First All-Automated Hotel Opens in Norway - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/first_all-automated_hotel_opens.php?sms_ss=hackernews&at_xt=4d3a10812febdf20%2C0 <comment><USER2> To be clear, they're just doing fully electronic checkin. The title had me imagining room service and housekeeping robots.

<comment><USER3> :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _I have not found the automated airport experience anything less than panic- inducing._

I live in Europe and have spent several years thoroughly _enjoying_ the convenience that the machines at the airport provide. I'd love to learn what panic-inducing experiences the author is alluding to; can any HN'ers help out? :)

<comment><USER5> Wow, Europe!? I wish we had automated check-ins at airports over here in boring ol' America.

<comment><USER4> _Wow, Europe!? I wish we had automated check-ins at airports over here in boring ol' America._

I stated Europe because the article's author lives in America. Hence the next sentence where I wrote _I'd love to learn what panic-inducing experiences the author is alluding to; can any HN'ers help out?_

Is that really so offensive?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hmmm, I was able to checkin and checkout at the Hyatt Regency at Pittsburgh airport last year without dealing with a human being. On arrival, swiped my credit card at a computer in the lobby, which dispensed a keycard. On departure, same computer printed my bill and I put the card in a slot.

There were people working at the checkin desk, but you didn't have to deal with them.

<comment><USER7> Did exactly the same thing last time I was in London. Swipe credit card on checkin and checkout at one of the half dozen or so terminals scattered around the lobby. In fact that was the only way to check in. If you went to the reception desk all they did was lead you to one of the terminals and walked you through the procedure. I don't get what's so "first" about this system, unless they mean first in Oslo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I seem to recall Motel Formule 1 doing this at least eight years ago in Canberra, at least if you happened to arrive late (after the checkin desk was closed). You'd show up, scan your credit card, and receive... actually I don't remember whether it spat out a key or a code.

Also, don't Japanese love hotels operate on a similar system?

<comment><USER9> I stayed at a Formule 1 in France in 2002 that was also fully automated (self cleaning showers and toilets too). They apparently have an iphone app now as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Omena Hotels (<http://www.omenahotels.com/>) does this in Finland in several locations, and it works very smoothly. If you reserve a room in advance, you pay online and get a keycode or you can also just do chip & PIN at the door if there's vacancy.

</comment><comment><USER11> Checkins at Japanese love hotels are often fully automated. For obvious reasons.

</comment><comment><USER12> 'The Comfort Xpress Hotel in Oslo now allows guests to reserve, check in and check out without ever having to deal with a pesky human.' I love technology as much as the next geek, but there are some places I would _really_ like to deal with pesky humans -- hotels, hospitals and restaurants come to mind.

<comment><USER13> Given how much human error happens in hospitals, I would be happier to have less pesky humans involved.

<comment><USER12> Unfortunately, medicine today isn't deterministic. A lot of decisions are made with 'instinct' -- a fancy word for intangible experience. Human error is always going to be an issue. What might prevent human error in the design of said automated systems?

<comment><USER14> It is conceivable that automated medicine would have a lower failure rate for common diseases than "instinct."

<comment><USER12> I can agree with that. But you've made two implicit assumptions here:

1\. The disease is diagnosed and identified as 'common' 2\. There are no other complications because of say alcohol abuse, or a genetic condition with kidneys and so forth

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Hasn't CitizenM ([http://www.citizenmamsterdamairport.com/amsterdam-lodging- ho...](http://www.citizenmamsterdamairport.com/amsterdam-lodging-hotels.php)) done the same for yeras? This isn't really exciting, it's just a badly-working touchscreen interface.

<comment><USER16> Yes, they have. I love CitizenM. A truly great hotel concept.

<comment><USER17> The one and only time I tried to use the automated check-in system at Citizen M it didn't work. Then the key I got to the room didn't work. Probably just my luck. But overall I really liked the concept and would still stay there again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> In Japan there are a lot of love hotels where you 'check in' using a ticket vending machine with a touch-screen interface. Cheaper than having check in staff and you get the requisite anonymity.

</comment><comment><USER19> hmm, me thinks there are a few other things going on at a hotel beyond the checkin process. Are other functions at this hotel automated or is "All- Automated" inaccurate?</comment>


Iceland proposes citizenship for Snowden - <AUTHOR> http://www.newsday.com/news/world/iceland-proposes-citizenship-for-snowden-1.5628482

<comment><USER2> Just before adjourning Icelandic parliament for the summer, a vote was cast to put the bill before a parliament committee to be discussed further. That vote was defeated 24 to 33, 5 didn't vote and one was absent. Seems like this door has closed, at least for now.

Can't find news articles on this, except this piece [http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=is&tl=en&js=n&prev=...](http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=is&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dv.is%2Ffrettir%2F2013%2F7%2F4%2Fmeira- kjarkleysid-og-aumingjadomur%2F)

Also discussed at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5991203](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5991203)

</comment><comment><USER3> > the idea received minimal support.

Title here is slightly misleading...

<comment><USER2> It´s not the title so much as the reporting. A bill was indeed set before parliament to grant Snowden citizenship, but because it was put forward on the last day of parliament it didn't get voted on. Instead a vote on a parliament committee was made. The support of almost half of parliament is a little more than minimal.

<comment><USER4> 38.1% isn't really half, but considered the small amount it feels closer. Still 38.1% voting yes to something probably not in their interests, because they're nice guys, is still a pretty good result. At least it is when you the world we live in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You know Iceland only has a population of ~300,000. I've wondered if a few tens of thousands of hackers moved there, they could have a pretty significant effect on the government.

<comment><USER6> Unfortunately, Iceland has a very difficult immigration policy. That's how it's maintained its relative wealth and prosperity.

<comment><USER7> what is the primary driver of Iceland's wealth? What is their principal industry(ies)?

<comment><USER8> My knowledge of this only comes from Michael Lewis' book, Boomerang, but in there he writes that Iceland got wealthy when they figured out how to securitize their fishing industry. They also starting smelting aluminum.

<comment><USER9> >They also starting smelting aluminium.

An energy intensive exercise made extremely affordable, because of very cheap geothermal energy sources.

<comment><USER10> If you can't export cheap power, bring the industry to you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Talk about wanting to make headlines.</comment>


Discover the right investors for your startup - <AUTHOR> https://glassdollar.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> GlassDollar is an investor discovery tool for founders who'd rather create than waste time on the fundraising process.

Based on your industry, start-up stage and location, GlassDollar shows you investors that are most likely to be interested in your start-up.</comment>


Sliding Right into Information Theory - <AUTHOR> http://www.joachim-breitner.de/blog/747-Sliding_Right_into_Information_Theory <comment><USER2> Could somebody explain this like I am 5 years old?

<comment><USER3> While working on the tail end of a side channel attack paper, the author came up with a new analytic form for Renyi entropy used in the type of hidden markov model used in the side channel attack. Pretty solid piece of work.

I am not super familiar with the use of Renyi entropy in HMMs, but it looks pretty generally interesting; something that can be used to find recurrence maps in general.

<comment><USER4> Your ELI5 needs an ELI5 :)

<comment> a-dub They're talking about computing k^m mod p. In the era where you can get a sense for what operations have taken place based on fingerprints left in the cache, timing, etc, the algorithms for computing it are ideally designed to be hardened against it. That is, given knowledge of the sorts of operations that have taken place, how many bits of the secret that is being computed can be recovered? They demonstrate that more bits than previously thought can be practicably recovered from an actual implementation of RSA by using clever statistical modeling and ideas from information theory.

<comment><USER4> This is much easier to digest, thank you. What's the significance of computing k^m mod p in this context?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> a-dub LOL his headings appear to use the same font as David Mackay's excellent free book on information theory!

[http://www.inference.org.uk/itila/book.html](http://www.inference.org.uk/itila/book.html)</comment>


Mars One Is Bankrupt - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2019/02/11/mars-one-is-dead/ <comment><USER2> Total scam. They wanted to start a reality show to fund R&D for a Mars base. There aren't any technical details on the "Mars Transit Vehicle", which looks like a KSP rocket with a Dragon stuck on the end.

Poking through their investor relations, they don't really have anything besides the website and some renderings. Wikipedia says that their proposal to launch modified Dragons was rejected by SpaceX. You would think an organization that plans on sending humans to Mars has a headquarters filled with very smart people, but it's just an empty rented office.[1]

[1] [https://www.space.com/21270-private-mars-colony-scam- china.h...](https://www.space.com/21270-private-mars-colony-scam-china.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> > "When you join the 'Mars One Community,' which happens automatically if you > applied as a candidate, they start giving you points. You get points for > getting through each round of the selection process… and then the only way > to get more points is to buy merchandise from Mars One or to donate money to > them."

Yeah... if you do that to people applying, you're not pretending anymore to be anything other than a scam. This was a Fyre-level attempt to get more money from attendants - like that Fyre band one "should charge with thousand of dollars" just days before the event.</comment>


Steal != Copy - <AUTHOR> http://www.64notes.com/steal-copy/

<comment><USER2> I wait for a program that generates all the copyright content in existence. It will automatically not generate copyrighted and pubic domained content already.

The business model is automatically sending notices claiming copyright infringement. Youtube automatically sends you money. Collection societies give you a cut from their racket. Most of the money will initially go towards lawsuits where I can demand up to $100,000 (highest fine in the world in USA, even if it's non-commercial). All part of the good ol' effort against the piracy economic bogeyman.

