Why David Petraeus's Gmail account is a national security issue - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2012/11/10/why-david-petraeuss-gmail-account-is-a-national-security-issue/ <comment><USER2> Well, Petraeus gets a +1 for not using his official e-mail account, or an old DoD account for this. In fact, it's kind of pleasantly surprising that he used GMail over...say, an aol.com address.

In fact, it seems that for any given government official who wants to conduct risky non-official business, using something like GMail would actually be the more secure route, if you were trying to keep secrets from both your employer (which includes the public and public record requests) AND from the usual enemies of the state.

If both Petraeus and Broadwell had used GMail accounts _not_ associated with their names, such email@example.com and email@example.com, how likely is it that anyone would discover their shenanigans? For an enemy of the state to find out, it would have to compromise both GMail _and_ somehow connect email@example.com with David Petraeus. Sure, it's security through obscurity, but we're talking a nearly unsurmountable amount of obscurity.

Of course, once they start forwarding emails from their private account to their publicly known addresses, then the game is riskier. There's also the problem of keeping the ruse without making an AutoComplete mistake, such as sending a message from email@example.com to email@example.com without realizing he's logged in as firstname.lastname@example.com.

<comment><USER3> > If both Petraeus and Broadwell had used GMail accounts not associated with > their names, such firstname.lastname@example.com and email@example.com, how > likely is it that anyone would discover their shenanigans?

I'd argue that every security agency worth its salt is also keeping a close watch on its bosses (especially on its bosses) so that let's say if Petraeus had logged in with firstname.lastname@example.com his communications being intercepted someone would have noticed. As a non-American, I'm not exactly sure what's for example the relation between the NSA and CIA, but I guess it's somehow telling that the whole thing seems to have been driven by the FBI

<comment><USER2> According to the NYT, the revelation was due to the emails being forwarded from Broadwell. So as almost always is the case in real life, it seems the security breach was through a social lapse, not through a technical obstacle. And it was not movie-like/CSI-level sleuthing, but just an accident, that the authorities found out

<http://nyti.ms/RLx6QT>

> _WASHINGTON — The F.B.I. investigation that led to the resignation of David > H. Petraeus as C.I.A. director on Friday began with a complaint several > months ago about "harassing" e-mails sent by Paula Broadwell, Mr. Petraeus's > biographer, to an unidentified third person, a government official briefed > on the case said Saturday._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If I was a foreign government I'd have multiple spies working inside Google by now.

<comment><USER5> I'm sure the US government DOES have spies working inside Google as we speak

<comment><USER6> I'm sure the US doesn't need to bother wasting the resources required to train and embed a spy when a lawyer with a subpoena will do...

<comment><USER7> I know that this is a pot shot against the American legal system (especially with regard to copyright stuff), but it really makes no sense. A spy would likely be no more expensive than a legal team (in fact, he'd be subsidized by his salary at Google) and would be monumentally more effective and secretive.

Beyond that, the hard part of training a spy to get into Google would be getting a good enough computer science student involved. From there, it's really just a matter of teaching them to cover their tracks semi- intelligently. However, given what I'm sure is a mountain of completely legitimate reasons to look at user data (for example, to resolve data corruption, investigate malicious users, etc.) and an inconceivably larger mountain of user data to look at, I don't actually think it'd be that hard to get away with it.

<comment><USER8> A surprisingly few people at Google have the authorized access to read a users GMail mailbox. It would mainly be the GMail Site Reliability Engineers, and support teams. The developers usually don't access to peoples inboxes.

Any support/SRE/developer access to a users' GMail mailbox would be logged and if they exceeded their authorized access by such as accessing a "public" persons email, They'd be fired pretty quickly.

<comment><USER7> I'm sure the auditing and control is more than enough to stop your average creeper employee from reading normal people's inboxes, but I very much doubt that it's enough to stop a very smart, very determined spy from doing the same. At the end of the day, _someone_ has root, and that guy can do pretty much anything.

I'm confident that Google is doing a better job than pretty much anyone else, but this problem is a more or less unsolvable one.

Edited to add that another interesting idea is that the people who man the DC's are actually pretty sparse (relatively few people for a lot of servers) so it's not inconceivable that one could trigger a failure on an important box, take down a replica of the figure's mailbox, swap out the drive for RMA and then do a quick copy. I bet this would be easy.

I guess my point is that no level of internal controls at any company can _actually_ stop a determined government. If that were true, governments, which are much more paranoid than tech companies, would have eradicated spying a long time ago.

<comment><USER9> > At the end of the day, someone has root, and that guy can do pretty much > anything.

I do not disagree with your overall assessment, but this is not strictly true. Most good real-world security schemes don't follow the 'root is God'-model of Unix, and for good reason. It's perfectly possible to design a system where each operation performed by a "superuser" must be validated, or at least logged.

<comment><USER10> But does Google follow best practice or did they invent their own half-assed method - the evidence from the way the Chinese hacked them is the latter.

If Google were serious they should have brought out Bruces company Counterpane and put him in charge of security.

<comment><USER11> Do you have details of China's hack that show Google as being stupid in security, or does being compromised by a nation famous for hacking prove incompetence. Seriously, with the amount of value stored inside Google's computers, it seems like they are doing a pretty good job with their security systems.

<comment><USER10> Well not properly securing the system the us law enforcement used to legaly get info from google - that should have been locked down properly with hardware cypto gear so that it could only talk one way to approved system in the FBI or better still via an air gap.

Its blindingly obvious to any one with even a basic knowledge of computer security best practice.

<comment><USER11> Can you be more specific. From your post I am assuming that China hacked into Google by using a direct line the FBI has into Google's servers. Even assuming such a link exists (which I do not), 'hardware crypto gear' is still a far way away from a complete secure system. And it seems like an air gap would also inhibit the intended functionality of the system.

Security is hard, and it is even harder when any device on the internet is intended to be able to work with the system, and it is even harder when you operate one of the most valuable networks in the world.

<comment><USER10> They spearfished a pc apparently.

And systems used by your TLA's to handle law enforcement access are not available to "any device on the internet"

As I said they should be set up to only talk over a private circuit to one other end point and also have proper hardware crypto gear that is external to the systems.

separating the extraction of data and applying the decoding probably should have been done on separate systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There's a log of bogus assumptions in these articles, and he got caught because she was investigated, not him.

If he used a gmail account _and_ used a separate device such as a private smart phone or tablet to access that account there would have been zero vulnerability, other than the fact that he could have been blackmailed. Gmail is pretty hard to hack into, the IP address of the device probably wouldn't tell anyone anything about where he is, since it's a private IP on the telco (can you tell a person's location from the IP on the telco?), and there wouldn't be any way to get to any of his secure accounts or make a mistake of using the wrong email account.

<comment><USER13> Telco's log everything! So it would not have been difficult, if you could connect the phone number to him, to track everything else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Who knows if it's accurate, but Buzzfeed is reporting that it may have been Anonymous as part of its Stratfor attack:

[http://www.buzzfeed.com/zekejmiller/anonymous-may-have- hacke...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/zekejmiller/anonymous-may-have-hacked- petraeus-mistress)

<comment><USER15> I doubt it.

<comment><USER16> The news story there claims the first step in this scandal was that Paula Broadwell's yahoo account was compromised. That's not too hard if you can guess her password hints.

The next step, it seems, was sending some trolling emails. That requires acquiring or just guessing some email addresses. The people who got the trolling emails set the discovery of the affair in motion. Well played. But did not require a 133t hAx0r.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The most likely explanation is that she accessed his smartphone or computer when he was not looking.

</comment><comment><USER18> He wasn't even using two-factor authentication?

<comment><USER19> How would two-factor authentication stop the FBI from lawfully demanding your email from Google?

<comment><USER18> His mistress accessed his e-mail first, not the FBI.

<comment><USER20> Actually, sounds like all they had to go on was she got certain e-mail addresses. Seems kind of thin really.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Petraeus's personal email should be no more sensitive than the mailbox outside his house, which any junkie could "hack". If he put classified information on google's servers, that's a whole different problem. This is a non-issue and a distraction from the real reason why he was forced out.

<comment><USER22> That depends on what he used the e-mail address for. If it was strictly for romantic liaisons, it's no big deal. But if he used it for any other purpose (talking with his lawyer, chatting with senators, etc.), it would be a hell of a platform for social engineering attacks. In that scenario, the information in Petraeus' personal inbox is beside the point[1]; you can use the trusted address to get your hooks into something more interesting.

[1] Ignoring the blackmail value of the affair.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Sounds like Janet Napolitano has the right idea.

[http://techdailydose.nationaljournal.com/2012/09/napolitano-...](http://techdailydose.nationaljournal.com/2012/09/napolitano- i-dont-use-email-at.php)

</comment><comment><USER24> Yes, in the hands of voters that kind of information could ruin an administration. He should definitely be fired lest the public find out what the CIA is upto.

</comment><comment><USER25> Obviously Google should delete David Petraeus's account immediately. National security is at stake!

;)</comment>


Learning Vim in 2014: Working With Files - <AUTHOR> http://benmccormick.org/2014/07/07/learning-vim-in-2014-working-with-files/

<comment><USER2> "Learning Vim in 2014" seems to mean glossing over a few basics and going straight to plugins.</comment>


CLI Design (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://jmmv.dev/2013/08/cli-design-series-introduction.html <comment><USER2> I'm one of the maintainers of the DVC.org tool and was even trying to find a person CLI UI/UX engineer to get UI to the next level. Have someone heard about people specializing in this? It should someone who just feel pain when UI is not good, someone with great empathy to end users.

