Algorithms for Planar Graphs and Beyond (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.889/fall11/lectures/ <comment><USER2> A little bit off-topic but I have a real problem:

I sometimes play with my 4 year old son with the Lego Duplo train and I realized that often our tracks have fixed points in the sense that if the train starts at a random track piece and random direction, it eventually arrives at a piece where it cannot

\- traverse the same piece the other way round

\- reach all other pieces from the same piece

The track consists only of standard 2-ended pieces and junctions with 3 ends ABC where AB or AC is an edge but not BC.

In order to come up with a track where the above problems do not arise, I'd like to

\- formalize the track layout and find a suitable logic (which is not that easy given that AB and AC are edges and therefore BA and CA are edges but it does not follow that: BA & AC => BC, i.e., it's not transitive)

\- find track layouts where each piece is reachable in either direction from every other piece/direction combination on the track. (I know that an 8 where the middle point consists of 2 connected junctions is such a track)

Up to now I have been unable to find anything formal and useful other than trivalent graphs [1] (a dead end) and penrose railway mazes [2] where the problem is just solved on images using search algorithms.

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

[2] [https://demonstrations.wolfram.com/PenrosesRailwayMazes/](https://demonstrations.wolfram.com/PenrosesRailwayMazes/)

Can anyone help me?

<comment><USER3> I think you are on the right track with the figure 8 configuration. I think the two loops are what are important for traversing both directions. I would formally define this loop as follows. (Note: that since these edges are directional I am using "->" to denote these edges.)

Definition: Junction Loop

Consider an arbitrary junction K with vertices l,m,n such that l->m and l->n. This junction K will contain a loop if there exists a path that connects m->n or n->m.

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

Defintion: A Dmichulke Track

A Dmichulke Track is a track that any piece of track can be traversed in both directions and there exists a path between any two pieces of track

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

Conjecture:

Any track will be a Dmichulke track if it has a two junctions J_1 (with vertices a,b,c such that a->b, a->c) and J_2 ( with vertices x,y,z where x->y and x->z) that satisfy the following conditions.

1) J_1 and J_2 must be have a path connecting vertex a to vertex x

2) J_1 and J_2 must contain a loop.

3) There must exist a path to either of these junctions from any point of the track.

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

This should satisfy the stated conditions. You should play around with track configurations that satisfy these conditions and see if you can find a counter example.

This is only a conjecture though since I didn't really prove anything. I may take a crack at working on that proof over the weekend and let you know how it goes.

</comment><comment><USER4> This may sound snarky but it's actually something I would really like to know: Are there any serious applications of planar graph theory?

<comment><AUTHOR> From [https://www.cs.sfu.ca/~ggbaker/zju/math/planar.html](https://www.cs.sfu.ca/~ggbaker/zju/math/planar.html)

 _connecting utilities (electricity, water, natural gas) to houses. If we can keep from crossing those lines, it will be safer and easier to install.

Connecting components on a circuit board: the connections on a circuit board cannot cross. If we can connect them without resorting to another layer of traces, it will be cheaper to produce.

Subway system: if subway lines need to cross, we've got some serious engineering to do._

Also:

 _The study of two-dimensional images often results in problems related to planar graphs, as does the solution of many problems on the two-dimensional surface of our earth. Many natural three-dimensional graphs arise in scientific and engineering problems. These often come from well-shaped meshes, which share many properties with planar graphs._</comment></comment>


Dark corners of Unicode - <AUTHOR> http://eev.ee/blog/2015/09/12/dark-corners-of-unicode/ <comment><USER2> I am not sure whether these are dark corners of Unicode or just complex language support. When dealing with text, you need to learn and educate yourself about text. International text is much more complex than localized text, but if you intend to support that, learn it. Sure, frameworks exist that hide a lot of the complexity, but then you hit a specific bug/corner case where the framework fails you, and since you are not familiar with the intricacies of the language-specific problem, you are clueless how to proceed and fix it, whereas if you invested the time to learn about it, it would have been much easier.

A similar (albeit rather simpler and more limited) problem is calendrical calculus, where people who have little to no grasp of how to perform correct date operations do complex calendar applications and fail spectacularly in some edge cases.

Call me crazy, but if you are dealing with text, have some time set for research before you start your development.

<comment><USER3> As you point out, many of these features are dependent on how well they're handled by the application developer. If Unicode were "just" about rendering pre-made glyphs consistently it would not be nearly so hard, but it aims to do more - sorting, capitalization, string length - and that's also why it tends to fall over in production systems. Nobody is ever going to get Unicode completely right, just a subset of it for the languages they've successfully localized.

The simplest character encoding you could hope to work with is something like a single-line calculator or vending machine display - fixed-width, no line breaks, just the Arabic numerals and maybe a decimal point, some mathematical symbols, or a limited English alphabet to display "INSERT CASH". Any featureset above that produces issues. Just line breaks alone are responsible for all sorts of strange behaviors.

I think it's a bit magical that we've managed to do so much with text given the starting situation. At each step - from early telegram encodings through the proliferation of emoji - the implementations had to codify a thing that was previously left open, develop rules around its use, etc. We've made language more systematic than it ever was in history, for the benefit of machines to parse and process it.

<comment><USER4> Unicode is complex because language is complex. Before we had that complexity in Unicode there were a lot of languages and scripts that couldn't be represented accurately (or at all) in computers. Mixing scripts in one document was nigh impossible. I'm not sure that's a world we want back.

It's funny though, how people are not even aware of the fact that different languages are different until they see something break with Unicode. Casing and collation rules have been language-specific before. It's just that before lots of software didn't even _attempt_ to do it right. Again, a world I'd rather not have back again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For locale-aware correct sorting of unicode strings, based on the Unicode Collation Algorithm, some open source libraries twitter released are pretty awesome.

ruby: [https://github.com/twitter/twitter-cldr- rb](https://github.com/twitter/twitter-cldr-rb)

javascript: [https://github.com/twitter/twitter-cldr- js](https://github.com/twitter/twitter-cldr-js)

Human written language is pretty complicated. The Unicode standards (including the Common Locale Data Repository, the Unicode Collation Algorithm, normalization forms, associated standards and algorithms, etc) -- is a pretty damn amazing approach to dealing with it. It's not perfect, but it's amazing it's as well-designed and complete as it is. It's also not easy to implement solutions based on the unicode standards from scratch, cause it's complicated.

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't agree with the section about JavaScript strings. Those are proper strings, just encoded in UTF-16.

> JavaScript's string type is backed by a sequence of unsigned 16-bit > integers, so it can't hold any codepoint higher than U+FFFF and instead > splits them into surrogate pairs.

You just contradicted yourself. Surrogate pairs is exactly what allows UTF-16 to encode any codepoint.

Once you start talking about in-memory representation, you need to agree on an encoding. UTF-8, UTF-16 being the most common. wchar_t could be UTF-16 or UCS-2.

<comment><USER7> Javascript strings are not UTF-16, you'd only ever see codepoints if that were the case. Javascript "strings" are UCS2, it's trivial to demonstrate: "\ud83c" is a valid Javascript string, it's not valid UTF-16.

Here's the relevant section of the Unicode FAQ on the subject:

> UCS-2 does not describe a data format distinct from UTF-16, because both use > exactly the same 16-bit code unit representations. _However, UCS-2 does not > interpret surrogate code points_ , and thus cannot be used to conformantly > represent supplementary characters.

A correct UTF-16 implementation would interpret surrogate code point, validate that they're paired and prevent access to either surrogate via _string_ operations.

<comment><USER6> ES6 did get some new functions to correctly deal with surrogate pairs in strings. In then end, JS strings are just an sequence of 16 bit values, with the unfortunate case that many string functions interpret those as UCS-2 and only some new functions as UTF-16.

When you come across an invalid sequence while decoding particular input (like "\ud83c") then you generally have three choices: throw an exception, skip the invalid part, or replace it with a replacement character. The default JavaScript behaviors is to be lenient. But if you need more control over the decoding behavior then you can use StringView or TextDecoder which is part of this spec: [https://encoding.spec.whatwg.org/](https://encoding.spec.whatwg.org/)

<comment><USER7> > ES6 did get some new functions to correctly deal with surrogate pairs in > strings. In then end, JS strings are just an sequence of 16 bit values

Which is exactly why they are not and can not be UTF-16.

> The default JavaScript behaviors is to be lenient.

The javascript behaviour is to have UCS2 "strings".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting that Firefox takes the decomposed Hangul and renders it as whole syllables, while Chrome shows them as the sequence of individual jamos. [http://mcc.id.au/temp/hangul.png](http://mcc.id.au/temp/hangul.png)

</comment><comment><USER9> He's rendering normalized text, but normalization is only for string comparisons...

I don't understand why emoji are width 1 either.. really the EastAsianWidth.txt from the Unicode standard needs to match fixed with terminal emulators.

I've been dealing with all of this recently in JOE: [http://sourceforge.net/p/joe- editor/mercurial/ci/default/tre...](http://sourceforge.net/p/joe- editor/mercurial/ci/default/tree/NEWS.md)

In particular JOE now finally renders combining characters correctly. It now stores a string for each character cell which includes the start character and any following combining characters. If any of them change, JOE re-emits the entire sequence.

But which characters are combining characters? I expect \p{Mn} and \p{Me}, but U+1160 - U+11FF needs to be included as well but isn't. It's crazy that these are not counted as combining characters. Now I'm going to have to check how zero-width joiner is handled in terminal emulators. JOE is not changing the start character after a joiner into a combining character, ugh..

