The big drug database in the sky: One firefighter's year-long legal nightmare - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/05/the-big-drug-database-in-the-sky-one-firefighters-year-long-legal-nightmare/ <comment><USER2> Someone please explain: Who are the victims in this supposed "crime?"

It would be a huge understatement to claim that the US has a strange obsession with so called prescription narcotics. Sending doctors and patients alike to jail for supposed overuse or over-subscription.

Look, yes, there is a public interest case where someone is known to be selling or allowing others to be selling such medications onto the black market. But in many of these case (most?) that isn't really the case, or at least they have no evidence of that.

So, again, what exactly is it they're trying to accomplish? Why is the victim? Why do they care?

On a related note, I have a family member (in the US) who works in a clinic, the sole purpose of this clinic is to get people with chronic or in some cases even terminal conditions off of narcotic painkillers. These people provably are in pain, but the system in the US is such that they'll kick people off of painkillers who actually need them simply because of some kind of "narcotic painkillers are bad" circular logic which nobody can explain to me.

I'd really like someone to explain to me why the prescription of painkillers isn't a matter best left to patients and doctors in most cases where there is no suggestion of resale or other corruption. It just boggles my mind that the police are getting into people's personal treatment plans and calling their painkillers illegal.

<comment><USER3> The cynic in me finally thinks that it simplifies to this:

Pills can make you feel good. You aren't supposed to just be able to feel good without doing some sort of "work" to "earn" it. So the pills are cheating. We'll give you a concession if your circumstances make you feel extra bad, but _only_ until you reach the normal level of "feel-good" that should be afforded to you by your station in life.

The whole "war on drugs" exploits this involuntary tic in popular opinion.

<comment><USER4> It's all about "if somebody has something I don't, I'm _worse off_ as a result". It's the same psychology that leads to people telling a lunch lady she can't make such good food because their kids' lunch-lady-prepared food isn't as good[1], so, therefore, their kids are worse off than they would be with everybody having crappy food. People try to justify it as "we should all be equal" or some garbage.

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/08/annika-eriksson- swe...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/08/annika-eriksson-swedish- lunch-lady_n_1948486.html)

<comment><USER5> From the link: "Update: The day this article was published, it was announced that Eriksson will be able to continue baking her own bread and providing healthful vegetable options. The incident has been called a 'misunderstanding,' according to Swedish news source dt.se."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _According to the order of dismissal, the state admitted that it had "insufficient evidence to establish the culpable mental state of the Defendant beyond a reasonable doubt, and that dismissal prior to trial is in the interest of justice."_

I'm sure it had nothing to do with his attorney filing an appeal, showing he was ready to fight a law that was far too lenient towards police access, which might get the law overturned and make other, easy convictions suddenly impossible to get.

The Third Party Doctrine _needs_ to go.

</comment><comment><USER6> So, if the officer _had_ gotten a warrant (which I assume would be more limited in scope than 'everyone'), and had come across similar information, it would be completely reasonable that he investigate it, right?

I'm also curious if they caught the original perpetrator. Tampering with narcotics would be tough to pull off in our agency... To get access to the narcs you have to swipe a ProxCard and enter a pin to access a safe (logging a timestamp attached to your identify), which gets you to a locked metal box and a numbered seal (which is checked twice daily). Any tampering would be caught within ~12 hours, and would be easily traced back to the card and pin number of the person who accessed it.

<comment><USER7> The officer never would have had probable cause for a warrant for this individuals information though, since he didn't even work at the sites that had the missing/tampered drugs.

<comment><USER6> Sure, obviously the warrant would likely be far more limited in scope (i.e. only people that had access to the drugs at the time), but the same scenario is certainly still possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's something super strange about how this article is written. There's a very heavy emphasis on how the government invaded this poor fireman's privacy and endangered the adoption process of two young children. The fireman is emotional, and feels victimized by the police and is even sueing the mayor, the main argument of the article seems to be that the police has too much information about people.

But when you extract just the factual statements from the article there's a whole different picture. The police was investigating a pretty serious crime. One of their tools in this investigation was checking medical records of employees of the fire department to find irregularities that might point to someone with motive to steal opiates. Instead of finding a direct motive they found out a person was committing fraud with prescription drugs. The person was charged, but eventually the charges were dropped because they couldn't round out the evidence, the reason is unclear.

Did this person really commit prescription drug fraud? Did he make money off that? Is that the sort of crime that should throw a wrench in an adoption process?

I obviously don't know the guy, but it seems a bit weird to me to just disregard the idea that the authorities have hard evidence of him circumventing a law. Using the properties of that guy that make him seem like a stand-up guy just to make a larger point about privacy feels a bit disingenuous.

<comment><USER9> > Instead of finding a direct motive they found out a person was committing > fraud with prescription drugs.

Where does it say that? All I see is this:

 _Pyle had been prescribed short-acting and long-acting opiate-based painkillers for years after being diagnosed with an inoperable mid-back disc herniation from a dirt-bike accident._

If that counts as evidence of fraud sufficient for criminal charges to be filed, I think we have a problem.

<comment><USER10> Evidence only counts if you can't get the victim to plead guilty to a lesser charge. A bit of trial by media, career damage, pressure on the family, legal costs and who is going to contest a charge. Sadly society doesn't seem to care about the occasional Aaron Swartz getting caught in the machine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I feel conflicted about this.

On one hand, a nice guy has had his life upended during the most stressful phase of parenthood.

On the other hand, having a sympathetic defendant has paved the way for meaningful reform of third-party doctrine.

</comment><comment><USER12> This seems like a Rand Paul issue.

</comment><comment><USER13> It's your fault, not the doctors that legally gave you drugs goy!

<comment><USER14> Doctor shopping usually means going to multiple doctors and keeping them in the dark about each other.

Whether or not you agree this should be a crime (see UnoriginalGuy's comments), current laws _do_ make this a crime.

And it's hard to imagine how the doctors could be implicated in that crime-- essentially, they are the ones being duped.

<comment><USER15> But isn't the point of the database to allow doctors to know if there are interactions with other things a patient may be taking? Is other prescription information hidden unless there is a conflict, or does each doctor have access to the patients prescription history? If they can see the history, then they should be able to decide if he's seeing multiple doctors to get more drugs. If that history is hidden from his doctor, why should the police get to look just because?

At a higher level, let's assume for a moment that 3rd party data should not be protected by the 4th amendment. That does not mean the database maintainer is obligated to hand over records to the authorities. It just means they can if they want to without violating a persons rights. The DB owner is certainly allowed to say "come back with a warrant" with will of course require probable cause.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I disagree that third party doctrine is outdated, as the article states. The fact is this: the Constitution says nothing about "privacy" or "information." The literal text of the 4th amendment prohibits essentially what are trespasses (to one's house, person, papers, or effects) in the name of gathering evidence. The whole "expectation of privacy" concept is itself a judicial bolt-on, and to go further and pretend that people have an expectation of privacy in records that were never their own property to begin with strains reason.

It's not like third party records did not exist in 1791. The framers, being lawyers and businessmen, would have been intimately familiar with the concept of entrusting their person information to the documents of third parties. Had the framers intended "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" to actually mean "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects [and their doctors' or accountants' or lawyers' concerning them]" they could have written the text that way. They didn't.

<comment><USER9> _The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people._

\-- Ninth Amendment to the Constitution

<comment><USER17> The Third-Party Doctrine dates back to the time of the framers of the Constitution. Not merely the idea that there are third parties that have searchable documents, but the Constitutionality of the resultant searches.

<comment><USER9> Whether or not that turns out to be true, I still don't care for Rayiner's argument. Attorney-client privilege is also older than the Constitution, and the framers didn't see fit to mention it here either. I think their intent was to get the broad outlines right and let future generations hash out such details.

In keeping with that intent, the phrase "their papers and effects" is not precisely defined. I think it's up to us to hash out the appropriate meaning for our day and age. _Pace_ Rayiner, I don't think it's at all unreasonable to imagine that that phrase was not _necessarily_ intended to encompass only papers and effects that happen to be within one's house.

<comment><USER16> Attorney-client privilege isn't a Constitutional right, it's just an evidentiary privilege. And it can be lost by disclosure to third parties. Moreover, you're glossing over the fact that much of the information held by third parties doesn't fit within any conception of " _your_ papers and effects." Even if we assume that your Google Docs are covered, what about information like your facebook friends? Those database records linking you to other facebook users aren't your documents, they're Facebook's.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Noise-Canceling Window Treatment - <AUTHOR>

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/29/noise-canceling-window-treatment-video_n_4171667.html <comment><USER2> I want someone to try these and report back. I've covered mine with a drywall + insulation + drywall sandwich.</comment>


AI for humanity - <AUTHOR> https://www.aiforhumanity.fr/en/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm very happy they list "Opening up the black boxes of AI" as a main point.

While we have very powerful classification devices able to navigate the subtle hidden topology of a problem, this is still correlation.

To me Explainable ML will be key to go from correlation to causality. Explanability will help by pointing where to investigate and hypothesize and test for some causes. It could be the missing link between ML and Judea Pearl's causality theory.

DARPA has a program on it [1], NIPS a symposium [2]. This is a significant dimension that is growing in the field.

