The US's Stance on Surveillance Needs a Hard Reset - <AUTHOR> https://backchannel.com/obamas-parting-gift-to-trump-expanded-surveillance-powers-1c0df058d838#.o9oj35h2j <comment><USER3> Between the inauguration and living in DC, all anyone can talk about lately is politics. So I've had the opportunity to probe a bunch of mainstream Democrats on this issue. The overwhelming response has been not caring (though many are more worried now that Trump is in the charge of the surveillance apparatus rather than Obama). Even to the extent people care, nobody cares enough to want to spend limited political capital on the issue. To the extent policy is necessarily subject to political compromise, privacy doesn't seem to even make the top 10 of issues Democrats are willing to fight for.

It seems inevitable to me that the same generation that willingly hands over all their personal information to Google and Facebook, and sees government mostly as a positive force for enforcing civil rights and increasing social equality will embrace the expansion of the surveillance state.

<comment><USER4> Wow. That has not been my experience at all. People on most sides of me are afraid of being rounded up, or are afraid someone they know will be rounded up.

(They are not worried about it happening this year, but are extrapolating 5 years.)

This is amongst mid-westerners and west coast types. East coast liberals I talked to years ago were part of the DC or military machine, and think 100% surveillance is just a natural tool for vetting politicians: "You have to live inside DC norms since birth or will be blacklisted, even if it is just a joint in high school... Otherwise, how will the ruling class keep running things?"

This was pre-Snowden, but after the at&t leaks, and they didn't believe NSA universal surveillance was possible inside the US. Maybe their tunes have changed. Anyway, maybe that demographic is the type of 'mainstream democrats' you are talking about. Is it some other group?

(I'm talking about my social circles, not trying to stereotype entire states, regions, though the above reads that way no matter how I word it)

edit: I see you live in DC. Called it, I guess. :-(

<comment><USER5> >People on most sides of me are afraid of being rounded up

Rounded up for what? No one I know has that fear.

<comment><USER4> Being from china, eastern europe, south/central america, the middle east or being black. There's also persecution for being a single mom or lgbtq, but that doesn't fall under "rounded up".

I haven't talked to any climate scientists recently, but I suppose living in antarctica for a year gets you on the "maybe losing your job" list.

The "america first" chant on Friday didn't help. Neither did the "for americans" rhetoric.

<comment><USER6> Thinking that only the "Trump voters" are safe is a kind of thinking that borders on hysteria and is hard to take seriously. Undocumented immigrants are the only people who should have a reasonable concern of being deported.

It's not like other countries don't deport undocumented immigrants either whether leftist or rightist so I don't see how when the US does it it's especially denouceable. [keep in mind, that Obama deported more than W].

I've lived in other countries [China as well as Eastern Europe], and it's not uncommon for regular police to either enforce immigration themselves or cooperate with the immigration office when people overstay their visas or sneak in.

<comment><USER4> One of those groups (east europe/russia) is being defended by trump. Others have escalating troubles that predate him.

There's plenty of blame to cover both parties.

People seem more concerned that the system elected him than anything else. How bad (in this discussion, xenophobic) will the next president be?

I have noticed a profound, bipartisan disappointment with both parties.

<comment><USER6> Many people in the press conflate border control with xenophobia and anti- immigrant sentiment. I didn't vote for the guy but my take is he isn't looking to kerb legal immigration (with the exception of people form "terrorist hotbeds") so much as require all immigrants to get the proper visa as well as get expelled if they overstay a visa --normal operating procedure for most mature governments.

I can understand the preoccupation that he might especially kerb people from the ME. However I see this constant conflation seemingly to scare all immigrants into thinking that the new administration is "anti-immigrant" whereas I see it as anti-illegal/undocumented immigration.

<comment><USER7> This conflation creates division. The same occurs with a myriad of other issues. Someone could have supported Trump at the inauguration on Friday, marched in support of women's rights on Saturday, and been entirely consistent in the views they were espousing. However, a common viewpoint is that these are somehow mutually exclusive when in fact they are far from it.

<comment><USER6> Exactly. Many people were/are surprised by the large proportion of [white] women who voted for Trump and some people continue to think that only misogynists could have voted for Trump.

It's clear many people are _trying_ to sew division where none exists in order to advance an agenda [in the immigration case there are people who because they favor unregulated immigration do purposely conflate things in order to raise concern with legal immigrants --people completely unaffected by any new immigration laws]

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Please stop pointing fingers at the American "government" and realize that the issue is really the average American.

The US public has had over 10 years to figure it out, blaming the government is just causing more problems, not less; to understand why it's been 10 years, Google "Room 641A", which was exposed in 2006.

Sure, there are people in America that are opposed to mass surveillance, but the bulk of Americans willfully allow it.

If you think the issue is important, do me a favor: find 10 people next week that do not believe it is an issue, help them see it is, and get them to the point that they want to help do the same thing you just did the following week.

Even if only 5 of the 10 people go on to do the same the week after, if that pattern went on for a year, by the end of the year mass surveillance would no longer exist; happy to explain, but math is a basic viral coefficient[1]; that is if only one person reading this did it and succeed, which would mean in less than three months the majority of the US would have been "converted" to supporting change.

[1] [http://nichevertising.com/viral-coefficient- calculator/](http://nichevertising.com/viral-coefficient-calculator/)

<comment><USER9> I think this is a great idea, and I may give it a go.

If you are initiating anything else like this, though, I'd make one suggestion: we need some materials that can be honed in their effectiveness in communicating the danger, as what has been done to make it a reality so far. It's a complex issue, and most ad hoc attempts to explain it to a random person will end in disinterest on their part.

Seems like one wiki page for techies and one for non would be a decent approach. For the most part, it would be best to have potential _teachers_ use the resources on the wiki rather than students—but they could hold a repository of illuminating examples, analogies etc. until effective approaches for communicating to each audience type stabilize.

Edit: probably the main benefit of this isn't making teachers more effective, but rather that it would make it easier for potential teachers to get on board. As it stands I'd need to go do a bunch more research and collect specific figures personally before I'd feel prepared to teach anyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > (If you're wondering what data the NSA collects, its own site[1] offers a > list and this statement: "The standard operating procedure for the Domestic > Surveillance Directorate is to 'collect all available information from all > available sources all the time, every time, always.'")

The linked site is a PARODY. There is no such thing as the Domestic Surveillance Directorate, that would be the FBI. How the author of this article fell for that, I don't know.

[1] [https://nsa.gov1.info/data/](https://nsa.gov1.info/data/)

</comment><comment><USER11> I agree with the main point of the article, but feel like it undermines itself in a couple of ways. Firstly (and by far most importantly), the alleged quote from the NSA[1] comes from a parody site which explicitly states "[t]his parody website has no connection whatsoever to the National Security Agency"[2]. If a reader isn't already convinced of the potential harms of mass surveillance, (accidentally, presumably) using such quotes makes the arguments easier to discard.

Secondly, and this is more of a pet peeve of mine, is the "top highlight" that appears mid-way through the article. I know they aren't really comparable, but "mass surveillance is bad, but, by the way, we are totally tracking every interaction you make with this article" doesn't feel like a particularly consistent position to hold.

[1] > The standard operating procedure for the Domestic Surveillance Directorate is to 'collect all available information from all available sources all the time, every time, always.', per [https://nsa.gov1.info/data/](https://nsa.gov1.info/data/)

[2] [https://nsa.gov1.info/about/about.html](https://nsa.gov1.info/about/about.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> Mass surveillance in the digital age is a Pandora's box that's been opened.

Without comprehensively putting extreme restrictions on what people can put online, there is only ever going to be an exponentially growing trove of data to mine that reveals implications far removed from whatever whoever made it available intended to communicate.

While it may be possible to significantly cut back the amount of surveillance done on communications intended to be private, I think people need to accept that the automation of surveillance and of inferring likely connections from it are developments which irreversibly change how society functions going forward.

What's more, technology has a very persistent tendency to become accessible to more people over time. I have yet to see any reasons this wouldn't be true specifically in the case of automated surveillance. Remember the story about someone trying facial recognition to tie pictures of strangers on the subway to VKontakte profiles? That's just a small taste of the implications.

I think it's realistically possible to push back a large portion of the surveillance that invades private communications, likely by technological means more often than legal ones. And I think the article highlights that possibility, especially at a time when distrust in government is reaching a peak in America and elsewhere. That said, I'm waiting for the Pandora's box of wide access to powerful surveillance tools using publicly available information to be seen for what it is.

</comment><comment><USER13> Putting the debate over actual necessity aside, it's not a great political move to be the one to actually abolish any of these programs. God forbid a future attack is shown to have been planned through a medium that you or your party ended surveillance of.

Realistically, I don't expect to see these programs change much until terrorism ceases to be a force in the world.

<comment><USER14> > until terrorism ceases to be a force in the world

I think you're basically implying this, but I think it's worth elaborating: there is no particular reason for terrorism to cease being a force in the world if things stay grossly similar to the way they are today.

Unlike, say, war, which requires state actors to maintain aggression, terrorism requires just one individual with an idea. Even addressing root causes won't eliminate terrorism entirely. Unless people cease to be afraid (perhaps due to improved numeracy / statistical thinking), the threat of terrorism will forever loom.

