Treasure in a Cornfield - <AUTHOR> http://imgur.com/gallery/tj4Ef <comment><USER2> I've lived in Kansas City for years. The Steamboat Arabia museum is a great experience. In the early days, one of the original guys would often be there and tell the whole story to groups.

Interestingly, they had a lot to learn about saving the artifacts. Since everything was submerged for so long in fresh water mud the wood artifacts would shrivel up when they dried up. For many months, they stored all the wood artifacts in one of the guy's backyard pool until they could learn how to properly transition the wood artifacts to a restored state.

<comment><USER3> Glad they knew to learn instead of being surprised by shriveled artifacts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a fantastic illustration of geological processes. Sometimes I look at hillsides and geological layers and wonder how they could ever be built up so much. How could hundreds of feet of rock be deposited little by little, to make such thick layers? Well, here it is. A boat that sank in a river is 49 feet below a cornfield only a few human generations later. Amazing.

<comment><USER5> No geology here, just geomorphology. These are surface features, and the movement of water and soil happens at a rapid clip when humanity doesn't lock it in irons.

Natural rivers are usually not static features. The Mississippi is full of sediment, and strongly inclined towards major floods. In a natural landscape, those floods deposit mud every time the banks are breached, the banks are constantly degrading, the surrounding areas are swampy, flattened areas that get reshaped on a regular basis. A natural floodplain-river exists in a dynamic equilibrium, constantly shifting a tiny to medium-sized trickle of water around a vast, deep, soft bed of mud it deposited, only occasionally bumping into the hills (geological or aeolian features usually) bordering the floodplain.

What's strange and unnatural is that we could draw a line on a map, expect a river to be confined to this line, and reinforce that line with rock walls and soil levies; That we could dam major portions of the continental watershed in order to regularize water distribution; That we could drain swamps the size of states and turn them into cropland, or fill prairie or desert with canals to do the same.

We have cut off this area from the natural cycles of sedimentation, all but the most extreme "natural disasters" are prevented through intensive engineering began sometime in the 20th century. Because we needed to make spring planting. We replaced the silty mud that made the region such great cropland with chemical fertilizers & pesticides, and specialized farm equipment.

<comment><USER6> Either we feed our species, or we die. Granted, we as Americans eat too much and waste too much, but even if we all stuck to 2000 calories a day and cleaned our plates doing it, 19th century and prior farming techniques would simply not support our current population. And I disagree with your last sentence. Fertilizers and pesticides don't replace dirt, they make it more effective at growing crops.

<comment><USER5> Of course.

I just feel the need to push back against the people who think about agriculture as some kind of natural ecological outgrowth. Ag changes the ecology of a landscape enormously, and the accomodations to ag end up reshaping the physical character of things so much we forget what they originally looked like or how they originally functioned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's really interesting that 45 vertical ft of silt can pile up on top of something in 150 years.

<comment><USER8> Makes you wonder what you walk over every day hidden beneath your feet.

<comment><USER9> In Europe, that could be anything from Roman ruins to unexploded WW2 bombs.

Most suitably large construction digs will turn up something of archaeological interest.

<comment><USER10> That's what happened during the dig for our (Bloomberg) new London HQ. A ton of stuff was unearthed and will be featured in an exhibit on the site once the office opens.

"'Entire streets' of Roman London uncovered in the City": [http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england- london-22084384](http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-22084384)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I went to this museum on a road trip when I was a kid. It is truly amazing and I have thought back on the experience a lot throughout the years. Go check it out if you have the chance. You wont regret it.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm dying to know if they actually got the excavation done before the spring planting.

<comment><USER13> Yes they did, and I can recommend the museum, they are down to the last 60 tons or so of material being restored.

One of the reasons they had to finish on time was that as soon as it got reliably above freezing the sandy "walls" of the excavation would no longer hold and the entire pit would subside into a depression. Fortunately they avoided that.

Other interesting bits are that because the mud had locked out transpiration of any additional air, once the oxygen was used up it stayed that way, so a number of things which would not have normally survived, did. For example, according to the museum, they have the only examples of rubber boots from that era anywhere in the world.

The other really fascinating thing for me was that the steamship was supplying stores along the river, and because of that it had pretty much one of everything you could buy at a store, and as a result you get to see the _entire_ contents of what would have been a hardware store on display. And that gives you a really good idea of what you could build/make with the tools that you could buy, and what tools you would have to make if you wanted to make something that those tools couldn't build. That sort of defines an interesting set for "preppers" if you imagine you are trying to "reboot" the US from scratch :-).

<comment><USER12> Yeah, this got better and better as it went on and I kept seeing more and more interesting items. I don't know when I'll end up in Kansas City, but this will be on my itinerary when I do get there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Here's an entire Roman city that was well-preserved thanks to silting and river meandering: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostia_Antica](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostia_Antica)

</comment><comment><USER15> America, I so love your craftsmanship as exemplified by many of these items. Always the practical with a touch of elegance.

</comment><comment><USER16> Great minute-earth video about river meandering [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8a3r-cG8Wic](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8a3r-cG8Wic)

</comment><comment><USER17> Wow, what a great discovery!

Some other amazing shipwrecks I saw in museums on a recent trip:

* The Vasa, a Swedish warship that sank in 1628 (in the Vasa Museum in Stockholm)

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

* The "Tang dynasty shipwreck" or Belitung shipwreck, an Arab ship that sank off the coast of Indonesia while sailing from China to Africa about 1190 years ago (in the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore -- just the artifacts onboard, not the ship).

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

I wonder if there's a list of shipwrecks that are now in museums. It seems that there must be dozens or hundreds of them around the world.

</comment><comment><USER18> > Jars of preserved food that are still edible, tested by one of the > excavators themselves, who ate a pickle from the Arabia finding it to be > still perfectly fresh.

So that happened.

<comment><USER19> The process of canning was developed to preserve food almost indefinitely. Its a sterilized air tight container. The term is _non-perishable food_ for a reason. When the process is followed correctly, there shouldn't be a biological process that can take place to cause spoiling.

<comment><USER20> Are the "don't eat me" signs of an incorrectly-followed process pretty obvious? Just wondering for next time I come across...err...out of curiosity

<comment><USER19> On modern cans the lid will be depressed inward from air pressure. If this lid is popped upwards (while still sealed) this shows that biological activity has change the air pressure within the jar... so it wasn't properly sterilized/seal on production.

I'm assuming these are Mason Jars. Which have been in use since 1858 (the patent has long expired so they're almost universal).

When dealing with something like pickles the seal isn't as important as the pickle _juice_ itself is incredibly hostile to bacterial life. The seal is more important to prevent evaporation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It is really amazing, but I'm left to wonder about something.

Now that we've dug it all up, and are exposing it to air, the items won't last nearly as long. It seems like some items should be left in an inert environment. Do they do things like that?

<comment><USER22> The museum is likely a controlled environment. The artifacts may not last quite as long as if buried in mud, but what use is them lasting longer if they are useless?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Definitely a gem of a museum if you're ever in KC.

<comment><USER23> The Liberty Memorial WWI museum's also excellent. Better in some ways than what they've got at Les Invalides in Paris. One of a handful of things in the city worth adjusting an itinerary or travel route to see/experience.

Incidentally, the Middle Eastern restaurant (Habashi House, I think it's called) on the City Market square where the Steamboat Arabia museum's located is pretty damn good. Coffee shop in the corner's got good sandwiches. Avoid the Indian place—not good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Now that is what I call _industrial_ archaeology!

</comment><comment><USER25> Amazing how well the mud preserved all those items. I would like to find a source for recreating some of the bottled food items, I wonder how much of that has changed. It is still one of the long term storage methods when done right.

With so many artifacts I wonder how many were sent to other museums if any? Time capsules, if any, from that time period would not have had such a treasure

<comment><USER26> If it's anaerobic, things can be preserved for a very long time. Check out bog bodies:

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Excavated in 1988 but still awesome!

</comment><comment><USER28> For some music for how it could _sound_ to take a keel boat up the Missouri River in the early 1800s from Saint Louis all the way to the Grand Tetons:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6_Jr_Y5FrA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6_Jr_Y5FrA)

that is, the music from the movie _The Big Sky_. So, right, the music is by Dimitri Tiomkin.

</comment><comment><USER28> How the heck did the boat get buried 45 feet deep under mud in a now level corn field?