<comment><USER5> Well, there are multiple normalization forms in unicode. The OP isn't clear about this. (Perhaps because the python library he's using also isn't as clear as it ought to be? I dunno)

'compatibility' normalizations are mainly for comparison (including indexing/search/retrieval) and sorting, although there might be other uses. But indeed you should not expect a 'compatibility' normalization to render the same as the not-normalized input that produced it under normalization.

The 'canonical' normalization outputs ought to render the same as de- normalized input, but rendering systems don't always get it quite right.

For the web, the WWW consortium recommends a canonical normalization.

The Unicode documentation on normalization forms is actually pretty readable and straightforward, for being a somewhat confusing topic. [http://unicode.org/reports/tr15/](http://unicode.org/reports/tr15/)

> Normalization Forms KC and KD [compatibility normalizations] must not be > blindly applied to arbitrary text. Because they erase many formatting > distinctions, they will prevent round-trip conversion to and from many > legacy character sets, and unless supplanted by formatting markup, they may > remove distinctions that are important to the semantics of the text. It is > best to think of these Normalization Forms as being like uppercase or > lowercase mappings: useful in certain contexts for identifying core > meanings, but also performing modifications to the text that may not always > be appropriate.

The compatibility normalizations are pretty damn useful for indexing/search/retrieval though. Anyone storing non-ascii text in Solr or ElasticSearch (etc) probably wants to be familiar with them -- as a general rule of thumb, you probably want to do a compatibility normalization before indexing and again on query input.

<comment><USER10> OP here. You say this all, _and yet_ , if I google for "unicode strip accents"...

Top-voted answer uses NFD, one below it uses NFKD: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/517923/what-is-the- best-w...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/517923/what-is-the-best-way-to- remove-accents-in-a-python-unicode-string)

NFKD: [http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=835238](http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=835238)

NFD: [http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=1105025](http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=1105025)

NFD: [http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=485681](http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=485681)

NFD: [http://drillio.com/en/software/java/remove-accent- diacritic/](http://drillio.com/en/software/java/remove-accent-diacritic/)

NFKD: [https://gist.github.com/j4mie/557354](https://gist.github.com/j4mie/557354)

Two and a half of the first six results blindly apply NFKD to arbitrary text. _All_ of them use normalization.

Sad state of affairs.

<comment><USER11> "Strip accents" is not a well-defined operation outside of a specific locale. Does "Ö" have an accent or not? In German, yes: it's an O with an umlaut. In English, yes: it's an O with some funny dots on it (heavy metal umlauts?). In the "New Yorker" dialect of English, it's an O with a dieresis. But in Hungarian, Finnish, Turkish, and many others, it's _not_ : it's the letter between O and P, or between O and Ő, or after Z, or...

If you do want to do this, you should know that it only makes sense in your own locale, and you shouldn't be surprised that the methods are somewhat ad- hoc (I'm not saying you _shouldn 't_ do this: I've done it myself).

<comment><USER4> In German, history of the letter and rules even dictate that ö should be written as oe in such cases (that's what it evolved from and that's what the two dots are; e.g. it's not a diaeresis in German, despite looking the same).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _"Also, I strongly recommend you install the Symbola font, which contains basic glyphs for a vast number of characters. They may not be pretty, but they're better than seeing the infamous Unicode lego."_

I disagree with the notion of Symbola not being a pretty font. As I mentioned here¹, the glyphs Symbola has for the Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols block are quite beautiful². (It may help that I'm using the non-hinted version on a HiDPI display though… still that implies it will look even better when printed on paper with an inkjet or laser printer since they still produce more DPI than the typical HiDPI monitor).

――――――

¹ — [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10198620](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10198620)

² — [http://f.cl.ly/items/2h2p0r1F1h2E1y2o2y0c/Screen%20Shot%2020...](http://f.cl.ly/items/2h2p0r1F1h2E1y2o2y0c/Screen%20Shot%202015-09-10%20at%2011.51.55%20AM.png)

</comment><comment><USER13> Its a good article. There is a direct analogy with the article asking if HTML is a semantic markup language or a binary graphics art format, and the groups not overlapping very much other than in failure while mostly not being very interested in each other.

<comment><USER14> That sounds like an article I'd like to read - can anyone provide a link?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > _I strongly recommend you install the Symbola font, which contains basic > glyphs for a vast number of characters. They may not be pretty, but they're > better than seeing the infamous Unicode lego._

Well, I installed the Symbola font as he suggested but I'm still seeing lots of Unicode lego in the article.

I'm using Windows 7 and the latest version of Firefox, and I set the Symbola as the default font in Firefox and unchecked the box that says, "Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of my selections above".

What could I be doing wrong? I would assume that if the author recommends Symbola font, he's checked that Symbola has representations for all the symbols he's using.

<comment><USER12> Symbola certainly does support most of the characters used in that article (not all though). Specifically, it doesn't have glyphs for the CJK characters or the regional indicator symbols used on the page, so you'll need another font for those. (OS X v10.7+ includes the 'Apple Color Emoji' font which has glyphs for the regional indicator symbols, while on Windows 7, 'Segoe UI Symbol' includes glyphs for them (you need to have installed the update¹ for the font first though)).

Anyways, firstly, there's no need to uncheck 'Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of my selections above'. You can go ahead and let the page specify whatever fonts it wants. If you don't have the font(s) specified in the webpage's stylesheet, or the webpage contains a character that the current font doesn't have a glyph for, your OS/browser will substitute it for another font on your system that does have a glyph for that character (if it exists), so you can recheck that option. In fact, you don't have to explicitly even pick Symbola to be used as a font for any type of text in Firefox at all, since your OS should use font substitution automatically if any of those fonts chosen there don't have a glyph for a character on whatever webpage you're on. In fact, to begin with, it's impossible for any one font to contain all of Unicode right now, since even OpenType fonts can only contain a maximum of 65,536 glyphs, while Unicode has more than 120,000 assigned codepoints, so font substitution is absolutely necessary (so you can change the fonts in Firefox back to the defaults if you like).

Secondly, after you install the font, you may have to restart the computer or close Firefox before it actually picks up on the new font.

Thirdly, the version of Symbola that was linked to in the article is an old one. I'd recommend this² one instead (covers more codepoints).

――――――

¹ — [https://support.microsoft.com/en- us/kb/2729094](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2729094)

² — [https://web.archive.org/web/20150625020428/http://users.teil...](https://web.archive.org/web/20150625020428/http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I predict someone will complain, as usual, that Unicode could and should be regular and programmer-friendly and everything.

My response would be this: [http://xkcd.com/1576/](http://xkcd.com/1576/)

Unicode is merely as complex that which it encodes: human language.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is why you should provide a locale for most sting functions in C# for example. I think this article is mostly about bad unicode support in programming languages.</comment>


RedisBloom v2 RC1 - <AUTHOR> RedisBloom - a Redis module that extends Redis with probabilistic data structures such as Bloom and Cuckoo Filters - has been added with TopK and CountMinSketch :)<p>Feedback is welcome: https://github.com/RedisBloom/RedisBloom/releases/tag/v1.99.0 <comment><USER2> Count-Min-Sketch [https://sites.google.com/site/countminsketch/](https://sites.google.com/site/countminsketch/)

TopK [https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc18/presentation/gong](https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc18/presentation/gong)</comment>


Oculus Research to Present Focal Surface Display Discovery at SIGGRAPH - <AUTHOR> https://www.oculus.com/blog/oculus-research-to-present-focal-surface-display-discovery-at-siggraph/ <comment><USER2> VR sickness is primarily caused by latency. ie you move your head, the image takes a few milliseconds to respond and you feel dizzy. But there are other types of VR sickness, like the inability to focus on an object. This research improves your ability to focus on objects at different depths. Your vision is less blurry. So yes, this research does help eliminate nausea in VR. To say otherwise is misleading.

<comment><USER3> Primarily?

I'd say it's primarily caused by a disconnect between what the human vestibular system (your sense of balance and spatial orientation) is telling the brain your body is doing vs the acceleration forces that your body is feeling vs what your eyes are telling you about what the body is doing.

Or in other words - differences in movement/locomotion your eyes are seeing in HMD vs what your other senses are experiencing.

Which probably would include latency as a subset.

<comment><USER4> The term in the medical literature you are looking for is 'Simulator Sickness'. There are 2 main theories on it's occurrence, one of which is the issues with the vestibular system. Wikipedia has a good introduction here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulator_sickness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulator_sickness)

To note, simulator sickness is not that new, we have been grappling with this for ~65 years since the first flight simulators. Despite the massive funding that the DoD has at it's fingertips, we have not found a cure for it OR there has not been a lot of work done to find a cure. However, it seems that more time in the simulator does help, thought it may then hinder actual flight performance. Also, the more experienced pilots had a higher occurrence of it. Again, it's not that well understood.

<comment><USER5> Mayo Clinic has some recent work on hooking electrodes up to your vestibular system: [http://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/mayo-clinic- and...](http://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/mayo-clinic-and-vmocion- introduce-technology-which-creates-the-sensation-of-motion-transforming- virtual-reality/)

<comment><USER4> Wow! Now that is some pretty cool stuff! Besides the VR issues, this has some really good applications to things like vertigo and Meniere's disease (unfortunately one of the 'suicide diseases'). Maybe this really will help people!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9ni%C3%A8re%27s_disease#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9ni%C3%A8re%27s_disease#Prognosis)

<comment><USER5> I'm slightly skeptical at the moment because there was a lot of buzz at the time of the press release, and then it's total silence for more than a year now. I tried to find any sort of hands on commentary to confirm that it actually works and exists, but no luck.

