Sanders wants to replace credit reporting companies with public credit registry - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/2019/9/21/20877050/bernie-sanders-credit-score-equifax-transunion-experian <comment><USER2> Awful idea. Having the government giving you a rating, even just for loans is way too far. Politics shouldn't impact my ability to pay but it certainly will. Look at the games Republicans play to suppress minority voters. You want to give those same people power over your credit scores?

This is just trying to solve a symptom with a deeper problem. The real problem is that our judicial system is absolutely cowardly towards corporation prosecution. If you actually just sent the responsible people to jail or actually bankrupted the worst actors, the situation would improve. This impacts everything from the financial industry to oil & gas to credit to privacy rights on the internet.

All of these companies get away with anything they want because we don't send the execs to jail and we rarely fine them more than the profits they made from doing the bad thing.

<comment><USER3> > Republicans play to suppress minority voters.

What are they doing to suppress minorities?

<comment><USER4> They want to require people to show government-issued photo IDs when voting to prove they have the right to vote.

<comment><USER5> I'm a progressive liberal, but I believe this is hogwash. Many countries have a government issued national card for citizens. It's not a huge deal. Activists have made it seem like it's a way to suppress voters but I think that's largely BS.

We could start a campaign now, or just after the next election in 2020, and get people to sign up for cards by 2028, and enforce that then. We have census every 10 years, it's something the country can easily coordinate.

<comment><USER6> Sure, if you had a free and convenient citizen ID card, requiring ID to vote might be just fine.

As it is currently, it's _absolutely_ a way to suppress the vote of low-income (and minority) people. In many areas of many states getting photo ID is non- trivial, especially if you're in a shitty job.

<comment><USER5> Hence why I said start the program today, with the same level of canvassing as a census, and then enforce it some time in the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If they do this, it has to be like the FED. Absolutely independent from any political interference. Not allowed to sell data and be rigorous about user data. Also, find an alternative to SSNs for base ID for people.

On the other hand, it must not transform into what the CCP is doing. It has to stay true to being a proxy for credit worthiness —that is all. No handicapping either or dings for "unapproved" ideas, behavior, purchases, etc.

<comment><USER8> You know it absolutely would be used to target political opponents from both sides.

<comment><USER9> The performance of the IRS is a strong counterargument to this.

<comment><USER10> Actually, no, it isn't. Many conservative organizations were targeted by the IRS under the previous administration.

[https://www.npr.org/2017/10/27/560308997/irs-apologizes- for-...](https://www.npr.org/2017/10/27/560308997/irs-apologizes-for- aggressive-scrutiny-of-conservative-groups)

<comment><USER11> Is it possible that it was due to warranted concerns that these groups were misusing the tax-exempt status?

<comment><USER10> It seems possible until you realize that the IRS publicly apologized for targeting them and paid a settlement to 427 of the organizations. Four hundred twenty-seven is far beyond any random accident or mistake.

<comment><USER12> No, I mean sure, if you think a conservative administration settling with conservative groups is a valid admission of guilt, go for it! But for many of us, it just seems like Trump trying to define truth unilaterally to pander to his base. See: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy)

Spoiler: both liberal and conservative groups were subject to extra scrutiny via keyword triggers, but only conservative groups got a settlement for whatever reason only Trump knows. Trump was smart enough not to let it go to court (lest any facts get argued for real).

<comment><USER13> > No, I mean sure, if you think a conservative administration settling with > conservative groups is a valid admission of guilt,

For the actions committed under the previous liberal administration.

<comment><USER12> Trump campaign: the IRS under Obama is corrupt!

Trump becomes president: see, I told you, the IRS under Obama was corrupt! Let's settle everything and withdraw all criminal charges (because you can't just say people are guilty) so a judge/jury doesn't actually determine anything.

But maybe this is valid under Trump supporter logic, I guess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's interesting seeing the American perspective on this. The perpetual mistrust of government would, I think, be warranted were that government not elected by the populace. As it is, I am a little confused why the same skepticism is not directed at the for-profit entities now operating the credit scoring system.

<comment><USER15> The government is elected by about a quarter of the populace, and even the winning quarter is often dissatisfied at the lack of control it exerts over its representatives.

Democratic representation is one of the leakiest abstractions ever devised.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you look to Bernie's wonderworld, Norway (where I'm from), all that is taken care of privately. However the credit and debt registry companies are obliged by law to inform customers when a check-up is done on them. It's quite painless, and it's a service completely paid for by the finance industry, instead of being a poorly run and corruption prone state owned and agency financed by tax money. The debt registry can perhaps become a nuiscance to a small subset of bank customers, but only those who take on added risk by loading up on big loans and credit lines at many different institutions.

<comment><USER17> Why aren't private corporations corruption prone? They're the ones DOING the corrupting! But somehow we feel they're better than government? Every 'appropriately funded' govt service I've used has been miles away better than the equivalent private service. Schools, hospitals, research facilities, police, student loan management company etc etc

<comment><USER18> >Every 'appropriately funded' govt service I've used has been miles away better than the equivalent private service...

Strange because my experience has been the exact opposite in every case, with the exception of police - and that's only because I don't have an immediate proxy. That private industry provides alternatives to these public goods and does them better is an indictment of the competence of our government, and shouldn't be viewed as an endorsement or evidence in favor of free markets for everything. These markets emerge _because_ of government incompetence, not because of corruption or because the market is inherently "better".

<comment><USER17> I disagree with 100% of what you've said here.

<comment><USER18> Great. I also think that Houston will win the World Series again (sorry, LA).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Thanks, but I'd rather the government _not_ collect all this sensitive, personal information. In fact, I'd rather _nobody_ collect it. It's kind of shocking in the first place that our banks and lenders are allowed to release such personal information to a credit bureau without our opt-in. I'd rather Sanders focus on legislating a right to privacy, rather than for the government to take over a role that shouldn't exist.

<comment><USER20> > without our opt-in

You do opt-in when you sign credit agreements and the like.

Since all creditors require it your options are to opt-in to credit reporting or opt-out of borrowing.

<comment><USER19> Right, that's what I'm saying should be legislated to be optional. I don't think citizens should be forced to make that choice. Frankly, I think it might even be best to forbid a third party from collecting a borrower's personal information as a condition of a lender providing a personal financial product.

I will in advance disagree with the objection that this would make it impossible for the lending industry to operate. I have run a lending business before, and in the industry FICO score is much less valuable than a lot of other information available to lenders (demographic, income, assets). For asset-based lending (car loans, mortgages, etc), FICO is even more irrelevant compared to factors like loan-to-value.

<comment><USER21> _demographic_

I don't think it's a good idea to go back to the bad old days before credit reporting where whether you could get a loan or not was based on your demographics (color of your skin) rather than on the objective criterion in a credit report.

<comment><USER19> Your home address, age and marital status are absolutely used by lenders in a data-driven analysis of whether you are a creditworthy borrower. I don't think that's a necessarily malevolent analysis, but it's also not true that we live in a society where your demographics are irrelevant to your ability to access credit.

<comment><USER21> _Your home address, age and marital status are absolutely used by lenders_

Oh I know. The world isn't perfect in this respect, but it's a hell of a lot better than it used to be thanks to credit reporting. It has been an incredibly powerful tool for social justice. Outlawing it as a tool would be a very large step backwards.

<comment><USER19> I honestly think it would be overall better for us. Like I said, FICO is a very weak signal that isn't given much weight in the adjudication process; and your lenders are using these other signals I listed _anyway_ , so the negative social effects you speak of are already happening. So, the only net outcome of automatic, forced credit reporting is that third party companies exist that collect, misuse and profit off of citizens' personal data.

Anyway, rather than a draconian approach of outlawing credit bureaus, I think a law making third-party credit reporting optional rather than required is the right thing to push for, and more realistic than a nonstarter suggestion like nationalizing the credit bureaus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > Under this proposal, Americans would be able to receive credit scores for > free

I have never paid to see my credit score, so I'm not sure how this is novel?

Also, are things not going well at Vox? 900px (height!) of ads at the top of the page along with Outbrain trash and numerous right-rail ads and inside-the- content ads (on desktop) do not give the impression of a thriving publication.

<comment><USER23> Re: the ads - Facebook & Google are playing games and playing them dirtier than ever before: [https://thechive.com/2019/09/19/facebook-and-google-are- curr...](https://thechive.com/2019/09/19/facebook-and-google-are-currently- playing-their-toxic-endgame-10-photos/)

<comment><USER24> Google really has been pushing the limits of their customers tolerance for their advertising recently. Has there been some management change or is this just another stock boosting attempt to mask the plateauing which happens to every business?