Bonus: USA is known to steal works from public domain 'as part of being treaty obligations' and thus, since Mickey Mouse. Copyright will never expire.

I'm a pirate because intellectual property is flawed and the next piracy will be 3D printers. <http://reprap.org/wiki/EndOfIntellectualProperty>

Look to China for how businesses is done in a country with no regard for IP. Microsoft sells cheaper software and better services. Copyright companies isolate China from rest of world under region restrictions, etc.

<comment><USER3> I wrote program for that, will this do?

        for x in chain.from_iterable((product(*repeat(string.ascii_uppercase + ',.!? ', n)) for n in xrange(1, 2**32))): print ''.join(x)

It's currently limited to 4GB though. I am also afraid it will produce content that infringes someone elses existing rights.

</comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady Kind of explains the "Good artist borrow, great artist steal." saying but the examples given are terrible.

Smartphones did not steal wrist watches. A better example might be that Apple 'stole' the iPhone/smartphone idea from Palm or RIM.

And I wouldn't say iCloud is stolen from Dropbox. They fit two different purposes imo. iCloud doesn't do the folder sharing Dropbox does and doesn't have the file management capabilities power users need.

<comment><USER4> If iCloud did exactly what Dropbox does, that would be a copy, no?

iCloud _syncs, in principle, and makes things available_ on all your i-devices.

Dropbox _syncs, in principle, and makes things available_ on your devices.

<comment> k-mcgrady You just invalidated your own point. If iCloud was 'stolen' from Dropbox it would take what Dropbox does and vastly improve and build upon that based on your login. But you have just said above that iCloud 'sync and make things available on all your devices' and that Dropbox' syncs and makes things available on all your devices'.

<comment><USER5> You're thinking improvement in terms of end-user features, while Apple thinks of it in terms of ease-of-use and ecosystem lock-in

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Suppose you had millions of copies of some object for sale. As the manufacture cost of the object tends to zero, the outcomes of copying tend to the outcomes of theft.

</comment><comment><USER7> I was hoping the piece would truly stick to the title point: that stealing != copying. But after a page or so into it it became clear he was just another person trying to make a distinction between two degrees of copying.

Good rule of thumb: if someone steals something from you, you don't have it anymore. If someone copies something from you, you still have it.

</comment><comment><USER8> Not to nitpick, but the logical inference in the title is backwards. What they want to say is "Copying is not necessarily Stealing", because "Stealing is not always Copying" is obvious because stealing can be done by other means. Sorry for geeking out.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think the quote is "good artists borrow, great artists steal".

</comment><comment><USER10> starts article with "creation-stealing", discusses "copying-stealing". divulges into apple vs others as usual

<comment><USER11> I think you meant "diverges" not "divulges"?</comment></comment>


ETS Isn't TLS and You Shouldn't Use It - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/02/ets-isnt-tls-and-you-shouldnt-use-it <comment><USER2> We need a big budget cut in the "homeland security" area. All this interception is not paying off. The biggest "terrorist event" in the US since 2001 was the guy who shot up a gay nightclub in Orlando FL in 2017. That was a solo nutcase; there was no planning chatter to intercept. The Boston Marathon bombing was two brothers. The San Bernardino shooting was a husband and wife.

What's discouraging terrorism is the US's overreaction outside the US. It's become very clear to terrorist organizations that if they attack the US, the US is going to hit back, even if it's insanely expensive and causes collateral damage. The people in charge, and many people around them, end up dead.

Remember ISIS, the Islamic State? ISIS is down to 1.5 square miles, surrounded, and everybody but the most fanatical fighters is surrendering. The holdouts have days to live.

We don't need more Big Brother.

<comment><USER3> I completely agree with you, but the counter argument is the only incidents that are getting through are the ones that are solo because the more complicated plots are getting intercepted and disrupted.

<comment><USER4> > I completely agree with you, but the counter argument is the only incidents > that are getting through are the ones that are solo because the more > complicated plots are getting intercepted and disrupted.

The problem with this argument is that it can't justify continued spending because that would make it unfalsifiable. We need to spend $450B/year on a bear-repelling rocks because we currently pay for the rocks and there are no bears. And if any bears do appear then we obviously didn't have enough bear- repelling rocks and we need to start spending $900B/year.

If there is a real question as to whether the ~0 bears is a result of the rocks, it's time to cut the bear-repelling rock budget in half and see how many bears there are next year. If it's still ~0 then it didn't need to be as high as it was and it may _still_ be too high.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Funny how word 'Enterprise' picks up more and more negative connotation in modern software world. These days, 'enterprise' means outdated, inflexible and intentionally flawed monster of technology.

<comment><USER6> Did it ever meant anything else?

Many that throw jabs at J2EE (written on purpose), never had the joys of trying out xBaseEE, CEE, C++EE (CORBA, DCOM/MTS),...

<comment><USER7> I think it's an unfair characterisation. Let's go with early-2000s "Enterprise" stuff: CORBA and SOAP specifically.

There are these large corporations with a significant investment in their existing infrastructure and systems - and now they all need to make them interop. The mindset is "how do we make our CORBA ERP communicate with their Java CRM without needing to make any changes to either of them?". Hence SOAP: It packages existing method-call semantics into a HTTP message that will cross a firewall: not even the IT dept needs to get involved to change firewall rules. And they hammered out a working spec within a couple years. That's impressive considering the slow-moving nature of large, risk-averse enterprises. We now know that REST-is-Best, but it took the industry around 10 years to figure that out, and another 5 years for the tooling and ecosystem to catch up. SOAP was a quick-fix that was needed immediately.

So I'd recharacterise "Enterprise software" as "fits into your existing system and does what you need it to, right now" - and their MC Escher-inspired architecture is a consequence of it needing to support and fit-in to whatever systems were prevalent when their project was started.

It's not Enterprise software that's rigid and inflexible - but cutting-edge software that I have more problems with. I was working with Neo4j in 2016 and having issues with security because it didn't have any built-in security support until last year. I had to change what I was doing to accommodate them, instead of vice-versa.

<comment><USER6> Except for two year pause, all my career has been in the enterprise space.

More often than not, those MC Escher-inspired architecture as you call it, are the result of corporate politics with each department having a say in how their tooling should look like, and bringing in externals to actually build it for them at lowest bid with fixed cost projects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's worth reading the mailing list posts by BITS (the main proponent of ETS) here: [https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/tls/KQIyNhPk8K6jOoe2Sc...](https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/tls/KQIyNhPk8K6jOoe2ScdPZ8E08RE). The replies are pretty informative. You can see here the message in which BITS starts to consider fixed DH keys, which were implemented in ETS: [https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/tls/3d7TM0g_EdtMzhgmcP...](https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/tls/3d7TM0g_EdtMzhgmcPn_Xb- ZFjY)

> Tue, 27 September 2016 18:21 UTC

> The various suggestions for creating fixed/static Diffie Hellman keys raise > interesting possibilities. We would like to understand these ideas better at > a technical level and are initiating research into this potential solution.

The core argument made by BITS is that they need a way to log TLS traffic such that it can be decrypted later, in order to provide data retention in line with regulations. While this could be done by logging all ephemeral keys generated by the servers, BITS argues that this isn't practical due to their use of dedicated packet logging hardware that is key-ignorant. Instead they want to use non-forward-secret TLS so they can decrypt past messages easily. Their beef with TLS 1.3 is that it removes all non-FS key exchange methods, and further that by explicitly obsoleting TLS 1.2 as a standard pushes them to have to adopt 1.3 in an enterprise environment (or risk current/future regulatory scrutiny over their use of an obsoleted standard). Hence why they want to develop a competing, active standard with non-FS key exchange.

<comment><USER9> I've read Andrew Kennedy's email. This line hits the point for me. His argument is reasonable, sometime it's impractical or hard or costly or all the above to upgrade all the systems to meet regulatory compliance and the newer and stricter and safer security standards.

         It is vital to financial institutions and to their customers and regulators
         that these institutions be able to maintain both security and regulatory compliance
         during and after the transition from TLS 1.2 to TLS 1.3.

One example of that is the NIST's recommendation on password policies. Most of the time the regulatory mandates are outdated and it's hard to bring them up to speed, in the mean time, as a financial institution you simply cannot have your IT system incompliant, even that means having a less security practice.

<comment><USER10> > as a financial institution you simply cannot have your IT system incompliant

This just isn't true, or rather "compliance" tends to be quite fuzzy.

Regulators generally expect you follow recommendations from places like NIST. But it's not a hard requirement, you just need to explain why deviating is better.

Unfortunately most fincial institutions trip up at the "explain why it's better" bit. Either because they aren't competent enough, or (more likely) can't be bothered.

<comment><USER11> If something was better for the entire industry one would think the compliance recommendations would be the topic of discussion, not explaining why it needed to be done differently individually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is a remarkable story. Fortunately, this ETSI-backed "ETS" standard appears to have just about zero uptake or internet presence, let alone vendor acceptance. So although this is fairly outrageous based on the EFF article, it doesn't look like something that's a big threat to TLS at this point.

PS. I can't even get ETSI's website to load! [https://www.etsi.org/](https://www.etsi.org/)

<comment><USER13> If you're having trouble getting etsi.org to load, try using their static key for diffie-hellman: 0x00000000.

<comment><USER14> Works every time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > This would only require changes to servers, not clients, and would look just > like the secure version of TLS 1.3.

If a TLS 1.3 client will happily connect to an ETS server that isn't playing by the rules, doesn't that indicate a flaw in 1.3?