Still, if it were a total scam I wouldn't think the Mayo Clinic would put their name on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There is nice table in the paper which compares the capabilities of the different technologies trying to solve the DOF problem in HDMs.

[http://i.imgur.com/8rdoeS3.png](http://i.imgur.com/8rdoeS3.png)

</comment><comment><USER7> Having a display that can support ocular accommodation (selective focus by the eye) is an important research development, though it will most likely not change the viewer's experience in a radical way.

Practical electronic 3D displays requires bandwidth reduction, both data bandwidth for transmission and optical bandwidth to create practical or lower- cost optical modulators. The goal is to use bandwidth reduction techniques that produce little or no visual artifacts. Some of the techniques used are the same as in 2D (spatial discretization, time multiplexing, compression), while others are unique to 3D (view discretization, limits on view angle, elimination of coherence).

Head-mounted displays are basically descendants of stereoscopes, the first 3D displays developed by Wheatstone in 1838. Wheatstone's amazing discovery was that you can throw a huge amount of information about the world away, provide just two images from two viewpoints, project them out to infinity in front of a viewer's two eyes using two lenses/light paths, and a vivid sense of 3D is evoked. That's an incredible amount of information reduction from real life.

In the traditional stereoscope, accommodation is thrown away, mostly because its really hard to recreate electro-mechanically, but also because we're generally fine with it. Accommodation isn't effective for distant objects (or for even larger depth ranges as we get older we lose our ability to accommodate), so we likely have neural circuitry to discount imperfect accommodation cues. One of the reasons we turn on bright lights when doing detailed work is to stop our eyes down and increase our depth of field, reducing the need for accommodation.

However, there have been perennial debates about the physiological impact of conflicting depth cues involving accommodation, and those debates are more interesting in VR where objects can be (virtually) very close to the viewer and the viewer can dynamically change their physical relationship with virtual objects.

Until you have a light modulator that can let you experiment with selectively modulating accommodation within a scene, you can't provide real data on how important accommodation (even approximate accommodation) is for a particular application. Can't wait to see the studies.

We did some similar focal plane manipulation in holographic video more than a decade ago, for related reasons (see Fig 7):

[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/255603167_Reconfigu...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/255603167_Reconfigurable_image_projection_holograms)

<comment><USER8> I would argue it's an important but not the most important thing for VR/AR given what I've seen from consumer feedback. The most important based on real world talking with consumers is a tossup between FOV and latency.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a much better (IMO)approach by Nvidia: [http://www.fudzilla.com/news/graphics/39762-nvidia-shows- off...](http://www.fudzilla.com/news/graphics/39762-nvidia-shows-off-its- light-field-vr-headset-at-vrla-2016)

<comment><USER10> If I'm understanding things, that only has two focal planes. They mention the approach of just having several focal planes in the video.

<comment><USER11> They time-multiplex the two planes (switching the displays on and off quickly). Amazingly, the brain interprets it as a 3rd, or 4th, or 5th, plane!

This Facebook optic uses the same technique.

<comment><USER10> No that's not accurate. The brain may not be able to distinguish the two focal planes but it's just wrong to say "the brain interprets it as a 3rd, or 4th or 5th plane".

And this Facebook technique clearly doesn't use the same technique. Instead of a focal plane they have a focal surface that isn't restricted to a plane. It might not be noticeably better (who knows) but it's definitely not the same technique.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Would it be possible to detect the focal distance of the eye and change the entire focal depth of the display to keep it always in focus, similar to automated vision testing devices? It could then perform blurring of out of focus objects as a rendering step.

<comment><USER13> That wouldn't account for the fact that the lenses in your eyes are _physically_ trying to focus on a different plane because of other cues in the scene. If you look at a close by object in VR (like say the gun you're holding) your eyes will automatically try to accommodate to render nearby objects sharp. By doing so they will actually make the gun blurrier, because it (like everything else) is rendered on a medium-distance plane, while your eyes are cued in to focus on a nearby object.

Or did I get that completely wrong?

<comment><USER12> That's why you'd need to have the rendering engine blur things that should not be in focus. From what I understand on how the medical systems work, you'd shine an IR light into the user's eye. The return from the light would allow you to measure the focal distance of the eye. You'd then adjust the lenses of the headset so that the display is exactly that focal distance away. The focal distance of the eyes would get passed to the renderer. The renderer would do proper focal distance bluring to objects that are not at the correct focal distance. The main limitations would likely be the measuring of eye focal distance in realtime, having lenses respond to it in real time, and the possibility that the always in focus screen door effect would cause issues.

<comment><USER12> Oh, and accommodation really helps your eyes speed up focusing. Try focusing on things near and far with both eyes, and then only one eye. You can still do it with just one eye, but it goes much faster with 2.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm a bit skeptical of how much of a problem this really is. I have never noticed it in VR. Perhaps because:

1\. Display resolution is still quite low, so really everything is blurry.

2\. You will never be able to notice blurriness where you aren't focused anyway because you aren't looking there! Everything is always blurry in your peripheral vision.

3\. Surely eye focus is a feedback system, like in cameras? I mean nobody has problems focusing on TVs because your eyes just magically change focal length until the image is sharp.

I am stereoblind so maybe it is a big problem for others.

<comment><USER14> Have you tried to focus on something that is under 1 foot from your eyes in VR? From my experience it is virtually impossible, and I think the cause is related to this problem (not 100% sure though).

<comment><USER15> I think for very close objects you need to have a very good match between your interpupillary distance, the interaxial distance of the HMD lenses and the interaxial distance of the virtual cameras.

Also it depends on the HMD screen size, at some point parts of the object's image for each eye falls off screen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why are holograms / light field displays not technically possible now? I would assume think we have bright and dense enough displays, and can shape the microlenses.

<comment><USER17> Because n^4 is nasty.

Full light field displays have to draw every ray, not just every location; that's two additional dimensions. Resolutions scale badly, and if you make any of the four dimensions lower resolution, you'll get ugly artifacts.

Microlenses aren't the limitation. Pixel density is, both in physical manufacturing side and when refresh / drawing.

<comment><USER18> >> Because n^4 is nasty.

I keep thinking there will be a significant reduction in complexity there. The intensity of a pixel in a hologram is essentially an integral over all surfaces visible from that point. So imagine a rather complex formula applied for each surface for each pixel. Then imagine holographic bounding boxes that compress complex geometry into a few holograms of what's inside. This would reduce the n^4 back down, but the resolution required for holograms is still very very high. But we could use fancy GPUs to evaluate the integrals.

Just hand-waving thinking here...

<comment><USER19> You can compress most Earth light fields really well. That might be what you're intuiting. There's a ton of redundancy due to the mostly opaque nature of reality.

But compressing a light field and projecting one into an eye are totally different things. Your display needs to be capable of displaying all 3n^4 possible intensities at different times. Depending on the scene and where you're looking, you can get away with showing only a smaller handful of those (some megapixels) but the display still needs to be _capable_ of displaying them all.

If your display is just fixed LEDs behind a microlens array then you still need n^4 resolution. Like, a megapixel per pixel. Most of the pixels can be off at any given time, but you'll need them all to display arbitrary scenes.

<comment><USER17> It's actually worse than that, for a near-eye display: unless you know where the person is focusing, you actually don't know where the redundancy is, so you have to draw the entire 4D raster. (If you know their focus distance, you can probably just draw a 2D image on the retina and be done -- you get that 4D->2D projection.)

Otherwise, the existence of those additional rays is what allows for focus accommodation: as you focus in different planes, it 'shuffles' the light around, to create sharp edges (where similar light rays line up) or blurry foreground/background (similar light rays strike different portions of the retina -- and if any are missing, there is a 'hole' in the blur disk).

Pedantic, perhaps... but these are the stakes.

<comment><USER19> This is one of the reasons why I'm actually quite bullish on handheld VR/AR. It has none of the optical challenges of a headset. You lose one hand, and give up some immersion, but in exchange you get all of the other benefits of VR/AR without any of the optical challenges and lots more performance headroom.

I think Google is on the right path with Tango-first. Didn't used to think so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Ctrl+F "inner ear" \- no results. To me, that's going to be the keystone to a functional VR experience. Until there's some relatively non-intrusive mechanism to fool the body's systems into playing along, I'm sorry, I don't think image resolution or refresh or FPS will solve the problem. They're all very important, sure, but I think the biology of the conundrum is the most challenging short term.

<comment><USER21> How do astronauts combat nausea in space? Practice. I personally don't expect a technical solution to this any time soon. We just have to acclimatize ourselves.

<comment><USER22> Not everyone is fit to be an astronaut. Not everyone is able to eliminate nausea through reasonable amounts of acclimatization.

The target audience for VR is everyone.

<comment><USER23> I know many people who can't play first-person games because of simulator sickness. That didn't stop the game industry.

<comment><USER24> To add to this, motion sickness from FPS-on-a-screen is inherently unfixable due to the lack-of-locomotion issue. But roomscale VR deals with that issue. VR done right could very well expand the FPS market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think this is overstated (though without looking through the prototype, this is only speculation).

During normal, outside-of-headset vision, we focus naturally and quickly on whatever we're looking at. We don't spend time with our eyes consciously defocused on subject matter in our foveal view. So anything that's out of focus will tend to be in our peripheral view.

So this is a peripheral technology. I think everyone's still looking for the killer additional tech that will make VR perfect -- but it's not about one magic tech bullet, it's about ecosystems slowly growing, and content getting better. (The headsets are better than people think.)

</comment><comment><USER25> "It may even let people who wear corrective lenses comfortably use VR without their glasses."

If just for this, it's a move in the right direction.

