Mr Robot S02E01 easter egg - <AUTHOR> https://0x41.no/mr-robot-s02e01-easter-egg/ <comment><USER2> Is this season going to have a lot of "weird" stuff going on as well?

I watched the first one. I enjoyed the first few episodes, seemed like it was going to be a drama about people working in InfoSec. Definitely appreciated the relative plausibility of the hacks. Was very disappointed when it turned into a psycho-druggie-anonymous-whatever sort of thing. It went so quickly from a semi-plausible portrayal to a fetishization of [black hat] hackers.

I understand how that's more appealing to a wider audience. Just saying what I'd prefer personally for my own sake.

<comment><USER3> The first two episodes were definitely on the 'trippy' side of things.

I wish they'd ditch the whole split-personality plot, but seems like we're stuck with it. It's not a disaster, just sort of tiresome. Seems cheap when compared to the rest of the show's plotting, and I was hoping there'd be less focus on it this season now the 'reveal' is done with. I think it's mainly that they want to keep Christian Slater on screen.

The trippy 'Lynchian' stuff really doesn't work for me here either, it seems out of place/poorly handled. Judging by the critics/friends though, I think I'm in the minority there. I think the show is generally a victim of its writer's grandiose ambitions; it wants to appear epic and sophisticated but it ends up oversimplifying.

Hacking is still great, though.

<comment><USER4> The brilliance of the show is that it portrays dissociative disorders in an extremely realistic fashion.

If you didn't identify with that, then you're obviously not part of the subculture that the show portrays and is really made for. Mr Robot is not about the drugs or computer hacking, it's far more grandiose than that. Similarly to Fight Club, it can be viewed as a social study of a subculture that's operating on the frontier of consensus reality and could characterize where that reality will shift in the future.

Have you had to juggle multiple identities in your head, every day for years if not decades? Have you thought what this does to you?

Have you had to keep secrets from everyone around you?

Have you "felt" what cyberspace really is about? Have you experienced the VICIOUS feedback loop of projecting a thoughtform/idea (what the audience views as "hacking") into that new domain only to have it manifest and achieve its own reality, as if by magic?

The technical aspects of the show are by far the least interesting.

<comment><USER5> >> "Have you "felt" what cyberspace really is about? Have you experienced the VICIOUS feedback loop of projecting a thoughtform/idea (what the audience views as 'hacking') into that new domain only to have it manifest and achieve its own reality, as if by magic?"

What would be an example of this?

Are you referring to something similar to multiple discovery:

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

<comment><USER4> Hacking [breaking boundaries, making the seemingly impossible possible by pure force of will] is the archetypal example of this. Obviously, the discipline is not new and has been present for thousands of years, any sort of artistic/creative process encapsulates it.

The arrival of cyberspace however and its subsumption of more and more aspects of our everyday lives acts as a positive feedback loop. What was unthinkable or even heretical 20-30 years ago is now routine.

In a sense, we are witnessing a new paradigm shift where the intermediate substrates (mind/inception to manifestation) are being dissolved and the feedback loop gets shorter.

<comment><USER6> >What was unthinkable or even heretical 20-30 years ago is now routine

You can see this with the subsequent breakdown of social structure and monetary philosophy. The masses are reaching harmonization through their own voices rather than having a conductor leading them (politician/bankers/middlemen in general)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The coolest thing about this show I discovered was that every hack depicted is actually tested to see if it would work, and the screenshots cut into the show are always shown in the correct order of execution. Amazing.

Wish there was a clip on YouTube but their tech consultant Kor Adana explains it in the "Hacking Robot" panel discussion they ran after the season premiere (around 8:50 tons of ads sorry): [http://www.usanetwork.com/mrrobot/videos/hacking- robot-101](http://www.usanetwork.com/mrrobot/videos/hacking-robot-101)

<comment><USER8> I still do not believe that the Steel Mountain hack could be pulled off the way they did it.

<comment><USER9> They worked with Chinese hackers in order to pull it off. Most likely working for the Chinese government to hack into US servers and steal data without getting noticed.

I'm not sure how the data tapes got erased, but they planted a Raspberry PI to the heating system to turn up the heat and fry them all? Bypassing safety checks and displaying normal readings to the people monitoring it? Wouldn't those people feel the heat going up and panic?

<comment><USER10> plausible imho. data tapes could be in area A where people rarely go. admins could be in area B. temps could be set higher in area A, but not in B, at 4 am on a saturday night.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think Mr Robot has good tech in it, because it's not a show about tech CSI- Cyber style. It's a drama, which uses tech as a basebone. All the hacking largely stays in quick snippets displayed, and maybe a sort of slow-marathon style of filming where it's clear something takes a while.

It's a show about hacking, but hacking is secondary to the other aspects, it just moves the plot forward, and that's why it works so well.

<comment><USER12> Don't watch the new _Person of Interest_ tv show then, it's a lot like CSI but they name-drop technical jargon in only semi-relevant context, which makes it even worse for some reason.

<comment><USER13> I think that's rather over-criticizing it. Person of Interest may not be able to match Mr. Robot in technical realism, but it _is_ set in a fantastical universe with a fully functional AI. I wish they were as committed to realistic hacking as Mr. Robot, but it cannot be said that they didn't try. Its hacks were explained enough for a layman, and shown enough for a technical person.

And its story was good, too. I'd recommend it to people just for that.

<comment><USER12> But that's what makes it _worse_ than CSI, because it's so heavily grounded in technology that suspense of disbelief is disrupted when technical terms are misused.

<comment><USER13> Can you give some examples? I'm sincerely asking, since I never felt that technical terms were misused. I want to know where I missed that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I am probably going to wait for the season to complete so I can binge watch. Am I the only one?

My big concern is all of the media and spoilers that surround these popular shows. Why do I know who died in Orange is the New Black? Why does Google think I need this as part of my news feed that I check only once or twice a day because I just need the most important news items.

<comment><USER15> It appears I'm pretty unusual in that I actually like reading spoilers and they don't really spoil anything for me. The few times that people have had spoilers but still read or watch the story in question, I've asked them, "did you enjoy it less because you knew what would happen?" and they said "no". I don't know of someone who actually had their enjoyment of the story modified by knowing the story, but many people who loudly proclaim that spoilers make them upset.

A good story should work even if you know what will happen. The components of the story (such as the easter eggs in the present discussion) should be more interesting than some gimmick of a big reveal. The whole concept of spoilers is extremely modern, probably invented by Hitchcock as marketing to sell more tickets to his movies. When you go see the ballet or an opera, you're given the whole plot upfront as part of the programme.

<comment><USER16> When a story is well done, I can immerse myself in it and see it from a character's point of view. So I can still enjoy a movie with a big reveal at the end even if I already know the reveal.

On the other hand, some movies are simply too intense to be enjoyable for me. So I often pull up Wikipedia first to make sure that the payoff is going to be worth it.

An example that falls into both categories is "The Fugitive" (Harrison Ford movie based on the TV show). I already know who the villain is and who dies at the end, but I can still enjoy Harrison Ford piecing it together and Tommy Lee Jones trying to stop him. And the last part of the movie is more intense and action-heavy than I really like, but I can take it because I know how it turns out.

I sometimes joke that I'm a member of the "Wikipedia Film Club" because I read about more movies than I actually end up watching.

<comment><USER17> _I sometimes joke that I 'm a member of the "Wikipedia Film Club" because I read about more movies than I actually end up watching._

That's so funny. I definitely do that too. However, a lot of the times I don't end up watching the movie unless it's really good. That's probably my favorite use of Wikipedia.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Cached: [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:3sFdXb...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:3sFdXb85U3wJ:https://0x41.no/mr- robot-s02e01-easter-egg/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

</comment><comment><USER19> On top of what I consider to be utterly extraordinary film making craft, this show really gives me a new appreciation of the nature of anarchy. There is a very real sense in which "anarchy" \-- a kind of lack of predictably -- is always the resultant state after a large enough change to a power structure -- if it were more predictable then the rules of the incumbent power structure would be likely to predict and prevent such a large change.

I feel like this idea is present at many levels in the story -- including the dynamics of Elliot's personality disorder and his attempts to construct trust in his perception of reality and his own motivations.

Intermingling these themes with the idea of hacking -- the art of finding/manipulating unexpected behavior in systems -- is incredibly rich -- and mesmerizing.

<comment><USER20> > There is a very real sense in which "anarchy" \-- a kind of lack of > predictably -- is always the resultant state after a large enough change to > a power structure

If this is the kind of anarchy you envision, you're going to be sorely disappointed if something like that happened in real life. Real anarchy would look more like how people would react if zombies broke out. There would be mass looting, killings, raping, and people taking advantage of the chaos (opportunists). It would literally be the wild west with all services, including power and the internet going down.

The "anarchy" in Mr. Robot is a falsehood, it's a libertarian/hackers fantasy. That's not anarchy at all. Not even close.

<comment><USER21> While I agree with your assertion that a state of anarchy introduced by force (technical or otherwise) in a relatively stable democracy would be nightmarish, I suspect that's going to be the thrust of season 2.

The activists leveraged some technical know-how and swashbuckling intrusions to bring down a big bank's systems, but the opening episodes of season 2 point to a mobilization of the democratic government forces to restore order by force. They didn't create anarchy by destroying the source of financial truth, they handed the keys to democracy to the very conglomerate they attempted to take down.

The series was supposed to have been composed as a three-act movie originally, and it'll be interesting to see how it unfolds moving forward in the second act.

<comment><USER5> >> "they handed the keys to democracy to the very conglomerate they attempted to take down"

Maybe, did you catch White Rose's fire side chat at the end of season one? Who is handing the keys to who in season two?