[1] [https://www.darpa.mil/program/explainable-artificial- intelli...](https://www.darpa.mil/program/explainable-artificial-intelligence)

[2] [http://interpretable.ml/](http://interpretable.ml/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> sama is in a panel at about 2:05 into the video, themed on global AI market competition.</comment>


Descopes: A missing compiler feature - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@greglo/descopes-a-missing-compiler-feature-b4a5fa0751c8 <comment><USER2> Python has it: 'del'

C++11 has it, as long as your intermediate thing is not a parameter: auto real_var = []() { complicated lambda; return calculated_value; }();

I'm sure someone will figure out how to polyfill it into javascript ;-)</comment>


Ask HN: What if all internet websites forced IE users to switch to Chrome? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I don't use IE, but I don't use Chrome either and refuse to use Chrome. Why I refuse to use Chrome isn't the point of this response, the point is there are reasons why I refuse to run Chrome and if you make it so your site is only accessible via Chrome then I won't be visiting your site.

What I just said about Chrome could be said for any browser, a lot of people have different reasons for not running certain browsers on their system. To generalize it's a bad idea to make your site accessible only via a specific browser.

</comment><comment><USER3> I will switch to not using websites at all and just using apps :)</comment>


Seth MacFarlane to match up to $1M for Reading Rainbow Kickstarter - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/readingrainbow/bring-reading-rainbow-back-for-every-child-everywh/posts/890470

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know of many campaigns where they are trying to help so many kids with an actual, proven set of media. As a youth with dyslexia, Reading Rainbow helped me so much. Now, as an adult with children of my own, I am glad I can help it to be brought to millions of new children!

</comment><comment><USER2> I have to say I never in a million years thought I would be close to putting Seth "Family Guy, Dads, Boobs, etc." MacFarlane on my hero list but between Cosmos and this I'll drafting his induction letter soon.

<comment><USER3> What if I told you Seth MacFarlane and Elon Musk are engaged?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For scale, when they say they can reach 12,500 classrooms, there are about 130,000 schools in the United States.

[http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=84](http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=84)

<comment><AUTHOR> That is true, however I think about 50% of the schools are elementary schools, which is the target market for Reading Rainbow. The interesting numbers I would like to see are which schools do not have the funding to buy this kind of a program already. For example, the school which my kids go to certainly could afford a site wide license for a reading tool like Reading Rainbow. They often do spend 10's of thousands on programs like that in a year. If handled properly, this program could easily snowball into being available almost ubiquitously in the US and other locations in the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> When I watched the original Reading Rainbow, I was about 2-3 years too old for the books it was showcasing, but the presentation always sucked me in anyway. Good stuff.

</comment><comment><USER6> Seth MacFarlane

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops! Corrected :) thank you</comment></comment>


Coronavirus, a fiasco in the making? [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6MZy-2fcBw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6MZy-2fcBw<p>Perspectives on the Pandemic: Dealing with Coronavirus, a fiasco in the making? As the coronavirus pandemic takes hold, we are making decisions without reliable data. <comment><USER2> Please submit the link in the URL field, not as a text submission.</comment>


Internet Voting: A Requiem for the Dream - <AUTHOR> http://phrack.org/issues/69/11.html <comment><USER2> Voting here refers only to elections.

Indeed voting using computers for elections is the worst thing one can do. But voting on policy/law for example should be done more often and using computers as the risks are mitigated by other factors</comment>


Tell HN: Want to save a browser session as an 'app'? Make a bash script - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> This is stupendously simple, but I haven't thought about it until now.

Sometimes I don't want to put my URLs into the favorites tab. But I do want to save them as an app icon on my Desktop.

It just occured to me that you can easily save it in a bash script.

An example script for Mac (but I'm sure there's an equivalent on Windows and Linux) [1]:

open -a "Google Chrome" [https://mml-book.github.io/](https://mml- book.github.io/)

open -a "Google Chrome" [https://mml-book.github.io/book/mml- book.pdf](https://mml-book.github.io/book/mml-book.pdf)

open -a "Google Chrome" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21293132](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21293132)

\---

Obviously, you have to chmod +x it and tell your machine when you double click .sh scripts (or whatever extension you chose, I suppose it's smarter to invent your own extension) to open it with terminal.

[1] From a recent HN submission of which I felt the need to do this</comment>


Microsoft Office for Mac updated with real-time collaboration, auto cloud saving - <AUTHOR> https://9to5mac.com/2018/01/18/microsoft-office-real-time-collaboration-more/ <comment><USER2> The bigger news here is that for the first time in 20+ years, all platforms are using the same codebase and that includes iOS, Android, Mac and Windows.</comment>


Brainwaves can predict audience reaction for television programming - <AUTHOR> http://www.news.gatech.edu/2014/07/29/brainwaves-can-predict-audience-reaction-television-programming <comment><USER2> At first glance this seemed really creepy and invasive, but it seems like they're just measuring 'engagement' and predicting user preference for ads. If that leads to more interesting ads, I'm not entirely opposed. On the other hand, it's treading awfully close to Huxley/Bradbury territory.

</comment><comment><USER3> One step closer to converting all mass media into a homogenous slurry designed to appeal to a "broad audience" I guess.

</comment><comment><USER4> Misleading title. Looks like they were able to predict 40-60% of the variance. And we're talking about tweets.

<comment><USER5> That doesn't seem too surprising to me. After working on some EEG projects in the past (coincidentally within gatech) coming up with meaningful correlations that generalize across multiple subjects is very nontrivial and for a number of features you're not going to find anything of much use.

Tweets also do seem to be a poor feature to try to track, but generating labels for anything regarding EEG related problems tends to be quite fickle and very subjective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I look forward to the day we can track larger populations of this this data in real time. I say this because yesterday me and a good friend got back from a long road trip and one of the more interesting ideas I thought we discussed was the notion of an ever-increasing level of synchronicity between each of our creative/entertainment brainwaves, whether that increase in overlap could be mathematically predictable, and finally whether a gigantic clap of overlapping unified consciousness could be considered a type of singularity. We also joked about which of our favorite youtube videos could do it.</comment>


Cookie.js – a JavaScript cookie library - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/js-coder/cookie.js

<comment><USER2> looks nice, been using jquery.cookie for a while now.. ridding ourselves of the jquery dependency is cool.. but how many projects these days do not use jquery??? Still, certainly something I'll spend some time playing with.</comment>


The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing (1956) - <AUTHOR> https://archive.org/stream/RapeOfTheMind-ThePsychologyOfThoughtControl-A.m.MeerlooMd/RapeOfTheMind-ThePsychologyOfThoughtControl-A.m.MeerlooMd_djvu.txt <comment><USER2> Just skimmed through a bit, but I found this particular part comparing modern hyper-communicative society to mental attacks to be interesting

 _These subtle menticidal forces operate both within the mind and outside it. They have been strengthened in their effect by the growth in complexity of our civilization. The modern means of mass communication bring the entire world daily into each man 's home; the techniques of propaganda and salesmanship have been refined and systematized; there is scarcely any hiding place from the constant visual and verbal assault on the mind. The pressures of daily life impel more and more people to seek an easy escape from responsibility and maturity. Indeed, it is difficult to withstand these pressures; to many the offer of a political panacea is very tempting, to others the offer of escape through alcohol, drugs, or other artificial pleasures is irresistible.

Free men in a free society must learn not only to recognize this stealthy attack on mental integrity and fight it, but must learn also what there is in side man's mind that makes him vulnerable to this attack, what it is that makes him, in many cases, actually long for a way out of the responsibilities that republican democracy and maturity place on him. _

<comment><AUTHOR> Another interesting quote on his Wikipedia page [0]

"And yet one day men will have to grow up. Compared with the long ages of human existence on earth, our civilization is in its infancy. Sooner or later we must be ready to leave the dreamland of childhood, where imagination finds unlimited scope, and take our place in a world of limited freedoms. That world however, can in the long run give us something better than any vision conjured up in childhood." – Total War and the Human Mind, 1944.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> When I see the length of some of the articles featured on HN, I start to think that HN is just a giant conspiracy to stop me from getting anything done ;-)

<comment><USER4> The more dastardly conspirators upvote you, for obvious reasons.

<comment><USER3> Hey thanks I learned a new English word (I'm French).

I thought you wanted to wright "bastardly" at first ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interestingly, although Meerloo seems to think that the Reichstag fire was a Nazi plot, the Wikipedia article on the incident ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_fire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_fire)) makes it sound like the current consensus is that Van der Lubbe set the fire after all.

<comment><USER6> > makes it sound like the current consensus is that Van der Lubbe set the fire > after all.

Does it?

> The responsibility for the Reichstag fire remains an ongoing topic of debate > and research.

The German one is not quite so sure either: [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstagsbrand](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstagsbrand)

> Marinus van der Lubbe was arrested at the scene. However, the circumstances > and especially who did it could never be cleared up without doubt, and are > still an object of controversy today.

<comment><USER7> The English wikipedia article also says: "According to Ian Kershaw, writing in 1998, the consensus of nearly all historians is that Van der Lubbe did set the Reichstag on fire. Although Van der Lubbe was certainly an arsonist and clearly played a role, there has been considerable popular and scientific debate over whether he acted alone; the case is still discussed."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow. This article is the definition of tl:dr.

But it did remind me of a professor I had in College - he described himself as one of the two most expert hypnotists in the world - and described how the CIA kept asking for his help. He had discovered that people could be hypnotized to do things against their will, and with no memory of the hypnosis. He said that they would react just like Oswald to their actions under hypnosis. And my professor believed that the other expert worked with the CIA.

Truth is definitely stranger than fiction.

