The Shape of Things to Come - <AUTHOR> https://granolashotgun.com/2017/03/08/the-shape-of-things-to-come/ <comment><USER2> Wow, this was excellent. Thanks for posting.

<comment><AUTHOR> This blog has many great posts on the topic of suburban development, decline and dynamics. For example:

[https://granolashotgun.com/2016/08/31/a-thousand-hidden- subs...](https://granolashotgun.com/2016/08/31/a-thousand-hidden-subsidies/)

and the follow-up: [https://granolashotgun.com/2016/09/01/them-thats-got- shall-h...](https://granolashotgun.com/2016/09/01/them-thats-got-shall-have- them-thats-not-shall-lose/)

[https://granolashotgun.com/2016/10/13/the-talisman-of- colera...](https://granolashotgun.com/2016/10/13/the-talisman-of-colerain- township/)

[https://granolashotgun.com/2016/07/23/the-great-hollowing- ou...](https://granolashotgun.com/2016/07/23/the-great-hollowing-out/)

[https://granolashotgun.com/2016/10/13/our-state- religion/](https://granolashotgun.com/2016/10/13/our-state-religion/)

[https://granolashotgun.com/2017/01/09/gazeboland/](https://granolashotgun.com/2017/01/09/gazeboland/)

<comment><USER2> Yep, I perused it after reading the linked post. Really solid stuff, thanks again.</comment></comment></comment>


Email sucks. Time saving tips from Kevin Rose - <AUTHOR> http://kevinrose.com/blogg/2010/8/17/email-sucks-5-time-saving-tips.html <comment><USER4> The biggest issue is you have to work out how important email is to what you do + achieve. If you are a developer, it's probably a distraction.

If you are a founder, entrepreneur or similar then your (filtered, non-spam, non-bacn) email is contextual to your business relationships and actually prioritizing your time to properly tend to it is important.

This whole "I have over 1000 unread emails, oh my!" crap just feels like bad email management and poor time keeping.

I filter away all twitter/facebook/plancast auto-notifications, intentionally avoid mailing lists unless there is an RSS option and keep very on top of spam using similar email address tricks (I tend to use <foo>@<mydomain> but it's the same deal).

So with the Spam and Bacn taken care of, I actually am left with a very manageable amount of ham ('real') email every day and so I set aside the appropriate amount of time to deal with it because it is all high-value messages.

Things work out fine, relationships are founded/maintained and I don't have to email people automatically telling them I couldn't be bothered to read their email in 14 days - which would make them look unimportant and me look like a bit of a douche.

<comment><USER5> "This whole "I have over 1000 unread emails, oh my!" crap just feels like bad email management and poor time keeping."

I'd wager he gets hundreds of emails per day from random people, some of whom could actually be important. This is in addition to internal email lists at his company, VIPs, etc. I get dozens and I'm quite a bit less public/important than Kevin Rose.

Say he gets the following daily:

30 messages from people he knows 150 emails from fans, strangers, some of whom might be worth responding to 50 internal company emails that merit SOME attention

That's 220 emails per day to process. Say 150ish on the weekends, so he has 300+ to process every morning. Now say he takes a 1 week vacation.

Call it an average of 1 minute per email for processing (some are near 0, some need to be scanned, some need to be carefully read, some require short replies, some require longer replies). That's 4+ hours per day.

What he needs is an assistant to go thru the "I don't know you" pile to see if there is any "ham".

<comment><USER6> _some of whom_

I hope you meant some of which.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> GMail users: If you find a site that doesn't like the + character, you can also use strategically placed periods to help direct spam. firstname.lastname@example.com and email@example.com are all routed to the same account. Just create rules based on the address you give to friends and the one you give to potential spammers.

<comment><USER8> I liberally sprinkle my address everywhere (here it is again, spammers: email@example.com) and I don't have a spam problem. I get at most 2-4 messages per week that make it through GMail's spam filters.

Those are all glaringly obvious spam though, to the point that I've begun suspecting that they're just using me to confirm that suspected spam really is spam.

<comment><USER9> I agree -- I rarely (few times per week) receive spam to my main inbox.

I used to obfuscate my email address, but realized it doesn't matter. Spammers will get at you no matter what (unused email addresses get spam), and obfuscation just annoys people who would like to contact you. I let GMail do its job.

<comment><USER10> I once ran a grep on my personal postfix mailserver's logs. Turns out I would constantly 550 bounce spam for email addresses that didn't exist for my domains. Thousands of connections a day, all looking for adam@, barry@, charles@... and down an alphabetical list.

That, on top of the relay requests, would fill up a single day's logfile 5 times faster than authorized traffic.

<comment> mike-cardwell This is why I stopped using firstname@domain and started using firstname.surname@domain. Tends to stop the dictionary attacks from working.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've been noodling with an idea for a while, and maybe this is a good time to see people's responses:

We have Spam filters. Why not Content filters? (ok, a ham strainer)

I want unlimited, user-defined bayesian filters for my email. Flag everything political-sounding, and have it (reasonably accurately) filtered - no more FUD chain letters in your main inbox! Flag anything funny - get a humor folder. Flag everything that's a bug report - get a bug report folder. Ultimately, you have an auto-sorting tagging system defined by your needs.

I'm primarily thinking it'd work for people with high-to-very-high email volume, as then the filters would have enough to learn from. But even if it's somewhat inaccurate, pre-sorted mail would be _extremely_ useful to me - <USER3> just have to correct it occasionally, instead of correcting it _every_ time.

\</comment><comment>---

More on-topic, the single-most-useful thing I've done to manage my inbox has been to make a "this week" query-based folder. Far fewer things fall out of my attention that way, because it's a reasonable amount to scroll over if I've got a bit of time - something I _never_ did when I had 3k+ in the same view.

<comment><USER12> See [http://blog.jgc.org/2010/08/solving-kevin-roses-email- proble...](http://blog.jgc.org/2010/08/solving-kevin-roses-email-problem.html)

<comment><USER11> Oooh, I'll have to look into that, thanks.

I'm personally planning on developing my own at some point ("learning" programs fascinate me), but that might fit the bill in the meantime (probably a few years...).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> All of these tips are generalizations of the same idea: with email, nobody grabs your attention without your consent. This is a new idea in society - <USER3> could always get someone's attention by finding them in person, and you could usually reach someone on the telephone. Call screeners and security guards are expensive, so only a few people had them. But now, I can just open up my GMail preferences and have my mail prioritized, flagged, tagged, deleted, and archived without lifting a finger. And malevolent emails are filtered out by someone else! At the end of the day, effectively dealing with email is like programming - when something sucks, automate it.

</comment><comment><USER14> Tip 6. Stop routing a ton of noise into your primary email accounts, use something like OtherInbox.com for trivial stuff such as Twitter and Facebook notifications.

<comment><USER15> I just don't let any of that crap get into my email, personally. Facebook, Twitter, and other low-priority sites I check on a case-by-case pull basis--I don't need to be notified if something happens on those sites, because if it's really important the person can email me themselves and if it isn't important it can wait until I have time to waste.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you get that much email you have issues larger than what you do with those thousand emails. The root problem is that you _got_ a thousand emails. Address _that_.

e.g. Instead of firstname.lastname@example.com - try not signing up for shady lists in the first place. Has anything of value come out of a newsletter from a dicey web site?

<comment><USER17> Your comment might be on topic if it wasn't for who the writer of the article is. It's not unlikely that simply by being himself and having an email address he's going to receive that thousand emails and there is no easy way to address that short of changing identity or to stop using email altogether.

Shady lists probably are not his main problem.

<comment><USER16> And people in that unique situation should hire assistants.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Curious: how many of those thousands of messages are actually personal and worth reading? How many are notifications from stores, social sites, and so on? (Programmers only:) How many are notifications from your apps, giving you updates about processes you're running?

I find it incredibly hard to understand how anyone could have a thousand personal worthwhile messages coming in every day. I guess an Internet celebrity (or famous angel investor!) would have a large number of contact attempts each day, but that counts as work email, right? (The author's post says "1002 unread personal".)

<comment><USER19> This is also what I would like to know. How many are spams, automatic notifications, "cold calls" and undesirable personnal sollicitations, mail sent to him to be in the loop but which are not really relevant to him, etc.

Regarding your second point, I do think it is possible to have many hundred mails per day of personnal sollicitations which I would call legitimate mails.

When most people cross the street no one cares and they can move freely. If it is a well known person, like a star, many people will try to talk to him, ask for something, or whatever to the point they can't move or even become in danger. So it is possible that some people become overdrawn by legitimate mails. But this is quite exceptional and concluding from this that "mail sucks" is not very fair.

It sucks and in many ways, but not because of that type of situation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> i've been "inbox zero" since i was introduced to email (c. 1994, on my dad's university vms account). my inbox contains only messages requiring some action (either reply or something external). everything else goes into the trash ("bacn", e.g. update notices for software i don't use anymore, bank newsletters, etc.) or into a folder (or is just "archived" in the case of gmail). i really don't understand why so many people have so much trouble coping with their email. i used to spot english majors by their enormous inboxes when i was in college....

<comment><USER21> I have a similar policy, and a saying that 'as goes my Inbox so too goes my mind'. Using it, as I do, as a de facto 'to do' list isn't best practice, but it works for me. When I have <30 messages, I know I'm on top of things.

Currently have 92. Must. Leave. HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> correction to tip #2: the plus trick (firstname.lastname@example.com) works with many mail systems not just gmail (as stated). its origins predate gmail.

correction to tip #4: iPhone's append "Sent from my iPhone" not "Sent from iPhone". i'd notice the missing "my". "Sent from my mobile." is just fine and probably a better approach.

<comment><USER23> > correction to tip #2: the plus trick (firstname.lastname@example.com) works with > many mail systems not just gmail (as stated). its origins predate gmail.

Obligatory note: this doesn't work with all signup forms, unfortunately.