<comment><USER15> Which is why government allows for surveillance directly in its constitution. Search warrants have always existed.

There is no government without a search warrant, since no government allows privacy against the state's will.

Until you are your own king, you will always have to live under the permission of government.

<comment><USER16> Right, but there is a procedure behind obtaining a search warrant, which is nothing at all like giving the government blanket surveillance powers.

<comment><USER17> I'm not well versed on the details of U.S. government surveillance, but is it not the case that collection of phone logs, for instance, does not entail the government directly infringing on or even caring about 99.999999% of the public's private activity? My understanding is that these types of surveillance programs technically exist so that logs can be pulled up retroactively or algorithmically in rare but important cases.

I am asking because I am intellectually curious. It seems to me that _on average_ people could stand to gain from surveillance and possibly predictive algorithms for crime. I would like to better grasp the other side of the argument.

<comment><USER4> That argument has been made by repressive regimes to justify all sorts of witch hunts: "Our records say you were friends with John; you should have known he would be branded a subversive traitor. Why didn't you turn him in first?"

Stats make this even worse: "Sorry. The computer said we have to lock you up for your own good."

Also, the framers of the US constitution had a deep mistrust of government (they just overthrew the brits!). The right of revolution is something they teach (at least used to teach) in US schools: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_revolution](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_revolution)

Tl;dr: If law enforcement is too effective then you can't defend yourself from unjust governments. This is why we have juries and the right to bear arms / form [state in addition to federal] militias.

<comment><USER17> Thank you for your reply. Your argument makes sense to me, however I am still having some difficulty understanding how ultimately surveillance is anything but negligible in aiding law enforcement to oppress U.S. citizens - <USER2> to the government's already existing enormously superior weaponry. IF the government were out to get me, I can't imagine how I could stop them, even if they had only basic information about me. UNLESS I am a criminal mastermind, in which case it seems like the government would NEED information about me to stop me, which would probably be a good thing? I dunno... do you at least see where I'm coming from? I haven't formed a concrete opinion about it all, and I am a student of cyber-security. Presently considering all points of view.

EDIT: I guess your point is that the surveillance information can be used to /justify/ an attack on a citizen, so that the public accepts it. But somehow I imagine the government could already easily falsify records to do exactly that without deep troves of info?

<comment><USER4> The ideas I presented are from a long time ago. Arguably, modern military technology made grass roots revolutions impossible in first world countries (or will soon, given drones, etc).

Dragnet surveillance creates capabilities like "shoot the 1% of people in this city most likely to oppose me." A more effective / socially acceptable version is already being implemented in China. They have a number that measures how good of a citizen you are. As I understand it, it can be used to vet people for all sorts of things (employment, credit, housing, law enforcement targeting, etc).

So, now, if you say something wrong in private, you might end up begging for food on the side of the road.

Of course, the input to the score is secret; presumably it can be adjusted up or down by (abusive?) people in authority.

Even if I am wrong about the details of the Chinese system (maybe it has great checks and balances for all I know), it is easy to see how government agents could abuse such a system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Legal and bureaucratic impediments to surveillance should be removed.

Calling all engineers! We do have the power amongst ourselves to add technical impediments to surveillance to the services we're building, and to the internet as a whole.

The technology exists to prevent surveillance, we just need to care, and to use it. Also keep in mind that net neutrality would be an _automatic byproduct_ of an internet that prevents automatic surveillance.

> "The standard operating procedure for the Domestic Surveillance Directorate > is to 'collect all available information from all available sources all the > time, every time, always.'"

This will never change, and I would go so far as to suggest it's even a reasonable position to take, from someone who's job it is to collect information for the government. What we need to do is make our internet usage _unavailable_ to onlookers.

<comment><USER19> Net neutrality by encryption seems like a much better idea than government imposed NN. It's optional and not one size fits all.

Let's encrypt all the things!

<comment><USER20> I take it you've never had WiFi drop your connection when you start using a VPN?

<comment><USER19> Yep, and then I switched to OpenVPN! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The article cites the NSA's data collection methods by linking to [https://nsa.gov1.info](https://nsa.gov1.info) This site describes itself as "a parody of nsa.gov" in the footer of every page. Don't believe everything you read.

</comment><comment><USER22> Once again, why do we need to store these files "in the cloud"? Why do signals need to go to California so that two people in an Indian village can talk to each other? Email, IRC, the Web, Git, IPFS and many others don't have to work that way. The world of always-on broadband ruined what was a great software ecosystem that didn't assume you were either "online" or "offline", but cared whether one machine was reachable from another machine. Broadband led to centralized platforms like facebook.

 _Now that the bulk of our most valuable "papers and effects" are online, they are vulnerable to being tracked and searched by the NSA without the agency ever securing a warrant, asking our permission, or leaving a trace._

That can to a great extent be mitigated if there was software for communities to host their own private networks, and only send signals out when necessary. The way the original telephone switching worked.

Communities would be more resilient, too, and could help each other in the event of a disaster. We should decentralize cellphone signals and power generation eventually too.

Our platform is an attempt to make a standard platform for such decentralized social networks: [https://qbix.com/platform](https://qbix.com/platform)

</comment><comment><USER23> I think "presumption of privacy" is going away. The next generation will see bubbles of privacy as something you can create, by force, not something guaranteed by societal norms.

Frankly, I am a little surprised when I see other technologists advocating for governmental/corporate/societal reform of privacy-respecting practices. It seems like a losing battle to me. We are headed toward a time when you can buy a $100 vial of drone dust at Best Buy, dump it into the air, and 30 minutes later have a live 3D video feed in every window within a 5 mile radius. Maybe it will take 100 years, but every year between now and then will be a shade closer to that reality.

Even if we could get strongly worded laws from Congress, I just don't see that stopping bad actors, inside government or out. It feels a little bit like bow- and-arrow culture trying to legislate that government agents shouldn't be allowed to use these new "gun" things. You can to legislate, but bigger forces are afoot. The physics of information is changing very fast.

</comment><comment><USER24>
      One reason that leaders as diametrically    opposed as Obama and Trump can be aligned on surveillance is simple: The majority of Americans don't care.

The reason why this keeps getting worse and worse.

<comment><USER25> Just for future reference, please don't quote using the four-spaces code block. It can make it difficult to read on mobile, and often requires scrolling from side to side on desktop.

Please, instead, use the `>` (meme arrow). While it does not add markup, it does make it significantly more readable. Thanks.

<comment><USER26> > `>` (meme arrow)

It's much older: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet_quoting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet_quoting)

...and it looks suspiciously similar to the "diple" used by ancient Greeks: [http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2015/01/30/quotati...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2015/01/30/quotation_marks_long_and_fascinating_history_includes_arrows_diples_and.html)

<comment><USER25> Oh I'm sure it is. I just called it that because it's funny.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> When Obama says that Snowden created serious security implications, do you think that's from a point of privilege, or simply placing ideology over practicality? Based on everything I know, both Obama and Snowden appear to be fairly authentic characters. It seems weird that they would have opposing view points. If we're to assume the best ideals are forged though intelligent reasoning and debate, shouldn't they have both concluded the same? Glenn Greenwald has proven himself to be less than authentic at times. If I could pass a criticism Snowden's way, it was _who_ he went to, not _what_ he did. Am I wrong to feel this way?

<comment><USER28> Fairly authentic characters regularly have drastically diverse viewpoints. For instance, Republicans and Democrats. Parties on both sides have fairly authentic views[1] on various moral points, that end in very, very different opinions. And no amount of intelligent reasoning or debate will bring either party closer to the other.

[1]Both parties ALSO have fairly unauthentic views, on how they will in fact, happily sell us out to a corporation for a side gig when they leave office. But they tell us they won't and that's shameful to even suggest that's what they're doing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> These articles are just wishful fantasy. Our history has shown that people are perfectly willing and happy to tolerate any form of govt abuse as long as they get their dose of reality tv and 'justifications' from mass media, all you need to do is mention the T word and 'keep America great' and you can do whatever you want.

Even if people cared, which they don't, the govt has zero incentive to actually do anything, because increased surveillance gives them more power and more power to abuse the system.

<comment><USER30> America already has all the power to abuse the system. They have a standing military. The reason the government is the government is because they maintain a monopoly on violence. Freaking out about surveillance is like freaking out about the compass in Rambo's survival knife when he's got a rocket launcher aimed down your throat. The compass is new I suppose. The rocket launcher has been there so long we don't even notice it any more. Whether or not the government abuses it's powers is strictly a matter of whether or not it feels like abusing it's powers. With or without trendy new surveillance capabilities, the logic of that doesn't change. Why this isn't obvious is beyond me.

<comment><USER17> Honestly, I do not disagree. In some ways I imagine that mass surveillance may even be necessary for the protection of the country, considering the potential for destruction that even a few people with the right technology and planning possess. Following your logic, it seems that the mass surveillance maybe has more potential to help than to hurt (since the govt already possesses plenty of resources for destruction).

Given how many people on here are adamant about anti-surveillance I feel like I must be missing something... like I get the overall premise but it seems to exclude a lot of important considerations...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It is basically impossible to hide yourself if you want to take part of society. Just standing there, you send out information about yourself body posture, dandruff, IR signature, ...)

