Ask HN: Internet-free household? - <AUTHOR>

I've been kicking around the idea of canceling my Internet connection at home. The primary reason is to have a "disconnected" place where I'm not distracted by devices. I'm hoping that I'll get more reading and relaxing done.<p>Crazy or stupid? <comment><USER2> I have done this for short stretches, 2-4 weeks at a time, by giving my cable modem to a friend with strict orders not to give it back until a specified date.

It made a huge difference in my productivity and my overall well-being when I didn't have internet access.

When I sat down at the computer, I got right to work, since there was nothing else to do — no email, HN, reddit, etc. (I'm not a gamer, at all; that might be a distraction for others.)

When I was burned out working for the day, I turned the computer off and did other things like reading and relaxing. No aimless web surfing, useless forum opining, etc.

When something came up that I needed to research or do on the web, I wrote it down in a Word doc, and once or twice a week I'd go to McDonald's and use their wifi for an hour or two, knocking out all the specific web tasks on my list.

At present, I am a programmer and I work remotely on software that runs in the cloud, so it's very nearly impossible for me to go without internet at home.

That's a bummer, because my past experience tells me my life and my productivity are both _immensely_ better without it.

I urge you to give it a try. If you don't want to cancel it right away, consider giving your modem to somebody to keep for a month. (One time I mailed it to my mom, and then she wouldn't send it back, for my own good, she said — I had to buy a new one — so... don't trust your mother.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Not crazy or stupid at all.

With 27 years of Internet access of one form or another under my belt, the same thought has been entering my mind the past couple of years. The first 11 years weren't bad, with dedicated access only in college computing labs or at work. Home was dial-up only, so restricted to e-mail, usenet, etc. Lots of time for reading.

But since broadband (DSL and cable) started becoming widely available in '98, my home-based non-connected leisure time has diminished. An inverse relationship with broadband speed, one could say.

Although I don't own a smartphone, their introduction and the cutting of the Internet wires has only exacerbated the distraction problem. Which is one of the two reasons I don't have one.

If I didn't run my business from home, I'd probably drop my connection too. And probably will the day I retire.

</comment><comment><USER4> Depends if you want to go through the pain of not having easy access to other services. Most government forms? You need to go to the office. Paying bills? Get on the phone / go to the bank. Contacting your phone company? I hope you saved the piece of paper with their phone number. Need a local plumber? Pay extra for calling number information service / get someone random without seeing any previous feedback.

Internet makes a lot of things in life so much easier. I'm probably going offline for a while soon. But that means disabling mobile data unless I really need it. Internet can still be treated like a utility - just don't use it if you don't have to.

<comment><USER3> US-centric:

Paying bills? Crazy little pieces of paper called checks.

Contacting your phone company? Paper bills, or just write it down. Or, wonder of wonders, dial 611.

Need a plumber? They still have these wonderful books called The Yellow Pages.

How in the world did we ever survive prior to the Internet becoming more mainstream just 12-14 years ago? Now sit down and let me tell you about the prehistoric times called the 1970s and 1980s...

And get off my lawn.

<comment><USER4> Yes, all of those things were possible before. But now they're easier and having internet access simply saves you hours and real money on the tasks like you listed. OP asked about it to limit distractions - but I'm guessing he'd be ok with having distractions if he had more even more free time for the reading and relaxing.

So the question is what's the goal? Forcing yourself to have less distractions, because you can't control yourself otherwise? Or having more free time? Using internet only when you need to saves you a lot of time.

Your response was an exaggeration - of course we survived before. But I'd rather make my live easier and just power off the devices when not used.</comment></comment></comment>


Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate - <AUTHOR> http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/01/authoritarians-distract-rather-debate.html <comment><USER2> This reminds me of the storyline from Newsroom where Neal tries to infiltrate the troll underground. The scary thing is how effective this kind of manipulation can be. I often check the comments on HN before reading the article to see if it's going to be worth my time. With sports or controversial news articles I love to jump to the comments to see what the debate is. I like to think of myself as a critical thinker, but I often find myself getting swept up in my own confirmation bias. Upvoting the comments I agree with and downvoting those I don't, almost mindlessly without really evaluating the arguments. It's the more modern version of the cable news network shows where they put a Republican on one side and a Democrat on the other and let them yell their talking points at each other while the host interjects every so often to stir the pot. I hate that it appeals to me, but something about my base nature is attracted to it like a moth to a flame.

<comment><USER3> As you note, this level of self-awareness may not be sufficient, but is probably at least necessary for information sources to provide the kind of value we expect from them.

It's still encouraging to see, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> i'd say our political machine in the US has done a great job for the last 35 years at distracting us from the biggest social threat of our times: wealth disparity. instead, the public conversations revolve around terrorism, who uses which bathroom, twitter, celebrities, and even health insurance.

if recent political movements (tea party, the 99%) and national elections have taught us anything, it's that this is increasingly on the minds of americans (and seemingly others, but i won't speak for them), yet politicians seem to want to talk about anything but that, lest they lose the financial backing of the economic elite.

at its core, this is about fairness, which is one of those fundamental psychological forces we can't and shouldn't ignore. game theory studies show time and again that we are willing to play into lose-lose situations if it means maintaining a semblance of fairness among participants. the trump election seems to be an example of that. the arab spring uprisings seem to be larger, more international examples.

we should be relentless about leading our politicians back to the topic of wealth disparity every single time they try to distract us with something else (particularly terrorism, which has killed far fewer people in the last 15 years than a single year of car accidents has, yet we have sacrificed so much monetarily and psychologically trying to battle that phantom).

<comment><USER5> >biggest social threat of our times: wealth disparity

Serious question, not trolling: why does wealth disparity matter?

Let's say you start the year barely having enough to eat and are living in a cardboard box and you end the year with plenty of food and a small house, why would it matter if your neighbor gets to eat steak once a week and has a slightly nicer house? Surely the absolute fact that your are better off than you were previously is more important than the relative distribution of goods?

A quick way to reduce wealth disparity is to burn down every home that costs more than the median house price. That doesn't mean it's a good idea.

So why is relative wealth more important than absolute wealth again?

<comment><USER6> Maybe a slightly bigger house is tolerable, but if my neighbor is making 10 times more than me and is able to buy his way out of legal trouble while I have to abide by the rule of law, I'm one of three things: lazy, inferior, or getting screwed. To maintain my faith in capitalist democracy in the face of large wealth inequality you have to convince me that one of these three options is acceptable.

Most poor people I know wouldn't consider themselves lazy, so that one is out. With some serious social engineering and propaganda you may be able to convince the poor that they are inherently inferior, but the trend in most of the world seems to be against this sticking. So in most cases wealth disparity means that the poor people feel like they are getting screwed, i.e. they feel entitled to a better life, and they feel that their institutions have failed them.

Look at any country with a high Gini Coefficient and you can see what this leads to. The rich end up corralled into compounds surrounded by razor wire and electric fences, kidnapping runs rampant, political corruption is the rule. With no reason to believe that the government is working for the underclass, you can't really expect the underclass to abide by the government's laws.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is really scary, because I do read comments critically, and have seen those sections being flooded with nonsense, or convincing arguments being pushed without evidence. Heck, this even happens on HackerNews, which users are thoughtful hackers and which are secretly trying to push an agenda? Or is there even a line between those?

Now some food for thought, does online anonymity ultimately help the powerful more than the general public?

<comment><USER8> Pushing an agenda is one thing if the person is doing it in good faith, even if I think their ideas are bad or not supported by evidence. In all likelihood there are large scale information operations going on with world powers trying to subvert each other's populations.

The really sinister thing is that we have paid, bad faith actors whose full time jobs are to spread misinformation and shape narratives online. There is just no way you and I, amateurs commenting sporadically in our free time, have the resources to combat armies of paid trolls.

I spent a lot of time thinking about it this weekend and it sounds bleak. Not only do they spread misinformation, the presence of bad faith actors in social spaces causes a breakdown in trust between all participants, leading to less dialogue and more polarization. Why bother debating me if I might be a paid agent from Belarus? Why bother investigating claims from the other side of an issue if there's a good chance it is paid propaganda? Meanwhile leaving yourself vulnerable to propaganda on your own side that increases group identity and groupthink.

Even worse, bad actors can start trends or spread falsehoods that end up motivating and encouraging good faith actors. There are plenty of people who have been caught up in an information operation, unwittingly propagating and defending someone else's manufactured data. That's scary.

