GPS tracker for Kids and Pets without monthly fees - <AUTHOR> http://superbcrew.com/gps-tracker-for-kids-and-pets-without-monthly-fees/

<comment><AUTHOR> These guys had a successful indiegogo campain, and raised $66,611 of $50,000 goal.</comment>


Parse.com is down (500) - <AUTHOR> http://parse.com

<comment><USER2> Check status.parse.com for updates. We're really sorry for the inconvenience and we're working now to resolve.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> [http://status.parse.com](http://status.parse.com) for updates.

</comment><comment><USER3> Many sites are down right now, including instagram.com, codecademy.com and vine.co

</comment><comment><USER4> RDS issues.</comment>


Ask HN: Is Make School worth it? - <AUTHOR> I'm from Portugal so the tuition is really high for our standards. <comment><USER2> 60K for learning how to make mobile and web apps seems like a lot regardless of where you are located. The only advantage would seem to be the in-person classes and the full-time nature of it but if your goal is to learn mobile and web application development then you have a lot of cheaper options (Udacity, Coursera, books) if you have the self-motivation and discipline to learn on your own. I guess the real question to answer is "Worth it compared to what other options you are considering"?

<comment><USER3> > if you have the self-motivation and discipline to learn on your own

And if you don't you should be seriously reconsidering if this is the industry for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Referring to this I believe:

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

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes! Forgot to include the URL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't know Make School, but can give general search advice however: Search for "make school" in combination with words like "scam", "sucks", "not worth it", "terrible", "experience" to find critical posts. You can also do it with positive words to get to know the other side. If tuition is steep, try "make school" and "grant", "support" etc.

</comment><comment><USER6> Yes school is worth it but you have to make sure you make the best use of the knowledge and teachers you have.

<comment><AUTHOR> You mean Make School or any school in general?

<comment><USER6> Any school you go to.</comment></comment></comment>


Frank Sinatra Jr. Dies of Cardiac Arrest While on Tour - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2016/03/16/us/ap-us-obit-frank-sinatra-jr.html <comment><USER2> For those unfamiliar with his work, here's his lead vocal with Was (not Was) on "Wedding Vows in Vegas";

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9FwhpZyzTc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9FwhpZyzTc)</comment>


More 8088 MPH how it's done - <AUTHOR> http://www.reenigne.org/blog/more-8088-mph-how-its-done/

<comment><USER2> Nostalgia to a simpler, different time.

The rather surprising thing, I think, is that most of the techniques they are using were known on the C64 at the time when CGA was popular. They weren't perfected yet, but they were already in use - but no one took them seriously on the PC:

Cycle counting was incompatible with the variety of hardware; CRTC games did not work on all monitors.. Almost no one even looked there. I remember being very proud getting 16 colors on the CGA's 320x200x4-color mode back in '87, only to see that it didn't work on my friend's shining new EGA.

In other words, I'm getting old .....

<comment><USER3> The PC's architecture was initially a curse. A graphics board that could not run popular software had very limited value and software that does not run on anything better than a CGA (specially since EGA could do better game graphics than CGA) was seen as buggy. In the end, the VGA-equipped PCs ate Amiga's lunch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Witchcraft?

 _reads writeup_

Yup. Witchcraft.</comment>


Is the Whonix project run by fascists? - <AUTHOR> https://micahflee.com/2020/06/is-the-whonix-project-run-by-fascists/ <comment><USER2> Probably the most ill informed article I've seen on HN in a long while.

The author is putting 2 and 2 together and getting 50.</comment>


Scary statistics: When Is Rape Okay? - <AUTHOR> http://lisashea.com/lisabase/womensissues/whenisrapeok/

<comment><USER2> I think she's misinterpreting Game of Thrones by describing it as an attractive, escapist fantasy world. I think that Martin's point is that we should feel ambivalent about this world because it is, in many ways, a brutal, horrible place. Martin is pretty clear that, in this system, the people who actually take the principles of honor and chivalry seriously are exploited by people who view those principles cynically. One way to look at the explicit sex (particularly with prostitutes) in Game of Thrones is that it shows that our conception about the men in this setting as chivalrous and protective of women is just a self-serving lie. What they say in their codes of honor is counterbalanced by what they do in Peter Baelish's brothels. This isn't just a society that sees women as "there for the taking", it's a society where everyone can be exploited and the honorability of your actions has very little connection to your fate. The fact that, in this environment, there are so many women who are powerful is an important statement and not one that we find in, say, Tolkien.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed.

I posted this article almost exclusively for the collection of statistics and studies, not for her analysis when it intersects with fiction material which can greatly cloud issues.

To illustrate my point: some of the greatest range of violent, sexual and gender assymetrical fiction material known is very readily available and used in societies like Japan (well before the advent of the Internet), yet their crime rates are virtually non-existent compared to much of the rest of the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Regarding the last statistic mentioned I found myself in a bit of a pickle myself. Maybe the question "Would you keep trying to have sex if your date says no?" is a rather complicated one.

It seems to me that the default answer is no. So if you ask someone you haven't gone that far yet after just a bit of kissing you would most likely get a no (which probably highly depends on the women and how she feels judged if she openly admits to her desires), but minutes later you might get a yes. A tug of war, a game. There is certainly a difference between a women laughingly saying "no", then taking her bra off anyway, and a women pushing herself in the corner screaming "no!", but what comes to mind if these men are asked? Really the latter?

I've had the former happen rather often, although my experience is limited to younger women. I would probably answer yes without hesitation, adding myself to the group of people this articles writer is dumbfounded by.

Reflecting on that I'm rather confused.

<comment><USER4> This show us we still have a long way to go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow, that's both scary (more than _50%_ of guys reported that rape was okay in some cases), and depressing (double digit % of women have been conditioned into thinking it's acceptable).

Seriously wtf is wrong with people :-/</comment>


Stephen Hawking: 'There are no black holes' - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/stephen-hawking-there-are-no-black-holes-1.14583 <comment><USER2> So basically they took off three words of what he said to make a super sensationalistic headline?

How scientific.

 _there are no black holes with event horizons_

If you take the mass of a sun and squeeze it into a few miles wide, you are definitely going to get inescapable gravity no matter what you want to call it.

<comment><USER3> By that logic neutron stars should be black holes. But they're not.

<comment><USER2> Sorry I didn't mean the sol sun, I mean a sun with enough mass to become a black hole.

Neutron stars are in a sense "failed" black holes because of not enough mass. I wonder if they could eat more mass and achieve that status though.

<comment><USER4> That is one of the standard candles - type 2 supernova IIRC - when neutron star in binary system is eating the other star and turns nova very predictably.

<comment><USER5> The standard candles are Type Ia supernova which are when white dwarfs exceed the Chandrasekhar mass and become neutron stars. It is thought that when neutron stars exceed the maximum mass of a neutron star (which is not well known, by the way) they form a gamma-ray burst.

<comment><USER6> The TOV Limit for those following at home. It's when the star's gravitational pressure exceeds neutron degeneracy pressure and collapses into a black hole.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff_limi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff_limit)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I echo my comment from the other Hawking thread on the HN front page:

The article being referred to seems to be a short piece where he summarizes his points and puts forward a (new?) idea. Maybe it's obvious to researchers in the field, but I don't see much argument or reasoning supporting his claim. It seems like he's just introducing a new idea for people to consider (brainstorming with the community).

So please don't blow this out of proportion.

<comment><USER8> This seems like a good way to read it to me. Hawking does put forth some meaningful arguments in there that deserve attention (or else it wouldn't be worth listening, even if this is Hawking), but he hasn't proven any new theorems or shown an explicit counterexample to previously accepted physics.

This firewall issue is just _complicated_ , and it has stubbornly resisted consensus from the physics community despite a year or so of intense interest. I think we're in the market for crazy new ideas at this point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The funny thing about black holes is that the classical story of the black hole never made sense, but the "old men" of the physics community always suppressed any real criticism of it since it's been almost impossible to get a job in physics since 1968.

If you right down the equations for a simple black hole you immediately encounter a singularity at the event horizon, but this is swept under the rug by making a coordinate change. The trouble is that coordinate change breaks the warrantee on the space-time continuum because it will stretch a plank length out to something macroscopic. making quantum phenomena visible.