Therefore, it is much more important to make sure we have full insight into those who have power. Sunlight is an effective disinfectant!

</comment><comment><USER32> Trumps stance on the intelligence community might be a good thing, as they all leave leaving the government with a desire but no experienced people to do the work. Of course that also leaves us wide open to be attacked. So maybe this causes a reset of sorts.

<comment><USER8> Clearly you don't understand Trump, he's just positioning himself with the intelligence community; as far as I am able to tell, his first visit to a government agency was to the CIA headquarters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> For any constitutional law experts: have there been any efforts to amend the 4th amendment to explicitly take into consideration private information held by third parties (ie abrogate FISA)?

<comment><USER8> Constitutional amendments are very hard to do, and in the context of mass surveillance, highly unlikely without the public demanding in as a majority.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> The average citizen doesnt know or care, and in this day and age many would trade "freedom" for what they think will give them "security". This story is already over.

<comment><USER8> Saying changing is not possible is unreasonable; see this comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13459166](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13459166)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The article cites data collection methods by linking to [https://nsa.gov1.info](https://nsa.gov1.info) That site describes itself in its footer as "a parody of nsa.gov" Don't believe everything you read.

</comment><comment><USER35> This is a thinly-veiled "Bash Trump" article. It is purely speculative what the Trump administration will do at this point. Obama was shitty on civil liberties, Bush was the one who caused us so much harm to begin with. But if we want privacy then we have to fight to get it back the same way Americans are fighting to get back their full 2nd Amendment rights. It can be done, but this stupid, petty, left vs. right false dichotomy has to end--there are only statists and individualists, that's all there is. You have those want to coerce and those who want to be free.

<comment><USER36> So Mike Pompeo won't be CIA Director?</comment></comment>


Emulating Linux MIPS in Perl – Part 1: ELF loader - <AUTHOR> http://schplog.schmorp.de/2015-06-08-emulating-linux-mips-in-perl-1.html <comment><USER2> A tiny mips emulator I wrote which can boot a linux kernel:

[https://github.com/andrewchambers/cmips](https://github.com/andrewchambers/cmips)

</comment><comment><USER3> This series of posts is amazingly well-written, it explains the steps involved really well IMO, thoughtfully ordering the code snippets to make understanding each step simple.

As a perl user, I'm also highly biased as it's nice to see a perl article on HN once in a while :)

</comment><comment><USER4> The next step along this path would be to run Perl inside this VM, and then run the emulator in it...

MIPS is certainly one of the simplest instruction sets. A while ago I decided to write one too, for fun, after having done ones for a few other CPUs (Z80, 6502, 8086), and MIPS was by far the simplest, almost to the point of being boring. Getting the branch delay slots right (see [http://www.pagetable.com/?p=313](http://www.pagetable.com/?p=313) for some details) was the hardest part.

<comment><USER5> W.r.t. branch delay slots.

An interesting idea: instead of fixing a number of branch delay slots (or none), what about splitting branches? That is - you have a branch_commit instruction, and anything between the branch and the branch_commit is treated as (a) branch delay slot(s), with the processor either filling in pipeline bubbles or stalling the branch as necessary. If you want to get fancy about it you can start doing matched branch / commit pairs (like nesting brackets), or potentially even start dealing with general matching.

Although the decreased instruction density may kill the benefits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I came across the phrase "XY problem" the other day [http://www.perlmonks.org/?node=XY+Problem](http://www.perlmonks.org/?node=XY+Problem)

> You want to do X, and you think Y is the best way of doing so. Instead of > asking about X, you ask about Y.

If we allow "ask" to include asking oneself, then this seems like a great example :)

</comment><comment><USER7> Ironic; I put together a MIPS based Linux distro about eight years ago, and Perl was one of the items that wouldn't cross-compile to it.

How you get Perl on MIPS is by compiling on a MIPS machine, or in an emulated chroot environment (QEMU on x86, say). Now Perl can maybe supply that environment.

</comment><comment><USER8> Speaking of MIPS, has anyone had success emulating IRIX?

</comment><comment><USER9> Am I reading this correctly??

Emulating a whole processor to run a shell script on Windows.... Seriously??

Strikes me that someone didn't research the options correctly or just wants an excuse to play...

<comment><USER10> Playing aka learning in this profession. Some still care to work towards being able to contribute to the "options" that are in play. This is how those developers and new options are born.</comment></comment>


China Has Already Gene-Edited 86 People with CRISPR - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/china-has-already-gene-edited-86-people-with-crispr-1822297524 <comment><USER3> The stance of the US government on this issue is completely hypocritical considering that there's drugs advertised on TV just about every weekend which can cause the ultimate side effect: death. Or is it that the pharmaceutical companies have more competent lawyers than the universities which are capable of dealing with avoiding liability with a clearly experimental treatment?

<comment><USER4> Death is not the ultimate side effect at all. The ultimate side effect I can think of would occur when these genetically modified humans reproduce - <USER2> permanently corrupted human genome with unforeseen, potentially species-ending side effects down the line. We don't know what we don't know yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The article ends rather abruptly.

Is CRISPR really seen as a realistic cancer cure, or a significant component of one?

<comment><USER6> Not yet, it's explored for prevention and some treatments but it's not a cure on any measurable scale.

Only a few cancers have been tied to specific genes and even then it's not exactly clear.</comment></comment>


Amazon AI Designed to Create Phone Cases Goes Hilariously Wrong - <AUTHOR> http://www.iflscience.com/technology/amazon-ai-designed-to-create-phone-cases-goes-hilariously-wrong/ <comment><USER2> Hilarious products, at least some of them. The "complaint" posted in the article, though, is seriously toxic.

Makes me wonder how well these sell. Quite refreshing to see products going against the usual, dystopian pseudo-happyness everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER3> If Amazon's not willing to go through with this, someone should.</comment>


Old-Fashioned Play Builds Serious Skills - <AUTHOR> http://www.waldorftoday.com/2013/07/old-fashioned-play-builds-serious-skills/

<comment><USER2> These days it's all about results: what are we going to get for doing this action? What purpose does it serve? The same thing has happened with our eating habits, among other things. How many calories does this contain? What vital nutrients will this give me? (I'm not saying it's a bad thing.) However I have a feeling it'll be a while before this approach will work with child development.</comment>


The secret effort to secure nuclear material at an abandoned Soviet test site - <AUTHOR> http://thebulletin.org/thin-air-story-plutonium-mountain This is pretty amazing. The report Plutonium Mountain has just been released by the Belfer Center at Harvard. It describes the remarkable effort the US made to get the Russians to recognize the nuclear proliferation risk they left behind at the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test when the Soviet Union collapsed. In this interview with Siegfried Hecker, he describes how he and other scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory recognized the risk to world security, as the Semipalatinsk site became overrun with metal scavengers. It's a great story. <comment><AUTHOR> Sig Hecker deserves a medal for this</comment>


Ask HN: Would you play Heroes of Might and Magic 3 if it was MMORPG? - <AUTHOR> Hey!<p>I remember having great time playing Heroes 3 many years ago. They have been coming with new versions over time I did not find such a great fun and now, since it's the time of "everything available on the web", I would love to be able to play this game online like other MMORPG games. Would you? <comment><USER2> I already have it on my computer. Will "online" bring anything new/different ?

<comment><AUTHOR> I would love to play HOMM3 from the browser the same way as I would play other MMORPG games. In that sense HOMM3 is not available to be played (is it?).

<comment><USER2> But why ? It would just be in-browser? Or do you want it to be mmorpg instead of just rpg ?(which is another game)

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly, turn HOMM3 a MMORPG. A little bit like bombermine (I don't mean rules, only the idea to make it available to multiple players at the same time).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Are you talking about Heroes of Might and Magic III?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, will update the title to avoid confusion.</comment></comment>


Jeff Bezos Responds to the Amazon NYT Article - <AUTHOR> http://www.geekwire.com/2015/full-memo-jeff-bezos-responds-to-cutting-nyt-expose-says-tolerance-for-lack-of-empathy-needs-to-be-zero/ <comment><USER3> Reposting my comment from Geekwire:

        Notably, no one else on this comment thread is
        willing to attach their real identity to it.
        I've been contacted by Amazon recruiting many
        times. I'm a Seattleite with 10+ years of
        software engineering experience. And I'll say
        the same thing here that I say to every AMZN
        recruiter who contacts me: no way, no how.
        Amazon is a sweatshop, and anyone who thinks
        otherwise—especially Jeff—is deluding themselves.

        I wish that Amazon featured *anywhere* on my
        list of 'prospective employers that I'd consider
        working at someday,' but given the reputation
        that they have with my friends, there's
        absolutely no way I'd ever consider working
        there under any circumstances.

        If my feelings are anything like other
        prospective senior and principal-level
        employees here in the area (and I assume
        they are), then it concerns me deeply about
        Amazon's future.

<comment><USER4> Agreed, I did 3 months at Amazon and ran screaming for the hills. To this day I am stalked by recruiters trying to get me to come back, even after explaining to them that only people with deep, neurotic lack of self worth would ever do that. Amazon does not hire just the best, they hire the brilliant geeks who don't realize they are brilliant and have personality problems such that they don't understand when they are being screwed over. Well, except for the aws team. They are pretty ok from what I recall.