<comment><USER19> White rose is fascinating -- his obsession with time comes across to me as a very insightful attribute to associate with a hacker in a Confucian oriented society -- I wonder if social hacking a great harmony society would tend to involve a lot of precise timing attacks. And the name is great -- perhaps referring to the anti-nazi protest movement in Munich -- a subtle reference to an existence proof for the possibility that a "hacker movement" could be deemed "correct" to oppose the existing paradigm in which its embedded. And it's great that he's Chinese -- we are so conditioned in the west to think of "Chinese hackers" as only and always state sponsored black hats. How strange that preconception given how noble a calling we should perceive there to be for "hackers" operating domestically in China -- to tweak at what we perceive as an often overly authoritarian regime. It made me feel a startling lack of examples in western media of "good guy" Chinese hackers. The realization has me always looking to find ways to try to establish trust with the white rose character. Not sure if he should have it, but I hope he is revealed to deserve it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Mr Robot propelled Kali Linux into the top of the Linux OS rankings. After watching the Season 2 premiere yesterday even I decided I'm going to check Kali Linux out - either on Virtual Machine or my Raspberry Pi 3.

Also I was pleasantly surprised to see Joey Badass in the show (his first acting gig I think). Hopefully they will allow the character he plays to shine. Great show!

<comment><USER23> I'm installed my android phone & I want to operate kali Linux app

<comment><USER24> I want the program to cleanse the Wi-Fi network and Thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Thats really good detective work. I was not expecting this much attention to detail at all - even after season one seemingly surpassed every film/tv show in history on that account. I will definitely be screen pausing for the rest of this season myself now.

</comment><comment><USER26> This show is amazing IMO. It's like a love letter to all those late nights when I was 15 and glued to my freebsd box until unhealthly late hours!

</comment><comment><USER27> Love this show bc it's like Fight Club meets Hackers. Can't wait to watch the full season

<comment><USER28> Fight Club meets Hackers meets American Psycho, with a soundtrack like The Social Network.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> There is a QR code drawn in Elliot's journal that leads to www.conficturaindustries.com (one of the URLs linked to the same SSL cert) - the same company name that is on the front of the journal. And the meticulous zoom-in on the apple skin left on the floor looks very similar to the logo of the company. Looks like they had fun making this :)

<comment> csm-dev They had a lot of fun but this is also why i love this series :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Really nice! But Mr Robot is something I won't watch anymore. It is just too weird and slow at this point.

<comment><USER31> I saw it until it became too sad and depressing. Are joy and triumph not good for plots? Why not a character like Mike from "Suits"?

<comment><USER32> > Why not a character like Mike from "Suits"?

Suits already has a character like Mike from Suits. The characters name is, surprisingly, named Mike.

If Elliot were to be like Mike from Suits, Mr Robot would need to change the name of the show to Suits.

<comment><USER33> > If Elliot were to be like Mike from Suits, Mr Robot would need to change the > name of the show to Suits.

And it follows that the space of sitcoms is a singleton.

That explains a lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> "I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale. – Thomas Jefferson"

Apparently I have more in common with Jefferson than I thought (Re my numerous comments in the past regarding the danger of consumer credit).

</comment><comment><USER12> Can anyone get a read on the QR code from his notebook?

[http://i.imgur.com/4H0M2hj.png](http://i.imgur.com/4H0M2hj.png)

I tried to isolate the image but it's not reading:

[http://i.imgur.com/fQV1EIn.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/fQV1EIn.jpg)

<comment><USER35> [http://www.conficturaindustries.com](http://www.conficturaindustries.com)

<comment><USER12> Looks like NBC registered it a month ago and it's hosted on Adobe cloud. Maybe they'll change it later during the season?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Does anyone recall a Mr. Robot giveaway with American Giant hoodies? I went to the AG retail space two days ago to figure out what hoodie size I needed, and made a Mr. Robot joke. The salesperson said, "hey, we did a promo with Mr. Robot, actually, where there was a website in the show and if you followed a bunch of clues, there was some morse code and eventually you got a free Mr. Robot hoodie from us."

At the time, I marked it up as "awww, too bad I missed it", especially since I tend to binge shows after they're all available at once. But I wasn't able to find any evidence of this promo existing on the web, and now there's this thing with morse code and so on. Soooo maybe there's a nice hoodie at the end of this road.

<comment><USER5> f you want to figure out this mystery on your own, the number is (212) 804-6003.

____ SPOILER INFO HERE: [http://decider.com/2016/05/18/mr-robot-season-two- trailer-se...](http://decider.com/2016/05/18/mr-robot-season-two-trailer- secret-message/)

<comment><USER36> Aha, thanks - so the free hoodie (and they're really nice hoodies!) happened already. The promo page is still pretty neat, though, and a quick perusal of the javascript indicates there may be some more hidden material in there somewhere.

<comment><USER37> Yes, they sent hoodies on premiere night to the first 509 people that reached the end sign-up page. Very cool of the marketing team and everyone involved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> There is also an archive quine embedded within the image at [http://www.conficturaindustries.com/images/linkexchange_bann...](http://www.conficturaindustries.com/images/linkexchange_banner.png) , which is the website corresponding to the QR code that was shown briefly in his notebook.

I didn't look at it closer, there might be more in there.

</comment><comment><USER39> I feel like I'm the only person on the planet who doesn't drink the Mr Robot kool-aid.

It's cool that they get the tech right, but I just feel as though the protagonist has the mentality of an angsty teenager trying their best to be 'edgy' by 'fighting the man'.

Maybe if the show took itself a little less seriously I might enjoy it more.

</comment><comment><USER40> >AdobeTracking.showSiteFeature = 'Mr. Robot : S2 Easter Egg Sites';

[view-source:[http://www.evil-corp-usa.com/](http://www.evil-corp-usa.com/)]

 _Sites_

I get the feeling this will be ongoing...makes the show more fun and a little interactive

<comment><USER41> they actually had a really cool ARG before S02ep01, the winners got a really cool sweatshirt

</comment></comment><comment> SG- I'm pretty happy they used BitchX for the IRC client.

</comment><comment><USER42> Neat easter egg. Though you should get some better servers for your site. That load time is crazy. Especially on my 1GB connection. Granted, I'm going through proxies, but wow, still horrible.

Anyhow, can't wait to see what this season has in store. I find myself relating to a lot of the personal struggles in the last season. Maybe that makes me crazy. ha.

</comment><comment><USER43> Fun fact. Mr Robot S02E01 was doing a scene right around the corner next to AWS NY Loft. Not sure if it was accidental or intentional. I only came to realize until this HN post and looked at what the main character looks like. Yeah the kid with hoodie. He was there.

</comment><comment><USER44> Thought it was intriguing that a schizophrenic uber-hacker's poison of choice was morphine; it seems more in line with methamphetamine use, imo! Hacking on morphine... would.. be... something..... like...... this........

</comment><comment><USER45> Stuff like this is a nice touch. I wonder how long it will stay up?

It would be controversial but really interesting if they dropped an actual 0-day during the show as well.

<comment><USER20> Episodes are filmed 6 months to a year ago. Would it be a 0-day at that point? I remember when 0-day actually meant brand new (typically a release on that particular day), but that was 15-20 years ago. Over that time, the definition could have changed.

<comment><USER46> That's still the definition. But if they filmed an episode with an unknown exploit, it didn't get leaked and nobody else finds it between filming and release, it would be 0-day. Very questionable to do though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Apparently, I'm way behind on this series if we're already in season 2. Yikes. I guess I better catch up!!! no more spoilers please!!!

</comment><comment><USER48> what about? [https://www.reddit.com/r/MrRobot/comments/4joo75/no_spoilers...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MrRobot/comments/4joo75/no_spoilers_mr_robot_arg_master_thread/)

</comment><comment><USER49> And the eyeball seems to be delivering ASCII in hex to you, The Martian-style.

</comment><comment><USER50> Tell me where Tyrell is...

<comment><USER51> I just binge watched the show a couple of days ago. Remember how Elliot stashes the gun given to him by Darlene in the popcorn machine instead of taking it to the meeting with white lotus? When Elliot shows Tyrell the Fsociety space, that same popcorn machine starts making popcorn.

I sincerely doubt Elliot turned on the machine just for popcorn.

<comment><USER52> There's no doubt he was reaching for the gun. You can see him sticking his hand in there and digging around.

One fan tinfoil theory is that he killed Tyrell and the last two episodes have been him sitting in a jail cell.

I don't really buy that, but he probably did shoot or try to shoot someone.

<comment><USER53> The voice on the phone at the end of s02e02 is Tyrell though. He's obviously on the run somewhere; most likely overseas.

<comment><USER12> We joked that Tyrell is another split personality, since the main character never really seems to interact with Tyrell and other people in the same conversations.

Tyrell's wife could know about his personalities and just not care, hence the weird conversation at the end of season 1.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Clearly no one here has seen blue 'heet me' velvet

</comment><comment><USER55> Scan the QR code hand-drawn in Elliot's notebook.

