New spacesuit by Boeing: First look at the suit that will take astronauts to ISS - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/01/25/a-new-spacesuit-for-a-new-spacecraft/ <comment><USER2> "All-right, let's start with the feet and work our way up. These are very light-weight, you can roll them up and stow them safely when she gets into space, but they were built in collaboration with Reebok, so, and they've actually put some branding on it for us, so you see how see how the color sort of tapers into the color of the suit."

Just so tacky. A sign of times to come?

(Yeah, I'm sure the marketing and financial departments of Reebok/Adidas did a lot of _collaboration_ with Boeing to pull this off.)

Side-note: from an outside observer this seems like just another way the United States is selling off/diluting its brand in the rest of the world. Have some pride in what you do!

<comment><USER3> Who does this hurt? All this branding does is 'reduce the cost' (increase the revenue generated) for going to space. Seems like a benefit to me.

<comment><USER4> Just poor taste, is what he's saying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The story behind the original Apollo space suits is great[0]. All the top aerospace and defense contracting companies were bested by a Playtex (the bra and girdle company), which had more experience designing high performance clothing than anyone else in the 1950's and 1960's much to the embarrassment of the ex-military space flight types. Add in the designers breaking into offices to steal back their own designs to make the suits and I can't figure out why this never made it into a movie.

[0] [https://www.wired.com/2011/02/pl_spacesuits_showdown/](https://www.wired.com/2011/02/pl_spacesuits_showdown/)

</comment><comment><USER6> [https://www.wired.com/2017/01/boeings-new-spacesuit-may- look...](https://www.wired.com/2017/01/boeings-new-spacesuit-may-look-stylish- hell-business/) is better

<comment><USER2> Somehow it also mentions Reebok, both in the video ("from the sporty new spaceboots, designed by Reebok") and the textual article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like how it can rapidly deflate and still be something practical that the astronauts can wear comfortably while indoors. Very clever. Almost makes me wish that we could move towards a society where fashion was irrelevant in consideration to function, and we could all walk around in multipurpose jumpsuits like this.

<comment><USER8> Augmented reality?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here's Boeing's press release and video on the subject. (no paywall, or crazy adds) [http://www.boeing.com/features/2017/01/space- suit-01-17.page](http://www.boeing.com/features/2017/01/space-suit-01-17.page)

</comment><comment><USER10> > _first look_

Except the site is so completely riddled with JavaScript errors from failing to handle localStorage properly that the video atop the article fails to load entirely. All of which could be avoided with a simple  tag. (Or even a <video> tag or whatever HTML5 added, but no, the video is a


NAS: Please fix your defn of P-values - <AUTHOR> https://errorstatistics.com/2019/09/30/national-academies-of-science-please-correct-your-definitions-of-p-values/ <comment><AUTHOR> If you were on a committee to draw up guidelines on P-values and replication, what's the first definition you'd check? Exactly. They didn't. It's wrong throughout the National Academies of Science recently released book.</comment>


Show HN: Annoying Google chrome extension to force you into pomodoro flow - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pomodoro-must/fgfijdapfaaflemmapmdegapgmhgfkhh <comment><AUTHOR> Hello,

Recently I've tried (again) to force myself into pomodoro flow and couldn't find the timer which satisfies my need: 1. to be able to assign pomodoros into projects. 2. to have annoying notifications that would remember me to re-start the timer again. So this google chrome browser extension [1] completely solve this by constantly reappearing in case timer not found. Extension utilizes brilliant tomato.es [2] system and is fully open sourced on github [3]. I hope it could be useful for someone else too!

[1] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pomodoro- must/fgfi...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pomodoro- must/fgfijdapfaaflemmapmdegapgmhgfkhh)

[2] [http://tomato.es](http://tomato.es)

[3] [https://github.com/ziogas/pomodoro- must](https://github.com/ziogas/pomodoro-must)</comment>


Star Wars: every movie (well the first six anyway) in XKCD inspired chart form - <AUTHOR> http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-12-16/star-wars-every-scene/7013826 <comment><USER2> A handy way to get an update on the Star Wars universe

<comment><USER3> I'm trying to furiously cram as much into my head as possible, as I've run out of time to marathon the movies ahead of tomorrow's cinema trip!</comment></comment>


Dim lighting sparks creativity - <AUTHOR>

http://www.psmag.com/blogs/news-blog/dim-lighting-sparks-creativity-60437/ <comment><USER2> It definitely does. I get a lot of ideas when I'm laying in my bed really sleepy looking at the two dim bedlights that are on while the rest of the room is black.

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe this could explain why hackers love to code late at night. I'm definitely more productive at night then in the day time.</comment>


Is Mint.com secured and recovered from the Heartbleed bug?  - <AUTHOR> https://satisfaction.mint.com/mint/topics/is_mint_com_secured_and_recovered_from_the_heartbleed_bug

<comment><AUTHOR> The official response (so far) is "We've examined our servers and are updating them to protect against the vulnerability. Customer data appears unaffected."

Is this adequately reassuring to other Mint users?

<comment><USER2> Boilerplate/automated responses are rarely helpful and often the single most frustrating thing in the technical support/customer support world. I would truly wish on technical forums (like Mint, and Microsoft, etc.) that they would be done away with.

The complete lack of emotionality and disconnect it creates with your user base is damning to your company. The only automated response I want to hear is "Your ticket was forwarded to XYZ, if there is no response within 24 hours please contact firstname.lastname@example.com".

I really feel that customer/technical support is a BIG part of keeping customers/getting repeat customers/selling via word of mouth. And its so often tossed to the way side.</comment></comment>


Getting Started with Emacs 24 - <AUTHOR> http://batsov.com/Emacs/2011/10/09/getting-started-with-emacs-24.html <comment><USER2> Additional note, the traditional starter kit configuration files, now in version 2 (tailored for emacs 24)

<https://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit>

<comment><USER3> _the traditional starter kit configuration files_

Traditional in what sense? Is emacs-starter-kit considered a must-have?

<comment><USER2> I didn't meant it literally, but in case newcomers are tempted to try this new release, they might want some dotemacs files to play along.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's why I've created the "non-traditional" Emacs Prelude <https://github.com/bbatsov/emacs-prelude> ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does anyone know the status of multithreading and concurrency in Emacs 24? As far as I can tell, multithreading didn't make it in. Why not?

<comment><USER5> None of the Unix shells (csh, bash, etc) are multithreaded either. Like Emacs, what concurrency they have comes from fork, exec and setting "listeners" (terminology?) for signals from child processes.

If I were to write a web server in Emacs Lisp (or bash) I would probably want multithreading in Emacs or (bash) but I have never felt the desire to write a web server _or anything else_ that needs multiple threads all running in Emacs Lisp, and I've written many 10s of 1000s of lines of Emacs Lisp.

Although my web browser (Firefox) is multithreaded, I spend orders of magnitude more time waiting for my web browser's UI to stop being unresponsive than I do waiting for Emacs or any of the Unix shells I have used to stop being unresponsive.

<comment><USER4> Here are some features that to the best of my knowledge are currently impossible:

* Non-blocking save on network drives

* Non-blocking autosave

* Rebuilding tag tables in the background

* Loading and fontifying large files in the background (i.e. concurrent fontification, not just jit-lock)

* Concurrent url fetching and downloads (e.g. updating el-get without blocking) [1]

* Concurrent spellcheck

* Fast scrolling in large buffers (especially complex XML files opened in nxml-mode) without annoying hacks like <http://stackoverflow.com/q/4160949>

There are plenty more improvements that wouldn't affect me personally. I imagine erc and other networked packages would also benefit from true concurrency.

[1] I just started using el-get on my laptop and I haven't checked this yet. Maybe it somehow works.

<comment><USER6> Some of these exist, and all are possible without threads.

 _Non-blocking save on network drives; Non-blocking autosave_

This requires a memcpy and the aio_* functions. When a save is requested, you make a copy of the buffer in memory (so that what ends up on disk is what the buffer looked like exactly when the save was requested), then you stream this data to disk with aio_write (perhaps making the write atomic by doing a synchronous rename after all the data is on disk). This would probably take no more than a few hours to implement, and most of the complexity is simple to handle with atomic writes and aio_cancel. I think the biggest problem is handling the "userspace" semantics; after-save hooks expect to run after the data is on disk but before the user has changed the buffer in any way. What do you do about this?

(I've done this before. I have an Emacs mode at work that saves to a special centralized database in addition to the local disk at every modification. We just queue the write in before-save hook and tell some other process to read the data from a temp file that we create. It works perfectly, even on Windows!)

 _Rebuilding tag tables in the background_

This is easy and eproject already does it. You run etags in a background process and when it's done, point Emacs at the new tags tables. Since the tags tables don't do anything until a lookup is requested, this is completely asynchronous.

Try it today:

[https://github.com/jrockway/eproject/blob/master/contrib/epr...](https://github.com/jrockway/eproject/blob/master/contrib/eproject- tags.el)

 _Loading and fontifying large files in the background (i.e. concurrent fontification, not just jit-lock)_

This you can't do unless you can guarantee that matchers are bounded and generate correct results no matter what the boundaries are. I don't know of any programming mode that could be made to meet this invariant easily; consider the case:

        /* this code is bad:
           int i = 0; */

If we had two threads fontifying this block, and the bounds were set to thread 1 = line 1, thread 2 = line 2, the results are going to be wrong. The first line will be treated as a comment and the second line will look like a normal variable declaration because getting the correct syntax information requires analyzing the entire first line. Any language with multiline constructs (string literals, preprocessor directives, comments, etc.) will have this problem, thus making parallelization Not Easy. If font-locking is slow, profile it and fix the algorithm, but don't expect speedups for free. Parsing programs that are invalid (as most are while being typed; you type characters, not tokens) and guessing what the user "means" is hard.

