The newest threat on the official Android market - <AUTHOR> https://blog.avast.com/2014/03/07/google-play-whats-the-newest-threat-on-the-official-android-market/ <comment><USER2> XPrivacy should really come installed by default with Android: the new versions are really quite good (especially with the cloudsourcing and on- demand bits) and really highlight how atrocious most apps are with your personal data. And it is a hell of a lot more effective than relying on companies like Avast to detect and remove bad actors from the market. I've lost track of the number of times random apps (most of whom are just shells around a website) ask permissions for my full phone number, Google and Facebook accounts, contact info etc. for no reason at all. At this point, I'm scared of using Android without the module. (not that ios or windows are any better)

<comment><USER3> Denying permissions breaks most apps (I'd say, 8-9 out of 10 just crash due to unhandled exceptions), so XPrivacy returns fake data (no contacts, no Internet connection, spoofed MAC and IMEI etc.).

But, then, some companies are _really upset_ about spoofing. For example, Swype had serious issues with that to the extent they cried they won't even be able to release their famous keyboard if they weren't be able to get personal data for their analytics. [1] So, CM team decided to not built any spoofing (the only practically working solution to the problem) in.

Dancing bunnies 1 : Security 0

____

[1]: [http://www.androidpolice.com/2011/05/25/swype-cyanogenmod- pe...](http://www.androidpolice.com/2011/05/25/swype-cyanogenmod-permission- spoofing-could-mean-the-end-of-swype-beta-on-android/)

<comment><USER2> I see where the Swype folks are coming from, but it's a bit like the people who complained against the existence of mailinator.com a decade back. Are they seriously claiming that a company whose entire business is based on making sense of dubious data will completely break down if its analysis service gets some bad inputs? How do they deal with shady manufacturers who return wrong data?

Swype is operating in a marketplace that is full of apps crying wolf and asking for way more permissions than they need, usually for unknown purposes. For example, I like to read The Verge and use its app[1], but it has "read phone status and identity" and "modify or delete the contents of your USB storage" in its manifest, which I'm not comfortable with. There is nothing that explains what they use this information for, how long they store it, and who they share it with. Heck, my desktop browser doesn't give theverge.com this permission and yet the site functions just fine.

Why should I bare my personal data to the whole world just because one developer is too lazy to implement checks on his inputs?

[1] [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.verge.andr...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.verge.android)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Given how shady the whole premium SMS/premium number business is to begin with, it should be made legally simple to refuse all payment on charges to them.

eg. Say you notice you suddenly owe $100 on your phone bill due to a phone app causing charges to your bill (or even just because you gullibly fell for a social engineering attack), you should be able to just refuse to pay with no repercussions other than that the premium provider will be sent a notification that you refused to pay and then may block you via caller id from future use of the service.

I doubt this will ever happen since politicians generally don't give a rat's ass about consumers anymore, but it would be nice.

<comment><USER5> in aus

> Require mobile carriers to provide the option of barring premium SMS and MMS > services on all plans from 1 July 2010. This gives consumers a choice to > block such services;

[http://www.acma.gov.au/theACMA/premium-phone-services- austra...](http://www.acma.gov.au/theACMA/premium-phone-services-australia- bill-shock-i-acma)

My SIM came pre-blocked which was nice.

<comment><USER6> When I asked O2 Germany to do this, they told me they would have to block mobile internet as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Bear in mind it is Avast writing this post (not exactly my favourite company at the moment, incorrectly reporting a trojan to a few users in one of my Apps), so the alarmist perspective is motivated by their business.

If the worst they can report on is an obscure and rather obviously dodgy looking App no longer on Google Play then there isn't much for us to worry about.

</comment><comment><USER8> I thought KitKat was supposed to block apps from automatically sending SMS messages to premium numbers?

This is a nasty piece of malware, but premium SMS scam apps are nothing new to Android. So the article playing up the danger of this random, seemingly single-market focused malware (Hispanophone vs. global) isn't particularly scary.

<comment><USER9> >I thought KitKat was supposed to block apps from automatically sending SMS messages to premium numbers?

From the analysis posted, it's trying to bypass that by not sending an SMS to a premium number. It's sending the phone number to a website, and whatever it is that is running on that website is subscribing the user to a premium service.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, it reverse bills the SMS. Android can only block your device from _sending_ premium rate SMS, not receiving them (how could it? It's up to your network operator to handle that side of things).

The original idea with reverse-billing was that users could subscribe to services such as weather updates, which would automatically send a message once a day/week, and the user be charged upon receipt. The problem with reverse billing is that it's clearly open to substantial abuse.

<comment><USER11> It is a Spanish premium subscription number. To subscribe you need to opt-in, either by web (getting a PIN code you need to enter to confirm the subscription) or by SMS (You need to confirm by replying to a free message from the short code).

I guess this app is going through SMS opt-in, sending the reply behind the scenes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> at this point i'd like to recommend cyanogenmod with privacy guard again [1]

or openpdroid [2], or both. the cool thing about openpdroid is that you can spoof location requests too. also, i don't think any other privacy app allows you to block requests to sim and imei info

[1] [http://www.androidcentral.com/cyanogenmod-updating- privacy-g...](http://www.androidcentral.com/cyanogenmod-updating-privacy- guard-20-new-features-coming-cm102)

[2] [http://www.xda-developers.com/android/openpdroid-brings- an-o...](http://www.xda-developers.com/android/openpdroid-brings-an-open- source-privacy-solution/)

<comment><USER3> I believe XPrivacy[1] looks more promising than OpenPDroid. First of all Xposed Framework feels easier to integrate - no need to mess with full-fledged ROM embedding, just light patch to the Dalvik and reboot.

And the things I really fancy about XPrivacy is that current versions have learning mode (like `su` GUI prompts, configurable to automatically deny or allow after a timeout) and yet-underdeveloped but very promising argument- level permission controls (i.e. allows WebView's loadUrl for one URI, but not another).

[1]: [http://forum.xda- developers.com/showthread.php?t=2320783](http://forum.xda- developers.com/showthread.php?t=2320783)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Looks like it's gone from Google Play.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm surprised they went to those measures to get the user's phone number, it seems like there would be much simpler and more inconspicuous ways to do so on Android.

</comment><comment><USER15> It's a long time since I didn't touch Java, I don't get the instruction "break label217;".

Is it equivalent to a "goto label217" ? (shock and horror !!!)

<comment><USER16> That won't actually compile. Having decompiled java binaries before, the decompiler will sometimes generate things like that. I think it happens when there's a jump instruction it doesn't know what to do with.

<comment><USER15> Thank you.</comment></comment></comment>


Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer - <AUTHOR> http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16569567

<comment><USER2> The study concludes that receiving prayer doesn't necessarily grant any health benefits, but thinking someone is praying for you may cause you to have _more_ complications after surgery.

Is that irony?

<comment><USER3> Only if you think prayer is going to do the person good. (Do note that this paper is six years old)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's really the issue is that someplace money exchanged hands for this study to be run. And at Harvard Medical School?

Just replace prayer with voodoo dolls and feel the nonsense flow from your screen.</comment>


FIRST Championship team spotlight: Einstein's Daughters - <AUTHOR> http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2010/04/first_championship_team_spotlight_e.html

<comment><USER2> That is awesome and is the kind of thing I want my daughters to do when they get older. They need to take after their geek father (sw developer/beginning entrepreneur), grandfather (hardware hacker), and great-grandfather (Apollo NASA tech).</comment>


A Conversation with Arthur Whitney (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://portal.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=1531242&type=pdf <comment><USER2> > But the thing about the languages that I implement is that there are no > libraries: those 50 operations are it. Every-body builds from there, and the > resulting programs are extremely short.

Sounds controversial, but so often the task doesn't need much over built-in operations (verbs).

</comment><comment><USER3> _" AW: I much preferred implementing and coding in LISP, but once I was dealing with big data sets and then having to do fairly simple calculations, APL just seemed to have the better vocabulary. It had to come up one level. Common LISP even then had about 2,000 primitives. I didn't like that. What I liked was the original LISP, which had car, cdr, cons, and cond, but that was too little. Common LISP was way too big, but a strippeddown version of APL was in the middle with about 50 operations."_

I wonder why he didn't try Scheme. That should have fit the bill, and have been much closer to Lisp than APL.

</comment><comment><USER4> Thread from 2014: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8476120](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8476120)

2009 but small: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=650149](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=650149)</comment>


Apple patents tech that lets government disable iPhone video, camera and wi-fi - <AUTHOR> http://boingboing.net/2013/08/12/apple-patents-tech-that-lets-g.html

<comment><USER2> Bogus article. If you read the actual patent ( [http://www.google.com/patents/US8254902](http://www.google.com/patents/US8254902) ), the quote about some police activity requiring complete blackout conditions is actually in reference to the _screen brightness_ , not the cameras. One aspect of the idea seems to be that the phones OF THE COPS would be able to go dark in response to a central command. It has nothing to do with turning off the cameras of citizen-journalists.

