to generate problems, explain stuff, track your every mistakes, and schedule practices problem using spaced repetition. Right now, long run khanacademy users like me knows more and is the most refreshed on mathematics than the vast majority of high school students and working adults. We practice math problems everyday, thus ensuring that we never forget and be prepared to build a new knowledge as soon as Khan Academy adds new exercises or revise old one.

That's in contrast to going to a very inefficient traditional institutions and receiving a "great education" and then immediately forgetting most of what you're taught. That's a very inefficient way to learn.

<comment><USER7> > Yes, it is, and it have nothing to do with our funding. The way we teach is > extraordinary inefficient and outdated.

I don't disagree, but do you have anything to back this up?

I ask because my girlfriend is a teacher, and teaching is a lot harder than most people seem to believe.

<comment><USER6> _I don't disagree, but do you have anything to back this up?_

Like what? Numbers and studies? Khan Academy said that they have very promising results in which students perform significantly better on standardized tests.

That being said, I already wrote in my post how we can improve efficiency and effectiveness by leveraging computers for all they're worth. I think this is sufficient to show how dated the teaching is done in schools, if not exactly proves how inefficient our school teach. I think it's quite obvious that it's better to watch a recorded lecture than to see the teacher perform the same lecture years after year.

 _I ask because my girlfriend is a teacher, and teaching is a lot harder than most people seem to believe._

All I am advocating is giving the teachers and students better tools based on cognitive science that we discovered a long time ago. Making sure students get the practice they need on summer vacations and scheduling practice problems to reduce unnecessary studying isn't rocket science.

<comment><USER8> _Like what? Numbers and studies? Khan Academy said that they have very promising results in which students perform significantly better on standardized tests._

Without numbers and studies, this sounds like self-selection to me - <USER4> doing Khan Academy courses are surely more self-motivated than people attending colleges and universities, a substantial percentage of whom probably don't really enjoy being there.

 _I think it's quite obvious that it's better to watch a recorded lecture than to see the teacher perform the same lecture years after year._

Do you mean obvious from some study you've heard of, or obvious to you? Because that's not _at all_ obvious to me personally - in fact, the opposite is true. I think I learn much better from in-person lecturers (providing the lecturer is good, which would have to be true in a video lecture too). I think there are two forces at play that make this true - first, the lecturer can gauge the response of the audience and tailor his presentation - timing, level of explanation etc. Second, the atmosphere makes me pay attention more - <USER3> much the same way as going to the cinema or to see a play in a theater is more engaging that watching the same thing on TV or YouTube.

I know that basically everything I've said is all anecdote and presumption, but my presumption seem just as valid (to me, more valid :-P) than yours in the absence of hard data.

On your point that we should _[give] the teachers and students better tools based on cognitive science that we discovered a long time ago_ , I wholeheartedly agree, but it needs to be done based on scientific conclusions, not anecdata (yours or mine).

<comment><USER6> _Without numbers and studies, this sounds like self-selection to me - <USER4> doing Khan Academy courses are surely more self-motivated than people attending colleges and universities, a substantial percentage of whom probably don't really enjoy being there._

Spaced repetition and spacing effect is well known science and it works. For everything else I said, there should be more studies and experiments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For anyone who's interested, I recommend watching the film 'Race to Nowhere' - it documents the current education system's focus on standardized tests and questions what 'success' looks like.

Personally I think we should be gearing curriculums towards what are being defined as the 21st Century Set of Literacies: how well we can find information, validate it, synthesize it, leverage it, communicate it, collaborate with it and problem solve with it.

What's education really for? I'd like to see the focus move from a focus on test scores towards producing future generations who are creative, empathetic, resilient, driven and entrepreneurial.

<comment><USER10> _I'd like to see the focus move from a focus on test scores towards producing future generations who are creative, empathetic, resilient, driven and entrepreneurial._

Without testing, how will we know if we succeeded?

<comment><USER9> I don't think testing as a way of tracking progress should be stopped completely (what gets measured gets done, right?) But the focus on testing is too strong.

In systems geared around testing, it creates a culture of scarcity in which teachers and schools are competing against each other. This compares with a system such as Finland, where they have no standardized tests (and hence have a more collaborative approach to education) and yet they rate among the world's best for educational outcomes.

<comment><USER10> How do you know Finland rates among the world's best for educational outcomes?

<comment><USER9> The 'Program for International Student Assessment' is an international testing system of 15-year-old students undertaken every three years by the OECD - Finland repeatedly ranks amongst the top of these international rankings based on science, mathematics and literacy.

Education's a random passion of mine so I've read a lot about it - the Finnish system is just so cool as it focuses on non-cognitive skills more than most systems - growing emotional intelligence and resilience - so it's pretty cool that despite no national testing program (apart from the OECD) they come out really well :)

<comment><USER10> You know because of standardized testing. My point is made.