<comment><USER26> Yes! Many people cannot use the VR Headsets unless they wear contacts, and even then it feels quite unnatural.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Wont this also need gaze-tracking to be successful? In their video they described a manually moved camera.

Is this technology compatible with foveal rendering?

<comment><USER28> No, I think this technique presents differently-focused areas to the eye all at once (sort of like natural light, just at extremely coarse resolution) and eye tracking is not needed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Sort of strange to describe it as a "discovery" \- I'm sure a team of engineers with a variety of fields of expertise spent 1-3 years solving problems that led up to this. A "discovery" would seem to describe something that existed in the aether prior to their work - it seems to diminish the innovation and effort they put in.

</comment><comment><USER30> Weird that I haven't noticed this yet when using VR. I wonder if I'll notice next time after watching this.

</comment><comment><USER31> i guess whatever the faults of the paper, i like that they do have a product on the market and are demoing and publishing research. magic leap? not so much.

</comment><comment><USER8> Honestly I found the paper critically lacking where they attempted to make reference or comparisons to virtual retinal displays. Saying that a VRD is functionally restricted to _moderate_ FOV in comparison to the 120 degree FOV of the Rift - using only the embodiment of the deform-able membrane mirror as reference is ridiculous on it's face.

Even a rough version of the deformable mirror AR VRD described by researchers at UNC Chapel Hill [1] accomplishes 100 degrees FOV with accommodation.

They went further with the Pinlight achieving 110 in 2014 [2]

The technical limit according to our own work for VRD FOV is H: 200o, V: 140o (Combined). So either they're ignoring work in the field intentionally cause they don't want to do VRD or they don't know about it. My guess would be the former.

[1][http://telepresence.web.unc.edu/research/dynamic-focus- augme...](http://telepresence.web.unc.edu/research/dynamic-focus-augmented- reality-display/)

[2][http://www.cs.unc.edu/%7Emaimone/media/pinlights_siggraph_20...](http://www.cs.unc.edu/%7Emaimone/media/pinlights_siggraph_2014.pdf)

edit: I find this whole thing extremely frustrating. Facebook could throw 2 billion dollars at VRD tech and actually get to a working stable consumer grade system if they wanted to - everything is there for it. Why aren't they?

<comment><USER32> > Why aren't they?

You can say that about any other multi-billion dollar company, let it be Google, Microsoft, Xerox, Cannon, anything.

The short answer is that VR is not their core business.

<comment><USER8> Zuckerburg spent his entire keynote talking about AR - he effectively told everyone that they are a social AR company. They are investing the most into AR/VR and creating glasses etc...

How is that not what they are planning as their core business?

<comment><USER32> Might not be. Might as well be strategy to discourage others from pursuing the same while Facebook works things out eventually.

\- Hey Mike this is VP John Smith, until yesterday we were interested in investing round A of $10 million in your VR startup but unfortunately we heard today that Zuckerberg plans to be deep in it, therefore I regret to inform you we will be unable to go with the round. Sorry and we wish you good luck!

<comment><USER8> I think I have about 20 of those email responses at this point!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Article headline is misleading. Eliminating nausea is not the primary benefit of this research and isn't even mentioned in the article. It may help a little with nausea in some cases but it won't eliminate it.

<comment><USER34> Thanks, we've reverted the submitted title "Oculus Research Presents Focal Surface Display. Will Eliminate Nausea in VR" to that of the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> No one has mentioned magic leap.

</comment><comment><USER36> Nausea in VR is already a solved problem, at least for the case where you have a stationary camera. This is for giving people an extra method of depth perception, but one which isn't strictly necessary.

<comment><USER3> Saying nausea is solved in VR is like a casual observer saying space flight is solved after the first Wright brothers flight.

I say this as a VR enthusiast who is optimistic about the industry.

You can't say it's solved until an HMD can forcefully move your viewport in- HMD without triggering nausea caused by the real body not moving.

<comment><USER37> To be fair, he did say a stationary camera.</comment></comment></comment>


Creator Of Angry Birds' Physics Engine Calls Out Rovio For Not Giving Him Credit - <AUTHOR> http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2011/02/28/creator-of-angry-birds-physics-engine-calls-out-rovio-for-not-giving-him-credit/ <comment><USER2> And here's the same story from a less sensationalist source.

[http://www.joystiq.com/2011/02/28/overheard-gdc-credit- where...](http://www.joystiq.com/2011/02/28/overheard-gdc-credit-where- credits-due/)

 _"What physics engine did you use for Angry Birds?" --Man "Box2d" --Peter Vesterbacka, Rovio "Would you be willing to credit it?" --Man "Yes" --Vesterbacka "I'm the creator of Box2d." --Erin Catto, creator of Box2d

Following this exchange -- which took place during Rovio's panel on its multi- million-dollar franchise -- a smiling, caught-off-guard Vesterbacka said that the company would credit Box2d as the physics engine it uses if Catto would see him after the Q&A session._

AFAICT, this controversy is completely fabricated by the MobileCrunch tabloid.

<comment><USER3> Here's a thread @Box2d where Erin responds to this himself, confirming that this was not a "calling out" or any sort of big deal: [http://box2d.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=6462](http://box2d.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=6462)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you want to be given credit for some open source software, require it in the license. Otherwise you have no grounds to complain.

<comment><USER5> Counterpoint: If your company has developed a powerhouse franchise with a value roughly equivalent to the GDP of Canada, and all of that is built upon a little piece of open-source software, it wouldn't hurt anybody to toss him some credit or sponsorship. He did say he'd appreciate it.

Just because you don't _have_ to doesn't mean you _shouldn't_. I'm not sure I agree with this little display, but saying he has no grounds to have a gripe is a bit simplistic.

<comment><USER6> While they're at it they should probably toss Isaac Newton and von Neumann some credit, too. I mean, who did the _real_ heavy lifting here?

And let me be the first to acknowledge all the authors of the floating-point math libraries that power the physics simulation that powers Angry Birds. Whoever you are: Nobody ever thinks of you, but I know how much work you did. Thanks.

Also, somewhere, probably in China, there is a crew of people who work long hours in a clean room, peering through microscopes, inspecting the tiny wire bonds on the RF multiplexers that will filter all those Angry Birds levels out of the ether and capture them onto our iPhones. Let me thank those people, many of whom are young and work very long hours, because I doubt that many of them will ever come to a tech conference and stand up to demand credit for their work, perhaps because they don't speak English well, and perhaps because they probably can't afford the tickets to the conference, but mostly because they're just too polite.

Meanwhile, what on earth should we expect the Rovio folks to do when some passive-aggressive person stands up _in the middle of a crowd at a conference_ and claims to have written some underlying component of their product? Make the guy pull out his open-source license, put some lawyers on speakerphone, and adjudicate the thing right in the middle of the Q&A? Or are they just supposed to casually give credit to anyone who asks politely, without doing the necessary research first? Are software licenses supposed to be taken seriously or not? Do people not realize that copyright trolls and cranks exist?

<comment><USER5> So what you're saying is, you didn't make it to the part of my comment where I indicated that I wasn't on board with his stunt?

I merely pointed out that dismissing his gripe is a bit premature. How he went about expressing his gripe is an entirely different matter, and embarrassing companies publicly is often not a good first step.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Box2d is amazing, and powers about 90% of physics flash games and now a good portion of iPhone games as well.

It's also a great example of a creator having buyers remorse about the licence used. At somepoint the creator decided to be altruistic and release it in a way that it could be used far and wide in applications across hundreds of platforms. Now people are using it in fabulous projects and very rightly, getting famous and wealthy through those creations.

That said, Angry Birds isn't successfull because of it's physics engine. In fact, there isn't one single element of the game that makes it successful. The Rovio guys studied their audience, listened to feedback, and invested everything in creating a killer app.

Box2d was one bolt in the process, and if the licence had prevented the developers from utilizing it, they would have swapped it out for another model. It wasn't the lynch pin to Angry Birds' success.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, but how hard it is to give one guy credit for the free fish you got; and why did he had to ask for it?

That's why I've been saying it - a gift economy on the Internet does not work, except in very few instances / narrow niches. In the future, we'll get more DRM and more restrictive licenses, not less ; as most people are just leeches.

</comment></comment><comment> mkr-hn Direct link to the license (for the curious): [http://code.google.com/p/box2d/source/browse/trunk/Box2D/Lic...](http://code.google.com/p/box2d/source/browse/trunk/Box2D/License.txt)

</comment><comment><USER9> This is probably coming up because Tiny Wings gave Box2D credit, and Catto's probably like 'Hey! Why didn't Angry Birds do the same!'</comment>


My dad left me $7M and I have no idea what to do with it - <AUTHOR> http://sevenmillionblog.tumblr.com/

<comment><USER2> The answers you get here will be posted in the best of intention by the people here, but i can't help but point this out — Whatever they post will _to some extent_ be affected by their identity (which is unique to everybody). Most will ask you to invest it in startups, some will probably even ask you to save, and whatnot.

The thing about money is, when you don't have it, you think of all sorts of things you could do if you had money. But when you get it, you go blank. So I'd really suggest getting some professional advice from a financial planner (an expense that you can actually afford, given your financial position)

Personally, I'd buy a BMW M4 Convertible, and then think of what to do with the rest. But that's just me.

</comment><comment><USER3> Leave it in the bank, sit on it for a year. Think things through, take advice from different people. You will eventually find a house that you want to buy, or a business you want to invest in, or a holiday you want to take. Don't use it for the sake of using it.