A simpler paradox which has never been taken seriously is that an outside observer sees that it takes forever for something falling into a black hole to hit the event horizon. However, knowing about Hawking radiation, you know the black hole doesn't last forever, so an outside observer never sees anything fall into a black hole.

Thus the classical black hole was always a pipe dream. In the 1970s the information paradox showed that a classical black hole (which makes information disappear because you can't tell the difference between a black hole that was made out of gold bars or feathers) makes information disappear, but information can't disappear in a quantum mechanical universe.

<comment><USER8> I'm sorry, but comments like this seriously irritate me. Your words here reflect some basic misunderstandings of the science involved, but rather than concluding "I don't understand this", you've instead suggested what amounts to a conspiracy theory. Quite apart from the deep insult this implies toward generations of physicists, you're baselessly contributing to the erosion of public confidence in science.

The quickest way to counter your claims of suppression, I think, is to do a Google Scholar search for a term like "black hole information paradox". No, we don't entirely understand what's going on there, but figuring it out has been one of the most active and fruitful areas of research in relativity and high energy physics for decades.

As for your "breaks the warranty on the space-time continuum" claim, I'd love to know why you're choosing the "spherical coordinates" coordinate system as _the_ fundamental one (so that we should judge coordinate stretches as "too big" relative to its measure). Not that I like the idea of specifying one reference frame as "preferred" at all, but if I had to, the only natural choice would be the reference frame of a freely falling observer. And that's precisely the coordinate system we typically change to in order to show that there's no essential singularity at the event horizon. So please don't lob insults at the active physics community based on your own misunderstanding of the theories that _they_ spend their lives striving to understand.

[Credentials: I'm a professional physicist: a professor specializing in string theory with a background in general relativity.]

<comment><USER10> >> A simpler paradox which has never been taken seriously is that an outside observer sees that it takes forever for something falling into a black hole to hit the event horizon

> [Credentials: I'm a professional physicist: a professor specializing in > string theory with a background in general relativity.]

That's my one of my biggest problems with physics (other is Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics). As I understand it in our frame of reference, nothing ever (before present moment) crossed any event horizon because of gravitational time dilatation.

When I tried to solicit people on the internet to help me understand it they said that in general relativity theory you can draw line of simultaneity arbitrarily and that causes "before" and "after" to not make sense for two distant points.

I can imagine that's true (although I'm doubtful), after all in classical theory simultaneity is straight line orthogonal to time, in special relativity it's straight line but slanted dependent on speed of reference frame. I was imagining simultaneity line in general relativity theory as a well defined curve dependent on speed of reference frame and mass distribution but I can also imagine that it's not defined in unambiguous way at all. I am yet to read some actual scientific material about defining simultaneity in GRT and how it relates to gravitational time dilatation that seem pretty well defined to me.

If you could recommend some reading material about simultaneity in GRT (or some more general concept that gets reduced to simultaneity in universe without mass) I'd be most grateful.

It doesn't have to be too simple. I was International Physics Olympiad national level laureate and I'm pretty motivated to understand that as it costed me some sleepless nights over the last ten years or so.

<comment><USER8> First, an aside: the OP's comment "which has never been taken seriously" about this topic is also entirely mistaken. Heck, I've heard that issue come up in serious conversation within the past year.

I've got to concur with the other people you've heard from: simultaneity in classical (Galilean) physics is the same for every observer, simultaneity in Special Relativity is different for observers moving with different velocities, and simultaneity in General Relativity often isn't even globally well-defined for one observer at a time. That's not too surprising given other features of GR. You've no doubt heard about "gravitational lensing", where a large mass curves space so that "straight" light rays from the same distant object appear to come from two different directions. Now imagine the same thing happening to a "line of simultaneity", and you'll start to understand the issue.

I suspect that one concept that might satisfy a part of what you're looking for as a "generalization of simultaneity" is a _Cauchy surface_ or _Cauchy hypersurface_ : [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauchy_surface](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauchy_surface) This idea, essentially, is an arbitrary (possibly curved but everywhere spacelike) plane that divides time into "future" and "past", and that can serve as an "initial value surface". Have a look at that article for more information, and see if it's something like what you're looking for.

[Also: I don't like the Copenhagen interpretation, either. I've become more of a "many worlds"/Everett person ever since a fantastic and highly mathematical quantum course in grad school, despite the somewhat uncomfortable philosophical issues with it.]

<comment><USER10> Thank you very much for your response.

I guess my struggle now is about how to reconcile the fact that simultaneity in General Relativity often isn't even globally well-defined for one observer at a time with the pretty well defined gravitational time dilatation. How can one say that time flows slower in higher absolute gravitational potential then somewhere else without being able to unambiguously say what's before and what's after at those two points.

Cauchy surface at least from wiki description doesn't sound much like a simultaneity line/surface/subspace. Is it dependent on the speed of the observer? I'm looking for some concept that in universe without mass reduces to SRT simultaneity. It might be twisted, branching, looping as in you lensing example but smoothly transitioning towards SRT simultaneity as mass goes to zero. Also time distance at two remote points between such surfaces should be reflect value of gravitational time dilatation between those two points. Is there something like that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Black Holes, as originally posited, are quite extreme things to have sitting around in the universe (infinitely dense singularities etc). Physics seems to be tying itself in knots to figure out how they would work; alternatively the idea that they might not be possible in the first place is a much tidier solution.

This reminds me of a competing theory that states black holes (as currently understood) can't exist: Instead they are Magnetospheric eternally collapsing objects [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetospheric_eternally_collap...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetospheric_eternally_collapsing_object)

</comment><comment> vezzy-fnord Title is misleading. This is simply more research on the very well known black hole information paradox, proposing that a commonly cited property of black holes may be wrong.

<comment><USER11> Not that misleading. Hawking goes on to say there would also be no singularity. That's quite a big change.

<comment><USER12> Yeah. It sounds like his theory is that gravity/spacetime eventually becomes "turbulent" as the energy level of gravity approaches C (I'm sure I phrased that wrong). My instinctive analogy is to compare it to how the ideal gas law or laminar flow equations fall apart in cases where individual particle interactions screw everything up... to the level that it's impossible for all the matter to get compressed into a single point.

That's far more interesting to me than the idea that the "event horizon" is gone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I never bought that humans could travel through an event horizon[1].

Say that your leg is inside the black hole, but the rest of you isn't. How can the atoms just outside the horizon detect the quantum forces from the atoms just inside? Electromagnetic forces are transmitted by photons, which are forbidden to cross this barrier.

Thus, if you pulled back away from the horizon, you would have an event- horizon-curvature-shaped hole where your lower leg had just been.

Similarly, for any matter traveling through the black hole, unless two atoms and all their electrons passed through the horizon simultaneously, no chemical bond could survive (since from the point of view of one atom, the other "blinks" out of existence.)

Thus, anything that crosses an event horizon _must_ be fundamental particle mush, no? Assuming gluons were also forbidden to cross back, even protons and neutrons would be torn apart.

[1] I mean one around a very massive black hole - so that spaghettification is yet to occur.

P.S. - This argument takes a very literal interpretation of fundamental particles; indeed, it would be interesting to test the quantum-ness of matter to see how this worked - i.e. whether "stuff" really is particles or waves - since waves could, potentially, exist on both sides of the barrier at once.

<comment><USER14> IIRC: from the point of view of the human, it takes infinite time to reach the event horizon, since their speed will approach the speed of light. So the actual experience of passing through the event horizon never occurs!

<comment><USER15> _from the point of view of the human, it takes infinite time to reach the event horizon_

No, it doesn't. The proper time (time by the infalling observer's clock) that it takes to fall to the horizon is finite.

 _their speed will approach the speed of light_

This isn't correct either. The infaller will see the horizon pass him at the speed of light, but that's because the _horizon_ is a lightlike surface-- _it_ is moving outward at the speed of light.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is very interesting, because:

>Einstein denied several times that black holes could form. In 1939 he published a paper that argues that a star collapsing would spin faster and faster, spinning at the speed of light with infinite energy well before the point where it is about to collapse into a black hole.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein's_unsuccessful_investi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein's_unsuccessful_investigations)

<comment><USER17> We have exact solution to spinning black holes (discovered after Einstein's death) which settles that question. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerr_metric](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerr_metric)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Just making sure, the "fire" of the firewall is the Hawking radiation, right? That is, the event horizon divides matter from antimatter in the energy of space and spews it outwards. Or are they distinct concepts?