 _Concurrent url fetching and downloads (e.g. updating el-get without blocking)._

Fork curl or wget. Display the result when done. Or, implement HTTP from scratch; network IO is already nonblocking.

 _Concurrent spellcheck_

This is already implemented this way; a pipe is opened to aspell and words are piped to aspell as necessary. If parsing the results is too expensive and you don't care about interactivity, wait for bigger batches of data back from aspell. All IO to other processes is asynchronous and can be made synchronous with special calls like accept-process-output.

 _Fast scrolling in large buffers (especially complex XML files opened in nxml-mode)_

How will threads solve this problem?

<comment><USER4> Thank you, especially for your notes on aio_. As promised, I sent you something by email, but know that your comment is worth more than that.

 _Fast scrolling in large buffers (especially complex XML files opened in nxml-mode)_

I think nxml-where.el is guilty for the slow scrolling in large xml files. I wanted to offload that to another thread, but a simpler solution is to only update the path post-scroll.

<comment><USER6> Thanks!

It's also worth pointing out that Emacs and Emacs Lisp need not be multithreaded in order to implement specific asynchronous operations. If aio did not exist, there's nothing stopping you from creating a thread (from C), doing your blocking save there (and nothing else), and sending a note back to the lisp side when it's done. It's generic threading that adds complexity, because that would require all state-changing operations to be threadsafe, which can be very difficult to "bolt on" to a complex system like Emacs. (Not to mention locking overhead; see Python's GIL debate.)

A good example of this approach is the 0MQ messaging library. While it is internally threaded, it does not care what the application does about thread safety; there is no way that you can ever "see" its threads. It simply requires that you pass ownership of blocks of memory to the library, thus avoiding locking and issues of thread safety while still using threads.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Stop writing Regular Expressions – Express them with Verbal Expressions - <AUTHOR> http://thechangelog.com/stop-writing-regular-expressions-express-them-with-verbal-expressions/ <comment><USER2> Stop writing URLs as strings. Express them with VerbalResourceLocator:

      var vrl = VRL().
        schema("https").
        tld("com").
        sld("ycombinator").
        subdomain("news").
        path("/item").
        query({"id": "6164276"});

Seriously though, Verbal Expression is a great way to turn terse regexps into un-reusable verbiage that barely improves readability.

<comment><USER3> Speak for yourself, this is a lot clearer for me. I'm used to navigating grammars, but I can't deal with regex (way too terse). Especially when I'm not just matching, but I want to extract info. Some verbosity can go a long way to making things clearer.

Don't know if this is the solution I'm looking for though

<comment><USER4> If the terse run-together-ness of usual regexes is unclear, you may also want to look into 'freespace' formatting... which lets you insert insignificant whitespace to break the regex into logical groups/lines, and even add inline comments:

[http://www.regular-expressions.info/freespacing.html](http://www.regular- expressions.info/freespacing.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I had never heard of this before. The stated goal is to simplify difficult regular expressions, but the examples seem to be more complicated than the corresponding regexes. Maybe I'm just old school.

I'm not sure that someone who relies on this would be able to debug the resulting generated regex when something doesn't work as expected.

<comment><USER6> I agree that for someone who already has the skills to reason with regexes this has little to offer. But I'm not ready to count the idea out yet -- it's easy to underestimate the length to which people will go to avoid being forced to learn a new way to think. Easy string matching without regexes would have been extremely appealing to my just-starting-programming self.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm always a bit wary of posts that tell me to "Stop doing X". I'm also pretty comfortable with regular expressions. They take you outside of the procedural comfort zone, but are a valuable tool that will pay off to learn.

Still, it's worth a shot trying to create a tool like this. What I don't get is how they would handle subexpressions.

<comment><USER8> Looking at the wiki, I don't think it does handle them. I reckon that if jehna when to the trouble of making this, he knows of at least one use case, even if it's his own. I appreciate that he's shared his work. That said, from my own experience, by the time a regular expression becomes difficult for me to parse, there are subexpressions, negative lookbehinds, and other less comprehensible regex features that this library doesn't seem to support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> when you pretend you aren't using regular expressions, then you have two problems.

</comment><comment><USER10> pyparsing ([http://pyparsing.wikispaces.com/](http://pyparsing.wikispaces.com/)) is more object-oriented and composable, and it can parse recursive grammars.

<comment><USER11> And of course there's also Parsec ([http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/daan/download/...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/daan/download/parsec/parsec.html)) for Haskell.

<comment><USER12> My first thought was that "Verbal Expressions" are simply parser combinators, which of course can do things that individual regular expressions can't do. From the examples though it looks like this is just translating to regular expressions under the hood, which would make it considerably less powerful than Parsec and other parser combinator libs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What is news? it's LINQ just for string

</comment><comment><USER14> Looks like cl-ppcre.</comment>


Show HN: Speed-optimized keyboard-friendly news reader - <AUTHOR> https://erudite.supermind.org <comment><AUTHOR> Press ? for keyboard shortcuts.

You can personalize the feeds by signing-in.</comment>


Ask HN: What music do you listen to while coding? - <AUTHOR> Last few years I've noticed most people listen to music while programming probably due to awful office environments. Any recommendations? I like Jean Michel Jarre, Mike Oldfield, Black Sabbath, Caravan. Prog or instrumental is often good, can really get you in the zone ;-) <comment><USER2> For some reason good music[1] with vocals that I haven't heard to death add a sort-of distraction when I'm working so I choose to listen to music that I've heard enough to have memorized the vocals or music without vocals at all. Since it gets annoying to listen to songs I've memorized, I'll pick acoustic or unique covers of that music (I've grown fond of odd piano covers - I found five tracks that are piano-only versions of My Chemical Romance songs -- a band who's music I generally don't enjoy but when done in piano, it's just ... oddly interesting).

When I'm in an intense bit of code, rapidly writing implementation, I like to pop in Progressive Rock of any kind, the longer the track the better. I'll often pick something by Dream Theater, though sometimes the metal-ish sound is a little much for me depending on my mood.

[1] As in, music I enjoy listening to which is usually 70s rock and alternative from 1995-2010. That's not to imply that this is a universal definition of "good music", only that it's what _I_ enjoy listening to.

</comment><comment><USER3> It really depends on my mood. Most of the time, heavy metal and hard rock of various sorts. I like everything from 80's era hair metal, speed metal and thrash metal, to the latest black metal and death metal, with a healthy dose of NWOBHM, power metal, doom metal, etc. mixed in, as well as plenty of "just hard rock".

If not that, sometimes I listen to classical and my tastes for that are pretty all over the place. I'm not actually all that educated (or picky) when it comes to classical, so I'll usually just put on a shoutcast station in the genre and go with that.

Outside of that, when I'm coding I sometimes like electronic music that I don't otherwise listen to a lot of. I'll put on some trance/house/ambient whatever stuff, or listen to something like Daft Punk, Kraftwerk, Giorgio Moroder, etc.

</comment><comment><USER4> Depends on the time of day! Morning - classical or ambient to not fatigue the brain while tackling tougher problems: Baroque style classical, ambient: Mysteries of the Deep, FAX (Pete Namlook), Boards of Canada, film score (Tron, Hans Zimmer etc), Fez game score by Disasterpeace

Afternoon - techno, to get the adrenaline flowing again: \- any live mixes from Adam Beyer, Berghain residents, Nicole Moudaber, Nina Kraviz, etc etc

Night - Trance - really to keep the motivation going, any older A State of Trance episodes (pre 500) will do to add some melody to the grind

That's it, every day :)

</comment><comment><USER5> I like game music

POP Warrior Within - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1potMUPsJI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1potMUPsJI)

Assasin's Creed - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-nrEl3NqX8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-nrEl3NqX8)

In Motion from The Social Network - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yczul_609Gg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yczul_609Gg)

<comment><USER6> I have listened to In Motion so many times it's not even funny.

Also, A Familiar Taste is good, and Magnetic. I think Magnetic is actually my favorite track but In Motion definitely hits the spot like right when I open up my editor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> [https://focusatwill.com](https://focusatwill.com) \-- they always have a beat that fits my current energy level.

</comment><comment><USER8> That's the nice thing: [http://musicforprogramming.net/](http://musicforprogramming.net/)

</comment><comment><USER9> I use background noise: [http://www.noisli.com/](http://www.noisli.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good idea. Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Drum 'n' Bass – might be a UK thing.</comment>


First xkcd comic explained - "i wonder where i'll float next" - <AUTHOR> http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1

<comment><AUTHOR> I stumbled upon the first kxcd comic, dating all the way back to '06, it's no wonder they seemingly have a comic for every scenario. But what really int are strikingly different than the current techno-humor. I enjoy both and wanted to share them with people who might not have seen the old ones.</comment>


Slicehost now has 32-bit images - <AUTHOR> http://www.slicehost.com/articles/2010/3/1/32-bit-images-now-available

<comment><USER2> _we have created a 64-bit Slice and kernel with a 32-bit userland_

Does this mean memory consumption will be similar to that of 64-bit images, since the kernels are the same?

