Why China is fixated on the Moon - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/25141597 <comment><USER2> This fixation on the moon in a country with stark poverty for most of its rural majority is a sign of China's tyrannical government. The government is seeking glory for the ruling party rather improvement of the daily lives of the common people. (Yes, I do read Chinese and I have been to China more than once and I have been studying China's national policies since the 1970s.) I wish there were a higher percentage of participants on Hacker News who have both thorough knowledge of the language and culture and regular access to the Chinese press and mass media to comment on stories submitted here about China. I especially wish that more of those participants were old enough to have direct personal memories of the Cultural Revolution period and personal travel to both sides of the Taiwan Strait.

The article kindly submitted here reports the thoughts of a British space scientist (not a Sinologist): "He believes China could have astronauts on the lunar surface by 2025." I will make a testable prediction here, which I hope all of us live to see confirmed or disconfirmed. China will not have astronauts (the Chinese term is "taikonauts") on the lunar surface as part of a Chinese national space mission by 2025. (By contrast, I think it is barely possible, but not particularly likely, that an international space mission with a crew from several countries may return astronauts to the lunar surface by that year.) As China democratizes, which is something I fully expect to happen between now and then, China will readjust its national policy priorities. The big priority for China in the next decade will be opening up the political system to more dissent and more effective participation by the masses, especially the rural masses who make up the majority of the population, and avoiding the "middle-income trap" of economic growth stagnating while China is still a relatively poor country on a per-capita basis. China has a lot of issues to work on that are a lot more important than putting taikonauts on the moon as part of a Chinese national space mission.

<comment><USER3> >country with stark poverty for most of its rural majority is a sign of China's tyrannical government

China lifted more than 600 million people out of poverty between 1981 and 2004. The ongoing Chinese urbanization effort is massive. From 2010 to 2025, 300 million Chinese (little less than US population) now living in rural areas will move into cities.

China has tyrannical government, but it's not incompetent like it was during the Mao era. They know that they can keep the power only as long as they keep making things better for majority of people. If they fuck up, no security apparatus can keep people from toppling them.

China must ensure that China has the energy needed to reduce poverty and increase living standards. The great sucking noise in Africa is part of that, so is the conflict in the China Sea. If they look for the Moon for resources, that's not surprising.

<comment><USER4> How many of those 300 million rural Chinese who are going to migrate to cities are already migrant workers? About 50% of rural Chinese (i.e. most working age rural Chinese) already spend 2-12 months working in cities.

<comment><USER5> It still stands that they are lifted out of poverty. Note, those people are not sent by force, they are not arrested and send to labor camps. The way the economic structure is set up, rewards them to do that. It would have been worse if they had shitty conditions in the country side _and_ no possibility to move to a city to work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Getting to the moon is not a technology challenge (we've shown it can be done with 1960's era technology) it's a financial one. It's hugely expensive. I'm not sure how you "exploit" the resources of the moon when it's entirely cost- prohibitive just to get there and return.

<comment><USER7> We should not touch our moon. We shouldn't extract anything from it, and we should add very little to it. Earth's weather depends on it, so unless we're trying to manage our weather and its gravitational pull, etc.. then we shouldn't touch it.. and we shouldn't be trying to play with our Earth's moon unless we need to for some unexpected solar event.

<comment><USER8> What exactly could we do to it that would affect its mass significantly? Ship a significant mass back to earth? If things come to that scale, it can be easily corrected by dropping asteroids on it to balance the mass loss.

This sounds like a "we shouldn't have any fusion or fission in space!" argument.

<comment><USER7> That might be a possibility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This scene somehow reminds me of one of my favorite old DOS games -- Civilization I. A lot of you may share the same good memory. In the game a number (up to six) of civilizations/nations compete, you control one while the computer AI takes care of the rest. The game would end should one of the two goals achieved:

1\. One civilization/nation conquered/destroyed all others

2\. One civilization/nation managed to assembly a spaceship and launched it to fly to the closest Solaris -- Alpha Centauri

The first goal seems easy and tempting to follow, but turns out very difficult. In the end, to win the wars over those nations that often have huge cities (20plus) and perfectly armed with numerous tanks and battleships, you often resort to nukes to take them over. In more difficult levels such as deity level, it's very likely your populous cities get nuked. After a short while, I started focusing on building spaceships instead and had a few wins and felt better that way.

