Oracle continue to circumvent EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL() - <AUTHOR> http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/31357.html <comment><USER3> Oracle are their own worst problem right now.

My managing director dictated Libre Office over Open Office because it solves his problems with OO.

My dev team are keen as mustard to replace the remaining MySQL instances with MariaDB. Supporting an opaque platform that in turn is not likely to be supported by the distro's we use is not an appealing proposition.

Oracle respin of Red Hat was never an appealing option. We're a SUSE crowd at heart anyway.

From Oracles offerings (the ones they bought, we'll never use oracle DB) that leaves Java as a language and tool set. Dev time is too costly, the language is too clunky, the memory pressure is too high.

<comment><USER4> > ... that leaves Java as a language and tool set. Dev time is too costly, the > language is too clunky, the memory pressure is too high.

Are there languages out there with lower memory pressure that cost _less_ in dev time?

<comment><USER5> Isn't Go's purpose to be a high-performance language that improves worker productivity?

<comment><USER6> Relative to what other languages, though? The competition gives important context.

I can say, "Language X is designed to be fast". But that doesn't tell you what it is good for.

What if I say "Language X is designed to be faster than Python"? Doesn't that tell you way more about Language X?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Programming like that must be an absolute nightmare. Not only would have to understand the convoluted API scheme, you'd have to research the origins to see if you can _legally_ use it.

Things have gone too far when you start namespacing by license.

<comment><USER8> Sure, but all you have to do to avoid this nightmare use the GPL. So since this encourages people to contribute their code back to the community (by releasing it under the GPL or a GPL-compatible license), I think it's a good thing.

<comment><USER9> Nice in theory, but many commercial shops will just use BSD instead. And that's fine.

<comment><USER10> They are welcome to license kernel contributions under dual BSD/GPL ;-).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> SystemTap is a tracing framework for GNU/Linux without such license issues and available on several distributions: [https://sourceware.org/systemtap/](https://sourceware.org/systemtap/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Can someone explain the point of having EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL() and EXPORT_SYMBOL()? Is it trying to protect the user from accidentally violating the GPL?

More importantly, why is there no high resolution clock available from EXPORT_SYMBOL()? Is it deliberately gimped, or is there issues with getting such a piece of software into the kernel whilst not being GPL'd?

<comment><USER12> > Is it deliberately gimped

Yes. It's deliberately gimped because the author of the function decided Freedom™ is more important than functionality and so they hid it behind a license check.

Most new symbols exported after its introduction are exported with the GPL check. See this for more info: [http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0110.2/0369.html](http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0110.2/0369.html)

<comment><USER13> > _Yes. It 's deliberately gimped because the author of the function decided > Freedom™ is more important than functionality and so they hid it behind a > license check._

Would have been a good comment without that remark, and almost certainly why you got downvoted. I gave you an upvote anyways, because the link is actually relevant and helpful.

<comment><USER14> I think that remark makes the comment better. It's ridiculous to claim that a simple timer has relevance to creating a derivative work, and the implication of zealotry in anyone making that claim via EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL is appropriate.

<comment><USER15> The whole reason this is even an issue is the ambiguity of the license on the subject of dynamic linking and what precisely constitutes a derived work. Of course, if Linus wanted proprietary kernel extensions, he should have picked LGPL, but the issue arose long after the license was originally picked (and there being any possibility of changing/clarifying it). Also, no "or any higher version" clause, so the only way this is ever going to be resolved one way or another is in court. FWIW, my impression is GPLv3 wouldn't have helped here either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Very interesting article; I wasn't aware that the kernel had this level of legalese/license shenaniganery built in.

<comment><USER17> It's basically a form of DRM, and the first time I saw it I was pretty taken aback too. Although this time, I'm actually on Oracle's side, since their workaround is yet another example that shows how technological measures to enforce copyright are an awfully bad idea.

Maybe when more people realise the distinctly unique aspects of digital data and how, for lack of better words, pliable and copyable it is, we can have a real copyright reform. Of course that requires the population understand this type of thing, but a copyright reform is exactly what companies like Oracle _don 't_ want, so the probability is pretty low...

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Note that DTrace/Linux exists outside of Oracle. (Search github for dtrace4linux).

As that author of the product, I took a different approach to the GPL symbols - one which may be questionable, but nobody has raised the issue as yet.

Yes, GPL symbols are problematic, and the dtrace4linux is CDDL - the GPL vs CDDL - means its impossible, from a legal perspective to get the balance right. That does not preclude generation of a useful tool - the beauty of all open source - is the ability to learn from it.

</comment><comment><USER19> making stuff open source seems much easier than battling for inserting proprietary code. hint hint.

<comment><USER20> DTrace is open source and found in OS X and FreeBSD. DTrace is not proprietary code.

<comment><USER21> And there are no barriers to it being licensed so that it could be included in Linux, other than Oracle not wanting to.

<comment><USER22> Just like there are no barriers to changing the GPL so it is compatible with the CDDL, other than the FSF not wanting to?

<comment><USER23> The person who wrote the CDDL says it was deliberately written to be incompatible with the GPL.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Development_and_Distribu...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Development_and_Distribution_License#GPL_incompatibility)

<comment><USER24> And the next person in that cite is disagreeing with that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> i still remember the day in a meeting when someone spoke of my employer having acquired some lic for a product which they designed to modify and i asked if we have a legal team to analyze it , well the director came back shouting another team should take the job!

</comment><comment><USER26> Seems to me that the appropriate attack might be fraud and misrepresentation, if not copyright abuse. That's an attack which could be levied on Oracle by any party (oh, say, someone who's already upset at them for some reason, perhaps Google), not just a kernel copyright holder or The Linux Foundation.

<comment><USER26> I'm curious about the apparent disagreement here.

The misrepresentation is of the module as being validly licensed under the GNU GPL where it clearly isn't. In an earlier case concerning copyright, the question rose whether or not a brief citation for functional reasons was valid or an infringement of copyright. The court's decision was that a literal quoting that served _functional_ purpose was not, in fact, a violation of copyright.

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

The case with regards Oracle involves the use of one of two largely equivalent mechanisms. As the article discusses:

 _The kernel actually has two levels of exposed (non-userspace) API - <USER2> exported via EXPORT_SYMBOL() and those exported via EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL(). Symbols exported via EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL() may only be used by modules that claim to be GPLed, with the kernel refusing to load them otherwise. There is no technical limitation on the use of symbols exported via EXPORT_SYMBOL()._

Use of EXPORT_SYMBOL and EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL are equivalent _except_ for the expressed compatibility with the GPL license. Use of EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL where it's not justified is making a claim about suitability of use. That is the basis for my fraud claim.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I wonder if, with the right septuagenarian judge, this constitutes unauthorized access to a protected computer system?

</comment><comment><USER17> _with the kernel refusing to load them otherwise_

This makes me wonder how easy it would be to write a (GPL'd) kernel module whose only purpose is to scan for and NOP out these silly checks!

Props to Oracle for taking the "fuck you" approach with this. And a "fuck you" to Oracle for everything else they've done...</comment>


ICOs at the End of 2017: What We Think We Know and What We Don't Know - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsgr.com/WSGR/Display.aspx?SectionName=publications/PDFSearch/wsgralert-initial-coin-offerings-1017.htm <comment><USER2> Honestly I can't wait until that filecoin ICO thing becomes an epic disaster. Like most of the ICOs I've seen, it is flawed on basic principle and lacks a clear business model, and is ill-positioned for the future. Just because you can make a big splash and raise a bunch of money does not mean you have created anything of value for the world.

ICOs seem to be a new way to raise from unsuspecting investors aka a way of separating people who have too much money and not enough common sense from their money. The fact that it is utilizing a blockchain technology has nothing to do with the actual mechanisms at work here, focusing on the use of blockchain in negotiating ownership and value is actually harmful here.

The real technology isn't glamorous at all and has been in operation ever since Charles Ponzi "innovated" the concept in the 1920's.

<comment><USER3> That's one of the least questionable ICOs. Most of them are much more vaporous.

<comment><USER4> It's the most questionable to me. The ones that are "vaporous", it's obvious to everyone so not many questions need to be asked. But about FileCoin...

How can they compete with economies of scale? And how will they prevent data centers of disks being created (centralizing forces)? If they manage to stay decentralized, how will the very public team defend all the illegal and/or illegitimate content that gets hosted on there? How will they defend against the FBI ordering them to shut it down? Why would people pay more for a slower or less reliable storage solution?

It's very questionable that they were able to make bold claims and get millions of dollars from people who do not have a clue that FileCoin and "distributed storage on the blockchain" is DOA unless you want to store your 3d printed gun designs in the cloud. But in that case, the team building it should've been anonymous...

<comment><USER5> I don't use filecoin's network but I do use a competitor that is basically doing the same thing, storj. Also when I say I use the network I am talking about actually uploading and paying for data storage.

To answer some of your questions, storj's network consists primarily of people who are renting out their unused hard drive space. Economic of scale doesn't really matter because the people renting the space are just trying to make a few extra bucks per month and they have already paid for the hardware.

They have no way of preventing centralization of disks but the whole network is decentralized. The file you upload is being hosted on thousands of different disks.

Like all companies, they will probably comply with FBI/DMCA orders to the best of their abilities. The issue for them and the FBI is that all data uploaded to the network is encrypted at the point of upload so it is impossible for the FBI/DMCA to find it. These decentralized file hosting systems don't allow public sharing of the download links/keys (yet at least).

Also the reason I pay for storj over say google is because storj is cheaper and has higher redundancy requirements. I have files that I absolutely can never risk losing and storj allows you to pay for the service anonymously while other services do not. In the world of data breaches everywhere, the less information the company has about you, the better.

