Obama to release FISA court opinion that ruled NSA surveillance unconstitutional - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/document/doj-status-report-re-releasing-fisa-court-opinion <comment><USER3> I donated money to Obama's 2008 campaign and voted for him twice. I am very disappointed with him.

Now, my honest opinion is that at worst he sometimes flat out lies, or at least cleverly tries to confuse people. He says that he had an orderly plan for reviewing privacy issues, all the while, I think that his administration has consistently been trying to keep things hushed up.

<comment><USER4> Mark, I agree. I think that the situation is this: politicians, in the short term, view the security side of the security vs. freedom debate as the best option. If you can stop a terrorist attack from occurring by infringing freedom, then do it. An attack will make you look much worse than a few intelligent people being upset about privacy invasion. That, sadly, is the unfortunate incentive happening here.

I think this short term benefit of always choosing security over freedom has always been too tempting for politicans and leaders not to do it. The founders recognized this, which is why the 4th Amendment, along with the rest of the Constitution, is supposed to be enforced by the separate branch of government that is the Judicial Branch.

But you know what? The Judicial Branch hasn't kept up with the Executive at all. The Executive Branch has huge agencies within it. The Judicial Branch is just a few judges and their staff.

Why isn't there a Judicial Branch agency that safeguards the Constitution from the other two branches?? Why couldn't this agency have a bunch of people with Top Secret clearances working for it who answer to nobody but the Supreme Court and can be contacted by Edward Snowden type whistle-blowers whenever someone feels the folks they work for are undermining the Constitution?

We need a Constitution Protection Agency that is part of the Judicial Branch. Their entire job should be going after the bastards in the other two branches who go against the constitution.

<comment><USER5> _The founders recognized this, which is why the 4th Amendment, along with the rest of the Constitution, is supposed to be enforced by the separate branch of government that is the Judicial Branch._

You're saying the police power is the province of the Judicial Branch?! This is a...unique interpretation. The Constitution divides the power of the government in legislative (making law), executive (promulgating and enforcing law), and judicial (evaluation of the law). In common law jurisdictions the judicial branch does not have any kind of police power, and to the best of my knowledge never has had.

I am perplexed by the number of HNers that seem to think we live in a civil law jurisdiction. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_law_(legal_system)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_law_\(legal_system\))

<comment><USER6> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_Council_of_Franc...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_Council_of_France)

<comment><USER5> France, too, is a civil law jurisdiction. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's fascinating that the situation is such a mockery of the rule of law, yet it keeps on rolling. If the FISA decided that the NSA's activities were illegal, why would it keep rubber-stamping the warrants? It seems like at that point it should deny every single request going forward until the illegal activities have stopped.

Is there a process for impeaching the FISA judges for malfeasance?

<comment><USER5> _If the FISA decided that the NSA 's activities were illegal, why would it keep rubber-stamping the warrants?_

First, I don't agree that they rubber-stamp warrants, but believe they evaluate them on a case-by-case basis - not least because their decisions might be classified now, but may well be declassified in the future, and their reasoning will be held up to scrutiny.

More importantly, just because an agency is found to have operated illegally does not mean that everything the agency does must then be rejected. It's easy to find examples of police officers or even entire departments being corrupt, but it does _not_ follow that everyone who is arrested by the police is necessarily innocent, or that all arrests are flawed.

Arguments of the kind you make above involve a _fallacy of composition_ , one which seems to appear ever more frequently on HN. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_composition](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_composition)

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure how anyone can has enough reasonable information to make a case that FISA _doesn 't_ rubber stamp cases. It seems to me it works that of the way large organizations navigate political nuances internally; people who don't run the technology and platforms make the decisions as it pertains to influence that, is often, good for self-preservation and fiscal motivation - the operators implement the systems as they see fit and generally don't have "real" oversight from the approvers. Even if they do - generally they don't have enough understanding to enforce it if they wanted to. It's just a matter of mincing words at that point.

I think until we see clear evidence from examples the number of cases denied are an obvious minority. Based on what we know from public disclosure, there is abuse. That to me states there is a good indication rubber-stamping has in fact occurred and should be reviewed. But, since it can't be...

The trustworthiness of the system is not there anymore and it has degraded to a point where most informed citizens would err on the side of saying there is something wrong. There are some grave issues that need to be addressed in short order or our government is going to push any data related industry the way of safer harbors.

<comment><USER9> _" I'm not sure how anyone can has enough reasonable information to make a case that FISA doesn't rubber stamp cases."_

The burden of proof is on the positive, not the negative.

<comment><USER5> In fairness that runs in both directions - we would certainly be better off with some proof of FISA courts' effectiveness, even if were historical (eg declassification of past decisions from >10 years ago, or the establishment of objective criteria for declassification).

<comment><USER10> It would also help significantly if the default for their opinions not be that they are automatically classified and put the burden of proof on the government in each individual case to justify why the public shouldn't know what the law is.

<comment><USER5> Well, opsec. Spying is by definition a clandestine activity, and I think there are good arguments in favor of spying - the main one being that while it might seem nicer not to spy on anyone, you end up being less informed, and uninformed executives are more likely to end up going to war, which is a lot more destructive than spying. If you read up on the Curveball story in Iraq, that's a classic case of what happens when you make decisions with inadequate information.

<comment><USER10> You don't have to disclose the specific targets you're spying on to publish the relevant court opinions. You can redact the names and still publish what the law is.

And there is a difference between collecting intelligence on foreign governments (which I don't think anyone could ever expect not to happen) and mass data collection. Part of the problem here is that spying on "terrorist" "suspects" is so broad and poorly defined that it could encompass nearly anything and becomes nothing but a convenient fig leaf for mass surveillance.

We lump too many things under the label of terrorism. Someone with the likes of a machete or a hand grenade is distinctly a law enforcement problem rather than a national security problem and cannot justify secret mass surveillance or data collection.

Once you take all of that out and get to the actual national security threats (i.e. nuclear or biological terrorism) you end up with a completely different threat model. More to the point, you need to keep a lot less secret because instances of attempted nuclear terrorism are much more rare. You don't have to classify every court opinion related to some idiot with defective instructions on how to make a pipe bomb just because you have to classify certain methods of preventing nuclear proliferation.

<comment><USER5> _You don 't have to disclose the specific targets you're spying on to publish the relevant court opinions. You can redact the names and still publish what the law is._

If you have to redact all the of the relevant facts, then any statement of the law is meaningless because it's unclear what sort of fact pattern it should be applied to. I realize this seems abstruse, but the fact pattern is very important in common law judgments. You can't just say 'the law is X' and have it be portable to any other case. The opinion would read something like: 'HELD: the government may xxxxxxx xxxxx when xxxxx xxxx xxx in a xxxxx and xxxxxx.' Read some judicial opinions in normal cases and then imagine how little sense they'd make if the facts were matters of national security and couldn't be published. For that matter it's quite hard for a lot of people to understand the law in many regular criminal cases where all the details _are_ available.

 _Someone with the likes of a machete or a hand grenade is distinctly a law enforcement problem rather than a national security problem and cannot justify secret mass surveillance or data collection._

9/11 only involved boxcutters, but I'd say that it presented a rather significant national security problem when those turned out to be sufficient to hijack planes and fly them into high-value targets. There's an assumption in some corners that since we're now more aware of the risks, no hijacking can ever work again, but that's not the case.

You're also ignoring the fact that many kinds of low-level terrorist activity aren't open to direct investigation by law enforcement. For example, suppose you pick up signals about a plot involving Mr X, who has not yet arrived in the US but whose phone number you have managed to identify. If he's in a country that's friendly to the US you might be able to get their law enforcement people to investigate him, but if not then it's logical to monitor who he communicates with for prophylactic purposes.

<comment><USER10> >I realize this seems abstruse, but the fact pattern is very important in common law judgments.

You're basically assuming they would have to redact everything. Just replacing names and addresses with tokens that don't identify the specific subjects would get you most of the way there unless the specific fact pattern is unique to the suspect, and then you can redact what is necessary to make it less specific.

In addition to that, once any given investigation is over the opinions and redactions that were held secret for the purposes of that investigation should be published, and it shouldn't be so easy to keep things secret for decades just by making a facile claim of national security.

>9/11 only involved boxcutters, but I'd say that it presented a rather significant national security problem when those turned out to be sufficient to hijack planes and fly them into high-value targets.

9/11 was not a national security problem. 9/11 was a mass murder. It was shocking but we have inflicted more damage on ourselves in our overreaction to it than the terrorists did in committing it. More have died avenging the victims of 9/11 than died on 9/11.

A national security threat is a nuclear bomb, or a plague, or a foreign government infiltrating high level government offices in preparation for some kind of Communist takeover. Something that would be a factor of 1000 worse than 9/11 and present an actual threat to the security of the entire nation. This watering down of "national security threat" to mean any jerk who might kill some people with an IED is just a ruse to rationalize the use of extremist measures against everyone rather than taking into account the proportionality of the threat.

