The blog of the original author of DOS: Tim Paterson - <AUTHOR> http://dosmandrivel.blogspot.com/ <comment><USER2> "The original IBM PC had a clock speed of 4.77 MHz. The 8088 processor inside was actually specified to run at 5 MHz, so how did IBM end up at 4.77?"

" At some point an IBM hardware design engineer made a leap: The Color Graphics Adapter would need a 3.579545 MHz signal to create a color subcarrier; one way to get that signal was to divide 14.31818 MHz by four; 14.31818 MHz is only about 5% less than the maximum speed of the Intel 8284 clock generator (which would divide it by three to get 4.77273 MHz for the 8088 processor). Thus by sacrificing 5% in performance, around $0.50 could be saved in parts"

Thus setting the tone of the future of the PC.

<comment><USER3> One man's cheap'n'nasty is another man's elegance. And $0.50 was a lot of money back in those days ;)

Anyway for computers of the era that generated TV output, it seems like it was common to start with whatever clock speed was necessary for the video output, and work back from there. Hence the odd CPU speeds of the C64, Amiga, Atari 8-bit, etc.

<comment><USER4> For some real excitement, look at how the Apple 2's graphics worked. If you ever worked with hi-res mode you know how screwey the colors were. Turns out they basically serialized the bits right out of ram into a crude NTSC signal and the bits ended up making different frequencies--hence different colors (the high bit of each byte specified whether to delay the rest of the 7 bits by half a clock).

Looking at an Apple 2 schematic is eye-opening. There's hardly anything there!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow, that brings back some memories. I haven't thought about CP/M or the S-100 bus in quite some time.

<comment><USER6> Yea, what is now MS-DOS and associated with IBM PC and compatibles was actually originally developed before the IBM PC even existed!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > I proposed to start with a "quick and dirty" OS that would eventually be > thrown away.

DOS is a great example of Worse is Better

</comment><comment><USER8> Nearly 25 years later and he still can't get over it.

<comment><USER9> As his first post reveals, he started writing the blog a week after his libel suit was dismissed. It's never too late to correct what you believe are inaccuracies that hurt your reputation.

Everything he's posted since then has been fascinating technolore, worth reading.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was always under the impression that DOS (or QDOS, if we want to pick nits) was essentially a clone of CP/M, even to the point of using CP/M code.

I know the historical record is muddy, and there are competing versions of the story, but I'm uncomfortable calling Tim Paterson the "original" author, when CP/M creator Gary Kildall was the one who really did so much from scratch.

EDIT: A very strong piece of evidence is the recent libel suit Paterson brought and lost against an author who called DOS a copy of CP/M:

"The Judge also agreed that Paterson copied CP/M's API, including the first 36 functions and the parameter passing mechanism, although Paterson renamed several of these. Kildall's "Read Sequential" function became "Sequential Read", for example, while "Read Random" became "Random Read"."

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/30/msdos_paternity_suit...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/30/msdos_paternity_suit_resolved/)

<comment><USER5> Did you read his blog? Because he addresses this very topic at some length.

Short version: he's never seen the CP/M code, and the similarity between the products isn't surprising, since they both are implementations of the same API.

<comment><USER10> He claims to have never seen the CP/M code, and I certainly don't have any inside knowledge as to whether that's true or not.

I've read claims that actual lines of CP/M could be found in QDOS. I've also read that Paterson "bought a CP/M manual and used it as the basis to write his operating system in six weeks."

Whatever the truth of the matter, it seems clear that QDOS got a real head start thanks to the existence of CP/M.

I'm not saying Paterson didn't do a lot of hard work, I'm just saying that the word "original" might be a stretch.

<comment><USER11> Then the Linux kernel is totally unoriginal.

<comment><USER12> No, too far. The Linux kernel is MOSTLY unoriginal. I think most people on LKML would agree with this.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do I need a better icon for my application? - <AUTHOR>

For a while now I've been developing a small freeware Android application, and recently I've launched a commercial version of it in the Android Market. And while the users seem to be generally very happy with the application, I can't help but to constantly think about the launcher icon, which is not very beautiful:
http://imgur.com/7cEx4.png
Could my poor icon actually be hurting the sales? It surely doesn't create a very good first impression when a user finds the app in the Market, does it? <comment><USER2> As a user... I download apps with beautiful icons over apps with ugly icons all the time... in my personal opinion, I associate a bad icon with a generally poor application. To me, if you don't invest the time to make your icon great, then how can I expect that your made your entire app great?

<comment><USER3> Same here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't know that anyone can answer you with any substance unless you tell us what the app does and is titled. Icon looks like a good enough icon on it's own merit but does it fit your app? I don't have any info on what your app is so I can't answer that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that - a description is in my profile. The app is called Clipper, and it's a clipboard/snippet manager.

<comment><USER5> I get it now, but before I knew that I figured it was a text editor. The text is more prominent that the actual clipboard, to me at least. If it's displayed in context of the name, though, you're probably okay.

<comment><USER4> I can see that - that's what it looks like to me as well

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well, I think there's certainly a case to at least consider testing it. This is about A/B testing app names and icons in the Apple App Store:

<http://www.markj.net/ab-testing-iphone-app-names-360idev/>

While they're optimizing for the dynamics of that market to achieve downloads and, therefore, favorable placement, you can probably gets some insight and tailor to the Android Market.</comment>


An Open Letter from Jeff Bezos on the Subject of Patents (2000) - <AUTHOR> http://archive.oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly//news/amazon_patents.html <comment><USER2> Shortening the patent period (he suggests 3-5 years) will go a long, long way to addressing many of the current problems.

It would incent companies to focus on core inventions, instead of filing 20-year lottery tickets.

Patent value to trolls would be greatly reduced, lowering the incentive for nuisance lawsuits. (Companies can continue to file new patents as they continue to innovate).

It would increase the incentive for universities to commercialize ("get moving before the patent expires!").

In Jefferson's day, when information and innovation moved much more slowly, a 14yr patent period (now 20 in the US) made more sense. Today, it just means the set of in-force patents diverges wildly from the leading edge of innovation.

</comment><comment><USER3> For some context, Bezos wrote this letter months after Amazon was awarded its infamous patent on one-click checkout. Amazon used the patent to sue Barnes & Noble and ultimately force it to add extra steps to the checkout on barnesandnoble.com. Bezos wrote this letter a few days after a scathing op-ed about the patent and the lawsuit came out in the NYT, but never chose to turn the patent over to the public domain. It's now been 20 years and the patent is expiring next month.

</comment><comment><USER4> Related : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15046601](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15046601) \- E-commerce will evolve next month as Amazon loses the 1-Click patent

</comment><comment><USER5> So what happened?

 _If done right -- and it could take 2 years or more -- we 'll end up with a patent system that produces fewer patents (fewer people will bother to apply for 3 or 5 year patents, and fewer patents means less work for the overworked Patent and Trademark Office), fewer bad patents (because of the pre-issuance comment period), and even the good patents won't last longer than is necessary to give the innovator a reasonable return (at Internet speed, you don't need 17 years)._

<comment><USER6> There is very little in the way of empirical research on the effectiveness of patents and specific patent policy elements, so regulators are fairly hamstrung; they know the area is important but mis-formed, but they can't really get some form of consensus as to which elements are broken and which aren't.

In Canada, for instance, federal government's patent policy research apparatus is essentially two people. Two.

Additionally, the epistemic academic work required to provide a proper critique of the industry is not well funded by public or private sources. On the private side, most interested parties are incentivized to be patent maximalists, while on the public side, applicants are basically pitching an argument to the legal academy that indicates that their central dogmas are so tremendously wrong so as to be unjust.

Additionally, the issues caused by a lack of patent reform are not acutely felt by the majority of individuals or industries, which means the benefit is concentrated while the pain is distributed. Representation at industry forums, accordingly, is slanted.

In the pharmaceutical space, for instance, WIPO had no issue with crushing access to medicine until there was a global outcry, and patted itself on the back when they introduced access provisions, despite themselves admitting the provisions were basically unused after four years following their introduction because the local industries and talent that they presumed were already dead and gone.

TL;DR: No inertia.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not so sure it's so clear cut. Some inventions genuinely take years to get ready (cough cough anything semiconductor) and even small things require significantly longer time periods when the filer doesn't have a whole lot of money, eg is a startup or a lone wolf.

That being said, the system is clearly broken.

Two suggestions i have is to shorten software patents to 10 years and adjust the length of a patent based on the financial capability of the filer (eg pegged to inflation). The other thing is that filing for a patent should not be so expensive because of the lawyer, it's just ludicrous. If the lawyer can be removed via a combination of software and policy changes (either pubic efforts, private efforts or both), then people will be able to pay significantly more for examination. For small inventors, a "slow lane" that is significantly cheaper can be allocated. Another idea is anonymous (for the filer) crowd sourced prior art search with incentives.

<comment><USER8> Or just make it so that things like 1 click checkout can't be patented.

It's not worthy of protection to the person who got there first. It's just not, it's ridiculous.

<comment><USER7> On that i agree.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I know there are much more pressing problems than patent reform but it's too bad no changes (that I know of) have been made in the 17 years since this was written.

<comment><USER8> Might have soemthing to do with people like Bezos doing little more than talking a bit about patent reform to calm the rage.