<comment><USER9> I don't disagree, but Finnish students are subject to one OECD test at age 15, as opposed to going through a system geared around very regular, standardized tests. There's a big difference. Personally I think the Finnish system sounds more fun.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A significant portion of this reminds me of Sir Ken Robinson's TED talks.

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9LelXa3U_I>

</comment><comment><USER12> I hate being mean to 15 year olds.

But this was just platitudes and motherhood statements.

Did you win an essay contest or something?

<comment><USER13> I suppose anything you already know could be described as a platitude. Doesn't mean everybody else knows it already. Apparently the people currently responsible for education don't know it yet.

<comment><USER12> > _I suppose anything you already know could be described as a platitude._

It's platitudes because of the vagueness. Students should want to learn, stuff should be relevant, etc etc. These are unmeasurable, untestable and thus irrefutable statements.

Given that education has as an inputs billions of dollars and amongst its outputs the future of civilisation, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask for a little analytical rigour.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Please see the Editor's Note attached to this article: Arooj Ahmad plagiarized excessively.</comment>


FBI Reportedly Looking Into Angelgate - <AUTHOR> http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2010/09/fbi_reportedly_looking_into_angelgate.html <comment><USER2> This is a great opportunity for McClure to do some product market research and sell products to the bureau.

It's rare that such a large organization comes to YOU for a PROBLEM that they are having and not just go DIRECTLY to ya MAMA (or the bank):

#1 Take chances. The other guy who didn't got off scotch free with no time serving (web requests, ya twitter stream, nothin!).

#2 Hold ya own. Fast talkin ain't just for the guy on the other side of the table. Let him know you have a dictionary and thesaurus too. Don't pull them out so fast though!

#3 Haters hate, but you gotta love. If you aren't allowed to leave the room to get coffee suggest a friendly game of thumb wars.

<comment><USER3> This really doesn't have the same panache without the variable-sized red and green letters.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I cried a river that I couldn't express myself like that. Fake McClure blog in the works? Maybe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I feel like this isn't going to go anywhere- after all, you can't prosecute someone based on vague tweets and a witness (Arrington) that felt awkward. It's possibly a few of the "uncomfortable" Angels will step forward with more evidence, but I'm not convinced there's enough evidence to make a real case out of it.

But then again, all I really know comes from TechCrunch blog posts.

<comment><USER5> Evidence for many (maybe most) cases is gathered at the interrogation stage. The larger the group the likelier it is that an investigation involving talking to the people there will uncover everything.

Cops can be good at their jobs.

<comment><USER6> I would have thought that top VC's would be smart not to say a word about this that isn't vetted by their lawyers. Except maybe Dave McClure :-P

<comment><USER6> Err, the other obvious explanation is that whoever was at these meeting really don't have anything to hide, and Arrington is grossly exaggerating the few anonymous tips he's gotten.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> From the peHUB post[0] cited in the article: > _Arrington declined to say if he had been contacted by law enforcement officials._

Could law enforcement force Arrington's silence if he _was_ contacted directly? Or can we expect another post by him titled, "So the FBI walked into my office..."?

[0] [http://www.pehub.com/83069/angelgate-is-"100-percent- accurat...](http://www.pehub.com/83069/angelgate-is-"100-percent- accurate"-says-michael-arrington/)

<comment><USER8> The answer is whatever creates more buzz - "declined to say" is the most "interesting" way to say no.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have to plead some ignorance on this one: I'm familiar with Australian securities law (at a very high level) but American securities law is of course quite something else.

Price-fixing I'm not sure applies here. It normally applies on the sell side but not the buy side. So if all the gas stations in the country said they would charge $6/gallon that would be price fixing. If all the consumers said they wouldn't pay more than $1.50/gallon then that's not price-fixing in the same sense.

But which side the angel investors are treated as is open to interpretation. It's also worth noting that this is investment rather than the sale of goods or services so price-fixing, depending on the law, may not even apply.

Collusion is a little more interesting. Australia has very strict laws here compared to the US (to both our benefit and detriment I suspect). I'm not even sure how to begin at unravelling such a thing.

It strikes me a little odd that it's the FBI spearheading this. I would've thought the FTC and/or the SEC would've been at the front of this. The FBI means the DoJ doesn't it? Or is the FBI the enforcement arm for these kinds of actions?

One disturbing possibility that would require FBI intervention: racketeering. Take a look at RICO:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeer_Influenced_and_Corrup...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeer_Influenced_and_Corrupt_Organizations_Act)

Trigger offences include securities fraud:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securities_fraud>

"Securities fraud, also known as stock fraud and investment fraud, is a practice that induces investors to make purchase or sale decisions on the basis of false information, frequently resulting in losses, in violation of the securities laws."

Now that normally applies to companies but could it be applied to the enticement of other investors? If angel A puts in money at $3m pre-money while at the same time someone else is putting in money at $4m pre-money, enticed by angel A (without A disclosing his or her better deal), couldn't that qualify as securities fraud?

IANAL and it seems unlikely but when you get any securities malfeasance or the appearance thereof the whole thing can really spider in all sorts of unexpected directions.