>You're also ignoring the fact that many kinds of low-level terrorist activity aren't open to direct investigation by law enforcement. For example, suppose you pick up signals about a plot involving Mr X, who has not yet arrived in the US but whose phone number you have managed to identify. If he's in a country that's friendly to the US you might be able to get their law enforcement people to investigate him, but if not then it's logical to monitor who he communicates with for prophylactic purposes.

So get a warrant and conduct surveillance on him then. That's not the same thing as spying and collecting data on _everyone_ "for prophylactic purposes" at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Buy stock in whatever company the DoJ buys their black markers from.

<comment><USER12> If momentum builds behind an internet blackout a-la the SOPA protest, that'd be a clever way to do it.. write some js/css that black-marker-redacts the page contents.

<comment><USER13> Reddit already has that for spoiler alerts.

<comment><USER14> I believe it is just some subreddit css that implements that effect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Can anyone turn this lawyer speak into something the layman tech person can understand, please?

<comment><USER16> They will release a redacted version of the opinion in question, and a redacted version of exactly one paragraph from a classified whitepaper given to congress on it. In both cases, how redacted they will be is up in the air.

They requested an extension until August 21st to do this (original deadline was August 12th). The EFF "reluctantly did not oppose this"

<comment><USER17> It's really unfortunate that secret courts aren't unconstitutional. You would think that one should have been obvious.

<comment><USER18> Article III of the constitution is amazingly brief. It doesn't even explicitly create the supreme court's power to determine constitutionality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> At a point in our nation's early history, we decided to trust Constitutional interpretation to the Supreme Court. There were cons to that decision - <USER2> Constitution is our social contract and thus it's interpretation is ultimately up to the people - but on the whole I think it was a good one.

But, if for whatever reason, this Judicial review cannot occur - whether that be willful avoidance by the DEA for "Parallel Construction", or various activities related to the FISA Star Chamber - that's a problem that needs to be solved, lest the constitution lack any enforcement ability whatsoever.

<comment><USER20> The idea that the interpretation of the Constitution is up to the people sounds like a good idea; however, how exactly would that work in practice?

We obviously can't just let each individual interpret it how they see fit, or it becomes effectively meaningless. It would be equally impossible for each Constitutional question to be 'voted' on by the people.

Is there a way I am missing? It seems the courts are the only logical choice to interpret the Constitution.

<comment><USER21> > The idea that the interpretation of the Constitution is up to the people > sounds like a good idea; however, how exactly would that work in practice?

The people individually would decide what the Constitution means, and they would -- having made those decisions -- individually and collectively act to hold incumbent officials and candidates accountable to those interpretations through voting, public advocacy, protests, and, in extreme cases, direct action.

> We obviously can't just let each individual interpret it how they see fit

Not only can we, but we really have no other choice; whether we _like_ it or not, each individual will do that, even if "how they see fit" is to delegate the interpretation to some individual authority, or the collective wisdom of the rest of the population.

<comment><USER19> Great post. I think my central point is that it's dangerous for a democratic society to believe that nine robed Brahmins are the only people qualified to interpret it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Let me guess, this will be used as a way to legitimize the FISA court. Nothing to see here - move on. See, your rights are being protected.

<comment><USER23> The FISA court that's been around since 1978? There's entire major commands of the military that have been created and then killed again in the time FISC has existed, seems pretty legit to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is there some sort of bat signal we can use to get grellas to this thread?

</comment><comment><USER25> This is actually really, really great news, and I'm really impressed that we're changing direction so quickly. This is a huge bureaucracy, and softening even this much in a few short months is an amazing thing. I see this as a very hopeful sign that we'll get back on track - just more slowly than anyone (including myself) would like it to go. But it's a nation of almost 400 million people and crazy complex body of law to deal with: nothing changes on a dime.

</comment><comment><USER26> I think we're going to get a bit of data, and say, good job guys, we did it! ... and nothing changes.

</comment><comment><USER27> Time to do the Obama Shake: [http://i.minus.com/iwOSyasN8lziO.gif](http://i.minus.com/iwOSyasN8lziO.gif)

</comment><comment><USER28> As I referenced in another thread, Obama himself voted for the FISA amendment[1].

How clearer must it get that people working for companies like AT&T and Booz Allen are complicit in receiving monetary remuneration for collaborating with various arms of the government in circumventing/intel laundering/routing around the laws and regulations said arms of the government were to be checking each other against?

Must there need be more details of local law enforcement letting Steven Seagal maraud around in federally sourced tanks? Booz Allen assisting local law enforcement in copyright prosecutions? Drone managing SAIC running private monitoring centers with federal fusion center support?

AT&T workers NOT going along with what management puts forward, revealing secret closets instead. Or services shutting down to prevent such hardware from ever being installed?

The US government, all branches, are corrupt by being complicit in each others deeds. Together along with employees within corporations that collaborate with the US government, law is being undone or outright ignored.

Refuse, resist.

[1] H.R. 6304 (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 ) Obama (D-IL), Yea: [http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_c...](http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=110&session=2&vote=00167)

<comment><USER29> I don't think the world is so black and white.

If you pay taxes to the federal government are you complicit with all of the government's actions? Well sure, but what other option do you have? You could not pay taxes and go to jail, or you could move somewhere else where there isn't an imperfect government--- say Antarctica.

Similarly, what are you going to do if you decide not to work for some "complicit" organization? Move to Silicon Valley and work at a startup? Is that any better? Is there any company that is morally and ethically perfect?

Governments, industries, populations, etc. are all part of an inter-related system called The World. If you think this system is imperfect and should be improved, then exiting the system won't solve anything. Rather, you can work within the system and do what you can to make it better.

<comment><USER28> I never said anything was black and white, just that a very large amount of people have become complicit in what they acknowledge as wrong-doings.

As to working within the system, attempting to halt or mitigate what you view as malfeasance is indeed not complying. Merely suggesting though, that people are working within doesn't do much in the face of the number of those working for without care or question.

Yes people have to make the choice of being complicit or face going to jail in some cases. Most just need to stop defending their profiting from the murder/kidnapping/torture/rendition/detention/prosecution of others. Providing infrastructural support like telecommunications is indeed an enabler for industries like drone warfare.

It's called "The World" as you put it.</comment></comment></comment>


The Problem with Founders (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/20/the-problem-with-founders/ <comment><USER2> "Feeling bored at work? Just go start a company. Feeling depressed about life and lack any direction? Just go start a company. Broke up recently? Just go start a company. Had a parent die and can't move on? Just go start a company."

This is how we end up with statistics like 27% of founders have mental health issues. Source: [http://www.businessinsider.com/austen-heinzs-suicide-and- dep...](http://www.businessinsider.com/austen-heinzs-suicide-and-depression- in-startups-2015-7)

<comment><USER3> About 10% of VC-funded companies are big successes, defined as making 10x their investment. About 20% go broke, and most of the rest end up in zombie mode, able to pay their bills but not pay off their investors.

Most founders, therefore, are doomed to be losers.

But VCs look for people who are sure they will succeed. Most of them turn out, in hindsight, to be wrong. This is inherently going to push a sizable fraction of them into mental health issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What every founder will tell you - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVKKRzemX_w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVKKRzemX_w) [Louis Armstrong - Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen (1962)]

...and it's true.

</comment><comment><USER5> > has now become something akin to Hollywood: a world of stars amid extras and > hopefuls.

wow, nailed it.

</comment><comment><USER6> The numbers in this article are way off. A higher end employee (senior/chief engineer) who joins at say #30 in a company will still have a decent exit on a $250million exit. I say this as someone experienced in this.

<comment><USER7>
      s/will still/can/g

Your experience, while fortuitous and probably well-earned, is far from universal.

<comment><USER6> Totally true. I developed the product that was responsible for >50% of the company's revenue and walked away with 0.04% at exit.

It was decent, not life changing. I probably should have negotiated significantly higher. Hindsight etc.

<comment><USER8> That is $100k or $25K per year assuming a 4 year vesting schedule. Even assuming that you did not take a pay cut relative to working for a bigger or more established company, it seems a little low reward for the risk involved. Particularly considering that $250M exits have low odds to begin with.

<comment><USER6> It was low risk on my behalf. A full time job taken in 2000 when everyone was letting people go (and I had been out of work for 6 months despite a high profile in the open source community). At a decent pay.

I do think I should have at least negotiated double what I had. But I was young and had no clue about stock and exits etc. Even given that, I did ok considering I was #30.

I still stand by what I said. The numbers are a bit off. A $250m exit is good for most of the early employees. Although of course a $250m exit is extremely rare.

