Intel Gets Serious About Neuromorphic, Cognitive Computing Future - <AUTHOR> https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/02/11/intel-gets-serious-neuromorphic-cognitive-computing-future/ <comment><USER2> The article misses the core issue: neural network architectures are still in flux. "Neuromorphic" chips are hardwired to one architecture, which makes them power efficient but less flexible. When designs are more stable, such chips could be more practical.

Meanwhile, upcoming (non-neuromorphic) AI processors are taking two directions: larger numbers of simplified GPU-type cores (such as NVIDIA Xavier and Intel's Lake Crest/Nervana chips), and FPGAs.

Simplifying cores means lower precision, as fp32 and fp64 are overkill for neural networks and take up lots of silicon. The current NVIDIA Pascal added fp16 and byte operations such as the DP4A convolution instruction[1]. Even smaller precision is practical (down to 1 bit with XNORnet[2], and the DoReFa paper[3] gives an excellent summary of the falloff in accuracy through 32-8-4-2-1 bits for weights, activations, and gradients).

[1] [https://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/mixed- precision-p...](https://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/mixed-precision- programming-cuda-8/)

[2] XNORnet, [https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.05279](https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.05279)

[3] DoReFa, [https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.06160](https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.06160)

<comment><USER3> This is a common fallacy, although the architectures themselves may be changing (quite a bit!), the basic computationally intensive operations, such as convolutions and matrix multiplies aren't. The simple way is to switch from FP32 to 16-bit fixed point, and you're good to go, and you just saved almost 10X power. This is the strategy Nervana/Intel, even Nvidia, and other startups such as Wave are pursuing.

<comment><USER2> Exactly - evolving network architectures suggest using a non-neuromorphic design (such as Xavier, Lake Crest), which trades less precision for more cores given the same power/real estate.

Neuromorphic designs like IBM's True North are more hardwired, and that's the limitation towards general purpose use. Yann LeCun's remarks on True North:

[https://www.facebook.com/yann.lecun/posts/10152184295832143](https://www.facebook.com/yann.lecun/posts/10152184295832143)

<comment><USER4> The reality is that TrueNorth can use CNNs and be trained with backprop to achieve good performance with networks like ImageNet despite LeCun's comments [0, 1]

LeCun's primary critique is that binary wont work; "to get good results on a task like ImageNet you need about 8 bit of precision on the neuron states". There was no evidence for his claim then, and now this is clearly false [2, 3].

LeCun's post is based more in pride than reason; he spends most of the time talking about NeuFlow which at one point was a competitor to True North for funding. In the end, NeuFlow never became a chip, but True North did.

[0] [https://papers.nips.cc/paper/5862-backpropagation-for- energy...](https://papers.nips.cc/paper/5862-backpropagation-for-energy- efficient-neuromorphic-computing)

[1] [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.08270.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.08270.pdf)

[2] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.05279](https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.05279)

[3] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.02830](https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.02830)

<comment><USER3> Yeah, this all sounds nice in practice, but look at the actual numbers: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.08270](https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.08270)

1) Nothing on imagenet

2) They already fall to 83% accuracy on CIFAR-10! Imagine how bad imagenet will be! If they string many chips together (exploding their power consumption, since here comes the Von Neumann Bottleneck of data movement), they get a paltry 89%.....

Meanwhile even squeezenet achieves better results.

<comment><USER4> I'm sure today we could create an _even better_ chip focused on the advancements in neural networks and chip design, but it's awesome that a chip from 2012 can still take us so far! AlexNet was just a baby then. I doubt any CPU, GPU, FPGA, or DSP from 2012 would hold up as well.

I dont think you understand their architecture, and neither did LeCun. The Von Neumann Bottleneck is a specific term referring to limited throughput between data in memory and compute in the CPU. TrueNorth is not a Von Neumann architecture and does not have this bottleneck. Memory is located adjacent to compute elements in True North. For comparison, GPU's have very tiny amounts of on chip memory, and have to spend lots of energy copying data back and forth to off chip memory, which is why they are investing heavily in approaches like HBM. FPGAs also dont have as much memory as an ASIC because they need to dedicate space to reprogrammable logic, integrated ARM cores/DSPs, etc.

The chips can be laid out in flexible topologies such as a grid. While it's true that communication between chips is more power intensive than within a chip, this cost is only occurred for the relatively small amount of traffic sent between chips versus computed locally. Hierarchy and small world nature of neural networks can mean that there is more local computation than you would expect naively, and a grid can mean a spike routed from one core to the furthest core would be O(sqrt(N)) instead of O(N).

<comment><USER3> ...

Pretty sure LeCun and I understand what the Von Neumann Bottleneck is thank you very much.

The thing is though that TrueNorth isn't doing anything special by pouring a ton of memory on die, and even in GPUs, CNN runtimes and energy consumption is dominated by compute.

<comment><USER4> I appreciate healthy discussion of technical topics. However, I'm not sure you're having this discussion in good faith. I wrote this response in case you are.

LeCun never said anything about the Von Neumann Bottleneck. TrueNorth is not a Von Neumann architecture; it does not have a memory bus; it does not have the Von Neumann Bottleneck [0,2,3]. From wikipedia [1]:

"TrueNorth circumvents the von-Neumann-architecture bottlenecks and is very energy-efficient, consuming 70 milliwatts, about 1/10,000th the power density of conventional microprocessors"

If you disagree, please explain how you think the Von Neumann Bottleneck applies here.

With regards to energy consumption keep in mind the smallest GPUs (TX1) are ~10W, typical FGPAs ~1W, versus 70mW for TrueNorth! It's popular to hate on TrueNorth but you could throw 10 of them together and still be fantastically more efficient than anything else today - that's super cool to me! It required lots of special engineering effort to get right, such as building a lot of on chip memory.

On chip memory is one of the most difficult components to get right, minimizing transistors while not breaking physics. It's not as simple as "pouring tons of memory on a die" and requires specialized engineers that hand-layout these components. The event driven asynchronous nature of TrueNorth is fairly unique and undoubtedly added complexity to the memory design.

Do you have any references or evidence for CNN runtimes being mostly dominated by compute? The operations performed in a CNN are more than just convolution; for every input you multiply by a weight, you now have a memory bound problem, which is much more expensive than ALU operations. Don't just take my word for it, listen to Bill Dally (Chief Scientist at NVIDIA, Stanford CS prof, and general computer architecture badass) [4]:

"State-of-the-art deep neural networks (DNNs) have hundreds of millions of connections and are both computationally and memory intensive, making them difficult to deploy on embedded systems with limited hardware resources and power budgets. While custom hardware helps the computation, fetching weights from DRAM is _two orders of magnitude more expensive than ALU operations, and dominates the required power_."

This is what TrueNorth got right, and made its bet completing design before AlexNet was published. That was a time where Hinton was viewed by the ML community as a heretic talking about RBMs and backprop and hardly anyone believed him. TrueNorth, like NNs at the time, gets some shade by doing things differently that over time we're seeing validated by other researchers and architectures incorporating.

I recommend reading [4] if you haven't already, as it is rich in insights for building efficient NN architectures.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture#Von_N...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture#Von_Neumann_bottleneck)

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

[2] [http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7229264/?reload=true&arn...](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7229264/?reload=true&arnumber=7229264)

[3] [http://www.research.ibm.com/articles/brain- chip.shtml](http://www.research.ibm.com/articles/brain-chip.shtml)

[4] [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.01528.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.01528.pdf)

<comment><USER5> _GPUs (TX1) are ~10W, typical FGPAs ~1W, versus 70mW for TrueNorth!_

These numbers are meaningless. If you want to compare power consumption for different chips, you need to make sure they:

1\. Perform the same task: running the same algorithm on the same data

2\. Use the same precision (number of bits) in both data storage, and computation.

3\. Achieve the same accuracy on the benchmark.

4\. Run at the same speed (finish the benchmark at the same time). In other words, look at energy per task, not per time.

If even a single one of these conditions is not met, you're comparing apples to oranges. No valid comparisons have been made so far, that I know of.

p.s. The numbers you provided are off even ignoring my main point: typical power consumption of an FPGA chip is 10-40W, and I don't know where you got 70mW for TrueNorth, and what it represents.

<comment><USER3> Also those are teeny 32x32 images.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Could someone explain what a neuromorphic chip is?

The article assumes we know, but I haven't heard of it. And the wikipedia article on "neuromorphic engineering" talks about stuff like analog circuits, copying how neurons work, and memristors, none of which seem that related.

