Ask HN: I just bought a Mac, where do I go to learn Cocoa? - <AUTHOR>

I know how to program, I've just never used Cocoa/Objective C. Is there any free stuff (preferably from Apple) I can read to learn enough about Cocoa and Obj-C to start making iPhone Apps?<p>If not, which books should I buy? <comment><USER2> Aaron Hillegass's "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X" is pretty much the standard.

Also see:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=388538>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=431967>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=346967>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=401744>

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's a pretty good tutorial amongst their developer documentation: [http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/Co...](http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/CocoaFundamentals/WhatIsCocoa/chapter_2_section_3.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> Don't forget #macdev on irc.freenode.org

Also, this is a great rundown: [http://andymatuschak.org/articles/2007/09/09/getting- started...](http://andymatuschak.org/articles/2007/09/09/getting-started-with- cocoa-a-friendlier-approach/)</comment>


Scientists can't find evidence for damages by Online Film Piracy  - <AUTHOR> http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1986299 No damages to the film industry in the U.S. could be proven - outside of the U.S. 7%, mainly because of delayed film releases <comment><AUTHOR> No damages to the film industry in the U.S. could be proven - outside of the U.S. up to 7%, mainly for films for which the release is substantially delayed.

"... By contrast, we do not see evidence of elevated sales displacement in US box office revenue following the adoption of BitTorrent, and we suggest that delayed legal availability of the content abroad may drive the losses to piracy..."</comment>


Amazon's "Just Walk Out" will solve clicks to bricks tracking - <AUTHOR> https://kolemcrae.com/notebook/justwalkout.html <comment><USER2> This is very likely true, which is one of the main reasons why I will not shop at stores that use this technology.</comment>


Show HN: Polymer IOT Home Dashboard – Android Phone Sensor Reporting - <AUTHOR> http://qvdev.github.io/pdash/ <comment><AUTHOR> Created a very simple Polymer website that shows "Realtime" sensor information from my phone. The site is hosted on github pages.

The website is connected with Firebase and uses binding to automatically update the values. And a simple background service app for my phone to send this data to firebase.

Feel free to look around and post feedback. The code is on Github [https://github.com/QVDev/pdash/tree/gh- pages](https://github.com/QVDev/pdash/tree/gh-pages)</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone here using Nagios? - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN, just asking around. Who here uses Nagios? Anything you don't like about it in particular? What about it you like the most?<p>Just trying to know what systems/server monitoring tool people are using nowadays. I hear the usage of NewRelic often times from other people. <comment><USER2> Nagios is a mature solution. It is well known, reliable and has a large community with many contributed plug-ins.</comment>


Currency and the Collapse of the Roman Empire - <AUTHOR> http://thesoundingline.com/currency-and-the-collapse-of-the-roman-empire/ <comment><USER2> Blogspam of

[http://money.visualcapitalist.com/currency-and-the- collapse-...](http://money.visualcapitalist.com/currency-and-the-collapse-of- the-roman-empire/)</comment>


Ask HN: Is it possible to invert the races on police shooting videos? - <AUTHOR> If race is supposedly not a factor in these incidents, inverting the races of the police and civilian should produce the same response. <comment><USER2> The videos are anecdotes. They either represent a larger pattern or they don't. If the victim is white, they don't represent a larger pattern.

Further reading:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/study-finds- police-f...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/study-finds-police- fatally-shoot-unarmed-black-men-at-disproportionate- rates/2016/04/06/e494563e-fa74-11e5-80e4-c381214de1a3_story.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> What is your question exactly?

<comment><AUTHOR> Is it possible through some sort of post production processing to have white individuals appear black and vice versa?

I'm curious how reactions change, if at all, when the situation is reversed.</comment></comment>


Show HN: PHP Code Generator – A scaffolding framework - <AUTHOR> http://about.asika.tw/php-code-generator/ <comment><USER2> So now we have PHP, which started as a lightweight script language, following Java down the road toward a more verbose style, and so now we need code templates? Java programmers have been doing this for awhile, they rely on IDEs such as Eclipse or IntelliJ to write some of the boilerplate for them, and that is important in a language like Java, which has so much boilerplate. But with Java, that boilerplate at least buys you something: static typing and type checks, which allows the compiler to check for bugs, and which offers immense benefits in terms of speed. In PHP, we get... what? Apparently PHP is now verbose enough that people feel the need to write code templates for it, but what benefit do we get in exchange for all of that boilerplate? PHP is still dynamic, and it is still very slow.

This seems like the worst of all worlds.

<comment><USER3> PHP has a real glut of talented programmers right now, which is why you're seeing the same overengineering that plagues Java. Fun problems have dozens of solutions because everyone wants to work on them. Templating is just one of those. Weird, case-specific conventions are another.

<comment><USER4> This isn't really anything new. Yii and Symfony have been doing code generation for years. Someone simply decided to create a library that's not framework specific.

<comment><USER3> The problem is that everyone is creating every library, over and over. It is a real problem in PHP that there is no single, polished solution and every framework is being reinvented (and breaking BC) constantly.

<comment><USER4> That's why I hope StackPHP gets some traction and more people create framework agnostic libraries (e.g. phpleague).

<comment><USER5> I'm not familiar with StackPHP but how agnostic is it? The first middleware listed (HttpCache) relies heavily on Symfony.

<comment><USER6> It relies on a single Symfony component which has become the standard for almost every HTTP package.

You don't need to download the entire Symfony framework

<comment><USER5> Right, but that's a large, core Symfony component, not a small library. It essentially dictates how you handle fundamental tasks (such as routing) and immediately starts you off doing things the "Symfony way".

<comment><USER4> Eh, it doesn't dictate how you handle routing. I think you're misunderstanding the dependency here: what StackPHP depends on is the HttpKernel _interface_. Basically the function signature for a HTTP request handler.

It does tie you into the Symfony Request object, but otherwise there are no other dependencies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have been writing an application that is a thin PHP application on top of a relational model that implements (what I hope is) a clever business.

This framework would not solve a single problem I have had. None of the frameworks do, which is why I'm not using one of them. The only thing I really found lacking in core PHP was a way to manage the urls. (In this case, query strings.) I believe this would have been difficult on any platform, as the data is deeply hierarchical so the urls would be gnarly no matter what. So I wrote a class that understands the entity hierarchy and can generate query string sets that are needed for each level in the scope.

I wish the PHP community would spend less effort trying to be rails and more effort on simply removing pain points of basic, idiomatic PHP development.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is done by [http://platform.qbix.com](http://platform.qbix.com) as well. You may wish to look at [http://platform.qbix.com/guide/models](http://platform.qbix.com/guide/models)

</comment><comment><USER9> [https://minuteproject.wikispaces.com/Propel](https://minuteproject.wikispaces.com/Propel)

[https://minuteproject.wikispaces.com/Php+doctrine](https://minuteproject.wikispaces.com/Php+doctrine)

<comment><USER10> Scaffolding in terms of code templates, rather than data model scaffolding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> As someone who has never used a code generator before, what is the use case for this?

<comment><USER12> It helps you solve the problem quicker and more cleanly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So this is basically a PHP version of Yeoman?</comment>


Show HN: An open source web application to track cryptocurrency prices - <AUTHOR> https://cryptocoinalerts.net/ <comment><USER2> There's always coinbin.org and a couple of apps that you can set up to deliver you with alerts on price fluctuations and news. What's different with your product?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, as I see that is just an API for retrieving mostly historical data, I've built a complete service that notify you when a condition is meet, for example, `1 LTC >= 0.02 BTC`.

honestly, I started building this service for 2 principal reasons:

1\. None of the free apps that I found meet my requirements and I decided to build something that I can grow it to my needs and let the community grow it as well.

2\. I'm mostly a back-end guy, it is quite difficult to explain what you can do because most of our work is usually private, now I have something in my portfolio that I can show while looking for clients or jobs.

Just to give an example, I wanted to be notified when an exchange supports a new currency and that's one of the alerts that I added, now I can receive an email instead of be checking the exchange sites or social networks, as this works with the APIs, I could even get notified faster than when they announce it.</comment></comment>


Spotify: Apple rejected our app update to drive iPhone users to Apple Music - <AUTHOR> http://www.stereogum.com/1885802/spotify-apple-rejected-our-ios-update-to-drive-iphone-owners-to-apple-music/news/ <comment><USER2> Previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12009990](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12009990)

</comment><comment><USER3> Spotify made changes to their app that violate the App Store rules they've been playing along with for many many years. Specifically around App Store subscriptions and advertising out-of-app purchase options inside your app.

I'm not defending or denigrating the App Store rules here, but make no mistake - this is a deliberate move on the part of Spotify to cause a controversy.

What's with iMusic in the title? That's not a product, it's not in the linked article, and it's not common shorthand for Apple Music.

\-- _edit: thanks for fixing the title_

<comment><USER4> Yeah, amusingly, even Google Play has rules against third party payment processors. So Apple's behavior cracking down on directing app users to go pay somewhere else than the app store isn't even Apple specific.

<comment><USER5> Actually... There's a specific exemption for this kind of thing[0] on Google Play.

[0] [https://play.google.com/about/monetization- ads/](https://play.google.com/about/monetization-ads/)

Edit: Relevant section: "Developers . . . must use Google Play In-app Billing as the method of payment, except [when] . . . payment is for digital content that may be consumed outside of the app itself (e.g. songs that can be played on other music players)"

Edit 2: To clarify, Spotify services are available outside of the app itself so I'm fairly certain they can avoid using Google Play's In-app Billing if they so desired. I have no idea if they actually do or not or if Google would actually have a problem with this or not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What Spotify would like is to be able to not pay Apple for use of its store.