In retrospect, it may reflect the believing of the designer Sid Mier's, whom I totally agree with and respect for. Following the same spirit, we as human beings might as well put our inner conflicts aside and target the space instead.

</comment><comment><USER10> It is pretty clear that any country that has their own access to space is stronger than a country that does not. It provides a strategic advantage if you can freely put satellites up, it provides a military advantage if you can freely put people and satellites up. If you are competing with someone who can freely access earth orbit, then you can only have the upper hand if you can freely access the moon. Stations on the moon can take out anything in earth orbit, and they can take out places on the Earth by just throwing large rocks at them. A lunar rock attack can be as devastating to a city as a nuclear attack, with no fallout and no long term radiation risk. And you have a nearly infinite supply of rocks on the Moon.

Thus any nation that can establish and maintain a permanent presence on the Moon, and build the facilities for throwing chunks of the moon at any particular point on Earth, Will have overwhelming military superiority over any nation that cannot do that. Up to this point, the US has been the only country with the economic strength and technology to pull that off. That we did not do that, reflected more on the fact that we did not need to, rather than we could not.

If you are a foreign policy wonk, China getting a permanent moon base with manufacturing capability makes Iran developing a nuclear weapon seem insignificant. There are many nations in the 'nuclear' club, there are none in the 'moon' club.

<comment><USER11> Interesting, but ridiculous. Why build such a moon base when you could easily fly in a spaceship and destroy it without the effort of actually landing and building on moon?

<comment><USER10> Ok, follow that line of reasoning for a bit.

In order to destroy a Moon base, you have to get to it to destroy it. That takes time, up to several days if you don't have a favorable launch window from your launch pad.

Next you need a pre-text. I'm going to assert that it is a reasonable assumption that the Moon base is presenting as either entirely docile (scientific research etc) or entirely hostile (sending rocks at the planet). If its the latter taking out the handful of launch facilities is pretty straight forward which prevents any future attack from that vector. If its the former, well your attacking country needs to come up with a reason why they are flying what is no doubt a nuclear warhead, in the guise of a satellite toward the Moon.

Then there is terminal control (targeting at the site). So you may know in general what facilities are on the Moon from an initial landing point, but if the base has existed there for any length of time all bets are off. Also making the initial establishment on the dark side would force an adversary to first orbit the moon trying to identify your base, and then de-orbit into an attack orbit.

During its orbit your attack device will be vulnerable to orbiting defensive satellites which probably also play the role of communications relay which justifies them in lunar orbit in the first place.

My point is that mounting an attack on the Moon from the Earth is much more difficult and expensive than mounting an attack on the Earth from the Moon. Because the moon has a much shallower gravity well and the Earth has a much wider variety of targets which are more easily threatened.

The US and Soviets understood this although the technology to implement it was so expensive neither could afford to carry through. The cost of the technology has come way way down and once again there is another country putting its hat in the ring as 'superpower.' In a weird way, that means someone is going to the Moon, to create a permanent installation. My thought is that the US is like the hare in the story of the tortoise an the hare, confident in its ability to make that happen if it becomes necessary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> While China certainly has other things it should be working on (poverty, hunger, pollution, etc.), I think that the Chinese view this as a "coming-of- age". As China works to build its image as a superpower, it needs to be capable of other great feats beside economic prowess. Space exploration has always been one of the ways nations do this (read: space race). Sure, China is a bit late to the game... But better late than never.

</comment><comment><USER13> So is it time to start taking photos of the moon before the image seen from earth completely changes. Every time I read about the moon and mars I think about how humans are going to change the environment after living there for a while. The moon also happens to affect nocturnal life on earth, which means it will end up being an environmental issue too.

<comment><USER14> "Every time I read about the moon and mars I think about how humans are going to change the environment after living there for a while."

There _is_ no environment on the Moon. Can't 100% guarantee that for Mars but it's still the smart bet.

Repeat that as often as it takes to understand it. In the way most people mean the term, there is _NO_ environment on the Moon. There is _NO_ environment on the Moon. There is not a SINGLE LIVING THING on the Moon. If you want to be a Moon environmentalist, then you should be in _support_ of Human growth onto it, because until that happens, there is _no_ environment on the Moon to even become "changed".

Unless you really are in favor of some right for literal _rocks_ , utterly lifeless, sterile, dead, unconscious rocks with absolutely 0 probability of any of that changing to remain "undisturbed", there is no current environmental concern for the Moon.