<comment><USER16> Either client or server can break secrecy. Server compromise isn't a threat model the client can defend against. For example, the server could simply forward a copy of the whole communication in cleartext to someone, and the client can't know this.

In this case, the server is using a predictable number instead of a random one for part of the protocol. Possibly a client could detect this by doing multiple transactions and seeing if a number gets reused, but that seems outside the scope of TLS.

<comment><USER15> The expectation is that the encrypted link is not decryptable by a third party. If that isn't always true in the face of an adversary then claims of forward secrecy for TLS 1.3 are false.

<comment><USER17> The expectation is that the encrypted link is not decryptable by a third party _if_ both parties are implementing the protocol in good faith.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> So what's the argument from the other side? Going through all this effort to allow PFS to be disabled seems like a ton of work? What's their use-case?

<comment><USER19> If your stance is:

No opaque data leaves my network

Then this is the only way you can have outbound HTTPS connections. And for e.g. a bank, certain legal firms, or any company that has a lot of sensitive data they either don't want to be leaked, or at least want the option of detecting when it is leaked, that is a somewhat reasonable stance. In the case of banks, this is needed for regulatory compliance regarding insider trading. For legal companies, I imagine this is about ensuring certain confidentiality. I could see the same thing for companies dealing with trade-secrets.

The statement 'Just log it on the end-points' presumes complete access to those end-points and all software running on them.

This method is considered better than terminating TLS early at a proxy and setting up a separate tunnel to the clients because breaking PFS is passive, rather than active. Thus it is a lot less resource intensive, a lot less vulnerable (no internet facing box that, if broken, has all communication in plaintext), and introduces no extra latency.

It is essentially a 'better' way to do an authorized MitM on everything on your network, and some companies want this authorized MitM. Like any authorized MitM, it introduces a third party who can compromise security, which is not generally desirable, but some companies don't mind being that third party to their own employees.

<comment><USER20> It's a pipe dream. The webpage or application can easily include its own encryption that can't be broken by these proxies.

If your stance is 'no opaque data leaves my network' your only option is an air gap.

<comment><USER21> Engineering is all about making trade-offs ("perfect is the enemy of the good and all") and security engineering is no different. The same logic could be used to say that you don't need an edge firewall because each client should have one but it's much easier to simplify the baseline.

If nothing else, it would make the remaining traffic stand out more since you wouldn't be spending time auditing normal apps which decode cleanly and it's highly likely that someone trying to circumvent such a system would be required to do things which stand out more than routine usage.

As a simple example, an organization which does that kind of monitoring is unlikely to allow users to install arbitrary applications or visit any site on the web. With a standard setup, someone trying to exfiltrate data could just hit a popular site like Github, Gmail, Dropbox, etc. but if they need to use some custom encryption or steganography code they're either forced to install it somewhere far less common (i.e. more likely to stand out) or installing something locally where client monitoring can report an unusual browser extension or application.

<comment><USER20> A cute excuse until one of your popular sites starts to do this. Now it happens to be that Google hates these proxies as they are a popular target for repressive governments, who technically can't be distinguished from a snooping 'enterprise'.

The reality is that world kept turning without these proxies and it will keep turning once they are made obsolete.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm not sure I understand: why can't they record the decrypted traffic instead? (I assume they have it plain text at some point). Of course they could encrypt it again before sending it to their audit server

</comment><comment><USER23> How does ETS break MITM for corporate LANs that are trusted CAs on work devices? Why can't a proxy still MITM a connection by terminating the client side, establishing the server side, and that be that?

Also, banks seeing their own corporate traffic is ethical and moral. Whether they need to simply find another way to read all data leaving their network is another piece of the story.

</comment><comment><USER24> Seeing articles like this remind me why I donate to EFF on the regular and recommend others to do so, too. They're on our side.

</comment><comment><USER25> > Instead of thinking of this as "Enterprise Transport Security," which the > creators say the acronym stands for, you should think of it as "Extra > Terrible Security."

</comment><comment><USER26> As long as browser makers don't support it, this is a non-issue. Correct?

</comment><comment><USER27> I wonder how they plan to get this into Chrome.

</comment><comment><USER28> Christ, what assholes.

</comment><comment><USER29> Yeah, let's just make it harder for banks to protect your money so that nobody can figure out your Facebook password in 10 years.

EFF: "Everything sent over the network should be a secret! Nobody has a good reason to inspect traffic, it puts users' privacy at risk!"

Bank: "We keep trillions of your dollars. Inspecting our own traffic is how we make sure nobody is stealing it. We're a pretty big organization, so this stuff costs a lot of money, and is complex and takes a long time to get right. Can you give us a way to do that in this new TLS standard?"

EFF: "No!! Privacy!!!"

Bank: "Ok... I guess we'll have to make our own standard, then...?"

EFF: "Don't ANYONE use that standard, it will cause REAL HARM!!!!"

Bank: "..... Nobody else was going to... except us....."

<comment><USER30> PFS doesn't prevent inspection of traffic, it just makes passive capture more complicated since you now need to log the ephemeral keys for each connection rather than just using the private key to decode the whole package.

Not necessarily trivial but not exactly impossible for someone who controls one of the endpoints.

Active interception with a middlebox still works exactly the same as it always has.</comment></comment>


The Myth of the Risk Taker - <AUTHOR> https://betterhumans.coach.me/the-myth-of-the-risk-taker-how-to-actually-make-it-big-40b9f2bef496#.yptdbawbz <comment><USER2> Bill Burr on risk taking: [http://imgur.com/0Y2u4Xb](http://imgur.com/0Y2u4Xb) Couldn't find it in text format :(

The point being what seems like risk to many people, is actually avoidance of a different risk by the protagonist.</comment>


Eight or Nine Wise Words about Letter-Writing by Lewis Carroll (1890) - <AUTHOR> http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38065/38065-h/38065-h.htm

<comment><USER2> "when you have written a letter that you feel may possibly irritate your friend, ... put it aside till the next day"

I have a similar policy. Upon receiving an email that makes me hyperventilate even a little, or sets my pulse racing just a bit, by all means draft a reply immediately -- frequently emotional and full of invective -- but the set it aside for _at least_ 24 hours. 48 in more severe cases. Then, and only then, re-read the message that got me all hot and bothered in the first place, re- read my draft reply (assuming I did that) and then redraft as needed before hitting "Send".

I call this my "24-hour Rule" and apply it always.

Then there's the "Never Hit Send While After Even a Single Drink Rule"... but that's another thing for another day.

<comment><USER3> A good test for this kind of thing is to ask these three questions for every statement you make in a confrontational communication:

1\. Does this have to be said?

2\. Does it have to be said now?

3\. Does it have to be said by me?

If you can't answer all three questions with a strong and affirmative yes, then delete the statement.

<comment><USER4> From Buddhism, "5 factors of speech":

[1] "Do I speak at the right time, or not?

[2] "Do I speak of facts, or not?

[3] "Do I speak gently or harshly?

[4] "Do I speak profitable words or not?

[5] "Do I speak with a kindly heart, or inwardly malicious?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This was the most familiar:

"My eighth Rule. When you say, in your letter, "I enclose cheque for £5", or "I enclose John's letter for you to see", leave off writing for a moment—go and get the document referred to—and put it into the envelope. Otherwise, you are pretty certain to find it lying about, after the Post has gone!"

<comment><USER6> I appreciate Thunderbird every time it reminds me to add attachment(s) if it finds that keyword in the email text.

<comment><USER7> gmail does this too. I've been caught several times having forgotten to actually attach the file.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Mentioned almost as an aside, but I'd never heard of 'cross-writing'[1] before, and now having looked a few examples, I can quite imagine how painful it would be to read.

[1] [http://blog.paperblanks.com/2013/03/cross- writing/](http://blog.paperblanks.com/2013/03/cross-writing/)

<comment><USER9> You know, CSS can do this too, nowadays. Perhaps some new... ah... "research"... is necessary to see whether this can increase our ability to read online as well.

It's that "April" sort of research one does, if you know what I mean.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The "On registering Correspondence" section is rather fascinating - neurotic, but probably extremely helpful for someone who received a large number of letters. I wonder what he would've made of "Inbox Zero"!

<comment><USER11> I think he would have found threaded emails with labeling an acceptable replacement.

<comment><USER12> Exactly — the stuff on keeping a mail register essentially amounts to manually creating the equivalent of an email client, complete with tracking conversation threads, subject lines, figuring out which messages need replies, and which messages are urgent or require further action.

One thing which struck me is that his example numbering system had exceeded 22000, and I doubt he logged spam.

<comment><USER13> > his example numbering system had exceeded 22000

There was a lot of correspondence going around. In Carroll's time, good cities would deliver and pick up mail from your home four times a day. (And now plenty of people check their email less often.)

<comment><USER12> And it was also doing the job of your telephone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I consider writing letters the top way to actually keep in touch, even if no one ever writes back, and it is a great exercise of the mind and body. When I first started writing letters, I was astounded by how difficult it was to write legible and coherent sentences. There were a lot of scribbled out words or sections and it was like I had forgotten how to write. It's very different from writing notes or the everyday writing that you do.

I don't do it that often, I think on average my friends who have moved away get 1 or 2 a year, but I usually include some extra stuff like a thumb drive with some music/mixes or a trinket I happened to buy that I thought someone would appreciate.

Also IMHO, there is also something sepcial about getting a package or letter in the mail that is unexpected and isn't a pre-approved credit card.

</comment><comment><USER15> The point about putting your full address on the letter reminds me of Microsoft Outlook's irritating habit of stripping email addresses when forwarding emails.