<comment><USER29> Wikipedia on the Mississippi river:

Before 1900, the Mississippi River transported an estimated 400 million metric tons of sediment per year from the interior of the United States to coastal Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico. During the last two decades, this number was only 145 million metric tons per year.

It's not called big muddy for nothing.

<comment><USER30> It's Missouri River, not Mississippi.

Place of sinking at Google Maps: [https://goo.gl/maps/Mwvbn9KiyUQ2](https://goo.gl/maps/Mwvbn9KiyUQ2)

<comment><USER29> The Missouri is one of the major tributaries (accounting for about half the volume once it meets up), it's where the a large portion of that 400 Mt comes from

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It's cool and all, but I was hoping they would find a bunch of gold bars or something. It's kind of a bummer to go through all that and just find some shoes and canned goods... :( Actually, I'd be pretty pissed off.

<comment><USER32> Why would gold bars be cooler? Gold can be bought on the regular market. 150 years old pickles are rarer.</comment></comment>


Duqu trojan written in mystery programming language - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/08/duqu_trojan_mystery_code_riddle/

<comment><USER2> I'm not an expert in computer languages, but it seems like their information in that article is a little vague to pick out a language?

Couldn't the programmers just write their own language too, doesn't java/any of the lisps have that capability?

<comment><USER3> More details about the mystery language can be seen in the referenced source of the article: [http://www.securelist.com/en/blog/667/The_Mystery_of_the_Duq...](http://www.securelist.com/en/blog/667/The_Mystery_of_the_Duqu_Framework)</comment></comment>


PSA: How php enhanced security of unserialize function in version 7 - <AUTHOR>

https://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/3j88v4/something_about_php_7_i_just_saw_in_rlolphp_why/
This might be a small thing. But I think this is a very good indicator how poorly thought out the features that are being added to the language. I could catch this by a casual glance at the new features. Imagine how many horrors will be hidden deep in it.
I am making this post to make people look into the matter and to decide for themselves if they want to subscribe to the hype php's marketing machinery is generating for version 7. Also, this shows how the community views these issues. They just don't see anything wrong with it.
Posts like this that exposes bad things about the langauge are downvoted and posters often banned without a warning from /r/php.
Even civil comments that speak against big names in the community are blindly downvoted and hidden. See this thread [1].
So just be warned. The language is as bad as ever. The community, even the best part of it, is still ages behind. Both in thought and in practices.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/3j4p3u/rfc_short_closures_for_71/cumnfs6 <comment><USER2> meh.

it's opt-in to downgrade security. so typos, wrong data, etc would keep the good safety.

it's backward compatible.

and above all, if you really cared you would have written at least a decent use case that actually serialized a single class and submitted to places the dev look, like the several anonymous forms on the site.

php is the most convenient project to send bugs to. zero logins. but you choose reddit and hacker news

<comment><AUTHOR> >it's opt-in to downgrade security. so typos, wrong data, etc would keep the good safety...

Not sure I follow. Please explain.

>if you really cared you would have written at least a decent us..

And the point is not about fixing this issue. The point is to show that the php development is still follows the same path that it has been following since the beginning. The same path that resulted in so many weird behaviors and pit falls. I don't see any reason why the language can be thought as 'improving'. As claimed by legions of php users. Please note that I don't consider simply increasing the feature count of the language as 'improving'.

>php is the most convenient project to send bugs to. zero logins. but you choose reddit and hacker news

I really don't care about improving the language because I don't think it is possible. It is a lost cause. The only think that can be done is to spread awareness of its gross inferiority.</comment></comment>


How an ex-FBI profiler helped put an innocent man behind bars - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-profiler-wrongful-conviction-20170720-htmlstory.html <comment><USER2> Worth noting that the submitter of this story, user ClintEhrlich, played a main role in freeing the wrongly-convicted man. He posted about it on HN a couple years back, in a highly upvoted and discussed thread (500+ upvotes, 200+ comments): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12010760](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12010760)

Edit: it's an ironic coincidence that this follow-up feature was published on the same day of the news of O.J. Simpson's parole: [http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-oj-simpson-parole- board-...](http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-oj-simpson-parole- board-20170720-story.html)

Simpson is being paroled for a robbery conviction 9 years ago but of course his most famous run-in with the law was when he was acquitted of double-murder despite a huge amount of forensic evidence linking him to the homicides (he later lost a civil suit, which has a lower standard of evidence).

In the case described by the OP, the jury voted to convict in the total absence of physical, forensic evidence. It's astonishing that this profiler's beliefs were enough to sway the jury beyond a reasonable doubt but even more grotesque is how a clusterfuck of dumb, unverified assumptions led the profiler to his conclusions. He blames the detectives for not doing "Investigation 101", and says he would not have testified if only he had known the detectives were so negligent.

As much blame as the profiler deserves (he basically comes off as reliable as a psychic), seems like a large portion of blame should go to the district attorney, who presumably knew he was so short of evidence that he had to base his case on the profiler's testimony. Can't imagine what was going through the jury's heads; prosecutors often complain how modern juries demand the presence of DNA because of how TV dramas like CSI portray and hype DNA and other evidence as ubiquitous and unimpeachable, but this jury seems to have had the completely opposite mindset.

<comment><USER3> My feeling has always been that we should reengineer our jury system. Jurists should be professionals, not a random nobody pulled from the community. They should be independent, private employees with a code of ethics and training in skepticism and the sciences of statistics and evidence. Also, they could specialize in fields relevant to certain cases. In our current system, we look for the most ignorant juries so that the lawyers can fill their heads with whatever knowledge they please, unencumbered by facts.

In the new system, professional jurists would be paid for by the courts, but not directly employed by them or the government. The prosecution and defense could have their pick that they must agree on just like now, but they would be basing their pick on the professional reputation of the jurist, not exploitable characteristics or ignorance.

<comment> white-flame I have heard that the intent of the term "trial by peers" was that the jury should be full of people with understanding and similarly experienced to the accused, so they would be well-versed in the specific nuance and details around the accusations. Like if a banker was on trial for financial crimes, the jury should be randomly selected bankers.

Jury selection today specifically selects against "peers" of the accused. (and as you also mentioned, against "peers" of anything in general :-P )

<comment><USER4> Peers in context are your fellow citizens nothing more.

<comment><USER5> Peers is a word that could be unpacked to mean more than just fellow citizens though, and to prove that it originally meant only fellow citizens runs into all the problems inherent in authorial intent multiplied by the number of people who worked on the constitution. Hence the need for supreme court interpretation.

Peers in context have been interpreted to mean your fellow citizens, nothing more.

Although I'd like to note that letting a jury of bankers sit on a financial crime might mean no banker ever got convicted. So the whole more exacting definition of peers argument has some definite problems.

<comment><USER6> > Peers is a word that could be unpacked to mean more than just fellow > citizens though, and to prove that it originally meant only fellow citizens > runs into all the problems inherent in authorial intent multiplied by the > number of people who worked on the constitution.

No, it absolutely does not, because neither the phrase nor any alternative phrase on the subject incorporating a reference to "peers" appears in the Constitution, which instead provides (in the Sixth Amendment) for an "impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law". (It is a common rephrasing of a guarantee—"the lawful judgment of his peers"—in _Magna Carta_ which unmistakably was an product of the barons' insistence that members of their formal social station should render verdicts against them.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Profiling, like much of "criminal science" such as Arson Investigation is a large part unsubstantiated bullshit. It's amazing how poorly regulated all of it is and how many innocent people are in prison, or executed, because of it.

<comment><USER8> DNA testing too, complete nonsense

<comment><USER9> Unfair sarcasm. DNA is one of the _very_ few forensic tools with any hard science behind it. Even fingerprints can lead to highly conflicting "expert" opinions.

<comment><USER10> You can get "DNA" at every barbershop. Every overtrusted tool will become a weakspot.

<comment><USER11> And you leave fingerprints on everything you touch. But, it's all we've got as far as hard evidence aside from testimony and camera recording.

<comment><USER12> Basically all we have is camera recordings because 'eye-witness' testimony is notoriously bad.

<comment><USER13> Machine Learning will put a stop to that there are several project right now working completely fabricate audio and video in realistic ways...