<comment><USER5> I was advised to take a 3 month summer internship because I'd learn a lot while I was there. I was also advised that my life would be miserable during those 3 months and that I should not work there full time.

A wise tradeoff for the right person, imo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Jeff if you're reading, how about a new leadership principle?

Work Hard; Live Hard

Description: Have a good work life balance. When you're able and its appropriate, work hard. If you're not able, for whatever reason, or if it isn't appropriate to be working, please don't be working.

What is deemed able: If you're sick, you're not able. If you're tired, you're not able. If you're grieving, you are not able. etc.

What is deemed appropriate: Work <strike>50</strike> 40 hour weeks _on average_. While working regular hours, work hard. There may also be weeks you need to deliver, there may be weeks you need to be oncall: please work hard (i.e. more). However, if you constantly "have to deliver" or are consistently fighting fires, then something is wrong. This shouldn't be happening. Consider: are you setting bad dates for yourself? is your manager/team setting bad dates for you? Either way, fix that tomorrow. Meanwhile, quote this leadership principle and go home.

Scared your manager wont like your new attitude shift? Just quote "Its in Amazon's blood, Work Hard; Live Hard, I have a Kelly Clarkson concert to go to!"

P.S. Please realize I haven't given this much thought, every idea requires refinement, and this post is 40% in jest. Meanwhile, if you'd like to help Amazon potentially find a new leadership principle on the internet, constructive criticism or humor are my favorite types of responses ;).

</comment><comment><USER7> Amazon's attrition rate is among the highest in the industry. So, despite how he makes it sounds in the memo, the news should not have been of much surprise to him.

In a nutshell, he fails to acknowledge that there is a problem, and passes the risk of reporting to employees.

<comment><USER8> I read his response as an open confession that he's out of touch with his own company.

I'm not sure how he intended it to be read. I'm waiting to see if his "you'd be crazy to work at a place like that" actually results in improvements, or an increase in attrition.

My experience there (also 3 months) was that there were all these young kids who had no idea what a healthy work environment looked like and so they didn't know what they were missing out on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Great to see that the HN community is quite aware of the terrible work conditions in Amazon. I do wonder, though, how many of you still buy in Amazon, nevertheless.

Its important to note that when you buy a product, you are essentially voting with your wallet, saying "yes" to a company, its values, ways of operation, impact on the planet, etc etc. Its easy just to pass this as an internal amazon problem, but if you still buy there, you are supporting it anyway.

I've stopped using Amazon 2 years ago, dont miss it, and dont think I will.

<comment><USER10> I see this argument come up a lot in these kinds of discussion, but the problem with 'vote with your wallet' are numerous, including (not all might apply to the HN crowd):

1) market competition: if there's no (better) competitor and you need the services provided for whatever you need, how can you vote with your wallet?

2) Price: I'd love to buy ethically sourced-everything, but I simply cannot afford it and will never be able to (on my current income) as long as unethically sourced remains this much cheaper and the norm. Income and market prices adapt to each other.

3) Knowledge & time: It is incredibly time and energy consuming to find out all these things. Amazon has now made the news, but how do you know which competitors are better? Look at food, even with all the labels we have these days there is still a lot of misleading information out there.

4) All of the above and more applied to everyone: As I mentioned, the above probably doesn't apply to most of the HN crowd, but any of these reasons (and probably a lot more I missed) would be enough to stop someone from voting with their wallet. In order to do so you must have the knowledge, time, energy and availability. Something not everyone has. If but a small minority can (and wants) to vote with their wallet, it will almost never be cost-effective for companies to change.

Whatever happened to good old fashioned legislation? One can make a similar argument for voting (time & knowledge limitations mostly), but they should be less severe barriers.

<comment><USER9> Those arguments are valid, but apply to only a fraction of the cases.

Really, how many of us _need_ to buy office supplies, diapers, or groceries from amazon? How many times do you _need_ to have a book delivered to you in less than X hours? We have these fabricated needs and companies that provide services to fulfil them, which really says a lot about the power of their marketing.

Again, not disagreeing with your arguments, I just think they dont apply to the majority of the cases, where you _can_ avoid amazon and just shop elsewhere (slightly less convenient, I must say - its a matter of values, and voting with your wallet)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Amazon seems to be informed by Bezos' time on Wall Street in many ways. The most prominent of these to me are the expectation of overly arduous hours, a highly contingency based compensation structure (annual bonuses vs back loaded RSU vesting schedules), and knowing which buttons need to be pressed in Analyst calls and the bare minimum amount of information that needs to be given.

As an AMZN shareholder, these are big benefits. As an employee, I would expect things to break down a bit.

</comment><comment><USER11> Out of the very few people I interviewed from amazon, I had one candidate who didn't like his job since he had to do be alert (pager) during the nights (not mentioned when hired), and his boss ocassionaly gave him work on friday evening to be finished till monday, so he had to stay on the weekend to finish it. When he talked to human ressources about this situation, HR actually fired him, and that's why he applied to us at the end. I actually didn't believe him at that time, but I guess there was some truth to it at the end after all.

</comment><comment><USER12> That request to email him sounds farcical as hell to me.

The CEO of a gigantic company, who's most likely already absolutely swamped in email, is asking people to email him at his direct, known-to-public address, which is most likely managed by a team of secretaries, instead of providing a specific target address along with instructions on how to send mail there anonymously.

I don't think anyone would dare take him up on that offer in the first place, and if he's really this deluded about it, he might end up taking zero incoming mails on this topic as "proof" that everything is fine.

That remark about contacting HR is also a little funny, since it seems like employees already consider HR to be enemy agents.

<comment><USER13> The email was [redacted]. We don't know what it is.

But in a way it is a time for action. Pushing your people to the extreme and caring about them are not mutually exclusive. Depending on Mr. Bezos' actions in a few days we will understand if the amazon toxic culture is policies stripped from a lot of nuance when made into soundbites or got that way by design.

And a CEO could indeed be somewhat isolated - at that level you see reports that have already passed a couple of levels of sanitation.

<comment><USER12> > The email was [redacted].

Please clarify. The article does mention an email address. Twice.

<comment><USER13> Sorry. It was removed in the topic here on HN that quoted it. And i thought we were in it.

<comment><USER12> Ah. Happens. Have two upvotes from me for standing by your mistakes, no matter how tiny. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _"But if you know of any stories like those reported, I want you to escalate to HR. You can also email me directly at email@example.com. Even if it's rare or isolated, our tolerance for any such lack of empathy needs to be zero."_

This seems a bit "Closing the barn doors after the horses are gone".

Alternately, this rings a bit hollow given the turnover rate: _I strongly believe that anyone working in a company that really is like the one described in the NYT would be crazy to stay. I know I would leave such a company._

For as much as there's an emphasis on data, that seems like a worthwhile value to track.

<comment><USER15> Perhaps Bezos has convinced himself that the higher attrition rate reflects the willingness of other companies to retain under-performers. At least I can see how he could choose to believe that interpretation in the face of the data that must have been known to him.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > But if you know of any stories like those reported, I want you to escalate > to HR. You can also email me directly at firstname.lastname@example.com

Really, and who's going to stick their neck out? I would rather get off than wasting time trying to fix things which I don't have control on.

</comment><comment><USER17> I seem to remember hearing rants of working as a developer at Amazon 3 years ago. Here's a link to Steve Yegge's diatribe and Bezos's web services mandate: [https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX](https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX)

Here's an excerpt:

His Big Mandate went something along these lines:

1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.

2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.

3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.

4) It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care.

5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.

6) Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired.

7) Thank you; have a nice day!

Ha, ha! You 150-odd ex-Amazon folks here will of course realize immediately that #7 was a little joke I threw in, because Bezos most definitely does not give a shit about your day.

<comment><USER18> it doesnt seem like such a bad idea to me. generic communication between services? yes thx ill take that.

and thats why so many use AWS.

<comment><USER19> People use AWS for the same reason people buy from Amazon. Because it's bloody cheap, not because it's good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > Those that choose to work there do so out of greed (rising stock price)

Seattle is full of tech workers who retired young from their appreciating stock options, from Microsoft and Amazon and presumably other companies. At one point I read that Microsoft had minted 10,000 millionaires in the Seattle area. I don't know what the corresponding Amazon figures are, but I suspect they are similar.

Note that AMZN is up about 60% just in the last year.

</comment><comment><USER21> He seems out of touch, given the comments I've heard from current and former AMZN employees here in Seattle.

</comment><comment><USER22> His email is in "CEO English". It doesn't mean anything and it doesn't help anyone. Standard Corporate America practices. Nothing to see here...

<comment><USER23> He's offering people to report cases as described in the NYT article directly to him, that's a good thing - unless of course he's just saying that for the media.

What would be a better way to respond as a CEO? What would you have done?

<comment><USER22> First thing they should recognize they have an issue. When this many people are complaining there is an issue

Second they could have offered an increase in benefits like paternity leave to show they want to improve things.

He did neither of those

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> What a PR nightmare for Amazon. One can only speculate about the damage done to their ability to hire best candidates but considering that the CEO himself responded it must be pretty substantial. Will it be enough to mitigate the damage though?

