Ask HN: How do I pursue an academic relationship with a professor? - d-crane Brief background: I'm a 29-year-old junior in an undergrad CS program. I've been going to school one class per quarter for a few years while working full-time and supporting my wife during her second degree, but now that she graduated I've recently quit my job and this is my first full-time academic quarter.<p>I've recently discovered that the professor teaching my algorithms course is somewhat well-known in the cryptology field, which is exciting for me as an interest in and passion for crypto is what got me to go back to school and study CS. I would really like to pursue an academic relationship with this professor, but I"m not sure what the best way to do that would be, or even necessarily what that would like. I'm essentially thinking of someone from whom I could ask for a letter of reference, and ask for course/topic of study recommendations, that kind of thing; perhaps even as an adviser for the independent-study type credits that are offered. I feel like I have better-than-average interpersonal skills and perspective compared to the just-out-of-high-school students who make up most of my classmates, but having worked a full-time job for the last ten years and having only recently gotten into computer science, I don't really have side-projects of my own I can talk to him about, which seems like a disadvantage.  I'm performing well in his class, though I'm not at the very top. Can anyone give some advice on how I might best make a good impression on him (aside from just performing well and being interested) and open a dialog with him? <comment><AUTHOR> I think that its okay that you don't have side projects. I just graduated with my undergrad and was quite close to my professors. I'd say, if you can still go to office hours, go to them prepared and with good questions. Let them know that you did your research and noticed that they were into cryptology, and tell them that that's something you'd be interested in learning more about - ask them if they have books or papers that they would recommend. After a couple of office hours, or when you're comfortable, ask them if they would be willing to grab coffee. This will create more of a personal professional relationship rather than one just related to class. If you do not feel comfortable, continue to talk to them about the papers you've read and so on. Ask them how you can learn more, or if they'd be willing to help you code some stuff. Show them that you're truly interested.

I don't think you have to be at the top of your class to have a good relationship with your professors (I definitely wasn't!)

<comment> d-crane Thanks, this is definitely helpful. I've got three or so weeks left in the quarter, so I can certainly go by during office hours between now and then. Very much appreciated.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, glad to help! Feel free to reach out if you have any questions!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> There are formal and informal relationships you can have with your professor; you seem to feel the need for an informal mentoring relationship. That means that you need to get to know the professor and vice versa.

Every professor holds office hours (it's an obligation that comes with teaching). Make an appointment, be on time, meet with the professor, and talk with her/him about things that interest and concern you. It helps if you are up-to-date on events in your chosen field and have been doing some research on your own--but that's not mandatory. You can also ask for help.

Interaction with bright, interested, and thoughtful students is a primary reason your professor is teaching a class. The professor is not going to be worried about whether you have a side-project or what sort of grades you have gotten on your homework assignments. She/he will be interested in whether you have been thinking about the field and whether you have interesting ideas.

Office hours are often the most exciting time of a professor's day (35+ years of experience).

<comment> d-crane Thanks for the reassurance that side projects and being the top of the class aren't particularly important. I definitely get a little worried when there I've got the 20-year-old classmates that have spent the last six months building some crazy thing, or have two internships and are launching a startup or whatever, so it's a relief to hear that being interested in the field and having ideas about it is enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Go to his office hours, definitely. A common trap I've seen a lot of students fall into is that they think they can't approach a professor until they are impressive enough (have enough personal side projects, have read enough of their papers, have perfect grades in their class, etc), or they try too hard to appear more knowledgeable than they are. It's totally fine to just go and say "I'm interested in this, do you have any advice on what I should do to learn more?". You'll have a better time impressing him by following up on that advice successfully than you will trying to make a side project on your own.

<comment> d-crane Thanks! I'm definitely guilty of falling into that trap so far. I haven't wanted to show up and feel like I don't have anything interesting to say or like I can't make any kind of good impression, but your advice to just ask what I should do to go forward in the area I'm interested in totally makes sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Other than the mentioned advice of going to office hours with a purpose, I would say a golden way to get your professor's attention is to read their papers (select the top k most cited/interesting/whatever heuristic works for you). After doing that, you will undoubtably have focused questions to ask that can lead into discussion that will implicitly signal to the professor your interest/curiosity/passion (don't bog yourself down in the low level details). Reading papers is good practice anyway if (a) stuff like independent study intrigues you and (b) you want to stay current within your field of interest.

<comment> d-crane Thank you, that seems like great advice. A few of his better known papers are definitely over my head currently, although I'm familiar with the basic concepts at least; but luckily he has some other work that is at least somewhat accessible for where I'm at. I'll keep working through his stuff and come armed with some questions, and as you point out, I can definitely use the practice in being able to read papers well and stay abreast of things.</comment></comment>


The 8 Laws of Pain - <AUTHOR> http://chrisoleary.com/projects/TheParadoxOfPain/Essays/whatapita.html

<comment><USER2> Thanks for posting this, I remember reading it when it first came out and having a lightbulb go off in my head. I have been looking for it off and on over the last few years and couldn't find it.</comment>


The end of the Apple dynasty? - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/29/the-end-of-the-apple-dynasty/ <comment><USER2> I've never been a fan of apple, but the author seriously does not understand apple. This quote "Apple has always been the leader in new technology platforms from iPod, to iPhone, to iPad" proves that.

Apple was not a leader in mp3 player, or tablets. The phone was 'maybe' the device they were most innovative with, but others were already on the same path.

They don't lead the technology, they lead making the technology mainstream by taking the work done by others and simplifying it for the average consumer. UX of mp3 players was pretty bad until the iPod. What 'firsts' did the iPod implement? Diamond and Rio had been there before. How about tablets? Microsoft had been doing them for ages. Apple realized that (for them) the right way to get market acceptance was to make it into a huge iPod/iPhone and not a full computer.

I'm sure Apple will get into VR/AR when the market has matured a bit. I think that will cost them as Android is leading the market well, but if you've tried the clunkiness of a Hololens, you'll see there is still lots of work to be done. Microsoft likes to take the lead and put out products that are not yet ready. Google/Alphabet is the same. Apple waits. It's been a winning strategy for them so far.

</comment><comment><USER3> Another one of these?</comment>


Ask HN: What's your blog? - <AUTHOR> Along the lines of a "Ask HN: What are you working on?", I'm sure a lot of us have blogs that we write on that don't get a lot of exposure. So link your blog here with a short description about your topics... <comment><USER2> [http://hypermove.net/](http://hypermove.net/) I write about Guile scheme

<comment><AUTHOR> Very cool! Only thing is that it took me a while to figure out that I needed to press the "next" button on the navbar to see the content as the page you linked to is blank.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't blog per-se due to time restraints, but I do upload the odd project to my personal site: [http://www.jaruzel.com](http://www.jaruzel.com)

Click, don't click. I don't mind either way. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Read your post on "The Importance of Information Preservation". It made me think of The Long Now Foundation ([http://longnow.org/](http://longnow.org/)). Also made me think you would enjoy this article -> [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/13/google- bo...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/13/google-boss-warns- forgotten-century-email-photos-vint-cerf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://mdswanson.com/](http://mdswanson.com/)

I'm not famous and I don't work at a large company. I'm a software engineer based in Indianapolis and I work at a 100 person, 100% employee-owned development + design company.

I write semi-frequently about software, product development, and professional growth. I also review books I've read, which tend to be more tangential to software as I'm interesting in pulling in ideas from other fields/disciplines and applying them to software.

</comment><comment><USER5> I haven't written much yet but I'll nevertheless take the opportunity to shamelessly link [http://jonaseinarsson.se](http://jonaseinarsson.se) especially since I would love to hear what the HN crowd has to say about [http://www.jonaseinarsson.se/2016/biological-computer- graph-...](http://www.jonaseinarsson.se/2016/biological-computer-graph- reachability-p-np.html) but the submission to HN pretty much fell right through :)

</comment><comment><USER6> [http://www.storytechnologies.com/blog/](http://www.storytechnologies.com/blog/) I write about story development software and techniques.

<comment><AUTHOR> really neat! I've (very) briefly looked at procedural content generation for VR things and hadn't thought about the approach you are using of "data from OpenStreetMap to help generate some of the initial 3D environments". Very interesting. Excited to read what you post next :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Writing on and off on [http://keanankoppenhaver.com](http://keanankoppenhaver.com) trying to expose people in the real estate industry to technology and automation.

I also post on more dev topics on Medium every once in a while. [https://medium.com/@kkoppenhaver](https://medium.com/@kkoppenhaver)

Trying to do more of both in the coming months.