</comment><comment><USER56> This is great. Nice job!</comment>


Change Amazon package routing by adding "Box" to address - <AUTHOR> http://mailp.in/f9y3c8H5/

<comment><USER2> I have had the reverse problem. I use Amazon Prime two-day shipping fairly regularly, which requires that I specify a physical address for delivery by UPS. Occasionally, however, Amazon will decide it wants to ship by USPS and will try to send my package to my physical address which does not have postal service rather than to my Post Office Box. I tried to get Amazon to understand that they need to have an option to select the destination address based upon their choice of shipping carrier. No luck. Eventually, I settled on adding "PB ####" following the street address; my local post office usually (but not always) figures out that this is a box designator when they cannot deliver to the street address and I get the package delayed by a few days.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Read from [https://twitter.com/joatca/status/469505689052667906](https://twitter.com/joatca/status/469505689052667906)</comment>


View leaked secrets in Git live - <AUTHOR> https://shhgit.darkport.co.uk/ <comment><USER2> We created a static version of this (almost similar to shodan but for keys) using publicly accessible Github dump hosted on Google Cloud in 2017. We then hosted the processed data, website and our search infra on AWS. AWS security team reached out to us for a potential "collaboration" and asked us to send all AWS keys that we discovered and we sent them the whole list. As a tiny startup, we were elated. Few days later they call us and threaten with a cease and desist notice if we do not take down the website. Remember we are not targeting AWS keys, neither are we in violation of any licensing agreements with respect to the data. We refused to shut it down. They then ask us to stop hosting it on AWS or "anywhere" else since we were using AWS credits to host the product or they will shut our account. When their this strategy did not work out, they contacted someone at Stripe who had given us the AWS credits, who then asked us to take it down or face consequences. We eventually had to shut it down since we did not have a lot of money to fight these people.

It was a stressful week for us where we learnt that corporates can lie and bully you to get whatever they want and then can shut you down. Unless you have the means to fight back. Does not matter where you live.

<comment><USER3> I know this sounds a bit mean but what did you expect to happen when you host a page of leaked aws keys?

<comment><USER2> It included high entropy strings including keys from 30+ API and service providers, one of which was AWS. We did not target AWS specifically. None of the other services complained. In fact, a customer service widget company even took our help and thanked us. AWS tricked us in taking our findings and then changed their tone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Author here. I released the tool a few weeks back and since downsized the EC2 instance. So this post pretty much killed the box. I've just up-sized it again but it's still running fairly slowly due to high load. It typically finds around 5 secrets/a second. Corresponding blog post here: [https://darkport.co.uk/blog/ahh-shhgit!/](https://darkport.co.uk/blog/ahh- shhgit!/) and you can run your own instance here: [https://github.com/eth0izzle/shhgit](https://github.com/eth0izzle/shhgit)

</comment><comment><USER5> Blog post about shhgit: [https://darkport.co.uk/blog/ahh- shhgit!/](https://darkport.co.uk/blog/ahh-shhgit!/)

</comment><comment><USER6> This is highly amusing.

One of the first things it found was a publicly accessible oracle db. Second thing it found was someone attempting to make an authoritative repo on standards for django, which included this all-too-familiar line in settings.py

      # SECURITY WARNING: keep the secret key used in production secret!
      SECRET_KEY = '(d5%@h=u0m2a5-$4f^n(d%4mkt-@f1%h#3n64%+wmhf(kmx)ga'

<comment><USER7> Leaving the tab open for a half hour turned up about five of those, a google oauth key, and what seemed to be an SSL certificate private key, among others.

<comment><USER8> If you find "real" SSL private keys (from the Web PKI, ie they would be trusted by something like a web browser out of the box) you should be able to get a CA to revoke any certificates issued for that key by proving you know the key.

The usual format of private keys makes it mechanically trivial to get the corresponding public key back and then you can ask a public monitor like crt.sh to determine if that key is seen in any certificates.

Once you identify one or more certificates, you can ask the issuer to revoke them, offering proof you know the private key as the reason. For Let's Encrypt or any CA offering the ACME protocol you can use the ACME protocol to do this without involving any humans (the Certbot software for example has a "revoke" keyword that can do this).

Other CAs should have at least an email address manned 24/7 to respond to problems, which can explain how they'd prefer you prove you know the key. Or if you're just bored of this and want them to shut up and fix it, you could just email them the private key, whereupon now _they_ know the key for someone else's certificate they issued and that's prohibited by the rules they're working under so it's now their problem.

<comment><USER9> Sounds like a value-add for a CA. "We've seen your private key in public, we're revoking your certificate for you. You're most welcome."

<comment><USER10> And we sell you a new one :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This tool should create issues in relevant repos unless the repo whitelists itself explicitly. Or alternatively just create one master issue per repo (should there be more violations in the future)

<comment><USER12> The tool has a flag icon which will open a new issue in the repo. I've seen a few false positives while watching, so auto-opening issues would be an issue.

<comment><USER11> I feel like it's better to err on the safe side.

<comment><USER13> You don't want to flood github with wrong issue, that's a good way to lose the right to open issue altogether.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What are recommended tools for team wide secret management?

<comment><USER15> We're using gopass ( [https://www.gopass.pw](https://www.gopass.pw) )

<comment><USER16> Btw. this is a go implementation of pass [https://www.passwordstore.org/](https://www.passwordstore.org/)

<comment><USER17> The git repo [0] says "All Rights Reverse Engineered" at the bottom. Is that just a joke, or has it actual meaning?

[0] [https://git.zx2c4.com/password-store/](https://git.zx2c4.com/password- store/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Nice tool. Is there a similar tool that you can use privately to notify you before you commit sensitive data to git?

<comment><USER19> Like git-secrets? It's mentioned on the site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Rather link: [https://darkport.co.uk/blog/ahh- shhgit!/](https://darkport.co.uk/blog/ahh-shhgit!/)

The service is currently overloaded.

</comment><comment><USER21> Got this message in alert

Failed to retrieve signatures! Reloading...

<comment><USER22> Me too. I lock down Firefox pretty hard so it's probably some cookie or JavaScript being blocked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I can't run this in the background more than 5 minutes without getting high CPU usage and and unresponsive tab :-(

</comment><comment><USER24> I have to say I'm not a huge fan of making secret theft more convenient. I don't see many positive uses for this website...

<comment><USER25> There is nothing quite like seeing your password in plain text published somewhere for the world (or some subset of the world) to see.

Seeing an obscured version doesn't have quite the same effect as the raw plain text.

Nothing quite like seeing a failed login attempt for username 'yourpassword' emailed to the entire IT team to make you think about changing your password from your ex's name to something distinctly less personally identifiable.

<comment><USER24> The chances of you watching this website while _your_ credentials unintentionally show up are essentially zero. This website is a tool for watching other peoples' secrets.

<comment><USER25> This website takes a raw firehose and puts a nice human-friendly UI around it. The live data already exists in a much more machine-friendly format.

If I was going to be watching other peoples' secrets for fun and profit (and not just for fun), I wouldn't be using the human-friendly version.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How do you go about acquiring a parked domain? - <AUTHOR> I was wondering what the best approach to aquiring a parked domain is. What  is a good initial offer? What techniques or tactics are there, if any, etc? I appreciate that the situation can be different for different domains and different vendors but if there is any generally applicable wisdom it would be much appreciated. Cheers. <comment><USER2> 1) Send email to ask them if the domain is available for sale.

2) Receive email back saying that it is for sale, for $40,000, despite the domain not being a dictionary word or a combination of dictionary words or anything anyone but you would ever likely be interested in.

3) Send email back with a reasonable offer (say, $500).

4) Receive email back saying that the price is $40,000. Firm.

5) Look for a new domain name. Repeat.

(Actually happened to me. After that, I usually don't even bother)

<comment><USER3> I was quoted $275,000 for a domain last January. It's a very good name in a competitive market (mortgages.)

I say, "Oh? Well, gee, I only had $1000 budgeted."

They said "We're willing to negotiate." They offered it for $100K...then all the way down to $25K. They won't budge from there, though.

[Four months went by]

They contacted me to see if I'm still interested. I ended up paying $1300, but I had to wire the money IMMEDIATELY. Turns out they had an unexpected expense come up. I almost felt bad...

That will NEVER EVER happen if the domain you want is owned by a professional domainer company, though. They won't even usually talk to you, no matter how much cash you have to throw at them. They consider it too 'time-consuming' to even field the offers.

If you want to hear a sob story...I used to own SI.com. I was planning on using it for a Spanish language portal. I sold it for WAAAAAAY too little money. Now, of course, it's Sports Illustrated. It would have made a better Spanish language portal, dammit!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Offer the owner what you think it's worth, and if you don't have a deal immediately, give up on that one. Otherwise attempts to buy domains drag on interminably, which a startup can't afford.

Trying to buy domains is such a time-suck that it's usually less work to think of an untaken one.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds like good advice. Any tips on evaluating what they're worth?

<comment><USER3> You can look at various services to get a very rough guesstimate at how much traffic the domain gets...Alexa, Comscore, etc. You can also check the number of backlinks, etc. That's basically all the domainers do. Ultimately, you just have to judge what it is worth to you, though. It is rarely worth paying the quoted price.

Most "appraisals" from domain companies aren't worth the paper they're printed on. Everyone massively overestimates the value of 95% of domains...especially if they own the domain in question. Inflation of domain prices is so pervasive and out of control that it is almost humorous. There is a reason that most of the domains in the world are just 'parked' by squatters...MASS PSYCHOSIS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why bother?

Surely you can find an appropiate domain name that isn't taken.

Make an app people will want and find a way to reach them. Your domain name should be the least of your worries.

<comment><AUTHOR> I could look for another name but I've thought of one that is particularly appropriate and its being squatted on. However I think you're right; investing time thinking of others names is more effective.

<comment><USER6> tdnam.com; click on advanced search; click on Expired Name Auction checkbox and .com checkbox; type in a keyword to search on then click search. Give it a chance, do a lot of searches. I found some really good domains the most recent one I bought was "askshare.com" I paid $20.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> godaddy has a service where they negotiate on your behalf with the domain owner - they're usually in a stronger position than you are because they're regarded as an expert authority on the subject. They also have an appraisal system.