<comment><USER7> What I remember from my neuromorphic engineering course (or analog VLSI course) is that we designed the silicon layout (with n and p doping regions) in a way that the transistors are operating in the subthreshold regime in the IV characteristics. If I remember correctly the IV characteristic is linear in the subthreshold region? In contast in normal digital chips only the super- threshold region is used (voltage above a certain saturation threshold switches the transistor completely on). Using the subthreshold region it is possible to implement spiking neuons with only very few transistors. It works completely different than digital circuits. The connections between the transistors don't transmit just 0's and 1's. Instead all wires transmit analogue signals where the exact voltage matters. This makes these chips extremely energy and space efficient. These chips can also work much faster even in comparison to biological neurons (obviously using some assumptions and simplifications, such as neglecting certain special kinds of ion channels found in real neurons).

<comment><USER8> Theoretically , Analog is by far the best for neural networks. But why aren't we starting to see chips offered ? Heck even an old process like 130nm could have some practical uses .

<comment><USER9> Could you implement an approximate matrix multiplication in a direct analogue way? If so, I wonder why it hasn't been used for graphics cards.

<comment><USER5> Yes: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.02091](https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.02091)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The near future is not in putting learning inside a chip. We're a long ways off from the one shot learning needed to make a device actually interesting with localized learning.

Instead, the future is recording and uploading your observations to the cloud, with data scientist and neural net wizards training over this dataset on a cluster with tons of GPUs, and then deploying an optimized model to scrappy low precision inference chips.

This is why FPGA based designs will fail to be stunning. Specialized low precision ASICs more similar to DSPs like Movidius' Myriad (in the Phantom drones and Google's Project Tango devices), Google's TPU, upcoming Qualcomm chips, or Nervana's will become increasingly popular.

</comment><comment><USER10> Are these the Neuromorphic chips [1] Jeff Hawkins of Numenta [2] has been talking about?

[1] Neuromorphic Chips [https://www.technologyreview.com/s/526506/neuromorphic- chips...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/526506/neuromorphic-chips/)

[2] Numenta papers/videos [http://numenta.com/papers-videos-and- more/](http://numenta.com/papers-videos-and-more/)

It would also be good to see a major chip manufacturer or cloud provider that makes its own chips (Google/IBM) get serious about graph processing chips [3,4] and moving beyond floating point [5].

[3] Novel Graph Processor Architecture [https://www.ll.mit.edu/publications/journal/pdf/vol20_no1/20...](https://www.ll.mit.edu/publications/journal/pdf/vol20_no1/20_1_7_Song.pdf)

[4] Novel Graph Processor Architecture, Prototype System, and Results [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1607.06541.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1607.06541.pdf)

[5] Stanford Seminar: Beyond Floating Point: Next Generation Computer Arithmetic [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aP0Y1uAA-2Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aP0Y1uAA-2Y)

</comment><comment><USER11> Seem like a fancy name for parallel computing chip that specialize in efficient parallel computing

<comment><USER12> It's that what it actually is? Not familiar with the field, so is "neuromorphic chip design" really "we wired a bunch of GPUs together?"

Don't mean to minimize the work involved, just trying to decipher the marketing speak.

<comment><USER13> They are a chip architecture that communicates similarly to how neurons do - i.e. spiking behaviours. Makes it easy to approximate some neural systems (such as a neuromorphic retina).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Do 'Neuromorphic' chips do anything useful? At least neural networks have well known utility, but afaik, neuromorphic (i.e. heavily simplified models of neurons that one only hopes - but cannot prove are correct) have no useful applications - or even theoretical functions.

<comment><USER15> Low-power video object recognition for military drones, security cams, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Would it be possible to build an analog neural network with hardware?

<comment><USER3> Yes, I work at a startup that's doing this, but it's very dangerous with the amounts of noise, which seem fine on MNIST and even CIFAR, but you die on imagenet.

The key to circumventing this is very complicated and our "secret sauce".

<comment><USER17> Can you say a bit more about what you mean by "it's very dangerous with the amounts of noise"?

<comment><USER3> Network accuracy crashes

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> For laughs, I searched this document for the term Nvidia.</comment>


Against Facebook - <AUTHOR> https://0xadada.pub/2018/05/01/against-facebook/ <comment><USER2> > _This process of commodification has turned us all into tastemakers, > reviewers, likers, retweeters and brand ambassadors. The platform takes our > real authentic friendships and first commodifies them, reifies them, and > then sells them back to us as an "image of friendship", but one that is > bankrupt of any genuine social value._

This is the money quote.

The article raises a lot of points and is a provocating read. One of the points it brings up has also been on my mind lately: all the content I contribute on the platform just goes there to die. It's not searcheable, it's not easily indexed, it fades quickly within the matter of hours and it doesn't foster in-depth discussion. The silverlining is that this is finally pushing me to get my own site/blog up. Yes I will still link to it from FB and they can analyze the sh*t out of it if they want; but at least I get to keep and curate my own content.

<comment><USER3> See, 'microwork' is flawed. Facebook doesn't really benefit from the endless stream of likes and comments and sharing. Facebook couldn't care less what you like or what you actually think about current events or what your mood is or who your friends are or whether you're single. The "work" you're doing by telling Facebook this is not for Facebook's benefit. The "content" is not the point. Facebook can monetize the data, sure, but here it is acting as a prison guard; it surveils and records everything and so gathers more knowledge about the prisoners and thus maybe even more power over the prisoners. But this missing the key question: why have the prisoners voluntarily entered the prison and why do they play the games they do?

Prison is the right analogy for social media. The real danger of social media is not the endless surveillance and advertising. Social media is a prison. It's simultaneously lawless -- there are no real rules, no clear expectations, no documented roles or requirements or expectations -- and also deeply authoritarian. Everyone is subject to harsh unstated rules and watched constantly by the guards. It's a culture without any rituals, a game that can be won or lost but has no rules or regulations or referees. Indeed nothing is even real, everyone and everything is "playing" at something -- but it's never clear what. And the result, make no mistake, is chaos. Fake news, "context collapses," human impostors (bots and politicians), social media mobs -- all of these a just terms for a kind of deep-seated anarchy that rules over social media. Social media is a society surrendering to the logic of the prison and deciding to imprison _everybody._ And corporations sit back and just observe and record everything and print money.

But what's also interesting is that if they could the corporations would put an end to the anarchy. Facebook, I think it's very clear, does not like the chaos. They would love to put an end to all the fake news and scams and general crazines. But they can't. And this is important: in prison the guards are not really "in control." Their best hope is to guide the violence, give it direction, but they can't end it completely and in fact they did the system would turn on them. Zuckerberg is as much a victim of Facebook as everybody else.

The essay is interesting but I think focusing on the economic aspect and even dopamine addiction is missing the point. The question again is why the prisoners do what they do. And the answer I suspect is fear and violence. There is a kind of fear that drives people back to Facebook. People check their phones over and over, every fucking minute, not because they want to see what's new but because they are fundamentally concerned for their own safety and wellbeing. The concern is that somebody will have unfriended them or not invited them or simply said something about them. Or something may have happened completely unrelated to them and they know they must be seen to react in the right manner. This is what drives Facebook, the source of its enormous power. It is not a bunch of bored, dopamine addicts being tricked into doing "microwork." The truth is even worse than it appears. It's a bunch of deeply frightened prisoners doing their best to survive in an anarchic system of structural violence.

And here's the real genius of the system: it doesn't really matter whether you are on Facebook or not. The violence is structural. Quitting Facebook -- leaving the game -- can still be interpreted as an act of aggression by the prisoners left behind. They may be induced to respond and, worse, now you won't even see them coming because you've given up your ability to monitor them. No, it's always a good idea to keep an eye on your fellow inmates. Sleep with one eye open and always be aware of who's behind you.

<comment><USER4> Very well written but it's only if you are still within the matrix that Facebook even matters to your life.

I see teenagers checking their little phones every minute on Instagram or Facebook and I think it's sad, but they will learn from it. Currently human kind is learning what it feels like to require random likes from strangers in order to feel happy. At the same time a lot of people feel nervous in real life because they get less and less practice doing real human interactions.

Facebook makes people act like monkeys to get bananas. Its funny and sad how real humanity is disappearing from our lifes.

<comment><USER5> As someone not in the prison, it feels wonderful to _not_ have to deal with this whole class of problems that come with being on these platforms.