(jwz nails it here: [http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/08/oh-noes-apple-has- patented-b...](http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/08/oh-noes-apple-has-patented-big- brother/) )

Here is the full paragraph from which the misleading sentence was yanked:

> _Excessive lighting emanating from wireless devices can also create > disruption in dark environments. While it is well known that excessive or > bright lighting in a movie theater can spoil the mood of certain movies, > excessive lighting can also become a more serious issue in other contexts. > For example, darkrooms used to develop film can only tolerate very low > amounts of ambient lighting. Some biological labs also require low levels of > lighting in certain instances (for example, as in the growth of light- > sensitive bacteria)._ Covert police or government operations may require > complete "blackout" conditions. _A person 's sleep can even be interrupted > by a bright flashing or modulating display (such as to indicate an incoming > call)._

<comment><USER3> Try again.

From the description:

 _This policy enforcement capability is useful for a variety of reasons, including for example to disable noise and /or light emanating from wireless devices (such as at a movie theater), for preventing wireless devices from communicating with other wireless devices (such as in academic settings), and for forcing certain electronic devices to enter "sleep mode" when entering a sensitive area._

<comment><USER2> Same error here. You're reading a meaning into the undefined phrase "sensitive area" from the abstract that doesn't seem consistent with that term's use elsewhere in the patent. But if you grep "sensitive" and look at the other uses it seems to mean primarily (a) places where light or sound would annoy or frustrate, (b) situations like wanting to control EMF levels in a hospital or airplane to avoid adverse effects (c) security issues related to "enterprise" applications.

There's actually a REASON we can know that this patent isn't trying to cover the specific case of turning off cameras in places where The Man doesn't want us to have that capability. The reason is: somebody else (not Apple) had ALREADY previously patented that explicit use case.

This patent is about adjusting general system settings, especially ringer volume, display brightness, and communications settings, in a way appropriate to the venue. For instance, pairing bluetooth when you get in your car and then turning that feature off again when you get out of your car. The vast majority of it really shouldn't be patentable because it's too obvious to any practitioner in the field. The general thrust of it is NOT about preventing phone users from photographing the police and it's not clear anything in THIS patent would even make it easier for the police to have that capability. (You have to do a fair amount of reading between the lines to even make that connection.)

In short: the original article is still linkbait.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I believe we call that a mobile device manager. Only this one is much more pervasive and used by the Feds. I know of few companies that do not use one nowadays.

Is this not old news though? The first time I was really relieved I use CyanogenMod in particular was when the story broke the an American company was actively encouraging carriers to use a special monitoring system that cooperated with the necessary phone-side code baked into the firmware. This caused shock waves, ironically dwarfed by PRISMgasm. I believe it was CarrierIQ. The current revelations blew the scope out of the water; it took me a while to even re-jog my memory using Google.

</comment><comment><USER5> Not sure why this is being covered again. The patent is from last year. There were plenty of articles about it back then, here is one - [http://www.zdnet.com/apple-patent-could-remotely-disable- pro...](http://www.zdnet.com/apple-patent-could-remotely-disable-protesters- phone-cameras-7000003640/)

<comment><USER6> Perhaps, because the inventions covered by this patent are patently relevant to social issues of the day. _(Pun un-intended.)_

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The source of the boing boing post: [http://cis471.blogspot.com/2013/08/apple- patents-wireless-ca...](http://cis471.blogspot.com/2013/08/apple-patents- wireless-camera-kill.html)

He also mentions there are legitimate but less headline-worthy uses for this:

> _While the patent does use "covert police or government operations" as an > example of an application, it also mentions legitimate applications, for > example, stopping cameras in a locker room or other place where one has a > reasonable expectation of privacy._

<comment><USER8> It'd be pretty great if phones couldn't get make/get calls in movie theaters (aside from emergency calls).

<comment><AUTHOR> It'd be pretty great if people were _polite enough_ not to make/take calls in movie theaters.

Our devices should not dictate such a thing, unless the feature is a "hey, I recommend that you not be an asshole, but you can disable me if you really want".

<comment><USER9> Yes, I think that would be a good option. When you enter the theater, it pops up with a dialog - "You have entered Regal Cinemas - your phone is going to theater mode. Press here to cancel."

Making it opt-out rather than opt-in would create much more social pressure to not text during the movie.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is one patent I really hope gets used in litigation.

<comment><USER3> Ha. Came here to say exactly the same thing.

This is why mobile is too important to be in the control of a single proprietary vendor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Just what we need, _more government intrusion_ into our lives. Yet another reason not to embrace proprietary technology.

</comment><comment><USER12> Pure 100% linkbait.

If you actually read the patent the one place where they mention government blackout is clearly in the context of the _agents of the government_ blacking out their own devices so as not to give themselves away, not some sort of "kill switch" for their targets. It is like a more extreme version of the mute switch.

All the things describes in the patent pertain to opting-in to policies that shut down aspects of the phone in certain environments.

</comment><comment><USER13> This was widely covered over two years ago, when the patent application was published. Boing Boing was among those that covered it [1].

It was also widely covered a year ago, when the patent issued. Again, Boing Boing covered it [2]. That article was written by the same author as the present article. In that article, he mentioned likely legitimate uses (movie theaters), and said that the paranoid side of him imagined government might use it for bad purposes.

This new article seems to be redundant. Everything it says was already covered in their second article.

[1] [http://boingboing.net/2011/06/16/apple-patents- mobile.html](http://boingboing.net/2011/06/16/apple-patents-mobile.html)

[2] [http://boingboing.net/2012/08/30/apple-granted-patent-for- lo...](http://boingboing.net/2012/08/30/apple-granted-patent-for-locat.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> This is good. Apple is probably the least likely company to implement something like this, so the fact that they own this patent means that other companies may have a harder time implementing this feature.

<comment><USER15> Really. What has Apple ever done to make you think they value privacy more than say Nokia, Twitter, etc? Or, Aside from the fact that they don't do ad supported services, even Microsoft or Google?

The only thing I see them doing is deploying a allegedly end to end encrypted messaging system that rather clearly isn't[0], and participating in "PRISM" while loudly asserting their system is secure. I'd actually say this puts them in a worse position than say Google or Microsoft, since neither of them ever claimed to provide end to end security and in the case of Skype admitted as much in their ToS.

[0] [http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2012/04/icloud- who-h...](http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2012/04/icloud-who-holds- key.html)

<comment><USER14> Apple makes money by selling hardware and software, whereas Google and Twitter make money selling ads, which incentivizes them not to encrypt our data so that it can more easily be used to target users. Or at least that's what this post seems to imply: [http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2011/11/two-honest-google- employ...](http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2011/11/two-honest-google-employees- our.html).

I'm not convinced that this story is necessarily reliable, but it's better than the reverse: [http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57577887-38/apples- imessag...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57577887-38/apples-imessage- encryption-trips-up-feds-surveillance/).

And in Apple's statement on privacy: [https://www.apple.com/apples-commitment- to-customer-privacy/](https://www.apple.com/apples-commitment-to-customer- privacy/).

"For example, conversations which take place over iMessage and FaceTime are protected by end-to-end encryption so no one but the sender and receiver can see or read them. Apple cannot decrypt that data. Similarly, we do not store data related to customers' location, Map searches or Siri requests in any identifiable form."

As John Gruber says, "That last sentence separates Apple from many other companies." ([http://daringfireball.net/linked/2013/06/17/apple- privacy](http://daringfireball.net/linked/2013/06/17/apple-privacy))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Yeah, that's not going to get abused at all.

</comment><comment><USER17> I could see this tech being a hit with theatres (that is - if they stick around.)

</comment><comment><USER18> Patent != Feature</comment>


If Your Kids Are Awake, They're Probably Online - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/20/education/20wired.html?ref=business <comment><USER2> There's no real distinction anymore between "online" and "offline". If I'm near my tower computer and we're not in the middle of a storm, I've got internet. If I've got my laptop and I'm near a coffee shop or college campus, I've got internet. If I've got my iPhone and I'm not in the middle of a desert, I've got internet.

It's a major shift from 10-15 years ago, when you weren't online unless you were on your desktop computer and dialed in, and a major shift from even 5 years ago, when you weren't online unless you were on your desktop computer.</comment>


Paul Kedrosky: DoubleClick acquisition aimed at cutting off Microsoft's air supply - <AUTHOR> http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2007/04/13/googleclick_and.html <comment><USER2> Followup - Paul Kedrosky: Microsoft calls for mommy <http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2007/04/16/google_rivals_c.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes, but what you forget Paul backspace backspace backspace, Paul, is that Microsoft Vista has voice recognition. I don't think that google has voice recognition. At least in that respect, voice recognition will be very hard for all when based service to do. You'd really need a desktop application such as the built in each recognition in Microsoft Windows vista to catch up to the future of the Internet -- voice dictation. For example, this polls is written entirely in Microsoft backspace now delete that in speech recognition.

<comment><USER4> "Yes, but what you forget Paul backspace backspace backspace, Paul, is that Microsoft Vista has voice recognition. I don't think that google has voice recognition. At least in that respect, voice recognition will be very hard for all when based service to do. You'd really need a desktop application such as the built in each recognition in Microsoft Windows vista to catch up to the future of the Internet -- voice dictation. For example, this polls is written entirely in Microsoft backspace now delete that in speech recognition."

I honestly can't tell if you are just trying to be clever...

If your post really is written in MS voice recognition, it is hardly an endorsement.