It seems the same amount of memory on Slicehost slices doesn't go quite as far as that on 32-bit VPSes.

<comment><USER3> No, it doesn't go as far.

<http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/11/24/slicehost-vs-linode>

Which is unfortunate, because their pricing isn't _that_ bad if that's not a factor. And they seem like good people with good service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> These 32-bit machines use too much memory. I only need a 31-bit address space! Can you guys please drop everything to support my micro-optimization needs?

<comment><USER5> I agree ... it's a major pain on EC2 to have separate images that are only used for the smallest instance sizes. While 32 bit vs 64 bit pointers do save RAM on these small machines, I think you make a good point in an amusing way, and you shouldn't be downvoted for that.

<comment><USER4> I am mostly commenting on the comments on the blog. "You guys have excellent customer service, so maybe I'll switch back after you make some obscure change for me that I could make myself, but am too lazy to."

If you want a 32bit userland, just make a directory, debootstrap the i386 userland there, and schroot to it. It's a 30 second operation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _"Unfortunately, the RPM based distro's such as CentOS and Fedora do not have 32-bit ELF support so we are, at this stage, unable to offer equivalent images for those particular distros."_

Wow. I didn't know Slicehost was on crack.

Can somebody explain to me WTF they mean that RPM-based distros don't have support for 32-bit ELF files? CentOS and Fedora have been using 32-bit ELF binaries for _ever_.

<comment><USER7> I suspect what they mean is that Fedora doesn't support running at 64-bit kernel with a 32-bit userland. The problem starts with the initramfs, and I suppose slicehost is not in the business of modifying to underlying OS all that much.

[http://www.mail-archive.com/fedora- email@example.com/msg47714....](http://www.mail-archive.com/fedora- firstname.lastname@example.com/msg47714.html)

<comment><USER6> Modern CentOS distros ship both 32-bit and 64-bit binaries (including 64-bit kernels). All they should need to do is kick a 64-bit image and remove the 64-bit binaries, and change your yum repo to a 32-bit one only. If the initrd was an issue they'd just switch to the other arch's initrd or rebuild kickstart-images with whatever support they need. This is pretty easy stuff.</comment></comment></comment>


Have we reached the end of the road for microfinance? - <AUTHOR> http://www.neweconomics.org/blog/2011/01/20/have-we-reached-the-end-of-the-road-for-microfinance

<comment></comment>


Ask HN: Moving to a hedge fund - <AUTHOR> I am considering a move to a hedge fund (background in math/software/machine learning). I'd love to hear the thoughts/advice of people who have tried such a move (or people who have friends who did). How did it work out for you? Did you have to face a huge change in culture? Was the work interesting/fulfilling? Any regrets? <comment><USER2> It might be helpful if you gave a little info about the nature of the nature you're considering. What kind of company are you moving from? What's the role like that you'd be taking on? How does it compare to the role you have now?

I don't have any personal experience in finance, so I can't answer your question, but I'm curious to hear other people's answers.

Also, I'm curious, how does the comp compare, both in relative value and structure?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm moving from a software company in the Bay Area where I work as a data scientist. The new role is a quantitative researcher ("quant"). The comp offered is considerably higher than the current one.</comment></comment>


Alien Contact Unlikely for Another 1,500 Years: Study - <AUTHOR> http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/alien-contact-unlikely-for-another-1500-years-study/ar-AAh4O0q?li=BBnb4R7 <comment><USER2> Interesting. It should be "at least another 1,500 years" as they're not saying that anything is out there, just that it would take a while for word to reach it.

Is broadcast TV the drivel that these races will judge us on? Or will they interpret the destruction on violent TV as signs of war?</comment>


Dynamic Neural Networks in Tensorflow - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Miej/Dynamic_Neural_Manifold <comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys, I put together a little project to implement dynamic neural networks in tensorflow, and I figured someone might find it interesting, so here it is!</comment>


Tell HN: I will build a functioning prototype of your idea - <AUTHOR>

I saw something similar on here a few days ago and I would love to do this as well.
I have been doing ruby on rails for about 1.5+ years and I am looking to expand my portfolio with some projects and I currently have some time to do freelance work.
This could be your minimum viable product(MVP). This could be what you link to in incubator applications. Just a web application that closely matches your basic vision.
I would be able to do very basic design based on mockups you give me.(Mockups, sketches and any graphics and copy text you want me to include)
I am willing to work 1-2 weeks per project so that I can build out your basic idea/prototype.
Let me know if you have any questions/ideas or just message me @ hnprototype[at]gmail.com
Price range for projects $800 - $1500 <comment><USER2> You plagiarized my post here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2685010>

<comment><AUTHOR> I mentioned you "I saw something similar on here a few days ago and I would love to do this as well."

<comment><USER2> You copied entire sentences word for word without quotes or attribution.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry I didn't mean too, I will change it next time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> weaksauce, i did one for 100 dollars, cheap mexican labor codes. #winning</comment>


Show HN: Worpy - yet another replacement for Google Reader - <AUTHOR>

Hey HNers,
In light of recent news, I wanted to bring attention to an RSS feed reader project I'm working on that is intended to fill the hole Google has now placed in your hearts.
It's called Worpy. If anybody has suggestions or comments, please feel free to be critical.
http://worpy.com <comment><USER2> It's just a landing page. Signed up to be notified. What feedback can I give you?</comment>


Ask HN: any startup that wants to spend two months in Copenhagen? - <AUTHOR>

Hi Guys,
Do you know a team (up to 15 people) who might want to live in Copenhagen's sexiest office space between 1. Feb - 2. Apr. 2013?
We are going to be in San Francisco for those two months and our office in Copenhagen will be free.
Email me at francesco [at] evertale [dot] com for more details.
Photos here: http://ge.tt/7fO6BwT
Cheers,
Francesco <comment><USER2> props for doing this</comment>


Ask HN: What are your monitoring data retention policies, and why? - <AUTHOR> I'm in the process of putting in place a monitoring solution which, to begin with, will collection information on:
* CPU, RAM, disk, and networking; * The system's load (averages, # of procs, etc); * User information (logged in, and so); * HAProxy, MariaDB, MongoDB, ElasticSearch;
I'm wondering what a good retention policy would be for a generic monitoring solution like this? And Why?
What policies does your business mandate and what is the reasoning behind them? <comment><USER2> We adjust it so that it uses 80% of the monitoring servers disk.

Just store as much as you can - "some" metrics is more valuable than an empty disk, even if only marginally, and you never know how you might want to slice and dice the data in future.</comment>


Franky Zapata: Flyboarding Frenchman crosses English Channel - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-49225001 <comment><USER2> So we've got Franky Zapata, and we've got Richard Browning building something comparable in the UK, and David Mayman in Australia. Is there anyone else?

Why is this all happening now? They can't all have made revolutionary breakthroughs of their own simultaneously. Is there some underlying technology that has quietly improved to the point where personal aerial dickery has become feasible?

<comment><USER3> I assume these boards must be self stabilising, so the breakthrough would be the kind of miniaturised gyroscopes, accelerometers and associated processing power found in smartphones.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure that's 100% true, I saw an interview with the french guy who said it took tens of hours to learn how to balance before he could fly it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Mentioned in the article how the French military has shown a fiscal backed interest for using this as an observation or assault platform.

Whilst platform is viable with gyro's or computer aided flying if you wish. How much kickback can it handle - could you actually fire a gun from this? But certainly does negate many of the aspect people have against armed drones as this is in effect a human drone.

But it is pretty neat, as many recall the facination with jetpacks and the dreams that we would all have them in the 60's/70's (along with flying cars), so this kinda ticks many box's of past dreams.

As for distance/flight time - kerosene is pretty dense energy wise, and I can't think of anything else that would be as flexible and offer greater energy density. But still, if you compare this to jetpacks - very impressive.

For me one use case for something like this may well be firefighting or certainly a way to escape a tall building that is on fire from your flat balcony.

<comment><USER6> Yea an assault helicopter transports troops to many locations and brings with it enough fire power to suppress anybody on the ground, however, it's somewhat common that helicopters get hit by rpg's and similar things by ground forces as they are landing or about to land so it does happen that helicopters crash land when deployed into the middle of a firefight and everybody climbs out rapidly and now are stranded. These personal airborne mobile weapons platforms (I'm sure there is an acronym there somewhere), would be much more effective if there was a swarm of say 20 of them. You couldn't just shoot an rpg at all of them and they would have the high ground basically always and could just rain fire down on you from basically all angles.. sniper nest? Better be an igloo.. top of a building? Not enough cover..

Another place they could be used is to escape following a covert raid.. you would carry or stash the platforms someplace near the operation before hand then jump on them and all take off, you would only hear them escaping.

<comment><USER7> > You couldn't just shoot an rpg at all of them

Yes, a single explosive projectile wouldn't be too effective, but consider an RPG round loaded with cluster bombs, shrapnel, or flechettes. Or the good ol' pray-n-spray with small-arms fire. You don't need much kinetic energy to kill a human on a hoverboard (or at least knock him off).

Helicopters put all of your eggs in one basket, but least it's a somewhat armored basket.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can see this as the "penthouse to penthouse" service of choice - and I for one would love to tour manhattan on one.