<comment><USER4> > Economic of scale doesn't really matter because the people renting the space > are just trying to make a few extra bucks per month and they have already > paid for the hardware.

OK so hypothetically, if this decentralized storage thingie made the sellers a profit, there would be at least 1 rational and greedy seller who would take that profit, invest it in more disks, and save on costs compared to other folks, right? In other words, if I have 100,000 computers in a data center with central cooling system, the total electricity costs will be less than the total cooling costs of 100,000 individuals each with their own 1 computer. Furthermore, the total bandwidth costs of the 100,000-computer data center will be cheaper than the total bandwidth costs of 100,000 individuals with 1 computer each (economies of scale).

How can you say that "there is no way to prevent centralization" and then follow up with "the whole network is decentralized", when the cost structure obviously makes more sense for this distributed storage to all be controlled by a handful of resourceful entities?

Then those 4-5 data centers just become an encrypted Dropbox, right? So like, SpiderOak?

<comment><USER6> It's Airbnb for disks. Maybe not the perfect analogy, but I think the idea here is to just capture latent inventory that is otherwise being wasted. It's not about competing on margins, but activating latent resources that are sitting out there completely unused.

<comment><USER4> > It's Airbnb for disks

I haven't made the analysis but maybe Airbnb works because it is actually more profitable for an entity to host 100 airbnbs then to have a regulated hotel with 100 units, in which case the analogy doesn't work because that's the crux of my argument.

In the case of decentralized storage, this is not the case, as we've seemed to have agreed. Which means this:

1- The 4 data centers will host 99% of the available storage because it's so profitable for them

2- Because the supply of storage on the network is so high, the reward given to the hosters goes down (this is how FileCoin works I'm guessing, the reward needs to come down to close to the overall cost of the suppliers, like difficulty adjustments in Bitcoin)

3- Because the costs of the data centers which now have millions of disks all under centralized electricity/infrastructure is so low, the reward becomes _lower than the cost of being an individual storage supplier_.

4- At this point, the individuals with "latent resources" have no incentive to put these on the network, and actually are incentivized to _sell the disks instead_ , because at least that way they'll make money.

5- Who is incentivized to BUY these disks? See #1

That's how economies of scale work and why they will make FileCoin useless.

<comment><USER7> And yet I am sitting here with about 500GB of free space on my disk that is worth $0 to me.

The answer is that there are other factors outside of the scope of your defined economy at play.

<comment><USER4> Your argument is "maybe not", which isn't adding much. So can we agree that if the reward you would get is actually _less_ than the electricity+bandwidth costs of you leaving your computer on all day, then you're better off keeping the 500GB free?

Just like in Bitcoin, my free CPU cycles are better kept free because if I try to mine Bitcoin I would have to leave my computer on 24/7 and it would cost me more than the BTC rewards I'd very rarely receive?

We've literally just swapped free CPU cycles for free disk space, and we both know PoW is centralized and it's not worth individuals with a laptop to mine, but somehow the free disk space won't suffer the same fate?

<comment><USER6> Prior to AirBnB property owners left their homes unoccupied while they continued to pay property tax and upkeep on them during those times. Similarly, there are people with computers powered on all day that have disk space unused while they continue to pay for the electricity costs. If you assume these are the people who are going to make up the majority of the FileCoin network, this is effectively "found money" for those folks. (Albeit probably not much money.) This might not be the way it plays out, but if it does, your arguments about margins and electricity bills are moot: these costs are not increasing after the network is connected.

edit: Also even if FileCoin doesn't throw off a ton of ETH, presumably there will eventually be a wide array of services like the FileCoin network that you can transparently trade your liquid crypto assets into. For example, consider a person who happens to have 50TB of disk they don't need for the next month but would like to perform some low latency rendering jobs on the RenderCoin network during that time instead. They could easily just trade one for the other, increasing market efficiency for those resources. This example would be a small transaction in terms of ETH, but multiply that across the entire set of all computing resources, across all services, and it is a potentially tectonic shift in effective allocation of resources.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Posted this in a different thread:

A quick chat with an attorney who is an SEC specialist basically said "if it breathes" i.e. involves money that ICO is seen as a security. The SEC putting together the digital division which covers cryptocurrency tokens is part of what led to him saying this. Basically fish in a barrel.

It is in my opinion that any US-based ICO is now in a lottery as to whether they get the SEC visit.

Not legal advice at all, just sharing an excerpt from a coffee chat.

<comment><USER9> By that logic Linden Dollars (from Second Life) and PLEX (Eve Online) are securities too.

<comment><USER10> I saw your analogy got downvoted because people didn't like it.

But I've talked with prominent lawyers about this distinction and securities laws are flexible enough to include practically any product in their purview.

The Howey Test isn't the only test that courts and regulators have created.

There are several tests floating amongst the states and various federal circuits, which can and have deemed otherwise benign products and services as things that should be registered as securities with the most onerous costs and distinctions.

A California country club's member fees were deemed securities under one framework.

And every kickstarter and centrally issued product can under other frameworks.

There is nothing wrong with your analogy. The securities regulators generally don't try to stifle all commerce so far.

The idea that all ICOs will experience this form of securities discrimination - just for the mere fact they are using cryptographic hashes and get a lot of revenue/capital - is just as logically unsound.

But they could. Just like almost every product or service could. When they do it will quickly evolve securities law towards a more apt framework. Its not about "securities or not" its about consumer and investor protection, and this is currently the tool available.

<comment><USER11> I agree, many things which could be deemed securities are not. The SEC's mandate is to protect small investors and public faith in investment markets, and they will hopefully focus their power on instruments where that faith is being challenged.

If they do, the best strategy for an organization raising money through an ICO is to use that money in as transparent and ethical a manner as possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > When do tokens that are securities stop being securities? This is a central > question in the token community right now. Our current view is that once the > value of the tokens is primarily driven by their commercial usage, rather > than by the efforts of the token sponsor or other developers, the tokens > should no longer be deemed to be securities. The SEC has not yet addressed > this question.

This has been settled law for 70+ years.

When one of the biggest law firms feels the need to preemptively issue a public statement pretending they don't understand how the law works, you know shit is about to get crazy.

<comment><USER13> I was saying the same thing when Uber launched- "An Uber is just a Taxi and if they don't follow taxi regulations they will be shut down quickly."

I'm still not sure exactly why this didn't happen, but if people can agree that Uber isn't a Taxi, then I think they can also come to the conclusion that an ICO token isn't a traditional security... the world just isn't as black- and-white as we often like to think, and legislators are human beings that have a lot more flexibility around enforcement than people imagine.

<comment><USER14> > I was saying the same thing when Uber launched- "An Uber is just a Taxi and > if they don't follow taxi regulations they will be shut down quickly."

The difference is that Uber was not created to fleece the masses via investment pump and dump scheme.

As of now, ICOs are purely pump and dump. They are modern day unregistered securities, promoted via modern day version of faxes

<comment><USER15> Tell that to the taxi drivers who are now selling their once coveted medallions at a loss.

<comment><USER14> Thank you for proving my point:

 _taxi drivers_ are selling their medallions that they used to offer service. They are selling these medallions at a loss because a competitor is eating their lunch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The unintended consequences of the SEC forcing ICOs away from representing equity towards "use tokens" is that investors lose any rights at all.

The SEC is fucking up pretty hard at the moment and doing real damage. Their actions in the IPO market, meant to protect advisors, have resulted in only pump-and-dump crap like snapchat and blue apron going public, while all the gains from real growth tech companies are being retained by VCs, sovereign wealth funds and investment banks, while retail investors holding index funds miss out.

I think this is a major factor contributing to widening gap between the super- rich and everyone else. There are a lot of ICO scams, however giving vague guidance and forcing ICOs out of their own jurisdiction when clearly people are still investing in tokens as a speculation/profit vehicle is worse than useless. Token-holders need the ability to change management, dissolve companies and reclaim cryptocurrency investment if companies are mismanaged or scammy, and they need to have the right to see how funds invested are being spent.

</comment><comment><USER17> Regulators move at the speed of government, not the speed of technology.

However, if you think financial regulators are _at all happy_ with the nature of ICOs you only have to read between the lines of what they have said.

</comment><comment><USER18> How does buying an ICO link me to a company? does it entitle me to a dividend for investing in them? Are the company under any obligation to share their success with me?

<comment><USER13> Speaking as the world's biggest ethereum believer: ICO have pretty much have zero obligation to share their success with you and it seems crazy to me that anyone would buy into an ICO.

<comment><USER19> Well they have as much obligation as you when you read TOS/EULAs and click "Agree". So there is an actual obligation in most cases when it was specified in the terms on their website. It's very hard for most top ICO teams to deny their ties to the ICO and it's terms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > Simple Agreements for Future Tokens (SAFTs), as used today, almost always > are securities.

Does this mean that SAFEs are also securities? I imagine so, and they are usually given to accredited investors. I have also seen them being given to contractors and employees as partial payment in equity.

Is paying a non-accredited contractor in SAFE a possible issue with the SEC? If not, how are SAFTs different?

<comment><USER21> > Does this mean that SAFEs are also securities?

Well, obviously, stocks and future interests in stocks are the basic textbook examples of securities. On SAFEs specifically, see, e.g., [https://www.sec.gov/oiea/investor-alerts-and- bulletins/ib_sa...](https://www.sec.gov/oiea/investor-alerts-and- bulletins/ib_safes)

"Some issuers have been offering a new type of security as part of some crowdfunding offerings—which they have called the SAFE."</comment></comment>


AudioKit's "Analog Synth X" Source Code - <AUTHOR> http://audiokit.io/downloads/ <comment><USER2> Thanks for the post. If you're interested in what the code does, here's a video: [https://vimeo.com/152378869](https://vimeo.com/152378869)</comment>


Rails – #forty_two() method - <AUTHOR> http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/FinderMethods.html#method-i-forty_two <comment><USER2> I think there was a talk by David Heinemeier Hansson where he talks about this. I believe it's mainly put in to annoy someone.