<comment><USER3> It is written using MS Voice Recognition; hence the sarcasm. ;).</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best way to start a blog in 2019? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Have something to say. ;)

It depends on your niche/topic, but I highly recommend this routine in the beginning: start with a notebook first. Write 5-10 articles. If you could assemble a reasonable amount of articles in a given period of time, you will last as a blogger.

Added advantage: you have build up content already.

</comment><comment><USER3> Write in Notion. Publish with [https://onepage.nopub.io/](https://onepage.nopub.io/)

</comment><comment><USER4> People here generally recommend a static site generator (Jeckyll, Hugo, Pelican) and hosting freely on github.io.</comment>


Google Driverless Car – The Obstacle Detection Unit - <AUTHOR> http://greybmusings.wordpress.com/2014/06/14/google-driverless-car-the-obstacle-detection-unit/

<comment><USER2> The sensor fusion reminds me of the F-35 JSF. The software seems to be one of the big things in the fighter project.

So actually this might be a good fit for Google after all. Sensors are getting trivialized.

I'm sure Google is working for a LIDARless car. They've published their stereo vision to 3d library.

[https://code.google.com/p/openvis3d/](https://code.google.com/p/openvis3d/)

<comment><USER3> Indeed. This is a sensor fusion problem I really want to work on. I loved the problem space while I was working for Raytheon, but I can't stand working on large government programs.

I'm surprised about the lack of IR sensors, though. I can think of cases where the IR data could be fused with data from other sensors, particularly visual, to improve object recognition. Particularly pedestrian and animal detection.

<comment><USER4> > Indeed. This is a sensor fusion problem I really want to work on.

Have you thought about working for Tesla? firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER3> I have, actually. I'm concerned about the work-life balance there, though.

<comment><USER4> Same reason I don't work in IT at SpaceX. I wouldn't have a wife anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is Lidar really required? I assume Google uses it only because it does not care about cost at this point of the development.

German car makes (Mercedes, Audi, BMW,...) think they can create a driverless car without the need for expensive Lidar, see for example [http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that- think/transportation/self...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that- think/transportation/self-driving/bertha-the-car-comes-to-california)

<comment><USER6> Although that article also makes it unclear the degree of autonomy we're talking about here, using Lidar or otherwise. The big challenge, as noted in the link) is that there's this space between drivers still needing to drive (with assistance) and true driverless 99.999% just works. And within that gap, you potentially don't want to introduce certain automation because it will make drivers inattentive even though the machinery isn't quite up to the task of handling every contingency on its own. The billion dollar question is the timeframe for the 99.999% case--which enables a whole lot of radical use cases which the 99% case does not (such as no driver or no attentive driver). Just because the 99% use case could be here relatively soon doesn't mean that the 99.999% case couldn't be much further off (as in many decades).

<comment><USER7> > _which enables a whole lot of radical use cases which the 99% case does not > (such as no driver or no attentive driver)_

I'm excited for this. Car ownership and operation could be an interesting historical note 200 years from now. Family scheduling would become much more flexible and children incapable of operating a vehicle will be empowered to travel long distances.

<comment><USER6> I'm not convinced about car ownership. There are a lot of benefits in owning a car that you can keep "stuff" in. But just as Zipcars have presumably eliminated some car ownership use cases at the margins, fully autonomous cars would have a significant effect.

<comment><USER7> > _But just as Zipcars have presumably eliminated some car ownership use cases > at the margins, fully autonomous cars would have a significant effect._

The big big thing I see about driverless cars is:

a) You can use it on-demand, even more easily than Zipcars. No need to physically be located near a lot, I can "hail" a driverless car and have it waiting for me when I need it. Smart routing and allocation can ensure that capacity is used smartly - it could drop somebody off while picking me up.

b) People who can't or won't drive can benefit from this. From young children to the elderly, transportation becomes much much easier. Have to take your kid to an appointment in the middle of the day? A driverless car can pick them up from school and bring them directly to the appointment and you can meet them there. You go to the appointment together, then driverless cars can take each of you back to your daily work, saving time all-around.

Yes - it's useful to have a car to keep stuff in. I can imagine you could keep one "on call" for a day out, and you can meet the car (at whatever exit is closest to you!) throughout the day to get supplies or drop things off.

Maybe I'm being too optimistic about what driverless cars can give us. Realistically I think hands-off driverless cars are within the next few years, but FUD and lawsuits will prevent more radical forward progress. It's certainly not unimaginable that it will take an entire generation of people to die off before truly autonomous cars are common and accepted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Offtopic, but it kind of stood out for me in the text:

> _driverless car_ (i.e. not "self-driving car")

> _robotic chauffeur_

Is it me, or the article is pushing some new terminology?

<comment><USER9> Driverless is not new, e.g. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_driverless_car](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_driverless_car)

<comment><USER10> I prefer driverless horseless carriage.

<comment><USER11> So just "carriage" then? :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder if the radars they're using can do frequency binning, that is figuring out the relative velocity of objects they detect via Doppler as well as their distance?

Also, that 64 beam 360 degree lidar makes me drool a little bit.

<comment><USER3> I don't see why not. Pulsed transmitters are fairly ubiquitous nowadays. A bit more complicated and expensive than CW transmitters, but easy nonetheless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is one of the places where I think there should be colaboration across companies. I'm not sure "not hitting pedestians" should be market differentiator.

<comment><USER9> It's not a "market differentiator". If a company can't develop that "feature", they just won't be able to release their driverless cars.

<comment><USER14> It's not a binary checkbox feature, though. I doubt any implementation will make it _utterly impossible_ to hit a pedestrian - and that's fine, as long as they do better than meatbag drivers. A better detection/avoidance implementation is absolutely a differentiator, mostly via lower insurance premiums for operators.

<comment><USER15> That's not clear, in our litigenous society. I hit a pedestrian: I get in trouble. A driverless car hits a pedestrian: all driverless cars (of that manufacturer) are potentially 'at fault' and recalled. Its definitely a different bar to pass.

<comment><USER16> That's interesting. A computer hits a pedestrian, then presumably the algorithms are updated and the probability of that scenario playing out again drops to 0. While A human hits a pedestrian, and that scenario is likely to never occur for that driver again, but for all other drivers the probability remains the same.

<comment><USER17> Although you technically may be right (depending on how easy 'updating the algorithm' turns out to be - it being as easy as updating an app seems a bit on the crazy side to me) I don't know that the likelihood for all human drivers of hitting a pedestrian is necessarily high, though.

It exists, obviously, but I think human drivers already come with the "don't hit pedestrians" firmware installed, and it mostly seems to work.

To me it won't be demonstrable that driverless cars are vastly superior until there are a decent number of them on the streets, mixing it up with traffic in all kinds of weather, dealing with unexpected hazards and inaccurate maps, for an extended period of time.

<comment><USER9> _depending on how easy 'updating the algorithm' turns out to be - it being as easy as updating an app seems a bit on the crazy side to me_

Tesla is already updating the firmware of their cars over-the-air[1]. It seems likely that driverless cars will have the same feature.

[1] [http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/24/3385506/tesla-model-s- over...](http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/24/3385506/tesla-model-s-over-the-air- car-firmware-update)

<comment><USER17> Fair enough - just crazy enough to work, maybe.

 _(but still crazy.)_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If lots of these cars were on the road would these sensors interfere with each other?

<comment><USER8> Probably a bit, yes, but there are ways to filter out the interference to some extent. Anyway, I'm strongly hoping that they'll make cars that talk to each other - so instead many cars adding noise to each other's readings, we'll have cars that share data and dynamically delegate the task of detailed region mapping to few cars that would not interfere with each other.

<comment><USER19> How would you handle malicious actors in such a situation?

<comment><USER8> Probably in the same way you handle malicious actors now - people deliberately obstructing view of other cars, shining laser pointers at drivers, etc. A very important observation is that those are _extremely rare events_.

In a way, humans are also machines, and we have very similar attack vectors, so just extending our current solutions might be good enough to accommodate self-driving cars on our roads.

<comment><USER19> I think that the way you handle malicious actors now is that people know that they have a laser in their eyes. This would be more like "what if someone could just make another car or obstacle invisible to you, and you have no way of knowing it."

I agree it is a very rare event, and will always continue to be. But it would need to be handled, and handled in ways other than, "Hi, here's a 100 car pile-up."

Similarly, and probably less rarely, you'd need to handle scenarios in which another actor wasn't malicious per se, but faulty to a degree that it was functionally malicious. Of course, we've always had to handle the idea that somebody might be driving a car with bad brakes, and that's dangerous enough, but before now a car with bad brakes wouldn't also make the brakes bad for ten cars around them. I think that's worthy of some contemplation.

<comment><USER8> I agree with the sentiment. There's a lot to consider and test in practice, though any of those scenarios don't sound like show-stoppers. After all, humans are also machines, and where a person can "know that they have a laser in their eyes", a machine can equally well realize that one of its sensors suddenly started reporting weird results that don't match the expectations and that don't seem to agree with other sensors onboard or with what other cars nearby are reporting.

We'll have to sort out a lot of those scenarios, many by means of "testing in production", but as long as self-driving cars can outperform humans on average, we'll be better off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The car is really amazing. This blog has posted 5-6 posts about the driverless car. here is the link to the tag - [http://greybmusings.wordpress.com/tag/driverless- car/](http://greybmusings.wordpress.com/tag/driverless-car/)

Google is utilizing multiple techs in this invention.