<comment><USER8> Yep check these guys out: [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/24/voice_stealing_lyre...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/24/voice_stealing_lyrebird/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This Safarik guy sounds like a real piece of shit. Absolutely zero remorse for telling a tall tale in front of a judge and jury which led to a man spending 11 years in prison for something he didn't do.

> "Like other killers I've known, he's also arrogant and narcissistic — fatal > traits that led to his demise," Safarik says. "This was all his doing…. > Ultimately, he was responsible for it."

I only see arrogance and narcissism coming from one person in the story told, and it wasn't from Jennings.

<comment><USER15> His ego does seem completely out of control. Safarik seems to take himself way too seriously while simultaneously treating other people with little regard

<comment><USER16> Well, after all, he worked for the FBI.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've been skeptical of FBI profilers ever since they declared that the Unabomber had attended college or trade school but not graduated. [1] It turned out that he had a PhD and had been a professor.

[1] [http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Mixed-Success-for-FBI- Age...](http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Mixed-Success-for-FBI-Agents-in- Profiling-2987140.php)

</comment><comment><USER18> The big crime is how little epistemological support there is for some of the big forensic tools (fingerprints, DNA, bite marks, arson spread, etc), how little interest there is in researching these areas, and how trusted they are.

But I am curious: apart from TV shows, how important is this kind of evidence in most trials? Is it actually uncommon?

<comment><USER19> From what I understand DNA has gotten pretty good when used responsibly, but the rest are no better than reading a chicken's entrails. Have I perhaps been misinformed about DNA?

<comment><USER20> Is comparing fingerprints _really_ "no better than reading a chicken's entrails?" I could understand things like trying to guess based on similarities with a partial print, but comparing two full prints seems like it would be pretty easy.

<comment><USER19> You would think, but even "experts" on fingerprinting call it at best an art. It can be affected by bias[1], and there's no standard for declaring a match[2](same case as [1]).

> I could understand things like trying to guess based on similarities with a > partial print

That's really the rub, pun intended I guess, there are no clean neatly pressed fingerprints left on object collected by police, generally speaking.

[1][http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211368113...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211368113000028)

[2][http://www.cbsnews.com/news/fingerprints-infallible- evidence...](http://www.cbsnews.com/news/fingerprints-infallible-evidence/)

<comment><USER21> The stuff in this thread about fingerprints matching algorithms and DNA lab errors -- does that mean we shouldn't even use it as exculpatory evidence?

<comment><USER22> It's easier for evidence to say the person is innocent than guilty. Ex: a blurry video of a white guy. It's in no way enough to show which white person did it, but it is enough to show no black person did.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is there any possibility of this man Safarik being punished? Can Safarik be sued and held accountable for destroying eleven years of an innocent man's life?

I feel like some sort punishment is due towards ruthless opportunistic people like these. (I would say the same about the people who pursued Swartz even after MIT & JSTOR dropped the case.)

<comment><USER24> > _I feel like some sort punishment is due towards ruthless opportunistic > people like these. (I would say the same about the people who pursued Swartz > even after MIT & JSTOR dropped the case.)_

How could you possibly prosecute people for the Swartz case? They were simply seeking the punishment that the law specifies. If you don't like the law, then lobby to have it changed. If you want it to be less vigorously enforced, then vote for a President/Governor/DA that will enforce it less vigorously. You can't put people in jail for following the law.

<comment><USER22> There is following the law, and there is knowingly conviction of an innocent. This is the second one, and IMO there really should be penalties for this.

<comment><USER25> Now I'm wondering what it would be like if fake honeypot cases with actors scripted with an obviously inappropriate implicit offer of a seemingly lucrative reward for straying from true justice were routinely run as a part of policy to catch bad lawyers and judges. I don't see how it could hurt for them to be subjected to ongoing surprise tests of whether they're worthy of being involved in the justice system. Heck, let's extend it to politicians while we're at it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> What is fair compensation for innocent victims put behind bars?

When wrongly convicted inmates are freed from prison, I think it reasonable to remunerate them per year of jail time, with accelerating penalties (as more years are lost to jail, opportunity is taken away at an accelerating rate; 20 years lost to prison is far more than 10 times worse than 2 years lost to prison, for example).

The base rate of $550,000 tax-free per year for lost work/family/life opportunity and pain/suffering seems eminently fair to me, with escalating amounts per year, as stated before. Probably could get behind a permanent waiver of personal income tax for life on any income under $200,000/year as well.

<comment><USER27> I agree that the victims of false imprisonment deserve a heck of a lot more than they get now, but one thing to consider is that mandating things like this may lead to fewer convictions being overturned due to the costs it would incur. It wouldn't help at all if the requirements just keep more innocent people in prison longer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> "Safarik spent more than a decade studying serial killings, sexual assaults and stalking cases."

no history of gang crime, "didn't have a boyfriend or a criminal record", "wallet left", "Mustang wasn't taken", "parking lot was lighted and patrolled", Her tube top was pulled down exposing her breasts." -> "sexual assault". "wipes his hand over his brow" -> guilty.

Imagine Safarik was a Machine Learning algorithm. More than a decade's worth of training data led to a model that predicted Jennings to be guilty.

The counter-evidence (phone missing, no scratch marks) wasn't part of the model.

In his defence, Safarik denies "assigning too much weight to [evidence]. It was the totality of things that shaped his finding."

Likewise, it is difficult to fix errors in a Machine Learning model once it is trained. The "totality of things" is the history of other crimes the model has investigated.

Can Deep Learning do the same job as criminal profilers? Are they as accurate? Should their predictions be trusted, when the consequence of failure is 11 years of prison for an innocent man?

</comment><comment><USER29> Evidence handling and testing should be independent of law enforcement and prosecution. It should be handled the way environmental testing or weights- and-measures are tested by state authorities - with no incentive to "win" on behalf of prosecutors.

</comment><comment><USER30> I remember this case from when it happened. I can't believe it's been that long. It seemed pretty obvious at the time that the parking lot guard was innocent. The DA was stuck on the idea that if he was doing his job he would have made her leave. And if he didn't make her leave, he must have murdered her. It just didn't pass the sniff test.

<comment><USER31> Does he float? If he sinks, he wasn't a witch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Might as well convict a person based on tea leaves....

<comment><USER33> Or HN Karma

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> So a good story teller who can weave physical items into a cohesive narrative. Shouldn't these folks work for Disney and not the justice system?</comment>


Wheelhouse: How Technology Changes the Meaning of Words - <AUTHOR> http://priceonomics.com/wheelhouse-how-technology-changes-the-meaning-of/ <comment><USER2> > The term "wheelhouse" was also used in the rail yard. When a train came to > the end of the line, it had to turn around to go back the way it came; this > was usually accomplished by using an enormous circular turntable that > rotated the train. These turntables were often covered, or partially > covered, with a building so that maintenance work on the locomotive could be > carried out indoors between runs. The buildings were commonly called > roundhouses but were also known as wheelhouses.

When a train came to the end of the line (or even a division point in the middle), the _engine_ was often rotated on a turntable. Not the train, just the engine.

The roundhouse was built _around_ the turntable. It was not a cover _over_ the turntable.

And I have _never_ heard of a roundhouse being called a wheelhouse. It is by far _not_ standard terminology, if it was ever used that way.</comment>


On Fungibility, Bitcoin, Monero and why ZCash is a bad idea - <AUTHOR> http://weuse.cash/2016/06/09/btc-xmr-zcash/ <comment><USER3> This is a very one-sided discussion which makes it seem like it was written by a person who wants Monero's value to rise. It doesn't mention any drawbacks of Monero - like poor scalability - that blocks it's wide adoption. There's also a good deal of FUD around Dash and Zcash, which has been quickly refuted on reddit [1].

Apart from that I liked this post and it shone some light on issues I wasn't aware of.

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/4nai1r/on_fungibility_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/4nai1r/on_fungibility_bitcoin_monero_and_why_zcash_is_a/)

<comment><USER4> Note that Monero's scalability problem also exists in Zcash - an indefinitely growing list of spent tokens; if scalability is a drawback of Monero it's a drawback for Zcash.

<comment><USER5> An indefinitely growing list of spent transactions is the least of Monero's scaling issues. Monero doesn't scale to large anonymity sets.