<comment><USER13> You mean there is no ecology or atmosphere on the moon. The environment is whatever there is around. On the moon it will be a terrain of grey and white matter that reflects a lot of light when there is a full moon to the point that you can see around you here on earth. This is what I'm pondering since moon cycles affect nocturnal creatures here on earth. I'm not worried about plants and animals becoming extinct on the moon because there aren't any.

Btw, there is an atmosphere on Mars but I believe it is only CO2 and very thin. Mars missions have recorded Martian winds blowing sand on the tiny rover.

<comment><USER14> "You mean there is no ecology or atmosphere on the moon."

I believe I said: " _In the way most people mean the term,_ there is NO environment on the Moon..."

I stand by that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Who "owns" our Luna? Seriously, if China did decide it was economically feasible to mine it, are the resources theirs for the taking, or do we have international treaties defining things, similar to Antarctica (although that's also up for debate...)

<comment><USER16> Well, there's this: [http://www.unoosa.org/oosa/SpaceLaw/moon.html](http://www.unoosa.org/oosa/SpaceLaw/moon.html)

Enforcement is another thing.

<comment><USER17> From [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Treaty#Ratification](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Treaty#Ratification) -

 _" As of 2013, only 15 states (Australia, Austria, Belgium, Chile, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Mexico, Morocco, Netherlands, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Uruguay) have ratified it. France, Guatemala, India and Romania have signed but not ratified it."_

The only country in the list with a current space capability is India.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm glad the Chinese go for it, for whatever reasons. It's a net gain for everyone, technology or socially-wise. I'd rather see funding for the moon program or new exciting probes rather than dozens of useless companies like Buffer.

</comment><comment><USER19> I hope we have spies in place. They never play by the rules. NQ mobile is a perfect example.</comment>


Show HN: CodementorX – Hire freelance developers on demand - <AUTHOR> https://hire.codementor.io <comment><AUTHOR> Our team at Codementor is launching our new freelance developer platform and we're excited to share CodementorX with HN!

Over the past 2 years, Codementor has grown to become a vibrant developer marketplace for live 1:1 mentorship with 5000+ vetted expert developers. We're now expanding our marketplace with a new freelance platform called CodementorX.

CodementorX allows entrepreneurs, startups, and businesses to hire the top 2% of developers on Codementor. Unlike traditional freelance platforms, CodementorX is an invite-only network of senior engineers at Silicon Valley companies, startup CTOs, top Stack Overflow contributors, and experienced freelancers.

Let us know if you have any questions or feedback!</comment>


Images from Sun's Edge Reveal Solar Wind Origins - <AUTHOR> http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/images-from-sun-s-edge-reveal-origins-of-solar-wind <comment><USER2> Was any of this data from the recently-revived STEREO-B?

<comment><USER3> If you mean "from data acquired since connection to STEREO-B was reestablishd", then no. The abstract of the paper says:

> "We present image sequences collected by the inner Heliospheric Imager > instrument on board the Solar-Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO/HI1) > in 2008 December"

and the article information says the paper was received 2016 June 9.

Contact with STEREO-B was lost on October 1, 2014 and regained on August 21, 2016.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why does Slack App on macOS drain 3GB of memory? - <AUTHOR> Can somebody explain to me why the Slack app drains >3.5GBs of memory.
I am using the version 3.1.0 on 10.10.5 OSX.
Am I the only "lucky" user getting such a poor memory performance? <comment><USER2> I quickly abandoned the slack "App", but even dedicating a chromium tab to Slack ended up being absurdly heavy. So I've finally migrated to weechat+weechat slack plugin. For a moment I thought I was too late, as slack is killing the xmpp and irc bridges - but the dedicated slack plugin for weechat uses the slack api.

As an added bonus, there are no more animated emojis in my peripheral vision that can be mistaken for an update / alert.

I'm on Linux, but I presume wc works fine on Mac. A bit of a shame that the qt-based client seems abandoned - but it's open source and python so maybe it'll pick up some steam for those that want something a bit less console only, but still not Web app crappy.

[https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack](https://github.com/wee-slack/wee- slack)

[https://github.com/weechat/weechat](https://github.com/weechat/weechat)

[https://github.com/weechat/qweechat](https://github.com/weechat/qweechat)

I imagine that both for the console client and the qt one it should be possible to map some of the more common emojis to Unicode (eg :heart:).