<comment><USER3> Haha. Genuine question - why are nth methods available in ActiveRecord? Basically anything past .first doesn't seem necessary (functionally speaking).

<comment><USER4> For me, it comes up in test cases. In a controlled environment, it can be nice to mentally say "add two objects, the first should be this, the second should be this." I don't think I've ever used `second` outside of the testing realm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Fun! This can also be found as a general array accessor:

[https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/ed03d4eaa89a7b4ab09e7f5d...](https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/ed03d4eaa89a7b4ab09e7f5da76b522d04650daf/activesupport/lib/active_support/core_ext/array/access.rb#L58-L63)

Here's another interesting one from ActiveSupport giving Ruby Numerics the ability to be treated as various quantities of bytes:

[https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/9eeb5fed2ff8e781e56202f6...](https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/9eeb5fed2ff8e781e56202f62b125bfadc486999/activesupport/lib/active_support/core_ext/numeric/bytes.rb)

</comment><comment><USER6> It seems odd that ActiveRecord even has the methods #first through to #fifth...

</comment><comment><USER7> Looks like it was merged in on January 20th: [https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/13757](https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/13757)

</comment><comment><USER8> The answer to life the universe and everything !

<comment><AUTHOR> pft

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am familiar with this reference!</comment>


Crypto 101 – Introductory course on cryptography - <AUTHOR> https://www.crypto101.io <comment><USER2> +1 for the fact that the "get book" button on linked site _just downloads the pdf_.

<comment><USER3> Thanks, for the comment. I wouldn't have bothered with this otherwise. Normally a _" Download our PDF|Whitepaper|Whatever"_ is a 100% sure way to make me close a site immediately nowadays - and this is what I did. Just stumbled upon your comment because the tab was still open and it was the first comment.

VirusTotal seems to be cool with the file too, so that's how it should be.

[https://www.virustotal.com/#/file/fe42077288cfaa6d1d1b83c088...](https://www.virustotal.com/#/file/fe42077288cfaa6d1d1b83c088751e9224323cdec2a0c1904f0571e28a1f9cd4/detection)

<comment><USER4> You can get the org mode plaintext source here: [https://github.com/crypto101/book](https://github.com/crypto101/book).

It doesn't read as well as the PDF because there's a ton of illustrations and _something_ has to render them.

<comment> black-tea I find it amusing that you wrote the book using org-mode but the README using ResT.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hi! I'm the author. Happy to answer questions.

<comment><USER5> It seems that the downloadable pdf doesn't have a couple of tweaks that have landed in master ([https://github.com/crypto101/book](https://github.com/crypto101/book)). Any plans to generate a slightly updated version ?

PS: Thanks for your work ! Watched your talk and it was a nice quick primer. Glad you turned it into a book with more detail.

<comment><USER4> Sure, I should get around to that :-) Really I'd like to make a docker image or similarly repeatable environment that can do builds -- right now it's way too tied to my own environment.

Also: I'm not sure org-mode -> TeX was a great idea.

<comment><USER6> I used to use org-mode exporting to reveal.js for doing slides. Unfortunately this turned out to be a bit of a pain to get everything set up, especially when collaborating with people who for some have failed to embrace the One True Religion^H Editor. So in the end I changed to using Markdown and pandoc to convert to reveal.js.

As a bonus, using pandoc to convert my org sources to markdown worked reasonably well.

<comment><USER4> Yep, I took exactly the same path. Still use org-reveal sometimes but pandoc is really great and anything-to-anything :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I read the book, it is well written, accessible and pretty accurate. I think it's worth a skim even just to learn more about something you vaguely know but you can't explain in your own words.

<comment><USER4> I'm glad you feel that way, because I'm honestly embarrassed by how shoddy my old writing is. (I'm the author.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A resource I found really helpful was a fantastic classroom-setting lecture series Introduction to Cryptography by Christof Paar[0] .

[0]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aHkqB2-46k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aHkqB2-46k)

<comment><USER9> Seconded, I am working my way through this course and its fantastic, specially if you also do all the homework problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There is also a cryptography course from Udacity: [https://www.udacity.com/course/applied-cryptography-- cs387](https://www.udacity.com/course/applied-cryptography--cs387)

<comment><USER11> Cryptography 1 by Stanford on Coursera is really good too : [https://www.coursera.org/learn/crypto](https://www.coursera.org/learn/crypto)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Cool, thanks!

BTW why is EPUB mentioned but not available?

<comment><USER4> (I'm the author.)

Because it's not a priority for me and I never got the org -> epub generation flow working correctly. In particular, the book has a lot of illustrations, and getting illustrations right across a ton of ebook readers is quite complicated. To wit: they all support different formats and to get it more or less compatible you have to guess what the approx DPI is for most of those devices and then rasterize the vector imagery.

If someone gets it to work I'd be much obliged, it just hasn't been a priority for me :)

<comment><USER12> I see.

> what the approx DPI is for most of those devices and then rasterize the > vector imagery

As far as I know you can use SVG illustrations in EPUB.

Alternatively you probably could rasterize to a redundant resolution and rely on the viewer app to downscale the pictures to fit the page width.

<comment><USER4> You can, but at least a few years ago most cheap readers would horribly mess that up (usually not render it at all). And those that didn't were typically nice enough that they could just render the PDF correctly ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> From 2016: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13089489](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13089489)

</comment><comment><USER14> I skimmed through it this morning and was genuinely surprised by its accessibility.

The concepts are as I remember from my cryptography course in college, and is a great refresher!

Thank you!

</comment><comment><USER15> FYI: I just put the PDF on my Kindle Paperwhite and it actually looks like a regular ebook in terms of font size and readability so far.

</comment><comment><USER16> Oh interesting. I recently got "Applied Cryptography" in one of the nostarchpress sales. I expected it to be turbo technical and way outside my league but popped it open on a whim one day. So far it's incredibly accessible, does anyone have thoughts on that versus this course? Worth taking the course after I finish Applied cryptography?

<comment><USER17> Applied Cryptography is terrible.

[https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2013/07/22/applied-practical- cry...](https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2013/07/22/applied-practical- cryptography/)

No Starch's "Serious Cryptography", the JP Aumasson book, is strong.

<comment><USER18> I recall you saying that "Cryptography Engineering" was much better than AC somewhere.

Do you recommend Serious Cryptography over that?

<comment><USER17> Both books have their strengths. If I had to pick one, it'd be Serious Cryptography, since it's much more up-to-date than Cryptography Engineering is.

<comment><USER19> Part of our current Humble Bundle, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Thanks for this. I just finished the XOR stuff and can't wait to read more!

</comment><comment><USER21> I just watched the talk on that page, it was fantastic! Especially for dump developers like myself who never studied actual CS or math. Thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER22> Started reading it, pretty good so far!

Only thing, why did you choose to introduce block cipher modes in the stream cipher chapter? This makes little sense to me.

<comment><USER23> It actually makes a lot of sense for practical purposes. This probably looks strange to you because most introductory cryptography texts strictly segregate stream and block ciphers. The standard pedagogical style bifurcates modern symmetric encryption into one of these two categories and talks about things like synchronization, on-the-fly encryption, speed, error correction, etc. between the two.

In point of fact, there isn't as significant a difference between the two in active research and industry. Many (most?) stream ciphers actually use blocks internally. For example, Salsa (and its spiritual successor, ChaCha) both use blocks and rounds. From one legitimate perspective, a block cipher mode enabling streaming encryption is a generalization of a stream cipher.

When you develop a stream cipher _without_ a block system internally[1], you're trying to remove the versatility of block cipher modes in exchange for (hopefully significant) improvements in speed and efficiency. This is very difficult to do while maintaining security. At the end of the day there are only so many ways to do confusion and diffusion.

_______________________________

1\. For example see Sosemanuk, which internally uses a linear feedback shift register and finite state machine.

<comment><USER24> > Many (most?) stream ciphers actually use blocks internally.

I don't think there have been any new designs for a good while that didn't. RC4 is, I think, the last actual stream cipher that saw widespread use (apart from designed-as-broken telco crypto). The same observation can be made for classified crypto, where they used to use bit-stream ciphers like Walburn or Saville (efficient, relatively low gate count hardware implementation) but pivoted to block ciphers since the ~80s.

<comment><USER25> Most of the eSTREAM finalists ([http://www.ecrypt.eu.org/stream/index.html](http://www.ecrypt.eu.org/stream/index.html)) are not block-based. I think only Salsa20 matches that description.

More generally, I think the distinction between a "block-based stream cipher" and a block cipher (or permutation) mode is the degree to which you abstract away the block cipher. Personally I wouldn't put them together. Counter mode completely abstracts away the cipher, assuming it is an idealized pseudorandom function; sponge-based modes also abstract away the permutation as ideal in most cases; stream ciphers usually do not do this, and use weaker (but still sometimes block-based) primitives to generate output. There are, for example, sponge modes that use very few rounds past the initialization, which makes them more streamy than spongy. So their cryptanalysis is often different.

<comment><USER4> > More generally, I think the distinction between a "block-based stream > cipher" and a block cipher (or permutation) mode is the degree to which you > abstract away the block cipher.