Authoritarian regimes have much less to fear from this. If we disrupt public opinion in China, who cares? They don't really need public consent to do anything. Manipulating the public in democracies will lead to poor decisions and bad governance, giving authoritarian countries ample opportunities to seize more power on the world stage. We can't even fight back effectively.

<comment><USER9> _The really sinister thing is that we have paid, bad faith actors whose full time jobs are to spread misinformation and shape narratives online. There is just no way you and I, amateurs commenting sporadically in our free time, have the resources to combat armies of paid trolls._

What's the difference between this and a lot of PR?

<comment><USER10> Secrecy and deception. Advertising and corporate PR are open about their interests, purveyors of payola and positive-reviews-for-freebies are usually recognisable and the people involved often admit it.

Outright fabrication of big lies by paid PR/psyops operatives who pretend to be "one of us" is a different kettle of fish, and if it is repeated thousandfold, even people who are normally skeptic might at least perceive it as a plausible mainstream view.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In China the government hires people to sway public opinion. In the US, special interests and those with money do it. Is it worse that the Chinese government does it to "keep the peace", while those in the US do it to get your money? Super PACs, political activists, pharmaceutical companies, Reddit power users, brigades and pay-for-votes services... not sure if there's any real difference.

<comment><USER12> One major difference is how concentrated the special interests are. In the case of the Chinese government, public opinion is being swayed by a single entity. In the US, a large number of interest groups are all competing to try to sway public opinion. In the latter case, I think it's harder (at least in principle) for any one group to have a large effect on its own.

<comment><USER13> Except, centralization of wealth means that the opinions of a relatively few people control the seeming surface diversity of "influencers" in the USA by holding the purse strings (when the proles resort to crowd funding they can break out of this to an extent, Bernie being an example).

<comment><USER14> The elites rig the elections and the public sphere, while the proles use the one election where they can still sway the vote to vote for dangerous populists as a protest.

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

Old republican values are relegated to the dustbin, and a civilization becomes a shadow of its former self. This has happened before, and will happen again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm not sure what's especially revealing about this story. A lot of the content we already knew, except now there's more evidence of it. The marginalrevolution author wrongly suggests that "it has long been assumed that propaganda posts would support the government with praise or criticize critics of the government" and says it's surprising this paper found it wasn't. This is no surprise, others have concluded this before this has been known probably a decade.

Kudos for the authors to write this paper though, it takes courage to do this.

For most people skimming the comment section, this interview here with a paid Chinese "online commentator" is far more revealing than submitted article is:

[http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/politics/2012/10/china%...](http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/politics/2012/10/china%E2%80%99s-paid- trolls-meet-50-cent-party)

The commentator estimates 10-20% of posts on Chinese media are by "online commentators" like him, and he also talks about the methods he uses to guide and manipulate the discussion.

<comment> aaron-lebo Gary King is a pretty prominent political scientist. It's unlikely that this is unoriginal work. Yes, that's an appeal to authority, but I think the methods used are what's novel. And don't discount just having some evidence!

Here's the article:

[http://gking.harvard.edu/50c](http://gking.harvard.edu/50c)

edit: it's also in the apsr, which is one of _the_ poli sci journals.

There are a lot less people doing this kind of analysis in an academic setting than one might expect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Yep. This is real in the US, too: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JTRIG](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JTRIG) & [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Strategic_Counterte...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Strategic_Counterterrorism_Communications) & [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Earnest_Voice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Earnest_Voice). Sure, these are officially targeted at enemies of the state, outside the US.

But we have proof that they lie about these things preventatively as well as reactively.

I imagine that in China as well as here, their shills are skilled at disruption and redirection.

</comment><comment><USER17> Title might want to be altered: this is a description of a specific research paper analyzing Chinese online propaganda campaigns, not as general an analysis as the title indicates. Interesting stuff!

<comment><USER18> RAND has study says the same about Russia.

The Russian "Firehose of Falsehood" Propaganda Model Why It Might Work and Options to Counter It [http://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html](http://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html)

<comment><USER16> Thanks for the excellent link, I've been looking for a documentary on Putin's propaganda regime that I saw a few years ago, but this paper is a much deeper look which will serve the same purpose.

<comment><USER19> If you want more context on Putin's regime, check out, "Nothing is True and Everything is Possible" by Peter Pomerantsev. It's an inside view of Russian life/propaganda from someone who worked as a TV producer for a Russian network:

[https://www.amazon.com/Nothing-True-Everything-Possible- Surr...](https://www.amazon.com/Nothing-True-Everything-Possible- Surreal/dp/1610396006)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> aaron-lebo Pretty fascinating stuff.

I'm not sure what Trump's arm of this kind of propaganda is, but Correct the Record was a very real thing, despite the bogeyman descriptions of it in some online communities.

[https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00578997](https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00578997)

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

Interestingly, the original website is now gone, but it used to say essentially that it advocated for Clinton across Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, and other forms of social media.

[http://www.correctrecord.org/](http://www.correctrecord.org/)

The scary thing is just how cheap it would be to pay people to sit in online communities and drive attention to and away from whatever you wanted. Even more interesting is in 10 years it'll be like it never existed. Spread some propaganda, pack up, and go home.

<comment><USER20> > I'm not sure what Trump's arm of this kind of propaganda is

In all seriousness - it's /pol/. See also /r/The_Donald, gab.ai, and a handful of niche forums.

As an aside, I'm sad that gab.ai hasn't seen adoption outside that political group. It's really got a lot of potential as a platform.

<comment><USER21> Do you have any links about paid propaganda on /pol/?

<comment><USER20> I've not seen any allegations of that.

I'm not saying it's paid, I'm saying it's his propaganda arm. They serve the function, officially or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > …find a massive government effort, where every year the 50c party writes > approximately 448 million social media posts nationwide. About 52.7% of > these posts appear on government sites. The remaining 212 million posts are > inserted into the stream of approximately 80 billion total posts on > commercial social media sites, all in real time. If these estimates are > correct, a large proportion of government web site comments, and about one > of every 178 social media posts on commercial sites, are fabricated by the > government. The posts are not randomly distributed but, as we show in Figure > 2, are highly focused and directed, all with specific intent and content.

This is massive. But I am sure Western governments are paying attention as to how to combat online opinion using similar tactics. But I doubt they can match that sort of scale with their economies. Indian freelancers aren't really going to be that convincing to the American public.

<comment> wu-ikkyu >But I doubt they can match that sort of scale with their economies.

Chatbots scale much easier than manual astroturfing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This makes me wonder more at the pro-Chinese position of a lot of western media, particularly the New York Times. Its fairly telling that Taiwan is most often described as a "renegade province" as opposed to a "peaceful high-income democracy", for example.

Having talked to a lot of English speaking, wealthy, educated, overseas Chinese people I am always disturbed at how many of them take communist party positions, despite being able to google "Tiananmen Square". More disturbing when they weren't even born in China.

<comment><USER24> Googling:

      [site:nytimes.com] [renegade] [province]

turns up only things like:

      "Beijing has maintained that Taiwan is a renegade province..."

which is perfectly factual.

I do agree with your larger point that a lot of stories in Western media are uncritical of the shortcomings and risks of the Chinese political system.

<comment><USER25> That's interesting. Can you recommend me some pro-China Western media? I am having trouble finding one.

<comment><USER24> I should be more precise. I'm trying to say that much Western writing is not critical of the decisions the Chinese political system has made about how society is organized there, despite its costs for the country. (E.g., the fast building of roads, trains, and infrastructure; the responsiveness of its electronics industry -- these things have costs for the people of China, but their benefits are very unequally distributed.)

I didn't mean to suggest that there is widespread Western cheerleading for China's political system, especially recently as Xi Jinpeng has consolidated power. What I was trying to capture is Western willingness to overlook the costs.

<comment><USER25> On the contrary, I keep getting the sort of news that you are missing, on my daily dose of social media. Just yesterday, I got this:

[http://www.economist.com/news/china/21714383-and-theres- lot-...](http://www.economist.com/news/china/21714383-and-theres-lot-more- come-it-waste-money-china-has-built-worlds-largest)

And plenty more critical of govt decisions (ghost city, pollution, food safety) from this particular Facebook page which is quite popular for news in China:

[https://www.facebook.com/shanghaiist/](https://www.facebook.com/shanghaiist/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Thank god media doesn't try to distract us with trivial minutiae in the West, eh?