Likelihood of licensing some moron with a tank full of jet fuel to buzz above thousands of pedestrians- about zero % :-(

<comment><USER9> > Likelihood of licensing some moron with a tank full of jet fuel to buzz > above thousands of pedestrians- about zero %

Well, in the US there are plenty of morons with licensed fire arms, so why would jetpacks be an obstacle?

<comment><USER10> >with licensed fire arms

Even more with unlicensed fire arms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think most of the comments here are incredibly short sighted. I see this as a huge development. Nobody cares about fuel consumption when inventing a new mode of transportation that says goodbye to roads, airports, boats. This is just insane and could change the world.

<comment><USER12> This is a really cool invention, and I think it would be a lot of fun to use. But it's not the first personal flying device, and fuel considerations have been an obstacle to many of those.

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

"their uses are much more limited than their fictional counterparts because of the challenges of Earth's atmosphere, gravity, low energy density of available fuels, and the human body not being suited to fly, and they are principally used for stunts"

The "low energy density of available fuels" is a concern for this device too: note that the prototype required refueling in order to cross the English Channel. Having to carry your own fuel is a big limitation for flying machines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder how much money he would have got if he was in the US ?

Edit: if he was american and built it in the US

<comment><USER14> Where would an American demonstrate their machine ?

The ~20 mile distance provided by the Channel is just about right for stunts like this.

<comment><USER15> I imagine you could find lots of 20 mile shore to shore routes in the great lakes. And an easy way to scale up once that's not long enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm game for a laugh and achievement. But such ventures if proposed as commercially viable are surely a non-starter owing to environmental impact?

</comment><comment><USER9> I suspect not a very eco-friendly solution.

Also, wouldn't this be way more efficient if he just added some small delta wings?

<comment><USER17> It would be difficult, for them to work they must have the correct angle of attack.

The way the device is controlled is by constantly changing the angle of the jets, so the wings need to be angled precisely otherwise it'll counteract the control input.

I suspect body position would make a much bigger impact. [https://www.businessinsider.com/why-ski-jumpers-fly-in-a- v-s...](https://www.businessinsider.com/why-ski-jumpers-fly-in-a-v- shape-2014-1?r=US&IR=T) Obviously there are no skis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> And no video of it. Brilliant.

</comment><comment><USER19> You gotta give it to those cops playing with the protesters in the second video... Judging by the difference in weapons, those young guys got away with more than a fun experience to look back, retell, relive... Reminds me of NYC occupy protesters busting into McDonalds' buildings to take milk.

Play safe, everyone.

~·¤·~

Harvey Danger - Flagpole Sitta

[https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=sVt1Dy_LblQ&feature=share](https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=sVt1Dy_LblQ&feature=share)</comment>


Show HN: View Instagram Profile Picture in Hi-Res - <AUTHOR> http://igpic.tk/ <comment><USER2> I had just used another submission[1] I found on HN to get it! Unfortunately the picture is still really low quality, and it's a good one that isn't anywhere else so I've been trying to find it for awhile.

1\. [https://apinsta.herokuapp.com/u/appwithus](https://apinsta.herokuapp.com/u/appwithus)</comment>


Aristotle's Lost Book on Magic (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.ancientmedicine.org/home/2018/3/11/aristotles-lost-book-on-magic <comment><USER2> > The title either refers to the art practised by the Magi (the Zoroastrian > priests from Persia), or it refers to the fact that the discussion is a > discussion about the Magi

In Aristotle's time, Magic / Magi refers mostly to priests and/or healers, not the "sorcerers" that we might have in mind today.

<comment><USER3> Also medicine and magic used to be synonymous until quite recently. See for example the American Indian medicine men.

<comment><USER4> > Also medicine and magic used to be synonymous until quite recently.

Not at all. Under Roman law, "magic" was forbidden, and healing magic was considered "not magic" precisely because it was helpful instead of harmful. (As we can see by the fact that people wrote about the question at all, they were well aware of the conceptual similarity.)

Compare WWII terminology in which the difference between a submarine and a U-boat is that the submarine is good and the U-boat is evil.

<comment><USER5> Really they all seem to have had roughly common roots and then engaged in speciation over time by culture. "Witch" essentially meaning poisioner or "bad pharmacology/herbalism" ans posioned and cursed as essentially synonymous. Given that dose and application make the poison this ends up being a very dangerous look for any herbalist even before any cynical power grabs because they would always look guilty of carrying poison even if the foxglove was to steady the heartbeat instead of stopping it.

The split from Philosopher to Natural Philosopher which later split to Scientest and Philosophy of Science essentially are a more "modern" version of the same process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > It seems to me as if all these testimonies could be referring to a > discussion of wise philosopher kings [EDIT: e.g. Persian Zoroastrian kings] > who are able to predict the future through their understanding of the > heavens and the science of nature.

Makes me wonder if that is the particular sort of "philosopher king" Plato had in mind, rather than a more general smart guy with the final say-so. The former would resonate, at least a little more, with modern desires to apply empirical methods to sociological and political problems.

<comment><USER7> I sometimes wonder if humanity will veer off into scientific priesthood that will control humanity.

That eventually forget why they are worshipping a language they no longer understand.

<comment><USER8> We have plenty of scientism already, but scientists are only listened to when it's convenient. See: vaccines, nuclear energy, starlink, and climate change. Besides, the interesting questions that drive politics aren't scientific ones.

Science rarely speaks authoritatively on moral questions.

<comment><USER9> > Science rarely speaks authoritatively on moral questions.

At least they aren't allowed to. Even if you don't allow to derive 'ought' from 'is', facts and reasoning can transform some simple 'oughts' into interesting consequences.

Ie 'ought' plus 'is' can derive you another 'ought'.

You still have to pick your initial 'oughts', of course.

I agree with your first paragraph!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> To be fair "among the other things he predicted about Socrates, was that he will have a violent end" could have been predicted by pretty much anyone who had grown up among primates. A contemporary phrase: "στέργει γὰρ οὐδεὶς ἄγγελον κακῶν ἐπῶν."

[https://existentialcomics.com/comic/344](https://existentialcomics.com/comic/344)

</comment><comment><USER11> Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Clarke may have enunciated it, but Aristotle may have been first to recognize it.

<comment><USER12> > Aristotle may have been first to recognize it

It's truly amazing how many concepts fit that description.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> >"Diogenes reports that Aristotle thought _magic wasn 't sorcery, but philosophy or wisdom_.

This is confirmed by the Suda."</comment>


Why I Quit Tech and Became a Therapist - <AUTHOR> http://glench.com/WhyIQuitTechAndBecameATherapist/ <comment><USER3> Maybe too many people are trying to find all their meaning in life through their work. It's not a recipe for success for most people, I think the media plays it up a bit too much. They're only covering the success stories in terms of people who are single minded and who make their work everything.

The author of the article doesn't mention any relationships or other interests in life, no passion for anything but work. Maybe that wasn't the case but you can't tell from the article.

Lots of people do something in the arts, music, physical fitness, etc.. on the side along with family & relationships or faith/religion to find meaning. If you're happy from that aspect work becomes just something you do to pay the bills. It doesn't mean you're not passionate about work but the other things can make up for times when work isn't so great.

<comment><USER4> > Maybe too many people are trying to find all their meaning in life through > their work.

You probably shouldn't make your "meaning in life" reside completely in your work. But then again, you can't work at a job that is completely meaningless to you.

The problem with burnout generally comes from the feeling of pointlessness. And IT excels at that feeling. _We_ 've built an industry that is accustomed -almost to the point of being a fraud to society- to such things as:

\- Extremely low productivity in the large. While workers may be fully occupied, and even over-worked sometimes, in the large, a lot of productivity is simply wasted in projects which never take off, are discarded, scratched, changed, etc.

\- Low accountability. Current trends like #NoEstimates #NoTesting #NoProductOwners etc, while may or may not have valid points all lead to a larger #NoAccountability "ideal" where developers seem to want no accountability at all for whatever they do. Not having any responsibilities in what you do is actually _not_ the good idea some think it is.

\- The pervasive idea that it's all horrible but that's alright. That you don't really need to know how to do stuff, you can just copy-paste it from SO or whatever you find on Google. That programmers just don't know what they are doing but haha I change this line here and it works and I don't know why but it works and that's what matters so I'm going to sarcastically twit about it because everyone will understand and concur. That everything could just crash and burn in microseconds but that won't really happen, right?

\- The masterful move of claiming that anyone can program with just good will and disposition. That a degree doesn't matter, that experience doesn't matter, that actual knowledge is secondary to "passion".

All this ends up producing the result that a lot -most? probably so- of jobs in the industry and a large part of every job in the industry is _mostly pointless_ , or at least feels so. And this pointlessness in turn is what produces the burnout.

And I don't really know, but I would tend to think that no matter how much meaning you find _outside_ your job, if that job doesn't at least give you a minimum meaning, you will have a very hard time fighting burnout.

<comment><USER5> >you can't work at a job that is completely meaningless to you

You absolutely can, and millions of people do every day.

<comment><USER6> But that's also probably why millions of people are psychologically miserable all the time. The subset of people who are working a full-time completely meaningless job (may not apply to part-time) and then finding happiness outside of work entirely. There's plenty of gray in-between though (people define 'meaningless' in their own way).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been having the same existential crisis for a couple years now. I started working at a FAANG company right out of college, then after a bunch of personal health problems ended up taking a leave of absence that I didn't return from.

I took a long break from software and started learning politics, philosophy, and history, and eventually came to the conclusion that most of the world's problems are social/political and won't be fixed by technology.