It would be as if a product inside a Walmart demanded to be allowed to put up a display INSIDE Walmart of their product with a large sign saying instead of buying our mop for $13 here, come out to the parking lot and I'll sell it to you for $10.

<comment><USER7> The App Store is not a Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart doesn't let people use its store to give stuff away for free, for example, while Apple has no problem with free apps that never require payment for anything. Wal-Mart also isn't the sole source for products which work with another kind of product, they're just a store, little different from other big stores. The App Store is the sole source for software that runs on iPhones, and it exists mainly to drive iPhone sales, the revenue from the App Store itself is insignificant.

<comment><USER8> Apple requires all developers to pay $99/yr to publish any applications, even free ones. They are strictly pay to play. Also, App Store revenue is certainly not "insignificant", we're talking $Billions of dollars for Apple here... [https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/07/apple-10b-in-app-store- sal...](https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/07/apple-10b-in-app-store-sales- in-2013-15b-paid-out-to-developers-to-date/)

<comment><USER7> Good point on the $99/year. Still, good luck convincing Wal-Mart to let you user their stores as a distribution point for your free stuff for a low annual payment.

Apple is big enough that billions can easily be insignificant. According to that article, they've paid out $15 billion total to developers. That means that Apple's cut has been about $6.5 billion. That's over a period of eight years, so somewhat less than $1 billion in revenue per year. Currently Apple is making $10-20 billion per quarter in _profit_ , with yearly revenues beyond $200 billion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As an Apple and Spotify customer I will quickly stop being an Apple customer if they try to control / influence Spotify. I use it all day at work and at home on my Sonos. I never knew that if challenged I would be more loyal to a music streaming company then my main hardware providing company, but, it would be a non negotiable issue for me.

<comment><USER10> You're aware that this whole thing is caused by Spotify choosing to violate the terms which they've operated under for years, just to get attention?

<comment><USER9> As a customer, that is literally of no concern to me. I'm not taking a position on who is right or wrong. I don't care who did what and to who, the only thing that matters to me is how my service(s) are interrupted. As the customer, I will first choose the provider that I perceive as providing me with greater benefit and then remove any resistance to that provider services. Anything outside of the equation ultimately doesn't matter and therefore won't enter into my individual purchasing power.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This sounds like spotify is trying to stir up a public outrage, so it can get around the rules apple applies to everybody.

<comment><USER12> It's kind of amazing how well it works. I completely understand consumers being upset about anti-consumer behavior from businesses, but competitors using every tactic they can get away with to out-compete each other, especially enforcing established contracts, is expected behavior. Nobody wants monopolies, but the phenomenon of people swearing off a brand forever because they try to make use of their business advantages is fascinating. It might be a sign of a need for someone to intervene to level the playing field, but I'd never be personally offended by it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> When you start an article telling me to read an awful book that tries to tell me it's allegorically easy for a company to turn into a dystopian ruler of all, you seem more than a little alarmist. Regardless of the rest of the content.

</comment><comment><USER14> Title should not say "iMusic", but "Apple Music" like in the linked article.

</comment><comment><USER15> Links to [http://www.recode.net/2016/6/30/12067578/spotify-apple- app-s...](http://www.recode.net/2016/6/30/12067578/spotify-apple-app-store- rejection)

</comment><comment><USER16> Amazon does something similar regarding stepping around the 30% Apple fee with Comixology and their ebook offerings- you can access them on the app, but you have to buy them on a web browser. I can't recall if they explicitly say "go outside the app store to buy" or not though.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm surprised so many businesses ever got convinced to work with a company that can shut down your entire business on a whim, with no recourse.

<comment><USER18> Sounds like the same comments I see when Google changes their search algorithms.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, if your entire product's strategy relies on someone elses platform and you don't have multiple income streams, or ways to acquire customers, you'll be exposed to these sorts of things.

I wonder how big Spotify's android base is. I know they get my $10 a month.</comment></comment></comment>


"Fuck the EU" – Phone call intercept (Google translate) - <AUTHOR> http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tagesschau.de%2Fausland%2Fukraine-mitschnitt100.html Somebody, possibly the Russian government, intercepted a phone call between the "Europe person" in the state department and the US ambassador in Ukraine. The phone call was then put on Youtube, see [1].<p>[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSxaa-67yGM <comment><USER2> Not a long time ago, similar youtube video with Russian subtitles appeared with a phone conversation of a Lithuanian (where I'm from) ambassador in Azerbaijan having a conversation with another official. This was as well with a goal to discredit Eastern Partnership (a cooperation agreement between the EU and several post soviet states).

One of the conclusions: diplomatic lines in many countries close to Russia are tapped by Russians. Ironic that Snowden is taking refuge in a country which has even less regard for privacy than the US. Not saying he had a choice..

On another note, not completely clear from the audio why the US diplomat is saying 'fuck the EU'. Wouldn't be surprised that EU is not being effective in making hard decisions in helping solve the Ukraine crisis.. causing disappointment among US diplomats. EU should be taking the lead in this IMO, but it's possible it's hugely ineffective due to lack of power (EU is not a state, it has to get a mandate to do things from member countries).

It's just a speculation, however.

<comment><USER3> You don't know if it was intercepted by Russia, but you sure ready to blame (Snowden part). I read that security service of Ukraine made the interception, which seems logically since one of parts was in the Ukraine. As of privacy, I think US did the same, did you forgot that foreign governments was spied on? Merkel wasn't happy about that. I don't think any government in the world would be happy to know that protesters actively contact foreign powers and discuss who will be in the new government.

Of course we don't know if that tape is 100% real, at least someone have to check they sound the same as in public recordings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> No problem with German news, but please remember how poor Google Translate is. When you have the option, try to pick an English article — or do a proper translation yourself.

[http://world.time.com/2014/02/06/victoria-nuland-leaked- audi...](http://world.time.com/2014/02/06/victoria-nuland-leaked-audio- european-union/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, thank you for that link. I so far hadn't seen an English-language article on the incident, so I submitted the German one with some more context in the comments.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Accompanying text: Somebody, possibly the Russian government, intercepted a phone call between the "Europe person" in the state department and the US ambassador in Ukraine. The phone call was then put on Youtube, see [1].

[1] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSxaa-67yGM](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSxaa-67yGM)

<comment><USER5> A rare glimpse at the geopolitical game that is played behind the scenes every day.

<comment><AUTHOR> In a now deleted comment somebody claimed that this info didn't contribute much. After all, this isn't reddit. However, while I was at first hesitant to submit it, there are IMO a few aspects to this that are relevant to the HN community specifically:

1\. If the US state department can't keep its communications secure, how are we supposed to do it with the communications between our web services and customers?

2\. Russia is using a very smart "marketing" tactic to discredit the US: Instead of making stuff up, they leak uncomfortable parts of the truth to the public. They have been doing so for quite some time now, though most of it remained below the radar.

3\. Even though many of us (here in Europe) have been led that we're equal to the US and its citizens, these things serve as a reminder that the EU-Europe has yet to assert itself on the international stage (and in the digital realm for that matter, see the state of the startup scene in Europe).

<comment><USER3> I don't understand what USA even doing there. Why should they interfere, when there's clearly 3 parts involved: Ukraine, EU, Russia.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you get publicly caught bugging world leaders like Germany's Merkel, it's open season on your own diplomats.</comment>


Show HN: NIST 800-53 Controls in SQL - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/luiz-surian/nist-800-53-db <comment><AUTHOR> I've made a SQL structure with the infosec controls of NIST 800-53, feel free to use it if you want.

I'm translating it to Brazilian Portuguese. If you can, please help me translate it, to pt-br or any other language, Thank you.

Feedback is much apreciated.</comment>


Temporal circuit of brain activity supports human consciousness - <AUTHOR> https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/11/eaaz0087 <comment><USER4> Man, I love seeing more research like this. My personal experience, as someone who has dealt with a variety of issues in psychiatrists' offices and rehabilitation rooms, is that a clear scientific understanding of what is actually going on under my skull provides a much firmer basis for any therapeutic approach. I'm really hoping that in my lifetime we will see connections made between the physiological elements of consciousness and the modern psychiatric plagues of depression, anxiety, and addiction that finally produce the targeted, universally effective therapies that are desperately needed.

<comment><USER5> I was recently talking to a registered psych nurse, and we got talking about Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.

I believe I've been self administering a form of it for a couple years, and I summarized my understand of CBT as "moving more thinking from the amygdala to the prefrontal cortex", and she confirmed that with "in laymen's terms; yes".

It's not like the fields are completely isolated, I guess is what I'm getting at with that anecdote. It's hard to go from neuroscience to psychology, but that's always being looked at. I reckon most big advancements will start coming when we start understanding the connectome more, but it's not like all advancements will come from there, and it's not like people aren't working right now to bridge neuroscience and psychology.

Also I want to hang out with the laymen she does.

<comment><USER6> I'm not qualified to contest this, but I do remember a side blurb from "Principles of Neuroscience" (Kandel, Schwartz, Jessell) that said overactive mPFCs are attributed with autism and below is some more research on it.

I don't think you're saying this overtly but I have seen people from the Thinking Fast & Slow crowd glorify their PFCs as arbiters of cognitive bias while forgetting that healthy social, emotional processing required integrated functioning between all neural correlates involved, including the amygdala. I would venture to guess CBT is effective because it stops overactive PFCs which is the opposite of what the nurse's guess is. But as a laymen here, I can't say one way or the other.