I never understand how Einstein's concept of relativity and his discovery of an arbitrary maximum speed of the universe can coexist. I mean, how can everything be relative when there's an absolute maximum velocity? The event horizon and Hawking radiation/the firewall naturally come out of the speed of light.

Physics confuses me ever so much.

<comment><USER18> The short version of maximum speeds is that velocities don't add how you'd expect at relativistic scales. If a ship is moving at 0.5c relative to an observer and it launches a missile forward at 0.5c relative to itself, the missile is moving at less than 1.0c relative to the same observer.

In fact, the missile could launch a smaller missile forward at 0.5c, and _that_ missile would still be moving under the speed of light relative to the observer. If you just added speed up classically, it'd be going 1.5c.

Really it always works like this, but at speeds we consider normal the error from simplifying to v1+v2=v3 is incomprehensibly small.

<comment><USER12> I assume time-dilation accounts for that, since the ship perceives that it's launching something at 0.5C but its perception is skewed by time dilation... but that implies the reverse, since time dilation means that the ship perceives time traveling _slower_ than the outside universe and thus the outside universe is _faster_ and so the 0.5C missile should actually be moving _faster_ than the sum of the accelerations... but relativity says that _both_ sides perceive their counterpart as slower, and then you get the to the twin paradox.

ow, my head.

<comment><USER19> It's not just time that get's distorted, but also distance.

More importantly, there is no privileged viewpoint. As far as a spaceship is concerned it's everything else that's moving and it's standing still and the same physics predictions work just fine it's only the measurements that seem different.

<comment><USER12> Oh, right, I forgot the flattening effect. That makes me feel a bit better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Ok, how did this happen?

Yesterday black holes were there. Everybody knew about Schwarzschild radius, about Cygnus X-1, about black holes theorized to be occupying the centers of galaxies.

And now everyone here is commenting like it was an obvious fact that black holes were never real and no one considered them seriously.

What happend? What did I miss?

<comment><USER21> That what label we put on things does not affect what they actually are? Whatever it is out there in the real universe that are these really massive things, they aren't waiting for little humans a billion light years away to decide what they are or are not.

<comment><USER22> The map is not the destination.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> "There are no black holes" was shown 8 years ago, much more simply than Hawking has posited: [http://finbot.wordpress.com/2008/03/05/no-black- holes/](http://finbot.wordpress.com/2008/03/05/no-black-holes/)

Black holes are a mistake of general relativity (GR), specifically their absolute event horizon is incompatible with GR's equivalence principle postulate, as the blog (which is not mine) shows. In software terms, black holes are a bug in the theory.

Let's remember that Einstein disbelieved in black holes and for many years tried to prove they couldn't exist. Also there is no definitive evidence that they actually exist in nature. By their definition, such evidence can't be detected.

<comment><USER24> The argument there looks wrong to me; in particular combining the equivalence principle with the proposition called (K) there seems wrong. EP in the form given there says that no test _within the small region in question_ can distinguish it from a similar small region in a gravitation-free universe, but "seeing whether the small region can be extended to a larger region" is not a test you can perform within the small region and it isn't an EP violation if you can do the extension in the gravityless universe but not in the with- gravity one.

Other articles on that blog claim to solve other major problems in physics, in every case giving an answer that disagrees with (what I understand to be) the consensus of working physicists.

So I could trust the author of the blog, Just Because (which doesn't sound like a great strategy). Or I could trust my own opinion (which is that on the one point I looked at it looks as if there's a substantial conceptual mistake). Or I could trust the current mainstream consensus.

I'm having trouble seeing reasons why I should believe what the author of that blog says. Do you happen to know of any?

<comment><USER23> I'm not concerned with trust or consensus, those aren't scientific concepts. If anyone shows a logical inconsistency with GR, then it's invalid regardless.

> but "seeing whether the small region can be extended to a larger region" is > not a test you can perform within the small region

That law K doesn't apply in a frame falling through a horizon (a logical test within that frame, which is defined to be an inertial frame) indicates that physical tests can also show that the laws of physics differ between that frame and other inertial frames. The picture in the blog is an example of that. It's impossible to conduct a test where the cloud described there isn't splitting in two, unlike in some other inertial frame.

<comment><USER24> I agree that trust and consensus are not scientific concepts (well, except maybe in psychology or sociology, but that's not relevant here). But they are things it's reasonable for those of us who aren't expert theoretical physicists to take into account, when Some Guy On The Internet says all the professional physicists are wrong and he's found an internal inconsistency in general relativity.

The "larger region" you need to look at to determine whether K applies is not small enough for the defining characteristic of the small region -- i.e., that spacetime curvature is negligible there -- to hold. The equivalence principle stops applying once you start considering regions large enough for spacetime curvature to be non-negligible within them.

<comment><USER23> Go ahead and take that into account, but hinge your conclusion on whether the logic's valid, if you wish to stay fully scientific.

Frame X, in which law K is tested, is _defined_ to be small enough that the spacetime curvature is negligible there. So it's definitely small enough. The test of law K is conducted wholly within frame X.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> My reading of this is that black holes still very much do exist and have almost exactly the same properties we thought they did before. The only difference being some slightly different effects on the quantum scale and on enormous cosmological time scales (well beyond gigayears).

The editorialized headline here is wholly unwarranted and does a disservice to the process of scientific advancement, Nature magazine should be ashamed. This is barely one step up from "Hawking says black holes don't exist, the explanation will shock you."

</comment><comment><USER26> I couldn't find the article, but there's a theory that states something to the effect that black holes are only 2D and the rest of the universe is a holographic projection. They back some of this up by noting that the size of the event horizion of a black hole grows as a function of 2D mathematical spaces rather than 3D spaces.

</comment><comment><USER27> Is there a modern day Feynman that can explain this to us not familiar with this but still interested?

</comment><comment><USER28> Does this mean Kip Thorne has to return a year's worth of Penthouse magazines?

</comment><comment><USER29> Sadly I suppose this implies the impossibility of Malament-Hogarth hypercomputers.

</comment><comment><USER30> I think it's important to note that this paper has not yet been peer reviewed, so this is nothing more than an attention-grabbing title from Nature.

<comment><USER31> The arXiv paper indicates he has no intention of submitting it to a peer- reviewed journal -- something that's becoming pretty common in some physics fields. On the contrary, I see the "yet to pass peer review" remark as a crass editorialization from the _Nature_ journalists¹. This paper has already seen more, meaningful, peer review that most papers _Nature_ publishes; informal review from people downloading the (free, open) paper from the arXiv, or listening to the talk at the Kavli conference. The institute _Nature_ is defending is becoming an irrelevant middleman: what's the point of reviewers, if they barely read the papers, and then hide them behind paywalls from anyone who actually _wants_ to read them, when there's whole social network of researchers who will read papers _enthusiastically_ , for free, and share what they think of them?

[http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.5761](http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.5761)

¹ You should question to what extent they're journalists, when their employer is a for-profit entity existentially threatened by the subject they're reporting on.

<comment><USER32> "This paper has already seen more, meaningful, peer review that most papers Nature publishes ..."

I really don't think that this is true. The useful bit of peer review is changes made to the original paper as part of the peer review process (both for accuracy and clarity of exposition). No feedback from arXiv readers has yet been incorporated into this paper; perhaps in a few months there will be an updated version that includes such feedback. Until then, people will have to search the net to get a feeling for how the wider field views his ideas.

In terms of feedback from conferences, plenty of results are presented at conferences prior to publication in Nature and other journals, so I doubt there is any difference in the review level here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Sad.

The new terms do not sound as cool as "event horizon", "black hole" and "singularity".

</comment><comment><USER34> I give up.