I've used them.

Do I think they're good at providing this service? Yes.

Would I use them again? No.

Godaddy are fine, but the chances of getting an owner who wants to sell at market value are slim. Better to invent a babyword (bebo.com) a letter agging (digg.com) or a domain hack (deli.cio.us).

Or just get a good domain (not a great one) and be at the top of the search results, like 37signals.com is when you google for 'basecamp' style.

<comment><USER3> I've never used GoDaddy's "negotiation" services, but I have used them to "backorder" a domain. If the current owner lets anything lapse, you have a chance of getting the domain. It rarely works out, but I have gotten a few good domains that way. I think they charge around $18 to backorder a domain. There are, of course, other registrars that provide the same service...or you can just build your own script to monitor for changes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> When my company started, our company's name was already registered (and parked). After following a bunch of links to find the owner though, we came across a small paragraph stating that if we had some claim to the name, they would forfit the domain. After we incorporated, we sent out an e-mail, and then when they asked for proof, we faxed a copy of our incorporation papers. Only had to pay a $20 transfer fee.

<comment><USER3> I'm impressed you were able to do it with just incorporation papers! That would normally just make the squatter see dollar signs.

I've only SEIZED CONTROL of a squatted domain once, and I had to send trademark documentation. [Since most squatters are just speculators they don't bother to register the names as trademarks. If they are redirecting within your industry (and the class you got the trademark in), it is easy to get control of the domain.]

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Worst-case is when you get some get-rich-quick guy with dreams of gold. Domains are so cheap there is a lot of speculation in the market by average Joes looking for the next Google to make them a 7-figure offer on their property. An appraisal service can help. I don't have a lot of faith in the third-party brokers, but I've never tried them.

</comment><comment><USER10> Since many of the other members of community suggest looking for your own domain name, I would suggest you read: <http://www.thenameinspector.com/10-name-types/>

It will help you think creatively of the domain name. I've used GoDaddy's service before as well as just negotiated it on my own, and the GoDaddy service increases the total cost of the transaction, but either way, chances are always slim.

</comment><comment><USER11> <http://www.sedo.com/>

They also have a domain appraisal service [http://www.sedo.com/appraisal.php3?tracked=&partnerid=&#...</a>

<comment><USER3> The last time I tried Sedo they had a minimum transaction amount. And just their FEE on that minimum transaction amount was more than I was willing to pay for the actual domain I was interested in! I've never seen anything I would consider a "deal" on Sedo.

I'm assuming they still have that minimum transaction size...?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Do a "whois" on the domain to get contact information for the owner, call them and ask them if they'd like to sell it.

or

Get Go daddy or another service to do the same thing ("Domain Buy Service"): <https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/broker/landing.asp?ci=8995></comment>


Barack Obama on House of Cards - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/BarackObama/status/434108103789793281

<comment><USER2> House of Cards could not have got a better endorsement or a better ad : Obama has over 41 million Twitter followers, and that particular tweet had gotten over 10,000 retweets. Netflix probably gained a few thousand new subscribers already.

Edit : Great show BTW, and I can't wait to see the second season either :)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, would a better title be "regarding" HOC? Just realized it might sound like he's "on" House of Cards. As in, a guest star.

:(</comment>


OWASP Application Security Verification Standard 3.0 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/OWASP/ASVS/blob/master/OWASP%20Application%20Security%20Verification%20Standard%203.0.docx OWASP Foundation:<p>We are in the last stretches of reviewing the OWASP Application Security Verification Standard 3.0, to be released at AppSec USA in September. If you are an application lead, lead developer, developer, tester, pen tester, code reviewer, or auditor, please review the draft here: https://github.com/OWASP/ASVS/blob/master/OWASP%20Application%20Security%20Verification%20Standard%203.0.docx We would also appreciate if you could pass this draft onto software engineers, practitioners, developers, CISOs, and architects. Please log any discovered issues here: https://github.com/OWASP/ASVS/issues <comment><AUTHOR> OWASP Foundation:

We are in the last stretches of reviewing the OWASP Application Security Verification Standard 3.0, to be released at AppSec USA in September.

If you are an application lead, lead developer, developer, tester, pen tester, code reviewer, or auditor, please review the draft here: [https://github.com/OWASP/ASVS/blob/master/OWASP%20Applicatio...](https://github.com/OWASP/ASVS/blob/master/OWASP%20Application%20Security%20Verification%20Standard%203.0.docx)

We would also appreciate if you could pass this draft onto software engineers, practitioners, developers, CISOs, and architects. Please log any discovered issues here: [https://github.com/OWASP/ASVS/issues](https://github.com/OWASP/ASVS/issues)</comment>


Crossing the Sahara in the Fourteenth Century - <AUTHOR> https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/crossing-sahara-fourteenth-century <comment><USER2> For comparison, the modern day version:

Mauritania Railway [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEo- ykjmHgg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEo-ykjmHgg)

</comment><comment><USER3> Dorothy Dunnett writes of a fictional account of a transit like this, in "scales of gold" (hers is from Timbuktu to the coast, following salt/gold traders paths) -she always did good research on things before including them in her work.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's a shame because of the topic seems fascinating but I couldn't read past the first paragraph. Maybe it's because I'm on my phone and somewhat distracted but the article seems very badly written.

<comment><USER5> why does every article have someone like you commenting on it? what value does this add to the conversation about this topic? is this your idea of an issue submission? do you think the author will rewrite the article now? do you think your reading aesthetic is generic enough that this is a useful warning to others? do you think that difficult texts shouldn't be read?

like literally I don't know the answer to any of these questions and I am struck by them every single time I open the comments to almost any non-tech post (of course the tech posts have their own flavor of perennial criticisms).

what compels someone to complain about free content. I will never understand.

<comment> saiya-jin Why the knee jerk reaction? It is not that easy to read, maybe only to non- native speakers like me or OP. I still read it, beautiful window to the past we can't ever experience, but it required focus and re-reading some sentences. Is it hard to understand that world is full of people that are different in every possible way to you?

Definitely not for usual glancing through</comment></comment></comment>


Björk on nature and technology - <AUTHOR> https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/bjork-on-nature-and-technology/ <comment><USER2> All the modern things Have always existed They've just been waiting To come out And multiply And take over It's their turn now

<comment><USER3> What kind of capitalisation convention is that? It's not German, or all the nouns would have been capitalised. Prepositions and conjunctions, with verbs and pronouns some of the time?

<comment><USER4> Its lyrics from Bjork song...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is Bjork expert of nature and/or technology?

<comment><USER6> ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ Probably. When you create complex and realistic videos about robots, an entire album explaining literally basic Geology and Biology concepts, and use Tesla coils and sounds from venezuelan songbirds in your songs, you end learning something about nature and technology. I had noticed also the Glaucus starring in their last video as an alien creature.</comment></comment>


Bitcoin, the Biggest Bubble in History, Is Popping - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-09/bitcoin-seen-popping-like-the-greatest-bubbles-by-bofa <comment><USER2> What a silly article. The metric they use for reaching the conclusion that bitcoin is the biggest (??) bubble in history is... peak multiple of an arbitrarily defined "starting value"...

I don't know what's worse, the cargo cult of bitcoin or the reactionary hate.

<comment><USER3> doesn't even qualify as an article. just a chart of some bubbles that have popped implying that bitcoin is the same

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Viewed on a logarithmic scale it looks like an adjustment back to the trend- line:

[https://blockchain.info/en/charts/market- price?timespan=all&...](https://blockchain.info/en/charts/market- price?timespan=all&scale=1)

<comment><USER5> Why would it make more sense to look at this as log and not linear?

<comment><USER6> Because of how exponential growth works, regardless of whether you consider inflation, or the price of stocks or commodities to be more relevant to the discussion of bitcoin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Bitcoin is worth 5x what it was this time last year. BoA is huffing glue.

<comment><USER8> Understanding of Bitcoin surely can be modeled, and the price and hash rate are parts of that proxy model. Can its uptake be compared to other challenging ideas, such as global climate change, or propagation of more effective forms of government? Does this form of bubble, crash (but not as far), slow up-take, and re-bubble (3x now for Bitcoin) compare at all to how other disruptive concepts have been propagated?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> That's the most absurd article ever. With 3 lines of text and laughable graph. "Years from peak". There have been so many peaks in the history of Bitcoin, what is the reason to think this is the final one? No word on that.

But hey, let's talk about Bitcoin? Why not! It's super interesting. I think there is not enough real debate about it on HN!

I think we are facing a massive wave of change due to the crypto technology that is currently developed. I expect it will be as big or bigger then the internet. But I am skeptical about Bitcoins share in the long run. I doubt we really need the mining. I expect that there will be new technologies that enable crypto without proof of work. And they will become strong competition to Bitcoin.

However, the market is so enormous that even with a small market share, Bitcoin _could_ be worth the $100B it is currently traded for.

<comment><USER10> Excellent, I can't wait for accellerated climate change & global warming from even more mining! /s

This seems like fanboyism and marketing. Crypto around for 9-10 years now and I haven't seen it change anything in the world for the better. I worked for exchanges and worked on multiple crypto projects, but due to the nature of the cryptocurrency community being extremely toxic, I could no longer handle the death threats and pulled out of crypto entirely. Feel free to name something that it's changed. What do you think it's going to change and how?

<comment><USER11> For one thing, it's much easier to buy drugs on the internet now. People can use it to skirt capital controls. It may have some uses in money laundering. You can gamble with crypto much more easily than with a credit card. These may or may not be positive things, depending on your point of view, but they are things that have changed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If the Internet is a series of tubes, well, Bitcoin is a series of bubbles.