Monero uses CryptNote's ring signature approach, which scales linearly with the number of coins you want to mix with. Want to fully mix 1,000 coins together? You need a 30kb transaction[0]. You chunk those coins into smaller mixing sets, but then they aren't fully mixed. In anything using this approach, your anonymity set is limited by what you can transmit across the network in any given transaction or a small set of transactions. I've never seen an exact proposal for mixing tx size and I'd be very interested to see one, but if it was more than 100 coins per tx I'd be surprised.

In ZCash, transactions are constant size and are fully mixed with every other coin in the current anonymity set.

Both approaches do have the indefinitely growing list of spent tokens issue. Which in practice means you need to move coins into a new anonymity set after e.g. 2^32 serial numbers and throw away the old coins and spent serial number list[1]. So there is an inherent limit on the maximal anonymity set you get out of any anonymous ecash scheme. Zerocash hits that limit. Due to its per transaction scaling issues, CryptoNote simply can't.

As a result, in ZCash, your coin is hidden amongst all the coins in the maximal anonymity set. In Cryptonote/Monero, it's hidden amongst a far smaller fraction of that set. In Monero, you are far less anonymous. All things being equal, you want to be more anonymous.

Of course, all other things are not equal. There are merits to both Zerocash and CryptNote on a technical level, but scalability isn't where CryptNote shines.

[0] Assume one group element per signature in the ring at 32 bytes per element. The real scheme is likely worse.

[1] There more sophisticated approaches that can be used.

<comment><USER6> > which scales linearly with the number of coins you want to mix with. Want to > fully mix 1,000 coins together? You need a 30kb transaction

Actually, it does not scale linearly, it scales logarithmically in the worst case.

If you create a transaction to send 1543XMR, it splits it into 4 pieces: 1000, 500, 40, and 3, respectively. Each of these transactions are put into a ring signature, where the other transactions in the ring are selected from the pool of all other transactions of the same size, since the creation of the network. I'm not sure why you think that it scales linearly on the amount of coins sent.

Edit: Unless you mean, "to achieve perfect anonymity, you need to mix your coins with every other transaction of the same size, which scales linearly with the total number of transactions performed since the start of the network", in which case, yes. It is linear. But thats serious overkill, theres no reason to have a ring size that large.

<comment><USER5> Yes, I meant perfect anonymity.

If we consider imperfect anonymity, we need to consider more than the size of the anonymity set, we need to consider how likely it is a given coin in the anonymity set is the actual one we are hiding. This is a bayesian thing that depends on that attackers prior knowledge. For many coins it may be vanishingly close to zero. Which means they don't really contribute to the anonymity set. Which means you can end up with a large looking anonymity set that is equivalent to a perfect anonymity set of say 5 coins.

How big is the anonymity set for a given CryptoNote transaction? You might think it 1) clearly is at least the size of all the coins in the tx and 2) actually it's the union of those coins anonymity sets. But what are the probabilities? I don't know. But consider a few possible issues.

If you sample the coins in the mixing set for your tx uniformly from the whole blockchain, than many of them will be very old, but the actual coin you are spending is likely new. This also applies to the sets you are taking the union of. Couple this with other issues such as long term intersection attacks, and it gets very hard to say how much anonymity you really have. Especially because we don't know what techniques the companies that are doing coin tracing have and more significantly, what third party data they are correlating with beyond just the blockchain. Perfect anonymity and very large anonymity sets is the best defense we have against this stuff.

<comment><USER7> Unsurprisingly, there exists research by the Monero Research Lab highlighting temporal association attacks and other possibilities.

[https://lab.getmonero.org/pubs/MRL-0001.pdf](https://lab.getmonero.org/pubs/MRL-0001.pdf) [https://lab.getmonero.org/pubs/MRL-0004.pdf](https://lab.getmonero.org/pubs/MRL-0004.pdf)

As to your last statement: even if the supposition is that the true signer is the most recent output on the blockchain, that is nothing but an unprovable supposition, which means that Monero enables plausible deniability at the very least.

Since transactions are both unlinkable (for any two outgoing transactions it is impossible to prove they were sent to the same person) and untraceable (for each incoming transaction all possible senders are equiprobable) the anonymityset continues to grow, which makes the privacy risk cryptographically negligible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In practice, many of the gatekeepers to the layman using Bitcoin require so much documentation that anonymity should not be a major selling point. Perhaps you can acquire a few thousands USD worth that is anonymous, but trying to scale that anonymity doesn't go easily. Ironically, the needlessly growing inquisition into how I was using Bitcoin is what forced me to close my Coinbase account. They pretty much require the same information as a bank does, including photocopies of your state ID, even tax documents.

Having used a handful of the exchanges and other more casual wallets like Circle, it's obvious that the trend is towards more "security" and legitimacy by vetting users and knowing their real world identities, etc. Which can include Skype interview, scanning personal bills to prove addresses and so forth.

<comment><USER9> This is not really specific to Bitcoin, but to any player/system that is going to become popular and thus used/supported by companies and/or integrated with the rest of global infrastructure.

The laws in almost everywhere (except niche jurisdictions that treat holding offshore accounts as their main industry) pretty much require you to know your customer and not be an enabler of any anonymous transfers of money - <USER2> alternatively, be treated as responsible for any "bad" money passing through you.

Any institution that would enable you to trade a scalable amount of USD for Monero or some new cryptopayment solution would also have to require the same information to know your real world identity.

Any institution that would enable you to trade a significant amount of such new cryptocurrency for USD would be required (perhaps not immediately, but definitely if/when it becomes sufficiently popular) to report that to IRS, who would then request documentation about the transactions and originators where you obtained that amount (which you surely reported when filing your taxes, didn't you?), and it doesn't really matter that much that the blockchain is anonymous since essentially you'll give them the transaction details anyway or go to jail.

If no institutions enable that, then the cryptocurrency cannot be liquid enough for everyday use, as it's not easy to trade it with other liquid currencies.

<comment><USER10> A major feature of untraceability is that exchanges can know your identity in this way, yet your transactions still remain confidential.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm always surprised how people seem to focus on bitcoin's alleged anonymity. It was quite clear from the beginning that bitcoin is not completely anonymous, or rather that it is not more anonymous than internet itself is. Just as you don't have to give your name or a photocopy of your passport to register to a website, you don't have to do that either to use bitcoin. So to a degree it is anonymous, but only when compared to other payments systems like Paypal for instance.

This relative anonymity is not what attracted the vast majority of bitcoin users anyway. It was more the idea of a public, decentralized ledger.

<comment><USER12> >> it is not more anonymous than internet itself is

It's less anonymous than that. Not a 100% accurate analogy but this would be similar to having your browsing history stored in a public location mapped to your IPs.

<comment><USER11> There are no IPs in the blockchain, are there?

<comment><USER12> there are btc addresses tied to your wallet (in my analogy this would be an IP address) mapped to transactions with a major kicker being that the coin involved in these transactions is traceable back to where you acquired it and then back to where it was mined in the first place.

so my analogy is actually less 'severe' than the reality of the bitcoin setup.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Good read till the "Enter Monero" line :)

I'd also mention that bitcoin had a BIP at some point to add stealth address support to the core (BIP63) with a couple of wallets providing support for those.

<comment><USER7> Stealth addresses aren't nearly enough. It needs to be mandatory stealth addresses + some sort of mandatory passive mixing that can't be Sybil attacked + Confidential Transactions. At a minimum.

<comment><USER4> Yup, Stealth Addresses are just a small fix to one usecase, not a general solution. And I say this as the guy who came up with the name and played a part in developing the exact protocol Dark Wallet implemented (many others deserve credit, including for the underlying math).

<comment><USER12> Just mentioned those since the OP's article is talking about monero using stealth addresses but doesn't mention these when talking about bitcoin.

SX and DarkWallet was what kind of pulled me personally into the bitcoin "ecosystem", very entertaining read trying to understand all of that :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sounds like a Monero pump to me

<comment><USER7> This is an utterly stupid comment. If you read an article that slammed MongoDB's eventual consistency and encouraged people to use mysql instead would you call it a "mysql pump?

This is also not the first time someone has smacked down ZCash for being ill- conceived and dangerous: [https://blog.okturtles.com/2016/03/the-zcash- catch/](https://blog.okturtles.com/2016/03/the-zcash-catch/)

<comment><USER14> Your comments in this thread are unfortunately breaking the HN guidelines, by calling names and generally being uncivil. Please don't present your argument that way. It poisons the atmosphere and makes your argument less credible. Instead, please refresh your memory about what HN is looking for by reading the following, and then post civilly and substantively (or not at all) in the future.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html)

<comment><USER7> That's fair enough, but consider that SakiWatanabe's comment is equally uncivil and insulting to an open-source project and the contributors that have built it. Why is that allowed, but when I call that person out I get SJW safe- space thrown at me? Don't you think that is hypocritical as a moderation strategy?

