del.icio.us rewritten in PHP - bye Perl! - <AUTHOR> http://www.symfony-project.com/blog/2007/10/02/delicious-preview-built-with-symfony

<comment><USER2> No surprise that it got rewritten in PHP, since we're talking about Yahoo.

</comment><comment><USER3> Agreed Symfony is nice to look at nice to work in as well.

</comment><comment><USER4> Perfect spelling for a PHP framework.

</comment><comment><USER5> symfony is the good stuff.</comment>


A professor who got inside Anonymous - <AUTHOR> http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2014/09/14/a_tribe_called_anonymous_meet_gabriella_coleman_anthropologist_of_hackers_and_geeks.html <comment><USER2> Whenever a news story refers to Anonymous as a group, you know that the author has a terrible misunderstanding of Anonymous.

And whenever you see an expert refer to Anonymous as a group, you know that they are either being misquoted, or are also full of BS.

Since we know Biella isn't full of BS based on her past work, I'm hoping she is being misquoted and her story is being taken out of context or just blown up a bit in advance of her book.

There is no single group called Anonymous. It's the banner loosely knit groups of hackers use out of convenience. Some are organized for long periods of time, some are individuals who want a flag to fly. And the ethos is so similar, that a common flag makes sense.

<comment><USER3> Actually, there's a chance both you and the professor are correct. To an anthropologist, the word "group" might mean something closer to "subculture" than "organization".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Circa a decade ago I was doing a little coding for a group that worked out of the SF EFF offices. It was there I met a bright young grad student studying online communities and online activists. It has been so long that I forget the details of our short conversations, but I do remember that I was really impressed. She was somebody who was dedicated to understanding our culture and the technology that shapes it.

It's great to see how far she has progressed. I encourage people to look past the inevitable issues with a general-audience newspaper article and read some of her actual work. Her website is a good place to start: [http://gabriellacoleman.org/](http://gabriellacoleman.org/)

<comment><USER5> I've heard the argument that it is not a good idea to encourage deep understanding of online activists and hacker culture by institutions because it might give outside forces a handle to control and influence it (in a negative way).

While there are also good arguments for the other side it is something that should at least be considered, IMHO.

<comment><USER4> Well, presumably the really sinister outside forces can bring to bear a lot more resources than one nerd-friendly anthro professor. The upside for me is in public understanding. The vast bulk of humanity has no idea what to make of Anonymous other than seeing it as vaguely sinister. We fear what we don't understand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Steps to getting inside Anonymous.

1) Join correct irc channel

There is no step 2.

<comment><USER7> what was it like to talk to hackers on steroids?

<comment><USER8> Bought a dog.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> >got inside Anonymous

Stopped reading here. Anonymous isn't some organisation with a membership process. Go on 4chan or join one of any number of IRC channels and you too can 'get inside Anonymous'.

Stuff like this is nearly as bad as that "Who is this Four Chan person?"[1] TV news piece.

[1][http://www.themarysue.com/who-is-this-for-chan-person- anyway...](http://www.themarysue.com/who-is-this-for-chan-person-anyway/)</comment>


Q&As with Leading Remote Companies - <AUTHOR> https://remote.co/qa-leading-remote-companies/ <comment><USER2> I've been a remote worker for almost a decade now, and I've been through three different companies. My effectiveness always depends on how supportive the company is. As a remote worker I have to spend more time communicating; overcommunicating usually. It takes time to learn but the end result is worth it. I feel I have been more effective than I was in person and my quality of life has greatly improved. (Not to mention being able to afford a house).

<comment><USER3> What kind of work do you do? How did you start?

<comment><USER2> I started as an engineer but moved into developer evangelism. I was on the Swing team at Sun which gave me experience speaking at JavaOne. I first went remote because I got married to a woman in Oregon and Sun was okay with remote working (depending on the team). After Oracle took over I want to Palm and then Nokia. I am limited in the companies who will hire me (ex: Google and Amazon don't allow remote working) but the benefits have been worth it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This looks like a good way to break down some of the barriers to remote work. There are several good strategies, and several problems with good solutions. Hopefully this will give more managers and business leaders the confidence to consider remote work as a viable labor solution.

I like how this is organized both by-question and by-company, so you can get one question answered from different groups, or you can see each group's perspective by going down their responses on their page.

I feel as though the concept of remote work has moved on past the bleeding edge and early adopters, and now we're about to see many late adopters (especially the more nimble BigCos and governmental departments) start to consider remote work seriously. Within 10-20 years, we might see the "office culture" become as rare as remote work is today.

Edit: And the site looks to be rather burdened. I'm now getting a database error instead of a helpful FAQ.

\--- HN is rate-limiting me, so I cannot post more comments. \---

jbob2000 had an interesting comment that is dead for some reason:

 _Most of these companies started remote. I 'm really curious about how to transition from non-remote to remote. What does a company do with all the hardware and furniture? What about the administrative staff who would serve no purpose in an office-less company? How did employees deal with going from buying a lunch everyday to making one or getting one delivered? etc. etc._

Some groups might let workers transport office equipment home, to be used when working remotely - if Asim is going to be working from home, let him take his work chair and work monitors to his home, so he can use them for work from home.

For some companies, they might consider moving into a smaller office at some point. Something to consider for an office culture is that a usually-empty office can be demoralizing when people are used to being infected with their coworkers' enthusiasm. And it's easier to fill up a small office with a few people, than to make a large office space feel full with only a few people.

Another large part of an office culture is the lunch routine. This is not just a common biological need, but it's also a social time for coworkers to both discuss non-work activities and workplace issues, while networking. Do remote workers miss out on this? Is this a cause of the rise in popularity of coworking spaces?

<comment><USER3> jbob2000 would appear to be shadow banned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Has anyone noticed the salaries for some of these companies is a bit low and it seems some of them are doing it as labor market arbitrage? [e.g. A European company hiring a Brazilian developer for ~10k Euros less than they would hire a European ]

I see alot of them offering $40k-$50k salaries for positions than [in any metro area in the US or Europe] would be $70-80k for similar qualifications/experience.

I'm not saying its wrong, I'm just saying Toggl would be a 40% paycut at the top end and I don't live in Silicon Valley or NYC.

<comment><USER6> FWIW, I work for Canonical, which is also all remote work, and I got a reasonably big pay bump compared to my last job at an office. Yes, of course someone in Argentina is going to get paid differently than someone in New York City. I don't know how it works at other companies, but at Canonical, you're paid a competitive salary for companies in your area. So, for me, that means companies in the Boston area. I certainly didn't take a pay cut to work remotely. Obviously, what you get paid is different from company to company, but I doubt many companies would be successful in hiring quality engineers if they didn't pay as well as office jobs. Remote work is definitely a big plus, but at the end of the day, it doesn't pay the bills (it does save some money though - I don't need to get a $250 monthly train pass or pay gas/parking etc).