Any other great resources on this topic?</comment>


A visual history of 11 successful blogs - <AUTHOR> http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/10/21/a-visual-history-of-11-successful-blogs/ <comment><USER2> In every single case, ads went from 0-10% of the space to usually around 40-60%. In most cases, the best above-the-fold space was re-purposed for ads.

<comment><USER3> Hah, that's exactly what I noticed and came back to comment on. I don't think it's specific just to successful blogs though -- it's amazing how different online advertising has become even in the last 3 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Initially it was a zine started in 1988 by Mark Frauenfelder and Carla Sinclair, then in 1995 it became a website, and in 2000 it became a blog."

heh I wonder if the site ever changed or just the buzzwords

</comment><comment><USER5> Wow, TechCrunch used to look good.

<comment><USER6> Precisely my first thought on glancing over this article. What happened w/ the redesign?

<comment><USER7> Same with Gizmodo and Engadget. So much cleaner.

EDIT: And Huffington Post and SmashingMag to some degree.</comment></comment></comment>


Understand the unwritten term in the term sheet - <AUTHOR> http://redeye.firstround.com/2006/03/as_a_little_kid.html <comment><USER2> He says you can't build a company to sell it, but several of the founders in Founders at Work seemed explicitly or implicitly to be (successfully) building companies to sell them. I'm highly suspicious, particularly since it's coming from a VC to begin with.</comment>


Half a brain girl recovers vision - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8159631.stm

<comment><USER2> _"Despite lacking one hemisphere, the girl has normal psychological function and is perfectly capable of living a normal and fulfilling life. She is witty, charming and intelligent."_

I'm always impressed at how the brain can put so much function in such a small space on such low power. But it's this like _this_ that really impress me: imagine a computer not only as powerful and efficient as the brain, but also which is so adaptive that you could _remove half of it during production_ and it would still, when finished being produced, be capable of most of its normal function.

<comment><USER3> The research I've seen tends to lend weight to the view that each hemisphere is its own indpendent computer. Each may specialise in particular tasks but they are not dependent on each other. It's kind of like disabling one core in a dual core CPU.

<comment><USER4> This was interesting:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrocephaly#Exceptional_case>

One interesting case involving a person with past hydrocephalus was a 44-year old French man, whose brain had been reduced to little more than a thin sheet of actual brain tissue, due to the buildup of fluid in his skull. The man, who had a shunt inserted into his head to drain away fluid (which was removed when he was 14), went to a hospital after he had been experiencing mild weakness in his left leg.

In July 2007, Fox News quoted Dr. Lionel Feuillet of Hôpital de la Timone in Marseille as saying: "The images were most unusual... the brain was virtually absent."[9] When doctors learned of the man's medical history, they performed a computed tomography (CT) scan and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan, and were astonished to see "massive enlargement" of the lateral ventricles in the skull. Intelligence tests showed the man had an IQ of 75, below the average score of 100 but not considered mentally retarded or disabled, either.

<comment><USER3> There's a lot of interesting stuff with hemisphere seperation. Also check out that TED lecture of the lady having a stroke.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Predicting Customer Pregnancy At Target (How We Would Do It) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.custora.com/2012/02/how-we-would-do-it-predicting-customer-pregnancy-at-target/

<comment><USER2> I'd imagine tanimoto or cosine similarity would get you most of the way there while being very off-the-shelf.

If you're going to go the route of binary classification, I'd personally do it via RFs as variable importance (product importance) is built in. (But that's just personal pref)

I think that it's a solid step-by-step thought process on tackling the problem -- I'd probably think of the false positive vs false negative in terms of the relative expected values of success/failure in those classifications. (And perhaps cost-sensitivity could even be added to your original classifier -- perhaps if you had a forest of 500 trees, and you get even 100 votes for pregnant, that's enough to decide to send a pregnancy-targeted mailer)

</comment><comment><USER3> After watching a coworker innocently ask a woman who wasn't expecting, "When are you due?", I've developed a simple rule for this:

If she tells you she's pregnant: _Congratulate her._

If she doesn't: _Keep your mouth shut._

Seriously, if you want to target expectant mothers, let them register for a discount program. _Diapers are expensive!_ Any marketing effort that begins, "We think you might be pregnant..." is doomed.

</comment><comment><USER4> Not much real content here. Feels like a rather crass attempt to capitalize on the buzz around the Target story.

<comment><USER5> I don't know if crass is the right word. It's opportunistic I guess, but this is how the world of marketing works -- a story about something similar to what you do catches the Internet's brief attention, and you put your hand up and say, hey me too!</comment></comment>


Multipath routing on a Raspberry Pi 2 - <AUTHOR> http://www.whizzy.org/2015/05/multipathrouting-rasppi2/

<comment><USER2> I do not know much about networking but:

> I don't really get how, in the case of an HTTP conversation (or flow) which > is connectionless, all the packets in the conversation get marked the same.

What do you mean? HTTP is stateless, not connection-less. This is probably related to:

> Although HTTP is a connectionless protocol this change of IP address did > seem to freak some services out.

Maybe what you saw is a single request being split into multiple packets taking different routes then different source address from what you said. I have no idea how such setup could work in practice.

<comment><USER3> I thought he would put all the connections back together on the other end with VPS or something.

<comment><USER4> quite a few outfits do this with MPTCP, with varying degrees of success.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very cool project. One downside to this approach is that each tcp connection cannot use more than one link's bandwidth. I've been meaning to try this with a multipath VPN to work around that issue but haven't had the time yet.

<comment><USER6> I tried this[0] and successfully round-robin packets in a single stream. Problem was that the two links had different latencies and Linux has no tolerance for out of order packets. Instead, it would cause a huge number of retransmissions.

[0] [https://github.com/erjiang/tuntuntun](https://github.com/erjiang/tuntuntun)

<comment><USER5> Interesting, even so was it a net win?

It looks like tuntuntun is pretty basic, my thought was OpenVPN with null encryption over MPTCP. But the combination would obviously have a lot more overhead than that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think it would have been nice to have bit more discussion on the results, both on performance and fault-tolerance points of view. Getting 10MB/s on 2x70Mbps lines sounds like the RPi is bottlenecking quite heavily.

<comment><USER8> I haven't added any fault tolerance. Should be fairly easy to detect if a route is unavailable and re-write the routing table. And yes, I expect the Pi is still a bottleneck.

<comment><USER9> Is there any embedded hardware that can handle 140Mbps line speed without being maxed out?

<comment><USER10> Something like the Cubox-i/Hummingboard should do the trick. It has a beefier CPU and a gigabit ethernet interface that isn't attached via USB like the one on the Pi/Pi2.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Emails Show Feds Asking Florida Cops to Deceive Judges - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/06/feds-told-cops-to-deceive-courts-about-stingray/ <comment><USER2> I'm actually surprised, I would have figured that by this point, there would have been a revolution, or at least mutterings. The federal government is actually circumventing the law and the justice system in order to illegally incarcerate citizens. The American government is the enemy of the American people by the governments own admission.

It turns out it wasn't Brave New World or 1984, rather it's both, each enabling the other.

I just pray America elects someone who can turn this ship around, rather than doubling down on the stupidity of it all.

<comment><USER3> Revolution? You don't really understand revolution if you think the Stingray is going to be the cause of it. Look at what the East German Stasi was able to get away with, and there wasn't a world shattering revolution there.

I wish people would leave the drama to the Young and the Restless and stop implying that the misdeeds of the NSA and other law enforcement in their current state will lead to revolution. You still have clothes, you still have food, the power structure at hand is stable, the key pieces of uncertainty that can foment a revolution are missing. More importantly, you can talk about revolution on a public forum without getting your door reduced to splinters.r

<comment><USER4> This + a stable Democracy really has a natural safety valve every 2 years. Elections. That, and as long as people can leave the US permanently relatively easily...the people who would seriously consider "revolting" and be effective...they end up in other countries.

If things get bad enough, people will keep kicking out incumbents until things stabilize.

That said, voter suppression is getting worse...not better. So that may slowly close off the safety valve.

Personally, I plan to stick around until/unless I think the chance of me getting arrested is greater than that of being hit by lighting. Then, I'm going to bounce and find another country.

<comment><USER5> The problem is that going to another country does not put you beyond the reach of the US Government if you are an American. Even if you move your body, it's still difficult to exit the system.

Elections don't seem to be working very effectively. Too many incumbents are gerrymandered into unassailable districts, and are barely challenged in their primaries.

I would also like to have a contingency country, but practically every one that I would be inclined to pick is cheering the US on as it reshapes itself into a police surveillance state.

<comment><USER4> This is about a revolution level event, not whether you think the process is working.

It provides enough of an escape valve that if enough people who want to revolt feel that way, things would chance before violence started.

You can also renounce your US citizenship which is what truly leaving permanently entails.

<comment><USER5> Renouncing one citizenship without first acquiring another is a great way to destroy your own freedom of movement and generally undermine your own quality of life. Stateless persons are usually treated according to the amount of wealth they possess. As someone not particularly rich (by Western standards) getting free of the US requires chaining yourself to a less objectionable regime. As might be expected, the countries that people want to live in have stricter immigration requirements.

The "just leave" escape valve is thus not very effective whenever the pressure builds too quickly. Besides that, the smartest and wealthiest people leave first. Anyone left behind is less able and possibly less willing to defuse the crisis.

For most people, they have significant investment in their local community, with financial, social, and reputation capital built up over many years. Abandoning that represents a huge loss, and would require a proportionally large threat to even be worth considering.

I don't expect emigration to change anything, unless some other country miraculously changes its policy to out-freedom the US, and thereby suck all of its brains out.

<comment><USER4> Renouncing your citizenship and finding citizenship in another country is still easier, safer, and cheaper than starting a revolution.

Anyone capable of organizing and running an effective revolution is capable of leaving the US with less risk & effort.