<comment><USER9> You should nail down this story. Write the guy, ask for background, confirm your version of the story, etc. The reason I say this is, if your memory is off by a single degree, that could change the entire story here. If your professor's memory is off by a single degree, getting that resolved could prevent some other people from hearing the story and going down a rabbit hole and causing themselves unneeded anxiety. I've never read a hypnosis book that suggested people would do things against their will, but that is different from being open to suggestion.

<comment><USER8> Obviously, his work was very secret. He shared some of the techniques with some of his students - and there are more steps involved than normal hypnosis. You can believe it or not. As for "anxiety" \- well, have you looked around at our world recently? Wars, aggression, suffering, struggling, greed. One might argue that we should rationally be feeling more than "anxiety".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just half-read, half-skimmed through the article. The TL;DR is simply that almost all humans have a limit of mental breakdown, and torture tactics have proven to destroy the mental barrier.

What was more interesting was the author's analysis of human behavior and notions of fear, courage, and conformity.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm a member of a religion that is often thought of as a cult, and a website where I share my experiences in said religion is often Googled by people looking to confirm their cult-oriented thinking (edit: to clarify, they are googling to confirm that their assumption, that religion X as a cult, is true).

So I ended up doing a lot of reading up on brainwashing. My tack was to determine the objective signs of brainwashing or mind control, and it was a very productive exercise, even though I came up negative regarding my own experience.

What did fascinate me, though, was learning about Douglas Rushkoff's research on our consumer culture. "The Persuaders" (Frontline/PBS) is a pretty amazing show that gets at what I suspect is currently the biggest brainwashing- equivalent threat that we face.

<comment><USER11> I'm curious to know what you determined are the objective signs of brainwashing and mind control. Would you share?

<comment><USER9> It's been a while, but if it helps, I divided my research into different categories, like the signs that you'd expect from an organization using brainwashing techniques, the objective signs that you'd expect in a leader or leadership team using brainwashing, and the objective signs of someone affected by brainwashing.

Using #2 as an example, some people assume that because an organization has a publicly-visible leader, that person calls the shots (edit for clarity: when in fact the organization may rely most on local councils, etc. and not so much on the figurehead). That's why it's important to be clear on one's own status --outsider or insider. This was a huge research boon for me. That clarification results in a better idea of your own biases, and also gives you an idea of the way your opposites (outsiders if you're an insider) may be getting their information or education.

It is extremely easy to get one's own subjective thinking caught up in this, no matter what your position. For example, some frequently-listed signs of brainwashing are "emotional attachment" and "dependency." Not very helpful in some hopefully obvious ways; these terms are practically plug-n-play with confirmation bias. On the other hand, it _could_ be helpful information if you developed a set of criteria. Some have tried, as I recall. Nothing scientific because you essentially end up typologizing.

The other rather frightening thing was learning about government-sponsored anti-cult movements, like the fairly recent movement in Russia. TBH, the whole thing was pretty jacked up, and I cut it short when I started reading about possibly innocent people getting locked up in psych wards. Another surprising "anti-cult" force commonly listed is the media, and this seems like it could hold true at least to the degree that a news outlet is willing to sensationalize vs. provide solid reporting (then you get into what is solid reporting, etc.). After researching that, IMO if you're getting cult information from the media, it's a good idea to remind yourself that it's not the same as doing your own research, no matter what the facts are about the organization in question.

<comment><USER11> How can you determine who the insiders are if you are an outsider?

I'm not familiar with anti-cult movements. I'll have to look into it.

I might consider that if you find yourself referring to other people as outsiders, you might be in a cult (though, I may be using a different definition than you).

<comment><USER9> Ah, so just to clarify regarding insider / outsider terminology, I'm getting those terms from my research into religion in general and anthropology[1][2] rather than my own religion. But that made me chuckle a bit, the idea of a bunch of stepford wives chanting "outsider...outsider" and banishing someone. That is a familiar sort of stereotype to me as an insider, though many outsiders (again, not really my term, just a convenient abstraction) haven't usually seen such a mental concept through to completion via e.g. direct research, so it's still a shockingly common perception. I have some pretty hilarious anecdotes from encounters with those perceptions, but they are long to tell.

(BTW I'm happy to leave the non-scholarly use of terms like "outsider" to nation-states[3]...hehe)

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Insider-Outsider-Problem-Study- Religio...](http://www.amazon.com/Insider-Outsider-Problem-Study- Religion/dp/0826481469) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emic_and_etic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emic_and_etic) [3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaijin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaijin)

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the links. I've started to look at them.

Sorry, I don't have much more to add to the conversation for now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interesting tome. I wonder how much of it is actually empirically accurate?

I'll skim it and see what's up. Obviously people will be jumping to call this some sort of conspiracy theory style document, but whatever, maybe the information is useful.

<comment><USER13> It reminds me of a floppy disk that came into my possession, in the days of floppy disks being actual things. The label read: "Dear Friend, Please tell my story. God bless you, Dave Koresh". I was intrigued, though I knew even then that its connection with the famous Branch Davidian leader was tenuous at the absolute best. After inserting it and carefully checking for viruses, I found that the contents were vaguely anarcho-punk, techno-liberwankian writings of unknown provenance, perhaps culled from USENET or similar. Many of them had no attribution.

In short, food for thought, but needs solid confirming data to be taken utterly seriously.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I submitted this link to HN but didn't upload the text to archive.org. I was doing some research on marketing and advertising methods used by politicians in their campaign material (just general interest, no particular party or conspiracy theories).

I don't know which article linked to this text (I had opened many tabs as I was reading) but it appeared interesting enough for a submission to HN. It didn't generate any interest initially, but I received an email from HN that it appeared to be an interesting post and that I should submit it again, so I did.

The second post has made it to the front page and generated some discussion, I was going to post a link to the downloadable formats provided by archive.org, but after checking the archive.org page I see that the text is actually a published book [0] (1956, by Joost Meerloo (1903-1976)) uploaded by someone with an Obama conspiracy theory that may not have the permission to release the text to archive.org under a Creative Commons license (there are links from Wikipedia to other online versions).

There's a Wikipedia page for Joost Meerloo[1] with links to online versions of this and one other of his books - Delusion and Mass Delusion (Meerloo 1949) [2], the Wikipedia bibliography list some other interesting titles authored by Meerloo.

The book is available on Amazon (and goodreads.com) but the publisher (Progressive Press?) appears to have many conspiracy-related releases so I don't know how reputable they are.

[0] The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing (1956, by Joost Meerloo (1903-1976)) [http://www.amazon.ca/The- Rape-Mind-Psychology-Brainwashing/d...](http://www.amazon.ca/The-Rape-Mind- Psychology-Brainwashing/dp/1615773762) [http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6736285-the-rape-of- the-m...](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6736285-the-rape-of-the-mind)

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

[2] [http://www.lermanet.com/exit/mass-delusion- meerloo.htm](http://www.lermanet.com/exit/mass-delusion-meerloo.htm)</comment>


Poolside.fm - <AUTHOR> https://poolside.fm/ <comment><USER2> I have no idea what's that and why it exists but I like it!

The UI is brilliant, and everything just works. Not that it's doing anything as such.

<comment><USER3> "UI is like a joke. If you have to explain it,it's bad."

<comment><USER4> If you can get away without explaining it explicitly, that's great.

But if you make a user interface for eg pilots to fly a plane, there are other things to optimize for than not-having-to-explain-anything.

Similar considerations apply in less extreme scenarios, too.

<comment><USER3> You shouldn't use a button where every other plane uses a lever, or a new term for a label to describe added functions when you can easily use a modifier of an existing similar label. It means things like that. Pilots know the UI of planes so newer planes should need minimal explanation of the UI to pilots is that the philosophy means, it does not mean new planes should have pretty ui anyone off the street can understand

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have been using the macOS menu bar application for a while [1].

There used to be a page [2] linking to it, but it seems they deleted it.

Surprisingly, the app is fully native [3] and that's why I keep it around.

Here is a screenshot [4] in case anyone is curious to see how it looks.

[1] [https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/poolside- fm/HeyThereHotSt...](https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/poolside- fm/HeyThereHotStuff.zip)

[2] [https://poolside.fm/mac/](https://poolside.fm/mac/)

[3] [https://pastebin.com/raw/9j45WN00](https://pastebin.com/raw/9j45WN00)

[4] [https://i.imgur.com/k0Ahk6h.png](https://i.imgur.com/k0Ahk6h.png)

<comment><USER6> Downloaded it, but it asked for permission to use MacOS' accessibility features, which I thought was weird.

But they mention iOS and mac apps on the site coming soon and have an email signup form.

<comment><USER7> A lot of non-accessibility apps use the accessibility features to do things like window resizing and clipboard management. Looking at my relatively pristine MacBook Pro's settings, I've got Flycut and Rectangle (expected) and less expectedly Dropbox and Aquamacs with accessibility access.

I think (but could be wrong) that it's a relatively low-risk permission to grant.

<comment><USER8> It's a risky permission. It allows the app to read keystrokes and manipulate other apps as though they were receiving input from the user.

<comment><USER9> Agreed. Accessibility permission gives pretty much root access, since you can click anything and give yourself any other permissions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Cute: [https://github.com/Poolside-FM](https://github.com/Poolside-FM)

Menubar: [https://github.com/JoaoTMDias/poolside-fm- player](https://github.com/JoaoTMDias/poolside-fm-player)

<comment><USER11> It looks like the first repo list is intentionally left empty?