</comment><comment><USER35> So, how does one poop?</comment>


Antichrist2020.com My blog archives from 1996-2019 - <AUTHOR> http://www.antichrist2020.com <comment><AUTHOR> These are all of my personal/tech/political blog archives over the past 24 years. Not proud of everything there, but fuck it - there it is.</comment>


Citizens don't have right over their bodies – Govt to Supreme court of India - <AUTHOR> http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/citizens-dont-have-absolute-right-over-their-bodies-government/articleshow/58486260.cms <comment><USER2> The article title seems pretty biased to me. This seems to be about the Indian government obtaining biometric identification data from its citizens.

Do readers successfully infer this from the article title, or do they think the matter at hand is some kind of physical invasion? I thought the latter, which is why I think the title is misleading and that this journalist is biased.

I understand the concerns about a government mandating the collection of biometric data, but it's hardly about their "right over their bodies".

</comment><comment><USER3> Then they are subjects, possessions, and things to be owned? Surely a citizen would never be treated as such

</comment><comment><USER4> Ah yes, the voluntary Aadhaar program.</comment>


A poem where every word is pronounced the same - <AUTHOR> http://blog.expectlabs.com/post/43651946901/a-poem-in-which-every-word-is-pronounced-the-same

<comment><USER2> One of my favorite pieces of wordplay. Right up there with "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo."</comment>


No single algorithm can compress all possible files - <AUTHOR> http://worthamention.wordpress.com/2010/01/09/no-single-algorithm-can-compress-all-possible-files/

<comment><USER2> You can make that more concise too. An ideal compressor would be able to map every string of length n to a string of length m<n and back. Since a bijection requires that its source and target sets are of the same cardinality, and there are more strings of length m than length n, this compressor cannot be a bijection. Or even more concisely: you can't fit 10 pigeons into 9 pigeonholes unless one pigeon shares.

<comment><USER3> Isn't it the opposite? there are more strings of length n than the number of string with length m < n.

There are b^n strings of length n, but only (b^n - 1)/(b - 1) strings of length m < n, where b is the number of possible characters

<comment><USER2> Oops, indeed, it was meant the other way around. Past the edit window now though. Thanks for pointing it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Um, yeah. Pigeonhole principle. Not exactly news...

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

Any programmer who does not know this near-instinctively (and also related things like the impossibility of having distinct hash values for all strings) should be ashamed of himself and brush up on basic math.

<comment><USER5> Additionally, a compression algorithm need only have a worst case of adding one extra bit in the case that it couldn't compress a file.

<comment><USER6> This post reminded me about the day when I invented a perfect compression algorithm ( [http://www.diovo.com/2010/01/the-perfect-compression- algorit...](http://www.diovo.com/2010/01/the-perfect-compression-algorithm/) )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Technically, this proof is slightly flawed. Why?

Take the set of all files of 10 bits. There are 1024 possibilities.

You can compress these files to 9 bits. But you could also compress them to 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, or even 0 bits. In total, that gives you: 1024 possibilities!

Of course, the issue is the initial assumption that the files all contain exactly 10 bits. If we had started with the problem of compressing files between 0 and 10 bits to files with at most 9 bits, the proof is trivial.

<comment><USER3> That only gives 1023 possibilities

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Obviously, since there are are files that no algorithm can compress.

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

<http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/CDMTCS/chaitin/ns.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> I did not understand how this proves that no single algorithm can compress all files. Why does he assume that the compression generates less files?

<comment><USER9> I was going to post a response, but brazzy beat me to it...

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1041416>

<comment><USER3> I knew the principle but I read the article as if set 1024 and set 512 where specific instances of the sets ence I was unable to derive the conclusion.</comment></comment></comment>


Speeding up Python with Nim - <AUTHOR> https://robert-mcdermott.gitlab.io/posts/speeding-up-python-with-nim/ <comment><USER2> Hmm. this didn't render the newlines in my code, and markdown doesn't seem to be supported. bummer.

Really cool! It seems to be comparable and perhaps even faster than cython!

I happened to be in an Ipython shell and didn't see anyway to do this with nim, but you can probably get a good _approximate_ of the speedup with nim in Ipython/Jupyter by doing a quick:

[1] %load_ext Cython

[2] %%cython ``` cpdef long cyfib(int n): if n <= 2: return 1 else: return cyfib(n - 1) + cyfib(n - 2) ```

[3] start=time.time(); x = cyfib(47); end=time.time(); print(x); print(end- start)

2971215073 5.558561325073242

Nice choice of 47! I had to change the cython function's return time to long to prevent overflow. Something you don't need to do in nim

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice writing. Using python as a 'glue' lang and nim as a 'core' lang makes a lot of sense. Will give it a try for my next project.

</comment><comment><USER4> You also can use lots of python functions directly in nim too. Do this in nim:

import nimpy; let datetime = pyImport("datetime"); echo datetime.datetime.now(); let pysys = pyImport("sys") ; echo pysys.version;

It is really cool.

</comment><comment><USER5> The complexity is of recursive implementation of fibonacci is O(golden ratio ^ n). If it was O(n ^ 2) it would run under 0.1s.

By the way, the nimpy looks cool. Thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER6> This was an excellent read. I'll have to take a deeper look at the NimPy project that was mentioned in the article. Thanks for sharing.</comment>


Howzatt: Live cricket scoreboard on your mac's menu bar - <AUTHOR> http://varunoberoi.github.io/Howzatt/

<comment><USER2> Probably distracting while you try to work. But good to have this just as World Cup starts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Better than opening a website every 20mins :P</comment></comment>


When Dickens Met Dostoevsky (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/when-dickens-met-dostoevsky/ <comment><USER2> I read this back when it came out. It's an awesome detective story. The central question is why would someone perpetrate such a minor fraud. It is like art forgery but you can't sell it.

You have to get into the fraudster's head, which the article does to a degree. The resulting answer isn't rational in the sense that you would agree with. The fraudster doesn't get anything but rather damages something. You come to an empirical understanding, according to the facts presented, of a minor mediocrity passed over by life and striking back.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's also [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jul/10/man-behind- dic...](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jul/10/man-behind-dickens- dostoevsky-hoax).

</comment><comment><USER4> > "that the letter isn't genuine, which is rather sad, because the idea of the > two men meeting is so wonderful."

I may be biased, but to me Dickens looks like a bit of a hack publishing serials in newspapers, and Dostoevsky one of those serious writers dropping deep books once in a while.

<comment><USER3> Dostoevsky did publish in serials! This is related to a story. Before he finished _Crime and Punishment_ , which was being serialized, he had to write a whole other novel in order to prevent an unscrupulous publisher from capturing the rights to all his future work. In the end he was saved by dictating _The Gambler_ to a young woman named Anna Snitkina who was the star pupil at the local shorthand academy (shorthand was an innovation at the time). During the day, he would work on finishing _Crime and Punishment_ while she worked on transcribing _The Gambler_. Then in the evenings, he would dictate the next part of _The Gambler_ and she would get it in shorthand. They would talk about the characters too.

They finished on the last possible day. The publisher cunningly closed his office that day and ordered all his staff not to receive the manuscript, but Dostoevsky went to the local police station, handed it in, and got a receipt. Thus his career was rescued. And then he and Anna got married.

It's fitting that this high-stakes drama produced _The Gambler_ (a great short book btw), since Dostoevsky had gotten into it in the first place because of his gambling addiction. The marriage was a long and happy one and his life stabilized after that. His books maybe got a tad less exciting though.

Joseph Frank's biography is the best English source but he spends too many pages on this for a Google Books link to be useful. This one works though: [https://books.google.com/books?id=1C1K-BnFGFIC&pg=PA51&dq=do...](https://books.google.com/books?id=1C1K-BnFGFIC&pg=PA51&dq=dostoevsky+anna+shorthand&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjl3a_v_oDlAhXIs54KHUT1DY4Q6AEwAnoECAIQAg#v=onepage&q=dostoevsky%20anna%20shorthand&f=false)

Re serials: it's mind blowing that so many great masterpieces of the novel were written and published that way, and yet are so coherent, Dickens included. How on earth did they do it? But no doubt the non-masterpieces were less coherent.