That is the point you are missing. This is about a revolution & revolutionaries, not "is this easy for anyone? is this best for everyone?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Reminder to support the ones fighting this on the front lines:

[https://www.aclu.org/donate/join-renew- give](https://www.aclu.org/donate/join-renew-give)

<comment><USER7> Yep. Noticing the Wikipedia article on these devices has expanded, I'd also encourage those with documentary skills and technological comprehension to lend their time to increasing the availability of the immediately accessible public record in areas of technology/politics as a means of effective protest. The more facts are out there, and the easier they are for people to discover, the greater the checks and balances on govscale surveillance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> So the mailman now remembers every letter you've written, the policeman is able to trick your cell phone into telling you where you are and whom you're calling, the state security service is monitoring all of your electronic correspondence, and the IRS is able to _read_ any of your papers it wants as long as your account has been flagged -- no warrant or judicial action necessary.

Remind me where I live again? Because when I grew up, we were the free and open society and the other guys, the _bad guys_ , were the ones in everybody's knickers. (Recommended movie: The Lives Of Others)

Of note here is that it was the Assistant State Attorney, not the cops, that had problems with being honest with the court. There's a guy who needs to be disbarred.

<comment><USER9> Perjury and obstruction of justice. The disbarring should at least follow a minimum sentence, it sure would be sad if the ASA lived in a 3 strikes jurisdiction.

Alternatively, throw out the warrant because it is the fruit of fraud, then charge the ASA with conspiracy to computer fraud and abuse (unauthorized access) with one count for each subscriber in the area, and refuse to admit the warrant as evidence because it's null and void.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> So the problem is they claimed "Confidential Source" and the presumption was that it was an informant? To me secret surveillance fits the definition of "Confidential Source". I don't see any deception there. (EDIT: I've been corrected, apparently legal definition defines source as person)

The real question is why can the magic words "confidential source" be used as justification for a warrant without more clarification.

Well also the part about using the devices in the first place without warrant.

<comment><USER11> According to this[1] definition, a confidential source is a _PERSON_ who provides information. If this is so, then the judge that approved the warrant was actually tricked: a _person_ providing information implies that the information may be volatile (the witness may have seen something by pure luck), and on top of that it also means that the information was obtained through a legally sanctioned way (ie, a witness and/or a confession). If they used a word that defines a person to identify something that was not a person, then yeah, there was some deception involved.

If I read the article correctly, what happened is that the police obtained information in ways they apparently weren't allowed to use (unconstitutional surveillance), and then hid this fact under the pretense of a supposed person giving that information. This is all kinds of wrong and, among other things, voids those warrants.

[1] [http://definitions.uslegal.com/c/confidential- source%20/](http://definitions.uslegal.com/c/confidential-source%20/)

<comment><USER12> There's a much bigger problem going on here. Why is it acceptable to say that your information comes from a "confidential source" at all? The nature of the claim is that it can't be verified; a confidential source cannot be distinguished by any means from a fevered imagination.

I assume you can't get a warrant to search someone's house for drugs by saying "he looks like a junkie to me". It would be too easy to ask how claiming a "confidential source" is better than that. How is it _different_?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder what the specifics are of the "I signed an NDA so I am not able to tell the court anything, even with a subpoena" defense. Struck me as odd.

<comment><USER14> I'm assuming a judge can put them under contempt. If they lie, it's perjury.

The thing that is more interesting is the dynamic where neither happens because judges are unwilling to tip the apple cart. I hope that someone is doing a review of transcripts now to see if police in those courtrooms have perjured themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Freedom is cyclical... When oligarchs rule, they unknowingly give power to anyone who will appeal to the mob... Whoever picks up that power will claim it's for the "good of the people", and the people will gladly trade their freedoms to be free of the oppressive rich elites... A people without freedom and dependent on their king for everything is a weak people, and eventually their empire will fall to pieces through some combination of internal fighting and weak external threats. Falling apart is hard as the people have no emperor providing free bread anymore and the people must learn to fend for themselves again... from this rises individualism and freedom once again. Cyclical.

</comment><comment><USER16> Wow, this story makes me appreciate 'the Wire' even more. In the last 2 seasons the cops are trying to bring down some corrupt officials and their thug cronies, using a shady wire-tap. In the end, they catch them but it backfires because of their 'confidential source' which was also a shady wire- tap setup ...

</comment><comment><USER17> You know, I guess that speaks well of the independence and low level of corruption of the judiciary.

</comment><comment><USER18> Shouldn't these things be easily detectable? If you can use your GPS and radio in your phone to get a list of nearby towers and one mytseriously shows up, it seems likely this would be one of these devices.

<comment><USER19> As noted in another discussion, there are official portable ones regularly used for events, but those don't attempt to hide.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Do/can they perform an MITM attack with a stingray?

<comment><USER21> From how I interpret the Stingray, it is executing a MITM attack. These types of devices are sometimes refereed to as IMSI-catchers, and sit in between the users phone, and the real network towers. [1]

My concern is what exactly is being contained, and collected. The cell phone companies are already collecting the same data, but I would assume that with the Stingray it makes getting access to that data much faster versus having to request it from the cell phone network companies. The article mentions what they are collecting with the Stringray, "When mobile phones—and other wireless communication devices—connect to the stingray, the device can see and record their unique ID numbers and traffic data, as well as information that points to the device's location. By moving the stingray around, authorities can triangulate the device's location with greater precision than they can using data obtained from a fixed tower location." This technology could very well advance, and allow them in the future to collect much more maybe. Gathering location seems to be the biggest reasoning behind using the Stingray.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMSI- catcher](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMSI-catcher)

<comment><USER22> I'm hoping that these devices don't interfere with 911 calls. The Enhanced 911 service uses GPS data from the cellphone (if available) and cell-tower triangulation to locate the caller. If the Stingray device is acting like a tower, and someone calls 911, wouldn't an incorrect (or no) location be reported?

<comment><USER20> On the other hand, if an accident does occur, the police are already nearby. :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> In the long run, lying to judges eventually bites you in the ass.

</comment><comment><USER24> Stronger... grows the shadow.</comment>


7 Step Guide to Increasing App Downloads by 300% - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140826110449-2241112-7-step-guide-to-generating-massive-app-downloads

<comment><USER2> I felt like i needed something more to overcome my hesitation to sign up to a new mailing list.

Rahul, please tell me that what i'm missing is huge!

</comment><comment><USER3> STOP ADS PLEASE</comment>


Beautiful Terminal Diffs, Everywhere - <AUTHOR> http://blog.robertelder.org/terminal-diff-tool/ <comment><USER2> Wow - not only is the utility called with the developers whole name, but the GitHub project starts with this:

        Fire DO NOT CREATE PULL REQUESTS FOR THIS PROJECT.  Fire

        Fire ANY PULL REQUESTS YOU CREATE WILL NOT BE MERGED IN. Fire

This has worked well for me: [https://github.com/ymattw/cdiff](https://github.com/ymattw/cdiff)</comment>


Technologists have produced a 3D-printed painting in the style of Rembrandt - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35977315 <comment><USER2> If it were a -human- painting a fake Rembrandt, no matter how perfect an imitation, it would be called "a very very good imitation of Rembrandt" and nobody would claim that they'd in any sense brought Rembrandt back to life. Calling a very good forged Rembrandt a "new Rembrandt" would be pretty silly.

Calling one generated by a computer a "new Rembrandt" seems just as silly. Just because it was composed by an algorithm doesn't make it Rembrandtier than one painted by an expert forger.

Pretty cool as a technical achievement, though.

<comment><USER3> Computers are our new babies. We applause and cheer for anything trivial they come up with.

<comment><USER4> I think it might just be a simple as interpreting your work in the most significant way increases exposure and potential grant money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I feel like it's misleading of them to say that a computer painted the picture. That makes it sound like all works of Rembrandt have been fed into a Machine Learning algorithm and finally the computer spit out this piece.

After having watched the YouTube video, I fell like actually the picture was more or less photoshopped together from existing Rembrandt paintings. The role of the algorithms was "only" to generate the most average / representative of his works.

<comment><USER6> I used to paint old masters portraits as a hobby (including Rembrandt). I think it's a bit disingenuous to describe this as 'painting'. On top of ma2rten's criticism that it basically photoshopped previous examples to create a most representative work, I'd add that 3D printing with texture is not painting. Rembrandt, in particular, was known for painting with countless layers of semi transparent glazes to give his paintings a sense of depth and an ethereal glow. He'd also mix his pigments with bindings aside from pure linseed oil, sometimes adding chalk or glass. 3D printing the final result with none of that process makes for a very limited reproduction.

Also, I'll add that I think it's very impressive, but I think they're overselling it here.

<comment><USER7> The 3D printed element is the least interesting part of the process because it's literally superficial. There's no reason you couldn't set up a robotic brush painter next to a robotic pigment factory to recreate all of the above.

However - what's interesting to me is that the only way to make this work was by defining the features that were going to be included, analysing and averaging them separately, and gluing them together to create a whole.

This wasn't a "Throw everything into an RNN and see if something useful falls out" project. It deliberately separated specific target features.

That works well for an artist with very consistent and narrow clothing, lighting, and background choices, and limited model poses.

It might not work so well for artists who included a much wider range of imagery - which is probably most of them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's an impressive achievement. But compare the computer generated image[1] with a real Rembrandt of a similar subject at high resolution.[2] Compare the detail in the neck ruff. Look at the iris of the eyes. (Why do Rembrandt's people have no eyelashes?)