</comment><comment><USER4> You could invest into my start up. I'm not asking for anything extraordinary at the moment but our general plan is to start as a computer repair business to fund our research in home automation the link to the page is

[https://www.tilt.com/campaigns/help-me-open-a-computer- repai...](https://www.tilt.com/campaigns/help-me-open-a-computer-repair-shop)

Right now I have an IT specialist, a Hardware Engineer, a Web engineer, and a Marketing person. If we could make enough to start on our own enough to quit our day jobs we could have a functional business within a month, because we already have clients.

</comment><comment><USER5> If it were me, my family and friends would have the resources to do something meaningful with their time instead of living to work. I would gift money to projects that have the intent to change the world, but don't have a method to make money. That would include funding sustainable off-grid intentional communities. I would also stop doing anything myself that is just to make money and do things of real value.

</comment><comment><USER6> How old are you now? How old will you be when you die? How many weeks are there between now and then? What is $7m / that number?

That's how much you can spend per week. You probably need to lock up an amount in safe savings for old age.

It'd be really easy to burn through $7m in a couple of years and you probably don't want to do that.

</comment><comment><USER7> Obviously fake. If OP really had that money, they could afford a very good financial planner and wouldn't have to resort to asking random people on Hacker News about how to manage their finances.

If I had that much money, I wouldn't invest in any company whose CEO is gullible enough to think that this post is genuine.

</comment><comment><USER8> Well, I have an interesting innovating idea concerning eInk electronic book readers and I just happen to look for investors. I cannot disclosure all details in public, because there are no patents yet. If it's interesting to you, let's get in contact.

</comment><comment><USER9> Well, at this place you're probably going to get this advice quite often: Invest in several startups. Just what YC themselves do.

I'm the CFO of a tech startup myself. We are building "The Instagram for online trade". I'd love to talk to you.

If it were my money I would invest a portion of it in startups (but you must obviously know that the risk of losing these money is present), and I would invest most of it in stocks and keep the rest in the bank. I have some personal recommendations, but if you don't have any idea on the stock market I would consider contacting an investment bank. I think that would be reasonable with your amount of money.

</comment><comment><USER10> Hi, you should become an angel in startups' investments... take a look at [http://angel.co](http://angel.co)

</comment><comment><USER11> General Investing Advice: 1\. You will never beat the market. No one is able to beat the market, even those who's job is investing, rarely ever beat the market. Over 100 years of investing research has proven that it just doesn't happen. (See Warren Buffet for exception?). The best thing you can do when investing is to place your money in a low cost mutual index fund and wait. do NOT get involved with active trading with your retirement funds. Do not do it yourself, do not hire a broker to do it for you, do not, do not, do not!

The rule of 9 is this: Any amount of money you invest in the stock market today will double in 9 years when averaging 9% returns. (The US Stock has historically grown 11.87% per year for the past 100 years).

Specifically I would invest equally in three different funds: S&P 500 - Equally spreads your money in stocks from the 500 largest companies. (The S&P 500)

Total US Market - Equally spreads your money in stocks from all US companies in the stock market.

Target Date fund - A diversified fund that shifts from high volatility (Stocks) to low volatility(Bonds) as your near your retirement age.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----What I think you should do with the $7,000,000</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

1\. Pay off Debts 2\. Set up Emergency Fund 3\. Set up retirement Account 4\. Set up investment account 5\. Any money left over can be used for helping family, donating to your favorite charity, or open-source.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--Detailed Description</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---

1\. Pay off debts. - If you find yourself out of a job or in a sudden life change, the financial peace of no outstanding debts makes it easier when "life happens". In many cases, you could earn a bigger return per dollar by investing (Such as investing in a Index fund vs. paying off student loans), however the flexibility and peace of mind of not having debts is hard to measure.

2\. Set aside 1.5 - 2 years worth of money in a "O shit fund". This should = your living expenses for 1.5 - 2 years. Place this money in a savings account that you cannot easily access. Many banks can set it up so you have to show up in person to access the money in your savings account. This money is in case you (or your wife) lose your job, it will float you until you get a new one.

3\. Call Vanguard to open up a retirement account. [https://investor.vanguard.com/home/](https://investor.vanguard.com/home/) (I do not work for Vangaurd, they are just the best to work with, and have low management fee's from my experience) With a phone call, Vanguard is essentially a free financial planner. Surprisingly enough, All major investment firms will NOT pressure you to open an account with them over the phone, they will answer all questions you have and tell you to have a great day at the end without hassle.

4\. Vanguard will help you determine the amount of money you need to place into your retirement accounts to have a happy retirement without running out of money when you hit 90+. All major investment firms will likely recommend that you place a little extra in as well, do this. Open up 2 accounts with them, a retirement account comprising of a S&P 500 index fund, Total Market Index Fund, Target date fund (These three will represent your retirement portfolio) and then a brokerage account. A brokerage account work exactly like a retirement account, except you contribute money after paying taxes, you pay "Capital gains" taxes when you withdraw cash from the account. Invest $2million into your brokerage account ($1m in a S&P 500 index fund, and $1m in a total us market index fund) and you could theoretically retire tomorrow, living off of the returns from the brokerage account alone.

5\. Some ideas for what you can do with the left over funds.

a. Open a college fund for kids or future kids. (Look into 529 plans)

b. Pay your parents back for raising you, helping you with college, etc by paying off their mortgage or contributing to their retirement fund.

c. donate to charity's

d. donate to open source

e. purchase investment houses in a high demand area, let a property management company handle the houses for you, they will take a slice of the profits off the top in return for finding renters, handling maintenance calls, rent, etc. They will only call you for major repairs such as replacing appliances or the roof. (This can take many years to get a return on your initial investment but after you have earned your money back, it can be very profitable)

f. Open an HSA (High deductible health care plan required), max out your HSA contributions, and set your HSA account up as an investment account just like your retirement accounts. HSA's are accounts that have a "Triple tax advantage" so these accounts have the greatest return for the dollar. (You can only use HSA funds for health care costs, like dental visits, ER visits, prescriptions, or even buying floss or toothpaste) A little known loop hole is that you can max out your HSA every year, and pay for all your health care costs out of pocket, place all your receipts for health care in an envelope and when you retire, you can "reimburse yourself" for ALL the costs from your HSA tax free. This allows your money to gain compound interest over the many years before you "pay" for the health care, earning the most money on your money.

</comment><comment><USER12> buy Ferrari

</comment><comment><USER13> Burn it, burn all of it.

<comment><USER13> Why the vote down? Should I ask for a handout like everyone else instead?

Yay Capitalism, yay products, yay materialism! Because all of these things have done wonders for the world thus far.

BURN IT ALL.</comment></comment>


Using Gravatar Images as Captcha - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/nu7hatch/grapcha

<comment><USER2> Wouldn't this be trivial for a bot to bypass? If you know the email address to be used, just get the gravatar for that email address and compare it to all of the images in the lineup.

Depending on how it's implemented (haven't looked at the code) you might even just be able to compare the URLs used to display the gravatars...</comment>


With Gas Prices Less of a Worry, Buyers Pass Hybrid Cars By - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/15/automobiles/wheels/with-gas-prices-less-of-a-worry-buyers-pass-hybrids-cars-by.html?_r=0

<comment><USER2> Forgetting that prices will start going up again soon, buyers put their hands over their eyes and buy gas guzzlers.

Gonna stick with my Prius and the 40+ mpg I get so that next year when all the articles are sob stories about people with huge SUVs find their resale value is junk because no one wants to fill it with $4 gas, I can have a good belly laugh.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just waiting for Google's self driving cars at this point :)</comment>


GMO Chickens Lay Eggs Containing Drugs to Fight Cancer - <AUTHOR> https://www.mirror.co.uk/science/chickens-genetically-modified-lay-eggs-13916988 <comment><USER2> This raises the future possibility that, depending on what is in them, people might start smoking chicken eggs.

<comment><USER3> smoked chicken eggs are already a thing.</comment></comment>


I watched the movie that astronauts must view before launch - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/04/i-was-bored-so-i-watched-the-movie-that-astronauts-must-view-before-launch/ <comment><USER2> So I have not watched this yet (as I have never heard of it before today) but will do so soon. However based on the description of the movie, it's hard not to view it as a major source of inspiration for the character Tchitcherine from the Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow. Tchitcherine is part of the red army stationed in Central Asia, who saves and befriends an ethnic minority from Kazakhstan. Pynchon's scenes are both reminiscent of westerns and slapstick, through out the book but also in full force during the Tchitcherine sections. Considering GR's major themes are film and rockets (ones that destroy us and well as ones that take us to the stars) it's really hard to imagine that Pynchon himself had not watched this before publishing his novel 3 years after The White Son of the Desert's release.

All that said I have found no mention of anyone putting these two things together.

</comment><comment><USER3> White Sun of the Desert is a very good movie, too! Somewhere in the vicinity of Indiana Jones or the Man With No Name westerns, but with more heart and tenderness.</comment>


Americans who swap/give up their citizenship - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0ae8415c-9e5e-11df-a5a4-00144feab49a.html

<comment><USER2> Subscription only..?</comment>


US on 'KONY 2012': No plans to remove advisers - <AUTHOR> http://worldnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/03/08/10613108-us-on-kony-2012-no-plans-to-remove-advisers

<comment><USER2> Since the Kony video became viral, a lot of celebrities have shows support as well, and what better way to do that by posting it to social media sites such as facebook, twitter, and blog accounts.