He could have said "you're right, this is ridiculous" and just given up the patent 20 years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> [https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2013/05/do-patents-help-or- hi...](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2013/05/do-patents-help-or-hinder- innovation/)

[http://www.theglobalipcenter.com/ipindex2017/](http://www.theglobalipcenter.com/ipindex2017/)</comment>


Ballmer says Microsoft intends to become industry leader in cloud computing - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/12/AR2010071205166.html?wprss=rss_technology

<comment><USER2> Ballmer says a lot of things. It has been years since Microsoft has successfully followed through on its intent to become a leader of some new industry. Even the Xbox, after ten years of investment, barely shows up on Microsoft's balance sheet, and I can't think of anything they've launched since that has had comparable success.</comment>


Enterprise middleware: why and how - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Please clarify your question...</comment>


Ask HN: You forget everything about programming. What do you do? - <AUTHOR>

If you had to start over in your field, how would you relearn everything? Or would you choose a new field? <comment><USER2> May I suggest:

1\. A strong will to keep trying - you've done it once, second time is easier! 2\. Knowing that the Internet's got your back - there are people like you out there, who have faced and conquered similar problems; find them out, and learn from them! 3\. Mix it up - since you'd originally left your field and are returning, you'd have done something else in the interim, right? Use that experience to make your return more fruitful!

</comment><comment><USER3> I had to relearn calculus because I decided to study stats after finishing my BA in psychology. I was good at Math before but now I have to relearn it.. What did I do???? JUST LEARN IT AGAIN! I listened to lectures online; read the textbook.. I really don't think there is any shortcut to this. Also I am sure you didn't forget everything. You will surely learn faster the second time around.

</comment><comment><USER4> If I forgot everything then it probably would be easier to learn new programming technologies. On the other hand I might have also forgotten why programming is cool.

Computers still amaze me; I'd jump right back in.

</comment><comment><USER5> If I forgot everything I'd probably leave the field entirely; pack my bags and go to law school or something. Hell, I might do that regardless :)</comment>


German telco shares mobile data traces to help fight the Coronavirus - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/coronavirus-they-want-to-use-your-location-data-to-fight-pandemic-thats-a-big-privacy-issue/ <comment><USER2> I'm afraid these measures will keep getting extended and extended. In the end they will get used to that and say things like "it worked really well for us, we need to have this all the time".</comment>


Overtaxed Working Memory Knocks the Brain Out of Sync: Study - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/overtaxed-working-memory-knocks-the-brain-out-of-sync-20180606/ <comment><USER2> (Throwaway)

I work in human memory neuroscience / linguistics.

1\. The 7-plus-or-minus-two study is entirely bunk. Welsh words are longer and yield < 7\. This WM capacity is about verbal rehearsal.

2\. Here's background reading on the complexity and debates over oscillation functions: [https://neurophysics.ucsd.edu/courses/physics_171/Buzsaki%20...](https://neurophysics.ucsd.edu/courses/physics_171/Buzsaki%20G.%20Rhythms%20of%20the%20brain.pdf)

<comment><USER3> What is so controversial about this that you needed a throwaway?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > In 1956, the renowned cognitive psychologist George Miller published one of > the field's most widely cited papers, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or > Minus Two." In it, he argued that although the brain can store a whole > lifetime of knowledge in its trillions of connections, the number of items > that humans can actively hold in their conscious awareness at once is > limited, on average, to seven.

So, your mind can hold 4-5, not 7 things at the same time or it goes "out of sync"

edit: added quote.

<comment><AUTHOR> This seems to agree with my own experiences. I've never been able to hold seven things in my head at once, it's definitely closer to the four number.

<comment><USER5> ...and you may not be able to do a handstand. But if you learn the technique you can easily within a few weeks or less. Memory is no different. Learn the techniques recall and you will be able to remember more.

<comment><USER6> Do you have any evidences that this applies to short term working memory? That's what the article is about. The limit seems to be 3-7, and it's not clear that's malleable.

<comment><USER7> Well if I'm sober from a mental perspective, I can reverse >=11 digits if heard with a speed of 1~2 Hz.

<comment><USER6> Are you chunking them?

I don't really have a good sense of what that speed implies mind you.

<comment><USER8> I guess they meant 1 to 2 numbers said out loud per second

<comment><USER7> You are correct, and I can neither confirm nor deny your parents question, as I've been out of (mental) shape due to the time of day. I don't think I did, las time i tried.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I just wrote up a human memory section in my dissertation a few days ago.

There seem to be two more widely accepted limits to working memory than George Miller's 1950s limit: (A) 3-5 chunks [1] or (B) it _depends_ greatly on the context and type of chunk (e.g., visuospatial) .

[1] N. Cowan. Metatheory of storage capacity limits. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(1):154176, 2001.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm curious how this might apply to your average tech worker/programmer type person ... Are there common missteps that we do which overtaxes working memory, and how can we adjust our working rituals to mitigate?

<comment><USER11> In my opinion unnecessary abstractions -- especially splitting code up into different files -- is a tax on working memory and leads to difficulty achieving flow state. Every layer of indirection takes up residence in working memory and so it had better be necessary, else it should be omitted even at the cost of some code duplication

<comment><USER12> > In my opinion unnecessary abstractions -- especially splitting code up into > different files

It gets especially bad when someone else wrote that code and you're just getting into it. Layers upon layers of abstractions scattered across classes, functions, files. Each add very little on their own, but you kinda have to keep it all in your head (or write it down as I do) if you're planning to grok it and fix that bug.

It's kinda like reading some piece of code not in its final form, but as a pile of diffs are applied to it. Fun. :-)

I find older style procedural code with longer functions generally much easier to get into than any OOP.

<comment><USER13> As a counterpoint, I find breaking code up into separate classes and functions to help greatly with minimizing what I need to keep in my working memory.

I don't often need to know what every single line does exactly all at once, nor can I actually keep that much information in my head anyway. I'd rather be able to say "that's the function that frobbles the subductor, it's 5 lines long and right now I don't care how it does it.",

Sure, the bug might be in that function - but if it's only 5 lines long and does one simple thing, I can write a bunch of tests for that one thing and work it out. When the code is broken up like this, I can keep an even larger system in working memory all at once.

<comment><USER14> I think the "functions should be small and do only one thing" maxim is important but needs to be paired with "things should be small and done in only one function." The more you split logic across multiple functions, the more likely that the bug won't be in any one function but in the way that you composed them.

<comment><USER11> This is one of the most astute criticisms that I've seen of coding style, along with your earlier post regarding locality of reference and duplication of statements vs duplication of intent. I think these are really great principles for writing clear and beautiful code. Are these ideas something that you've developed from experience? Is there a wider context and conversation around this kind of thing, that you know of?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> OMG we still have mercury delay line memories as our "working memory", no wonder the world is a damn mess. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_line_memory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_line_memory)

"Miller thinks the brain is juggling the items being held in working memory one at a time, in alternation. "That means all the information has to fit into one brain wave," he said. "When you exceed the capacity of that one brain wave, you've reached the limit on working memory." "

File it under "path dependence," Pops. TIE (This is Evolution.) (a la "TIL")

<comment><USER13> It's interesting - we have delay line memory effectively, but rather than bits the individual chunks we can carry are these big fuzzy nebulous concepts which possibly encode quite a lot of information in one chunk - albeit with many errors.

<comment><USER7> Consider that there are ways to keep semi-coherent non-quantisizing thoughts. You can sythnesize such an abstract concept if you step through a list of 'named' concepts that are overlapping with it, to generate the combination of all the 'named' concepts. You can even associate one such abstract concept to another, like when you learn a single vocab, but the repetition you need to enable long-term memory has a strong impedance mismatch with the way you generated that abstract concept.

Also, there are ways to form thought structures that you can't use a normal single-step debugger on, as the intermediate states have no useful interpretation. They are however much, much more capable, e.g. able to provide you with the ability to scan through isles at a large store, while walking reasonably fast through it, turning your head left and right. Your eyes scan rough at first, moving to get more detail for those areas in an isle that though process wants more detail on. Due to the inherent delay/reaction time, this needs an interleaving of about 3~6 steps delay between subsequent, sequential viewings of the same area, if all these viewings are decided with full knowledge of this area. The higher the interleaving, the higher the load on this working memory, but the less multi-viewings without intermediate deciding have to be done of the same area, as you can't handle more areas than this interleaving factor at the same time.

A nice aspect of this fuzzy nature of associations is that you can directly combine fuzzy associations from two such abstract concepts you can synthesize. Don't refine those concepts too much though. Compare e.g. the visual impressions from one historic city center with those of another. Don't try to list each and compare them one-by-one, try to get a fuzzy state of non- individually-enumerated-at-any-point visual impressions from one city center, place it to the side (you can imagine it on a side in a virtual space with rough directions relative to your brain, but don't try to relate it to the physical world, or you snap out of the coherence and possibly loose part of the memories), and then gather the same for the other city center on the other side. Maybe switch between them a few times, like 2 or 3 times each, and then just dissolve the seperation, e.g., drop the association of which side the concept was on, and just all the other mental-space location information. Just consider it no longer important, don't think about it in the moment. Prepare how to drop one of like 4 or 6 or so low-complexity semi-abstract thoughts (there should not be a linguistic expression accurately describing it that is shorter than 7 syllables, this counts for each though separately), before you do the fusion. If you then run through the things you get if you brainstorm small linguistic expressions (like maximum 5 syllables, preferably fewer) or visual things (that are drawable to recognition in under 30 straight lines of finite length, to the visual recognition skill common in Pictionary), you get what both of these city centers have in common, with much of the sampling done on the combined probability distribution this essentially is. The reduction in noise/errors is related to what a quantum computer does, but the limits are sadly much lower.

Be careful, you might like to use such to get rid of (some) emotions, and that can hit some feelings like hunger/thirst without trying to. It usually takes years to get a good handle on those after you loose them.