</comment><comment><USER8> [http://eskatrem.github.io/Newton-Raphson](http://eskatrem.github.io/Newton- Raphson)

I wrote a post to show the Newton-Raphson algorithm implemented in Python and Clojure, the underlying goal being to show an advantage of lisp-like languages.

</comment><comment> mike-cardwell [https://grepular.com/blog/](https://grepular.com/blog/) \- Tech stuff.

I used to write quite a lot, but it tailed off. I'm actually in the middle of rewriting the engine behind the website so that might prompt me to start writing again when it eventually goes live.

</comment><comment><USER9> [https://paragonie.com/blog](https://paragonie.com/blog)

Mostly pertinent to software security and web development. Occasionally covers cryptography topics as well.

I generally submit anything technical to HN, and while most of the time it gets ignored, chances are y'all have seen one or two of them already. :)

</comment><comment><USER10> I have my blog at [http://joaoventura.net/blog](http://joaoventura.net/blog). It's made with Flask and rendered to static html files using flask frozen. I write mainly about programming, web development and one or two more personal things..

</comment><comment><USER11> I write about personal finance and tax. My recent article on prenups seems to be popular. I also just wrote an article about shady tax evasion tactics people come up with. Visit me at Finangle [http://finangle.com/](http://finangle.com/).

</comment><comment><USER12> I write about many subjects at [http://www.pesfandiar.com/blog/](http://www.pesfandiar.com/blog/) It's usually about software, but also about subjects that I find interesting (finance, real estate, ads, ...).

</comment><comment><USER13> [http://haidrali.com](http://haidrali.com) I have plans to write about topics which I have working including ROR, XMPP(open fire, Tigase ), VIOP ( Asterisk) and quite often Android

</comment><comment><USER14> I try to keep it related to tech, mostly on anything I find interesting [http://darrelld.com/](http://darrelld.com/)

</comment><comment><USER15> I have recently started blogging. It's just a jekyll site hosted on Github pages. I usually post things about data structures and some of my side projects.

chinmayapatanaik.com

<comment><USER16> Very neat! Couple of questions. What theme is that for Jekyll? It looks great. How did you get the related posts below the Disqus?

<comment><USER15> Sorry for the late reply. I am using a little bit modified version of Poole([https://github.com/poole/poole](https://github.com/poole/poole)). And I read a couple of other blog posts on adding Disqus comments. I don't have the links now, but you can easily find them online.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I write on [http://hkelkar.com](http://hkelkar.com) mostly about being a Software Craftsman.

</comment><comment><USER18> [http://www.peace.cm/](http://www.peace.cm/)

It's just about life and my exploration of tech.</comment>


A dirt cheap "spectrum analyzer" with an RTL-SDR dongle - <AUTHOR> http://hansvi.be/wordpress/?p=91

<comment><USER2> Can someone briefly explain for those of us who are electronically challenged what the purpose of diodes in series is (D1 and D2)?

Googling on "diodes in series", I found some discussion about how you can do this if you need a reverse breakdown voltage that is higher than that of one diode, but aren't D1 and D2 always forward biased in this circuit?

<comment><USER3> D1 and D2 are normal diodes in forward direction[1], in series they drop 2⋅0,7V = 1.4V. R2 just pulls them down. So the cathode of D2 will sit 1.4V below supply voltage.

Q1 in this schematic is acting as a current source: If conducting a reasonable amount of current, a transistor needs a base-emitter voltage of Ube = 0.6V. This is a PNP transistor[2], so base needs to be 0.6V below emitter, hence the voltage over R1 will be U(d1d2) - Ube = U(R1) = 0.8V. The current then is of course set (to first order, ignoring the base-current contributing) to be U(R1)/R1.

Why such a "complicated" circuit and not only use R1 to bias D3? Because a current source has a much higher (theoretically: infinite) impedance: Z=dU/dI, but dI=0 (stays constant) whatever the change in voltage (dU > 0) might be.

\</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-

1) forward direction: A diode that is operated, like a LED supposed to light, will have a certain voltage drop. For a standard silicon diode, this is 0.7V, a red LED would have 1.6V or so.

2) PNP transistor: A transistor has three terminals, base is the cross-bar, emitter is the diagonal line with the arrow, collector is the other one. a NPN transistor runs on a base current (technical direction + to -) into the base terminal and conducts current from emitter to collector, a PNP transistor runs the reverse.

Edit: emitter/collector mixup

<comment><USER4> I think, to put it more simply, those two diodes exist to cause a 1.4 volt drop to the transistor.

The transistor is a PNP transistor, so the base (middle terminal) must be about .6V lower than the emitter (top terminal) for the transistor to turn on.

I'm guessing one diode wouldn't turn on the transistor reliably, so the author used two in series. This also probably allows for a more convenient value of R1.

<comment><USER5> So why not just use an appropriate resistor?

<comment><USER6> The voltage drop of a resistor is proportional to current.

<comment><USER7> So in many appliances the LED serves two functions, Light and part of the active circuit to lower voltage? - This is why HN has for me replaced slashdot and digg. Thank You.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A tragic event of posting a job on oDesk - <AUTHOR> http://verbose.co/post/83139819118/a-tragic-event-of-posting-a-job-on-odesk

<comment><USER2> I'm still a little confused at why you are complaining about Odesk? It's like if posted a "help wanted" ad in a newspaper and then complained that the newspaper was horrible because you are poor at choosing job candidates. Honestly..stop whining, do your research, and select the best candidate for the job - otherwise hire a trusted development team with a proven background.</comment>


ATDT relief - <AUTHOR> https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/12/11/ring/ <comment><USER2> Oh man, this reminds me of a time that I got into trouble. We had a phone system (Isotech 228, IIRC) that had these boxes call OPXIs that let standard telephone equipment connect to the phone system. They provided talk battery and ring voltage.

We had a modem tied to an OPXI, which required that our dial strings in Telit (remember that? I liked it better than Procomm) start with "91,", which was 9 for an outside trunk, then 1 to select a trunk, then a comma for a pause. Then the phone number of the BBS site.

The OPXI messed with the newer modem speeds. One Friday I decided that we didn't really need the OPXI if I bridged the modem with the fax line, so I did.

I didn't tell anyone. That was a mistake.

Monday morning I showed up for work and my boss (the chief engineer and president) called me into his office. Uh oh.

He said, "Did you remove the OPXI from the modem line in the lab?" "Yes." "Why?" "Because we didn't need it."

He then told me about how he came in on Saturday, finished up some PCB artwork and went to dial into the board fabricator's BBS to upload the files (long distance), and kept getting failures to connect. He tried it a bunch of times before he heard banging on the front door. He went to the front and there were multiple police officers outside. They said there were multiple 911 hangups from this location and wanted to know why. He swore that he was the only one there and there were no 911 calls. They then wanted to come in and look around the building, so he let them.

After they left, he put it all together. The dial strings were set up to dial 91,1-areacode-phonenumber which dialed 911 emergency without the OPXI in the path.

He verified that the OPXI was no longer in the loop and was ticked off. He knew immediately who did it.

He said, "Things you do to systems other people use can have unintended consequences. Please think those things completely through in the future."

Good advice, and I still hear his voice in my head today when I'm reconfiguring something.

<comment><USER3> Once as a kid, staying at a hotel, I tried to call some family staying in Room 117. For whatever reason, the call didn't go through. I glanced again at the instructions on the phone, which said "please dial a 9, then your number". So I did. The police showed up fifteen minutes later.

And while "9" is a bad special prefix, the "91" in your story has to be the worst possible in the US.

<comment><USER4> > And while "9" is a bad special prefix, the "91" in your story has to be the > worst possible in the US.

Possibly the only worse prefix would just be straight-up "911." 91- is just unimaginably dumb.

<comment><USER5> Our building once leased out a portion to a call center based in India. India's country code is "91" and to get out on the PBX was "9". But this old junky Nortel system would outpluse immediately when it saw the dial string "911". So when ever someone would try to dial "9911XXXXXXXX" it would immediately outpulse to our local PD when the dialed digits equaled 911. And whenever the outbound caller heard the PD pickup, they would get scared and just hangup.

Ugh. Those were good times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I read ATDT -- thought "Oh, the Hayes command to dial - wonder what it means now." Great story. Good memories.

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

<comment><USER7> That command set is still in use! I was working with it just last week to control an LTE module.

<comment><USER8> AT commands are still in use inside your smartphone. On an iPhone, when the main CPU wants communicate with the baseband chip to make a call or send SMS or whatever, it literally sends AT commands.