And in many ways, the type of work we do directly cause harm to people. (Unfortunately, with the long gap in my career I need to build up work experience before switching to anything else)

How can I continue to work at a corporation that directly causes wealth inequality? Sure, I might personally enjoy working on math and software related problems. But why is my own intellectual curiosity more important than whether someone else gets to eat?

I don't want to just donate to charities, I want to end systemic problems that lead to charities needing to exist in the first place.

<comment><USER8> > But why is my own intellectual curiosity more important than whether someone > else gets to eat?

It's not, but unless you are working on something that is directly impoverishing someone to this point, then the economic or social system that allows people to go hungry and without basics is more to blame than your particular role.

People don't go hungry anymore due to lack of societal resources. It's due to either a lack of sufficient collective concern, or even a belief that it is largely acceptable that this occurs.

That the effect of your inequality inducing job is hunger for someone can only be countered with policy and incentives that work at societal, not with individual choices to disengage from jobs that optimize productivity.

It's similar to the fallacy of asking Warren Buffet to cut an additional check to the IRS vs raising tax rates, or the fallacy of thinking that an individual's choice not to eat meat has any meaningful effect on climate change.

> I don't want to just donate to charities, I want to end systemic problems > that lead to charities needing to exist in the first place.

This is actually a great way to think about it, and if you have the personal means to pursue the systemic issues without having to worry about your own survival, then go for it. But know that this will almost certainly involve spurring on the collective human will to act towards that goal, not inventing a technology as an individual that will fix the problem.

<comment><USER9> And get downvoted when asking how it's ethical to allow a small fraction of people to own unlimited wealth when 25% of Americans don't have clean tap water. :3

<comment><USER10> It's actually 63 million people, roughly 20%.

[https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/08/14/63-million- am...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/08/14/63-million-americans- exposed-unsafe-drinking-water/564278001/)

<comment><USER11> _As many as 63 million people — nearly a fifth of the United States — from rural central California to the boroughs of New York City, were exposed to potentially unsafe water more than once during the past decade, according to a News21 investigation of 680,000 water quality and monitoring violations from the Environmental Protection Agency._

I'd say that " _exposed_ to _potentially_ unsafe water more than _once_ during the past _decade_ " is pretty far from "20% of Americans don't have clean tap water". If anything, I'd rather say it's impressive that 80% of Americans haven't been _exposed_ to _potentially_ unsafe water more than once in a decade!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I knew there would be some relation with drugs in the text.

People who think psychedelic drugs (even Cannabis) are just about 'having fun' or 'getting high' are skipping past the biggest ability these compounds have: to make you change some already hardcoded aspects of your life.

Someone who isn't me started working out and eating properly after having an epiphany on cannabis which prompted him to openly evaluate his relationship with food. After seeing truly how he ate, it disgusted him. This person is now 50kg slimmer and away from obesity BMI.

<comment> thraway-burnout Please congratulate that person on my behalf. Even though it may be the result of an epiphany, self-restraint is still hard to achieve and a noble goal in itself :-)

<comment><USER13> I'd like to prefix this as _anecdotal_ as it is only some speculation I've done on the matter, but here is my take on it:

The brain is in the end a neural network, and like all such devices, can get stuck in various local minima that are difficult to get out of. An old habit that has been reinforced through many years can take a considerable "shock" to dislodge. All the little cognitive and behavioral biases that one accumulates through their life get in the way in very subtle forms that are entirely sub- conscious.

What psychedelics like LSD, psilocybin and others can do, is remove or downregulate these internal filters for some time. To give an example: the visual cortex normally applies a filtering mechanism to what the eyes see and correct problems. It acts as a common-sense filter to remove improbable or impossible information and augment, perhaps even add some extra detail to save the conscious part from being swamped with ridiculous data. Mostly it just lets the sensory input through with little synthetic stuff. This means that the visual cortex has to have some sort of model of reality that it builds over time (with feedback from the consciousness). This filtering mechanism is one way mostly, the visual cortex modulates the input and adds information here and there, and then reinforces the internal model with feedback form the consciousness.

Now, under psychedelics, one gets all the output that the visual cortex can generate together with the actual real data from the eyes. The previously subtle filter applies the full transformation described by the internal model to the sensory data. This results in wacky outlandish shapes and impossible landscapes as reality is modified fully with all the information that the visual cortex has accumulated. Quite like the bizarre images generated by artificial CNNs when ran backwards!

So to arrive at my point, I posit that psychedelics can (not guaranteed of course), remove the long standing subconscious filters and biases that one has built over their life and offer the raw perspective on things. They remove all the useful illusions that the brain pulls over our eyes to get through our days. A thing that one tends to lose during a "trip" is control over the thought process, some call it ego death, a profound sensation of being able to observe one's thoughts from outside - as if unburdened by one's own insecurities and from an objective view. It isn't unpleasant at all, if anything it is liberating. It is always difficult to face one's own shortcomings, because of the importance that we place on the ego. Once that burden is removed, it becomes an experience of resignation and healing.

I want to avoid ascribing religious or transcendental characteristics to the process, far from it. It's a mere result of some very pleasant time spent being free from the tyranny of the ego and the subsequent introspection.

<comment><USER14> The problem is that we shouldn't feel the need to use drugs to make our lives bearable. Depression, burnout and other mental issues is amplified by our lifestyles and the system that allowed them.

Sure you can take psychedelics, anti depressant, alcohol, and other drugs to make it bearable, it won't fix the underlying issue(s).

I agree with most of what you say on psychedelics, I don't see it as a cure to what we're talking about here though.

<comment><USER13> I don't know why you are being downvoted (I upvoted you), because you are raising a point that absolutely needs to be discussed.

Perhaps I phrased things incorrectly, but the idea behind using psychedelics is not to suppress the symptoms, as is with classic anti-depressants. They cannot do that. Rather to change the way one thinks in such a profound way that they will voluntarily solve the root cause of the problems without being intimidated by them.

Taking Prozac will make one completely numb to feelings, and the hope is that since they no longer feel crippling depression, they can overcome whatever difficulties are the root cause. I would describe it as depersonalizing the individual completely so they become a robot. Psychedelics absolutely do not do that. You remain a feeling, emotive being - more so if anything, but they allow you to see your own thought process objectively.

I haven't studied the clinical usage of psychedelics, but my impression from cursory research is that the approach is different from traditional anti- depressants, and arguably more constructive path. Rather than numbing all emotions using very biologically-addictive substances, use non-addictive substances with very low abuse potential to make the conscious mind want to fix the problem. Not because it is being forced to, but because they want to heal. Often, part of this healing is a sort of resignation, or letting go, where the emotional baggage is fully acknowledged and the pent up pressure can be released. This is part of the therapeutic process, by removing the internal filters, one cannot help but acknowledge and face these things and interestingly enough, in a positive way.

E.g. a person who has problems with their weight will finally come to terms with their body, which allows them to acknowledge the root cause and start working on fixing it, now liberated from the suffocating feeling of "having problems".

I don't know how to describe it better, and I realize I'm being incredibly un- scientific, but perhaps you see what I mean?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There is a severe workplace burnout problem in IT(especially MSPs); which when not addressed grows into bigger mental health issues and even literal sicknesses.

There just isn't enough skilled IT people. The industry is immature and is bottom heavy. The top performers and seniors, are then overwhelmed with work and the business is unable to hire more senior people to reduce workload. Then the business keeps growing and eventually you get a death spiral of people quitting and making the situation worse.

>I started asking myself questions like — "Even if the projects I'm doing succeeded beyond my wildest expectations, how would it affect people?

IT is so inherently negative as well. In my last job 1 person and myself were the only people trying to stay positive. The other people in the office had succumb to the negativity and would even attack us for being 'mr happy'. They were literally so negative that they just attacked positivity.

I had places where I would go onsite to resolve an emergency. I never caused the outage, I was there to help. I would still get death threats from clients. "The accounting files are the server, if you lost them I'm going to go to your office and kill everyone." My employer wasn't even their IT, their IT person quit upon discovered 2 drives dead on the raid 5 array and no backups.

<comment><USER16> >I had places where I would go onsite to resolve an emergency. I never caused the outage, I was there to help. I would still get death threats from clients. "The accounting files are the server, if you lost them I'm going to go to your office and kill everyone."

Isn't that a criminal offence?

<comment><USER17> Yeah, I can't see how a professional services company overlooks this casually, unless they're really hurting for new work. Can you imagine a client treating their tax lawyers or accountants like this ?

But then, if the service company needs the new business that bad, that's hard to square with "there are not enough IT people".

<comment><USER15> I report it, they told me "She wasnt serious"

<comment><USER18> If it was me I'd report it to the police before management.

<comment><USER19> People get worked up and over-react over dumb shit. It happens. Making a big deal out of it does not do anything to improve the situation. I'm not wasting everyone's time by calling the cops unless the threat is at least remotely credible. I know that in this day and age of shunning responsibility being the person willing to define "remotely credible" is not going to be popular but whatever. Calling the cops when some stressed out person goes a little too far isn't smart and doesn't improve safety. It's just ass covering that lets you pat yourself on the back for "doing something". If you really want to address the situation your best bet is probably to chew out whoever did it later after they have cooled off.