Just to make sure I understand you correctly, for example:

\- CTR: definitely a stream cipher, and a synchronous one at that

\- CBC: maybe a little like a stream cipher (you're e.g. exposed to the block width, and also less like most stream ciphers because asynchronous)

\- AEZ: extremely not (because you're exposed to round counts)

That makes perfect sense to me, since that's where I felt the analogy started getting tenuous :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> How does this compare to Crypto 1 on Coursera?</comment>


Successful Attack Against a Quantum Cryptography System - <AUTHOR> http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/09/successful_atta.html <comment><USER2> Quantum crypto and classical crypto are both susceptible to faults in implementation. Big freakin' deal. Here's why Quantum crypto is the future:

If you encode something via any classical crypto system (e.g. RSA) it's usually based on something that is computationally difficult to crack rather than something that is impossible to crack. You can usually find somebody willing to tell you it will somewhere on the order of thousands of years to crack that message, even assuming Moore's law growing resources. That's utter crap. In reality, algorithms continually evolve such that encryption algorithms become insecure in a matter of decades, and that's without disruptive algorithms/tech. (e.g. Quantum computing will shake things up bigtime if and when it happens, but 4096 bit RSA will probably be toast long before that happens.)

Here's where things get scary. Any encrypted message you send today that is encrypted classically can be archived by an eavesdropper without your knowledge and cracked at any point in the future. Your credit card info is going to change before that's likely to happen, but what about your medical records? If information is going to remain sensitive for decades or more, it's already idiotic to protect it with classical encryption.

So how is quantum crypto different? Why can't an eavesdropper just archive a quantum encrypted message and crack it at their leisure the way they can with a classically encrypted message? The answer boils down to the no-cloning theorem, which I encourage you to look into if you're interested. To be brief, quantum crypto algorithms rely on exchanges of quantum states that, if an eavesdropper attempts to intercept and copy, will introduce errors that will alert the sender/receiver to the fact that they are being eavesdropped upon. With quantum crypto, an eavesdropper can obtain no information unless she has an attack that works at the time the message is sent. The attack mentioned in the article is no different. This isn't like DES, where the vulnerability means that all past messages sent can now be trivially cracked. It means that future messages might be compromised if upgrades are not made, but that's it.

With quantum crypto you only have to worry about attacks that can be made with existing knowledge and technology, not all attacks that could be made in the future. If you send a message via quantum crypto and it's safe when you send it, it will be safe for all time. Not just for a while like with classical crypto.

Classical encryption is not safe. It's safe for a while. Quantum crypto is actually safe.

<comment><USER3> So it sounds like Quantum cryptography is only useful for data being transmitted between two points, and would not apply to data at rest? Or is this a false distinction?

<comment><USER4> Yeah, that's true. It depends on entanglement of particles (or photons in this case, which are definitely never at rest!), which is hard to maintain for more than a fraction of a second.

Edit: If they ever get this working that might change! <http://www.physorg.com/news196613216.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Should be pointed out that it was a hack against the hardware, not the theory. Hardware vulnerabilities will probably remain the key weakness of quantum encryption, not that this is necessarily anything new.

<comment><USER6> You're absolutely correct, but the irony is that the whole point of quantum encryption is to eliminate certain classes of hardware vulnerability. You _could_ skip the whole quantum thing and send a conventionally generated key over a dedicated line (regular fiber or even copper), and you'd be no more vulnerable except to hardware attacks (cable splicing or other eavesdropping tricks).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> help me understand Quantum Mechanics. As I've read, with great interest, QM is a no longer a theory but a provable science that electron spin or rotation is equally opposite in two different places at the same time? What hardware do we use to detect electron spin direction and such... Can anyone explain this in easier terms?

<comment><USER8>
      QM is a no longer a theory but a provable science that
      electron spin or rotation is equally opposite in two
      different places at the same time?

No, this "superpositioning" aspect of QM is still a completely untested theory, al beit one which is accepted without question by most contemporary physicists. It's called the Copenhagen Interpretation. There are other possibilities, and no empirical basis for distinguishing between them, at this stage.

<comment><USER9> Don't most scientist prefer the many worlds interpretation now?

<comment><USER4> Neither of them is really accepted. Scientists might have a preference toward one or the other, but so far they both have inconsistencies.

<comment><USER9> Both may not be very convincing, depending on your biases. But I found them consistent (especially the many worlds interpretation). Could you explain?

<comment><USER4> I'm not an expert, but this guy is: [http://quantummoxie.wordpress.com/2007/04/18/inconsistencies...](http://quantummoxie.wordpress.com/2007/04/18/inconsistencies- in-the-many-worlds-interpretation-of-quantum-mechanics/)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What's Going on During Wave Function 'Collapse' - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-quantum-trajectory-theory-lets-physicists-understand-whats-going-on-during-wave-function-collapse-20190703/ <comment><USER2> The article feels incomplete. I don't feel like I have a better understanding of what's going on during wave function collapse, rather I just know QTT is a thing and people are experimenting with it and it's yielded promising results when using more sophisticated measurement apparatus to observe an "atom", like reversing a quantum jump mid-flight by injecting feedback into the system as it's being measured.

<comment><USER3> I liked some commentary in a similar direction [https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/484675/does- the-...](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/484675/does-the-new- finding-on-reversing-a-quantum-jump-mid-flight-rule-out-any- inter/484681#484681)

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the link it covers all the details I was looking for. My favorite part:

> Copenhagen and, say, many worlds just differ on how to treat branches of a > superposition that have completely decohered.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Quantum trajectories more or less have the usual Copenhagen interpretation built in, so they don't really solve the old interpretation problems any more than decoherence does. Although they can be a nice way to understand some experiments, in particular how conditional probabilities of a set of measurement results obtained in sequence occur, I'm not sure if it's good to present it as some fundamental insight in popular articles.

<comment><USER5> This seems to be the opposite of what the article is saying, or implying. I read it as saying that there is no need for an interpretation, because there is no wave function collapse; the particle can be described in precise terms.

<comment><USER6> It was buried way deep in the article, but:

> But what exactly is this trajectory? One thing is clear: It's not like a > classical trajectory, meaning a path taken in space. It's more like the path > taken through the abstract space of possible states the system might have, > which is called Hilbert space.

QTT is not a definite prediction of classical physical trajectory.

<comment><USER7> Although classical physical trajectory is one if the possible states QTT helps us predict. It's more than that, not less.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I recently read a book by a cosmologist Max Tegmark in which he brought up another theory - that the function wave function doesn't really collapse, it's just that the moment of measurement lets us determine our location in the multiverse. I think this is related:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many- worlds_interpretation#Int...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many- worlds_interpretation#Interpreting_wavefunction_collapse)

And also an interesting read:

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

</comment><comment><USER9> > "Quantum trajectory theory makes predictions that are impossible to make > with the standard formulation," Devoret said.

That is bullshit. If it were true, the predictions made by QTT would be tested and if they came out as predicted it would be the biggest news in physics since the Aspect experiment.

What is "going on" during wave function "collapse" has been known for decades: entanglement and decoherence. That's all.

I am really getting sick and tired of these sensationalistic headlines.

(I'm also not entirely sober. It is the Fourth of July after all.)

<comment><USER10> > What is "going on" during wave function "collapse" has been known for > decades: entanglement and decoherence. That's all.

Wasn't it a famous physicist who said "If you think you understand Quantum Mechanics then you don't understand Quantum Mechanics"?

I'm not defending this article, but I was under the impression that the proper interpretation of quantum mechanics / QFT is far from a settled matter among physicists.

<comment><USER11> It's not so much that it is settled as everybody knows that it isn't a useful topic of conversation. All the various interpretations have the same math behind them, give the same prediction, and have the same observable behavior. Since there isn't anything to distinguish them, they are all equally valid.

In practice, things tend to go with the "Shut up and calculate"[1] philosophy.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_quantum_mec...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_quantum_mechanics#shutup)

<comment><USER10> I've heard that idiom, and I'm sure it has its use. I don't think we should stop calculating, by any means. However, there are individuals in the field who think new insights are possible through continued attempts to improve our interpretations (in addition to continued development of the theory as expressed through robust math). I don't have a source handy, but I've heard the physicist Sean Carroll express this idea on his podcast, Mindscape.

Numbers by themselves don't mean anything (for humans at least). The meaning is found in how the numbers relate to the concepts that we make use of.

<comment><USER9> It is legitimate to ask how our everyday perceptions can be so radically and fundamentally different from what the math appears to say about the nature of reality. "Shut up and calculate" is not a legitimate answer.

(For the record, the phrase "Shut up and calculate" was coined by David Mermin as a pejorative characterization of the Copenhagen interpretation, which actually says simply that we cannot know anything more than what the math says, and that's just the way it is, and any attempt at further inquiry is doomed to fail and therefore should not be attempted. It's a deeply unscientific attitude.)

<comment><USER12> I read statements from Feynman that I interpreted as very similar. He said things like: the question "what is the underlying reality behind all this" probably "has no meaning." I never understood what he was trying to say.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Talk by Zlatko Minev on this result: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGNL91MhC5A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGNL91MhC5A) \- JQI Seminar 4/22/2019 - Zlatko Minev

</comment><comment><USER14> Indeed very interesting, what's going on? Reading the article, the only phrase where "wave function collapse" occurred is:

> What's more, this near-complete knowledge of how the system changes smoothly > over time allows researchers to "rewind the tape" and avoid the apparently > irreversible "wave function collapse" of the standard quantum formalism.

Please, answer this intriguing question, what's going on?

<comment><USER7> I think in QTT there is no collapse event, just a series of state transitions. It looks like the concept of a collapse is a product of a less complete understanding of what is going on.