In fact, one of the earliest iPhone jailbreak exploits relied on a vulnerability in the AT command interpreter inside the baseband.

<comment><USER9> Commands that have to prefixed with AT are still in use. Most of the actual commands after the "AT" part are not recognizable to someone who knows dial-up modems; they have nothing to do with the Hayes set other than the AT prefix/misfeature.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, that's what always confused me about it when I worked on GSM phones back in the mid-2000s - if you're going to overload an old protocol so heavily, it's time for a new one.

<comment><USER10> Probably nostalgia! That would be good enough for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I hosted an international Mailman list that blew up on my dialup Linux box in the mid 90s. Every inbound message was expanded to a batch of thirty recipient outbound messages, for a very busy phone line. I also had busy squirrels that every few months would degrade my line, especially in the winter when the phone line boxes offered some warmth.

One night I came home late to find a police car parked outside my house. The officer told me they got a 911 call from my house. They wanted to "look around", to verify that I didn't have some woman locked in my house or anything. Standard procedure, they said. I have no idea how long the police car waited for me to return.

Sure enough, the dial string at the time included embedded 9-1-1 so if just the right digits were dropped, it was a 911 call.

</comment><comment><USER12> 1997 : I used a text-to-email gateway and hooked it up to procmail doing a sleep 300 followed by an ATDT to my cell phone.

Whenever I wanted to get out of somewhere, I went to the bathroom and texted to the gateway.

5 minutes later my cellphone rang with a "very important call" :)

</comment><comment><USER13> Back in the day when I actually had an office a guy from across the hall would come and lean on the door jamb and talk at me, endlessly if I let him. Mostly cynically about the company. I came up with my solution: After a couple of sentences I would just look back at my computer and start typing, and not respond. He'd go back to his office and play Tetris.

<comment><USER14> My mother has always suggested being "busy", with as little specificity as possible. "I'm sorry, I'm afraid I'm not available." The nice thing about this excuse is that it doesn't wear out: one can always be "too busy".

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > the blathering would start, I'd look over, he'd nod, I'd do the phone trick, > and then it would be over.

A coworker and I had a similar arrangement at the last office I worked at :)

<comment><USER16> I live in fear that I am that person.

<comment> le-mark Used to work with a guy who was similarly boarish and oblivious, he'd comment on his email to the entire office, every damn morning. Interesting wikipedia minutia? Whole office. I quit in large part to get away from this person.

<comment><USER17> I do this sort of thing compulsively (announce minutia to the poor souls trying to work around me) and then feel incredible shame about it later. For me it's probably related to my ADHD, since that's an impulse/executive control disorder, so this behavior matches the pattern of being unable to resist the impulse, and then later I feel anxious/guilty/embarrassed about it. It'd be a lot easier to manage if I had an office with a door, or even a cubicle.

I might try to get a remote job so I don't have this problem. I feel terrible about it but can't seem to quit. I must be so annoying to my coworkers, who I quite like. Maybe I'm starved for social interaction. I'd like to say sorry to you for your coworker on behalf of all of those like us.

<comment><USER18> Just my two cents, but if I was your coworker and you told me the situation, I can virtually guarantee that my annoyance would instantly transmute into some degree of sympathy and tolerance. It goes a long way to know that you're aware of the problem and feeling some stress yourself. Suddenly it isn't something you're inflicting on me because you're oblivious.

<comment><USER19> Also, it could help break the social barrier and lead to them being honest with you when they feel annoyed.

"OC, you're doing it again! :D"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> That is a funny story. I used to dial into BBS' with modem commands. You could learn the screech patterns pretty well to know if something goofed before the computer did. Modem command sets are still quite prolific and if you ever mess with a M2M LTE module you will be right back in it.

<comment><USER8> I can still hear the screech pattern in my head, and I know exactly what you mean about knowing before the computer. There was short repeating pattern and if it repeated too many times (more than about twice IIRC) then the game was up, time to redial.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Hilarious! Even better than what I thought the link was for.

I honestly thought the article was going to be about the absurdity in determining a modem configuration string. Back in the late '90s, all modems shipped in default configurations that only worked for very old configurations. They all needed to be configured to do things like hardware handshaking, and tell the computer that the other end hung up.

These drove dial up BBSer's nuts, because every vendor used a different AT code just to set the modem to a normal configuration.

I always wished there was something like ATmodern to standardize on.

<comment><USER22> The worst were pages that compiled large numbers of random modem init strings for different modems. They just got copied around from page to page with no context as to what they did, nor why. They often wound up being worse than factory defaults.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> My own private ATDT relief was the day our phone company upgraded their systems and I could finally start using ATDT instead of ATDP, making the dial time so much shorter and significantly raising the chance to be the first dialer when someone finally logged off from any of the heavy loaded BBS lines from the redialing list.

Communications was really sucks, but we were lucky enoguh not to know it back then.

<comment><USER24> I remember always tuning the DTMF timings (duration/spacing) to make the dialing as fast as the phone company could reliably allow. Even to this day when I hear the DTMF tones playing at the default speed, it pains me and makes me want to go adjust the dial command (ATDT) to speed things up.

<comment><USER25> I did this!

I also had a USR Courier with a button on the front that could be reprogrammed to do anything. I reprogrammed it to dial my favorite BBS, so I could turn on the computer, press the button, and by the time AUTOEXEC.BAT had finished and Telix was launched, I'd already be connected.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Boy, talk about memories. My fondest one is when we finally got a Western Telematic console server I could dial into from home to troubleshoot a down server. This instead of having to get up when the pager wouldn't stop beeping at 3am, drive half an hour to the datacenter (I use that term loosely--it was an office in a run-down office building), unplug and then plug back in the server, check that yep it's back up and running, and then drive the half hour back home.

I don't recall the details but it seems like that WTI console server used Hayes commands somehow.

<comment><USER27> We're definitely spoiled now. However, I feel like there's so many more things which "page" these days, and less tolerance for downtime. Did you track "4-nine" uptimes back in the day?

<comment><USER26> This was such early days in web hosting that nobody thought that was an option. It was a little like the early days of Twitter where you just assumed the web site would be down as often as not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Makes me wonder how many modems are still sitting in some company's closet, forgotten but still hooked up and able to be used if you know the right tricks.

<comment><USER29> Several billion are being carried around right now in people's pockets, actually: the baseband processor in mobile phones use ATDT/Hayes commands to talk to the host processor(!).

It's quite interesting how the command set has been extended for modern needs, for example see: [https://www.u-blox.com/sites/default/files/u-blox- CEL_ATComm...](https://www.u-blox.com/sites/default/files/u-blox- CEL_ATCommands_%28UBX-13002752%29.pdf)

<comment><USER30> I kind of wish I'd never read that. Every time something like this comes up I remember a quote from A Deepness in the Sky [0] and shudder at the thought that we will be stuck with crappy software forever.

[0] " There were programs here that had been written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it—the horror of it, Sura said—was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra's past, these programs still worked! And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders' method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth's moon. But if you looked at it still more closely. . .the starting instant was actually some hundred million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind's first computer operating systems. "

<comment><USER31> One of the things I love about that book is how he attacks below their layer of abstraction. This is a pattern you see over and over again in real life, people build a secure system at one layer, but don't consider all of the implications of the layers below. Indeed there is so much complexity hidden in those abstractions that it takes experts years to learn enough about them to understand the attacks. The people who do work in those layers aren't interested in security, they're just trying to get the things to work in the first place.

Spectre/Meltdown are a good example of what happens when (after a couple of decades) the security guys finally understand what the architecture looks like at that level and start looking for vulnerabilities.

This is also why you should be wary of devices and especially device drivers. This is why binary blobs in drivers are such a butt clencher. And then you're talking about drivers that are stupendously large and are more or less attached directly to your web browser.

<comment><USER30> It isn't as though being open source solves that problem, look at things like Heartbleed.

<comment><USER32> They may not solve the problem, but they do you allow you to solve the problem.

<comment><USER30> Not realistically unless I have a lot of experience with driver programming. After all, I can technically hand-edit the machine code of a binary blob too.

<comment><USER32> > After all, I can technically hand-edit the machine code of a binary blob > too.

Signed binaries make that a lot harder.

<comment><USER30> And how does source code help that? I can resign a modified binary just like I can a freshly compiled one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I once wrote a program to send data for free anywhere in the world, by dialing another machine and then hanging up. The remote machine's modem would say RING. With the right excruciatingly adjusted and slow timing you could send binary data insanely slowly. Start bit, then 8 data bits, maybe check bit, something like that. Let's just say it never took off. Something on the order of 0.1 baud.