</comment><comment><USER27> In the actual paper ([http://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/50c.pdf](http://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/50c.pdf)), the authors say they asked hundreds of Weibo (a chinese social media site) posters the following question:

> "I saw your comment, it's really inspiring, I want to ask, do you have any > public opinion guidance management, or online commenting experience?"

After tallying up, 19% of the people who post online answered yes.

</comment><comment><USER28> There is something new going on in the social network realm that can undermine trolling efforts as they exist today.

Social networks started appearing when tech adoption was relatively scarce. They predate the smartphone revolution. As such they had to bend out of shape to produce as much public or semi-public content in order to attract and engage enough users to sustain the network effects. The direct side effect of this approach is transparency of the discussion. People who disagree would butt heads because the feel the need to defend "their side" in "public". A manipulation agent can assess the current state of discussion as well as the immediate outcome of his actions, so that he can fine-tune his campaigns.

Now that the smartphone adoption is basically 100%, it becomes possible to build private social networks without making everything public or semi-public. The ones where content is only posted/shared in a close group and is not observable by trolls. No shares, no reposts, no likes, no "people are talking". Nothing. How would you use Snapchat to assess and manipulate the public opinion? The best you can do is check the hits on your web site. What if you lost even that to some sort of caching? Now you're flying completely blind.

Pretty much every popular messenger app has the potential to mutate into an opaque social network. Perhaps many already did.

<comment><USER29> It correlates with my theory of Endless September someday having an end. The problem of Endless September was growth - too much growth, too quickly. When that stops, and unless we experience an AI personhood event, it has to, because we only have so many people on the planet and so much data they can transmit - the network settles into a place where it can focus on quality instead of sheer scale. In the developed world we are likely already entering this phase, with online access surpassing 80%, and the rest of the world is not that far behind.

So then what happens? The business model changes. Social network technologies will re-commoditize and the value will return to communities. Privacy takes a bigger role, as you note. And the world, for better or worse(but probably better), becomes even weirder and harder to assess or manipulate top-down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> There is no doubt that memes and social media have been militarized for propaganda use. This presentation from a consulting agency to many U.S. TLAs and defense contractors outlines the strategies and contains numerous references to DoD work in the area. It gives models, tells what metrics to use, identifies roles, etc.

[http://robotictechnologyinc.com/index.php/military- memetics](http://robotictechnologyinc.com/index.php/military-memetics)

Either find the PDF halfway down, or just go here: [http://robotictechnologyinc.com/images/upload/file/Presentat...](http://robotictechnologyinc.com/images/upload/file/Presentation%20Military%20Memetics%20Tutorial%20Conference%2013%20Dec%2011.pdf)

And here is their 1,680 page compendium of ~100 papers on the subject which they used as references: [http://robotictechnologyinc.com/images/upload/file/Memetics%...](http://robotictechnologyinc.com/images/upload/file/Memetics%20Compendium%205%20February%2009.pdf)

Distraction is a tactic, but it's only a single tool in the strategy. It's also relevant _when_ to distract, when to counter, when to ignore, etc.

</comment><comment><USER31> It's a cultural problem. There's always been these two styles of communication - one where you communicate to honestly express your views, and another where you communicate to put across an impression that is useful for your agenda. We're in an age now where the second style is making a huge comeback, from state-sponsored propaganda to social media trolling.

</comment><comment><USER32> Its interesting to compare the behavior observations in the article to the concept of "concern trolling" which is almost the same.

</comment><comment><USER33> bread and circus

We've known this for a few millenia.

</comment><comment><USER34> What is this political drivel doing on HN?</comment>


Git is the next Unix - <AUTHOR> http://www.advogato.org/person/apenwarr/diary/371.html

<comment><USER2> This is the original entry:

<http://alumnit.ca/~apenwarr/log/?m=200801#31>

Same person who brought us "Tracking an entire Windows sytem inside Git" last month:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=455320>

Note the title could be construed the wrong way, the author means it is the next unix only as an analogy: it's a new, underlying platform where atomic building blocks can be combined and hooked up by higher level programs to do a lot of great things.

<comment><USER3> Any title describing success or rants on GIT, Lisp, Haskell, or Ruby gets automatic up-votes.

And maybe it could be stretched to be "the next _Linux_." Still wrong.

<comment><USER4> I read the article before upvoting it, sounds like you didn't since he made a pretty clear analogy between GIT and Unix that wasn't just link bait.

<comment><USER5> I hope you read any article on Hacker News before upvoting it.

More than that I hope you read the comments too, because if you aren't an expert that might be one here who can help debunk snake oil before you upvote.

I've been caught a few times reading a story, upvoting it, and then finding a well written comment a moment later about what total tosh it is.

<comment><USER6> ... and agreed with the comment?

<comment><USER7> Yes, that happens all the time to me, too. Comments here are often much better argued than the linked articles. And I guess it should be no surprise to you that even well-written articles can be complete tosh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Git is great and it blew and expanded my mind.

But I have some questions for the the experts. Is git really a fantastic achievement, or is the praise for git coming from people who are not experts in source control (+)?

Based on my cursory readings, it appears that the concepts Git uses (dag, everything is a node, tree snapshotting etc) existed in Bitkeeper.

(+): I ask this because I've repeatedly found that what looks like a big conceptual leap to outsiders is actually a gradual evolution. Examples: I first thought RISC was a big leap, but on reading up the technical papers later, I realized that it was made of lots of innovations by lots of people.

<comment><USER9> I think your hypothesis is correct, but that doesn't make Git any less of an achievement. Certainly it is the product of technologies that existed, but it is the manner in which Git packages those features that is innovative. Indeed, much of the brilliance of Git is how _simple_ it is conceptually compared to other systems--it is the concepts that Git leaves out, not what it uses, that count.

<comment><USER7> Moreover, git is extremely fast compared to almost every other VCS. Performance was the thing that pushed Linus to start the project in the first place, but it's still amazing just _how_ fast it is.

<comment><USER10> _Performance was the thing that pushed Linus to start the project in the first place_

No, problems with the bitkeeper license was the reason git was started. Linus was very happy with bitkeeper as the VCS for Linux until some kernel contributor tried to reverse engineer parts of bitkeeper which caused the bitkeeper author to threaten to revoke the free license. Git is basically a rewrite of bitkeeper

<comment><USER7> Sorry, maybe my comment wasn't quite clear enough.

BitKeeper license problems caused him to _look for another VCS_. However, before he started git, he tried a bunch of other DVCS systems, including open source ones, and decided he couldn't work with them because they were simply too slow. Hence git. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(software)#Early_history> From the quote there it's clear that it's _not_ a BK rewrite. git is apparently faster than BK.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> GIT is built to manage a large collection of small files. e.g. the linux kernel repos, files that are a only a few KB on average. It is optimized to operate fast on such a cluster of small blobs, but as soon as it processes bigger files (MB,GB) its performance and advantages degrade a lot. Also, the lack of partial checkout makes it painful to get only a subset of the large files that you are storing. Probably because you wouldn't want to checkout only part of the linux kernel.

But those limitations may only be in the Git porcelain, all the plumbing underneath might be a great base for the concept of a distributed file system. GIT is the first step in the right direction, or even could be the platform to support it. <http://www.wizbit.org/drupal/> is a company that tries to achieve something like that.

</comment><comment><USER12> So Git is something that should be built into your OS? Yeah, no shit, that's why Squeak has fine-grained version control built-in, and weren't there operating systems that had version-controlled file-systems?

<comment><USER13> VMS did. It had a configurable (not sure if it was system wide, or user definable) number of versions it kept and it was simple to retrieve past versions (as long as it was within the number of generations it kept). And since it was at the OS level, anywhere you could request a file, you could also specify the version.

I don't know if the versions applied to directories though (I doubt it, but my exposure to VMS was quite brief).

<comment><USER14> No, just files. And it handled the versioning by copying the whole file, if I recall correctly, at a heinous space cost. (My quota was 500k IIRC.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I am wondering can't we use git as database?

<comment><USER16> It _is_ a database.

Not a relational database, though. But the Tree objects (1) make a hierarchical database.

(1) <http://book.git-scm.com/1_the_git_object_model.html>

<comment><USER17> It will be tough to use as a useful database for most applications without cursors. I'm also not certain that its directories are ordered. If they are, I'm even more doubtful that you can specify a custom ordering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Git is an OS now? Let's make a GIT native FS first, or distributed information over 'the cloud'

</comment><comment><USER19> i'm not sure how any of that makes it the "next unix". a good filesystem replacement/companion maybe, but hardly an operating system.