</comment><comment><USER21> I understand how the cars can be aware of other objects on the road, but are they actually aware of themselves and where they fit into the environment? It seems they'd have to be in order to function, right?

So we've get self-aware machines now. Did anyone even notice?

<comment><USER2> If it sees itself in a mirror and notices a stain, does it drive up to a shrub and start going back and forth to rub itself clean?

<comment><USER22> If it were programmed to keep itself clean, and had an algorithm to do that ("scrape the dirty area against a shrub"), I see no reason why it couldn't pass the mirror test.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wonder how much a production version will cost, with all the high-tech equipment..

<comment><USER12> It looks like the lidar costs $75K retail, but none of the rest of the sensors look particularly expensive.

<comment><USER24> Velodyne recently released a 16 channel LIDAR for ~ $8000. I agree with you that the cost can come down tremendously with volume. You also need to consider the differences within LIDAR systems. The velodyne system is for 360 degree field of view. Other automotive LIDAR systems (See continental, Valeo, Ibeo, etc) with lower FOV and functionality (forward collision warning, blindspot detection,etc) are much lower cost > 10x ....</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: would you hire a transgender engineer for your startup? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> If someone meets the qualifications, is excited about the position, can handle the startup life, and isn't destructive, I don't see why not

<comment><AUTHOR> I've read dozens upon dozens of posts about how social fit is a deal braker when it comes to hiring. Wouldnt that be an issue?

<comment><USER3> Can you go into some detail about what parts of that social fit do you imagine to be a deal breaker? If transgender engineers like to play foosball and guitar hero, and like to read Ender's game, just like the rest of your heteronormative teammates, what part of them being transgender makes it a bad social fit?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If your 'culture fit' doesn't allow this, it's time to build a new culture.

Assuming equal skill levels, sure, I would.

<comment> saiko-chriskun This.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yes, of course.

<comment><AUTHOR> For your early stage, 3 people startup? (Just asking, not choosing sides here)

<comment><USER5> Yes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Are they good?

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you implying that that would be your only consideration? For the sake of the discussion, let's say they're good just as the next engineer. Not brilliant, but def up to par.

<comment><USER5> I think that is pretty clear that is what they are saying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> saiko-chriskun why is this even a question?</comment>


What's Wrong with the Default Alert Rendered by the Browser? - <AUTHOR> http://smsohan.com/blog/2014/11/20/whats-wrong-with-the-default-alert-rendered-by-the-browser/

<comment><USER2> What's wrong, for me, isn't the native alert. It's a personal pet peeve that most of them ask "yes" or "no" questions when "Okay" and "Cancel" are the actual options presented to the user.

Also, I believe localization of the web app's text can be made more difficult when the text's semantics don't align with the native UI's semantics.</comment>


Oculus reverses course, dumps its VR headset-checking DRM - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/06/oculus-reverses-course-dumps-its-vr-headset-checking-drm/ <comment><USER2> See also [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11971486](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11971486)

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't understand why this is not combined with a big announcement. A clear "we fucked up, sorry" would go a long way in making the Oculus popular again. This silent reversal looks more like one party inside the company opposing the DRM won for now, but does not have the power to make Oculus promise to play straight. This way it is all too likely that they will later add DRM again.

<comment><USER4> The release is dated for tomorrow, it looks like it got released early. Perhaps they were planning on putting out a big announcement tomorrow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> After last week's E3, this isn't super surprising. Almost every story I read about Oculus wasn't about their Touch controller demos but about how they were buying timed-exclusives while locking HTC Vives out of the store.

Still good to see it happen though.

</comment><comment><USER6> Too late. Facebook, DRM and a superior competitor (Vive) have already killed this brand for so many people now.

<comment><USER7> That's not what got me. I don't care about the brand too much, and most of the games I was interested in were supporting Oculus first.

When I read about Revive adding Vive support to Oculus games, I ordered a Vive as well and would keep whichever shipped first. Oculus had my order for 2 months and hadn't done anything; The Vive shipped within a week after putting in an order. That is what killed Oculus for me.</comment></comment>


After the Crisis, Big Business Could Get Even Bigger - <AUTHOR> https://prospect.org/coronavirus/after-the-crisis-big-business-could-get-even-bigger/ <comment><USER2> There's a reason why the forest floor in a redwood forest is pretty barren. Redwoods, with their extremely tall, thick trunks, survive forest fires that wipe out smaller plants. Then, their thick canopies prevent light from reaching the ground, preventing most other plants from establishing themselves.</comment>


Show HN: Identify Health and Safety risks, together with your employees - <AUTHOR> https://finnovatec.com/boards/new <comment><AUTHOR> Creator here, I'm happy to get feedback, or discuss!</comment>


Image Processing Algorithms: Mathematical Explanations and Online Experiments - <AUTHOR> http://www.ipol.im

<comment><USER2> Romain, this is good. The pictorial examples are great for understanding image processing and its applications. The presentation is clear and concise. I'm bookmarking.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great! I have been working on a contribution for a little while now. Some of the C implementations are amazingly well written.</comment></comment>


Analysis of suspected MH370 pings recorded by Ocean Shield - <AUTHOR> http://iheartmatlab.blogspot.com.au/2014/04/analysis-of-suspected-mh370-pings.html <comment><USER2> More DIY youtube-video-telemetry-data-extraction fun from the illustrious Oona Räisänen:

[http://www.windytan.com/2014/02/mystery-signal-from- helicopt...](http://www.windytan.com/2014/02/mystery-signal-from- helicopter.html)

She actually pulls out data from a binary stream. Her whole blog is amazing, it's been on here many times.

</comment><comment><USER3> The potential Doppler shift is mentioned at the end. If there were three towed ping detectors and all of them were moving at a fixed speed, would you be able to immediately triangulate the position of the device? How many seconds of ping would you need in order for it to be reliable? I wonder if the software to do that (I guess it must exist) has a very clean UI showing approximate location getting better as more data flows in. (Think the indicator for GPS accuracy in map apps.)

<comment><USER4> You can do better than Doppler shift. If the clocks on three ping detectors are well-synchronized and their locations known, you can use the ping arrival times to triangulate. Sound propagation in water is nontrivial, but the people who are good at it are good at it.

Furthermore, as long as the clock on the pinger is fairly good, the ocean environment fairly stable, and you don't drop many pings, you can drive one ping detector around and triangulate from the ensemble of ping measurements.

<comment><USER5> You can do that with a single moving platform, since the target is not moving. Record the bearings for half an hour, make a 90° turn, and recore another half hour of bearing data. That should give a decent approximate location. Its also basic target motion analysis that a military sonar operator can do in their sleep.

<comment><USER6> > Its also basic target motion analysis that a military sonar operator can do > in their sleep.

Which makes me wonder: Does the US not have military assets in the area? Or do they and they don't want to disclose their capabilities?

EDIT: I'm behind the times; I didn't know the US had a sub-hunter in the area.

<comment><USER7> I think it's safe to assume that someone(US, Russia, China, etc.) has _something_ in the area, but nobody's going to be talking about it to the public.

It's not so much about disclosing capabilities as much as it's just simply operational secrecy. The entire point of a submarine is that it's hard to find.

<comment><USER8> >I think it's safe to assume that someone(US, Russia, China, etc.) has something in the area

accidentally, this search may find a lot of that "something"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Best would be to contact the video source and ask exactly what the audio track is.

I don't think the video shows the pings from the blackbox. More likely they are the chirp pings from a sidescan sonar. They are looking for an shadow (image) of the blackbox in the data. Here is a nice diagram showing what they are looking for: [http://www.southwestcoastalgroup.org.uk/cc_mon_sidescan.html](http://www.southwestcoastalgroup.org.uk/cc_mon_sidescan.html)

<comment><USER10> The video shows a moving spectrogram of the received signal from the TPL-25 towed pinger locator. It has nothing to do with sidescan sonar.

In fact they explicitly have not launched the sidescan capable Bluefin21 AUV because of fears of acoustic contamination of the towed pinger audio.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> According to the Wikipedia, the cockpit voice recorder records only up to last two hours of the talks in the cockpit:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_recorder#Cockpit_voice_r...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_recorder#Cockpit_voice_recorder)

It appears that even once the recorder is found we can just discover that nobody talks anything substantial in the last two hours of the long flight, that is, that "interesting" (to find the motives) conversations are already overwritten.

The flight data recorder can save more flight data but maybe it can only be the confirmation of the flight path already relatively known. Maybe the mystery won't be solved even with these devices present?

<comment><USER12> Would there be any chance of recovering data from personal phones/laptops? Assuming the passengers were alive and aware, perhaps some of them tried to document what happened.

<comment><USER13> The only problem with that idea is that electronic devices may have been scattered on the ocean floor or not survived fire or other destructive forces that happened either during flight or during landing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I find it annoying that the media call this thing a "pinger". To ping means to send out a signal in expectation of maybe receiving an echo or reply. It's a two-way process. The device's manufacturer calls† their product a beacon because that's what it is. It doesn't listen. It only sends. Until its battery runs out.