I remember a decade or two ago, the ACC+vmPFC combo was getting a lot of praise as this balancing force between the dlPFC and the amygdala saying strong ACC+vmPFC could be the clue to healthy brains. I think the answer will always be, "hey all these parts are important. Just meditate, exercise, and eat right. And don't believe your thoughts too much (CBT)"

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5192959/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5192959/) [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4688328/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4688328/)

<comment><USER7> As a depression patient, that's more or less healed, here's my take: \- In depression you can get up lost in these cognitive negative loops

\- One of the feedback loops is between what you feel and what you think - <USER2> bad feeling induces you to think some bad thoughts, and as those thoughts are combined with the bad feeling, they are validated as true. Now the thought is associated with a bad feeling, and one will give rise to the other , just like tinkle of the bell induced pavlov's dog to drool. But in this case the drooling of the dog can also make the bell tinkle, causing more drooling...

\- the amygdala response is about the bad feelings, and how the bad feelings can induce more physiological discomfort due to amygdala kicking in and doing "what it's supposed to" \- now your bad feelings are superchardged as well

\- so, I would say it's not only about cortex or amygdala, but in depression the negative thought patterns and the physiological response can get linked into this destructive loop of continuous feedback. Hence, it does not matter that you can rationally say to yourself the bad thoughts you had are not that serious because they just launched a full scale amygdala based storm of bad feeling and anxiety

\- my ssri:s kind of felt like they cut out this bad loop. I felt like my cognitive self was insulated from the physiological response, giving me space to unlearn both cognitive and emotional bad habits one at a time without the disruptive loop taking control

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The anti-correlated behaviour of these two networks, and even their default mode vs. attention functions, reminds of the attention schema theory of consciousness [1].

Specifically, the attention schema theory posits that some constant back and forth signal switching between internal and external models of the world results in the illusion of subjective awareness, in an analogous manner to how task switching provides the illusion of parallelism on single-core CPUs.

[1] [https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.0050...](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00500/full)

<comment><USER9> So psuedo basic for the consciousness algorithm:

      10 look at world
      20 look at my reaction to world
      30 goto 10

Which generates consciousness like frames per second generates motion. Or like the colored lines over this black and white photo generate a color image:

[https://twitter.com/SteveStuWill/status/1248000332027715584/...](https://twitter.com/SteveStuWill/status/1248000332027715584/photo/1)

<comment><USER10> > 20 look at my reaction to world

who is the "my" you are referring to? you have an 'a priori' conflict.

<comment><USER11> By "my" I guess he's referring to an internal state that has been built up over previous interactions with the external world? So more like:

      10 receive information from world
      20 do operations on information
      25 update state based on operation result
      30 goto 10

<comment><USER12> I think it's more like:

10 receive information about the world, body and reward signals

20 evaluate the current situation and possible actions

30 act

40 goto 10

Emotion results in step 20 when we judge situations and actions in the context as good or bad. In this step two subsystems cooperate:

1\. a system for fast reaction - works best when there is no time to reason, or when the action is repetitive, or when available information is uncertain

2\. a system for slow, reasoning based reaction - works when we can build a mental model and imagine possible outcomes, is especially necessary when we encounter novel situations and have the concepts necessary to reason about it

System 1 is based on instinct and system 2 is learned. They are both essential as they are specialised in different situations. Using system 2 all the time would be too expensive and probably impossible, we need to rely on instinct which in turn relies on evolution to be fine tuned.

Learning happens through the reward signal. We reevaluate situations and actions based on outcomes. Emotion is just a synonym for the value we assign to our current state with regard to our goals and needs.

Our goals include adapting to the environment in order to assure the integrity and necessities of life - the primary goal, then as secondary goals - <USER3> part of a social group, learning, mastery, conceiving children, curiosity and a few other instincts. We are born with this goal-program which is in turn evolved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sounds like the temporal circuit is acting like a clock, as in a computer chip's clock. Pretty cool.

> We demonstrate that the transitions between default mode and dorsal > attention networks are embedded in this temporal circuit, in which a > balanced reciprocal accessibility of brain states is characteristic of > consciousness. Conversely, isolation of the default mode and dorsal > attention networks from the temporal circuit is associated with > unresponsiveness of diverse etiologies. These findings advance the > foundational understanding of the functional role of anticorrelated systems > in consciousness.

</comment><comment><USER14> This feels right in terms how I experience things when I've had bad migraines and notice parts of my capability going away temporarily such as understanding speech or being able to read words or missing visual areas entirely. Things get jumbled or confused, all the while, I am aware of these things happening yet unable to control them. It feels like there are separate parts of me like modules that go offline but the one that is constant is the sense of "me" or the consciousness part. These episodes are few and far between but I am still thankful to have a different perspective of our bio-mechanical nature. It also makes me feel closer to my pets in the sense that awareness or consciousness doesn't correlate with cognitive ability or intellect but that is just my guess.

<comment><USER14> relating to this...it makes me very curious about Neuralink or similar tech impact on humanity once that becomes more advanced. If it is true we have these specialized processing areas while our awareness is another specialized area, it would follow that all sorts of capabilities the new tech brings would simply be incorporated and assumed just as we assume our ability to remember a name or add numbers in our head. It will be a crazy future that I hope to see.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Here, we conservatively use the term "unresponsiveness" instead of > "unconsciousness" to allow for the possibility that covert or disconnected > consciousness could occur in the absence of behavioral response.

Conservatism is very wise! Given what they say in that quote, I'm very confused why they think it's justified in the intro to suggest they've identified 2 systems responsible for consciousness. Shouldn't they replace every use of the word "consciousness" with "responsiveness"? They're relying on a purely behavioral understanding of consciousness

Descartes famously thought that consciousness lived in the pineal gland, and similar arguments has tended to generate some well deserved criticism from philosophers of mind. Pointing at a physical thing and saying it's the source of conscious experience should come with pretty extraordinary evidence.

<comment><USER16> >They're relying on a purely behavioral understanding of consciousness

They're relying on the fact that consciousness has physical manifestations in behavior. The alternative is epiphenomenalism. While it may be a philosophically interesting position, its useless scientifically and so its fair to assume consciousness has some physical artifacts in a scientific context.

<comment><USER15> I don't think we're forced to choose between behaviorism and epiphenomenalism.

But my point is more internal to the paper. They make claims about the physical basis for consciousness and seem to believe they've generated evidence for it, but they also explicitly say they've only gathered evidence about responsiveness.

EDIT: To be clear I'm objecting to the semantics (which I consider important), not the potential value of the research.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The brain is the most complicated structure in the known universe. The probes currently available to science- fMRI and GSR - are both gross measures of cortical electrical activity. They're enough to start to explore apparent structural and (gross) electrical correlation between brain areas and (gross) alterations in "consciousness", in this case unconsciousness invoked via propofol and ketamine. Fair enough.

However, it irritates me when I hear scientists loosely throw the word "consciousness" into these studies and here's why.

In these studies, consciousness is always implicitly defined operationally as the electrical activity in some identified networks- DAT and DSM and front- parietal and sensory motor etc.. But the concept of consciousness has another life in philosophy where in works by people like Patricia Churchland and others, it references something more subtle- the mystery of why there should be anything we call experience at all.

Experience itself doesn't seem to be necessary to the working of any machine, including our brains. We don't think our TVs have any experiences despite (being capable of) accurately representing all human visual experiences. The reason we don't think they experience what they're displaying is because we know how they work and we know there's no ghost in the machine. Adding on "experiences" to an explanation of how TVs work is gratuitous and unnecessary.

But that's not the case with humans-just the opposite. Experience is absolutely foundational.

Descartes tried to boil his world down to what he could know with absolute certainty and arrived at his famous "Cogito ergo sum" formulation, but actually, he skipped a step; that step is simply- "There is experience".

Experience is perfectly gratuitous to any explanation of brain activity since all that activity, like an electrical storm, could take place in exactly the same way without it. We (our brains) could be, and most scientists believe are, very complicated, but purely mechanical machines. They could be exactly as they are with no more awareness- not to say feedback loops- than a blender.

But that account leaves the problem of experience or consciousness completely untouched. That would be O.K. except we know we have it.

The mystery of consciousness is not totally defined by questions like of "can I make you unconscious or conscious?" or "can I cause you to have this or that illusory experience by stimulating your brain?". The mystery of consciousness is _why is there anything like experience at all ?_

So whenever I read a paper that makes some confident assertion about consciousness, it gets under my skin. It's electrical activity and perhaps human behavior and speech they are actually examining, not consciousness. I hear these papers gratingly assuming the consequent with respect to the biggest mystery there is. They are implicitly saying "this is consciousness, this pattern of electrical activity in the brain and here is what we have discovered about consciousness". That's one perspective, but to philosophers, both academic and non-academic, it's a form of punting on the real question.

Consciousness is to brain science what AGI is to AI. Researchers just love to make assertions and grand predictions.

Actually the correlation between the two is closer than that since strong AI claims that consciousness can be captured in a computer; Kurtzweil and his Singularity concept is in this school of thought.

He and people like him claim that not only does experience arise as a direct result of brain activity but any substrate- including general purpose computer platforms- will similarly give rise to the same experiences if only they are programmed in a particular way, specifically, if the computations are functionally equivalent to the brain's computations.

Are badly programmed computers therefore experiencing chaos? Well, why not? Are simpler computers, like a thermostat which "experiences" temperature changes, also somehow dimly conscious? If that seems like a straw man argument to you, you should know Marvin Minsky bought it and so do a lot of other scientists whether they realize it or not.

All of this is just a non-starer to people like me. You don't get to skip a step because it keeps your theory neat or provides you the promise of immortality because you uploaded your "you" to a machine.

Consciousness, understood in this way, is a genuine mystery which for now at least I don't think we have the conceptual tools to even define much less make pronouncements about.