<comment><USER5> Yeah, its why I said "some".

Buffer, Canonical, and probably about half pay competitive rates for most of the US/Europe. The other half want to pay below $50k USD for engineers and that just isn't worth doing for anyone with 5+ years of experience and/or college degree.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have noticed an apparent chicken-and-egg problem in this space of the industry. Increasing numbers of companies want to embrace distributed teams, but they strongly prefer or only consider people who have worked remotely before. That makes it hard both to start out in remote work and to find people to fill your positions.

<comment><USER8> We've hired both "experienced" remote workers and "inexperienced" remote workers. I noticed that those with little to no experience working remotely are so excited (liberated?) working that way that it almost seem as if they are extra productive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The site is currently down, but a Google cached version is available if you're willing to work a bit for the answers.

<comment><USER10> And to moderately lessen that work, here's the link to the jump-off page: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Smsaa08...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Smsaa08DDHIJ:https://remote.co/qa- leading-remote-companies/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Where can I find remote jobs? Other than weworkremotely,odesk which doesn't seem all that great, I'm interested in other sources or websites.

<comment><USER12> [http://wfh.io/](http://wfh.io/) and [http://jobs.remotive.io/](http://jobs.remotive.io/), you can also sort angel list to only show remote jobs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Most of these companies started remote. I'm really curious about how to transition from non-remote to remote. What does a company do with all the hardware and furniture? What about the administrative staff who would serve no purpose in an office-less company? How did employees deal with going from buying a lunch everyday to making one or getting one delivered? etc. etc.</comment>


Cilk Plus/LLVM: Intel Cilk Plus C/C++ Language Extensions in LLVM - <AUTHOR> http://cilkplus.github.io <comment><AUTHOR> Cilk Plus is an Intel language extension for expressing parallelism in C and C++: [https://www.cilkplus.org](https://www.cilkplus.org)

Mostly it's supported by Intel's ICC and ICPC compilers, but I was interested to see that it's been ported to LLVM.

There's a parallel project for GCC as well: [https://www.cilkplus.org/build- gcc-cilkplus](https://www.cilkplus.org/build-gcc-cilkplus)

<comment><USER2> You don't need to do any of that last link for GCC 5.0+, which supports the Cilk extensions out of the box.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, I hadn't realized! That makes it dramatically more likely that Cilk will gain some traction.

 _Full support for Cilk Plus has been added to the GCC compiler. Cilk Plus is an extension to the C and C++ languages to support data and task parallelism_

[https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-5/changes.html](https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-5/changes.html)

Do you have any idea if support is likely to be built into clang as well?

<comment><USER2> Yes, the moment GCC landed those Cilk extensions, I started using them. The Cilk5 paper was seminal, and modern Cilk incorporates some support for SIMD, so I was delighted when GCC 5 arrived.

I don't know what the status for Clang is, but I'd be surprised if they weren't mainlined soon; that's a largely uneducated opinion though...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> So does this attempt to better utilize the multiple compute units which make up a single compute pipeline? For example Skylake technically has 4 FPU's per _physical core_ 1 SIMD, 3 x87 FPU-esque units, 1 branch processors, and 3-4ish IPU's (branch processors have some IPU uOPs)?

Or is it just a compiler integrated green thread library?

The FAQ is really vague just says its makes interfacing with parallelism easier.

<comment><USER4> It started as a very simple green-parallelism library (spawn/sync/for), but it looks like it has been expanded to include an array syntax for c (a[:] = sqrt(b[:])*c[:])), which will automatically vectorize if possible. It also has`#pragma simd` to hint to the compiler that you want a code block to be vectorized, even if the compiler would otherwise not.

There's something about 'hyper objects' too which sound like race-condition safe objects for doing things like reductions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "The Intel® Cilk™ Plus runtime library is distributed under a BSD 3-Clause license.

"

Enjoy having to put attribution in literally every Cilk binary you distribute :P

<comment><USER6> I don't know why you are getting downvoted. Clause #2 would require the inclusion of the BSD license with any release of compiled code. This is a very serious issue with the library. Any additional licensing terms which must be propagated to the compiled software is bad juju.

<comment><USER7> What are you talking about? Every open source license I can think of requires you to distribute the license with your binary: GPL, LGPL, BSD, MIT, Apache, etc.

<comment><USER5> The vast majority of compiler runtime libraries have explicit exceptions to licenses to avoid this, to avoid creating copyright infringers out of everyone.

<comment><USER8> So? You just don't use Cilk if you don't want to include the license, just like a normal library. It is a language extension, not something that magically infects your regular C or Fortran code...</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Automated D3 maps of any country of the world - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/climboid/d3MapMaker

<comment><USER2> tl;dr: Python script with hard-encoded Mac OS X paths, that runs `ogr2ogr -f "GeoJSON"` on data downloaded from <http://gadm.org/>

</comment><comment><USER3> Where does the data come from?

<comment><USER4> <http://gadm.org/></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does HN have admin side? - <AUTHOR> How do you manage inappropriate posts? Is it only by down votes or? <comment><USER2> From the FAQ "Other factors affecting rank include user flags, anti-abuse software, software which demotes overheated discussions, and moderator intervention."

Users with karma over 200 (I think) have a 'flag' link. If multiple users click it then a submittion or comment goes [dead]. In your user profile you can opt-in to see those, the default is to hide them. I flag a couple per day, usually SEO spam ("lock smith in city X"), gambling sides and other promotions and the occassional story that doesn't belong, let's say "Famous footballer has an affair".

The moderators, that's two people afaik, have their own self-build tools and more visibility. Well, they have access to the servers and databases. They can ban users permanently, change algorithms, merge stories, change titles and such. Nobody else is moderator.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I assumed about about "flagging" but was always wondering about some other less frequent features, as merge etc. and how they decide who has advantage of getting all the karma... Even if it is only 2 moderators it looks a quite significant task considering amount of posts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I imagine it works similarly to Lobsters[0] which is basically a HN clone...

[0] [https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters](https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters)</comment>


Pingdom copied our idea, success?! - <AUTHOR> http://www.verelo.com/blog/2012/05/14/have-you-seen-whatsdowntoday-com/

<comment><USER2> Your idea has virtually no barrier to entry. Expect more people copying it. I could probably write a script to do it in roughly an hour.

Instead, think about how you can add something unique.

<comment><AUTHOR> Our overall product is much larger, this is really just one feature.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. It's a feature. And an easy one for anyone to implement.

But. It's also a good idea and take credit where credit's due. I'd take it as an awkward compliment that Pingdom copied it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Although I do feel they copied you mostly because the look and feel of it, I also don't think they meant to as the type of service that Pingdom offers is very similar to yours. I see it more as Target saying "oh Walmart now has a grocery section, we need one!" type of ordeals.