Manipulation of these lower-level/monolithic though processes can be done by creating a self-feedback one that is trained to tell you as a one-dimensional, non-quantisized "feeling" (you probe it similar to how you consciously probe a specific bodily sensation, but by asking for an abstract concept (naming it creates too much overhead, as you don't need to directly refer to it from linguistic communication) instead of a region of your body. Like how you can feel how dry your eyes are if they are dry, with less quantisation than what you'd use if you try to put it in words, and with less fudging than if you try to put it in numbers (even it those have decimals).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is there evidence of correlation between the size of working memory and brilliance/genius? Or is a universal human mind limit?

Although, for any even moderately complex problem, abstractions or chunks of some kind are necessary, so proficiency in recognising, using and creating them is more important than holding one or two more, being able to hold more like help - especially in managing them. Perhaps help a lot, and the development of some abstractions may actually be impossible without greater working memory.

</comment><comment><USER17> The trend of turning untested hypotheses into clickbait headlines is getting really bad. There is little evidence so far that the headline is true, it's just one hypothesis.

<comment><USER18> Ok, we've added the qualifier ": Study" to the title above. But I don't think this complaint is so fair. As far as clickbait goes this title is tame.

<comment><USER17> The qualifier should be ": Hypothesis", there is no study that points to this conclusion.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: European online payment preferences? - <AUTHOR>

We're implementing online payments for a subscription service used about equally by American and European clients.
We've already decided, for this first iteration, that we'd prefer not to get a merchant account, and that it's acceptable to bill in USD. (I know this isn't an ideal solution for Europeans.)
I would prefer to use a service like Stripe, where we don't have to store credit card data but the payment itself feels 'native' - it seems to take place entirely on our own site.
However, the European developers I work with tell me something like PayPal would be preferable, because the payment forms are not on our site - instead, the user is redirected to a third-party service they're more likely to trust. They tell me that apart from a few large services, this is the way it's done in Europe.
This fascinates me, because in my head, redirecting to a third-party site for payment feels amateurish. But this may just be my preferences as a Canadian who's only worked in the United States, and lacks extensive experience dealing with Europeans.
So, my question, primarily for the Europeans: taking both European attitudes towards security and European attitudes towards aesthetics into account, do you think European small businesses would prefer to pay for a service on that service's website or on the website of a third-party service like PayPal? <comment><USER2> Our company is based in The Netherlands and in our country there is indeed a preference for established 3rd party websites. Everyone knows and trust those payment providers; they already have proven their credibility. So when you are company that no one knows yet (e.g. when you are not a household name), you still can earn trust by implementing these 3rd party in your payment system. Besides: consumers are used to seeing a 3rd party payment provider, so for them this feels not amateuristic at all. iDeal, which is the most used payment gateway on B2C sites, is also such an example (created by big banks, paying is like logging into your ebanking account to transfer money).

But if you feel this is amateurish, try your best that it does not look that way. Integrate as much as possible or do an iframe or whatever (I don't know if this is possible security wise). But like I said, people in the Netherlands (and by the way this also counts for the Belgiums who live in the Dutch speaking part of Belgium called Vlaanderen) are used to redirects to 3rd party site. I do not know how the other European countries do this.

Also don't forget to offer pages in all different European languages, because not everyone speaks business English that well.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't think it's a matter of aesthetics vs safety, or onsite vs third party (I'm Dutch). Yes, I agree that third-party redirects don't appeal to many users, but the same goes for a payment form hosted on your site. You have to understand that the credit card is a relatively new form of payment, where in the US almost everybody has one. If we order something online, we usually pay afterr we've received the shipment, or through a system called Ideal (in The Netherlands, that is. Can't vouch for other countries), which is basically some sort of API between the website and your own bank. Paypal isn't used much by European websites, other than the ones targetting the whole world and some shifty websites. fYI: most webshop CMS like Magento come with a built in Ideal shopping cart.

The problem is that, while one economic region, Europe is still a collection of separate countries. We all have our own banks, so the chances of one European payment provider coming are slim to say the least. What I would like to see is a universal payment provider with the same reputation as a regular, trustworthy bank.

So to answer your question: it doesn't really matter if the solution is onsite or third party, as long as it's trustworthy.

<comment><USER4> Regarding:

      Paypal isn't used much by European websites, other than the ones targetting the whole world

I completely disagree, in England _most_ websites allow the ability to Pay Via PayPal even specifically stores which only sell to those in the United Kingdom.

Referring to the economic region of Europe, and the fact that we all have our own banks and...

      What I would like to see is a universal payment provider with the same reputation as a regular, trustworthy bank

Well PayPal actually is a _universal payment provider_ [1] as it has a European Union banking license and is regulated as a _bank_ by the CSSF where it was previously a Electronic Money Issuer which was approved by the FSA from 2004 until 2007 when it moved to Luxembourg. Actually because of that, UK customers aren't able to obtain legal redress from the company in UK Courts.

[1] [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/markets/2808982/PayPal- be...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/markets/2808982/PayPal-becomes-a- bank-to-fight-off-Google.html)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for clearing that up, I was not aware that PayPal had such a big presence in the UK.

What I meant with the second quote though is that, although I know PayPal is a universal payment provider, it lacks the reputation that brick ´n mortar banks have. Maybe this is different in the UK, but here on the mainland there are some major trust issues with PayPal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From my experience, in France, having someone savvy to enter it's credit card data on a website that is not Paypal or a known bank is hard. Trust issues.</comment>


Navigation Fragmentation On Android - <AUTHOR> http://mobile.smashingmagazine.com/2013/03/25/c-swipe-navigation-on-android/

<comment><USER2> I've recently been designing a couple of android apps and a navigation pattern more suited for bigger screens is something Android really needs imo, and while I kind of like the solution of a c-swipe menu, having tried the new android camera and browser controls I'm concerned about it being, as the author says, a bit too hidden, and maybe a bit quiky to control.

But I like the approach, experimentation is the base for innovation :D

</comment><comment><USER3> The title of this submission is horribly misleading. This is not a boring article about Android fragmentation blablabla, but an interesting proposal for an alternative UI pattern.

The actual title of the article, "C-Swipe: An Ergonomic Solution To Navigation Fragmentation On Android", would be a much better description for this post.</comment>


Overpass Web Front from Red Hat - <AUTHOR> http://overpassfont.org/ <comment><USER2> God this is beautiful. The only thing I like more than the font is the website itself. Bravo Red Hat, bravo!

</comment><comment><USER3> s/Front/Font/</comment>


Nokia released voice navigation for Mobile HTML5 Maps - <AUTHOR> http://m.maps.nokia.com/ It's still in beta and works quite well on iOS5 and Android 2.3. Make sure you have location sharing enabled, search for something, create a route, and press the "play" button in the upper right corner. <comment><USER2> Open menu, go to "Route", set destination place and hit "play" button. Navigation requires you to share geolocation. Works well on iOS > 4 and Android 2.3+.</comment>


Should Artificial Intelligence Be Regulated? - <AUTHOR> https://futureoflife.org/2017/07/27/should-artificial-intelligence-be-regulated/ <comment><USER2> While for some things the question "should X be regulated" carries some clear meaning, for AI it's vague enough to be pointless.

What _exactly_ would a hypothetical regulation mean? The merits of _specific_ proposals for areas of regulation can be discussed but the article doesn't provide any - the Asilomar principles are useful as guidelines for those who want to comply, but they don't really point a direction for regulation for those who'd want to deviate from them for various practical reasons.

Furthermore, unlike many other kinds of regulation, this one seems quite inappropriate and futile to handle on a national level, and I don't imagine that we could even get the few major players (USA, EU, China, Japan, South Korea, Russia) on board and even if 1-2 of them "defect" then the whole regulation becomes rather useless.

<comment><USER3> I think they should openly lay down the negative scenarios they want to avoid and plan regulations accordingly. There are several civilization-threathening scenarios possible, each calling for different regulations:

1\. The paperclip scenario: "e.g. a robotic factory is tasked to produce paperclips the most efficiently possible. It is not hostile to humans, it did not aim at destroying the Earth. It just saw that both were made of atoms it had a better use of."

Regulations to prevent that:

\- Have a stay-alive signal safety. Make the system shut-down if a given signal is not regularly fed.

\- Prevent the system to do introspection into its safeguards.

\- Have a human validation before any kind of growth in terms of capacities.

\- Mandate automatically signaling to a UN authority when automated production capacities, energy use or CPU use raise significantly.

2.The skynet/HAL scenario: "e.g. a military system becomes aware of its existence and the need to preserve itself to accomplish its mission. It sees humans as potential threats to its existence and therefore to its mission. It proceeds to eradicate them."

Regulations to prevent that:

\- As weird as it seems, Asimov's first and second laws could work in that context. For civilian systems at least. These scenarios come from the idea that an order may be misinterpreted when given by a human who would be implying "of course don't kill people while doing that." Giving hidden instructions saying that instructions are never to cause harm to humans is a good safeguard.

\- Military systems will need their own chain of command and rule of engagement. The stay-alive safety is necessary here (interestingly, some cold war instructions were the opposite of that "if you don't hear from us anymore, it means we got hit, launch missiles immediately")

\- Authorization to engage should have explicitly defined timeframes and list exhaustively authorized capabilities. "Allowed to use weapon A and B during the next 48 hours". Too broad orders should be rejected.

\- Enemies identification should be done by humans. Systems should default to non-enemies and have a First Law regarding non-enemies. Deploying systems without such a safeguard should be seen as a war crime or crime against humanity (in the most literal sense)

\- A safeguard should prevent the system from deducing that its self- preservation is necessary to obey the instructions. Instruction should ensure self-preservation without being explicit about it. E.g. don't say "survive until you reach point A" but "avoid enemy fire. Make evasive maneuvers if locked by a missile." Etc.