<comment><USER18> I think we're a long way from a good understanding of how consciousness works, but I also think a lot of people are going to subscribe to a sort of consciousness-of-the-gaps idea no matter how much progress is made in understanding the actual mechanisms. Even if we fully understood and and could reproduce it, there would be scores of people who would flat out refuse to see the evidence and would simply assert that the ineffable "experience" does not exist within beings for which they don't want to acknowledge it. The very concept of p-zombies illustrates this a priori refusal to admit any possible evidence whatsoever of consciousness. Another person could simply decide that I am in fact a p-zombie and lock themselves in a closed system of thought out of which there is no path to demonstrating that I "experience" anything at all.

I think if you want to put forth a hypothesis that there is some ghostly ineffable part of consciousness called "experience" that cannot ever be touched or measured by scientific means, then you have a self-defeating argument that cannot be supported. You might as well go full solipsism. There's nothing stopping you.

Consciousness is a genuine mystery at this point, but I think some people will still see it that way even if we solve it, and this is clearer to me every time I see people trash any kind of effort or progress made by science in understanding the brain, claiming that it is not in fact progress at all.

<comment><USER19> On the other hand, I think that many people are emotionally invested in believing that science must be capable of solving the hard problem of consciousness even though there is no reason to assume that science is.

It is perfectly possible that the hard problem of consciousness is in principle and forever beyond the reach of scientific investigation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> ELI5 "anti-correlated" here? What I envision is the temporal circuit acting like a computer clock, and the other as input/output. But "anti correlated" makes it sound like that's not the case?

<comment><USER21> Not ELI5 exactly, but the article does a pretty good job of explaining in the first paragraph:

> The default mode network (DMN) is an internally directed system that > correlates with consciousness of self, and the dorsal attention network > (DAT) is an externally directed system that correlates with consciousness of > the environment... the DMN and DAT appear to be in a reciprocal relationship > with each other such that they are not simultaneously active, i.e., they are > "anticorrelated."

The "temporal circuit" the paper describes is the neural architecture that facilitates the transitions between these two networks.

<comment><USER22> Totally fascinating. It makes me wonder what kind of dysfunction would result from both the DMN and DAT being active at the same time, and especially what my subjective experience of that would be if it were happening to me.

<comment><USER23> I am not sure if this is accurate but intuitively, in strong psychedelic experiences it feels that both the DMN and DAT are active at the same time, which leads to, among many other things, a clearheaded view of mental processes that are hard to observe otherwise. One example would be observing emotions and how they affect your state of mind, while at the same time being totally detached from them. Some studies [1] propose that this happens because of an increase in connectivity between various parts of the brain, which could also be the thing that leads to ego dissolution.

[1] [https://www.cell.com/current- biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(16)...](https://www.cell.com/current- biology/fulltext/S0960-9822\(16\)30062-8)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Language is a Virus. Consciousness is an OODA Loop. (You could write an alternative set of lyrics to the Laurie Anderson song.)

</comment><comment><USER25> I'll be the asshole here: this is crap. They took some weak correlations (anti-correlations whatever) between conscious brains and 'unconscious' brains induced via Ketamine. The rest of the paper is just creating new jargon for large vague regions of the brain, and tons of jump-the-shark assumptions about how they work together.

Most notably, there's no mention of STDP, nor the cingulate gyrus, or any reference to the fine-structure internals of the brain.</comment>


Making a Blog or How I learned to stop worrying and love static site generators - <AUTHOR> https://blog.isaachawkins.com/web/2018/11/15/How-I-Learned-To-Love-Static-Site-Generators.html <comment><USER2> I have to say this site/blog is painful to attempt to read on mobile.

<comment><USER3> This. Fixed header and footer limit the reading space. Block text layout makes it quite hard to read (for people with cognitive problems even more).</comment></comment>


Neel Mehta donates Heartbleed bounty to Freedom of the Press Foundation - <AUTHOR> https://hackerone.com/reports/6626 <comment><USER2> This is a great reminder for others to consider a donation to the Freedom of the Press foundation's ongoing campaign to fund the development of encryption tools to benefit journalists, sources, and everyone who communicates digitally!

[https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/](https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/)

Huge thanks to Neel, whose donation pushed us over the edge to meet our goal!

(Full disclosure: I work for the Freedom of the Press Foundation)

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice move!

I was already wondering, though: might Mehta and/or Codenomicon have been put on the scent of the Heartbleed bug by an inquiry from one of the journalists with Snowden docs?

I hope we hear more about how each of the researchers found the bug – code auditing? fuzzing? observing attempted exploits? etc – and in the same general timeframe.

<comment><USER4> No. Neel found it by auditing code. See CVE-2011-0014 for a previous OpenSSL bug he found by auditing code. See CVE-2010-0239 to witness his awesome ability to find bugs by auditing assembly code.

<comment><USER3> Thanks! Do you know this because you work with him and are relaying his report of that approach in this particular case, or do you just expect that's the case from his usual technique and prior cases?

Wouldn't that track record of awesome ability, and his support for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, also potentially make him a sought-after expert about mysterious things that a journalist didn't understand in a leaked NSA (or other) document?

Do you know if the Codenomicon researcher(s) found the issue in the same way? (Their corporate webpage makes a big deal about their fuzzing tools.)

Do you believe it was just coincidence that both recently found this same monumental vulnerability? How long would Mehta and/or Codenomicon typically privately research such a bug, with or without coordination with OpenSSL maintainers, after first confirmation of danger?

<comment><USER4> You're welcome! I know this because I work on the same team with him. I'm not familiar with what Codenomicon did and won't publicly speculate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> @neelmehta 's twitter description says "One day you will understand..." We do now.

Huge thanks to Neel.

</comment><comment><USER6> What a bullet point to put on a resume. Congratulations Mr. Mehta.

<comment><USER7> That's a nice sentiment, but for whatever it's worth: Neel Mehta is one of the best-known and most well-respected people in vulnerability research.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is Hackerone the thing now for reward programs?

<comment><USER9> It is one option, there is also

[https://bugcrowd.com](https://bugcrowd.com) mainly paid reward programs, can start using it for a bug bounty/rewards program for free (also maintains the bug bounty list which is used by many white hat hackers [https://bugcrowd.com/list-of-bug-bounty-programs/](https://bugcrowd.com/list- of-bug-bounty-programs/))

[https://crowdcurity.com](https://crowdcurity.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Cheers pal! that's a hacker with bleeding heart ! Well done.

</comment><comment><USER11> Bank account - 15,000

Karma + 1,000,000

</comment><comment><USER12> Thank you Mr. Mehta wherever you may be. Thank you for your fantastic audit skill. You are unknown super-hero working against dark forces.

</comment><comment><USER13> Would Neel Mehta be ineligible collecting via his employment at Google?</comment>


SIM Cards Must Die - <AUTHOR> http://ilyabirman.net/meanwhile/2012/03/23/1/ <comment><USER3> I'm afraid if we kill SIM cards, the opposite will happen: your phone will be locked to one network, and switching networks means switching hardware (beyond just the sim). I really like that while traveling I can just buy a local sim, put it in my own phone, and use it. That would only work in these wireframes if all operators would agree to support this. Which I think they won't.

<comment><USER4> Yep, a SIM card gives freedom from networks and the ability to change numbers easily and use pay as you go services when travelling.

There's no way killing SIM cards would be a good thing.

<comment><USER5> Americans don't know that because their phone companies forbid that practice. AT&T doesn't even bother to move your SIM card from your old iPhone to your new iPhone when you upgrade, they just give you a new card.

<comment><USER6> Really, they give you a new sim on upgrade? I can understand this if you are upgrading _TO_ an iPhone since you need a micro SIM, but rather pointless otherwise.

I think I've had the same SIM card for about 6-7 years now!

<comment><USER7> Older sims dont have 3G capabilities either. (Not sure why)

<comment><USER6> Mine is defo new enough that it supports that! Anyone know if you need a new sim card to support 4G services?

<comment><USER8> IIRC, yes, at least for AT&T's LTE -- HSDPA (and HSUPA, HSPA+, etc) will work just fine with a 3G SIM (since they're just souped-up 3G).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The SIM is an integral part of the GSM standard and provides a huge range of benefits. The point of their existence is to establish the identity of a subscriber _independently of a handset_ , which has a lot of interesting, useful and important side-effects.

A very large proportion of GSM subscribers use dual-sim handsets, to take advantage of the cheapest available tariffs. This is the norm in price- sensitive markets like China, India and Africa.

Many GSM subscribers use several phones with the same SIM. Outdoor enthusiasts switch their SIM between their smartphone and a rugged dumbphone. Some ladies use a smartphone during the week when they use their normal handbag, but switch to a tiny dumbphone for parties.

The SIM makes life very easy for small carriers to connect new subscribers. In London, virtually every shopping centre and high street has someone handing out SIMs for Lyca or Lebara, two Virtual Network Operators offering cheap international calls to mainly immigrant customers. They can connect subscribers on the spot in a matter of seconds.

IMO we should be working in the opposite direction, towards a proliferation of SIM-like devices in other markets. A physical token which securely establishes a pseudonymous identity on a network is quite ingenious and facilitates all sorts of really elegant HCI.

<comment><USER10> I've found that the opposite is true when traveling - every new country I go to requires a different (local prepaid) sim card. My iPhone 4S stays the same, but I end up with a new sim card and phone number while I'm in the country, and then end up throwing out the sim card once I leave.