</comment><comment><USER5> Monitor the uptime of PingDom... so that people know if Pingdom goes down.

</comment><comment><USER6> Is yours the Technorati Top 100 as well? I feel like this has been done many times in the past, both by individuals and businesses of monitoring products.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nah, ours is our personal favorites + a few others that we felt were popular at a global scale.

If you have any ideas for sites we could add I'd love to hear them!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Who copied who if Pingdom's public reports have been around for over a year?

[http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/02/08/new-public-report- from-p...](http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/02/08/new-public-report-from-pingdom- enters-beta/)

</comment><comment><USER8> I've been using <http://api-status.com/> for ages, seems pretty similar

</comment><comment><USER9> The UI is nearly identical. Tough to argue that they took your idea and made it their own.

<comment><USER10> Pingdom's UI is the same as their public status report feature they released over a year ago: [http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/02/08/new-public-report- from-p...](http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/02/08/new-public-report-from-pingdom- enters-beta/)

They didn't copy the UI, they just made a list of websites using a feature they already have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yes, success. Suppose it validates that it's a cool marketing idea. I'm sure you have others (and those will be copied too...if you're lucky). Think of where else you can post this to get some attention (sorry I have no suggestions). Maybe show side by side of the UI in the blog post?

</comment><comment><USER12> It is a great idea. I shall be copying it for my own web monitoring site.

</comment><comment><USER13> What idea is that _exactly_?

<comment><USER14> Yeah, that was my thought. This is a glorified report, not an "idea".</comment></comment>


Embracing Another Point of View by Alex Hillman - <AUTHOR> http://alexhillman.com/embracing-another-point-of-view <comment><USER2> Thanks. That's an especially poignant title for me considering that I just posted this, which will probably be dead/deleted by the time you click on it: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4385454></comment>


Variable Scope In JavaScript: A Commercial Screencast - <AUTHOR> http://www.watchmecode.net/javascript-scope

<comment><USER2> I've bought and watched the previous paid screencast (<http://www.watchmecode.net/refactoring-javascript>) and it's not worth half the price of a good book. The level of preparation and detail that goes into these productions don't justify the price atm. Not bad, but at this price you should get something inspirational.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback on that first episode! I heard similar statements from other buyers as well, and I've taken it to heart for this episode.

I took the time to script out the code and the talking points this time around. I also recorded the audio separately so that I could really focus on the code and on the audio, independently.

I hope this episode shows the level improvement I think it has! If not, I'm always looking for feedback on what I can do better.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best practices for creating unique IDs - <AUTHOR>

Would you use your database's "auto increment" function, GUID function (if any), or simply assign a randomized alphanumeric string of N characters? Each method has pros and cons, but I have never been able to really settle on one. Lately I've been using random generation on the assumption that a sufficiently large number of characters (say, 32) makes the risk of duplication nearly non-existent - but not impossible.<p>When you've written something from scratch, which method have you most commonly used? I'm more interested in security than readability, but I can't find any data suggesting one method over another aside from the possibility of guessing an auto-incremented field. <comment><USER2> Do you have security concerns besides someone guessing the id? I always figured you just make sure you only allow authenticated users to edit/view the data they are authenticated to see.

I always figured people used GUIDs over ids to avoid the performance implications of re-pinging the database to get the new id. I would be cautious of creating my own GUID generation though. I'd assume that the db's GUID implementation is probably WAY better than anything one can hack together within a short time-frame.

I'm an auto-increment man (if I can get away with it). :)

<comment><AUTHOR> My concern with security stems from the eventuality of exposing that identifier to a viewer, most likely through a link - maybe to their profile page, or (for example) to a specific node or post. More commonly, that ID would turn up as a hidden form field on a comments form, a simple right-click away.

I would expect that good authentication would negate the worry about this, but I don't always see every side of things ;)

<comment><USER3> Any value that you use to look up user information to populate a template is going to expose some information about how your application works, whether it's incremental or a GUID or a hash. There is some value in not having it be incremental in that it's not as easily fuzzable, but spidering the site will still cough up a bunch of valid values for the 'userid' parameter. Even if the form field is hidden.

What are you writing, anyway?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> GUIDs (UUIDs) are not necessarily good for cryptography; some implementations or versions make it easy to predict subsequent values. Originally UUIDs were created to provide uniqueness in cases when you didn't own the namespace: <http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4122.txt>

I'm trying to figure out a solution to a similar problem this week. I'm leaning towards an AES of an auto-increment ID + random salt and my coding partner wants to create a random MD5 hex digest and store it as a second key in the database. He's probably right but I'd like to avoid creating yet another index.

</comment><comment><USER5> You can take a look at this : [http://www.rubyfleebie.com/encryption-with- alphanumeric-outp...](http://www.rubyfleebie.com/encryption-with-alphanumeric- output/)

It cares more about readability than security but I guess it is safe enough.

</comment><comment><USER6> I read 15 Bytes from /dev/urandom, use base64 on it and cut of the last two padding characters.

That's 2^120 possibilities - just guessing a valid id will require a lot of luck and a collision is very unlikely.</comment>


Show HN: We brought iOS dictation to Windows - <AUTHOR> http://www.myechoapp.com <comment><USER2> This post set off HN's voting ring detector, but we turned that off because we want to see original work on HN.

Please don't ring-vote posts, though. It's against the rules, makes it likely that your post won't be seen (I only caught this one by accident), and will eventually get your account dinged.

<comment><USER3> What does it mean to "ring-vote" posts?

<comment><USER4> A voting ring is a group of people that all upvote each other's posts. But most of the time, it lacks that level of organization -- usually, ring-voting just refers to having all your friends upvote your post for you.

One really easy way to trip HN's voting ring detector is to send your voters a direct link. However, in my experience, this acts less to detect voting rings than to weed out HN newbies. All my friends just post on facebook with something along the lines of "go search the New page for <x> and upvote, please!"

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, so are you (and is @dang) saying that tweeting or facebooking a link is Ring Voting? I didn't ask for upvotes, I apologize if this was a violation of netiquette. Thanks for explaining this!

<comment><USER4> I can't speak for dang, but if you didn't ask for votes, I don't think you violated netiquette at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One of those ideas that seems obvious in retrospect. Nice work!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just tried out and am really impressed with the entire setup and pairing process. Very clever use of QR Code. It works just as featured in the video. The 2-3 second wait for uploading/processing is annoying but I can get used to it. However, having to click 'Done' disrupts my chain of thought and makes concentrating harder. I don't think I can get used to manually clicking 'Done' after every other sentence/paragraph. I wish there was a way you could auto- click 'Done' when my sentence was completed.

A neat UI could be a buffer that slowly grows, maybe showing the # of seconds recorded. Once it's near 30-60s length and I pause for 1-2 seconds OR shake the phone backwards, auto-click 'Done'.