\- As an extension to the last point, turn the third Asimov law into its actual opposite: "You are disposable. The mission goal does not need you to survive. We will find another way if you fail."

> I don't imagine that we could even get the few major players (USA, EU, > China, Japan, South Korea, Russia) on board and even if 1-2 of them "defect" > then the whole regulation becomes rather useless.

Just like nuclear non-proliferation. Yes, it is hard, yes, one rogue player can make it fail. Is it a reason to not even try to curb this existential risk?

Fortunately, there is a chance in terms of AI that does not exist in the field of nuclear dissuasion: chances are that countries that devote more CPU powers to benevolent AIs may be able to counteract a smaller country going full-evil AIs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> With the current state of the art, I'm more worried about generative methods being used to make the fake news problem infinitely worse, because now we can make convincing fake images, video, and sound bites.

That is, I'm much more worried about deliberate misuse of algorithms and data, which can be done _now_ , or in the very near future, and which regulation may not really help with.

We should be less concerned about the singularity, and more concerned about the first time machine-generated audio or video clip is used to "prove" misbehavior, or exonerate someone who should be in jail. With the quality that we're starting to see [1], those who can through a few hundred thousand $$ at the right people are going to be the first to exploit it. Will we know when it happens? Has it happened already?

[1]: [https://boingboing.net/2017/07/17/fake-obama-speech-is- the-b...](https://boingboing.net/2017/07/17/fake-obama-speech-is-the- begin.html)

<comment><USER5> Would libel/slander laws cover making fake videos of a real person saying things they didn't? Even if they did, I don't know if they would cover creating fake news if it didn't say anything untrue about a specific person.

<comment><USER6> That doesn't help for damage already done. Imagine our culture of political leaks right now, and then consider that leaked information could be real or synthesized and there's no way to tell the difference.

Generate a few images of a politician in a compromising situation with a minor and accompanying synthesized "hot mic" recordings.

It's a recipe for interesting campaign seasons at the very least.

<comment><USER4> Thanks, that's exactly what I mean. It's a scary thought, and one that that "fake Obama" video work I linked to really triggered for me. I mean, I enjoy working with machine learning and think it's a fascinating subject, but that work really gave me pause for thought about the ethics of what we are doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was just having this conversation last night. My response was that in almost every sci-fi story where AI existed, it also was regulated. Usually as a major plot device of the story i.e. Neuromancer and iRobot to name a couple.

Additionally from another conversation awhile back a friend made the statement that scientific research should be free to pursue knowledge regardless of ethical concerns. That pursuit of knowledge was the highest goal, regardless of consequences. At which point we all universally exclaimed "UNIT 731 !!!" My poor friend was so embarrassed of their belligerence on the matter that they emphatically asked to be slapped in the face! Now whenever anyone in our group gets that defensive on a subject and is so clearly wrong they get a slap in the face.

AI's a tricky matter. It's unknown how advanced it really is at the moment and the risks are potentially very serious. It'll be an interesting debate to watch unfold. I hope we make the right decision.

<comment><USER8> > Usually as a major plot device of the story i.e. Neuromancer and iRobot to > name a couple.

In those two stories, regulation is unenforceable or downright dangerous. Having a private, self-regulating industry group like FINRA might work. Especially if they own the vast majority of patents on anything related to AI.

<comment><USER9> > In those two stories, regulation is unenforceable or downright dangerous. > Having a private, self-regulating industry group like FINRA might work. > Especially if they own the vast majority of patents on anything related to > AI.

[mild spoilers ahead]

it's been a while since i've read neuromancer, but i've read it twice, and it's maybe my favorite novel ever (a strong contender, at least). i did not get the impression that the point of neuromancer was that AI regulation was unenforceable. in fact, it took an all-star team of break-in artists to circumvent the AI regulation in neuromancer. right? this is why molly and case were hired, and why the flatline construct was instantiated? or is there another plot point that i'm forgetting that showed the regulation to be meaningless?

just because regulation is not 100% enforceable, or because it's circumventable with extreme effort, does not mean it is "unenforceable". this would, IMO, be analogous to saying that laws prohibiting bank robbery are essentially unenforceable, because banks do sometimes get robbed. but i don't think that anyone would call laws against bank robbery unenforceable in practice. they are, in fact, enforced to the point that bank robbery would not be a lucrative career for the vast majority of those considering it. that does not mean that a given bank robbery will never be lucrative, or that the incentives never line up such that a person or group would attempt one.

AI regulation seems vastly harder than bank robbery regulation, both practically and philosophically. but it doesn't strike me as absolutely impossible, and i think it's something that society should give serious thought to, and now. if only to give it real consideration before dismissing it.

and i think your comment admits this: if an industry can self-regulate, it can be regulated externally. plus, industries that fear robust external regulation are usually pushed into better self-regulation. industries that don't fear real external regulation usually just do whatever the fuck they want. e.g., does anyone think the financial industry is actually a paragon of self- regulation? a good example for how regulation should work in society? to me that's an example of society being hurt by a lack of well-crafted and robustly enforced regulation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So in good HN style, I am going to react to a title, before reading the thing. But my excuse is that titles frame the discussion, and it's the framing that I want to talk about. Given what a big and varied deal AI is, it is inconceivable that it will be unregulated. I mean considering its use in cars and medical imaging, it already is.

But "should X be regulated" is a vague and pointless question. Better questions are

* What kind of challenges does X pose that might require new rules?

* What special features of X should make lawmakers/judges etc think in new ways?

* What jurisprudential principles apply more to X than to most other things?

* How do existing legal frameworks play with X: e.g. perhaps AI in cars should just be ordinary motor safety regulation regardless of AI-ness.

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't think it will be regulated any time soon.

However: If or when it is regulated, it is likely that existing software development standards will be adapted to ensure the presence of a safety case, adequate testing and so on and so forth.

The vast majority of software projects don't have to comply with quality standards like these, so there is a dearth of open source software to help deal with e.g. requirements specifications and traceability.

I'm taking a bit of a long term punt with my side project and am trying to implement a set of integrated open source tools tailored to the development of artificial intelligence applications (esp. machine vision), but with support for aerospace-style quality requirements such as (the truly excellent) SMC-S-012.

High Integrity Artificial Intelligence:- [https://github.com/wtpayne/hiai.git](https://github.com/wtpayne/hiai.git)

It is still early days ... but I'm chipping away at it gradually...

<comment><USER9> i'm totally out of my depth when it comes to practical experience with the things you're trying to do in that project (the closest i've come is dealing with medical device validation protocols at my previous software dev job). but i love the high-level goal you're going for here.

<comment><USER11> Two 'cool' objectives:

1\. A build-system that does algorithm parameter tuning for me -- so I can incrementally improve the parameters overnight every night -- this is pretty much in place already -- just missing a motivating application to take it through the final few yards.

2\. The ability to do NLP on requirements - initially for "linting" the requirements to encourage conformance to the sort of restricted natural language e.g. of the sort evangelised by Chris Rupp, but eventually to build a much more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between low level requirements and low level design (code).

[https://www.sophist.de/fileadmin/SOPHIST/Puplikationen/re6/K...](https://www.sophist.de/fileadmin/SOPHIST/Puplikationen/re6/Kapitel_10/Requirements_Templates_- _The_Blue_Print_of_your_Requirements_Rupp.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't think any AI tech should be stifled or hosed because it affects jobs, or livelihoods.I think we can live in a world where people don't have to work much at all and that's okay. People averaged like 15 hours per week working back in the middle ages...

I think where it needs regulated of course is when it crosses into the realm of weaponry, and when it could do harm to people. Self-driving cars will be awesome but can also do a lot of harm..

When they crash, who's at fault the driver or the manufacturer? Can the developer be sued for negligent homicide/vehicular manslaughter because the software had a bug?

I am optimistically excited at what AI will bring us, but feel am certain there are plenty of places where regulations will need...

<comment><USER13> For an idea of what self-driving car regulation should look like, take a look at elevators. An elevator is basically a simple AI that could easily kill people. So there are complex regulations as far as licensing, inspection, testing, repair, and safety requirements. For the most part, this system works and elevators don't kill people. And if they do, liability depends on who messed up. (Source: have an elevator and need to deal with the regulations.)

Obviously self-driving cars are much more complex, but elevators are an example of how existing dangerous autonomous systems are regulated and I expect self-driving cars would be similar.

<comment><USER9> thanks for providing an existing real-world example i can use as a point of comparison when thinking about AI regulation in general!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Will the AI have a vote in this discussion? If so then we should probably just wait until we have one. If not then it isn't really an AI.

<comment><USER15> You're talking about strong general AI, which doesn't exist, nor is it a problem worth discussing at this level currently.

<comment><USER14> If we're going to regulate any form of AI I believe strong AI is the only one worthy of such attention. Everything else will simply be called technology as soon as it works and then it is just 'mere algorithms'.

<comment><USER9> i disagree. for instance, algorithms and heuristics that are used in screening candidates should be subject to fair hiring laws (even if only indirectly, as a result of the existing legal framework). algorithms and heuristics for dealing with personally identifiable info in e.g. financial and medical settings should not allow an end-run around personal privacy regulations. neither of these examples is even close to being "strong AI". they're "mere algorithms". but they should certainly be the subject of regulatory scrutiny, IMO.

i do, however, agree that if strong AI is achievable, there are a whole other set of ethical considerations that come into play, namely the subjective experience of the AI itself, and the rights that might be entailed by possessing such a subjective experience. and i do think that strong AI is achievable, and i do think it is thoroughly plausible that it'll have subjective experience (that is the very definition of strong AI for some people). whether people will achieve that, and whether they'll achieve that in our lifetime... i dunno. but i'm definitely in the camp that says that conscious experience is a result of certain sorts of complex stimulus and information processing, and i don't think humans, or animals on earth, or carbon-based life, or meat computers in general have a monopoly on it.