<comment><USER3> I don't have a horse in the slack/xmpp race (although I do hope open standards win out) but if they have a public API which lets you do all that, would it be easy enough to build an XMPP gateway?

<comment><USER4> IRCCloud have actually written a IRCv3 gateway for Slack (although it's not open... yet): [https://twitter.com/IRCCloud/status/971416931373854721](https://twitter.com/IRCCloud/status/971416931373854721)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is what you get when you use a full-blown web browser for a simple messaging app.

</comment><comment> yoz-y A lot of digital ink was spent on this issue. Basically it is due to the fact that the Slack app uses Electron, and thus it is not much more than a Chromium browser with several loaded webpages.

<comment><USER6> VS Code is an electron app

<comment><USER7> And it sucks at this too. Just not as badly as Slack or Atom.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> 104 MB at the moment. For me at least, Slack really got their shit together sometime last year and improved the issue significantly. I still remember having to restart Slack twice a day, but it ain't issue anymore.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, mine is 122MB at the moment as displayed in the OS X Activity monitor.

<comment><USER10> Continuing the anecdata collection, I'm in the over 1GB club. One instance of Slack, six of Slack Helper, several of which using 200GB of memory, but the biggest being 1GB. Timely thread, since when I sat down this morning and unlocked my computer, I was warned that I'd run out of memory and needed to quit some apps.

<comment><USER11> _> several of which using 200GB of memory_

I really, really hope you mean "200MB", although I honestly wouldn't be surprised if they managed to use 200GB if accidentally started on a beefy server.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What I find interesting is that this is now becoming more noticed by other people. We've had a whole bunch of non-tech people at my company start complaining about Slack's sluggish performance, connection drops, the fact that it makes other things on their machine unusable, that kind of stuff.

I would like to think this means there will be a bit of a change going forward.

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't use the app anymore and open it in my browser as a regular tab. Much much better.

<comment><USER14> I have a MPB 2012 and I purchased a second hand ipad mini2 just so I could handle all my comms through it. Slack was the main culprit for that decision, my computer was basically unusable while running rails with guard + ember + chrome(pivotal tracker) + slack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> No, that's the default slack experience if you have a lot of teams.

I recommend:

* Disabling emoji support, especially animated emojis>

* Disabling auto-expanding of images (gifs are egregious)

* Use compact display

* Limit number of channels/groups you're in if possible, surely you don't need all those channels.

Doing this curbed my resource usage quite a lot. I don't miss emoji's all that much.

<comment><USER16> Hm, I wonder how much a company's Slack culture affects memory usage. I've never seen it eat more than a few hundred MB, but then my coworkers almost never post GIFs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> to be fair, this is not an electron issue as vscode runs fine on all platforms. I don't really want to bash the devs but... Maybe they should take a look at it.

<comment><USER18> VS Code is by far the best optimized Electron app I've seen, but with a total of 5 files open, it will still turn my laptop into a pizza oven on my lap.

It, and every JS/Desktop hybrid has so much promise, but my Lord, as a proficient JavaScript junkie that has a deep abiding love for the language, it's not performant.

I just can't use either Atom or VS Code for day to day work.

PS, Sublime, please support some form of JS plugins, even if that means limiting the API for JS plugins.

<comment><USER19> they have plenty JavaScript plugins which functionality are you missing?

<comment><USER18> I mean supporting it as the language in which the plugin is written. If there are plugins that are doing that, let me know, I'll be googling that all day today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> _Am I the only "lucky" user getting such a poor memory performance?_

No, that's very common. For most people Slack's usefulness outweighs it's poor memory footprint.

</comment><comment><USER21> I hate these questions.

You need to put it in context. Is system ram under pressure? Poor memory performance is measured by swap i/o or bandwidth, not usage.

If you have 16gb of ram and little else using the ram then there is nothing to worry about. If you have 4gb of ram then a support ticket is probably your best course of action rather than whining to random forums.

To answer your question, runtimes will lazy garbage collect because you might want the data again. Decompressed images and frame buffers lead to faster under interface interaction. You're not using a terminal app, you're using an app that can render any font or image in complex ways to an image buffer, for rendering at 60fps with smooth scroll. Are you also on a retina display?

</comment><comment><USER22> This reminds me of the CPU issues there were previously with Slack: [https://email@example.com/wheres-all-my-cpu-and- memor...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com/wheres-all-my-cpu-and-memory-gone- the-answer-slack-9e5c39207cab)

Sounds like Slack doesn't have any type of performance testing as part of their release cycles.