I guess they've given up the constraint and minimalism that helped them get to #1 in the first place. Once again the obsession with never ending growth is compromising the utility of the top players and pressures the regulators to do something.

Google should be happy there are ad blockers, otherwise there'd be a lot more outcry and pushback from the influential tech community.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm not sure that this is wholly superior, but given the apparent need for credit agencies and the zero liability for them misreporting information, the extortion, and the functionally zero cost to them when they leak information on more or less every American maybe this is the best option?

OTOH Governments have a tendency to pass laws the make suing them very hard even when they do screw up, so who knows what the ideal solution is?

</comment><comment><USER26> I think a lot of people miss that federalizing things creates a monopoly, and it's less different from a private monopoly than we might like to think.

It is a democratic monopoly, but democracy among 300+ million people is a big hammer. Do you really, actually think that this will be a well-run service where mistakes are quickly corrected?

No. It will just be an extra layer of protection for any mistakes that are made. At least private companies have to fear the government at some level... who does the federal government fear when it does somethihn unfair? The voter? Hah.

<comment><USER27> Federalizing means all Americans are voting shareholders but the goal isn't to make a profit.

There are lots of situations where I think that is preferred, but people won't look at it this way because of socialism/communism scare.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Re: "a public, transparent algorithm to determine creditworthiness that eliminates racial biases in credit scores."

Eliminating racial bias is admirable, but is not a thing that we have any idea how to do in any computationally rigorous way, certainly not as assumed in that language.

Modern credit scoring for anything that matters involves lender and context specific analytics. It's a much richer process than the imagined single monolithic FICO score.

In this world, giving a single entity a monopoly in generating these bespoke scores is, simply for mechanical reasons, a complete non-starter.

The way to deal with profit-oriented lenders making what seem to be unfair credit decisions is to have a credit process that solves for fairness, not profit. That amounts to starting from a place of making capital grants, something the government is very good at, and which would be a better angle for Bernie to be taking.

Andrew Yang's UBI proposal could be tweaked to optionally, at the receivers request, treat the grants in part as low interest rate loans, allowing receivers to create a credit history if they so desire.

</comment><comment><USER29> Name one program the government has been In charge of where there isn't some form of widespread corruption or bogged down by red tape. You want the government to give us a number like China? No thank you. I like my free will. It may be limited digitally, financially, and geographically, but I'm still happy with the government not assigning me a number.

<comment><USER30> What's a SSN in your view, then?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Sounds a lot like the creepy Black Mirror shit China is doing.

<comment><USER32> Companies like Equifax are already selling your credit data and handling it irresponsibly. I'd rather have my credit data be held by the government than the idiots at Equifax.

<comment><USER31> I'm not thrilled with Equifax, but I have a hard time believing bureaucrats are the solution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Why are credit scores "racist" (as claimed by Sanders and Vox)? The outcomes being distributed differently among races does not make the methodology "racist". The input factors into credit scores do not include race. Correlation to race, even if strong, is not causation.

<comment><USER34> If you're interested in this topic, you should look at "Weapons of Math Destruction."

It's a question of if the outcomes are distributed differently among races because the races represent truly different probabilities, or because the inputs to the model were already tainted against some race. For example, let's say you judge creditworthiness based on membership in a particular honors society, but that honors society doesn't exist at historically black colleges.

<comment><USER35> In the latter case, the solution _is_ racism. If the non racial signals are biased against group X, then, when used in the context of those other signals, membership in group X becomes a positive signal, regardless of its independent signal. I believe there was a time when the military did precisly this for black SAT (or simmilar) score, because they found the same score tender to be smarter when it was a black person.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Having known lots of people in the lending industry not a single one of them believes that the current credit rating system (with many I've talked to pointing out FICO in particularly) had any real net positive impact on the average person not so they seem to believe that banks or other lending institutions have derived any other even fit than a loophole for setting interest rates high for as many people as possible.

I think we should just go back to what we did before credit ratings, which was basically best due diligence and requiring just a little bit more documentation for a loan application

I also think in lieu of this the government can be a net positive here. In the EU this is the norm from what I understand

<comment><USER37> Having worked as an apartment manager, I can say that credit ratings were the single best factor for selecting a good tenant. I gave three tenants with bad credit a shot (single mom I felt bad for, blue color couple who seemed really nice and hardworking at screening and a couple who moved from abroad and had no credit at all) and I got burned by all of them ending up missing rent and needing to evict, sob stories and late rent, or causing other problems and fighting with their neighbors. After those experiences I basically only selected people above 750 to for our units and it always seemed like the higher the credit score yielded us responsible tenants who paid on time, didn't cause headaches at the building and left their units in good condition when they moved out.

As an aside, one interesting thing I noticed over the years fielding applications for open units, _EVERY_ single person in the world who has bad credit or subpar credit apparently has the same psycho ex. It was rather amusing hearing that story over and over again. If you have poor credit and you're trying to rent a place- own up to it and be honest about why it's bad!

<comment><USER36> Makes sense since those with that kind of rate tend to be people with their lives a little more out together.

Not to dismiss the point though, but it's also extremely anecdotal. I don't know that it would actually hold true statistically that this would be the majority case.

Escpially given I myself have been under 750 and I have never had these issues

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I love the idea of disrupting the for profit credit reporting industry. I don't know that the government would do any better, but knocking the other guys off the map is a great start. It's been decades since the FCRA was passed (specifically to reign in Equifax which operated more or less like the everyman's TMZ at the time and would even pay for people to go through neighbors garbage) and it has had little impact. The big three credit bureaus are constantly sued and reprimanded and they just ignore it. Let's try something else.

</comment><comment><USER39> I think people would somewhat rightfully make comparisons to China's social credit rating system.

I like the idea of killing off the existing credit rating industry, though. I would prefer it just be heavily regulated as a utility and run by an entity outside the gov.

</comment><comment><USER23> The terrorist watch list is a good example of how the government runs and rates "risks" within its clear jurisdictional areas: [https://www.thetrace.org/2016/06/fbi-terrorist-watch-list- gu...](https://www.thetrace.org/2016/06/fbi-terrorist-watch-list-guns/)

Here's the key quote:

> _" Last year, the The Intercept published a government document that spelled > out the process for putting suspects in the terrorist database. The > guidelines say agencies can nominate candidates for the list if there is > "reasonable suspicion" to believe they are a "known or suspected terrorist." > That's a relatively low bar, and the guidelines even make clear that > agencies don't need "concrete facts" or "irrefutable evidence" to back up > their assertions. The guidelines also give a single White House official > unilateral authority to place entire categories of people on the no-fly > list."_

We can only guess whether the public credit registry will be run with the same, better, or worse level of care and due diligence.

And before you say "omg Trump!!11" note that this article is from June 2016 and the leaked guidelines are from March 2013.

</comment><comment><USER40> Leave them private but make legally liable for leaks and for the bad info. That mistake cost you dearly so make the registries pay.

</comment><comment><USER41> How long until they also replace background check agencies with a public social credit registry :-)

<comment><USER42> In a way they do (minus the "public"). The Global Entry program uses opaque trustworthiness criteria to decide who should get less screening at airports.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Huge support of Sanders.. I love and hate this idea...

Love the idea of a totally open credit bureau that values privacy and does not use medical loans against us. And has full transparency....

I do however not trust the government as we've seen w/ Trump it could easily swing from leftist egalitarianism to rightist fascism in 1-2 election cycles. Then they could use credit scores as a weapon.

I think instead the government should create a regulation platform for credit agencies where they must follow certain principles to be allowed to operate as such including:

* No medical debt.

* Full transparency on how credit scores are scored -- perhaps even being required to use a government sanctioned algorithm.

* Free credit reports to consumers and other tooling.

* Must provide free counselling and support to consumers.

* May make profit from government grants + charging businesses for report access.

* Must offer ways to notify consumers when their reports have been accessed, by who, and when, and allow consumer to revoke and remove access at will.

* Must be protect privacy EVEN from government agencies, to ensure highest level of security for consumers.

Edit: a nice addition would be if they did have more integrations with government programs though, so say every citizen in the credit system is an automatically registered voter in their most recent locale.

</comment><comment><USER44> Is there any reason someone couldn't just make a nonprofit credit bureau today?

</comment><comment><USER45> Social credit score? You mean like china?....

</comment><comment><USER46> Sounds too much like a social credit system.

</comment><comment><USER47> Communism!!!

</comment><comment><USER48> Ah. The China model. Piecewise. Shocking /s.