<comment><USER25> There will be a slow trickle of AWS employees (working in a pretty isolated, high-margin sector of AMZN) showing up on tech blogs saying "hmm, everything's cool here, what's the problem?". It's already started on HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've already read a couple of "the NYT storiy does not reflect my experience" posts from engineers, both very senior (Tim Bray) and not so senior.

My take is that engineers (much in demand, can leave and pick up new work anwhere in this sellers'market) are going to live in a different work culture than anybody else (the general job market is still bearish, they can't transfer any specialist skill so easily).

</comment><comment><USER27> >...still sounding exhilarated months later about providing "Frozen" dolls in record time.

At the risk of a very lame pun, this leaves me cold.

Denigrating someone else's work isn't good reporting.

They may just be "Frozen dolls" but it's what Amazon does, they sell everything to everyone.

Should an Amazon worker be more exhilarated by supplying much needed medical supplies in record time? Perhaps, but in essence - the company's ideals should (and clearly do) run through its entire business.

Working people to breaking point (which is what the article is about) can be reported on without making a value judgement on what the company sells or how important they think it is.

</comment><comment><USER28> This has of course hit the mainstream press in turn. Amazon Chief Says Employees Lacking Empathy Will Be Instantly Purged [http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/amazon- chief-...](http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/amazon-chief-says- employees-lacking-empathy-will-be-instantly-purged)

</comment><comment><USER29> Amazon has appeared unsustainable for 20 years, both financially and in terms of business practices. That might be Jeff Bezos' one key strength; how to make people, both investors, partners and employees, tolerate endless amounts of abuse.

</comment><comment><USER30> It would be great if LinkedIn also responds to the NYT article with data on attrition rates at Amazon vis-a-vis other tech-companies. _That_ would be irrefutable evidence.

</comment><comment><USER31> This is not suppose to be a insult to people who work hard in Amazon, but I am really interested to know,

Apart from AWS, ( technically a well defined and ran technology platform ) what exactly is Amazon doing to make it a sweat shop. If something similar were to describe Apple or even Google / Tesla . Then i could understand as they are constantly innovating, pushing hard at everything on a tight deadline, while Amazon.........

<comment><USER32> Don't pay enough and a shit working environment.

The rest make larger gross margins, so they can afford not to treat their employees like a massive cost center.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Sure, it might be the case that some employees are having the time of their life and enjoying their jobs. However, all that talk about the sweatshop work conditions of Amazon employees can't be all hearsay. To the very least, Jeff should act and investigate the issue instead of completely refuting it.

IMO, investigating the issue and acting upon it is a better move for Amazon's employees and PR.

</comment><comment><USER34> I have been contacted by recruitment from Amazon and Friday's article got me thinking.

This story is really pushing me to walk away from the process.

</comment><comment><USER35> I guess he also doesn't recognize the industry-worst Maternity/Paternity leave that their HR department has apparently had in place for years?

There were many truths in that NYT article (and probably also many stretchings of the truth as well), but to try to sweep all of that aside seems extremely disingenuous. What a nutcase this Bezos guy is.

</comment><comment><USER36> i'm no expert in this manner, but jeff bezos strikes me as a classic sociopath. that goofy smile, that deliberately saccharine and smarmy facade that he constructs whenever he speaks in public... it all just seems so ridiculous and fake. he doesn't seem like a normal person. to me he seems like a prick trying to imitate what he thinks a nice person would act like.

and through my own professional experience, i know for a fact nobody with a cutesy demeanor like that builds a company like amazon. i don't buy it for a second. i don't buy this little emergency damage control email either.

also, just one little detail from the article that jumped out at me - <USER2> company that specifically designs and defines a mechanism for anonymous reporting (snitching) on your coworkers to your manager, knows how it will be used - as a manipulative backstabbing tool. these people aren't naive, they're professional assholes designing their own little lord of the flies workplace.

it's like someone took the gervais principle and optimized for it.

<comment><USER37> A lot of CEOs are classic sociopaths. E.g. the following has been attributed to Steven Anthony Ballmer:

       "Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy.
       I'm going to fucking bury that guy,
       I have done it before, and I will do it again.
       I'm going to fucking kill Google."

But that's bush league. I'm sure that many people would agree that Lawrence Joseph Ellison would easily win any "sociopath contest".

<comment><USER38> I struggled a lot with this in my business. I would look at and hear about other successful businesses who were getting their employees to put in 18 hour work days, assessing them on every single thing, and asking them to work on vacations, birthdays, and other things.

I would feel like a failure because I couldn't push myself or my employees to work that way. I wanted everyone to have a good time, to work, but also to have fun with their work. It felt like I was doing something wrong.

Today, I've given up on that "18 hour workday" dream. I'm not built like that. I don't care about maximizing efficiency or increasing profitability. I want everyone to be happy, and I've realized that that's anti-thetical to the way businesses usually work across the world.

I don't care. I'm happy. My workers are happy. The clients I have are certainly happy. Others can work their 18 hour days and buy six figure cars they can't drive. I'll stick to my 7-8 hours, read my favorite authors and spend time with friends.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Can we stop with the responses to the nyt article already? Boo hoo amazonians are offended by that piece.

<comment><USER34> Jeff Bezos does not usually respond to this sort of article. It's quite new and the Amazon-the-horrible-place-to-work theme has been growing for a number of years(as I've been researching). I guess it's time to pop.</comment></comment>


Does a solution to the Riemann hypothesis render RSA encryption obsolete? [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://phys.lsu.edu/~fmoxley/fieldsMedalSymposium.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> A very major threat to RSA encryption would be a solution to the Riemann hypothesis. If a solution is found, prime numbers would be too easy to find, and RSA would fall apart. Undoubtedly, much more sophisticated algorithms than RSA will continue to be developed as mathematicians discover more in the fields of number theory and cryptanalysis.

<comment><USER2> This is incorrect.

"prime numbers would be too easy to find" \-- they're already really easy to find. Factoring large semiprimes is currently hard. Primality testing and finding primes for RSA keys is very easy. If the RH was proven true, it wouldn't speed that up in any practical way either.

As an experiment, assume the Riemann Hypothesis. Does that make factoring easier? No. Do we have any currently known methods of weakening RSA if the RH was true? No.

For some actual consequences of the RH: [https://mathoverflow.net/questions/17209/consequences-of- the...](https://mathoverflow.net/questions/17209/consequences-of-the-riemann- hypothesis)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> A small note to future viewers - This PDF does not mention anything about solution being a threat to the RSA encryption. It provides a mathemetical proof for something which I couldn't comprehend.

Also, on a quite unrelated note - won't any kind of encryption be obsolete of it is proved that P=NP. I read this two days ago on the Wikipedia entry of "P versus NP problem" in the "Consequences" part.</comment>


Ask HN: Why mismatch between dates on HN page and search/API? - <AUTHOR> Take this story for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13969114
At the time of writing, this is listed at "5 hours ago". But when you search for this story over the API or on https://hn.algolia.com/?query=sloppy%20land%20surveyor&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story , it says "a day ago". The API lists the correct date as 1490632191, which also points into the latter direction.
What's up with this? Is this a case of a story being kinda resubmitted by HN staff? <comment><USER2> > _Is this a case of a story being kinda resubmitted by HN staff?_

Probably, but because nobody except the mods than can give you a definitive answer on this you really should ask them (e-mail is in the footer) instead of posting here and ask for guesses.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, I just emailed dang about this misbehavior yesterday.

They _did_ fix the bug with search not handling quotes properly, however.</comment>


The Little Coder's Predicament - <AUTHOR> http://whytheluckystiff.net/articles/theLittleCodersPredicament.html

<comment><USER2> This is an old article, but in my opinion kids today have the same opportunity to learn programming, only now it's not tied to a particular hardware platform or operating system--it's the Web! They might start playing with simple HTML, text and graphics and maybe some JavaScript. Or customizing MySpace or whatever.

The Web is also more collaborative--instead of coding in isolation they can share their results with the world.</comment>


A System for Detecting Software Plagiarism - <AUTHOR> https://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/moss/ <comment><USER2> I took a brief peek at the paper cited by the article ([http://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/publications/papers/sigmod...](http://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/publications/papers/sigmod03.pdf)) to see how the system worked. It uses hashes of n-grams of the submitted programs to compare similarity.

My own experience with plagiarism came when teaching a university course for CS majors. For most, the class was their second course in programming. While grading an early programming assignment I noticed a program that reminded me of one of the early ones I had already graded. Comparing the two programs revealed that they were identical, except that the variable names had been changed to protect the guilty.

I wonder if this system would have detected this case of collaboration.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, MOSS does that.

I have been TA'ing a first year Python Programming course since beginning of this year; what you describe is the most common trick used by students---even though they have been told time and again that this will be detected.

As an example, MOSS picked up 91% similarity---between two students---for one of the module files.