<comment><USER20> I just assumed the author decided to say something so ridiculous that nobody would try to question whether it makes sense or not.

<comment><USER2> It was an analogy, the author was not suggesting git would _be_ an OS.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How much time do you spend on HN everyday ? - <AUTHOR> And how do you manage it?
This could apply more broadly to social media, and other online communities like ProductHunt.
A few months ago, I deactivated my Facebook account and unfollowed most of the people I used to follow on Twitter. I tried it as an experiment, and it worked out great. I dont have any urge to visit FB any longer, and I save ~10 hours every week which I used to spend browsing (mostly) useless stuff on FB (I keep track of the hours via Rescuetime).
When I look at my monthly HN usage, I can see that I visit ~8 links (on average, posts and comments) via HN everyday. However, thinking deeper on it, I hardly remember anything that I read via those links over the past month. I have been consistently spending ~1 hour everyday on HN for ~4 years now, and have been recently considering drastically reducing the time I spend here, as an experiment to see how much I would miss it. Its one of the more difficult things to do because I love the HN community, but I could probably spend that 1 hour everyday on more productive activities. <comment><USER2> Even though I have an account for years now, I just recently got hooked on HN. I still don't have an estimate on how much time I spend on it, but I don't even care. Ok, I use it as a news aggregator and I'll probably forget about most of it in a few days, weeks or whatever, but more importantly, I use it to find out about resources too.

Resources for learning and for my job in general, for my own products or for my day job. I think it currently might be one of best places to stay informed and on top of latest technologies.

I don't think HN and Facebook belong in the same category here, at least not for most of people. Somebody can still use Facebook to get informed about the technology, but most people don't.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Resources for learning and for my job in general, for my own products or for > my day job.

I agree with you on this. However, when I need resources to learn about a topic, I have found it more effective to just go to the HN Algolia search [1], and look for the most voted links for that topic.

For example, if I want resources on React, I would search "react" filtered by "past year" on Algolia [2]

I find this approach more effective because I dont have to be constantly following all the stories on HN, and keep bookmarking the resources I find useful.

[1] [https://hn.algolia.com/](https://hn.algolia.com/)

[2] [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=React&sort=byPopularity&prefix...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=React&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=pastYear&type=story)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> How do / would you prefer to find "news"? I treat HN as a stream of stuff I would have missed otherwise with my limited set of RSS feeds (like you, limited on purpose to avoid making them infinite).

Seems like there's a follow-up: do you find reading actual news to be a waste of time?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I find actual (TV) news to be a waste of time. It wasn't always like this. I used to follow news related to politics etc daily, until I realised I was spending too much energy and time on it, and over a long period it wasn't helping me.</comment></comment>


Cool laser based audio visualization I hacked together for my Halloween party - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0SEvrFwSXs&feature=youtu.be

<comment><AUTHOR> The setup is super simple. I simply glue a small mirror to the the cone of a cheap speaker and bounce the laser off of the mirror.

There are a few things i've been planning on changing with my setup.

If I use two mirrors (one for each speaker) and restrict the mirror's movement to the x plane on one speaker and the y plane on the other speaker I should be able to be able to draw cool shapes and paterns on the wall by manipulating the tones on the left and right channel. Maybe something like this:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYYTtaW2FqM#t=83](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYYTtaW2FqM#t=83)</comment>


An Offer to Sony from 2600 - <AUTHOR> http://www.2600.com/?q=content/offer-sony-2600 <comment><USER3> The last time people got this crazy about a hack, Kevin Mitnick was thrown in solitary confinement for months because they thought he could "whistle nuclear launch codes into prison telephones". 2600 made the documentary about it, Freedom Downtime, and I strongly recommend watching it if you never have.

So what if North Korea did it (of course I'm skeptical of this, anyone with a computer can conduct the same activities, with the motivator of trolling the entire world for fun). It's not a big deal, it's not something that requires US presidential intervention. It's not even remotely as big of a deal as the CIA torture report that just came out. The CIA report threatens our legitimacy as a world power. The Sony hack just costs a corporation some money, maybe (free publicity FTW). Big. Deal.

If this is the worst a hacker can do, I'd love to see all future wars replaced with hacking. I'll take that over agent orange and torture any day.

This sad, sick notion that hackers are terrorist enemy #1 and this is the most important thing governments should be working on is, like this movie will probably be, shitty fiction, a self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuated by Hollywood in movies like War Games that make it look like we're all going to be nuked thousands of times if we don't stop the Hacker menace. Help me change the media's perception of hacking before we start throwing more whistleblowers and e-graffiti artists in prison.

TLDR: Sony got hacked, too bad, learn a lesson and fix your computer security, let's not start WW3 over it shall we?

<comment><USER4> _> The CIA report threatens our legitimacy as a world power. The Sony hack just costs a corporation some money, maybe (free publicity FTW). Big. Deal._

It is a big deal actually. Sony and these movie theaters taught the world that US businesses are so risk averse that they will give into any threat - credible or not. The crazies will now come out of the woodwork. Not every business will give in, but the volume of threats and the disruption they cause will vastly increase.

A foreign dictator just told the US population that it isn't allowed to see a movie he doesn't like (false flag conspiracy theories aside - sometimes things are exactly what they appear to be). I am not sure how anyone can think this isn't a big deal worthy of presidential intervention.

<comment><USER5> Sony is not a US Business...

<comment><USER6> > Sony is not a US Business...

Yep, it sure is.

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

"Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc. (SPE) is the American entertainment subsidiary of Japanese multinational technology and media conglomerate Sony."

<comment><USER5> The studio takes their direction from Japan-based Sony. Japan, in fact, required changes to The Interview assassination scene to tame it.

<comment><USER6> Nevertheless, it's an American company, subject to and benefiting from American law enforcement. They are a relevant company for the FBI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sony CEO Michael Lynton says Sony still wants The Interview to be seen and is considering their options. Those include DVD and Blu-ray home video, YouTube, VOD, and other digital platforms but "there has not been one major VOD distributor, one major e-commerce site that has stepped forward and said they are willing to distribute this movie for us." [1]

Hackers to Sony: We'll stand down if you never release the movie.... "Now we want you never let the movie released, distributed or leaked in any form of, for instance, DVD or piracy. And we want everything related to the movie, including its trailers, as well as its full version down from any website hosting them immediately." [They] warn the studio executives that, "we still have your private and sensitive data" and claims that they will "ensure the security of your data unless you make additional trouble." [2]

Imagine Sony putting it on BitTorrent with a pre-roll asking viewers to donate money to a charity of their choice through a micro-site they setup to track how much has been given. Or something.... This is actually a moment in history where Sony could truly shine.

But back in reality, whatever is in those held-back stolen docs, they probably need time to prepare for the fallout. If they can stall the remaining doc release by stalling the movie release, they can buy themselves some time. In the meantime, the audience for the film is growing daily, but I think will peak and fall if they wait too long.

[1] - [http://deadline.com/2014/12/sony-president-obama-the- intervi...](http://deadline.com/2014/12/sony-president-obama-the-interview- response-1201330799/)

[2] - [http://money.cnn.com/2014/12/19/media/insde-sony-hack- interv...](http://money.cnn.com/2014/12/19/media/insde-sony-hack- interview/index.html)

<comment><USER8> Sony _owns_ several digital release platforms.

If they want this movie out, they could make it happen tomorrow.

This is just PR speak. They might cave and release anyway, but Lynton's statement is deliberately weak and duplicitous, once again attempting to deflect all blame from themselves rather than admit to any mistake on their part.

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure they are in complete control, although it's a great image of master manipulation to imagine they are. I'm waiting until I really understand the whole story to start assigning any blame.

I'm more interested at this point in figuring out what this means for the future. Do we live in a world now where state-actors will target specific _companies_ and basically try to rip them to shreds and extort them? Now I'm supposed to personally defend my company and my network against _state- sponsored_ targeted persistent threats?

It should be possible to lock down individual machines which aren't ever supposed to be networked. That's hard enough. I'm personally of the belief that any networked device is ultimately hack-able up to the physical constraints of the network. It's all about how much it will cost an attacker to gain access, and how much they can steal once they get it.

If governments start routinely sponsoring these attacks, I'm very concerned the cost-levels we impose today are 5 - 6 orders of magnitude too low, and the network bandwidth 5 - 6 orders of magnitude too high, to deter these types of attack.

<comment><USER9> The thing is that from what I can tell this attack is not even in the same order of magnitude as the state sponsored attacks you are referring to.