</comment><comment><USER49> With how awful credit scoring is in the US, this is probably the only option going forward to actually fix it. Right now there's nothing stopping credit scores from being heavily politicized anyways, it's just a few bribes and favors away. Allowing private companies to control this information hasn't fixed anything at all and just left our information even more vulnerable to leaks or being sold.

The rest of his plan involves shrinking the usage of credit scores so that it doesn't affect employment, housing or insurance so I imagine this would lead (ideally) to the general phasing out of the ubiquitous credit scoring nonsense we have to deal with.</comment>


Netflix angers film-makers with 'insulting' speed-up function - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-50220575 <comment><USER2> While I agree that watching a movie in the original intended speed will be a better experience in most cases I don't see how this feature justifies such an outrage.

The consumer should have the choice how they experience it, they may have valid reasons to modify that experience for their own preferences. People are free to read books however they like, listen to audiobooks in whatever speed they set the playback to, YouTube allows speeding up slow talk recordings and now Netflix lets you change the speed of movies as well. Sure, some elitists and purists will say it's not the "true way" of experiencing that content, but to put it simply: it's none of their business how someone else watches a movie.

Every decent video player has that feature and nobody complained, so why not. In the end it is an optional choice and not forced.

<comment><USER3> It might be a case where some paternalism is warranted. I would guess that timing contributes to the "magic" of film more than is obvious. If it's made too easy to speed up playback, people will do it, find their enjoyment of movies/shows diminished, and then probably misattribute their dissatisfaction to the quality of what they're watching rather than the fact that they haven't watched it "as designed."

If enough people do this, filmmakers are forced to counteract it by making works that are more amenable being watched sped up -- assuming that's possible -- but it's inevitable that that will reduce their quality when watched at a normal rate; the end result being that all media will become worse.</comment></comment>


Redesigning Hawaii's Emergency Alert System UI - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/redesigning-hawaiis-emergy-alert-interface-in-the-open-91c6318a7045?b9 <comment><USER4> Going the other way, on /r/ProgrammerHumor/ they're showing designs that are even worse than the original.

[https://gfycat.com/DevotedUnfortunateBongo](https://gfycat.com/DevotedUnfortunateBongo)

[https://gfycat.com/KindlyEverlastingGibbon](https://gfycat.com/KindlyEverlastingGibbon)

[https://gfycat.com/PepperyGoldenAfricanpiedkingfisher](https://gfycat.com/PepperyGoldenAfricanpiedkingfisher)

[https://i.redd.it/ubnpsrzljla01.gif](https://i.redd.it/ubnpsrzljla01.gif)

[https://v.redd.it/8pcx6ymh0ha01](https://v.redd.it/8pcx6ymh0ha01)

[https://gfycat.com/QueasyGrandIriomotecat](https://gfycat.com/QueasyGrandIriomotecat)

[https://i.redd.it/y0a33r0ohja01.png](https://i.redd.it/y0a33r0ohja01.png)

[https://gfycat.com/BadOrganicCanary](https://gfycat.com/BadOrganicCanary)

[https://gfycat.com/BabyishBonyHorseshoebat](https://gfycat.com/BabyishBonyHorseshoebat)

[https://gfycat.com/RegalHighAlaskanhusky](https://gfycat.com/RegalHighAlaskanhusky)

<comment><USER5> [https://i.redd.it/ubnpsrzljla01.gif](https://i.redd.it/ubnpsrzljla01.gif)

is the best.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It looks like it would help prevent the recent incident, but the confirmation screen at the end doesn't make it clear whether it's a test or a real thing. I know there was that big screen at the front, but if you're confirming something you need all the options presented again to double check.

<comment><USER7> There was a story of a nurse who was looking after a mother and her child in ICU. Child had many probes and alarms for alerting of change in condition.

The alarms were going off constantly, but often times, the condition was not severe. Mother was not getting sleep. Nurse took pity on mother. She tried silencing alarms. The system had, i believe, seven warning screens warning against deactivation, all needed to be acked to proceed. She proceeded. Mother got rest. Alarms were silently blaring. Nurses did not get the critical alarms. Toddler did not make it. Nurse obviously fired hospital sued, monitoring system mfg sued.

Monitoring mfg stated they didn't put in further failsafes because they never imagined someone would possibly go past seven ack Windows with all the warnings . Someone did.

<comment><USER8> Did you know its actually a crime to sit in traffic and constantly honk your horn for no reason at all? That's because alerts are _supposed_ to actually alert someone of something. By constantly sounding alerts for basically no reason, you are creating an unsafe environment, because REAL alerts will be ignored.

I've sat by those beds, and had alarms not stop for 12 hours straight. They don't get nurses to come by and check, they aren't alerting to anything important and they are completely ignored.

I believe the company should be sued, not for the GROSS negligence of the nurse unplugging every system, but for the minor negligence of designing a system where constant alerts that don't really mean anything or require any action can't be silenced.

<comment><USER7> The problem is she not only turned off the alarms and beeps in the patient room, but also all the notifications going to nurses' station and pagers, so when the real bad thing happened, no one got alerted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As others are pointing out, steps 2 and 3 are flawed in this design. In an effort to break out the decision steps into a wizard, the author chooses to treat the distinction of 'test alert' vs 'real alert' as a simple configuration option whose decision was already chosen, so it doesn't need to be shown on step 2. This is the sort of designer-bias mistake that, ironically, leads to terrible interfaces like the original that precipitated this whole sequence.

Test alerts and real alerts are entirely different in every imaginable way: one's normal procedure, the other is hopefully a rare event; one causes people to scoff at their phones while the other creates urgency and concern. Playing up the distinction on 'step 1' is good, but eliminating all visual indications of the choice on further steps is bad in ways a confirmation screen can't rectify. UI is only a portion of the UX and the overall operator process, but there should be as few commonalities between the process (and UX) surrounding test alerts and the process surrounding real alerts as the trained operators of the system can bear. It's even odd to have them originate in the same entry point, but as the author has done, I'll also keep my criticism focused on a UI that can do both.

Concretely, I propose a simple way of rectifying the loss of context on 'step 2' is to get rid of the spurious 1-2-3 breadcrumb that doesn't communicate anything that isn't abundantly clear otherwise, and use the space for several conditional indicators that trigger in case a real alert was selected. Warning icons, clear wording, exclamation marks, attention-pulling colors or patterns should be used to distinguish the context of real alerts from text alerts in so many visual ways that accidentally confusing them, even through a momentary loss of situational awareness, is practically impossible.

</comment><comment><USER10> While we all love pretty and overdesigned UIs, for it to be more 2018 friendly make sure to add 5MB of JavaScript and CSS dependencies and new features that only works on Chrome!

As others have noted though step-based flow is not really recommended on a mission-critical UI as you can't rely on user memory. Why not just show the choices sequentially without hiding anything through various generic message screens?

Alert type: [ test ] - <USER2>

Message: other1 - [ Kauai county only ] - <USER3>

Confirm: Send test > Kauai county only?

</comment><comment><USER11> We're going to see a multitude of design hot takes here over the next 10 days, but I think most of these designers are missing the problem. The interface that caused this failure isn't because the system lacked designers. This design was created by being handcuffed by bureaucracy, with no strong leadership in place to solve the problems that were caused.

<comment><USER12> No, the UI is just a limited problem and people enjoy taking their whack at it just like how developers like to test out their own abstractions.

Neither a line of code nor a stroke of paint is going to solve bureaucratic issues. To suggest that everyone is unknowingly glancing past these issues except for you is a bit tacky, as if one is trying to score some me-too points.

<comment><USER13> It's not that. People are talking about the UI design because that's their area of self-efficacy. They are able to design a better UI, but they're not able to come up with a better bureaucracy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Imagining using this 3-page design makes me feel uncomfortable at step 2 and 3. What if I didn't know what the "test" notification was supposed to look like and wanted to make sure the system took my input correctly? What if it's such a dire emergency that the operator forgets (perhaps from experiencing intense anxiety) which one was selected? I think a stronger approach would be to flatten the design to one page. You could then visually confirm that you've chosen a test/real alert, which alert was chosen, and then see what those options actually produce. In addition, because of the seriousness of sending an alert, I think it would be better to make the "Yes, Send Now" button harder to engage — maybe a slide to send, press and hold to send, or simply give a confirmation dialog after clicking it would help.

<comment><USER15> You should probably also keep in mind that this isn't a consumer app. Who ever uses this will have seen the entire process before and tested it in a training environment. The redesign seems mostly to focus on making sure stuff isn't done by accident.