</comment><comment><USER16> Surprisingly, it turns out the "Wonderland Stamp Case" was a real product: an Alice themed folder with slots for the different types of stamps. Who thought merchandising a fiction franchise started with George Lucas?

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Wonderland+Stamp+Case&t=ffcm&iax=1...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Wonderland+Stamp+Case&t=ffcm&iax=1&ia=images)

</comment><comment><USER17> "And never, never, dear Madam (N.B. this remark is addressed to _ladies only_ : no man would ever do such a thing), put "Wednesday", simply, as the date!"

"A Postscript is a very useful invention: but it is not meant (as so many _ladies_ suppose) to contain the real gist of the letter"

Interesting to see how society has changed in a hundred years. This would probably cause a bit of a fuss if it were written today.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, today instead of an amusing observation that celebrates our differences, it would become fodder to feed a conflict. It really was a gentler time.

<comment><USER19> I will wait 24 hours before responding to your comment in the way I initially intended to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wonderful. Words to live by :)</comment>


Debut of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket now planned early next year - <AUTHOR> https://spaceflightnow.com/2017/11/28/debut-of-spacexs-falcon-heavy-rocket-now-planned-in-january/ <comment><USER2> There's still hope that they will make their first static test fire in December, though! This will be their first time lighting all 27 engines, so it could be very exciting.

A FH static fire can only be done on the pad: there is no test stand big enough to do it.

<comment><USER3> And by exciting, do you mean a high probability of a RUD?

<comment><USER2> I don't know about "high", but there's at least two new things happening that jump out:

* staggered start, the engines are started in pairs on the order of 100s milliseconds apart, so 13 chances for an unbalanced engine start

* vastly increased acoustic and vibration shock, I really wish I could hear the noise in person (from a long way away)

<comment><USER4> [http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Disaster_Area](http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Disaster_Area)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The Techcrunch article just references the Engadget article [https://www.engadget.com/2017/11/30/spacex-falcon-heavy- laun...](https://www.engadget.com/2017/11/30/spacex-falcon-heavy-launch- delayed-2018/)

And the Engadget article just references an aviation week article (paywalled) [http://aviationweek.com/space/falcon-heavy-debut- slips-2018](http://aviationweek.com/space/falcon-heavy-debut-slips-2018)

There's a lot more (non paywalled) information here: [https://spaceflightnow.com/2017/11/28/debut-of-spacexs- falco...](https://spaceflightnow.com/2017/11/28/debut-of-spacexs-falcon-heavy- rocket-now-planned-in-january/)

<comment><USER6> Ok, we've changed to that last link from [https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/30/spacexs-first-falcon- heavy...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/30/spacexs-first-falcon-heavy-launch- will-now-take-place-in-2018/). Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "At first it sounds real easy, you just stick two first stages on as strap-on boosters" \--Musk

This made me laugh. I think it belongs on shitelonsays.com.

<comment> King-Aaron With enough struts, I could see it working. You might lose a few Kerbals in the process, but you know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Anyone don't think that two simultaneous touchdowns and a third later would be awesome ? I really like to see the vids of it!

</comment><comment><USER9> It would seem that Elon's personal business model is an inversion of the "under-promise, over-deliver" dictum. I wonder when it will catch up to him.

<comment><USER4> When what you deliver is still fantastic, people will forgive you for the pie in the sky promises.

<comment><USER9> Sure, it's just hard to take any of his dates seriously when they're consistently wrong. I love the guy, but he tends to stretch himself a bit thin.

<comment><USER10> My theory is that the public date announcements are actually a bit of a perverse incentive to motivate his employees to work longer hours to meet the arbitrary date specified.

<comment><USER11> And himself. Sometimes you'd never start a project if you thought "it'll take me years".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's a bummer, but it was kinda expected. Let's hope we get to see it in Q1 2018!

</comment><comment><USER13> The FCC license (or was it FAA?) expires mid January, so it's probable they'll still try to launch before then.

</comment><comment><USER14> What's the ETA for their methane engine (Raptor)?

<comment><USER15> Raptor won't fly on the Falcon, so it depends on the arrival of the BFR. Elon wants that to be doing Mars missions in the 2022 window, so test flights would have to precede that by some time. Construction of the first BFR is due to start around Q2 next year; when it gets in the air is anybody's guess.

<comment><USER16> There is still a good chance they might do a FH Raptor-powered second stage :)

<comment><USER15> A higher-impulse second stage on the Heavy would make sense in payload terms, but have you seen anything from SpaceX indicating that they actually are thinking about doing this? My understanding of their design philosophy is that they prioritise the operational efficiencies of only having one type of engine and one type of propellant to worry about on the pad.

<comment><USER17> SpaceX's initial money from the Air Force for Raptor involved the possibility of a new Raptor-powered FH upper stage. There's no sign that such a stage is still planned (or was ever seriously considered, really.)

<comment><USER15> Huh, I'd forgotten about that -- thanks.

Yeah, I doubt it was seriously considered. Probably just didn't want to tell the Air Force what they were _really_ planning to use the Raptor for. Can't say I blame them!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tell HN: Watch out for scams exploiting Haiti earthquake - <AUTHOR>

It seems to be common now, so watch out if you plan to donate any money to help..<p>Some links: http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=7987 http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=7978 <comment><USER2> There aren't any scams. Please wire donations to routing number: 388299332 account: 1912818281

<comment><USER3> what's your name and address :)</comment></comment>


Fake fingerprints can imitate real ones in biometric systems - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/15/fake-fingerprints-can-imitate-real-fingerprints-in-biometric-systems-research <comment><USER2> You only get one set of fingerprints. If you use this as a master key, and someone else gets a hold of your fingerprints, you're vulnerable for the rest of your life.

Not very secure.

<comment><USER3> No, that is just not how "secure" works, you need to take into account all the details of the system in question and the threat model. Usually biometrics is not being used alone, there is an actual master password and the biometric authentication is being combined with a physical token as a shortcut/proxy. Someone "getting ahold of your [fingerprints|eyeballs|face|internal chip|whatever]" and the physical "token" (smartphone being the most common) amounts to a targeted physical attack, which is a very difficult class to deal with but also not scalable. Don't count on any naive or technical only method to defeat this: passwords may well be _worse_ because in any non-physically secure setting it's far more trivial to shoulder surf a passcode entry then to grab biometrics and seize the token. Furthermore most people are simply unwilling (with good reason) to deal with an appropriately complex passcode in constant usage on the go, so it's a case of biometrics+complex password taking the place of say a 6 digit PIN.

It seems like every single HN thread on biometrics somebody comes in to proclaim for the nth time that "finger prints aren't passwords!!" or something of that nature, as if "something you know/something you have/something you are" haven't long been known and considered as basic building blocks of authentication with various tradeoffs vs different threat scenarios. Your kind of oversimplification is not helpful given that it can actively harm real world security, which requires amongst other things actually working with how actual humans really are and making the right economic tradeoffs.

<comment><USER4> I would say biometrics is "usually" used in phones where it's used completely on its own to unlock them.

You might still need a PIN to install an OS update, but that won't keep someone from going through all of your photos and emails.

<comment><USER3> > _I would say biometrics is "usually" used in phones where it's used > completely on its own to unlock them._

So you'd say that "there is an actual master password and the biometric authentication is being combined with a physical token as a shortcut/proxy" then? Because that's what it is.

> _but that won't keep someone from going through all of your photos and > emails._

Neither will a PIN in a targeted physical attack. The long, good master password can defend against offline attacks (including most particularly backup data stores off of any specific device), serve as a line of defense against lower level modifications, etc. You keep "someone" from going through device data through physical defense of the device, difficulty of time-to- attack vs methods like remote wipes or physical limits, network reqs, perhaps coercion code/auto sensor limits down the road, and on and on. All within the framework of expected cost/benefit, like all security.

<comment><USER4> _> So you'd say that "there is an actual master password and the biometric authentication is being combined with a physical token as a shortcut/proxy" then? Because that's what it is._

I'd say that the fingerprint is the single factor to unlock your phone and access all of your data. Sp I'm not sure I understand your point about a physical token. That the phone is a physical token that you need in order to unlock the phone?

I guess that's true, but it's a weird way of describing it versus just calling the fingerprint a single factor used to unlock the physical device.

That feels like saying "My house has two factor authentication, one factor is they key and the other is the house." The house isn't a second factor, it's the thing you're getting access to.

<comment><USER3> > _That the phone is a physical token that you need in order to unlock the > phone? I guess that 's true, but it's a weird way of describing it versus > just calling the fingerprint a single factor used to unlock the physical > device._

No, it's an important (and interesting I think) difference. Compare to many of the systems you deal with otherwise: with most of them the specific physical thing you're using to access the data isn't that (or at all) relevant. With your HN account for example, if the password were known then it doesn't need to be access from one of your devices. Nothing of yours needs to be physically possessed. You could say storage on one of your computer systems would require more physical access, and that might sort of be true (there are gradients in all these things), but from a pure technical perspective general practice has been, even with full disk encryption, that the password is still the root. For software FDE the password is generally going to go through a key stretching algorithm to turn it into something cryptographically usable and add some resistance to brute force of so-so keys as well as time/memory tradeoff attacks (rainbow tables), but it's a deterministic process. If you know the password, the key can be generated, including if the drive was pulled and put into another system or imaged onto some other piece of hardware entirely. Getting access to the data may present challenges depending on where is (local could be harder then an attached drive which might be harder then a LAN volume, or the reverse). But once that data is acquired, knowledge of the password is sufficient.