<comment><USER9> _A full time job taken in 2000 when everyone was letting people go (and I had been out of work for 6 months despite a high profile in the open source community). At a decent pay._

While I grant that at that point in my life I was older than the startup norm (40 but _very_ productive due to a quarter century's experience and study from the very start of software engineering), there was some serious value to such a job back then. I.e. a lot better than the job I took in semi-desperation at Lucent in 2001 just when it started downsizing from 106,000 to 35,000 employees....

And doing "OK" with equity being employee #30 plus the wonderful resume enhancer of "my product earned over 50% of the company's revenues" is not bad, not bad at all. Being able to tie a serious technical accomplishment to an outsized portion of the company's bottom line speaks to everyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Somebody should add [2014] to the title. I started reading it, then realized that it all sounded familiar.

<comment><USER11> Thanks. Done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The founder/engineer social class division is one of the reasons why I expect the Silicon Valley ecosystem to implode and will be disappointed if it doesn't.

First, there are two types of founders: Made Founders and Hustling (it's a nicer word than "Marginal") Founders. Made Founders (often called "serial entrepreneurs") already have it worked out that, unless they rip off their VCs, they'll get a soft landing. I won't say that they don't work, but they have enough investor-rank friends that they don't really worry about anything, because if their companies tank, they'll be lined up with VP-level positions where they'll probably make twice the salary that they had as founders (typically, founders don't make more than $175k). They probably put in 30-60 hours per week, but they work on the fun stuff and have double-digit equity so... yeah. They worry more about managing up into the investor ranks than running a company, for obvious reasons. (If you build a successful company but lose control and most of your reward, you lost. If you fail but the investors like you and make you a Partner at their VC firm, you won.) It ain't a bad gig, although it's a bit boring because, well, you're a corporate executive. Being a Made Founder is based on pre-existing social class; either something you're born with, or something you luck into. Merit's not a part of it. Hustling Founders are the ones who don't have investor-level people pulling strings all the time and who really, really, really fucking have to pound the pavement-- and hope that a Made Founder doesn't decide to compete in their space, because then they're up against someone who's going to have 50 times the capital.

In the 1960s, _all_ founders were of the Hustling variety because the pedigreed people were still in banking, during the Bateman days when it wasn't a real job (3-martini lunch), and in a time when the pedigreed asswipes still thought the West Coast unprestigious.

What the OP is describing is a cultural shift as pedigreed people with _generational_ social connections jump into the game as Made Founders. They've never been employees or subordinates of any kind (except to VCs) so they don't have the empathy that it takes to run a company, and they tend to be low on competence spectrum (since the mainstream business elite puts its successes in hedge funds and private equity to manage billion-dollar deals, and throws its failures into VC and VC-funded tech).

What hoodwinks a lot of people is that the Made Founders are great at presenting the appearance of Hustling Founders, and thereby they justify getting 100 times the equity as the employees they manage. In reality, most of the Hustling Founders (a middle-class crew) have been driven out and are unfundable due to a lack of social connections, and also because the amount of stress involved in dealing with VCs and abusive investor-level personalities is such a mental-health crusher that even normal people become paralytically neurotic after about 5 years in that game.

<comment><USER13> > Merit's not a part of it.

If you are good enough to build something people want, skip VCs and get paid directly from users.

<comment><USER14> +1.

What michaelochurch seems to ignore is that it is now so easy and cheap to start alone and without investment _something_ with a non zero probability that people will want. It's not easy - I am trying to do that, so far unsuccessfully - but definitely doable, by renting a cheap VM from Digital Ocean or Amazon and start making a web app, or putting a mobile app in the App Store or Play Store.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This was ridiculous the first time it came out. It's just as bad now.

<comment><USER16> care to explain?

<comment><USER15> Here's what I wrote at the time: So much nonsense in one article. If you think the "bar is so much lower" to becoming a founder then stop whining about being one of the forgotten early employees and get off your ass and start a company for the right reasons: finding a market opportunity and making money from it. If you can't or won't, then you can't expect the rewards.

Early employees are important, and should be given credit and fair payment for their work, but their risk profile is far, far less than the founders and investors. Investors stand to lose their investment (which is an accumulation of work) and the founders can lose money, reputation, and time. In my last business I lost hundreds of thousands of dollars of my own money and five year's 24/7 sweat. Every employee walked away.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The simple solution to this problem is to enable a new type of sales model for software. The current models are broken and lean toward the investor-founder- operations-developer chain of control, with the investor and founders controlling the revenue. Flipping the model on its head would allow for the revenue to flow directly to the developers, bypassing the chain. I think I may have a solution for this, but it's going to require some infrastructure changes.

<comment><USER18> The problem is money. There is no way to magically get money into the hands of the founders and the people that have it (IE: investors), will never make a deal where they won't get a good ROI.

<comment><USER19> Sell software directly from your own website.

software you write all by yourself.

Lots of coders do this, some are brilliantly successful. The ones that dont make money dont know how to Read The Fine Manual.

For example, SEO is not a black art, it is well documented.

<comment><USER20> > The ones that dont make money dont know how to Read The Fine Manual.

Can you elaborate, do you mean that making money selling software from one's own website is a well understood and replicable process? Not trying to argue, I'm genuinely curious.

<comment><USER21> It _used_ to be a well understood and replicable process. But these days I'm really not so sure that it is either well understood, or replicable. The late 90s are gone and won't be back and selling software got harder, not easier since then unless you sell apps.

<comment><USER22> "selling software got harder, not easier since then"

Can you elaborate? I'm fairly clueless - I thought services like stripe which streamline payments and Steam that serves as a whole distribution platform would have made software sales (for PC:s) easier.

<comment><USER21> There was a time when everything you did with your computer was an application. Nowadays a very large portion of that work is done with a browser, either for free or ad supported. So the market for licensed software sold to end-users has contracted, and the delivery mechanism (installing downloaded software for your PC) is more and more tainted because of malware and rogue installers.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


She shut down the Bay Area to slow the deadly coronavirus - <AUTHOR> https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2020/03/29/she-shut-down-the-bay-area-to-slow-the-deadly-coronavirus-none-of-us-really-believed-we-would-do-it/ <comment><USER2> You know, color me stupid, but at this time, I don't think we need this kind of languid, laconic writing. It reads like a retrospective of the situation, but it's hardly begun.</comment>


Why Google had to make this about China - <AUTHOR> http://coderoom.wordpress.com/2010/01/19/why-google-had-to-make-this-about-china/

<comment><USER2> Hmm... I really disagree with this. From all the I've read on the situation, saying that "Google servers were hacked" is inaccurate. Everything I've read points to this being a rather sophisticated phishing-style attack against a few specific accounts. My understanding was that only the profile information of 2 accounts "may" have been compromised. Given the nature of other GhostNet attacks, I think the fact that Google got off so lightly is extremely impressive, and actually increased my confidence in their systems. On top of that, I've read several reports that Sergey Brin has been wanting to leave China for sometime, mainly for philosophical reasons.</comment>


Apple Maps: The FAQ - <AUTHOR> http://counternotions.com/2012/09/21/applemaps/

<comment><USER2> The weirder section of the Apple blogosphere was pretty tragic reading even when Apple was regularly knocking them out of the park, the response to this map debacle really sorts the sheep from the goats.

It sounds awfully like Apple would like a chance to prove themselves and iterate their beta product. But we wouldn't want to be grading on a curve* now would we?

* [http://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Adaringfireball.net+grading+o...](http://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Adaringfireball.net+grading+on+a+curve)

(I provided the reference, as this phrase, much like "race to the bottom", seems to be used in a sense about 180 degrees removed from it's actual meaning in the Apple blogs)

</comment><comment><USER3> The As seem a bit aggressive

<comment><USER4> The reason, of course, is that they aren't actually answers, they're part of a desperate attempt to justify and deflect blame for Apple's royal screwup...

I don't know why people do this sort of thing (go nuts defending something obviously indefensible). As one of the few sane commenters points out, liking Apple's products, and even being a all-out fan, doesn't mean one can't be realistic about their problems. Indeed, well-placed and clear-eyed criticism will in the long run only make Apple's stuff _better_ , and surely that's something any fan could get behind, right?

I'm certainly not an Apple fanboy, but I generally like Apple's products, and have even thought about buying an iphone 5 ... but now ... I'm not so sure (I guess I'll wait and see how things play out). Which sucks, because in many ways it's an absolutely delicious piece of kit (and in the case of the ipod touch, pretty much the only game in town). Please Apple, do the right thing, even if it means swallowing your pride in the short-term; if you do, I will happily give you my money...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Swap out "Apple Maps" and "Google Maps" for "iPhone" and "Windows Phone", and you have a ready-made link for Gruber, with a snarky comment about "skating to where the puck was" ready to go.