How many times I've obsessed over taking the perfect selfie: ZERO

How many times I've posted a status update and worried about how many "likes" I got: ZERO

How many times I've felt anxiety over who to friend or unfriend: ZERO

It is great to actually have time to live my life rather than to always be promoting and marketing it!

<comment><USER6> how many times have you obsessed about the perfect HN comment though?

<comment><USER5> Pretty much never. I've edited spelling errors though. Comments get up and down voted pretty much randomly here, but who cares? They're fake internet points!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Twitter invents the "pull-to-refresh" UI gesture that leverages variable > rewards to trigger addictive behavior as a way to increase user engagement > with the timeline; Facebook invents the "red dot" notifications that keep > people checking their phone for the next new thing.

two minor corrections:

1) pull-to-refresh was not invented by Twitter, but by Tweetie, a third-party Twitter client.

2) The "red dot" for notifications was not invented by Facebook, but most likely first appeared on Apple's mail.app about 20 years ago in the first version of Mac OS X.

<comment><USER8> [https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=mailbox&source=lnms&tbm=is...](https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=mailbox&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjFvpiL_OTaAhUDQ8AKHdW- AVcQ_AUICygC&biw=1280&bih=681)

<comment><USER9> Indication of receiving mail "with a computer".

Yep, checks out. Patent granted to new invention never thought of before.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Media Consumption Strike

...

> No TV/Netflix/Youtube

> No radio

> No podcasts

> No social media, delete your Facebook account

> No messaging/chat

> No idle web browsing

> No news aggregation sites

> No gaming

> No using a computer if it is not directly related to creating or resisting > (not consuming)

Seems kind of extreme to me. Article mentions that our "attention has been colonized". Maybe focus a little more on how your attention is being sold instead of targeted.

Understanding the way FB values users ($100/year if you're in the US) and sells their attention to marketers would instruct better ways to deal with attention colonization IMHO.

<comment><USER11> >> Media Consumption Strike [list from OP]

> Seems kind of extreme to me.

Not really. Literally the next paragraph after that list is this:

> Don't be a fundamentalist about the rules. Rules are meant to be broken. If > it's art, the rules are more loose; if its corporate media, more strict. > Cinema, literature, sci-fi, comic books, indy games: as long as these types > of works are not connected with our professional, interpersonal, or > political responsibilities, use them in moderation. In general, make sure > media consumption is done with more moderation than usual. The goal is to > break your habits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This article makes it sound like people are forced to be social addicts. Maybe some of us our outliers here so it may be odd for me to say this but I honestly have spent more time coding social networks than actually using them. So no, I don't get how people are forced to use them.

<comment><USER13> I don't know how old you are and I don't want to make assumptions, but in high school and college, societies, school sports teams and friends all tend to use Facebook as their sole means of communication. As someone who refuses to make a Facebook account (on principle and because I'm really stubborn), I do feel like I'm being compelled to use social networks more than I want to.

<comment><USER12> Yes, I agree it is more a part of our civilization as an expected norm of operation. Where I differ from the author is the fact that the majority of us our very capable of controlling our behavior although we may not initially realize our pattern or be self-reflecting on how it may be detrimental.

<comment><USER14> Curious if you use ad-blocking software/extensions? Most people don't AFAIK. Curious if you let yourself be influenced by ads or not. Not a judgement call on ads, some people like being exposed to ads especially if they're targeted.

<comment><USER12> I don't. I usually scroll/resize the window so I don't see them. I honestly don't care if they are tracking me one way or the other. If you know what the government already does, we're already screwed so its more of a statement than useful to ad block. I think if you go to the trouble of being on a TOR network then you're good but otherwise, you're fooling yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm hopeful that platforms like Brave Browser/BAT (Basic Attention Token) will take off, to allow people to more directly monetize their attention, so that 'unpaid microwork' will become 'microwork.' I don't know how much demand there is for it though, since people seem content to consume endless amounts of social media for free. On the advertising (rather than consumption) side, people will advertise stuff in hopes of getting free stuff or some type of sponsorship opportunity. It's crazy how much advertising they will do for free. Brands have to be making bazillions off of this type of advertising.

Recently, I noticed that Instagram has tweaked their algorithm so that likes (and story views) are doled out in a more spread out fashion. If you post something, you won't get a bunch of likes at once, now, you're more likely to get them over the course of 24-48 hours to get you back checking the app over the entire window. I figure they have always done this, but the window seems to have grown substantially. It seems like they are reaching further and further to get engagement.

Will FB be able to infinitely increase their engagement, or will they run out, and be left with a bunch of zombie addicts who are no longer valuable to them, since they've effectively killed their host? It seems like drugs sometimes have this end game.

Personally, I'm moving away from using any more unpaid platforms to host my data or work. If a platform has a free option, I choose to pay for it. I no longer trust companies that rely solely on advertising revenue (err, maybe that means I shouldn't be using HN :) )

<comment><USER16> > _Will FB be able to infinitely increase their engagement, or will they run > out, and be left with a bunch of zombie addicts who are no longer valuable > to them, since they 've effectively killed their host? It seems like drugs > sometimes have this end game._

Perhaps more saliently, microtransaction mobile games already have this pattern. They grow aggressively, stabilize after consuming all easily reached users, then slowly peter out.

Rather than unbounded growth, we actually see something a lot like bacterial growth in a closed culture: lag, log, plateau, death. [1]

It's (part of) what killed Zynga: their long-term engagement predictions didn't pan out and they couldn't cycle users to new apps fast enough. Subsequent companies like Supercell have learned to EOL apps like Clash of Clans - they draw down their advertising and onboarding efforts in favor of monetizing their existing players, and eventually wind down in favor of the next big thing.

I'm not sure whether Facebook will end up like this - they have a real advantage because their users generate new content without requiring corporate effort. But I and several of my friends have abandoned FB less out of any moral principle than out of sheer disinterest in their increasingly unfriendly, cash-focused product. My suspicion is that they'll emphasize daily time per user and monetization, but slowly bleed daily users in return.

[1] [http://academic.pgcc.edu/~kroberts/Lecture/Chapter%206/growt...](http://academic.pgcc.edu/~kroberts/Lecture/Chapter%206/growth.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why "Against _Facebook_ "? I know some mention of other services in the essay, but the headline, topic sentences and conclusion all call out Facebook pretty much exclusively.

Starting off attacking solely Facebook in the headline and wrapping it up nice and tidy at the end with "You should delete your Facebook account :)" creates a false sense of security for readers that once they delete their Facebook accounts, they're safe from the effects the essay warns about, but that's not true, as long as they're still on the web.

...and please understand, I'm not coming from the position of defending Facebook, but trying to get journalists and essayists to point out more clearly that these issues are pretty much baked into the web at this point and cutting off Facebook, even entirely, is going to have little effect in insulating yourself from things like unpaid microwork, having your data sold, being targeted with ads, etc., even if you are reading _good_ books in your free time.

<comment><USER18> > the headline, topic sentences and conclusion all call out Facebook pretty > much exclusively.

Perhaps because it's the easiest target and otherwise the general public might feel overwhelmed, and think that the fight for privacy is futile.

<comment><USER19> > fight for privacy is futile

See I always disagree with these sentiments. Again like everything in America it's about political action.

Problem #1: Not enough people vote.

You can break that down into, I see it, 3 buckets.

1\. People are content enough with the way things are going, and trust they will keep going so they don't waste their time, or rely on the "wisdom of the crowd" 2\. People are lethargic of the issues happening around them and complacency has fully set in. 3\. People are so underwater with responsibilities, debt, and pressure from stagnant wages and rising costs, their primary focus is survival, feeding family, and paying rent.

I am a firm believer that people get the government they deserve. It's not enough to wish a government into existence.

Having said all that, call this a gross oversimplification or whatnot, but I think it comes down to not enough people feel threatened or inclined to take action by the current privacy situation. That's it. Plenty of people love to talk about it, bikeshed about how things should or should not be, play the contrarian, whatnot, but if there's anything life has taught me: if people really want something, they do it (not saying want thing that thing is a good or bad thing)

<comment><USER20> > 3 buckets

4\. People don't feel self-efficacy, i.e. that their vote is having an effect. (Esp. in a two-party system where, if you don't like either big party, you're basically fucked.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Social media companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter and Snapchat have > created a marketplace for our attention, where we become the product sold to > advertisers who subtly change our behaviour to buy products and services for > their own benefit.

As opposed to what? There has always been a marketplace for our attention, and our attention has always been sold for profit. The only thing that has changed is the medium. Merely stating 'we are the product' doesn't make an argument.