See below:

<http://felldowntherabbithole.tumblr.com/post/18984415138> \- Diana Agron (Actress)

[http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/gossip/2012/03/kony-2012-whi...](http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/gossip/2012/03/kony-2012-which-20-celebrities- were-targeted.html) (shows celebrities who are being targeted to support KONY 2012)

<comment><USER3> But is it really that great? Can't they choose any other org that gives more than 31% of their earning to Uganda?</comment></comment>


Wear Your Uniform - <AUTHOR> https://8thlight.com/blog/lihsuan-lung/2016/11/08/wear-your-uniform.html <comment><USER2> I don't like the idea of being mandated to wear a specific uniform. But I do love wearing a uniform of my choice: medium black T-shirt with 569 Levi's jeans. The only time I have to think about what to wear is when I'm going somewhere fancy.

<comment><AUTHOR> > I do love wearing a uniform of my choice

Every uniform is someone's choice. If it's my own, I love it. If it's someone else's then it's a hit or miss -- I will either love it or hate it.

Rigid rules are a bane or a blessing depending on which side of the table you are on.</comment></comment>


Zero Knowledge Authentication Protocol Secure Comparator - <AUTHOR> https://cossacklabs.com/introducing_secure_comparator.html <comment><AUTHOR> ... and a more formal whitepaper for cryptographic people: [https://cossacklabs.com/static/secure-comparator- paper-v1.pd...](https://cossacklabs.com/static/secure-comparator-paper-v1.pdf)</comment>


SynSin: End-to-End View Synthesis from a Single Image - <AUTHOR> https://ai.facebook.com/research/publications/synsin-end-to-end-view-synthesis-from-a-single-image/ <comment><USER2> how is this different from [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.08240.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.08240.pdf)

?</comment>


Why Mozilla Persona is the right answer to the question of Identity - <AUTHOR> http://labs.newsint.co.uk/blog/2012/10/why-mozilla-persona-is-the-right-answer-to-the-question-of-identity/ <comment><USER2> The biggest problem with Mozilla's Persona is the branding of it. Until they are able to get a handle on the branding-related issues, it can't get off the ground:

* Logo is ambiguous and looks like a generic button

* "Mozilla" in the name instantly steers away other browsers

We've implemented it on LinkUp (<https://www.linkup.com/account/>), love the technology, and REALLY hope the adoption of it takes off - but until I can explain it to a user in 2 sentences, it won't claim the throne.

<comment><USER3> > We've implemented it on LinkUp (<https://www.linkup.com/account/>)

What's your experience with that? Implementing OpenID tends to not be very fun (whether as a consumer or as a provider), is Persona better?

<comment><USER2> I did OpenID early on in the site (nobody understood it), RPXNow/JanRain (more than we could afford for fewer features than we needed), and finally our own solution that does OAuth* for the various providers and Persona.

I love Persona. I want a Persona shirt and tattoo. OpenID was just a bit harder, but had nowhere near the payout that using Persona offers. The only burden of Persona is the auto-login/logout handling, which is a good thing in the long-run but in the short-run involves tracking down all your login/logout methods and making sure they all react properly.

*OAuth integration is a nasty mess of nastiness that I can't bring up w/o derailing this entire conversation. If you want to chat about that train-wreck, email me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Have any of the other major browsers made any public statements about BrowserID or Persona? How about Paul Irish or other developer relations type people? Somebody has to have said something even if it was 'unofficial'.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm genuinely curious. I did my bachelor's thesis on the identity ecosystem. I was an early adopter of CardSpace, iNames, OpenID, and any other digital identity solution that came along and I watched them wither from lack of interest. I was continually told that passwords are good enough, and that nobody is interested in a digital identity solution.

Persona doesn't sound that different from solutions that came before it. It sounds really similar to CardSpace, especially with how easily you can integrate it into a site. So why would Persona have a chance at succeeding where so many others have failed? Is it just a matter of timing, coming after some major password leaks, or are they hoping the Mozilla name will buy them support from the developer community?

<comment><USER6> I am not familiar with CardSpaces, but a considerable difference between OpenID and Persona is a matter of anonymity. With OpenID, your OpenID provider (e.g. Google) can track you as you log to your various accounts. By opposition, with Persona, the Persona provider does not get any meaningful information that can be used to blow your anonymity.

<comment><USER5> tl;dr - Here's a video demonstration: <http://youtu.be/0_6rC025sK0?t=34m16s>

CardSpace was a Microsoft project led by Kim Cameron, the godfather of digital identity. They originally wanted to make it part of Windows Vista, but it was dropped for lack of interest. It was an open standard, and there were browser plugins to make it work in other browsers and operating systems. Microsoft knew they couldn't make it a Windows-only thing if they wanted people adopting it. They just wanted to be at the forefront of security for once.

A developer would add meta tags to a site's login page with a URL to post identity info to and a list of information it's requesting. That would trigger the browser (or plugin) to open a modal display of identity "cards", which the user could choose from. Then it would show what information the site requested and they could deny individual pieces of info. The data would be posted back to the site, along with a unique signature for that user & site.

Cards could be self-issued or issued by a third party, like your employer or bank. They could have graphical backgrounds applied so they looked more like ID cards or credit cards. It was a great UI for identity, and easy for developers to use. But I think the Microsoft name tarnished it. I know people outside the identity community were making comments about how this was Microsoft's attempt to become Big Brother & so forth, even though Microsoft was completely out of the communication loop between the user and the site.

<comment><USER7> You lost at "browser plugins". Persona uses a JS shim that requires no plugins or browser changes.

<comment><USER8> CardSpace was 2003ish.. "browser plugins" were the standard option for all kind of things, while JS shims merely provided <blink> on non-MS browsers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Some thoughts from a privacy perspective:

Technically, I think this is vastly superior to the currently available login solutions. But one of the things I never liked about centralised or even federated auth was all the links between accounts.

One thing I don't like: ideally, all a site should need to know is that I'm the same entity I claimed to be last time. I only want to be locally unique on the site, not a globally unique value which can be correlated between sites. Also, it should be my choice as to whether I disclose my email address to sites.

In practice, email addresses are usually required for signups, and it's easy enough to create throwaways. I can absolutely see why it was designed this way, but it would still be nicer if the protocol did not disclose more than it needed to.

In this case, the email address (and equivalently the public key the browser holds for that email address) can be correlated between sites.

I thought a bit about making a mailinator-like IDP (i.e. a convenient way to hack around this). Unfortunately, I can't see a good way right now to get both these properties at the same time:

a) The IDP doesn't know what site (RP) the user is logging in to b) The IDP can auto-generate a persistent unique id for each site (RP) (e.g: <type-4-uuid>@idp...)

I guess the degenerate case would be an IDP which signs <anything@idp...>. Not super useful, but OK for sites where you didn't really want to have a login anyway, I guess... true mailinator style, but for logins.

A few other points:

* Would also be good to have a privacy option to force the browser to generate a fresh keypair every time a new user certificate is requested; at least then we can only be tracked by identity and not so much by device over time as well.

* There is the obvious timing attack, where if the RP doesn't cache the IDP's public key, it may disclose what site the user is logging in to, to the IDP.

* Also, verifier.persona.org will know who is logging in where, if you use their JS (since you pass the assertion and the audience via REST).

* I am not 100% sure at this stage what stops a malicious user from simply asking the browser to perform an identity assertion and grabbing email (or clickjacking the user into doing it) when they already have a user cert; haven't looked at it in depth though.

</comment><comment><USER10> I worry about Persona, for exactly the same reason OpenID chose the design it did: It's a serious mistake to permanently tie email to identity.

It's still possible within the framework of Persona to fix this -- the browser / identity provider needs to support freshly-generated opaque "email addresses" for each new site that needs a login. This prevents tracking and spam problems, but will also require both providers and relying parties to downplay the 'email address' token in the UI, which I fear is far too much to ask.

<comment><USER11> Just use <somethinghere>@mockmyid.com.

It doesn't even ask for a password. I don't think it would be too much work to create a Persona service like 33mail.com, which provides your own domain for email _and_ authentication. That way, you would enter "firstname.lastname@example.com", the site would send you there for auth, 33mail would reply that you are logged in to your account (if you were, obviously), and that'd be all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Persona - An identity system by Mozilla

Personas - Skins for the Firefox Web Browser

This is an issue that needs to be resolved.

<comment><USER2> They've resolved it in planning ([http://www.ghacks.net/2012/03/02/mozilla- personas-renamed-to...](http://www.ghacks.net/2012/03/02/mozilla-personas- renamed-to-background-themes/)), but the implementation just hasn't been completed. Yet.

"To sum it up:

* BrowserID renamed to Mozilla Persona

* Personas renamed to Background Themes

* Themes are now Complete Themes"

<comment><USER13> Background Themes/Complete Themes - sounds like they just created a new problem. Throwing the word 'theme' in there for backgrounds is just asking for confusion.

I think most people understand Wallpapers (Backgrounds) / Themes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't understand why this is better than just using a public/private key to represent identity. Why involve the email operator? Why can't I log in by having my browser sign a certificate, without involving a third party at all?

<comment><USER15> Because my mother doesn't give two shits about public/private key. She just wants to authenticate and the easiest way both logistically and mentally to do that is to just sign into her email.

I fully support this idea from Mozilla and I hope it kills OpenID, as even that's a pain in the ass sometimes.

<comment><USER16> Surely the real win here is the massive reduction in password re-use on 'less secure' environments.

Obviously google/microsoft etc are not immune to screwing up and having their database hacked - but I'd rather put all my eggs in that basket than having a single egg in lots of baskets with differing levels of security that subsequently enable access to all of my eggs anyway and...

Yeah. So the eggs metaphor doesn't really work. Sorry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > OpenID uses URLs as identities.

True, the fact that URLs identify them confuses some people. However, <http://> being usually superfluous, I don't see why roger.example.com is more confusing than firstname.lastname@example.com.

> Most sites would like at least an email address to be able to contact you, > so will almost always require an additional step after logging in for the > first time.