I haven't found a good write up on the attack, however my understanding is it was mainly due to Sony's lack of security and not the prowess of the hackers.

This was something like SQL Injection and non password protected excel files with employees social security numbers. The state-sponsored APTs you are talking about are hundreds of millions of dollars worth of custom software engineering.

However I agree with your general premise that another government essentially blackmailing one of our private companies is worrying.

<comment><USER10> Whatever else there is one thing I'm sure of: we won't let any facts get in the way of Cybergeddon 15.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Too much condescending tone in this "proposal"...

I think people just want to see the film. I certainly want to see the film. It might have a crappy plot or a second-rate screenplay or subpar acting, but with this sort of publicity none of that matters. Just watching it will be an event, perhaps an even bigger event than watching The Last Temptation of Christ was way-back-when...

Anyway, Sony seems to be in a defiant stance. It doesn't seem like Sony is going to yield; it seems like they are going to just find an alternative distribution path: _" No thanks, 2600. We got this. After all, this is the sort of hype that we'd... uhh... kill for.... uh..."_

<comment><USER12> > _Just watching it will be an event_

That brings up a good point. Perhaps Sony should even consider using the controversy in its marketing, then later make claims about how much more successful the film was than projected, thanks to the added publicity (which will almost certainly be true).

Not only would it show defiance, it would underscore the paradoxical effect of trying to stifle free speech in this manner. And, that might provide the biggest disincentive of all for future prevention: demonstration of ineffectivness.

<comment><USER13> What has lead you to believe that free speech is any consideration in Sony's dealings? This is the company that has (and still does) push for SOPA and CISPA-like abilities to take down websites with the most minor effort!

It's unclear why the release was canceled. Maybe Sony wants to just put this whole thing behind them. Maybe they want to curtail any further leaks that they feel may be worse. Perhaps the executives feel that being a victim of a foreign nation absolves them of any culpability and they're playing that card to the greatest extent they can. But I highly doubt they're going to make any about face on a policy issue and are still very much against free speech as far as the internet is concerned. If anything this incident will be used to bolster their arguments and to that end maybe it has worked out better for them than "The Interview" ever could.

<comment><USER12> > _What has lead you to believe that free speech is any consideration in Sony > 's dealings?_

Call it artistic freedom if you'd prefer. It's all a form of free speech and I'm not sure that Sony has ever come out against artistic expression.

Regardless, I think it's pretty clear that the shoe is on the other foot now. That point, of course, is essentially the main premise of the article on which we are commenting, and it's what makes the situation so sweetly ironic to its author(s).

But, you know, it's all P.R. and all about messaging (from both sides). Sony doesn't have to really believe in free speech for everyone in order to make a stand on that premise. They are surely aware that standing on their right to make a profit probably wouldn't engender as much support or be as effective as standing for artistic freedom, free speech, etc.

And, of course, all of this discussion about what to call it is pedantic, because my bigger point was that they have an opportunity to turn this on its head and have it completely backfire on the attackers, thus providing strong disincentive for future attacks.

> _It 's unclear why the release was canceled._

I think it's pretty clear that, at least in part, they were tired of having their asses handed to them. In short, they were punked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I still have a hard time believing NK did this without any definitive evidence.

Wasn't it last December that NK was sending fax messages to communicate with SK? Now they can download Terabytes from Sony without anyone noticing?

<comment><USER15> I also feel that it would be super-easy to just nullroute North Korea and be done with this "state sponsored terrorism" in about three seconds.

<comment><USER16> Many NK attacks also originate in China.. Many Chinese hacks also originate in China come to think of it..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> That was a thoughtful offer from the folks over at 2600. I had this little internal dialog beginning, "what a conundrum would Sony find itself in had it it instead been a threat?" I thought it was a silly thought, but then, I really started to wonder what the Sony response would be. It would have a group threatening them--supposedly--if they do release the film, and another threatening the same consequence if they don't. To whom do you yield, Sony?

</comment><comment><USER18> I don't get it. Doesn't sonny have the money to hire people like Spender, D. Hartmeier, etc. To secure their network?! To they need a _hacker community_ to secure their network?!

I mean it's obvious that they don't care about security or that they do care but they value flexibility more, than tight security. Either way I don't understand the nature of the _offer_ , maybe it's pure irony and I missed it.

</comment><comment><USER19> I guess a movie about two brave maverick North Korean TV stars heading to Washington to assassinate Obama, the evil emperor of the United States could also be a 'funny' comedy movie to watch.

Seriously though, while the plot of the film is both purile and offensive to the North Korean dictator personally, should NK be behind the attack on Sony (im still not convinced) then it is definitely an ulterly inappropriate response.

Problem is, and this is a genuine question, how should they have responded? Is the western media, specifically the US media going to publish a written complaint from NK? Probably not right. I'm not justifying their response in any way, but would be curious to know if they have any way at all to complain.

I'm playing devil's advocate here before anyone starts assuming I'm some NK sympathiser. I too would like to see the NK people freed from the tyranny and death camps they currently live under the constant threat of.

<comment><USER18> > I guess a movie about two brave maverick North Korean TV stars heading to > Washington to assassinate Obama, the evil emperor of the United States could > also be a 'funny' comedy movie to watch.

Except from the fact that it's a boring script, I don't see nothing wrong with it and I'm pretty sure that you an do a movie like that anytime you'd like in the US. I'm pretty sure the government will not send _hackers_ to attack the studio... For making fun of any figure. In the _late night show_ the host makes fun of virtually everyone and anything. Satire shows pretty much the level of a democracy.

ps. Consider that I'm very critical of the US gov. But it's absolutely nowhere near N. Korea if that was your point.

<comment><USER19> No, that wasn't my point. My point that the film picked a target where it doesn't matter if it offends.

The film studio quite deliberately decided not to make a film about assassinating Vladamir Butin, or Angela Derkel.

I also find such a plot puerile. That was my point. Also read my original last sentence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady Very little content here. Seems more like self-promotion and a silly offer that Sony would be stupid to take. Why let someone distribute the movie for free when they spent over $40m making it and can (worst case scenario) put it on a website they build and charge $10 to everyone that wants to watch it?

<comment><USER20> im still hoping its a very genius marketing campaign...but either way, setting the movie free (not as in beer) would send a powerfull message. cant think of a better xmas gift to humanity right now...

<comment> k-mcgrady >> "cant think of a better xmas gift to humanity right now..."

Saving people who want to see a movie $10 is the best gift to humanity you can think of? (jk) It would definitely send a message but considering the loses they've already made from this + the hack they need to exploit the situation and make as much money as possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Finally, real hacker news :)

</comment><comment><USER22> If Sony can't find a distributor they should start taking Visa on their site and offer direct downloads, watch the dollars start rolling in, and get their first exposure to a business model they should have been pioneering 10 years ago.

<comment><USER23> Who in their right mind would give their VISA to Sony at this point?

<comment><USER7> I know I'll get downvotes, but seriously, I'm crying I'm laughing so hard right now. So true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Not sure what is this trying to say.

"if you want to put it online, you can put it on our website full of anti- governmental rants"

Ummm... All right. If Sony wants to put it online, they will find other ways.

</comment><comment><USER25> This would be awesome but so very unlikely. I Suspect that Sony exaggerated the threat and cancelled the film as a publicity stunt. Was it a real attack? Sure. Is the film cancelled forever? Highly doubtful. Sony is way too profit oriented to let this opportunity pass and they certainly are not going to hand the film over to the hacker community and loose out. That said, I think that 2600 releasing the film would be AWESOME!!

</comment><comment><USER26> Paulo Coelho, world famous novelist, also made a neat offer: [https://twitter.com/paulocoelho/status/545465796202606592](https://twitter.com/paulocoelho/status/545465796202606592)

<comment><USER27> Not too surprising, since he advocates "piracy":

[http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/feb/01/paulo-coelho- re...](http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/feb/01/paulo-coelho-readers- pirate-books)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> So, the threat is to expose private and sensitive data retrieved in the hack when The Interview is leaked? Who says The Interview wasn't obtained during the hack, and will be leaked by the same party issuing the threat?

<comment><USER29> The goal, which is working so far, is to prevent the release of the movie. The movie should be released because fuck whoever did this. Sony may be hated for good reason but not releasing only encourages this type of thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The threat called for retribution even if it is leaked.

</comment><comment><USER31> Isn't this two not really related events being conflated?

1) Sony gets hacked. A big hack, but just a hack.