<comment><USER13> With each one getting progressively bigger. Does that mean it is constantly popping but sometimes inflating more than it is popping?

<comment><USER10> You only have two samples. Not exactly a fantastic sample size.

<comment><USER12> There are 2 other major ones in 2011 and start of 2013, so sample size 4.

<comment><USER10> I'm only seeing two major rises when looking at the price chart (ALL). 2011 didn't make it past $20 and and 2013 was its rise to the Mt. Gox scam.

Are you also accounting for Mt. Gox creating the first one in Dec 2013? Technically, there was only one real big non-manufactured rise and it happened in late 2017.

You have a sample size of 1.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Sounds like it's time to buy.

</comment><comment><USER15> Good. Maybe I can start shopping for graphics cards again.

<comment><USER16> Graphics cards haven't been relevant to bitcoin in a long time, unless you mean the ripple effect this might have on the price of other cryptos.

<comment><USER17> The graphics card I want retails for $700. It is getting more and more possible to find it at that price, but NEWEGG is still charging $1,000 for it.

So I think its a little premature to say that Graphics Cards unaffected by crypto.

[https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/cryptocurrency- minin...](https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/cryptocurrency-mining- graphics-card-prices/)

<comment><USER18> > So I think its a little premature to say that Graphics Cards unaffected by > crypto.

The person you responded to said "graphics cards haven't been relevant to bitcoin" (not crypto)

Bitcoin isn't mined with GPUs any more. The GPU shortage is because of the ethereum hype which is strongly linked to bitcoin hype.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One important thing to know that many are not aware, is that banks don't trade on their public research. Because it's useless. Nobody made any money trading banks research ever.

If you have a real investment idea, you don't broadcast it to the world.

</comment><comment><USER19> Is it 'popping' or _has it popped_? The other example bubbles don't all drop to zero. Notably that 'gold' bubble (that I admit I've never heard of). I'll say it has popped with certainty only when it's been years and the price hasn't risen again.

Also what's with the Mississippi Company value having distinctive step-like patterns? I assume they represent the banks refusing to pay for long periods

</comment><comment><USER20> This kind of volatility is nothing new for Bitcoin. This kind of volatility in an asset with that market cap is fairly rare.

</comment><comment><USER21> Is it just me or does that read - _Mulriple_ from starting levels? If yes, that is some poorly written and edited report.</comment>


Which major open source releases are you most anticipating in 2009? - <AUTHOR>

...and why? What makes you look forward to them?<p>Similarly: what do you think were the major open source releases from the past year? Not necessarily in immediate impact (Python 3 will probably have a long term effect for example), though anything that caused huge downloads right away ought to be on the list too (such as Firefox 3). <comment><USER2> Parrot 1.0 (<http://www.parrot.org/news/vision-for-1_0>)</comment>


Will Facebook M&a Accelerate AR? - <AUTHOR> https://arinsider.co/?p=12054&preview=true <comment><USER2> Seems like usually big companies buy competitors, shut them down, and then progress slows down.</comment>


DHS defends media-monitoring database, calls critics "conspiracy theorists" - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/04/dhs-defends-media-monitoring-database-calls-critics-conspiracy-theorists/ <comment><USER2> Who wants to bet that the names of critics have been put in a different database?</comment>


Will security become Facebook's Achilles' heel? - <AUTHOR> http://news.zdnet.com/2010-1009_22-6231585.html

<comment><USER2> article is flawed

1\. User authentication was not 'tossed out the window'. You still need a .edu email address from the college network you would like to join. Which is the same authentication they had in the beginning.

2\. Facebook actually has pretty good privacy controls. Feel free to block who sees your profile based on friends status or network.

3\. Use the 'other applications' tab in the privacy menu to disallow applications from seeing your info.

4\. So you're mad because they wanted your DOB? That req is there for legal reasons i believe. You could have made one up if you want. Or you could have not cared because your DOB is already public info.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you manage passwords across your team? - <AUTHOR> We're having a bit of trouble managing passwords while keeping it secure and reasonably convenient across our development team.
We have tried a number solutions such as written notes on sealed envelopes with a logbook to access (our oldest 'system'), to an SQL database with a custom application, to a LastPass account with a shared master password.
The passwords that we are trying to manage range from credentials for remote desktop, custom applications to SQL auth. We're looking for a system that has to be secure, available to junior devs and editable by senior devs. Also, there are frequent movement on our teams, as well as several vendors which complicate things.
What can you guys suggest? Also, what do you guys use? <comment><USER2> I highly recommend PasswordState[0].

We run it on an internal-only server, only accessible via 2fa.

Edit: The one time I found a software bug, the developer sent me a fix within an hour.

[0] [http://www.clickstudios.com.au](http://www.clickstudios.com.au)

</comment><comment><USER3> everyone should have an ssh key that can be added to certain groups. Or a login to a VPN, or otherwise. Have some devops people responsible for managing access, i.e. adding people to appropriate groups when needed, and removing them when they leave (or are let go).

rely as little as possible on 'passwords'. instead, use google apps and google oauth logins, that have an 'admin' interface where you can turn them off if need be...</comment>


Rands in Repose: How to Write a Book - <AUTHOR> http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2010/06/28/how_to_write_a_book.html

<comment><USER2> Excellent post! Also check out his survey of notebooks that are nice to use as journals ([http://randsinrepose.com/archives/2008/06/01/sweet_decay.htm...](http://randsinrepose.com/archives/2008/06/01/sweet_decay.html)). And I thought I was the weird one, obsessing about details like these. One important thing he forgot, though: the smell of the paper.

</comment><comment><USER3> My favorite quote: if I stopped being a software engineering manager, my voice would quickly become an echo of how things used to be rather than how they are.

I find that the "software engineering manager" can be substituted for a number of other fields.</comment>


ING says bank-owned digital currencies are coming – and we're all doomed - <AUTHOR> https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2019/10/14/ing-says-bank-owned-digital-currencies-are-coming-and-were-all-doomed/ <comment><USER2> Clickbait? I can tell you this: ING is more concerned with the seating position of their employees and slowing down their existing IT down than with something relatively risky and innovative like issuing their own digital currency. Like their economist says, they are waiting on ECB to make the first move, after which they will comply with the standard to continue their core business of multiplying money 48x.</comment>


It's official. The next version of .NET Standard will be versioned as 2.1 - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/terrajobst/status/1034127593719513088 <comment><USER2> What is .NET Standard? At one point I thought I was savvy in .net but with all these versions, like core, framework, standard,... it's all just rather confusing... I'd imagine that being the single biggest customer complaint just understanding versioning and naming.

Which one would you use if you do a new project, no legacy requirements?</comment>


Ask HN: Best Language for testing embedded Linux hardware - <AUTHOR>

I work for a company that designs and manufactures embedded single board computers, primarily ARM based. Currently we use bash scripts and NFS filesystems for testing and programming. It's worked well to date, but I can't help but think Go, Python or some other object oriented language would be a better approach(code reuse / common architecture that can be shared). My concerns are we tend to implement the same boiler plate logic over and over - call a test which passes or fails. Log low level details to a server for analysis(NFS plain text file), and display a high level pass / fail message. Most scripts are tightly coupled, so one script is used for multiple boards. This results in surprises when someone makes a change for one product and breaks another related product that shares the same bash script. The boards themselves vary widely in that the kernels could be anywhere from 2.4 to 3.1x, oabi, eabi... busybox, ubuntu, debian for filesystems... This makes me think an interpreted language such as Python would be the way to go. My concern is this is run in a manufacturing environment so interpreted languages(e.g. Python) that are slow would cost money on every board processed. Any thoughts / suggestions on a language and / or architecture? Googling around hasn't turned up much... <comment><USER2> If you currently use bash, I wouldn't be much concerned that Python would be slow - in general, a general-purpose language would have more advanced interpreter than a shell. Python is also pretty high-level language with "batteries included", definitely more high-level than Go, Lua mentioned here. And with implementations like MicroPython ([https://github.com/micropython/micropython](https://github.com/micropython/micropython)) you can be sure that you can scale down if needed (e.g. to a system with just 2-4MB of flash with Linux, or 128KB+ with bare-metal).

</comment><comment><USER3> The particular programming language you use for your test framework does not matter. Execution efficiency of the framework is not likely to be a problem.

A carefully designed test framework that manages the board testing in an automated fashion does. Thinking through and formalizing the testing process (and the analysis to test results) will be much more fruitful than worrying about whether to program the framework in BASH, Python, Golang, or LISP.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Should have mentioned these are high end embedded systems. 512MB or more of RAM and 400MHz or faster CPUs.

<comment><USER4> It sounds like you have more fundamental architecture issues. Language is mostly orthogonal to this and switching languages won't necessarily make anything better, though I personally find bash to be clumsy for writing anything large and kind of slow too.

So first, don't dismiss C. C still dominates in embedded environments for good reasons. Every processor has a C compiler, C is fast, C gives you a degree of compiler checking, C is small, and writing re-usable libraries in C is a well- understood thing (this is the basis of every Linux/Unix distro). And yes, you can write tests for C. Look at CTest for one.

If you really want a scripting language, then Lua is generally the top choice for embedded. Lua is tiny, fast, 100% ANSI C (which means you can port it anywhere because as mentioned, everybody has a C compiler), and Lua is extremely extensible for custom needs. Lua is also designed to interoperate with C so if you are really concerned with performance, you can pretty easily split up the performance sensitive stuff into C and write the rest in Lua.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great point about architecture, this is most definitely a major issue and is not specific to what language is used. I've just been reassigned to oversee development in this area and am hoping to fix both these issues.