<comment><USER2> Even _Don Quixote_ was published in two parts, separated by a decade. In fact, there was so much clamoring for a sequel that someone else wrote a sequel and then Cervantes spends a bit of time (Chapter 59) in part two dealing with the author, Avellaneda.

BTW, if you like Russian literature, I recommend _Possessed_ by Elif Batuman. It is her reading of Russian lit and a recounting of her travels in Russia and Turkey during graduate school at Stanford.</comment></comment></comment>


Building Analytics at 500px - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@samson_hu/building-analytics-at-500px-92e9a7005c83 <comment><USER2> Thanks a lot for a detailed post. 20gb of log to not seem like much though? Not really sure of 500px scale. Fully conceding that at my company probably are logging too much, I'm wondering what takes ETL pipeline 4hr to run over that. Is just no need to optimize it since there's no benefit to have these metrics real time? Or am I missing some really data heavy part. Again not trying to be negative just wondering.

Luigi seems cool, can anyone comment on it compared Airflow or Spring XD, or is are those just different products.

Periscope looks like Kibana for relational stores, also cool to see.

Thanks again for great post!

<comment><USER3> Its not a lot of data, but the biggest constraints to me were cost time to implementation. You could actually get an amazon memory intensive server and do it all in memory, but I didn't have those resources. ETL + a Redshift server in the end cost me around $5000 a year, which is TINY compared to the value we got out of it and the cost that most companies pay.

<comment><USER2> Makes sense I'm used to physical servers with tons of ram at work. If you don't mind, and I assume you're on Amazon entirely then, what size instances/how many are you using for the ETL(luigi) nodes? And do is there any infrastructure besides s3 (mysql dump, logs) => amazon instances (luigi) => redshift being involved?

<comment><USER3> That is all there is. s3, one amazon instance for luigi which holds the mysql read replica, and amazon redshfit. There wasn't any heavy ETL in Luigi. Luigi mostly just extracted/dumped data. All the heavy lifting was in EMR

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is such an awesome post. Samson shared the details of his data engineering work at 500px and Wish during a Keen IO event last night. His slides are here -> [https://keen.io/blog/130230045601/analytics-startups-and- lau...](https://keen.io/blog/130230045601/analytics-startups-and-laughs-at- keen-hq)

</comment><comment><USER5> Great post, and a nicely detailed read. This also came up on HN a few months ago ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9760606](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9760606)), with some interesting alternatives to some of the presented tech in the comments.

</comment><comment><USER6> Wow, this post is incredible--I can't thank the author enough for writing it! It's so thorough and has so many pieces of wisdom to offer in building a complete analytics solution from top to bottom. I'll be returning to this often.

</comment><comment><USER3> Author here

I'll follow up and say that my first three months in SF/Bay area have been amazing. This is truly the capital of technology here. The level of talent and the one-ness of the community goes beyond anything that exists in Canada. I'm excited to take what I lear back one day.

Send me questions via email shanzhen.hu at gmail.com if you have any questions about the process. I'm happy to help.

<comment><USER7> Just wanted to say thanks for this writeup. I read it the last time on here and it was definitely inspirational.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Previous discussion 3 months ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9760606](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9760606)

</comment><comment><USER9> I really appreciate the amount of time - and honesty - that went into this post. The author really sounds like they have their head firmly on their shoulders. Thanks, Samson!

</comment><comment><USER10> Very good post. So great to get this kind of detailed insights into the whole process: requirements, trade offs, architecture and implementation decisions, impact across the whole business and the end result and added value.

</comment><comment><USER11> It is quite interesting post. I have been working in a scenario where the company is moving out of traditional Oracle based BI stack and this post just highlights how opex for BI can be reduced drastically.

</comment><comment><USER12> What a terrific article. Well organized, clear, just enough detail to support the important points and on top of all that, a fun read. Thanks!</comment>


Ask HN: What is the coolest things that have been done in/with node.js? - <AUTHOR>

I am not a node.js user, but I think I would like to be. However, there seems to be no site that truly shows off what node.js can really do easily (with or without popular node.js-oriented frameworks). <comment><USER2> We've recently launched <http://www.codecloud.io> which provides a NodeJS back-end for apps, and you can start coding right away from your browser. Of course we think it's pretty cool, but you be the judge :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Trello does a pretty good job, I think: <http://blog.fogcreek.com/the-trello- tech-stack/>

</comment><comment><USER4> check this out: <http://www.attictv.com> fully built with node.js

</comment><comment><USER5> This map shows in "realtime" when users around the world take or leave bikes in a bike sharing system scheme of their city: <http://citybik.es/realtime>

Or, if you want, here's the popular gif cursor party done in real life <http://citybik.es/cursor_party>

<comment><USER6> I want to put something like that map in our app and can't find anything. Anyone know how this was done or any plug-and-play options to reproduce? Thanks!

<comment><USER5> I assume you mean the "explosions" on the map?

These are canvas elements, put inside a RichMarker.

Each canvas element is a small particle generator (this was not needed, but somehow bastarized this version (<http://scurker.com/projects/particles/>), to better control what I wanted to display.

What I still don't like about it, is each canvas having his own timer / update interval. It would feel more homogeneous having a global timer, and updating each canvas element sequentially. In another release I would probably do that, and replace WebSockets with Server Side Events.

I think the code is pretty straightforward, so feel free to dive into it.

<comment><USER6> Hey, thanks.

Any chance I can hire you to put something together for me for our specific case use? Or otherwise, consult with you to ask some more questions?

John.

<comment><USER5> Sure, sorry for the late response. Drop me a line at firstname.lastname@example.com</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to be a cultural superpower - <AUTHOR> http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/sunday-toi/special-report/How-to-be-a-cultural-superpower/articleshow/5256363.cms <comment><USER2> That article misses the boat.

American cultural exports aren't popular because of some Ten Year Plan by the government to promote them.

They're popular because they've found things that appeal to a large number of people, and because they represent the culture of the United States, which is still has (if somewhat tarnished) the appeal of anyone, from any background, being able to "make it".

I don't see China competing in this "race" at all, to be honest. A culture rooted in extreme nationalism and glorification of the past, what is attractive about it to anyone who doesn't happen to be Han Chinese?

India, on the other hand, has a lot more to offer, in my opinion again, but if the popularity of Bollywood movies and music are any indication..

<comment><USER3> Bingo.

The US govt didn't export rock, jazz, r&b, soul, country, etc. (The USO did export some big band during WWII.)

Besides, the US already imports culture. It just doesn't catch on (the British invasion being an exception).

See <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lNFRLrP014> for an example of culture invasion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's like a game of Civ come to life.

<comment><USER5> I'm still hoping for a Space Race Victory...

<comment><USER6> If they can get the right team in place, it will be a cinch to kick the United State's ass in the next 10 years. Our space program has become a jobs program. Innovative work is discouraged while doing the same stuff for an incredible markup is the name of the game. Bureaucratic aparatchiks are the movers and shakers in that world. Their inertia will keep the US back if someone else wants to step up to the plate and kick some ass.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple's iPhone Upgrade Program is a strategy to turn carriers into "dumb pipes" - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/500349/apples-iphone-upgrade-program-is-a-brilliant-strategy-to-turn-carriers-into-dumb-pipes/ <comment><USER2> Good for Apple! Its about time the big carriers got their comeuppance. We come some way since the days when the business model of carriers was little more than $5 ringtones, un-installable crapware, and nickle-diming every feature. There is still a way to go.</comment>


TIOBE Index for March 2015: All time high for F# at position 11 - <AUTHOR> http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Not that anyone should take the TIOBE ranking seriously - as discussed in other thread, the methodology is not reliable (and the fluctuation is suspicious too) - but it's interesting to see F# high on the list.</comment>


Accelerating the discovery of therapies for aging and its related diseases - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/spring-discovery/accelerating-the-discovery-of-therapies-for-aging-and-its-related-diseases-7c6a2109189f <comment><USER2> Well, I suppose given the success of In Silico Medicine, after many years of grit and bootstrapping, it was inevitable to see other groups try the same model and find willing sources of funding.

If these folk apply their technology to discovering senolytics and cross-link breakers, then great. If they apply it to finding mTOR inhibitors and geroprotectors, not so great.