But with a good smartphone (and starting to be more in computers via HSMs or built-in like Apple's T-series of chips) it'll instead be that the authentication factors go to a blackbox dedicated security chip, and that then handles keys which are entangled with hard burned-in data specific to that device. You cannot pull the storage or image it then unlock it, knowing the user's password is insufficient. For any data using that phone's hardware security as its root, you _must_ go through that specific, physical chip regardless of any knowledge of biometrics or passwords. It is an integral part of the data security in a way that is not yet typical for traditional systems (let alone online). As far as I know all of those systems still have a password as one way to authenticate to them, with biometrics being another, and in principle they could make use of further automatic sensors too as well as do interesting things like require different authentication factors for different operations, or enable powerful anti-coercion features.

Of course, it also means if that chip ever has any trouble or gets lost better hope to have backups because otherwise you're hosed, no recovery is possible even if the physical storage is completely fine and all the encrypted data is right there.

So "what you're getting access to" is the data and operational capability of the phone, but "how you do so" is going through a "separate physical token authenticated by another a 2nd/3rd factor" (the hardware security chip), no different then if you had a USB HSM you plugged into your PC and made it a blackbox requirement for data decryption or certain operations like signing. Just because the connection between the separate token and what you're accessing happens to be direct solder and traces on a motherboard vs USB or PCIe or whatever doesn't mean it's not a separate factor here. And as it's the physical token intermediating even total compromise of the system to be accessed doesn't by itself mean biometrics or passwords leak either.

<comment><USER4> I would describe the difference in a much more simple way:

For the security of my Gmail account you need 1) password, 2) TOTP code, 3) an internet connection to Google

For the security of a physical place like my house, you need 1) key, and 2) physically be at my house. The being at my house part is more analogous to having an internet connection than another authentication factor.

The phone as a material object follows a threat model like my house. If someone has a copy of my fingerprint and is physically at my phone that's like having a copy of my house key and being at my house.

It's true that someone in China can't remotely break into my phone with the fingerprint, just like someone in China can't take a copy of my house key and steal my television.

So yes, there's security value in needing physical proximity, but I think it's a stretch to describe it a second authentication factor.

How the secure enclave and encryption works is immaterial to the fact that if I leave my phone sitting on my desk, you only need one thing to get to my data, and it's a fingerprint that for all I know someone pulled off of a Starbucks cup 10 years ago after I tossed it into a rest stop trash can, and my only option to avoid that is "disable the fingerprint scanner" because it's a single authentication factor that I physically cannot change, unlike a leaked password.

Anyway, I think we agree on how it works, we're just arguing over the semantics of how to describe it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I used to have stacks of these yellow sticky notes with my password printed on it. I ensured, that whereever I went, I would stick one of them to anything I touched, so I'd have it ready just in case.

Thanks to fingerprint biometrics I can do this now just as well without even having to buy sticky notes.

</comment><comment><USER6> This seems pretty obvious. Anything static is forageable and hence vulnerable. Bio can add complications (is this fingerprint warm and pulsing?) but ultimately all will be overcome.

</comment><comment><USER7> What I don't like about the abstract is that it does not say what this is good for.

This thing is designed to fool ANN and adaptive systems as used in certain kinds of biometrics e.g. pictures.

<comment><USER8> The usual approach to spoofing fingerprints is by somehow acquiring a latent fingerprint from a "genuine" user, creating a mold from this latent fingerprint through e.g. [1], and then applying the mold to the fingerprint sensor.

What these authors previously showed is that you can create a "masterprint" on a representation (feature vector) level that "averages" a lot of fingerprints together, creating something that is usually quite close to any individual's fingerprint, and thus is able to fool recognition software quite often.

In practice, this would require an attacker to by-pass the sensor and feature extractor parts of a biometric system, and inject their masterprint feature vectors directly into the biometric comparator (one that compares the current sample, to a template derived from previously enrolled samples). Considering these systems are usually tightly integrated, this is quite a hard attack to do.

What the authors now present is a way to generate "DeepMasterprints". These are actual images that can be used to create molds such as [1], and can be applied to any fingerprint sensor that doesn't have a sufficient Presentation Attack Detection(PAD) mechanism (Hint: supposedly most PADs on smart phones are easy to by-pass, same thing for older fingerprint sensors). For these spoofs attacks, the difficult part was actually getting a high quality print off the genuine user.. but now it turns out this isn't really necessary and you can use a "deepmasterprint" to get a high enough chance of being mistaken for _any_ genuine user.

[1] [http://www2.washjeff.edu/users/ahollandminkley/Biometric/ind...](http://www2.washjeff.edu/users/ahollandminkley/Biometric/index.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hum, about fingerprints as keys to store valuable and personal things. What happens if tomorrow I would suffer a car accident and 'lost' my key? or have a new scar hiding a part of my key? Would be locked out forever?

Or how to explain a machine that will keep asking for my 'real key', the concept of a wasp's sting for example?</comment>


A high-tech mecca rises to rival Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/13/a-high-tech-mecca-rises-to-rival-silicon-valley.html <comment><AUTHOR> Mentions Utah-based YC company SimpleCitizen near the end of the article.</comment>


Ask HN: Marketing SaaS to Universities? - <AUTHOR> I am looking into a possible idea I have for a SaaS business, but I don't have any experience marketing it.  I know from plenty of reading here that I should focus hard on the marketing side of things more than the tech at first.  Research and market fit is my primary focus right now.<p>That said, I was thinking about the idea, and it seems like universities would be my target market for the app.  I was wondering if anyone here has any experience dealing with or marketing to universities for software?  Any insights to share, or methods for going about pitching to them would be greatly appreciated! <comment><USER2> First of all: use your personal bondings you have to your home university. If you don't have any, look for people you know who can introduce you to university staff they know in person. Many people have/had jobs in university departments and know quite a bit about the people working there and can give you both insights and warm leads about the people they have worked with!</comment>


Italian aerospace group Leonardo invests in solar-powered drones - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-leonardo-drones/italian-aerospace-group-leonardo-invests-in-solar-powered-drones-idUSKBN1XL295 <comment><USER2> there's almost nothing in this article, so here's some related links for anyone interested in the topic:

This guy has been iterating on building a solar drone for several years now, here's his latest: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwbJJoe09DI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwbJJoe09DI)

Here's a presentation on how multi-junction thin film gallium arsenide wafers can achieve a much much higher power-to-weight ratio: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7zkGstEf-g&t=1456s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7zkGstEf-g&t=1456s)

Here's a solar-electric two-seater motor-glider flying last month (ok not a drone): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37-QWbjrho0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37-QWbjrho0)

the parts (flight controllers, composites, solar cells, batteries, motors) are mostly all in place now. its a game of integration engineering going forward (kinda like where tesla was when they started the roadster).

<comment><USER3> Tesla had Lotus make their chassis for the roadster (minimally modified Elise iirc).

I assume there's a suitable airframe manufacturer out there?

<comment><USER2> If I had the money I'd slap those solar cells (maybe $20k for 4kW) on this electric motor glider (~$150K): [https://www.pipistrel-usa.com/taurus- electro/](https://www.pipistrel-usa.com/taurus-electro/)

also just nifty option, ardupilot supports autonomous thermaling now: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwAX3cPvMqw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwAX3cPvMqw)

you could creating an autonomous piloting service that used a combination of thermal-hunting and solar-pv to dramatically cut the energy budget required of the batteries.

edit: re-thinking your question, I think the real answer is "the entire kit market". In america the regulations allow for people to build their own planes under a certain weight, so companies get around that by selling "kits" that the buyer has to finish assembling themself. so most of the <$100k air "plane" market is already a lotus-like frame you can do stuff with.

edit2: for instance, check out this absolute masterpiece of a website where you can buy an ANT-E kit: [http://www.newmexicotrikes.com/ant/ant.html](http://www.newmexicotrikes.com/ant/ant.html)

edit3: or this thing [https://www.ruppert- composite.ch/en/](https://www.ruppert-composite.ch/en/)

<comment><USER3> the long continuous overhead wing of the Ruppert plane seems perfect for solar panels

the "foot launch" is hilarious

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The news on the company homesite :

[https://skydweller.aero/news/](https://skydweller.aero/news/)

provide some insights, they just acquired the SI-2 (and _related assets and exclusive IP license_ ) from Solar Impulse:

[https://aroundtheworld.solarimpulse.com/adventure](https://aroundtheworld.solarimpulse.com/adventure)

[https://bdnewsnet.com/defence/uav/leonardo-invests-in- skydwe...](https://bdnewsnet.com/defence/uav/leonardo-invests-in-skydweller- aero-to-build-solar-powered-drones-unlimited-flight-hours/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Skydweller Aero Inc, the company acquired, has a video on their website containing almost entirely stock footage with an awkwardly worded voiceover and a little footage of the Solar Impulse aircraft: [https://skydweller.aero/](https://skydweller.aero/)

Sounds like some folk from the Solar Impulse group are involved somehow.

</comment><comment><USER6> More info on the solar impulse plane:

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

</comment><comment><USER7> Posted just two days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21516427](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21516427)</comment>


Jeff Bezos is letting his charities do something radical – whatever they want - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/8/12/20758787/jeff-bezos-day-one-fund-philanthropy-charity-homelessness <comment><USER2> I'd worry less about fatcat executives than about success. Fighting homelessness is hard, and the problems are rarely about what most people think they are.