Over time the manufacturing software has evolved. Originally everything was written in C, it was a single C file to test all products. It was fast but from a maintenance standpoint it grew to be too large and this approach was abandoned as a result. In practice we've found writing low level tests in C that only do one thing and then use bash as glue logic seemed to work well. Some hardware tests must be implemented in C(low level register accesses where timing is critical).

We currently interface with USB printers(the board under test) to print a serial number corresponding to a MAC. address. I found maintaining this utility on all boards became a major issue(udev, devfs, busybox - eabi, oabi...) so I implemented it in Python and from a maintenance standpoint it's been a huge improvement. The problem is it's slow on some products(30 seconds or more to print a label and log to a file via NFS) and I have to admit I haven't yet dug in to understand why.

<comment><USER4> Sounds like a good job for Lua.

You can replace the glue logic with Lua. And then you can augment or replace the tests on a case-by-case basis. For tests that must be done in C, you can either leave them as is and drive them externally, or create a binding so you can invoke the C portions from Lua.

LuaJIT's FFI feature makes it very easy to experiment with bridging because it avoids writing binding code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> python's not necessarily slow -- are your tests typically CPU bound or I/O bound? If the latter, I suspect the difference between Python and other languages will be insignificant.

More powerful ARM CPUs (ARM7 or better IIRC) can take advantage of pypy.</comment>


AT&T and Others Announcing Rival to Apple App Store - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2010/02/14/app-store-alliance/

<comment><USER2> (App Store - iPhone) != App Store

<comment><USER3> I know the iPhone app store has been very successful, but I wouldn't completely discount other ones. What makes the iPhone's app store so great?

Is it the humongous supply of apps? Androlib [1] suggests that the Android Market is approaching 30K apps. Many of them may be crap, but then again, I think many of the iPhone ones are too.

Is it the exclusive iPhone only apps? Yes, there are a lot of them (considering app store sizes alone), but I'm guessing most "popular" apps exist in both stores. Anecdotal evidence: When my dad got a Droid, he asked me about all the apps I used on my iPhone. Most of them were on the Android store too. In the few cases where the apps didn't exist, there was usually a comparable replacement app from some other app maker. Now that doesn't necessarily translate to games, but I don't really play many games on my iPhone (and can't comment on the store differences there).

Now, the Apple App store has been a huge success. If I was a mobile app developer, I wouldn't hesitate to develop for the iPhone (even being aware of the sometimes unpredictable approval process). I also don't like the idea of a network owned app store and the complications and restrictions it will probably bring, but we'll see what their announcement entails. I just don't think that Apple's app store is the only viable one, and certainly isn't the best fit for all people (nothing ever is).

[1] <http://www.androlib.com/appstats.aspx>

<comment><USER4> Human nature is to focus on the negative. Say whatever you want about draconian App Store policies but Apple does a reasonably good job in promoting third party apps. They get featured in TV ads, writeups etc. And third party review sites serve a niche in reviewing and recommending. So an entire industry forms up around it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Competition is great in any market, but the declaration that this consortium of followers is creating another app store indicates that everyone is playing catchup. The other mobile manufacturers have seen the dollar signs and all want a piece of the pie. Fair game, but Apple will always be Apple, and with some tweaks to the store, their adherence to a solid framework, gorgeous hardware and a lovely OS will see them retain their fanbase regardless of what anyone else comes up.

</comment><comment><USER6> So, um... how the hell is this going to work? This isn't a plan, it's the combination of NFI and too much scotch (or cognac or whatever these people drink)

</comment><comment><USER7> I love so much when people "believe" something, test it, doesn't work,the market fails, and repeat it because they are right.

Apple let's devs to code in low level(Objective C).IMO is the single factor that makes it so powerful(if you want high level, use web tech). Even Apple didn't wanted to do it at first, letting other people control the device as fast as they do.

Now I can't see any real competitors in sight, as an Iphone app store developer, I would love some competition that "get it".

</comment><comment><USER8> What a pain, for both users and developers. New ideas are great and everything, but it's just a pain to have to support iPhone, Android, WebOS, Blackberry, Symbian, and Windows Mobile. Didn't J2ME used to provide a common API for all platforms? What was the problem with that (other than that all phones sucked back when that was popular)?

<comment><USER9> J2ME sucks because the API is not always implemented correctly on all the devices. It seems up to the handset maker to ensure compatibility. It is certainly not write once, run anywhere...and the API is limited. The GUI library really sucks, you have to hand roll everything if you want anything interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I dare them to announce that it's based on Java. So long as Apple isn't involved then it will an insignificant platform. Even the other app store clones combined will be tiny compared to Apple's.</comment>


GitHub Thinks I'm a Robot - <AUTHOR> http://vonnieda.org/archives/1905 <comment><USER2> In all honesty -- and I say this as someone who tends to advocate GitLab over GitHub -- I think they did everything right here.

They implemented spam detection in a way that minimizes the potential impact, prominently notified the affected user, provided a mechanism for solving the problem and did so quickly.

I understand the author's frustration and sympathize, but I'm not sure how much better GitHub could have done here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here. I agree that they handled it well and quickly. Props for that. I have two main concerns:

1\. Why did it happen in the first place? I have a very active account with lots of "human" evidence. If I'd posted a single spammy link or something in a Gist (which I didn't) how does that override the fact that I'd just committed and updated my Wiki 12 hours ago?

2\. Why not notify me and let me respond? If the account is flagged, send an email and require me to log in, answer a question, perform a captcha, etc. I'd even be okay with it if they flagged the account first and then sent me an email, but the only way I found out about this is by logging in this morning.

I love Github, but I think this system / policy could use some work.

<comment><USER3> As someone who deals with spam in an even more difficult situation, that being a forum where anyone can post just by accessing it in a browser with no account needed or even possible: Often nicer ways are not usefully scalable or even feasible.

I get a lot of child porn link spam and am currently looking into OCR software to identify images spam bots post, because the spammers have been hard at work at circumventing any other measure i put in place. With that kind of thing being "spam", i can't be nice about it. I need to be zero-tolerance on any detection, even if it may be a false positive.

As for why it's not reviewed by a human: That may not scale. My forum is rather small, 30000 unique visitors per month, but even so, with a team of three people, there is simply no way to look at everything identified as spam. And going by the contacts we get from users about false positives, even if i assume 10 times as many things are false positive than people ask us about, we're still below 1%.

Also, at a wild guess: With an account as big as yours, maybe you just went past a total size limit for all the repos in your account, looking like a bot trying to treat github like a storage system.

Lastly, something meant to be friendly advice: I understand that you're a little upset, but going to the effort of writing such a big blog post, and using that strong language for something that did no actual damage is over the top. This may not be part of your daily dealings, but before you attack github over this, i invite you to try and spend some time to think about how you could write bots to abuse github, which is pretty much a publicly writable storage system, and how you would counteract such abuse.

<comment><AUTHOR> I understand that fighting spam is difficult; I ran public email servers for years, and I think that Github does a great job at it.

My gripe here is that they didn't notify me before or after hiding my account. I don't expect a human to review the flag and I'm not suggesting they do. I agree, that doesn't scale. But it doesn't take a human to send me an email that says "Your account has been flagged for spam. Please contact support to resolve this issue."

The issue is that if I hadn't happened to log in this morning I would not have known that my account was hidden until I started getting complaints about broken links. Github was returning 404 errors for my repos. That means no one could download code or releases, read Wikis, file Issues, etc. It was like the repos had just been deleted.

My projects are pretty small, comparatively. But imagine if you went to read some docs on Angular or Express or any other large, open source project and you just got a 404 for the entire project? It's pretty scary.

My only ask here is that they notify users that they flag. Nothing more. I think it's a pretty reasonable request. I have since exchanged a couple more emails with them and they have said they'll raise the issue internally.

<comment><USER3> Ah, i did not realize they did not email you.

That is something to which you at least deserve an answer to, though i expect they don't do it because sending out that email would alert the owner of the bot which would otherwise never be any wiser. It's a cousin of hellbanning, something which even HN does.

Though i think it's also fair to point out that your post only raises that issue as an aside, while that is the most salient thing in it.

Also, a bit of github background: Personal accounts are meant for small personal things. They expect anything big and important to happen in organizations, which i suppose are treated slightly differently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Spam detection is far from perfect. The "error" message seemed incredibly friendly (it made me smile), the support guy was nice and as helpful as he could be, and they fixed it right away. Something triggered their alerts, and they temporarily locked down your account. The alternative is thousands of spam bots running amok.

It's not ideal, and maybe a warning would have been nice... however, I feel like GitHub handled it way better than most other sites would. If this happened to me, I would have had no complaints.

<comment> chao- Same. The author's "completely lost my trust" feels unwarranted. With all data still accessible and a resolution protocol clearly presented, I'd tout this as an example of a good policy. I wish other sites/organizations would learn from Github and handle cases like this so clearly and promptly.

Now I'm sure I would still feel inconvenienced for this having happened at all, but again, with things presented so clearly, it falls into my "well, shit happens" bucket rather than the "I am morally outraged and cannot conceive how this would ever occur!" bucket.

Maybe it's because I _can_ conceive how this would occur? Having only tangentially worked with a few such systems (e.g. identifying bot behavior), false positives come with the territory and so I've got some empathy for the Customer Support reps who have to deal with the fallout from edge cases in such a system.