Also what does the "Log Dictation on Desktop" option mean?

<comment><AUTHOR> It shouldn't take 2-3 seconds to process. Where are you in the world? We have servers in West Europe, South East Asia (for Asia and AU/NZ) and Chicago. If you are far from one of those, or your phone isn't on Wifi you might see some slowness.

Good point about the Done thing, but we're limited to what iOS allows. If we do anything that modifies Siri then we could get booted from the store.

Log Dictation on Desktop literally keeps a text file on your desktop of everything you've dictated. For your records.

<comment><USER7> Why would I want to use my phone, and public network latency, to do what windows already offers built in.

Is it really that much better dictation? Or is it one of those I'm lucky I speak the 'way' that windows is expecting.

<comment><USER8> A fair question! If the built-in tools are working for you then you might not need myEcho. Our inspiration for writing the app was that we found the built- in dictation to be lacking, and wanted to have the same quality we were getting on iOS. myEcho is free to try, though, so you can decide for yourself! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting app; I'd thought about doing something similar with a web socket and the (non-Siri) iOS dictation capability, but never got around to it, so this might come in useful.

No points, though, for autoplaying your demo video in the middle of Domingo's _Nessun dorma_. That's just rude.

</comment><comment><USER10> Finally an app that is compelling enough to make me want to upgrade from my iPhone4 !

</comment><comment><USER11> Thats cool!</comment>


Helvetica Now – A redrawn type family in three sizes - <AUTHOR> https://www.monotype.com/fonts/helvetica-now <comment><USER2> I don't have a dog in the font fight/discussion, but I'd just like to say that websites for fonts are some of the coolest websites visually.</comment>


Ask HN: Have developers become a commoditised resource? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> It depends a lot on what you're hiring developers for. If you need a developer to add some new UI features to a web app, there will be thousands of junior developers you can hire. On the other hand, if you need to reduce the time it takes to execute a stock trade by 0.25 microseconds, there may many fewer developers in the world with the domain knowledge (high frequency trading) and programming skills (high performance C++ programming) to do that. Even fewer developers will have the skills needed to write the flight control software for a new spacecraft.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes and no. Being a computer programmer covers a wide range of skills and roles. It's like construction. There's a huge range. Some people cut and nail up dry wall. They do their work without having to invent things, using skills that can be executed rote. Other builders have to design a custom bridge for a unique mountain range that must handle stress not normally found in cookie cutter bridge designs.

A big part of the market is making CRUD apps. The skills to develop these kinds of apps can be reliably learned. But even still, it's not quite as rote a skill as being a cog on an assembly line. There's still a lot of variability, and lots of parts to master (front end, databases, etc), interpretation of requirements. It's hard to just hire an army of peons and expect them to participate in CRUD.

If the development is exploring out new territory, then the workers will never be a commodity. Making new things never done before. Facial recognition, OCR with high reliability for crumby hand writing, etc. For these workers to be a commodity, you will have to create an AI with human level creativity to do exploratory creation. That will likely not happen in our great great great grand children's lifetimes.

<comment><USER4> > Other builders have to design a custom bridge for a unique mountain range > that must handle stress not normally found in cookie cutter bridge designs.

Aren't you confusing builders and engineers?

<comment><USER3> No, that's actually the point of the post. That programmers, developers, or what have you are all clumped together. When in reality there are many distinct kinds of programmers with different skills, just like in the world of physical structures.

The term "computer programmer" gets assigned to everyone who makes software. Some programmers invent little like a dry wall worker. All average people could become this kind of programmer.

Other programmers invent with skills out of reach of most common people.

<comment><USER4> Actually I don't think it is. Nobody thinks the guy that installs my fence designed the Golden Gate Bridge.

<comment><USER3> It seems you are arguing agianst a point that you are trying to make yourself.

<comment><USER4> > Other builders have to design a custom bridge for a unique mountain range

These are not builders and nobody would ever call them builders.

Well one person would, I guess.

<comment><USER5> To me it is clear he is saying dry wall work and bridge design are separate skill sets. Contrasting that with the general term "developers" where different skill sets fall under one umbrella term.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> No, but the most common problems become commoditised. 15 years ago I could make money building a restaurant website, now it's just squarespace or Wix. I could build a CMS or set up an ecommerce site. There was enough demand that companies like Shopify grew into existence.

But while the baseline expectation is higher, so is the complexity of new problems. Being a developer is to constantly be learning and adapting, changing direction and always trying new things.

</comment><comment><USER7> Not really. Sure, programmers that only know HTML, CSS and JS and that were/are making money by building restaurant websites are having a hard time because there exists Wix and the like. But the IT world evolves: Docker, Kubernetes, Go, Terraform, React etc., and developers are hired if and only if they know the new stuff. In 20 years probably all the stuff we usually do now (manually) will be automated, but again in 20 years we will probably program in $NEW_FRAMEWORK and $NEW_LANGUAGE, so Docker, Go, Kubernetes, VueJS will all look like plain HTML + CSS + JS today.

</comment><comment><USER8> There's a huge stratification going on, between developers as commodities and developers as assets.

<comment><USER9> Absolutely.

If you're a tech company, looking to grow by building new products or significantly expanding existing ones, then your developers are assets and you treasure them.

If you're looking to grow in other ways (e.g. by acquisition) then you can put all your products in maintenance mode, and your developers are a cost that you want to cut as much as possible.

Developers as a whole are not a commoditised resource, but certainly can be treated that way depending on the company and its business plan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The reality is that there are different markets and different market segments.

There is actually a large segment of the online marketplace where I would say "commoditized" is almost accurate especially when compared with some Silicon Valley rates. And this does in fact include a significant percentage of highly skilled programmers.

Of course, when you are in the commodity rate range, finding the highly skilled programmers is a challenge. But as I said, they do exist.

But there is a limit to how far that goes. You will see massive discounts when comparing some markets, but the less common knowledge still is at a premium rate.

One caveat is that there will often be a minor concession in terms of something like English language proficiency for example.

But I think that us programmers actually should try to take proactive steps to slow the race to the bottom in terms of compensation. Especially as remote becomes mainstream and markets open up to online and overseas programmers even more.

My own personal belief, which is really just pure speculation, is that ordinary types of programming will be automated by artificial general intelligence within one or two decades. So I personally think that the wage labor paradigm and other core aspects of our economic system will be completely obsoleted.

</comment><comment><USER11> Certain businesses see developers as a commodity and work to further commoditize them by using cookie-cutter tooling that turns programming as closely as possible into plugging cords into outlets. However this can only take you so far.

If you have developers that use ever-more-simplified-tools and languages, there are companies that make those tools, and cloud companies that make the infrastructure and build all the things that make life easier for other companies. They still need strong programmers.