<comment><USER12> More Git _lost_ than Git _hub_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I want more of this kind of internet.

<comment> kube-system Unfortunately, I can't find Windows RG in HTML5, but there's this:

[https://www.windows93.net/](https://www.windows93.net/)

<comment><USER14> Thanks. The only thing that doesn't click with me and a lot of these kinds of sites, is that I was never an Apple user. There were some at school, but I started with early Windows. Not making a value judgement, just saying I have very little nostalgia for Apple because I didn't use it.

<comment><USER15> Did you reply to the wrong comment or something?

<comment><USER14> Not sure how that happened. I had replied to a comment where someone posted a link to [https://www.windows93.net/](https://www.windows93.net/)

Sorry for the confusion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The onboarding experience is so good. I was dropped into a nostalgic interface that I recognized and I immediately knew what was going on and started exploring. Everything made sense and I happily signed up. Good Job!

<comment><USER17> I had the opposite experience. There was no context or description provided by the author, and the website is confusing and has stuff flying all over it. Furthermore, their Soundcloud API access is already revoked, so there is no music playing, thus making it even more confusing. I'm all for novelty websites, but this is a mess.

<comment><USER18> The website is confusing? It's a desktop layout, how could it be any more familiar? Also there's a message explaining the API access issue.

<comment><USER19> Without passing comment on the contributors in this comment string, I think we will find more often either a jarring or nostalgic reaction to design elements depending on if your formative technology experiences were on Apple II's, DOS, and Win3.1 or iPhones, iPads, and Alexa.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "I've been into '80s/'90s design for years, I can't shake it, it's just so full of fun and positivity."

80s music strikes me as this way. Even the breakup songs have this upbeat vive.

<comment><USER21> Maybe it's a scientific research question. Maybe as everything pop / media was limited/produced/organized we as consumers could only be hit with heavy filtered (see nice and consumable from bigcorps) content ?

<comment><USER20> Maybe it was the fact that media didn't play as dominant a role in people's lives? You'd read the daily paper and then move on with your day.

As for the popular music, I dunno. I mean 80s music is distinctly optimistic in contrast with 90s grunge. Maybe it was an echo of the disco era of the 70s that bled into the music style?

I remember the 90s very well and it definitely was an optimistic period even though the music was mixed, with hip hop taking off amongst the gang violence of the early 90s. And grunge and emo with their much more emotional versions of rock. Still, seemed like the world was generally at peace and everything was getting better and people believed they were getting better.

In many ways the world is still getting better, but there seems to be a lot of tension today and I don't know what all the root causes of that are.

<comment><USER22> The positivity of '80s culture was a reaction to the darkness of the '70s, which were marred by political violence, the heroin epidemic, massive international tensions, and a lot of '60s acts trying to stay relevant by taking themselves way too seriously. At the time, a lot of the intellectual establishment criticized the '80s shift as vapid, shallow, and "commercial", in the context of a rising yuppie culture based on banal materialism.

The '90s felt peaceful because the Cold War was over and Desert Storm was a walk in the park. Europe was uniting, political-correctness was rising (which helped minorities get more respect every day), and a lot of people thought that we could now move on from "capitalism vs socialism" to a capitalist society that could responsibly adopt the best bits of alternative systems.

<comment><USER20> Interesting tidbit I recall from an interview with Steve Martin, a stand up comedian who became popular in the mid-late 70s:

"Mr. MARTIN: Yes. It sounds so frivolous now but it was a crucial decision then. I - you know, the Vietnam War was raging but it was winding down. America was very politically conscious. There were protests, you know, there was political humor everywhere, and I just sensed that the era was ending, that it - you know, it was a kind of - I don't like this word but it was an implosion because you know, you just can't keep taking drugs and have a philosophy, live on. People are dying, and you know, Charles Manson came on the scene and besmirched everyone with long hair. And so I decided, OK, I'm putting on a suit, I'm putting on a tie and I'm cutting my hair. And I cut every political reference out of my act, which was a staple for comedians at the time because it was such an easy laugh. You just mentioned the word Nixon or something - everybody would cheer, I mean, meaning because they didn't like him. And so that was, at that point, the difference between me and them." -[https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=989365...](https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98936589)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've known about Poolside for a while, looks like they've changed their format a bit (it used to just be a full sized 80s videos with background music.) When I used it often, I discovered some artists which was nice.

<comment><USER22> Yup, same. The new website is pretty cool, as it is the fact that they've diversified over a few different playlists.

I'm slightly sad that they removed some of the videos they used in the past.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Accompanying artwork: [https://www.creativeboom.com/inspiration/poolside-fm- gets-a-...](https://www.creativeboom.com/inspiration/poolside-fm-gets-a- refresh-with-a-90s-operating-system-in-your-browser-with-super-summer-music- and-vhs-visuals/)

</comment><comment><USER24> My expectation was that this was Uber for pools: a VC backed 2 sided on demand pool marketplace where I could instantly book and swim. Now I'm totally confused :) <s>

<comment><USER25> No, that would be [https://www.swimply.com](https://www.swimply.com)

And as someone who owns a pool, it will freeze over here in CA before I let some stranger book it for a party on the Internet. This is the pets.com of the sharing economy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> See also: [https://plaza.one/](https://plaza.one/)

</comment><comment><USER27> Poolside FM is great music to play in the office; it's upbeat but never obnoxious or explicit; no one ever complains. I don't stream the graphics though I think that would be a little cheesy for work.

</comment><comment><USER28> This reminds of the rose colored Internet of the past.

</comment><comment><USER29> Well, you beat me to to it. I've been creating radio visualizers and fake OS libraries to make this kind of projects. Yours is well done and I love it. Congratulations.

</comment><comment><USER30> Niice

Hat tip to the classic, the original:

windows93.net

</comment><comment><USER31> Makes me have hope for the internet again. Thank you.

</comment><comment><USER32> Crazy, been on poolside for at least 6 years now. Tell everyone I can about it. It's just fun. Simple.

</comment><comment><USER33> I feel ignorant but the radio never loads for some reason.

Edit : ahh > the mojito cooled server has hit it's limit.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's too bad, its awesome 80s/Vapourwavy stuff. I wonder whether SoundCloud limits are daily or monthly.

<comment><USER22> If i remember correctly, daily.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I would like to find a list of similar places on the internet. Also I use Poolside FM for a while now and I liked their IG account too: [https://www.instagram.com/poolsidefm/](https://www.instagram.com/poolsidefm/)

</comment><comment><USER35> It's cool and in 1997 I was around 16, so this does bring back some good memories. Very well done. Is this just for the the visual reminiscence of the mid 90s or does it have a direction that I am not aware of? Good job!

<comment><USER22> This is actually v.2 (or even 3) of the site. The previous one was just a "tv channel" showing '80s tv material while playing music "you would hear by the poolside". The idea was to play music that feels all summer-y and lounging, with a touch of retro nostalgia for what were arguably the peak years of Miami-style iconography. I think the guys behind it are Scottish.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I love how this isn't at all what you'd do if you were to optimize for usability, but it's absolutely a great experience.

It's like they maxed out the style stats and disregarded all other conventions. I love it.

</comment><comment><USER37> Looks like we killed their SoundCloud API access with too many requests.

</comment><comment><USER38> Sad. Soundcloud API maxes out at 15000 calls per day and these guys hit it. I'm not sure how Hype Machine gets around it.

</comment><comment><USER39> See also: [http://www.chiptune.com/](http://www.chiptune.com/)

</comment><comment><USER40> Cute. No way I'm going to enter my email to ride a jackass, homie.

The 'Format C:\' option made my day.

</comment><comment><USER41> My first computer was a Macintosh Quadra 610 running Mac OS System 7. It looked exactly like this!

<comment><USER42> Oh, the memories!

LC 475 and Performa 5200 here

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I don't know wtf this is but it's amazing. Windows 3.1 throwback

<comment><USER44> It's the look of a classic Mac OS desktop, not Windoze.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Whoa, I was just thinking about this site today. Amazing aesthetic.

<comment><USER46> A E S T H E T I C

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Fun little vacation.</comment>


Show HN: 4th of July Party in a Box, Delivered to Your Door - <AUTHOR> http://july4th.openshelf.co

<comment><USER2> I can't imagine how a service like that could be profitable. Is it just for the Chicago area?</comment>


Evil: A site that displays the phone numbers of random Facebook users - <AUTHOR> http://www.tomscott.com/evil/

<comment><USER2> Once upon a time, there used to be these books that contained everyone's phone number. They called them the "White Pages". Oh the humanity!

<comment><USER3> And it didn't have pictures next to the number making it easy to target certain demographics.

<comment><USER4> Or an associated set of "Like"s - reasonable indicators of a person's outlook.

<comment> X-Istence Numbers of all the hot girls I could never get in high school :-( where was Facebook back then!