2) Sony pulls a movie because it offends a nasty dictator identified by name.

Why are these connected? It's not as if they learned about the movie from the hack? I've seen the ad for that movie a few times, and I'm pretty sure that the spymasters in North Korea can watch the same Seinfeld reruns that I do.

Why is the ridiculousness over Sony pulling the picture (PR stunt or not) at all related to the hack?

<comment><USER32> What don't you get?

Sony got hacked, the hackers said if you halt release of the film we'll stop releasing your private data.

The release was cancelled, the hackers stop releasing private data.

It doesn't take a data scientist to put those two together.

<comment><USER31> But the movie was pulled over concerns about terrorism, not embarrassing revelations:

[http://www.politico.com/story/2014/12/sony-north-korea- the-i...](http://www.politico.com/story/2014/12/sony-north-korea-the- interview-113655.html)

Sony left the decision up to the theater chains, and those chains were reported to back away from the movie because of the legal liability if there were a terrorist incident.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I won't be adding much to the conversation but I really feel I need to say this. If Sony doesn't release this film I am not buying a Sony product ever again.

</comment><comment><USER20> how much money have they spent on this movie? If people pitch in world wide...how much money does HN think it would take for Sony to "sell" this movie to the public.

</comment><comment><USER16> Funny how the U.S. government goes nuts over an offensive YouTube video or Koran burning video, but suddenly Obama's administration calls out Sony for "making a mistake" for caving to (allegedly) North Korea? Does anyone else find this to be a double standard? We can "offend" North Korea, but if we "offend" Islam, then somehow that's different? I say let's offend everyone. That's what free speech means.

<comment><USER7> I think Terry Jones burning a Koran is starting to get into the "you're putting peoples lives in danger just to prove what a ridiculously pompous ass you are" camp.

There is a fairly well defined limit to free speech, e.g. yelling "fire!" in a theater. Burning a Koran, just to fuck with people, is probably in "yelling fire" territory.

But as far as Obama's quip against Sony goes... I was really surprised to read that. I think it's tone-deaf for Obama to call out Sony. First of all, it was the theaters not Sony who refused to show it. Second of all, it was the FBI who told the theaters they couldn't guarantee they weren't going to get hit by terrorists on Christmas. What?!

Yes, the capitulation is absolutely shocking and terrible. That's what Obama should be saying. But victim blaming? It's like blaming the kidnapping victim for doing what they're told so they don't get hurt. Sony still has a gun to their head, they are still being actively extorted!

Edit: @icebraining set me straight.

<comment><USER34> _Burning a Koran, just to fuck with people, is probably in "yelling fire" territory._

No, no it's not. It's an insensitive, assholish and petty action, but it does not constitute an incitation to immediate violation of the law, including but not exclusively because it was announced beforehand.

<comment><USER7> Incitement to crime -- speech that spurs another to commit a crime -- is just one of 6 categories of speech which are not protected.

The other five main exceptions to free speech protection include; Defamation, Obscenity, Sedition, and...

Fighting words: As defined by the Supreme Court, fighting words are "those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace."

Causing panic: The classic example of speech causing panic is someone yelling "Fire!" in a crowded movie theater. Speech may be suppressed where a reasonable person would know that his speech is likely to cause panic and/or harm to others.

The government also has the right to restrict speech in order to promote a "compelling government interest," such as national security. This standard is extraordinarily strict and hard to prove, making it a rather narrow exception to free speech.

[1] - [https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/free-speech-primer- what-c...](https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/free-speech-primer-what-can-you- say)

I _thought_ that the courts would look at it under this 6-part framework and they might possibly decide, under the facts and circumstances of Terry Jones for example, that it falls under "fighting words" or maybe some kind of hate speech.

But now I've read up more on Terry Jones and what actually happened, and, you're right, the consensus was it was protected speech.

Pulling an Obama quote from Wikipedia;

President Barack Obama was asked on September 9, 2010, on ABC's "Good Morning America" about the Quran burning controversy. He said, "You could have serious violence in places like Pakistan or Afghanistan. This could increase the recruitment of individuals who would be willing to blow themselves up in American cities or European cities." He said, "I just want him to understand that this stunt that he is talking about pulling could greatly endanger our young men and women in uniform who are in Iraq, who are in Afghanistan. We're already seeing protests against Americans just by the mere threat that he's making." "I just hope he understands that what he is proposing to do is completely contrary to our values as Americans, that this country has been built on the notions of religious freedom and religious tolerance," Obama said. "He says he's someone who is motivated by his faith ... I hope he listens to those better angels and understands that this is a destructive act that he's engaging in." Asked if the event could be stopped, Obama replied, "My understanding is that he can be cited for public burning … but that's the extent of the laws that we have available to us."[42]

<comment><USER34> Considering that flag burning is infamously declared legal, it'd be hard to justify banning Quran burning on "fighting words" grounds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> _The CIA report threatens our legitimacy as a world power._

no it does not...almost everyone in the world understand that under certain conditions, torture to get potentially life-saving information is just the way of things.

let me put it this way...if your immediate family was going to be blown up in two hours, wouldn't you say go ahead and torture that guy who you KNOW has information on how to diffuse the bomb?

<comment><USER36> Your premise is pure fantasy. There was never a ticking time bomb scenario. And torque is NOT an effective means of extracting information. Everyone from Napoleon to Hitler to our own Military generals have aid as much.

Here's a good article on the subject: [http://www.theguardian.com/science/the- lay-scientist/2010/no...](http://www.theguardian.com/science/the-lay- scientist/2010/nov/04/2)

<comment><USER37> >And torque is NOT an effective means of extracting information.

Then how do you explain this case in Germany where simply threatening torture resulted in the perpetrator divulging the location of his victim: [http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/10/world/kidnapping-has- germa...](http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/10/world/kidnapping-has-germans- debating-police-torture.html)

<comment><USER38> The key distinction is that in this case it was a matter of

        simply threatening torture

Torture would not have produced more useful results, and may have actually produced less useful results. _Threatening_ it, on the other hand, seems to have worked.

The issue with the CIA torture scandal is that you have a bunch of guys who may or may not know anything. These guys are interrogated, and, probably, disclose everything they know. Then, the higher ups at the CIA, acting on the authority of Cheney[1] and Bush[2] required that the guys being held—who may or may not know anything more or at all—be tortured to extract more information.

At this point, the guys being held who may or may not know anything are going to start telling their 'enhanced' interrogators anything they can in order to stop what's happening to them. It doesn't matter if it's real or fake.

[1] [http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/sep/09/dick-cheney- def...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/sep/09/dick-cheney-defends- torture-al-qaida) (and it's important to note that the Senate report on this subject revealed that torture had _nothing to do_ with the discovery of bin Laden's location.)

[2] [http://www.businessinsider.com/afp-bush-knew-about-cia- tortu...](http://www.businessinsider.com/afp-bush-knew-about-cia-torture-says- cheney-2014-12)

<comment><USER37> Maybe, but consider: instead of someone like the person in the article, the perpetrator is a member of a radical fundamentalist organization who believes that death is better than life and is not so put off by the prospect of some discomfort, at least in theory. It's conceivable that once theory is put into practice he might rethink his position.

<comment><USER38> That's completely, verifiably wrong.

        The Senate report has a revealing passage saying that
        the statement of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed ("KSM")
        "during his first day in CIA custody included an
        accurate description of a Pakistani/British operative,
        which was dismissed as having been provided during the
        initial 'throwaway stage' of information collection
        when the CIA believed detainees provided false or
        worthless information". KSM was later water-boarded
        (simulated drowning) 183 times, leading him to make
        frequent confessions that later turned out to be false.
        Another section of the report says that "KSM fabrications
        led the CIA to capture and detain suspected terrorists
        who were later found to be innocent".

[http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/torture-it- didnt...](http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/torture-it-didnt-work- then-it-doesnt-work-now-9923288.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I pledge to pay Sony 1 BTC if they let this happen. [https://twitter.com/hansent/status/546273749163466753](https://twitter.com/hansent/status/546273749163466753)

<comment><USER39> That's a noble sentiment, but unfortunately the GoP also took sony_wallet.dat

I kid, but this hack was pretty damn deep.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> If Sony wanted to release the movie they probably wouldn't miss the chance of making money with it so this proposal sounds rather stupid. There is no differentiation between Hacker and Cracker in public media. Get over it.