[1] [http://ichef-1.bbci.co.uk/news/950/cpsprodpb/4B28/production...](http://ichef-1.bbci.co.uk/news/950/cpsprodpb/4B28/production/_89104291_rembrandt.jpg) [2] [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/Johannes...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/Johannes_Wtenbogaert_by_Rembrandt_van_Rijn.jpg)

<comment><USER9> I think your first link is not high-res enough. I don't know why but the website breaks the image into tiles: www.nextrembrandt.com/static/img/painting/painting_XX.jpg where interesting values for XX are 17, 18, 22, 23, 24, 28, 29, 33. (Full range is 01-40 inclusive.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> youtube video showing the process [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuygOYZ1Ngo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuygOYZ1Ngo)

<comment><USER11> They said they incorporated the height map from the original.

How did they obtain them? Do museums/galleries/owners let scientists or engineers study the layers of paint of the physical paintings?

<comment><USER12> Yes they let scientists study the layers.

You can create hight maps by casting light from each side of the painting and using the shadows for your hight map calculations.

<comment><USER12> Edit: this (old) tutorial shows how you can do it yourself: [http://zarria.net/nrmphoto/nrmphoto.html](http://zarria.net/nrmphoto/nrmphoto.html)

I think a flat bed scanner is great for creating those maps. Just scan your peace 4 times each time rotating it 90 degrees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> awinter-py elephants do really good abstract impressionism as long as you tell them when to stop.

[http://www.getty.edu/education/teacherartexchange/archive/No...](http://www.getty.edu/education/teacherartexchange/archive/Nov06/0182.html)

Not to say that rembrandt = abstract impressionism. Still, the humans tagging features is kind of a copout. The 'grain of salt' for these projects is to look at the variation of outputs when you tweak the model inputs. In this case it's going to be a head with oil paint texture 9 times out of 10 (and the tenth will be cecilia jimenez 'I fix').

It won't be long until a computer can 'participate' in a genre and really contribute to art. This project, while cool, isn't there yet.

<comment><USER13> Take a look at these:

* Combining Markov Random Fields and Convolutional Neural Networks for Image Synthesis ([http://arxiv.org/abs/1601.04589](http://arxiv.org/abs/1601.04589))

* A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style ([http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.06576](http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.06576))

They do much more than photoshopping. It's actual synthesis of new images in the style of a desired painter.

<comment> awinter-py neural blending side-by-side on p6 of the first paper is really cool

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If it was that easy, why didn't they produce more paintings?

I have the feeling that a lot of human work still went into this painting (besides writing the algorithm).

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm interested in how they 3d printed this picture. Also how they colored it.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm curious why I cannot get hi res scans of old masterpieces I can use as wallpaper on my monitor. Doing image searches only turns up low res versions.

<comment><USER17> Check out: [https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/search?s=objecttype&p=1&ps=12&...](https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/search?s=objecttype&p=1&ps=12&f.principalMaker.sort=Rembrandt%20Harmensz.%20van%20Rijn&ii=0)

They require you to make an account, but they have tens of thousands of public domain photographs of many of the artworks in their collection.

<comment><USER16> That looks awesome! Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It would be cool if we could upload a photo and then have it oil painted by a computer in Rembrandt style.

<comment><USER19> Yes, and I imagine it would be a short step to having e.g. your portrait painted in the style of an artist of your choice for a fraction of the cost. I wonder could there be any intellectual property issues arising from this down the line?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Everybody keep calm - the Sublime Text 2 instance used to code in the video was registered.</comment>


How can Wall Street be so healthy when Main Street isn't? - <AUTHOR> https://apnews.com/6cadd78335fd98926ffb1e5d6ecb2916 <comment><USER2> By holding interest rates so low, the Fed has created a double-bind: despite the systemic risks (which are very high) people who have investable cash have two options: the stock market or paying down debt.

The stock market is being "invested" in not because it is a good investment at this point (it isn't) but because there is no where else to go. If interest rates ever revert to anything normal, it will get crushed. In the meantime this means that large, multinational companies are flush and are able to destroy smaller, more local competition. This trend is aided by the lockdowns, as well as the fact that large companies have access to the extremely low interest rates, but smaller players do not. You will continue to pay usurious rates on credit cards and most small business loans, while Global Corp. can issue corporate debt as very low rates.

Paying down debt is the opposite of what the Fed wants: in our system debt is the true money supply, so when debt is extinguished the money supply contracts. You can see this clearly in 2008:

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TCMDO](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TCMDO)

Steve Keen outlines our best hope, a modern debt jubilee, here:

[http://www.profstevekeen.com/modern-debt- jubilee/](http://www.profstevekeen.com/modern-debt-jubilee/)

<comment><USER3> >Steve Keen outlines our best hope, a modern debt jubilee, here:

>[http://www.profstevekeen.com/modern-debt- jubilee/](http://www.profstevekeen.com/modern-debt-jubilee/)

This doesn't really make sense. If you force me to pay down debt and I want cash then I'm just going to take out more debt.

Low interest rates or high debt aren't really the fundamental problem. The problem is a concentration of cash/wealth. Adam Neumann is a billionaire because he convinced some morons in Japan to give his company 10s of billions of Saudi money. But an average Joe would be laughed out of a bank if they asked for 10s of thousands to start a business.

If we are worried about a deflationary spiral the solution is simple. Give everyone money.

<comment><USER2> > If we are worried about a deflationary spiral the solution is simple. Give > everyone money.

Yeah, you might want to spend a bit more time thinking and reading about it. Keen has been ignored and mocked by the economics establishment, but he's the only guy I know who takes debt seriously and has developed computer models for dealing with the natural instability of exponential growth in it (Krugman famously has said "we owe it to ourselves").

You need to bring the total debt load down, to bring the absolute payment load down to a sustainable level and handle the exponent in debt growth. Giving everyone money without forcing them to pay down debt doesn't accomplish that, it's a linear response to an exponential problem. There's a reason debt jubilees were built into most pre-modern societies.

<comment><USER3> > bring the total debt load down

You saw the part where I said people would just take out new debt, right? You can't force people to lower their debt load unless you also prevent them from taking out more debt.

<comment><USER2> I would again suggest reading and thinking about Keens much more extensive treatment of the topic. We aren't going to make much progress here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's really not that complicated. Wall Street doesn't (generally) own businesses on Main Street. Main Street is skewed towards locally owned boutiques, cafes, shops, restaurants and so on. Those are getting killed but it doesn't matter to the S&P 500 because they're not listed there. To some extent it is good for the S&P 500 as the money shifts from those locally owned businesses to the mega corps in the S&P 500.

We've gone from ~4% unemployment to 10-15%. Which sounds bad. But if you flip it around, we've gone from 96% employment to 85-90%. The vast majority of people are still employed and the economy is mostly still humming along.

<comment><USER4> >We've gone from ~4% unemployment to 10-15%. Which sounds bad. But if you flip it around, we've gone from 96% employment to 85-90%. The vast majority of people are still employed and the economy is mostly still humming along.

This is not how it works.

The US measures unemployment using levels, the 10-15% are U-3, which only counts people without jobs who are in the labor force. To remain in the labor force, they must have looked for a job in the last four weeks.

The U-6, or real unemployment rate, includes the underemployed, the marginally attached, and discouraged workers and is at 25%.

There are plenty of deeper explanations online but basically politicians love to talk about U-3 but the true unemployment is U-6.

<comment><USER5> U-6 was 16.5% in July - it's improving. It was 6.8% pre-COVID, so it's not really any worse off then U-3. It's still about a 10% jump in both.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Where else are you gonna put your money? Stable governments are paying ~0 or negative interest.

I'm actually asking, right now I'm just paying off debt but would be curious what people think. If I didn't have the debt I'd probably buy equities (index fund, etc.) like everoyne else.

<comment><USER7> Commodities could be another option. I think gold and silver aren't great choices right now, but maybe platinum is. Along this same line, real estate has real value to it.

<comment><USER8> Lumber has been having quite the ride the last several weeks

<comment><USER7> Could be a good shortterm play. I'd be concerned about getting in now for a long hold. The price spikes are mostly due to covid related supply issues. Prices should normalize in the next few months (I think).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Federal Reserve balance sheet:

[https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttren...](https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttrends.htm)

The simplified version is that when the Fed wants to inject money/liquidity it buys assets (exchanging new "money" for the asset) in the open market. These operations are done within the financial system. The idea is that banks next loan the money to non-financial businesses which in turn stimulates economic activity. But that last part isn't happening, the injected liquidity is remaining within the financial system where it is being used to bid up the prices of existing financial assets rather than being used to create new ones.

</comment><comment><USER10> Personal take: A subset of "Main Street" is unhealthy not the entire country. Most things are not closed anymore and the stock market is propped up by tech stocks that saw little slow down due to COVID.

It's weird situation because I'd be willing to bet that the people who own stocks are simply not the one that have been laid off.

<comment><USER11> And if all businesses are hit by hard economic times, should all stocks go down? Wouldn't that mean that people are selling stocks and not buying other stocks?

I don't think modern investors just don't-buy-stocks unless they need the money for something else. They invest in _something_. And if everything is doing poorly, that means the market doesn't change.

<comment><USER12> I wouldn't assume everything is doing poorly. There are big winners and big losers in this economy, and the S&P 500 happens to be constituted primarily of the winners. Almost anything digital right now is gold.

There's also the fact that many companies that are doing well right now are keeping quiet about it. I know from personal experience at the company I work for (fintech midsized startup) that executives are very careful not to be openly positive about benefiting from the pandemic. Publicly admitting that you profitted by a global pandemic and an economic recession is in poor taste, and companies are rightly tentative about doing so.

From my work I've seen anything adtech related explode. Publishers or aggregators whose primary revenue stream is online advertising income are growing at incredible rates. Assuming that everyone is hurting because physical businesses are hurting is a huge mistake.