      # Student 1
      at1 = input("Attempt 1:\n")
      at2 = input("Attempt 2:\n")
      at3 = input("Attempt 3:\n")
      maxi.append(max(eval(at1),eval(at2),eval(at3)))

      # Student 2
      attempt1 = input("Attempt 1:\n")
      attempt2 = input("Attempt 2:\n")
      attempt3 = input("Attempt 3:\n")
      maximums.append(max(eval(attempt1),eval(attempt2),eval(attempt3)))

I find it interesting that MOSS does a one-on-one comparison for each student.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I wonder, can MOSS detect cross-language plagarism? For example, if a student is asked to submit an assignment in Python, what if they find a solution on the Internet in another language (e.g. Ruby), then translate it into Python? Assuming MOSS had a database of code samples taken from the Internet to compare against (containing the solution the student used), could it detect this?

</comment><comment><USER4> we used moss once a few years ago while i was a ta. it was interesting. we actually found a few similar programs. we were also doing a 15min oral exam with the person's code in front of us, so among the ones that has similar code, we were figuring out who wrote the original code, and who copied, etc.</comment>


The Pentagon as Silicon Valley's Startup Incubator - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/23/technology/the-pentagon-as-start-up-incubator.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

<comment><USER2> Came here expecting the early history of SIGINT[1].

1\. [http://steveblank.com/2009/03/23/if-i-told- you-i%e2%80%99d-h...](http://steveblank.com/2009/03/23/if-i-told- you-i%e2%80%99d-have-to-kill-you-the-story-behind-the-secret-history-of- silicon-valley/)

</comment><comment><USER3> > The government is doing a lot of interesting things they don't disclose. You > have a unique perspective on what the adversary is doing and the state of > computer security at a whole other level.

I believe in our government's right to privacy for security's sake, but reading this makes me sad. They get a bad rap, including from me sometimes. So, If they are really doing things that are that cool and useful, they should share them, so we can see where the tax dollars are working. I have a feeling though that this statement was just for PR. Nothing at the classified level can be all that cool. Coolness is for SAP's.

</comment><comment><USER4> (with :sarcasm

Thanks guys, for working for the NSA and making the Internet a great secure and safe place!

)

</comment><comment><USER5> If you can navigate certification, authority to operate, authority to connect + other long list of red tape crap, there are quite a few opportunities for start-ups in this world.

If anything, sometimes you get an opportunity to mop up after a big incompetent behemoth messed up a large long project. You can come in quickly, finish it fast and save some hire up's ass.

(Generals and other hire ups, love nothing move than to look good. Picking winning companies to purchase from. Services and products).

</comment><comment><USER6> I wonder what percentage of stuff is in house? I mean what percentage are developers who want to create new experimental things and the poor guys stuck kludging together some huge undocumented systems of contractor libraries?

Is innovation shot down if it competes with a contractor or has monetizing potential? How many fundamental systems are designed in-house and how many are external?

Is it easier to push yourself if you understand the potential significance of your work?</comment>


How a Shortcoming of the English Language Doomed Two Decades of Web Design - <AUTHOR> http://gun.io/blog/how-a-shortcoming-of-the-english-language-doomed-two-decades-of-web-design/

<comment><USER2>
      > If we want to associate their account with a username,
      > we can already deduce that from the email address -
      > simply take everything before the '@'.

The concept of a "username" as a special entity is long obsolete.

If accounts are uniquely identified by an email address, let users sign in with their email address. If users object to showing their address publicly, add a free-form text field so they can tell you which name they want to use.

      > We're a quickly growing young startup - we really just
      > want as many interested people to enroll as possible.
      > If we have to slightly uglify our 'settings' page or
      > burn a bit of energy on support for the percentage of
      > users who don't want to use their email address name
      > as their username, we can manage that.

The problem is that you're not just spending your own mental energy, you're spending that of every other person who signs up. You're forcing every registree to think of, type in, and remember another string if they want to use your site.

      > What do you think? Have you seen any better examples
      > in the wild? Do you have any better ideas that I
      > haven't addressed here? As a user, how would you
      > prefer to approach this problem?

IMO, the best login form supports OpenID, OAuth, and nothing else. Put up a couple big buttons up for the major providers (Facebook, Yahoo, Google, AOL, etc), plus the generic OpenID logo to handle any alpha-nerds.

Then the registration flow takes two steps (click button, click "yes send my info", user is signed in), and the re-login flow takes only one (click button, user is signed in). The user doesn't have to fill out a form, or remember a new password, or wait for a validation email to arrive.

<comment><USER3> > If users object to showing their address publicly, add a free-form text > field so they can tell you which name they want to use.

Although I mostly like it, there is a potential identity theft security issue with that approach. Anyone could pick "jmillikin" (or your email address if you have chosen to display that) as the display name.

It is usually possible to set any image as an avatar, so this point might be moot anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "Use Websitename"</comment>


How much countries spend in R&D - <AUTHOR> http://uis.unesco.org/apps/visualisations/research-and-development-spending/ <comment><USER2> A large proportion of the so-called public R&D spending is actually backdoor subsidies to company's normal production activities.

Here in the EU there has been a relentless lobbying push by industry to redefine 'Research' to include the higher 'Technology Readiness Levels' [1].

Traditionally 'Research' was deemed to be up to TRL-3, and 'Development' up to TRL-5. The distinctions are important as there are far stricter subsidy percentage limits on public funding of 'Development' then on 'Research'.

Now industry lobbying is trying (successfully) to have everything up to TRL-7 be labeled under 'R&D'. Sad times for the real research in the EU, as overall budgets aren't increased and the higher the TRL, the higher the investments that can now make a claim on the money.

A single car factory production line development subsidy can eat up a region's whole yearly R&D budget if left unchecked. It's not private enterprises aren't already swimming in public money, but this is a further land-grab on public funds.

An example: at the same time VW got fines for diesel-gate in other parts of the world, Belgium (which holds the dubious honor of being both a 'tax heaven' for companies with rates in practice close to 0%, while at the same time being the world record holder for taxing workers pay of around 54%) was cutting VW new deals and funneling VW millions of € in subsidies).

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

<comment><USER3> This. I can see the Netherlands on 2+% of GDP on the chart as well. The Netherlands indeed grants tax cuts if you do R&D (The law is called "WBSO"), however it totally depends on how you word what you're doing towards the tax authorities. Installing Kubernetes & building Jenkins pipelines? Sorry, that's obviously NOT R&D. Oh wait -- someone hired a company to word it slightly differently. Now you're getting an X million tax cut.

Source: Worked at a company that got a 10M+ tax cut for moving to Microservices & rewriting a fucking frontend in React.

<comment><USER4> I work for a company mainly based in The Netherlands that gets a ~$400 million USD/yr tax cut through WBSO. Search for "Innoation Box" here: [http://ir.bookingholdings.com/node/23191/html](http://ir.bookingholdings.com/node/23191/html)

It's definitely a huge benefit, but as far as I know this doesn't subtract from government budgets for basic research in The Netherlands (but maybe I'm wrong).

It's basically a tax benefit the government uses as an incentive to get more knowledge workers into the country and to stimulate that sort of economic activity in general.

<comment><USER5> Those knowledge workers can also get a flat 30% tax reduction which is applied to their gross wage before other reductions. The end result is that someone earning 100k EUR a year has a net take home pay of 101k EUR.

Source: the tax returns of someone I know who took advantage of this scheme (I could have, only I found out about it too late).

<comment><USER4> Indeed, but this is unrelated to whether or not their employer participates in "research" via WBSO or any other schema, it's more like the U.S. H1B program, i.e. they've got to try to search for talent domestically (or at least make a show of it), not find it, and then pay above a certain amount for the job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Given the expansive definition of R&D esp. given the tax rebates companies get in their respective countries even a website using a new framework can be categorized as Research and Development. So that begs the question how do we qualify real "R&D" from fake R&D ?

what are the markers a curious investigator should look for in this pile of data ?

<comment><USER7> Absolutely - in the past I've been asked to review past work to see if it qualifies as R&D for tax purposes; this was all bespoke client stuff really, but the retrospective criterion was a vague handwave about reusability.

<comment><USER8> Yes I had exactly the same experience! it seems like the people reviewing what qualifies have absolutely no technical understanding.

Even when trying to be honest, the questions are posed so vaguely that they are really relying on you taking the moral high ground when choosing what _you_ think qualifies as R&D, even then it becomes an internal battle of definitions.

<comment><USER2> As one of those reviewers I beg to differ on the non-understanding part :).

You have to understand that the reviews happen in context. What isn't always understood by the layman is that countries/regions etc. aren't reluctant to grant subsidies, but actually want to subsidize as much as they can get away with.

The break on the system is international treaties of mutually agreed limits on what you are allowed to subsidize. But the agreed budget will be spent.

The distribution strategy and selectivity are often set by the political factions that hold the office at the time, and the administration is bound by the strategy laid out.

This can vary from being realy critical and looking for true R&D high potential high-risk/high potential risk taking, to lowering the bar and just give everyone a little bit of the budget with few questions asked.

Reviewers are always allowed to be very honest in their assessments, and have more than enough experience in seeing through all the shady hand-waving. They also usually look into the potential of the company/team beyond the strict letter of funding proposal dossier as submitted. How the expert advise is taken into account in a funding decision is up to the administration. The reviewer is paid for the review, and is not even informed of the final decisions.