<comment><USER24> In some email systems like postfix, you can change what the + character is (like . or _ or even numbers) So you could have email@example.com

<comment><USER19> Underscore is not a valid character in user names. Use - instead.

<comment> mike-cardwell You're confusing "usernames" and "email addresses". Underscores are fine in the local part of an email address. The following are also valid:

firstname.lastname@example.com

"Foo@Bar"@example.com

<comment><USER19> Indeed. Sorry about this. I was confusing local part with domain name. Here is a blog note providing a detailed information on this.

[http://haacked.com/archive/2007/08/21/i-knew-how-to- validate...](http://haacked.com/archive/2007/08/21/i-knew-how-to-validate-an- email-address-until-i.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is what I do for my work email:

1\. I create rules for every Exchange DL that I consider important. This is the first line of defense.

2\. Any email that I receive that I am not in the to or cc line is sent to a "Check Later" email folder. Either someone bcc'd me, or someone (maybe me) adding me to a DL that I didn't create a rule for.

3\. My Inbox should contain only mail that is directly to me.

4\. Any mail in my Inbox that is not actionable (either I'm done with it or it's informational) is filed away.

Of course, these strategies only work for certain people (I'm just a cog in a machine), but it has done wonders for keeping my Inbox manageable. I rely heavily on Outlook Search to find mails that I remember seeing but have filed away (I have a single "I've read these mails and want to keep them" folder).

</comment><comment><USER26> One thing I've been wanting to mention at HN but don't think is worth starting a thread for is how bad email is for task / project management, and how much I think there's room for an alternative.

My running dream is that it would be web based (but not a todo list) and would be based on the idea of a project built of tasks with definite finishing points, and subprojects, and the ability to direct other people to them and ask/answer questions, make notes, verify things and confirm tasks are complete.

I picture it in my head as Etherpad meets old-school vertical scrolling 2D games meets Gantt charts meets braiding ( <http://theautry.org/ortega/images/four_string_braid.jpg> ), I guess meets Google Wave though I've never used it.

The braids go to other people "request input from Alice, then verification from Bob, then back to me for implementation", and as the "view" scrolls, the completed tasks are fixed in time and cannot be altered, but can be brought back up to the front for reattention.

I put it here so I can note it somewhere and because it's related to how annoying email is to use for ongoing work between people. I'm suspicious that it's impractical if delved into in any depth, and that the good bits are done in some existing tracker / helpdesk / ticket / project management software if I knew how to look for that kind of thing.

<comment><USER27> Team Foundation Server from MS could achieve this I reckon (might need a bit of work to get it exactly how you want).

Or possibly even (I hate to say it) sharepoint.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The best way to reduce the amount of email you get is to reduce the amount you send. Works like a charm.

<comment><USER29> +1!

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I used to have two places to check for all of that semi-automated "I'd like to read this but it isn't urgent" material: my email inbox (mailing lists, newsletters, etc) and my RSS reader.

The fix -- a quick'n'dirty script that moves all those emails over to RSS: <http://github.com/danshoutis/mail-to-rss>

Caveat: if you're using Google Reader, you need to put the output RSS+HTML into a non-password-protected place, which means someone who can guess the URL can read your stuff. (For maximum convenience, I'm just dumping it into the public folder of my dropbox account.)

It certainly needs polishing, but not so much that I've felt the need to work on it recently. :)

<comment> mike-cardwell Seems more sensible to me to filter mailing list mail into its own mail folder than filtering it into an rss feed. At least when it's in a mail folder you can reply to it without messing about...

<comment><USER30> It does get filtered into its own folder; it's just that I prefer to read that folder's contents in Google Reader, along with all my other "feed" stuff, in one shot.

This is more appropriate if you mostly lurk on mailing lists; if there was a list I was highly active on, I'd probably treat it differently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I can think of three tips that are more useful than any of the ones in the article:

1\. Don't subscribe to mailing lists. Really, don't.

2\. Answer yes or no questions with a yes or a no.

3\. Don't reply if the email doesn't require (or warrant) a response.

</comment><comment><USER32> At the risk of double entry...

Regarding 3) VIP filter -- That's how I'm currently using AwayFind [1] with my GMail in Google Apps. My most frequent VIP filter is {if they reply today} but for some people I'll do {if they reply this week} and I get a phone call and it's read back to me. The context and timing is the important thing for me. The really powerful feature is specific words (optional) but I'm presently inclined to rely on my own reply behavior to set the tone of my perceived inbox. It's pretty addicting.

[1] #include 'disclaimer.h' /* I'm an advisor */

</comment><comment><USER33> I use the X1 search program to make my life a lot easier. At my office we have to use Outlook, X1 makes using email like having your own local copy of Gmail.

Doesn't really help with huge volumes of email, but it does help when you have to find that email you were sent last week along with 7000 other emails.

</comment><comment><USER34> Why not create a mail with a 250 character limit. Or forget the limits, something like the facebook stream, but a lot more private just like email. Not sure if such a service exists today..something like a Short Message Service implemented with email protocols.

</comment><comment><USER35> Rather then put a +spam on the end I give a unique email out to every place that asks for it. Then I filter on that "To" address with labels. Makes it easy to scan.

Then I follow GTD of having an empty email box.

<comment><USER36> I do that too - the downside is that it actually multiplies the spam, because my address will be in the spammers lists multiple times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> heh, #4 is from me.

</comment><comment><USER38> Wasn't a big fan of this post. it would have been more interesting if he showed some examples of his three sentence replies to actual emails. 3 sentence emails sound great in theory, but really after a while if you are sending such short responses you are just an email mass producing factory.

I've been on the receiving end of some short/terse emails and I have to say that my impression is not positive. I understand people are busy, but when I read short replies to emails that don't make sense it doesn't make me feel special at all :(

</comment><comment><USER39> I don't read tiny white text on black backgrounds. I don't care who wrote it, or what it purports to say. Period.

<comment><USER40> Then may I suggest the Readability bookmarklet from Arc90? It's available at <http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/>

Or you could use Safari 5, which has it built in.

Aesthetics are a terrible grounds upon which to dismiss textual information.

<comment><USER41> You're right about aesthetics being terrible, shallow grounds for dismissal but there is one instance I can't bring myself to be sensible about: old math books that are typewritten with hand-written formulas. I've managed to read papers that are like but so far refuse to read entire books...</comment></comment></comment>


Dev Bootcamp is the future of our industry - <AUTHOR> http://dickey.xxx/dev-bootcamp <comment><USER2> Disclaimer: I think Dev Bootcamp is awesome. My friend went through it with zero programming background and is in love with programming now, and is as employable as many a fresh 4-year grad.

But this particular line is horrible: "For me, classes like algorithms and compilers were really hard because I just didn't care." And he goes on to characterize those who would be interested in such topics as engaging in "pointless optimization".

God help us if the future of our industry lies in blithe ignorance.

<comment><USER3> I'm a teacher at DBC and that's not our attitude at all, for what it's worth. :)

As we get better-and-better at optimizing those ten weeks, we'll add more advanced topics. I'd love to have a set of challenges like that later in the 10 weeks.

In fact, one group wrote their own custom query language to query github repositories (e.g., a language to say things like "Give me a list of all github repositories whose primary language is Ruby with more than 1 contributor and 10 outstanding TODOs") as part of their final 9-day project. They might not have had the vocabulary for it, but they were essentially wrestling with problems in compiler design.

The more salient part of his sentence is the last half: he didn't care. At DBC we spend tons of energy on creating situations where the only way to solve a (fun, hopefully) problem is to learn compilers, algorithms, databases, etc.

<comment><USER2> Definitely! From what I've heard (I was at the graduation on Friday), there's a level of investigation at DBC that goes beyond anything I've seen in other programs like Codeacademy. Which makes sense, I guess, given the much greater time investment and cost.

The thing that strikes me is how negatively a four-year program is seen. It's a matter of pride for some that 1. they got their jobs with a relatively minimal time investment 2. they learned "practical" concepts rather than the "useless" CS theory college grads get.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm sorry butI just have to call BS. First of all, CS degrees are not only attainable by those that learned CS at a young age. OK, whatever. Then we dismiss compilers, algorithms, etc as useless optimization ... Right, because the only practical things in this world are more useless blog engines written in RoR? Come on.

Secondly, we're treated to this business how all these RoR bootcamp grads are making $79K or something, OK great ... If you keep pumping out people that simply reach the bar of "can build a Web app from following tutorials on RoR" at such a rate, how do you think that's going affect this salary? You're going to flood the market with people that don't know very much, to just be honest about it and without sugar coating.

Then we get this to "full stack" stuff about how you should want to learn as much as possible .. well except for that nasty CS stuff, yuck! Make sure you only focus Web MV* framework du jour ... Seriously?

<comment><USER5> Why, oh why, do you have to pit Dev Bootcamp against a CS degree? Nobody is saying that algorithms and compilers should be dismissed, or that CS degrees should be abolished. That's certainly not our position.

Education is a nuanced and rich topic, and shouldn't be reduced to "CS GOOD. DEV BOOTCAMP BAD" or the other way around.

We're in a market right now where companies are willing to take on total beginners who show potential, and pay them to continue learning our craft. What the hell is wrong with that? And are you suggesting that we stop teaching new developers in order to protect people's salaries?

As far as I can tell, there will be high demand for good engineers for the foreseeable future.

And please don't reduce our work to "can build a Web app from following tutorials on RoR". You clearly haven't met any of our graduates. It pisses me off that you dismiss everyone's hard work without knowing anything about us.

<general plea>

Will everybody please get off their fucking high horse (Yes. I realize I'm on one too). Our industry is young, and we're all just figuring this out together. Nobody has all the answers and few things are black and white. Especially when it comes to the mess that is education and vocational training in this country.

</general plea>

<comment><USER4> But I didn't pit one against the other, did you read the article?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I completed this program earlier this year after burning out working tech support and failing, failing, failing to move up into dev ops, QA or some more satisfying, challenging technical role no matter how hard I tried.