Feels a lot like having a credit card get locked while traveling (which I have had happen _despite notifying the issuer_ of impending travel). That is, a system which helps in most cases wound up classifying me as a different-from- most case. That's going to keep happening throughout my life. It's part of the automation-assisted world we live in.

The question is how Github handles these cases, and I think they did fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm always surprised when other people are surprised that these centrally controlled third parties have the ability to control access to data that you give them.

Why is it _so_ surprising and upsetting that something like this occurred? I've always taken the approach that data shared to these types of services are, fundamentally, out of my ultimate control - is this not a common viewpoint?

By using GitHub, or any other service for that matter, you're literally giving someone else your data to manage and are at their mercy. Yes, you'd hope that that service would continue to operate and provide value to you but you do have to take steps to make sure that you have alternatives in place should the worst happen.

The real core of it is what is it that make events like these so intensely surprising and _personal_ to those who experience it?

Finally, I'd have to say that GitHub did everything correctly here, they responded quickly, rectified the fault and gave a reasonable answer.

<comment><USER6> github is somehow advertised as ideal place for open source community.

instant-banning long-term active-user and not telling what was THAT suspicious in his user activity that they have to ban him doesn't seems to match being "open"

in my opinion - active account of long term user should get so many "positive score" in the banning rules that it shouldn't instant-ban him. it couldn't be scenario like "your account had been taken over" \- they told him he get into spam filters. he should have been given at least 24 hours to react before hiding all his stuff

but yeah.

nobody should treat github seriously. not anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ouch. Yeah, it's not good when suddenly everything is disappeared from public view.

So, two comments.

First, GitHub, if you believe an account is not associated with a human, put a banner up on all of their pages, one that _everyone_ can see. For the banner visible to everyone, say something like "We [GitHub] think this account's owner is not human. Please have the account owner log in ASAP, or this page will disappear soon!"

Next, don't forget this this is Git. If you don't have 100% trust in GitHub, then just mirror your repo somewhere else. Spend the 20$ a month to get an account at a web host that supports cron jobs, and run a mirror script every five minutes.

<comment><USER8> $20 a month for a web host? What year did I get teleported back to? How about a $5/mo digitalocean box or $15/mo kimsufi dedicated server.

Better yet, just host your code on your own stuff and sync it over to GitHub using a hook. Deploying gogs or gitlab using docker is dead easy.

<comment> chao- Seconding setting up your own. I have a low-power just-in-case "server" (a term I use loosely, it's a little $200 Zotac zbox) paired with a NAS just for this purpose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I once triggered this by pasting a very, very long URL into a gist. It's unsettling realizing that your entire identity can be turned off at the flick of a switch.

It's hard to think of a better way to handle this. Github's current behavior is to remove your account from public view until it can be determined your account wasn't compromised. During this time, you can still push to your repos and do any other write operation. Another way to handle this would be to make your account read-only without hiding anything. The latter is objectively worse: imagine suddenly not being able to do anything.

Gitlab is quite pleasant nowadays, so that's an option.

<comment><USER10> The whole point of distributed version control is that if Github shuts down (or locks you out), you can still do your work.

Them making your account read-only should not lead to you not being able to do anything.

<comment><USER9> Certainly, but many companies have centralized around Github to the point that it's integrated into their workflows (e.g. deployment).

<comment> chao- Github has a clear resolution policy, and by the author's account they were also quite responsive, even on a weekend. If a temporary user account issue completely destroys the ability of a professional team at a company to interact with their production system, is it Github's fault, or is it the company's for not having a backup method of interacting with something so critical?

I like Continuous Delivery systems as much as anyone, but if something in that pipeline broke _and it perfectly lined up with_ an everything-is-on-fire moment where I needed to deploy a hotfix? I'd just run my tests manually and deploy directly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This worries me a bit: I have another github account that is definitely a robot: it publishes documentation on github pages automatically on successful travis build.

There are robots everywhere: for example, the Rust's github repos won't work the same without bors or highfive.

If I remember correctly, the github itself definitely used to allow robots for such use cases.

<comment><USER4> They aren't worried about robots, they're worried about spam. The "we don't think you're human" error message was just to sound cute. Automation is fine; it's likely the poster pushed a spammy link or something that set off their filters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> >Sorry, but we have to keep our spam-detecting tactics hush-hush. If I were to share that information and word got out, it would be like releasing access to some of our security protocols into the big, wide world. I hope you understand.

I don't know much about spam-fighting, so I don't know to what extent this "obscurity" strategy is viable there, but this is at best a bad analogy since the consensus seems to be that security protocols that you have to hide are not good security protocols.

<comment><USER5> Keeping a capability secret is a perfectly valid approach to providing security. If you publicise a capability then an attacker can work to defeat that capability very easily and directly. By keeping it secret you force the attacker to first find out you have it and unpick that capability in order to defeat it.

Security by obscurity cannot be the _only_ approach to security, but it's certainly a valid tool. Militaries and security services the world over rely on it throughout history for instance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The sudden disappearance is not only annoying to the victim. The last time I saw an account disappear in front of me, I thought that person might be a joker.</comment>


TechCrunch Elevator Pitches - One startup. 60 seconds. - <AUTHOR> http://pitches.techcrunch.com/

<comment><USER2> My pitch is for a website that lets you upload videos talking about your startup and then others can rate it. I want to call it something snappy. Like elevator.tv or eleva.tv or maybe vator.tv.

<comment><USER3> Interestingly, it doesn't seem like these sites do anything beyond that. How about a semi-private forum for potential investors? How about a feature request video forum for young companies that aren't locked into legacy interaction design?

<comment><USER2> The intent isn't to crown an American Idol, the big show's at TC50, but just to have a clearinghouse of the rejects on video.

How about some actual partnership with some VC firms? Mike's got the pull and the firms can spare interns to view the videos. The people that submit these crave legitimacy.

<comment><USER4> A lot of these companies seem to be already funded.

<comment><USER3> Not all funding is Series A.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


An API up and running in 10mins with Grape, Heroku and 3scale - <AUTHOR> http://www.3scale.net/2012/06/the-10-minute-api-up-running-3scale-grape-heroku-api-10-minutes/

<comment><USER2> This could be the beginning of the API Olympics. Can anyone launch a fully authenticated API in less that 10 minutes?</comment>


Ask HN: Predictions for future post Covid-19? - <AUTHOR> Pandemics, chaos and economic down turn are not always a bad thing! I, for one, am very excited about the prospect of the future and birth of completely new opportunities! These sort of events have a tendency of clearing out industries of old, rusty and obsolete players, making room for people brave and observant enough to try new innovative ideas!
This is a global pandemic and no one has any clue what's "actually" going to happen to our macro/micro economy, jobs, real estate, businesses, society, local politics, geo political relations, potential wars and etc...! All we can do is guess ... and from guessing we can develop predictions and hopefully move to innovate!
Please share your positive and negative thoughts on the near future. i.e. 2-5 years!
The governments, specially USA, have moved to release a huge stimulus packages worth trillions ($2-8+T). However, I personally think it's premature and misses the entire core of the epidemic and USA's own nature of capitalism. They simply try to copy 2008 QE strategy and assume business as usual once people move out of quarantine! It's only a failed attempt at short-term avoidance and delay of the inevitable.
Restaurants, movie theatres, concerts, weddings, hotels & vacations and most other social structures will not get packed with people immediately. It will take years for them to become booming businesses once again. But if things are going to be different, how would they look like? share your guess... <comment><USER2> Most likely we'll see that more companies will make more of their roles remote. Especially for smaller business, office space rent can be expensive. With COVID-19 they've probably seen that many jobs can be performed remotely, so hopefully we'll see more flexible business jobs. (This of course makes sense for software stuff more than hardware/service...)

<comment><AUTHOR> So does this mean the tall skyscraper office buildings are becoming somewhat irrelevant and potentially obsolete? The icons and fabric of downtowns could be turned residential

<comment><USER3> The iconic Empire State building is too old structurally to create what corporations like for offices— large, unobstructed open areas.

So it's turning mostly into residential.

And when you think about it... what you're suggesting is like step n of "internet-era social organization" because we now have the infrastructure to make it work. Have mainstream broadband for >90% of the population? ⇒ you may remote massively entire categories of jobs (probably leave a skeleton crew on- prems for peace of mind).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think we'll recover within that time frame and things will mostly return to normal.

The efficiency of WFH will be forgotten and the rat race will continue.

<comment><USER5> If you think about how fast we adapted to life quarantined at home, it should be obvious to everyone how fast people are going to adapt back to normal, especially in the summer weather.

Never underestimate the predictability of human nature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Covid 19 is very mild compared to the first colds unleashed on humanity that wiped out civilizations. It just seems worse now since we are experiencing it.

2-5 years, the whole world will become infected and gain resistance. Minor changes in behavior will be established such as masks becoming socially acceptable in western countries.</comment>


Mark Zuckerberg's 2016 personal challenge - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10102577175875681 <comment><USER2> > My personal challenge for 2016 is to build a simple AI to run my home and > help me with my work. You can think of it kind of like Jarvis in Iron Man.

> This should be a fun intellectual challenge to code this for myself. I'm > looking forward to sharing what I learn over the course of the year.

I would be seriously impressed if he still had the technical chops to build and code this kind of ambitious project on his own.

It's also interesting that he's opening his life up like this and promising to share his (somewhat) individual work with the world, which most CEOs would never do. It has the potential to open him up to critical scrutiny and/or change his public persona. You would never see Musk releasing any updates on personal (less-ambitious) projects because it would detract from his hard- earned and paid-for superhero/wunderkind persona.