<comment><USER5> If you "could never get" a girl's number, what would be the point in having it? The point isn't only to have someone's number, but for her to actually talk to you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> X-Istence So, open the website in the webkit inspector, go to the script tab, open the console and paste this to get the full numbers. Just to make it just a tad bit more evil!

        function parseNumber(num) {

          var onlyMildlyEvil = false;
          var digits = num.toString().replace(/[^0-9]/g, '');
          var parsed = '';

          if (digits.match(/^0[127]\d{9}$/)) {
            // probably a UK phone number
            parsed += '(' + digits.substr(0,5) + ') ';
            parsed += digits.substr(6);
          }

          if (digits.match(/^[2-9]\d{9}$/)) {
            // probably a US phone number
            parsed += '(' + digits.substr(0,3) + ') ';
            parsed += digits.substr(3,3) + '-';
            parsed += digits.substr(6);
          }

          if (parsed.length == 0) { parsed = num; }

          if(onlyMildlyEvil) {

            parsed = "" + parsed;
            parsed = parsed.substr(0,parsed.length-3) + 'XXX';

          }

          return parsed;

        }

</comment><comment><USER4> Tom is crazily productive. There doesn't seem to be a week when he's not releasing or doing something unexpected. He recently ran as a candidate for MP in the UK general election as a pirate, <http://www.madcapntom.co.uk/> (watch his campaign ad!) and had success with "Tweet Trumps" in the last two weeks: <http://tweettrumps.com/>

<comment><USER6> This man is incredible, his projects page is teeming with greatness: <http://www.tomscott.com/projects/>. Also, maybe it's just me but the background image on Tweet Trumps is kind of trippy when reading the text on the page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The advice about googling your phone number is interesting. Apparently this guy is using my GV phone number: <http://tr.dexigner.com/turk_tasarimcilar/m_yasin_sivis.html>

("OMG, now I know jrockway's phone number!!11!". Yeah, well, don't worry, I never answer the phone and the "block" button in GV is quite effective.)

<comment> X-Istence I love Google Voice. I use it all over the place, gmail, my portfolio site, everywhere. And if people bother me, click, blocked. Simple and effective.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How is it to be a freelancer on toptal.com? - <AUTHOR> There was a discussion (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10107448) 2 years ago. Most of the comments were negative. Has anything changed? <comment><USER2> There was a discussion of "Where to find clients" a few weeks ago where Toptal comes up.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14842684](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14842684)</comment>


Yes, React is taking over front-end development. The question is why - <AUTHOR> https://medium.freecodecamp.com/yes-react-is-taking-over-front-end-development-the-question-is-why-40837af8ab76 <comment><USER2> I'm in the middle of building a fairly large application which features a fairly deep and complex user interface for one part of it.

I seriously don't know how I would have done it without react (or something similar). There are so many parts to it and the thought of having to do this by manually changing the DOM and trying to keep everything in 'sync' makes me feel ill. Lots of the components call our Rest API and the changes are reflected in the redux store, which then trickles the data down through the entire application. Everything stays nicely reactive and in sync, without me having to worry too much about it.

Another thing I love is the ability to make large changes in the application without too much breaking. Just remove/replace a component and the rest of the app keeps working as normal. It really is lovely.

A few years ago I was involved in building another fairly application, with nothing but pure javascript, our own little MVC framework and manual DOM manipulations. I dreaded everyday I was working on it. As most of you will know, clients change their mind, requirements change, things need shifted around when development is in the early stages and everything is in a state of flux. I can remember trying to make changes and realising that other things would randomly stop working if they depended on certain DOM elements. Hated it. Maybe there was an element of bad design and pre-development planning, but it was awful.

Now, front end development is something that I really look forward to.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't think it does. It does take over former angular 1 mindshare thanks to effectively botched angular 2, while at the same time being eaten by Vue.</comment>


Researchers solve a materials mystery key to next-generation electronic devices - <AUTHOR> https://news.wisc.edu/beyond-silicon-researchers-solve-a-materials-mystery-key-to-next-generation-electronic-devices/ <comment><USER2> "We're not just improving the performance of devices," says Eom. "So, not improving a cell phone, for example — but envisioning an entirely new device made possible by this advance. This is the beginning of an exciting new path."

For someone not in this field, what does this innovation allow for? What are the new possibilities?

<comment><AUTHOR> Oxide Interfaces—An Opportunity for Electronics -- [http://science.sciencemag.org/content/327/5973/1607](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/327/5973/1607)

I'm on my phone but I'll try to add examples later on.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's the paper:

[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41563-017-0002-4](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41563-017-0002-4)

(Can't find a free version)</comment>


Ask HN: Disappointed by the new Macbook, what alternatives do we have? - <AUTHOR> I've been very happy with my 2012 Macbook Pro Retina and was looking forward to a worthy successor. However the unveiling of the new Macbook was a big letdown for me. Everything that made the Macbook "Pro" seems to be removed. Enough has been said about the topic already what I want to do here is look at what alternatives there are.
So my question for you is; Which laptops, around the price point of your average Macbook Pro, come close to the build quality of the Macbook and use hardware that's greatly supported in Linux.
Extra kudos if somebody can recommend me a terminal on-par with iTerm. Out of all my apps I think I would miss iTerm the most. <comment><USER2> I asked the same question and read replies to others. Just a quick summary;

\- Lenovo has decent laptops. Personally, I'd not touch anything from Lenovo after their shady stuff. (Maybe not an issue on Linux, maybe it is. I don't trust them)

\- Dell XPS series are really good but people complain about coil whine, worse battery life compared to MBP and hit/miss trackpad. It might not be that big of a problem. And if you are running in clamshell mode, these are generally no issues. I don't run clamshell though.

\- The Razer Blade stuff seems to be great too. They are mostly aimed for gamers but look decent. Someone mentioned about huge display bezels being really huge in person. Gotta see. I can't find any info about them here, maybe they only sell in USA.

\- I skipped Asus due to past support experiences with them. Also some smaller vendors due to possible support issues I'd have especially since I'm out of US.

<comment><USER3> Important corrections:

\- Lenovo's _ThinkPad_ line has decent laptops. Lenovo's more popular line, Ideapad, which are branded just "Lenovo", are terrible.

\- Dell XPS series are good, but if you're looking to run Linux on them, make sure to get the Developer Editions

<comment><USER4> Can you elaborate? Why are the Ideapads terrible? Why get a Developer Edition?

<comment><USER5> The IdeaPads I had were not of low quality. They are plastic through and through, but high quality plastic. They feel reasonably solid and a reasonably priced.

Obviously they are not carved from a solid block of magnesium alloy, like ThinkPads used to be.

<comment><USER3> They do _feel_ solid. But the innards are not as good (e.g.: poor Broadcom Wi- Fi cards, bad power management).

And the ThinkPad units didn't have Superfish or the Win10-only-SSD BIOS lock.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Massive tip if you decide to stay with a < 2015 MacBook Pro.

Open up the laptop and reapply the thermal paste on the CPU with something high quality like Arctic Silver. It really needs redoing after 1-2 years. This will result in a significant improvement to overall performance. Why ? Because when OSX detects that the laptop is overheating it schedules a dummy task e.g. secd or kernel_task to throttle the CPU. Cool the laptop and the throttling stops. Use iStat Menus or top to check for the process.

Takes all of 10 minutes and iFixit can guide you through it. As much of a performance difference as going from HDD->SSD. The other most vital thing to do on OSX since all of the daemons result in lots of random reads (check fs_usage).

<comment><USER7> Is this specific to certain years only? I have a 2012 non-retina and it is great, but apparently certain years had more problems than others. Would you recommend it for my 2012 model too?

<comment><USER5> This is a general issue affecting lots of notebooks from all vendors.

<comment><USER6> Sure. But what I haven't seen on Windows or Linux is the deliberate high priority scheduling of a dummy process designed to throttle the CPU.

<comment><USER5> The CPU will throttle itself soon enough after that anyway. The only difference would be that without the kernel throttling it earlier, it can get a bit hotter and last a bit longer before throttling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Opportunities:

\- A Thunderbolt 3 dock that has all the missing ports in new MacBook Pro

\- Lenovo, HP, Asus release properly supported notebook with Linux similar to Dell XPS Developer edition. Makes desktop Linux available across PC industries.

\- Microsoft release Surface Pro and Surface Book with Mubuntu (MS version of Ubuntu, since MS already has working relationship with Canonical)

\- Cloud service via emulator that allows developer to build, test and submit iOS apps without actually owning a Mac

\- Google release Pixel Book which runs a brand new OS that is ChromeOS+Android hybrid.

We need:

\- Adobe releases Photoshop & Lightroom for Linux

\- Microsoft releases Office for Linux

\- A few major games for Linux. Makes Linux a game platform.

\- One or two major Mac developers develop for Linux

\- More developer using Electron and React Native for Ubuntu

But we will be back to the same by spring 2017 when Apple refreshes MacBook Pro with new CPU and cheaper price.

<comment><USER9> Thunderbolt 3 dock coming soon: [http://www.belkin.com/us/p/P-F4U095/](http://www.belkin.com/us/p/P-F4U095/)

<comment><USER10> That is actually pretty neat, I've been wanting a macbook dock for ages and this is almost that...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> No terminal is on par with iTerm. I was using Linux and *BSD for years, used many terminals, and of all iTerm is bread and butter (and with that font rendering and retina screen, nothing comes close). I would recommend to evaluate your needs, but be objective! If you can live with 16GB of RAM (I can, I do not do anything that would require me to use 32GB of RAM) then buy last year model. I have it, amazing machine.

And maybe it would be better to hold on to your MBP, and buy Chromebook, at least to test the water with Linux (or whatever OS you want to use). Install them on small machine, setup few essential programs to you and use them for few weeks. Why am I telling you this? Well I really appreciate some things on macOS, which will keep me glued to it for few more years at least. (iTerm is one of those things)

<comment><USER12> I use iTerm daily but I don't think I get it. What makes iTerm so great?