There will always be the need for extremely good programmers. If you are an extremely good programmer then you should be able to earn outsized monetary rewards and find intellectually stimulating projects if you are able to move to the right location (SF, Boston) and interview well.

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't think so. For large corporations, the hiring process is still very qualitative and selective and the pay is high and variable based on how good of a fit the developer is for the specific project needs.

If you compare this to the average McDonald's worker who is just expected to fulfill the same generic duties for the same generic pay, you can see most devs don't fit this definition.

</comment><comment><USER13> Partial answer:

Hmm... given in the interviews I've been as a web developer... No.

If I could redo my whole thing again, I'd focus much more at making people laugh and like me. That might get some "you passed the coding challenge but you don't have enough experience" out of the way.

</comment><comment><USER14> Agile did it. Developers became resources to be pluged into existing projects sprints.

Want it quickier just add more resources.

<comment><USER15> Huh? How does that even work?

<comment><USER14> Usually adding one new resource subtracts a resource overall because they take other resources time. In the best case it may give you half a resource boost but it puts pressure on supporting units.

<comment><USER15> Especially if you only think of them as 'units' rather than individuals with strengths and weaknesses.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mr. China Comes to America - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/12/mr-china-comes-to-america/309160/?single_page=true <comment><AUTHOR> This quote: "Say you have an idea for—anything. (For me, the list would start with silent leaf blowers, which I'd give to all my neighbors as gifts)" reminds me of the recent discussion of "The Quiet Ones": <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4802118>.</comment>


The Fake Bomb Detectors in Iraq - <AUTHOR> http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/06/fake-bomb-detectors-iraq <comment><USER2> Oh God. This is sounds like the cruelest prank in the world.

From the wikipedia article is [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651)

" It requires no battery or other power source; its manufacturer claimed that it is powered solely by the user's static electricity. To use the device, the operator must walk for a few moments to "charge" it before holding it at right angles to the body... According to Husam Muhammad, an Iraqi police officer and user of the ADE 651, using the device properly is more of an art than a science: 'If we are tense, the device doesn't work correctly. I start slow, and relax my body, and I try to clear my mind.' In one promotional video McCormick claimed that the device could detect elephants from 48 kilometres (30 mi) away."

They should be charging this guy with murder. Not fraud.

<comment><USER3> Selling magic sticks should not be illegal.

Buying them with public funds for public safety applications, however...

<comment><USER4> Being able to sell magic/fraud legally only means that client will be more cautious when buying.

Regulation is not to protect the dumb, it is to promote competition when the majority of consumers are clever enough to not try a service that has not been proven not to be a fraud.

For example, Amazon would never have worked if it was legal to sell book online and not sending them. People would only shop in local shop where they pay for the book they have in their hands and we would be all laughing at the (few) morons that thought they could trust a website. And that works for simpler things too - would you try a different brand of food if it is legal to poison stupid people, would you even try another shop than the one you trust the owner ?

<comment><USER5> Spot on. I am very reluctant to try supplements from unknown brands, because I've heard previous scandals (in my country) where the amount of supplement has been way off (both too much and too little), without any serious action taken against them.

<comment><USER6> 'supplements' in general are snake-oil, so I wouldn't worry about it too much...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For one thing, as far as bribes have been payed, I'd like to see this guy being charged to the full extent.

Also there are charlatans selling magic stones or other nonsense to the mentally weak, and I think that humans susceptible to this kind of fraud should be protected from it, so I'd say if he had sold this to private persons I'd love to see him convicted of fraud.

That being said, apparently many of his loyal satisfied customers have been the military or police, and seriously that's pretty disturbing: These are the people trusted by their citizens (well... in theory...) to keep up the peace and safety in their country. And in exchange they get to arrest people, and run around with guns. At the sam time these are the people who were not able to distinguish the equivalent of a dead rock from a scientific device to detect miniscule traces of chemical compounds used in explosives. Sure, there's _some_ blame to put on the guy selling the disfunctional device, but quite an insignificant amount of blame, given how gullible his highly decorated customers were.

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure that this is necessarily a valid claim. The people who have to use the device are not normally the people who purchased it.

I'm sure that most of us have been in a position where we have been forced to use a product that is inferior or even completely broken, trying valiantly to make up for the shortcomings in the product. The person who purchased the product may have done so in good faith; misled by a smooth sales pitch, or may be actively corrupt and complicit in the deception.

I have no doubt that many of the people who were forced to use this product were aware that something was not right, but I doubt many of them were in a position to do anything but shut up and soldier.

<comment><USER7>
        > most of us have been in a position where we have
        > been forced to use a product that is inferior
        > or even completely broken

I might have used equipment that was inferior, or been made to perform a procedure of which I thought it will add very little, or maybe _almost_ none value. I definitely haven't been in a position where I have been forced to use something equivalent of a dead brick, and pretend as if it would do something very technically sophisticated (bomb detection).

        > I have no doubt that many of the people who were
        > forced to use this product were aware that something
        > was not right

For some almost-untrained security guard, I'd say this is probably right. Add to this the context of living in a very hierarchical system where you "just do what you're told" and I certainly can imagine someone wielding a stick around a car claiming to examine it, "as long as I get paid..."...

But then, this person isn't the one being deceived about the effectiveness "bomb detector" but rather it was the leadership of the whole army/police/security-service who obviously didn't care the least to invest even 1 second of thought into what's being bought (for thousands of $, no less...). So how much thought was put into the effectiveness of the weapons being bought? The procedures of checking cars? The method by which locations of checkpoints around sensitive areas were determined?

The death of people being killed by bombs was the result of the complete ineffectiveness of these "bomb detectors" only to a very little extent, but likely mainly because the whole organization responsible for safety was unable of rational thought and planning.

<comment><USER9> > I might have used equipment that was inferior, or been made to perform a > procedure of which I thought it will add very little, or maybe almost none > value. I definitely haven't been in a position where I have been forced to > use something equivalent of a dead brick, and pretend as if it would do > something very technically sophisticated (bomb detection).

I've had to use a very expensive product from a big-name tech company that was, as far as I or anyone technical could tell, a JVM that took even longer to start than usual.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> According to other articles I've read about the devices, they were advertised as "running on the body's static electricity", and able to detect not only bombs, but also "illegal immigrants, truffles, contraband ivory and 100 dollar bills" from a distance of three miles.

It's utterly bizarre that various governments have paid over $100,000,000 for these things.

<comment><USER11> There are a lot of very expensive weapon systems that are only slightly less of a fraud than this.

<comment><USER12> Like the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, go watch "the pentagon wars" you're in for a treat.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for bringing up that to my attention, it's pretty funny!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXQ2lO3ieBA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXQ2lO3ieBA)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A similar device showed up with the Egyptian military to detect nothing less than 'viruses' in what's been known as Koftagate.

