Ask HN: Why the lack of remote work? - <AUTHOR> With the Bay & other areas exploding with software developer jobs at increasingly large salaries, why do more companies not look to in sourcing positions to lower cost areas or to use remote workers?
I'm an experienced developer but am location constrained to the Texas panhandle (shared custody of my daughter) for the next 11 years.  Not much of an IT industry here and no growth options.
I'm finding it hard to find positions that allow remote only or occasional travel onsite. I'm open to freelancing also but not much luck.
I'd love to relocate but that is not an option now, and quality of life here is really good.
Another option is to try build a tech presence locally, but that is an uphill battle. <comment><USER3> Such things are driven more by the needs and biases of management rather than the capabilities of the remote employees. The current trends and fashions are apparently to have everyone on-site.

Except for the offshore employees.

Logical consistency is usually not a factor. It is simply not popular now because it is not popular now.

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't get me wrong, I like being in the office - I think there is more creativity and idea flow. Our team has 2 remote employees in DFW, but they are former employees and know the domain quite well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've found the reverse to be true, there's tons of remote options (with the possible exception of security driven work).

Forget the job boards, focus instead on reaching out to senior executives at interesting companies that you can help. Point of strategy-- attend conferences and meetups in major markets for networking.

No need to justify your home base location. But if it helps your narrative, 'I'm a Dad raising a young daughter, my commitment is to stay here.' Subtle message, I'm dependable.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks jSeymourATL - I had thought about using LinkedIn to extend my reach - <USER2> work in the payments industry (card issuance & processing) so my knowledge is specialized to a degree.

<comment><USER4> That specialized industry knowledge adds tremendous value.

Here's a list of potential leads for you> [http://www.paymentssource.com/conferences/card- forum/attende...](http://www.paymentssource.com/conferences/card- forum/attendees.html)

If I can assist further, see my contact info here> www.linkedin.com/in/justinseymouratlanta/

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the help - I will keep in touch with you.

My team is a small group (3-5 devs). We have kicked around going freelance separately and as a group.

Atlanta is big in the payments industry correct? I previously worked for First Data / with a unit that was driving 50K ATMS at one point and issuing cards for 120 banks. I was on the issuing side.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://weworkremotely.com](https://weworkremotely.com)

[http://workingnomads.co](http://workingnomads.co)

[https://www.wfh.io](https://www.wfh.io)

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

[http://www.authenticjobs.com/#onlyremote=1](http://www.authenticjobs.com/#onlyremote=1)

[http://www.dice.com/job/results?caller=advanced&src=19&u=1&x...](http://www.dice.com/job/results?caller=advanced&src=19&u=1&x=all&p=)

[http://ratracerebellion.com](http://ratracerebellion.com)

<comment><USER6> thanks for the list

<comment><USER7> [Warning! Self-promotional comment] www.area301.com - free web dev leads aggregator which filters jobs from many sources and tries to show you only those which are with your time

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm not a software developer. But my economist guess is: a developer's job is to map vague, not-entirely-defined conceptions into program specification. Why don't people just learn programming? Because they're busy and they hire nannies to take care of their children too, but also because they need a bridge from business logic to software engineering logic.

Actual code-monkey work is easy to find online on Fiverr, Rentacoder or Odesk.

</comment><comment><USER9> I work in a company with a transatlantic workforce. We do a really really good job of communicating on IRC, going on Hangouts and such. But it is really hard. If you have clear, concise problems that need to be solved, it becomes easy. But if not, you kind of need facetime. There are so many problems which get solved on a whiteboard, or while talking in the corridor. Sure, we travel often to meet each other but that is not the same as how much easier it could be if everyone is in the same office.

What I am trying to say is that I completely understand the situation you are in. Your best bet is to find a company that has done this for a while and knows that having a remote person who is fucking good is not a bad thing. However, what I said might give you perspective as to why people don't really do that unless it is a truly rare exception.

</comment><comment><USER10> Datastax is committed to a highly distributed workforce, and is hiring like crazy. Almost all of our engineering positions are "anywhere".

[http://www.datastax.com/company/careers](http://www.datastax.com/company/careers)

(Most of the engineering jobs represent multiple openings)

</comment><comment><USER11> [http://rssident.com/feeds?47&e=telecommute&t=job](http://rssident.com/feeds?47&e=telecommute&t=job)

<comment><AUTHOR> nice - thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Someone else in the Texas panhandle knows about HN? Crazy. This place is stuck in 2001 technologically speaking. Anyway, Amarillo is pretty much exclusively .net but I'm sure you know that. I have seen one place that uses rails and that's it. Java is probably used in a couple of places too. If you are comfortable working with the .net stack I can give you some suggestions about local employers.

</comment><comment><USER13> Check out the companies of people that spoke at this conference: [http://officeoptional.co/](http://officeoptional.co/) They all belong distributed workforces by definition & encourage it. Their company websites should have info on job openings

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I should note that while Java was my main area of focus (now Rails & Java), I'm language agnostic and we use a variety of technologies at work - it keeps me from being bored.</comment>


Justin.TV as a country - <AUTHOR> http://abstractstuff.livejournal.com/51445.html

<comment><USER2> My startup's user population is currently hovering somewhere between that of Pitcairn Islands and Vatican City. But with hard work, luck, and a dash of moxie, I hope to someday achieve Tokelau levels of citizenship.

</comment><comment><USER3> i'd be interested in how much money justin.tv makes as compared to various countries' GDPs

</comment><comment><USER4> I have a site with more users! Admittedly 98% of these are spam signups or people who don't use the site anymore, but it's the raw numbers that count, right?

right?

No, of course not. So they've hit user #2,500,000. How many of those users are active? Last day? Seven days? How many actually broadcast?

<comment><USER5> ajkirwin - that's a great question!

You are correct user numbers are exciting but not everything.

One number that we use to gauge overall usage of the site is the total amount of video watched per month. It can be argued that for an online video site - the volume of video watched is the primary metric by which to define the success of the product.

In October 2008 there were over 2000 years of video watched on Justin.tv.

2000 years equals:

24,000 months 720,000 days 17,280,000 hours 1,036,800,000 minutes

Everyday over 570,000 hours of video are watched on the Justin.tv live video network.

That is quite a feat for an 11 person company don't you think?

<comment><USER6> Sorry, I'm having trouble reconciling those numbers. Assuming 2.5 Million users:

2000 Years of video watching a month comes out to about 7 hours/month/user.

5.7 Million hours a day comes out to over 2 hours/day/user, or about 60 hours/month/user.

I think one of those numbers is off by an order of magnitude ... Or is my my math wrong?

<comment><AUTHOR> Your math isn't wrong, but the assumption that you have to register as a Justin.TV user in order to watch video _is_ wrong.

<comment><USER6> In either case, the numbers still don't reconcile.

Is the 5.7 Million hours of video/day number right, or is the 2000 Years of video/month right?

2000 Years of video/month only works out to half a million hours per day ... not 5 million. They still differ by an order of magnitude.

<comment><USER5> Smanek - your right - I misplaced a decimal point - corrected above.

Thanks :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


FCC Chairman Scraps Plan to Promote Set-Top Box Competition - <AUTHOR> http://deadline.com/2017/01/fcc-chairman-ajit-pai-scraps-plan-promote-set-top-box-competition-1201898265/ <comment><USER2> _But opponents, including Pai, said that Wheeler's proposal would interfere with arrangements that networks make with distributors about advertising, security, and channel placement, among other things._

Well as long as everyone but consumers are covered. I know he was controversial when he joined the FCC but given his track record I think we're going to really miss Tom Wheeler.

</comment><comment><USER3> Good. There isn't a clear and immediate consumer benefit for this regulation on a dying technology.

Quote from Ajit Pai - "the Commission should focus on ways to ditch the set- top box and embrace the video marketplace of the future."

reductio ad absurdum - We might as well regulate music too and have the FCC tell Apple and Spotify how to build their apps and for which platforms

<comment><USER4> Take a look at my cable bill and you'll see the clear and immediate consumer benefit from having a TiVo with CableCard. Take a look at the superior interface, which, even after stagnating for 10+ years, blows away the usability of any cable box offer by the major providers. Or look at how incredibly terrible (crashing, buffering issues) and restrictive (no DVR, forced ads) the cable companies' own apps are, e.g. on Xbox, Roku, etc. By the way, how likely is it that we'd even have DVRs if the cable companies had not been forced to play nice with TiVo in the first place? Or if the broadcast flag went forward?