Additionally, as many analysts have been saying, the pandemics primary effect so far has been to accelerate existing trends, not create new ones. We're seeing a fast-foward in economic transition. Companies that were well positioned before the pandemic for the economy of the future (automation, digital) are doing swimmingly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The price of productive assets goes up as interest rates fall, this is a simple NPV calculation.

Interest rates are low, and have been low in the developed world for a while. The reason for this has nothing to do with central bank conspiracy theories. The neutral rate of interest is determined by productivity growth, profitability of available investments, and how much capital there is that can be invested in them. The best a central bank can do is 1. be good at detecting where this equilibrium is and reacting to it, and 2. move interest rates at the margins to smooth out the business cycle.

Think of it this way. If, in the aggregate, an average business would make a real return of 3% per year, then an interest rate above 3% would discourage all but the best business ideas from being pursued. Likewise a lower rate would encourage investment in worse ideas with lower profit margins. This is one way to think about the "neutral rate of interest." It is determined by exogenous facts about the real economy.

Now, we have fewer "profitable ideas" (and lower productivity growth correspondingly), and significantly more savings due to greying populations (people who are older/will live longer require more savings) and cultural tendencies (e.g. higher savings rates in China, Germany). So the neutral rate falls, and the result of that the price of capital goods rises.

Central banks' hands are effectively forced by this situation. If policy maintained an artificially high interest rate when the neutral rate is lower, economic contraction would ensue disadvantaging all parties.

</comment><comment><USER14> Basically, you can think of the stock market (price) driven by two components: 1) an aggregate of all company profits in the stock market and 2) the cost of borrowing capital (discount rate).

1) Corporate Profits - From what I recall, corporate profits have been flat to down over recent quarters.

2) Discount Rate - The cost of borrowing capital has been falling as governments make access to capital easier for businesses. This has a huge effect on the valuation of the stock market compared to the impact of the profits. This is why the stock market continues to go up. The issue is that if you were to make access to capital harder, thus increasing the discount rate, companies in theory wouldn't be able to borrow as much, and therefore grow as much. Thus, the market would in theory go down, probably alot.

</comment><comment><USER15> Just from a very theoretical level, low interest rates means the net present value (NPV) of companies, ie their stock prices, are weighted more heavily to future earnings and not just this year's earnings. So if the market is pricing in some return to normalcy, even if it's a year or two out, you wouldn't expect to see much of a hit. Assuming companies can get from here to there without going bankrupt, something the government has been very explicit about helping with by providing cheap/free funds.

Edit: Plus there's FAAMG driving the S&P500 up, who for obvious reasons are doing very well right now.

<comment><USER16> This is true but incomplete. The S&P500 is basically at the same level as mid- February, and even if expected earnings for, say, mid-2021 forward are the same as they were in February, the missing earnings between February 2020 and mid-2021 should be reflected in prices.

What's missing is that a decrease in interest rates also directly results in an increase in the NPV of future distributed earnings. That increase seems to have offset the decrease in the expected nominal (undiscounted) value of earnings. But this also makes for lower expected returns in the future: In principle, if interest rates and expected earnings stay the same, the unwinding of that discounting is what drives equity returns.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Easy Congress put on bandannas and robbed the tax payers of about $18,000 each.

Congress then turned around and gave taxpayers $1,200 each, of their own money, that total amount can be doubled that to account for the temporary unemployment benefits increase. The rest of the taxpayer money went to the FED so they will guarantee the prices of shit stock...the market can't lower because as many rich CEOs and investors cash out their shit stock the FED is there to buy at these artificial prices.

Its not healthy obviously, its just another in a long line of scams on taxpayers who paid for the golden parachutes and will be left holding the bag. There is about $4.2T the FED has to buy stock at artificial prices so it will be sometime before this bubble pops.

<comment><USER18> I'd really like to read more about how tax payers are paying $18,000 each but all I can find as a source is some twitter comment and a reddit thread where the claim is disputed. Do you have something more substantial I could read? At first glance it seems extremely exaggerated so I'd like to get my head around it.

<comment><USER19> I think this is simply dividing the cost of relief packages by the number of taxpayers. It's oversimplification of government budgeting to the point that it doesn't mean much of anything other than to give a sense of scale.

<comment><USER20> Over-simplification in the extreme. Much of the stimulus was in the form of lending. The government will get most of that money back over time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Because the rules around running a business in the COVID-19 environment have been set such that large companies can afford to comply with them but small business can't without losing money. So all their employees, and eventually the business owners themselves, bear the brunt of that.

</comment><comment> blaser-waffle TINA -- There Is No Alternative [to Wall Street]

Plus economies of scale on top of COVID killing mom & pop shops means that only large scale players can survive as Main Street offerings, e.g. the Starbucks on every block, or large chain eateries.

</comment><comment><USER22> Remember the stock market has always been a game, it's never mirrored reality.

I'd say that the institutions that own the majority of stocks, colluded and just decided to sit tight.

</comment><comment><USER23> "Main Street is the now, Wall Street is the future" is the main point. Yes, things are bad now but it's not permanent.

</comment><comment><USER24> 1\. Stock markets are forward looking. Prices reflect expectations about the company going far into the future, not just right now. So yeah, this year and next year are going to be bad, but we expect that five years from now things will be back to normal or better and prices reflect that.

2\. Companies in the S&P 500 (which is what people often mean when they talk about Wall Street/the market/etc) are by definition are big and have easy access to the capital markets. Consequently, they are the best positioned to whether the storm and seize the opportunities as they come. When things start recovering companies with money/easy access to the bond market are going to be the ones who can open new locations and capitalize on pent up demand.

3\. There are a bunch of big companies that have actually done well for the last six months. The obvious ones are companies like Amazon, Netflix and Zoom, but for instance Target and Walmart have benefited from being allowed to stay open because they sell essentials while also selling everything else so they were often the only option other than Amazon.

4\. When people talk about the S&P 500 recovering unbelievably fast, they often mean vs. the lows in March. Those lows were not reflective of the reality of what was happening (definitionally: nobody knew the reality of what was happening, lack of testing, etc.), but there was some concern that the actual apocalypse might have occurred... and everyday as merely bad news poured in that actually restored confidence because the news was not apocalyptic. So, the prices rose.

5\. There really are a bunch of bored people buying stocks on their phone because they can't bet on sports anymore [1]. It's not clear how big an effect this is, but there really does seem to be extra retail demand for stocks.

[1] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2020-07-09/inside- the-m...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2020-07-09/inside-the-mind-of- a-young-retail-day-trader-podcast)

</comment><comment><USER25> Fed invents money. It has to go somewhere. It goes into stocks. Someday it stops and so do stocks. Your grandchildren eventually pay it off somehow.

</comment><comment><USER26> From the New York Times this morning, about the irrational stock market:

"As irrational as it might seem, here's the way investors rationalize the bullish stock market to themselves (we'll only find out whether they are right or wrong in the future):

1\. The stock market is forward-looking: Investors are betting on what the world and the economy look like in 12 to 18 months from now, not what they look like today, tomorrow or this fall.

2\. The big get bigger: Much of the stock market's success has been the result of a run-up in value for a few big technology companies — including Apple, Amazon and Microsoft — that make up a large share of the index. And retailers like Walmart and Home Depot are growing in part because small businesses have closed, allowing the bigger companies to take even more market share.

3\. Betting on a vaccine: Given the daily headlines about the potential for a vaccine, investors want to be invested in the market when the news comes that there is a genuine vaccine, on the assumption that it will send stocks even higher.

4\. The only game in town: With the Federal Reserve planning to print money for the foreseeable future, investors don't want to be in cash or bonds, which are steadily losing value. So where else can they put their money? The stock market has become a default.

5\. Help from Washington: As dysfunctional as Congress has proved to be, investors are betting that Republicans and Democrats will find a way to keep plying the economy with stimulus. (Anecdotal stories suggest some Americans have even taken their $600 unemployment checks and invested them in the stock market.)

Of course, all of these rationalizations don't take into account the possibility of a terrible second or third coronavirus wave, a delay in the discovery of a vaccine, a constitutional crisis come the election in November, runaway inflation, the prospect of higher taxes to pay for the stimulus, a more significant trade war with China, or the dozens of other risks that seem to be bubbling just below — and in some cases on — the surface.

In the meantime, happy trading!"

 __ __ __*

#4 I hadn't thought of, and is a VERY troubling sign I think. Cash is devaluing because of inflation. Bonds are devaluing because of a loss of hope of future repayment (they are debt instruments).

<comment><USER27> #4 seems like somewhat of an overstatement. It's true that you probably can't really keep money out of the stock market if you have appreciable money to invest. But that doesn't mean you can't reasonably hedge your bets at least somewhat. You won't get the full upside if the market continues to do well but you do have some downside protection that has at least a small return.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Money printer goes brrrrr.

</comment><comment><USER29> So many ways to approach that question. One might be, look at the shape of a graph of S&P 500 over the last 4 decades or so, vs the shape of wages adjusted for inflation.

At this point, assuming one can tell you much about the other requires justification.

</comment><comment><USER30> The bull case is that by mid-1Q we have a vaccine and the crisis is over. Government fiscal and monetary keeps the economy on life support until that happens. If you value a business bottom up and you think 2021/2022 sort of revert back to 2019 then by now in 2020 you are basing your valuations on those numbers and decreasing the equity value where necessary for businesses that took on debt to get through 2020. The Fed has said it will keep rates low for longer and overshoot 2% which is an average target not a ceiling. If your money has to go somewhere (and it does) then fixed income duration at paltry yields looks like a bad bet if we get a tick up in inflation. In an inflationary environment stocks aren't great but they will preserve purchasing power better than bonds. Sure you can play with commodities and bitcoins but are you as say a middle-aged saver with a family going to put your entire liquid net worth into gold bullion and bitcoin (of course this being Hacker News I expect a good number of "of course" responses!)