[http://muftah.org/countdown-kofta-gate-egypts-called-cure- ai...](http://muftah.org/countdown-kofta-gate-egypts-called-cure- aids/#.VYuSb7OCPCQ)

<comment><USER14> Yeah, the cure for AIDS and Hepatitis Virus C was a nice touch on top of that as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Even if you believed the claims in general, wouldn't you want to test the things on live explosives just to get a feel for their behavior?

<comment><USER16> Here in lies the problem. People who don't understand proper testing protocols won't blind their testing. And they'll subconsciously influence it to work. And if it doesn't work, they'll let someone else who is more "experienced" try it.

<comment><USER17> Testing is not the end of things though. Here in the US, TSA failed in DHS tests:

> In one case, an alarm sounded, but even during a pat-down, the screening > officer failed to detect a fake plastic explosive taped to an undercover > agent's back. In all, so-called "Red Teams" of Homeland Security agents > posing as passengers were able get weapons past TSA agents in 67 out of 70 > tests — a 95 percent failure rate, according to agency officials.

[http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/investigation- breaches-u...](http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/investigation-breaches-us- airports-allowed-weapons-through-n367851)

They pushed the agency chief out and ordered more training. Are we doing some kind of Sun Tzu's Art of War style of management?

The writing is on the wall. We should dismantle the TSA. We won't do it though.

<comment><USER18> That is completely different. The TSA is there to make passengers _feel_ safer. As long as you don't read news stories about their failures then it works.

<comment><USER17> The fake bomb detectors make people feel safer as well. It acts as a small deterrent as long as nobody knows it is bs.

We know that security through obscurity is a doomed idea in the long run. I am not trying to defend the purchases. I'm just trying to present a view of the lowly peon who has to operate this magic wand. They need people to believe this thing works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Well, it is easy to come up with glib moral indignation. However, more interesting aspect of this story is the prevailing atmosphere of hysterical wars on "terror" and "drugs" which provide fertile breeding ground for this kind of operation. Clearly, authorities everywhere want these kinds of devices at any price. So, whether they work or not is just a boring detail. This is a typical symptom of advanced irrationality, of course. This time, worryingly, on the side of the authorities.

Mr McCormick is a genius at spotting timely market opportunities. The only thing he missed out on is an internet startup around that idea <irony warning>.

</comment><comment><USER20> As everyone here has said, this is clearly fraud, if not worse. Which makes this line from the article completely crazy:

"Meanwhile, Roe's device had attracted the attention of the F.B.I., which tested one, determined it was worthless, and sent out a Teletype warning to law-enforcement agencies."

The FBI tested this thing, found it was bogus, and did the equivalent of writing a letter to Consumer Reports. If only the FBI were, I don't know, familiar with some kind of department of the government whose job it was to prosecute illegal interstate acts. Some kind of Justice Department maybe? It's wild that they didn't relay this to a federal prosecutor.

<comment><USER21> "...sent out a Teletype warning..."

WAT?

This is what we use in the USA for inter-agency comms in the 21st century?

<comment><USER22> It's hard to tell with the way the article is written, but I think the FBI tested the device in the 1980s or early 1990s.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I was in Iraq when these were first starting to hit police checkpoints and the article's description of the utterly absurd spectacle of the technology in action is not exaggerated.

The article made me wonder whether McCormick eventually started to believe the technology actually worked. The fact that he spent hours trying to patiently explain the science behind it when first arrested suggests that either he started to believe his own story or was really, really confident in his ability to lie to others. Of course, the best liars to some extent do believe their own lies to some extent, which is what makes them so good at it....

<comment><USER24> > he fact that he spent hours trying to patiently explain the science behind > it when first arrested suggests that either he started to believe his own > story or was really, really confident in his ability to lie to others.

Or he knew that what he was going to be charged with was fraud, which requires intentional deception. Therefore failing to keep up the lie would be exactly the same as pleading guilty.

If this guy can convincingly maintain the lie that _he personally_ believes they work, then he has plausible deniability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I was in Pakistan a few months ago on a project. Security at the main Benazir Bhutto International Airport in Islamabad were using these. As I arrived at the airport, with massive and completely over-the-top security everywhere, stern-faced soldiers are marching up and down holding these devices out at arms-length.

Terrifying to realise, in that moment, that this is all that stands between a bomb and me.

</comment><comment><USER26> Obligatory Advertising Gripe: The site/article feature two(!) overlapping modal windows - the top shows an ad, the second layer shows a subscribe call- to-action. You have to close both to access the content. This takes bad UX to a whole new level.

</comment><comment><USER27> That's pretty clever. Unless you hand every operator a sample bomb (or elephant!) they are very unlikely to ever come across the real thing. The positive rate on things like this must be very, very small, so it would take a really large number of samples to get even one detected bomb.

If you've ever been at an airport where they dust you with a pad (I guess for drugs?), that device could be broken and you'd never suspect it unless you had a sample of some sort.

But of course the authorities who spend the public's money on equipment must have thought about this, right?

<comment><USER28> The glove swipe tests for explosive material (supposedly).

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The conspiracy theory version of this is that the people responsible are really just fighting against the larger nation states. The type of bomb that these things are designed to detect are mostly used by people rebelling against such nation states. So in a sense, McCormick has stuck a blow for the "little guy" in a way that a reasonable person would think impossible.

A true anti-patriot... Possibly the most effective anarchist ever...

</comment><comment><USER30> What a nice feeling of accomplishment this guy must have, while chilling on his yatch.

No seriously, this is an horrible story. I hope thy all end in jail. Karma will take care of the rest.

<comment><USER31> "Karma will take care of the rest"

How ironic.

I have a batch of Positive Karma Inverter devices, do you want to buy some? It works on the nuclear quadrupole resonance principles.

<comment><USER32> This reply is a master piece.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Stories about this device have been posted to HN periodically, going back at least 5 years - [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=bomb%20detector&dateRange=all](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=bomb%20detector&dateRange=all)

e.g. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1070732](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1070732)

Shocking that these things are still out there.

</comment><comment><USER34> Not to be confused with the fake bomb detectors who work every day in the airports in the United States, though their success rates appear to be similar.

</comment><comment><USER35> But... wait... Don't tell me they've never tested it! I mean with or near real explosives, etc.

Regardless... the responsible should be charged with murder.

<comment><USER36> The article addressed both of your points.

The people in charge of "testing" the device before approving the purchase were probably getting kickbacks.

The prosecution opted to go for fraud over corporate manslaughter because the former was much easier to prove.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> It's very hard to have sympathy for believers in dowsing. The victims of the explosions resulting from the gross negligence, yes, but not the negligent, superstitious idiots.

Just shows the whole Iraq project was doomed all along.

</comment><comment><USER38> I thought everybody knew that they don't work.

</comment><comment><USER39> >McCormick's income over five years approached $80 million.