Arguably, a _real_ pinger (underwater transponder?) would have much better battery life, needing only to listen for part of each second or minute for a page from a passing search vessel. It would squawk only when it hears such a page, and, encoded within the squawk would be the airplane's serial number, so there would be no doubts about marine mammals or stray locators. Also, the search vessel could measure the ping delay, revealing the range to the wreck. A number of pings from different positions would pinpoint the wreck's location.

The pinger could listen for search vessel pages on one frequency and respond on another. The page could contain a serial number, which the pinger would echo back. So, it would be simple to match page and response for the delay time measurement.

†[http://www.radiantpowercorp.com/dukane-seacom-locator- beacon...](http://www.radiantpowercorp.com/dukane-seacom-locator-beacons.aspx)

<comment><USER15> I worked on a project involving this type of underwater audio beacon, and everyone called it a "pinger." So it's not just the media.

<comment><USER16> The GP's point is well-taken. The company that produces this particular widget calls it an "underwater locator _beacon_ ",[1] not a "pinger".

To "ping" implies you are the locator, not the locatee, whether you are sitting in front of a terminal window or are running the _active_ sonar[2] on a boat. You send a signal out and await a response, be it a reply (as in the case of the ping command) or an echo (as in the case of sonar).

[1][http://www.radiantpowercorp.com/dk-series-underwater- locator...](http://www.radiantpowercorp.com/dk-series-underwater-locator- beacons.aspx)

[2][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonar#Active_sonar](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonar#Active_sonar)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Re: low battery, what's that circuit look like? I can imagine a real simple RC discharge/charge circuit (ping/delay) that would behave like that. Of course anything quartz-based would behave very differently.

</comment><comment><USER18> Why no radio ping?

<comment><USER4> Deep ocean water is opaque to all but the lowest frequency RF.

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

<comment><USER14> Which is why, during the Cold War, the US maintained very powerful long wave transmitters, both land-based and airborne. Using VLF†, they could send the nuclear launch codes to the nuclear missile submarines without the subs having to break the surface and create a possible radar return.

They kept an airplane aloft 24 hours a day carrying a SAC general. In the event of war, it could reel out a long-wire antenna a couple of miles long from its tail and send out the codes.

†[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_with_submarines#V...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_with_submarines#Very_low_frequency)

<comment><USER19> I wonder how this can have worked; according to my understanding VLF transmission for underwater reception needs very much power.

Did they bring really a powerful generator in the plane?

<comment><USER20> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Communication_Station_Har...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Communication_Station_Harold_E._Holt)

This says 1 MW power.

I would say a mobile platform could get away with much lower power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I thought the audio frequency that was chosen for the black boxes was one that only came from a man made source?

</comment><comment><USER22> its too bad that the data from the search process is not made available more openly. they used crowdsourdcing for the image analysis, but as this analysis shows -- its likely the people can really be useful at all stages of the search effort.

kudos for doing this! really great.

<comment><USER23> All he did was take an average of the pinging interval... I'm pretty sure the analysts actually working on this didn't need to crowdsource that.

<comment><USER24> In the OPs defense, he not only determined the average ping interval but also provided analysis on what the numbers could mean...without the second part, the numbers don't matter.

I would hope the people working this case could do the same but I also support the idea of crowd-sourcing.

<comment><USER25> It sounds like a good idea in theory but, in reality, I think you'd end up with a lot of people coming to different conclusions, all convinced that they are right.

The "crowdsourcers" would be demanding that their theories be looked into and, if they were, it would take away from the search operation vital resources.

It reminds me of when I'm troubleshooting network issues and my (very non- technical) boss calls and offers up his ideas of what might be wrong. It distracts me from what I'm doing and simply results in it taking longer to resolve the issue.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Obituary for Ian McNaught-Davis - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/18/ian-mcnaught-davis

<comment><AUTHOR> He was a big influence on me working in technology and becoming a programmer. Thanks for all those BBC programmes in the early eighties.</comment>


Most-favorited Hacker News posts - <AUTHOR> https://observablehq.com/@tomlarkworthy/hacker-favourites-analysis <comment><USER2> The OP says " _The most favorited articles by the top 10k most active Hacker News members._ " How was "most active" defined? (Edit: oh I see - the users who post the most comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24352688](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24352688)). It's an interesting list, and it never occurred to me that by counting the top favorites of different subsets of users you might get quite different interesting lists.

I got curious about what the global most-favorited would be. Here are the top 50. The first column is the fave count. It's interesting how many are Ask HNs, i.e. text posts with no external URL. Sorry that the item ids aren't clickable:

      836 19087418 Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
      783 16745042 Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken?
      685 16775744 Ask HN: How to self-learn electronics?
      581 21332072 Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
      554 21581361 Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
      510 18588727 Ask HN: What are your "brain hacks" that help you manage everyday situations?
      510 20264911 Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?
      506 22786853 Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer?
      472 15919115 Machine Learning 101 slidedeck: 2 years of headbanging, so you don't have to
      470 23151144 Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
      463 20916749 Questions to ask a company during a job interview
      461 22299180 Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building projects?
      454 23092657 Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life
      448 23904000 Systems Design for Advanced Beginners
      447 22400375 Mathematics for the Adventurous Self-Learner
      444 23588896 Teach Yourself Computer Science
      441 21585235 Basic Social Skills Guide (2012)
      439 17238135 How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team
      439 22105229 Tricks to start working despite not feeling like it
      432 16493489 Machine Learning Crash Course
      425 24351073 Most favorited Hacker News posts of all time
      422 22310813 Gears
      421 20985875 The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
      416 19490573 A guide to difficult conversations
      409 24120275 How to stop procrastinating by using the Fogg Behavior Model
      409 21324768 Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
      406 23229241 Linux Productivity Tools (2019) [pdf]
      398 21712194 Ask HN: Best book / resources on leadership, especially for tech teams?
      396 12702651 Ask HN: What is your favorite YouTube channel for developers?
      381 18805624 Algorithms, by Jeff Erickson
      374 21536789 Build Your Own React
      372 18104814 Ask HN: What are the best textbooks in your field of expertise?
      369 23170881 Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?
      366 22226380 The missing semester of CS education
      365 23053981 Medium-hard SQL interview questions
      364 17163251 The Importance of Deep Work and the 30-Hour Method for Learning a New Skill
      363 22276184 My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file
      360 22235279 Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?
      360 13660086 Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building one project?
      358 14486657 Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?
      358 15602538 Ask HN: Where can I find high-end stock images for a website?
      356 19900955 Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into
      356 20044876 Advanced Data Structures (2017)
      355 19264048 Immersive Linear Algebra (2016)
      355 12713056 Ask HN: How to get started with machine learning?
      353 23339830 Tools for Better Thinking
      353 21900498 Ask HN: Best books you read in the past decade?
      352 20254057 Startup idea checklist
      347 17999659 Ask HN: Favorite teachers on YouTube?
      347 23276456 Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?

<comment><AUTHOR> I did normalize by number of favorites too, so each person had 1 vote shared over all their favorites. The idea that a person who only had one favourite was a really strong signal for that single link, whereas people who have lots of favorites are using it differently to what I want to select for.

At some point I had a similar selection of Ask HN dominance. One problem with my data is I only grabbed the first page of favorite results.

EDIT: SHOOT, you exposed a bug, my parser skips things things without URLs! Hence I ended up filtering out most of the Ask HN's!

EDIT: Fixed it

Now my list looks a bit more similar to yours but not quite. Currently "Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?", your #1 is my #50. If I turn off normalization, it goes to #13 on my lists, so that has quite a significant impact on the rankings.

sidenote: Lol this post is the 20th most favorited article now.

<comment><USER3> I'd actually assume one favourite to be a misclick.

<comment><AUTHOR> But those would be randomly distributed so it would not affect the top ranks much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The fact that favorites are a hidden feature and hard to use made me think the quality of the curation signal would be even better. Also the fact the HackerNews API, Angolia don't expose this feature made it even more interesting to aggregate.

Hope you like it and as it was a pain gathering the data, I put it in an observable notebook so hopefully we don't need to gather that dataset again for a while.

The learning resources were the most useful thing to me. I have seen most of those links whoosh by me when reading HN, but this list has made me revisit some of them that were lost to the sands of time. In particular the bash shell resource [1] is something I have been trying to re-find for ages!

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17057596](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17057596)

<comment><USER4> When I emailed mods to argue that the 'web' button should be restored[1], I was told by dang that he was actually considering removing 'hide' and 'favorite' too, because people rarely use those features. (I routinely use 'hide' but hardly ever use 'favorite'.)

Btw, 'favorite' may be lesser-known but it's certainly not hard to use.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23762479](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23762479)

<comment><USER5> Favorite is one of my most used features. Please don't remove it, dang! :(

I frequently go back to these stories, whereas I don't often care to find things I upvoted again. If the two features become conflated, I'll probably stop upvoting so that I can use upvoted stories and posts as a bookmarking system.

Please keep favorite stories and posts around.

If you're worried about feature utilization, maybe name it "save" for better discoverability. That's essentially what I use the feature for.

I don't trust or use browser bookmarks much anymore. HN favorites are high quality bookmarks that work across all my browsers and devices.

<comment><USER6> Yes, like you I use favourite routinely. Please don't remove it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I personally find the comments far more interesting than the stories. Does anyone know some HN users with interesting favorited comments?