</comment><comment><USER4> Well that was embarrassing...</comment>


Amazon battles counterfeit masks, $400 hand sanitizer amid virus panic - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-battles-counterfeit-masks-400-hand-sanitizer-amid-virus-panic-11583880384 <comment><USER2> I hope they battle it harder than they "battle" counterfeits in general. It seems like they generally like the money they make off of counterfeits and just pay lip service to preventing it so they don't get yelled at too much for it

<comment><USER3> Yeah, they don't seem to battle it too hard when you can just search your local amazon for a relevant keyword, sort by price descending and find the offers. Amazon has every incentive _not_ to battle this, the higher the price, the higher their percentage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well, cash is known to be very dirty:

[https://time.com/4918626/money-germs-microbes- dirty/](https://time.com/4918626/money-germs-microbes-dirty/)

* Antibiotic-resistant bacteria

* Cocaine

* Heroin

* Pet DNA

etc. So, the way the $400 hand sanitizer works is by making you let go of all your filthy, filthy money.

<comment><USER5> Also, often contains bodily fluids, from a very voluptuous exotic dancer.

It's best to launder the money prior to using it.

<comment><USER6> [https://xkcd.com/1426/](https://xkcd.com/1426/)

<comment><USER4> Pun-tastic :-\

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like Amazon, but at some level I find it hard to believe that a company that can build a store that automatically tracks my purchases with ML and let's me walk out without a checkout can't figure out how to flag some of the blatantly fake stuff being sold on their site.

Sure given the scale there can always be a few bad apples but some of the stuff is clearly fake and stays up for ages.

<comment><USER8> In the Amazon Grocery Store in the Capitol Hill Neighborhood of Seattle it takes them over an hour to charge you and send you a receipt.

Doesn't seem like they perfected automated tracking yet. This screams manual human review of video footage -- seems like they are still collecting data for a future ML model.

<comment><USER9> I doubt it. They send a push notification to your Amazon Go app immediately upon exiting the store. They then later send an email receipt, as you said, about an hour later.

Because of the novelty of the store, and because it's on my way to work, I routinely go the store, and I've never noticed a discrepancy between the push notification and the emailed receipt.

I have no specific knowledge why the receipt email is delayed, but I suspect a more mundane reason, like they're batching payments, in case of multiple trips in-and-out.

<comment><USER8> Just to clarify again, this is at the Amazon Go Grocery store of which there is only one location in Seattle.

I don't use the Amazon Go app. I use the Go option within the regular Amazon app. I get no email and no status change within the app for over 1 hour.

Also, I'm really not that convinced that they have mastered picking up various fruit and vegetables and the bakery items I chose. Those things don't use RFID and from what I could tell their system must be vision-based online here.

Edit: My friend was with me and used the Amazon Go app and also didn't receive any message or receipt until an hour later. This has been a frequent occurrence at this store.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Make your own hand sanitiser (WHO recipe): [https://www.who.int/gpsc/5may/Guide_to_Local_Production.pdf](https://www.who.int/gpsc/5may/Guide_to_Local_Production.pdf)

Buy 95% ethanol (from hardware/paint department, or maybe Everclear booze if in US) or isopropyl alcohol (hardware/paint department).

Buy Glycerin (Chemist, or I found it cheap at Indian goods store, probably other places).

IMHO the Hydrogen peroxide can be safely skipped if you can't easily find it.

Maybe also get some hand cream (frequent use of hand sanitiser will screw your skin).

<comment><USER11> Oh thanks for the link. I was looking around to source food/cosmetics-grade carbopol 941, Caprylyl Glycol, AMP or high-purity TEA, and Isopropyl Myristate per a chemistry formulation forum. I was going to cost $500 or so to get started making even small quantities, and then everclear and distilled water for the balance.

Oh man... without very careful fractional distillation, random Home Depot paint thinner, fireplace fuel isn't a good idea at all. For use on hands, it must be food or cosmetics grade.

Maybe some aloe vera would be better than hand cream, which would leave less of an unpleasant, oily residue? Also, random hand cream would likely interact with the recipe because they usually include many components.

Please don't get too crazy if you're not a chemist.

<comment><USER12> If the stuff is clearly labelled ethanol, for cleaning/burning, made from biological sources, you can be pretty sure it's just simple continuous distilled sugar-based (likely via yeast) reasonably high-purity ethanol with mandated-by-law denaturation additives (over here in Germany that'd be ~1% methyl-ethyl-ketone and a hint of denatonium benzoate) to make it taste too bad for people to get drunk from it.

This is far from random paint thinner or random mineral-oil-based lighter fluid/accelerant.

For use on your hands the normal home and garden ethanol is sufficiently harmless, and will itself do more damage than any residues. After all, it's made for use in situations where most people don't wear gloves.

<comment><USER11> Sorry, wrong... you're making a big leap of assumption rather than understanding what grades mean. If it's not food / cosmetics grade, you have no idea what toxic impurities are left in it... that's why the fuel-kind is cheap and for burning, not placing on your hands. Unless you have a decent mass spectrometer, you can feel free to gamble with your and your own family's health and/or lives.

<comment><USER12> I might be have made wrong assumptions about consumer safety regulations where you are. I'm pretty sure you can't sell anything in Germany to consumers that's toxic on contact with hands if it's something people usually touch and you don't warn about it.

The reason the fuel-type is this cheap is that it's taxed much less than the drinking kind. For technical applications they have good reason to keep if clean, safe for traces of impurities. The stuff they use for non-medical hand sanitizer and such should come from the same factory. There isn't much you can do wrong when producing industrial quantities of generic technical ethanol.

I'm sorry if I caused confusion though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I do hope this is an impetus for Amazon to finally address the huge counterfeiting problem on their platform.

<comment><USER14> Just like how my employer sent an email saying "you are allowed to work from home" and then all the managers come and say "that doesn't apply to our team" :)

<comment><USER15> Looks like we are working in the same company :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Perhaps Amazon should manufacture masks/sanitizer/etc via its house brand, and churn them out by the billion.

<comment><USER17> > Perhaps Amazon should manufacture masks/sanitizer/etc via its house brand, > and churn them out by the billion.

Where would they do that? China is still pretty locked down, and I think they're still struggling to supply domestic needs of those items.

<comment><USER18> It's recovering. In my hometown (Shandong province), no more restrictions on manufacturing and transportation since yesterday, aside from body temp checkpoints.

It is basically contained in China outside Wuhan already. Wuhan will join in a few weeks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> [https://archive.md/pRD7w](https://archive.md/pRD7w)

</comment><comment><USER20> Amazon has not done anything to combat counterfeit items on their website before now, I don't expect much from them now.

<comment><USER21> Do we know that for a fact? Maybe they actually block 99.9% of counterfeits, but the volume is tremendous.

<comment><USER22> Whatever they're doing it's not working. Nearly every "Amazon's Choice" that I see in search results is some counterfeit Chinese garbage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It'd be nice if everything were labeled honestly; but people get riled up around the wrong thing. High prices are necessary to get more production of these things quickly; and honestly the public buying counterfeit masks to leave real supplies for the hospitals is probably a win for us all.

The only issue here is deceptive advertising.

</comment><comment><USER24> Who trust Amazon and its marketplace on general goods nowaday? The only thing I can trust from Amazon is used foreign books.

<comment><USER25> _Who trust Amazon and its marketplace on general goods nowaday?_

About 95% of the people in the world who are not on HN.

Average Joe Lunchbucket assumes that the products he buys through Amazon are vetted by Amazon, like at his local store. He has no idea that the stuff he buys are from a thousand different randos.

<comment><USER26> Your local store vets products?

<comment><USER27> Wal-Mart is notorious for their knowledge of the supply chain for their vendors, whether the vendor wanted to give up that information or not. On the other side of things, I've seen some pretty questionable items in dollar stores including food products that weren't labeled for the US market. The gas station near my house buys some of their products from Costco and breaks the packs into individual items, complete with "Not labeled for individual sale" warnings. Hopefully Costco is like Wal-Mart when it comes to supply chain knowledge.

<comment><USER28> "Not labeled for individual sale" has any legality?

<comment><USER29> Generally thats exactly what it means - the individual products don't have nutrition info or something else which would be required for them to be sold by themselves by law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Amazon Germany. Before the panic started, I was looking to buy sanitizers for the office. 4x500ml was €120 at Amazon from third party seller, with delivery time 2 to 3 weeks. The same seller, directly on their website, ... €50, delivered 3 days later. Amazing.

<comment><USER31> €50 for 2L is still absolutely insane for something that costs pennies per liter to make.

<comment><USER30> Considering the times we're in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Good to see Amazon doing this but ultimately this should be a government driven initiative. E.g. Japan has put a fine and up to 1 year jail sentence for profiteering on masks and similar.