What an astounding story. A complete con, but man... I wish I had that kind of talent in sales...

<comment><USER40> It's easier if you can change your sales patter to fit exactly what your client wants to hear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> :O :O :O

</comment><comment><USER42> Corruption is the main reason of US&allies failures around the world.

<comment><USER15> Not really, unless you mean that in some really broad sense. I think that when US foreign policy fails it is usually because it is driven more by domestic politics than foreign realities.

<comment><USER42> Afghanistan / Iraq (just two examples of reckless schemes) wars were started just to transfer taxpayers money into war corporations accounts. Such an absence of adequate goals could leads only to a failure(and that what was seen). "Domestic politics" is just serves as a screen for corruption schemes(as the whole american "political system" is just a screen for corruption processes).

<comment><USER43> Assuming your premise is true, that the US government exists to transfer taxpayer money into select corporate accounts, then there are far easier ways to do this than venturing off to war. Most of the large private companies that benefited financially from the Iraq and Afghan wars are primarily logistics or general defense companies; there are plenty of other opportunities for these guys to win new defense contracts outside of active war zones.

<comment> saiya-jin unfortunately, in some way or other, his premises are true. more chaos it creates, the longer it all takes, the more cash extracted.

take a look at afghanistan - there was never a critical mass of enough soldiers/equipment to swiftly win the war, conquer whole territory. just enough to appear winning, but not really (in reality, US lost the war, in similar way as soviets did). look what's happening with iraq - US is/will be coming back. oh gosh, what an unfortunate coincidence. is there still anybody out there convinced that iraq game was about protecting US citizens anyhow? I mean, look at the map, look 12 years back at politics, there was no threat, there is still no threat to US citizens back home. Just enough to piss off radical muslims, and radicalize rest. let's not forget we're talking about oil-richest region on the planet. yes, coincidence again...

why are there so many lobbyists in Washington? i mean these people should be put in jail for treason</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Art of Doodling - <AUTHOR> https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/05/22/the-art-of-doodling/ <comment><USER2> One thing that always fascinated me is that in constrained mediums like doodles (the constraint being time spent on it and the reliance on lines), there still are hints so as to the artist being _professional._

The doodle of King, who is not a visual artist, is just incomparable to the one of Cocteau, who did work in film and visual arts. There's something charming to both of them, but the way trained artists can make even the shoddiest of their work beautiful to look at is something I am quite envious about.

Disclaimer: My doodles are shit.

<comment><USER3> It's not necessarily a thing of being professional. There is this mental trick of being able to switch your mind from a symbolic to a visual processing style, which is easy to do once you learn it. [1] (Betty Edwards[2] uses this explanation to sell her books, but the first free exercises are enough to understand what it's all about).

In the article, Stephen King's and Queen Victoria's doodles are clearly using the symbolic brain, creating "drawings" equivalent to writing in hieroglyphs - the parts of the drawn objects are unrelated to how something _looks_ in real life, only to what each shape _means_.

You don't need to become a professional of visual arts to overcome that style, only realize that you're doing it and _practice_ drawing from pure visuals, without symbolism, and turning off the analytical brain.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOh4eIEjqvY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOh4eIEjqvY)

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

<comment><USER4> I don't really agree with this. Betty Edward's process is great for drawing from reference and learning to see. Drawing from imagination relies on a completely different skill-set.

In Cocteau's case, I would even argue that it leans more towards symbolic drawing, but with a more comprehensive visual library to draw upon- one that would've been developed from his profession.

<comment><USER5> I will disagree with your disagree. Edwards demolished a barrier for me in learning to see and draw. YMMV but it was profound for me.

Edwards does focus entirely on drawing from observation, but I see that as a necessary step on the way to drawing from imagination, in much the same way that you must first learn circuit analysis in order to do circuit synthesys.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I realised recently that doodling during meetings (yes, work meetings as well!), and brainstorming has helped me capture more details than just writing in my notebook. Having ADHD, it's often difficult to follow so many ideas and points being discussed.

My colleagues noticed that and I'm grateful that they specifically asked me to doodle during a workshop we hosted. Here's a cartoon I did during that time: [https://twitter.com/prashnts/status/1104060675205316609?s=21](https://twitter.com/prashnts/status/1104060675205316609?s=21)

</comment><comment><USER7> I always carry a note book with me. It has my plan for the day ([https://medium.com/@kristiandupont/high-resolution- planning-...](https://medium.com/@kristiandupont/high-resolution- planning-a76175574e7f)), random notes and random doodles. I got into it after purchasing an old copy of Thinking With A Pencil ([https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Pencil-Henning- Nelms/dp/1626...](https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Pencil-Henning- Nelms/dp/1626541841)) which I think was a recommendation from some thread in here.

I am not sure what it does for me, but I've been quite consistent for well over a year now and I do find all my old note books are quite fun to scan through.</comment>


Ask HN: What do you think of Wolfram Language? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> It's a really cool thing.

The only issue I have with it is that it's expensive as hell.

But for educational purposes, it's really really amazing. I've used it in the past to plot some functions and such - it's crazy what you can do with it.

</comment><comment> cbm-vic-20 It is aptly named.</comment>


Using Uninitialized Memory for Fun and Profit - <AUTHOR> http://research.swtch.com/2008/03/using-uninitialized-memory-for-fun-and.html

<comment><USER2> That data structure can be actually used for a log structured database where the sparse vector is the log file and the dense vector is the record index.

The index of the dense vector is then the record identifier, and the dense vector contains the offset of the valid record in the log database.

The record identifier is a handle to the record data. It can be reused when the record is deleted but will remain the same for the lifetime of the record.

The dense vector is very compact and may be stored and retrieved efficiently, even if stored in the log itself. The record key index stores the association between the key and the record identifier.

The GC or crash recovery process can easily locate valid records by checking if their offset matches the one found in the dense index.

So this data structure is not just of historical interest. Thanks for the link.

</comment><comment><USER3> An interesting implementation of this trick can be found in the LZF compression lib: <http://oldhome.schmorp.de/marc/liblzf.html>

Basically the hash table used to compare the current input with already seen input is uninitialized, since the two values are anyway compared bit-per-bit to actually make sure there is a match.

</comment><comment><USER4> malloc + memset takes about .24 seconds per gig on my machine. So be sure that your dataset is really, really sparse before you try this.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure if your comment suggests that .24 seconds is fast enough not to worry about it, or not fast enough.

In my time at IBM doing very performance oriented C development, saying that a server operation only took .24 seconds would get you laughed out of the development meeting as the operations were designed to take 12 _microseconds_.

<comment><USER6> Allocating and initializing a huge array of memory at start-up can take a second, and subsequent server operations take 12 microseconds. Nobody's talking about allocating a gig of memory every time a server gets a request.