If anyone thinks the list of posts here is very heavy on programming things, feel free to browse my favorited comments. I have quite the mix of all topics. The usual disclaimer applies - these are just my HN favorites, I do not endorse them. Many favorited comments are completely wrong, they are not medical, legal or financial advice, I am not licensed to sell insurance etc etc.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=owenversteeg&comme...](https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=owenversteeg&comments=t)

<comment><USER8> Is it possible to favorite a comment on HN?

<comment> non-entity Yes, click the timestamp on the comment and you'll see the full range of actions.

<comment><USER9> _Yes, click the timestamp on the comment and you 'll see the full range of actions._

Very interesting, after the very active recent discussion about discoverability in user interfaces.

It's like HN hired someone from the iOS design team to come up with the notion of "timestamp" = "favorite."

<comment><USER10> Another way to look at it is that "timestamp" = "permalink", which is a fairly common pattern (I'm not trying to imply that it is intuitive, just that it is common). Once you are at the permalink you have a range of options available to you.

<comment><USER11> Same, as a permalink. I'll bookmark the permalink then run it through archive.org using a simple addons of mine, in case HN goes down I will have an archive backup.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Honestly, I'm kind of surprised more people do not use the favorite feature to bookmark interesting links / posts. 96 favorites on the most favorited seems really low.

<comment><USER13> I use the mobile app and its horrible. I can't often save comments, i can't see my comment threads, ...

There are probably many HN features nobody knows about because the UI doesn't expose them.

<comment><USER12> Why are you not using the website? It works really well on mobile and loads almost instantly. I've never seen a reason to use app for HN.

<comment><USER14> I only ever use private browsing and don't want to have to log in every time I want to upvote someone.

The content is saved unless I explicitly reload or navigate away from the content. So I can close the app and come back to exactly where I was rather than the browser that will not save that state and then try to reload even if I don't have an internet connection.

Navigation is easier in the app, because every action is clicking anywhere on the post and selecting an action from a large pop up menu. Except for collapsing/expanding which is also easier because you click the post header not just a tiny dash.

Automatic dark/light mode.

Etc. Etc. The app I use isn't perfect but it's preferable for lots of reasons to visiting the site directly.

<comment><USER15> I also only use private browsing mode, but the login annoyance is not enough to make me use an app. Most apps in fact track like crazy (potentially even third-party apps for sites like HN), and the whole point of private browsing is to not be tracked.

Instead I just lurk most of the time since I'm too lazy to log in, which means I'm not really contributing with votes. Maybe what we need to do is reduce the friction in logging in. I've always turned off the browser's password saving features and use my own password manager; maybe I should reconsider that policy.

[edit] Nevermind, apparently Firefox can't remember passwords when in permanent private browsing mode. So much for that idea :/

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I... never knew "favorite" was a feature on hacker news until I read this post.

Now I see the "favorite" link right above this comment form. I guess I never even noticed the links on the post page are different than when browsing stories on the front page. Now I'm noticing there's also a "hide" link!

<comment><USER17> I never knew about the favorite "button" as well. I think the "button" might be more clear if a unicode "heart" was used instead.

<comment><USER16> And elsewhere in this thread, I also discovered you can favorite _comments_ too (by clicking on the timestamp to get to the permalink page for the comment).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've occasionally looked at the favorites of highly active users (e.g. the list of karma leaders), and I've rarely found other users to have used the feature. As for me, I love using it – it has the right amount of friction such that I only end up using it for things that really are my favorite. I never look through my own upvote history. But whenever I need to find something that I remember being great, it's almost always in my favorites list.

<comment><USER19> My only complaint with the favorite feature is that after favoriting, it takes you to your favorites page, versus an async request leaving you in place with the comment or post favorited.

<comment><USER2> That's on my list to change. It'll work like voting does.

<comment><USER18> That's funny, I always thought it was intentional. Because the slight inconvenience of the favoriting action definitely makes me more selective in using it.

I suppose the public nature of the favorites list (as opposed to upvoted list) will still have that self-filtering effect.

<comment><USER2> It was intentional, but the intention was feature discovery. We did it that way in the hope that people would get to know the favorites page and start browsing the favorites of others. It doesn't seem to have had that effect; it's just a pain. I suppose we could put up a confirmation screen first: "Do you want to add 'foo' to your favorites?" But that might just be a pain too.

There's another discovery issue, which is that not everyone knows that favorites are public. Publicness was the primary reason we built the feature: the hope that it would be a new way of finding interesting stories. One can see that happening in this thread to some extent. Overall, though, I was disappointed that it didn't have more of this effect, which is why I considered removing it.

Perhaps we just didn't do enough to promote it. Someone suggested having a quarterly post about the most-favorited stories. That might be a good way. We could have different most-favorited lists based on different subsets of users. We could ask people which accounts have the most interesting favorites. and so on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wrote some JavaScript and Python tools to search your HN Favorites and export them to CSV or HTML.

The JavaScript runs in your browser like a browser extension. It scrapes the HTML and navigates from page to page.

Setup and usage instructions are in the files.

JavaScript: [https://github.com/gabrielsroka/gabrielsroka.github.io/blob/...](https://github.com/gabrielsroka/gabrielsroka.github.io/blob/master/getHNFavorites.js)

Python: [https://github.com/gabrielsroka/gabrielsroka.github.io/blob/...](https://github.com/gabrielsroka/gabrielsroka.github.io/blob/master/getHNFavorites.py)

Previous discussion, other tools and more info: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22788236](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22788236)

</comment><comment><USER21> Why use website-specific favorites instead of browser favorites? Isn't it inconvenient to have bookmarks siloed across different websites? My browser bookmarks work on any website, are synced across devices and backed up automatically (Safari), and are easily searchable and organized via folders or tags.

<comment><USER3> I use it as a super-upvote.

I try to only favourite the cream of the crop, in the hopes someone will stumble into my favourites list and enjoy them.

I mostly favourite comments not submissions though.

<comment><USER22> > in the hopes someone will stumble into my favourites list and enjoy them.

I did. Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Interestingly, [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21429740](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21429740) is both on this list and flagged. Apparently people have very strong and diametrically opposed opinions on cancel culture, leading to a lot of flagging and a lot of favoriting of the same article.

</comment><comment><USER24> I quite like the favorite feature. I did not know until reading this post though that you could favorite comments as well - I'll be sure to utilize that in the future.

Others have mentioned that the favorite feature is of little utility because they are using other bookmarking software (browser/browser extensions, etc.). I would say, personally, that I still love the favorite feature on HN because my typical collection of bookmarks contains a whole variety of things - history, politics, music, self-help stuff, etc. The stuff I read and favorite on HN are of an entirely different set of information and curiosity and thus, I really do find it useful to have them all collected in one convenient location.

</comment><comment><USER25> I was surprised to learn that I _wasn 't_ using the favorite feature!

I primarily browse HN through the Android app "Materialistic", which has a prominent "save" button at the top of each story.

However, those saved stories (~1.1/week) aren't favorited. Just saved locally.

Could this be part of why the feature seems so rarely used?

</comment><comment><USER26> I think this list is more useful: [https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=&sort=byPopularity&type=story)

<comment><USER27> Thanks for the link! I've been looking for such a feature that shows me the most popular posts within a given timeframe. My thought process was that, as much as I enjoy discussions on HN, I don't want to spend too much time on it and, in particular, I want to avoid browsing HN out of FOMO multiple times a day. Instead I'd rather just schedule half an hour to an hour every week to have a look at the most popular posts.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is a best link [https://news.ycombinator.com/best](https://news.ycombinator.com/best)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I don't fav any posts that I like, but upvote them. I also up upvote the ones I want to bookmark, so that I can later come back to read more comments. I don't really understand why I would need to fav a post.

</comment><comment><USER29> Of course now _this_ post will become the most favorited HN post of all time. I certainly marked it and reminded myself to use that feature more often.

</comment><comment><USER30> It might be embarrassing to admit but I use 'threads' as my bookmark service - if something was engaging/striking/funny enough for me to comment on, then I want to come back to it.

At some point I will write a thingy to go grab all my old comments but for now HN is more useful to me than pocket / delicious etc.

It turns out to be a useful heuristic - the mental process that says "I should store that for later" fails far more often than "that is something I have something vaguely useful to say about".

</comment><comment><USER31> I find it amusing that the #19 on this is flagged dead.

</comment><comment><USER32> What's amazed me down the years is where some random user will reveal they are the developer behind some well known software, or the author of a famous book etc. Then when you look at their profile you'll see that they've been a member for years but only have a small amount of karma.

</comment><comment><USER33> Clicking on the timestamp to get to a comment so that I can favorite it, is not that intuitive either.

</comment><comment><USER34> The list will be inherently biased for recency (note that "Ursula LeGuin has died" is high on the list) simply because there are more people around to vote.

Doesn't make the list meaningless, but it may not surface the "best" articles that might interest _you_.

<comment><USER2> I posted the global list here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24355617](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24355617)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'd like to see collaborative filtering applied to this.

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

<comment><USER2> You mean "people who favorited X also favorited Y"? That could be interesting. Not sure there's enough data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Notice that the 19th most favorited post is also flagged. ("Those People We Tried to Cancel? They're All Hanging Out Together"). To me, that indicates the flagging mechanism on hn is broken.

<comment><USER37> Have you actually read that thread? It's a garbage fire.