For my two cents I was embarrassingly late the the bull party and couldn't believe the rally back so fast. There will of course be a jobs recovery from the lows as the virus threat ebbs but I suspect a decent number of the jobs lost are structural and employment won't quickly rebound to sub 5%. Gun to my head I'd say high single digit unemployment could linger a while which is pretty painful. If the Federal government remains deadlocked then state and municipal austerity will multiply the economic pain.

<comment> the-dude AIDS never got a vaccine, SARS and MERS neither.

<comment><USER31> There are several COVID vaccines in stage 3 trials, I think it is safe to say that we will have a vaccine being rolled out by mid 2021 at the very latest.

<comment><USER32> Are you an immunologist? I'm not, but it's my layman's understanding that most candidates are likely to make it to stage 3, and that most will fail in stage 3. As far as I can tell, the number of candidates in stage 3 trials is not a strong indicator of the likelihood of a successful vaccine being developed.

<comment><USER31> No but Dr. Fauci, along with other scientists working on the vaccine (ex. Dr. Sarah Gilbert), have repeatedly said we will likely get a vaccine by 2021, and have millions of doses rolling out by mid 2021.

<comment><USER33> > No but Dr. Fauci, along with other scientists working on the vaccine, have > repeatedly said we will likely get a vaccine by 2021.

No, Dr. Fauci has said that _if_ the vaccines currently in testing, which are being rushed to production before trials are complete, pass trials, _then_ it is likely that there will be tens of millions of doses available in Spring 2021 and enough for everyone who wants them by the end of 2021.

But he's also acknowledged, at the same time, that that's an "if" and instead all of that vaccine could end up getting dumped if the trials fail.

<comment><USER31> _Looking ahead, Fauci said he's "cautiously optimistic that we will have a vaccine by the end of this year and as we go into 2021. I don't think it's dreaming … I believe it's a reality (and) will be shown to be reality."_

[https://globalnews.ca/news/7242988/fauci-usa-coronavirus- vac...](https://globalnews.ca/news/7242988/fauci-usa-coronavirus- vaccine-2021/)

Of course nothing is guaranteed, but to me that seems like we can be pretty sure that we will have a vaccine in 2021.

<comment><USER33> Your source leaves out a lot of context; see this article with more context on the same remarks: [https://www.businessinsider.com/fauci-coronavirus-vaccine- li...](https://www.businessinsider.com/fauci-coronavirus-vaccine-likely- available-to-all-americans-in-2021-2020-8)

Fauci is _cautiously optimistic_ that a vaccine will exist by the end of the year, be in limited deployment in Spring, and generally fully available in the US by the end of the year to everyone who wants it.

But that's cautious optimism that stuff currently in testing and rushed into production in anticipation of success pans out, and there is a risk that it doesn't and we're back at square one. Nowhere does he even suggest a likely timeline if his cautious optimism about the current crop isn't realized, which he very clearly acknowledges it might not be.

It may seem _to you_ to be "pretty sure" we'll have a vaccine in 2021, but that's certainly not a conclusion supporter by Dr. Fauci's statement.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: I made a command-line iMessage interface - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/CamHenlin/imessageclient

<comment><USER2> Please note that this isn't actually using the iMessage protocol, this just uses AppleScript to fire messages via Messages.app. However, it's nice to finally be able to iMessage over SSH. :)

<comment><USER3> Agreed! I'm definitely going to lift some of this code for some Alfred workflows too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Please post it, I'd love to see what you come up with!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _## Why did you make this?_

 _Why not?_

Regardless of the actual repository (though don't get me wrong, this is still super cool and I like seeing AppleScript in action since I feel like it's criminally underused), this kind of thing in a Readme always brings a grin to my face. Tinkering for tinkering's sake is the best.

<comment><USER5> "Why not?" is fine, but my question is:

What are you going to use it for?

<comment><USER6> I'd say using iMessage over ssh. What makes your question more valid than 'why make this'?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For those of you who, like me, might want to use this on older hardware, I got an error on launch on Mac OS X 10.8.5 Mountain Lion: [https://github.com/CamHenlin/imessageclient/issues/2](https://github.com/CamHenlin/imessageclient/issues/2)

Just thought I'd mention it here in case others are thinking of trying this out on Mountain Lion.

 _Edit:_ CamHenlin has already committed a fix for this problem. Nice work!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, hoping that I can help you out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If it could be ingrated with [WeeChat] [1], it could be a way to provide iMessage support as a [web browser chat client] [2] and to [Android devices] [3].

[1]: [https://weechat.org/](https://weechat.org/) [2]: [https://github.com/glowing-bear/glowing-bear](https://github.com/glowing- bear/glowing-bear) [3]: [https://github.com/ubergeek42/weechat- android](https://github.com/ubergeek42/weechat-android)

<comment><USER9> It's "just" using AppleScript for some GUI scripting, it's still using the Messages.app. Still a pretty cool project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I know I'll sound like I am an old man yelling "Get off my lawn!", but as far as I can tell this is a text-mode application but it is _not_ a commandline interface. Note that it's only the HN submission title that gets it wrong, the Readme.md on GitHub correctly calls it "terminal-based" rather than CLI.

An actual commandline interface would also be cool, to be able to easily send iMessages from shell scripts, for example.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, you're right, I just got excited typing out the title :) You could actually use the AppleScript files in the repo to send messages directly without the use of the rest of the code. Usage would be like this:

osascript sendmessage_single.AppleScript PHONE_NUMBER_OR_ICLOUD_EMAIL "my message text" false false

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Have you looked into using MessagesKit.framework? (In /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks)

If it's written in Obj-C, you can extract fully usable headers from it. If C++/C/etc., it will be difficult (but not impossible) to understand it.

After extracting the headers from that, you may well be able to use it instead of AppleScript.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the pointer, exactly the type of response I was hoping to elicit

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Really cool. Now I must figure a way to add this as an emacs mode. Good job!

<comment><AUTHOR> How about a Sublime plugin :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> ive played with this similar before capturing incoming. as well you can write events for messsages in javascript just now with yosemite the same as you would applescript. you can use osacompile and osascript command tools to run and compile javascript/applescript. the same things applescript can do. i find easier to write. doesnt have to be complicated to run for personal use inside ssh.

<comment><USER14> Did you tried capturing incoming messages? If yes, please redirect me how to do so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is amazing, I have been wanting something like this for some time now. Hopefully the protocol can be demystified such that this is less clumsy.

<comment><USER16> This has the potential to be some day disruptive to Twilio, Plivo, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> ANyone know of way or an app to search your iMessage threads?

<comment><USER18> [https://flexibits.com/chatology](https://flexibits.com/chatology)

This looks solid

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Awesome! Is there a way to create a new conversation?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, just wanted to let you know that I added new conversation functionality!

<comment><USER19> Great thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Cool project! Though, the OSX requirement makes its utility pretty limited.

Could someone host iMessage as a service without being sued into oblivion?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, op here, I'm actually working on a hosted solution right now making use of a set of physical Macs and fast user switching. Hoping to have something to show for it in the next several weeks!

<comment><USER21> I think this is one of those projects we all think about doing, then realize an Apple ID is way too critical to a Mac / iPhone user's security (remote wipe anyone?) to let a third party authenticate with it.

It would be really handy as something I could run on my own mac.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, the service will essentially be a man in the middle on the account, and I believe it will be very important to communicate that with users. I'll think about releasing a standalone "server" app based on the code although I've already built something somewhat similar (although even "clunkier" if you can imagine that) here: [https://github.com/CamHenlin/imessageservice](https://github.com/CamHenlin/imessageservice)

<comment><USER22> > Yeah, the service will essentially be a man in the middle on the account, > and I believe it will be very important to communicate that with users.

No, it will be very important not to do it, because you are knowingly busting security open on Apple IDs with your service and think that educating users is the best way to mitigate that. We all know most of your users won't know any better. The better way to mitigate it is to _not_ accept Apple IDs in the first place.

If you launch that service, I would feel obligated to tip off the iCloud folks that you're knowingly compromising Apple IDs. That isn't because I want to see you fail, but because you are compromising Apple IDs and your users are caught in the middle.

This is an idea you should let go. I know that sucks to hear.

<comment><USER23> I generally hate posts that are just a +1 to something, but I feel your point is important enough that it needs echoing. I as well will do the same as you if I see a service like this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> vhost- macmini-server-in-a-closet = iMessage on linux over ssh.

I should label it "iMessage server".

</comment><comment><USER24> Yeah why not?

</comment><comment><USER25> Anyone know of a CLI client for Microsoft lync?

<comment><USER26> Yup. Pidgin + SIPE [http://sourceforge.net/projects/sipe/](http://sourceforge.net/projects/sipe/) \+ Finch [http://linuxers.org/article/finch-command-line- alternative-p...](http://linuxers.org/article/finch-command-line-alternative- pidgin)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Bitlbee!!</comment>


[video] Does the W3C not actually exist? - <AUTHOR> https://youtu.be/S97TCpuBvnc
Sorry for the video, couldn't find a resonable text article on the subject.
I'm just getting into programming and tech on a professional level so I don't have anything useful to add to the conversation but I would love to hear some thoughts on the matter. <comment><USER2> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulf_War_Did_Not_Take_Plac...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulf_War_Did_Not_Take_Place)</comment>


When an "African unicorn" commits fraud - <AUTHOR> https://newsletters.iafrikan.com/issues/when-an-african-unicorn-commits-fraud-195304 <comment><USER2> More info on the fraud and broader context here: [https://qz.com/africa/1692129/jumia-reveals-internal- staff-f...](https://qz.com/africa/1692129/jumia-reveals-internal-staff-fraud- legal-fights-widening-losses/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Jumia is not an african unicorn. That point bears repeating over and over again.</comment>


U.S. Department of Energy Unveils Blueprint for the Quantum Internet - sahin-boydas https://www.energy.gov/articles/us-department-energy-unveils-blueprint-quantum-internet-launch-future-quantum-internet <comment><AUTHOR> Quantum encryption is solving a non-problem. It provides a mechanism which guarantees that a message sent over a point-to-point optical link hasn't been intercepted. However:

* It is orders of magnitude slower than normal data transmission.