</comment><comment><USER23> I get around this by using the web client daily (pinned tab in chrome) and open up the desktop app whenever I need to do specifically screen sharing (or just skype). It's not worth the resource headache.

<comment><USER24> Same. The web client has feature parity with the desktop client so I haven't understood why people bother with the latter.

<comment><USER25> It does not have complete feature parity. One of the things missing, that is important for me and the team I am on, is the ability to share screens and allow for remote control in that session. That is a Mac App only right now, at least the last time I checked.

<comment><USER26> Now that screenhero is no more, screen sharing is literally the only reason one of my teams use slack. We use hipchat (not by choice) for the rest of our communication.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> FreeBSD an entire operating system runs on about 100MB ram. [https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/bsdinstall- hardware.htm...](https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/bsdinstall- hardware.html)

<comment><USER28> CentOS 7 is roughly the same.

For a minimal install (with ssh service and vsftpd), i booted it and flushed the filesystem cache, then ram usage was about 88MB.

<comment><USER29> Heh, the _recommended_ amount of RAM to run Windows 95 was 8MB.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> If you're signed into many workspaces, try closing a few.

</comment><comment><USER31> I once had it hit 40gb of memory usage. I bought more RAM.

</comment><comment><USER32> The joys of Electron...</comment>


You gave $1000 through Tipjoy. Thanks. - <AUTHOR> http://tipjoys2cents.blogspot.com/2008/02/you-gave-1000-through-tipjoy-thanks.html <comment><USER3> Is that a $1000 pledged or paid?

<comment><AUTHOR> pledged.

<comment><USER3> I'm really interested in what the conversion rate is, but I understand you might not have that data yet or want to release it. I don't think a low rate is an invalidation of tipjoy at all incidentally, as long as its not zero of course.

<comment><AUTHOR> The rates widely vary from 100% to 0%. It's hard to get an average from that. It'll always be hard to get a single number, as they'll be content and site dependent.

Soon we'll publish numbers that the average blogger can use.

<comment><USER3> Actually I think it makes more sense if you don't report pledges as a monetary amount (at least not directly). It feels a bit like a rip off when the real amount is inevitably lower and any potential users is going to be trying to do the conversion rates for any figure they see. A user report might say you got 100 pledges and $5 this week.

Already a lot of people are worried about people tipping and absconding - <USER2> think you should redefine the way people think about your tips: its a way of showing your appreciation which you can convert into real money at convenient times. Don't fight the people who want to show appreciation and not pony up the cash, and don't fight with bloggers to see the pledge amounts as real dollar amounts when they won't be.

<comment><USER4> At <https://tipit.to/> we don't normally count pledges. We do display them, but in gray. Right now in our top charts I've turned on a little flag so that pledges are included in the front page top charts algorithm, but that's just for the launch. I'll turn that off sometime soon.

One of the main reasons we do this is because not counting pledges automatically reduces on welching. When an unpaid tip is something only you yourself can see, then there's absolutely no point in pledging a tip without any intention of paying it. The only welching going on would be those that honestly forgot. Either way, it doesn't drag down the validity and utility of the statistics.

<comment><USER3> Interesting. The other side of the coin is that encouraging people to click that button is the first step in getting real money. I don't think I could tell you which is a better idea without seeing stats for both, even then...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Won't people tip themselves, thus turning this service into an advertising one?

<comment><AUTHOR> We'll be smart with the top tips page to try to make this harder. That is the only page where this would be a problem, and lots of people will only pay attention to what they've tipped, and and what their friends are tipping.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> 1000 in gift cards! yay!

</comment><comment><USER7> sweet! Way to go guys.</comment>


Ask HN: Other businesses? - <AUTHOR>

I'm curious how many of you have (or had) other non-software businesses large or small. e.g., I'm into LED lighting and right now I'm designing small reading lamps I plan to sell on Etsy. <comment><USER2> I've had a gas station in Northern Canada, but it was a total failure, which is sad. We got defrauded big time while we were in Europe and the whole thing almost literally collapsed. Some of our employees had had the great idea to go and gamble in the casino with the proceeds of the business, they would put back the 'borrowed' money before we returned.

You can guess the rest.

By the time I found out about it (a supplier calling to Europe why we had not paid for a month) it was much too late to salvage anything.

So, since then I try to stay out of retail as much as I can...