Seems like Zuck wants to be perceived more as a fun, quirky, techie rather than the corporate CEO of Facebook. On the plus side, he'll probably get to spend a lot more time with his daughter if he's hacking around the house all day :)

<comment><USER3> Really? I wouldn't be very surprised at all. I'm sure the guy has serious programming chops, and the goal is sufficiently vague. He's not literally going to build Jarvis in a year, but there are lots of concrete things you can build to automate your home that are Jarvis-like.

He says "simple", so I would say being able to understand and execute "turn off the lights in the second floor bathroom" probably counts. I'm sure he can do something like that in a year (even though there are programmers who can't).

I think a lot of programmers are under the impression that he is this idiot who knows a little PHP and got lucky building a website. But I'm sure he is probably better than the vast majority of working programmers out there, on account of building the initial versions of Facebook (and I say this as a working programmer). People just don't want to believe that because he seems douchey in many ways.

<comment><USER4> Not to mention that he had built several other things prior to starting Facebook.

There's also a lot of libs/services he can use

And if he needs help in understanding or implementing something, he can always ask for some help from someone @ FB...

<comment><USER5> This. I think most of the work that goes into building a successful large- scale project is making the design choices that minimize required effort.

Everything after that is a matter of typing correctly and adjusting design choices to unexpected constraints.

Having the knowledge of FB's engineering at his disposal will certainly make things easier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Guess this is what billionaires do with their free time. Bill Gates did this to his house many moons ago.

<comment><USER7> That is exactly what I thought about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I love how this post perfectly encapsulates the concept of facebook: Someone with a very comfortable life humble bragging about how he's going to use technology to solve first world problems.

It is a cool idea and an interesting project, and publically declaring it will probably help to motivate some people to take on projects of their own. But I do get the feeling that he could be aiming a little higher. With great power comes great responsibility and all that. The alluded to Iron Man was a billionaire who used technology to fight gods and monsters. Zuckerberg is...tinkering with the internet of things? Can't tell someone else how to live their life, but I would have expected him to make public announcements about the Big Problems and leave projects like this for cocktail party conversation.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've had a sci-fi-villain-hunch about this guy for a long time and this just takes the cake. This is straight out of Ex-Machina, except for the hot robots but who knows, maybe next year...

</comment><comment><USER10> There's a lot of neat libraries out there and papers to read. There's a lot of hero worship, and a lot of disparaging comments as well between here and the facebook post but a year is a serious amount of time, and with a little dedication I'm sure he can expect to see some decent results out of his pet project.

Similar to that hacker who built a "self driving car" in his garage, which, in the end, although not being a polished finished project did self drive a decent bit, I'm sure we can expect similar if not better results from Zuckerberg here.

Anyone who's claiming differently may not have fooled around with some of the libraries out there (I built something for named entity recognition with Stanford's library in a few days once I found it), and might also be overlooking the fact that we're talking about a person with a serious resume of impressive accomplishments. I'm not sure how his Chinese is and to be fair I was a little less than impressed with the two books a month goal (I do that on the train it seems like anyways, but I don't have a huge company to be CEO of or a family to spend time with), but we are certainly talking about someone who qualified for entry into Harvard (based on merit I presume), and has the drive to sit down and create websites (one of which eventually ballooned into facebook, which he then steered through a public ipo). And let's be fair, getting started is generally the hardest part.

I'd have to be hardpressed to discredit the guy, think ill of his challenge, or feel he couldn't accomplish much regardless of my personal feelings about his attitude and to that I say "Good on you Zuck! Here's to hoping I hear more about this interesting project you've got going."

In the end, lord knows I always enjoy reading about cool projects.

<comment><USER11> > There's a lot of neat libraries out there and papers to read.

Can you please link those? Because I will move into a house in the middle of the year and I do already have a concept for life form detection based on sonar and 16X4 pixel IR thermal array (MLX90620 / MLX90621).

<comment><USER10> Hey, so I've mostly done stuff with natural language processing and Stanford's NLP library which I don't think would help you here. But Google's TensorFlow could maybe help you? I'd also look at some of the Python libraries. Just search around and I'm sure you'll find what you need.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hmm. That's what I'm doing. Ok, so the pressure's on...

</comment><comment><USER13> Why all the nay-sayers?

He's got a lofty goal. Better yet, it's lofty goal where you can get 70-80% of the way quickly, and if passion serves, you can slog through the next 5-10% throughout the year.

But, why all the negativity?

I, for one, am jealous of the resources (time + money) he has at his disposal to make an actual go at this. But, that jealousy doesn't extend to me hoping he fails.

</comment><comment><USER14> I feel like I've been seeing more celebrity type stuff on here lately. I guess I would've been more impressed if the comments were about an actual project instead of a personality. If this project is interesting enough to be on the front page, why not talk about that?

</comment><comment><USER15> I somehow doubt thats the most efficient use of his time but thats his right I guess.

Anyone can have a go at this. Why not pick something that is both challenging and out of reach of "lesser" mortals. Kinda like Bill Gates & his crusade to eradicate Malaria.

<comment><USER16> I wouldn't be shocked if he goes that route, but he's still the CEO of an engineering-driven company. I think it would inspire confidence that the person at the top cares about technical stuff and can empathize with other employees who write code for a living.

Also I imagine he probably misses just hacking on stuff for fun.

<comment><USER17> > Also I imagine he probably misses just hacking on stuff for fun.

Exactly... Is that difficult to imagine that he just enjoys the process of learning/building as many of us do? I've also been looking to start a new pet project with simple AI just for the sake of grasping a better understanding of NNs...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Well, I guess if he succeeds in doing all of this in a year, it tells us that AI is actually a much simpler discipline than, say, OS development, or compiler design.

<comment><USER19> It could also suggest there are more tutorials and/or easy to use tools available, making it easier for novices to make a quick impact in the field.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder if he means he is going to lead efforts to build an AI such as Jarvis with some help from his friends at FAIR or whether he's actually going to sit down and train his own models (for recognizing his family's faces for example). Quite motivating actually to see someone who is leading a billion dollar company to find the time to study machine learning on the side and apply it.

<comment><USER20> I seriously doubt Zuck is that smart or capable. Intelligence wise Zuck is no Bill Gates. Go look at what Facebook looked like when it was just Zuck working on it. Zuck has not been honing his skills at networking or AI or deep learning for 10 years, he's been leading a company. He's not going to write any of this. Zuck wants to come off like he's the brains behind all of it... and sure he has business sense and billions of dollars to put that business sense to the world. Technically he's very limited.

tl;dr Zuck is not Iron Man.

<comment><USER21> That's pretty harsh considering you don't really know him at all, and he was at least smart enough to build a company that was good enough to "get lucky" and balloon to the billion dollar one it is now.

<comment><USER20> It's hardly judging. Considering the amount of effort it takes to master a single language or even a set of algos or putting those algos into a running program. Unless you have been a programmer the last 10 years, you're a manager. A manager should not try to take credit for what his programmers do. That's really the really stupid thing about Stark, he did it all himself. No one does it all him self. Everyone stands on the shoulder of giants.

<comment><USER21> But I think saying "Mark Zuckerberg had help building facebook" is different from saying "Mark Zuckerberg can't possibly implement the new AI algos on his own", and the latter seems to imply he's some sort of an idiot, which he's not.

<comment><USER22> Doesn't sound like he is planning to implement new AI algorithms on his own:

"Thanks buddy! I'm still deciding between using the FB environment and AWS. The FB environment gets me access to all of the great stuff the Facebook AI research team has worked on, so I'll probably do that." ([https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10102577175875681?commen...](https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10102577175875681?comment_id=1193499537344277&reply_comment_id=1193505944010303&comment_tracking=%7B%22tn%22%3A%22R9%22%7D))

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Keep inventing and love innovation. That's the reason why he can be successful. Some say you need to become a billionaire so that you can have free time to invent. However, he could become a billionaire because he used all his time on inventing. This is the fundamental difference between ordinary people and billionaires.

</comment><comment><USER24> Sounds like a fun challenge, but some of the comments here are a bit too hero- worship-y for me... He's a mere person.

<comment> sean-duffy There always seems to be that kind of vibe on any of his posts, they seem to be mostly from people in Asian countries. I guess everyone needs a role model, and when people see the chance to interact with theirs they really reach out for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think what's cool is that Zuck has actually replied to a good chunk of top- level comments on his post. Most bigwigs on social-media don't really engage with their "fans".

<comment><USER26> To be fair, replying on the platform he owns is a fairly significant value-add process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> A lot of what he mentioned can be done without writing a line of code. He is basically talking about a large scale home automation system with a voice interface to it

</comment><comment><USER28> 127.0.0.1 facebook.com

</comment><comment><USER29> > My personal challenge for 2016 is to build a simple AI to run my home and > help me with my work. You can think of it kind of like Jarvis in Iron Man.

I wouldn't throw those names around too much. The Marvel movie empire might not be worth as much as facebook, but it may be close. Those trademarked names are valuable assets. There are firms out there ready to pounce on any unauthorized use. Not the acceptable wording "like Jarvis in Iron Man." That's ok as it uses the terms descriptively. His legal department would have rejected "I'm building Jarvis".

[https://trademarks.justia.com/862/94/jarvis-86294162.html](https://trademarks.justia.com/862/94/jarvis-86294162.html)

"Computer application software that may be downloaded via global computer networks and electronic communication networks for use in connection with mobile computers, mobile phones, and tablet computers, namely, software for use as a voice controlled personal digital assistant." .. not fictional software. The Jarvis mark is protected in the real world just like Siri.

In the international descript Jarvis is also a "fire-extinguishing apparatus." A coincidence, but it made me laugh.</comment>