If there's one positive thing that Pai's FCC might accomplish with policies like these, it's that maybe we'll finally stop watching.

<comment><USER5> I am for free market and competition. One thing about the cable and satellite industry that annoys me is everyone keeps merging.

But I totally feel like the cable is way behind satellite technology. I have Time Warner(Well now Spectrum). We kept cable for phone + internet but switched to Dish for television. So the jack with the modem gets cable signal, while the rest of the house is wired to satellite.

Setup took a bit to download, about a half hour but it did a software update over the satellite. While the guy was explaining the features and everything.

But once he had it all setup, so much superior. The box was more responsive than the cable box felt, even though we just replaced it a year ago after complaining to the cable co. Then another cool thing is the remotes are paired to each receiver like a game controller would be to a console. So you can still use it without aiming right at the box. It still uses IR for volume and power on the TV itself, but when using the Dish box itself it's nice.

I remember with cable I'd fast forward and the stupid thing wouldn't play when I hit play even if I aimed right at it. The boxes were super laggy. Cable seems to have very outdated tech...

We have the whole home Hopper, we had the whole home with cable too. One big box in the living room, and then the other rooms have a box that can watch recordings(but not store them). With cable you had to go in the living room to record shows, with Dish you can record from any room but it's still stored on the main box. And the smaller boxes, The Joey's are like a quarter of the size of the cable companies equivalent box.

Plus Dish already support 4K, unlike cable. I've asked, they don't even support it. But even though Dish supports it, not all channels broadcast in it anyways. But I remember seeing ads that Dish had HD even before cable had it. Oddly though they install two dishes now. One for local, and a separate for the rest. But it doesn't go out so far in the rain in about the month we've had it.

We'd had Dish in about 2003 when I was a little kid, and I remember it always went out, but newer systems don't seem to have that issue. It seems like Dish has improved a lot in over a decade. Cable seems like it's always playing catch up. I seems Dish puts the user experience first.

I think the cable company uses a third party vendor for their boxes and software too. From what I can read, it seems like Dish is closely affiliated with EchoStar, that makes their hardware. I don't know if the cable company executives try out competitors products, but I'd recommend their CEO signup for Dish for their own home. Then once they see how much better it is then take all their R&D in house to step up their game. I think companies should try to control the whole experience as much as possible. So everything is all integrated and works as smoothly as possible. Apple is a good example of a company doing this.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Could sites let their ad provider serve content to thwart ad blockers? - <AUTHOR> That would prevent those blocking ads from seeing the content, especially if the URLs used are randomized.<p>It needn't even be _all_ content; it could be just enough to make things a nuisance. <comment><USER2> Sure, they _could_.

OTOH, this might not be good either for the sites or the advertising networks. I suspect a lot of the influencers whose consumption of and subsequent free promotion of content drives views are also people who use ad-blockers -- make their experience worse, and fewer of the non-adblocking masses will see your site, consumer your ads, and pay your bills.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is actually a good business idea.

Full disclosure: I hate ads. I also strongly believe in the right of a company to show ads on their website. I also strongly believe in the right of an individual to block the ads.

Let the cat-and-mouse game evolve!</comment>


Concrete AI Safety Problems - <AUTHOR> https://openai.com/blog/concrete-ai-safety-problems/ <comment><USER2> This sort of "internal" approach to AI safety, where you attempt to build fundamental limits into the AI itself, seems like it is easily thwarted by someone who intentionally builds an AI without these safety mechanisms. As long as AI is an open technology there will always be some criminals who just want to see the world burn.

IMO, a better approach to AI safety research is to focus on securing the first channels that a malicious AI would be likely to exploit. Like spam, and security. Can you make communications spam-resistant? Can you make an unhackable internet service?

Those seem hard, but more plausible than the "Watch out for paperclip optimizers" approach to AI safety. It just feels like inventing a way to build a nuclear weapon that can't actually explode, and then hoping the problem of nuclear war is solved.

<comment><USER3> Excellent post, I rather agree.

> As long as AI is an open technology there will always be some criminals who > just want to see the world burn.

Thankfully we have yet to see terror attacks with nuclear weapons, but the lower barriers of entry for potentially catastrophic AIs undoubtedly is alarming.

I often wonder if analog solutions will not be critical. To continue with your example, a nuke that must be armed with a physical lever would be a rather great hindrance to any AI. Internet communications, etc. will be more tricky, due to the high frequency activity, but the point of having meatspace 'firewalls' on mission critical activities is a nice short term kludge.

<comment><USER4> Low barrier to entry for catastrophic AI? Surely you aren't talking about the current state of AI. The current barrier of entry for an AGI (which is _at least_ what it would take for catastrophe) is "does not exist". That's about as big as barriers get. Even when the first AGIs show up it will take full time supercomputers to perform like a single human brain. I don't see that as a particularly low barrier.

<comment><USER5> Eh. The barrier for entry for an AGI does exist, though it is currently undefined, since we don't know what it is. The reason I say that is there are at least 7 billion general intelligences running around this planet (and many more if you consider animal intelligences) It is important to define it that way, not that it is impossible, just that it is unknown how much effort is needed to create an artificial one.

This distinction is very important when comparing the threat of AI with other significant threats. Before nuclear bombs were built we could not tell you what the difficulty was in creating one. Now that difficulty is well defined, and we can use that knowledge to prevent them from being built by most nations, except the most well funded.

If the barrier for entry for AGI (then ASI) is lower than we expect, then the threat of AI is significantly different than if AGI/ASI can only be created by nation states.

<comment><USER6> The barrier for entry for an alien invasion does exist, though it is currently undefined, since we don't know what it is. The reason I say that is there are at least 1 bloodthirsty species running around this galaxy (and many more if you consider the statistical possibility of life on other planets) It is important to define it that way, not that it is impossible, just that it is unknown how much time is needed before an alien invasion.

The reason I am framing things this way is we need to be _very_ careful here because we are starting to turn towards speculation.

<comment><USER7> You know, you mean for that to sound implausible, but the Great Filter is in fact an open research problem.

<comment><USER6> I'm pointing out that this is all speculative and dangerously close to science-fiction.

<comment><USER5> You should learn the difference between what is impossible and what just has not happened yet. Much science-fiction that was in the realm of possibility is now science-reality. One should not need reminded they are communicating at the speed of light over a global communications network capable of reaching billions of people at a time. I'm sure at one point in the past that was science-fiction, now reality. I don't believe you can show me any science that points out why AI/AGI/ASI can be created, we simply are not at that level of sophistication.

<comment><USER6> Your argument is basically "some science-fiction has sometimes turned out to be true." That doesn't counter the fact that this is just speculation.

<comment><USER5> Um, pretty much, no.

Science fiction turns out to be true when physical reality agrees that it can be true. This again, is why we have a global communications network and personal wireless devices connected to it. This is also the reason we do not go faster than light.

The reason we don't have flying cars is they are completely possible. They are also terribly dangerous and expensive and a complete waste of energy.

The reason we don't have AGI is not that it is impossible, again if nature can create it, we can recreate it. Since we don't have a good understanding of the networked nature of emergent intelligence we cannot create a power optimized network that would allow us to create a energy efficient version. AGI itself is a complete waste of energy _at this point_. We already have many types of AI that are energy efficient and used in products now.

<comment><USER6> > Science fiction turns out to be true when physical reality agrees that it > can be true

This is a ridiculous argument. Furthermore, even if it were true, it tells us nothing about the timeline. It could take 10,000 years for all we know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Paper: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.06565v1.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.06565v1.pdf)

Google Post: [https://research.googleblog.com/2016/06/bringing- precision-t...](https://research.googleblog.com/2016/06/bringing-precision-to- ai-safety.html)

It was a pleasure for us to work on this with OpenAI and others. John/Paul/Jacob are good friends, and wonderful colleagues! :)

<comment><USER9> First of all, thanks for the wonderful work, and I hope there's much more to come from your team! In fact I'm really pleased one of the authors came down to HN to comment.

I think the scariest part of AI security is when the program itself becomes unfathomable. By that I mean, we can't just look at the source code and go "Ah! There's your problem". Now, your paper assumes a static reward function, but we can imagine the benefits of an AI that could dynamically change its reward function, or even its own source code.