I lost some money, which was sad, but they lost their livelihood and their reputations, which is probably more of a problem in the long term. It took me a while to get over it though, I had a serious trust problem for a while.

</comment><comment><USER3> I had and have numerous over the years. I had a successful Contracting business (electro-mechanical) for quite a few years, a Consulting Business in the same field, a Computer School in the days that the masses wanted to learn DOS :), a plastic bags factory. The software business has always been my sideline even when luck was not on my side (running a couple of web projects now).

The Contracting Business found a glorious end when the Zulus were marching in central Johannesburg some years back and the Construction Industry just faded away. The Computer School ran out of capital when Windows came out and I had to replace 200 computers and I sold it to someone else (I hated mice for quite a few years after that). The Plastics factory was a big thing for me until they banned plastic bags and I cashed in! Oh! and I forgot and I had this great software that was used for designing Halon 1301 Fire Protection systems that all the big data Centers were using until the Ozone Layer appeared and halon was banned! I am now busy with the greatest thing after Primavera!

I guess I am from the Old Hacker School. Isn't that what you guys do? Just let your imagination roam and do things? Over the years two things kept being with me right through all the businesses, I take time to revisit my Maths twice a year and I program. It keeps me sane and now and then makes me some additional income.

<comment><USER2> I think it was the ozone layer that was disappearing ;)

You're a busy bee, nice to see you active in so many different fields!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> An "entertainment" company with a friend. Currently shooting a short film and produced/performed one theater play.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you know who this person is? - <AUTHOR> Hi! Quite a while ago I saw a tech talk by someone.
I'd like to see this talk again.
The problem is that I can't remember anything about the person in question and I can't remember the title of the video.
All I remember is that the talk was about being quite cautious about using technology we don't understand (Quite a lot of emphasis was on machine learning) and the speaker was actually quite funny.
The talk was on one of these coding conferences. Don't remember which one, obviously.
The speaker in question has a homepage on a university website (I think it was a university in the US north-east but I'm not sure) and was actually really funny. He also had other talks he had made.
I've been tearing my hair out here - even spending a few hours scrolling through my Youtube history.
Do you know who I'm talking about? <comment><USER2> James Mickens, probably: [https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity18/presentat...](https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity18/presentation/mickens)

Many, many people found that funny. I don't, but I seem to be in a small minority.

His Mossad article is great, though!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. That's him! Awesome! Thanks!

<comment><USER3> Wow... this was worth the watch - thank you!

awesome lol at [https://youtu.be/ajGX7odA87k?t=1540](https://youtu.be/ajGX7odA87k?t=1540) (tldr - feeding gratuitously racist input to ML twitter bot 'TayTweets'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> hmmm - what happened here is very interesting outside of the specific question : HN as human based search with complex criteria. Looks like OP got his answer in ~1 hour.

I wish I knew how many people viewed this question during that hour.

<comment><USER5> > I wish I knew how many people viewed this question during that hour.

here's my naive attempt to crudely estimate this:

[http://www.siteworthtraffic.com/report/ycombinator.com](http://www.siteworthtraffic.com/report/ycombinator.com)

      > [daily] Unique Visitors 	257,211
      > [daily] Unique Pageviews 	439,687

[https://www.similarweb.com/website/news.ycombinator.com](https://www.similarweb.com/website/news.ycombinator.com)

      > Total Visits 15.88M  [per month]
      > Pages per Visit 2.51

[https://ahrefs.com/blog/website-traffic/](https://ahrefs.com/blog/website- traffic/)

      > SimilarWeb overestimated total unique visitors for 91.67% of the websites.
      > SimilarWeb overestimated total unique visitors by 308.81% on average;
      > SimilarWeb overestimated total pageviews by 210.58% on average.

SimilarWeb estimates 1.3 million total daily pageviews . Lets blindly correct trusting the ahrefs comment about overestimation, that gives us 1.3 / (1 + 2.106) = 0.42 million total daily pageviews. That roughly agrees with the siteworthtraffic 0.4 million unique daily pageviews number. So, let's arbitrarily trust siteworthtraffics 1/4 million unique daily visitors estimate.