[https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/03/10/national/japan-...](https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/03/10/national/japan- punish-reselling-face-masks/)

</comment><comment><USER33> They should try whatever methods were so effective in preventing Chromecast from being sold of the platform.

</comment><comment><USER34> Thanks for reminding me to cancel Prime.

<comment><USER34> Since this was downvoted, I'm sure because it didn't add to the conversation, I'll add some more.

This has been happening for multiple years with Amazon seemingly doing little about it. I've faced it from both sides, selling and buying.

Selling: Counterfeiters were selling our item. We knew this because we were the manufacturer and only seller of the item. If we weren't selling it, it was counterfeit. In order to prove this, Amazon made us buy the counterfeit item from the other seller, and send in images to prove it. So when we did this, the counterfeit sellers caught on at some point and started simply shipping us random crap instead of the fake product. Then we had NO evidence they were selling a counterfeit item - we didn't have the photos to prove it.

Buying: Recently in the market for a bike air pump, I search Amazon and see no less than 50 listings, all having 4.5-5 star reviews, all the same bike pump, all off-brand sounding names, but all identical. It made it impossible to find what I need/want and also made it impossible to know whether or not these bike pumps were really worth anything at all. I didn't buy anything from Amazon, and that experience has made me question all my purchases from Amazon since. So, as mentioned above, I had meant to cancel my Prime membership - this post reminded me to do so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Few days before the corona virus chaos started, we ordered a pack of PURELL hand sanitizers from Amazon. Then the chaos started and we wondered what will happen to our package. We tracked the package move around, then delays, then messages about possible delays, then it just never arrived.

I hit up Amazon.com and saw all these crazy markups on hand sanitizer. Eeek! But, I found 1 that was $10. Also from PURELL. Looked like the ones used at gyms. So I added it to my cart. Continued browsing and at checkout it got automatically removed. Subsequent searches revealed just the over priced hand sanitizers. Arrr!

Thanks Amazon!

<comment><USER36> I ordered a pack of the amazon bran hand sanitizer on Feb 26, and was wondering if this will happen. Luckily I didn't the order arrived 2 days later. During that week time amazon algo had already increased the price from $12 to $20 per pack and next week when I checked everything was sold out.</comment></comment>


How Renormalization Saved Particle Physics - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-renormalization-saved-particle-physics-20200917/ <comment><USER2> The concept underlying renormalization/invariance as we now understand it, is a fundamental and profoundly beautiful idea about the very nature of what it means to make a model for a phenomenon. Essentially:

 _A theory is nothing but a way to turn (a finite number of) measurements into predictions_.

The number of degrees of freedom in some putative model might be infinite, but all/most of them will be common between the observed context and the prediction context; it's only the difference between those two that matters. And renormalization theory provides certain bookkeeping tools to track & ensure that, which then makes tractable the task of predicting.

<comment><USER3> > A theory is nothing but a way to turn (a finite number of) measurements into > predictions.

That's a very nice way of putting it. Is there a particular book, lecture, or other resource you could recommend for this interpretation of theorizing?

<comment><USER2> That particular statement is something I made up once I finally understood what was going on; I've not seen any references which explain it quite that way. If there are any specific leading questions, I might try to unwrap that intuition here; otherwise it's a little difficult and I'll need to think harder to cook up a nice motivating example :-)

That said, Simon Dedeo has a relatively accessible set of online lectures which explain the concepts behind renormalization and broader connections to ideas in computing and other fields, without needing as much heavy machinery as a typical theoretical physics treatment. I haven't watched it, but in general I appreciate his pedagogy, so here's the playlist: [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF0b3ThojznTzAA7bfLWh...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF0b3ThojznTzAA7bfLWh4RKzRrwNF4L0)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Renormalization is a beautiful hack, but it is a hack.

Let's take infinity, subtract other infinitites add a bit of alchemy and here is our prediction. <\- from mathematical perspective this is a very sketchy business.

But it works. And it works in other fields. For example in the theory of phase transitions (I have PhD on the topic :))

And it is pretty common in Physics to work with sketchy constructions for decades before mathematicians catch up.

I love the example of "Generalized Functions" (examples are Delta function and Step Function) that were widely in Physics decades before a consistent mathematical theory was developed.

I hope, at some point we will have a similar story with Renormalization theory.

<comment><USER5> Well, that's how this was discovered, as a clever hack that worked. In the 1940s.

But it was subsequently understood much better, in the 70s. There are no infinities involved in thinking about renormalisation group flow.

That progress seems like exactly the story the article is trying to tell.

It's indeed not so different from the story of calculus. You don't even need Dirac, the very basic idea of calculus is a hack for dividing zero by zero without getting confused, which later got nicely cleaned up to became respectable mathematics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Following the links in the article, it seems it's about:

[https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/Schwinger-Tomonaga-Feynman- Dys...](https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/Schwinger-Tomonaga-Feynman-Dyson)

leading to:

[https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/perturbative+algebraic+quantum...](https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/perturbative+algebraic+quantum+field+theory)

<comment><USER7> The first link is indeed relevant, but the second is emphatically _not_ what physicists talk about when they talk about QFT. (It is generally true that nLab usually lacks perspective, to put it mildly, and the corresponding Wikipedia articles are likely more information.)

For a description of the differences, I suggest this paper (link is to a preprint version): [http://philsci- archive.pitt.edu/8890/1/critique_sep10.pdf](http://philsci- archive.pitt.edu/8890/1/critique_sep10.pdf). The author also gave a talk on it which was recorded and put on YouTube.

<comment><USER6> > the second is emphatically not what physicists talk about when they talk > about QFT

Thanks many times. It looked weird to me too, but I've thought "well, some fringe theoretical physicists -- metaphysics topics".

"Quantum" attracts everything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > _renormalization's hostility to microscopic details works against the > efforts of modern physicists who are hungry for signs of the next realm > down_

No, it doesn't. It simply says "your tools are good down to about here; beyond this point, you must use different tools." That's all.

</comment><comment><USER9> Ken Wilson wrote a beautiful popular article on the renormalization group for SciAm in 1979.

[https://websites.pmc.ucsc.edu/~wrs/Project/2014-summer%20sem...](https://websites.pmc.ucsc.edu/~wrs/Project/2014-summer%20seminar/Renorm/Wilson- many%20scales-Sci%20Am-79.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER10> So, the need for the renormalization group could be seen as Nature's answer to reductionism. Emergent phenomena can (and perhaps should) be treated independently.

</comment><comment><USER11> @dang: Could we get a title change to "How Renormalization Saved Particle Physics"?

<comment><USER12> It's interesting, you can see in the URL that at some point the article was named "How Renormalization Saved Particle Physics". My guess is that an editor changed it to make it more comprehensible / clickbaity.

<comment><USER13> I found it less click-baity and more a sly reference to the perception of the theory by its contemporaries (particularly Feynman in his QED book):

"…is technically called 'renormalization.' But no matter how clever the word, it is what I would call a dippy process! Having to resort to such hocus-pocus has prevented us from proving that the theory [...][...] is self-consistent. It's surprising that the theory still hasn't been proved self-consistent one way or the other by now; [...][...] What is certain is that we do not have a good mathematical way to describe the theory of quantum electrodynamics: such a bunch of words…" \- Feynman, QED 1985

kudos to /u/acqq for the links in their comment.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Review my site - Shiftpop.com - <AUTHOR>

Shiftpop is a live video aggregator that's been running as an open beta preview for a while now, we're trying to figure out if people are interested in using something like this, and if it's going to be possible to monetize at some point.
http://shiftpop.com
Any input would be appreciated.  Thanks. <comment><USER2> I had trouble figuring out what the site did from the text in your advertisement, possibly because referring to video as "casts" is counter- intuitive to me. It makes me think of the word webcasts, when your examples seem to be video files and movies.

Tried dragging a video into the lower sitecast box which is right beside the video selection menu and it did nothing, although it started playing in both when I dragged it into the upper one. The Say What option didn't work for me, or maybe I just don't know how that stuff works. Clicking in various places there did nothing for me. Someone with more experience with SEO would know if the tag cloud is being useful. I wouldn't try to find video using it.

I wouldn't pay for this, but that's more because I don't think it makes sense to pay intermediaries for online content presumably sourced elsewhere. I do like the design and the drag and drop functionality, although the line-height on the about page needs to be increased to make the text more legible and some of the navigation terminology "Cloud" is puzzling.

</comment><comment><USER3> Second dropping the 'Casts' terminology. I would go with webcasts or streams. I would use google's keyword suggestion tool and find out what people are using to search for webcasts, then use those terms.

I think you'll loose initial users people who don't get the functionality with the drag and drop.

I like your design, but for the intro tutorial, I'd simplify it greatly, using less graphics. It seems too much like a video I didn't choose, which I was ignoring at first.