* The range is limited.

That makes it suitable for key exchange between two switches connected by a fibre. However Diffie-Hellman key exchange does this perfectly well already, if you need it. Also quantum encryption can't survive going through any kind of forwarding other than an optical circuit switch, so as soon as you do anything higher level you need to decrypt and re-encrypt the data, breaking the physical guarantees.

When you look at the security threats to modern communication, physical taps are way down the list. Security is already built on the idea that the network is compromised, so end-to-end encryption is already the norm. Adding quantum encoding buys you nothing.

<comment><USER2> Oh, it's Quantum as in "quantum encryption" rather than "let's break the speed of information thanks to quantum entanglement"?

That starts to make more sense.

<comment><USER3> You can't use entanglement on its own to signal at all, let alone sidestep the light speed limit.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No- communication_theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> It's great to see fundamental research being funded.

However, the title is... a tad ambitious. To the best of my understanding, the "quantum internet" so far has managed to transport 1 bit across 26 miles and it's not clear at which speed (yeah, I know it's theoretically above the speed of light, but I'm not sure about the specifics here) or which infrastructure was needed (apparently, fiber cable, in which case it's not entirely clear to me what makes this quantum).

<comment><USER3> No, it's not faster than light. It can't be. You have to physically pass particles around to communicate, and those move at a normal speed.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No- communication_theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem)

All quantum cryptography does is make the photons you send tamper-evident. You can use it to establish a shared key that can't be snooped on, and then use that to communicate using ordinary symmetric cryptography. Of course, asymmetric crypto does this fine, so unless you are very suspicious of modern asymmetric crypto you probably don't need it.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the precisions, my bad :)</comment></comment></comment>


Apply HN: lumiverse – the best place to discover educational videos - <AUTHOR> http://lumiverse.io<p>I want lumiverse to become the perfect place for people to publish, discover and discuss great educational videos. I want to build a friendly and intelligent community, make it easy for video creators to find an audience, and make it easy for viewers to discover awesome videos. <comment><USER2> Would there be a kid friendly area of lumiverse? As a mom of 3, I think this would be great if I knew it was safe for my curious kiddos.</comment>


Nvidia's first DirectX 11 Video Card Launched: GeForce GTX 480 [Review] - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2361767,00.asp

<comment><USER2> Neat, it's a single chip, with as the name suggests 480 cores.

So in raw power for computing applications it should be comparable to a GTX 295 (which uses two chips), but the new chip is said to be much closer to a general purpose CPU. Does anybody know more about the chip?

specs here:

<http://www.nvidia.com/object/product_geforce_gtx_480_us.html>

and for the 295:

<http://www.nvidia.com/object/product_geforce_gtx_295_us.html>

At first sight the memory bandwidth seems to be a bit lower, but that's no surprise given the width of the memory bus being smaller, the increased clock rate does not quite make up for the less than twice as wide memory bus.

Interesting that it is quad sli ready, that would be a monster machine.

It also has a bit less memory on board standard than the GTX 295.

It seems there is also a lower end version of the card labeled the gtx 470.</comment>


Slack is down - <AUTHOR> https://status.slack.com/ <comment><USER2> When things like this happen, I start thinking how much we got some things wrong, especially things like chat.

Here I sit, with my colleagues, connected to the same network, with the same application open, but we cannot write to each other, because some backend server in the US have a problem.

How in the world could this not have been fixed yet? Our internet backbone addiction is seriously crippling us when things go sour. Not thinking specifically about Slack, but other more mission-critical tools that just... stops working because they cannot ask the time from their backend server.

We seriously need P2P systems (without blockchains please) that can be used by normal applications to solve issues like this. Offline and local network communication should be obligatory today.

<comment><USER3> Why not simply use IRC?

<comment><USER4> Because, while you can by dint of extreme effort produce a user experience with IRC that's broadly comparable with what Slack offers out of the box, doing so requires so much relatively rare expertise, and so much more support investment, that it's not cost-effective to do so.

<comment><USER5> We have an IRC server that lives in private IP space and is only accessible by VPN. It was not rocket science to set up. If you think that running ircd- hybrid on debian requires "rare" expertise, then your definition of rare and mine do not exactly match.

<comment><USER4> Running an ircd doesn't require rare expertise. Running an IRC infrastructure that your sales team can and will use, that's as reliable as Slack is - well.

<comment><USER6> Is using an IRC client any less intuitive compared to using a locally installed Slack client (or, in the past, using something like AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Google talk, etc)?

<comment><USER4> No, as long as you pick a client that supports automatic image unfurling, file sharing via some cloud storage service or other, a broad range of emoji including customizable ones (people care more than you think!), _and_ run a bouncer so your users don't lose their entire scrollback every time they disconnect.

I'm not saying that an IRC experience comparable to Slack _can 't_ be achieved. I'm saying that it is so much work to do so that, for many organizations, just paying Slack a few bucks a user makes a lot more sense than sinking scarce and vastly more expensive engineer time into reinventing that particular wheel.

<comment><USER5> There are a number of people that will say automatic image unfurling and file sharing are unwanted features which also pose security risks, if you want to operate a truly internal-only text chat system...

<comment><USER4> If you want a truly internal-only text chat system for security reasons, you're not looking at Slack to begin with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> But the stupid status page says it's still up.... this is like S3 all over again

[https://status.slack.com/](https://status.slack.com/)

<comment><USER8> I swear, most of these status pages could just be static HTML with how inaccurate they are during an actual outage.

<comment><USER7> HN Could make a killing selling a saas product that monitors if sites are up. Honestly it's more reliable at this point.

<comment><USER9> Ostensibly, that already exists: [https://www.statuspage.io/](https://www.statuspage.io/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hooray! Everybody can do some work now, without distractions! Be swift everybody, that's your rare chance!

<comment><USER11> He typed on Hacker News...

<comment><USER10> Yep, that's another funny part :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Mmmh, how peaceful it feels. Like someone turned Internet loudness off and the balance has shifted to life for a while.

</comment><comment><USER13> For the past few weeks there have been a series of 500 errors accumulating on strangely easy API requests ( like user presence detection ) on an increasing number of endpoint hits, more and more frequently.

<comment><USER7> Agreed. Also issues with the sidebar loading and the mentions bar loading.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Slack going down really did something strange at my workplace. My cube- neighbors started talking to me using their mouths, instead of sending Slack messages. It was very disconcerting.

</comment><comment><USER15> Bitbucket is also having issues since at least 13:47 UTC.

[https://status.bitbucket.org/](https://status.bitbucket.org/)

<comment><USER16> Yeah, had problems all day today!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The silly thing is that Slack is perfectly shardable, as teams cannot communicate with other teams, so a global failure like this isn't necessary.

<comment> vhost- Slack has shared channels: [https://get.slack.help/hc/en- us/articles/115004151203-Create...](https://get.slack.help/hc/en- us/articles/115004151203-Create-shared-channels-on-a-workspace-beta-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> No problem, I'll just switch to a different server on this IRC network... oh.

</comment><comment><USER19> Maybe someone ran the client on the server.

</comment><comment><USER20> first thought after closing: peace at long last

<comment><USER7> Shudder at the thought of sending an email lol

<comment><USER21> Someone replied to our internal outage notification and replied to everyone@ with a gif. The chaos has begun.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Now time to go to twitter and read all of the tweets about slack being down.

<comment><USER23> Why, when you can come to Hacker News and read all of the duplicate postings? (-:

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16109335](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16109335)

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16109132](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16109132)

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16109140](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16109140)

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16109194](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16109194)

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16108912](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16108912)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Update on status page: [https://status.slack.com/2018-01/d8cf1517de9ecfa8](https://status.slack.com/2018-01/d8cf1517de9ecfa8)

</comment><comment><USER25> Mattermost is a self hosted alternative to Slack. Very happy with it.

</comment><comment><USER26> There was a Glitch in the Matrix!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch_(video_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch_\(video_game\))

</comment><comment><USER27> Is Slack's status page down as well? I can't reach [https://status.slack.com/](https://status.slack.com/)

<comment><USER28> same here (mid-Atlantic, Verizon) edit: although I am now able to chat on Slack with some colleagues, the status page is still down for me

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> What's the problem here? This is the 2nd time I recall a major outage in the last few months. How can they get something so wrong? Where's the resiliency and failover? What could possibly happen that causes such a system-wide failure?

Granted - I've never built or run any system on such a scale as Slack - but I think that I would have either 1. learned from past experience 2. built some anti-fragility into the thing...

<comment><USER30> Everybody _thinks_ they have resiliency and failover. But like any software, until you try it, it doesn't work. It has to be debugged. And nobody is willing to put up entire data centers to try recovery from a system-wide failure. Especially not a startup company.

<comment><USER31> I think Netflix struck a good balance with their Chaos Monkey tool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Guys can someone check all my jenkins builds for me and tell me what's going on, i'm flying blind here.

<comment> forgot-my-pw It's ok, bitbucket is down too. Let's take a break!

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Even the status page is down for me.

</comment><comment><USER13> Back online //

</comment><comment><USER34> It says to clear cache and restart. Now its sitting there...

<comment><USER13> That was a notice posted for yesterday.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Lastpass is also down.