<comment><USER11> After I used many of dated terminals, everything from xterm to urxvt (was ok), to more modern ones like termite (this one I liked very minimal), I really appreciated everything about iTerm. The amount of GUI customization is insane, plus you can configure everything about from key bindings to mouse, arrangement, etc etc. I really liked it how it doesn't get in your way. Splits are amazing, it is the only terminal where clipboard has worked perfectly with tmux,zsh,vim/emacs combo out of the box. I was really impressed how little configuration it required.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Just got a Thinkpad T460s. Practically the same dimensions and specs of a X1 Carbon but with replaceable memory and disk. Can easily be made to have 20GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD, and if someone makes a 32GB DIMM could potentially go up to 36GB of RAM although that's not advertised as supported. Everything works in Linux just fine and the 2560x1440 screen looks great.

<comment><USER14> T460s only has partially replaceable memory, some of it is soldered on. And god help you if that fails outside warranty, spare Thinkpad mainboards usually cost more than a new laptop.

<comment><USER15> I'm curious about the mother board comment. I have a t430, and rebuilt it the motherboard cost me 30$ via ebay. Searching for the t430s I'm seeing about 40 -> 80 on ebay. I'd think that by the time you need to replace the mainboard, it'd be at more attainable levels on the second hand market.

<comment><USER14> Third party mainboards are either used (and you don't know whether and for how long they'll work) or not initialized (throwing errors during boot). Factory replacements via Lenovo's spare parts service cost you $400+ for simple models and $800+ for dedicated graphics models.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I mostly used Macs for about ten years, but I don't like the direction the ecosystem is taking (cloud, app store, etc.), so recently switched to an XPS 13 (developer edition) running Ubuntu. (I actually also gave an SP4 a good chance for a few months, but couldn't get on with Windows.) It's pretty decent (both the laptop and Ubuntu) - sometimes wish the display was brighter or speakers louder, but depends on the environment. Nice size, bit heavy, but feels solid. Wifi was a bit dodgy before updating to 16.10 - seems fine now though. The HD screen is nice (once you change the scale setting; there's a problem with the touch screen not working after sleep though). I've never been much of a keyboard snob, but this keyboard is so much nicer than a MBA.

<comment><USER17> Just making sure you meant to say what you did; did you say the xps13 was a bit heavy? I thought it was rather light.

<comment><USER16> I think this is more about feeling heavier than it looks. Pretty sure it's heavier than my 13" MBA though (despite being smaller, area-wise).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> One thing I never liked about my Macbook is that there is no option for a matte screen. So I consider switching and finally getting a matte one now:

[http://www.productchart.com/laptops/sets/1](http://www.productchart.com/laptops/sets/1)

I will replace Windows with Linux. I heard Thinkpads are good for this. But the Dell XPS series looks very compelling too.

</comment><comment><USER19> You might want to be more specific, about the "pro" part that you want which is no longer in the MBP. For instance others have pointed out that the 16GB limitation is in all notebooks which use the same intel chipset and low voltage ram, so you'll have to sacrifice battery life for more memory. That's fine for some folks but not for others.

<comment><USER20> _you 'll have to sacrifice battery life for more memory_

Or get a bigger battery. Not all laptops are stuck with a non-removable battery that must fit a certain size.

<comment><USER19> Then you're sacrificing space. Look, that's a perfectly fine tradeoff, but OP didn't mention what tradeoffs he was willing to make.

For me: I would rather have a smaller and lighter computer since I travel. The battery doesn't have to last more than 5 hours since I'm either out and traveling or at home and plugged in, but if it is plugged in it has to be able to drive pixels on an external monitor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I honestly don't know what everyone is complaining about WRT the Dell XPS line. I have a refurbished Dell XPS 13 (Skylake) -- NON-Developer Edition even -- and I'm very happy running Arch Linux without any headaches. It's a great laptop with excellent battery life and performance. I don't experience coil- whine at all. (Although, I've heard the rumor that the coil whine is a bigger deal on the XPS 15.)

Naturally, the Arch Linux community has an extremely helpful wiki to help you get set up:

[https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dell_XPS_13_(2016)](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dell_XPS_13_\(2016\))

</comment><comment><USER22> I'd also miss iTerm.

Have you looked at the Dell XPS 13 Dev edition, the Razer Blade Pro, the Lenovo X1 Carbon, Lenovo T Series, or the Asus UX305F?

</comment><comment><USER23> What about a 2015 MBP? I also have a 2012 model, with a little water damage, and am seriously thinking of upgrading to 2015 and then giving Apple one more upgrade cycle to come to its senses.

<comment><USER24> My guess is there may be decent sales around thanksgiving as vendors look to clear last year's stock. I'm mostly hoping saner people prevail at apple too. Or you could learn to type on an ipad, which is clearly the future of computing!

<comment><USER6> Saner people did prevail at Apple. That's why for a laptop that typically lasts 5+ years they went with USB-C to replace the other dozen antiquated ports.

<comment><USER23> Some of us were using those antiquated ports.

<comment><USER6> I know. I'm one of them.

But I will always applaud Apple for when they do things like this because through sheer attrition they will move the industry forward.

The iMac is largely what made USB a success. And I am hoping this will make a single connector world a success.

<comment><USER23> A single-connector world is not an end in itself. The reason anyone finds it appealing is because it means people won't have to carry a forest of adapters and connectors, or worry about incompatible devices.

But that's what Apple is now forcing us to do if we buy their new laptop. USB-A is going to be around for years to come, as is HDMI. I'm not going to throw out my extremely expensive Thunderbolt display because it uses a heretical connector. I am not going to refuse to speak at a conference because the projector doesn't work with my new machine.

The basic requirement of a professional machine is that it let us get our work done. This is just design wank.

<comment><USER24> As a wag on twitter said -- let's call it a courage of cables that we can haul around with us!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> copying my comment from here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12832547](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12832547)

You can buy a dell xps 15 today that comes with: 3840 x 2160 display / 1tb pcie solid state disk / nvidia gtx 960m (crucial for developing cuda programs and prototyping deep learning on your laptop) / 32g ram. For $2340 (ten percent off coupon at the top of the page). I'm not sure if this link will work: [http://www.dell.com/en- us/shop/productdetails/xps-15-9550-la...](http://www.dell.com/en- us/shop/productdetails/xps-15-9550-laptop/dncwx1609h)

And this thing comes with regular usb ports and an hdmi port instead of usb-c nonsense so I don't have to immediately drop $250 in dongles just to keep the capabilities I already have. (And one usb-c port).

here's a detailed guide to getting with ubuntu from a year ago: [https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2301071](https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2301071)

it appears that it only works modestly well. So if you buy this, you're probably going to have to live with Windows or the issues in the above thread.

</comment><comment>==

My personal plan is to buy a 1-ish year old mac and cross my fingers that someone builds a well-supported powerful linux laptop by 2018. Good sleep/power management support seems to be a common problem.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm in the same situation and right now leaning towards a beefy hackintosh desktop + maybe one of the small macbooks. It's such a pain though.

<comment><USER26> Would using one effect your Apple Developer status if you are seen using one of these?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I've been using an HP Spectre X360 15" with a 4K touchscreen which is truly amazing. The only downside is that the one USB 3 port is not a thunderbolt port, making it not all that useful unless you get a dongle that allows you to plug in a regular USB cable.

Other than that, I've been enjoying it immensely and it made me stick to Windows at a time at which I really wanted to switch to Linux or MacOS.

</comment><comment><USER28> If you want more power Lenovo T. If you want something closer to air, Lenovo X.

<comment><USER29> I'm really skeptical about Lenovo because of the proprietary software issues they've had, even read things about bioses with sketchy stuff in them which couldn't be flashed and such.

<comment><USER30> Erm which proprietary software issues are you referring to?

<comment><USER29> This [http://thehackernews.com/2015/08/lenovo-rootkit- malware.html](http://thehackernews.com/2015/08/lenovo-rootkit-malware.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Lenovo... works really well. Ubuntu + Lenovo can last many years.

</comment><comment><USER32> I find Razer Blade laptop as a good replacement for Macbook pro. Also Pc Specialist has custom laptops - [https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/laptops/](https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/laptops/)

</comment><comment><USER33> The options I am considering as substitutes for the new mbp 13" are:

\- The new razer blade stealth: Great built quality, kaby lake, usb-c/thunderbolt 3, great screen, reasonable price, although im not sure Ubuntu would work out of the box.

\- Xiaomi Air 13: This is not really a competitor but im really tempted to try it. It is cheap (less than 1k) it looks like having a nice built quality, fast ram, good i5 processor, dedicated nvidia GPU ( so may be some acceleration for training small deep learning models). USB-C, USB3, HDMI, Ubuntu works out of the box. CONS: you have to import it.

</comment><comment><USER34> What's wrong with your current laptop?

<comment><USER35> My first thought. Do you really need to change because you broke your macbook, or do you want to change because its "trendy" ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Few problems:

CPU is slowing down lately, even switching tabs in Chrome sometimes takes a 1sec to actually render the page.

Disk is getting too small. I use a lot of VMs for work and I never have enough space to run them all.

Laptop is dead, if I replace it I will be without a laptop for weeks according to Apple.

I let it drop once making the fan very noisy, not really a problem just annoying.

<comment><USER36> So, you've dropped the laptop and the fan became noisy, which would also lead to CPU throttling because if the fan isn't working right, CPU is going to overheat and your laptop is going to suffer as the result of this.