Good luck!</comment>


Show HN: GitKit – A Toolbar App for Searching GitHub Pull Requests and Issues - <AUTHOR> https://gitkit.io# <comment><USER2> Very nice, what features are you looking to add next?

</comment><comment><USER3> I get the use-case for this application, however I don't think I would want to run another browser in the background as a 290MB toolbar app to be searching GitHub PRs and issues makes sense to me. As a native app, yes but something like Electron is overkill for this use case.

After all, I still have too many Electron apps running on my Macbook hitting my swap space while I use Chrome to browse the web, so I can't have yet another one doing the same thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair enough. To each their own. My MacBook is running 32gb of ram so I'm not as concerned over a few hundred mb. But noted.. I'll have to make one in native code for you.. ;)</comment></comment>


Punycode Exploit: a billion Chrome and Firefox users and undetectable phishing - <AUTHOR> http://blog.epicbrowser.com/2017/04/punycode-exploit-puts-one-billion-chrome-firefox-users-at-catastrophic-risk-for-undetectable-phishing-attacks-epic-privacy-browser-users-are-safe/ <comment><USER2> Firefox is not working on a fix for this??? That's hard to believe. Is Google's fix out yet?

<comment><USER3> Chrome on both Android and Windows has been patched.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> It does look like Google is rolling out updates and Mozilla hasn't responded yet.

</comment><comment><USER4> It doesn't say Apple.com in Vivaldi :)</comment>


Dr. Fauci says he takes Vitamin D and C to "lessen susceptibility to infections" - <AUTHOR> https://www.insider.com/fauci-takes-recommends-vitamin-d-and-c-supplements-immunity-boost-2020-9 <comment><USER2> the headline doesn't fit with the text of the article. the article doesn't quote him as saying that he takes vitamin C, but that taking a gram of vitamin-c is not bad.

\----

"If you're deficient in vitamin D, that does have an impact on your susceptibility to infection. I would not mind recommending, and I do it myself, taking vitamin D supplements," he said. "The other vitamin that people take is vitamin C because it's a good antioxidant, so if people want to take a gram or so of vitamin C, that would be fine."

\----

</comment><comment><USER3> Big problem being that for most people, it's about same susceptibility as cold, meaning, eh? (Measured by symptoms. COVID has much higher rate of very bad symptoms.)

The people who are susceptible to colds will be just as susceptible to COVID-19 and supplements will do about nothing.

Much less than religiously washing hands and wearing quality masks, preferably respirators, for sure.

</comment><comment><USER4> Sorry this is dup..</comment>


A Chat with Browsium Founder Matt Heller about IE6 on Win7 (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://www.brianmadden.com/podcast/A-chat-with-Browsium-founder-Matt-Heller-about-IE6-on-Win7-and-how-we-got-into-this-whole-mess <comment><AUTHOR> Soon after this was posted, I presume that Browsium was ordered by MS legal to stop using IE6 binaries. When EMIE was created two years later, "avoiding many performance, security, and other problems associated with running older Internet Explorer 8 binaries." was mentioned in [https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ie/2014/04/02/stay-up-to- da...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ie/2014/04/02/stay-up-to-date-with- enterprise-mode-for-internet-explorer-11/)</comment>


Ask HN: What's some good content for a background/ambient projector display? - <AUTHOR> I have a spare projector; generic <$100 one, so it does reasonable video and larger displays, but you wouldn't want to be reading fine text off it.
I'm considering using it as an always-on background display for "ambient" purposes (more decoration than information radiator) in my home work/play/create space. Display hitting a wall off to the side, driven by a PC or Raspberry Pi, custom code if necessary.
Looking for ideas for content to display on it, beyond the obvious slideshow of random photos or generic nightclub-esque visualizations.
Don't have anything specific in mind - probably something dynamic, maybe data-driven, connected, more so than pure art. Assume similar tastes and proclivities to the usual HN demographic.
Any ideas? <comment><USER2> [https://www.window-swap.com/](https://www.window-swap.com/)

Open a new Window somewhere else in the world!</comment>


Java, JVM, JNI and Signal Handling Explained In Simple Terms - <AUTHOR> http://nerds-central.blogspot.com/2011/04/java-jvm-jni-and-signal-handling.html Before you use JNI on Unix or Linux - read this! <comment><USER2> I always assumed that the SEG in SEGV referred to memory segmentation like that found in x86 real mode, not 'A process will request one or more segments (typically hundred,s thousands etc.)'.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hiya, I went and looked this up for you:

" Intel segmented memory

This usage should not be confused with that of the x86 memory segmentation used by early Intel processors such as the Intel 8086 and Intel 8088, as they did not provide any protection. Any program could access any segment with no restrictions, and a segment consisted of only a starting location and a fixed length of 64 KiB. Segmentation in the Intel 80286 and later provided protection. "

I think Dr Turner's description of segments is a bit rough and ready; I guess he was just trying to make the post simple.</comment></comment>


Show HN: FFdynamic – Extend FFmpeg with A/V process composition, runtime control - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Xingtao/FFdynamic <comment><AUTHOR> The code shipped with an application 'Interactive Live' which builds on FFdynamic. It shows how concise code could be, when we can make audio/video process in a compositional way, to do dynamically add input streams, add new output streams(with different resolution and codec settings), layout update, etc..

</comment><comment><USER2> Nice! I love ffmpeg, but this looks like it could be used to bring the smooth real-time video editing that's common on the Mac to Linux systems!

</comment><comment><USER3> Comparison to Avisynth / Vapoursynth ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not for editing. A library can do dynamic change during transcoding or live broadcast, add new inputs/output, change output settings. It is more like a Video Conference backend, but keep FFmpeg's libav* capacity.

<comment><AUTHOR> Besides, 1. it provides a way can compose different audio/video component. For instance, video decode -> post-video decode filter -> video mix -> pre-encode fileter -> video encoder -> muxer. 2. can easily write new plugins, for example a dehaze plugin, which in turn can compose with other existing components (dehaze example shipped with project)</comment></comment></comment>


Reflection in C++14 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Cylix/cpp_reflection

<comment><USER2> There is a really interesting proposal to add reflection to the language: N4447 [1] (N3951 before). The idea is based on an observation that C++ already sort of has reflection-like syntax in form of parameter pack expansion [2]. I find this approach to be a very elegant and in the spirit of modern C++. It is also very powerful. Bond serialization is implemented using reflection. Because C++ doesn't have reflection, for normal classes we have to use code generation to provide type metadata. But for std::tuple<T...> all the necessary information is already available and Bond can serialize arbitrary instances of std::tuple<T...> today [3].

[1] [http://www.open- std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2015/n444...](http://www.open- std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2015/n4447.pdf)

[2] [http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/parameter_pack](http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/parameter_pack)

[3] [https://microsoft.github.io/bond/manual/bond_cpp.html#tuples](https://microsoft.github.io/bond/manual/bond_cpp.html#tuples)

<comment><USER3> As another example, Firefox uses "manual reflection" to e.g. build lists of all the smart pointers in some classes. It then uses these lists as part of its "cycle collector", which breaks cycles in the refcounted graph of objects.

Writing and maintaining these lists is error-prone, and at least used to be a major source of memory leaks. You can imagine writing a static analysis to figure this out, and the Moz folks may have since I last checked, but if the language could do it, that would be so much better...

<comment><USER4> As a somewhat-related data point, Servo is already using the macro deriving infrastructure of Rust to generate these lists at compile time for its garbage collector.

<comment><USER5> I understand the urge to evangelise, but does Rust have to crop up in every C++ thread?

<comment><USER6> It was in response to a comment that was referring to Firefox. Servo is touted as the eventual replacement of Firefox's rendering engine. It's literally a response to a comment about Mozilla's current practices in this area explaining their proposed future practices.

Seems appropriate to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> [https://github.com/aantron/better-enums](https://github.com/aantron/better- enums)

This is better ; P

In C++98

<comment><USER8> Similar: [https://github.com/flaub/boost-enum](https://github.com/flaub/boost- enum)

Examples: [https://github.com/flaub/boost- enum/blob/master/libs/test/en...](https://github.com/flaub/boost- enum/blob/master/libs/test/enum.cpp)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Random Band Name Picker - <AUTHOR> https://www.weegeeks.com/bandnamepicker/ <comment><AUTHOR> Something silly I knocked up this morning. Generates random band names, for laughs, and maybe even useful if your new band is stuck for a name :)</comment>


Practical Drift Towards Failure - <AUTHOR> https://risk-engineering.org/concept/Rasmussen-practical-drift <comment><USER2> Interesting take, and the phenomenon is real. One way to mitigate the "drift" is to have zero tolerance for deviation from procedure, but to also have a formal and rapid system for updating procedures, including explicitly temporary measures.</comment>


Why most female newscasters have the same hair - <AUTHOR> https://www.instyle.com/hair/secret-beauty-rules-of-television-talking-heads <comment><USER2> If we draw an analogy to stagecraft and "Ann Anchor" is a character from a popular play, it isn't unreasonable to expect a performer to dress up for a role. Actors sometimes go as far as losing or gaining weight or muscle mass to better fit a role. Like the theatre, television is show business.