</comment><comment><USER34> Why not be honest and direct?

<comment><USER35> Because it doesn't always work. I had someone try to get me fired because she came into my office and said "do you have a minute?" and I said (because I was legitimately busy with something important) "No".

She was enraged that I didn't drop everything I was doing to listen to whatever problem she had, and went to complain to my manager, blithering about rudeness, and me not being a "team player".

Since my manger was the one who had assigned me the important work, he told her in polite manager-speak that I had done the right thing and that she should try again later if she still needed my help.

<comment><USER36> Someone asking you if you have a minute for something work related vs someone chatting your ear off about non-work related things isn't the same thing.

<comment><USER37> You are right, it is not.

The interruption and the resulting loss of productivity because of it however is the same in either case.

Focused work without interruption must be respected and enforced when needed. If you are bored at work, go ask for more work to do, I'd say.

Or do as I did when I was still in offices many years ago: politely and without raising your voice just ask the room directly: "Anyone up for 10 minutes coffee break?". If nobody would respond then I would still go at a balcony drinking my coffee alone. Nobody is mandated to listen to my blabber and I understood and respected that. It's rather amazing how many people didn't though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Who else went through this:

"Star Wars? no that's not right"

"Modems? no nobody writes about those anymore"

<click>

</comment><comment><USER39> Back in the BBS days, sysops would enter chat to say they are doing maintenance and taking down the bbs. Then you would see +++ and DISCONNECTED

For fun, I started coding ansi sequences, that would say the sysop entered chat, that the sysop was banning you for some really lame reason, and to never call back, then showed "+++" and disconnected, and then a lot pauses to make it look legit. I had fun creating ansi pranks.

BBS and Modem days, such fun.

Oh yeah. WinModems. FU.

<comment><USER40> Conversely, Shampage was a tool much loved by sysops themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> The Hayes Modem technical reference is available at Archive.org.

[https://archive.org/details/Hayes44012TechnicalReferenceForH...](https://archive.org/details/Hayes44012TechnicalReferenceForHayesModemUsers1993)

But I have an original spiral-bound paper copy - if you want it, email me and I'll send it to you. Include the Fidonet ascii-art dog in your email.

</comment><comment><USER42> We used to use modems for almost everything. I even contributed a small piece of code to the kermit project a long time ago, maybe 1989 or so? A kermit script could have made this easier to do with 2 keystrokes... [http://www.kermitproject.org/](http://www.kermitproject.org/)

</comment><comment><USER43> At $work, we have a command line application that initiates phone calls, but behind the scenes it uses a SOAP API to talk to the telephone server, which uses SIP to talk to the phone on the desktop.

Quite a bit more overhead involved there... :)

</comment><comment><USER44> The bad date rescue call sprang to mind. Looks like there's an updated version of this trick: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/chelsea-handler-gotta- go!/id...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/chelsea-handler-gotta- go!/id1012517766?ign-mpt=uo%3D8)

</comment><comment><USER45> Glad I'm not the only one who did that to get rid of the annoying co-worker! Ah, those days were great!

</comment><comment><USER46> This reminds me of when I used net send to flirt with women in the computer lab. I thought I was so cool.

</comment><comment><USER47> I still have an analogue modem attached to my PC at home. I use it with NCID to get caller ID info flashed on to my screen and TVs for incoming calls, and to dial outgoing calls from my address book.

The best thing though, is the black-list to which I shunt various telemarketer, etc numbers.

</comment><comment><USER48> Don't forget ATV0 (I _think_....memory is hazy) to set the modem speaker volume to zero (silence) before dialing. :)

</comment><comment><USER49> This brings back some memories. I got my first modem in December, 1988, 30 years ago.. 1200 bps!

</comment><comment><USER50> +++ ATH

</comment><comment> scott-smith_us We had a bloviater guy at one company. I used to get up after ten minutes or so and go to the mail room, then call the guy in the next cube and say "this is your rescue call".

</comment><comment><USER51> Nice try. Totally outclassed by smack-my-bitch-up.sh though

[https://github.com/NARKOZ/hacker- scripts/blob/master/README....](https://github.com/NARKOZ/hacker- scripts/blob/master/README.md)

</comment><comment><USER51>
       434 Points
       124 Comments
       123 Is
        25 mes

And yet only one comment suggesting the direct approach... You'd have an easier time finding Waldo.

Is this low-grade nerdery really any easier (or smarter) than just saying, " _Yeah, yeah, NT is great, Unix sucks, now I 've got work to do._"

</comment><comment><USER52> Whats up with this new writing style on HN? This entire article could be summarized as "You can do ATDT 12345 to dial a phone number on a modem, and I used it for pranks round my office in the 90's."

All the detail about the coworker, the social cues, etc. doesn't really add insight nor entertainment value, but pads out 1 sentence into 1 page.

Journalists used to use that style when paid by the word and they didn't have much to say, but rachelbythebay _isn 't_ paid like that, so why is she writing as if she is?

<comment><USER53> It's her _personal blog_. She's probably writing first for _herself_ , and second for anyone who is interested in hearing her reminisce about whatever Major Software Company she worked at.

Sometimes you just wanna tell a story about a thing that happened, you know? "Me and my officemate kept on tricking this guy who endlessly droned on about how useless our specialty was."

<comment><USER54> Yeah, it's also not a new writing style for HN, her blog posts have been popular here for quite a while.</comment></comment></comment>


Post-Quantum Encryption No Longer a Laughing Matter - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/22/pq-solutions/

<comment><USER2> Brings up a lot of excellent points. Namely: quantum computers are being created currently and eventual encryption has to be "PQ" or "post-quantum." Everything leading up to (but not) that is so easily swept aside with a quantum computer of size that now is the perfect time to start thinking about PQ security.

I didn't know that a lot of that work/research actually occurred in the 1970s. That's awesome. Echoes like Turing building computers in his papers way before there were things like where you're sitting now.</comment>


Threat to Detroit's Rebound Is the Mortgage Industry - <AUTHOR> https://nextcity.org/features/view/detroit-bankruptcy-revival-crime-economy-mortgage-loans-redlining <comment><USER2> The author really wants to turn this into a race thing.

The reality is that these homes are unprofitable investments especially in the short-to-medium term. No sane banker wants to make an unprofitable investment. The only way the investment gets made is someone who gets extra intangible utility from the investment (e.g. they like the neighborhood, close to family, etc.), has a longer time horizon, and lots of extra money to support the short-to-medium term financial costs.

It's not a race thing. It's a money thing -- banks and investors will steer a wide berth around people considering clearly unprofitable investments, so those investments will frequently not get made, and when they do, they will tend to be made by people who are willing to put up their own money.

<comment><USER3> The article explains it itself, even though it metaphorically apparently doesn't want to listen to itself:

"Should someone take an interest in buying one of these homes, it might be priced as low as $500 or $1,000.... And the cost of rehabbing these cheap houses and making them livable can range from $50,000 to $90,000 for a small bungalow. _Renovation will cost more than these homes will sell for._ "

Emphasis mine.

You simply can't mortgage a house like that, if the owner intends to renovate for living in it. There's no collateral. Of course it's a cash-only deal... _what else could it be?_ What mortgage terms are we condemning the banks for not writing, exactly?

Should the city continue reviving, these property values will go up. Once the property values go up, the banks will be able to have collateral, and mortgages will resume flowing. But it will do all sorts of harm to try to push the banks to short circuit that process. Are we really _demanding_ that banks write mortgages to poor minorities that they will basically have no ability to service if they experience the slightest economic disruption? Is that _really_ helpful to anybody? Aren't we basically still in the recession we created by writing mortgages far in excess of any underlying value?

I'm all for helping the poor, but chaining them with unserviceable debt or forcing the banks to get screwed isn't "helping the poor".

<comment><USER4> 50k to 90k for the renovation of _bungalow_? These numbers just don't make sense. 90k buy you a mansion in developing countries and even in western Europe you can get a small (say 100 square meters) pre-fab stone house, minus floors and appliances.

I think the only valid point this article makes is "mortgage is hard to get at the moment". Yes, any kind of (sane, i.e. no loan shark thing) credit is currently hard to get anywhere in the first world.

<comment><USER5> Have you ever tried to rehab a house? $20k-$40k for a modest kitchen is not out of the ordinary.