And openId provides an email if the site asks for it.

> OpenID is a jarring login process.

The difference is that the provider page is a full page rather than a popup?

> Both OpenID and oAuth allow your identity provider (be it Google, Facebook, > Twitter) to track every website you sign in to.

So does mozilla persona as your identity provider is your browser ! I remember an opera unite app that acted as an openId provider. How is Persona different/better than that?

> oAuth is complicated for developers to implement [...] several versions of > the protocol, [...]

That is true. And it will also be true of persona in two years when you will have to support firefox15 to 20, chrome 33 to 35, ie11, opera14, opera15, webkit-beta-nameless-browser, webkit-alpha-nameless-browser and others' own versions of persona

<comment><USER18> > True, the fact that URLs identify them confuses some people. However, > <http://> being usually superfluous, I don't see why roger.example.com is > more confusing than email@example.com.

Because roger.example.com is not what most people's OpenID is. Google uses the same OpenID url for all accounts. If you have a Gmail account, your OpenID URL is: <https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id>

How the hell can you not find that confusing?

<comment><USER19> I have been confused about that every, single, damn, time I've ever used Google OpenID, whether it was supporting it or using it. Thanks for opening my eyes.

I knew I liked BrowserID and you've pointed out around reason why.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I would love to use this, but apps I work on are both web browser based and native clients. Persona does not _yet_ work with native apps (Android, iOS native apps); it only supports browser based auth right now.

Browser only auth doesn't get me all the way there. I can look at wrapping UIWebKit, or whatever, in my apps, but I bet I am just asking for some hurt. :-)

</comment><comment><USER21> This just beats OpenID hands down. And I will be very interested to see how fast Google et al support it.

I think they may be a bit evil.

</comment><comment><USER22> The recent wave of password and hash theft might become an incentive to move to this login method. I was skeptic about the possibility of BrowserID catching on, thinking the Google/Twitter/FB wouldn't give up tracking users with their ID methods. But if there is a way to make this widespread (though I can't imagine how) I'd really like it to happen.

Will Mozilla provide native support or an extension? Or they feel like it would hurt if someone could implement a bad login page that still works if the browser has native support?

<comment><USER23> Password/hash thefts have been happening for as long as there have been systems with passwords. What changed recently is that we now have centralized services with huge numbers of important accounts. There are more service with large number of accounts and more services that affect multiple aspects of your digital life. When someone steals hashes from _those_ , the press and people are more likely to notice.

I think most people overemphasize the importance of the particular authentication scheme used and overlook the problems created by extreme centralization of stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This Persona/BrowserID kludge makes me sick. I don't get why everyone is so optimistic about it. I believe there's absolutely no reason why one just can't be a source of their own identity (as it naturally happens), with so-called "identity providers" actually being "identity notaries."

In BrowserID they _do_ generate keypair, but then tie identity not to it, but to an email address, something user lends, but never actually possesses. Completely the same as with OpenID, where identity is tied to URI. Actually, the only change is URI scheme part: http/https to mailto — which is nice UX- wise, but that's about all the advantages.

OpenID was _heavily_ criticized for that (remember all those "did I sign up with Google or Facebook?", URI changes/account rename issues, identity providers being temporarily down, and so on?), and now those who criticized OpenID are praising system that have _most_ of the same problems.

I can only hope Persona would silently fail and never gain any significant popularity, so users won't have to struggle with another hype wave, to only lose their trust (if there's any left) in non-centralized identity systems.

</comment><comment><USER25> Chrome, IE, and Opera need to natively incorporate browserid ASAP.

Please, put your egos away and get this done for the sake of everyone who uses the web.

</comment><comment><USER26> A well-crafted solution desperately in search of a problem to solve.

<comment><USER27> If registering at yet another site (forum, online store, government site, etc) and remembering the password when you get back to it 2-3 month after is not a problem for you, I admire your memory. Or maybe you're not visiting these types of sites as much as I do.

<comment><USER28> Another solution to this is a password manager, eg Keepass. It still centralizes your identity under one roof, in the encrypted DB, but only locally.

<comment><USER29> But the overhead is much larger and let's be honest, this solution is only used by a tiny minority of (mostly tech) users. Mozilla Persona could be used by everybody because for the end user it is exactly as complex/easy as it is currently or even easier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Tying email addresses to a user's identity is a terrible idea.

\- I don't want to give my email address to every site I use. It should be available to the site only if I approve their request.

\- I use a unique email address for every site that needs one.

\- What if I want to start using a new email address?

<comment><USER31> I wouldn't actually say it's a terrible idea, for 99% of users it should work better, faster, and easier for them, since -very- few people have the same habits as you.

However, having said that, I do otherwise agree with you, I also don't want to give my email out to all of them, and when I do, it may be one of a few address, depending on how much I trust them, or care about the responses. I'm given very little option in that regard.

<comment><USER32> > it may be one of a few address, depending on how much I trust them, or care > about the responses. I'm given very little option in that regard.

You are given the choice of which email address you want to use to log in. Isn't that exactly what you want?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I don't see a compelling reason, especially since I'm in the EU and don't want my e-mail address, password and website usage statistics transferred to Mozilla's servers in the US, where they can be accessed and possibly misused by authorities.

<comment><USER34> Mozilla has the only implementation at the moment as they are still developing it, but the intention is that any email provider can provide this in the future. They have not written themselves into the spec. In fact they have commented that the more successful this standard is, the less important they become.

<comment><USER35> Commendable goals, but in my opinion somewhat conflicts with the 'Mozilla' prefix in the name, if they hope to make it a widely adopted standard they need to drop their branding and just call it 'Persona'.

<comment><USER36> Read the article. The protocol is called BrowserID. The Mozilla service to try and help adoption is called "Mozilla Persona"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> tl;dr Uses an e-mail address to make public key crypto easier. Sounds nice.

Unfortunately, most people fuck up PKI and now we're relying on a third party (Mozilla) to authenticate all our logins.

You could also just implement client certificates without a third party. Issue your users a cert when they register or log in. This would be similarly "automatic" authentication without relying on Persona to be stable and secure 24/7. I wonder why they didn't just make a browser plug-in that simplifies using client certificates (without the expense of supporting a highly reliable 3rd-party site and extra code to make it work)

<comment><USER38> _I wonder why they didn't just make a browser plug-in that simplifies using client certificates (without the expense of supporting a highly reliable 3rd- party site and extra code to make it work._

So the goal is basically: I have a computer at work, a computer at home, a computer in my pocket, and a computer I just borrowed to check something at a friend's house. I want to be able to go to the same random site on all four devices and have it recognize that I am the same person, without (1) remembering a special password for that site, or (2) trusting that site in any way.

So there are two ways to do that. One involves generating a certificate on one of my devices and somehow communicating it to the others without a central authority. The other involves a central authority that each device can communicate with.

The first way will be, let's say, extremely challenging to get working reliably across all devices and platforms in a way that average users can handle. So Mozilla went with an extremely flexible version of the second way. It goes like this: users remember a Username and URL, in the form Username@URL. They also remember a Password which is only shared with URL. When I want to identify myself to that random website on any of my four devices, Mozilla helps me get a verifiable statement from URL to send to the random website that I am Username@URL.

There are two things mixed in to make it more likely this will take off. First, users are already used to remembering Username@Url / Password credentials, so they don't have to learn anything new to identify this way. And second, because existing Username@Url identities are email addresses, Mozilla can offer an intermediate identification service based on the ability to receive email, until other identity servers come online.

TL;DR: By using an intermediate ID server and credentials that look like email addresses, Mozilla has created a path to cross-device, cross-platform user ID that solves the problems of user adoption, technical adoption, and independence -- it can be implemented in existing browsers, understood by existing users, and offers a clean transition to completely decentralized identification. Very cool.

<comment><USER37> This makes it easier for people to use one login for all the websites they use. That also makes them inherently less secure.

Multiple accounts is a good idea because it creates separate security domains which cannot be broken. You crack my Facebook password, there's no way you can get into my completely separate Citibank account. The one-login-for-all model is less secure because it centralizes your accounts into one general security domain: the ID provider.

If you hadn't made it a requirement that you can use the computer at your friend's house, this would be more secure, because you could keep your private keys just on your trusted devices. But now you're on a foreign device and you didn't bring your keys - so you have to either get them from your ID provider, or generate new ones.

Now an attacker can either A. break into the ID provider and steal the keys for _all the sites you use_ , or B. intercept the username/password login to your ID provider.

The risk of A. is of course possible, plausible, and given the track record of companies with the highest security reputations in the land being pwnd by lame phishing expeditions, likely to actually work (eventually).

If you were using your home computer with the keys already stored in the browser, B. would be impossible, but you're at a friend's house with no keys. And my guess is there will be malware developed just to disable browser keys, force a u/p login, collect the creds, and try all online banks using this system to find your account and siphon funds. (This is exactly what malware does today, only they usually use direct injection of your normal banking browser sessions or steal saved logins)

Of course you can use separate accounts with Persona. They advertise you using a work e-mail and personal e-mail to make separate accounts. But let's be realistic: who the hell wants to complicate their logins further? People will probably use one e-mail for all their accounts - _because it's easy_.

I have a solution for these security concerns. It's to _stop trying to making security easy_. If you forced people instead to jump through hoops for the one or two accounts which really need to be extra secure, they'll deal with it (once) and get on with their lives.

Banking is one example. You can step a user through generating and storing a client certificate, and then they never have to do it again until they use a new computer. If they need access from outside their home (WHICH IS A BAD IDEA, BUT ANYWAY,) they can use a temporary e-mailed login token which is only good for one session and requires things like login rate limits, additional identity verification, etc. We can do this today without any new technology.