As ethbro pointed out[1], criminal statutes have been interpreted such that a non-credible thread does not usually fall within them. Cops generally don't like it when you call them for non-criminal things. Honestly you're probably best off asking whoever got threatened what they want to do rather than optimizing for corporate ass covering.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19359233](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19359233)

<comment><USER20> Are you qualified to assess threats for credibility? It's actually a fairly involved skillset, and unless you're used to working with MOSAIC you might want to leave it to people who are qualified.

<comment><USER19> And the beat cop who was to take your statement is going to be more qualified? They know even less of the details of the situation.

The only thing calling the cops does is make the prosecution's job easier in the highly unlikely event that the threat does turn out to be credible. Calling the cops doesn't actually protect you from anything in a situation like this. I don't understand why people don't understand that. They take statements and leave. On the off chance the prosecutor is feeling bored and wants to pursue charges then yet more people's time is wasted and nothing happens, maybe someone gets a fine.

<comment><USER21> Even as someone who is in some regards-but not all-annoyed with and frustrated about the state of policing in America, this take is even too cynical for _me_.

 _And the beat cop who was to take your statement is going to be more qualified?_

Emphatically: yes.

Threat assessment is literally one of the things police departments are trained on in some degree or another, and they have a pretty powerful escalation path at their disposal when working to vet and take action on those threats if deemed credible when someone says "I will come to your office and kill you"\--if the situation warrants it (PNI).

You may not like the outcomes, but one's personal opinions on how effective an investigation is doesn't preclude the constabulary from having much more expertise in their ranks than a direct line supervisor at investigating a threat to someone's life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Wow! Can I ever see some parallels with the inverse correlation of my own inward search for meaning and my lack of contentment with life.

They say that happiness is found within, but the more time I spend looking inward, the more and more sure I become that it's not.

Happiness, at least for me, is found in friendships and relationships, in human connection. The search inward may lead to many profound and philosophical insights, but so far, happiness has not been one of them.

<comment><USER23> Happiness is overrated too. One needs to be content and aware first of all. Friendships are great to have but most can't do without them because they're truly afraid of being with themselves(e.g alone)

<comment><USER22> I've spent much of my adult life feeling alone, if not physically, mentally. I think this is common in careers where we're paid to spend our time thinking. It's a hazard of our profession exacerbated by who many of us are as human beings. We found ourselves in these careers precisely because of this trait, our ability to think deeply about solutions to problems - which seems to be a net side effect of our proclivity to spend our time weighed down in our own thoughts.

I wouldn't knock those who fear being alone. Enduring being alone is mentally and emotionally grueling - even if you don't shy away from it. If you're not scared of it, then either you're one of the lucky few who are resilient to it or you're not giving it the gravity it's due. Either way, I'm envious of you.

I have days where I feel like my only reason to live are my friends and children. Without them I wouldn't even make it through the day. On those days, I fear being alone. Not because I'd harm myself, but because I know that it's the first step on a spiral into a depression I don't want to be consumed by again. I fear it because I've been there on more than one occasion. I fear it because I know how hard it is to drag yourself out of.

If you're not truly afraid of it, you've never been there.

<comment><USER24> I've moved to another country 10 years ago and had great difficulty rebuilding my social life. After years agozining about my loneliness, I had an epiphany: it was just a primitive fear (probably of survival), and once I confronted it as a non-lethal threat, it lost its power and control over me.

It's great to have good people around you, but if this fear is dominating you, it will always be there tormenting you. My personal experience showed this doesn't have to be the case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> For years I struggled to become financially independent (as Mr Money Mustache). Years upon years of watching the clock until it hit 17:30, hating the dumb coders who made a mess for me to clean up (because I know FP, and if we had types these bugs wouldn't be here in the first place!).

A year ago, I pulled the plug, and retired. Finally, I could work on my dream project every day.

I did so for 6 months, and travelled, and had fun.

But the following six months were full of waking late, getting stoned (sometimes waking and baking), having a liter beer a day (Germany), being bored all day, and obviously falling into depression. Lounging around in long johns waiting for the evening so a friend would be off work and meet for dinner.

Then I answered a recruiter who contacted me about a job in a big boring government office. A place with endless dumb scrum bullshit processes (wasn't it about having less process?), suits, good bye cakes, clueless managers, and all what I earlier resented.

But without that I was depressed. So now I go to my boring government job with a huge smile, and I honestly love the phony agile coach, coffee machine talk, and coding up things the stakeholder wants. Legacy code - what a joyous load to lift.

No one of my coworkers know I don't have to be there, they just know me as the smiling guy.

I don't know what to spend my salary on - I guess I can invest more maybe? I make sure to treat my friends to rounds at the bar, and concert tickets, and pay for dinner with this girl I asked out.

I learned that it is good to have something to aim your bow at, and a place to go every morning, and a heavy load to carry with your mates.

<comment><USER26> A common problem with FIRE is that people don't have hobbies other than FIRE. Once they retire they don't know what to do. Get some hobbies, try new things, build something physical, volunteer with non-profits.

If I could stop working today I'd never be bored. I've taken two extended periods of time off (6 months and 18 months) and both times the primary reason for going back to work was money. I had plenty of things to do.

<comment><USER25> That might be, but it wasn't the case for me.

I play music, have some pretty cool coding projects, am self-studying science, do sports, and have good friends. When this contract is up I'll def take some months off, maybe another half year. Would have never imagined the situation to turn out like this for me, but apparently that's the kind of guy I am. Born a work horse, distressed with no heavy load to carry.

I just wish I knew this during my working time, so that I wouldn't had been such a resentful, selfish, prick.

<comment><USER27> I know that one year I worked from home and hated it. I realized most of my social interaction came from work. I wonder if volunteering or teaching part time during the day might be a solution for you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> And from the other side of the aisle, "Why I Quit Being a Therapist":

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0Fi32LbXHA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0Fi32LbXHA)

<comment><USER29> Wow thanks for the opposing perspective. Seems like even as a therapist you're still fighting the system and still only able to treat the symptoms.

<comment><USER28> I imagine that OP has done his due diligence, but if it were me, I don't think I'd handle the transition very well. Like any other branch of medicine, psychiatric practice is tightly regulated, and operating outside the standards of the professional community is strictly forbidden. That means that innovation is no longer part of his job description, as that responsibility falls principally to researchers.

In other words, OP has basically left his job as a developer (of software) to be a sysadmin (of humans). Not to disparage the choice, or even remotely suggest that it's the end of the road! Only to say that existential dread can await you no matter what path you choose.

<comment><USER30> > a sysadmin (of humans)

Lol, that's a terrible way of putting it. A sysadmin has a lot of power over the systems they control. A therapist is like a consultant brought in to evaluate, but with no actual power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I have an MSW and quit therapy (though to be fair I was mostly doing policy- level and community-level work, not individual counseling type work) to become a programmer, but occasionally I think about going back. Good read, thanks!

I definitely think nearly anyone could benefit from therapy (and a lot of people could benefit from a few strong psychedelic sessions where they are willing to ask themselves what they really want to do with this one precious and fleeting lifetime) and I applaud the courage it takes to listen deeply to oneself and strike out on that path.

We could for sure benefit from a lot more humans asking deeply and honestly "Does this make me deeply happy and what effects (if any) do I want my work to have on other people's lives?"

</comment><comment><USER32> Congrats on the change in careers, Glen. My own journey follows a very similar arc. For a rational person it's incredibly lonely: the spiritual community often sees the rational mind as a hindrance into more subtle realms, and the rational community sees the spiritual one as full of fluff and fantasy. It's difficult to have a foot on each side.

We must understand that one does not invalidate the other, they belong to different realms of being. An inner truth (i.e. everything happens for a reason) does not invalidate an outer truth (i.e. everything that happens is random). Being able to hold this paradox is an important developmental milestone.

Another duality is the relationship between mind and body, and for mental people bodywork is crucial to make emotional breakthroughs, but in my experience most people dedicated to this don't understand where you're coming from. Very little can be accomplished if the rational mind is the master at all times, but at the same time it's guarding an emotional dam that should be drained with caution.

Therapists who understand the tech industry and the rational mind are desperately needed, most people who get into it are naturally empathetic and operate from the heart, which is wonderful for therapy, but they can't relate at all with the territory you're traversing when you're going through transformation. The maze that you describe is completely foreign to them, and even worse: very few people have navigated it successfully, it remains largely unexplored and uncharted, so it requires infinite patience and lots of trial and error.

</comment><comment><USER33> I'm so jealous he got to work with Bret Victor on Dynamicland! (in a positive sense, I suppose envious is a better word)

I've met 2 types of computer science students at uni: (1) the ones that love programming and love the mechanics of it. (2) The ones that love making music or similar forms of media.

The reason the second type gets into computer science is because they love media and they love it so much they're willing to go through the ordeal of learning how to program in order to create it. In my experience, I like programming, but _I love_ the end to end process of empathizing with the user, designing the media/app and then implementing it.

It is these people that I call "Bret Victor" type of people. I'm one of them.

I am absolutely jealous. If anyone knows "Bret Victor" type of workplaces, let me know.

<comment><USER34> [https://notion.so](https://notion.so), in addition to being a really great product, is the most Victor-ian company I've seen. Really great thinking and product sense there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I feel a lot like the author. Computers used to hold promises. But both because understanding of society complexity and aging I have a lot less value in them.

At first I thought, maybe I just need to make people use of computers happier, but the average person doesn't care, they mostly fear computers and don't want to learn but mostly have a vaguely workable tool to fill taxes or get mail. While I'm at it, take a step back and see how much negativity is around computers... privacy, encryption, it's insane.