> This type of persuasion is most effective when these platforms command our > attention with a heightened level of distraction.

I should suppose adverts are most effective when they manage to distract us from what we were doing when we weren't paying attention to the advert, yes.

> We create the content that is then used to command the attention of our > peers, which is then used to sell advertising space while the surrounding > content is measured for engagement, and the results are analysed to optimize > the next round of ad placement.

Might be new, but unclear how this has less upside for me than me consuming content which is written by someone else for the attention of my peers with the advertising space around it being sold and measured for engagement.

As for 'microwork', haven't we always done a lot of objectively pointless stuff, norms, social customs because together they make the world we live in a little more pleasant for ourselves? Why yes we have.

<comment><USER22> > Merely stating 'we are the product' doesn't make an argument.

I dont think i merely stated "we are the product"

> As for 'microwork', haven't we always done a lot of objectively pointless > stuff, norms, social customs because together they make the world we live in > a little more pleasant for ourselves? Why yes we have.

We've always done pointless stuff, but the engagements (microwork) we do on social media may _seem_ pointless to us, but to Facebook it creates the value they sell.

<comment><USER21> > We've always done pointless stuff, but the engagements (microwork) we do on > social media may _seem_ pointless to us, but to Facebook it creates the > value they sell.

As the time I spend grooming my hair every morning creates value for my hair wax company, or the time a salesperson spends filling in SFDC creates value for Salesforce. If I'm a salesperson, I don't expect Salesforce to pay me personally for the time I spend engaging in microwork using its product, because Salesforce creates value for me too. Facebook creates value for its users too, whether you choose to see that or not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > The net effect these platforms have on us is to alienate us from our very > lives.

I really like this conclusion paragraph. I definitely feel that everything I do through my phone is a much worse version than if I had just done them irl. Socializing is the biggest one. It makes me very happy to be with friends, but when I check up on people through FB etc I may get some instant gratification but it really just leaves me a little depressed in the end.

<comment><USER24> I added about 2,000 people after pulling off a political stunt.

Lost all control of my facebook and have a ton of randoms.

Made it very easy to leave, now my friends actually have to send me messages to tell me news.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think the article's diagnosis part hits home. But it's preaching to the choir. Most ordinary users won't see it that way. They seem to fall, hook, line, and sinker, for the respective platform's advertised purpose (pun fully intended). This is visible even in their complaints about a platform's perceived shortcomings.

</comment><comment><USER26> Not going to happen. There is a need here, people want some sort of social media. The best we can do is offer a better alternative. A federated protocol (e.g. like email) would solve a lot of problems.

The problem is that unlike email, not enough open source dev time goes into federated open source social media. Projects like diaspora, mastodon, and the like (there are even go and rust implementations of these protocols for those interested) as well as do it yourself servers like sandstorm.

If we want to get rid of facebook, make it an easy 5 step process to install Ubuntu, install sandstorm, download the diaspora server app, download the diaspora phone app, get your friends and family on it. I find it hypocritical that so much anti facebook sentiment is here, yet so little open source dev time goes into projects that could kill facebook.

<comment><USER27> 5 steps is too many

<comment><USER28> This is actually true now. I set up a mumble voice chat server. It is about 3 steps to set up your login. Nobody would use it. They use discord which is super happy-clicky and logs all messages forever. I predict Discord will be the next FB discussion.

<comment><USER20> > Discord will be the next FB discussion.

It's already sorta current: Discord's brother-in-spirit Slack is already past the hype and way into the Trough of Disillusionment with more and more people complaining about chat killing their ability to focus at work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The sad thing here is that the people who need to hear what is said in this essay the most, no longer have the attention span to absorb it due to the damage Facebook and similar platforms have caused to their minds.

</comment><comment><USER28> In my experience, people that have been absorbed into the collective must decide for themselves to leave it. Some may not have the will power or desire to do so and some may be oblivious to the effects it has on them.

In my opinion, this is nearly identical to seeing friends hooked on powerful drugs. I can't tell them it's hurting them. They have to experience enough negative effects to reach out for help themselves. Some choose to ignore many of the harmful effects. Usually a significant amount of damage has occurred by the time they accept something is wrong.

<comment><USER11> > They have to experience enough negative effects to reach out for help > themselves.

I think, when it comes to social media, the harmful effects are much more subtle and harder to identify and articulate than those for addictive drugs. There's a benefit in pointing out and elucidating them, as well and the mechanisms by which they operate. For instance, until someone told me, I didn't realize the Facebook app works just like a slot machine, except it dispenses small amounts of social affirmation and novelty rather than small amounts of money. I just hadn't made the connection.

<comment><USER28> In principal, I completely agree with you. I have just found the effort futile. This could be the circle of friends I have are just drawn to this. I see it as a dystopian story unfolding in real time. Then again, I saw the FB campus as highly dystopian and couple of my friends understood why.

<comment><USER11> > In principal, I completely agree with you. I have just found the effort > futile. This could be the circle of friends I have are just drawn to this.

Yeah, I think it's more of a marathon than a sprint. Right now, I'm satisfied if someone's engagement is knocked down a level (e.g. heavy to moderate, moderate to light, light to none, none to deleted).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> So I'm curious after reading this, since Facebook lives off advertising, do advertisers hold Facebook accountable for generating a certain # of clickthroughs, or heavens forbid, some other ROI metric for their advertising dollars?

Or are advertisers just funneling money into FB regardless of any measurable impact on their revenue just because there are "N millions/billions of active users" monthly on it?

They could certainly claim this even if you logged in once a day, never looked at any ads and then just left. Why continue to pay money for advertising?

For Google, I can see how it makes sense, because you are already in "search mode" for something, so if they pop in an ad that is even semi-relevant, you might click on it - I know I have... but Facebook?

It seems that money follows eyeballs...whether those eyeballs actually deliver any value... who cares. Or am I off?

<comment><USER31> I think your assertions may be correct and you'd still be off in that the some large fraction of the money facebook takes from big companies came from advertising avenues subject to exactly the same risk of being ignored.

Think billboards, train stations, toilets, tv, cinemas. All of those could be ignored and are often unrelated to the activity conducted at the time.

The value of Facebook if nothing else is that it is one central point to reach everyone's eye at any point in the day.

So for the non-data driven decision maker, Facebook at worst will be no worse than other low-yielding "mindshare/brand awareness" channels and is at least current and conveniently executed. (consider the admin that goes with negotiating and conducting lots of adhoc coverage with each channel)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Trying to perform a "media consumption strike" without dropping your smartphone is like trying to quit coke while keeping a eight ball in your pocket.

</comment><comment><USER33> IMO, we need to develop an orthopraxy around partial renunciation to navigate the future we are creating for our species.

<comment><USER34> What?

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> just block ads and use FBP, isnt the problem solved?

</comment><comment><USER22> hey, nice article

<comment><USER36> Hey there nice name!

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> people who are upvoting anything that includes "facebook" in the title should read it first. it's a bad article full of dramatic language and hyperbole.

<comment><USER38> okay, but could you give some example to back up your judgment? I don't want to read huge long things like this that are bad _nor_ to let "it's bad" comments be enough to sabotage my potential reading of something.

<comment><USER37> > media-driven neuroticism—a love of change for its own sake, or neomania, a > love of new things. Ultimately, neomania together with the media has a > negative effect on our moods, which isn't surprising considering most of > what makes the daily news is negative. This leaves us feeling powerless, > like the world is falling apart. So we turn to social media to witness the > (seemingly) beautiful lives of celebrities, and the romantic and exciting > lives of our friends and family. But this ends up driving the compulsion to > compare our own lives with those of the people we see on social media, > creating feelings of inadequacy, loneliness, and jealousy.

> The more media we consume, the more noise we get (rather than the valuable > part, called the signal.) If we consume the news on a yearly basis (in the > form of books), we can assume about half of what we consume is signal, and > the rest noise (randomness). If we increase our frequency to a daily intake, > the composition would increase to about 95% noise, and only 5% signal. If we > increase our intake to an hourly frequency (as those who follow the stock > market or heavy social media users do) the composition increases to 99.5% > noise and 0.5% signal. This is roughly 200% more noise than signal, more > toxic noise to both misdirect and distract, and has negative effects on our > mood.

It seems it's not just hyperbole, it's plain falacious bullshit. Sorry i did not read it all.

<comment><USER39> That signal to noise quote is actually great, and one of the reasons why the late Aaron Schwartz refused to read the news. He said in one of his essays it's far more valuable to read books, and basically explained in more words, the signal to noise problem.