<comment><USER11> Try something like <http://www.globalsimcard.co.uk/index.php> or <http://www.roammobility.com/sim-card> , one SIM that automatically goes local whichever country you are in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I suppose you live in the US, with only a couple of huge carriers. I live in Germany, I am French, travelling a lot between France, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark and Switzerland. I am so happy with the SIM card system. I can switch carrier if I want easily (swap the SIM card) but especially:

I do not care when I travel which carrier my phone will pick. It will work, nothing to do and I know what it will cost in advance.

I love SIM cards.

Update: Keep reading the thread with very good comments about identity. The added benefit of the SIM card is that it is protecting/managing your identity on the network without a hard link between your phone and you.

<comment><USER13> This

I travel enough to see the benefits as well. Phones that handle multiple sim cards are also nice.

I also view it as an added layer of security. My phone can't be connected to the network until the pin for my sim is entered. The ability to save data to the sim is also a nice feature. I don't really see any reason for them to go away.

<comment><USER14> Each phone could have a built in key for signing. You could tell operators to not allow any other phone except for yours (which has this key) to access your account. Not a problem.

<comment><USER13> What happens here - is the phone itself becomes the sim card. That is troublesome on a number of levels. I'd rather push those functions to a little piece of plastic that is easy to move between handsets.

"You could tell operators"... How and where? When I'm in Thailand on vacation, I want data but I don't want to have to worry about registering my phone - <USER2> just go to kiosk and get a sim.

When I was in Ethiopia a few weeks ago getting a sim took a bit of work. I had to give them photos and some other documentation. A lot of governments are moving this way. Once it was done though, I had the sims I needed and the phone choices were wide open.

Maybe I'm missing a piece of the puzzle but in my experience the sim is what makes me free. The idea that the existence of a sim == being locked down comes from a broken telecom system not a technical limitation of the format.

<comment><USER15> There are some countries you do have to give extra documentation, and often providers will rip you off by giving you more airtime only if you register.

Funny you mention Ethiopia, the telecom there is completely state controlled, and it has been used to thwart opposition (listen in on calls, shut down complete SMS, etc). It's one of the many "remnants" of the communist regime. Supposedly Orange was coming in to manage and change that however...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Why isn't Apple fighting to kill the SIM cards?"

They tried: [http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/05/24/apple-wanted- to-...](http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/05/24/apple-wanted-to-kill-the- sim/)

Personally I'm a big supporter of SIM cards. While competing network systems (CDMA, iDEN) were designed to lock in networks and users to a single vendor, GSM was designed by a consortium of european national telecoms at every single layer to ensure that all the stakeholders (users, telecoms, regulators) had as much interoperability and freedom as possible, and SIM cards are the user's end of that plan.

If Apple implemented his proposal, you can bet iPhone users would only be able to pick special overpriced iPhone plans, instead of just using whatever prepaid plan they want.

</comment><comment><USER17> This guy so doesn't get it. It's almost as if he is trolling.

SIM cards (as implemented everywhere in the world except the US) is made to allow exactly the portability which he seeks.

I fail to see why it is even linked here.

Edit: Also why is he illustrating this with an _iPhone_? Is it for lulz that he in the name of advocating openness links to the closest closed phone of all out there?

I'm voting troll here.

<comment><USER18> "I'm voting troll here." - Me too. Sorry for asking a noob quesiton, how do you vote troll on HN?

<comment><USER19> I don't think you literally "vote" troll, it was meant more symbolically. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think the author is conflating SIM cards with vendor lock-in. Phones locked to SIM cards from a particular carrier are not good. If you want them to die, then fine - but that's got nothing to do with SIM cards.

SIM cards as authentication tokens work just fine. My phone takes SIM cards from any carrier. If I want to switch carriers, the new carrier just sends me a new SIM card.

Get rid of SIM cards, and you're going to end up with a security problem with keys being copied/cloned from phones. You're going to find that you need some kind of authentication based on a hardware crypto token, and will end up inventing...the SIM card.

<comment><USER6> In the UK now (possibly the EU) at the end of your contract (normally 18-24 months) the carrier has to unlock your phone now, my brother just came to the end of his contract and had his iPhone unlocked for free.

<comment><USER21> In the EU in general you can unlock your phone for a price, even if you're under contract.

The last time I checked Orange was charging something like 70 EUR for unlocking iPhones under contract, which is really not bad, considering you get the freedom to put any SIM in it after that.

Also, my own mobile carrier (Cosmote) sells subsidized unlocked iPhones. Basically for them the contract is enough to keep you "locked" as if you terminate early, you have to give back the subsidy you received for the remaining time, which is fair to both consumers and the mobile carrier.

It's crazy how better the mobile carriers are in Europe, versus the US.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The SIM card is so you CAN easily change your identity / phone. Without a SIM, how does the network verify your identity? A simple username and password are not as secure, and tying your identity to your phone is exactly what SIM cards were introduced to avoid.

<comment><USER23> A username and password is secure enough for things more important than this.

<comment><USER24> Hum ... like what ? It is quite critical, someone with your username/passwd would be able to call for several hours without you knowing it.

<comment><USER23> A lot of banks don't support two-form authentication. A lot of online merchants keep credit card information on file and allow for quick check-outs.

<comment><USER25> And they count on being able to use your phone to confirm identity. Someone could hack your bank and phone at the same time so when you get a call about the suspicious transaction, it really goes to the hacker who says "yep, that was me".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I don't see what sim cards have to do with locking in customers. Even in his hypothetical sim-free future there is nothing preventing the carrier from saying "if you select this plan you must pay us $59/month for the next 2 years before we let you cancel".

<comment><USER27> Indeed, as can be seen with Verizon (which does not use SIM cards on account of being a CDMA network)

And the other way around, nothing in SIM cards mandate lock-ins, I bought my phone unlocked (the previous one was bought simlocked and I'd made use of my legal rights to get it unlocked 6 months into my contract) and my current ISP is pre-paid, no-contract on SIMs. I ordered a SIM from them, popped it into my phone and I fill the account when I need to.

And when I travel across europe, I can trivially get cheapo pre-paid SIMs and put them in if I need to. There is no lock anywhere.

In fact, I'd expect far _more_ lock-in with TFA's solution: my current indie ISP never managed to get a reply from Apple when they tried to get their IPCC into iTunes (so user would not have to enter e.g. data network info by hand), Apple only deals with big ISPs, not with virtual operators for a few tens of thousand clients in minor euro countries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I have an old Moto Razr that I put my SIM card in when I go on long bike rides in the boonies. The battery lasts longer and if I fall I don't have to worry about crushing my smartphone.

</comment><comment><USER29> SIM cards are the only thing left protecting consumers from carriers and to a lesser extent Apple. Apple still lock out features (APN settings, tethering) even on SIM-free models of the iPhone when a "recognized" carrier is connected. The _only_ reason they do this is to protect carriers.

</comment><comment><USER30> There's actually a really good reason why this isn't coming anytime soon to the US: number portability is not entirely centralized, and the porting system is built to run in batch, not in realtime.

So if, say, Sprint issues a portability request to Syniverse (the mapping platform provider) so that they can have your number from Verizon, Syniverse puts that request in the next batch. Then the batch gets passed to VZ for evaluation for things like whether you still owe them money. If you're good to go, VZ kills your DN (that's your number and the associated SVC mapping), and your VZ service goes dead. Then they pass your record back to Syniverse who then passes the thumbs-up and the number to Sprint who sets up a new DN to your new service (and presumably your new handset if you're going from one locked-in CDMA net to another).

That's a really watered down, 4am version of what happens. But the upshot of all of it is that if it worked like WiFi SSID switching, every time you switched, you'd probably lose service for awhile. If all things work for the good, the switch can take like 10 minutes. I'm sure they could get it down to 1 or 2. But probably not 0.

Here's the punchline... the SIM card in GSM was specifically designed to OBVIATE the need for all that (also to act as an encryption key, but that got hacked years ago). The SIM is supposed to authenticate you to a particular DN and link you back to a billing record at your primary carrier. The theory was that every carrier would create roaming treaties, and you'd just wander from network to network, oblivious to whose actual network you were on. And your primary carrier would sort it out on the backend. And in many places, it actually pretty much works that way. You can carry 3 or 4 cards and swap carriers and numbers based on the plan you want to use. Because the phones aren't locked to a single carrier's cards.

A good example of this is that in the T-Mobile / AT&T breakup, they came to an agreement to allow cross-network roaming sometime late this year. So if you're a TMo subscriber, but you've got an AT&T signal, even in a TMo service area, you'll just ride AT&T instead.

So essentially the reason it doesn't already work this way is because A) CDMA is so popular in the US, and CDMA really requires the rigorous porting process, and B) the carriers who do support it (AT&T, TMo and Sprint on their now-dwindling GSM net) have been jerks about it for years. It's a business decision, not a technical one.

</comment><comment><USER31> In principle, I love this idea. In practice, without a great deal of work, this will make it much more difficult to switch between _phones_ , which typically occurs more often than switching carriers. Right now, you can pull out a SIM and put it in a new phone, and you can immediately use the phone number with that new phone, without any interaction with the carrier.

<comment><USER27> > In practice, without a great deal of work, this will make it much more > difficult to switch between phones, which typically occurs more often than > switching carriers.

In practice it also makes it much more difficult to switch between carriers (which is in fact much more common than switching between phones when you travel across Europe or south-east asia): to switch carriers right now, I just need to replace my current SIM with a new one (assuming the phone is not SIM- locked, which it is not).

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Nice, the intellectual failure of the "must die" meme in the headline correctly predicted the intellectual failure of the article. SIM cards solve a real problem for the consumer in a convenient way. Better to replace a 5 dollar card than a 500 dollar phone when I travel, and lucky to be able to transfer phones easily.