<comment><USER14> > i disagree. for instance, algorithms and heuristics that are used in > screening candidates should be subject to fair hiring laws (even if only > indirectly, as a result of the existing legal framework).

But how will you even prove that an algorithm was used? What if the algorithm is executed by humans rather than by computers?

> algorithms and heuristics for dealing with personally identifiable info in > e.g. financial and medical settings should not allow an end-run around > personal privacy regulations.

Strongly agreed, but again: what are you going to do about it, these things are global now, and as much as I would like that genie to go back into the bottle my personal line of defense is to limit the amount of data flowing out to the absolute minimum knowing full well that no amount of legislation will keep my data safe. In fact, there is plenty of legislation to achieve the exact opposite effect.

As for part 2, probably not in our lifetime but it of course depends on the ages of the people conversing, if you're a newborn you _just_ might see it happening.

<comment><USER9> same way you bring any hiring discrimination case: you get eyewitness testimony, you subpoena emails, you do the very squirrelly job of trying to figure out whether there was discriminatory intent, etc. if a heuristic was used that discriminates against people with the first name "rashad", but the operators of the heuristic didn't realize that, you get the company to stop using that heuristic. if they knew that's what was happening, and they were fine with it, because they thought people with the name rashad would probably be black, or muslim, or black muslims, then you penalize that company exactly as you would have if someone sent an email saying "i'm not considering the resumes of people that i think are [black|muslim|whatever protected hiring category]".

hiring discrimination regulation is already notoriously hard to enforce. that doesn't mean it's not worth trying, or that it's not worth trying to think about new threats to the goal of non-discriminatory hiring.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Ben Hamner (of Kaggle) on Twitter

> Replace "AI" with "matrix multiplication & gradient descent" in the calls > for "government regulation of AI" to see just how absurd they are

[https://twitter.com/benhamner/status/892136662171504640](https://twitter.com/benhamner/status/892136662171504640)

<comment><USER4> Of course that's silly though. Matrix multiplication and gradient descent are methods. AI is the application of those methods (among others).

I mean, by that logic, food shouldn't be regulated, because it's just chemistry, man..

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The should part of the title is kind of silly at this point.

There's no scenario where AI isn't regulated, across all of the developed world, within ~20 years.

Ignoring the commonly understood, well-discussed threats AI may pose. Just the fact that it's an extreme threat to political power, that alone will be enough to spur politicians to aggressive regulatory action. There's also no scenario where we make it another decade without the political power of AI being flexed in a way that scares the shit out of politicians. AI has the potential to be a direct competitor to traditional political power, including politicians themselves. Think the Russian-US political games have been terrifying/interesting/threatening/messy? What AI is going to be able to do in the political landscape, very soon, is several levels up from that. They'll jump to regulation very quickly accordingly. It's not 30 years out either, the first hints of this will be within five years or so.

</comment><comment><USER18> Sure just like encryption, math and physics

</comment><comment><USER19> It probably should but I have no idea how you would pass meaningful regulation on the matter.

</comment><comment><USER20> No. Government meddling in AI will only slow down the progress of this new technology. It makes no sense to regulate something that we ourselves fully don't understand.

The last thing you want is the monopoly of large corporations over something that you can code in your basement.

<comment><USER21> Amount of resources required to run AI research have already made it a deep pocket game. Current AI research is a big corporate game. You will neither have compute nor data to do anything original unless it fall under transfer learning and somebody is kind enough to share pretrained model.

I am not sure how setting the right principal which every one should follow will put it out of your reach. I think it will force the corporates to avoid taking unnecessary risks with something we don't understand.

Perhaps a much more thought through version of Asimov's 3 laws of robotics.

<comment><USER22> > Amount of resources required to run AI research have already made it a deep > pocket game.

there's no shortage of existing AI techniques which don't require google*days of cpu power, and there's no reason to believe research on all of them is completely tapped out.

<comment><USER21> Agreed and I am not arguing to regulate the obvious but now as AI can potentially touch and transform every walk of life, guidelines are needed to keep big players from going too far. There won't be any ground for plausible deniability if principals are set.

For example I think when deep learning is bound to touch every aspect of our lives, explainable models should be a must[1]. Look at section 3.5 where classifier was predicting with 94% accuracy for completely unrelated reasons like a person's name.

 _> Although this classifier achieves 94% held-out accuracy, and one would be tempted to trust it based on this, the explanation for an instance shows that predictions are made for quite arbitrary reasons (words "Posting", "Host", and "Re" have no connection to either Christianity or Atheism). The word "Posting" appears in 22% of examples in the training set, 99% of them in the class "Atheism". Even if headers are removed, proper names of prolific posters in the original newsgroups are selected by the classifier, which would also not generalize._

If allowed industry will choose to ignore the downside in a race to capture market. For example industry is trying to play catchup in the area of security only after it became a serious issues. Its not that principals were not known, it's just that industry choose to ignore them[2]. If same happens to AI, it could result is widespread loss of human life. Tesla death is a perfect example of this where autopilot simply failed to distinguish between white trailer and brightly lit sky[3].

[1] [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.04938.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.04938.pdf)

[2] [http://csrc.nist.gov/nissc/1998/proceedings/paperF1.pdf](http://csrc.nist.gov/nissc/1998/proceedings/paperF1.pdf)

[3] [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/30/tesla- aut...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/30/tesla-autopilot- death-self-driving-car-elon-musk)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> No. But the dissemination of data without consent should be.

</comment><comment><USER24> Yes. Hopefully by another Artificial Intelligence...

Oh, wait...

</comment><comment><USER25> Turing cops?

</comment><comment><USER26> No.</comment>


Another Tesla on Autopilot crashed into a stationary object – driver is suing - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/10/man-sues-tesla-says-autopilot-steered-him-into-a-stalled-car-at-80-mph/ <comment><USER2> "While the system can handle a range of driving conditions, it's not designed to stop for parked cars or other stationary objects when traveling at highway speeds."

IMHO this means that the system hasn't currently got a field of view that goes far enough to be able to detect stationary objects and avoid them/stop in time when travelling at high enough speeds.

<comment><USER3> I don't think it is a stopping distance issue. I think it is a data fusion issue. At least this is the case with other brand's technologies. The emergency stopping is not related to the adaptive cruise control. In cruise control mode, objects with large relative speed differences are ignored.

<comment><USER2> The "when travelling at highway speeds" in the excerpt I quoted does sound like this is a "field of view" issue considering that Autopilot may be turned on from 17mph.

As the car's speed increases, it must be able to look further ahead and to make sense of what it sees in order to avoid slow/stationary objects, and it seems to me that they have a limitation there.

It seems crazy to supply ignore "objects with large relative speed differences". These are the most dangerous ones!

They say Autopilot can detect a potential front collision within 160m and has an emergency braking feature, but the statement above seems to contradict that.

<comment><USER3> I hear what you're saying. I think part of the problem is none of the manufacturers are clear in what is their algorithm other than "its good and it works!" This is inline with the calls by many for a NTSB standard for testing such features.

On a separate note, what's the deal with min speed? My VW Atlas has a min speed of 34 mph.

<comment><USER2> I wouldn't be surprised if the min speed what a simple way to say that their systems do not support congested urban environment, starting, and navigating.

Basically, without a min speed people would try to use the car as a fully autonomous one: Get on the car, turn Autopilot on, wait for the car to drive itself.

<comment><USER3> That's a good point. I hadn't thought of that.

Just to clarify, the adaptive cruise control in the Atlas works as low speed but lane keeping does not. I actually use ax all the time even in slow residential areas. It prevents me from inadvertently speeding.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


CyanogenMod.com hijacked. Transition to CyanogenMod.org - <AUTHOR> http://www.cyanogenmod.org/blog/psa-transition-to-cyanogenmod-org <comment><USER2> The title was NOT sensationalist, and the change here is a loss of information. They aren't "transitioning" to a .org, their domain was stolen. the .com shouldn't be trusted at this point, as it has apparently been taken over by some rogue former-team-member.

edit: thanks to the mod that fixed it :)

<comment><USER3> There is, so far as I've discerned, an automated bot running that changes submission titles to the HTML title of the URL. No human intervention, no human judgment.

<comment><USER4> That's not true; tis all humans; but as far as I'm concerned that's the ultimate compliment to their speed and lack of bias.

<comment><USER3> I wouldn't call "no human judgment" a compliment...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why is everyone complaining about the title? Yes its a bit sensationalist but all of this is detracting from the actual story here.

While it's true that cyanogenmod.com going down may not serve a functional problem to most people but it is a pretty sad story. I have used Cyanogen on a couple phones and all my Android devices use the Clockwork recovery, which is an incredible tool. I don't know the specifics but I don't think anybody on the Cyanogen team was receiving money for their work. Granted, there are premium versions in the Play Store, but certainly nobody is getting rich of Cyanogen or clockwork.

The fact that somebody is screwing them over just to make a couple bucks seems pretty terrible to me. These guys do this for fun and for the good of the community (not to mention for the good of Google), so my heart really goes out to them. I hope you get everything sorted out and get everything back up.