I got hired right out of the program making twice what I've ever made before in my life, doing satisfying work in an in-demand field, learning every day.

Love it, love it, love it. Highly recommended. Full blow-by-blow here: <http://douglascalhoun.tumblr.com>

</comment><comment><USER7> Thank you for such a genuine, articulate endorsement of Dev Bootcamp's process. I was one of the students of the Summer 2012 cohort that met with you this past Friday, and can really identify with your thoughts. I was weeded out of my Intro Computer Science in the freshman year of college. I had never been exposed to programming before, and was overwhelmed and intimidated by all my peers who had been coding for years. I've spent the better part of the last year trying to make my way back into the technical world. I'm intelligent, motivated, and passionate about coding. While I lack experience, there is no reason why my liberal arts background should preclude me from gaining a development position. As we prepare to enter the workforce as junior developers, I know that my fellow Boots and I are most excited to keep learning!

</comment><comment><USER8> I mentored a couple of the students at DevBootcamp in the last class, and I have to say that I've never seen people completely throw themselves into something as much as these guys did. They really jumped head first into it, with a passion.

</comment><comment><USER9> Tech Bootcamps don't work.

Well, let me rephrase that... they may work now, but not for long. As an industry, we've been down this road. There are limitless dime-a-dozen bootcamps that will get you all kinds of certifications (remember when those mattered?)

When I got my first tech job, doing support for Windows 2000, the training class was about 50% people who had attended various Windows 2000 MCSE "bootcamps" and were all certified. Unfortunately, they didn't know anything about Windows 2000. There was no understanding that people like me had gained from actually USING and WORKING with this stuff. While they were quietly led away to the Word Support team, the rest of us marveled at the hilarity of a "bootcamp" that taught very little real world knowledge.

I think 4-year schools, while mostly being terrible at producing people who can code for a living, do provide a depth and reach of experience that no bootcamp will ever supply. If someone goes into a "Ruby" bootcamp and already knows how to program in Java/PHP/Whatever, then sure, that will be valuable. Otherwise, this is going to be another training bubble similar to the training bubble of the late 90's early 00's.

<comment><USER6> "Tech Bootcamps don't work."

Your opinion is based on a small group of people you met briefly 10 years ago who had gone through programs in no way related to what is being discussed here.

I'm sorry if I'm being snarky (I admit I am), but I'm so tired of this negativity. HN has a huge anti-beginner bias. Since before I even started this program people have been telling me it will never work, I'm wasting my money, I'm joining a cult, etc. I'm glad I didn't listen.

I hope that you will take the time to learn a little more about what is going on here. If you'd like the real story see my comment below: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4415088>

<comment><USER10> Finster, You have a very good point with the Windows 2000 MCSE bootcamps, though the comparison to Dev Bootcamp is not a perfect analogy. I speak from experience. I spent 10 yrs in the IT Industry. I actually went through the process of getting the Windows 2003 MCSE certification. I did it over a two yr period of working as an IT administrator.

I also just completed the last Dev Bootcamp class last week.

Having an MCSE is supposed to denote a large amount of IT knowledge, if not being an expert. So people that spend a week, get an MCSE and then claim to be experts aren't going to fly very well in a production environment.

At Dev Boot camp we spent 75 hrs a week learning for 10 weeks. The motto here is that we are 'World Class Beginners'. So we spent about 10-15 times longer and then claim to be 'beginners' not experts.

We all spent last Friday meeting 30 companies that want to hire us, being very upfront about our knowledge. In just the last two days I've gotten 8 interviews for companies looking for Jr Developers. I'm going in this week for technical interviews with these companies. They are going to know exactly what I know and what I don't very fast. I'm not alone here, I know many of my classmates are also getting this many interviews.

I've also been told that about 94% of people from the last class got jobs. I've personally met about half of the last class and know they are all working at very respectable places. Actually some are at amazing places.

So with a lot of knowledge on this subject I'm very confident that this program is nothing like an MCSE bootacmp.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think DBC is great because of the mindset that it fosters in its students - that you don't need to go through the standard CS program in order to hack, and that anyone with passion for making "cool shit" can do it.

I believe that not having a degree shouldn't deter anyone from going into a programming career. However, it's inaccurate to say that going through DBC will make you successful in the industry. Even with the wide range of topics covered in DBC, in ten weeks there's no way you can acquire the depth or span of knowledge that people have coming out of a 4-year CS program.

Personally I'm having a hard time forming an opinion - DBC motivates you to learn interesting and practical things outside of a CS degree, yet doesn't that defeat the purpose of doing it on your own? Also what constitutes interesting/practical? Some might say compilers, algorithms, and optimizations. DBC trains you for a specific area but that is really a small subset of the whole.

Also, from knowing someone at DBC I'm pretty sure that they did ajax calls with jQuery, not actually creating the XMLHttpRequest object.

<comment><USER12> Disclaimer: I just graduated last week. I think the stated goal of the program is to make you a well positioned beginner. So you're right in saying that there's no way for DBC to offer the depth or span of knowledge that a 4 year CS degree offers, but that's not its goal. I think the program is designed to teach you how to learn about programming, and give you a huge jumpstart in doing it. Consequently, nobody there is religious about any one topic. Yes, we all learn Ruby, Rails and Javascript, but what we really take away is not the knowledge of how to do things in Rails, but the ability to learn programming concepts, now and in the future.

As for learning on your own, I would respectfully submit that learning often happens in groups. At DBC there was a lot of solo time, but there was a lot of pair/group time, where we continued learning from each other. Group time is arguably more valuable since it not only affords the opportunity to learn form what you're doing, but also what everyone else is doing, to say nothing of the meta-skills gained from working on software in a team. I personally gained a lot being immersed in an environment where 40 other people were learning with me versus trying to do it on my own.

You're right: I think most people used jQuery for ajax. That said, if Marty McFly went back and destroyed jQuery one day, I'm sure it would only take about 5 extra minutes for anyone to implement XMLHttpRequest instead. We all had to figure out how jQuery ajax calls worked, we could figure out XMLHttpRequest as well.

Finally, thank you for keeping an open mind despite your skepticism. So many seem to use any skepticism to completely dismiss the concept. There are also many on here who support it, but it's a pretty open pace so I'd suggest you go check it out for yourself during the Fall cohort if you're curious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> While your Site is SFW I did have some apprehension about visiting dickey.xxx while at work.</comment>


Silicon Valley investing slump continues, fewer startups get funded - <AUTHOR> http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/04/04/silicon-valley-investing-slump-continues-fewer-startups-get-funded/ <comment><USER2> At least it's a slow decline and not a sudden bubble pop.</comment>


I'm Going To Give My Startup Ideas Away - <AUTHOR> http://blog.kirigin.com/free-ideas <comment><USER2> I wouldn't just give away everything. Use the executive summaries as a sales tool. Make a note that for any of these startup ideas you're willing to serve as a minor stakeholder (say, 10%). That would 1. allow you to gain something from someone executing on your idea, and 2. allow the people who executed on your idea the benefit of having your brain involved in the development process. The ideas are yours and you know them better than anyone else. You've had them longer than anyone else, and you've thought about them longer than anyone else. It makes sense for you to be involved to some degree because you have far more to contribute than just a few sentence concept overview. It would be a win/win for all. If they are truly _good_ ideas, it would be a shame to just _give_ them away. They are your children and you their parent (that's how I feel about my ideas, at least!). Stay around. Stay involved. Watch them grow. Be a part of it!

<comment><AUTHOR> You're not considering opportunity cost. My time involvement dilutes my other ventures.

<comment><USER2> Your involvement could be as little or as great as you'd like it to be. It's all up to you. An hour or two per week?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> 1\. Bravo, this is a really well-done content-marketing campaign. It's original/greenfield, provocative, interactive, and you intentionally made your idea list screen-shot so low resolution it's impossible to read unless we tune in :)

2\. Broadly I agree with you open-sourcing ideation does a lot more benefit than harm. I have a similar list that frustratingly keeps getting rows added where I'd rather see an idea validated by someone else's execution than die on the vine.

</comment><comment><USER4> Ummm... I actually wanted to see the ideas, but the image there is all blurry. Am I missing something?

</comment><comment><USER5> Ideas are easy. Implementation is the bitch.

<comment><USER2> Ideas may be easy, but _good_ ideas are _incredibly_ hard to find.

If implementation is so difficult, outsource to me! Give me your executive summary, 20 grand, and a 20% stake, and my team and I can have your project implemented in under 6 months. I'll call it the HN 20/20/6 deal. (I'll do it for 10 grand if I think the idea really has potential.)

<comment><USER3> I've thought about doing this too (a "dev-venture" model), but unfortunately I haven't found the time to flush it out legally or look for good deal-flow. Maybe one of us should write a blog post about our concept in case someone else wants to execute on our good idea :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I put all my start-up ideas on twitter, [https://twitter.com/smtddr](https://twitter.com/smtddr) , because I'm probably never going to execute on them so maybe someone else will.

EDIT: Hey, is this article just bait into having to sign up to see the ideas?

EDIT#2: Ah, after seeing the reply-comment explanation , I understand.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was debating putting the first idea in this post, but I thought it would be confusing.

Separately, I'm experimenting with email lists to help promote blog posts. It is related to content marketing experimentation for my startup. Read more here: [http://blog.yesgraph.com/post/63562259689/first-1000](http://blog.yesgraph.com/post/63562259689/first-1000)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> why is it dead for me?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, fixed! It has something to do with svtble publish time maybe? Or it could be that I refreshed an edit mode page that didn't have it published.