There is a fork in the road for interventions in aging: one path leads to damage repair (e.g. senolytics to remove senescent cells, AGE-breakers to remove cross-links), the other to tinkering with metabolism in its damaged state (e.g. mTOR inhibitors and other tools that force greater stress response mechanism activation, the same thing that happens in calorie restriction and exercise). The former offers cost-effective rejuvenation of the old, the latter offers an expensive path to marginal slowing of aging and little benefit for people already old.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why would it make sense to kill senescent cells when we know it could kill the patient? [0]

IMO it makes more sense to apply the Paget's "seed and soil theory" of cancer research to aging, and work on biological mechanisms than on a crude approach like "killing cells".

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumor_lysis_syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumor_lysis_syndrome)</comment>


DNA Data Storage Is Closer Than You Think - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dna-data-storage-is-closer-than-you-think/ <comment><USER2> It's fun to think about our DNA already being used for storage...the storage of the various attributes defining a reproductively-successful organism. The data being stored is an amalgamation of billions of years of environmental knowledge going back in lineage to the first cells on earth (presumably).

</comment><comment><USER3> I read a very similar article touting this technology 20 years ago. It was in the research phase then, and it still seems to be in the research stage now, with no DNA storage devices available on the consumer market yet or any time soon.

I'd love to see this tech become a reality, but right now outside of the laboratory it seems to be all hype.

</comment><comment><USER4> Isn't glass storage closer to the masses and already in use?

[https://www.disclose.tv/these-5d-glass-discs-store-360-tb- of...](https://www.disclose.tv/these-5d-glass-discs-store-360-tb-of-data- for-138-billion-years-370041)

<comment><USER5> Do you actually know how long it lasts? What if it lasts only 100 years? With DNA we know the lasting period very well because of carcasses and corpses that died thousands of years ago and whose DNA we were able to sequence.

<comment><USER6> you're making the assumption we'll use the same type of DNA and that this will work in exactly the same way. pretty powerful assumption

<comment><USER7> Well, it's impossible to have it both ways. If you want the already validated approach then you'll have to stick with DNA and not some variant structures.

It's a decent point, however, that if this tech takes off, there may be innovations in storage molecules to improve read/write speed, density, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a very interesting use case by the trip-hop band Massive Attack, by storing their 20th anniversary re-issue of Mezzanine in DNA 'spray'.

[https://www.wired.co.uk/article/massive-attack-mezzanine- dna...](https://www.wired.co.uk/article/massive-attack-mezzanine-dna-album)

</comment><comment><USER9> If I can store data in DNA, can I use yeast for genetic algorithms?

<comment><USER10> You'd have to figure out how to encode the fitness function into the DNA/environment. We're only scratching the surface of how DNA works in its entirety and are likely decades away from being able to "compile to DNA."

<comment><USER9> The genetic variability available to the organism can be treated as normalization / quantization of abstract encoding. Map your desired results to this abstract "latent space" and start breeding yeasts. Build environment with various factors' parameters controlled by actuators attached to computer doing ML, maybe even GAs. The environment is the function!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "we are about to have a serious data-storage problem" is a bit hyperbolic but the technology is very real and being actively developed by a few different orgs.</comment>


CEO of Banjo admitted to being a Neo-Nazi skinhead in his youth - <AUTHOR> https://onezero.medium.com/ceo-of-surveillance-firm-banjo-once-helped-kkk-leader-shoot-up-synagogue-fdba4ad32829 <comment><USER2> I know two people who took jobs at Banjo. Both of them quit within months because the place was so incredibly toxic. Second hand info, so take with a grain of salt:

The CEO tries to run the company like a personality cult. Everyone was expected to be available 24/7 to respond to his demands. He liked to demand things on Friday night, weekends, or holidays to test people's loyalty. My friend was told he had to schedule his weekend activities with the company because everyone was on call all the time (he wasn't devops).People who didn't drink the kool-aid were filtered out quickly.

Banjo is also extremely aggressive with NDAs and threatening legal action against employees who speak out. Their Glassdoor page has been flooded with extremely dubious glowing reviews and I've watched many of the negative reviews slowly disappear over time for some reason.

The CEO recruited both of my friends with some grandiose stories, including the same story about being close friends with Zuckerberg. I don't know if he's actually close to Zuckerberg, but the Banjo CEO has been telling many people in Utah that he and Mark Zuckerberg are close friends, at least as a recruiting hook.

Banjo was already unpopular in Utah because they were awarded some very questionable state surveillance contracts. The state of Utah has already paused the contracts. As a Utah resident, I really hope this is the end of Banjo's involvement with Utah's surveillance.

<comment><USER3> Wow, an abusive, toxic person both then and now. It's funny how such people often rise to the top through bluster, despite being objectively bad at their jobs.

<comment><USER4> I've thought a lot about this. I think there is actually a form of manipulation / abuse that makes a leader objectively GOOD at their job. They become successful, wealthy, etc. That said, that form of leadership has costs. I think there are other modes of leadership that can be even better (cf. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teal_organisation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teal_organisation)) and that's what many company cultures are trying to cultivate.

<comment><USER5> > _I think there is actually a form of manipulation / abuse that makes a > leader objectively GOOD at their job._

Based on my experience, I'm more inclined to think the inverse it true. Those types of leaders are actually pretty bad at their jobs but appear subjectively good through manipulation and abuse.

<comment><USER6> Some people are motivated better by reward. Some people are motivates better by fear of punishment.

<comment><USER7> > Some people are motivated better by reward. Some people are motivates better > by fear of punishment.

Some people just want a fair trade of labor provided in exchange for money. All sane people, actually. Save the motivation bs for the army.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> When reached for comment, Patton wrote:

"32 years ago I was a lost, scared, and vulnerable child. I won't go into detail, but the reasons I left home at such a young age are unfortunately not unique; I suffered abuse in every form. I did terrible things and said despicable and hateful things, including to my own Jewish mother, that today I find indefensibly wrong, and feel extreme remorse for. I have spent most of my adult lifetime working to make amends for this shameful period in my life. In my teens, I dropped out of school, lived on the streets, ate out of dumpsters and raised money panhandling. I was desperate and afraid. I was taken in by skinhead gangs and white supremacist organizations. Over the course of a few years, I did many things as part of those groups that I am profoundly ashamed of and sorry about. Eventually, I was able to get myself away from this world while serving in the United States Navy. This turned my life around. While serving my country, I worked with law enforcement agencies in hate group prosecutions and left this world behind. Since then, I have tried and failed to completely accept and come to terms with how I, a child of Jewish heritage, became part of such a hateful, racist group. One thing I have done, through therapy and outreach, I have learned to forgive that 15 year old boy who, despite the absence of ideological hate, was lured into a dark and evil world. For all of those I have hurt, and that this revelation will hurt, I'm sorry. No apology will undo what I have done. I have worked every day to be a responsible member of society. I've built companies, employed hundreds and have worked to treat everyone around me equally. In recent years, I've sought to create technologies that stop human suffering and save lives without violating privacy. I know that I will never be able to erase my past but I work hard every day to make up for mistakes. This is something I will never stop doing."

<comment><USER9> Can someone verify that he actually has a "Jewish mother?"

<comment><USER10> Claiming to have a Jewish mother (and thus being considered Jewish by pretty much everyone else, regardless of how you self-identify) does it for me.

You call yourself a Jew? You're welcome.

There are way more people shunning their Jewish identity, but I've never met someone _pretending_ to be Jewish.

<comment><USER11> I believe it does happen. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binjamin_Wilkomirski](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binjamin_Wilkomirski) is not clear whether the subject lied about being Jewish or simply lied about his upbringing, but I'd guess the latter.

<comment><USER11> oops: I'd guess the former.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ouch. I'm sure this will destroy him financially and his reputation, but what if he actually turned his life around and is completely ashamed of this past? I don't want to come off like I support his past whatsoever, because I don't, but I feel there's no forgiveness left in our society to give people like this a second chance.

I guess I just believe people can change for the better and I want to encourage that more, rather than seeing people shunned after trying to become better and potentially being a danger to society once again as a result.

<comment><USER13> It's lunacy. I have no idea about the man or who he is but 30-odd year old incidents should never ruin a person's career. This reeks of moral panic.