<comment><USER4> No, I have not. But I helped creating a lot of not-for-profit events and setting up some hacker spaces out of rotten spaces. 20k for a kitchen? Seriously? I call that bullshit. Every chef who would dare to ask for that would have gotten the finger. You can create a functional kitchen for 0.5 - everything above that is luxury, which I'd love to have (I'm a passionate amateur chef) - but I'd never ever would invest 20k into that upfront.

FFS, one of the most well known places in Berlin was started with not more than 12 crates of beer with a board on top to simulate a bar (Bar 25).

<comment><USER6> I'd love to know where you're buying from, that you can get a range, oven, refrigerator, cabinets, and counter for $500. (I'll be generous and leave the dishwasher off.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The way that it divides into the race deal makes this easy play for the Author to make it sound like racism at work but to be blunt, all the facts point to the lower end of the economic spectrum just not having shit for assets to put up on the mortgage. You're going to a bank, asking for $100 grand to buy a thousand dollar house and out $90k in reno into it? What is the bank borrowing against? The house won't be worth $91k all said and done, and renovation is never a sure thing especially when dealing with dilapidated houses.

Detroit has spent a very long time digging the hole their in, it's going to take an even longer time to fix it.

Also, who the hell is moving to Detroit? I've never heard a peep about this "trend."

<comment><USER8> Re: the moving-in "trend"

There's been an uptick of post-college types moving in the midtown area, and professionals in the downtown area -- but it's pretty much limited to those two areas, a tiny portion of the city as a whole.

It'll be interesting to see how the midtown-downtown area might (or might not) become more a populated semi-region of it's own, compared to the rest of the city (sans a couple of nice remaining neighborhoods) which still looks very empty.

If you dig a bit on Google you'll find some press on it, mostly local. I think the some bigger papers did a bit or two about it after the bankruptcy.

It's interesting to watch what will happen given the state of the city.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was just reading [1] about how Detroit's original decline was due, to a significant degree, to the mortgage industry:

Through a system called Red-Lining in the mid-20th century, which the federal government actively facilitated [2], banks refused to lend to any residents of neighborhoods with even a few residents who were of 'undesireable' races, including of course, blacks. This wasn't a conspiracy theory; it was all done in the open. Consequences:

1) Even for whites happy to integrate: A few black families move in, credit dries up, nobody can sell or improve their homes, and your housing values plummet.

2) And even worse for blacks: Imagine trying to buy a house without credit. Now imagine doing that coming from the rock-bottom financial circumstances imposed on most blacks in the mid-20th century.

3) Blacks who did obtain homes couldn't get home improvement loans, resulting in deterioration of their homes and a reputation among whites for not caring about their properties.

4) The effect on supply and demand: It forced a very large and growing number of black residents into a small, artificially limited number of rentals (they could only live in certain neighorhoods, remember), driving up rental rates and driving down the quality of their residences (landlords could fill their properties without doing maintenance). Even more perversely, even if someone would sell them a house, blacks had to pay more than whites _for the same house_ \- the black bidder had far fewer options. Again, remember the people in the worst financial circumstances were the ones facing these problems.

Back then bankers said the same thing: They are bad credit risks.

\----

[1] The Origins of the Urban Crisis:Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit by Thomas J. Sugrue: A prize-winning scholarly history. Highly recommended; it changed dramatically how I understood racial issues and urban development ([http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10233.html](http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10233.html))

[2] It was called 'red-lining' because the Federal Home Loan Association (I think I have the right agency) would literally draw red lines around these neighborhoods and identify them to banks as the worst possible credit risks.

<comment><USER8> It was as if Detroit was hit by a perfect storm of boom-town, bust-town with all the sexy variables thrown in.

What you described is a big part of it. And being mostly a one-industry town was another part, in an age of rapid globalization, and with strong unions making Detroit the more expensive place to produce.

Moreover, the core of Detroit was sliced up by an extremely extensive network of freeways, and in patterns where you get a fairly intense breakup of neighborhoods when you compare to other northern cities of the time who were building expressways through theirs. Detroit's postwar suburbs came calling for all of those automobile-owning middle-classers back in the D.

Also, most Detroit housing was quickly-built wooden construction, which are a lot more vulnerable to breaks in maintenance. While brick buildings can wait "on inventory" much longer, much of Detroit's wooden stock was expensive to maintain, and didn't last long waiting "on inventory" to be put into re-use. Michigan suffers dramatic freeze-thaw cycles, rain/snow/ice, and loose ground that can bust-up under-maintained buildings in no time.

Another, a perhaps seminal event, at least for people living in city, were the 1967 riots (which you could connect to all that redlining that went on). All through the central city. That was the "last straw" for most everyone who could leave and wanted to leave. Many people I know personally remember as a kid moving out not long after '67\. And the race riots seemed to have made race relations worse in the region, in my unsubstantiated opinion.

<comment><USER9> I think you'd find the book valuable; it has a lot to say about the riots. Race relations were bad before them: For example, blacks moving into previously all-white neighborhoods could face angry mobs who threw things through their windows and burnt things on their front lawns.

<comment><USER8> Oh you bet! And I'll probably will need to read that book, as well. Sounds intriguing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Having just gone through this in the last year, I can say there is a FHA 203(k) Rehab Loan/Insurance which is designed to do what the author desires. However, it's not exactly easy to do (a full rehab doesn't qualify for the "streamline" version), but it's a thing.

I'm not an underwriter so I'm not sure if the proverbial $1,000 house + $90k in renos is something they'd cover, but since the author doesn't even mention the 203k I'm left wondering if it was researched at all.

[http://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/HUD?src=/program_offices/hou...](http://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/HUD?src=/program_offices/housing/sfh/203k/203k --df)

</comment><comment><USER11> In addition to the other comments, mortgages under $50k might be very hard to write legally. For the most part, the origination, appraisal, and closing fees for a $50k loan and a $250k loan should be very similar.

Let's assume $2000 in fees associated with these two loans. Both borrowers area offered a 4% interest rate over 30 years. On the $250k loan, the APR is 4.0662%. On the $50k loan, 4.3280%. 35k, 4.4665%.

I'm not an expert in the law, but these APRs, or the ratio of fees to loan may trigger anti-predatory lending laws.

</comment><comment><USER12> This title made me laugh, because a big part of downtown Detroit's revitalization has been driven by Quicken Loans moving jobs and offices there.

Before I read the article I assumed it was some type of criticism of that.

<comment><USER13> That is exactly what I was thinking....they didn't even mention Dan Gilbert, even though it is clear they should have interviewed him as the driving force behind so much of the revitalization and the chairman at a mortgage company...

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I was going to say that in this day and age of transparency, reporting, open information and Edward Snowden, how would a large bank even risk racial profiling in loan denials?

Then I remember I got a $63 check in the mail a few months back from Chase, for a lending discrimination class action lawsuit.</comment>


Ultrasound, thermodynamics, and robot overlords (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://independentscience.tumblr.com/post/101728968844/ultrasound-thermodynamics-and-robot-overlords <comment><USER2> > considering all the exceptions that exist for every other set of physical > laws, thermodynamics has exactly zero exceptions

Actually, conservation of energy doesn't hold on cosmological scales, at least with the usually accepted meaning of conservation of energy. [0]

That's not relevant to the author's argument, but I think it's dangerous to perpetuate the idea that thermodynamics is somehow an inviolate theory that doesn't break down under certain conditions just like every other physical theory.

[0]: [http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2010/02/22/energy-i...](http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2010/02/22/energy- is-not-conserved/)

<comment><USER3> It's interesting that the only theory that seems to be treated as inviolatable is the one that has big parts built on statistical, aggregate behaviour which doesn't hold on the small scale.

<comment><USER4> The author of the linked article points out there are competing interpretations under which mass-energy is still conserved on the small scale. It's just that if you introduce the variable of local gravitational energy you wind up with a system of more variables than equations. We don't presently know of any laws that further constrain the system of equations to a unique solution unless we take local conservation of energy as an axiom... which of course prevents us from proving local conservation of energy.

However, we don't have any observations that are inconsistent with local conservation of energy if gravitational energy is taken into account.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This really does have a stench of scam and a whiff of foolish VC on it. But just like cold fusion you hope deep down that it might be possible.

I took a look at the patents which are easily found by searching on google patents for ubeam as assignee and there just wasn't that much disclosed. Sort of vague references to steering a beam. It did not appear to be enough to 'enable one skilled in the art to practice the invention.'

[http://www.google.com/patents/US20150214764](http://www.google.com/patents/US20150214764) (for example)

I did notice one thing: mention is made of capactivie micro-machines ultrasonic transducers [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitive_micromachined_ultra...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitive_micromachined_ultrasonic_transducers) which seem to be in the same family as the micromachined mirror arrays commonly used in DLP projectors. My only experience with ultrasonic is with piezo.