Did you even take the back off to try to reseat it or clean up the laptop? You can try to take it to an authorized Apple repair shop to see if they can re- seat the fan/clean up the fans for you.

I have same '12 rMBP and the performance is just as snappy as it was back in '12 and I've never reinstall OS either, so it's all consistent and snappy.

I have no plans to upgrade this because there's nothing else that comes close to replacing it right now, not even '16 rMBP.

As for the disk, I put my VMs on external SSDs, works great. Certainly cheaper than replacing the laptop and easier to upgrade every year to more storage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Lenovo T or X series, ASUS Zenbook series.

</comment><comment><USER38> I love my Aorus X3: [http://www.aorus.com/Product/Features/X3%20Plus%20v6](http://www.aorus.com/Product/Features/X3%20Plus%20v6)

Portability, power and build quality are all excellent. Battery life isn't up to MacBook standards, but you get a good 4 to 5 hours on a single charge which is still fairly usable. The trackpad isn't as nice as a MacBook either, but it's good enough. Everything else about it has the MacBook Pro completely outclassed in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER30> I am a Lenovo Thinkpad user x230 specifically. Heavily criticised by people who love their X220's but it works great for me 12" form factor and packs a punch, separate slot for SSD if you want one and loads of ports. I have 2 actually. One runs my home server. I dropped out of the main stream sphere mainly because of this carrot donkey driven eco-system (Who knows where they are taking us). I am quite happy with my Arch Linux deployment. Its decent for gaming too.

</comment><comment><USER39> This isn't really a recommendation, but if I could have it my way, I'd take this computer, except with OS X:

[https://system76.com/laptops/oryx](https://system76.com/laptops/oryx)

• 15.6" 1080p IPS LED-backlit Display

• NVIDIA GeForce 1070 8GB

• 3.5 GHz i7-6700HQ

• 32 GB DD4 at 2400MHz (upgradeable to 64 GB)

• OS Drive: 512 GB NVMe (PCI with 2600MB/s read and 1600 MB/s write)

• 2nd Drive: 2.5" 1 TB SSD

• 1080p HD Webcam

• Kensington® Lock port

• 1x Gigabit Ethernet

• 1× HDMI

• 2× Mini DisplayPort

• 2× USB 3.1 Type-C

• 3× USB 3.0 Type-A

• Stereo Speakers

• Stereo Mic

• Headphone Jack

• Mic Jack

• S/PDIF

• SD Card Reader

• Ubuntu 16.04.1

$2,870

Obviously the dream would be for it to look like a MacBook Pro, but I would give up the sleek case if I could run OS X reliably on that sucker.

<comment><USER40> * off-center trackpad (of unknown quality) is right there a no-go for me...

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I'm absolutely loving my SP4 as my main laptop for a couple of months. It has enough juice to be able to do most things well, amazing display and weighs like nothing.

</comment><comment> et-al What's the use case?

If it's just for general web development, my plan is to buy a used 2015 MBP, but with AppleCare until mid-2018 or later, and re-roll the dice in two years.

</comment><comment><USER42> I'm running a HP Spectre 13. Couldn't be happier

<comment><USER43> They look great actually. Are you running Linux or Windows?

I've been a Mac user for the last few years, but spent the few before that as a ThinkPad + GNU/Linux guy. I could see myself going back to GNU/Linux on the desktop one day.

<comment><USER42> I'm on Windows 10, with a VM linux (when it launched, driver support was buggy to say the least, and I've not been bothered enough to try adding linux again)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> What is so special about iTerm? Features, font rendering?

For features and portability, I can warmly recommend SecureCRT[0], you won't find a more capable terminal app anywhere.

[0] [https://www.vandyke.com/products/securecrt/index.html](https://www.vandyke.com/products/securecrt/index.html)

<comment><USER45> I like the ability to easily have multiple panes without having to learn tmux.

<comment><USER46> I find that Terminator solves this problem.

You can control it with the mouse and the keybindings are much closer in simplicity to iterm than tmux.

[https://linux.die.net/man/1/terminator](https://linux.die.net/man/1/terminator)

Check it out :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I have March 2015 MB 2.9GHz with 8GB Ram. Working cool and I don't guess I'd need up-gradation

</comment><comment><USER48> Recently bought an Entroware Apollo ([https://www.entroware.com/store/laptops](https://www.entroware.com/store/laptops)). Amazing device, if you don't mind Linux and are in the UK.

</comment><comment><USER49> I've been struggling with the same question, ending up sticking with the MBPs.

Resell value, build quality, battery life, weight are all factors that other manufacturers can't match. I really wish they'd released something better though.

</comment><comment><USER50> Just will left it here [https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/surface/devices/surface-book](https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/surface/devices/surface-book)

</comment><comment><USER51> I bought a HP zbook studio G3, looks nice, not heavy and can deal with 32GB RAM ;-).

</comment><comment><USER52> XMG ( [https://www.mysn.de](https://www.mysn.de) ) offers custom, fully configurable high-end laptops. Take a look if you really want high performance without compromises.

</comment><comment><USER53> Disappointed by the new Macbook? Try the old Macbook.

</comment><comment><USER54> The Dell developer edition laptops are really excellent machines. I've used the M3800 and the XPS13 and found them both to be great.

</comment><comment><USER55> I'm not a Mac User but I know that the Dell XPS 15 is a decent notebook with a very good keyboard and all the connectors you need.

</comment><comment><USER56> Damn near anything. For the markup on equivalent specs that Apple commands, you can often get two laptops from other manufacturers.

<comment><USER57> That's not really true, if you configure equivalent rMBP and Thinkpad, the Thinkpad is going to cost you more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> For most things, my C720 Chromebook runs Ubuntu and handle any tasks I need. Don't equate price with utility ;-)

</comment><comment><USER59> Whoever builds an easy hackintosh with metabox level specs will have my business

</comment><comment><USER60> see also [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12815183](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12815183)

</comment><comment><USER61> Dell XPS 15 (With touch screen retina style display).

</comment><comment><USER62> the zenbooks look like a good alternative a

</comment><comment><USER63> So what made MB "Pro"? SD card slot? Height? Weight? Absence of TouchBar? People complain about 16GB RAM. Does your current MPB has more?

<comment><USER64> What made the MB "Pro", if memory serves right, it was filled with components that represented the state of the art when it was released. Best screen, latest generation of CPU, PCIe SSDs, etc... The best you could possibly get, in a sturdy, well designed machine, coming with an OS that just works.

In 2013, some company even found that the best performing Windows laptop was a MBP (!). [1]

[1]: [http://www.zdnet.com/article/want-the-most-reliable- windows-...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/want-the-most-reliable-windows-pc- buy-a-mac-or-maybe-a-dell/)

<comment><USER65> The GPUs were never state of the art on Mac laptops, and they don't matter for those that just use iTerm + Emacs/Vi.</comment></comment></comment>


Elon Musk Says "Hardware 2" Teslas Will Get Better Self-Driving Software in June - <AUTHOR> https://nyc.epeak.in/2017/05/22/elon-musk-says-hardware-2-teslas-will-get-better-self-driving-software-in-june/ <comment><USER2> > An NHTSA investigation into the crash revealed that the car's software was > not to blame for the accident and that virtually every automatic emergency > braking system would also have failed to activate given the specific > circumstances of the crash.

Which is why Tesla should really stop marketing this as "self driving" or "semi-autonomous." These are safety features similar to those found on newer Hondas and BMWs (lane assist, emergency breaking) that are meant to supplement driving rather the replace the human. Sure Tesla's might be more advanced versions, but they shouldn't allow drivers to be less aware/more lazy.

<comment><USER3> Can you point to any evidence that Tesla owners are being confused by Tesla's marketing?

For example, after being challenged by the German authorities, Tesla commissioned a survey and it turned out that 98% of owners weren't confused:

[https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_attachments/t...](https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_attachments/tesla_survey_autopilot_awareness.pdf)</comment></comment>


Cylance Discloses Voting Machine Vulnerability - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cylance.com/cylance-discloses-voting-machine-vulnerability <comment><USER3> I worked as an election judge in the 2012 general election in Arapahoe County, Colorado. We had these exact machines. What isn't pictured is the physical security performed with them.

Typically, tamper seals that are identifiable as broken are placed on all access doors (including the power switch, data load slots, etc), access panels, and openings on the device. All seals were verified in tact before and after the election, and no voter was ever permitted in the back of the access panel where the firmware update would take place.

Before the machine starts, it gives a "zero" report which is verified independently by poll watchers, and confirms candidate choices are in place as needed. When the polls are closed, we seal everything again before the machines are sent back for reporting (at which point the seals are checked and verified prior to dumping results).

If this was really a damaging hack, the protective counter & live counters would show different numbers than what the machine read, but that didn't happen. It very clearly was tampered with, which means these physical measures would counteract any unwanted firmware updates during an election. It's preposterous to think that election judges aren't actively verifying seals during election day and making sure nobody is tampering with them.

<comment><USER4> You mean I could void all the votes simply by tampering with the seal? Seams like an easy attack

<comment><USER3> The answer to many physical security questions is "it depends." I don't have my materials on me anymore, but in general, seal tampering means a lot of extra scrutiny on the people watching the machines and transporting them. The chain of custody will pin the blame on the last person who signed off, and things get investigated as needed.

The system doesn't have something in place typically that says "if (sealVoided) { throw out election }" it just means that additional precautions are taken to ensure everything is good. It's never a binary answer, unfortunately.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Dear America,

This all sounds complicated and insecure.