<comment><USER14> I agree with that, but would you extend that sympathy to e.g. people running for political office?

<comment><USER15> Yes? I do not see why that would be different.

<comment><USER14> I also agree, but it's a crazy world we live in and I don't know if most people feel the same when it's pointed towards a political opponent. We think the current President did questionable things in his past, but imagine what kind of dirty laundry will be revealed looking farther out into the future in the age of total & instant information... The entire life of future politicians from the time they were wearing diapers through adulthood will be documented in HD, geographically tracked, word-for-word. It will be interesting!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's hard to judge someone for doing something stupid at 17 when there's adverse influences around them. But Damien Patton wasn't 17 when he did this-

[https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/z3bgky/banjo-ai-used- secr...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/z3bgky/banjo-ai-used-secret- company-and-fake-apps-to-scrape-facebook-twitter)

That should be illegal. Are there not any laws against this?

<comment><USER17> >But once users logged into the innocent looking apps via a social network OAuth provider, Banjo saved the login credentials, according to two former employees and an expert analysis of the apps performed by Kasra Rahjerdi, who has been an Android developer since the original Android project was launched. Banjo then scraped social media content, those two former employees added. //

CMA (UK)/CFAA (USA) both make unauthorised access a crime, so, yes there are laws against this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> "Typos on records connected to Brown and Armstrong's case — first a misspelling of Patton's first name, Damien, as "Damion" in an initial affidavit of probable cause; then, in subsequent filings, spelling Damien as "Damian" — have helped prevent the discovery of Patton's full biography for the past 30 years."

How remarkably lucky for him.

It is striking that such luck, and second chances, are rarely afforded young men of color who find themselves on the other side of the law in this country.

<comment><USER19> Agreed. This hate crime was committed 1 month from his 18th birthday. A defendant that wasn't white would have been tried as an adult and thrown in jail for years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> What a moving redemption arc! Going from guerilla acts of racism to making a company that aids in institutional racism.

</comment><comment><USER21> This just in:

Utah Attorney General suspends state contract with Banjo in light of founder's KKK past

[https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2020/04/28/utah- attorne...](https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2020/04/28/utah-attorney- general/)

Discussion on HN

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23012144](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23012144)

</comment><comment><USER22> Tough situation. I can understand him trying to hide the mistakes in his youth. I certainly wouldn't want to be haunted by whatever idiotic things I did or said as a kid, although they definitely were nowhere near what this guy was doing.

Admitting such things _before_ building a career would instantly be a non- starter. I also think as a society we have to acknowledge that rehabilitation and forgiveness needs to be possible, especially for mistakes we make as kids. The mob seems to want people like this to be disappeared, which is unfortunate for a country so influenced by Christianity, in which forgiveness is a prime value.

On the other hand, this guy seems to have really been a subscriber to some bad, dangerous ideas, and more importantly, he doesn't seem to have done much to atone for it. Donating to the synagogue, getting involved with the community or somehow seeking forgiveness by acknowledging his mistakes would have been better than just hiding it.

He didn't need to do anything public that would dig up the past either: I imagine he could have donated or helped the synagogue in an pseudonymous way. Certainly the people he hurt would be far more willing to defend his rehabilitation now if he had done so.

<comment><USER23> > I imagine he could have donated or helped the synagogue in an pseudonymous > way

How do you know he hasn't donated anonymously?

> Certainly the people he hurt would be far more willing to defend his > rehabilitation now if he had done so.

I think "I did some donations" would be perceived as self-serving, or would simply be cynically attacked.

Your comments feel would be damned either way.

<comment><USER22> Now would be the time to mention that he's been donating to the synagogue for X years. If donations are too cold and abstract, then starting an organization that fights hate, or somehow getting involved seems doable. He is a wealthy person and had the resources for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Yes, people deserve second chances. No, they can't become C.E.O.'s because C.E.O.'s are effectively unelected government officials of the United States and the same criterion that says it's a bad idea to let him run for president means it's a bad idea to have him continue being C.E.O.. It's not like "bad man become good and pays back debt to society as a small-time business owner" because of the power differential. Interesting story though.

But if you deny people second-chances, then said criminals have no incentive to make amends. If they cannot make amends due to it being absurd, then society should be prepared to reduce them to menial slavery... because that's the only other way to prevent them from continuing the bad behavior (given that society made it impossible for him to move on from the past).

I have discovered that there are exactly three objectively unforgivable offenses:

1\. Inducing another human to despair thereby depriving him of a right to a future.

2\. Accusation with the intent of marring another human's soul with eternal guilt.

3\. The deliberate and intentional reduction of another human being to slavery.

Notice that being a murderer isn't one of them.

<comment><USER25> >because C.E.O.'s are effectively unelected government officials of the United States

This is a really, really interesting take on it. I happen to agree, but if they're public officials, then how do we square the absolutely massive incentives to action at the expense of the public good?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Unwalled: [http://archive.is/gvYP4](http://archive.is/gvYP4)

</comment><comment><USER27> The panopticon-as-a-service product Banjo is hawking right now is way more disturbing than the past rantings of the company's founder.

<comment><USER28> I don't know if this is better or worse in that respect, but I have been following Banjo since 2017 and I'm pretty convinced that the product Banjo is hawking is basically vaporware[1], and that Banjo is actually in the business of defrauding state and local governments (and Softbank of course, but that goes without saying).

If you look at the press releases and publicity Banjo has released as well as the talks Damien Patton has given, their big success story stems from a trial run in 2013 where the Utah CPS ran a simulation of a child kidnapping and Banjo identified the probable location of the (simulated) kidnapper. Since then, there has been nothing.

Meanwhile Patton's message has continually evolved in perfect lockstep with the hype cycle, from mass shootings to the opioid crisis to, these days, some mysterious power to provide predictive security while still protecting individual privacy.

[1] He probably has a reasonable social media/text analytics product with some geographic aggregation. But it's hard to separate from the promises because no one has actually seen it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Another instance of Softbank investing in toxic management and people with past or current criminal behavior. Clearly management team due diligence isn't relevant to their investing strategy.

</comment><comment><USER30> I think softbank largely made up for it by giving free millions to wework's Israeli Adam Neumann. It really shows their lack of due diligence on both cases.

</comment><comment><USER31> It's not every day that you read such an article about a person you know and worked for more than a year.

I'm not excusing any of his behavior in youth, although I believe he feels very bad about it, but the person I know has definitely evolved from the distorted personality described in the article. It is possible, please see [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSH5EY-W5oM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSH5EY-W5oM).

The time I worked at Banjo was a great experience and still think he's one of the most skilled founders I've ever met. Great sales skills and tech chops. I was an immigrant and have always been treated with respect. At the same time it isn't surprising for me to read a comment like the other one on here about working at Banjo: with such a strong personality at the head of the company it can be like that for some, but I wouldn't consider it very different from other SV realities like FB or Amazon.

Sad that he participated in those crimes, and hope this becoming public can bring him to give back more to the community.

</comment><comment><USER32> This makes me think of the movie The Believer.

</comment><comment><USER33> It's so _interesting_ how these surveillance/data-gathering companies (Palantir, Banjo, Anduril) are founded by right-wing types. Professed small government libertarians building that very same government's intelligence apparatus for profit. It's exactly this double-speak on government and individual liberty that makes minorities distrustful of conservatives.

<comment><USER34> Small-government libertarians in my experience are really ok with big-defense. They are the sort who fund NSA and it's incessant attempts to vacuum up all internet data, spy on all people, etc. They rarely understand that those same powers might be turned against us all as easily as flipping a switch. It is a blindness that has always baffled me, especially since we have more proof everyday that that switch has already been flipped.

<comment><USER35> Because what small government really means is eliminating social safety nets and publicly beneficial programs, and focusing on protecting corporate profits above all else.

<comment><USER34> This exactly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> So an admitted Nazi might lose his shitty and unceative startup for wanting genocid

Let me find the world's tiniest violin.

To take a page from southpark. He fuck off

</comment><comment><USER37> What is the significance of SoftBank financing this business?

<comment><USER9> It shows they don't vet their CEOs very well.