Facebook, Twitter, etc aren't sensitive accounts and thus don't need ridiculous security - Persona would be fine for these. Crack my social media accounts, fine, but don't allow things like banks and e-mail accounts to be linked as well. It's like clipping blank checks to your house or office keys.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I get that I'm probably not the target market for OpenID since I'm already more tech-friendly than the average user, but I've never thought it was super complicated or "jarring," to use the definition in the article. I set up the URL on my web server years ago (thus securing me as more technical, I know), but it's been great. I can change providers in the background, and I only need to remember one URL. No more usernames or anything. Sure, it could be easier and more widely adopted (chicken and egg), but I have thought it was relatively pleasant for a while.

</comment><comment><USER40> I really want to see HN adopt Persona.

<comment><USER41> I'm a big fan of how they used to support OpenID but quietly dropped it, locking me out of my original account.

No, wait, that was terrible!

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I personally like OpenID, especially in combination with GMail. But if this is easier for most users (and it seems to be) then I could be fan of it as well.

One thing that I don't see is what happens if I sign up as a user now (with my GMail address) and then GMail later starts providing their own service, instead of the fallback. Do I lose my account on all the services I signed into?

<comment><USER43> As I understand it, you're identified to the site by an email address. So if GMail becomes an ID provider, you keep using the same identity, but with Google confirming it rather than Mozilla. I'm by no means an expert, though.

<comment><USER42> Okay, so there's no token being passed? If someone manages to spoof the system, they could be anyone and just accept my access request?

I haven't thought it all through, but it feels like there's a weakness there that's just waiting to be exploited.

<comment><USER43> I think there is a token being passed, but it's authentication, not identity. It's a signed declaration that you own that identity, and it must be either from the domain that issued it, or another source that the site you're visiting specifically trusts (i.e. Mozilla, at present).

I trust Mozilla to have done a good job of this. If there's a weakness, it's not going to be anything so obvious that you can see it from my stumbling attempts to describe the protocol. If it sounds like there is, I'm probably describing it wrong. Have a look at the details here: <http://lloyd.io/how- browserid-works>

<comment><USER42> Thanks. That link explained it, and at least took care of my current worries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> If this ever becomes popular, I can imagine law enforcement agencies will want to link e-mail address to people even more, and mail vendors such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft will become a much more popular target for subpoenas and such.

I just don't like the idea of all the passwords being centralized in one place and being so very easy to obtain by the US Government.

</comment><comment><USER45> I am really hoping this takes off. I'm currently implementing it in an app and, although the API is a little awkward, it was pretty easy to do. The only snag I've run into is that it has issues in Chrome if third-party cookies are disabled.

</comment><comment><USER46> I like the implementation but I don't like that it has a brand (Mozilla) attached to it.

Stripe is doing this right, when you make a payment on a website you have no idea that you're using Stripe.

<comment><USER41> I won't put credit card details into a site unless I have _some_ trust in the system they're using. The lack of a brand isn't necessarily a good thing here.

In any case, the brand is for marketing to developers right now -- once "Persona" becomes a thing in and of itself, this will be a nonissue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> As good as it may be, I have a hard time seeing this grow beyond Mozilla browsers, what with their reliance on browserid

<comment><USER48> Works in any modern browser. Check this out: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/persona/Browser_com...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/persona/Browser_compatibility)</comment></comment>


This Company Has Solved the Software Security Problem - <AUTHOR> https://www.tfir.io/polyverse-creating-security-through-diversity-alexander-gounares/ <comment><USER2> Skeptical of anyone who claims to have solved software security

</comment><comment><USER3> garbage link. real link is [https://polyverse.com/](https://polyverse.com/)</comment>


A Mortgage Tornado Warning, Unheeded - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/business/mortgage-tornado-warning-unheeded.html

<comment><USER2> People like Nye Lavalle (no relation that I know of) are the unsung heroes of our time. While his efforts did not seem to change the course of these institutions, it offers a poignant counter to the constant refrain of "no one could have foreseen this!" that we seem to be fed.

I have a friend that is currently perusing a similar path; He discovered a billing discrepancy on some medical tests. He was refunded promptly (as was his insurance) but the circumstances did not sit well with him so he investigated. He has spent a year and a half and a lot of favors from lawyer friends chasing down that rabbit hole with no expectation of any kind of personal gain. At last report there are active investigations by DAs in at least three different states, a complete dismantling of a case that the company was in danger of winning but has since settled since information he provided showed they committed perjury, an active investigation into kickbacks from the company to doctors in our home state etc. etc. He was told by one attorney "I have never had an unrelated third party do research on active cases and step in with relevant evidence like this."

I hope if I am ever confronted with that uneasy tickle in the back of my mind that I could find the fortitude to follow it to its conclusion.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Revolting" doesn't begin to describe it. Families losing their homes due to institutionalized fraud? How can these people sleep at night?

<comment><USER4> The foreclosure system was designed for a neighborhood bank to go down with its papers and foreclose. But now, the mortgage process is decentralized, so the lenders are taking shortcuts to satisfy the paperwork requirements.

However, a homeowner does not enter the foreclosure process unless he is _not paying his mortgage_. This is not due to any fraud by the bank.

On the other hand, this is exactly what happens when you have the government take over an industry because government entities like Fannie Mae have very little accountability or oversight. They should be abolished and the free market allowed to compete for the business.

<comment><USER5> > However, a homeowner does not enter the foreclosure process unless he is not > paying his mortgage. This is not due to any fraud by the bank.

the article proves this wrong

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Same types of problems will be found in the Education Loans industry

The Bankers, MPAA, and RIAA bought our government..quite cheaply

<comment><USER7> The student loan industry is interesting. If it collapses, higher education is going to get hammered. On the other hand, it's much harder to abandon a student loan commitment than a mortgage, so such a collapse could be a long time coming.</comment></comment>


Brendan Eich steps down as Mozilla CEO - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2014/04/03/brendan-eich-steps-down-as-mozilla-ceo-after-supporting-gay-marriage-ban/

<comment><USER2> Discussed earlier today.</comment>


ESO video of a gas cloud to be torn apart by black hole at center of Milky Way - <AUTHOR> http://www.eso.org/public/videos/eso1151a/

<comment><USER2> The best part of all of this is that it's already happened... about 28,000 years ago!

Remember that our telescopes can only pick up what they can see, and they can only see light that has reached us.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Youtube video at: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFLkewQIzoA></comment>


Former Cardinals Exec Gets 4-Year Prison Sentence for "Hacking" Astros' Database - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/07/18/st_louis_cardinals_exec_gets_prison_for_hacking_astros_database.html <comment><USER2> Here's the write up from SI[1], which has a lot more analysis.

Found this part interesting: _In his plea agreement with prosecutors, Correa acknowledged that he employed "sophisticated means" to mask his identity and location._

So I'm assuming he just used a VPN to mask his IP? How sophisticated did the Cardinals get, here?

Probably too early to tell if the Astros science experiment is working, but for those interested this[2] write-up from a few years ago is some great reading for the Baseball inclined.

[1] [http://www.si.com/mlb/2016/07/18/cardinals-chris-correa- hack...](http://www.si.com/mlb/2016/07/18/cardinals-chris-correa-hacks-astros- prison-sentence) [2] [http://www.si.com/longform/astros/](http://www.si.com/longform/astros/)</comment>


Numbers Show Millennials Abandoning Broadcast Networks - <AUTHOR> http://www.broadcastingcable.com/news/currency/upfronts-2016-numbers-show-millennials-abandoning-broadcast-networks/156297 <comment><USER2> How do milennials consume sports programming? Too bad about Bob's burgers pulling in so few milennials. Good show.</comment>


How to migrate a VueJs project to NuxtJs in 8 steps - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@nicogranja19/how-to-migrate-a-vuejs-project-to-nuxtjs-in-7-steps-b340faf2977b <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, today I wrote my first article on Medium explaining how you can migrate/convert your Vuejs app to a NuxtJs app in 7 steps.

I decided to write it because I faced that issue the last week. I had a Vue app that I wanted to rebuild completely using NuxtJs but I didn't find any useful guide of how to do it on the internet. So, once I finished rebuilding my website I decided to write my find outs.

For sure, is far to be a perfect guide, but I think is still a good point to start. Let me know if you have any doubts or you think I should add something else.

I hope it helps.

</comment><comment><USER2> The link to your site at the bottom is not working. There's an extra dot at the end of the URL.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, thanks for the heads up! Fixed it. Also, I noticed that there are 8 steps (I had two step 3, but no one noticed haha)</comment></comment>


Encrypt.today - <AUTHOR> http://encrypt.today

<comment><USER2> But not served over HTTPS :). I see you've not configured an SSL vhost and you're running multiple sites from the same IP (Actually appears to be a CNAME). While there's nothing wrong with that, you have no HTTPS fallback thus 'hacking.ventures' content is displayed when you visit [https://encrypt.today](https://encrypt.today).</comment>


Geographers Had Calculated 81% Chance That Osama Was in Abbottabad - <AUTHOR> http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2011/05/geographers-had-calculated-81.html

<comment><USER2> Woah! Massively misleading title - the paper actually predicts that he was in a town called Parachinar, about 400km to the west of Abbottabad. The 81% figure was simply based on a geographic decay calculation - that is, it is a figure that represents the probability that Bin Laden was x km from his last known location in the Tora Bora region. The larger x is, the lower the probability.

Parachinar is just the other side of the Pakastani-Afghan border, next to Tora Bora, about 50km away in fact. The real location was much further</comment>