Perhaps the most important thing Bezos could bring (aside, of course, from money) is a sense for finding people who know things. That's the true talent of a great CEO, being able to assess sincerity, intelligence, creativity, and the ability to manage people. Writing hundreds of pages of grant proposals is probably less effective than being able to tell a good story, which contains the crucial hints about how you assess what's important, how well you communicate, and how you think about the people you'll need.

There's a good chance many -- perhaps most -- of these will fail anyway. Homelessness will remain hard. But it could well end up being very cost- effective to let creative and industrious people try things, even if some fail. That's very Silicon Valley, at least in myth. I have no idea how much of that myth is real and how much was just lucky executives in the right place at the right time.

</comment><comment><USER3> What a lazy bugger (;</comment>


Why We Prefer Founding CEOs - <AUTHOR> http://www.bhorowitz.com/why_we_prefer_founding_ceos/ <comment><USER2> My question are you looking for Steve jobs the CEO legend or steve jobs the 19 year old kid that was selling crazy?</comment>


Gaia-X is Germany's attempt to break the hold of US cloud providers - <AUTHOR> https://fortune.com/2019/10/30/europe-cloud-independence-gaia-x-germany-france/ <comment><USER2> Unfortunately/tragically, before Peter Altmaier (German minister of economics, and a major proponent for Gaia-X) could explain technical details, he fell of the stage and broke his nose. He's ok now, but I still don't know the technical details of Gaia-X. A cursory search brings up only press info about "industry 4.0" and similar nonsense. Given that Gaia-X is positioned to be a cloud service for the public sector in DE (at least) and based on standards, has anyone technical details about Gaia-X to share?</comment>


CrowdAI (YC S16) Builds Smarter Image Recognition - <AUTHOR> http://themacro.com/articles/2016/08/crowdai/ <comment><USER2> Hey Hacker News, this is Pablo Garcia, co-founder of CrowdAI with Nic Borensztein and Devaki Raj. We'll be around to answer your questions!</comment>


Frustrated Computer Programmer Learning Marketing Finds a Unfair Advantage - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jtwebman/frustrated-computer-programmer-learning-digital-marketing-finds-a-unfair-advantage-11d27688bc63#.w2utq95xa <comment><USER2> I thought you were going to talk about a program you wrote that automated some tedious marketing process. This is a pretty tech, marketing, business savvy group, you probably need to offer something more advanced than the concept of affiliate marketing.

Also, here's my problem with affiliate marketing in general. There's no long term customer cash flow. I send amazon someone I get 4% of say $30 and they get a new customer for life. So, unless you have a big audience your screwed.

I used to do ads on google and send them to lead based affiliate programs. made a few bucks. no cash changes hands and I still make money. But that's a pretty competitive business. Then zillow came along and offered the info for free.

To me this is the best article I've seen in a while on "growth hacking" aka "digital marketing" [https://hackernoon.com/this-is-the-growth-hack-that-got- my-w...](https://hackernoon.com/this-is-the-growth-hack-that-got-my-whole- company-started-f5572fa6d36f#.p7rpajqp5)

If your going to sell for someone find someone to sell for that only you are marketing for and they have something unique for you to sell.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good read, thanks, it is about conversations on social media, Gary Vaynerchuk comes to mind. Also, the way to make money with affiliate marking is to sell high ticket items because you are correct the smaller percent items only work with lots of traffic.

<comment><USER2> become a mortgage broker you can get 2%-3% of the loan amount per sale.

<comment><AUTHOR> Way too hard to scale or leverage. No thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is a sales pitch. There's nothing of value in this article, it's written terribly.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow thanks, I was selling people only that they should expand outside of programming. Thanks.</comment></comment>


Official Google Blog: A fresh take on the browser - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/fresh-take-on-browser.html

<comment><USER2> This is something I hadn't noticed in the earlier postings about this browser:

 _"By keeping each tab in an isolated "sandbox", we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites."_

While the other features of the browser are hard to judge without active usage, this one is huge. Firefox, for all its virtues, is still too much like early 90's operating systems -- not enough separation between processes (tabs).

In fact, since the browser is now the de-facto OS for a large variety of applications, it makes sense for browser writers to consciously design it as such. This means not repeating mistakes made in the OS world (mistakes such as not running processes in their own protected memory space, or using cooperative multitasking instead of preemptive, etc.)

Also, while firebug plays its role as gdb-for-the-web admirably, we're still in need of some os-monitoring tools: top, free, and some tools to more closely look at memory usage.

With the increasing number of high-quality browsers, I'm hoping at least some of them will make this realization and push in the right direction.

<comment><USER3> A commenter elsewhere said that IE8 does this, and that it's worked wonders. Can anybody confirm that?

<comment><USER4> Yes.

ars technica reviewed IE8: "Running a tab in its own process allows that tab to crash (for any reason) without disrupting any other tab."

[http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080731-ie8-beta-2-get...](http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080731-ie8-beta-2-getting- heavy-performance-crash-recovery-tweaks.html)

<comment><USER3> Good. I'm glad to see Microsoft actually trying new things. I dislike their design team as-is, but I at least like remembering that they're talented, if disagreeable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Really really fast Javascript is game changing.

Think about it. People always make fun of how our computers are thousands and millions of times faster than computers of yore and seem to do basically the same thing... except that my word processor has live spell checking, and so on and so forth. Speed is technology enabling. Being able to add features to your site that won't make it pathetically slow when it would have been previously is huge.

Screw buzzwords, infrastructure is king. You are only as good as what lies beneath you.

</comment><comment><USER6> Interesting possibilities for Google here to have a new type of googlebot driven by the user. All browser activities (voting, commenting, contextual browsing, content generation, etc.) can be wrapped up into a single place driven by a human being and then beamed over to Google for efficient indexing far and away more accurate than what any other bot could offer in years to come.

What we need next is a "Google Personal Gateway" so that all of our connections to the internet can be monitored. Google could offer it out as a free virus/spam protection package but then have an even greater view of how people interact with the internet thus giving the consumer an enhanced internet experience.

[please refrain from informing me about how Incognito will protect user information - so called "private browsing" is not a full/rich internet experience]

</comment><comment><USER7> This is a smart move, and it's a step in the correct direction. The browser is an application platform but browsers have not truely caught up with this in the way the information is presented. The google browser screenshots seems to be the one that goes the furthest.

</comment><comment><USER8> if google books version is not opening for you

[http://gondwanaland.com.nyud.net/mlog/files/google-chrome- co...](http://gondwanaland.com.nyud.net/mlog/files/google-chrome-comic.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER9> Considering today's gas prices, shouldn't they have called the new JS engine "Turbo V6" instead of "V8"?

Lame joke I know ;)

</comment><comment><USER10> great now you'll have to test sites in Google also

<comment><USER5> except that its webkit and not OMG NEW BROWSER RENDERER!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> _"... We're releasing this beta for Windows to start the broader discussion and hear from you as quickly as possible. We're hard at work building versions for Mac and Linux too, and will continue to make it even faster and more robust. ..."_

Yeah great strategic move. If you start developing exclusively in the G-sandpit will this restrict any sale of an application/startup?

<comment><USER5> Just as much as developing solely for IE.

Good lord did you even think about what you just wrote? Its a browser, not a torture device!

<comment><USER11> _"... Good lord did you even think about what you just wrote? Its a browser, not a torture device! ..."_

Keep your emotions in check, ad hominem.

<comment><USER12> ad hominem -- name-calling to discredit the speaker's argument.

I could care less about your thread, but ad hominem wasn't in there. At least from where I could see. He didn't personally attack you, he was surprised at your remarks.

<comment><USER11> _"... Good lord did you even think about what you just wrote? Its a browser, not a torture device! ..."_

Can you explain the how this language adds to the discussion without resorting to ridicule?

 _"... I could care less about your thread ..."_

Chrome has the potential to be just as closed as MS (bad), Apple because the real power is in who controls the commits. Do you have anything worthwhile to add about how Chrome could become another closed system?

<comment><USER13> I vote that it's implied name calling... "did you even think about what you just wrote" is basically calling someone stupid. Not literally, of course, but semantically it is. But I thought it was funny, no rude.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Love MMO - Eskil Steenberg's Development Tools Demo - <AUTHOR> http://www.quelsolaar.com/love/tool_video.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Eskil uses verse (<http://verse.blender.org/>) and has open sourced the tools he created which can be found here: <http://www.quelsolaar.com/verse/index.html></comment>


Automakers Aim to Drive Away Car Computer Hackers - <AUTHOR> http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/computer-hackers-dissect-cars-automakers-react-27132494

<comment><USER2> Welcome to the future.

I think this quote nails it: yesterday, you stepped into a car; today, you climb into a computer.</comment>


Ask HN: Hetzner vs OVH dedicated - <AUTHOR>

Currently a Hetzner customer and has been very satisfied so far. Saw good deals on OVH, now wonder whether I should switch. <comment><USER2> Heads up on OVH I have a support ticket open since last Sunday on a dedicated server that the os wasnt installed properly, no response and now they refuse to refund my first month or respond to any of my calls/emails. A lot of reviews said their hardware and network is very good but their support is rubbish. I know my way around a server so didn't think I'd need the support! Shame they don't.

</comment><comment><USER3> OVH does not have a signup fee. It's more attractive than Hetzner if you just need to run an experiment for 1 month. They have servers in North America, so if you're targeting US, their latencies might be better.</comment>


Chinese Girl Died in Plane Crash – What Has She Done to Deserve Online Malice - <AUTHOR> https://pandaily.com/chinese-girl-died-in-the-ethiopian-plane-crash-what-has-she-done-to-deserve-online-malice/ <comment><USER2> Rule one for a happy life and peaceful afterlife: stay off of Weibo, WeChat, Reddit, the Chans, and other social media. Where there is injury, trolls rush in with salt.