Either way, I apologize</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Advice for African school computer lab setup - <AUTHOR> A friend is volunteering to setup a computer lab in an African village.  They have wifi but nothing else.  What is your recommendation for hardware / software setup to optimize for that environment? Things to consider: cost, reliability, ease of use, remote maintanece.  It'd be preferable to have an OS / software suite that is common in the work space so that the kids develop skills that are practical -- most likely MS and office suite.  Would love to get your advice / experience. <comment><USER2> Hi. For starters, it would make more sense to be more specific which African country you are talking about. Your approach in Morocco would be totally different from let's say Kenya, where I am located. In Kenya, several schools have computer labs and they all run windows. Am yet to come across any other OS. For a fact, Linux has a better chance of working out too than MacOS. Any hardware is fine. Have in mind, this machines will be used by so many kids on a daily basis and therefore, durability is key. Good core i3 Dell desktops tend to be durable with good build quality. Heavy duty keyboards can be considered as well as old school wired mouse. 17 or 19 inch widescreen monitors will do. In regards to softwares, Microsoft is king here and therefore the office suite is perfect. You can also consider having a software that wipes everything from the computer at every reboot. What's the electricity situation in the location? Yeap! Frequent blackouts can be a setback. You can consider solar, with an inverter, for those times. In regards to charges, for outside members, billing can be done per minute...again, which country? Anyway, I hope that helps and good luck.</comment>


Grep 3.0 released - <AUTHOR> http://savannah.gnu.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=8800 <comment><USER2> Best changelog I've seen in a while.

>Why call it 3.0? Mostly because I felt like it.</comment>


The Impatient Programmer - <AUTHOR> http://en.joy-toilet.com/rants/the-impatient-programmer/

<comment><USER2> > D) The people who are already "decent" at it probably won't tell you The > Secret to getting as good as they are or better.

This is not true from my experience.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sometimes being that impatient programmer can become a lot more worse. Instead of deciding to start learning by themselves, they can get impatient and decide to pursue other avenues which then keeps of going and ultimately they end up not knowing anything at all!</comment>


Java Ain't So Slow - <AUTHOR> http://owenrh.me.uk/blog/2019/09/15/ <comment><USER2> His history is q bit little off. LMAX came out with the disruptor after many other financial and trading firms had already done similar (or even better) work. There were a number of very fast Java-based trading platforms at the time at various exchanges and prop groups. While LMAX may have brought some of the techniques out to the general public, they were definitely not the first or even the fastest. But they definitely did excellent work in giving a framework to place similar systems.</comment>


New energy-saving transistor to eliminate the need for AC adapters in laptops - <AUTHOR> http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20090624p2a00m0na013000c.html

<comment><USER2> More details: [http://www.semiconductor- today.com/news_items/2009/JUNE/FUJI...](http://www.semiconductor- today.com/news_items/2009/JUNE/FUJITSU_240609.htm)</comment>


Ask HN: Which parts of cryptography should I study to master blockchain? - lucas-piske Which subdomains of cryptography should I study to master blockchain technology? <comment><AUTHOR> Hash functions</comment>


Apple, Google, Amazon are so profitable because they know what to lose money on - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/18246/apple-google-and-amazon-are-so-profitable-because-they-know-what-to-lose-money-on/

<comment><USER2> I thought Amazon had high revs, decent operating profits, but lowball profits?</comment>


Swizzle Inventor: Data Movement Synthesis for GPU Kernels [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://lenary.co.uk/publications/swizzle_inventor.pdf <comment><USER2> In short, they created a tool that makes it easier to optimize for GPUs.

Currently you need a good grip of- [https://devblogs.nvidia.com/register- cache-warp-cuda/](https://devblogs.nvidia.com/register-cache-warp-cuda/) to optimize your pipeline which is not pedestrian.

Now you can define what you want to do, and let Swizzle Inventor come up with the best way to exploit the register cache, apparently as well as top CUDA engineers.

Great for real-time computer vision applications that might need to solve large nonlinear least square problems.

</comment><comment><USER3> Their tool automates the creation of new GPU Kernels that are 1.1x to 3.2x faster than expert-optimized code in tested computations, including 2D convolutions (which are widely used in deep learning models). This tool thus has the potential to boost GPU performance for many computationally intensive applications, including AI applications:

      "We develop Swizzle Inventor to help programmers implement
       swizzle programs, by writing program sketches that omit
       swizzles and delegating their creation to an automatic
       synthesizer. Our synthesis algorithm scales to real-world
       programs, allowing us to invent new GPU kernels for stencil
       computations, matrix transposition, and a finite field
       multiplication algorithm (used in cryptographic applications).
       The synthesized 2D convolution and finite-field multiplication
       kernels are on average 1.5-3.2x and 1.1-1.7x faster,
       respectively, than expert-optimized CUDA kernels."

</comment><comment><USER4> Swizzles are among the most powerful instructions in all CPUs or GPUs.

AVX "vpshufb", CUDA PTX's "shfl.sync", and AMD's DPP / ds_permute / ds_bpermute instructions can very quickly, and efficiently, move data around.

Its not so much that these instructions are hard: its that these instructions are so flexible. Everyone who studies them instinctively knows that they are among the best operators for data movement ever invented.

It seems like this "Sizzle Inventor" provides computer-based optimization, to search for ideal swizzles. That's really cool.

</comment><comment><USER5> This looks really interesting - but I have to admit it's gone completely over my head. Can someone break this down into simpler terms?

<comment><USER4> In CUDA PTX, there is an instruction called "shfl.sync.idx", which allows you to shuffle data between threads arbitrarily. However, this shuffling is only efficient if you follow a variety of rules: avoiding bank conflicts and so forth.

Lets say you have 32-threads of a Warp running. Thread0, Thread1, Thread2, etc. etc. Now lets say they all have a variable named "x".

Thread0.x, Thread1.x, Thread2.x, etc. etc.

What "shfl.sync" does, is it allows these "x" variables to be shuffled between all threads in one step.

        // Parallel and synchronous: All threads swap
        // values arbitrarily. This is a simple "rotate",
        // but all combinations are legal for a shuffle

        Thread0.x = Thread13.x
        Thread1.x = Thread14.x
        Thread2.x = Thread15.x
        Thread3.x = Thread16.x
        ...
        Thread30.x = Thread11.x
        Thread32.x = Thread12.x

That's a swizzle. Now the descriptions on the right? The 15, 16, 17, etc. etc. can be any combination. You can broadcast (have Thread1.x copied to all 32 other threads). You can rotate, you can shuffle. All 32^32 specifications of CUDA-thread transfers is legal.

Now, it may be legal, but broadcasts are slower due to bank conflicts. So following the special rules to make fast swizzles is an annoying task for sure. This paper helps the programmer create optimal swizzles for their program.

For more information:

* [https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/parallel-thread-execution/index...](https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/parallel-thread-execution/index.html#data-movement-and-conversion-instructions-shfl-sync)

* [https://devblogs.nvidia.com/using-cuda-warp-level-primitives...](https://devblogs.nvidia.com/using-cuda-warp-level-primitives/)

TL;DR: GPUs have a rich set of highly-efficient data movement operations. They are easy to use, but hard to optimize. Paper presents concepts that help optimize them automatically.

<comment><USER5> Great explanation, appreciate the effort. Will dig deeper into the provided links.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Too bad source code is not published yet.</comment>


PH Launch Who is going to share feedbacks? - <AUTHOR> Hello Guys, MoovBuddy has launched on PH: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/moovbuddy<p>Please share your feedback and upvote if you like. Cheers <comment><USER2> Please change the title to something like: " _MoovBuddy: An exercise app for back & neck pain and joint health_"

It's also much better to link here to the page of the app directly, instead of the Product Hunt launch.

The description is a bit too specific:

> _Less pain killer, less medical imaging and less chronic pain._

I think it can be a problem like the old marketing saying

> _An apple a day keeps the doctor away._

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone! If you are interested and want to try premium, send me an email. email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER3> Hey Hackers, we have been working on MoovBuddy with Damla. Your comments and feedbacks are appreciated! See our launch in PH: [https://www.producthunt.com/posts/moovbuddy](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/moovbuddy)</comment>


Comcast's network investments soared–with net neutrality rules in place - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/?p=1236161 <comment><USER2> >Comcast's spending likely would increase regardless of whether the net neutrality repeal and tax cut happened.

There it is. ARS is salty because "Restore Internet Freedom" worked, and they want to imply Comcast would have handed out $1000 bonuses and scheduled massive infrastructure investment even without it.

Next stop, gigabit speeds nationwide. I'm glad somebody got this ball rolling. Thanks Trump!</comment>


R.I.P. Harry Harrison, creator of the Stainless Steel Rat - <AUTHOR> http://io9.com/5934884/rip-harry-harrison-creator-of-the-stainless-steel-rat-bill-the-galactic-hero-and-soylent-green

<comment><USER2> Rest In Peace indeed. I loved these.

Great computer scientists aside, does _anyone_ enjoy as much acclaim from hackers as classic (which can mean whatever you want it to mean) science fiction authors? Society owes a lot to hackers and is starting to reward them with stock options and IPO's, but I wonder if it realizes how much of a debt hackers owe to SF authors.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sorry to hear it, but he at least had a good innings.

Odd that one of my favorite of his satirical novels, _Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers_ (a spoof of E. E. Doc Smith's books, the _Skylark_ series in particular) didn't get mentioned. _Bill the Galactic Hero_ is a spoof of military SF, _Starship Troopers_ in particular.

The Stainless Steel Rat books would make good material for movies.

</comment><comment><USER4> My favorite Slippery Jim quote:

 _We must be as stealthy as rats in the wainscoting of their society. It was easier in the old days, of course, and society had more rats when the rules were looser, just as old wooden buildings have more rats than concrete buildings. But there are rats in the building now as well. Now that society is all ferrocrete and stainless steel there are fewer gaps in the joints. It takes a very smart rat indeed to find these openings. Only a stainless steel rat can be at home in this environment._

This, to me, describes the attitude of hustlers and hackers perfectly (albeit a bit metaphorically).

</comment><comment><USER5> Harry Harrison's novel "Make Room! Make Room!" was the basis for the 1973 science fiction movie Soylent Green.