Nowadays I'm much more interested in setting repair fablabs and planting trees to make both landscape and people happier in simpler ways.

My interests in computing have shifted a bit, I mostly care about very broad abstractions (say graph orderings and commutations or partial evaluation).

</comment><comment><USER36> Interesting. I quit psychology/counseling and work in tech now and the thought of my work being absolutely meaningless gives me a lot of anxiety, I hope I'll come to terms with it one day. Correction, _I 'm sure_ I'll come to terms with it but the transition is far from being smooth and takes longer than I expected.

<comment><USER37> i really feel for people who drive themselves crazy over their work, its impact, and their overall purpose. My poor wife struggles and suffers constantly over these things year after year.

Maybe i'm just mentally handicapped in some way but i like to code and solve business problems and so i'm a consultant who codes and solves business problems. I've never thought about if my work is meaningful, it's impact whether good or bad, or worried i'm not pursuing the true purpose of my life. It just doesn't come to mind.

<comment><USER36> You're not mentally handicapped, you're just in harmony with yourself which is amazing and very rare. :)

I would advise your wife to try volunteering (for whatever cause she finds important) if she hasn't already. I've started volunteering at a local NGO after switching careers and it's easily my favorite time of the month, gives me lots of energy and peace of mind, wish I could do it more often.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I applaud the author for sharing their life experience. Just sharing this may help others.

I want to add that these choices aren't black and white. Tech and helping people aren't mutually exclusive things. The author could have mixed therapy with his tech experience and made websites, apps, or services that helped people with career or relationship problems. Or worked towards getting an IT job at a psychology non-profit. I know it's a simplistic example, but look at the impact a simple app like Calm had on exposing people to meditation and therapeutic techniques.

It's all connected. Nutrition, relationships, rest, play, and work. There's so many opportunities to help people outside of paying a licensed therapist. One way to look at it is to go where people are spending their time: on the phone. We desperately need more wellness awareness where people are already spending their attention.

</comment><comment><USER39> Pushing everyone towards programming isn't what we should be doing. Sure, I get a ton of satisfaction from building software, regardless if anyone uses it. But people have different goals and drives in life, and there's no problem pursuing that.

</comment><comment><USER40> I agree with the ever-growing sense of increasing meaninglessness of many of the things that some of us have been working on in technology for over twenty years.

It leaves you wondering : "why am I doing this?", "Is this who I want to be?".

So I can totally relate.

Thank you.

</comment><comment><USER41> I love to read these kind of stories, It's hard to quit everything in life and pursue a new way of living. Not everybody has the guts to do it. I fall in this group of people that are too afraid for the unknown and sit in the job not seeing the point of it almost everyday.

<comment><USER42> I think what you'll find if you read more of these stories is that it's not bravery that causes people to switch, it's fear.

Read it again.

<comment><USER43> I concur. I switched from law to programming out of fear of doing the boring paperwork part of every project all my life, and wasting it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I'm a tech worker but I have a network of friends who are therapists and social workers. I hope OP realizes that therapy is a slog and many of your clients won't get better. Self-care for therapists is even more important than tech workers because you hear about terrible things day in and day out, and your clients (and their families) can be downright abusive at times. Also, it is much less financially lucrative than tech work. Internship lasts at least 2 years and many positions are unpaid or paid at essentially minimum wage, and pay does not get a whole lot better until you are running a private practice for wealthy clients (which depending on your opinions you might consider less rewarding than helping needier people). So I hope the OP is realistic about how this will impact their financial and emotional trajectory in life. All that being said, the skills you learn in training are useful to any walk of life. I frequently consult with these friends about how to deal with work situations, child rearing, and they are able to give me really amazing insights and help me navigate those situations. But just be honest with yourself as you go through the process, and be thankful that you have a lucrative fallback if needed.

</comment><comment><USER45> At first I was hesitant to read this, as it sounded like the musings of yet another software engineer who, upon attaining career success and financial security, starts to become restless and chase vague goals like "happiness" because now they're _too_ successful and there's nothing more for them to work towards. It's one of those problems you have to be extremely fortunate to have, and I can't relate to it at this point in my life. Actually reading to the end, though, it sounds as though what he was really seeking was more along the lines of spiritual fulfillment - and it sounds like he found it, through a series of inquiries and experiments that don't necessarily align with what society tells us we're supposed to find meaning in. Even for people not experiencing the particular problem of existential ennui plaguing the socio- economically privileged, I think this article has useful things to say about how to figure out what to do with your life - especially if financial security is a non-issue, whether because it's virtually guaranteed or because it's extremely improbable no matter what path you choose.

</comment><comment><USER46> OT: people often confuse being in tech with being an employed programmer. The key is to code but not as an employee or contractor. Then, being in tech is a joy.

</comment><comment><USER47> Glen, I really enjoyed reading this and found so many points of resonance with my own story.

My recent trip to Thailand and practicing meditation with Buddhist monks, getting one-on-one time with them to go deep until the lesson I needed to hear presented it self, getting vulnerable with my partner and with myself.. all of that along with my profound experience at a digital-detox adult retreat 3 years ago has put me on a path that is at odds with the corporate work that I do at a bank. The interesting thing is, the quality of my work as a product designer has dramatically improved, while my curiosity to explore music, lighting and deep human engagements have given birth to a new personality I call After 5, because it's after 5 pm where I deeply explore those experimentations as i consciously observe a new alignment with my values.

This has re-surfaced something important for me that I now realize could be a possible career stream. Thanks for writing about your experience and the thought process, truly.

</comment><comment><USER48> There was another HN-posted article from a therapist on why he quit being a therapist.

Found it: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18418022](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18418022)

The grass is always greener, as they say. I suspect that the OP will realize that it's not the job that is causing this, but OP himself.

</comment><comment><USER49> I don't think he did it so much from burnout, but Larry Constantine left tech to become a therapist, then returned: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Constantine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Constantine)

</comment><comment><USER50> I hope I'm wrong here, but I fear that the author is, in a way, just moving the goalpost.

A dissatisfaction with one's work that manifests as some sort of "what I do doesn't have meaning" or "what I do doesn't help anyone" is usually just an "I don't do anything relevant in my spare time" that is looked at through the wrong lens.

In a capitalist society, one should not rely on the same activity for both sustenance and psychological well-being or fulfilment. As many have pointed out before me, here and elsewhere, any hobby or similar activity stops being enjoyable once it becomes your job, i.e. once you pay your bills with it.

Instead of trying to stretch our daily jobs to fit two different goals, I believe we should, in fact, shrink our jobs so that they leave enough space for different activities that try to tackle the lack of meaning or passion in our lives: volunteering, cooking, making of art or just simply being there for our loved ones.

In other words, instead of the "equate life worth to career, find out life has no meaning, change career, equate life worth to new career" cycle, try the "equate life worth to... well, life itself" for once.

</comment><comment><USER51> Hey I'm doing the same thing!

We have little else in common though, mainly I just figured I really want to help people and tech helps in such an abstract way it doesn't feel rewarding. I do meditate though, so my own process isn't entirely devoid of spirituality.

Also, being from Canada, I find it really odd that you can just dive straight into the master's degree and become a psychotherapist (I know this varies by state though). I've had to start at the bottom again, it takes 7 years here in Quebec. It's worth it just to know you're working toward you dream job, but it's pretty awesome for you that you'll be done in only 4 years!

<comment><USER52> Where in Quebec are you located? I know a few psychologists here but nobody who actually left tech for it, it sounds like an interesting combination of skills.

<comment><USER51> Montreal. I'm not a therapist yet, and most people get rejected for the doctorate, but I figure worst case I'll have a bachelor's degree in psychology so with my programming experience I could look into AI companies.

Most likely I'll stay in the mental health field though, as I doubt I'll find passion for anything tech again. I mostly lurk on this forum because I'm still a geek at heart :)

<comment><USER53> I'm on the opposite track, but same location. I was an Educational psychologist before moving to Canada/Quebec, but as my B.A. wasn't valid here, then I started a career in tech.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> The worst burnout/depression I've had from software development has been putting in years of time and effort only to have the project I'd been sweating on fail/not be adopted/go under.

This is across the board, from a Fortune 100 company that decided to axe a division to a well-financed startup that cratered to some of my own side projects I couldn't quite get out the door.

It's just a gut punch to sit back and think: "If we'd done nothing we'd be in a better spot right now than this project that turned out to be a waste of time."

</comment><comment><USER55> I'm also on the same path, glad to see I'm not the only one.

Joined a FAANG after college, the good salary allowed me to start taking up Gestalt Therapy training on the side.

This is one of best decisions I've made in my life, I can better allocate the amount of fucks I give per day and live a happier life. I've been slowing overcoming many paralyzing fears.

I don't plan to start working as a Therapist in the near future, but the training itself has been life changing and would highly suggest to anyone who's curious about self development.

</comment><comment><USER56> I find that in Western cultures, people suffer from over-thinking (maybe over- banging). They get out of balance at some point. I recommend checking out Yin Yang philosophy.

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

It's about soft/hard, negative/positive. Reality is often grey instead of black and white. Contradictions are everywhere. Sometimes, you take things seriously. Sometimes, you let them go.

</comment><comment><USER57> > I started asking myself questions like — "Even if the projects I'm doing > succeeded beyond my wildest expectations, how would it affect people?