<comment><USER10> > So if all the gas stations in the country said they would charge $6/gallon > that would be price fixing. If all the consumers said they wouldn't pay more > than $1.50/gallon then that's not price-fixing in the same sense.

That's probably true with those examples, but antitrust law tends to ignore large groups of individuals "colluding" in their personal retail purchases. Companies that together exert significant market power get more scrutiny, though; for example, if all the gas-station owners in Texas got together and said that they wouldn't pay more than $1.50/gallon wholesale for gas from refineries, that could be a Sherman Act violation. There have been a few cases about "group boycotts" as well; whereas consumers can organize boycotts for political or personal or whatever reasons, groups of companies organizing boycotts of other companies will attract investigators looking into whether the purpose of the boycott is market distortion.

<comment><USER9> I certainly don't claim the authority to determine if the Sherman Act applies in this case (or in fact any case).

To summarize my earlier post the most interesting thing about this is that the FBI is leading an investigation on this (if the story is true and indeed "Angelgate" is the subject of that investigation). The FBI having jurisdiction raises all sorts of interesting questions.

The lesser point was that the FBI investigates racketeering and the RICO statutes have very broad application as written whether or not they've been used that way to date.

Take the Sotheby's/Christie's price-fixing case. That was a civil matter was it not? It bears some similarity to this (an important difference being that the auction houses were providing a service whereas the angels are investing, which legally speaking isn't quite the same thing).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I may smack the next journalist that uses the -gate suffix in a title.

<comment><USER12> Then, unlike the angelgate people, we'd know you were _definitely_ guilty of a crime.

Violence is illegal, immoral, and quite uncool. You should be ashamed. But for some reason you are proud to say this in public. How bizarre.

And don't reply that you were "just joking" as if that makes it ok. Violent crimes aren't funny. If you think it's funny, you're basically denying it really is a violent crime.

<comment><USER13> Rape and murder are violent crimes. Smacking someone causes them minor pain that subsides within seconds. It's something you shouldn't do, but it's not _violent_. Talking about it in an abstract sense is not something that is particularly shameful.

Using this action as a literary device is not offensive. Saying "I want to smack someone" acts to convey a desire to show someone that their actions are wrong, like a parent reprimanding a child for finger-painting all over the walls.

Honestly, in this situation, I find it appropriate. "I think using the suffix -gate to describe a scandal is silly" doesn't have the same emotional and visceral effect as "I want to smack these guys", even though the OP probably means the former.

Writing is about conveying emotion just as much as conveying literal facts and desires.

<comment><USER12> Are you genuinely unaware that many people think smacking children for finger painting is disgusting, immoral violence? And that it should be a crime.

And that the excuse "smacking children is educational" is false.

<comment><USER13> I never suggested hitting a child. I said the expression "I want to smack..." conveys an emotion like a parent reprimanding a child. The emotion is one of "talking down", not one of hitting someone, even though that's what a literal reading means.

What I hate about HN is that very few people here seem to be able to understand that the written word can be interpreted in many ways. What the words literally mean is not what the combination of those words means.

 _And that the excuse "hitting children is educational" is false._

But actually, I assume you're just trolling. I know because you are "anticipating" future arguments that have absolutely nothing to do with the comment thread. The OP used a figure of speech. I mentioned parents and kids. Now you want to have a debate on parenting philosophy?

What for? To waste my time?

Well, it worked, but now you have several fewer karma points and I have several more.

<comment><USER12> If you don't want a debate on parenting philosophy, then don't advocate doing cruel things to children. You brought it up but now you deem it off topic?

As to educational, if you do not consider hitting or punishing children educational, then I'm curious: what is your justification?

<comment><USER13> Look: I didn't say parents should hit their kids. I didn't say parents shouldn't hit their kids. Nowhere in anything I've said in this thread, did I bring this subject up. I have no opinion on this matter and don't care to discuss it.

Please find some other comment thread to reply to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> haters gonna hate, players gonna play and the FBI is gonna investigate

</comment><comment><USER15> They don't have a choice - it's their job... So what do you think, will the FBI investigation play out to be good or bad for us entrepreneurs?

</comment><comment><USER16> If you are a VC who was at those meetings, and you are on your blog loudly claiming nothing illegal was going down, I guess you'll be directly answering all the FBI's questions instead of letting a lawyer do the talking for you, right?

I didn't think so.

The bad thing is, even if the conversations were innocent, the FBI does not let go easily. Things start nice... "just want to make sure we clear up any misunderstandings..." and then there are wiretaps, and more fun. Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER17> Evidence for many (maybe most) cases is gathered at the interrogation stage. The larger the group the likelier it is that an investigation involving talking to the people there will uncover everything.

www.homadynamic.com

</comment><comment><USER18> Weather or not the investigation will succeed, it will change significantly how reckless angels and VCs have been when it comes to back-room deals and silent partnerships. Time for transparency and thinking before speaking.

</comment><comment><USER19> Good.</comment>