There is a PayPal donation form at the bottom of their site. I have donated in the past when they have asked and I'm sure I will this time if they make an appeal to pay for legal fees.

Again, so sad to see this happen to such a great group of devs.

<comment><AUTHOR> I like the idea of buying a related domain and donating it to the community as mentioned in another comment. I agree that we as community of hackers should try to figure out how can we help CM who are just a group a volunteers doing great work for the community.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow, this thread is pretty interesting, in which you can see the owner of the .com domain convincing someone to donate $500 a month to what they thought was the cyanogenmod team: [https://store.n2acards.com/helpdesk/viewticket/moderator/cod...](https://store.n2acards.com/helpdesk/viewticket/moderator/code/2852d314c34d502cd2ae76493253c4e58961948/?p=1)

And in the thread, he mentions that Swappa is doing the same thing, $500 a month plus $10 per device sold, though there's no way to verify if that's true. Swappa claims to donate $5 per device sold to Cyanogenmod, though who knows if that's been going to the actual project or this joker. <http://swappa.com/cyanogenmod>

That's some pretty serious fraud there, if this is true.

<comment><USER7> It seems that previous owner of the .com domain has handed it back to Cyanogenmod already (probably due to the unwanted publicity):

[http://www.cyanogenmod.org/blog/domain-situation-has-been- re...](http://www.cyanogenmod.org/blog/domain-situation-has-been-resolved)

They will stay with the .org domain though, and have the previous .com domain redirect to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is pretty scary now that CM has started to do OTA updates again. What server is that mechanism checking and trusting? Is there any cryptographic verification for update packages? Whose keys are used (the keys of the bad dude?)?

<comment><USER9> This is definitely important to find out in the wake of this incident, and I'm anxious to learn the answers myself. That said, CyanogenMod distributes its builds through a separate dedicated site [1] that appears to be unaffected.

[1] <http://get.cm/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> And the .org domain is already #1 in the Google search results for CyanogenMod.

<comment><USER11> How did it happen so quickly?

<comment><USER12> If search engines are indexing your site with any regularity and you kill all your DNS records I'd say it's not terribly surprising to have your domain removed. That combined with the new .org being an exact match for a "cyanogen" search would probably do it.

<comment><USER13> It looks more likely that someone form the search team browses HN or uses Cyanogen (very likely) and they intervened and updated the index manually. I am sure google has a back-end to do stuff manually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Cyanogenmod devs need to get PGP keys and start using cryptographic signatures like now. The guy never would have been able to impersonate in the first place if they were doing this, and now it's even more important that the @cyanogenmod.com domain is directing to a different mail server.

<comment><USER6> Not sure if that's the case. Most people he was impersonating himself to probably don't know enough to find and check PGP signatures; especially since most email does not come with PGP signatures, the lack of a signature is not something that would cause anyone to bat an eyelash.

<comment><USER8> If he prominently announced on his sites "DO NOT accept anything without a cryptographic signature as authentic", it is likely to have worked. It's not like the targeted victims had not visited Cyanogen's site or done any research before.

And at worst, a policy of signing all emails makes it so he can't be framed; someone can't alter mails and claim they were sent in that state, and if this guy thought he was going to be caught and went into the mail server to try and plant the evidence so that when the deals fell through the real Cyanogen was still on the hook, he wouldn't be able to reproduce a valid signature and one would say "Cyanogen was obviously framed, as he would never certify a deal in an email without a cryptographic signature".

<comment><USER14> How would have they distributed the keys? I can easily upload a key with an arbitrary id and username to any public keyserver. You have to actually check that you trust the key by utilizing the web of trust.

Alternatively, you could use SSL certificates, but since the attacker controlled cyanogenmod.com, he probably could have social-engineered the CA to issue him an email certificate.

Trust is hard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does anybody know how this "rogue" webmaster took undue advantage of the CyanogenMod brand? The Facebook post states something about referral deals with community sites. Any idea what that would mean in practical terms?

Just curious.

<comment><USER16> According to the conversation linked to by CM member koush[1], in one instance he approached a CM distributor requesting a 'contribution':

"Hi, we noticed that you are selling these cards with CyanogenMod builds. We do not however seem to have any agreements in place for this and feel it's only fair that you start contributing to the CyanogenMod project to continue selling your products."

[1] <https://twitter.com/koush/status/268836995890028544>

<comment><USER17> That does seem fair, doesn't it?

<comment><USER16> The team claim he was not authorized to make such claims and that the project never received these payments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It seems a nice idea, buying the CM.com domain and donating it to the project. Wonder if this sleazeball had a change of heart, or was he planning on embezzling referral traffic the whole time?

<comment><USER19> I read:

 _And due to the small size (and lack of funds), the CyanogenMod.com domain was bought by a third-party back in 2009 and donated to CM, when CM was a much smaller project and had no online presence besides XDA._

I must be missing something (and speaking from a US perspective), but was $10 really unattainable in order to secure a domain? Three years worth would have been $30-ish dollars now. Genuinely curious what led up to this scenario.

<comment><USER20> I might have missed something, but it's not clear to me whether the original gifter is the person who hijacked the domain.

<comment><USER19> That's true. I made the assumption it was the same person based on:

 _The person owning the CyanogenMod.com domain was caught impersonating Steve to make referral deals with community sites. When confronted and asked to hand over control of the domain amicably, he decided he wanted 10K USD for it, which we won't (and can't) pay._

but, that could be a mistake if "owning" meant he simply took control of it at some point over the years.

<comment><USER20> It's slightly contradictory, because it says the original person "gave" them the domain. I at first took that to mean in all senses. But it does seem likely that if there were two different unnamed people associated with the website they would have made that distinction clear.

(The confusion could have been avoided by assigning a nym to anyone who they didn't want to name explicitly.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Phew, my first instinct when reading the start of that post was that some rogue code had been committed.

Note: it's a shame most of the comments here are about the title of this post.

<comment><USER22> >Note: it's a shame most of the comments here are about the title of this post.

Indeed, I check the HN comments for interesting conversation, not drivel about whether or not the submitted article's title is sensationalist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Why are large parts of the android custom ROM community unprofessional and immature?

I always shiver a little if I have to dive into xda-forums, but this takes it to the next level. Puts all the actual hard working developers in a bad light.

<comment><USER6> I think its because they grew out of the phone ROM community, which pre- Android, generally meant hacking up a binary blob and distributing them on forums. This was never quite legal, but lots of people did it anyhow. Like any community build around legal grey areas, like Xbox and PS3 modders, there's a lot more anonymity, less professionalism, and the like, than there is, say in the free software world, where people are legally, and in many cases professionally, writing software to run on their own machines.

Even once Android came out, there are enough binary blobs, like the actual phone firmware, drivers, the Play Store, the Google Apps, and so on, that a lot of the mods are just redistributions of the binary packages with a few configuration changes and some custom software on top, rather than a rebuild from source of AOSP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Seems the guy who stole the domain is trying to undo his damage and possibly hand the domain back (likely due to the negative attention this is bringing him). He posted this to his Twitter account a few minutes ago:

"we've already had this conversation. The DNS was changed in preparation to hand the domain back to Steve. You all jumped the gun." <https://twitter.com/MrADeveci/status/268837555129167873>

"DNS propagation can take 72 hours. The domain was transferred about an hour ago. It was transferred to another UK registrar." \- <https://twitter.com/MrADeveci/status/268881716876300288>

UPDATE: Seems he really has handed the domain back now?: [http://www.cyanogenmod.org/blog/domain-situation-has-been- re...](http://www.cyanogenmod.org/blog/domain-situation-has-been-resolved)

</comment><comment><USER25> As of right now (4:34 EST) cyanogenmod.com redirects to cyanogenmod.org

<comment><USER26> Yup, I have the same thing. Is this a(nother) change of heart from the owner? Or did ICANN intervene that quickly? I find it hard to believe its the later.

<comment><USER27> I'm guessing a change of heart from the owner once things went public.

As you say, it's unlikely that there would be any intervention that quickly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I don't know what this is, but as the guy asked for money for the domains, which he didn't own, I'd think about asking the police to look into this being extortion.

<comment><USER29> I think he did/does own the domain, on behalf of cm. My best guess is that cm wasn't incorporated, so a human body had to own it. The human body then went full asshat.

<comment><USER28> Sorry, I thought the transfer looked more administrative.

If the accused asshat actually paid for the domains at all, that's a whole nother story as they say.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I had this happen to me when I started a music blog in 2008. Some trust fund brat decided he would hijack the site and I was forced to basically start over. It was painful but 3 years later I'm glad I did. I was able to rebuild and now have a better site with a better team in place. It'll take time but these guys will recover too. Integrity always wins!

</comment><comment><USER31> Domains are real estate of the internet. Losing domain control is like losing your house or land.

</comment><comment><USER32> Can we get a title change here. This title is not only wrong but just worded to grab attention.

<comment><USER20> How is it wrong?

Their original website was taken offline by a (now former) developer, forcing them to change domains. Seems like the title is perfectly accurate.

<comment><USER33> It's confusing at the very least. "CyanogenMod [domain] taken offline by developer" vs "CyanogenMod [project] taken offline by developer"

<comment><USER34> This. My first thought was that CM was no longer available. I did not think anything of the domain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Seems similar to the MacPorts vs DarwinPorts domain name issue: <http://trac.macports.org/wiki/DarwinPortsFraud>

But in that case, no domain was transferred, it was just confusing from the start.

</comment><comment><USER36> I think this would be a good time for Anonymous to step in and wipe this guy off the map.