To me, flagging worked as intended.

<comment><USER36> Apparently quite a lot of HNers disagree with you, and liked it well enough to save it. That should be enough to indicate the article is appropriate for hn.

<comment><USER37> And the low quality of discussion it produced and the number of flagged comments should be enough to indicate that it wasn't. Because people don't just flag for the article, they flag for the thread as well.

<comment><USER36> Then the comments should be flagged, not the article. There wasn't anything wrong with the article, and apparently it was interesting to the hn crowd - which according to the guidelines is exactly what makes it acceptable.

EDIT: to respond to your edit, there was an entire thread discussing this in the article discussion. The article should be flagged if there's a problem with the article, and comments should be flagged if there's a problem with the comments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This is cool. I think it would be helpful if the list showed the date of each post as well. That's an important signal for me when deciding which links to explore in a curated list.

</comment><comment><USER39> Surprised to see my project at the top, considering how old it is. Also surprised by the very low number of favorites overall; I use that feature quite often.

</comment><comment><USER40> Thanks to the poster and the slidedeck's writer, I have finally convinced and managed to read the Machine Learning 101 slidedeck [1]. I'd recommend you guys to read it as well, very informative reading.

[1][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15919115](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15919115)

</comment><comment><USER41> Wow, I've been lurking HN for years and I had never noticed or used the "favourite" button before

</comment><comment><USER42> I just learned a few things about music and synth and CSS because of this. Also, going to favorite THIS post.

</comment><comment><USER43> Possible selection bias here - How long has the favourite feature been available in its current form?

<comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073675](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073675)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> That is very good, if only a HN-lore exist, there are some links that are submitted to HN regularly, and every 6 months new people discover them. Great stories people here like sharing, articles, books, etc.. create a ranked list of HN folklore and traditions.

</comment><comment><USER45> I use the favorites feature as a kind of "read later" list (which I never do).

</comment><comment><USER46> I made this for scraping favorites a while back. [https://github.com/reactual/hacker-news-favorites- api](https://github.com/reactual/hacker-news-favorites-api)

</comment><comment><USER47> _clicks favourite_

Maybe if the favouriteness could be transitive in some way? It could be called "favouriterank" and we could use it to index the web and surface the best pages when people search for things they are interested in?

<comment><USER2> The original intention of the feature was to try to derive some interesting signal from collective usage (that's why HN favorites are public) so that's an interesting suggestion.

<comment><USER47> I confess: I didn't write it in a particularly serious tone (pfff, " _favouriterank_ " indeed — a comparison to the early days of a pre-monetized google.com) but behind it was a serious idea.

I appreciate the charitable response.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> When I saw "favorited" I thought that was referring to what I guess is "upvoted" - as others have mentioned, I didn't even realize that was a feature. Is there a list of most upvoted HN stories of all time?

<comment><USER49> [https://hn.algolia.com/?q=](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> How many HN members are there?

Is any data available on their locations? Demographics?

</comment><comment><USER51> It would be nice to have the feature action on the home page itself.

</comment><comment><USER52> Where can you find the list of most active Hacker News users?

<comment><USER53> It depends on how you define "active", but if you click on the Lists link at the bottom of this page, and then on Leaders, you find an ordered list of the users with the most points: [https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders](https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders).

<comment><USER54> HN's hall of shame.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I think it's interesting that out of all the news articles about famous people that have died, Ursla le Guin is the one that turns up in this list.

</comment><comment><USER56> TIL HN has favorite functionality!

</comment><comment><USER57> Fools. They could've only "favourited" this post _taps temple_.

</comment><comment><USER58> I will fav this post, so your list will have a chance to be recursively reachable.

<comment><USER59> Was just thinking this as I liked it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> It's interesting how few favorites the articles actually have.

<comment><USER2> Those numbers are artificially low. If you want to compare the global list it's at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24355617](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24355617).

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> I did use favorite features often for both submission and comments.

</comment><comment><USER62> What are the most upvoted HN posts of all time?

<comment><USER63> [https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=&sort=byPopularity&type=all)

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> What about most favorited comments?

</comment><comment><USER65> exodus

movement of jah people

</comment><comment><USER66> HN's most hidden feature is if you say anything that doesn't align with the mainstream liberal consensus you'll be flagged and a mod will reprimand you for flaimbait.

</comment><comment><USER67> Not very useful since almost no-one uses the favorite function on HN.

<comment><USER2> 68k users have used the favorite feature, on 1.7M posts. It's not widely used by HN standards, but that's certainly not "almost no-one".

You can also gauge it by how many people rushed to this thread to post "please don't remove the feature" when someone mentioned we had thought about removing it.

<comment><USER67> Follow up questions when you want to measure adoption:

\- 68k users out of how many users on HN? This is the metric that really matters when you want to consider how wide the adoption is.

\- Number of users may not be very easy to evaluate as there's throwaway accounts, inactive accounts and the like, so ideally you would need to account for the people who log on at least once every month or something.

\- Among those, you would need to filter those who actually use the feature regularly vs the ones who just used the feature once and never used it again. Look like the average is at 25 per user based on the data you provided, but I am guessing there are users with 100s of favorites so that means there are people at the end of the tail as well, with just a few, which should not be counted as "active favorite users".

By the way @dang, is there any hidden function on HN to see some HN related stats?</comment></comment></comment>


The Software Industry IS the Problem - <AUTHOR> http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2030258 <comment><USER2> Software and codes will always have problems, but this is not THE problem. The PLATFORM on which it runs IS the problem.</comment>


Product Prioritization Should Consider Cost - <AUTHOR> http://blog.larrold.com/2016/01/04/prioritizing-and-cost/ <comment><USER2> > Salaries of engineers * time – This is the superficial cost. Pretty easy to > calculate

We don't do it precisely because it's not easy to estimate.</comment>


Ask HN: Equity for engineering hires - <AUTHOR>

Folks, a question to gauge the market:
At an enterprise B2B startup with a little traction, what sort of equity would you expect the first five engineering hires to seek, and what would you expect them to get?
What would you be looking for if hired on as a senior engineer?
(for simplicities sake, pretend there's no dilution due to investors or other cleverness) <comment><USER2> Go to AngelList, put in your parameters and see what the market is actually offering:

[https://angel.co/jobs#find/f!%7B%22types%22%3A%5B%22full- tim...](https://angel.co/jobs#find/f!%7B%22types%22%3A%5B%22full- time%22%5D%2C%22roles%22%3A%5B%22Software%20Engineer%22%5D%2C%22company_size%22%3A%221-10%22%2C%22markets%22%3A%22B2B%22%7D)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hm, now that's interesting.

I think their tagging system is a little off, but that is quite useful. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It depends if you have a $1 million dollars in runway then you can just pay them. If you have no money to pay them and no traction you have nothing of value.</comment>


Firecracker: Secure and fast microVMs for serverless computing - <AUTHOR> https://firecracker-microvm.github.io/ <comment><USER2> Firecracker is great We use it to run fleets of fast booting vms at [https://fly.io](https://fly.io).

It's really the best OSS to come out of Amazon.

<comment><USER3> I played around with fly.io for a bit, it seems pretty interesting. It works pretty well too, I went through the setup for the DoH proxy and the latency I get is very similar to Cloudflare itself, so that's pretty awesome.

It seems that the autoscaling limits are only defined in the fly.toml with the soft and hard limits? It might be useful to make this easily visible under flyctl scale. Also if I delete the fly.toml, can I regenerate it easily?

As a sidenote, I was looking around for more information on the platform and looking at old hn posts. I know the company pivoted a couple of times, but all the old articles are 404ing because the blog url changed.

<comment><USER4> That's nice to read! Thanks.

We do need to cleanup our old blog posts and links. We created a lot of content at various times. This content is not always relevant anymore.

As for your fly.toml question, you can get the config with `flyctl config save -a your-app`. It'll create a fly.toml with the latest config we know about.

Concurrency limits are still being worked on. They should definitely be visible in more places. The only way to know about them right now is from the fly.toml, that's not ideal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I played with Weave Ignite the other day which is a Docker-like CLI for Firecracker. Sure there were some rough edges but the overall experience was pretty good. If you are familiar with the Docker CLI you will be able to get some virtual machines up and running very quickly.

Two questions in case someone from Weave tunes into the discussion:

I got the impression that VMs needed an SSH server to be accessible. Is this correct and if so will it be possible to implement something similar to docker exec so that I won't need an SSH server on every VM?

> At the moment ignite and ignited need root privileges on the host to operate > due to certain operations (e.g. mount). This will change in the future.

Is there a timetable and could you perhaps elaborate a bit as to why it currently requires root? (I don't know anything about virtual machine internals so this isn't a passive-aggressive question from my side. It's genuine curiosity.)

<comment><USER6> Containers are provided by host kernel cgroups and namespaces, therefore the kernel implements attach (exec) operation which is practically running a new proces (e.g. bash) in a cgroup (container).

Virtual Machines are provided by software or hardware emulation which run separate guest OS with own kernel. There is no standard way for a host to let you run any process and interact with its stdio inside guest OS because the host simply is not aware what you exactly run inside.

The solution is to have an agreed connectivity standard both on the guest and the host. The guest can provide SSH server, telnet server serial terminal, irc bot or some other kind of control capability. Then of course host needs a tooling too, e.g. SSH client.