</comment><comment><USER33> If your sim is implemented in software, how do you take it out of your smartphone when it breaks or runs out of battery and put it in a different phone?

</comment><comment><USER34> As an engineer working in the SIM card industry, as long as they add some other form of secure element for placing highly sensitive data like bank/id applets it would still be reasonable.

As others have commented though, I'm afraid that they would use it to lock the consumer to phone specific plans.

I like a lot the ability to take my SIM card to other phones, as it allows to carry some kind of ID with me, there are better and seamless ways of doing that that I can't wait to be implemented and deployed (a user and password to put when booting the phone is not a solution).

</comment><comment><USER35> The industry has been working on software SIMs for some time. I had a telco talking to me about the initiative years ago.

The problem is that the soft SIM provisioning process will become like DRM for phones. The users desires and the service providers desires are fundamentally misaligned here. Users want to be able to choose freely from the best tariffs available to them in a given location. Service providers want to lock people in and keep roaming expensive.

<comment><USER36> But surely this until the first carrier breaks the deadlock and then decides to offer soft SIMS to tourists ? Then the rest of then will be forced to follow on or else be squeezed out of the market. In fact, if you were a small- ish based carrier, then you could benefit from first-to-market as well as not being eaten by your customers going abroad (as you were first!).

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I'm afraid the author of this blog post doesn't know what a SIM card is.

First of all, it's a secure element: it allows authentication of the user's credentials with the cell phone. SIMs and smart cards in general provide security at the hardware level as well as the software level (using Triple DES encryption).

Also, they are essential in NFC: that standard is developed around the SIM card and the ISO 14443 standard.

Recent technology also allows the development of Java programs WITHIN the SIM card (it's called a JavaCard: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Card> ) and allows to use a single SIM for multiple applications. For instance, you could use your phone's SIM as a mobile wallet, a metro pass, etc...

Of course, as many others have noted in this thread, removing the SIM card would just add the vendor lock-in inside the phone.

Where I live (France), most phones can be legally (or illegally) unlocked to accept different SIM cards.

<comment><USER38> FYI, SIM cards aren't necessary for NFC. In fact, it is only the carriers that would prefer the SIM be used as the secure element, as they have control over it. Other potential NFC players would prefer the secure element be separate, so that the carrier doesn't have control over NFC-based transactions. And, ISO 14443 is not directly related NFC, which is governed by ISO 18092 and ISO 21481.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Ironically, the SIM card is exactly the technology that enables the scenario the author describes, and it exists today (maybe not so much in the US).

"Select from this list to send your payment information to an unknown carrier" is not exactly a realistic scenario. Instead, you have an agreement with an organization (let's call it "your carrier") who handles your payment information/billing, then that organization makes arrangements with other carriers to allow you to roam on their networks. The SIM is your account identifier, and most (GSM) phones allow you to select among available networks. Anyone who has used their GSM phone abroad has probably experienced this.

The only thing preventing the scenario he describes from being more common today is the reality of capital expenditure required to build a network and the consolidation of carriers (aka botched deregulation), making it uncommon in the US to have any real choice.

</comment><comment><USER40> While the concept is solid, getting carriers to go along with this is going to be impossible I would imagine. The other issue at hand is hardware pricing, especially for US consumers.

In the US, carriers love to lock their customers in by SIM locking their subsidized hardware and customers have come to expect this low cost subsidized hardware.

If you suddenly switched to a system where hardware was sold at retail cost, there would be a lot of confusion. I am guessing that if you ask the typical US consumer if they would like to buy their iPhone at $199 and commit to a contract or pay $649 for the ability to switch to another carrier at will, they will choose the contract option. It's what they have come to expect.

This type of system seems more suited to work in countries where subscribers already purchase unlocked hardware at full retail prices.

<comment><USER41> Sure US consumers are generally ignorant about the ins and outs of subsidized hardware, and they take 2-year contracts as a matter of course. But there's no reason a lot of people wouldn't pay full price if the economics were laid bare.

For instance, when I tell my US friends that I pay £15 / month for unlimited data, 300 mins, and 3000 texts on my iPhone _with tethering_ in the UK, it blows their minds. The fact that I can hop over to another country, buy a sim card for 10 bucks and instantly have data without having to sit on hold and beg a customer service rep to unlock my phone and then wait weeks is another huge bonus that any internationally traveling American can appreciate.

The only problem right now is that major carriers have a good thing going with overpriced contract plans and see little reason to offer reasonably priced pay as you go, thus giving Americans the impression that mobile service is inherently more expensive than it is and believing that they are getting a great deal with subsidized phones. But with globalization this illusion is bound to come crumbling down sooner or later, and customers will demand more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Obviously the author of this blog post (a Russian Designer) is an outsider of telecom industry. Neither would I believe s/he knows anything about a standard called "GSM", let alone the part where how GSM handsets id/authenticate with the network and the purpose of SIM card is. The proof of my assertion? Check out the sketch on the page, there is a ghost mobile carrier indicator "ABC 3G" there for all three screens.

Piece of advice: before you attack on technologies, make sure you understand it first, the history and the reason why they exists. Otherwise, you are going to be a public joke on HN.

I recommend him/her to read this: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subscriber_Identity_Module>

A little

</comment><comment><USER42> Apple would love to kill the sim card. They have numerous patents around technologies that will enable the SIM card to become software based. [http://www.nfcworld.com/2011/11/09/311213/apple-patents- sim-...](http://www.nfcworld.com/2011/11/09/311213/apple-patents-sim-within- secure-element-technology/) The carriers won't want this at all. They are trying to move payments from a card (with a chip) to another card (with a very similar chip i.e. the SIM) but this feels pointless to me. The SIM and the plastic payment card have had their day.

</comment><comment><USER43> While an interesting read, its pure idealism on the part of the author.

For SIM cards to die as the author imagines the carriers would have to accept that in the future they nothing more than dumb data pipes. This would be excellent news for all consumers.

The US carriers have spent billions in marketing and lobbying to avoid becoming dumb data pipes so they will not accept this future.

And until the US regulator wakes up and starts regulating the carriers, then the status quo will prevail.

</comment><comment><USER44> I want a phone that tests network signal strength for each call-- and uses the best network each time. I might use Verizon in the morning, AT&T at noon, and Sprint in the afternoon, depending upon how many real bars the phone is getting. For each Latitude/Longitude the carriers should have a realtime +/- score of how well they support that area.

</comment><comment><USER45> I read that iPads in France let you choose the 3G network during the first boot. Sounds silimar to what the author is proposing. If anybody has a screenshot of that screen, please share. [http://store.apple.com/fr/browse/home/shop_ipad/family/ipad/...](http://store.apple.com/fr/browse/home/shop_ipad/family/ipad/select_ipad2)

</comment><comment><USER46> not practical. sim card is like our citizen id card. digitalize all you want, but we must always keep a physical card.

</comment><comment><USER47> When you go to select the list of carriers on your phone as you propose, your phone will only be able to show carriers for which it can tranceive. It's not like they all share the same spectrum.

Furthermore, switching numbers and accounts, and transferring them to other phones could be made more complex.

</comment><comment><USER48> In Australia, you must provide ID to purchase a SIM card. Whether it is pre- paid or post-paid. It is illegal to sell a SIM anonymously. I guess this is for law enforcement reasons, and that they wouldn't like to lose the ability to match a SIM with a citizen quickly and easily.

</comment><comment><USER49> On a batch of 17 new phones rolled out about 30 days ago, we have had 3 iPhone users report problems that were tracked down to faulty/failed SIMs and one 'regular' SIM has failed in another phone - so I'm rather wishing SIM cards wouldn't keep dying!

</comment><comment><USER50> This is already here with WiFi networks and VoIP systems (e.g. Skype). You can log in to Skype from any phone and your calls will be billed to your account. You can even log in to Skype on your friend's phone or you can choose another VoIP provider.

</comment><comment><USER36> Hmmmm. Here's my post from 9 days ago : <http://ragmondocom.appspot.com/2012/03/Who-needs-SIM-cards> \- I propose virtual downloadable SIM cards....

<comment><USER13> NLIps says it below - and I agree - the problem I see with this 'virtual sim' is that it is less secure.

<comment><USER36> Not if you use the same ssl certification authority mechanism that browsers use (obviously with some improvements to avoid common pitfalls). In fact, I would argue that it would be more secure (with revocation lists etc etc). Gone are the days that your phone can't do rapid handshaking / crypto etc etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Mr. Birman's argument is so idiotic that he looks like a shill for telcos.

</comment><comment><USER52> Apple already have a patent for a virtual SIM card: <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/11/apple_sim_patent/>

<comment><USER17> I hear Apple and patents have a good track-record of ending up as standardized, reusable technology. A very good track, record indeed.

If this has been already patented by the Cupertino-based patent-troll, it is by definition doomed as a standard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> One additional issue is certain countries (eg: India) require a photographic ID, etc before they issue a SIM. This is becoming a larger issue in Europe and elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER54> IMHO the original posts and many of the comments are mixing up very different and somewhat unrelated issues.

Issue #1 The SIM card, as a piece of plastic used to identify your phone number and mobile operator, is indeed pre-historic technology. It's quite unbelievable that we're still using such a system in 2012. Unless I'm missing something, what a SIM card does could easily be done in software and this is part of what the OP is suggesting. I don't think that there is any doubt that the SIM card, as a data / identity storage system should be retired.

Issue #2 The issue of operator-issued mobile phones being locked to that specific operator is unrelated to whether or not the phone uses a SIM card. A phone can be locked to a specific operator, regardless of whether or not it uses a SIM card. In many countries, operators lock all their phones, meaning that you can't use a SIM card from any other operators in your phone.