In fact, the most powerful tool I can think of to train a multi-purpose agent is through evolutionary methods, and genetic algorithms. Take for example the bigger ideas behind [https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.02580](https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.02580) [Convolution by Evolution: Differentiable Pattern Producing Networks] and [http://arxiv.org/abs/1302.4519](http://arxiv.org/abs/1302.4519) [A Genetic Algorithm for Power-Aware Virtual Machine Allocation in Private Cloud], and determining the fitness of agents by the global accuracy on a large number of broad ML tasks. But I digress...

Given enough computing power and time, these have the possibility of ending in an "outbreak-style" scenario. [ _This exercise is left to the reader_ ]. And the way AI ideas and methods are so rapidly disseminated and readily available, it's safe to imagine that it could happen in a relatively short time span.

Here's my question: I know you're with Google Brain, but do you know if OpenAI is actively researching these avenues of "self-determined" agents? For their first security-related article, I was expecting security measures along the lines of: safety guidelines for AI researchers, containment and exclusion from the Internet, shutdown protocols for the Internet backbone, etc. I get the impression some of these issues might rear their ugly heads before our cleaning robots become cumbersome.

P.S. Looking at your CV, it's funny to see that you once interned at Environment Canada. I'm also working there presently, during which time I can perfect my knowledge in ML to eventually transition careers. Small world...

Edit: Grammar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> These are not asking the right questions, although they kind of hint at it, and they are not fundamentally questions about AI. Example: "Can we transform an RL agent's reward function to avoid undesired effects on the environment?" Trivially, the answer is yes; put a weight on whatever effect you're trying to mitigate, to the extent you care about trading off potential benefits. They qualify this by saying essentially "... but without specifying every little thing". So - what you're trying to do is build a rigorous (ie, specified by code or data) model of what a human would think is "reasonable" behavior, while still preserving freedom for gordian knot style solutions that trade off things you don't care about in unexpected ways.

The hard part is actually figuring out what you care about, particularly in the context of a truly universal optimizer that can decide to trade off _anything_ in the pursuit of its objectives.

This has been a core problem of philosophy for 3000 years - that is, putting some amount of rigorous codification behind human preferences. You could think of it as a branch of deontology, or maybe aesthetics. It is _extremely unlikely_ that a group sponsored by Sam Altman, whose brilliant idea was "let's put the government in charge of it" [1], will make a breakthrough there.

I don't actually doubt that AIs would lead to philosophical implications, and philosophers like Nick Land have actually explored some of that area. But I severely doubt the ability of AI researchers to do serious philosophy and simultaneously build an AI that reifies those concepts.

[1] [http://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence- part-2](http://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-2)

<comment><USER6> You're dismissing the paper for not asking the right questions, but you don't propose any questions that you think are better.

> The hard part is actually figuring out what you care about, particularly in > the context of a truly universal optimizer that can decide to trade off > anything in the pursuit of its objectives.

This seems basically equivalent to what they are saying. A reward function that rewards "what we actually care about." This might seem vague, but that's fine because these are only proposed problems.

<comment><USER11> I'm not sure what point you are trying to make. It's possible to dismiss an idea without providing an alternative. Yes, finding a reward function is equivalent to figuring out what we care about. Both are about as hard as teaching a bacteria to play piano.

The goal is avoiding unsafe AI. The reason such pointless efforts are wasted on this approach is we don't have a good alternative. The only thing I can think of is delaying it's creation indefinitely, but that's also a difficult challenge. For example, in the Dune books, the government outlaws all computers. That might work for a while.

<comment><USER6> Let me elaborate. It is _easy easy easy_ to nitpick and find holes in someone's proposals, someone's problem statements, and someone's goals in life.

Statements are adding _noise_ and less than nothing of value if they just consist of telling people they are working on the wrong thing... and not proceeding to tell them what they should instead be working on, and giving clear _positive_ reasons why (instead of _negative_ reasons someone should not be working on something).

Incidentally this is a broader problem with HN discourse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> In a variety of engineering fields, including but not limited to software, we have wonderful tools to track down and eliminate 'bugs'. While high standards are often not upheld, the concepts are largely sound.

In particular, I'm talking about verification and validation testing. I'm curious why generally these approaches are not being leveraged to ensure quality of output here.

I suspect this is because of the persistent belief that AI will annihilate humanity with one mishap, but I'm suggesting that we approach this much more like traditional engineering problems, such as building a bridge or flying a plane, whereby rigorous standards of are continually applied to ensure the system behaves as designed.

The resulting system will look much more like continuous integration with robust regression testing and high line coverage than it will be the sexy research ideas presented here, but I can't help but think it will be more robust. These systems are too complicated to treat them as anything but a black box, at least from a quality assurance standpoint.

<comment><USER5> Err. Great engineering failures are never one mishap creating a problem. They are many issues all meeting at a critical point. The problem with intelligence is unexpected emergence, a higher order problem occurs out of simple parts in an novel and unpredictable way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> From the article: _Safe exploration. Can reinforcement learning (RL) agents learn about their environment without executing catastrophic actions? For example, can an RL agent learn to navigate an environment without ever falling off a ledge?_

Yes. That's why I was critical of an academic AI effort which attempts automatic driving by training a supervised learning system by observing human drivers. That's going to work OK for a while, and then do something really stupid, because it has no model of catastrophic actions.

</comment><comment><USER13> Direct link to the paper: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.06565v1.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.06565v1.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER14> Related to the wireheading problem [0], [1]

[0] [http://www.wireheading.com/](http://www.wireheading.com/) \- David Pearce's ideas are.. _interesting_.. to say the least ;)

[1] [https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Wireheading](https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Wireheading)

</comment><comment><USER15> I may be stupid and I am indeed but it is insanely straightforward today (not tomorrow) to put a gun on a drone and tell it to image recognize some targeted 1.3-2.3m tall biped with oval head and shoot him/her down.

<comment><USER16> Is your point that there are unaddressed safety concerns with existing tech? While true, none of them are really existential threats, whereas something with greater than human intelligence yet none of the limitations of a single biological body to upkeep is such a threat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I always get the feeling AI is going to be like nuclear capability. Great reason to create it, but then once its made everyone wants to get rid of it.

<comment><USER18> There's a huge difference, though. Creating a nuclear weapon encourages others to do the same. An AGI, if done right, would never allow the creation of a second one with conflicting values; there should be no _second_ AGI.

<comment><USER6> You are mistaking an AGI for an artificial superintelligence (I might also add that the very concept of superintelligence is pure speculation - basic AGI at least can be grounded in replication of human brains). The first AGI will be closer to a low-IQ human than a Machiavellian super-optimizer.

<comment><USER16> I don't think there's much reason to be confident that the first AGI will be like a low-IQ human, at least for very long, even if it starts off as an emulated human brain. Machines have the huge advantage of faster materials (neurons are slow), perfect memory, perfect calculation, ability to scale horizontally, backups to restore in the event of bad self-modification experiments, and no need for things like sleep and food to take up its time from learning, improving itself, and acting upon the world.

<comment><USER6> You've omitted the _huge, overwhelmingly outweighing disadvantages_ of intelligence in machines, which is that _they don 't work_. Given that research progress is incremental, there really isn't reason to believe we will jump from narrow AI to super-smart AGI, instead of narrow AI to dumb AGI to smart AGI to super-smart AGI.

<comment><USER16> There are historical examples of discontinuities, though I don't think the FOOM debate will be settled soon. It may be quite a while before we even get to "dumb AGI", but the hardest part of that is the G part. Right now "they don't work" is indistinguishable from "they don't exist", but if we get that G, I don't see how you could claim either. From there, even if we suppose it's another huge leap to get to true super-intelligence instead of a FOOM, the time to get to merely smart AGI, and indeed smarter-than-human AGI, would be short, if only for the basic advantages of a silicon machine substrate. If all we had were human brains running on silicon even, that would be enough to quickly reach superhuman general intelligence, even if not true super- (or perhaps ultra- as I.G. Good originally put it) intelligence that we expect for a Singularity event.

<comment><USER6> This makes no sense. This is just unsubstantiated speculation right now. There is no reason to believe that dumb AGI will hardware-scale to smart AGI for free. In fact most machine learning algorithms have diminishing (logarithmic) returns with data and compute.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> How would we program a self driving car that is faced with something like a "Trolley problem" [1]. i.e. the car is faced with 2 possible probable collisions of which it can only avoid one. Or between running over a pedestrian and crashing into a tree.