<comment><USER14> I didn't notice that comment. It's bad because it's a shallow dismissal, but yours were worse because you called names and conducted yourself flamewar- style, and you did it repeatedly in the thread.

I don't think it's hypocritical, for a couple reasons: (1) it's impossible for us to read all the comments, and (2) one bad comment doesn't justify another.

HN is not a good place to "call that person out"—that just causes threads to degenerate nastily. On HN, an appropriate way to respond to such a comment might be to remind the commenter that unsubstantive dismissals aren't helpful, and then point out some relevant good things about the article.

<comment><USER7> Fair enough, I retract my name-calling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Another problem with ZCash is the fact that it's brand new cryptography.

It's using libsodium. This is an alarmist and false statement.

> Nobody can really guarantee that there aren't some bugs in the system that > will make it possible to deanonymize transactions or create coins out of > thin air.

Sure, that's technically true of all crypto-currencies.

<comment><USER7> You can't be serious. It's using libsodium in one part of the code, so therefore ALL cryptography uses libsodium? You do know that Bitcoin has already switched most of the secp256k1 stuff away from OpenSSL and to libsecp256k1, and ZCash will follow suit?

But more importantly than that it uses libsnark for the actual clever bits, which has already been critically broken[1] precisely because it is so new and poorly tested.

Even the cryptography in ZeroCash/ZeroCoin is too new to be trusted with a financial system. That is not alarmist, that is practical. Relying on old, established cryptography is precisely why Bitcoin hasn't been trivially broken, and the zk-snarks cryptography will need to go through the same peer- review and refinement process over the next decade or two.

[1] [https://leastauthority.com/blog/a_bug_in_libsnark.html](https://leastauthority.com/blog/a_bug_in_libsnark.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The navigation header effect is infuriating.</comment>


Show HN: Npmcdn – A CDN for stuff you publish to npm - <AUTHOR> https://npmcdn.com <comment><USER2> bug: [Error] Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 404 (HTTP/2.0 404) (fetch.min.js, line 0)

when trying to GET [https://npmcdn.com/fetch.min.js](https://npmcdn.com/fetch.min.js)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, great catch! I never see that error because that file is only loaded in browsers that don't have a native window.fetch. Thanks for catching that. Will fix right away.</comment></comment>


New responsive website for Paris - <AUTHOR> http://www.paris.fr

<comment><USER2> Thanks gov.uk for the gds blog and the inspiration.

Hope you'll like it.

</comment><comment><USER2> [http://m.imgur.com/bWL5UZd](http://m.imgur.com/bWL5UZd)

Hai from the launch party !

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Front-end lead dev here, I would be happy to answer questions :)

<comment><USER3> Parisian here, good job! This is awesome! Compared to the old one it's an order of magnitude better!</comment></comment>


Opening the Gates to the Tech World: A Proposal - <AUTHOR> http://samuelstern.wordpress.com/2013/02/05/opening-the-gates-to-the-tech-world/

<comment><USER2> Personally, my barrier to entry was not time, but access to books, someone knowledgeable, software and hardware. Once I gained those, I made the time. You make those available and kids will make the time, I think.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that access is also a barrier, and I think the proposal I made kills both birds with one stone. I also think that in 2013 the access to materials is increasing, almost everyone has some device that can get on Google/Wikipedia and in many cases that's all you need. However most people don't sit down and take time to learn for the sake of learning because it makes more sense to apply themselves to graded homework, which is said to pay off down the road, or get a job that pays in the short term but teaches almost nothing. If learning WAS the short term job, many more people might have the chance to discover their passions.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is something I have been thinking about for a while, and I really want to know what people on HN think. If you agree with me, or if you disagree, please leave a comment as I'd love to discuss.</comment>


Tell HN: AWS Console takes forever to load - <AUTHOR> Hi HN,<p>Since today morning, I couldn't login to the AWS Management Console. Is there anyone facing the issue? <comment><USER2> I am on the east coast of the U.S. and I've been on and off it this morning, no issues. Just double checked it now and all is good.</comment>


India's Great Parcel Race - <AUTHOR> http://graphics.wsj.com/indias-great-parcel-race/ <comment><USER2> e-commerce changed the way people buy things here in remote places in India. They could buy things that was not even in their dreams few years back. E-commerce advertisements cover most front pages of newspapers now. More startups are coming up in logistics space. Amazon, Alibaba etc has started investing here seeing the market potential. Logistics here is a big problem. Since local sellers are feeling the heat, they are doing everything they can to stop e-commerce players.

<comment><USER3> How will this impact people? Many of those local sellers already are very poor. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that families are starving as a consequence. For example, thousands of farmers in India are committing suicide per year, apparently due to economic conditions.

<comment><USER4> The suicide by drinking pesticides were happening for a long time, especially since mid-90s. The rate of increase has more to do with public policy , price controls and sub-par pesticides, fertilizers and seeds. The cock-tail of GATT, WTO restriction on farmer subsidies coupled with price controls and adulterated products, has created the farmer suicide hell.

ECommerce and logistics have nothing to do with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> tldr: Distance: 1,865.9 km Delivery Cost: 45 rupees ($0.70) Modes of transport: Three Time in transit: 32 hours 25 minutes Total time: Two days, 19 hours, 6 minutes

That's pretty good.

<comment><USER6> I'd say it's pretty sad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "India's per capita income (nominal) was $ 1570 in 2013."

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

So like 30-50 times less than a "western" country. :/

<comment><USER4> India is a very divided country. So, if you are catering to top 10% of the population you are already in the ball-park of 100 million people, that pretty much beats out every Western country except USA. The number in middle class is about 400million, that is the number to focus at least for immediate future. The rest of 800 million, well, God Bless them!

<comment><USER6> ... because India won't take care of them?

<comment><USER7> There is little justice in India if you do no have some kind of influence. So if you are poor = little real justice = yes, India currently doesnt care very well for their poor.

<comment><USER8> True, and not necessarily a situation unique to India.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am very to surprised to see article talking about Shopclues, which is notoriously famous for sending counterfiet items instead of genuine. You could buy pirated Windows or Xbox/PS game DVDs from that site.

</comment><comment><USER10> The lack of a consistent address system in India is definitely a challenge for a lot of provisioning (my address includes the phrase "Lot where the Cotton Mill was").</comment>


Intel Atom chips have been dying for at least 18 months - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/07/intel_atom_failures_go_back_18_months/ <comment><USER2> Nasty if true, I have 18 atom C2550 touch screen PC's in use in client locations all are now about 18 months old and out of customer warranty but I am going to be in a bit of a moral dilemma if a processor fails prematurely due to this.

Question is how would I even tell if the fault was down to a faulty CPU and what should my moral obligations be to clients considering I am unlikely to get replacement motherboards off the manufacturer?

</comment><comment><USER3>
      which results in bricked systems

Is that choice of "bricked" deliberate? When I see "bricked", I assume irreparable and all contents unrecoverable -- does such a failure go _beyond_ the Atom and destroy _data_ as well?

<comment><AUTHOR> Cisco's advisory on the issue states: "Once the component has failed, the system will stop functioning, will not boot, and is not recoverable."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As the Watergate scandal taught us, the cover-up is almost always _much_ worse than the obvious alternative -- publicly admitting the mistake and making amends.