That's why the article spends so much time contrasting QTT with the view offered by Shroedingers equation. With Shroedinger there is no specific state predicted, so you have to introduce the concept of some event inducing a specific state to occur. QTT allows continuous prediction of state and even the ability to prevent or influence state transitions. At least that's what I got out if it, although I'll concede I think that's a rough attempt at a summary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Previous discussions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20105091](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20105091)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20116267](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20116267)

</comment><comment><USER16> Stopped reading half way through, as it felt like the author didn't understand what he was writing about. What hope do I have reading the article, then?

<comment><USER17> It took me a long time to understand two's complement arithmetic for negative numbers in binary. Read several explanations on books and magazines (this was before the internet existed), couldn't understand it. Then one day it clicked. Awesome trick. I went back to some of the explanations that hadn't helped me understand it, and I could clearly see the author didn't understand it themselves. The world is too full of that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Has nobody at Quanta Magazine heard of the Many Worlds Interpretation? I'm tired of these awful articles from Quanta.

<comment><USER19> This 'awful article' is about experimental tests of a working theory.

Can you provide a reference explaining how MWI might be falsified experimentally?

<comment><USER18> MWI can be differentiated from the Copenhagen Interpretation via experiment as soon as the Copenhagen Interpretation decides what a "measurement" is, when it happens, and when it doesn't.

As it is now, the Copenhagen Interpretation is an incomplete theory because it doesn't give you a formal algorithmic way to know when to apply the measurement operator. The answer is whatever it needs to be to make the answer come out right.

To answer your question more directly, MWI could be falsified in a lot of ways, but one would be if structures larger than a certain size don't self- interfere.

<comment><USER15> Is the MWI more complete in this regard? How does it decide what a "branching event" is, when it happens, and when it doesn't?

<comment><USER18> Yes it is. MWI's only rule is that reality evolves according the the Schrödinger equation. It's what would get if you took collapse out of the Copenhagen Interpretation.

The idea of "branching" is a human-legible metaphor for describing the resultant behavior. But the math doesn't have branching.

<comment><USER15> According to you the MWI cannot make any predictions about experimental outcomes then?

<comment><USER18> How did you pick that up from what I said?

<comment><USER15> Maybe I misunderstood you. How does the MWI decide what a measurement is, when it happens, and when it doesn't?

<comment><USER18> According to MWI, there's no special privileged operation called "measurement" like there is in the Copenhagen Interpretation. Of course there's still scientists looking at stuff, but according to MWI, the scientists and their machines are made of matter that follows the same law of physics of the matter they're studying.

<comment><USER15> How does the MWI make predictions about experimental outcomes then? Unitary evolution doesn't cut it.

<comment><USER18> Sure it does. You should read about MWI.

<comment><USER15> You do need something more than Schroedinger's equation to get definite outcomes and probabilities. Apparently when and how it happens are not questions so easy to answer, are they?

MWI may be what you would get if you took collapse out of the Copenhagen Interpretation, but to get the same predictions you have to put the collapse back in somehow. And the question of what is a measurement cannot be completely avoided.

<comment><USER18> OK, I guess you need Born's Rule, too. But so does every other interpretation, including the Copenhagen one. My uneducated guess is that there's some geometric reason for it that hasn't been discovered yet.

> to get the same predictions you have to put the collapse back in somehow.

This part is just not true. There's no collapse and no formal "measurement" in MWI. You seem like you might have some misconceptions about MWI. I would urge you to read more about it rather than discussing it with amateurs on HN.

<comment><USER15> > OK, I guess you need Born's Rule, too. But so does every other > interpretation, including the Copenhagen one.

Sure (note that some people claim that Born's rule can be derived from other considerations but the issue remains highly controversial). And at what point do you need Born's Rule? (hint: m9t)

I've read enough about the subject to know that there is not "one" MWI but many different variants (that's of course also the case for the Copenhagen Interpretation, which is even less well-defined). DeWitt (who introduced the "many-worlds" label, by the way) seemed to believe that branches are more "real" than Everet did, for example. And I don't know where do you put the "consistent histories" formulation (some people say it's many-worlds, some people say it's neo-Copenhagen).

Anyway, you have not yet explained to me how do you get predictions about experimental outcomes.

This is what happens in standard QM:

1) You have a wave function describing the system of interest (psi), we assume it was prepared in that state.

2) You can calculate the possible outocomes of a measurement, say +1 with probability 50% and -1 with probability 50%.

3) You perform the experiment, the outcome is +1

4) Immediately after the measurment you describe the system with the wave function psi+ that is the eigentstate corresponding to the outcome +1 (for -1 it would be psi-).

5) You can use the wave function psi+ to make predictions for new experiments, for example repeating the measurement before the state has time to evolve (according to Schroedinger's equation) you will get +1 again.

If you think the MWI gives the same predictions, this is my best guess of how you may think it works:

0) There is a universal wave function describing the whole UNIVERSE (PSI)

1b) Some mathemagical operations can be used to extract a wave function that describes the physical universe (the branch of the UNIVERSE that we are in, however you want to call "our world" out of "many worlds"). Let's say we decompose it as psi for the system (which in "our world" has been prepared in that state, so it's described as in the standard formulation) and psi' for the rest of our universe (not the UNIVERSE, mind you).

2) You can calculate the possible outocomes of a measurement, say +1 with probability 50% and -1 with probability 50%.

3b) You perform the experiment, but you don't really do perform an experiment because the only thing that happens is that the UNIVERSE evolves unitarily and PSI follows Schroedinger's equation in a completely deterministic fashion. However, somehow _you_ do get a random outcome. You do also get the other outcome, but that's in another branch (or whatever). In your branch, you get an outcome with is either +1 or -1 as predicted. Remarkably, if you repeat the experiment the frequency of the different outcomes will match the predicted probabilities (unless you're unlucky, because there are other branches where you don't get the expected frequencies and your predictions will fail). Anyway, say that in your branch you got the result +1.

4b) You do the mathemagical operations of step (1b) again, but in this case to get the wave function describing your branch you don't say "in my world I have a system prepared as such and such", you say "in my world I had a system prepared as such and such and then I did a measurement and I got +1 as outcome". This gives you the wave function for your universe, that can be factored as psi+ (because you got the result +1) for the system of interest and psi'' for the rest of our universe.

5) You can use the wave function psi+ to make predictions for new experiments, for example repeating the measurement before the state has time to evolve (according to Schroedinger's equation) you will get +1 again.

As far as I can imagine, to make predictions about "your universe" you have to include the outcomes of the previous measurements to get the right description for the system (i.e. you need to recover the "collapsed" wave function psi, even though PSI doesn't collapse). That's what I mean by putting the collapse back in somehow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I always say _nothing_ is going on during wave function collapse. You can't tell the difference between a particle whose wave function has collapsed and one that hasn't. Since there is no change it seems nothing actually happened ;-)

<comment><USER21> > You can't tell the difference between a particle whose wave function has > collapsed and one that hasn't.

Could you expand on this? For example, in the double slit experiment, it's easy to observe the effects of "uncollapsed" (superposition) behavior.

Perhaps you're saying that we can't observe a particle without collapse occurring (from a Copenhagen perspective), so we never directly observe an uncollapsed particle. But we can observe the distinct effects that uncollapsed particles have, which seems to undermine your claim.

<comment><USER22> The double slit experiment has been replicated in fully classical macroscopic systems. [https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.97...](https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.97.154101)

<comment><USER23> Except that a droplet is not a single particle. We have known for a long time that a droplet is divisible and can spread as a wave.

Quantum theory states the existence of quantums: indivisible parts of matter and energy.

<comment><USER22> The interaction in that experiment doesn't have the droplet dividing or dissolving into the wave. For the purposes of that experiment, the droplet is a quantum unit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Nobody really cared about this question when I was studying physics. It drove me crazy.

The amount of handwaving was insane.</comment>


Show HN: Marketplace to build 3rd party applications APIs with NoCode - <AUTHOR> https://nocodeapi.com/marketplace <comment><USER2> I just upgrade my plan to developers. I just can't wait for some API's to be up. Gonna build some my left over todo's task/site

<comment><USER3> Cool!</comment></comment>


Fourier's transformational thinking - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03389-w <comment><USER2> This is one excellent article. Made my day. My most favorite part -

"Fourier would surely be delighted that his ideas have endured. Writing to a friend 229 years ago, he lamented his lack of achievement up to that point: "Yesterday was my 21st birthday; at that age Newton and Pascal had already acquired many claims to immortality.""</comment>


A Chicken Farmer Spy Who Tricked Hitler and Saved D-Day - <AUTHOR> https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-ii/agent-garbo-the-brilliant-eccentric-chicken-farmer-spy-who-tricked-hitler-saved-d-day.html <comment><USER2> Was enjoying that until we got to the D-Day deception.

 _" Pujol did such a good job that when the invasion happened on June 6, Hitler was convinced it was a diversion"_

Makes it sound like he achieved the deception single handedly. It was a _tiny_ bit more involved than that. Operation Fortitude[0], included creating an entire dummy army group (1st Army Group, commanded by Patton) with regiments of inflatable tanks, landing craft and squadrons of dummy aircraft in the right locations for a Calais invasion. Also significant fake radio and telephone traffic to be noticed and intercepted. It was a huge, ongoing, disinformation campaign and enormously successful.

Pujol was a fascinating tale, and played his part, but it was a small one.

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

<comment><USER3> It's incredible how comprehensively they constructed the ruse. The Allies really outsmarted the Axis in every way. Successful operation ruses, cracked ciphers, complete control over the intelligence networks.

<comment><USER4> > The Allies really outsmarted the Axis in every way.

History written by the victors. On our side bright minds and heroic hearts and on their side cowards and dunderheads. /s

<comment><USER3> Good point, but from what I've read of the war, it seems like the Allies absolutely dominated the intelligence (as in espionage) aspect in an objective sense. I think the Germans admitted post-war they got outplayed. Clearly the Axis was better at certain other things than the Allies, though, otherwise they wouldn't have taken over so much territory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Pujol is, therefore, the only one to have received awards from both sides > for his services in WWII.