I assume this probably already worked into the current prototypes. Does anyone have references to discussions about this in current gen self driving car prototypes?

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

<comment><USER19> Oh! just found a few references in the exact wikipedia article I linked.

Patrick Lin (October 8, 2013). "The Ethics of Autonomous Cars". The Atlantic. [http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/10/the- et...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/10/the-ethics-of- autonomous-cars/280360/)

Tim Worstall (2014-06-18). "When Should Your Driverless Car From Google Be Allowed To Kill You?". Forbes. [http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2014/06/18/when- shou...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2014/06/18/when-should-your- driverless-car-from-google-be-allowed-to-kill-you/)

Jean-François Bonnefon; Azim Shariff; Iyad Rahwan (2015-10-13). "Autonomous Vehicles Need Experimental Ethics: Are We Ready for Utilitarian Cars?". arXiv.org. [http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.03346](http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.03346)

Emerging Technology From the arXiv (October 22, 2015). "Why Self-Driving Cars Must Be Programmed to Kill". MIT Technology review. [http://www.technologyreview.com/view/542626/why-self- driving...](http://www.technologyreview.com/view/542626/why-self-driving-cars- must-be-programmed-to-kill/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> > Can we transform an RL agent's reward function > to avoid undesired effects > on the environment?

To me this is the toughest nut in the lot. Training a Pac-man agent to avoid ghosts and eat pellets, in a world of infinite hazards and cautions! Any strategies?

</comment><comment><USER21> We have well established techniques for developing systems which are safe and exhibit high levels of integrity. We just need to make the tools that support these techniques freely available.

<comment><USER22> 90% of the techniques for making reliable systems are careful requirements engineering and even more careful testing. There is no secret sauce.

I don't think these techniques transfer easily to the AI field. While I might be able to prove that the state machine that controls my nuclear power plant always rams in the control rods in case something bad happens, it's a lot harder to show that some fuzzy system like a neural network doesn't exhibit kill-all-humans behaviours.

<comment><USER21> You are right. There is no secret sauce. There are no magic bullets. Careful requirements engineering and careful testing is absolutely what you need.

However -- many of these techniques _do_ transfer to the AI field -- albeit with some tweaking and careful thought.

Requirements are still utterly critical. Phrasing the requirements right is important and requires more than a passing thought -- particularly as concerns testability.

A lot of it boils down to requirements that get placed on the training and validation data sets; and the statistical tests that need to be passed: how much data is required and how you can demonstrate that the test data provides sufficient coverage of the operating envelope of the system to give you confidence that you understand how it behaves.

The architecture is critical also -- how the problem is decomposed into safe, testable and understandable subsets -- which has much more to do with how the system is tested than how it solves the primary problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > Avoiding negative side effects.

Oh brother. Avoiding negative side effects is a wasteful proposition. Learning from those side effects, however, is priceless.

<comment><USER24> Why is avoiding negative side effects a wasteful proposition?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Any recommendations for relevant AI related sci-fi?

<comment><USER26> If you don't mind fanfiction, then Friendship is Optimal is quite interesting read: [http://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/friendship-is- optimal](http://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/friendship-is-optimal)

Also the related stories that explore this idea: [http://www.fimfiction.net/group/1857/the- optimalverse](http://www.fimfiction.net/group/1857/the-optimalverse)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Its common _today_ to make a robot that kills anybody that comes within a foot or two of it. Without any image recognition at all; much more damaging than a gun; and 100M of them already deployed. This conversation is silly and pointless, until we clean up the insane number of land mines deployed around our planet.

<comment><USER28> Land mines are awful and we should absolutely do something about them. But it makes precisely no sense at all to say "no one should bother to think about AI safety because land mines are awful". You might as well say "no one should bother to think about land mines because cancer is awful" or "no one should bother to think about cancer because aging is awful".

One problem isn't nonexistent or irrelevant just because there's another problem that you regard as worse or more urgent. It's not even like solving the problems of AI safety requires the same kinds of people or the same kinds of resources as solving the problems of land mines; if you tell people not to think about AI safety it's not really going to make them go away and solve the land mine problem.

<comment><USER27> Um, 100 million of them already out there? So locking the barn door after the horse is gone.

I get it; we don't have land mines in first-world countries, and we _will_ have AIs, so AIs are more interesting to talk about. That's why we continue to have land mines all over the world I think. Not our problem.

All the issues surrounding implacable AI killers on the loose are only something to talk about, if you haven't lived with them for generations already. Want to get real answers to sophomoric questions about robot killers? Just ask the people who already know.

<comment><USER28> > locking the barn door after the horse is gone.

It sounds as if that's intended to be an objection to something I wrote, but I've no inkling what. I certainly didn't mean to deny that there are a hell of a lot of them out there.

> we don't have land mines in first-world countries

I think the chances of a productive discussion would be greater if you didn't leap straight to assuming bad faith on the part of the people you're talking to.

Land mines are a big deal. They're a problem that needs solving. But you're not merely saying that; you're jumping into a discussion of something else and saying "you shouldn't be talking about this at all as long as there are land mines".

Which would be at least somewhat consistent (albeit rude), if that were your response to every HN discussion of things less important than land mines. But it isn't. By the advanced technique of clicking on your username, I see that you've been quite happy to participate in discussions of "table-oriented programming", mobile phone headphone jacks, and off-by-one errors in audio programming, and that you work in embedded software development. Are those things, unlike AI safety, more important than land mines?

I doubt you think that headphone jacks are more important than land mines. So why do you react to a discussion of headphone jacks by talking about headphone jacks, and to a discussion of AI safety by saying it's ridiculous and sophomoric to ask about AI safety when there are millions of land mines out there killing people?

You're trying to make out that the reason is that land mines are _the same kind of things_ as hypothetical unsafe AI systems because they are human-made machines that kill people. But you're an intelligent person and surely you can't possibly really believe that. To deal with land mines we need treaties to stop them being deployed, we need ways of finding them that are cheap enough to deploy in quantity and effective enough to be worth deploying, we need ways of disarming them with the same qualities, and we need effective help for people who get blown up by them. None of these bears any resemblance to anything we might do about AI safety. To an excellent approximation, there is no overlap between the people who can do useful work on AI safety and the people who can do useful work on land mines. And the dangers don't arise in the same way: land mines are dangerous because they are put in place with the specific intention of killing anyone who passes, whereas in the scenarios AI safety people worry about no one _intends_ the AI systems to cause trouble.

So that can't really be it, I think.

Why do you object to discussing AI safety but not to discussing mobile phone headphone jacks, _really_?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> And whatever you do, don't let Randall Munroe teach it:

[http://xkcd.com/1696/](http://xkcd.com/1696/) (the current xkcd)

</comment><comment><USER29> Seems like hyperparameter optimization to me. These techniques will be useful in general when selecting your model.

</comment><comment><USER30> it seems the authors have retracted their concerns. The site is down now but I got this screenshot [http://imgur.com/eL7GFOr](http://imgur.com/eL7GFOr)</comment>


Ask HN: Do you use any code review tool/service? - <AUTHOR> Are code review tools really helpful? Is it worth paying for them? <comment><USER2> I use a code review service as I believe that code reviews are important, especially on old legacy code.

I pay for code reviews in the UK from a company called Atlas Computer Systems Ltd [https://www.atlascode.com/](https://www.atlascode.com/)

They do code reviews for startups to make sure your code is high quality and isn't building technical debt.

</comment><comment><USER3> In a lot of business code reviews are compulsory (or at least some sort of inspection) and often required for accreditation. There is often a convenient change set from version control tools such as SVN/GIT etc that can be used to define review content and these change set often have associated diff tools to help. On previous projects we'd just branch every change in SVN and get someone else to check the changeset to merge onto trunk. Saying that we are currently using JIRA with associated code review tools and this is great and provides a nice log of comments and responses which we can present to QA (as review evidence) on a simple web interface. Reviewing the code is a great way of sharing the knowledge in addition to finding bugs earlier (if done well).

</comment><comment><USER4> We do line-by-line code reviews of all changes (high-assurance software, so we have to - but it's worth it anyway.) Some kind of tool is useful, since it allows you to (a) review code on your own schedule, and (b) stores the comments (for later review, if someone is on holiday, so that you can refer back to your initial comment when reviewing an improvement, ...)

That said, code reviewing is a skill (and perhaps a talent), and _not_ the same skill as software development; a degree of training - if just internal and informal - is necessary.