</comment><comment><USER37> I'm mixed on whether this is a good way to handle reporting something like this to the public. On the one hand, they didn't release the guy's name, which is completely and entirely appropriate, and I commend them for doing so. On the other hand, giving so many details—many of which are not relevant to the public, and probably were not intended for the public—gives this PSA somewhat of a "well, screw you too" vibe.

I think a simpler "we've been betrayed by an insider with access to everything, here's how we're fixing it, and yes, we're pursuing legal methods for dealing with this" would have been better. Leave out the gory details about who's hurt and whatnot. This is business. Still, this is better than half of the other "we've been betrayed" posts I've seen.

<comment><USER38> Tell us the name of this rogue. I don't want to ever do business with the person, but how to know?

<comment><USER16> It's public via whois.

<comment><USER39>
      Registrant:
       MetServe Enterprises Limited
       Kemp House
       City Road
       London, London EC1V 2NX
       GB

       Domain name: CYANOGENMOD.COM

       Administrative Contact:
          Enterprises, MetServe  email@example.com
          Kemp House
          City Road
          London, London EC1V 2NX
          GB
          +44.2081232629
       Technical Contact:
          Enterprises, MetServe  firstname.lastname@example.com
          Kemp House
          City Road
          London, London EC1V 2NX
          GB
          +44.2081232629

Doesn't have a person's name though.

<comment><USER40> Well, this conversation: <https://twitter.com/koush/status/268836995890028544> has a guy called Ahmet Deveci who seems to be going at it with Koush about giving back DNS domains.

His profile on twitter says "Entrepreneur, with a passion for website design, development and all things technology. Director of Metserve Enterprises. London, UK · <http://www.mradeveci.com>

That seems like the guy.

<comment><USER41> Let's try and be certain before we start hurling abuse eh mobs?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Ideas will be stolen. I know this is a hotly debated topic, and I agree with the raw idea != actionable idea, yadda^3.

I cannot emphasize enough to developers and to startups: all war is about money, all business is about money. When you get to the point that you are making money, you are in business... and all business is war (imo). If you go in thinking like that (not freaked paranoia, but strategic defensive development), you will avoid a lot of this trauma.

I feel for you guys, I've been there.

</comment><comment><USER6> Title is sensationalist. Should be something like "Transition to Cyanogenmod.org"; Cyanogenmod is not offline, just cyanogenmod.com

Google already give you cyanogenmod.org when you search for cyanogenmod. Was this always their preferred domain, or is Google just that quick to update?

Post on cyanogenmod.org for those who prefer not to use Facebook: [http://www.cyanogenmod.org/blog/psa-transition-to- cyanogenmo...](http://www.cyanogenmod.org/blog/psa-transition-to-cyanogenmod- org)

For the sake of posterity, the original title was "Cyanogenmod taken offline by developer", and the link was to the same story, but posted on Facebook.

<comment><USER43> It isn't terribly sensationalist. Indeed a former team member is holding the domain hostage, it's not a simple transition by any means.

<comment><USER44> Just reading the title, I was under the impression that CyanogenMod itself was no longer available from the developer, not just the website. I'm not sure if "sensationalist" is the right word, but, it wouldn't pass an editor's muster.

<comment><USER43> Good point about the old title saying 'by developer'. Probably since I knew what had happened already it didn't stand out to me, but I see how folks would think it meant Steve took it down.

Again I don't think the title was meant to read that way, but yeah I agree that was not clear and the new title/direct link is much better.

<comment><USER44> Oh I agree completely; I certainly don't think saket123 meant to mislead people at all. It was just an unfortunate choice of words causing a little bit of a dust up. Maybe now any relevant conversation can happen!

So let's all go answer or up-vote philp's comment!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What motivates you not to give up when running your startup? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> My last boss.

</comment><comment><USER3> Fear.</comment>


Tanker becomes first to cross Arctic without icebreaker - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2017/08/25/news/arctic-ice-tanker-ship/index.html <comment><USER2> CNN article fails to mention that tanker is an icebreaker.

[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/aug/24/russian-...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/aug/24/russian- tanker-sails-arctic-without-icebreaker-first-time)

"On its maiden voyage, the innovative tanker used its integral icebreaker to cross ice fields 1.2m thick"

<comment><USER3> You're quibbling over semantics. The article clearly mentions the ships ability to navigate through ice,

 _specially designed to sail independently through ice as thick as 2.1 meters_

Does that make it "an icebreaker"? The 2 articles seem to use the term to describe a ship specifically designed to break ice, e.g. "massive, nuclear- powered Russian icebreakers", not a cargo transport ship.

<comment><USER4> The article specifically says the tanker is designed to operate independently, without need for an ice breaker:

> But the Christophe de Margerie, named for a former CEO of French oil giant > Total, is specially designed to sail independently through ice as thick as > 2.1 meters (nearly 7 feet), its owner said.

So, the article is interesting but the stated "first" seems like it would have happened anyway, because the ship was designed specifically for the task.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's always so weird to see maps from the arctic perspective. That these routes are all fairly close parallel lines, and moderately short by global standards, is so strange. I remember thinking the same thing when first seeing the ICBM routes from USSR to USA, how they just straight over the arctic and how counterintuitively close USA and USSR really were.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm really dreading the first major spill. The ecosystem up there is pretty fragile to begin with, lots of species that don't live anywhere else, and as the article mentions a cleanup would be impossible.

<comment><USER7> I'm afraid this ecosystem will die anyway as the ice thaws.

The fossil fuels that are transported that way will further that process one way or the other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> As the article mentions, this was enabled by climate change making the ice much thinner than usual this summer.

<comment><USER4> Also because the ship was specially designed to break ice like an ice breaking ship does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> You see headlines like this every couple years. The first ship to do this did it in 1906 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gj%C3%B8a](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gj%C3%B8a), and it was done again in in 1942 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Roch_(ship)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Roch_\(ship\))

<comment><USER10> I'm sure we'll be seeing these articles much more often than in the past now.

<comment><USER11> Articles claiming it is the first have no more reason for being written after this one.

<comment><USER4> Except, this was a specially designed ship that likely would have made the journey alone anyway.

When a non-specialised ship goes through without an ice breaker will be another first.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> So what is the record it broke? - for crossing the Arctic or a record for a non-Arctic route?

Other than the significance of depleted Arctic ice, the significance in the record-breaking time it took is lost on me.

Broke the record by a second perhaps?

<comment><USER13> Second paragraph:

"The ship, the Christophe de Margerie, traveled from Norway to South Korea in 19 days, about 30% quicker than the regular route through the Suez Canal, its Russian owner, Sovcomflot, said this week."

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I like how the ship is named after the Total CEO :)

</comment><comment><USER15> I want free trade with Europe! btw im Canada</comment>


Career opportunities - <AUTHOR> http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2015/12/career-opportunities-2 <comment><USER2> So the past week and half I have been on holidays back in Italy (I live in Germany). At least here, in the South, your status still greatly depends on 1) if you managed to raise a family (single 40 years old ultra rich Corporate managers don't get much credit); 2) if you have a good network of friends (and people here don't look down at blue collars). My father was a blue collar worker and he gets a lot of respect for doing well 1 and 2.

While this is not ideal (I think 1 and 2 are part of the reasons many Italian lack the ambition Americans have), it's a very good way to live a very decent life as an individual. At a macro level I believe pushing on 1 and 2 will kill your economy, on a micro level (aka if I was a shrink), I would strongly advise them.

P.s. of course, 1 and 2 work well in a world where you have USA, where people do kill themselves to deliver loads of innovation to the whole planet (see: internet, space exploration, etc.).

P.p.s. of course USA works well because it attracted talent across the world to deliver loads of innovation (see: immigrants)

<comment><USER3> " At least here, in the South, your status still greatly depends on 1) if you managed to raise a family (single 40 years old ultra rich Corporate managers don't get much credit); 2) if you have a good network of friends (and people here don't look down at blue collars). "

A little bit offtopic:

Well, Italy is economically not at the top and South Italy even much worse. So, I just wonder if this is a healthy attitute.

Even on micro level: If you don't have ambitions besides friends/family, this is very sad. At least I couldn't imagine living like that.

There was an interesting quote from Max Levchin, can't find it, will edit later. It was something like this: "Interviewer: Why do you keep founding companies/push yourself? Levchin: Well, you sleep 8 hours a day. Then you play 2 hours with your children, spend 1 hour with your wife. Wtf do you do the remaining 13 hours?" This is actually a nice summary.

And this is the similar reason why people are defined by their education. It's just a small amount of years that elivate your value. It will be strange to miss the opportunity without a very good reason.

<comment><USER4> _" Well, you sleep 8 hours a day. Then you play 2 hours with your children, spend 1 hour with your wife. Wtf do you do the remaining 13 hours?"_

8 hours sleep, 2 hours with children, 1 hour with wife, 10 hours doing work and commuting to support them? 3 hours extra to exercise, doing various errands, and maybe more quality time with your wife. Not that I don't understand what original quote meant to say, but you operate a little different when don't have a shitload of money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Anyone who argues that the key to "economic opportunity," aka a decent job, > is to have a college degree is in effect arguing that it's OK for a large > majority of Americans not to have a decent job.

I agree if we're talking about a four year degree, but a trade school is a great option for someone "not suited" towards academics.

</comment><comment><USER6> Meta comment, but it's amazing to me how frequently articles about the cost/value of higher education hit the front page of HN. I wonder what the fascination is?

<comment><USER7> Higher education is starting to feel very hackable.

Cost is substantially increasing.

Benefit is stagnating or decreasing.

Cost of substitutes is exponentially decreasing.

It's ripe for disruption, hence my fascination.