I would be surprised if there weren't some Italians who managed to win awards fighting for both sides in the Second World War.

</comment><comment><USER6> I like to think that fascist regimes could never produce such a figure...

</comment><comment><USER7> Garbo is referenced in one of my favorite David Bowie songs "Quicksand".

      "I'm the twisted name on Garbo's eyes
      Living proof of Churchill's lies, I'm destiny"

</comment><comment><USER8> Was this guy the inspiration for Mr. Bean?

</comment><comment><USER9> The first paragraph sounded very weird: he was awarded the Iron Cross by the Nazis for deceiving the Nazis? This isn't cleared up until the end of the article.

<comment><USER10> I thought it was obvious that the Nazis did not know they were deceived.</comment></comment>


Abolish the TechToPrisonPipeline - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@CoalitionForCriticalTechnology/abolish-the-techtoprisonpipeline-9b5b14366b16 <comment><USER2> Original article has been taken down pending edits and publication, but here's an article about it: [https://www.abc27.com/news/local/harrisburg/harrisburg- unive...](https://www.abc27.com/news/local/harrisburg/harrisburg-university- develops-facial-recognition-software-to-predict-criminality/)

In related pseudo-science, here's the Wikipedia article on Phrenology [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology)</comment>


Ghoti - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti <comment><USER3> As a non-English speaker, I find the English spoken by non-native speakers far easier to understand and deal with than the English spoken by Americans/British.

I work with Germans, Italians, Spaniards, French, Dutch and I understand them 99% of the time. We use "normal" words (we are not fancy regarding vocabulary) and pronounce them in a non-native way (the way all Europeans that speak English understand)... But the moment our British colleagues join the conversation, then our understanding decreases to around 70%: either because of the usage of "fancy" words or because of pronunciation.

Besides, since we all make the same mistakes when speaking English, we understand each other without asking "sorry, what do you mean?"

<comment><USER4> > Besides, since we all make the same mistakes when speaking English, we > understand each other without asking "sorry, what do you mean?"

That's likely because the languages you speak all share recent ancestry (if they're not all Romance languages, they're at least all descended from Proto- Indo-European.)

Meanwhile, I've seen e.g. Mexican and Chinese ESL speakers have _very_ bad mutual intelligibility, because they make very _different_ mistakes.

<comment><USER5> Funny story, had this happen to me in a hostel in Germany. I had to "translate" from English with a heavy Italian accent to/from English with a heavy Vietnamese accent between roommates. Basically I just repeated what each said into my California English accent with a few touch ups. Everyone finally understood. :D

<comment><USER6> I did the same for my Grandfather, with his Punjabi accent, and a Jamaican cashier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If this irritates anyone, you might be interested in the work of George Bernard Shaw and Kingsley Read to reform English spelling. They proposed a consistent, phonetic, spelling and writing system called Shavian and published a now-rare book using that system. The second iteration made some slight usability and efficiency improvements and called the new work Quikscript.

Of course, in an alternate universe, this superior writing system was adopted along with the full SI unit system.

[https://omniglot.com/writing/shavian.htm](https://omniglot.com/writing/shavian.htm)

[https://shavian.weebly.com/uploads/1/0/2/1/10212142/30817_or...](https://shavian.weebly.com/uploads/1/0/2/1/10212142/30817_orig.jpg)

[https://www.quikscript.net/](https://www.quikscript.net/)

<comment><USER8> You don't need to go to an alternate Universe to find a place that uses a phonetic script and the metric system. Just go to India.

<comment><USER9> Germany had a spelling reform in the 90s that changed words to be spelled more phonetically rather than how they would have been spelled in their origin languages. For example "Delphin" (dolphin) became "Delfin" because German isn't Greek.

<comment><USER10> And even Greek uses a single letter for the "f" sound. The fact that "φ" is transliterated as "ph" is a historical accident: in ancient Greek the letter was pronounced like p with an extra puff of air, like in "Phuket".

<comment><USER11> Which is reflected in some contractions where, e.g., ἀπὸ αἵματος becomes ἀφ' αἵματος

<comment><USER10> Interesting! Never seen that phenomenon, do you know if it persists in Modern Greek?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Homophones, Weakly"[0] enjoys a place in my RSS feed. And I have a supposedly complete version of the referenced poem, "The Chaos"[1]...

[0] [http://homophonesweakly.blogspot.com/](http://homophonesweakly.blogspot.com/)

[1] [https://every.sdf.org/various/longish/thechaos.txt](https://every.sdf.org/various/longish/thechaos.txt)

<comment><USER13> You username is a hack, wow!

<comment><USER14> I'm surprised it was available as recently as 2019.

<comment><USER12> Seemingly one of the lesser considered adjectives. I have used it in a number of places with no rejections, so far. It was originally the name of a nethack character that attempted to ascend "every" role. And failed, of course...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There was also a meme going around that one can spell "potato" like "Ghoughphtheightteeau" with the following explanation:

\- gh for P as in "hiccough"

\- ough for O as in "dough"

\- phth for T as in "phthisis"

\- eigh for A as in "neighbour"

\- tte for T as in "gazette"

\- eau for O as in "plateau"

edit: formatting

<comment><USER16> > hiccough

I've never seen this word before! I've always seen it spelled "hiccup". Is it used in a particular region or do I just live under a rock?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> That is one of the reasons why I think Esperanto has too much more to offer to the World as an international language than English.

I'm not an activist. Besides, I enjoy so many features of English.

But the resources one must invest to learn it as a second language make it unreachable to a huge amount of people around the globe, providing breeding ground to the formation of "linguistic elites" and deepening social and economic inequalities.

Having contact with poor people in my country and others and being a non- native speaker myself make me very aware of that.

<comment><USER18> Forget Esperanto, give Toki Pona a look

<comment><USER19> Are we there yet [https://xkcd.com/927/](https://xkcd.com/927/)?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm a native English speaker who is currently learning German. THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR MAKING YOUR SPELLING Work GERMANY! Sorry about our mess of BS you have to learn to use English.

<comment><USER21> As a german, what I prefer about english spelling:

* You do not capitalize Nouns in your Sentences which is means I don't have to analyse the lexical Structure of a Sentence while writting stuff.

Stuff that is hard in English but rarely talked about because of the prominence of the phonetics-vs-traditional spelling:

* hyphenation (fairly complex, basically one needs to look it up or rely on tooling in english, rarely taught). * punctuation, especially placement of commas * capitalization in headings (a bit confusing, conflicting recommendations)

Oh and as for german there are a lot of strange things buried in what superficially looks like a fairly ok system.

* Typically you can infer from the roots of a word whether to spell with `e' or `ä' (i.e. schälen (to peel) is spelled with ä because it stems from Schale [peel]). But for some words that doesn't apply, for example Mehl (flour) is related to `mahlen' (to grind), but not spelled "Mähl". * Auslautverhärtung is not spelled out but implied. I.e. Hund (dog) is kind of pronounced as if it would end with a -t ("Hunt"), whereas "Hunde" (dogs) has a soft d sound. Turkish makes such things explicit (compare `kitap` and `kitabi`). If we went down the turkish route, we could introduce a soft-s and hard-s distinction in the alphabet (maybe z vs s) and get rid of the `ß/ss` mess. * `sch` should be replaced by Ş, w -> v (with existing spellings of v being replaced by f where necessary ("von" -> "fon"), z -> "ts", etc.

There is an obscure swiss organisation promoting a spelling reform for German(that differs from my suggestions) [https://www.ortografie.ch](https://www.ortografie.ch)

Its focus is a lot on vocal lengths and capitalization. Kind of interesting stuff (that will never make its way into the maintstream).

<comment><USER22> > and get rid of the `ß/ss` mess.

Swiss Standard German got rid of ß :)

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

<comment><USER21> yeah, but they didn't get rid of the mess, they kind of made it harder for German-learners to pronounce a written word (in comparison to the post-reform federal german spelling).

i.e. "Fuß" vs swiss "Fuss"

Swiss spelling makes it appear as if "Fuss" (with a long u) could be pronounced like "Nuss" (with a short u), whereas standard German "Fuß" is clear on that.

Prior to the German spelling reform, Nuss was also written "Nuß" and back then the swiss way of spelling had the appeal of avoiding an extra character that is specific to the german language (and wasn't found on french typewriters for example).

What I meant was a spelling like "Fus, Füse, Nuss, Nüsse" but "Gras, Gräzer" (instead of Gras Gräser).

z would be the soft s-sound represented by s in traditional german spelling. s would be the hard s sound represented by ß or s in traditional german spelling.

<comment><USER23> Fuss is because we have both french è é à and german ü ö ä on our keyboards, so we don't have room for ß.

Luckily for shell scripting, $ is unshifted (shifted would be £. I far prefer USD GBP CHF etc.)

(nonante-neuf > quatre-vingt-dix-neuf. Fais-moi changer d'avis :-) )

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This reminds me of a stack exchange puzzle that uses this same pattern. [0]

While this isn't the "correct" answer I think everyone agrees that it is the "best" answer (or at least the funniest). As a language lover, this is just a beautiful and hilarious.

[0] [https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/a/32280/22182](https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/a/32280/22182)

</comment><comment><USER25> I think this example is far-fetched and, due to being so far-fetched, is useless. I mean there are no actual english words where "gh" at the beginning of a word would be pronounced as "f", right? And "gh" at the end of a word hints heavily that you should pronounce it as "f", there are no irregularities here.