<comment><USER5> One thing to consider is we also aren't using small development boxes. These were Power7 zSeries servers with usually 16 cores (8 in hardware) and up to 32GB ram. You would be surprised what these machines are capable of. Of course, I'm not saying I can allocate a gig in .24 seconds and set it to zero, but I'm not saying its not possible either (I simply don't know as I no longer have access to these machines).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Liveness analysis - the motivating example - is typically in the form of a set with one element per local variable. Most practical routines will have less than 32 or 64 variables, however, so even in practice a 32-bit or 64-bit word will be better. Also, you often have to compute other set operations, such as union, intersection and difference, rather than just membership and iteration.

<comment><USER8> You still have to do something for the functions with many local variables. In those cases you have little choice but to allow all N variables into the set, even if comparatively few are in any particular set at one time.

Sparse sets are also a great way to implement NFA state sets, where again you have a large number of possible set members but most sets are small, and you don't want to pay the O(all possible states) cost over and over.</comment></comment>


New monitoring powers 'to tackle terrorism' proposed - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-32896921 <comment><USER2> This is about "combatting online terror" in the same way that reducing the benefits cap is about "helping working people".

Newspeak and doublethink abound.

<comment><USER3> Those two points are 100% factual.

The benefits cap reduction paid for people who are working to have their personal tax-free allowance raised and decreased the reward for not working ergo they are helping working people by providing tax relief as a reward. This just isn't the same "helping working people" soundbite that the vocal minority of media and population are annoyed about however which is where the disparity arises.

They _are_ ramping up surveillance with the intention of combating online terror. But there probably isn't anything much going on, but they're still doing it so they can be seen to be doing it.

Now I don't necessarily agree with the situation, would personally smash the state in a second, nationalise all industry and live as a strong fisted respectable worker under a common flag, singing Auferstanden aus Ruinen in a second but newspeak and doublethink it is not.

<comment><USER4> > They are ramping up surveillance with the intention of combating online > terror. But there probably isn't anything much going on, but they're still > doing it so they can be seen to be doing it.

The stated intention of combating online terror. However much like their ISP filtering, it was used for things other than the stated purpose within the first 6 months.

<comment><USER5> ISP filtering has not been used for other things.

There are three seperate systems:

1) the mandated porn filters; these are optional. Some of them have granularity so the customer can select other categories of stuff to block

2) court ordered blocking of torrent sites. These are quite seperate from the porn filters and they require a judge to rubber stamp an order.

3) the IWF lists of sites dealing in images of child sexual abuse. This is a system voluntarily used by most UK ISPs to filter sites that contain images of child sexual abuse.

When arguing against them it's probably useful to at least be factually accurate about the different systems.

<comment><USER4> [https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20141208/06160229348/uk- we...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20141208/06160229348/uk-web- filtering-blocks-access-to-website-europes-largest-oldest-hacking- community.shtml)

[http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/03/david-c...](http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/03/david- cameron-internet-porn-filter-censorship-creep)

I mean you can deny these things happen I guess? Before Cameron started meddling, this stuff was far less frequent and far more reasonable.

<comment><USER5> That kind of stuff has been happening forever. Of course it's more common now - every UK customer is now covered. But anyone who's been behind filters at work or school can tell you that filters have always had false positives.

Focussing on those cases is probably a mistake. They're caught in filters by accident, and the people responsible say "whoops!" then tweak the filters to unblock the charity sites. [http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets- and-tech/new...](http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and- tech/news/o2-changes-porn-filterafter-charity-sites-blocked-9023209.html)

And we've seen this rhetoric from politicians - "this is complicated; mistakes do get made; but we adjustthe filters when mistakes are made; and we need the filters because TERRORISTS or EXTREME PORNOGRAPHY".

<comment><USER4> Yet mysteriously other countries and the UK for decades have been fine without them.

[https://www.blocked.org.uk/faq](https://www.blocked.org.uk/faq)

You are aware they block things like dating sites as a matter of policy unless you opt-in to the "perv list", yeah?

<comment><USER5> So what? You call it a perv list, but you also point to the high rate of false positives. So someone opting out of the filters isn't chosing to view porn but is chosing to view a false positive.

You seem to think that I think the filters are a good idea. I don't. I do know that using factually wrong information when talking about the filters does not help when you're trying to change law.

<comment><USER4> [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/22/war_on_erupts_in_bri...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/22/war_on_erupts_in_britain/)

Its a term that was used for years in relation to the filter that it was about "perverts".

For someone dedicated to factual accuracy, the fact you seem to think commonly used terms in relation to something are "wrong" is proof you really don't get it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It seems like this is proposed in the same way the Patriot Act was proposed to the public. "We need this to go after those suspected of terrorism". Yet the bill allowed them to intercept data of many more people and not just for terrorism, but drug crimes and so on.

If what they really need is to go after "suspected terrorists", then all they should need is a warrant from a judge. But of course this bill is not about that. It's about spying on _everyone_ , and about censoring "extremist speech" (I assume the government gets to decide what is extremist, too, and not a judge?).

Checks and balances are supposed to exist for a reason. We've played this game before giving governments total power to "do stuff", including "protecting us", "improve the economy", "national security", whatever. It doesn't end well for the population. In fact, it ends exponentially worse than any "threat" mentioned when the government asks for such powers, for every single person, not just those "who have something to hide" or are "extremist".

<comment><USER7> This was proposed many years ago but blocked by the Lib Dems. Now the people of the UK destroyed the Lib Dems, there's nobody to oppose this.

A lesson in picking the lesser of evils. Nobody will learn it though, and the UK is screwed for the forseeable future.

<comment><USER8> The Lib Dems were destroyed because their core vote hated them. A lesson in not double-crossing your core vote.

Edit: Apparently the Lib Dems are universally loved, and never did anything wrong. I retract my statement.

<comment><USER9> 14,000 new members of the Lib Dems since the election would suggest it's not as simple as that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Relevant: [http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/2015/05/thoughtc...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/2015/05/thoughtcrime.html) (previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9564281](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9564281))

If you care about this sort of thing then please consider joining the ORG ([https://www.openrightsgroup.org/join/](https://www.openrightsgroup.org/join/)) and/or writing to your MP.

<comment><USER10> > writing to your MP.

One of the few advantages of a fptp voting system is that MPs have a very real constituency link. If enough people write on issues like this then MPs have to either listen or accept that they are directly losing support. So please do write to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> England has always been about five years ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to authoritarian garbage like this. Look for these sorts of bills to be introduced in other places if it's successful there.

</comment><comment><USER12> We need more control because of fear.

<comment><USER13> I thought it was more fear because control...

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> All 5-eyes partner nations are passing egregious legislation such as this, these programs are being brought in under the guise of combating "terrorism" however are more designed to monitor and quell civil unrest and thwart would be dissidents.

<comment><USER15> Don't forget the chilling effect on free speech.</comment></comment>