<comment><USER6> I too read the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> A more in-depth obituary:

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/aug/15/harry-harrison>

</comment><comment><USER8> Oh what? I loved these novels! I found them thrilling yet hilarious. Some of his other work was very provocative, a great SF author!

</comment><comment><USER9> I'd like to put in a word for "A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!" a superb piece of speculative fiction and possibly the first Steampunk novel.

(also more boringly called "Tunnel Through the Deeps")

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_Through_the_Deeps>

</comment><comment><USER10> Boo. I first came across these in the 2000AD versions, and then read the novels after.

[http://image.absoluteastronomy.com/images/encyclopediaimages...](http://image.absoluteastronomy.com/images/encyclopediaimages/s/st/stainless_steel_rat_prog171_carlos_ezquerra.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER11> Harry Harrison was the first author I was really obsessed with. By the time I was 16, I'd read his entire body of work. I haven't read anything that he's written in the past 15 years or so. I suppose I ought to find one of his newer novels as a way to commemorate him. Any recommendations?

</comment><comment><USER12> Man, I remember reading his books non-stop. The cover image for this news story is actually the first Harry Harrison book I read, "The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted."

I hope somebody picks up the rights to turn these into movies.

</comment><comment><USER13> For those of you who've already read SSRat, SSRat's Revenge, Star Smashers, MRMR and the Deathworlds, try Rebel in Time. I was lucky enough to read this in a version with a blank cover, since most versions can't resist giving the plot away. It's also notable for having that rarest of things, an explicitly black golden age sci-fi hero.

For that matter, they're still pretty rare.

</comment><comment><USER14> Oh, very sad to hear this... The Stainless Steel Rat books were a great love of mine in school. Harrison is a great SF writer!

</comment><comment><USER15> One of my favourite SF authors. His Deathworld series is what got me started in SF in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER16> I've just been re-reading the first one. Action-packed, full of fantastical gizmos, and with just the right amount of snottiness. And yes, as is mentioned elsewhere, a very hackerish attitude towards life, especially on the social engineering front.

</comment><comment><USER17> The Stainless Steel Rat series were a huge part of my teen years. I'll have to buy the entire set (I guess it's definitive now) and make sure my daughters read them.

Rest in peace Mr. Harrison.

</comment><comment><USER18> I don't know how many times when reading his books I had to stop because I had tears from laughing so hard.</comment>


How To Speed Up Your Website By 80% Or More - <AUTHOR> http://www.skorks.com/2009/10/how-to-speed-up-your-website-by-80-or-more/ <comment><USER2> Isn't this review a bit harsh?

Didn't Steve Souders basically invent this field, do a great deal of research and testing in order to find out what actually made a difference and then publicize it?

If _I_ was wanting to be harsh I would suggest buying this 2 year-old book, when both Yahoo and Google have automated versions of the same checklists, was the real mistake here.</comment>


Tilde.club (a shared server offering web and gopher hosting) is back Online - <AUTHOR> http://tilde.club/~ford/ <comment><AUTHOR> Tilde.club is one cheap, unmodified Unix computer on the Internet.It is a shared server offering web and gopher hosting, with a very active mailing list, and friendly, helpful users.

Context: [https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple- drinks-...](https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-drinks-and- woke-up-with-1-000-nerds-a8904f0a2ebf)

Link to other tilde servers - [http://tilde.club/~pfhawkins/othertildes.html](http://tilde.club/~pfhawkins/othertildes.html)</comment>


Yes, there is a better search engine (1998) - <AUTHOR> http://www.salon.com/1998/12/21/straight_44/

<comment><USER2> "The irony here is that the big portal sites are the ones, increasingly, making it harder to use the Web: They're under such pressure to turn a profit to justify their market valuations that their pages have become crowded, blinking arrays of commercial distractions. Meanwhile, they're failing to drive forward the technology at the root of their business."

Striking similarities to Facebook's current position.

<comment><USER3> Or to google itself, the way it's been pushing google+ lately.

<comment><USER4> The way it's been trying to monetize all its products, really.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reading this article definitely brought back fond memories of early Google. I remember the first time I used Google (based on a friend's recommendation), and I remember the elation I felt at being able to find useful results so easily. I spent about 20 or 30 minutes just searching topics that I was interested in. I found stuff that I had no idea existed despite looking for it fairly aggressively in the past (mostly academic content on cognition and timely news/culture information from PRC and Japan).

That night I took a dive down the rabbit hole, and I didn't come back out until sunrise....

Does anyone else remember their first Google experience?

The current state of Google is largely suckage, this recent link on Google killing organic search being just one representative example:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5971560](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5971560)

Is DuckDuckGo the answer? Are there any other promising engines on the horizon?

For anyone considering taking on the search space, I am definitely willing to accommodate some minimally intrusive monetization of a site (including straight payment), as long as I could get clean, fast, and highly relevant results.

<comment><USER6> My first google memory was in 1999 (early 2000, maybe). I was in high school chemistry and we wanted to search for something (probably unrelated to chemistry). I suggested google and then spent 5 minutes convincing the entire class that it was not a porn site (does google sound like a dirty word?) before we actually hit go and went to the website. I think I converted a few people that day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice to remember just how rough we had it to really appreciate the state of search today. Searching for something as obvious as "President Clinton" (while he was President) and having the official White House page not even come up in the top 10 is unthinkable today.

Of course, it still isn't #1, since that spot is universally reserved for Wikipedia... something that I suppose would've been unthinkable in 1998!

<comment><USER8> > Of course, it still isn't #1, since that spot is universally reserved for > Wikipedia

Most likely because both are classified "useful" not "vital".

<comment><USER7> For sure. And generally it is indeed very handy to have the Wikipedia result come up prominently. It's just interesting that a free, user-moderated encyclopedia as the world's predominant source of source of reference information would have been difficult to imagine circa 1998.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "And a Silicon Valley start-up company with the unlikely name of Google.com is showing the way."

Funny how brainwashed you get. Nowadays Google seems like the perfect name.

<comment><USER10> I don't think becoming used to something novel counts as brainwashing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The author said at the time that he is not an internet investor, but please tell me he was an early stage investor in google, please? I mean, google is just 3 months old, you're savvy enough to see what's right with it and what's wrong with everything else, he can't have missed the opportunity, can he? I mean, he is not being told by his investment advisor this and that, he can see it himself! I hope he invested.

<comment><USER12> Hey, this is Scott Rosenberg, who wrote this piece 15 years ago. Glad to see this piece unearthed again! I'm a journalist, not a tech investor. Never owned a cent of Google (except maybe through index funds in my IRA). More interested in writing about technology than in making money with it.

<comment><USER11> I see... And this is why I love the internet. You can read something from some American magazine from 15 years ago, and talk to the author about it. All the way from Africa. If that isn't a big deal, I don't what is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is a remarkably prescient article that gets a lot right about an alpha product, a company that was only three months old, and the Web itself.</comment>


Action video games improve eyesight - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSTRE52S1TW20090329 <comment><USER2> I don't see this as new/news. When my sister was about 12 (1990ish) and had a lazy eye, the doctor gave her an eye patch and told her to play an hour of video games every other day. I assume this wasn't just his thoughts on treatment and that there were studies at that time that pointed him toward this treatment.

To be fair, the study talks about improved recognition of shades of gray rather than curing a lazy eye, but I still don't think that playing video games to improve eye function is a new thing.

</comment><comment><USER3> When spectating others in an FPS I'm always surprised when they fail to see someone on their screen. This is more visual acuity than just an overall improvement though.</comment>


State Department Brief on Snowden - <AUTHOR> http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023239657

<comment><USER2> This has to be the awesomest reply ever:

> MS. PSAKI: Well, Matt, I think we broadly believe in free speech, as you > know.

Broadly believing in free speech tends to be a trait of regimes that are, well, broadly speaking, democratic...</comment>


Zcash – Privacy technology for blockchains - <AUTHOR> https://z.cash/ <comment><USER2> I thought DASH was the anonymous bitcoin.

<comment><USER3> Dash is very dodgy, I wouldn't trust it. The solutions "supernodes" etc sound like the people running it don't really know what they are doing. Monero sounds much more solid to me with the ring signature system. I personally use neither, but I can see the appeal to those who seek high level of privacy.

However this is about 5th article I see about zcash, and the thing hasn't even launched yet. Maybe they should stop marketing and instead try to actually deliver something.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which language and framework would you use to build a modern IDE? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Do exactly what Matlab does with that live code thing. Actually do exactly what Matlab does for everything. I love that you can right click on any code and get help with examples and everything was written in human understandable language and not some programmer who was forced to write a help doc. Showing what variables are what is good too.

I'm not a programmer and I thoroughly enjoyed using Matlab as a sort of scripting language to do things on my computer. Yeah it's Overkill but it was just so easy. Also the built in functions for image compare are great

<comment><USER3> Am programmer, and used matlab in the distant past. My opinion is the exact opposite of yours.

In fact, I would argue that being proficient in matlab creates a greater _barrier_ to being proficient in other language than helping.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd look at the most popular editors like Atom, or visual studio code. Go from there..

<comment><USER5> It might be a depressing conclusion but it is hard to make the case for building gui applications in anything other than US and that is because I have tried the alternatives.