<comment><USER37> can you explain how the logic is not flawed? If you are consuming 50% SNR news, it will be 50% regardless of whether you read once a day or once an hour

<comment><USER20> For example, let's say you watch TV news each evening. There's a political scandal going on which is featured prominently every night for a whole week as developments go on.

A lot of what is said will be redundant because each report needs to repeat the basics to be able to stand on its own. For a returning viewer, that's not new information, ergo noise.

The journalists and experts may spend time speculating about what happens next. This information will be outdated the next day as new developments take place, so it's noise for me unless the speculation provides value for me between the broadcast and the next day.

I stopped watching TV news on a regular basis, and switched to reading a weekly newspaper for precisely this reason. With a few days of distance from the original event, everyone can catch their breath and take a step back to put the story into the bigger picture.

Now after 6 years, I've cancelled my newspaper subscription in order to read more books, so I'm deliberately zooming out even more.

<comment><USER37> hindsight is 20/20\. but still that does not explain the flawed logic here

<comment><USER38> The logic is: have patience, reject neophilism, take things in with all the benefits of 20/20 hindsight by reading the best from the past year or month or whatever instead of whatever is new right now.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Using Machine Learning to Predict Bus Ticket Sales - <AUTHOR> https://heartbeat.fritz.ai/predicting-bus-ticket-sales-using-machine-learning-dd2fcfe15392 <comment><USER2> I hate to be That Guy, but would this meaningfully outperform a boring, cheap forecasting method like a moving average?</comment>


The US is going into hyperinflation - <AUTHOR> https://seekingalpha.com/article/4371490-united-states-is-going-hyperinflation <comment><USER2> This guy does not seem like the greatest of prognosticators. He is extremely (wrongly) bullish about metals.

Avino Silver & Gold Mines Providing Investors An Opportunity To Enter At A 50% Discount ([https://seekingalpha.com/article/4207912-avino-silver- gold-m...](https://seekingalpha.com/article/4207912-avino-silver-gold-mines- providing-investors-opportunity-to- enter-50-discount?source=all_articles_title)) -- ASM fell from 0.62 at the time to a low of 0.30 just before the pandemic

[https://seekingalpha.com/article/4241519-stock-market- recove...](https://seekingalpha.com/article/4241519-stock-market-recovery-is- dead-cat-bounce?source=all_articles_title) [https://seekingalpha.com/article/4215321-6-reasons- why-2019-...](https://seekingalpha.com/article/4215321-6-reasons- why-2019-will-be-nightmare-for-stock-investors?source=all_articles_title) \-- SPY +31% for 2019

</comment><comment><USER3> Hyperinflation usually occurs for one of two reasons:

1\. Supply-side shocks such as disruptions in oil production, food production, etc. that cause shortages, leading to massive spikes in price. This happened in the 1970s during the oil crisis and led to stagflation. Zimbabwe had a crisis in food production, leading to hyperinflation.

2\. Lots of foreign-denominated debt. Latin American countries experience hyperinflation because their debt is usually in USD rather than their domestic currency. Printing money to service foreign debt leads to hyperinflation. Weimar Germany had this problem when attempting to pay back the foreign- denominated debt reparations.

It's very rare to see demand-induced hyperinflation. That occurs when countries print way beyond the capacity of their economy to handle. If the US was at full capacity utilization and full employment, then an increase in the money supply beyond that would lead to inflation. But currently, the US is nowhere near full employment or full capacity utilization, so the threat of high inflation/hyperinflation is - to put it bluntly - nonsense.

You could make the argument that the stock market is overvalued because of current policy, but that is not hyperinflation.

</comment><comment><USER4> As long as it can print its own money without a serious devaluation (because the dollar is the standard international currency) it shouldn't happen.

The money won't lose its value. International goods will keep their prices in dollars, won't be an inflation on that side, so anything from outside won't get more expensive.

Trillions has been suddenly printed, in 2008 and this year, without making a big change in how expensive are things. If you try that, in those numbers, in any other country, you may face a big surge in inflation.

<comment><USER5> > without making a big change in how expensive are things

Stocks beg to differ.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is debatable. The end of our monetary path is probably not great. But with every major currency doing some form of QE, the ultimate outcome is uncertain. The current velocity of money seems to point to deflation in the near term. If inflation picks up, the Fed has a number of tools at their disposal. I distrust anyone who speaks confidently of the future in this arena.

<comment><USER7> Exactly right. Macro economics 101 provides the identity

      MV = PQ

where M is the money supply, V is the velocity of money, P is the price level, and Q is national output.

So it's true that if you hold V and Q constant, then an increase in M will lead directly to increasing prices.

But in the chart linked below, you can see that the V fell off a cliff at the same time M increased.

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2V](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2V)

Looks more deflationary than inflationary to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm not fully convinced about a hyper inflation along the lines of Weimar Republic or Venezuela or even Argentina levels inflation for that matter.

However, I understand that this is only and only because of US dollar being the global reserve. The real outcome of this is that all countries that handled covid better and are back on track economically, now are richer, because the US dollar is poorer. They can either choose to provide more liquidity in their system, thus raising their GDP or just stay rich with higher currency values.

Either way, Americans are poorer. And maybe deservedly so given the mismanagers that have been running the country.

<comment><USER9> > However, I understand that this is only and only because of US dollar being > the global reserve.

No, historically it's because the US dollar supply is actively managed with moderate inflation as a key goal. Now, the range of other policy options enabled consistent with that, yes, has benefited from the US dollar being a global reserve currency.

The Fed has recently made announcements that seem to indicate that it is weakening focus on the price side of it's mandate to do more on the employment side (to, in effect, compensate for Congress' failure to marshal fiscal polict to deal with that.) If there is unusual inflation, that active choice of monetary policy priorities—not debt or deficits—will be the proximate cause.

But even in that scenario, hyperinflation is unlikely unless the Fed completely abandons the price level side of it's mandate in setting monetary policy.

<comment><USER8> What makes you think other countries with rapid inflation don't manage currency supply?

If the monetary base suddenly doubles, the money will trickle down soon enough.

In US dollars case, it will trickle down to people and almost all other countries. Those countries will have more dollars in reserve, thus raising value of their currency or giving them low interest rates or ability to print even more.

This is extremely evident in the case of emerging markets like China. They will now get even more printed dollars in reserve and the only way to absorb it all is to print more yuan and allow more money to flow through China's economy, thus increasing wealth of the hundreds of millions still in poverty.

<comment><USER9> > What makes you think other countries with rapid inflation don't manage > currency supply?

They do. But on the (fairly rare) occasion of hyperinflation, they aren't managing it focussing on price levels, but some other objective, usually one or both of juicing short-term economic performance without regard to price levels or monetizing debt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The US has been hiding it's inflation for a while now. If you compare the quality of products vs the price of europe compared to the US, it's not even close.

<comment><USER11> I am not sure if I follow your logic about quality of products and what that has to do with inflation.

<comment><USER12> Imagine if it costs $2.00 for a 200g Kit Kat bar and ten years later it still costs $2.00 for a Kit Kat bar but they've shrunk the size to 160g. Size is an attribute and companies are working feverishly to alter attributes while staying as close to a price point as possible (consumers are much more focused on objective price point than subjective attributes and largely ignore objective measures like grams in a chocolate bar).

There is massive inflation, just not in first order pricing but rather in second order pricing-to-[insert attribute] ratio.

I think even casually observing your purchases over time will yield a conclusion that you are spending approximately the same for "less" in most (but not all) areas of your life.</comment></comment></comment>


Engineer intentionally derails train near Navy hospital ship - <AUTHOR> https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-military/2020/04/02/train-engineer-intentionally-derails-locomotive-near-hospital-ship-says-usns-mercy-was-suspicious/ <comment><USER2> Pizzagate part II

My Facebook feed is full of conspiracies about the virus.</comment>


Python vs. Pharo - <AUTHOR> https://levelup.gitconnected.com/python-vs-pharo-df47599a8ed0 <comment><USER2> I gave Pharo a chance. It stinks. Its classes are cluttered and complicated. The documentation is horrible. The syntax _is_ simple, but simple does not mean easy. In a lot of ways, I found myself re-inventing perfectly good wheels to get anything done because I couldn't figure out how to use the stuff that was there. In the end it was a waste of effort.