</comment><comment><USER41> Let us relook the issue here. Is it hackers attack on Sony or Sony making a movie on North Korean ruler(as I understand) or both?

Every human/culture has likes,dislikes ...etc and every one expect others not crossing those lines for peaceful co-existence. In democracy, no doubt, there is freedom of expression but if that expression is uncomfortable to other, then there is responsibility to control/prevent that expression rather than brazenly going ahead ignoring sensitivities of others.

If the story line as I understand from mass media is, assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and if North Korea protested it, then Sony should have understand and accommodated the sensitivities of North Korea and stopped making this movie. It is not censorship as President Obama noted.

People on HN voiced concern on NSA surveillance ...etc, since many felt privacy/anonymity is violated...etc. Just like you have sensitivities, North Korea too has sensitivities and it is natural to expect, others to understand them. Whether it is, dictatorship or democracy and their relative merits/demerits is different point of discussion.

I am neither supporting hacker's attack on Sony nor North Korea but Sony in first place, should have considered the sensitivities of other cultures, even if they are alien to your culture and act accordingly, given the story line.

Arts should further enable the stability or peace on earth and you may not achieve peace by hurting sentiments of others.

<comment><USER42> I understand the sentiment behind your comment but applying this doctrine does more good than harm.

The right to not be offended, quite simply, does not exist and should not exist in free democracies. Everything should be open for debate, discussion, parody, etc..

Not producing a movie because someone might feel insulted by it and then throw a temper tantrum is censorship by proxy in its purest form. The tyranny of sensibilities may be justified by humanitarian arguments (i.e.: "peace on Earth" !) but it is, more often than not, a disguise totalitarian doctrines take to silence opponents.

The fact that this attack allegedly comes from the last Stalinian regime - <USER2> worst dictatorship still in existence - certainly points to a totalitarian motive.

<comment><USER43> > The right to not be offended, quite simply, does not exist and should not > exist in free democracies

Genuine question: Why is that?

<comment><USER44> Because a right not to be offended requires a power to suppress offensiveness. The right to life and the right to property would be meaningless if murder and theft were decriminalized. In the same way, a right not to be offended implies that offensiveness must be punished.

The power to suppress murder is a relatively small power, and its limits are easily determined by laws and courts. A power to suppress offensiveness would be broad and vague, capable of suppressing anything anyone might object to. Since taking offense is so subjective, it would be difficult for this power to be administered by a neutral third party. It would be prone to abuses.

A right not to be offended requires an arbitrary power incompatible with freedom.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Developers Deserve Better Team Chat - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/teamcodestream/insights-on-the-power-of-real-time-communication-in-software-development-5c9a3255fe4a <comment><AUTHOR> Would love your input on this. We believe team chat can be way better for developers. Moving team chat inside your IDE is the starting point. Let us know what you think.

<comment><USER3> I've actually been looking for this at my work recently. Our team consists of several people in a few locations across Canada and the US, and I tend to get a lot of questions from other members that require screen-sharing.

If chat was built into our IDEs (we all use our favourites), I'd like the ability to see the other person's code and tabs, the ability to transfer control to either or both parties, and if we're both (or all of us participating in the chat) are working on the same project with the same files, there may not be a need for screen sharing - just open those same files (or transferred versions) locally and let the mouse move how it may - <USER2> changes get propagated to the originator and not necessarily saved on my end though :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally agree that seeing and sharing code is essential. The issue of transferring control is very useful, but separate from the chat itself. Independently of how the code is collaboratively changed, the chat should be persistent and pinned to the code itself on the spot where it matters. Then anybody in the team gets to see the conversations at will and knows both what changed and why.</comment></comment></comment>


DCPU-16 toolchain (all in one) - <AUTHOR> http://dcputoolcha.in/ <comment><USER2> Hi all. I could not follow closely the DCPU-16 movement, and now I am having troubles to put the pieces together; can anybody put together a brief explaination of what is going on? I can see from wikipedia <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DCPU-16#0x10c> that the game developer notch, known for Minecraft, is working on a new game called 0x10^c (why this name?), and this is somehow related to the whole DCPI-16 thing. I can guess that notch is writing an ad-hoc assembler to develop this game, correct? What did he need more than the framework he used in the past? I can also see that there is a channel on freenode called #0x10c-dcpu (8 people as of now) and another called #dcpu16 (8 people too). Can somebody give me the big picture?

<comment><USER3> Notch's 0x10c[1] is going to be a space exploration/trading game set in the distant future; players will customize and operate their own spaceships. One of its unique features is that the spaceships will be controlled by actual programmable computers; players will be able to write their own software and execute it within the game. DCPU-16 is the architecture for the in-game computers, and lots of people have jumped into developing software and tools for it.

It's pretty amazing how much stuff that the community has generated so rapidly. Lots of emulators, IDEs, compilers, code repositories, original software, ports of classic games, etc., have all reached a surprising level of maturity in only about a month.

[1]: <http://www.0x10c.com/>

<comment><USER2> sounds amazing. Thanks for the recap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The game has barely been started and the entire community is ready to go, wow. This game is going to be something else when it's released, can't wait!

</comment><comment><USER5> Github link, site's running slow: <https://github.com/DCPUTeam/DCPUToolchain>

</comment><comment><USER6> Typical, install instructions are several times more effort in Windows (not to mention Cygwin and having to restart your computer to play nice with VS). Is it not possible to get this working using MSYS and Mingw32?

<comment><USER7> Windows is pretty much always going to be a second class citizen once you take a half-step outside the mainstream. I would just try to "get used to it" (i.e. run Linux/Mac).

<comment><USER8> What mainstream do you refer to?

Surely not the desktop.

<comment><USER7> Sorry that wasn't clear. Mainstream programming is what I meant (e.g. Haskell).

<comment><USER8> Haskell is an example of mainstream programming?!

I am all for more acceptance of languages like Haskell in the industry, but that is as far as it can get from mainstream.

Mainstream is C, C++, Java, C#, ...

<comment><USER6> I was hoping this one would course-correct itself... (Reading comprehension). "Windows is pretty much always going to be a second class citizen once you take a half-step outside the mainstream."

He said... Windows is a pain in the ass if you do anything off the really- well-beaten path (like Haskell). And even then, yes, C/C++ can be a pain in Windows (again, see the linked project).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Python C extension for the eSpeak speech synthesizer - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/asrp/python-espeak <comment><AUTHOR> espeak is a fast speech synthesizer and is the only open source synthesizer I know that's still understandable when played at high speed (300-400 words per minute).

And this is the only python library that wraps the C library `speak_lib` rather than calling the `espeak` binary. This wrapping is needed to get callbacks from espeak. The espeak C library `speak_lib` has even more features that I wanted so I added them to this wrapper.

What do I need these features for? That's being prepared for next week.</comment>


Show HN: Domain Primer – warm up a new email for cold outreach - <AUTHOR> https://warm-up.email/ <comment><USER2> "Do you want to avoid having your automated system be detected as an automated system? We have an automated system for that!"

Secretly hoping this is an elaborate honeypot that ensures any email address entered _permanently_ goes to spam.</comment>


Ask HN: Why would a Google Sys Admin need "large Windows Network" experience? - <AUTHOR>

I saw this requirement in a Google Sys Admin job description (exp with a large Windows network -500 clients) and was curious as to what operation(s) the large Windows network supports.  Anyone have any ideas? <comment><USER2> Off-site Google engineers working to integrate Google products into customer networks?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Regression testing of Google products on Windows?</comment>


Ask HN: How technically hard was it for Twitter to move to 280 chars? - <AUTHOR> This is mostly for folks who work at Twitter or who have heard some behind-the-scenes stories about what it took to do this change.
Given that Twitter has long been only allowing 140 characters, I'm wondering if the 140 character limit assumption was hard-baked into any parts of their architecture that they had to spend time refactoring, or if it was as simple as removing a constraint on the front-most part of their stack? Did it for example require any changes to the storage layer?
Just curious. <comment><USER2> Here's a blog article regarding the changes required for search to support the tweet length changes: [https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...](https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastructure/2016/omnisearch- index-formats.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> The technical "changing-140-to-280" is only one aspect of the work. Other _very_ important aspects include QA (e.g does increasing the limit break the layout when 280 characters are used?) and data science (e.g does having longer tweets actually keep people on Twitter longer and increase engagement)?

Both of those are reasons why companies do staged rollouts of features incase the company makes a mistake.

<comment><USER4> Agreed, but also storage requirements I would imagine. Those extra 140 characters add up quick in an environment like Twitter.