One thing that I learned back then was that ultrasonics -bounce-. Aiming would be really, really hard. Not to mention that one thing people worry about in this field of steered array ultrasonics is 'necrosis' (which I don't like the sound of). Turns out that people use high powered steered beams to peer into peoples' skulls and to do things to the grey matter:

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3002099/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3002099/)

Even assuming arguendo that it would be possible to transmit measurable power via a steered ultrasonic beam, I certainly don't want to do it anywhere near my head!

<comment><USER6> Yep I'm a layman when it comes to this stuff but everything I've read pretty much says that a ubeam that functioned correctly would be effectively a short range ultrasound weapon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Near perpetual motion machines, near infinite compression schemes, nearly magical medical solutions: people keep pouring money into stuff that qualified scientists say is simply not possible. If the majority of people with relevant expertise say something is not possible, people should just believe them. They will say more careful things like 'there are technological difficulties' or "I don't see how you could make that work, but I guess it could be possible" if there is a possibility something will work.

Years ago the same kind of idea was charging phones by wifi and other EM radiation ubiquitously available. A short calculation by any physics undergraduate shows that it is simply impossible. Nevertheless people invested in companies pursuing the idea. A prototype was presented at expos. The result: nothing. On the other hand, charging by induction was never said to be impossible.

<comment><USER6> > When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is > possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is > impossible, he is very probably wrong. - Arthur C Clarke.

However when _all_ the scientists say you are wrong _and_ your device requires violating the most fundamental theory in Physics then its a different case.</comment></comment>


Do Developers Need Free Perks to Thrive? - <AUTHOR> http://www.datamation.com/careers/do-developers-need-free-perks-to-thrive.html?

<comment><AUTHOR> Related discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1007750></comment>


Git in layman's terms: isomorphic contours in source-code phase space - <AUTHOR> http://tartley.com/?p=1267

<comment><USER2> Is it wrong that I'm disappointed because this doesn't seem to make much sense? The actual topology involved has to be discrete, not continuous, as can never continuously deform from one branch to another.

Also, a tree of trees is still a tree. Git repositories form DAGs of trees, and this is not really that hard to visualize.

<comment><USER3> I too was really disappointed that this is nonsense instead of just very useless but correct. It downgrades it from smart and clever joking to "guy with a technical dictionary" joking.

<comment><USER4> Nevertheless, for the audience that have no technical understanding of technology, it's equally funny either way. Which is no doubt why it's possible to build a Visual Basic UI for forensic analysis in a few hours.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I no longer undetstand what Git is after reading this.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is not true. You now understand topology.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Guys, please. This isn't an analogy, it's satire. He's angry at how terrible he thinks the git manuals are.

<comment><USER7> Hey. OP here. This comment is the closest to my actual motivation for producing the post, although me and my co-author that afternoon were not so much angry about it as just 'delirious with laughter'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Best obscure joke/satire thus far in December :)

</comment><comment><USER9> Brilliantly well done trolling.

</comment><comment><USER10> Poe's Law strikes again. Half the commentators don't get the joke.

<comment><USER11> Perhaps you could let us in on the joke?

<comment><USER12> This very complex "simple" explanation of Git is funny because Git is rumored to have a steep learning curve, and the Git documentation is very heavy on theory and models.

It is also a bit funny because a lot of educated readers will try to make sense of the explanation, but the explanation is utter nonsense and has nothing to do with how Git works.

<comment><USER13> You left a layer of the joke: in order to be sure that the explanation is nonsense, you have to understand mathematical concepts that are much more complicated than git's architecture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This reminds me a lot of turbo/retroencabulator [1]. After you've watched the video (don't go first or it will spoil it), you can check out the wikipedia article.[2]

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXJKdh1KZ0w>

[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turboencabulator>

</comment><comment><USER15> The best analogy I've used in explaining Git to my non-tech friends is that "it's like kind of like photoshop layers"

It's definitely not complete but gets them to appreciate it.

<comment><USER16> I liked this conceptual introduction: <http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~cduan/technical/git/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Doh!

</comment><comment><USER18> Makes sense.</comment>


Decrying equality of outcome evades structural inequalities in opportunity - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/new-york-magazine/jordan-peterson-does-not-support-equality-of-opportunity-6bf80f3321a0 <comment><AUTHOR> Original title and summary:

> Jordan Peterson Does Not Support 'Equality of Opportunity'

> When conservatives decry "equality of outcomes," they're usually evading a > debate about structural inequalities in the distribution of opportunity

I selected a title that hopefully reflects the argument of the article well without being too clickbaity.

<comment><USER2> I think this article is correct in identifying bad faith, but I don't think conservatives are really wrong that many people _have_ embraced equality of outcome as the goal and the yardstick against which everyone is measured against.

You can see this in many tech-oriented diversity discussions where diversity advocates will brush off any discussion of "the pipeline problem" as meaningless.

Which is understandable since this can be an easy way to disclaim any responsibility, but it also makes discussions difficult because these metrics don't tell us anything about where in a system inequality exists and assumes that every actor in the system has a responsibility to ensure equal outcomes regardless of anything upstream of them and any other interests (e.g. making money) that they might have.

You see this pretty starkly in work on Fairness in Machine Learning, where it is clear that you have to specify exactly what your fairness criteria are, and it turns out that what many people actually want is equality of outcomes. This is some interesting reading on the topic: [https://www.propublica.org/article/bias-in-criminal-risk- sco...](https://www.propublica.org/article/bias-in-criminal-risk-scores-is- mathematically-inevitable-researchers-say)

In any case, I'm not sure what the point of this article is; is the argument that equality of opportunity is unachievable "absent a degree of social engineering that would make Chairman Mao blush", so we should seek equality of outcomes instead?</comment></comment>


Light-based computers in development - <AUTHOR> http://www.kutv.com/news/features/top-stories/stories/Light-based-computers-in-development-to-be-millions-of-times-faster-than-electronics-based-designs-133067.shtml#.VV0PMa77tC1 <comment><USER2> > The key advantage of light, made of photo[n]s, is it's the fastest thing you > can use to transfer information according to the professor.

I wish people would stop spreading this exaggeration. ~~Electrons~~ Electronic signals move at 0.66c. In practice 1c is unlikely to provide the most significant gains.

The key benefit is actually the energy efficiency that the article barely mentions, as well as massive reduction of interference within circuits (which is why you have to up the CPU voltage when you overclock).

<comment><USER3> I have to nitpick because that's a very frequent misconception as well: electrons, in fact, move very slowly in metals and semiconductors (a few cm/s at best). It's the electromagnetic waves that move so fast (depending on the material, it's going to be anywhere between 0.5c and 0.9c in most everyday appliances), but the electrons themselves are really slow.

<comment><USER2> Thanks, edited to clarify.

<comment><USER3> You're welcome :).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The main problem is still getting strong optical nonlinearity to build optical only transistors. Right now best case 1 in 100 photons will be affected by most "switches". There's been some research using various resonators to enhance the nonlinearities, but that's really the big problem to solve right now.

There's also scaling issues - we have 20nm electrical switches, which is almost 50 times smaller than the wavelength of visible light, so you either need to go to deep UV or confine light to area much smaller than the free- space wavelength, which presents its own challenges.

My personal interest in optical computing is mainly in building optical quantum computers, in which case the cost/size/power of solving these challenges could be well worth it due to the scaling advantages of multi-qubit entanglement. Classical optical computing does not really seem that worth it if we need to build computer chips that are 1000 times bigger and run each operation on average 10^8 times to get a valid result, although the clock speed and power benefits would be nice.

<comment><USER5> If efficiency is vastly improved, we can stack the layers and increase frequency by quite a bit. Even if the processor becomes a 10cm x 10cm x 10cm cube, it's okay as a proof of concept.

It's an interesting approach to overcome the inherient limitations of electron based circuits.

<comment><USER4> Again, right now 1 in 100 photons will interact with an optical switch. This effect multiplies with each level of transistors. This means you have to "run" your circuit potentially something like 10^100 times to get all of the transistors in your path to work on the same photon.

That's pretty rough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Light-based computers in development, to be millions of times faster

When will we see this millions time faster computers commercially available?

Maybe around the time when the thousands-times faster internet and 100 times larger batteries from articles I read years ago are available...

<comment><USER7> Are you being optimistic or pessimistic? It's only been 15-20 years since 56kb dialup was the norm, and Tesla are doing pretty well at the moment.