</comment><comment><USER5> Would be interesting to know exactly why, at the transistor level, it is failing.</comment>


20 states take aim at 3D gun company, sue to get files off the Internet - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/07/20-states-take-aim-at-3d-gun-company-sue-to-get-files-off-the-internet/ <comment><AUTHOR> See also: [https://www.scribd.com/document/385100943/Letter- Washington-...](https://www.scribd.com/document/385100943/Letter-Washington-v- Defense-Distributed-7-31-18)</comment>


Dishwasher Cooking: Make Your Dinner While Cleaning The Plates - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/08/25/214799882/dishwasher-cooking-make-your-dinner-while-cleaning-the-plates <comment><USER2> Also consider cooking with your car:

[http://www.wikihow.com/Cook-Food-on-Your- Car%27s-Engine](http://www.wikihow.com/Cook-Food-on-Your-Car%27s-Engine)

[http://www.amazon.com/Manifold-Destiny-Guide-Cooking- Engine/...](http://www.amazon.com/Manifold-Destiny-Guide-Cooking- Engine/dp/1416596232/)

<comment><USER3> Mythbusters also tried it (with the help of Alton Brown) in their "Surreal Gourmet Hour" episode ([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqABijWMlxA](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqABijWMlxA)). Incidentally, that episode also had a bit on cooking with a dishwasher but it was cut ([http://mentalfloss.com/article/13132/mythbustersalton- brown-...](http://mentalfloss.com/article/13132/mythbustersalton-brown- experiment-you-didnt-see)).

<comment><USER4> Interesting, I watched that episode in the UK and both the cooking on the car and cooking with the dishwasher parts were in there.

<comment><USER5> They cut the episodes shorter in the US to fit more ads. I haven't seen the episode in question, but the amount of cut time might be enough to remove a small segment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good chefs will always tell you: Use the right knife for the right job. Can we not simply use our kitchen appliances and tools for what they were designed for? The author suggests (and I'm inclined to agree) that using a dishwasher to poach salmon is a fairly wasteful use of electricity and water. If you want poached salmon, get out a pot and some water. If you're really particular you could buy a cheap thermometer to poach at whatever temperature you choose, and I'd be willing to bet you'd get more consistent results than using a large machine designed to clean plates. I'm all for new techniques and ideas in the kitchen, but this is a fad that should not and will not stick around for long.

<comment><USER7> > Good chefs will always tell you: Use the right knife for the right job. Can > we not simply use our kitchen appliances and tools for what they were > designed for?

I guess you never used a torch to reverse sear meat? The right knife for the job is the one that gets the best results. I do agree that there are probably better ways to get the same results, but if you dishwasher gets you the exact temps you need, go for it. I do a lot of sous vide steaks in a large cooler.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Could this be considered a derivative of Sous-vide[0]? That is, the mason jar technique is cooking in an air-tight container and temperature is at least somewhat regulated by the dishwasher. Have I had access to a cheap sous-vide machine this whole time!?

[0][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sous-vide](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sous- vide)

<comment><USER9> Sort of, but the temperature to a large extent depends on your water supply. Also, sous-vide often means cooking at low temperature for much longer than a dishwasher cycle. If you want to get into it on the cheap and are willing to experiment, a slow cooker is another option.

<comment><USER10> My dishwasher runs too quickly and my water is too hot to make this technique usable. I've had great success with a $20 crockpot and the Dorkfood DSV, a no- frills PID controller that you can get on Amazon right now for $99. Much cheaper and easier than the other Kickstarter projects or making your own with an Arduino or something.

And I didn't think about the energy angle until now, but I'd think the crockpot transfers heat much more efficiently than a dishwasher, where most of the joules are going down the drain in a short period of time.

<comment><USER11> "And I didn't think about the energy angle until now"

It doesn't matter except for greenwashing / guilt tripping purposes. Engineering analysis below or you can just trust me.

The embedded energy in food is very high, enough to cremate the food quite easily. Actually enough to cremate the food and vaporize the ashes. Takes an astounding amount of diesel to make a can of corn and deliver it to your table, for example.

WRT dishwasher salmon from the 70s (rediscovered periodically in the 80s, 90s, 00s, and 10s, just like acid, but I digress) I googled around and found a "Kentucky State University" presentation claiming farmed salmon takes 11 MJ per portion to create and deliver to your kitchen before it gets cooked. To about one sig fig 1 MJ = 1 KWh so for a family of 4 you're looking at an embedded energy of "forty" KWh to provide the salmon. Its hard to envision a cooking technique requiring more than "forty" hours at a KW or 40 KW for an hour unless you get ridiculous like using a literal rocket engine or thousands (millions?) of green eco friendly watch batteries. Maybe if you burned organically grown truffle oil in a camp stove, or made charcoal out of beef instead of hardwood and grilled on it. Its not physically possible for my dishwasher to approach even 4 KWh... I did the wiring, I know you can't draw that much current over as short of a time as one cycle...

The article also fixated on running the washer with soap on a normal load so you're really only "wasting" a fraction of its capacity, and most people don't run a washer at full capacity anyway, therefore the "waste" is typically zero.

The amortized medical costs are much higher. So one time in a thousand the package un-noticably leaks all over and everyone in the family gets horribly food poisoned when using the contaminated dishes, leading to multiple days lost labor, and little billy needs an ER visit for IV rehydration at $2K blah blah and suddenly using a crock pot or buying a real sous vide cooker starts looking like the cheapest alternative by far.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Be very careful when cooking with plastics, there are dangers in the sous vide technique if the wrong kind of bag is used.

[http://www.yourdoctorsorders.com/2012/12/sous-vide-and- plast...](http://www.yourdoctorsorders.com/2012/12/sous-vide-and-plastics/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Did anyone watch the Mythbusters episode where Alton Brown cooked a lasagne in the dishwasher?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IaT90jhuB0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IaT90jhuB0)

<comment><USER14> Damn, I need to watch more Alton Brown. _And_ more Mythbusters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is gross. Cooking salmon is all about the crispy skin. Without that, you should just eat canned salmon. Salmon is the easiest fish to cook. Put the oven on broil, burn the shit out of the fish on the skin side with a bit of oil in a pan, then put it in the oven. The top and bottom will be crusty, and it will be perfect.

If you want the canned salmon taste, put it is the dishwasher. Then again, you could just eat warmed canned salmon.

<comment><USER16> This is gross. Salmon is wasted if not eaten raw.

Or you know, it's possible that different people have different tastes.

<comment><USER17> Eat only the best Salmon raw please.

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

<comment><USER18> DO eat Raw Salmon!

I eat raw Salmon all the time. It's safe.

Either freeze it first (not ideal) or use Farmed Salmon that is treated for parasites. Soak it in vinegar before using if you are worried about bacteria on the outside.

I go for the farmed option and use Farmed Scottish Salmon (I'm in the UK) as it is proven to be safe for Sashimi. In fact, any EU-produced farmed Salmon is safe to eat raw.

[http://learnhowtomakesushi.wordpress.com/2012/07/02/you- can-...](http://learnhowtomakesushi.wordpress.com/2012/07/02/you-can-now-eat- raw-salmon-safely-fishmongers-read-on/)

Recipe:

When using supermarket Salmon I rummage around in the fridge looking for the freshest (far away date, firm body, not gooey, no 'leakage') and the most marbled with fat (the fattier the better in my experience). I use the large wedge-shaped steaks as the thin, flat tail-ends have too much surface area for the amount of meat. Farmed trout is also great eaten raw.

When I get it home I skin it and drop it into vinegar & salt for a few minutes (I wait until I see the skin start to whiten a little) before diluting it into a marinade (teriyaki sauce, soy-sauce, ginger, honey, …; or dill, chives, black pepper, …).

Leave for 15 mins to a day or so depending how 'cooked' you want it. If you are going to leave it over night add a little water or booze so the marinade doesn't overpower the delicate fish.

Pat dry with a kitchen roll. Slice into thin rectangular chunks with a large very sharp knife.

<comment><USER19> > I eat raw Salmon all the time. It's safe.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sashimi#Safety](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sashimi#Safety)

<comment><USER18> The European regulations linked there are out of date (2004). I linked to an article about the new ones.

"The study was included in a wider EU review of parasites in fishery products carried out by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), which confirmed the Scottish findings and led to the introduction of the EU freezing exemption for farmed fish in 2011".

<comment><USER19> > exemption for _farmed_ fish

A) Farmed fish only. The same fish that comes with a hefty dose of antibiotics and other tasty compounds [0], stuff that does break up but only if the fish is cooked.

B) Now, wild salmon has parasites as it grows up and spawns in fresh water. I assume this is not a contention point.

A + B + tell me again that you are OK with eating raw salmon and I'll tell you that you either like parasites or toxins :)

And, after all, all salmon sashimi you'd get in any Japanese place comes from the deep-frozen fish.

      --

[0] [http://www.albany.edu/ihe/salmonstudy/pressrelease.html](http://www.albany.edu/ihe/salmonstudy/pressrelease.html) \- First hit in Google for "eating farmed salmon raw"

<comment><USER18> If you read my first comment I said exactly that.