<comment><USER6> Is US a typo? What language or framework are you referring to?</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are the best math sources to learn Machine Learning? - <AUTHOR> Hacker News can we generate a list of mathematical requirements for a beginner to understand machine learning? I am specifically interested in beginner friendly sources to: Calculus, Linear Algebra and Statistics/Probability.
I want to take this a step beyond the "Learn Machine Learning through Python/MatLab" approach and make this a "Learn Machine Learning through math" approach but targeted for beginners. If the focus is more on coding and less on math then it doesn't fit what I am looking for.
Whenever I say beginners I am defining it is a smart layperson that is a non-math major. Think of it like a "very smart high school senior that hasn't seen calculus yet" kind of beginner.
So here are my questions:
What are very good beginner friendly introductions to Calculus, Linear Algebra, Statistics & Probability?
Can we generate a beginner friendly list of textbooks, MOOCs, youtube videos, lecture notes, etc. for the above fields?
If you only know of say beginner friendly sources for Linear Algebra, but not the rest of the above fields then that is ok, just list the ones you know for Linear Algebra.
If I am leaving any field of mathematics out (that a beginner should know) please include them and what beginner friendly sources they should start with. <comment><USER2> Coincidentally, today is the first day for the coursera course 'Data Science Math Skills'[1]. I've signed up. Hopefully this is what we are looking for.

[1] [https://www.coursera.org/learn/datasciencemathskills/home](https://www.coursera.org/learn/datasciencemathskills/home)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the link. The last two weeks of the course pique my interest esp. the "Introduction to Probability Theory" section. Is this apart of a sequence of courses in data science? It wasn't clear to me if this is a standalone course or apart of a larger sequence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm in that boat... I only took up through Calc I originally and even that was so long ago that I've forgotten most of it. So I'm working on a self-learning plan to go through Calculus (equivalent to traditional Calc I, II, III courses), Linear Algebra, Differential Equations, and Probability / Statistics. I can share some of what I've been using.

1\. The "Mooculus" Calc class via OSU / Coursera. [https://mooculus.osu.edu/](https://mooculus.osu.edu/)

I've found this to be useful, but the videos are all really short and the content is kind of "choppy". That is, it jumps around quickly, giving small nuggets of content, and doesn't flow super well. Still, there's some good stuff in here.

2\. "Professor Leonard" on Youtube. [https://www.youtube.com/user/professorleonard57/playlists](https://www.youtube.com/user/professorleonard57/playlists) I'm going through his Calc I sequence now. This is basically a traditional college class, just recorded and put on Youtube. Flows better than the Mooculus class as a result. Leonard is a good lecturer and keeps things interesting. He has videos series on Calc I, II and III, Statistics, as well as pre-calc / intermediate algebra, etc.

3\. Gilbert Strang's Calculus lectures on Youtube. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9t-u87df3o&list=PLBE9407EA6...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9t-u87df3o&list=PLBE9407EA64E2C318) Pretty good explanations of Calculus concepts, at least up to where I'm at (somewhere near the end of the section on differential Calc, just before the stuff on integration starts). Strang also has a very famous series of videos on Linear Algebra, but I haven't gotten to those yet.

4\. MathBFF's Youtube videos. [https://www.youtube.com/user/mathbff](https://www.youtube.com/user/mathbff) Short videos covering specific topics: how to evaluate limits, how to use the chain rule, etc. Helpful for an alternative explanation of a concept you might need more help with.

5\. Khan Academy. [https://www.khanacademy.org/](https://www.khanacademy.org/) Everything from basic arithmetic up through Linear Algebra.

6\. On Coursera there is a series of classes in a "specialization" titled "Statistics with R" from Duke University. I've done the first 3 of those and they've been very useful for both learning Statistics / Probability, as well as help ramp up my R knowledge.

I also have a whole pile of "dead tree" books I consult, ranging from traditional college texts (mostly acquired for dirt cheap at used book stores), to those high-school AP test study guides, to a bunch of books in the "For Dummies" series (eg, "Calculus I for Dummies", "Linear Algebra for Dummies", "Differential Equations for Dummies", etc.), and the like.

Edit:

I almost forgot. If you get stuck, there are various forums where you can ask questions / get help, like:

[http://math.stackexchange.com](http://math.stackexchange.com) (note, this is different from MathOverflow, which is more for research level questions and answers)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/learnmath/](https://www.reddit.com/r/learnmath/)

[http://reddit.com/r/cheatatmathhomework](http://reddit.com/r/cheatatmathhomework)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/homeworkhelp](https://www.reddit.com/r/homeworkhelp)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/askmath](https://www.reddit.com/r/askmath)

[https://www.physicsforums.com/](https://www.physicsforums.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the recommendations. Esp. Professor Leonard. Never knew such videos existed.

<comment><USER3> My understanding is that he covers pretty much everything you'd expect. I think it's just a question of ordering. Different Calculus classes sometimes cover certain things at different times in the sequence. See, for example, the distinction between the "early transcendentals" and "late transcendentals" Calculus courses out there.

If you want yet another take on Calculus, the MIT Calc series stuff is on Youtube as well.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7K1sB05pE0A&list=PL590CCC2BC...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7K1sB05pE0A&list=PL590CCC2BC5AF3BC1)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxCxlsl_YwY&list=PL4C4C8A7D0...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxCxlsl_YwY&list=PL4C4C8A7D06566F38)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDhJ8lVGbl8&list=PLEC88901EB...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDhJ8lVGbl8&list=PLEC88901EBADDD980)</comment></comment></comment>


Hardware Microphone Disconnect in Mac and iPad - <AUTHOR> https://support.apple.com/guide/security/secbbd20b00b/1/web/1 <comment><USER3> It's weird how the "hardware disconnect" term for the pre-2019 devices was stretched to include a firmware, that is software-only, feature. Kinda like the "end to end encryption" of Zoom. Glad that Apple resolved this for newer devices. I'd still love to see wiring diagrams or explanations how it actually works. Which kind of circuit do they use? Is it the power line that's suppressed or the data line? Is it only an analog line that's suppressed and if you tune up internal amp you might be getting some residual?

About the iPads, what does their "hardware" based microphone disconnect entail? It has to be some electro-magnetic based communication instead of currents so the circuit has to be more complicated. I doubt it's done without using any kind of software but would be glad to hear otherwise.

Overall, I'm glad that they are responding to concerns and working to address them.

<comment><USER4> > I'd still love to see wiring diagrams or explanations how it actually works. > Which kind of circuit do they use?

I'd like to see that too, but I don't think we will. I suspect it's a magnetic switch and I'm also curious which lines it cuts.

FWIW, you can still get some audio from an accelerometer if you can get it to report data with a high enough frequency.

Not sure what you mean about iPhones, their information does not mention the iPhone (and I would not expect it to).

<comment><USER5> I'd think the raw pressure-level input from the force sensors on the trackpad would be even more accurate. It's essentially an array of transducers already.

<comment><USER6> An accelerometer on a physical object is a force sensor. F=mA

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Despite Apple's anti-competitive ways, I am often impressed with their attention to details such as these. Glad there is still sanity out there in the world of "always listening" devices.

<comment><USER8> I wish people would qualify their "Apple Hate" every time they mention it. It would make it easier to know who's opinions to discount.

An alarming number of people still believe Apple slowed down all their old phones for the sole purpose of selling them new ones for example.

<comment><USER9> They did absolutely slow down their older phones, but it comes down to whether you believe that their explanation of why was the whole truth. [https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/02/apple-agrees-to- settlement...](https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/02/apple-agrees-to-settlement- of-up-to-500-million-from-lawsuit-alleging-it-throttled-older-phones/)

I'm not an Apple hater or a fanboy. I've owned a number of Apple devices in the past. However, they have their issues just like any other tech company, but their devoted following does seem to be more cultish than that of, say, Microsoft or Google.

<comment><USER8> I know the intricacies of what they did. To summarise: some phones with older batteries would suffer brownouts because the internal resistance of the battery was too high. They updated the OS to detect the brownout and throttle the CPU to prevent it happening again.

So they didn't slow down all old phones, only ones that had the problem. They actually attempted to fix older models. To me this is the opposite of planned obsolescence and appeals to my environmental view that all manufacturers should be supporting their hardware as least as long as Apple currently does.

Now they didn't communicate, and were fined. I think that is fair enough, but I feel the size of the fine was quite excessive given they were trying to extend the life of their customers hardware.

Note that the other phone manufacturers that have exactly the same problems did nothing and are actually better off because of it.

<comment><USER10> Your "summary" curiously omits one of the most important details — That the battery could be replaced and the phone would perform _like new_. If not, the ever deteriorating battery would result in a never ending arms race of throttling. Inevitably, that phone _and_ battery would be in the landfill instead of just the latter.

Whether or not the whole thing was intentionally nefarious I'm not convinced. But the episode _looks_ way worse than your comment suggests.

<comment><USER11> Are you suggesting it wasn't known that battery replacements were available for iPhones? I know I personally replaced several batteries over the years in iPhones, I don't think that was a big secret. There were shops you could drop your phone off at and have anew battery put in for fifty bucks in an hour overseas at least.

<comment><USER12> Apple didn't inform users that battery replacements would make their sluggish phones fast again.

<comment><USER13> More accurately, Apple didn't have a UI notification. This was not a secret and support people recommended it if you actually contacted them.

<comment><USER10> >This was not a secret and support people recommended it if you actually contacted them.

False. The retail and support staff were not informed of the throttling. See my other comment.

<comment><USER13> True, as personally witnessed.

<comment><USER10> Besides your singular anecdote, do you have any evidence that frontline staff were notified of throttling? Everything that's come out so far says otherwise. It's a key part of the class action lawsuit to which Apple agreed to settle.

It's possible that some staff deduced that replacing the battery would help, based on personal observations, but they were never advised by corporate to do this as policy. As such, the vast majority of them were not recommending battery replacements.

You must have got lucky.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I always wondered why the microphone on my MacBook Pro would stop working whenever I closed the lid when using my external monitor. Glad to hear the "bug" exists for good reasons.

<comment><USER15> What are users meant to do if they _want_ to use their Mac's microphone while the laptop lid is closed?

<comment><USER16> I remember years ago visiting a customer shortly after many of their engineering staff had just upgraded to whatever macbook was popular at a time.

Within the week that they had them, two people in the department had broken their screens/hinges from accidents walking in and out of meetings with the lids open because there was no way provided in the software to disable suspend on lid closed which was killing people's SSH sessions. Within the month someone in my office also managed to do the same, and most of us weren't even using macs.