<comment><USER6> Not pessimistic about technology, but about exaggerated article titles :)</comment></comment></comment>


No Great Technological Stagnation (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://nintil.com/2016/04/25/no-great-technological-stagnation/ <comment><USER2> Quite a lot to digest, even the reference links are still interesting.

I find it interesting when reading things like the headwinds identified on 186-187 (or pages 2-3 as the pdf reader counts them) of the document linked early on in the article [0]. It is a welcome break from data light world of politics and encouraging to see people talking about the parts of the future that are unlikely to be rosy.

Curious really that nobody fingers the bank bailouts from thing like the '07-'08 financial crisis as a risk to long-term growth. The financial companies determine where the money flows to and the crisis can be interpreted as the the economy signaling that the money managers are incompetent. Propping the system up with bailouts and QE probably does real harm over the long term, as people are incentivised to do things that have been proven not to work.

[0] [http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Research/Files/Interactives...](http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Research/Files/Interactives/2014/thinktank20/chapters/tt20-united- states-economic-growth-gordon.pdf?la=en)

</comment><comment><USER3> Great read! If you accept both his evidence that tech is accelerating AND the consensus thesis that productivity growth is slowing, then the simplest explanation is that there is a separate, fast-growing phenomenon that saps economic productivity.

Anyone want to propose what that is and share some measurements?

<comment><USER4> I'll offer some speculation with no data to back it up: quality of life is good enough that after a certain threshold of wealth people aren't willing to work extra hours any more. See: Europe & bigco tech jobs.

<comment><USER5> I think that's true. Most people just want a comfortable life. Only a few will always want more.

<comment><USER6> And out of these few, how much would prefer to put their efforts towards goals of _their_ choosing, instead of exchanging labor for money via whatever task _someone else_ is willing to pay for?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Original source code for Prince of Persia posted to Github - <AUTHOR> http://www.tuaw.com/2012/04/17/original-source-code-for-prince-of-persia-posted-to-github/

<comment><USER2> Original HN thread from last year: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3851605>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Github repo: <https://github.com/jmechner/Prince-of-Persia-Apple-II></comment>


Manafort held secret talks with Assange in Ecuadorian embassy - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/27/manafort-held-secret-talks-with-assange-in-ecuadorian-embassy <comment><USER2> Denied by WikiLeaks:

"Remember this day when the Guardian permitted a serial fabricator to totally destroy the paper's reputation. @WikiLeaks is willing to bet the Guardian a million dollars and its editor's head that Manafort never met Assange."

[https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1067430101548027906](https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1067430101548027906)

In response to Glenn Greenwald, who asked:

"Did the Guardian seek comment from WikiLeaks or Assange before publishing its story? The article says it sought comment from Manafort's lawyer but not from WikiLeaks or Assange."

WikiLeaks write:

'The "Guardian"'s Luke Harding wrote to former lawyer Melinda Taylor just hours before publication. WikiLeaks then tweeted Harding's email publicly, outing the "Guardian"'s fake news disaster prior to publication. The "Guardian" didn't include the denial and ran regardless.'

[https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1067440565762048000](https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1067440565762048000)

<comment><USER3> Looks like a lot of empty rhetoric to me. The evidence suggested in the guardian article sounds compelling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://www.newssniffer.co.uk/articles/1706143/diff/0/1](https://www.newssniffer.co.uk/articles/1706143/diff/0/1) Sure seems less "compelling" when they make these sorts of edits.</comment>


Heroku: The TOP5 legit use cases. - <AUTHOR> http://zakelfassi.com/2013/12/29/heroku-top5-legit-use-cases/

<comment><USER2> Numbers 3 through 6 are questionable...

Unless you directly link 3 with 2, you'd learn a log more and be able to experiment a whole lot more with a VPS.

You can self-sign an SSL certificate and not pay anybody anything...

And you can setup a similar `git push` to deploy scheme. Even on shared hosting. [http://sebduggan.com/blog/deploy-your-website-changes- using-...](http://sebduggan.com/blog/deploy-your-website-changes-using-git/)

<comment><AUTHOR> 3- By learning I meant learning to use a technology/programming lang. 4- Don't know if FB would accept a self signed certificate ... Never tried before! 5- Unless you're on a Cloud-based highly scalable hosting, I don't see how. 6- That would mean you need to setup a git server, on your server. Resource management and security wise, I wouldn't do it.

<comment><USER2> 3\. Part of the craft of programming involves knowing your environment. Learning how to get a production or even development environment up and running for a new technology or programming language is part of that technology and programming language.

4\. I can't see why they wouldn't.

5\. Sure.

6\. You don't need to setup a git server. You just need to have git installed... Nothing needs to run in the background at all.</comment></comment></comment>


This Is What Happens When You Let A Monopoly Own The Last Mile  - <AUTHOR> http://avc.com/2014/06/this-is-what-happens-when-you-let-a-monopoly-own-the-last-mile/#comment-1429316094 <comment><USER2> This is content-free. Major infrastructure construction projects are always behind schedule. Also, Verizon isn't a monopoly in NYC. RCN, TWC, and Cablevision all operate there too. Verizon isn't even the incumbent broadband ISP--it's being brought in to create competition for TWC and Cablevision.

Also, NYC folks can't complain when they elect people like de Blasio, who has turned FIOS into a civil rights issue, complete with hiring a demagogic civil rights lawyer: [http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20140219/TECHNOLOGY/140...](http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20140219/TECHNOLOGY/140219845/mayor- pushes-verizon-to-discount-fios-for-poor).

The irony of complaining about the "monopoly" here is that it's precisely behavior like NYC's that has led to these problems in the first place. Look at the NYC cable franchise map: [http://www.nyc.gov/html/doitt/images/photos/NYC_Cable_Territ...](http://www.nyc.gov/html/doitt/images/photos/NYC_Cable_Territories_090413.jpg). Why don't TWC and Cablevision overlap? It's because the city originally granted exclusive franchises to these companies, in the name of "universal access." In many places, the de-facto monopoly status is perpetuated by policies like build-out requirements, again imposed in the name of universal access.

There is no free lunch. Infrastructure is expensive and time-consuming to build. Cities like New York turn infrastructure development into a proxy war on race/class/economic issues, and investors unsurprisingly stay away. There's a reason why Google is building Google Fiber in places like Provo and Atlanta, not places like San Francisco and New York City.

<comment><USER3> The greatest irony in all of this is that it's precisely the capital-rentiers, the venture capitalists (this post, for example), etc. who are complaining about this.

Anyway, one place where I disagree with you is about the 'civil rights' being thrown in in this debate. I'm actually happy to see instability of this sort panning out, because it seems to me that we really need to go over this and let it play out in the hopes of getting greater stability in the end. So let this become a civil rights issue, as it happens there actually are lots of legitimate reasons why it should become a civil rights issue. This will get me downvoted, but here I go anyway: rich people shouldn't have faster internet just because they're rich -- what'll end up happening if this is true across a large scale is poor folks will have difficulty innovating for the future's faster internet. I'd rather that inequality in this way not play out, we already have enough of it in the tech space.

<comment><USER2> I'd support subsidizing service with tax money. My problem is that people like de Blasio are looking for a free lunch: that Verizon's shareholders will subsidize broadband for poor people in NYC instead of NYC taxpayers. It doesn't work that way. Taxpayers will pay in the end. It'd be most efficient if they paid via direct subsidy. As it stands, they pay in the form of higher prices, less competition, and less choices.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How much would the Raspberry Pi Zero cost in the 1980's? - <AUTHOR> Interested... for the spec the Raspberry Pi has, how much would it have cost historically to purchase?<p>- A Broadcom BCM2835 application processor - 1GHz ARM11 core (40% faster than Raspberry Pi 1) - 512MB of LPDDR2 SDRAM - A micro-SD card slot - A mini-HDMI socket for 1080p60 video output - Micro-USB sockets for data and power - An unpopulated 40-pin GPIO header - Identical pinout to Model A+/B+/2B - An unpopulated composite video header - Our smallest ever form factor, at 65mm x 30mm x 5mm<p>http://raspberry.piaustralia.com.au/products/raspberry-pi-zero <comment><USER2> If you go by the price of the FLOPS the system has, you can get a price for a similarly powerful system from the 80s in inflation-adjusted USD today.

According to Wikipedia, the hardware with the lowest cost per 1.0 GFLOPS was the Cray X-MP [1], so you'd have to pay around USD 42M in today's currency for the computing speed of the Raspberry Pi Zero (I assume 1.0 GFLOPS for the Raspberry Pi Zero) in 1984 (~18M USD in 1984's dollars).