And being forced to use a GUI to do simple text-related things made it smell from the get-go, but that's a personal preference thing.</comment>


Using a badge to distinguish development and production environments - <AUTHOR> http://blog.labnotes.org/2009/10/08/using-a-badge-to-distinguish-development-and-production-environments/ <comment><USER2> Another tip: use a different colored favicon. Makes identifying browser tabs much easier.

<comment><AUTHOR> ColorfulTabs in Firefox is great for getting that behavior universally -- different domains get their own hues.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've long been in the habit of using _NEON_ colors for backgrounds, shell prompts, etc. as a reminder on divergent systems/logins.

<comment><USER3> When I used KDE, my ssh-to-production script used dcop to change the terminal background colour. (KDE + dcop is great technology. External access to APIs running in other processes. API discovery. Great stuff.)

Whilst gnome-terminal claims to speak dbus, I don't see any functionality exposed which would allow this. Does anyone have any pointers to achieving the same thing?

(Solutions which have occurred to me but which I find unsatisfying: run kterm under gnome, have a launcher script open a new terminal with the desired colour. I'm being picky, but my habits are such that I live in a small number of terminals. I'd like those terminals to change state as I ssh around.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is one of those cases where the title of the article really says it all.</comment>


Open source licenses requiring minimum price. - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/buzz/amichail/XyY72JZhjYJ/Open-source-licenses-requiring-minimum-price-Do

<comment><USER2> An intriguing idea. As someone pointed out, it wouldn't really be "open source", since it includes a restriction on reuse that all the major definitions of free software and open source (the FSF's, Debian's, OSI's) would considered impermissible. But it could be called something else. It's sort of the flip-side of the "non-commercial use only" licenses: commercial- use only, with a definition of what minimum level constitutes sufficiently commercial use.

One practical problem is that it seems it'd only work within relatively stable, narrowly defined markets. The specified minimum price may make no sense if someone takes the code and uses it to make an app in a different market, or on a different platform.</comment>


Global namespaced to Common JS Modules in JavaScript with babel - <AUTHOR> https://www.npmjs.com/package/babel-plugin-modularize <comment><USER2> This looks very interesting but I can't figure out how it is intended to be used. Is it meant to be a one-time converter of crappy code to good code or a tool to be used often. Or maybe it is just research.</comment>


Heads ought to roll at Facebook over the Soros smear – starting with Zuck'sI'll - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/facebooks-zuckerberg-should-step-down-after-smearing-soros-2018-11 <comment><USER2> This type of nasty conspiracy story has real world consequences (case in point: [https://abcnews.go.com/US/billionaire-philanthropist- george-...](https://abcnews.go.com/US/billionaire-philanthropist-george-soros- home-explosive-device-found/story?id=58683450)) and puts innocent people at risk (case in point: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_synagogue_shooting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_synagogue_shooting)) While causation is obviously multi-factor, Sheryl Sandberg should be put on the hot-seat for fomenting such hatred.

The really shameful thing about Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg trying to malign Soros is that both Sandberg and Zuckerberg are Jewish. Anything for a buck these days I suppose.

<comment><AUTHOR> And to think that those 2 have actual political ambitions... scary!</comment></comment>


Trump Calls for 6G - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/21/trump-calls-for-6g-cellular-technology-because-why-the-heck-not/ <comment><USER2> He's a living meme of ignorance.</comment>


Ask HN:Which companies put out programming puzzles? - <AUTHOR>

If I see a company that puts out programming puzzles in an attempt to hire people, my respect for them increases ever so slightly. Consequently, I think working for them will be more fun.
I cannot explain why I feel this way, but I do. If you have any arguments/reasons why this is incorrect, please comment and let me know.
So far I've seen Quora, ITA and Facebook do it. I'm sure there are tons more that I am unaware of. <comment><USER2> Being able to solve programming puzzles does not mean someone is going to be a good coder, but it will probably help weed out people that don't have the analytical skill that a company needs -- assuming the company needs coders with strong analytical skills.

Working for a company that has a need for people with strong analytical skills would be more fun than working for one that doesn't. Software that doesn't require _thinking_ is a bit boring, even if there are parts like that in all software.

Personally, my respect for the company would increase if I solved a fairly difficult programming problem, and they interviewed heavily on working with other people's code, and making your code able to be worked on by other people (this is a kinda hefty topic...). I'd be pretty assured that I would be working in an intellectually stimulating environment with competent peers -- and that would be awesome.

I'm not aware of many other companies that put out "solve a problem" types of hiring screenings, other than google.

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://tachyon.in/jobs/></comment>


Google: We're Going into the Solar Mirror Business - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2352748,00.asp

<comment><USER2> See also: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=820097></comment>


Alan Turing's stolen OBE, doctorate recovered in Colorado - <AUTHOR> https://www.timescall.com/2020/01/20/feds-seize-alan-turings-doctorate-and-knighthood-medal-after-they-were-offered-to-cu-boulder/ <comment><USER2> This tale reminded me of the Totenberg Stradivarius (also known as the Ames Stradivarius), stolen in the early 80s in Cambridge Mass. and recovered after the thief, a former conservatory student, died decades later and his wife (unaware of the provenance) tried to have it appraised ([https://stringsmagazine.com/a-new-chapter-begins-in-the- tumu...](https://stringsmagazine.com/a-new-chapter-begins-in-the-tumultuous- life-of-the-ames-totenberg-stradivari/)). The thief kept it hidden at first, but in the 1990s and 2000s was apparently performing with it in public.

</comment><comment><USER3> > _Julia Turing isn't related to Alan Turing, but she changed her last name > from Schwinghamer in 1988, according to the complaint. A former biology > teacher at the Sherborne said Julia Turing claimed she was Alan Turing's > daughter when he gave her a tour of the school._

That's pretty nutty. I wonder how often this sort of thing happens.

<comment><USER4> I feel sorry for her. It seems pretty clear she's dealing with some mental health issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _federal officials searched Julia Turing's home in Conifer and recovered the > items, which are valued at $37,775_

I'd really love to know how this value was determined. Is this like some sort of 'Antiques Road Show' valuation for insurance purposes?

The real answer here, given the historical context, is probably closer to 'priceless'.

</comment><comment><USER6> Wow. $37,775 is an insanely low valuation - I wonder who came up with that.

If the Feds are reading this thread and are looking for a buyer, please send me a message ;)

<comment><USER7> It's probably what they were insured for in 1984 when they were originally stolen. I have to think they're much more valuable now, given the past 10 years or so of history.

<comment><USER8> Turing's rehabilitation actually started in the late '90s in England, through plays and memorials like the one in Manchester (2001). So it's more like "20 years or so".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Miss Schwinghamer does not sound like she is sound of mind.

<comment><USER10> Even beyond the comment on her mental state, this is an unnecessarily condescending comment. It both refers to her with a name she no longer uses and assumes a marital status when none is ever implied. The decent way to refer to her would be Ms. Turing. Believing she isn't of sound mind should be an even stronger reason to afford her this tiny kindness of respect.

<comment><USER11> She legally changed her last name to Turing, claimed she was his daughter despite being of no relation, and stole Turing's possessions thereby endangering his legacy. What sort of kindness and respect does this warrant? I don't think the comment violates HN standards, is civil enough and more importantly quite appropriate considering the crime.

<comment><USER10> People have a right to be called what they want. You even admit she legally changed her name so why not use it? The motivations around her desired name are of no concern to any of us.

Intentionally refusing to refer to someone by their chosen name is wrong whether that name is Muhammad Ali, Chelsea Manning, or Julia Turing. I have certainly seen comments flagged on HN for inappropriateness when they refuse to refer to Manning by her chosen name.

<comment><USER12> Julia Turing changed her name _in order to commit fraud_. Chelsea Manning changed her name because she was transgender. You seem to be ignoring context in order to make some kind of misguided point.

Are you trying to "gotcha" people who argue for trans rights?

<comment><USER10> The items were stolen in 1984 and she changed her name in 1988. It also sounds like the stolen items were accessible to the public and the claim of being Alan's daughter was not done for any financial benefit. It doesn't appear that any fraud was even attempted.

I am arguing for people to be in control of their own identity. It doesn't matter whether the reason for the change is due to gender like Manning, religion like Ali, or for someone unknown reason like Turing.

<comment><USER5> I'm happy to call this woman Ms. Turing, but I don't understand why you are defending her actions, other than the name change.

In no way, does it 'sound like' the items were accessible to the public. From the article,

> _A former biology teacher at the Sherborne said Julia Turing claimed she was > Alan Turing's daughter when he gave her a tour of the school._

So, while her name was not legally Turing _yet_ , it sounds like the good professor rolled out the red carpet for her, based on who he believed her to be. It's very certain fraud was attempted, and also successful.