<comment><USER16> I've seen video of police shootouts where the cops - presumably trained on such a thing, plus daily exposure to tense situations - miss repeatedly from just a couple feet away, trip and fall, and otherwise screw up.

Training is not a replacement for good design. It helps, but I'd expect someone _genuinely_ thinking they're about to be nuked to act differently than someone participating in a drill about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think step 2 and 3 are not very clear that you are sending an important message to millions of people, that should only be send in a rare occasion. It could just be that the designer likes red.

What blows my mind is that something like this can be send by a single person. A better approach would be that you need 2 or 3 people to send such an alert to millions of people.

How can a single person, that misplaced it's cursor by 20 pixels have such an effect? That is not only changed by fancier fonts and more colors IMO.

<comment><USER18> Is it possible to have two separate cursors?

Having two mice plugged in controls the same cursor so it doesn't work for dual entry.

With two separate cursors you can have a "double double click" on two sides of the screen. It's be like the dual key, " _1-2-3-Engage!_ " in the movies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is pretty awesome. Kudos to the author. It's cool to see the thought process around designing for clarity instead of purely simplicity on high- impact systems like this.

</comment><comment><USER20> What I find astonishing is that there was not a Two-man rule security control in place.

<comment><USER21> UI is not even remotely relevant compared to this. It can be as ugly 80'ies inspired as it wants to with poor UX. It should require 2 people signing off with their credentials for it to be send.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Why couldn't you just have the color scheme on the web page invert if you click one of the unusual, dangerous live alerts, so you're immediately very clear that you've selected a non-normal action?

So:

\-- Business as usual --

1\. Click test alert

2\. Confirmation appears.

\-- Nuclear attack or accidental click --

1a. Click live alert

2a. Invert colors

3a. Confirmation appears.

Doable entirely client-side, no need for extensive server-side changes which all these redesign ideas require. And the fact that the webpage background just turned black is clue that you've done something out of the ordinary, especially at shift change (so you don't just blindly hit the confirmation).

</comment><comment><USER23> Don't redesign the UI redesign the legal and bureaucratic frameworks that leads to the current UI.

But I get that that's not much fun.

</comment><comment><USER24> this could be written as a terminal app too, and without the need for the idiot interface called the mouse.

</comment><comment><USER25> make them confirm by typing test or alert</comment>


Snips Console will be closing on January 31, 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://forum.snips.ai/t/important-message-regarding-the-snips-console/4145 <comment><AUTHOR> Not even two weeks after announcing the acquisition, now the shutdown notice.

Seems like using snips for your own projects, with Home Assistant, ... is more or less dead outside of what you have working right now and don't need to change.</comment>


What Facebook, Blue Jeans, and Metal Signs Taught Us About Tornado Science - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/what-facebook-blue-jeans-and-metal-signs-taught-us-about-tornado-science <comment><USER2> > missing one of the nation's largest nuclear power plants by less than two > miles

I was fortunate to work for Dr. Twisdale, one of a handful of people (if not the only man) who provides wind hazard engineering support for nuclear power plants looking to renew their license. The biggest division are the two kinds of wind examined: tornadic versus straight-line gusts (thunderstorms, hurricanes, etc). What winds up being the most vulnerable are support buildings to the nuclear power plant and not the plant itself.

The most surreal experience working for him was on a NIST contract where I had to examine a lot of data about the Joplin, Missouri 2011 tornado. Normally, the numbers of engineering hide the personal touch of impacting people's lives, but examining various videos and reports really energized my younger self as working on a high-impact project. The NIST report starting on page 6 really is brutal to read [0]. Then there is the National Geographic documentary which really captures the human toll and the resilience of the survivors [1]. Then there is the video that tourists (I believe?) were taking when they crossed the tornado's path twice [2]. Then there is the video of their brand-new middle school at the time, which security footage captured the devastation [3]. What made this particular tornado devastating was the fact that it hit Joplin's major hospital which serviced the region, and took that hospital offline.

> "There is virtually no literature on that at all," Knox told me when I posed > this question to him, "but I will give you my guess."

That is because most engineering modeling is concerned with the creation of "missiles", such as a telephone pole going through someone's wall. For that there is plenty of literature, and even a single certified code by the NRC: TORMIS [4] (Written in Fortran 77 I believe).

Overall, wind engineering is incredibly tricky but very rewarding when done right. Sadly, it is not the "hip" nor most popular career paths.

[0] [http://www.nist.gov/manuscript-publication- search.cfm?pub_id...](http://www.nist.gov/manuscript-publication- search.cfm?pub_id=915628)

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vG2DTAzZAzw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vG2DTAzZAzw)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CburjPYmSdo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CburjPYmSdo)

[3] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64covicCcIY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64covicCcIY)

[4] [http://pbadupws.nrc.gov/docs/ML0802/ML080230578.pdf](http://pbadupws.nrc.gov/docs/ML0802/ML080230578.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Speaking as someone who was born and raised in Joplin, and retired to it in time for the tornado to trash my apartment that was right at the edge of the zone of total destruction ([http://www.ancell- ent.com/1715_Rex_Ave_127B_Joplin/images/](http://www.ancell- ent.com/1715_Rex_Ave_127B_Joplin/images/)):

 _What made this particular tornado devastating was the fact that it hit Joplin 's major hospital which serviced the region, and took that hospital offline._

We lucked out, in that by then St. Johns wasn't even the city's biggest major hospital, although the Freeman complex was a frighteningly few number of blocks away from it, we could have lost both and probably suffered twice as many deaths. At St. John a visitor and 5 people on ventilators died, but the hospital was otherwise successfully evacuated in an hour and a half as random people with those eeeevil large vehicles we in flyover country are castigated for owning just showed up and moved most of them. Over a several day period the local ambulance service transported over 1,000 people, a number to much more distant hospitals since I'm sure Freeman's ICU was way too small.

We plan for these sorts of things, and had enough spare hospital capacity, including smaller ones in the county and e.g. the beds for the nursing school at the local college were deliberately fully functional so they could help. The St. John's healthcare workers took their supplies and set up at our big multipurpose Memorial Hall, and per these [http://www.aocoohns.org/wp- content/uploads/2012/04/Walker.pd...](http://www.aocoohns.org/wp- content/uploads/2012/04/Walker.pdf) excellent overview slides (WARNING, some _really_ ugly pictures in the latter part of that, you might want to stop at the first CAT scan) a lot of "triage centers spontaneously developed at schools and intersections along the damage path" (we're the sort of people who march to the sound of cannons). Here's some pictures of those including I'm sure Memorial Hall: [https://www.google.com/search?q=joplin+tornado+triage+center...](https://www.google.com/search?q=joplin+tornado+triage+centers&tbm=isch)

The critical cases from St. John's and the tornado went to Freeman, which was a zoo; per the above overview, there were more than 200 patients in a 41 bed ER running on emergency generators. This first hand account by the Stormdoctor (a storm chasing internist) is _excellent_ : [http://stormdoctor.blogspot.com/2011/06/first-response- mode-...](http://stormdoctor.blogspot.com/2011/06/first-response-mode- may-22-2011-joplin.html) (and no pictures, but some ugly trauma described, a hopeless case triaged with morphine, etc.).

WRT to [3], security footage from our brand new middle school, a sobering thing to realize is that we have it because the tornado barely touched the building and I'm sure didn't damage the recording equipment inside. The school was near the edge of the zone of total destruction, like my apartment complex, and probably got hit by spinnoff vortexes or whatever.

The edge was very capricious, note from page 35 of the NIST report [0] the severe damage to the bottom, south part of the Wal-Mart. My part of the apartment complex was _immediately_ to the west, along the tornado's line of travel, and all that happened was that the "clubhouse"/office etc. got destroyed, and every top, 3rd story apartment got breached as well a few 2nd story ones on the east ... and no one in any of these, including the Wal-Mart, died.... But there were people inside running for the more secure back inventory section as the roof peeled off overhead, per an eye-witness report from a cashier I talked to later.

Back to the middle school: there was no serious damage visible on its north (nearest the tornado path) and west (the direction the tornado was going) facades. Officially 65% or more intact, we could have just repaired it, but that's another story about how the long term aftermath of such events can be a stage for megalomaniacal narcissists and carpetbagging sociopaths.

In the zone of total destruction there was very little other than piles of rubble....

Anyway, thanks for your attention to all this and the link to the NIST report, I'll look at it more closely to see if I can figure out the edge effects in my location. Which a ... NWS team, as I recall, that I ran into estimated the winds there were only 120 MPH based on e.g. how the bolts of the cell towers were sheared off.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for sharing your experience! It is one thing to read reports and another thing entirely to have gone through it all. I appreciate you writing about what must be a tough subject.