<comment><USER26> Riiiiight, so obviously you personally have no problems with the spelling rules of English (which do, in general, exist, contrary to popular belief). But, we need to ask ourselves: if it is at all conceivable that "ghoti" could be sounded out as "fish", just what the fuck is going on here?

Sure, you don't have a problem dealing with this nonsense - I don't have one neither! But I struggle to believe that you've failed to notice that a lot of people do.

Who is this system here to serve?

Could it not be improved?

<comment><USER27> Do you object to the fact that the spelling "th" invariably means /þ/ or /ð/, and not /th/? Or mapping "sh" to /ʃ/ and not /sh/? I highly doubt you do.

Here's the thing: spelling rules are context-sensitive, and if you actually understand the underlying sound rules, spelling in English is often not that bad. For example, there is a fricatization process for /t/ and /s/ sounds convert to a /ʃ/ or a /ʒ/\--this is how "-tion" is pronounced /ʃən/. Or the tendency of multiple consonants in a cluster to all be voiced or unvoiced (hence why dogs is pronounced /dogz/ and not /dogs/). Even consider the velarization of "n" in the "-ing" suffix, which is pronunced /ŋg/ and not /ng/ (try actually pronouncing /ng/! It's not easy).

I'm not aware of any spelling reforms that would propose to fix the last two examples I give, but the fricatization changes is often one of most common ones people suggest changing. That's a sign that people are willing to tolerate some degree of phonetic inaccuracies.

The _real_ issue with English is our tendency to adopt foreign words with foreign pronunciations, foreign spellings, and sometimes even foreign morphology. And sometimes we even botch that--witness words like "gyro" or "ginkgo". This means that trying to pronounce unusual words often means first guessing what language the words (or even morphemes!) comes from, and then internalizing some bastardized form of that foreign language's phonology.

<comment><USER26> I don't object to anything, at least not when English spelling is involved. English spelling serves me well, as I don't have a problem with it, and there are people that look down on those that do. I'll let you do the 2x2.

Given how useful writing is, I just feel we should be asking ourselves whether any part of the process could be simplified.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Once upon a time, I figured out the reason why 'gh' is so inconsistent. It used to be its own sound, but that sound has vanished from the English language.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gh_(digraph)#English](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gh_\(digraph\)#English)

'ti' pronounced as 'sh' is only in french loan words afaict.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin- script_digraphs#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin- script_digraphs#T)

I don't yet know how the 'o' in woman becomes an 'i'. When I do, I'll have finally cracked the whole of ghoti.

<comment><USER29> I'm not an expert, but I suspect that it has something to do with _wifmann_ , Old English for _woman_.

[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wifmann](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wifmann)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> In teaching my young son to read I have become starkly aware at just how inconsistent English is.

I never consciously realized how many ways there are to pronounce "ough". And not a single one makes sense.

That said, I am amazed at how quickly he's figuring it all out.

<comment><USER31> Neither my wife or me are native, our child started school last year. When we were introduced to the concept of "Tricky words" our reaction was: sorry, do you mean every single word?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Given the variation amongst different varieties of English, a phonetically- based reform would be tricky. E.g., should we spell 'car' as 'kar' or 'kaa'?

(It's also worth mentioning that English spelling is position-dependent: there aren't any real words where 'gh' at the beginning is pronounced as 'f'.)

<comment><USER33> Typically language reforms "solve" this problem by standardizing on whatever dialect is considered most broadly prestigious (often the dialect of the capital city).

<comment><USER32> Yeah, we already did this quite a while ago.

In 2020, which capital will you choose? London, Delhi, D.C., Canberra, &c. &c.?

<comment><USER33> In AmE the dialect would likely be "midwestern speech" since the political history of our "standard dialect" differs from that of many other countries. I would expect with English it might be best to consider the different major dialects separately, but at any point there's a tradeoff and someone gets the short end of the stick. The right way would probably be to bring in many different stakeholders from different speaking communities and hash out some compromises.

Incidentally, I was once chatting with a member of the English Spelling Society (they advocate spelling reform) and asked about this very topic. Shockingly it seemed like that group hadn't thought about it all.

<comment><USER32> > I would expect with English it might be best to consider the different major > dialects separately, but at any point there's a tradeoff and someone gets > the short end of the stick.

That seems like a bad idea to me. Standard Written English (which varies only slightly, with minor spelling differences) is fairly intelligible across speakers of different dialects and even quite a few time periods.

If English didn't already have a written standard, all of this might be worth considering. But actual reform would take massive effort for pretty minor benefits, which wouldn't endure long anyway given the ever constant presence of language change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Relatedly, this video is hilarious: What If English Were Phonetically Consistent? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8zWWp0akUU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8zWWp0akUU)

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm glad the Wikipedia article included the link to this page ([http://zompist.com/spell.html](http://zompist.com/spell.html)) that give a good breakdown of the actual general rules of English spelling - <USER2> there's almost 60 of them.

</comment><comment><USER36> Nationalism is rampant and leaking through in this thread. "English" sucks, replace with ______ native tongue is better. Someone posted a thread about cost of their neighborhood road renovation project and immediately an Australian tells the thread that America feels like a third world country from a sample size of exactly 1. I am not even American.

Everyone is getting tribal. Humanity is splitting apart with infighting even on a highly intellectual community as HN.

Folks, please try to be civil and self-introspective, especially if something you say perhaps is hypocritical or fuels your own nationalistic pscyche. Seek truth - the language nature understands, not our evolutionary tribalism and cultures.

<comment><USER23> Nothing wrong with tribalism as long as we're all seeking to understand people from other tribes instead of imposing our own tribe's[1] ways upon them[2]. A little less "melting pot" and a little more "salad"[3] might go a long way towards whirled peas.

[1] and even that "own tribe" has a fractal nature. Scratch a dialect and one finds a collection of idiolects.

[2] my understanding of swiss german dialect history is that there used to be pressure to educate the lower and middle classes to speak "standard" german, as the upper classes did. Developments in the 1930s put an end to that, so now not only do we encourage Romansh [https://rm.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pagina_principala](https://rm.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pagina_principala) (Mussolini had claimed they were just peasants who couldn't speak italian correctly) but one can tell where politicians and captains of industry grew up by how they speak. Differences are celebrated, not merely tolerated, or worse, steamrollered away. [https://als.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Houptsyte](https://als.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Houptsyte) gives the flavour of the dialects, but a more academic reference is required for all the isoglosses. (the variety of isoglosses also means that for informal use, SMS, internet, etc. orthography is a matter of regional taste)

[3] in which the constituents retain their identity but taste much better because they're all mixed together.

cultures are a fourier transform of humanity?

<comment><USER37> Your point about the fractal structure of tribalism reminded me of this joke:

I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump. I ran over and said: "Stop. Don't do it."

"Why shouldn't I?" he asked.

"Well, there's so much to live for!"

"Like what?"

"Are you religious?"

He said: "Yes."

I said: "Me too. Are you Christian or Buddhist?"

"Christian."

"Me too. Are you Catholic or Protestant?"

"Protestant."

"Me too. Are you Episcopalian or Baptist?"

"Baptist."

"Wow. Me too. Are you Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Lord?"

"Baptist Church of God."

"Me too. Are you original Baptist Church of God, or are you Reformed Baptist Church of God?"

"Reformed Baptist Church of God."

"Me too. Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1879, or Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915?"

He said: "Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915."

I said: "Die, heretic scum," and pushed him off.

<comment><USER23> TIL the great schism in baptism isn't between (a) the baptists who dance, and (o) the baptists who don't have sex standing up because that might lead to dancing. :-)

Here's a nice ecumenical baptist video, sadly (judging by YT views) hidden under a bushel: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjLSo3cRh6g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjLSo3cRh6g)

(for HNers who have never lived in the southern US, 0:29 depicts a spit cup. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spittoon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spittoon)

As for myself, I'm with the Popular Front of Judea.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This is because in English it's not always that you speak what you write. Pronunciation is different for the same letter in different cases. In some languages (mainly Indian) like Hindi, we speak what we write and we write what we speak i.e. Our letters have a definite and unique sounds.

<comment><USER39> While this is true, the pronunciations are not consistent across languages that use Devanagari script. ज्ञ is pronounced like "gy" in Hindi, but "ny" in Marathi. ज is pronounced like "jy"(with the य sound) in Hindi-ish languages, but without य in Marathi. Some sounds are completely missing/unused is some languages, like ळ and ण.

So non-native speakers with another Devanagari language as mothertongue still get pronunciations wrong.

<comment><USER40> Also, even within Marathi, at least for the letters ज and च, how you pronounce them depends on the word. You have to know the correct pronunciation beforehand, as it can't really be guessed from the word.

जेजुरी is my favourite example. चिंच is a close second :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Ghoti, sure... But the whole world still wants to learn English. Most people are not deterred by the messed up spelling and other irregularities.

Also, English like any language is a living and breathing thing. New words come in, new spellings, etc... Reform would cause even more confusion than benefits

</comment><comment><USER42> And natives still laugh when I pronounce a word wrong between the million others I say

<comment><USER37> There's a small category of words, at least in British English, that act as a fairly effective shibboleth when it comes to identify non-native speakers. Usually names for places, but not only:

Glouchester, Worcester, Worcestershire, leftenant etc

<comment><USER43> Lots of place names in US that reveal not just non-native speakers but also native speakers that aren't locals. Some that come to mind: Worcester, MA; Wilkes-Barre, PA; Versailles, KY; New Berlin, PA; and many others.

<comment><USER44> How you pronounce "New Orleans" can show not only whether or not you are a local, but which part of town you are from, and how old you are. I can think of at least four or five ways.

<comment><USER23> knowing which part of town you are from means I no longer have to ask where you went to school, but there's still more to know, like:

What was your mama's name?