Why can you not just do paper voting with simple ballots, like in Canada?

Yes, you have 10x the people, but just get 10x the human counters and scrutineers. Counting is parallelizable.

We run elections and get accurate, verifiable results in the same day.

Ours aren't as nasty as yours are, and we still have better anti-fraud than you do, since every paper ballot can be counted, as many times as needed. And since the thing which is counted is the same physical thing which can be audited, we can always verify the results if anything goes wrong.

You've had some problems with your ballots 16 years ago, and we're not sure why you haven't fixed this by now. After all, you've gotten people to the moon and robots to Mars--surely you'd want a fair, verifiable presidential election? (Especially when one of the two candidates is, frankly, terrifying to all your friends around the world.)

Love, Canada

<comment><USER6> _Why can you not just do paper voting with simple ballots, like in Canada?_

As much as I like Canada's easily audited voting system, there's a good reason for the US to not use a simple way of counting votes: They don't have simple _ballots_. Rather than just voting for one MP, as we do, a typical American might be asked to vote for a President, a Senator, a Representative, yes/no on 17 state propositions, a State Senator, a State Representative, the BART Director, the City College of San Francisco Board of Trustees, the San Francisco Public Schools Board of Education, a Superior Court Judge, and yes/no on 25 city measures.

In order for those to be counted the same way as we do in Canada, you'd need to hand the voter a book of 51 ballots and have them dropped into 51 separate boxes...

<comment><USER7> How do you even come up with these weird convoluted non-arguments, we have many choices on a single ballot here too. It's called a list. You can put lists on paper.

<comment><USER6> In Canadian federal elections, the vote counting process is:

1\. Open the box. 2\. Dump the ballots onto the table. 3\. Make sure the box is empty. 4\. Pick up ballots one by one, say "this looks like a vote for "Mr. X", and place into the appropriate pile. 5\. Count how many ballots are in each pile.

This _particular_ process doesn't work if you have multiple choices on one ballot. I'm not saying that you can't use paper ballots for more complex elections -- you absolutely should, for the well-known verifiability reasons -- just that the counting process is never going to be as simple as the Canadian (or UK) process.

<comment><USER8> Where I live, the ballots we use are cut into one piece per question. Then the pieces are counted separately.

There was a court argument over the use of scales by some municipalities. The scales are used to weigh piles of votes to determine vote count. So ballots with multiple question are cut, sorted, then weighed. I'm looking into lead pens to give my vote more weight :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think it's high time we start taking these concerns seriously. If state actors can accomplish stuxnet, then hacking a voting system seems well within the realm of technical possibility.

Fortunately, there are pretty simple policies we can enact to prevent fraud and give faith in elections (both in America, as well as other countries). If you care, I'd perhaps start at [https://www.verifiedvoting.org/](https://www.verifiedvoting.org/)

<comment><USER10> They don't even need to throw the election. Two or three machines with absurd results in favor of Clinton or Trump would be enough to push the county into civil unrest.

<comment><USER11> Absurd results aren't what you want, since they're readily dismissed as localized, and people could believe that hacking had no effect on the overall result. You want to prove that hacking took place, but subtly, so that people can imagine it was widespread.

More effective would be to preselect a precise number of votes for a few machines in a swing state, with totals just 3-4 percentage points higher than what polling indicates for that precinct. Email a few journalists before the election: "I'm a engineer working to hack the election for Clinton, but I'm sickened by it and I want to blow the whistle... attached are encrypted tallies for the voting machines we compromised in precinct XXX. I know we have a team in YYY and I think in ZZZ, but I wasn't able to get data for those machines out. Decryption keys will follow Nov 15th."

<comment><USER12> If you used a one time pad you could skip the whole hack the election part and generate a key that reflects the actual totals after they've been published.

<comment><USER13> Hm... Is it a crime to write an email, not under oath, to a journalist accepting responsibility for a crime that one didn't commit (and had no idea was taking place)? I'd like to answer no but I'm sure a judge would use the "fire!" In a crowded movie theater analogy to answer in the affirmative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I really don't see what problem these machines are solving, except for "as an operative, I would like additional vectors to manipulate the election".

In Germany, we get

(a) a paper ballot

(b) a pen

Works perfectly. And quickly.

<comment><USER12> How are the paper votes tabulated? If it's by machine you've just kicked the can further down the road.

<comment><USER14> By hand.

<comment><USER15> Same in the UK. Anyone who can vote can also take part in "The Count", where groups of volunteers count the votes in regional centres.

<comment><USER16> Wouldn't that be easy to spoof numbers? Getting a few hundred people to add 10 or 15 to a candidate in a swing state could make a huge difference.

<comment><USER17> There are 3 volunteers to tell, write and cross-check the paper ballot; and it's a public audience, meaning that there are a bunch of witnesses, including families who want to teach kids why the votes can be trusted, and party representatives who want to check that the election is not tampered with. It's hard to cheat when so many people can testify.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> noir-york Democracy must not only be done, but also seen to be done. Trust in that most essential of democratic processes - vote counting - must be absolute.

Approaching vote counting as a mere technical problem that can be solved with enough technical safeguards misses the point. You cannot just ask a democracy to beta test vote counting and fix the bugs post-election - that will kill trust in the process.

Politics is polarised enough as is and you will find demagogues who will latch on to anything to reduce the legitimacy of an election.

It shouldn't even be up for discussion that trust and legitimacy are the most important goals in vote counting. Stick to paper voting and only introduce e-voting in parallel and not as the authoritative and final vote counting solution.

</comment><comment><USER18> I wonder why countries don't use India's simple and scalable electronic voting systems. The latest ones have voter verified paper audit trails. They even have pooling systems to prevent counts from any single voting booth become known to prevent voter intimidation.

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

<comment><USER19> I believe you've answered your own question, unfortunately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why Electronic Voting is a BAD Idea - Computerphile: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI)

</comment><comment><USER21> Really what it seems is that we need more audits on machines. If democracy is to be a pivotal part of our election process we need to release the source code of these machines to ensure that we find and solve problems.

<comment><USER22> Seems like a decent place to apply formal verification as well to show the machines are bug free. Voting machines are critically high impact if they have bugs and (famous last words) the complexity of the software seems low.

<comment><USER23> The counting app itself might be low-complexity, but I'm pretty sure the app runs on some kind of off-the-shelf OS with hundreds of millions of lines of code and at least a few known vulnerabilities.

A somewhat outdated version of Windows is a common choice, as is some random non-LTS version of Ubuntu. I don't think OpenBSD is particularly popular among self-serve kiosk manufacturers.

<comment><USER24> I think it's worth adding that if it _doesn 't_ use some off-the-shelf OS, then the complexity of the software just jumped a few levels because you're talking about writing a lot more lower-level components to make it work. Using an off-the-shelf OS is almost definitely the better way to go unless there's some obvious reason that it won't work (Like architecture issues). I would also add that the choice of OS matters a lot less then configuration - If you do your configuration carefully and strip down the active components in the system, then you can make any of them secure enough for this task. And if you do a poor job of it, then even OpenBSD isn't going to save you.

That said, while I do agree the voting software should be open-source in principle, I'm not really as concerned with hackable bugs in that software that can only be exploited through physical means. If they have physical access to the machine like in this video then you're already shot - <USER2> you have preventive measures that will make it obvious when physical access has occurred. If you don't physically secure the machine, then it doesn't really matter how good the code is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Is there any way you can prevent hacks like this that require physical access? I guess cryptographically signing the updates, adding tamper proof seals and requiring multiple people to approve updates would help. The general mantra however is that once a hacker has physical access to your machine all bets are off.

Also, what happens if there's a random hardware/software glitch where incrementing one vote actually increments 10 votes? Is this checked for? How much reliance is there on the software and hardware being error free?

<comment><USER3> We definitely have seals, but for technical solutions, look at how Apple secures their devices. Signed firmware updates, public key crypto, and a well thought chain of trust solve these issues.

The problem is that the actual poll creation is done on a per county basis. I don't know how you would do this in such a way that every random county an precinct in America could have signing keys, firmware updates, etc., just sitting around ready to roll to build elections with.

<comment><USER22> > The problem is that the actual poll creation is done on a per county basis. > I don't know how you would do this in such a way that every random county an > precinct in America could have signing keys, firmware updates, etc., just > sitting around ready to roll to build elections with.

You mean creating and distributing the keys would be problematic if every county had their own keys? Are there any practical solutions to this?

Couldn't you only have a few keys that are used for many counties and updates should be verified and signed by multiple people? Each county could still verify the contents of the update was correct (e.g. correct names on the ballot).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> lovely! more paranoia about the upcoming competition for a single political position.

as if I needed more of a reason to say "wow, this is rigged", now I see this!

I can't imagine how well this will go. november is a cake walk. january is where the fun starts.

</comment><comment><USER26> [https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/11/voting_techno...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/11/voting_technolo.html)

</comment><comment><USER27> "The decision to announce the research findings was intended to encourage increased sales and revenue for Q4 2016."

<comment><AUTHOR> Ugh.

<comment><USER28> not sure are aware, but the actual quote is "The decision to announce the research findings was intended to encourage remediation of the vulnerabilities prior to Election Day".

<comment><USER29> 3 days before the election.... sure it was...

<comment><USER28> It doesn't seem likely they were seeking contracts or revenue at this time either. Perhaps making a political statement?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>