If you live in a country where all phones are sold unlocked or where phones can be unlocked after a certain period of time, it's almost certainly because mobile phone operators are being forced by law to do so. Not because the phones use SIM cards.

So the freedom to switch between operators at any time isn't a technical issue linked to SIM cards. It's just a matter of whether or not operators can legally prevent you to do it. If operators can legally lock their phone, they'll obviously do it. Why wouldn't they?

It's worth noting that if you want an unlocked phone, you can always just buy it straight from manufacturer - there's nothing that forces you to buy a phone from an operator (apart from the price, but I'll touch on that later). So this issue is actually already solved - it's just that many people don't think their freedom to switch between operators is worth the upfront cost.

Issue #3 Being tied to a long contract and not being able to switch between operators and plans at anytime is another unrelated issue. But then, it's a pain you choose to have. There's nothing that forces you to sign up for a contract. Most operators offer pay-as-you-go plans with no contracts. In the UK for example, well over 50% of the population is on pay-as-you-go (or was the last time I looked) so pay-as-you-go can definitely work.

Obviously, operators much prefer when you sign up for a contract. Just like tech startups go crazy for subscription business models - it's nice to get money automatically every month. So they try to trick people into signing up for long contracts by offering subsidised phones. And many people fall for that.

What it all comes down to. Most, if not all these problems, arise because of the perception by people in most countries that mobile phones should be free or reasonably cheap. People don't find it a problem to spend £600 on a laptop. But tell them they have to spend £600 to buy a new phone and they freak out. This is despite the fact that many people do the same thing on their phone as they do on their laptop and use their phones a lot more than their laptop.

It's this way of thinking that results in far too many people signing up for long contracts with operators, allowing operators to subject them to their every will. Changing this perception and making people buy mobile phones in the same way as they buy laptops (i.e. without subsidies and straight from the manufacturer) is what we would need to really change the statu quo. Whether or not phones use SIM card is merely a small technical detail (but one I'd love to see fixed nonetheless).

<comment><USER55> > The SIM card, as a piece of plastic used to identify your phone number and > mobile operator, is indeed pre-historic technology.

I highly doubt so. SIM cards are hardware tokens, which securely hold cryptographic keys — are those things obsolete or pre-historic?

They're holding a shared encryption key (so-called Ki) but never reveal it directly. This is the point of SIM cards.

SIM cards could (and, I believe, were) implemented in software, but such implementations reduce security, usability or both.

(Yes, nowadays, I believe, almost no operator would tell you what Ki is recorded on your SIM card, so you won't be able to clone the card. But that's a completely another issue.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Ya man, fuck economics.

</comment><comment><USER57> A better fight would be to push for 802.22 (super-wifi) broadband ISP's. Cell networks are obviously going to have a hissy-fit when any competition to their 3G and 4G oligopolies get tumbled over by superior technology. Due to the corruption of US politics I seriously doubt this will ever see the day of light.

[http://cleantechnica.com/2011/08/07/ieee- completes-62-mile-s...](http://cleantechnica.com/2011/08/07/ieee- completes-62-mile-super-wi-fi-wireless-broadband-standard/)

</comment><comment><USER58> This seems crazy. Business are built to make money not to be logical. This would make customer happy, but I think that aspect is secondary to making guaranteed money. Plus if we lock people in this way it would make it hard for new smaller companies to come in like a Metro. They are smaller and cheaper, but we should give bigger companies control over if they can compete. I don't dislike big companies, but I know they aren't good or evil also. They are greedy as they should be.</comment>


Facebook Distances Itself from Marc Andreessen - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/10/facebook-distances-itself-from-marc-andreessens-statements-on-free-basics/#.6qjorz:UTqk <comment><USER2> > I made an ill-informed and ill-advised comment about Indian politics and > economics.

Before entering a market with a radically different strategy, perhaps it is better to not be ill-informed or ill-advised. Business 101 tbh.

And when your board members say in public that they are ill-informed and ill- advised regarding one of your major strategies, what does that say ?!

If @pmarca was an employee he would likely be presented with a resignation letter to sign.

</comment><comment><USER3> Net neutrality is paramount. Regardless of country/region of the world. To offer limited Internet to people who are going to get it anyway within an year or two with control over what they could surf and what they couldn't is wrong. Period.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there a lulu.com for boardgames? - <AUTHOR>

I published a book on lulu.com awhile back and I now have a friend who would like to publish a board game themselves.<p>I was hoping to find a web-based self-publishing option but didn't have any luck finding what I was looking for, but I thought HN readers might know of something new and cool that I didn't run across in my search. <comment><USER2> How's this look? <http://www.thegamecrafter.com>

</comment><comment><USER3> There are quite a few websites that will do you small runs of custom playing cards, if that helps. (easy to find via Google) I haven't encountered anything for printing custom game boards and cardboard cutouts, unfortunately.

</comment><comment><USER4> in France there is a young startup who is doing a KickStarter for Board Games if you speak french: <http://www.mywittygames.com/></comment>


Ask HN: When do we give up on net neutrality and build a decentralized internet? - <AUTHOR> Seems like the more effective longer term solution to freeing the Internet from political influence and telecom monopoly would be to embrace the trend of the times and build a decentralized internet, bypassing the telecoms altogether. There are already many localized mesh networks / municipal broadband projects / decentralized communication platform PoCs. Isn't this the obvious path forward to usher in an era of digital libertarianism? Are the communities' efforts not better spent on this front rather than continuing the perpetually inane political battle? Is this a naive consideration to think we could take back the internet, forever, by innovating around ISPs? Why or why not? <comment><USER2> Linking freifunk[0], which built up some p2p mesh nets and developed OpenWRT modifications for their protocol.

I'd be interested in knowing what regulatory issues would exist for establishing point-to-point parabolic antennas, as it seems like that would help with long-distance communications. (I'm not an expert, etc.)

[0]: https//freifunk.net

<comment><USER3> [https://freifunk.net](https://freifunk.net)</comment></comment>


Dyslexie font, the revolutionary font for people with dyslexia - <AUTHOR> https://www.dyslexiefont.com/en/typeface/ <comment><USER2> This is certainly interesting. I had a good friend who owned a business located next to mine years ago who was dyslexic.

I found this out when he left a note on my door that looked like it had been written by 3rd grade kid. I was fairly well stunned by it because I'd never knew anyone who was dyslexic before that and he was very skilled craftsmen and very intelligent and I realized that was a pretty tough challenge for him to deal with.

I think it'd be a great option to offer in my web app preferences.

I did a quick check of my Safari browser's Preferences (v.11.1) and didn't see an option to select a font, but Firefox (v.61.0.1) does, and it allows the user to override a site's fonts. Chrome looks like it does as well, though it's a bit noisy in it's approach.</comment>


Is There a Shortage of STEM Workers? - <AUTHOR> http://www.cepr.net/blogs/cepr-blog/is-there-a-shortage-of-workers-in-stem-fields <comment><USER2> This bears an uncanny resemblance to the great depression, the dust bowl era, and "The Grapes of Wrath." Back then, companies distributed fliers advertising fruit picking temp. jobs. Americans would travel hundreds of miles just to fight with 3000 other unneeded people for such jobs.

Today we have companies making websites telling people to "learn to code" and advertising that there is a shortage of tech workers. People invest their own time, and pay for bootcamps for a shot at a job.

And the similarities don't end there. Agriculture owners would offer services like groceries and laundry to those who worked on their plantations...

<comment><USER3> In some ways it's actually worse in that programmers seem completely oblivious to what's happening to them.

They allow the media to call them "coders" and will actually argue with you when you point out how the term is being used to marginalize them. They actively support the boot camp movement and code.org initiatives. They give talks at conferences[1] and write blog posts saying there's no such thing as programmer talent and that programming is easy and anyone can do it (could you imagine a doctor or lawyer publicly asserting likewise about their professions?)

My advice to devs: make as much money as you possibly can now. Take VCs and tech companies for all they're worth and don't leave a penny on the table, because these people are fixing to crush you under their boot.

1 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9486391](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9486391)

<comment><USER4> > They give talks at conferences[1] and write blog posts saying there's no > such thing as programmer talent and that programming is easy and anyone can > do it (could you imagine a doctor or lawyer publicly asserting likewise > about their professions?)

I think it's more akin to someone saying "anyone can paint" or "anyone can make music". Sure, on a very superficial level that's true. Anyone can make crude sketches or learn how to play Chopsticks. But a true aptitude for programming is the same as a true aptitude for art or music: not everyone can do it at that level.

<comment><USER5> Except software engineering is both a science and an art. The statement 'anyone can make art' is widely accepted, but what about 'anyone can do science'? While anyone can pretty much do science the "I'm bad at math" or 'I suck at computers" rhetoric demonstrates a deep institutional feeling that science is fundamentally limited to only the most intelligent individuals.

Thus by limiting SE to only being an art it devalues the skillset, proving OP's point IMO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here are the summary passages:

>The story is then not that there are too few STEM workers, but that employers will say they can't find workers in order to increase the bargaining power that they have and hopefully lower their labor costs. Employers are increasingly pushing for policies shift training costs onto the public and expand H1B visas, which Hiltzik mentions. Some STEM employers are so desperate to reduce labor costs they even collude to keep down their employees' wages.

> The data indicate that Hiltzik is right to suspect that the STEM shortage is > phony. The real story is that employers want to pay workers less.

<comment><USER7> Also:

> So when employers complain about not being able to find workers, what they > really mean is that they can't find workers who meet their specific > requirements at the wage they are willing to offer.

e.g. Onsite work, "culture fit", low wages, interview hazing....