Beauty standards are narrower for women in TV because beauty standards are narrower for women period. Decades of feminism have done nothing to change the fact that being beautiful and fashionable is still far more important for women than for men.

TV executives don't personally care how anchors look. They care about viewer numbers and everything you see on screen is optimised toward that. If having a particular look boosts the numbers, then they will want that look. If having two heads boosted the numbers, they'd want that too. It's no different than politics: Only the voters can be blamed for electing bad politicians.

<comment><USER3> > Beauty standards are narrower for women in TV because beauty standards are > narrower for women period. Decades of feminism have done nothing to change > the fact that being beautiful and fashionable is still far more important > for women than for men.

IME women comment (judge) way more frequently on styling and looks of other women than men ("nice").

<comment><USER4> Women judge and police each other openly, yes, but men tend to judge women silently. That means if a man doesn't find a woman attractive he'll just ignore her (or act polite but curt).

Yes, some men will openly judge and mock women's appearances. These men tend to have a lot of other behaviour problems though.

<comment><USER5> Both men and women will tend to be polite but brief with a person they are not attracted to (in the context that the other person is trying to develop a romantic relationship). That is completely normal and I think it's fine and healthy.

Feminism will struggle against the tendency of women's attraction to be more heavily weighted by appearance than by character or economic status like men are.

I feel like from there men and women have organized themselves and their "competition" according to the criteria set by the opposite sex. Women will become more critical of other women's appearances and men will be more critical of masculine criteria (how much money do you make, can you defend yourself, are you tough/independent/emotionally stable) including penis size, because that is oh so important to making a woman happy.

Maybe men and women impose the harshest standards on themselves because they want to appease the opposite side more. And maybe even though it's true that those are characteristics we value in the opposite sex, we don't objectify the opposite sex as much as they objectify themselves.

Some men and women will resent the way they are "judged", blaming their "judges" for their feelings of inferiority. Some men and women will try to capitalize on the others insecurity to their own gain. Mostly the inferiority is self imposed.

It's a strange balance to acknowledge that (for example) appearances are important, and that it will be more difficult for either sex, particularly women, to find a partner if they don't take care of their appearances. And while that might be true acknowledging that you aren't an object and subjective qualities outside of the rubric of attraction actually do matter and are valuable to people you want to attract.

I don't think attraction will ever be negotiated, and that's where feminism will fail and frustrate people. It might become more taboo to admit you like her cause she's a lingerie model, or that he's a catch because he makes 7 figures, but those things are always going to make a person stand out no matter how angry or inferior it makes us feel.

<comment><USER6> There are many situations where those things won't make a person stand out, at least not in a positive light.

You describe a landscape that exists, but there are many other landscapes interleaved. We have some degree of control over which landscapes we choose to engage.

Feminism/Anarchism is not about making the "beauty+money" landscape go away, it's about helping people find situations when they can opt out of it.

<comment><USER5> Feminism and anarchy seem to target an entire culture. It really doesn't focus on the individual more than the collective. I think that necessarily manipulates all of these land scapes.

If it becomes transphobic to not date a trans person, purely on the basis of them being transgender, it necessarily affects everyone who interacts with a trans person who hits on them.

If it becomes sexist to watch and produce porn that can be interpreted as degrading to women, it necessarily changes decisions the porn that all people watch. If it is sexist for women to not be represented 50/50 for specifically high paying tech jobs, it necessarily affects that works with women or own a tech company. It almost certainly will make those changes through coercion rather than eliminating sexism in the interview process. People will pretend like all of these changes are justified but deep down it doesn't change the way we think and it only builds resentments against movements which restrict and criticise behaviors which are fair.

Some of the issues that these movements take on simply do not have a place for choice. It affects the entire landscape.

Helping women deal with "unrealistic beauty standards" would not work by ensuring that men don't prioritize or advertise with women that are beautiful (if you raise a bit and glorify images of women who are traditionally considered ugly, it will not work). If a boy is castrated at birth through a medical accident, and is raised as a girl and even given hormones, it still doesn't change traditionally male behaviors and sexual preference. People are not blank slates and I think we need to be careful that we set up a society that fundamentally works against ones nature.

Not that we should give in to every impulse, but I hope you can see what I'm getting at. At a work interview, women should be measured only in merit. Under the law, men and women should not be treated differently, except in manners that can only affect women or men (abortion, circumcision, etc.) In a social system, changing the way that people think about their attraction to women is just twisted.

I think it would be better to work on an individual level to help a person change the way they think about themselves to resolve the self esteem issues that photoshopped advertisements, or cookie cutter models and newscasters produce.

<comment><USER6> > It almost certainly will make those changes through coercion rather than > eliminating sexism in the interview process

Why do you say that? You're basically presuming bad faith. Eliminating sexism in the interview process is exactly what anti-bias recruiting tries to do.

> it only builds resentments against movements which restrict and criticise > behaviors which are fair

Not only that. It also helps get better people into the positions where they can be more effective, which leads to a more productive economy overall. The resentment is an unfortunate (I think inevitable) side effect.

To me the wage gaps are evidence that we're not using the labor force effectively, that there are talented women and people of color who are not getting into jobs where their skills are adequately leveraged. So getting them into better positions means companies will be more successful. The statistics suggest that some of the men in these positions don't deserve to be there and are holding their organizations back.

I understand you interpret the data in a different way, that some things just make men and white people more valuable. Differences aside, can you see that these interpretations are subjective and the data doesn't actually differentiate between "the women are just less capable" and "the process is not promoting the best people"? Those two realities are indistinguishable from pay data alone, which is why the stats become a Rorschach test for peoples' beliefs about gender differences.

Not sure how to engage the rest of your argument... I definitely wouldn't say people are blank slates, nor would I deny that gender differences exist. The vast majority of feminists don't think those things, those positions are straw men that anti-feminists like to bring up because they are easy to argue against.

<comment><USER7> > Not sure how to engage the rest of your argument... I definitely wouldn't > say people are blank slates, nor would I deny that gender differences exist. > The vast majority of feminists don't think those things, those positions are > straw men that anti-feminists like to bring up because they are easy to > argue against.

Not to derail the conversation too much, but why does the extreme seem to be accepted as ok by the left? Kids as young as 8 are getting hormone treatments to try and change their gender. [https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/transgender- children-getting-...](https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/transgender-children- getting-more-drug-hormone-treatments-1.1294699)

I myself see this as child abuse. It's a life altering decision made by a child who is too young to understand the consequences. If you don't see this as harmful, you can ignore the rest of this comment, because then I don't have an argument. But if you do see this as a problem, why don't you and others on the left speak out against it?

This is what scares me about you guys. Some of you preach moderation, but you all seem fine with things be taken as far as they can go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Do 95.8 percent of female newscasters have the same hair? I don't see it. Whats the source of that number? Where are the examples? All I see in the article is advertising and counter examples.

From what I can tell, the women in news just like the women in real life seem to change their hairdo every other day.

<comment><USER9> According to the article, it refers to the percentage who have straight hair.

<comment><USER8> Thanks, I see the critical line in the article now:

"95.8 percent of female anchors and reporters had smooth hair"

That is a totally different statement from the title to me.

Almost all, actually probably ALL the women in my professional circles have smooth hair too. Some of them get it straightened at a parlor. It may have something to do with where I'm located as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> TV is so dying, they don't even know it.

In one way, I'm worried about the quality of news reporting now when traditional media is slowly withering away, but since they are focusing on haircuts, I don't think it really matter. The quality journalism is already mostly gone, and what's left can be found in a small number of online and print publications, read by a small number of people.

<comment><USER6> It's not that TV is dying, it's that monocultures are contracting. They will grow again, but won't reach the same heights.

The haircuts need to be one way, because the anchors are trying to reach as large an audience as possible. If they were speaking only to, say, soccer fans, they would have other choices. Same is true for many other audiences. But if you want to go for a "universal" audience, you have to go to the lowest common denominator.

The internet has turned that on its head. You actually can sustainably run a news show for soccer fans only, and be financially successful. Whereas before the distribution costs were too high to allow anything other than mass market news brands.

However, we shant over-extrapolate here. It turns out that many people actually identify more with the "big middle" than with any little subcultures. They enjoy standard, "basic" stuff. They want no fuss, and they like universal appeal. They don't like balkanization. Perhaps they were part of a tight knit tribe, and they don't want to go back to that.