Have a little hardness of heart, for a bit of "fuck you too" helps mitigate the pain of being disrespected by strangers searching for someone to kick.

A lot of the hate seems to be based on class and gender. Resentment that the young lady was from a family that could afford college (for a female) and international travel.</comment>


The State of NoSQL in 2012 - <AUTHOR> http://practicalcloudcomputing.com/post/16109041412/the-state-of-nosql-in-2012

<comment><USER2> > Cassandra (similar to other Dynamo systems) offers great primary key-based > access operations (e.g. get, put, delete), but doesn't scale well for > secondary-index lookups

Riak does have secondary-index lookups. I wonder how those scale compared to Cassandra's.

<comment><USER3> It's basically the same design (both are good at indexing low-cardinality data, and poor for high-), except that Cassandra allows non-index predicates to also be filtered server-side during an index scan: [http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/whats-new- cassandra-07-seco...](http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/whats-new- cassandra-07-secondary-indexes)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You might find this of interest as well (as seen on G+ Node.js' page): <http://nodeup.com/eleven>

It's a podcast about various databases, both SQL and noSQL, in relation to Node.js.</comment>


Why the long-term future of humanity matters more than anything else - <AUTHOR> https://80000hours.org/articles/why-the-long-run-future-matters-more-than-anything-else-and-what-we-should-do-about-it/ <comment><USER2> In the long term, we're all dead.

Call me selfish, but I personally don't worry about the future of humanity in thousands of years. I'm sure most people don't either.

A kid born in the year 10,000 is a stranger to me. Sure, people can feel concerned about his fate, just as people can feel concerned about a stranger in a foreign country, but most people just don't. We're all selfish bastards.

<comment><USER3> I genuinely feel horrified by that. Like, it legitimately alarms me in the same way I'd be alarmed to find out everyone else in a room with me is a psychopath. I'm not very personally frightened to think that most people would be fine with me being hurt- it's not an imminent threat.

I still feel a deep discomfort from the idea that people could just be okay with people suffering. Obviously this is more acute with people in other countries than people who do not yet exist, and I have some allowance for laziness. But... people are genuinely fine with the idea that people starve to death? That's horrifying.

<comment><USER4> On the contrary. I can't imagine experiencing the emotions of all the people in 10000AD; at our current population growth rate, 10000AD will witness an _unfathomable_ number of human beings! Being concerned about all those people is far too much emotional stress for any one mind.

(Of course, experiencing others' emotions can in general be debilitating. Obviously, then, experiencing trillions of others' emotions would be trillionsfold worse.)

<comment><USER3> I mean for people you havent and never will meet; I can somewhat understand for people that dont actually exist yet.

I'm not thinking of personally being aware of them and i can even rationalize not finding strangers to be tangible. I understand the bystander effect and all that. There are any number of ways I can accept not _doing_ anything, but the idea that someone could legitimately just not care is deeply unsettling.

Like, for the bystander effect to apply a person has to care and then think "someone should do something". Its the idea that someone can instead just not care even superficially that is disturbing.

<comment><USER5> > Like, for the bystander effect to apply a person has to care and then think > "someone should do something". Its the idea that someone can instead just > not care even superficially that is disturbing.

To me, the idea that someone think "someone should do something" about that "something" is disturbing.

But this is HN, the place where those that make $100k/year a more wax poetically about the plight of poor people in third world countries while munching on the cheese and drinking the wine thinking that it is the waxing that counts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Baffled by Ord's defence of discount rates. The transcript reads like a primer on the pure theory of discounting.

In practice it's a cargo cult ritual that leads to the conclusion that we should give within epsilon of zero fucks about anything that happens N years from now for sufficiently large N (which you get to choose as the author of an analysis).

That's partly because there's no mathematical difference in exponential discounting for the role played by 'pure rate of time preference' and the 'good' discount rate. It's always just 3.5% for no particular reason other than that's what in the back of the Treasury handbook written before 2008 during the Great Moderation.

Oh, and is 3.5% a reasonable number? Sounds kinda like inflation/mortgage rates, right? But if you look at CPI $100 dollars in 1817 is, equivalent to roughly $2k dollars in 2017. But would I rather spend this 'same' amount of money in 1817 or 2017? It's a no-brainer as long as I prefer penicillin and smart phones to legal opiods and vintage mustache waxing. This is _really_ hard stuff to model, which is a clue that _it doesn 't get done_.

If Ord and Wiblin could pick one easy fight to change about government policy making and promote longtermism it would be savaging the use of discounting in long term policy decisions rather than beating around the bush.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're pretty negative about discount rates in the scheme of things. We have a paper on this which outlines why we think discount rates are worth using in some kinds of situations: [https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/sites/givingwhatwecan.org/fi...](https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/sites/givingwhatwecan.org/files/attachments/discounting- health2.pdf)

<comment><USER6> Apologies if I missed the nuance but in the paper's conclusions:

> Instead we will try to:

> 1\. discount money in the normal way to take account of inflation and > opportunity costs.

This is one of the problems with discounting though. Inflation is measured very badly over time due to technological change. If you go back to a policy maker in 1817 would have no idea that 2017 dollars could treat schistosomiasis, or any number of other medical conditions, so they would undervalue a 2017 dollar. I think it's fair to assume this process will continue to some extent over the next few hundred years.

This suggests that money is the wrong way to weigh up long term decisions. While problematic in their own way, something like QALYs and functions of QALYs could serve much better as a unit of account because their meaning is not relative with time. But you'd have to model how many you get in the future explicitly.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a very subtle issue I can't go fully into here. I agree with a lot of your concerns. Personally I would usually go for cost-welfare analysis rather than cost-benefit analysis, which resolves many of the problems you're concerned about.

<comment><USER6> Sure, I was just hoping to move you a little towards the position that lazy exponential discounting is generally not compatible with longtermism.

In terms of behaviour change, giving a mixed message is just going to excuse people falling back into the default method. This is what thoughtless acceptance of the default means:

[http://www.heritage.org/environment/report/discounting- clima...](http://www.heritage.org/environment/report/discounting-climate- costs) [http://www.heritage.org/government- regulation/report/questio...](http://www.heritage.org/government- regulation/report/questions-epas-cost-estimates-waxman-markey-climate-change- legislation)

So I think there's a real cost and risk associated with not taking a clear position on this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is my philosophy on the future. Feel free to adopt or reject it as you see fit.

Trying to reason about the future on cosmic scales is beyond our current and any foreseeable capabilities so let's discount that right away; we don't quite know if the universe will end in heat death (though we have some hints). We don't know if it is possible to create or move to other universes or even whether such a concept makes sense. As long as such things haven't been ruled out we can assume they're true: if life survives to the end of this universe it will have accumulated enough knowledge and technology to create or move to a new one.

Back in the present every species on earth is doomed. Whether an asteroid strike or the sun turning into a red giant eventually this planet will become uninhabitable.

It is not known whether intelligent life is a common result of evolution or we're a fluke. We do know it takes a very long time if it happens at all. It is possible we are the only highly intelligent species that will ever appear on this planet.

The primary responsibility of humanity then is to balance resource consumption with the creation of an interplanetary society first, then eventually an interstellar one. We must protect the earth's resources and preserve as many species as we can reasonably preserve... but we must also preserve modern technology and pursue the establishment of permanent self-sufficient colonies on other worlds in the solar system. Once we do so we must take and spread as many species from earth as we can. In the medium term (next million years) this isn't so important but once we can achieve some form of interstellar movement spreading life to other systems is key to ensuring it isn't wiped out (or reset back to single-cell organisms).

We are the only natural process capable of preserving life and so far as we are aware ours may be the only instance of life (or intelligent life) in the universe. What future iterations of life will make of such an opportunity we can only guess, but if we don't do it in all likelihood no one else ever will.

If no intelligent life survives then our existence is pointless and will be erased when the sun's red-giant phase scours every last trace that any living thing has ever existed from the face of the earth.

</comment><comment><USER8> In part I think this is why Musk is such a bigger than life figure. His whole spiel about making humanity a multi-planet specie makes for good PR but as far as I can tell it also genuinely matter to him & provides drive.

<comment><USER9> Once the first colony dies on Mars I think we'll forget about that distraction for a while. Near term future of humanity is on this planet and there won't be any long term future if we fuck things up here

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It matters... but not more than anything else. What matters even more is that we retain our humanity.

Notice that this idea is only one step removed from "the long-term future of the _race_ matters more than anything else". Think about what horrors have been done in the service of _that_ idea. Let us be very careful, then, that we commit no horrors in the service of _this_ idea. ("Nothing matters more than X" easily becomes "therefore it's OK - even good - to trample on people in the service of X".)

</comment><comment><USER11> Man this is a sad thread.

Humanity is the most incredible thing in what we know of the universe. Stars and gas clouds sure are beautiful too, but unless you are very religious, the those are simple an artifact of statistics, there was no intention there.

Without the humans, the universe is empty.

<comment><USER12> > _Without the humans, the universe is empty._

Max Tegmark adds a twist to that statement: without consciousness (subjective experience), the universe is pointless.

<comment><USER13> Would you mind expanding?