<comment><USER8> Don't forget about "familiar with every piece of technology we use because it's cheaper when employees paid for all their own training instead of leaning anything on the job"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The article argues that the reason companies complain that there are not enough STEM workers is so that they can pay existing workers less. It also says that an excess amount of STEM workers are created.

I think this Stack Overflow post helps clear up the mystery here. It shows that the only STEM category with more job openings than students is Computer Science. It also mentions that the problem is still not so clear since almost half of programmers do not have a Computer Science degree.

Stack Overflow post: [http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/27590/are- there-...](http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/27590/are-there-more- open-jobs-than-available-developers)

<comment><USER3> These discussions are unbelievable.

If there truly were a shortage of developers, then their wages would be rising, yet they aren't, as the report in the article notes.

If I complained about a "shortage" of Ferraris while only offering to buy them new at the price of a Honda Civic, no one would take me seriously. But when Fortune 500 companies make the same complaints about labor, that they can't find great programmers while only offering $85-115k, the government responds with corporate welfare in the form of the H-1B visa. If there's really a programmer "shortage" at the wages offered, then employers should have to do like the rest of us and either pay more for what they want or do without and quit whining.

Disgusting that even here on HN people make excuses for this.

<comment><USER10> Exactly, there is no shortage of STEM workers, but there is a shortage of cheap STEM workers.

<comment><USER11> I'm sure many companies want cheap labor, but other companies cannot find enough of the type of STEM worker they desire.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think the problem is thus: There is not a shortage of STEM workers.

However, I don't think this is a conspiracy to drive down wages, but a miscommunication. There is a shortage of _good, competent STEM workers_.

Ironically, complaining that there aren't enough STEM workers runs the risk of pushing a training glut, and as less qualified but equally credentialed labor enters the market, the cost of finding these workers increases, then there are more complaints about "not enough STEM" and we enter a reinforcing cycle.

The solution is to improve training quality, but that is difficult to measure or plan and thus not as appealing to political solutions, which is to just gun supply.

<comment><USER13> I don't think there's any evidence of a shortage of good STEM workers. There is a shortage of good STEM workers at the price businesses are willing to pay for them. There's less of an issue overall in the software world, though -- companies pay more for programmers, and there's less of a shortage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> We should not kid ourselves. The STEM shortage is a cynical fabrication. It is essentially war conducted with political, economic, and propaganda weapons. Against us. Keep that in mind when you decide to do something about it.

</comment><comment><USER15> Given the compensation mix in Silicon Valley (benefits, employee stock-based compensation), comparing hourly wages with other occupations is not apples-to- apples.

Additionally, STEM vs Computer Science jobs has been discussed before.

<comment><USER16> Stock options at most companies are the equivalent of lottery tickets, and should be valued at or near 0. Many companies offer a 401(k), but with no match. Don't even get me started on "unlimited vacation"....

Besides health insurance (which really ought to be considered a basic requirement rather than a "fringe" benefit), catered meals, and a flexible WFH policy, what do Silicon Valley/SF companies even really offer in terms of benefits?

<comment><USER15> > if there were a real shortage, wages would be expected to grow. This is > because employers would compete over a small number of workers, and they > would need to raise wages to attract those workers.

This is the crux of the article's argument, and I disagree. In a shortage, employers would need to raise _compensation_ , not necessarily wages, to attract workers.

(a) You're missing my point. The study cites hourly wage data for years 2009 through 2014. How large, or even how common, were sign-on bonuses (not perf bonuses) in 2009, and what are they at now? Sign-on bonuses are trivial to value. Any fair study would make an attempt to include that data - this one doesn't.

(b) How common were were shuttles, day care, onsite yoga/fitness lessons, gender reassignment surgery, egg freezing, and whatever else in 2009? These things do have some value - to me at least, it's the amount of _post-tax_ money I would have spent for these amenities elsewhere. People are unlikely to use all of the benefits of course, but the basket has grown.

Health insurance as a benefit can't be considered to be a "basic requirement" and ignored, since plans vary a lot in coverage.

(c) While the stock of "most companies" might be worth nothing, those companies tend to be small and short-lived. Regardless, the majority of engineers work at larger established companies, and most of those working at a startup that might fail in a month are doing it out of choice.

TL;DR I am making an argument against the merits of the study. Rise in total compensation, and not rise in wages, is what matters.

<comment><USER16> No, I'm not missing the point at all.

* Signing bonuses, I'll give you; they are trivial to value and probably should have been included.

* I would doubt that most companies are offering shuttles, day care, or any of these other benefits. Of that list of more esoteric benfits, my company offers yoga and Pilates classes. I'd value them about as highly as catered lunch (if I took advantage of them), because that's about what it would cost me to go do that stuff on my own.

I guess I'd go even farther on health insurance, then, and say that for a valued professional employee, _good_ health insurance should be a basic requirement.

You know what the most common tech company "benefits" have in common? They allow people to stay at the office longer.

* Finally, stock and stock options. Ok, if you're going to give me straight up liquid stock, I'm going to value that as a part of my compensation.

But, options are literally worth the paper they're printed on until they're exercised. And after that, unless the company has gone public, they're still hugely illiquid. Exercising them can be an issue in itself, depending on the strike price. And, then there are the taxes to contend with.

Let's just say I don't put a lot of value in stock options, in general.

<comment><USER15> Of course companies want their employees to work more. And I'm from the "exercise your RSU's immediately" school of thought as well.

All I was pointing out is that imo, the study is flawed in its central argument.

As for the benefits, while it is true that most _companies_ don't offer all of those benefits, it's offset by the fact that the larger companies do. Most large companies have shuttles now, for instance. So, the % of engineers who have these benefits is higher now than it was in, say, 2009 :)

I think that benefits that are actually used are more valuable than they appear to be because they are untaxed. But of course, depending on what your indifference curve looks like, you might well prefer post-tax cash to pre-tax benefits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> In a free market, the other way to state this: Is STEM workers underpaid?

<comment><USER3> YES. If corporations couldn't get the government to import cheap labor, and especially cheap labor subject to deportation when terminated by their employers (and thus extremely easy to abuse), they would have no choice but to increase our wages.

Meanwhile, there are actual laws that prohibit you from importing prescription drugs from countries where they're sold for a fraction of the cost they are here, even when those drugs were originally manufactured in the US! What about the free market? Unbelievable.

<comment><USER18> _What about the free market?_

In the case of pharmaceuticals, there probably isn't a free market at all. Regulatory capture has happened, and we're seeing the end result.

In other things, the idea is "globalization for me, but not for thee". That is, ship US IT jobs to India or Viet Nam or where ever, but keep lawyers and doctors scarce in the US, and forbid bringing in cheap subsitutes. Or perhaps region codes: keep prices high in US and western Europe, but allow lower prices for Africa and South Asia, via DRM.

<comment><USER19> For a doctor with a valid work permit for the US, becoming a US-certified doctor (allowed to practice medicine) is essentially the same process as for any US doctor.

You're basically interviewing to study under an existing doctor in a particular specialization for a period depending on the exact specialization, but minimum 2 years and I believe up to 5 years (you have to interview and get hired for this job). After that, assuming the guy/woman you studied under supports your application, you get your medical licence. The issue is interviewing successfully without support from a US institution.

For a lawyer it's much simpler : either you interview and get hired by a company, or you take the bar exam. Exactly the same process as US citizens (you do need a valid work permit - but that would be required for actually doing any law work anyway - although it can delay things). I know 2 lawyers doing cases in the US that aren't US citizens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Complexity of tech is growing, and complexity level difference gap in stem skills is growing as well. Thus its always a race between the need and skills availability, rather than total number of workers. But yeah,The real story is that employers want to pay workers less.

</comment><comment><USER21> I want more people working on building __T __he _F_ uture. That means we need more people getting STEM training.

This undergrad-level analysis of the labor market is a side show compared to that.</comment>


Recovering Nintendo's Lost SimCity for the NES - <AUTHOR> https://gamehistory.org/simcity/ <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18759898](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18759898)

<comment><USER3> That one was actually posted later, but we had put this one in the second- chance pool (described at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380)), which brought it back for a second viewing. Sorry, I know that's confusing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is excellent work!</comment>


CNN is down? - <AUTHOR> http://cnn.com <comment><USER2> There are websites that'll tell you if it's down for just you, or everybody.</comment>


Murphy's Laws - <AUTHOR> http://murphyslaws.net <comment><AUTHOR> Many, many, many years ago I'd picked up a (then new) copy of Arthur Bloch's _Murphys ' Law and Other Reasons Things Go Wrong_. With the "Wrong" printed upside-down, of course.

At the time, I found it an amusing set of anecdotes and quips.

As I've grown older, it's struck me that this might be the closest thing to a contemporary bible, based on technical experience. The deep truths (and arch cynicism) of the laws are enduring.</comment>


Cardiff Conversation Database - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.cf.ac.uk/CCDb/ <comment><USER2> Other than video, what does this database offer above the BBC's "The Listening Project", which has hundreds of conversations from all points of the UK, and has been used before for linguistic research?</comment>


A Reading Guide To Becoming A Better Developer - <AUTHOR> http://davybrion.com/blog/2009/11/a-reading-guide-to-becoming-a-better-developer/

<comment><USER2> I don't know. I think those books are worth reading at some point, but without SICP, Knuth, or Norvig's stuff, it is hardly a great list.</comment>


Hackers can trick self-driving cars into taking evasive action - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/07/hackers-trick-self-driving-cars-lidar-sensor

<comment><USER2> Probably possible with the radar based distance-keeping/collision avoidance assistance things of modern cars as well. "Only" slams the brakes, but in the wrong traffic situation that also can go pretty wrong.</comment>