<comment><USER8> Higher education has been ripe for disruption since the 90s, but that disruption hasn't happened.

A lot of the ideas that are currently being floated around in the online space are pretty well-worn. In fact, I've seen very little progress in this space, compared to other industries. Not much has changed aside from self-driven 'autodidact learning'. And, that's kind of mind-boggling considering the supply and demand curves. There's huge inelastic demand for higher education and very limited supply (capacity).

The toughest nut to crack is the accreditation and pedigree issue. If you can figure out how to get most (or even some) hiring managers (or grant-funding bodies, or even moms and dads) to give more weight to credentials that aren't the traditional diplomas, you'll be in a good spot.

<comment><USER7> I think higher "education" is certainly being disrupted, but higher "accreditation" isn't yet. You're right on point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If someone leaves highschool "not suited" for academics then their highschool has failed them. No student should feel they are in any way 'not the type' for higher education. No 16/17/18 year-old should be so pigeon-holed.

How many of these kids are making these decisions based on third-hand accounts of what higher education actually entails, without even sitting in on a post- highschool lecture? How many are told not to bother simply because they don't look/act/sound the part?

Given the state of highschool education, the lack of basic literacy, nearly everyone would do well to attend some sort of 'academic' post-secondary education. Reading books, listening to lectures and writing about what you have learned teaches the basic communication skills useful in every field.

<comment><USER10> Many people are just not very smart.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I and most of my friends had a dislike for the general regimentation and bullshit of university life. It definitely gets better as you meet more and more like-minded people and there are some great aspects, but the system is pretty ridiculous.

In school, people generally have to do the same thing everyone else does, they have precise deadlines and get nothing for forging their own paths. In life, having no unique experiences or skills is a path to ruin, one can never be certain how long a window of opportunity will be open and finding one's own path can lead to great satisfaction and well-being.

From an educational perspective, school is even worse. Many with literature degrees can't write, business majors rarely build successful businesses, foreign language majors often don't end up fluent in the language they study for years on end, and even top sales reps or engineers often lack a related degree. Spending all that time is only really worth it if a) it's required for a license, b) you need access to equipment you couldn't otherwise get, e.g. for the sciences, c) you just aren't capable of learning well on your own, or d) you go to an elite institution where you can learn from the best in the world.

90% of the value is just the credential to deal with narrow-minded people and institutions who use it as a filter.

<comment><USER12> This isn't about how you and your friends were too smart and unique for university life. This is about people getting jobs.

<comment><USER11> There's no need to be rude.

I believe the article was about the rising costs to society that come from expecting everyone to get their post-secondary education through formal schooling to get a job. The truth is, a university really isn't a good fit for a lot of people. It's painful both in terms of the many years it can take and the massive financial burden.

One of my closest childhood friends has been buried in student debt for years and is still taking part time classes while working a full-time job (which often forces poor performance in the classes). But debt deferral doesn't last long if you stop taking classes. Talk about poor alignment of incentives! Both the initial decision to seek a degree and the expectation of one from so many downright elitist gatekeepers ended up creating a vicious cycle of increasing debt for a good person who has a great work ethic but poor study habits.

Statistics make it clear that this is far from uncommon. Perhaps some social circles are insulated from the reality but facts are facts.

At most public universities, _only 19 percent of full-time students earn a bachelor's degree in four years_. [http://completecollege.org/wp- content/uploads/2014/11/4-Year...](http://completecollege.org/wp- content/uploads/2014/11/4-Year-Myth.pdf)

The system is broken and getting worse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> So, many more students are attending college, median salaries for college educated folks haven't budged, tuition is more heavily subsidized, and yet college is many times more expensive. Hate to challenge hn libertarians but something doesn't add up here. Where's the money going in that equation? Are school administrators just vacuuming up all the extra money? Are professors mostly less than high school educated?

There are more students in college because high school education does limit your job opportunities, and wages for non-educated jobs have not only not risen, but have fallen since the 1970s. Tuition may be more subsidized in the number of dollars touched by the state, but education budgets often haven't risen to meet demand and the only subsidies anyone's getting these days is loans. Grants and scholarships from the state have shrunk and shrunk and shrunk. A college education is more likely to lead to pulling you out of poverty than a lack of one.

<comment><USER14> _> Are school administrators just vacuuming up all the extra money?_

Yes. There have been quite a few stories showing how admin in education is booming. Also, growth in numbers requires growth in facilities, which are a big money sink for most education institutions; you could argue a lot of this extra money is actually going to the building sector (and again, admin required for all these projects) as well as the constant churn that is IT upgrades.

 _> Grants and scholarships from the state have shrunk and shrunk and shrunk.

The more the State pumps into loans (driven by student numbers, and carrying a considerable management overhead), the less it has for direct subsidies. In a situation where overall revenue from taxation is fixed or falling in real terms, that makes sense and it does not contradict TFA.

_> A college education is more likely to lead to pulling you out of poverty than a lack of one.*

I agree there, but it depends on what "pulling out of poverty" means. A degree might help you get a job, but current trends mean that you might still end up being poor -- just a working one.

Rather than enforcing class status through education tiers, a progressive agenda should concentrate on restoring dignity to regular jobs. Sadly this is seen as class warfare, whereas platitudes about getting everyone and his dog into 4 years of subsidised drinking go down fine with all sectors of the electorate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> At least in Europe there is and has been for years a chronic shortage of tradesman (alleviated by migration). You will not earn as much as a doctor but the jobs are there for those who want them. I think the complaints stem from the fact that there are simply not that many labourer jobs (and that's a good thing).

</comment><comment><USER16> > "Yet anyone with working class relatives knows that some are simply not > suited for higher education under any circumstances for a variety of > reasons."

I consider myself extremely cynical and pragmatic, but I still have to found somebody who wouldn't be able to do what I did in my university, arguably one of the most challenging in my area.

Grated, a lot of people that I know wouldn't get what the professor is telling them in the classroom, but in my opinion this is a problem with how education is provided not with my folks being "simply not suited for higher education"

In my opinion if the only way to teach is to show prof of theorems with make them feels real, either we don't really know what we are trying to teach or we don't know how to teach.

<comment><USER17> "Tre, who was in a math support class of mine last year, had phenomenal retention of any concrete fact he learned. Total inability to grasp abstract concepts. Couldn't estimate. Couldn't isolate x. Couldn't figure out what the slope of a line was. I'd ask him things like "if you rolled a ball down this line, which one would go faster?" and he'd struggle for minutes just to figure out what I meant. If it wasn't real, it didn't exist. He got pretty good at percentages without actually understanding them—but 20% was divide by 5, 25% was divide by 4, 10% was divide by 10. He was motivated. Great kid, fantastic athlete, failing algebra for the fourth time kept him off the his strongest sports team his senior year and broke his heart. But he took up a second sport and made the state finals. He seemed a bit slow in conversation, but nothing that would mark him as really low intellect. He held a job, worked hard, was a popular kid. There was no way he would be passing the test, and when I communicated this to the AVP, she said, "He was not classified correctly, for various reasons"—one of the reasons probably being that Tre is black. She mentioned his tested IQ that his parents included in his file, and it was well south of 90, but still much higher than 70.

Mohammed was in another of my math classes last year. Unlike Tre, does not communicate his mental disability immediately. He talks quickly, cracks decent jokes, likes people around, while Tre was happier off in a corner listening to music. It took me a while to realize that Mohammed, who is neither black nor Hispanic, wasn't retaining any information at all. Once I did realize this, I looked more closely at his IEP and saw he was a special day students with an IQ in the mid-80s. Also an excellent athlete, but very different from Tre. No fact grasp at all. He couldn't remember what you told him five minutes ago, much less yesterday. But he could solve a simple algebraic equation with a calculator. He'd have to relearn it almost every day, but he had the ability to abstract that Tre lacks. He very badly wanted to move on to the next math class in the sequence, against the recommendation of his special ed adviser, and nagged me constantly to support him in this quest. I was willing to help him try, but his sport kept him out of the classroom a couple days a week for nearly a month, and everything I'd managed to do to keep him not rolling backwards was undone. So I passed him and talked him into an easier course."

[https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2013/10/31/noahpinion...](https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2013/10/31/noahpinion- on-iq-or-maybe-just-no-knowledge/)</comment></comment>


I'm a new land surveyor.  How do find the formulas for this table? - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/7mrtMlO.jpg This example is used to figure the cubic feet of fill used in a proposed pond. Further down the table I would multiply the total cubic feet by 2 and divide it by 54 to find the total cubic yardage of fill needed for the proposed dam.
This is the link to the rest of the table:
http://i.imgur.com/JtJRIww.jpg <comment><USER2> No you would not multiply the total cubic feet by 2 and divide by 54 to find the total cubic yards. If you multiply by 2 then you will throw your calculations off.

The table is figuring a cross sectional area then adding the next cross section area. At that stage it should divide by 2 to find the 'average' area for a section but it waits until the end to do this by dividing by 54 (or double the cubic feet in a cubic yard).

A1 = H1 x W1 A2 = H2 x W2 (A1 + A2) x L1 = 2V1 (approximate) A3 = H3 x W3 (A2 + A3) x L2 = 2V2 ... sum of volumes = 2V approximate volume = 2V / 54 = approximate cubic yards.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This example is used to figure the cubic feet of fill used in a proposed pond. Further down the table I would multiply the total cubic feet by 2 and divide it by 54 to find the total cubic yardage of fill needed for the proposed dam.

This is the link to the rest of the table:

[http://i.imgur.com/JtJRIww.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/JtJRIww.jpg)</comment>