Can you make a roux?

(more seriously, New Orleans falls under my list of "civilised" places, because Carnaval/Fasnacht is still a thing there)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> [https://www.ghotit.com/](https://www.ghotit.com/) the name of this company relates to this; they sell a spell checker that is specially suited for people with dyslexia.

</comment><comment><USER46> Concerning the spelling reform, is there any language that recently underwent a successful spelling reform? And by recent, I mean in the last 10 years.

The thing is that with the widespread usage of the internet it seems harder to successfully reform the orthography of a language. Every language is, nowadays, in one way or another decentralized and uncontrolled by language authorities.

<comment><USER47> Not 10 years, but yeah, German was completely reformed some 24 years ago. It is still pretty major as several countries (Germany, Austria, Switzerland and others with german-speaking minorities) had to coordinate and consent.

See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_orthography_reform_of_1...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_orthography_reform_of_1996)

I as a child started learning the old orthography in school, was taught the "new" one later on and had to use it and even the "new new" one (there was basically a version 2.1 minor update). To this day I am confused about how to correctly spell and write words, and I always end up mixing old/new orthography. The fact that almost all major newspapers refuse to fully adhere to the new orthography and use custom deviations every here and there does not exactly help.

Lessons learned: It is a mess, don't do it.

<comment><USER46> I learned German in high school so I knew a bit about the reform. Compared to French, learning how to read German didn't take more than an hour.

French is another one, however, the transition to the new orthography is still incomplete around the world. I think Frank lately enforced it at schools.

Other examples include the Berber language in Morocco and Algeria. Most people ignore spelling reforms and just pick the spelling they like most. This is mostly because the standardization of Berber came after the introduction of the internet and the proliferation of informal spelling standards.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> It is correct the English spelling is really messy. Maybe, it is because they use Latin alphabets; Latin alphabets are good for writing in Latin (and, I suppose, Romantic languages), but for English perhaps isn't as good; but, it is what we have now, so it is what we are going to do. Germanic (futhorc) alphabets might be better way for writing English, maybe.

</comment><comment><USER49> In Lapland you can often see Germans and Finns use particularly "phonetic" English. The writing system is similar, so it is easier to pronounce words as they are written, instead of trying some fancy Hollywood way.

This might be the future of spoken English as most other languages have same wholesome writing system, and thus there are no ambiguities.

<comment><USER49> "Jäniskoski Bridge" comes to mind. There are no perceived differences between "b" and "p", or "g" and "k". And the "ʒ"-sound is not possible for most humans. So the correct pronounciation in year 2235 will be "prid-key".

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> [http://ghoti.xyz](http://ghoti.xyz) redirects to the Wikipedia article.

</comment><comment><USER50> > while ti would only resemble sh when followed by a vowel sound ("mention", > "martian", "patient", "spatial").

ti isn't "sh" in "mention," it's "ch," at least in any dialect I'm aware of. Cf. slang for Twitter mentions, "menchies."

<comment><USER51> In my NZ accent I definitely say "men-shin" not "men-chin", though those two sounds are very close.

<comment> matt-attack I'm a native speaker and I frankly don't know which I use. I could see it going either way.

<comment><USER52> This is, incidentally, one of the tricky parts of trying to add a phonetic spelling to English.

Should the phonetic spelling of "mention" be "menshin" or "menchin"? Should the spelling be the same everywhere, with people pronouncing it the other way having to learn to spell it correctly, or should it be spelled differently depending on the dialect of the speaker?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Dearest creature in creation, Study English pronunciation. I will teach you in my verse Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse. I will keep you, Suzy, busy, Make your head with heat grow dizzy. Tear in eye, your dress will tear. So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.

Just compare heart, beard, and heard, Dies and diet, lord and word, Sword and sward, retain and Britain. (Mind the latter, how it's written.) Now I surely will not plague you With such words as plaque and ague. But be careful how you speak: Say break and steak, but bleak and streak; Cloven, oven, how and low, Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.

Hear me say, devoid of trickery, Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore, Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles, Exiles, similes, and reviles; Scholar, vicar, and cigar, Solar, mica, war and far; One, anemone, Balmoral, Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel; Gertrude, German, wind and mind, Scene, Melpomene, mankind.

Billet does not rhyme with ballet, Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet. Blood and flood are not like food, Nor is mould like should and would. Viscous, viscount, load and broad, Toward, to forward, to reward. And your pronunciation's OK When you correctly say croquet, Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve, Friend and fiend, alive and live.

Ivy, privy, famous; clamour And enamour rhymes with hammer. River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb, Doll and roll and some and home. Stranger does not rhyme with anger, Neither does devour with clangour. Souls but foul, haunt but aunt, Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant, Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger, And then singer, ginger, linger, Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge, Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.

Query does not rhyme with very, Nor does fury sound like bury. Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth. Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath. Though the differences seem little, We say actual but victual. Refer does not rhyme with deafer. Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer. Mint, pint, senate and sedate; Dull, bull, and George ate late. Scenic, Arabic, Pacific, Science, conscience, scientific.

Liberty, library, heave and heaven, Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven. We say hallowed, but allowed, People, leopard, towed, but vowed. Mark the differences, moreover, Between mover, cover, clover; Leeches, breeches, wise, precise, Chalice, but police and lice; Camel, constable, unstable, Principle, disciple, label.

Petal, panel, and canal, Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal. Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair, Senator, spectator, mayor. Tour, but our and succour, four. Gas, alas, and Arkansas. Sea, idea, Korea, area, Psalm, Maria, but malaria. Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean. Doctrine, turpentine, marine.

Compare alien with Italian, Dandelion and battalion. Sally with ally, yea, ye, Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key. Say aver, but ever, fever, Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver. Heron, granary, canary. Crevice and device and aerie.

Face, but preface, not efface. Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass. Large, but target, gin, give, verging, Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging. Ear, but earn and wear and tear Do not rhyme with here but ere. Seven is right, but so is even, Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen, Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk, Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.

Pronunciation -- think of Psyche! Is a paling stout and spikey? Won't it make you lose your wits, Writing groats and saying grits? It's a dark abyss or tunnel: Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale, Islington and Isle of Wight, Housewife, verdict and indict.

Finally, which rhymes with enough? Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?

</comment><comment><USER54> Hou tu pranownse Inglish: [http://www.zompist.com/spell.html](http://www.zompist.com/spell.html)

EDIT: Just realized that the link is already mentioned elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER55> Conlang critic's take [https://youtu.be/TEsqY4MH40s](https://youtu.be/TEsqY4MH40s)

</comment><comment><USER38> One of the core problems of English language.

<comment><USER56> Most interesting problem of English language is that it is not direct. Good example is small talks. In many cultures direct question assume direct answer. If somebody asks you "how are you" you kinda obligated to give response with your real feelings and events happened to you last time. In USA mostly every stranger can start this conversation and expect only unsalted response. This tradition is much deeper than you think. On some lever you will never understand price for thing you buy, or will never get invite to the party or have no chance to get investment to your startup. And these games everywhere in English culture.

<comment><USER44> May I ask what language you are a native speaker of? I have a couple ideas based on the patterns of your errors but I'm not sure.

(My strongest guess is Russian due to your omission of articles.)

<comment><USER57> > omission of articles

AFAIK this pattern is not limited to native Russians, it's shared by most (all?) Slavic languages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As a polyglot and linguist, I have analyzed the spelling as follows:

Gh - Arabic hard G, O - Persian Ou, Ti - Russian Tee.

</comment><comment><USER38> More of such intriguing facts can be found in the book by Martin Jurafsky, Computational linguistics.

</comment><comment><USER58> considered harmful

</comment><comment><USER59> I thought this was about Eastern and Western Bengali at first.

<comment><USER60> In what way, I'm interested since I'm a Bengali speaker

<comment><USER59> Ghoti/Bangal?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Ghoughphtheightteeau

<comment><USER32> I use this example in my class.</comment></comment>


C# 4.0's dynamicity - <AUTHOR> http://blog.dispatched.ch/2010/05/10/c-40s-dynamicity/ In reply to http://blogs.msdn.com/csharpfaq/archive/2010/04/12/get-ready-for-c-4-0.aspx <comment><USER2> The point? To rag on C# for introducing dynamic when others already had it? He even poked at C# not being serious, as he put it, because the FRAMEWORK didn't have IPC. Um, okay?

Look, with some portion of dynamic being usefel everywhere and with the growing demand thereof, it was prudent to add these features. Heck, optionals and named were hotly contested features since 1.0 due to introducing mechanisms that were ultimately not important at the time. It introduces complexity, etc.

Maybe C# should give him a pony, too.

There were many other trumpeted features in C# as well as the framework as a whole.

<comment><AUTHOR> My point being? You gave yourself the answer.

If I may quote: ".. were hotly contested features since 1.0" This was around the year 2k IIRC. They honestly took ±10 years to include basic features while claiming to have a businessproof framework? Yeah, maybe - for ex-Java golems who still have WinXP developing _and_ server machines. As we all know, those would be.. the real business guys.

As to the "other trumpeted features" - I can't recall any on the beforehand mentioned release notes. Maybe the "improved COM" support. Have fun calling Excel for generating your CSV files.

<comment><USER2> This shows an axe to grind with C#, and not for the sake of C#. While you're information and insights were definitely interesting, I don't think that it really amounted to anything beyond, "Gimme a pony!".

That's just my opinion, though.</comment></comment></comment>


NFL player Willie Miller won the Silver Star. Why has his story been forgotten? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Since no link provided, how are we suppose to know?

[https://slate.com/culture/2019/01/willie-miller-rams- footbal...](https://slate.com/culture/2019/01/willie-miller-rams-football- vietnam-silver-star.html)</comment>