<comment><USER8> It sounds like we are talking about different things: this was in the form of R&D tax rebates, and all due respect, the reviewers involved asked for more and more "plain english" descriptions of the technology to the point of meaningless.

<comment><USER2> Ah! My review experience is in direct innovation project grants. I have been on the defending (receiving) side of the R&D tax rebates. As far as I could tell, these types of negotiations are done by people from the finance and economy, not the innovation and R&D administration. This is also the domain of professional intermediaries from the Big-5 offering this as a service. If you were there as the token 'techie' (I know i was), your unspoken role would typically have been to spew jargon and tech details, of which neither your financial consultants nor the administration representative would understand one word. They weren't looking for technical insights, just judging in how-far the activities and people you are claiming the rebates for differ from your 'normal' activities and employee pool, so they can draw a line somewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> India's is a sad state. It is partly to do with the fact that the nation maintains (rather proudly IMO) the colonial structure of being a mere 'training ground' for Engineers and Scientists before they move to the US/UK/rem. Anglo-Saxon nations. K Vijayaraghavan, the DBT secretary, and a NAS fellow, has written a piece on the matter.

[https://www.hindustantimes.com/analysis/india-must-shed- inte...](https://www.hindustantimes.com/analysis/india-must-shed-intellectual- colonialism-to-excel-in-science-and-technology/story- wfbhX71Evf9ilqqUKkjAQL.html)

<comment><USER10> Respectfully, it seems to me that India (and other countries in the region and maybe elsewhere) has a problem with strictly hierarchical structure, issues with accessibility and availability of resources. There is no investment in improving training for teachers. Typically, people that don't find jobs anywhere else take up teaching. Teaching is also typically a high-stress, low- paid job. It seems to have not a lot to do with language. There are more factors here.

Yes the Germans are able to get ahead cause of the use of both German and English. But it seems like lazy reasoning to suggest that this is solely the reason why they do better. How about looking into what else their education system does that is possibly absent in the Indian system? How about comparing the structure, the resource usage, the training for educators and managers in education and research? Surely, language is not the only difference between the two systems?

<comment><USER11> >How about looking into what else their education system does that is possibly absent in the Indian system?

No rote memorization for starters. I have found that if you want problem solvers, it's usually not people from rote memorization cultures. Hierarchical thinking is the next problem. If you want to disrupt something, you have to be a little bit of a rebel.

<comment><USER12> > No rote memorization for starters. I have found that if you want problem > solvers, it's usually not people from rote memorization cultures.

Rote memorization is the basis of all learning. It's actually the first step and it's at the heart of western education ( or it was until we decided to go to a silly route ).

You have to memorize the ABCs, the multiplication table, vocabulary, etc. And we used to teach kids latin and greek which required lots of memorization. Creativity and problem solving comes afterwards.

I'm against the anti-memorization movement in the US/West. It's great to memorize things and it's great to memorize things intelligently. Whether it be poems, songs, vocabulary, math theorems, code, etc.

As long as rote memorization isn't the end but the means to an end.

<comment><USER11> I see what you mean, you have to memorize the very basics. What I meant by route memorization learning culture is a bit different though.

I went to China once and during my visit I met a math teacher. He showed me some of the problems his students could solve.

I was impressed, it were very difficult problems for 11th graders. I couldn't solve some of them myself.

On one problem I asked him how to solve it and he handed me their math book. It was a chapter that had this problem solved in the beginning, and then about 100 questions which were just the same problem with different numbers.

I was hugely disappointed. The students didn't know how to solve a class of problems, just cherry picked problems that they learned by heart.

The problem here is not that you memorize some things, but in math you should understand the problem, and not just be able to input different numbers in an algorithm.

For vast memorization we have Google, for solving algorithms we have computers, for thinking how to solve something we need humans. And this class was trying to educate humans to be computers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> How much does Taiwan spend on R&D? I would guess that they are similar to South Korea and Japan, but they are nowhere on the charts.

<comment><USER14> I imagine they're not on the chart because they're not in the United Nations.

<comment><USER15> [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-22/in-global- innovatio...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-22/in-global-innovation- race-taiwan-is-tops-in-patents-israel-leads-in-r-d.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Implicit in this is the idea that if country X invests a significantly larger amount in research than country Y, then X will have significantly more output than Y. I don't buy this. And the reason I don't is because my own country, a small one, gets so much of its input from the US, that a doubling of research spending probably wouldn't do much of a corresponding difference (not produce many more Feynmans, I'm afraid). Culture within the country (e.g. attitude towards disruptors) and how the institutions are set up matters a huge amount.

</comment><comment><USER15> Where is Taiwan?!

Taiwan is one of top countries for patents per capita: [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-22/in-global- innovatio...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-22/in-global-innovation- race-taiwan-is-tops-in-patents-israel-leads-in-r-d.html)

<comment><USER17> This comes out of UNESCO, a UN agency. So probably counted as part of China, but might just be ignored.

<comment><USER18> Taiwan is not a part of UN?

<comment><USER19> very simplified TLDR - Taiwan was in the UN as the representative of China and blocked People's Republic of China until 1970s when second and third world countries voted PRC in instead of Taiwan and now PRC as the representative of China blocks Taiwan [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_and_the_United_Nations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_and_the_United_Nations)

fun fact, because USSR was boycotting the UN over this issue in the 50s there was no one left to veto US's intervention in Korea, therefore it was okay by UNSC

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I was excited to see such a fresh UI from the UNESCO site when the page first loaded, then as I started reading I realized the right half of every sentence is cut off in Safari on iPhone 6/7/8.

<comment><USER21> May I suggest you get access to a monitor?

In all seriousness, data visualization requires all the space it can get. I agree the graphics are not that fancy, but displaying them on mobile would be rather uninteresting as everything would be tiny.

Hence the minimal effort put on responsiveness.

<comment><USER22> Usability. They tried to do all sorts of fancy charts when a simple one could have sufficed. I'd bet HN has more mobile viewers and desktop.

So in this case all that expensive money spent making that page isn't really worth it since a large part of internet wouldn't even be able to properly read it.

Worse is they half arsed responsiveness. Could have left safari to browse the page like a normal desktop page but their width metadata gives a very poor experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> So by absolute spending, there are basically 3 centers:

1\. USA 2\. East Asia 3\. West Europe

East Asia combined, their spending is bigger than USA and EU.

What will be more interesting is to break down those spending on what particular field they are spent on, but I guess that data is hard to collect.

Overall, in line with my every day feeling, but kinda unimpressed as well. South Korea is an outlier here, their spending in R&D is absolutely massive in both relative/absolute terms.

</comment><comment><USER24> Ugh, I can only imagine the amount Canada wastes on dubious SHRED grants.

</comment><comment><USER25> % of GDP can be a bit misleading as rich countries easy fall to the left of the graph. I would rather see $ spent per person

<comment><USER2> Yes, GDP.

I always think of a toy-world example of a circle of 10 people cooking their own dinners. The GDP of that circle is 0$. Now if every person in the circle cooks not his own dinner but sells his dinner to the person on the right of them for 100$, suddenly the circle's GDP has shot up to 1.000$, while in fact nothing has changed.

Now I know very well that this is an oversimplification, yet it is not so outlandish and illustrates quite well how our economic ideology relentlessly pushes 'financialization' of service activities that used to be non- commercial. You need a job, and when you have one then you need to spend the money you earn on others to provide daycare and school lunches and house & garden maintenance ...

Financialization is key because it not just allows 'profits' to be made, but is essential to the 'rent seeking' economy as they can only exist by the nature of intermediating on transactions.

<comment><USER26> Even your example doesn't seem that pathological if you assume that the individuals are actually pursuing their preferences rather than deliberately trying to inflate their group GDP.

<comment><USER27> Which is why a more exaggerated comparison would be this: a person who walks home after finishing work to cook dinner with the family using vegetables grown in the backyard vs a person who eats out in a bar, drives home drunk, gets into an accident, ends up in hospital, and creates a huge increase in GDP.

The example downplays the positive impact of the increase in GDP (eg the drunk driver creates jobs for car manufacturers, police officers, and doctors) but it shows how our narrow focus on GDP rewards behavior that may not be desirable.

<comment><USER28> > _and creates a huge increase in GDP_

That evening, sure. In the long run, their productivity is likely diminished. You see a similar binge-and-reckoning cycle in macroéconomies, the difference being practically nobody is rewarded for higher GDP. Governments are rewarded for having larger tax bases.

<comment><USER2> I hope you'll forgive me for the bluntness, but I'm trying to be brief.

First a question: how come 'productivity' has gone up by 2% annually for nearly a century (if you know compounding you know how massive this is), yet we all have to 'work hared' and 'longer' for less, while our social security is being eroded?

'productivity' in a 'Red Queen's Race'[1] economy has 0 value. We're not doing work to ensure 'survival' or 'progress' anymore. 10% of People could carry that. We long ago stopped having a production problem, we have a(n artificially sustained) distribution problem.

At the 'economic ground floor' level we're in a self accelerating 'service economy' which at the systems level is both driven and preyed upon by a 'rent- seeking' economy that in socio-economic power far outplays the former. Transactions are the key, not what actually goes around.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race)

<comment><USER29> You could see real productivity increase by some measure (entropic, say, or total available free energy), with the "work harder and longer" dynamic, by other mechanisms.