It says these items were tucked away somewhere in 'a wooden box in a laboratory', not sitting in the library in the open for anyone to pick up and look at.

Therefore, I don't think the reason for the name change is unknown in the case of Ms. Turing. I think it is reasonable to surmise that she believed it would be in her best interest to to acquire the last name, that helped her commit the crime 4 years prior.

<comment><USER10> I'm not defending her actions. I am defending her right to control her own identity. Committing a crime doesn't result in a person forfeiting all their basic rights.

Also "a wooden box in a laboratory" doesn't exactly sound like something that is under lock and key with access limited to next of kin. If access to these items was truly so limited, their theft would have been pinned on Turing immediately. In addition, I don't see what benefit she could possibly have received in changing her name four years after the theft. If anything it would further endanger her by linking her legal name to the one she gave the people at Sherborne.

<comment><USER5> I'm so dumb. Forgive me, this is clearly a case of the IoB

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22101244](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22101244)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> We would likely all agree that seizing these stolen items back is the right decision, but I think it does raise an interesting question. Can a stolen item be possessed long enough for the person or entity in possession of it to rightfully be considered the owner? There are countless museum collections around the globe that are made up of mostly stolen material. At one extreme you have ancient artifacts that were taken by colonial era archaeologists. Does the British Museum have an obligation to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece? What about items that were stolen less than a human lifetime ago? There have been plenty of examples of art stolen by the Nazis that both have and have not been returned to the rightful owners. There doesn't appear to be any consensus on this issue which results in every case resulting in its own negotiation.

EDIT: I'm a little confused why this is being downvoted. Is it because of the belief that the stolen items should always belong the the original owner? I agree with that in a theoretical sense, but I was just commenting on the fact that this isn't how things operate in practice and seemingly few governments actually hold anyone to that ethical standard.

<comment><USER13> IANAL, but I believe the concept you're talking about is called "adverse possession," and that it's complicated.

Some say yes, the British Museum should return its fruits of conquest, and other museums have indeed repatriated stolen artifacts. Heck, one recent example involves the owner of Hobby Lobby: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobby_Lobby_smuggling_scandal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobby_Lobby_smuggling_scandal)

<comment><USER14> The technical term for recognized squatters rights, for instance, is "prescription by adverse possession" or "prescription by good-faith possession". (Obviously varies some by jurisdiction.) The difference is that the law in most places recognizes fault vs no-fault of the possessor, and so the requirements for legal ownership are different, usually about 10 years vs 30 years of possession.

Movable property is much more varied and complicated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> They seized his diploma, maybe? I don't see how a degree can be seized.

</comment><comment><USER16> Title misleading. Should be "Feds seize Alan Turing's stolen doctorate, knighthood medal after being offered to CU Boulder".

I had no idea they were stolen in the first place

<comment><USER17> Not only that, but also: "He died by poisoning in 1954."

No account of the motive of his poisoning, or his prosecution. When activists protest against erasure, this is what they're talking about.

<comment><USER18> This isn't a biography of Turing doing that. It doesn't seem particularly relevant for an article about some documents.

<comment><USER19> If the method of death is going to be brought up, the context is relevant. I would agree with you if all they did was list the year of death. But once they say "poisoning", they leave entirely too many unanswered questions for readers.

<comment><USER20> I think that's probably poor writing rather than anything malicious, but perhaps you're (or parent comment is) right.

<comment><USER21> It looks like the hand of an editor to me. The writer wrote "Alan Turing, who died after consuming poison in an apparent suicide in 1954...". The editor told him "we do not editorialize or speculate in this newspaper, stick to the facts" and it got rewritten. Of course, it should just read "Alan Turing, who died in 1954...".

<comment><USER22> It's not a fact that he's the exemplar of a law forgiving everyone ever convicted for being gay in the UK?

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

<comment><USER21> That's 1) editorializing, since the act isn't officially called that, 2) not what I speculated the original copy said and 3) needlessly political.

And before you tell me "gay rights aren't a political issue, human rights go beyond politics": a new law being passed by politicians is literally as political a subject as it gets.

<comment><USER22> Huh. The way I remember it, the government first only forgave him, and then after a huge public debate decided to forgive everyone in similar circumstances.

But if you think that's editorial and political if mentioned at all, despite being endorsed by all sides of the parliament, I guess that's a valid opinion. It's certainly the case that many people claim that anything objected to by a single person is political. I usually find that the BBC is more clever than that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> One line summary:

The items were offered in 2018 to the library University of Colorado at Boulder, by this weird woman who had apparently stolen the items in 1984, then changed her last name to Turing in 1988.

</comment><comment><USER24> > _recovered ... Turing's doctoral degree_

I find this phrasing a bit surprising, but maybe I can learn something about words here.

I've only ever heard "degree" used as an intangible noun, to refer to the achievement or title or whatever you want to call it.

Is it common to use it to refer to a physical object? Is it an informal way of saying diploma? Maybe a British way of saying diploma? I made some brief checks of online dictionaries and couldn't find that usage.

<comment><USER25> I'm British, sounds unnatural to me too. I would have said 'degree certificate' (assuming that's what it is) though, not 'diploma'.

A 'diploma' to me is a 'degree-equivalent' (as determined by government; not, perhaps, by employers) qualification offered by non-universities.

<comment><USER26> Also British; have degree "under my belt", have degree certificate; in a folder somewhere.

As you said, you can't sieze someone's degree, at best you can invalidate it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> But Turing didn't have a knighthood.

<comment> why-el That's right, he was an OBE. They probably do get the difference and just using this colloquially.

<comment><USER28> I've never heard anyone use "knighthood" to colloquially describe lesser Commonwealth honours. (Here in Australia, certainly, we've gone back and forth on whether we have knighthoods, and when the Abbott Government briefly reintroduced knighthoods a few years ago it was a huge deal - and very distinct from other grades of honours.)

The journalist is American, presumably, and the US doesn't have direct equivalents to the hierarchical orders that Commonwealth countries have, so maybe they just assume that knighthood means something much broader than it does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> An obe isn't a knighthood

<comment><USER30> You're right. Only the two most senior ranks of the Order of the British Empire entail knighthood (and the formal title Sir or Dame).

Not that it really matters in this case but it's imprecise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Not sure it really matters? The name & his thinking is famous...but the doctorate is well just a piece of paper really.

<comment><USER32> This is true of many things. The original US Constitution, and Declaration of Independence, the Magna Carta (do we even still have that?), the dead sea scrolls, etc. And yet people value these things. Something being "just a piece of paper" doesn't really affect its value one way or the other.

<comment><USER33> > the Magna Carta (do we even still have that?)

Yes. It was actually issued multiple times (with slightly different wording), and each issue was in multiple copies. The most famous is the original of 1215 of which four copies survive (all in England).

I've seen the manuscript of the 1297 issue which is on display at the Australian Parliament. Another manuscript of the 1297 issue is on display at the US National Archives. I think those are the only two manuscripts outside the UK; there are a dozen or more manuscripts surviving at various locations in England.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Julius Mathison Turing was Alan Turing's father. Julia Mathison Turing lives in Colorado and sells Turing-related artwork on eBay. It's nice: [https://www.ebay.com/itm/Alan-M-Turing-by-Julia-M-Turing- Art...](https://www.ebay.com/itm/Alan-M-Turing-by-Julia-M-Turing-Art-Work- Collectables-Poster-/201588273703)

I hope they aren't too harsh on her.

<comment><USER27> > I hope they aren't too harsh on her.

According to the article she stole a dead man's medal from a school and then vanished it out of the country where it is of national importance. Seems like a pretty rotten thing for her to do and something we need to discourage, right?</comment></comment>


Our family, divided by the Troubles (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/aug/06/our-family-divided-by-the-troubles <comment><USER2> As a Northern Irish person born in England to a French mother, I have no stake in either side. What I will say is the marching for hours on end annoys _me_ , let alone native Catholic Norn Ironers.

Especially when the burn effigies of young Catholic boys who had just died.

And they insist that we are eroding their "culture", how about you stop burning Irish flags (although the type of people who go to the bonfires usually end up with an Indian or Côte d'Ivoirien flag)</comment>


Google tells how it conducts eye-tracking studies - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/06/google-sets-its-sights-on-your-sight/

<comment><USER2> There is an interesting difference how the pages scanned in this video. The eye movement on the one with mostly images were more random than on a text based.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder where they get the equipment. Any ideas?