It is all too easy to get carried away with the Joplin tornado from an engineering standpoint. It provided quite a lot of data on structural responses, responses by people, warning systems, etc. But researching the event hit me hard; keeping the human cost in mind as the ultimate goal gave the other numbers much more significance.

I am happy to say the work is still ongoing. Unfortunately, my small part of it is complete.

Edit: Finally found the video that really put the numbers in perspective for me [0]. It is one thing to calculate "175 mph" winds, and another to see it tear up a family's backyard.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhU579An6PI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhU579An6PI)

<comment><USER3> Well, less than 90 MPH I would guess for the backyard, seeing as how the structure the camera was attached to didn't fail etc.

You're welcome, and, yeah, I suppose a tough subject, this is the first time I've watched any live videos from this event 4 years ago. Can't say how glad I was when the tourists, who had a clue, and thankfully decided not to shelter at the Home Depot, got past the Lowes on Range line. The video starts right at the edge of major destruction (if you look at the street view of that Payless Shoes you'll notice they have a shiny brand new building) and they crossed right through the zone of total destruction. More later, probably, have a phone call.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> My daughter, my wife and I visited the University of Alabama campus in late February of 2011 (about a month before the tornado) and started her college career there in August. When we returned to drop her off, the scale of the damage where the tornado ripped through Tuscaloosa was astonishing. There was an entire subdivision of suburban (stick-built) homes that looked like a pile of matchsticks. And there was a surprisingly small interface between the "completely destroyed" areas and "untouched" areas.

By the time she graduated this May, the damage has been cleared away but the path of this tornado is still visible. There are many brand-new buildings and a lot of open ground, but none of the new construction aligns with the grid of streets in the area. For a family from Pennsylvania (where we rarely see tornados or their aftermath), it was quite eye-opening.

</comment><comment><USER5> I live in an area that was hit by tornadoes that day I found an interior door from a manufactured home in my back yard.

The closest mobile home that was hit was probably 10 miles away "the way the crow flies". This door was about 28 inches by 78 inches and the door knob had been bent and sheared off. It probably weighed at least 15 pounds but all that surface area gave it plenty of lift.

It was a startling find.

</comment><comment><USER6> Tornado took out my grandfather's farm many years back (At 80-odd years old, he was out on his bulldozer 12 hours later, rebuilding). The tornado pulled the back window out of an old car and deposited it in one piece yards away. Tornado's are freaky.</comment>


WikiLeaks says Assange's Internet link was severed by 'state party' - <AUTHOR> http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2016/10/17/wikileaks-says-assanges-internet-link-was-severed-by-state-party.html <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12722929](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12722929)

</comment><comment><USER3> We basically know nothing at this point - the only evidence that it was a "state party" is that Wikileaks said it was. How they can be certain of that is anyone's guess.

That said, John Kerry is in London right now.

<comment><USER4> Also, coincidentally, Russia Today has had all of it's UK based bank accounts closed: [http://www.bbc.com/news/world- europe-37677020](http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-37677020)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The story is nonsense - there's no evidence of any of this happening at all.

Maybe a cleaner upplugged the router? Maybe his WIFI was playing up? Why not use a 4G dongle? The 4G is fine at the building, people are livestreaming from there.

The entire story is cringy hysterical nonsense.

</comment><comment><USER6> That must've been some party!

</comment><comment><USER7> no better source than fox? Many believe foxnews is not a reliable and a highly biased source.

<comment><USER8> [https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/787889195507417088](https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/787889195507417088)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Ranking Reddit Bots, Lambda Architecture and File Systems as a Database - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/ml-everything/ranking-reddit-bots-lambda-database-architecture-and-a-file-systems-as-a-database-b9a405f0aed3 <comment><USER2> I feel like this and some of your other recent posts doesn't really qualify as a Show HN. [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)</comment>


Heat Death: Venture Capital in the 1980s (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://reactionwheel.net/2015/01/80s-vc.html <comment><USER2> Really interesting article.

I am not convinced that we are more like the 80s than the 90s in terms of the types of risks VCs are willing to take, but I do appreciate that sense of the cycles in investing. (dearth of investors -> high returns -> everyone pours in -> returns dry up -> everyone leaves -> dearth of investors)

<comment><USER3> I think when this was written everything seemed pretty great. In 3 years it all looks like '90s to me, crossing his criticality into non-risky bets and slanting non-tech plays as some kind of tech-level margin plays (real estate, kitchens, delivery etc). There's a chance some of these non-tech plays turn out to be great monopolies (primordial Amazons) on a very extended time scale, but they are effectively using investor greed/incompetence to do so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8908463](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8908463)

</comment><comment><USER5> This kind of broad historical article is worth thousands of pages of financial press.</comment>


A girl who was never meant to survive - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/haven_shepherd <comment><USER2> I'm always impressed how people manage to go to "why not me though?" after thinking about "why me?". It's a sign of a strong and life-aware person. We usually gives us reasons why we shouldn't do something and then there's no guilt not to think about why we should do it. It's sad because there could be so many more stories like this one if more of us had will to go to positive side first or at least after thinking about the negative side.

<comment><USER3> I think a lot of which direction a person goes when faced with adversity has to do with their upbringing. I feel that, had she been left in Vietnam in an orphanage, it may have been a much different story with regard to her outlook.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've noticed lately that a lot of the "heartwarming" stories I read have a common thread: religion. People do good things not because it makes objective sense, but because their faith compels them to do the right thing. I'm sure plenty of non-religious people do great things too - but I wager the percentage is higher for those who are devoted to something "higher than themselves". (I say this as a person who is, at best, considered non- religious)

<comment><USER5> According to the book _Enlightenment Now_ , the difference isn't faith. It is being involved in a community organization, which churches happen to be.

Religious people who do not go to church are no more likely to volunteer than non-religious people. Non-religious people who are involved in community organizations are no less likely to volunteer than religious ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How can ever parents do something like this. I can't imagine how did she survived, not just physically but emotionally.

<comment><USER7> Kids can be surprisingly durable in pretty much every way imaginable.

Edit: We're talking about one bad event early in childhood here, not spending an entire childhood with abusive parents.

<comment> saiya-jin Yes but then you meet them as adults and they exhibit (and unsuccessfully try to hide) tons of mental issues due to messed up childhood. Usually revolves around trusting others in relationships and this trickles down to many aspects of their lives

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I've seen it both ways. Some people have learned to bottle up their negative childhoods, leading to various outward behavioral clues, while others seem like they were able to get past it somehow and live truly without that baggage holding them back.

<comment><USER8> Recently, I was reading Brain Rules for Baby by John Medina. IIRC, he said that normally people will have permanent psychological damage and but a few humans seem to get past childhood trauma. There are some genes which seem to make children more resilient. So resilience might be partially hereditary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It sounds like she "was" meant to survive.

</comment><comment><USER10> On mobile as you scroll through it cycles through some large photos, breaking the flow of the text. I had to stop trying to read it.

<comment><USER11> Even on desktop I find this style of presentation distracting. It looks cool, I get it, but it doesn't feel conducive to story telling to break up the text with a screen filling image every N paragraphs.

<comment><USER12> It does some curious things though. It makes reading online an interactive thing - you have to 'flip pages' quite deliberately and quite often. That would have a significant effect on engagement I would think. Perhaps (older?) folks like us are put off; but I can imagine a crowd that would be _more_ likely to finish the article, once they got going/hooked?

<comment><USER11> I don't feel like it makes reading interactive, so much as it makes reading laborious. Regardless of the quality, context, or merit of the picture, it's still a large, obtrusive break in the narrative. Paragraph, paragraph, paragraph, and then a couple of long drags on the mouse wheel until the structure resumes. If anything, this actually keeps me from getting hooked as my concentration and attention are being interrupted every couple of minutes. And I don't think this is related to my ripe old age of 34, either. I appreciate what this style of presentation is trying to do; look like a magazine. But reading in a browser is a much more linear experience than a magazine, where text is often in columns that split and resume on the same page; that's a design pattern we have had a century (or more?) to get used to. Further, in a magazine, we usually have the option to ignore the pictures at our leisure, which is simply not an option here. It looks cool, I'll grant that, but it's otherwise a distraction.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apologetic Error Messages & Mood States On Users' Performance Self-Appraisal - <AUTHOR> http://www.academia.edu/249090/The_Effect_Of_Apologetic_Error_Messages_And_Mood_States_On_Computer_Users_Self-Appraisal_Of_Performance

<comment><USER2> _I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that._</comment>


Pop Science and the Limitations of Infotainment - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZ2aSCH3zjY <comment><USER2> do they explain the irony of using youtube as a medium for explicating this concept? I'll have to give it a watch in veg mode sometime. Is this like "I can do an organic chemistry doctorate program through discovery channel reruns of tiger-vs-tarantula fight to the death or whatever dumbed down pissing contest passes for a nature program these days versus ever having to crack a textbook" kind of thing?