If it's wild — freeze it.

If it's farmed — it's probably OK (from a parasitical point-of-view).

Even in wild salmon the main risks of parasitical infection are from Tapeworm [1] (easily treatable) and Aniskasis [1][2](common in all fish, not a human parasite, usually not harmful). Plus, in the case of Anisakis cooking doesn't destroy the toxins that we react to so if it is infected theres a chance of a stomach upset and/or an allergic reaction even if cooked.

With the current crisis of overfishing wild fish in the waters around the UK the environmental argument against farmed fish is tricky and complicated. I'd sooner eat farmed fish than endangered fish or bottom-trawled fish.

As your link states, the biggest danger from eating salmon regularly is from PCBs, dioxins, dieldrin, and toxaphene etc. Freezing & cooking will do nothing for them. Plus these dangers appear in all large fish.

As for:

      after all, all salmon sashimi you'd get in any Japanese place
      comes from the deep-frozen fish.

May be the case in the US but it's not the case in the EU or, indeed, Japan.

[1][http://www.nytimes.com/1981/09/30/garden/eating-raw-fish- the...](http://www.nytimes.com/1981/09/30/garden/eating-raw-fish-the- dangers.html)

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Also a recent EMT episode of dishwasher lasagne

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08S9AmtH19o](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08S9AmtH19o)

<comment><USER21> Been a fan since the beginning

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> There's a swedish blog (and book) about alternative cooking devices such as hair-straighteners, dishwashers and coffee makers.

[http://kaffekokarkokboken.blogg.se/2013/july/alternative- coo...](http://kaffekokarkokboken.blogg.se/2013/july/alternative-cooking- devices.html)

</comment><comment><USER23> I worked in two different restaurants in the early 90s where this was the method used to bake potatoes. I have no idea if it was ever common.

<comment><USER24> Every kitchen I've ever worked in has a commercial dishwasher. These run for 2 minutes a cycle and would be completely unsuitable to baking potatoes (or anything else for that matter).

I have seen them used to wash potatoes though, to save time. I can't say I thought it was a great idea but it never seemed to kill anyone...

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> As a fan of cooking without fire, I like this.

<comment><USER26> More or less than cooking with an electric stove, which is basically the exact same type of device?

<comment><USER27> Except it uses air instead of water for conveying the heat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Title is misleading. The article clearly states that you cannot add any washing solution. So you cannot clean your plates, at the same time.

<comment><USER29> If you continue to read, though:

 _Instead of using aluminum foil, as many websites recommend, you should put the food into airtight canning jars or food vacuum bags. Then the hot water doesn 't touch the food. So you can add soap to the cycle and really clean your dishes while poaching dinner._</comment></comment>


Interesting Details of Modern Spycraft (Cladestine Communication) - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20009101-38.html

<comment><AUTHOR> The first of two linked PDFs is a really good read.

<http://www.justice.gov/opa/documents/062810complaint1.pdf></comment>


Why an Ex-Google Coder Makes Twice as Much Freelancing - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-19/why-an-ex-google-coder-makes-twice-as-much-freelancing?cmpid=BBD011916_BIZ <comment><USER2> > In some cases, the right person can be the difference between a failed and > successful product.

In ALL cases the difference is whether the company is made of the right people or not. Usually at senior levels.</comment>


Linux Voice - <AUTHOR> http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/5366

<comment><USER2> This is awesome. I noticed the digital and print price was about the same and saw this in the FAQ:

        Q. Will you create an interactive HTML 5/Ubuntu/Android/iOS/Windows
           8 appfor digital magazine delivery?

        A. We will get our magazine onto digital storefronts straight away.
           And we have ambitious plans for our own app - one where our community
           becomes part of the editorial. But to start with, we need to focus on
           getting our new magazine out of our heads and into your hands. We'll
           then be able to invest in our other ideas.

It would be really cool if they put out a nice interactive html5 app for viewing the digital version, and then open sourced it for the readers to make better (and for other magazines to use).

<comment><USER3> That's the plan (including open sourcing the app). We've just got to get the magazine up and running first.

<comment><USER4> How long do you think until it's available to buy? I like the idea, but I'm impatient. I'd buy it tonight if I could.

<comment><USER3> Well you can buy it tonight on indiegogo [1].

We expect to be in the shops in the uk in February 2014 (and we'll ship physical or digital copies to the rest of the world then). We hope to be in newsagents and book stores world wide not long after that, but it will depend on our distributors.

[1] [http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/linux- voice](http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/linux-voice)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not taking away from this announcement, but from the title I was hoping this was a new voice-command/NLP library for the raspberry pi..

<comment><USER3> The google speech API is the best that I've been able to get working on the Pi [1]. It needs a network connection though.

[1] [http://mikepultz.com/2011/03/accessing-google-speech-api- chr...](http://mikepultz.com/2011/03/accessing-google-speech-api-chrome-11/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The model is similar to lwn.net, where if you're a sub you get the great stuff straight away, if you're not you get it a week later. Which has always appealed to me.

This seems to be similar to that, with the huge difference that the article is then "freed" totally after 9 months. Great idea, I'll sign up for this.

</comment><comment><USER7> Andrew came to see us the other day and chat about their vision for Linux Voice. They know what they are doing and all have a solid publishing background so we can't wait to see how it turns out.

It's a really refreshing approach and they are committed to giving back to the FOSS community from the profits generated by it. I also really like that they plan to release the content for other uses after a brief embargo.

</comment><comment><USER8> I like this model, and hope the magazine catches on. Hopefully it will help provide one more step in figuring out how to help compensate people who do FOSS for their efforts.

Vaguely related: A thought I've been having lately is that instead of micro payments being a direct monetary thing, why not team up with ISPs, hosting providers, etc, and have an organization a "points" system similar to loyalty programs. Points can then be used to provide a discounts on hosting and bandwidth, and distributed both individually by people and by projects to contributors. This helps reduce some of the friction in transactions...

</comment><comment><USER9> Very interesting model. I am all for anything Linux and really hope this model works for them.

</comment><comment><USER10> Oh heck yes. If the content is up my alley, I'm totally in. Sure beats reading omgubuntu every day ;)

</comment><comment><USER11> How does the Indiegogo pricing compare to waiting for it to launch and subscribing at that time?

</comment><comment><USER12> What was the old Linux magazine, and why did these guys leave?

<comment><USER13> Linux Format. "Top-down meddling" was cited in this story: [http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/future-staff-fed-top-down- medd...](http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/future-staff-fed-top-down-meddling- crowdfunded-bid-launch-rival-linux-magazine)

(I used to freelance for Future years ago, and the standing joke was that, at the time, all their magazines were "something-or-other Format". When they launched a cross-stitch magazine, we were greatly disappointed it wasn't called Cross-Stitch Format.)

<comment><USER14> Oh my! Please tell me the entire magazine was actually made of Cross-Stitched pages!!! I would so like a copy. Frame a few of the good ones, use the rest as table-mats and coasters :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice!</comment>


Take a moment to relax and appreciate these lovely SVG waves of color - <AUTHOR> http://soundtocalm.com/?calmer <comment><AUTHOR> Title by Dudley Storey @dudleystorey</comment>


Mobile advertising is dead - <AUTHOR> http://cutecoder.org/business/demise-mobile-advertising/?utm_campaign=HackerNews_120320&utm_source=HackerNews&utm_medium=SasmitoAdibowo

<comment><USER2> Link goes to an incomplete WP installation.

</comment><comment><USER3> Link shows the Wordpress install wizard...</comment>


GitHub: Switch your picture with ease - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/blog/1803-switch-your-picture-with-ease

<comment><AUTHOR> Tom Preston-Werner is also the creator of Gravatar.</comment>


Making Video Games for Everyone (Not Just the Able-Bodied) - <AUTHOR> http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/06/18/making-video-games-for-everyone-not-just-the-able-bodied/?smid=tw-share

<comment><USER2> To play Devil's Advocate:

 _> In the video game "Perception," sound is as important as sight — if not more so._

So deaf people are shit out of luck? That isn't exactly _everyone_ , now is it?