<comment><USER7> Are there any real alternatives to SSH and/or sftp? E.g. a mutual TLS authenticated HTTP server...

<comment><USER8> virtio-vsock

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Firecracker provides a rate limiter built into every microVM. This enables optimized sharing of network and storage resources, even across thousands of microVMs."

Probably the most interesting feature.

<comment><USER10> One of the things you learn about multitasking is that in theory cooperative multitasking is the most efficient, but the least reliable. It's cheaper (for the human) to use hard and fast rules that trade nasty surprises for vague disappointment.

This sounds like a hybrid system. The intermediary is cooperative, the client code is oblivious. I'm curioue to see how this plays out over the long haul.

<comment><USER11> This runs Amazon lambda, so presumably well enough?

<comment><USER10> You don't think 12 years from now we'll be laughing about how lame Lambda is?

Coding practices change like the seasons. Every year is a little different, maybe a little better than the last, some things feel brand new, but the general patterns hold.

<comment><USER11> I'm sure we'll laugh about most things we are currently using and gasp when we need to revisit them in legacy systems. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> [https://blog.acolyer.org/2020/03/02/firecracker/](https://blog.acolyer.org/2020/03/02/firecracker/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Can I run a single process in a Firecracker microVM, or do I need to bring a full distro?

<comment><USER12> Seems like you can, but probably shouldn't since you'd want to run services like chrony to keep time inside the VM.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm curious about restarts and snapshotting: would it be feasible to reset a microVM for each incoming request?

<comment><USER2> Snapshot / suspend isn't doable yet, but it sure would be nice.

We've booted some apps in Firecracker in <20ms, so if you build the app properly you can absolutely do a new VM per request or TCP connection even.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, this is what AWS does....

<comment><USER15> No it doesn't. It pre-inits the Firecracker VM's before the first request: [https://www.usenix.org/system/files/nsdi20-paper- agache.pdf](https://www.usenix.org/system/files/nsdi20-paper-agache.pdf)

<comment><USER14> I meant the part about one request per VM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm happy to see AWS is giving back to the open source community.

<comment><USER17> if you had to guess.. what are your thoughts on _why_ this was open sourced? everybody i listen to seems a little confused by the "why" of this specific action

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Note Firecracker does not work on AWS cloud instances, apart from bare metal instances.

<comment><USER19> >2020

>Still no nested virtualization on aws

;( It should work on some azure instances and gce instances when you enable nested virtualization.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Does anyone know if any integration with Kubernetes is on the cards? Something like an operator with CRDs?

Or is this intended to be separate, a competitor?

<comment><USER2> There are a few ways to use k8s + firecracker, weave has one: [https://www.weave.works/oss/firekube/](https://www.weave.works/oss/firekube/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Firecracker: OSS virtualization techno, creating and managing secure, multi- > tena

This title is a bit awkwardly worded; in particular, "techno" in American English is a genre of music, not an abbreviation for "technology".

<comment><USER22> We've reverted it now. Submitted title was "Firecracker: OSS virtualization techno, creating and managing secure, multi-tena".

Submitters: please don't do that—this is in the site guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). If a title is misleading or baity, please rewrite it, but please also make it good English.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> My skills are more on the developer side, this seems more like a devops tool, right?

As such, I'm never really sure if this is something worth playing with. I've played with docker and k8s, and generally understand how those tools help me, but I'm unsure about how firecracker would help unless I'm building a PaaS like fly.io.

It would be really cool if someone wrote a blog post which compared running a service on the different comparable options. Developers have the Todo apps written in dozens of frameworks to compare against. Is a similar type of exploration not feasible here?

</comment><comment><USER24> docker is used for microservices, is firecraker designed for serverless applications? what's the key difference between firecracker and docker? are these two overlapped?

<comment><USER25> Amazon uses it mainly for Fargate and Lambda (from what I've read). Docker is a container technology (shared kernel), while Firecracker is an actual VM manager so it provides better isolation. It is more comparable with QEMU.

<comment><USER26> Why does FaaS (that's what Lambda is, right?) need more full blown virtualization? I thought you could maybe get away with even lighter separation than Docker?

<comment><USER27> Docker isn't really designed to be a security boundary, so if you're colocating containers from different customers (e.g. in Fargate), you need to separate them with a real security boundary like a VM. The same thing is true for lambdas: a lambda is just an archive and the code in the archive needs to run somewhere where one customer cannot intercept another customer's data.

<comment><USER14> To add on, AWS has never run Lambdas for different accounts on the same VM. Before Firecracker, they would run multiple Lambdas for the same account on the same VM. Now with Firecracker, they can run each lambda in its own VM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > Intel processors are supported for production workloads. Support for AMD and > Arm processors is in developer preview.

Firecracker looks very promising from a server-side technology stand-point but the support for AMD, RISC-V platforms couldn't be stressed more enough.

Amazon better find a way of supporting AMD processors since Intel's CPU bugs are being brought into the sunlight and exploited in all directions by security researchers which have cataclysmic implications for users and server providers these days. This is demonstrated by a ridiculous Intel vulnerability which rendered Apple's FileVault encryption facilities completely useless which is absolutely unacceptable to Apple. There are many other CPU vulnerabilities waiting to be found and it could be the next Meltdown-like candidate.

The sooner the move to AMD or RISC-V open technologies, the better for developers and users.

<comment><USER29> I am actually surprised by the absence of AMD support for a project born at AWS. AWS has been offering AMD Epyc ec2 instances for quite awhile[0].

Missing arm support is also suprising but less so, as arm market penetration is obviously lower than x64

[0][https://aws.amazon.com/fr/ec2/amd/](https://aws.amazon.com/fr/ec2/amd/)

<comment><USER2> AMD processors work fine with Firecracker, support is relatively recent though so they're being conservative about calling it production ready.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> What are some use cases?

</comment><comment><USER31> Would it not be better to make docker vm aware? The tooling would not have to radically change.

</comment><comment><USER32> ... and all the koolaid drinking Kubernetes fans are now going to refer to Kubernetes as legacy and start creating a new cottage industry of Firecracker migrations. Slightly cynical yes. But also a bit true.

</comment><comment><USER33> Will microVMs replace containers in short time?

<comment><USER17> i'd also like to know this..

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I believe it is still using virtio. Therefore, disk read/writes are not good enough compared to other virtualization tech such as qemu

<comment><USER13> qemu setups often use virtio, afaik virtio was defined by qemu devs, so your statement doesn't really make sense without more details.

Also, "not good enough" kind of needs a definition of a workload and what's "good enough" for it.

<comment><USER35> It's using virtio-mmio which is less efficient than virtio-pci. But I/O was not a focus of Firecracker, for example it doesn't scale very well because it doesn't do concurrent I/O operations.</comment></comment></comment>


TopCoder - your opinion? - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
What's your opinion on TopCoder.com and similar algorithm solving competitions like ACM? Anyone competing? I think it is a really good way to improve one's thinking skills -- granted, it does not measure your complete skill set(as programming isn't just algorithms), but algorithms are essential.
I think most people in the web 2.0 space are in it mainly for the money. The applications themselves are mostly pretty trivial from an algorithmic point of view, so I am really curious what's your opinion on this.
Or is everybody just on the road to change the world (with apps like twitter), and doesn't care about competitions like this(where hacking and bright solutions are still appreciated)? <comment><USER2> My university had the usual ACM algorithmic programming contests, but the ACM and UPE (CS honor society) student groups also put on other "alternative" programming contests, which I found more fun.

Last year they had a 24 hour programming contest to make the best app based around a certain theme... "a series of tubes": <http://uscp24.com/>

My team made a crime tracking web app for my school, which had nothing to do with tubes except we called it TOOBS: <http://toobs.tlrobinson.net/>

This year they're doing a two day contest called "Code for a Cause" where teams make accessibility software for the disabled: <http://ss12.info/>

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been contemplating on whether to compete or not in the competition this Saturday. (Who doesn't want a free t-shirt?)

This would be my first time competing in a programming/algorithm solving contest.</comment>


Hackathon Weekend Project – VUp - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/twoflowers/vUp

<comment><AUTHOR> We made this project to allow for development teams to easily build and configure their local environments to easily match what they may have in production.

Eventually we will be using vUp as the base, allow people to download their docker files and move them to production without missing a beat.

Definitely curious to what people think</comment>


On Single Founders - <AUTHOR> http://austinhallock.com/2013/06/23/on-single-founders/

<comment><USER2> I've been a single founder for over 17 years in numerous successful Startups...anyone who thinks that it's a drawback is a fool who's more interested in the fanboy hype world of Startups than in building real businesses. This phenomenon of "needing" co-founders is really a relatively new thing and is dismaying to watch.

I once co-founded a biotech company in New York with a guy. He was the director of research at a smaller investment bank and had tons of contacts in the biotech industry. Between his contacts and my tech skills it was a slam dunk.

That was one of the few times I ever had a co-founder...It was a _strategic reason_ to have a co-founder that fit a very narrow set of criteria...and really one of the only reasons to ever have a co-founder.

To say, on the other hand, "I need a co-founder" by default is just dumb. To treat it like an item to check off the list for creating a startup is insane. But that seems to be where we are these days in the world of startups...</comment>