I really do need to watch this, clearly, to satisfy my curiousity.

<comment><USER2> indeed! amen! great piece.

<comment><USER2> I'll instead argue that this is merely symptomatic of a society that is generally increasingly catering to short attention spans and dumbed down popular cultural discourse.

I'm not clear on the extent this is due to actual popular demand versus inculcation (pop culture being the go-to font of "entertainment" and leisure "activities") versus some other unmentioned factors.

Access to wider (global? trans-regional?) audiences brings new opportunities, but desiring broad appeal also causes reductionist behaviors.

Surely one can show the trends in UI's over the course of the last 3 decades and point towards the tendency towards increasingly simplified design. This has also become a feedback loop as the aesthetic of such practical decisions becomes a necessary signal to display.</comment></comment></comment>


Too Dumb to Fail? - <AUTHOR> http://logiccolony.com/2010/10/14/Too-Dumb-to-Fail.html

<comment><USER2> This reminds me a little of the kid who "hacked" into Sarah Palin's email by guessing her easily guessable security questions. One on hand, if someone is sufficiently careless or stupid, it's unfair to punish you for helping yourself to the fruits of their carelessness. But on the other hand, you have to respect people's desire not to be exploited. If you leave laptop in a park for 10 minutes, it's wrong for someone to hop on and use it, even if you should have known better than to leave it unattended.

I have less sympathy for this exploited bot, though, since you go in knowing the stock market can be a ruthlessly zero-sum kind of place.

<comment><USER3> I'd compare this to leaving your house's front door unlocked and open. You're an idiot, but if someone walks in and trashes the place, they still committed a crime.

That's my brain talking, of course. My gut reaction is to say, "stupid is as stupid does", and blame the person who wrote a buggy piece of software.

<comment><USER4> If you can guess how a _person_ will react to market fluctuations and make money off of it, is that a crime?

<comment><USER5> If you cause the fluctuations, yes. It's called "market manipulation" and it has been illegal for a very long time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The problem here is not the outwitting - but rather the manipulation:

      If I _know_ that a news item about a major law suite against a company
      will bring down it stock (predict behavior of others) - trading is valid.

      If I create a false news item in an attempt to bring down the stock - jail.

They didn't analyze current affairs to guess how the trading algorithm will respond, rather they used it to manipulate the stock price.

</comment><comment><USER7> Wow, that's just idiocy. What do they think some HFT algo's do?

</comment><comment><USER8> _"The two men worked out how the computerised system would react to certain trading patterns – allowing them to influence the price of low-volume stocks."_

The key phrase here is _"influence the price"_. Taking the quote at face value, they deliberately tried to manipulate the market.

Also, there seems to be a knee-jerk reaction to HFT in the comments to this story posted anywhere. If you just run an algo, it doesn't automatically mean you manipulate the market.

</comment><comment><USER9> This reminds me of the scene in "The Social Network" where Mark Zuckerburg sits in front of the Harvard disciplinary board for hacking into house face books to harvest student images.

The Zuckerburg in the movie thought that he deserved credit for pointing out security vulnerabilities in the Harvard network.

I do not believe the actions of these traders (or Zuckerburg) were correct. That being said, I still think their actions have value.

One way we learn is through our mistakes. There are many proprietary electronic trading platforms. Who checks them for bugs? Who checks them for accuracy or possible manipulation? I do not think these Norwegian programmers should be gaming a trading robot. At the same time, the SEC and other market regulators need to uphold their end of the bargain. If they would like to see a fair market, I think they should check trading robots for possible manipulation.

</comment><comment><USER10> Isn't the entire market about manipulating people's perceptions?

</comment><comment><USER11> They tried <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump> which is illegal.

<comment><USER12> This was not a pump and dump scheme. Pump and dump involves manipulating the price via spreading false information, which is not at all what they did. They manipulated the price by actually executing trades and predicting how (certain parts of) the market would react to those trades.

<comment><USER5> True, it's not pump&dump. It's "painting the tape". Still illegal.

<http://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/paintingthetape.asp>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> i'm a little confused about how this trade stuff works.

How are high speed trading systems not manipulating the market by making faster than human trades/micro-transactions?

how is it market manipulation if someone automates a patterned behaviour of trading and someone else exploits that behaviour to their advantage at the expense of 1 and only 1 party, the one overseeing the automated transactions.

if only the one HFT machine is affected, or exploited, how is it that exploiting a patterned behaviour isn't considered to be a mistake, or a bad decision, on the part of the HFT algorithm but instead considered a manipulation of stock?

if the exploit was subtle enough that no human trader could distinguish it happening, or if a human trader would never fall for the exploit (as a matter of common sense)then could the exploit be attributed to a bad algorithm and by extension a mistake by the trader who owns the HFT machine?

</comment><comment><USER14> This might turn out to be fairly straightforward if the 'discovery' of the flaw took place through industrial espionage or breach of contract.

<comment><USER12> According to the court documents he noticed strange patterns in orders being placed on a stock he was trading and through careful observations of these patterns over several month in 2006 he managed to conclude that there was an algorithm at the other end and managed to reverse engineer how that algorithm worked.

He apparently also documented his findings and conclusions on a trading forum so there might have been other people out there doing the same thing that haven't been caught.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The systems they manipulated were systems that were likewise designed to outwit dumb human and computer traders.

I can see there is some distinction if you make trades purely for the purpose of invoking a reaction from other traders, but an intelligent AI system will discover this effect and do the same thing, albeit without any explicit human intention behind.

<comment><USER16> "intelligent AI systems" don't do HFT

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> here're the court proceedings in norwegian: [http://multimedia.dn.no/archive/00198/Dom_robotsaken_198967a...](http://multimedia.dn.no/archive/00198/Dom_robotsaken_198967a.pdf)

description of what they did from another forum:

 _\- TMB is showing 5k bid @ 9.7 / 5k ask @ 10 \- Norwegian viking takes out the ask

\- TMB increases the bid to 9.8 and the ask to 10.1 \- Viking is a violent heathen so he continues to hit the ask, though with less size

\- Iterate this for a couple of steps

\- Suddenly the viking feels full and decides to drop his inventory at TMB's bid, and then he repeats the same procedure but by shorting in several steps instead_

Looks like incredibly dumb system to me. Albeit that was 2007 when the HFT arms race has just begun.</comment>


HIV-Infected Infant Cured With Early Use of AIDS Drugs - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-03/hiv-infected-infant-cured-with-early-use-of-virus-blocking-drugs.html <comment><USER2> One has to wonder if the infant is homozygous for the noted CCR5 variant that confers resistance to HIV infection. This could potentially explain a high viral load with negative titers later.

I can't tell (from the relatively scant details) if the child ever developed HIV infection, by which I specifically mean to include infiltration of a cell by the virus, replication, and a host reaction. I can't find text in the articles describing which blood tests were done on the child. If her ELISA and Western blot are negative (still) but she initially had a nucleic acid amplification test that was positive with high titer, then it would make me wonder if the drugs, for this baby, were not necessarily the key element causing her to be disease free. I.e., I would wonder if the infant weren't actually cured because she was never fully infected in the first place.

If she was truly infected and her body was reacting to the replicated pathogen, then this early treatment strategy is extremely interesting.

<comment><USER3> Also see: the Milwaukee protocol for rabies. No one knows just why it works for some people but not for others, but early treatment is key.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For those of you too young to remember the 90's, AIDS meant sure death in very few years. It was worse than cancer: with some cancers, you stood a chance.

How far we've come :)

<comment><USER5> My understanding is HIV is still more or less a death sentence, with the antiretroviral therapies being relatively effective to push back the final outcome. And there are issues not being discussed here, such as compliance issues with the treatments (adverse reactions and so on) that make patients drop the treatments. It's far from being perfect yet.

<comment><USER2> It's more of a chronic disease than a death sentence. We all die, and if you push back the final outcome far enough, your odds of dying from something else outgun your odds of dying from HIV/AIDS.

For example, those with HAART-treated HIV infection who have been treated for four years or more tend to die from a non-AIDS-related cause rather than from an AIDS-related one. [1]

[1] = <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20380565>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder how this child's "blood remains free of the virus" status compares to the 'undetectable' viral loads reported for others (eg Magic Johnson) for many years. Is there a qualitative difference?