If you only derive meaning from end results programming is probably not for you. It's a craft that requires you to enjoy the process as much if not more than the end result.

But if you want to get philosophical then the other thing about functional information, just like any technology is that you usually cannot predict the complete effect on society. If you create useful things that are at least not intentionally malicious or dangerous, then you will likely be doing a net good.

...The magnitude of this good can never accurately be predicted, however a decent heuristic is how _general_ it is - e.g if you are making something as contextually contrived as a shopping app to try and "help people keep track of what they need to buy", your net good is going to be pretty fucking low, and I know focusing on the smartphone app bubble tends to result in mindless crap like this - so if you were doing that, then fair enough I'd quit too... On the other hand - go make some contribution to a fundamentally new piece of code solving a _real_ problem and the possibilities are much greater.

</comment><comment><USER58> I am proud of this person for finding such deep meaning in his life.

I also think it's possible that one can practice deep listening, use psychedelics responsibly, and practice methods such as the Rosen Method (or any other meditation-esque practices including yoga etc) without dedicating their life fully to them, and receive magnificent benefits - <USER2> prevention of burnout.

It may be his calling, but it seems burnout is a large motivator to this decision as others have discussed.

I just wanted to come here to say I do the things he does regularly (but by no means am I an expert), to a great degree of success and benefit, while keeping a software job I love and not becoming a therapist. I have no signs of burnout and I actually attribute that in large part to discovering similar "clues" as discussed in the article, early on.

</comment><comment><USER59> Whereas I'm a therapist who's in tech...Goes both ways I guess.

</comment><comment><USER60> I realized quickly in undergrad I could not program. This prompted the change to psych and eventually a MS in Counseling Psych. Today I am licensed with a small practice and work full-time in public education.

Even though I have so much more to learn, moving towards a humanistic approach has had such a positive impact with clients and myself. Being able to sit back and be with a feeling, no matter how uncomfortable, challenges me to think about what is really the problem. This is beneficial in schools because it is the same way with students and faculty because the surface emotion is only an indicator something is wrong.

I think my curiosity to understand the human condition is what led me to study and practice. At the same time, involving tech into my practice is necessary to help indicate progress for clients in addition to how it can replace me when out of session.

<comment><USER61> When you say you could not program - can you expand on How that manifested for you personally?

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> A slightly easier method to find out what you should be doing with your life is to read "What Should I Do with My Life" by Po Bronson. [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/18813/what- should-i...](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/18813/what-should-i-do- with-my-life-by-po-bronson/9780375758980/)

</comment><comment><USER63> IT is bottom-heavy, and seniors are leaving because they're either giving up or retiring. More problematic is that a lot of senior level people are either out of jobs, or can't move from the job they're in because the hiring focus seems to be on the under-30 crowd.

<comment><USER64> In a mature market, the two extremes eventually balance out:

* Companies that hire only cheap starry-eyed love-my-latest-fad youngster crash and burn due to poor execution and short-sighted design choices.

* Companies that hire only experienced devs move along a less erratic path but burn way more on payroll.

You could argue the market is not mature though. Lots of turmoil all around, lots of "dumb money".

In that atmosphere, "fund it & flip it & long-term be damned!" definitely favours the cheap and fast. Horror stories of shitty systems and general lack of accountability ensue… The price we pay for living in exciting times.

And senior devs better be mindful of _" The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent"_ (or alive).

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> > Gradually, with Michael's help, I began to realize that my work wouldn't > help people be happier in ways that felt meaningful to me.

Could you elaborate on you notion of meaningful happiness?

</comment><comment><USER66> Read the comments, do not know what to say, too much similarity, too many possibilities, this is also a cognitive science process

</comment><comment><USER67> Emacs M-x doctor?

</comment><comment><USER42> tl;dr: burnout (+ woowoo + psychadelics)

To be honest, you didn't have to read the article to know it was going to be burnout, because that's why _everyone_ quits tech and does something completely different.

</comment><comment><USER68> Correction: "Decided to become a therapist".

>Shortly after beginning my Hakomi training, I applied and was accepted to the professional mental health counseling masters program at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I'm studying and training through 2020 to get my licensure.

Going through schooling is not the same as becoming something. The title implies that there was success found here, but so far it's just aspirations.

<comment><USER69> "Success is a journey, not a destination. The doing is often more important than the outcome."

-Arthur Ashe

<comment><USER36> The thing is that burnout among therapists is _real_ , everyone I know who worked in counseling came with lots of, how shall I put it?, infatuation, enchantment and everybody got severely disenchanted at some point.

So until the author has worked for a couple of years in the field, he comes off as a little bit... naive. I don't mean to come off as condescending, I hope he finds happiness in his new profession.</comment></comment></comment>


Multiple critical vulnerabilities in Sophos (antivirus) products - <AUTHOR> http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2012/Nov/31 <comment><USER2> This is funny to me in an admittedly schadenfreude kind of way, as I've had to deal with their false positive system before, and it was an exercise in frustration.

In short, one of my products is a guild hosting system for games like WoW. One of my tools offer is a profile harvesting and uploading system in the form of an executable that simply uploaded the Lua files generated by my WoW Profiling Mod (collecting things like character level, name, class, professions, skills, etc - nothing personal or potentially dangerous). After getting a few customer emails about Sophos detecting it as a virus, I contacted Sophos to let them know about it.

After verifying that it did indeed not contain a virus, they decided to _still_ flag it as a supposed "PUA (Potentially Unwanted Software) or Adware". I protested, saying that no one would ever accidentally install this (it's not bundled with anything, it's a direct download), nor does it generate ads, nor does it do anything the user doesn't expect it to do, which is exclusively uploading character profile information to their website. In no way should be classified alongside Adware.

They responded with something of the order "Sophos is for business computers, and because this is for games, it potentially unwanted on the business machine." They refused to remove the flag.

So my Sophos users just have to accept that Sophos basically tells them that my app contains malware - since who's going to see "PUA/Adware" and think anything other than _"This is adware? Screw this, not worth it. BRB cancelling this scam of a service."_

So I have absolutely no sympathy for Sophos, and it's funny to me that a company supposedly dedicated to keeping malware and viruses off business computers is riddled with security vulnerabilities, and then tries to brush them under the table because they have not yet been detected to have been exploited. Stay classy, Sophos.

</comment><comment><USER3> Money quote:

 _Sophos were able to convince me they were working with good intentions, but they were clearly ill-equipped to handle the output of one co-operative security researcher working in his spare time._

The very detailed account of his interactions with them prior to disclosure is a good read.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is actually an amazing paper - well worth reading. It's like a long list of what not to do in your application (even not a security-related one).

Looks like in a couple of days running Sophos may be more dangerous than not having it installed at all...

</comment><comment><USER5> Incredible list of flaws that a security company has no excuse releasing with. The ASLR flaws alone show a fundamental misunderstanding of basic security practices.

It seems from this that very little effort has been put into fuzz testing Sophos products. With the complexities involved in anti-virus scanning I really have to wonder how many other security products are actually the largest holes in the system.

</comment><comment><USER6> > Sophos products should only ever be considered for low-value non-critical > systems and never deployed on networks or environments where a complete > compromise by adversaries would be inconvenient.

IMO, that should hold true for just about every piece of third-party software that you're installing on your networks/computers without having a thorough audit done on it and the integration with your systems. At the end of the day, the security of your systems is _your_ problem, not anyone else's; while Sophos dropped the ball here and is responsible for the vulnerabilities themselves, it doesn't make you any less hosed if they're used to compromise your systems.

</comment><comment><USER7> Response by Sophos:

[http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/11/05/tavis-ormandy- sop...](http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/11/05/tavis-ormandy-sophos/)

<comment><USER6> "Sophos has seen no evidence of any of these vulnerabilities being exploited in the wild." in bold, along with "Sophos has seen no evidence of this vulnerability being exploited in the wild." in bold on every single vulnerability. That is incredibly, incredibly disingenuous.

Don't ever downplay the severity of a vulnerability because you believe it hasn't been exploited in the wild _yet_. If unpatched systems remain and the vulnerability is juicy enough, people _will_ exploit it. Statements like theirs are complete and utter bullshit; they do more harm than good for the security of their products and customer systems.

<comment><USER8> Once a patch exists (as in this case), it becomes a bit more meaningful, as the (non)existence of wild 0-day vulnerabilities is important. On the other hand if Travis could come up with more vulnerabilities than they can handle, I wouldn't be surprised to see wild 0-day exploits before the next set of patches on 11/28, as this headline will prompt more scrutiny into their product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > As demonstrated in this paper, installing Sophos Antivirus exposes machines > to considerable risk.

I've worked at Sophos and, in a way, I am not surprised. It's a company growing really fast, away from London where the top developers are...

</comment><comment><USER10> In brief: If you're running Sophos, anyone can make your computer do anything by sending you an email you don't even read.

I've just sent this paper to the security departments at the universities I'm affiliated with, both of whom provide and recommend Sophos.

I would really hope that as a security company Sophos couldn't possibly survive this.</comment>


Unauthorized unlocking of smartphones becomes illegal Saturday | Crave - CNET - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57565730-1/unauthorized-unlocking-of-smartphones-becomes-illegal-saturday/ <comment><AUTHOR> looks like it was initially deemed legal by DMCA, but this decision has been reverted:

[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/10/jailbreaking- now-...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/10/jailbreaking-now-legal- under-dmca-for-smartphones-but-not-tablets/)</comment>