(I understand that this was eventually workaroundable with some power users tools; and I imagine mosh makes the suspends a little less of an issue now).

I'm sad that the popular linux desktops later decided to emulate the bad software culture that brought anti-features like that mandatory suspend.

So I expect that mic off on hinge close will have similar results. Though, ... at least this seems a lot more legitimate to me than a refusal to not suspend.

<comment><USER17> A macbook works perfectly in clamshell mode. Just provide power and have a display connected. (not sure if you have to have a display connected, but it's how I'm typing this comment right now)

Also, using tmux (or screen) on the other end of the ssh connection helps. And not only for when you close the lid, but also if the connection gets interrupted (power failure, internet failure, routing failure, whatever)

<comment><USER18> > A macbook works perfectly in clamshell mode. Just provide power and have a > display connected.

I can't imagine how much more equipment would be damaged if the people described were carrying around a power source and a monitor with them so they could close their laptop and bring it to a meeting without dropping their sessions.

<comment><USER19> There are fake display adapters specifically to combat stupid problems with running mac displayless. Maybe we need a fake power source as well...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I would rather have a physical (manual) switch to disconnect the power to the microphone and camera hardware on all my devices (laptop, phone, ...). This way there would be no need to trust the Security Chip and there would be no attack vectors and possible future zero-day attacks on the security chip...

<comment><USER21> That's fair enough but you have to accept you're in the huge minority there. The average consumer does not want to have to flip a switch for every microphone on their devices when they want to use it. Not to mention the reliability implications of adding more moving parts and dust/water ingress points. There has to be a trade off between usability and security.

<comment><USER22> My teacher wife and a bunch of the folks she knows (non-nerds) cover their webcams with stickers or whatever. They'd all love (separate!) kill-switches for their cameras and mics. Plus everyone working in tech I know. So that's... everyone I know who's aware their laptops have cameras and microphones.

<comment><USER23> I think you're overstating your position.

If all of those people had to flip a hardware switch every time they wanted to use their phones, they'd complain about it.

<comment><USER19> On a laptop it may often be once in a lifetime.

<comment><USER23> Depends on your laptop. My Mac laptops ring when someone calls my phone in another room.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > All Mac portables with the Apple T2 Security Chip feature a hardware > disconnect that ensures the microphone is disabled whenever the lid is > closed.

vs.

> On the 13-inch MacBook Pro and MacBook Air computers with the T2 chip, and > on the 15-inch MacBook Pro portables from 2019 or later, this disconnect is > implemented in hardware alone.

Do these statements not contradict each other for the 15" 2018 MacBook Pro, for example, which includes a T2 chip? This would also contradict earlier documentation provided on the T2 chip by Apple themselves [1].

From [1]:

> All Mac portables with the Apple T2 Security Chip feature a hardware > disconnect that ensures that the microphone is disabled whenever the lid is > closed. This disconnect is implemented in hardware alone, and therefore > prevents any software, even with root or kernel privileges in macOS, and > even the software on the T2 chip, from engaging the microphone when the lid > is closed.

[1] [https://www.apple.com/euro/mac/shared/docs/Apple_T2_Security...](https://www.apple.com/euro/mac/shared/docs/Apple_T2_Security_Chip_Overview.pdf) (October 2018, page 13)

<comment><USER25> I don't think they contradict each other. The way I read it is, the former, have hardware disconnects controlled by some software/firmware, such as a relay/MOSFET or something of that kind; an electronic switch.

The latter I read as being hardware _only_; "only" being the key addition to this sentence. I would expect this implementation to be something like a reed switch to magnetically disconnect the lines _physically_ rather than electronically.

<comment><USER26> Isn't the whole point of software to control hardware, at some level? How is hardware-controlled-by-software different from plain old software-controlled? If a switch can be closed by software, I'm having trouble putting my finger on exactly what security benefit that might offer.

<comment><USER5> > How is hardware-controlled-by-software different from plain old software- > controlled?

Perhaps it's that the hardware interlock on the microphone can be _enabled_ by software, but can only be _disabled_ by a physical action (i.e. opening the lid.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Apple in 2020 is such a weird thing. Some of the things they produce - <USER2> in the software realm, I guess - have really careless and egregious bugs and design problems. But then they still come out and make amazing little features like this one that nobody thought to ask for, and don't get highly publicized, but really speak to that classic detail-oriented Apple mindset.

It's like there's a huge cultural schism running through the middle of the company, or something.

<comment><USER28> Is it too much to ask for a small LED next to each camera indicating if the sensor is powered? Should be standard on every phone.

<comment><USER29> Ditto. Or even an old-school LED that indicates data transmission like the HDD LED in old computer cases. Make it in hardware so that if any data is sent through the wire, it lights up.

<comment><USER30> People already complain about the price and battery life of current phones. I can't imagine either of those things making either situation better.

<comment><USER31> You can get SMD 0603 LEDs that use ~1mA of power for a few pennies in bulk. Peanuts compared to the power usage and price of the rest of the phone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> > iPad models beginning in 2020 also feature the hardware microphone > disconnect. When an MFI compliant case (including those sold by Apple) is > attached to the iPad and closed, the microphone is disconnected in hardware

does this mean Hey Siri won't work on an iPad with a closed cover?

<comment><USER33> Doesn't MFI use software to do verification? If the presence of a MFI software command is what disables and enables the microphone, that sure sounds like software control.

Sure, maybe its software on a peripheral that controls it. But it's software never the less.

<comment><USER34> I expect in this case it's a matter of having magnets in the correct locations as specified by MFI.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Why doesn't Apple have an option for buying a MacBook Pro with the camera and mic physically disconnected? They could sell this option at an appropriately priced premium — along with a stylish Bluetooth-connected, 4K webcam with phased array mics for a very reasonably $499. I'm sure they would sell hundreds of thousands of them.

If ANYBODY could monetize "security chic" it's Apple.

<comment> frosted-flakes How hard is it to stick a piece of tape over the camera and super-glue the microphone?

<comment><USER35> The underlying sensors are still active. I typically just keep my Logitech G430 headphones -- with the physical mute switch active -- plugged into my computer at all times because the system uses that for sound capture... except Siri/Cortana/Ubuntu One hear nothing when those are plugged in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Does it really matter if they have a hardware disconnect, when the hardware disconnect is controlled by software? It's not truly a hardware disconnect unless there's a physical switch that the user can flip on or off.

<comment><USER37> > On the 13-inch MacBook Pro and MacBook Air computers with the T2 chip, and > on the 15-inch MacBook Pro portables from 2019 or later, this disconnect is > implemented in hardware alone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Perhaps this is the hardware people are speculating about with magnetic switches?

[https://www.ifixit.com/News/33952/apple-put-a-hinge- sensor-i...](https://www.ifixit.com/News/33952/apple-put-a-hinge-sensor-in- the-16-macbook-pro-what-could-it-be-for)

Though it seems their "hardware only" solution was on earlier models than that, so maybe not.

</comment><comment><USER39> > _(The camera is not disconnected in hardware, because its field of view is > completely obstructed with the lid closed.)_

I love this aside xD

</comment><comment><USER40> Why not a manual switch? I rarely use the microphone on those devices.

<comment><USER41> This would result in a different UX.

Users would have to remember about turning it on/off, many would forget, leading to frustration.

Also Apple would have to place that manual switch somewhere, this would change the device's interface.

<comment><USER42> I once had a laptop with a manual switch for the wifi. Its sole purpose, as far as I could tell, was to get accidentally bumped and cause me to waste time figuring out why wifi wasn't working.

<comment><USER43> I feel you, but there would be a really easy solution to that, just make it clear with the network connectivity icon that the hardware switch is off. Don't know why it hasn't been done.

<comment><USER44> It would require Microsoft to standardise the interface and specifications for manual wifi switches, and certify and police compliance, to make sure the hardware and software worked properly together. For Apple this sort of coordination across teams is routine and simply the way everything works, but for Microsoft and its hardware OEMs it's a serious time consuming and expensive pain.

<comment><USER43> Thanks, I hadn't thought of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I'd rather have a manual switch for both the microphone and the camera.

<comment><USER46> I would too, on every device, but I don't know how the industry is going to get past two barriers to achieving this:

1\. It costs a little bit of money, and hardware designers love to minimize costs and eliminate parts.

2\. It's not idiot-proof enough for a lot of people. You're going to have people who can't find the switch. And who complain and generate support costs. And annoy their coworkers by being muted during video conferences.

Maybe you could fix the second one by having a flashing light on the switch that says, "Please switch this switch! The microphone is needed!" This could also increase awareness of when things are trying to use the microphone. although it would go against the first point because it's yet another part.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> They do not reveal how this is implemented at the physical level. I'd think such a statement should be accompanied by a circuit diagram.

The simplest and most fool proof method is a physical switch that interrupts the mic lead. If you want it to be 'pop and crackle' free you may have to fiddle a bit or use a make-before-break switch and connect the other line to ground. No amount of software hacking will get around that, and the position of the switch is good feedback that you are not open to eavesdropping. Anything less than that is likely hackable in some way or other.

</comment><comment><USER48> And yet they're still not encrypting iCloud Backups in a way that doesn't allow Apple (and by extension the federal police) unfettered access to spying on iMessage. iCloud Backup is on by default, so this means that iMessage for almost every iPhone user is insecure. Incongruent.

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud- exclusiv...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud- exclusive/exclusive-apple-dropped-plan-for-encrypting-backups-after-fbi- complained-sources-idUSKBN1ZK1CT)

</comment><comment><USER49> I did not realise this feature existed. Am pleasantly surprised.

</comment><comment><USER50> Would also be nice to have little hardware LEDs that automatically turn on when the microphone or camera are connected. That way you are sure to know if they are recording.