Seems like a $30k deal: [http://www.insideria.com/2008/04/is-eye-tracking-out- of-reac...](http://www.insideria.com/2008/04/is-eye-tracking-out-of- reach.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> Official Google Blog entry with full writeup: [http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/eye-tracking- studies-...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/eye-tracking-studies-more- than-meets.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> Moral of the story: beg borrow and steal to get to the top of search results, if that traffic is valuable to you.

</comment><comment><USER6> Clearly this is why they put the highlighted AdWords right at the top...</comment>


The computer crash - <AUTHOR> http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6446268.ece

<comment><USER2> And next time we have a crash due to obvious human error, the question will be why we spend so much money on technology if it can't be used to save lives.

I'm not denying the observations made in the article - they could be well- founded, and such questions are worth exploring. At the same time, I can't help reading it partly as filler material, and partly as an excuse to bash Airbus (a fashionable choice in some parts of the media, because they're a state-funded enterprise and even worse, they're _French_ ).

I'm not carrying water for Airbus, they have had their share of problems. But it's rather unfair to point out that they also have a very good overall safety record. Of course, statistics are abstract whereas tragedies are very very personal.

<comment><USER3> When people talk about airplane safety issues I like to point out that awesome avionics software, a ridiculous thrust to weight ratio and a great pilot landed an F-15 that had lost it's wing.

[http://www.airliners.net/aviation- forums/tech_ops/print.main...](http://www.airliners.net/aviation- forums/tech_ops/print.main?id=84282)

The simple fact is bad things happen all the time to airplanes and mostly they just keep on flying. People want 100% safety, but 99.99% is about as far as we can push things when we want to cheaply fly thought the air at 600+ MPH tens of thousands of times a day for hours at a time. Consider the idea that out of all domestic flights on 9/11 less than 1/1000 of them had any real problems.

PS: On a normal day there are 30,000 domestic flights, but most of them where canceled on 9/11.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A less sensationalist (and apparently more informed) analysis can be found here: <http://www.weathergraphics.com/tim/af447/>

</comment><comment><USER5> This article seems to be mostly Airbus-bashing. This part about the 'coffin- corner' is just ridiculous. If flying was that dangerous, the safety records should look differently. Airbus' fly-by-wire system is built specifically to keep the plane on the save side of the flying envelope and will actively prevent the pilot from swaying out of it. This is its purpose and design.

<comment><USER6> More than one accident (the 320 that ran off the airport here in São Paulo a couple years back comes to mind) happened because the computer thought the pilot needs it to do one thing while the pilot was trying to do another. Many pilots regard the Airbus avionics as overly complicated and prone to unexpected behavior since that 320 crash right early on.

During a crisis, the last thing I need is a tool acting unexpectedly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If sensors are providing conflicting speed measurements, is there a reason not to believe the fastest reading?</comment>


Appeals Court Holds that Email Privacy Protected by Fourth Amendment - <AUTHOR> http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/12/breaking-news-eff-victory-appeals-court-holds <comment><USER2> It still seems bizarre to me that anyone would argue that e-mail is _not_ protected by the fourth amendment.

The court's decision said it best:

      It follows that email requires strong protection under the
      Fourth Amendment; otherwise the Fourth Amendment would
      prove an ineffective guardian of private communication,
      an essential purpose it has long been recognized to serve

<comment><USER3> My understanding that part of the arguments center around the idea of a reasonable expectation of privacy. You're not protected by the fourth amendment for public communications, for example.

While most people probably do expect that their emails are private, it's not necessarily a fair assumption. Email is by default completely unencrypted. (even if you are communicating with your mail server sercurly, it is likely that when your message is sent to a different server it is unencrypted.) You can make the argument that such open communication does not carry a reasonable expectation of privacy when anyone on the network could read it so easily. (Let alone people using open wifi to connect to an unsecured mail server where anyone on the network could read anything -- firesheep)

This is further complicated by the fact that we most of us hand over our emails to be stored by third parties (a very different practice from entrusting the postal service with a sealed envelope) who don't necessarily have the same legal protection to maintain the privacy of your communication as you do.

I'm glad that the courts see email as protected, but I recognize that there are legal arguments to be made for the opposite case.

<comment><USER4> Most phone calls back in the day were analog, and there was no reasonable expectation that anyone with a pair of alligator clips and a speaker couldn't listen in to their calls - but privacy laws still applied.

Same deal here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The interesting question is how and when mail providers such as Gmail accept warrants issued by other countries. From some articles I've read in the past it seems that such warrants are accepted by Google - which does also make sense, as Google needs to adhere to local laws (at least if they have offices in a given country).

But when do Google or other mail providers comply to such a requests? Each time a warrant is issued by any (more or less) democratic country (also if I have no relation to the country issuing the warrant)? Only if I've chosen the given country as my home country during registration? If I've used an IP address of a given country in the past?

This question is especially important, as the standards for warrants between countries differ. For some countries (such as Germany) it seems to be sufficient to be suspected for illegal filesharing in order for a court to issue a warrant for a "house search".

<comment><USER6> <http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/governmentrequests/>

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the link. Unfortunately it doesn't state under what conditions Google complies with requests:

"The "data requests" numbers reflect the number of requests we received about the users of our services and products from government agencies like local and federal police. They don't indicate whether we complied with a request for data in any way. When we receive a request for user information, we review it carefully and only provide information within the scope and authority of the request. We may refuse to produce information or try to narrow the request in some cases."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Has anyone else read the judgement? The case itself is super fun. Some sweet justice was served on the jackasses behind Enzyte. They lied through their teeth to convince people to buy their product, enrolled them in recurring payments against their wishes, and lied to banks to let them keep running.

Almost all the convictions were upheld in this ruling. In fact, the ruling that the defendant's fourth amendment right was violated ended up having _no_ bearing on the case. The evidence was not thrown out because they ruled that the agents acted in good faith according to the law (which they didn't even follow correctly). The fault is put on the law.

Does that mean that if the law (stored communications act) is challenged as unconstitutional that the case could be re-ajudicated and the charges overturned?

(Also, sad to see this sentence in a legal document: "All told, the electronic evidence originating at Berkeley filled three "tera-drives" and numbered 17 million pages." pretty sure they meant terabytes.)

</comment><comment><USER7> Wonder if the same ruling would cover text messages. Can the police peruse your cell phone under "reasonable suspicion", or would an explicit search warrant be necessary.

<comment><USER8> It should, but I suspect it'll still need to be separately tested in court.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting timing on the day Richard Stallman pointed out the dangers of the cloud and its lack of legal protections... this might be the first big legal ruling connecting your data in the cloud to you personally. Let's hope it sticks and expands as precedent... [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/12/breaking-news-eff- vict...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/12/breaking-news-eff-victory- appeals-court-holds)

</comment><comment><USER10> It will be interesting to see if this morphs into an expectation that email providers offer a minimum level of protection, as a floor. And then, once the floor is established, will be a race to the bottom?

Edit: I'm not saying that such an outcomes logically follows, only that the vagaries of society may shift in that direction.

</comment><comment><USER11> Good. Hopefully this is the beginning of restoration of some common sense in these matters. It would be even nicer if we could get rid of the Patriot Act and the crotch-grabby TSA POSs while we're at it, but I know better than to dream.

</comment><comment><USER12> amazon/paypal/visa/mastercard dropping wikileaks demonstrates that its not worth the hassle for them to stand up to the government. I speculate that most service providers will continue to comply with warrant-less requests.

<comment><USER13> When you operate on the scale of Amazon or under financial regulation like the other three, it pays to be on the government's good side. If you're merely an ISP or hosting provider that does email, your business doesn't need to interact with the feds much, so there's very little extra-legal leverage they can use against you if the necessity of a warrant is well-backed by the courts. In cases like that, you may have much more to fear from your clients than from the feds.

<comment><USER14> I suppose that's just one of the problems with an ever-expanding government.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Imagine if the authors of the bill of rights had not had the vision to append these 1400+ words to the Constitution?

<comment><USER15> Perhaps we would instead be asking under which of the "few and defined" Constitutionally-granted powers is the Federal government basing its demand that one private entity retain the personal communications of another private entity.

<comment><USER14> yeah, I don't see this in the enumerated powers.

I heard an excellent discussion of the rights of the people and the powers of the government. One was meant to be expanded and the other only further constrained. And of course the government is confused about which is which.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Nice work, EFF. Thanks.</comment>