<comment><USER38> You expect them to go through 30-year old records on their creditors? Have you ever gotten a loan that required interviews with the people you went to high- school with?!?!

<comment><USER39> If a company's investing 100m in a company where directors likely need security clearances etc (I mean, I don't know if they do, but given the industry I would assume so), then, er, yeah, I'd expect a pretty thorough background check.

<comment><USER38> ...and they probably do do a background check - one that he would have PASSED.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Yuck. Why is there so much discussion about this cretin?

</comment><comment><USER41> I think there are three problems with the title:

1\. Clickbait exploitation.

2\. Conflating people who have sought redemption from past deeds with those who are jerks for other reasons.

3\. Social fascism isn't the proper response to actual fascism. Throwing people away, instantly and permanently, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck. If people "can never change" when they clearly have, this isn't the sign of a decent, functional, nuanced, or tolerant society in touch with the meaning of words or self-awareness.

<comment><USER3> It's pretty obvious that this new account is not arguing in good faith, but I'll take a stab anyway.

1\. It's a literal description of what happened. He admitted to being a neo- nazi terrorist.

2\. He has not sought redemption in any meaningful way, but has instead started a surveillance company. That his conduct has continued to be abusive just shows it is a permanent lack of moral character.

3\. I think you might need to adjust your definition of fascism. The "social fascism" you describe dilutes the word of all meaning, which is probably your intent.

He helped commit a terrorist act at the age of 17, and continued to be associated with Nazis for some time after. A tolerent and open society means that we cannot tolerate these kinds of people running surveillance companies with government contracts. The reasoning should be obvious. See also, Popper's paradox of tolerance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Thank goodness the title mentions it is Softbank backed, otherwise I would have missed some good Softbank bashing.

<comment><USER43> It's really hard to come up with neutral titles for a story this inflammatory. I changed it from the article's main title in the hope that it would have less of a less extreme effect on the thread ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23011234](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23011234)). But I missed the fact that the subtitle also included a different sort of flamebait.

One consistent lesson of moderating an internet forum is that titles dominate discussion virtually completely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Why the hell was this post flagged?

<comment><USER45> I rarely visit HN anymore because of shit like this, but I decided to check back over here to see what everyone had to see. not surprised

<comment><USER44> I guess we have to wait for the arstechnica writeup so it can get posted and discussed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Interesting story that the ethnically Jewish CEO was a neo-Nazi.

<comment><USER36> Well Hitler was Jewish

<comment><USER47> No, he wasn't

<comment><USER48> He's referring to the idea that Hitler may have been a quarter Jewish. Not sure where this study from 10 years ago ended up:

[https://www.history.com/news/study-suggests-adolf-hitler- had...](https://www.history.com/news/study-suggests-adolf-hitler-had-jewish- and-african-ancestors)

There were a lot of articles about that and here's a recent one:

[https://m.jpost.com/diaspora/study-suggests-adolf-hitler- was...](https://m.jpost.com/diaspora/study-suggests-adolf-hitler-was-a- quarter-jewish-597966)

<comment><USER47> Questionable evidence that his grandmother might have had an illegitimate child with a Jewish man is a long way from "Hitler was jewish"

Not to mention this is standard ahistorical conspiracy theory fare.

<comment><USER48> It's fine to point out it's questionable. Both of you were just throwing at one-liners with no substance like you're fighting on a playground. I rarely downvote and thought about downvoting him but I decided to search to see what he might be talking about. You didn't even look at my links, otherwise you would've known the first one was talking about a DNA study. Yes, as far as I can see it was very much up in the air, but I don't think I should be downvoted for explaining what he was referring to.

<comment><USER38> > Both of you were just throwing at one-liners with no substance

Welcome to HN - the new Reddit.

<comment><USER43> Please read [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) to the end.

<comment><USER38> It doesn't seem to be working. ...much like the Reddit guidelines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> This was so long ago and he hasn't killed anyone or done any thing of the sort since then. Who cares ? It is up to the system to deal with him

<comment><USER50> "the system" has given life sentences to people for marijuana charges while people who literally helped a hate group shoot at minorities go free. The system is broken, and i assure you, plenty of people care

<comment><USER51> >"the system" has given life sentences to people for marijuana charges

No it hasn't.

<comment><USER17> [http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/life-prison-selling-marijuana- peo...](http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/life-prison-selling-marijuana-people-new- pot-laws-forgot) (after a 5s google) suggests you're wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> People can change, and he was a kid from an abusive home per the article.

<comment><USER53> As the article repeatedly states, Patton proceeded to continue his association with white supremacist groups during his time in the U.S. Navy. Shockingly, white supremacist does not stop white supremacisting. Film at 11.

<comment><USER52> "I had known some of the Skinheads there from prior rallies in Tennessee and because of not knowing anybody there, I ended up meeting with them and hung out with them for some time," he said.

Isn't it human nature to reach for familiarity when in new places? You're reaching.

<comment><USER53> Human nature to reconnect with Nazis? I dunno--if I had a friend who was self- avowed _hostis humanis generis_ they would by definition no longer be my friend.

But this is your schtick, so continue to perform it.

<comment><USER52> "my schtick"? Jesus, you can't talk about stuff online anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Better hope the algorithm he programmed isn't racist.

[https://onezero.medium.com/how-tech-algorithms-become- infect...](https://onezero.medium.com/how-tech-algorithms-become-infected- with-the-biases-of-their-creators-d19756352dc9)

</comment><comment><USER54> Society will generally forgive people of the things they do while young, even heinous things, provided they're open and remorseful about what happened. But when you hide it there's usually an opposite effect. Seems this founder is about the learn about that the hard way.

<comment><USER55> Why not hide it? If you did something very stupid at 17, something of which there is public record for everyone to find with a background check, do you still have to go around telling it to everyone for the rest of your life?

You have paid for your stupidity and life goes on. In this case life has certainly moved on and it doesn't seem like he is secretly creating a 4th reich in his free time.

Of course if you can do something easy to hide it like spelling your name better great. It has been a long time, but some people don't seem to understand this and seem to want criminals to be punished forever.

Why bother about this?

<comment><USER56> >Why not hide it?

Integrity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> > _Patton was charged with — and pled guilty to—acts of juvenile delinquency > in connection to the incident_

Edit: as the getaway driver. Seems like a strange charge to bring up for the incident.

<comment><USER57> *On the evening of June 9, 1990 — a month before Patton turned 18 — Patton and a Klan leader took a semi-automatic TEC-9 pistol and drove to a synagogue in a Nashville suburb. With Patton at the wheel, the Ku Klux Klan member fired onto the synagogue, destroying a street-facing window and spraying bullets and shattered glass near the building's administrative offices, which were next to that of the congregation's rabbi. No one was struck or killed in the shooting. Afterward, Patton hid on the grounds of a white supremacist paramilitary training camp under construction before fleeing the state with the help of a second Klan member."

Paragraph 6 in the linked article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> > He says he became a self-taught crime scene investigator and then learned to > code. Eventually, Patton helped build the digital infrastructure of what > would become Banjo, a company that, in the past decade, has raised nearly > $223 million, according to the investment data-sharing platform SharesPost, > from prominent venture capital firms such as SoftBank.

Interesting and somewhat horrifying. Maybe SoftBank failed to do some due diligence here and have essentially funded a CEO with direct connections to the KKK. I can only see Banjo's next chapter going through three options:

* Option 1: Softbank cares enough and ends their investment in Banjo and the CEO stays on.

* Option 2: Trial by Twitter will pressure Banjo CEO to resign and everyone's happy.

* Option 3: Nothing happens.

Help me write the next chapter in which option is likely.

<comment><USER59> "Direct connections to the KKK" ? Did you read the article or his statement? He was 17 and fell in with white supremacists after/during an abusive childhood. If you want to dispute this account, fine, let's hear it. If you want to claim Banjo is otherwise an evil company, OK, it may be, but that's a separate point. But claiming that this episode as reported constitutes a direct connection to the KKK, and implying it's ongoing, is off the mark.

<comment><USER60> He literally was the getaway driver for a synagogue shooting by a kkk member. I'm not sure it's possible to be more directly connected to the kkk than that.</comment></comment></comment>