Thorough code reviews take a significant fraction of the effort needed to write the code in the first place; direct tooling costs are going to be insignificant in comparison. (And note that e.g. Gerrit and even GitHub both offer some degree of free tooling.)

</comment><comment><USER5> We use Crucible for our code reviews and I have been happy with it. We use the Atlassian 'stack' so it integrates well with Jira and Bitbucket, which is nice.

It is nice to have all changes highlighted and the ability to make comments on line levels or file level so that the author, and team, can see what is going on and get good feedback.

</comment><comment><USER6> We do code reviews, but I wouldn't use an automated tool for them. We treat code review as an opportunity for communication, learning, institutional knowledge transfer, and architecture review -- not as a way to enforce code style or catch memory leaks. That's what linters are for.</comment>


How to reach "dark matter" developers - <AUTHOR>

Scott Hanselman has talked about "dark matter" developers (http://www.hanselman.com/blog/DarkMatterDevelopersTheUnseen99.aspx) - the ones working in companies everywhere writing the software that keeps businesses running.  They're writing applications in VB6, MS Access, ASP.NET and often using outdated software and outdated practices.  They work 9-5 and when they go home at the end of the day the only technology they use is their TV remote.
I'm not disparaging them.  I work with them.  For them, writing code is just a job and that job helps keep the businesses we depend on working.
But they could be so much more productive if they updated their skills and had opportunity to gain new experience.
There is no shortage of educational information and opportunities on the web, but these aren't the type of people to go looking for it.  It needs to come to them, in their workplaces, ideally during their working day.
So, my question is this - if we want to help them enhance their skills and experience, how do we reach them? <comment><USER3> I think the real question is: do they want "help"?

They're doing perfectly well. They fill their role, they do their job, they do what they want during their free time. Who are you (or anyone) to say that needs to be changed?

The last paragraph of Hansleman's post captures it perfectly:

> The Dark Matter Developer will never read this blog post because they are > getting work done using tech from ten years ago and that's totally OK. I > know they are there and I will to support them in their work.

<comment><AUTHOR> My concern is that whilst they think they are doing their job, the people paying them don't think they are doing it well enough or doing enough of it to value it. I'm seeing more and more development jobs off-shored or out-sourced not because that results in better work, but simply because it results in the same work being done more cheaply. That's great for the companies and countries that are picking up that work, but it's leaving a swathe of developers who are "mid-career" who are at risk of becoming unemployed and whilst they may get new jobs, they may not earn the kind of money they are used to.

<comment><USER4> I honestly think this will continue. I've seen startups, and Fortune 5, Fortune 500 doing this. I believe a majority of the development function will continue to be outsourced. I read CIO magazine regularly, and I see the development process continue to be outsourced. In addition, India, Russia, China, Thailand are becoming good development alternatives. The first round of outsourcing in the early 00's didn't go so well. However, the economics of the situation, and the increasing skill set lead me to believe it will continue. I am sure this comment will be flamed, but it's the truth IMHO. (Note: I have a CompSci degree, done a few tech startups as CTO, so don't shoot the messenger).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> i'm a total newbie at technology and programming. I'm an accountant, but in the last year I've developed a passion for computing and learning to code. I was never exposed to coding or making growing up, everything was a dark hole or a black box that just worked (most of the time). My answer to your question is that if you want to 'reach' or 'help' them your energy will mostly be wasted. You can't install curiosity, motivation, or a lust for knowledge in a person. They have to want it, there is already enough resources to keep anyone's head spinning. (at least there is for me)

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, curiosity and passion are something you either have or you don't. As an industry we need to improve our capabilities and continuously demonstrate our value and a subset who are lacking or have outdated skills risks influencing the perception of the value of the whole.

That said, if we can't make people want to be interested we need to find another way to reach them.

Some industries require formal certification and demonstration of ongoing professional development, but IT generally doesn't (although there are pockets which do). Some of the best developers I have worked with have had no formal training, however, just passion, curiosity and a willingness to put in the hours to learn and excluding them would be a mistake. So how do we do it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> not sure whether this will come out the wrong way, but for some people programming is a career while for others it is and will likely always be a job.

again, don't get me wrong: the ones who do it as a job might well have other things that they love and that for them would be a dream come true type of career. doesn't mean they lack passion or are not really good at something else, but programming might just not be the thing that they are passionate about

<comment><AUTHOR> I totally agree with you - for many programmers, programming is just a job. And I'm not saying that's wrong, but I work with a lot of these developers and my issue / concern is that they are not actually very good at their job - <USER2> get by only because expectations of IT in their organisations are low, something which is true in most large corporations and many smaller ones.

When the people paying the IT bills have low expectations to begin with, and are often disappointed with the applications they are given, IT becomes devalued.

I'm working with a team at the moment where we have introduced a structured data access architecture (.NET shop, so Entity Framework underpinning a repository model) and it has transformed the productivity of the team. They are no longer writing the same data access code in 5 different places, testing it 5 times and finding 5 different sets of bugs. They are now writing the code once, testing it once and re-using it.

The team hadn't even heard of Entity Framework, despite being a dedicated Microsoft/.NET shop and Entity Framework being around for several years. Getting them to move from their hand-coded approach, which was what they learnt for .NET 1.0 was a challenge but, having done it, they wouldn't go back and love the flexibility and power the new approach gives them.

This isn't a discussion about technologies though. I'm sure that there are many other teams just like this team and I'm interested in how to get to them to introduce new technologies and ways of working. The more productive we are as developers, and the more "delight" the applications we develop are, the more valued we will all be as an industry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A newsletter like the startup digest.</comment>


Mishap during experiment led quantum researchers to crack a 58-year-old puzzle - <AUTHOR> https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-tech/engineers-crack-58-year-old-puzzle-way-quantum-breakthrough <comment><USER2> The whole article is worth reading, but my favorite part is the fact that the "mishap" mentioned in the title was inadvertently overloading a magnetic antenna, causing it to break and by coincidence become an electric antenna.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is pretty interesting, if it is truly tiny and simple enough to reproduce, what impact does it have on quantum computing devices? This example is designed for a single atom, so not applicable for multi-qbit computations, but it seems to break open the floodgates for new research into using electric fields to directly interact with quantum systems cheaply, which sounds potentially huge in my layman opinion.

</comment><comment><USER4> Sounds quite foundational and may impact a lot of fields.

Archive link: [https://web.archive.org/web/20200312192401/https://newsroom....](https://web.archive.org/web/20200312192401/https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science- tech/engineers-crack-58-year-old-puzzle-way-quantum-breakthrough)

Nature link: [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2057-7](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2057-7)

</comment><comment><USER5> arXiv link: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.01086](https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.01086)

</comment><comment><USER6> Pretty interesting stuff! Veritasium did a couple videos with this researcher 7 or so years ago:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_IaVepNDT4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_IaVepNDT4)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNzzGgr2mhk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNzzGgr2mhk)

</comment><comment><USER7> Serendipity is a critical part of progress and discovery. A limited list of inventions that occurred due to serendipity:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serendipity#Inventions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serendipity#Inventions)

</comment><comment><USER8> What is the difference with [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_quadrupole_resonance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_quadrupole_resonance) ?

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm not even an amateur when it comes to this stuff, much less an expert. But superficially, to my non-expert ears, this sounds like it could be a Really Big Deal™. Can anyone more knowledgeable chime in?

</comment><comment><USER10> This seems a pretty big deal to me. Secretly or not , we all wait for that big breakthrough that will revolutionize everything. Maybe this is part of the whole: The mythical Theory of Everything.

</comment><comment><USER11> Could this help with building Spintronics?

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

</comment><comment><USER12> Pretty big news, seems like an actual breakthrough with big implications.

</comment><comment><USER13> That shirt... Is something.

</comment><comment><USER14> Puzzle shmuzzle, what superpowers did they gain ?

<comment><USER15> More precise manipulation of atomic spin, potentially enabling less resource- intensive quantum computers (for the most boring application I can think of).

<comment><USER16> So, I'll finally get served a relevant ad?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's a layman article from the University of New South Wales, Australia: [https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-tech/engineers- cra...](https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-tech/engineers- crack-58-year-old-puzzle-way-quantum-breakthrough)

Quotes:

> "Performing magnetic resonance is like trying to move a particular ball on a > billiard table by lifting and shaking the whole table," he says. "We'll move > the intended ball, but we'll also move all the others.