Failure to equitably distribute gains, a capricious allocation such that individuals might make mint one year, be skint the next. No viable pensions or annuity system. Etc.

Value extraction from labour is _the_ age-old economics problem. It faced feudal peasants, it faces the modern urban/suburban knowledge wage slave paying it all out in rent or mortgage interest. David Ricardo's two bugbears were the laws of rent and wages, in opposition to one another.

GDP's distortions are legion, but you still have the rent/wage dilemma without that.

... Though some measures of gross happiness or support might address that. Hrm. We mearsure GDP. But Smith says:

 _POLITICAL œconomy, considered as a branch of the science of aThe first object of political economy is to provide subsistence for the people statesman or legislator, proposes two distinct objects: first, to provide a plentiful revenue or subsistence for the people, or more properly to enable them to provide such a revenue or subsistence for themselves; and secondly, to supply the state or commonwealth with a revenue sufficient for the public services. It proposes to enrich both the people and the sovereign._

[http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/smith-an-inquiry-into- the-...](http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/smith-an-inquiry-into-the-nature- and-causes-of-the-wealth-of-nations-cannan-ed-vol-1)

That is, his standard for economic performance is support of the population, generally, and financing the state. Elsewhere and earlier he calls explicitly for improving the lot of the poorest especially.

GDP does none of this.

I've beeen meaning to read Kuznts's notes specifically for some time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I am from a country in the bottom left 1/16th of the graph and can confirm. The whole economy is about subcontracting and sucking in money from various EU grants, any offices of global businesses are sad outsourcing and offshoring centers.

</comment><comment><USER31> Anyone know how much Taiwan spends on R&D? My dated recollection was quite high (10%?)

</comment><comment><USER32> If you click on the country it shows you the "R&D spending by sector of performance" where sectors are Business, Government, University. For all big spenders (right part of the chart) the business share is the biggest.

</comment><comment><USER33> Wouldn't it have been a more helpful/useful comparison to show R&D as a % of GDP alongside % of PPP-adjusted GDP? Total R&D spend in PPP$ seems like a not- so-useful comparison since it's still biased by size of an economy, whereas % of total GDP is trying to normalize for that (albeit not perfectly).

</comment><comment><USER34> This website sucks beyond amazing belief. I couldn't take it and left.

<comment><USER35> So long for constructive comments...

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

'Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.'

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Website is cancer on mobile. Using Materialistic HN APP on Android.

</comment><comment><USER37> Great interactive site

</comment><comment><USER38> My country is not even on the list.

</comment><comment><USER39> Obviously R&D spending is not high enough to make this website scale correctly on mobile...

</comment><comment><USER9> I really admire Israel on the intellectual front. This is a nation that starts using an obscure liturgical language (Hebrew) at the turn of the 19th century, and today has Silicon Wadi which is second only to SV, the highest proportion of PhDs in the population, and a couple Nobels, Fields, Turing and Wolf prizes! I wonder if there are some aspects of Jewish culture than can be incorporated the world over.

India on the other hand ... It's interesting how the homeland of the Semitic and Dharmic religions have fared (both historically and contemporarily).

<comment><USER40> But why does this happen in Israel? They don't benefit from the huge capital flows and single market of the US

<comment><USER41> I could be wrong but from what I read a while ago it's that there's not much traditional resources to export (Farming, Mining,..) and instead there's a focus on R&D and exporting technology. There's probably also a very high amount of R&D in the military sector that's subsidies as they have a very high export rate there (Elbit, Rafael,...).

<comment><USER28> > _there 's a focus on R&D and exporting technology_

Mandatory military service produces a disciplined and well-networked population. Israel also benefits from sensible commercial law and relatively efficient courts, two things India grossly lacks.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Porsche plans 500 fast-charging stations across US - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/16/porsche-plans-500-fast-charging-stations-across-us/ <comment><USER2> That's about one every 84 miles if they're evenly distributed.</comment>


Check out my project: reddit comment widget - <AUTHOR> http://reddit.commentwidget.com/ Since reddit offers JSON I thought one might put this to use.. After some JS hacking and getting lost in details for quite a while this is the first version I dare making public. Any suggestions? <comment><AUTHOR> Since reddit offers JSON I thought one might put this to use.. After some JS hacking and getting lost in details for quite a while this is the first version I dare making public. Any suggestions?</comment>


Mouse with 3D printed ovaries gives birth to healthy pups - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/3d-printed-ovaries-restore-fertility-mice <comment><AUTHOR> Also, this article from The Guardian is good.

[https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/may/16/3d-printed-o...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/may/16/3d-printed- ovaries-allow-infertile-mice-to-give-birth)</comment>


MacOS Sierra – Report lack of battery life as a bug - <AUTHOR> Since time immemorial, laptops have been able to show the expected battery time remaining based on the current usage profile. This is well understood by users and useful in order to gauge how they are using their systems (and adjust accordingly).
The removal of the battery life indicator from the latest build of macOS Sierra is a bug. The explanation from Apple (https://9to5mac.com/2016/12/13/why-apple-is-removing-time-remaining-battery-life-estimates-macbook-pro/) is pure flim-flammery, showing nothing but contempt for the intelligence of their users.
Report this nonsense for what it is - a usability bug: https://bugreport.apple.com/ <comment><USER2> Apple do make a valid point that, seeing as battery life calculation is based on _average_ power use, which with current CPU and OS extensive power saving kicking in every few seconds, getting that average is no longer straightforward and the estimated battery life can as a result be wildly inaccurate.

Not that I'm defending them - having the machine give you some idea of the estimated remaining battery life is useful, if only a ballpark figure. Apple answering the concerns by removing the gauge altogether is not an answer. A friend likened it to a car manufacturer responding to your concerns about the fuel consumption by removing your gas gauge.

It does need to be reported as a bug. Apple should do what they always do and re-establish the standards, set the predicted battery life to be rounded up/down to the nearest 10 minutes or something similar.

In fairness, all smartphones make do with percentage gauges only, which we've gotten used to, but removing it from the full computer is a silly decision that they need to reverse.

<comment><AUTHOR> Reporting it as a bug is a direct method of feedback - this trimming of functionality (for little good reason) shouldn't be accepted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I have Sierra MBP 2012 model I haven't got a 10.2 update, is the update hardware specific? my battery runs fine, no change at all. It is a bug if an OS is unable to tell the user about how much time the battery will stay, but is there any critical scenario where it is required to know how much time the battery will be active?</comment>


Ask HN: What do you use to track what your comeptitors are doing? - <AUTHOR>

Do you guys track what your competitors are doing such as their social media, blog, press, website changes, backlinks, etc?<p>If so, what do you use to easily do this? <comment><USER2> [https://en.mention.com/](https://en.mention.com/)

I really like Mention, since they also have a mobile app and the free tier does everything I want. We used it to hop into conversations on forums about car buying.

I agree with u/canatan01 that Moz is best for backlink tracking.

<comment><USER3> Hey thanks for the "mention" ;) I'm the Community Manager at mention and am always here to help if you have any questions: alex at mention . com

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What your competitors are doing is not material. Ask your customers what they want, and give it to them. In all my years, I have not altered my course a single iota based on what a competitor is doing. Pointless.

</comment><comment><USER5> [http://www.quicksprout.com/](http://www.quicksprout.com/) very good, free check for up to three competing pages! You can buy a pro account to.

</comment><comment><USER6> We do sometimes. We use Google Alerts with the names of our competitors as the keywords. And (seo)Moz for backlink tracking.

</comment><comment><USER7> www.wordlink.com gathers all the news in the world and sorts it by how active it is in social media in near real time. We have some partnerships with market and publishing intelligence firms.</comment>


Demonstration of End-to-End Automation of DNA Data Storage - <AUTHOR> https://rdcu.be/bswdz <comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-41228-8](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-41228-8) [https://outline.com/yqvCFB](https://outline.com/yqvCFB)</comment>


How a VC analysed his Chrome browser history - <AUTHOR> https://www.makerpad.co/stories/josh-miller-how-a-vc-analyses-his-chrome-browser-history-without-code <comment><AUTHOR> I've been seeing what cool things people have been doing with different tools (without code).

Josh Miller shared his chrome browser history tool. Avg. 126 sites/day. 45% of sessions start w/ a Google Search. Visited Twitter 4.7K times in the last 6 months!!</comment>


Private lives are exposed as WikiLeaks spills its secrets - <AUTHOR> http://bigstory.ap.org/b70da83fd111496dbdf015acbb7987fb <comment><USER2> "We're sorry but the page that you're looking for can not be found. The URL may be misspelled or may have changed. Try searching for the content in the search box below or select from AP's latest news instead. "

Just plugging "wikileaks" into the search box returned the correct URL:

[http://bigstory.ap.org/article/b70da83fd111496dbdf015acbb798...](http://bigstory.ap.org/article/b70da83fd111496dbdf015acbb7987fb/private- lives-are-exposed-wikileaks-spills-its-secrets)</comment>


Show HN: Flexpad, no more rows and columns - <AUTHOR> https://dherault.github.io/flexpad/ <comment><USER2> Dead in Safari, just fyi.</comment>