For this reason, I would call this moment a "contract" of mass media, not a death of it. I think these generic brands will contract, but in doing so will find their core audience. People who are not alienated by the "anchor bob" but comforted by it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Skimmed around for mentioning color keying but didn't find anything. That being said, I've long noticed the weird uniform of it all. And if you are on Sinclair or Fox you have to be blonde.

A few years ago I was in an art and technology exhibit. One of the neater exhibits was a scrape of all the profile pictures on Yahoo personals (this was a while ago) and all the women's photos looked the same and the men's were all over the place with hats or props it was rather crazy to see. I keep thinking of peacocks whenever I remember back on it.

</comment><comment><USER12> They are optimizing for their audience. Like this: [https://twitter.com/JRehling/status/1029374020037238784?s=19](https://twitter.com/JRehling/status/1029374020037238784?s=19)

</comment><comment><USER13> The GDPR blocker doesn't go away even if you accept.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, slowly we realise that GDPR was too good to be true. And indeed, it is bad.

<comment><USER15> Well, it's mostly news sites that get their money from advertising and tracking that have the gdpr-walls, I haven't really seen it anywhere else.

For now it's mostly ... interesting.</comment></comment></comment>


Sideshow Interview: Oliver Peat, TuneCrawl - <AUTHOR> http://sideshowhq.com/backstage/oliver-peat <comment><USER2> I'm also a programer always looking to build some fun-n-learn kind of project. Your advice for building onto third party API is good.</comment>


Robert Putnam on the gap between rich kids and poor kids - <AUTHOR> http://chronicle.com/article/Can-Robert-Putnam-Save-the/228443/

<comment><USER2> The last few decades in the US have seen a shift from 1 parent working sufficing to support a family to 2 parents working beening needed for middle class living, and longer hours than before. And more kids have only 1 parent in the household. There simply isn't time for participating in the community- building activities that filled the gaps before. So we are more isolated, and people's lies are in a more fragile balance.

<comment><USER3> I know lots of my friends have families where single income would sustain them but both husband and wife go to work.

We have stigmatized staying at home and raising children as a society.

<comment><USER4> I'd say is a net positive for society that women nowadays are more financially independent compared to the 1960s-1970s. Consider it this way, you're a stay- at-home mom who has decided to focus on her kids in her later 20s, and then you're 40 and divorce happens.

In the happy case your ex-husband and father to your kids still pays for their education and food and relared stuff, but what about you and your own financial needs? Now that you've been out of the work-force for 10+ years you're basically unemployable.

<comment><USER5> > _then you 're 40 and divorce happens_

Magic happens here?

> _what about you and your own financial needs?_

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

Regardless, there is a sneaky equivocation of women in the workplace & two- income households. Obviously women, as fellow humans, do and should have the choice to work outside the home if they want. But IMO _one_ parent should stay home. Is it any surprise that it takes the salary of two people to buy an average house? Things just get more expensive to take advantage of the increased income, and the net result is we spend more time working. Not a net positive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I suspect that all the programs meant to help people are actually a part of the problem. Not directly, because helping people doesn't really hurt (except maybe in a "don't feed the wild animals" sort of way, but most consider that negligible). But more in a "somebody else's problem" or a "bystander effect" sort of way.

In other words, the existence of programs to help people in need -- and worse, large federally funded and administrated programs -- make people feel as though it's not their problem and also that they're already doing something to help: paying their taxes and not voting against these programs. I say large federally funded programs are worse only because that makes the responsibility far more diffuse and the ability to influence ever more limited.

So the programs to help aren't directly bad, but the knock-on psychological effect is that they absolve people of any personal need to help (since they're already helping in a very vague and miniscule way) and that leads them to not take any (additional) direct action.

It feels like the inverse case of the tragedy of the commons.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_Else%27s_Problem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_Else%27s_Problem)

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

<comment><USER7> Do you believe that our population would effectively self-educate without gov't funded education?

<comment><USER8> Do you believe our population is effectively educated with government funded education?

<comment><USER7> No, I don't. However, I believe this is a problem associated with how we approach education as a task rather than how we fund it.

If it were merely an example of "gov't funded education" causes poor education then we would likely see significant gains when private education models are used to replace public schools. Currently, gains with private/charter schools are flat compared to public schools.

I do, however, believe that in absence of a publicly funded education system a large segment of our population would simply be locked out of educational opportunities. How is a family that already struggles for basic necessities going to find an extra ~6-10k a year to pay for private school fees?

<comment><USER6> > How is a family that already struggles for basic necessities going to find > an extra ~6-10k a year to pay for private school fees?

You do realize that those people already do pay for their children's education right? It's just indirect through property taxes.

Yes people who don't have kids in school also contribute but it's not as though there are 10x as many people without kids as with kids, it might be 50/50 kids/no kids meaning that the best you can get is a 50% "discount" over directly funding instead of funding via taxes.

<comment><USER7> Setting aside that progressive taxation probably means that the population I was discussing isn't significantly funding their children's education (and would likewise not be able to cover the actual cost of education if they were called on that burden) -- I was responding to mrwarn's comment asking if _gov 't funded_ education is working, to which I responded that public schooling is not working, but that the problem is not dependent on the source of funding.

When we turn public schools into private schools (as Chicago has done by the dozens in the last few years) we don't see educational improvements when the students population remains the same. When we do, it's modest or an outlier (and education is filled with outliers).

<comment><USER6> Education is almost 100% funded by property taxes and sales taxes. Property taxes are a tax on the value of the property, not on your income or your equity in the property, but based on the "fair market value" of the property. Sales tax is based on the value of the transaction.

Everyone lives somewhere, and somewhere basically always has a value attached to it. Maybe run down apartments aren't worth as much as fancy new ones, but property tax still has to be paid.

Even if you rent, you still pay property taxes. The owner of the apartment considers property taxes as a part of his/her expenses the same way a mortgage, insurance, maintenance, etc are expenses. Those expenses get rolled into the rent.

Sales taxes are largely regressive, because any money saved is by default not going to get any sales tax applied. And poor people spend a larger portion of their income on things which are taxed than wealthier people do; look at the whole "buying experiences" advice that well-to-do participate in. Those are generally arranged as "services" which aren't taxable, rather than products, which are.

Progressive taxes are generally based on income, not property value or transaction value. As a result, funding for education is currently borne fairly evenly amongst people who both have an address and buy things, no matter their income level.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A strong, common culture is the only historically verified way to escape the prisoners dilemma of social interactions. We've done a pretty good job of destroying that for the last fifty years in the west.

"We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful."

<comment><USER10> Yet violence has dropped impressively in the west in the last 50 years, both in crime statistics and in the absence of wars between major powers. And the last 50 years mark many incredible advancements in society: civil rights, gay rights, women's rights, the first attempts to take sexual violence seriously, etc. etc. etc. I'd much rather be a random American today than 50 years ago.

<comment><USER11> Agreed.

I cringe when people say how things are going for the worse constantly.

<comment><USER12> Sometimes it's because things are objectively worse. Cringing doesn't change the facts.

The original claim that we're less violent is easy to debunk, and has been debunked by many people. See e.g.

[http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/features/john-gray- steven-...](http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/features/john-gray-steven- pinker-violence-review)

But more than that, it's clear that economics and politics have become prime vectors for social violence in the 'developed' West: particularly economics, which has been used as an ideological excuse to destroy the possible future prospects and current living conditions of entire generations now.

Unemployment in - say - Spain for the under-25s is more than 50%. The rate in the US is around 12%, but that disguises the fact that many 'jobs' barely pay a living wage now, where fifty years ago even starter jobs offered comfortable salaries.

The destruction has been justified by a steady stream of _clearly wrong_ 'economic theories' that don't stand up to even the most basic undergraduate- level scrutiny. See e.g.

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

So yes - things are objectively worse for many people.

The fact that some people are doing okay and a tiny minority are doing really well doesn't change that.

Getting this stuff wrong has very real long-term social and political consequences. It's irrational to ignore that.

<comment><USER13> > even starter jobs offered comfortable salaries.

Source?

<comment><USER14> one good metric: minimum wage used to be 40% higher [http://www.businessinsider.com/the-real-minimum-wage- falls-e...](http://www.businessinsider.com/the-real-minimum-wage-falls-every- year--heres-how-to-fix-that-2013-12)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The key to well functioning kids is involved parents.

The key to involved parents is less time spent working.

Americans need to get over their fetish for hard work and start staying home more. Or just stop having kids altogether and use work as the primary source of joy.

<comment><USER16> That sounds great from where you may sit but what about those families where the parents have to work long hours just to provide?

I know there are some that are definitely not in a financial position where they can do that. Working less is just not an option when you are barely making ends meet. And trust me, they would love to spend more time with their kids.</comment></comment>