> "The breakthrough of electric resonance is like being handed an actual > billiards stick to hit the ball exactly where you want it."

This could allow much more compact MRI scanners, vast improvements in quantum computing, chemistry or mining, and of course to design fundamentally new science experiments.

> "This landmark result will open up a treasure trove of discoveries and > applications," says Professor Morello. "The system we created has enough > complexity to study how the classical world we experience every day emerges > from the quantum realm. Moreover, we can use its quantum complexity to build > sensors of electromagnetic fields with vastly improved sensitivity. And all > this, in a simple electronic device made in silicon, controlled with small > voltages applied to a metal electrode."

If you don't know about NER (Nuclear Electric Resonance), take comfort in knowing that Pr. Morello did not either. We're "rediscovering" this rather dead field. What a fantastic serendipitous discovery, isn't it?

<comment><USER17> Url changed to that from [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2057-7](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2057-7). Thanks!

For something like this where so few readers can understand the specialist article, it's preferable to link to the best popular summary.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll keep that in mind. Thanks for the guideline! — and proper title/link.</comment></comment></comment>


US Space and Rocket Center Launches 5k Rockets Simultaneously - <AUTHOR> https://www.al.com/news/2019/07/us-space-rocket-center-launches-5000-rockets-in-world-record-attempt.html <comment><USER2> Video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EsvR6cPVno](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EsvR6cPVno)

<comment><USER3> Did the parachutes deploy? looks like they might have been too close together and straight dropped down. Which is probably safest.

<comment><USER4> It looks like these were the smaller models that only deploy a streamer rather than a full parachute. They still got pretty tangled together.

<comment><USER5> Yep. Got my hands on a couple afterwards. Silver streamer style that looks like aluminum foil, but feels more like a plastic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A big list of other Apollo 11 anniversary events: [http://orbitalindex.com/apollo-11-anniversary- events/](http://orbitalindex.com/apollo-11-anniversary-events/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Now let's try to break the record for the most rockets _landed_ simultaneously!

</comment><comment> TD-Linux I wonder what they did to ignite all of them at the same time? The normal Estes rocket electric matches have pretty poor timing in my experience.

<comment><USER4> Igniter delay and variance can be reduced by increasing the current pushed through them.

The power delivery setup for this launch was probably the most interesting bit. Estes igniters are typically rated to require 2A. Supplying that times 5000 is no simple task. The video seems to show five large boxes (~1m on a side), each surrounded by a cluster of rockets. These boxes probably each concealed a pile of batteries and relays.

<comment><USER8> I suspect a capacitor bank could provide such starting currents.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Typical US saber rattling...

/s

</comment><comment><USER10> I wonder if they notify Russia China ... etc

</comment><comment><USER11> 5k *model Rockets

FTFY

<comment><USER12> There was nothing to fix. A model rocket that flies _is_ a rocket.</comment></comment>


We Should All Have Something to Hide (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/we-should-all-have-something-to-hide/ <comment><USER2> There are a couple different arguments that have been developed to counter the government requests/propaganda for access to our data.

Here, Moxie works on one I don't think has been popularized yet- To reform unjust laws, people must be able to break those laws. That is an argument against allowing the government to have total information awareness, because that access would allow the government to enforce laws perfectly, which would make some unjust laws permanent.

I believe that is the weak bit of the argument- although it's true, there is a big gap between how the government could move from information awareness to perfect enforcement.

Instead, I'd take the argument in the direction that a database of the criminal behavior on every citizen would create the prefect tool for the suppression of dissent. Anyone who became politically inconvenient would have their entries combed for wrongdoing, and their life destroyed.

The weakness with THAT argument is that it assumes a conspiratorial, immoral federal government. Many of us may be able to imagine that, but it's an idea at the periphery of the Overton window.

Which brings me to my point.

We need a reference detailing historic government abuses of data. It should focus on:

        How data was collected
        The original purpose of collection
        The benign intentions
          of the original collectors
        How the data moved from the collecting administration
          to the abusive administration

It seems like there should be a wealth of historical examples. What data did the Stasi have, Mao's china, the purges of intellectuals in russia and SE Asia. I bet there are even records of Torquemada's Inquisition.

I want us to make the posibility of a good administration collecting data, and then that data being captured or inherited by a bad administration, a part of the mental vocabulary of the US population. Yeah it's ambitious, but I think that is the best chance we have at fighting the Government here. And, I believe that an earnest civil servant could understand the danger, and want to limit his own power, once this was properly explained.

<comment><USER3> The weakness in the argument is that privacy or secrecy will minimize one's exposure to unjust laws. I don't think that's the case. It only makes it harder for an unjust system to effect its goals in other words, it introduces delay not necessarily avoidance altogether.

For example, if an unjust government didn't have access to or there didn't exist data at oblique or proximate collection points, they'd go about and find alternative methods. They would set up systems of popular reporting and surveillance as they did in Vietnam where it was beneficial and of self interest to report abnormal behavior or behavior contrary to that sanctioned by the government.

So, yes, privacy and secrecy can delay "the bad things" but they will not prevent it. Moreover, with less than perfect information, a bad government or actor will simply widen the net and accept more false positives. Privacy may defeat the mildly bad but not those intent on real bad.

<comment><USER4> > It only makes it harder for an unjust system to effect its goals in other > words, it introduces delay not necessarily avoidance altogether.

...which is what it's supposed to do. There is nothing that makes totalitarianism _impossible_ , what is necessary is to put up as many roadblocks in its way as we can so the people fighting the good fight stand a chance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't think the battle here is about privacy, encryption, or any of that stuff.

It's really about trust in government.

It's about the specific meaning of the word 'trust' \- the idea that 'trust' and 'distrust' are not equivalent to 'good' or 'bad'.

I can distrust my government, without thinking that they are bad.

When speaking to friends and family about this, that feels like the barrier. They believe that current western governments are generally 'good', and that historical ones were 'bad', accidents of some sort, that can't or won't happen again.

That troubles me, more so than any specific issue of the day.

<comment><USER5> As a programmer... in some ways I feel like it's an issue of abstraction. Naming variables is hard. Right?

We have this 'Terrorism' abstraction. But that's not really what it is. You might have an instance of Terrorism, that affects two people. Then is it really Terrorism? Shouldn't it be something else? I'd say it's just Violence.

The same happens all over the place. Child abuse, theft, piracy, etc. The battle seems to be fought and won by the media when we decide on how to categorise and name things.

So we end up in some frankly absurd situations, because we think we're discussing Y, when actually we're discussing X.

I don't know how to solve this, I just want to get it out of my brain, because it really frustrates me and stops me bothering with debate most of the time when people don't even seem to realise they've done it.

If I thought that eliminating privacy would save 1 billion lives, I would do it. No euphemisms. That would be a sacrifice I'd feel sensible in making.

But I don't want to talk about 'encryption' and 'terrorism' because it's just bollocks, really. It's an absurd simplification; it's a euphemism. You're not discussing anything real anymore, you're just giving platitudes.

<comment><USER6> The real issue is that people are even talking about terrorism at all. By the state definition more people have died from tripping over their own feet than from terrorism in the last thirty years.

It is not about degrees of abstraction, it is about composition. Terrorism is a wrapper function to obscure the true intent behind the militarization of the police, the expansion of the military, and the implementation of the surveillance state - as a politician, you fear uncertainty and a lack of control. The natural state of affairs is to trend towards totalitarianism - the centralization of power and authority in a society absolutely - and it takes the vigilance of participants to repel its advances.

We have been doing a _very_ poor job of that for quite a long time now, and the results of that gradual trend become more and more evident and indisputable.

<comment><USER5> Mmm.

I think what I'd say about this is that essentially 'Terrorism' has been defined as some sort of catastrophic instance, of collapse of society, fear of going outside, whatever.

But it's being applied to relatively trivial crimes (e.g. one soldier was stabbed in the UK, and that becomes 'terrorism', when really it's just premeditated murder).

I agree that there seems to be some sort of campaign to deliberately misuse terminology in this way. I'm just not sure what we can do to stop it other than to educate people about these 'tricks'.

<comment><USER6> Terrorism is just the threat. The nebulous conceptual threat - in the same way the US thought declaring war on psychoactive recreational plants was a sane proclamation, declaring war on the fundamental idea of violent political dissonance through fear is also equally untenable but also equally effective in placating the population through fear of the "other" / "sin" just by the simple animal brain logic of different == dangerous == threat == destroy.