You could get an MB of RAM for USD 1,331 (1984's currency) in 1984 [2], which adds up to roughly USD 1.5M in today's currency.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS#Hardware_costs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS#Hardware_costs)

[2] [http://www.jcmit.com/memoryprice.htm](http://www.jcmit.com/memoryprice.htm)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clearly alot of the technology is newer than the 80's - more interested in a general idea of how far we've come...

</comment><comment><USER3> Same as a Sinclair ZX81? Approx 70GBP for the assembled system, 50GBP for the kit.</comment>


PaidContent: The Fallacy of the Linked Economy - <AUTHOR> http://paidcontent.org/article/419-the-fallacy-of-the-link-economy/

<comment> onreact-com "a very large share of the people who were visiting the site were merely browsing to read headlines rather than using the aggregation page to decide what they wanted to read in detail."

It's exactly the way I use a newsstand. I mostly browse the headlines and unless I find something every interesting I don't buy a newspaper or magazine.</comment>


A mathematically proven way to achieve happiness - <AUTHOR> http://www.astatespacetraveler.com/a-mathematically-proven-way-to-achieve-happiness/

<comment><USER2> Thought provoking, but to those of us with less mathematical knowledge (I had never heard about simulated annealing and definitely didn't know it was the path to happiness !! :P ) it sounds like you smoked something :P

Advice I liked: \- "Leave the comfort of your local minimum" \- "consider every possible idea, belief, and value no matter how crazy or wrong they seem at first" (ok, I admit I sometimes dismiss stuff that's TOO crazy - after all I don't have infinte time!! (yet :P ) \- Trying to remove biases and beliefs (and man.. is that hard)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks GFischer.

Ya, I'm glad I ran my first draft by people first because they had no idea what I was talking with simulated annealing. I hope this final version does an OK job of explaining it.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the most significant turning point in society in our lifetime? - <AUTHOR> I'm asking this as a result of a separate thread on HN which suggest that the Election of Trump was the "most significant turning point in society in our lifetime". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12936107<p>I strongly disagree and thought I'd ask the general community what they think is most significant in our collective lifetime. <comment><USER2> For older folks, I would argue that Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor changed the entire world.

As for myself, I wasn't alive then, so it's probably the attacks on September 11th. They resulted in numerous wars, changed the lives of probably billions of people, changed the characterization of an entire religion, affected foreign and domestic policies, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> In my lifetime, the integrated circuit and its development ecosystem, Moore's Law, and for a long while, Dennard Scaling ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling)), I think.

Some others cite things like the web or the personal computer, but that would never have become a big thing without ever denser and for a long while faster ICs, then again, they don't have to be too much younger than me for the invention of the IC to fall out of their range.

9/11 was and remains big, but I don't think it's of a fraction the magnitude, unless, again, these other things happened before you were born. E.g. in that category, the assassination of JFK and how that shaped the coming Vietnam War was a _much_ bigger thing for the US, not sure about the world outside of East Asia, though, except through the profound effects it had through changing the US.

In a few years I might list Watergate in that category, for how it changed the power balance between the Executive and the Congress, and among other things changed the budgeting system to one where all internal restraints are pretty much gone. When the Feds can no longer can borrow huge sums of money at around 0% interest rates, well, things will get very interesting in the "interesting times" sense. How that will effect those outside the US, though, I'm not sure, but nothing good, I would think. I.e. the 2nd bank collapse phase of the Great Depression on steroids sort of magnitude.

</comment><comment><USER4> You said turning point so I'm going to list what I think caused the most significant change in society.

1\. End of Cold War / The Fall of the Soviet Union / Berlin Wall - because of its massive impact on geopolitics, the ultimate failure of the communism experiment, as pertains to Germany, the reunification of East and West.

2\. The Invention of the WWW - this was the ultimate culmination of the information revolution, the 20th centuries version of the industrial revolution.

3\. The Maastricht Treaty / Introduction of Euro - Formation of the European Union as we know it today. For western culture this has had and will continue to have profound impact whether the union ultimately succeeds in becoming a USA 2.0 or disintegrates into an economic union (Brexit, Grexit, etc).

4\. 9/11 - For what it represents for the 21st century, as regards a global jihad, an ongoing terrorism and counter-terrorism war, and what will most likely become the largest issue of at least the first half of the 21st century.

<comment><USER5> To which we could add:

5\. The introduction of "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics" starting in 1978 (combined with the post-Tienanmen crackdown, which appears to have been largely responsible for cementing the CP's longevity).

6\. Putin's appointment as Prime Minister on December 31, 1999 (and the ensuing waves of influence which have not only swept the region... but indeed, with the last election, have significantly impacted politics in the U.S. itself).

7\. The Reagan/Thatcher elections in 1979 / 1980 (basically responsible for the rise of neoliberalism as we know it).

8\. The Iranian revolution of 1979.

9\. The onset of the global HIV epidemic (ultimately leading to far broader recognition of LGBTQ rights, and to loosening of mores with regard to non- reproductive sex in general).

We have to stop somewhere, so 1978-1979 seems about as good as anywhere. (Basically, nearly everyone here seems to be "post-Vietnam/Watergate" and "post-deindustrialization").

Other significant changes have had no specific turning point:

1\. Major decrease in global poverty.

2\. Major decrease in urban crime in the U.S (largely responsible for gentrification and the long-scale housing bubbles we have today), for reasons still not entirely understood.

3\. Gradual winding down of armed conflicts in Latin America.

4\. And of course, anthropomorphic climate change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Its a little too early to write the history books because it all depends on how it plays out. Its not possible to say Trump's election is a turning point yet (despite all the angst on both the Left and Right) because we don't yet know how he'll govern or what he'll do. People forget, he ran as a Republican but was repudiated by the Right and he certainly isn't a Sanders-style Democrat but shares many of the same values of the centrist Democrats so change is in the wind, how much change depends on what happens next. Trump has single-handedly shaken both parties to the core. If this leads to a major change of one or both major parties then 20 years from now we can point to Trump as the instigator. If the two parties settle into superficial changes ("I feel your pain") to address the concerns of those who voted for him then his presidency will just be a blip on the road to the future and not a turning point.

Now on to your explicit question; By far and away the most significant turning point in our lifetimes is (last century) Ayn Rand's validation of reason by solving the problem of universals in her theory of concepts. I don't expect anyone here reading this to understand or appreciate this but it is an epic, world-changing achievement and, like Aristotle, she will be discussed in the history books 1000's years from now. She is a turning point in the history of man.

<comment><USER5> _I don 't expect anyone here reading this to understand or appreciate this but it is an epic, world-changing achievement and, like Aristotle, she will be discussed in the history books 1000's years from now._

It's pretty safe to say that if no one on HN knows what the hell you're talking about (and not even WP mentions PoS and AR in association with each other), then no, it's not likely that this will be seen as "the most significant turning point" of our era, centuries from now.

<comment><USER6> > WP mentions PoS and AR

Over my head, care to define your abbreviations? Thanks

<comment><USER5> WP = Wikipedia

PoS = should be PoU = Problem of Universals

AR = The Greatest Thinker Of Our Lifetime, And Indeed, One of The Greatest Thinkers In The History Of Man

<comment><USER6> > AR = The Greatest Thinker Of Our Lifetime, And Indeed, One of The Greatest > Thinkers In The History Of Man

Don't forget Aristotle! Everything we have now including science, technology, medicine, math, freedom and even Ayn Rand we owe to him for discovering the laws of deductive logic. But deductive logic was not validated till Rand identified the principle behind concept formation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think the economic and geopolitical implications of affordable electric vehicles and PV Solar isn't as appreciated as it should be.

Also outside the US there is a huge rural to urban migration occurring.

<comment><USER8> > Also outside the US there is a huge rural to urban migration occurring.

Notably in 2009 the world's population was majority urban for the first time in human history. It is now more common to live in a city than not to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I already see IC's, automobiles, and the Internet on the list. Let's add washing machines:

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/aug/29/my- bright...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/aug/29/my-bright-idea- ha-joon-chang)

</comment><comment><USER10> My lifetime: the personal computer. Parents: WW 2. Grandparents: the depression. Great-grandparents: the automobile.

</comment><comment><USER11> 1) Invention of the web.

2) 9/11\. It created policies that we deal with still, implanted ideology and its critics, and likely emboldened future attacks.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'd say the end of the Cold War.</comment>