</comment><comment><USER36> Ah, good someone else! Thought it was the coffee shop internet.

</comment><comment><USER37> same</comment>


Ask HN: New product management tool advice - <AUTHOR> hey guys, so i run a product agency, and i do a lot of research for my mockups, examining competitors etc.
Got tired of doing this through googling and created a tool that shows galleries of similar pages by category (all homepages, 404s, promo pages etc.)
Now i find this tool pretty useful because it cuts my research time but too bare-bones to be commercially viable.
So, my questions are:
1) what do you guys think about this product?
2) what features would you find useful if added?
thanks! <comment><USER2> How do the galleries get populated?</comment>


WebRTC + Web Cryptography API Chat Experiment - <AUTHOR> https://raed.tn/php/webrtc/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is based on the serverless-WebRTC project. I am working on a QR-code based solution for simpler sharing of "offer" and "answer".

If you have any idea on how to exchange that data (without a server) I'm all ears.</comment>


Bay Area Transit Agencies Among Several to Recieve Billions in State Funds - <AUTHOR> https://www.sfgate.com/news/bayarea/article/Bay-Area-Transit-Agencies-Among-Several-To-12871351.php <comment><AUTHOR> Now if only those funds were combined with more housing at transit sites: [https://reason.com/volokh/2018/04/22/the-failure-of- californ...](https://reason.com/volokh/2018/04/22/the-failure-of-california- bill-827-and-t)</comment>


Open-Source Docker Projects - <AUTHOR> http://www.centurylinklabs.com/top-10-open-source-docker-projects/

<comment><USER2> People just love sabotaging their own web sites: [http://www.imgur.com/rWEXEeR.png](http://www.imgur.com/rWEXEeR.png)</comment>


Show HN: A syntax-diagram generator for rust's macro_rules() - <AUTHOR> https://lukaslueg.github.io/macro_railroad_wasm_demo/ <comment><USER2> Try feeding the Java-ish Rust macro[0] into it, which was featured on HN last week.

> Failed to parse, and I didn't even write an error-handler. Anyway:

> ParseError(None)

0: [https://gitlab.com/jD91mZM2/jrust/blob/master/src/lib.rs](https://gitlab.com/jD91mZM2/jrust/blob/master/src/lib.rs)

<comment><USER3> do you mean to say there's a rust macro that lets you type java in rust? that's a horrible thing to invent! un-invent! exterminate at once!

<comment><USER2> There is, sort-of, and the macro appears to kill this tool. ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nothing happens, and I see this in the developer console:

      ReferenceError: WebAssembly is not defined

Does this need some kind of special browser?

<comment><USER5> Are you running the latest firefox? Works for me, but I don't see anything special about it.

<comment><USER4> Yes, I'm using the latest Firefox on my update channel (ESR), namely 52.9.0. It's up to date.

<comment><USER6> WebAssembly is explicitly disabled on the ESR version of Firefox 52, per [https://www.caniuse.com/#search=webassembly](https://www.caniuse.com/#search=webassembly), so that would explain that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Too bad you can't do the inverse: graphically lay out a syntax-diagram and get a macro_rules!() block back...</comment>


If you're not happy with Facebook's privacy, you have 4 choices. - <AUTHOR> http://safeandsavvy.f-secure.com/2010/05/03/privacy-facebook/

<comment><USER2> Option 4 should be more like assume any interaction you have with Facebook (be it through what you post or clicking like buttons or what sites you login to using Facebook Connect) is public knowledge. If you don't want something to get out on the internet, don't put it there in the first place. Even private emails between people get out when one party decides to forward it to someone else.</comment>


Energy Efficiency Across Programming Languages - <AUTHOR> https://sites.google.com/view/energy-efficiency-languages <comment><USER2> This is really interesting. Very excited to see the rust results.

I have to ask... _What on earth_ is the story with the regex-redux test? TypeScript beats C?!</comment>


Flipboard failure: Why are reviews ignoring the problems? - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/business/114998/flipboard-failure-why-are-reviews-ignoring-problems <comment><USER2> Not surprised at all that few people are talking about the problems that Fliboard is having. Most of the people reviewing are early adopting techies (Scoble, techcrunch). They understand the and are forgiving of the problems that come with launching as a startup (think of Twitter or Mint). They care much more about the product and whether or not it has value in their daily lives. Seems they're unanimously agreeing that it does in fact hold value.

<comment><USER3> Well that would be ok if it were slow or worked most of the time. It just doesn't work! Anyway, it's a decent product but not a big deal. The main issue is that technical journalism has stopped being journalism and has become a slave to the PR ecosystem. Journalism is a cornerstone of a free society and unfortunately, at least when it comes to reporting on technical products and services, it's controlled by PR programs. Flipboard is not a 2 man garage startup. It raised 10+M to write a page flipping UI. They did a great job of their PR launch though!

<comment><USER4> Would you still read a technical publication that _never_ got early press releases (so was always a day late to big announcements) or reviewer devices because they spat on all the PR flaks?

<comment><USER3> eli, no i wouldn't. but the coverage on this product is imbalanced for a product that isn't working yet. PR is good and necessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think if you're saying its a fail, because they couldn't handle traffic based on their press release then this is not a fail. This is actually a great validation for them , that people are interested in their product.

On the other hand if you read about how they are scraping content, and possibly violating copyright of other sites.. then this could be an issue.

<comment><USER6> It seems fairly similar to a new website launch that crashes under the traffic. Sure you have eyeballs but they just think "oh yeah, that thing is junk" and _tell everyone that_.

The only advantage for an app is that people might still have it downloaded when they want to try it again. If they don't delete it immediately (and rate it 1 star in the popup).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Actually, this angst about the app not working might be better directed towards Twitter, who throttles API connections to maintain performance. Flipboard can't help it that the demand of users that want to receive tweets through their app is higher than Twitter allows.

This article should have just said "twitter fails" and it would be more accurate.

<comment><USER8> I think this is more about the fact that Flipboard processes the tweets on their own servers. I don't think the twitter api throttling is a factor.

<comment><USER7> I see. The message I got from Flipboard app made it sound like they had exceeded their time-based quota of Twitter API traffic, but it makes sense that perhaps it is the Flipboard servers that are getting too much traffic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't get the problem. The app is great, they are having launch/growing pains. That much is true, to be sure, but would you write an article about how great twitter is and then be sure to write _but I occasionally get the fail- whale!_? I don't think so, it dates your article severely and isn't really relevant to the quality of the product.

Next week (or soon, anyway) things will smooth out. Review the app on it's functionality/style/etc not on the short-comings of it's server infrastructure. The latter is a detail that can be fixed pretty easily while the former is pretty permanent.

<comment><USER10> > _Review the app on it's functionality/style/etc not on the short-comings of > it's server infrastructure. The latter is a detail that can be fixed pretty > easily while the former is pretty permanent._

Was this missing a "/sarcasm"?

This seems like the most recklessly harmful remark I've read on Hacker News in ages.

Ideas are easy; implementation—especially in iron—is hard. It matters, and it's exponentially harder post launch.

> _would you write an article about how great twitter is and then be sure to > write but I occasionally get the fail-whale!? I don't think so, it dates > your article severely and isn't really relevant to the quality of the > product_

Mashable would, two days ago, on 21 July 2010:

<http://mashable.com/2010/07/21/twitter-scalability/>

To quote this "severely dated" article:

> _"[Twitter] must first and most importantly achieve an acceptable uptime > ratio. All the partnerships, revenue and media buzz in the world can fall a > bit flat when the app itself doesn't work."_

<comment><USER9> I think you're taking a bit of a leap with what I said. I'm not saying it's only the idea that is important at all, I'd be the first to argue that ideas are actually worth next to nothing by themselves. What I was trying to say was that their idea and their implementation are solid -- specifically I'm saying the part of the implementation that counts is solid. Server infrastructure problems are a minor detail compared to the app itself IMO.

And to the last part about the mashable article... I would absolutely say that article is 'severely dating' itself. Twitter isn't going anywhere (again IMO) and some server problems aren't going to change that. In a year that article will be a slightly less embarrassing "no one will ever need more than 640k of memory" piece of writing.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Good Internet Radio Stations? - <AUTHOR> I'm a programmer... and I usually to gets to work off in dark corner and write code in piece.
Anyways, I listen to NPR all the time, in the morning I listen to Morning Becomes Eclectic. It's great, but I need a change of pace.
http://www.kcrw.com/music/shows/morning-becomes-eclectic
Can anybody recommend any good internet radio stations, with a mix of music / talk / live performance.
I need some semi easily listening or something slightly tame. I listen to punk / alternative in the evening. But that can be a little distracting cause it's so adrenaline producing. <comment><USER2> Classical music: [http://www.kusc.org/](http://www.kusc.org/)

No traditional commercials, just the occasional pledge drives advertisement.

Always mentions the ensemble and composer - sometimes the director. Sometimes a bit of chat between each piece but not too much. May not be quite what you are looking for, but it sounds like you wanted something easy listening and calming. :) With the exception of the Russian war-marches, much of it is easy- listening.

</comment><comment><USER3> WFMU.org has great shows, lots of free-form. Xray.fm is a cool station out of Portland with some talk and mostly music. Soma.fm is ambient-type stuff.

</comment><comment><USER4> WNCW, in western North Carolina, is a superb non-commercial station.

www.wncw.org

</comment><comment><USER5> FIP radio if you want great mix of music. No talk though</comment>


Is COBOL Programming a Good Long-Term Career? - <AUTHOR> https://insights.dice.com/2020/05/12/cobol-programming-good-long-term-career/ <comment><USER2> No, unless you are in south america where they basically have firms that only work on old tech. You can't out compete.

</comment><comment><USER3> Skate to where the puck is going.</comment>