You don't want to finely define your threat when you want the threat to be perpetual to justify your seizure of power. Is it sad that this is literally what the awful Star Wars Prequel's did? The evil sith lord orchestrated vacuous foes for the much larger, much stronger Republic to fear, and then used that fear to see himself given absolute power so as to seize total control of everything once the curtain was pulled back and he was revealed the ultimate puppet master.

In much the same way, terrorism in the modern world is constructed with American arms and money, to create the strife that funds private defense contractors and military arms manufacturer's profit margins. It is a fabrication to instill fear, to enable the expansion of authority in _exactly_ the same way - and everyone agrees those movies were terribly written because the Emperor's plot seemed so impossible with so many people around him to see it, yet we are living it out ourselves in much the same way today - and the super majority of people are entirely ignorant, or even protective, of the fear-mongering.

<comment><USER7> I think declaring war against pot fit nicely into the puritanical history of America, and a few crazy controlling people like j edger hoover. We do seem to let those types get into power. Hopefully it won't happen with Trump. I would believe that some of those types of people would try things like that to control people.

But I think there's a lot larger group of conservative law enforcement and politicians that just go along with those restrictions.

Now I have even seen some republicans coming out against this national surveillance as they think about what it would be like if trump had access to that, instead of "their guy".

It will be hard to reverse the national surveillance state. The first step is contacting your representatives and reminding them of your objection.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Law enforcement used to be harder. If a law enforcement agency wanted to > track someone, it required physically assigning a law enforcement agent to > follow that person around. Tracking everybody would be inconceivable, > because it would require having as many law enforcement agents as people.

It is not inconceivable. It was very much real in east germany! People tracked each other, everybody became a law enforcement agent.

</comment><comment><USER9> Most people have committed a few felonies this year and either don't even know it or don't care.

Once prosecuting people becomes as automated as a license plate scanner generating hundreds of tickets per day, suddenly they are going to wish they had a little more privacy to balance the government being overbearing.

The problem is we give incredibly powerful weapons (both literally and figuratively) to law enforcement and then when going after the real big criminals turns out to be too difficult, they turn their eyes to the easy to catch regular folks with little way to defend themselves, just so crime prevention figures can look good in the budgets.

<comment><USER10> Well, a wsj article from 2009 claims in the US it is an average of three felonies per day [1], and I doubt the situation has become better since then.

[1] [http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527487044715045744389...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704471504574438900830760842)

<comment><USER11> It is an interesting post and certainly a concern around automated law enforcement in the future. That is certainly something folks need to keep in mind.

There are some skeptics breaking down that article however.[1] I am not saying I agree or disagree with their analysis. It is still very much a concern even if that article chose the incorrect examples to use for their thesis.

[1] [http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/22530/does- the-a...](http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/22530/does-the-average- american-unwittingly-commit-three-felonies-a-day)

<comment><USER10> Thanks for the link, it's good to be skeptical. But even if the number is inflated by an order of magnitude, it's still a very frightening one. And it's two orders of magnitude away from ck2's estimate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> " If a law enforcement agency wanted to track someone, it required physically assigning a law enforcement agent to follow that person around. Tracking everybody would be inconceivable, because it would require having as many law enforcement agents as people."

On the other hand, the Stasi and the KGB were infamous for the vast armies they employed in this task. Maybe they couldn't track everyone all the time, but they could track enough people enough of the time that people were generally aware there was a non-zero chance of being tracked, and doing anything that might arouse the suspicions of the authorities carried risk. Also, in those societies, everyone was at risk, whereas in the US, the risk is perceived to be weighted toward 'others'\--if you are not in the targeted group, it is easier to be complacent.

</comment><comment><USER13> We should. But we might not be allowed to in the digital world in the future.

A bill by US lawmakers, set for release in March, could require encrypted devices to be able to give un-encrypted data to law enforcement. Feinstein says the bill is "coming along ... some people are making it a lot harder than we think it needs to be". An alternate proposal is also on the table

[http://www.politico.com/tipsheets/morning- cybersecurity/2016...](http://www.politico.com/tipsheets/morning- cybersecurity/2016/02/march-is-encryption-bill-month-hackers-going-after- japans-infrastructure-a-mixed-final-2015-tally-212865)

</comment><comment><USER14> If this is genuinely important to you, don't forget to vote against every politician who supports mass surveillance. Do it in primaries and the general election. Write someone in if you have to, but do it, and don't make excuses about the lesser evil.

</comment><comment><USER15> Its a bit worrying that someone feels its necessary to write an article explaining how the government constantly spying on everyone could be bad.

</comment><comment><USER16> (The post is from 2013. Shouldn't that be mentioned in the title?)

<comment><USER11> It should include 2013.

This is only becoming more true every year. I hope that more folks read this post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> (2013)

</comment><comment><USER18> From 2013.</comment>


Fauci offers candid advice to city leaders - <AUTHOR> https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/05/fauci-offers-candid-advice-to-city-leaders-at-virtual-gathering/ <comment><USER2> > But minority groups, particularly African Americans, who live in the inner > city are extremely vulnerable, "on a scale of a nursing home or a prison or > a meat-packing plant" in terms of risk and how devastating an outbreak can > be, Fauci said.

> "We are really almost morally obligated on our part to concentrate the > resources in those communities so that they can do the adequate testing, and > then, when someone gets infected, identification, isolation and contact > tracing, and provide them with the resources to be able to physically > separate when they do get an infected individual," he said.

Unfortunately this has become a political issue, and the American president has already stated that much of the economic damage is self-inflicted by "blue" states, and that it would be unfair to provide more stimulus checks when it would primarily help blue states.

<comment><USER3> Party politics aside, much of the damage has been self-inflicted.

Take a look at this unemployment map:

[https://files.taxfoundation.org/20200521093315/Table-2-of- Ci...](https://files.taxfoundation.org/20200521093315/Table-2-of-Civilian- Workforce-5-21-FV-01.png)

Several wealthy states seem to have forgotten that money doesn't grow on trees and obliterated their tax bases. Most other states are pretty healthy and not in need of additional bailouts.

These states now have two crises instead of one.

<comment><USER4> Characterizing a response to a pandemic threat as "self-inflicted" is very disingenuous. Those states have not "forgotten that money doesn't grow on trees" as you so derisively put it, they are trying help people _survive_ while society attempts to mitigate the consequences of this pandemic in every way we can think of.

<comment><USER3> No, it's fully ingenuous.

Leadership is about balancing competing concerns, and five states in particular reacted in a way that is increasing human suffering rather than minimizing it. And even after paying a very high cost, they have infection rates similar to the rest of the country.

<comment><USER5> Washington went from being the first state with an outbreak to being the 21st state in absolute infection numbers, and 150 new cases/day, down from a peak of 600/day. New York brought daily cases down from 11,000/day, to 500/day.

Whereas, places like North Carolina, Texas, and Florida not even peaked yet. Seems odd to declare victory, when their numbers are steadily climbing.

I wonder, what is the economic cost of people falling sick, and needing medical treatment? Are the red states including that in their accounts of human well-being? Or is it a 'screw you, you're sick, it's your problem now'?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Fauci.. the man who is at the centre of this mess

[https://www.newsweek.com/dr-fauci-backed-controversial- wuhan...](https://www.newsweek.com/dr-fauci-backed-controversial-wuhan-lab- millions-us-dollars-risky-coronavirus-research-1500741)</comment>


OpenBSD Mail Server Intro - <AUTHOR> http://technoquarter.blogspot.com/2015/02/openbsd-mail-server.html <comment><USER2> I wish the email stack was simpler.

While working on a project to learn go, I was using postfix to pipe email directly to a Go program, that then sent them as an SMS. I couldn't help but thinking how old and clunky the software I was using felt. The Go ended up being done in an hour and the postfix part took me 2 nights.

The same goes for all of the other email protocols and software. It's all big, bulky, and complicated. especially considering how much of a backbone email is to business today.

I know of the mailinabox project that was meant to package and abstract out a lot of the difficulties, but found that even that was too complicated.

Does anyone know of any projects meant to simplify the email stack?

<comment><USER3> I'm biased but as far as SMTP is concerned, you can hardly find something simpler than OpenSMTPD: pretty much any configuration can be described in less than 10 lines of config.