'Colorblind mode' is another example. They largely only treat one form of colorblindness, when there are different types of colorblindness with different needs. Imagine the surprise for a deuteranope or protanope playing a game and enabling the "colorblind mode" only to find that the mode only caters to tritanopes? But will this game feature multiple colorblind modes?</comment>


Workshape.io: We're coming out of public beta - <AUTHOR> http://blog.workshape.io/coming-out-of-public-beta/

<comment><USER3> Novel idea to reward hiring companies for exhibiting good behaviours - <USER2> this will be easily gamed though?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, its Hung, CEO here.

Thanks for your comment - this is something we have thought long and hard about. We have placed restrictions against obvious gaming tactics (i.e requiring added team member to have the same email domain AND verify it before awarding the credit) and will be relying on these, as well as the vigilance of the community to help us identify bad actors on the platform.

As with any response strategy, its an evolving game for us. We'll keep a very close eye on how employers behave and will respond accordingly</comment></comment>


R for the Enterprise - <AUTHOR> http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/bigdata/r-offerings-1566363.html

<comment><USER2> This happened back in March. [https://blogs.oracle.com/R/entry/r_execution_in_oracle_datab...](https://blogs.oracle.com/R/entry/r_execution_in_oracle_database). It's a desperate attempt to co-opt the Red Hat approach to riches via open source support. Revolution R has been doing pretty well in this game, so Oracle is replicating. The only contribution back to the community so far has been to do a few mild updates to ROracle, the R to Oracle connector.

Oracle has basically wrapped up R and made it embedded in the Database. One nice touch is that they have made overloaded versions of most of R's base and stat functions, and let them handle the "ore" dataframes; these overloaded versons are basically wrappers on the "big-data" functions inside the DB.

If this is really interesting to you, here are a set of PDFs describing Oracles approach: [http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/options/advanced-...](http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/options/advanced- analytics/r-enterprise/index.html)

Bad news is: you are limited to Oracle approaches to scale and growth; while there's some to love, there's also lots to hate.

I worry that some of this commercialization of R is going to cause trouble, as we start having non-compatible forks of R creating non-replicable analyses. If I build a great model that can only be replicated via some vendor's proprietary approach, then it may be great for my business, but it doesn't move the field forward.

<comment><USER3> > _It's a desperate attempt to co-opt the Red Hat approach to riches via open > source support._

Yes, because Redhat is doing so much better than Oracle with its OSS approach...

And it's not like other major companies support OSS with their products, like say IBM...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Are data hackers gravitating to R? Given that Oracle and (surprisingly to me) SAS now both support R in their offerings, it seems that at least the enterprise will be taking up more R for analytics.

<comment><USER5> I've been using R because I have an amateur's interest in statistics.

As a programmer, it seems like an awkward language, although no more awkward than SAS, SPSS, etc. And as I do more analysis the language makes more sense. It's a special-purpose language made to do a specific task.

The general workflow for doing data analysis is 1) import the data 2) clean it and format it properly as input for a pre-built package that does the actual analysis 3) feed it to the package and 4) interpret the results.

To that end, typically R programs are short and pretty declarative. R packages contain C or FORTRAN extensions that do all the heavy lifting. Substantial amount of imperative R code is going to be slow. For instance, looping over a vector is always worse than applying a vector transformation, and R provides a rich set of transformations for all its data types.

R has gotten popular because the proprietary guys dropped the ball at the universities. I recall reading a posting by one researcher who said he switched to R because his students could only use SAS at the school's stats lab, whereas they could run R on their computers at home.

Once researchers switched to R, they started publishing their work with code meant to be run with R. The cutting edge is important in stats, so people want a short lead time between when a new test or model is published and when it's available. SAS's "cathedral" can't really keep up. Combine that with SAS's licensing costs (both arms and a kidney too) as well as its overall "mainframey" feel, and you can see why R is winning.

EDIT: Another big win for R that I forgot to mention is its support for visualizations. A step that should perhaps come after importing the data above is investigating it with various diagnostic charts (scatter charts, box charts, etc) these are all just function calls in R. In addition, R has a powerful graphics engine and there are a huge number of packages available to create more sophisticated visualizations: <http://addictedtor.free.fr/graphiques/>

<comment><USER6> This is a great description of R usage (import, clean, fit models), but I think a slightly erroneous explanation of R history.

John Chambers created "S" at Bell Labs. S was a programming language designed for interactive statistical analysis. Much like gcc and icc are implementations of C compilers, R and S-PLUS are implementations of S. S-PLUS was/is the primary proprietary implementation of the S language, whereas R is the primary free one (also, sometimes called GNU S). (SAS and SPSS are completely different languages/systems as far as I know.) I think that statisticians at some point made a conscious effort to publish their work in R, rather than S-PLUS (or any other statistical system like SAS) because it was more widely available. That in turn led R to be a viable competitor to S-PLUS (and other systems) because it had vast amounts of recent statistical libraries, often implemented by the people who developed the techniques. That said, SAS and SPSS seem to pretty much still have social science students locked up --- the market for R is probably statisticians who are also excellent functional programmers.

This history is in really marked contrast to MATLAB and its corresponding free version Octave, where computer scientists pretty much refuse to use Octave, despite MATLAB's massive price tag to pretty much everyone involved (even with 90% discounts).

(That said, if anyone lived through the change over from S-PLUS to R, I'd love to hear if this history is wrong!)

<comment><USER7> > This history is in really marked contrast to MATLAB and its corresponding > free version Octave, where computer scientists pretty much refuse to use > Octave, despite MATLAB's massive price tag to pretty much everyone involved > (even with 90% discounts).

Do you have any insights as to why Octave does not have higher adoption?

<comment><USER6> I've always been a bit sad about it, but everyone involved is probably a rational actor.

Computer science professors probably view a couple hundred dollars per MATLAB network license as a tiny expense on a $1m+ grant (whereas statistics grants are apparently often smaller), and they may be charged for it in departmental overhead anyway (removing the incentive to cut costs).

The type of people who could contribute either core code or toolbox type code to Octave often have an extremely rare quantitative skill set that is worth hundreds of dollars an hour, so there is a huge incentive to get paid to do similar work instead. There probably isn't much community recognition (to balance things out) for implementing a library in Octave. (Though, in the R world there are certain recognizable superstars like Hadley Wickham.)

Graduate students (who might work for cheap on these problems) are probably more focused on publications and networking.

As long as all of this is the case, Octave will always kind of just be a worse MATLAB that happens to be open source, so a new user choosing between them will probably just choose MATLAB by default.

<comment><USER8> Octave core developer here.

It is true that we have a lot of trouble attracting new contributors. Most of our users keep demanding features that seem to us unimportant but to them are all the world: a GUI ("whatever for?", we think. "Use a real text editor!"), a JIT compiler ("here's a nickle, get better vectorised code, kid"), perfect Matlab compatibility (a never-ending chase, not very fun, in which we must always be behind).

Of these, we're finally slowly listening to our users. Two of our current three GSoC students are working on a GUI and a JIT compiler respectively. I have wild hope that this will attract more users and developers. I'm also currently hosting an Octave conference in a few days towards this goal:

        http://www.octave.org/wiki/index.php?title=OctConf_2012

By the way, Octave is GNU (so is R, supposedly), so we're not really open source; we're free. ;-)

I don't know why Octave hasn't been able to replicate R's success. I don't know if R's not really being GNU despite in name has something to it (R developers routinely try to find new ways to get around the GPL and link R to non-free code, and I don't doubt that this linking to Oracle's database is another example of that). I don't know if it's just that a lot of people with big money care more about statistics and R than they care about Octave (banks and brokers for R, electrical and civil engineers for Otave). Maybe our code sucks more than R's.

Do you have any suggestion how to make Octave the standard instead of Matlab? The recent gratis classes that emerged from Stanford gave Octave a lot of publicity. Do you have any suggestion of what else we might do?

<comment><USER6> You're probably in a much better position to evaluate than I am! My guess is that more Octave-based classes would translate into more users and more code written for Octave down the line, but I'm not sure how to encourage more use of Octave in the classroom in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> R is great mostly for the breath of plugins/implementations contributed by the community... much better than its alternative SAS for an infinitely lower price... ($0 vs ~$10k). Not surprised by this move from Oracle as data analytics/mining gets more popular. For R enthusiasts there is a great blog I follow [http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2012/07/modeling-trick- masked...](http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2012/07/modeling-trick-masked- variables/)

</comment><comment><USER10> This explains the care about Solaris compatibility of R packages.</comment>