</comment><comment><USER51> This may be Apple's first real response to the checkm8 vulnerability. It had already been fixed on the current iOS devices as of its disclosure, but the T2 chip is still shipping (and is currently on computers that will last for a decade versus phones that last two years) with no fix AFAIK.

Apple could fix T2s going forward, but it would require a BootROM change not just a software update.

</comment><comment><USER52> So, the next target for malware creators would be to attack the software that communicates a "lid closed" event to the T2 chip.

<comment><USER53> There exist easier targets, such as the loudspeakers which can be turned into microphones.

[https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/woot17/woot17...](https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/woot17/woot17-paper- guri.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I asked my Alexa if this is true, but she didn't know. Anyway, this article makes me feel safer. I'll keep my Mac shut.

</comment><comment><USER55> Hmmm I wonder if anyone has done a teardown of the MacBook to show how these microphone disconnect mechanisms work.

</comment><comment><USER56> Feature request: iOS system-wide option to disable all optical cameras. FaceID can continue to use the IR camera.

</comment><comment><USER57> This is not enough, the sane solution needs physical switches like the Lenovo T400 had for WiFi.

Where are the real laptops? I'm tired of the glossy short screens, lack of ethernet connections and crappy keyboards (this applies both to Lenovo and Apple).

<comment><USER19> Thou shall follow the FrankenPad route.

<comment><USER58> Works for the ISS and OpenBSD users

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Why is apple so allergic to physical switches, directly switchable by the user?

<comment><USER60> I'm guessing easier to break, causes more troubleshooting issues, looks cleaner without it. The less moving components there are, the less warranty and tech support they probably have to field too.

Swapping out devices is probably less costly than fixing parts of it.

<comment><USER59> Depending on your point of view, only the second "reason" is true.

Software switches like the one described in the article (despite its name) are definitely easier to break since they can be hacked by software. No need to have physical access to the computer. A discrete switch definitely looks cleaner than a piece of duct tape, and is much easier to turn on/off. If you want to "switch off" your mic, bad luck.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> This is pretty cool. Can I interact with the switch directly? Can I use a little magnet to trip the switch on an iPad? Or a mac? What about iPhones, do those have hardware disconnects too?

</comment><comment><USER62> I think this is a positive thing and like the idea of being protected even if the machine is compromised. However I would still prefer the convenience of a switch in addition to this.

</comment><comment><USER63> Any idea does other manufacturers does this? Dell or Lenovo?

I'm impressed with Apple's attention to details like this!

</comment><comment><USER64> My Lenovo Laptop has a little physical shutter you can slide over the camera. It's very handy.

</comment><comment><USER65> Does other manufacturers does this?

Maybe it's a standard thing that Dell, HP and others do as well?

<comment><USER66> Purism do hardware switches for mic/camera and wifi on their Librem range. (Wish I could afford one of those machines!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Begs the question - how do they detect the lid is closed? In software? :P

<comment><USER37> Magnets!

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Hold on. How is this hardware? Is there a physical button/hinge that is triggered? If so, the chip shouldn't matter.

Or is this some piece of logic emebedded in the chip itself or the firmware of some other component, which makes this solution a software one.

<comment><USER68> My understanding is that the chip is a proxy for when they started including it in the design. Similar to how some older macOS/OS X releases had requirements like, "faster than 867MHz", or "newer than 2012" instead of, "GPU must support Quartz Extreme" or "CPU must support XYZ instructions".

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> But how am I supposed to use my computer when the lid is closed?

<comment><USER70> With an external microphone, if you need it.

<comment><USER69> I think you misunderstand. I want to use my computer normally while the microphone and camera are disabled.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> "The camera is not disconnected in hardware, because its field of view is completely obstructed with the lid closed".

How long until someone realizes audio data can be extracted by from the noise generated by a camera in the dark?

<comment><USER72> Source? Not because I disbelieve that it's possible in practice, but how much data can you really get out of that? A MacBook Pro camera operates at 60 Hz; unless you can interpolate samples some way I'm not thinking of (and that would necessarily degrade your resolution), the highest frequency you can capture is 30 Hz. Technically, this could be extracting audio, but it's not audio that meaningfully overlaps with the human experience.

<comment><USER71> No source, but there's just been such a long history of side channel attacks, and similar research ([https://nofilmschool.com/2014/08/mit-extract-sound- audio-sil...](https://nofilmschool.com/2014/08/mit-extract-sound-audio-silent- video-picture-information)) that it makes one wonder if a non-hardware disconnect fix is sufficient.

<comment><USER73> > high-speed camera that captured 2,000 to 6,000 frames per second

<comment><USER71> Literally the next lines

> In other experiments, however, they used an ordinary digital camera. Because > of a quirk in the design of most cameras' sensors, the researchers were able > to infer information about high-frequency vibrations even from video > recorded at a standard 60 frames per second.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> But I want to hardware disable it at any time...

</comment><comment><USER75> How about disconnecting it when you're near the laptop and the lid is open because you're .. I don't know... working on it?

</comment><comment><USER76> Is there any chance this is true? If so, is there a way to trick the hardware into switching microphone off, even while being used?

<comment><USER77> It's a physical magnetic switch. The article does explain this.

<comment><USER33> But magnet does not appear in the article?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> great! now give us back the hardware switch

</comment><comment><USER79> We only get guaranteed privacy when the lid is closed?

<comment><USER80> The problem is that otherwise "Hey Siri" wouldn't work on (newer) Macs. Still, you can use something like Micro Snitch to track webcam/mic use.

Also, in macOS Catalina (I don't remember if this was the case in prior versions), applications are not permitted by default to use the mic or camera and have to request permission.

These are perhaps not as good as a hardware disconnect, but I think Apple is trying to balance privacy and usability here. It is clear from what Apple is doing in hardware and software that they do care about privacy. Linux and AFAIK Windows do not provide that level of privacy, since applications have unfettered access to Cameras and Mics.

(Of course, a part of the Linux community is trying to improve this through Pipewire, Flatpak, and portals.)

<comment><USER81> >The problem is that otherwise "Hey Siri" wouldn't work on (newer) Macs.

I've never heard anyone use Siri on their Mac. I'm surprised they still bother supporting it.

<comment><USER82> I use it all the time. It's a great additional channel for commands in some workflows.

<comment><USER81> Can you give some examples? The only way I can think it's helpful is for hands free use, but that's more a scenario for a phone or tablet rather than a laptop.

<comment><USER83> Adding reminders is the only thing I ever use it for. They carry across to the iPhone, of course, so if I need to remind myself to do something later in the day it's quite helpful.

I'd use it to set timers, too (by far the most frequent thing I use Siri for on iPhone) but annoyingly that doesn't work from the Mac.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Oakland releases months' worth of license plate reader data - <AUTHOR> https://data.oaklandnet.com/browse?q=alpr <comment><USER2> Amsterdam did something similarly stupid. They released a large batch of license plates which had been 'encrypted' using MD5, as well timestamps and locations. It didn't take more than a day before someone had built the 'dude where's my car' app that listed where a licenseplate had been recognized and when.

Rumor has it this led to more than one divorce and the municipality has since changed the way they store the license plates and will likely not take part in the distribution of such sensitive data again. (At least, not voluntarily.)

The incident did wonders for people realizing that they too valued privacy.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I found this while perusing their open data portal for other information, was completely shocked that they would make this type of potentially very sensitive information public.

<comment><USER3> Could you please give an example of how this data could be misused now that it's public? I'm already aware of how it could be misused when it was private. TIA.

<comment><USER4> Ever had a stalker?

<comment><USER5> Are the license plates the actual numbers verbatim?

<comment><USER6> Yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow, before clicking I thought, "these better be anonymized" then before the page loaded I thought, "even if they are, with just a few points of data (like, I know someone went to work these 3 days but not these two days, which plates match that pattern?) it would be possible to locate some people and therefore know all other movements they made that month."

But then it's not even anonymous, so I could just look my neighbor up by their license plate. What about jealous partners? What about thieves that instantly know everyone's work patterns? What about your boss seeing if you actually did stay home sick that one time?

These sort of "emergent" privacy leaks are interesting. Information that is already "out there" but being collected and distributed for the first time is like a system shock when it happens.

</comment><comment><USER8> Funny. I posted something similar about Chicago a few hours ago.

Copy/paste: Chicago Tribune pretty much did this after a FOIA request for red light data was published. It's not searchable by owner name, but it's still pretty terrible.

[http://apps.chicagotribune.com/news/local/red-light- camera-t...](http://apps.chicagotribune.com/news/local/red-light-camera- tickets/)

[http://apps.chicagotribune.com/news/local/red-light- camera-t...](http://apps.chicagotribune.com/news/local/red-light-camera- tickets/data/chicago-rlc-data.zip)

[http://www.chicagophotociteweb.com/](http://www.chicagophotociteweb.com/)

I've sent many FOIA requests for parking ticket and towing data - the license data gets redacted every single time. I'm really curious about how the tribune got that data. FOIA specifically forbids license plate information from being released.

</comment><comment><USER9> Ars Technica already got 4.6M scans from 3.5 years of collection, and all it took was FOIA requests: [http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/03/we-know- where-you...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/03/we-know-where-youve- been-ars-acquires-4-6m-license-plate-scans-from-the-cops/)

</comment><comment><USER10> I already have been visualizing the Oakland alpr data. Thanks very much for the links to the Chicago data. The Guardian has some interesting visualizations for Chicago.

</comment><comment><USER11> Are there any legal ways of protecting yourself from this sort of data collection?

<comment> wes-exp Well there is the Steve Jobs solution: don't have license plates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> There's a searchable map of the data at oaklandlpr.com

</comment><comment><USER13> I assume this is accidental?

<comment><USER14> I imagine it's related to this: [http://arstechnica.com/tech- policy/2015/03/we-know-where-you...](http://arstechnica.com/tech- policy/2015/03/we-know-where-youve-been-ars-acquires-4-6m-license-plate-scans- from-the-cops/)</comment></comment>