<comment><USER14> Not familiar with the source from the parent, but the "point" to anything depends on a form of consciousness assigning that definition. There is no point to a water logged ball of rock, orbiting a giant ball of hot gas unless there is someone on that rock to say "the point of this rock is so I may exist.". Ignoring some cosmic creators with some purpose for us to exist (which would just be another form of consciousness), the whole point is decided by us. So without us, there would be no point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Why the long-term future of humans matters more than anything else"

Because humans care about humans more than anything else _and that 's fully sufficient_. Let's not kid ourselves, _we_ care about us, most everybody else is kinda meh. Symbiotic species like us too, I guess.

</comment><comment><USER16> Because otherwise everything up to this point would've been pointless do we really need an article explaining why the survival of our species is important?

<comment><USER17> There is still the real possibility that life is actually pointless. And there is no real justification why humans should rule this instead of any other species. Except made up ones, of course.

<comment><USER18> There is a scientific theory out that has yet to be proven, but addresses the actual purpose of life. [https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics- theory-o...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-of- the-origin-of-life-20140122/) TL;DR (with my philosophical interpretations included) - his claim is that life occurs as a natural process to help dissipate concentrations of energy. This occurs because the universe is on a never-ending march toward higher entropy and life is a tool to help it achieve that goal - the goal being maximum entropy and the effective end of the universe as we know it, a situation where all matter is in its most stable state and no energy can be obtained from anything anymore. So we are here to help the universe and all life die.

<comment><USER19> life cannot exist without (outside / away from) energy gradients. is the purpose of life to speed up destruction of its environment? even if the answer is yes which i disagree with, it's only an approximative answer: it's immediately followed by "ok but why is it so?"

imo, life has as much purpose as stars have: none. it's the wrong question to ask. life is simply there, just like stars are there. it "materializes" when- and-where there are the right conditions (a narrow spectrum of energy gradients), just like stars do (the spectra are extremely far apart, of course).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > Robert Wiblin: Are there some approaches that you think are just obviously > too broad?

> Toby Ord: Good question. I think just saying, "Okay, what about improving > science?" my guess is that because this begets technology, which begets some > of the risk, it's unlikely that just pushing on that is a plausible thing to > particularly help.

> ... They probably wouldn't even know about asteroid risk, or super volcano > risk, or various other natural risks.

I think talking about these kind of risks is a mistake. They're not the biggest thing on our plate and people will always be able to foresee them as too distant and too small.

<comment>~~

> Robert Wiblin: We've talked a lot about reducing risks to the future. What > about thinking about the opposite of that, which is extremely large upsides? > Are there any practical ways that people might go about not so much > preventing extinction or something horrible, but also trying to create > something that's much more positive than what we have reason to hope for?

> Toby Ord: It's a good question. I'm not sure.

If you want a specific technology, work on electric transportation. Fossil fuel transportation in agriculture allowed us to scale up humanity to 7.5+ billion people, but it created a time-bomb because as soon as its too pricey to move food around, we can no longer create it as scale, and there's no _going back_ to agrarian pastoral society without killing almost all the humans. Over the long term, we have a moral imperative to advance ourselves beyond fossil fuels for transportation. This is what I believe to be the most moral technology we could work on.[1]

"Humanity has a bug. We think of the future too little, and too often we think technology propels itself, that the future will simply unfold automatically. Or worse, many seem to have suffered a loss of faith in any real vision of the future. I wish this was not so."

[1] [https://email@example.com/the-moral- technology-6413ca...](https://email@example.com/the-moral- technology-6413ca8449c9)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.

</comment><comment><USER22> What is paramount is to support the force which brought humanity here, not humanity itself. We are an instantiation of a process, not the process. To best support that force we as a planet of people need to realize we are not the end-all-be-all and our species time will come and go. When our successor supersedes humanity we should celebrate that beautiful expression of a yet more well adapted carrier of the torch ... do not fight progress on this more supra anthropocentric perspective, embrace it, celebrate it

</comment><comment><USER23> It should be "Why the long-term future of the global ecosystem matters more than anything else". Not humanity. Humans cause nothing but destruction and suffering on an unprecedented scale. 80000hours and the EA community are not better than any other anthropocentric interest group. Seriously what's with this obsession about humanity? How shortsighted are people?

</comment><comment><USER24> If there is no standard of value outside this world, then nothing inside this world ultimately matters either.

</comment><comment><USER25> I have troubled finding exemples in history where we made the "right" decisions for the future of humanity when we wanted too. Think religion oppression, communism, etc. Why today will be different?

<comment><USER26> As an experiment, I think communism was absolutely worthwhile. Why not? Societies with private property have all sorts of problems, so let's see what happens when we change that variable.

The problem is when experiments continue despite failure.

<comment><USER27> > Why not?

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

<comment><USER28> If that's your qualification for a "failed experiment," the Atlantic slave trade proved Capitalism a failure before these people were born.

<comment><USER29> In what world are capitalism and slavery coexistent, even hypothetically? They're opposites. Capitalism is freedom.

<comment><USER26> You can have private trade without civil rights and personal freedoms. Was segregation-era America not capitalist?

<comment><USER29> Not if certain people aren't allowed to privately trade.

<comment><USER30> At that point you're just arguing that capitalism has never existed, so perhaps you should use another term for your "true Scotsman" version to reduce confusion when talking to people who use the common definition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> There is no long term future if there is no short and medium term future. It's very hard to create a better tomorrow if something is broken today.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's one of the topics we discuss! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This sounds like the musings of the idle rich, who can spend their days worrying about such things. No thanks.

</comment><comment><USER33> God, it annoys me to see so many people spouting Rick & Morty-tier nihilistic verdicts on life and it being "pointless". Seriously, go outside and read some more books, and synthesize your experiences and observations.

Even without going into rigorous philosophical discussion, if you still confidently claim that all of it is fatally worthless even after having seen as much of what there is to life, I think you seriously lack perception.

It's just shallow pessimism, not a thoughtful outlook on conscious existence.

</comment><comment><USER34> Nobody cares about humanity 600 generations from now. We're only truly concerned about our immediate family. I'd sacrifice my life for my son, but I could give a shit about my great great great great great great great great great great grandson.

I would say 90% of our environmental problems stem from this one fact. I mean we all drive cars and are unwilling to make the necessary sacrifice to stop.

<comment><USER35> > Nobody cares about humanity 600 generations from now. We're only truly > concerned about our immediate family.

Please don't project your own personal thoughts and opinions on to the entire human population. It's possible that some, even _many_ people do not think this way. I would claim to be one, although of course I can offer no evidence other than my word.

> I would say 90% of our environmental problems stem from this one fact. I > mean we all drive cars and are unwilling to make the necessary sacrifice to > stop.

Again, that seems like a projection of yourself on to the whole population. This ones easier to refute though, since it's an objective fact that I don't drive a car (and haven't even bothered learning). Concern for the environment is certainly a large part of the reason.

<comment><USER34> Sometimes humans talk in terms of self evident generalities derived from common sense instead of solely relying on scientifically verified facts. This is actually a very typical scenario when you communicate with other humans.

<comment><USER36> Except your generality is not at all self-evident.

<comment><USER34> I agree, it is not at all self evident to anyone who isn't human or doesn't have normal human communication skills.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> > _a sense of wonder about the universe we find ourselves in_

If we have a sense of wonder about the universe or our planet, then what we should really do is rid it of us, because all we have ever done is ruin it, make it hideous, inflict pain and destruction on it.

I have kids. My behavior is not consistent with my beliefs. In that I'm very human.

<comment><USER38> I don't understand this point of view. My interpretation of it is that there is some idealized, perfect form of earth (and apparently the universe) that doesn't include humans. Everything in it is perfect except for the humans, which ruin and devalue it.

What confounds me about this view is that humans are as much a product of the earth/universe as any other part of it. What is so unique about humanity in the universe that gives us the exclusive agency to tarnish it? Why are the products of humanity somehow excluded from the perfection of the other productions of the universe?

<comment><USER37> Excellent questions. The issue is speciesism. Humanity wasn't a problem for most of its existence. But it has now started to consume every ressource, spread on every tiny bit of land, and exterminate every other form of life.

If, as you say, _humans are as much a product of the earth /universe as any other part of it_, what is the justification for speciesism? What gives us the right to take everything for ourselves, kill and decimate other forms of life?

The rate of the extinction of species that the earth is going through right now is unprecedented _in all of earth 's history_, to say nothing of the torture we inflict on farm animals. And this is not an accident. We are doing it on purpose and we're proud of it; we call it "development", when the right word should be: destruction.

<comment><USER38> Speciesism is a new concept to me. Thank you for introducing me to it. Since you seem to be familiar with the concept and its application to the discussion at hand, perhaps you can clarify a point.

Are humans, among the species on earth at least, uniquely capable of speciesism? Are rats or ants guilty of it too, to the extent that they exercise speciesism until they run up against limitations of their environment? Or is speciesism a moral ideal, similar to murder, meaning rats and ants can't be guilty of it because they can't reason and act with intent?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Make A Better Elevator Pitch - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/how-not-to-embarrass-yourself-doing-the-elevator-pitch-2010-8

<comment><USER2> The tl;dr might be: sound like a human not a total douche.

I don't feel the credential based pitch can be replaced wholesale. Credentials matter and are effective because they communicate a great deal of information (often by assumption) in few words and also provide some social evidence. E.g. "Carl got his MBA at HBS." That instantly provides you with a (mostly positive) picture of Carl.

Aside: The best part of the article is the first comment.

Q: How do you know someone went to Harvard? A: They just told you.</comment>