<comment><USER7> Such people who are undetectable are also on meds. People who are not on meds don't have undetectable viral loads.

I wonder if the kid has the CCR5-Δ32 mutation, which seems to provide natural immunity against certain strains of HIV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The treatment details from this interesting article and from the Guardian article

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/mar/03/us-doctors- cur...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/mar/03/us-doctors-cure-child- born-hiv)

and New York Times article

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/04/health/for-first-time- baby...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/04/health/for-first-time-baby-cured- of-hiv-doctors-say.html)

just submitted to HN

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5315660>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5315673>

make clear that this is a very unusual case. The baby's HIV infection was acquired from an infected mother, but her HIV status was not known until she was in labor. Because she did not receive the usual preventive treatment given to HIV-positive pregnant women, the baby received three-drug therapy rather than one-drug therapy as the baby's treatment began after birth. The baby's current status of no detectable infection after a hiatus in drug therapy is a very unusual outcome. It's unclear how likely it is that this result could be reproduced in other patients. Thousands of failures to attain the same outcome have already happened all around the world.

From the Bloomberg article submitted to open this thread:

"The baby, whose identity has been kept anonymous, began taking a regimen of AIDS drugs about 30 hours after she was born at a rural Mississippi hospital, doctors said today at a medical meeting in Atlanta. At 18 months, the mother took the child off the medication. With no signs of the virus for 10 months, the infant was deemed 'functionally cured,' researchers said.

. . . .

"The baby's treatment combined lamivudine and zidovudine, both sold by GlaxoSmithKline Plc's joint venture with Pfizer Inc., ViiV Healthcare, and Abbott Laboratories' Kaletra."

From the New York Times article:

"If the report is confirmed, the child born in Mississippi would be only the second well-documented case of a cure in the world, giving a boost to research aimed at a cure, something that only a few years ago was thought to be virtually impossible.

"The first person cured was Timothy Brown, known as the 'Berlin patient,' a middle-aged man with leukemia who received a bone-marrow transplant from a donor genetically resistant to H.I.V. infection."

From the Guardian article:

"Children infected with HIV are given antiretroviral drugs with the intent to treat them for life, and Gay warned that anyone who takes the drugs must remain on them.

"'It is far too early for anyone to try stopping effective therapy just to see if the virus comes back,, she said."

AFTER EDIT: Following up on some of the other top-level comments here, gojomo asks how the case reported in this thread differs from Magic Johnson's condition. Magic Johnson has consistently taken his antiretroviral drugs, which were first developed only shortly before his HIV infection was diagnosed, throughout the decades since he was diagnosed. He has never had a hiatus in treatment. What's remarkable about the case reported today is that the baby's treatment was stopped at about age eighteen months, but the child still has no detectable HIV infection.

I remember all too well when AIDS was a sure death sentence. The development of effective antiretroviral drugs in the early 1990s was a huge surprise. Even today, there are very few drugs that are effective against any kind of viral infection (although there are many vaccines that kind prevent viral infections, and smallpox has been completely eliminated from humankind).

Another comment asked about cures for diseases announced in recent years. For the most part, reductions in disease risk are gradual, mostly from accumulation of better practice in treatment and prevention. But the death rate from all causes of death at all ages is steadily declining in the developed world,

[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity-w...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity- why-we-die-global-life-expectancy)

and has been throughout my lifetime. For more than a century, humankind has been gaining life expectancy at the steady rate of fourth months per year (or one extra day of life for each day you live),

[http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity....](http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity.aspx)

[http://www.demographic- challenge.com/files/downloads/2eb51e2...](http://www.demographic- challenge.com/files/downloads/2eb51e2860ef54d218ce5ce19abe6a59/dc_biodemography_of_human_ageing_nature_2010_vaupel.pdf)

<http://www.pnas.org/content/105/36/13274.full>

so a girl born in the last decade in the developed world has a better than even chance to living to age 100.

<comment><USER9> "I remember all too well when AIDS was a sure death sentence."

There was an _excellent_ documentary released last year about the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 80s and 90s, which I can't recommend highly enough. It's deeply interesting and eye-opening on several levels: <http://surviveaplague.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> "With no signs of the virus for 10 months..."

Does this mean that the virus could still be incubating in cells and some sort of stressor could cause the virus to come out, similar to those that have had Chicken Pox getting Shingles later in life? If so, is it really a cure? To me, a vaccine that has passed all trial stages and works almost 100% and w/few side effects is a cure. I don't want to belittle this miracle, but complacency caused by misleading news is much, much worse than playing it down and getting it right before announcing there is a cure. Hope is a wonderful thing though.

<comment><USER11> A vaccine is not a cure. It's prevention - which already exists for mother to child HIV transmission.

Anyway, the doctors don't make any absolutely definitive statements, but:

"Now, after at least one year of taking no medicine, this child's blood remains free of virus even on the most sensitive tests available"

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/mar/03/us-doctors- cur...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/mar/03/us-doctors-cure-child- born-hiv)

<comment><USER10> > A vaccine is not a cure. It's prevention

True.

My point was that the title of the post indicated that the child was cured. We don't know that yet, and may not know for some time. It will be nearly impossible to eradicate HIV without prevention. If this child has unprotected sex as an adult thinking that it is cured, is that safe? We don't know. Maybe the virus will show again in their adulthood.

However, if a vaccine is found and we can prove the vaccination works, that provides a lot more security. Because of many of our parents getting vaccinated, Smallpox got to the point where their children (us) didn't have to get vaccinated. That is where we need to get with HIV. Because of AZT, etc. people just assume it is more of an annoyance now, like Herpes that can be managed. We need adequate resources dedicated and I am concerned that touting a cure that may not be is not in the public's best interest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Being fairly young, I can not remember a time in my life when a disease was cured or a vaccine created that significantly reduced transmission. I keep expecting a grand announcement like "AIDS cured" or "Cancer defeated" but there are always so many caveats that it feels like progress isn't being made. I wonder if it was the same way with other diseases in the past, and I am just being important, or if modern day ones are somehow different.

<comment><USER13> Since 1980, we've developed vaccines for:

       - Hepatitis B,
       - Chicken Pox,
       - HPV,
       - Rotavirus,
       - Hepatitis A,
       - and Pneumococcal.

There's also been a lot of improvements in existing vaccines, regular new Influenza strain vaccines, etc...

A lot of those simply got quietly introduced into the routine vaccination schedule for children and the diseases quietly vanished without much fanfare in those countries.

Polio is _almost_ eliminated world-wide now, but that's taken decades.

<http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/vacc-timeline.htm>

[http://www.chop.edu/service/vaccine-education- center/vaccine...](http://www.chop.edu/service/vaccine-education- center/vaccine-schedule/history-of-vaccine-schedule.html)

<comment><USER12> That's uplifting to know! I've had several of those vaccines, but I didn't realize that they were developed so recently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _Those researchers also were unable to find any trace of the virus, prompting them to determine the baby had essentially been cured._

I am hoping for the best, it would a gift of life for millions, and drug cos can't hold this even if it cost them billions to make. Horrible PR and all.

However, could the virus still be there but under the test's threshold?

</comment><comment><USER15> how is this hacker news moroon

<comment><USER16> Well you have to consider a lot of innovation with technology and medical research led to this point. This article speaks only of the result of the work, but surely if you dig deeper you would find there are many smart people working on this issue, and I'd gladly lump them into the category of hackers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I highly recommend this documentaries , House of numbers <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fELMm5mAeXU> and The Greatest Medical Fraud in History <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vT3b_0doyRk>

<comment><USER18> Dude... where is the evidence? All I see here is posturing that HIV doesn't cause AIDS... on the linked web site there is even someone claiming the "HIV- virus" doesn't even exist.

<comment><USER17> Just check "how HIV tests are taken" , they don't even have virus to compare with, they just count your AntiBodies ..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The HIV-AIDS hypothesis is a hoax concocted by someone who never did any research on HIV. Do your research please.</comment>


Show HN: AlexaFeed – Use Twilio to create Alexa Flash Briefing feeds - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/nealrs/wwalexa <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN, I made this to scratch an itch & experiment with Alexa as a distribution platform. Basically, it's a Flask app that creates audio Flash Briefings for Alexa by doing 2 things:

1\. Allowing you to call in and record audio clips, saving them to s3 using date-based filename. (you can email them in too.)

2\. Generating a dynamic Alexa Flash Briefing JSON feed based on the current date.