Here's my configuration on this desktop:

listen on all

accept from any for domain debug.poolp.org deliver to maildir

accept from local for any relay

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Also check this by the author of "The Book of PF": [http://home.nuug.no/~peter/pf/en/spamd.setup.html](http://home.nuug.no/~peter/pf/en/spamd.setup.html)

\- isn't SpamAssassin too big, too old and too ugly considering it, according to the author, only stands for 5% of the anti-spam?

\- can ClamAV really catch modern malware or are we just talking legacy viruses from the 90s and 2000s?

<comment><USER5> I use SA on my own domains and I feel it is as efficient as Google's own spam detection. Although no spam mails slipped through in months, a few legit got caught due to their incompetence in html-emails.

As for ClamAV, their database is updated frequently. It's probably not as good as commercial vendors such as Symantec, NOD32 and so on (can't compare because I haven't used them for years), but I feel it offers some protection.

<comment><USER6> At this point I consider myself a competent SA admin. I've got one particular box with a domain going back to at least 1998 that I can't block enough spam, too much still gets through. SpamAssassin is great, but I've been using GMail since the beta and spam almost never gets through, like single digits for me in all that time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hands down, the configuration file for opensmtpd is the best I've ever seen. It's easy to grok and its declarative style beats Postfix's plethora of flags anyday. Looking forward to it making its way into the standard Linux distros.

[https://www.opensmtpd.org/smtpd.conf.5.html](https://www.opensmtpd.org/smtpd.conf.5.html)

<comment><USER3> thanks ;-)

It is already available as a package on various Linux distros: Gentoo, Arch, Fedora, ... as well as all BSD variants.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is an 8-part series of posts by the same author, the link at the top of the page.

[http://technoquarter.blogspot.ca/p/series.html](http://technoquarter.blogspot.ca/p/series.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> Hey, I'm trying to use this guide, do you know why you enable ssh in pf.conf?

Edit: oh dear, now I'm downloading the source for every program including ports.

<comment><USER10> What you mean by 'enable ssh in pf.conf'? What are you referring to?

<comment><USER10> Ok, found: pass in on egress proto tcp to any port ssh

It means that you need to open port 22 (ssh) in order to be able to log in as recommended firewall setting is to 'deny all' by default.

<comment><USER9> Thanks. That's weird, because I can already log in with ssh on port 22. I was asking because I didn't realize how it was related to a mail server. Now I understand you might want to log in remotely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> If doing this read the update in "OpenBSD Mail Server - Part 4, SpamAssassin and SpamPD".

</comment><comment><USER11> Nice find. I setup a Kolab + Ubuntu server based email for myself and family a few months ago and it has been running great. If anyone would be interested in a writeup let me know.

<comment><USER12> Why did you decide to use Kolab?

<comment><USER11> Because it has a good suite of tools that work out of the box. There's LDAP, webmail, webDav/calDav/cardDav, admin interface, antivirus, anti-spam, etc. It integrates well with OwnCloud too which is a nice plus.

When I was looking to move away from gmail, my requirements where security and privacy and Kolabsys was one of the first services that popped up as a viable alternative.

The thing is, I was also looking for a reason to try out AWS and get back to using linux after years of powerpoint and archimate _poisoning_ so everything came together like that.

I highly recommend it, even if it took me about 5 working days to get spamassassin, openDKIM, ciphermail and TLS working for all components. But hey, now I get a 94% grade on www.emailsecuritygrader.com and a A+ on SSL Labs's test so hurray for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Tutorials like this are good for learning, but since computers are great tools which can help to prevent repetitive work it would be great if the author published a virtual machine image or, even better, some saltstack or ansible recipes to build this on github, so it could be improved and maintained by everybody.

Hint to authors of similar tutorials: yes, just release the scripts to build the vm or docker image. This is 2015, it hurts to see 100 of people manually copy pasting things.

<comment><USER14> You're not going to learn anything from a premade docker image, or from ansible playbooks.

At that point, there's no need to provide a tutorial at all.

<comment> jon-wood The tutorial would provide the reasoning behind why the decisions in the script have been made, allowing people to adapt it to their own needs.</comment></comment></comment>


Greasemonkey word-count script for your Y Combinator funding application - <AUTHOR> http://olav.dk/code/ycombinatorwordcount.user.js The instructions on the application form says "Please try to answer each question in less than 120 words." This Greasemonkey script displays the word count in the bottom right corner of the screen when you are typing in a textarea. <comment><USER2> I took the 120 words to be a suggestion.

<comment><USER3> what if the backend software only takes in 120 characters and leaves everything else out?

<comment><USER2> Doubtful they would do something so opaque when their input is "Please try to answer each question in less than 120 words."</comment></comment></comment>


Hopper, the $22M, 6-years-in-the-making travel planning website, goes alpha - <AUTHOR> http://skift.com/2013/08/30/first-look-at-the-22-million-6-year-in-the-making-travel-planning-website-hopper/

<comment><USER2> Color me unimpressed.</comment>


The Non-Partisan Movement We Need: Anti-Authoritarianism - <AUTHOR> https://notesonliberty.com/2020/08/07/the-non-partisan-movement-we-need-anti-authoritarianism/ <comment><USER2> Hear, hear!

The authoritarians and their concomitant groupthink are on the cusp of destroying public discourse in America.

<comment><USER2> 47 minutes after posting this I've been downvoted to 0 points. Apparently someone _wants_ authoritarians to flourish in America.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha. Sorry about the downvotes...</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: SaaS plans: One without encrypted data at rest, and one with. How to? - <AUTHOR> Hi!
I was thinking to include in my highest plan to encrypt all customers data at rest.
A solution could be to have 2 DBs:
- a DB for the lowest plan without encrypted data (MySQL)
- a DB for the highest plan with encrypted data (MariaDB?)
Do you think it's a stupid idea? If no, do you have a better solution to achieve it? <comment><USER2> Is the data encrypted using the customer password (which you don't have)?

Do you have any background task (not initiated by a browser session) that you need to execute for your SaaS to work?

Will this encryption deny you critical data required in your background task (think cron/ mailing/ etc..) ?

What happens when the customer forgets their password, and need to reset it? Do they lose all their data in your DB?

Just some questions to think about

</comment><comment><USER3> Encrypt both, but only advertise the higher tier as being encrypted. Customers that place a high importance on encryption will buy the better plan. Those that don't will buy the lesser one.

You have minimal benefit for not encrypting all data anyway (more technical complexity and liability). Plus, there isn't a court anywhere that will get upset at you for selling a tier that's better / more featured than advertised.

<comment><USER4> Blatantly misleading customers is a shortsighted way to make money (and often illegal).

If the only benefit of the higher-cost tier is that it's encrypted, it's likely that a court _would_ be upset upon finding that out. Charging people extra money without any benefit is an easy way to lose a lawsuit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Encryption is meaningless if done incorrectly. I would encourage you to hire a security expert to discuss this and provide a roadmap for your dev team.

Other than that, I think it's not very client-friendly to charge for encryption. If you can encrypt any of the data, it would be good to encrypt all of it.</comment>


Adwords Is Dying and Google Knows It (and they are doing something about it) - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/1701119/adwords-is-dying-and-google-knows-it-and-they-are-doing-something-about-it

<comment><USER2> "Adwords is not dying yet and is actually still trending upwards, but we think Google thinks it might some time in the future."

</comment><comment><USER3> Ugh, super link baited title.

</comment><comment><USER4> Couldn't this just be called "Google Places is Getting Better?"

</comment><comment><USER5> Well, yes Adwords may be dying, but they are also throttling up Rich Media Display ads, which are going to supplement the lack of revenue from adwords.</comment>


Two OpenVPN Audits by OSTIF+QuarksLab and Matt Green Completed - <AUTHOR> https://ostif.org/the-openvpn-2-4-0-audit-by-ostif-and-quarkslab-results/ <comment><AUTHOR> Summary link by OSTIF, which includes a quick synopsis of both audits, and link to full report on OpenVPN 2.4 by OSTIF:

[https://ostif.org/the-openvpn-2-4-0-audit-by-ostif-and- quark...](https://ostif.org/the-openvpn-2-4-0-audit-by-ostif-and-quarkslab- results/)

Matthew Green/Cryptography Engineering audit direct link, which focuses more heavily on the protocol design, as well as a 2.2->2.4 changelog audit:

[https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2017/05/openvpn-2...](https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2017/05/openvpn-2-4-evaluation- summary-report/)</comment>