It's estimated at 500 million tweets a day. So UTF-8 characters take 1 byte. That's an extra 140 bytes needed per tweet (at the minimum, I'm not positive on how it's stored in the back end if they do ngrams or whatever else to a tweet). So that's 70,000,000,000 bytes. That's... 70GB, right? 70gb per day, that's an extra 24.920 TB of space needed per year. Not a large amount. Hell, I have a surveillance server with more storage than that. But then running analytics against that extra data, ALL THE DAMN TIME. Plus, if going 280 does, in theory, increase usage, then that number would be higher. I'm assuming UTF-8. I think I'm wrong. Might be 16, which then increases it to...6 bytes a character? I should really open a google tab, but I'm too lazy. I already grabbed a calculator. My exercise for the day is met :P

An extra 140 character SEEMS small, but on Twitter scale, that's not a light matter. Shit like that can run away on you fast.

edit: Jesus Christ, yes, I didn't include every single bloody thing. This is just a simple 5 minute example how Twitter scale can have a huge impact on "small" decisions. There's outliers in the average statistics. Not everyone will use the full character limit, frequency changes, etc. Nitpickers man...

<comment><USER5> be interesting to see the flip side of "how many multiple tweets will now get condensed into a single or fewer tweets", thus saving metadata overhead

<comment><USER6> And how many photographs/screengrabs of pieces of text are now posted as plain text.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Twitter's original limit was 140 bytes, but it's been 140 normalized Unicode code points for years. The physical message can be much longer than 140 bytes.

</comment><comment><USER8> Hopefully it was.

#define MAX_TWEET_CHARS 140

to

#define MAX_TWEET_CHARS 280

and a re-compile.

<comment><USER9> Hey now, we're a scala shop :)

<comment><USER8> is this better?

object MAX_TWEET_CHARS { val value = 140 }

to

object MAX_TWEET_CHARS { val value = 280 }

and a re-compile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm certain some obscure optimizations were done from top to bottom for 140 chars. 280 chars will also require a different mindset and optimizations.

</comment><comment><USER11> It'll be interesting to see what apps and sites that use twitter feeds start crapping out when they get all those extra characters.

</comment><comment><USER12> The interesting question is why did SMS only have 160 characters. I know those 160 bytes are 7 bit characters and that a 8 bit SMS can contain 140 characters, but why does the control channel limit it to that?

I worked on a WAP browser a long time ago, which would support SMS in PDU mode as a bearer. WDP packets would just be encapsulated in an SMS. I am too old ... :(

<comment><USER13> Because the technology that came before cell phones was pagers.

<comment><USER12> Good point, but why not 139 bytes or 141 bytes?

<comment><USER14> Many years ago I worked on an SMSC. SMS are sent over the same data channels as phone signalling (call setup etc.) using SS7 protocol stack. The SS7 protocol physical layers used fixed size data packets of around 256 bytes, for example on T1 data channels. On top of that you need routing info such as addressing in MTP, TCAP to get the packet to the correct mobile switching center. Then GSM or IS-41 MAP to route to the device. Finally the sms bearer encoding needs some extra bytes for thing like delivery reports and source phone number. This left 160 bytes free.

<comment><USER15> In other words, SMS messages could be delivered across the communication channel that the devices were already doing in-order to remain in-contact with towers, essentially allowing providers to charge (SMS used to be an add-on) for something that cost carriers basically nothing in transmission costs.

Is that a correct translation?

<comment><USER16> Yup, exactly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> change the db field from varchar(140) to varchar(280)

<comment><USER18> I suspect they would use unicode - nvarchar(280).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm going to say far less technically involved than fixing their harassment problem.

<comment><USER20> Much more tractable problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Terribly interested in this as well, and commenting to follow the conversation.

</comment><comment><USER22> Code refactoring is the process of restructuring existing computer code—changing the factoring—without changing its external behavior.

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

<comment><USER23> The fact that the maximum tweet length doubled means that Twitter's external behavior did change

<comment><USER24> I think that's the parent's point: it's not "refactoring" if the external behavior changed. Though I generally agree with the down-voting of the comment as needlessly pedantic, given the common usage of the term.

<comment><USER22> The common incorrect usage of the term is just one of my pet peeves. I couldn't help myself.

<comment><USER25> Sometimes, you may have to refactor existing code to be able to add new features.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Yet another example that TLA+ is math, not programming - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/tlaplus/comments/enencr/yet_another_example_that_tla_is_math_not/ <comment><USER2> I've found that this approach often backfires and makes people lose interest in TLA+. Telling people "it's not programming" tells people they can't use their intuitions for programming, and that they have to be "good at math" to learn TLA+. Neither is true.

(Also, Haskell isn't my strong suite, but aren't those completely different statements? Haskell functions are closer to TLA+ operators, not TLA+ functions.)</comment>


Authentication Bypass on Uber's Single Sign-On via Subdomain Takeover - <AUTHOR> https://www.arneswinnen.net/2017/06/authentication-bypass-on-ubers-sso-via-subdomain-takeover/ <comment><USER2> I find it concerning that the original report apparently "fell through the cracks" and had to be chased up with Uber.

<comment><USER3> And somehow they did reward it with a $500 bounty before it fell through the cracks, and a $4500 bounty after it was rediscovered.</comment></comment>


City to job applicants: Facebook, MySpace log-ins please - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/06/city-to-job-applicants-facebook-myspace-log-ins-please.ars

<comment><USER2> ... not to mention that it's specifically against the Terms of Use of every single one of those sites to give away your credentials to another person.</comment>


I installed an Amazon Echo Dot in a car and it was the best infotainment system - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/using-amazon-echo-dot-in-a-car-2017-7 <comment><USER2> My car (2017 Volt) has that same head unit, but with CarPlay (I'm surprised his doesn't have CarPlay)

CarPlay can do every thing mentioned with Siri, while _also_ not keeping an Echo Dot in a car 365 days a year. If you don't have CarPlay Bluetooth alone can already get pretty close with "Siri hands free"

</comment><comment><USER3> So, a number of years ago I had a cute stand/charger and plug for my iPhone 3GS in my Suzuki Swift, and I basically used the phone for everything via voice control; downside was I had to press the large button on the stand, but aside from that it was brilliant, though the voice control back then was a bit limited.

These days I think the same thing with Siri or Androids one would be brilliant, as just like the OP it can be truly handsfree, except it gives you the ability to do directions and more. I suppose I can't quite see why I'd get something like this when my phone can do it better?

</comment><comment><USER4> Android Auto and it's ilk are the future here. This is a neat hack, but having everything integrated into the head unit is great. We have two Kia's with this setup - it's early, limited, and has bugs, but is just awesome. Voice recognition works well.

</comment><comment><USER5> I _badly_ want to do this, but my car doesn't have a built-in hotspot and I can already tell tethering it to my phone every time will be more trouble than its worth.</comment>


False-positive results by consumer genetic tests show importance of confirmation - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/gim201838 <comment><AUTHOR> _Results: Our analyses indicated that 40% of variants in a variety of genes reported in DTC (direct-to-consumer) raw data were false positives. In addition, some variants designated with the "increased risk" classification in DTC raw data or by a third-party interpretation service were classified as benign at Ambry Genetics as well as several other clinical laboratories, and are noted to be common variants in publicly available population frequency databases.

Conclusion: Our results demonstrate the importance of confirming DTC raw data variants in a clinical laboratory that is well versed in both complex variant detection and classification._</comment>


Newest MacBook Pro design flaw allows 50v to be sent to CPU - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jahtu1_idVU <comment><AUTHOR> Title lifted from the reddit discussion[0] and lightly edited (added "Pro" to clarify the model and removed the exclamation point), as the original YouTube title did not convey as much quite as much detail ("Apple BOTCHES Macbook board design: AGAIN!").

[0] [https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/a46104/newest_macbo...](https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/a46104/newest_macbook_design_flaw_allows_50v_to_be_sent/)</comment>


GCHQ: A Christmas card with a cryptographic twist for charity - <AUTHOR> http://www.gchq.gov.uk/press_and_media/news_and_features/Pages/Directors-Christmas-puzzle-2015.aspx <comment><USER2> So many submissions, so little discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10719164](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10719164)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10718986](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10718986)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10716385](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10716385)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10716331](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10716331)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10711785](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10711785)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10710660](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10710660)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10710212](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10710212)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10710192](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10710192)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10709958](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10709958)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10706534](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10706534)</comment>