[Live demo of the feed]([https://wakeyio- alexa.herokuapp.com/](https://wakeyio-alexa.herokuapp.com/))

[Add this skill to your Alexa Flash Briefing and try it live!]([https://www.amazon.com/Neal-Shyam- Wakey/dp/B072LFK83G/ref=sr...](https://www.amazon.com/Neal-Shyam- Wakey/dp/B072LFK83G/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital- skills&ie=UTF8&qid=1497901445&sr=1-1&keywords=wakey+wakey))

If you're a frequent content creator/podcaster like Gary V or Justin Kan - this could be a neat way to get into people's daily routines.

</comment><comment><USER2> Awesome!</comment>


TripleSec - Symmetric Encryption combining AES, Salsa20, and Twofish - <AUTHOR> https://keybase.io/triplesec/ <comment><USER2> I may be wrong as I'm no security researcher, but I was under the impression that combining things like this (and rolling your own crypto in general) could potentially make things weaker. Is this the case here?

Edit: Reading it more, I'm more convinced. It looks like there was a discussion a few days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6401057](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6401057)

<comment><USER3> Combining algorithms, if done properly, isn't necessarily going to make things weaker. But doing it properly isn't trivial (which goes for crypto in general) and the more complex the construction, the more opportunities for screwing it up.

But at the end of the day it's still trying to solve the wrong problem. The chance of a well studied algorithm like AES having a significant weakness is much, MUCH lower than the chance that a particular program using it has a security flaw. Any effort spent layering Twofish and Salsa20 on top of AES would almost certainly be better spent making sure the usage of AES is totally secure.

<comment><USER4> It wasn't trivial to write TripleSec, which I why we did it and open-sourced it.

Any encrypted data you put onto a remote-server will live there forever, so your encryption has to be future-proof. I think it pays to hedge your bets here.

All of our implementations are tested against known test vectors. Side-channel attacks could be a problem though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like this idea to reduce dependence on trusting any given algorithm.

If I'm a global passive adversary, I would try to attack your blobs in these ways:

1) weaken your random number generators

2) guess your password by running massive dumps of passwords and passwords mutated with rules against pbkdf2 (why didn't you use scrypt?)

3) try to convince you or your system to decrypt a blob and reveal the plaintext to me surreptitiously (not so passive)

4) try to get your password from security flaws in wherever you store it

5) conduct traffic analysis on who is storing blobs where and when, and how long their blobs are

My bet is that the password is the weak point. Can you do anything to address that?

<comment><USER4> Passwords are bound to be weak, you are right. Running PBKDF2 only gives some protection against password-cracking, but a well-funded adversary can overcome that protection if the original password doesn't have enough entropy.

For passwords, I recommend using a sequence of 4-5 random words chosen from a ~20k word dictionary. This gives you about 58 to 72 bits of entropy.

I also recommend [https://oneshallpass.com](https://oneshallpass.com) for giving random PWs to different Web sites, but that's a slightly different problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Didn't Bruce Schneier publish a provably secure scheme in which multiple encryption algorithms could be combined such that a weakness in any single one of them was not sufficient to reduce the security of the message?

<comment><USER4> Yes, it's in Section 15.8 of the 2nd edition of Applied Cryptography. This is basically that scheme, but we're not inflating ciphertexts as he suggests (which is a good thing).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Don't use this thing.

<comment><USER4> Is there any justification to your comments? Your criticisms on the crypto have all been debunked by those who know the crypto. See here for an example: [http://d3j5vwomefv46c.cloudfront.net/photos/large/810438785....](http://d3j5vwomefv46c.cloudfront.net/photos/large/810438785.png?1379813991)

Again, I am open to valid criticisms. Those of the form "this is stupid because XSS isn't solved" aren't valid in my book because they are orthogonal problems, and progress along either axis is good.

<comment><USER7> What a weird comment. All Adam Langley seems to have to say about your system is that you didn't use a weak cipher composition but did use a weak MAC composition, and all I have to say in that thread is that I didn't think the Joux multicollision attack he was referring to applied. And yet somehow, presumably by ignoring the other cryptographers criticizing this design at the same time, you synthesized a narrative about how "my criticisms" were "debunked".

Here's the problem I have with your design: it doesn't make any sense to me. So worried are you about the NSA's ability to break AES or Salsa20 --- a worry not apparently shared by cryptographers, so far as I can tell --- that you resurrect Bruce Schneier's 1990s-era block cipher cascade, chaining Twofish(?!), a modified(?!) Salsa20, and AES. But so confident are you in the safety of Javascript crypto that... you deliver that code over an AES- encrypted TLS channel. I don't get it. What was the point of this again? How is anything you're doing making it harder for the NSA to subvert your comms? They're a single AES key away from rewriting your entire cryptosystem.

<comment><USER8> > a modified(?!) Salsa20

Other concerns aside, XSalsa20 is undeserving of your indignant reaction: it was created by DJB himself and was proven by him to be secure if Salsa20 is.

<comment><USER4> Agwa, thanks for coming to DJB's and my defense. Unfortunately, anyone who disagrees with tptacek gets an automatic downvote.

<comment><USER7> You have never in your life seen me criticize anything Bernstein said. You've once again deliberately mischaracterized something I said in order to replace rational discussion with emotional appeals. Here you've done it on two dimensions, first by suggesting that you're standing shoulder to shoulder with Daniel Bernstein, which you are not, and then by attempting to personalize the discussion to make it appear that you have a specific conflict with me, when in fact I just pointed out upthread 3 cryptographers, all of them smarter than me, who also had negative things to say about your design.

I don't think this style of argumentation is helping you. I think it makes it sound like you don't have good responses to technical criticism. But that's just me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is cool, but it lacks plausible deniability with the header, which is unfortunate. With that said, I'll be keeping an eye on it, and how it stands in the crypto community.

</comment><comment><USER10> Don't upvote advice without explanation.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. I am open to valid criticisms on the crypto and/or implementation shortfalls, but unjustified comments don't help.</comment></comment>


Programmers: Nuts or not? - <AUTHOR> http://sbb.com.np/post/index.php?id=xYd2MNfWiw

<comment><USER2> This article is like reading my thoughts aloud. Worth reading and sharing mate!</comment>


Why is Ivy Bridge so hot? - <AUTHOR> http://www.overclockers.com/ivy-bridge-temperatures

<comment><USER2> The takeaway I got from this article is that if I use solder to attach my heatsink to the spreader on my Core i5 2500K instead of thermal paste, I could get a big jump in heat conductivity. Now if only I had the tools to create a solder point that large...

<comment><USER3> Thankfully, someone already sells that. <http://indigo-xtreme.com/>

<comment><USER4> The '>20 W/mK' claimed by this method, while a lot better than the 5 W/mK of regular TIM, is still a fair way off the 80 W/mK that the article claimed for a soldered solution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The logical next step, sadly unexplored, would have surely been to do some testing without the IHS?

E: turns out it doesn't really help[0], though that doesn't mean it wouldn't have been better if soldered.

0\. [http://www.overclock.net/t/1249419/pcevaluation- intel-i7-377...](http://www.overclock.net/t/1249419/pcevaluation- intel-i7-3770k-temperature-measured-without-ihs)

</comment><comment><USER5> It doesn't make sense to me that Intel would do this just to save a nickel, unless solder is way more costly than I imagine. I'd like to know if some other aspect of production makes paste more desirable.

<comment><USER6> The only Ivy Bridge chips that are out are engineering samples. It's good that people are bringing it up, but this is likely just a beta thing. Maybe they wanted to be able to remove the IHS...or maybe they didn't want people to know the final overclocked performance characteristics for some reason.

<comment><USER2> What does engineering sample mean? I could go to Microcenter right now and buy a Core i5 3570K right now if I wanted to. Are they selling engineering samples? That seems like a somewhat shady move.

<comment><USER7> The first Ivy Bridge consumer chips are just hitting retailers today (NewEgg just put them on sale ten hours ago). All of the experiments done so far have been on review chips sent out some weeks ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Could it be that Intel is making current generation of Ivy Bridge less over- clockable, so when the next generation is due, they just change the thermal conductivity of it, and over-clock it a bit more and call it a new chip?

<comment><USER9> No, the next generation is a "tock" in Intel parlance, which is a whole new microarchitecture.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for mentioning intel tick-tock. I had not heard that before.

[http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/silicon- innovations/i...](http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/silicon- innovations/intel-tick-tock-model-general.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Apparently "Ivy Bridge" is NOT the name of a female model.

<comment><USER12> Or a Bond girl.</comment></comment>