Let's assume that traffic is uniformly distributed over each 24 hour period (wrong) and that 50% of traffic hits the first page of links under /news, /ask and /show (wrong) and that 50% of traffic hits other links. Of the former 50% of traffic, lets assume that 50% of people who click the link also scan the comments (wrong), and that views are proportional to the number of votes each link has (wrong), and that the current selection of links and votes is the same as during the 1 hour period between the question being asked and answered (wrong).

the sum of votes over links on the first three pages of /news, /ask and /show is roughly 4200 votes, and this ask topic has 19 votes, giving it a weight of 0.0044 .

multiplication gives 250,000 unique visitors / day * 1/24 * 0.5 * 0.5 * 0.0044 = 11 unique visitors during the 1 hour period before the question was answered.

it wouldn't be surprising if this estimate is off by 1 or 2 orders of magnitude -- underestimating, not overestimating, obviously -- if you can propose a more plausible estimate, propose away!

<comment><USER6> Nice analysis. No idea if it's correct but it seems logical.

Ps this would be a great question for an interview (if you believe in those "how does this person think" type questions).</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which front end stack would you recommend for 'platform' stability? - <AUTHOR> If you where going to pick a stable frontend setup for a project that will run for years what would you pick today?
In the next few months I'm starting a new project and I'm primarily a backend developer who does 'full stack' by the simple reason that I'm the only developer.
At present I use a heavily customised variant of Bootstrap (24 col grid, custom 'components' that kind of thing, lots ripped out) with KnockoutJS/Babel (ES2015 stuff) and Browserify, TypeScript is on my radar.
I like KnockoutJS a great deal and for the things it handles it handles them well but it's showing it's age (it's quite slow on mobile if you aren't careful) and it's user momentum has dropped off (that said I've found it to be ridiculously compatible with things and I've never actually had a serious issue with it, something I can't say about a lot of things in JS land).
VueJS seems like it's spiritual successor and has some neat features and off course Bootstrap 4 is on the horizon.
I'm aware this is a potential holy war question but as always with this stuff I'm worried I'm missing something awesome and obvious to someone in that domain, I only found out about Knockout years ago because of an off-hand comment by a front end dev I was talking to on IRC and it has saved me vast amounts of time over the years. <comment><USER2> The reason there is such a wide variety of ways to develop web platforms isn't because each one before it wasn't stable enough, it's because people have different preferences and skillsets. Nginx is one of the most widely used web servers and it's written in plain old C. It's the developer who ultimately decides whether or not they shoot themselves in the foot. Languages like C simply take off the safety in exchange for the quick draw. So pick the whatever is most intuitive for you to learn and ideally also choose platforms components that are modular.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank your for your response and I understand what you are saying (I used to be a desktop developer years ago).

That wasn't really my question though, I was asking for what other people thought was going to be a stable platform over the next few years.</comment></comment>


How I Spent Six Years Developing a Product - <AUTHOR> http://blog.scrape.it/how-i-spent-six-years-developing-scrapeit-and-why-you-shouldnt-repeat-this-mistake

<comment><USER2> After reading the article just realised why didn't you use mechanize with beautifulsoup library in Python. I feel you could have succeeded in your first attempt within 3-6 months. I did it in 2008 and it worked great for me. Also look at another open source project called scrapy [http://scrapy.org/](http://scrapy.org/)</comment>


The Best-Paying Internships in America - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-02/these-are-the-best-paying-internships-in-america <comment><USER2> The data here is only for large companies. I happen to know what a couple of medium-sized quantitative trading firms (Jane Street and DE Shaw) pay interns, and it's meaningfully higher (10–12k/month), although it might even out if you consider the housing allowance Facebook et al provide.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting that they never mention law firms. Summer associates at top law firms generally earn the prorated salary for a first year associate, which can be easily in excess of $15,000 a month.

I'm bringing this up because it is important, when we're discussing "shortages" of engineers, to keep in mind the kind of options highly educated people have available to them in the US.

Yes, law requires a graduate degree and passing the bar, but many of these interns at tech companies have graduate degrees, and the undergraduate prep for a STEM degree is considerably more rigorous than the typical poli-sci or economics taken by pre-law types (yes, Econ takes a bit more math, but not typically on a level of what is demanded of STEM majors).

Generally speaking, Law school isn't a great idea, but for the top students at the top schools, it remains extremely lucrative. It really makes no sense to compare the top CS and Engineering majors at top schools to some average salary. You need to look at what the options are in other fields for elite students.

Once you do, it is pretty clear why people with choice often decide to do something other than STEM, and why a bit part of the appeal of work visas such as the H1B is that they create a pool of workers who aren't allowed this free choice. Without that crutch for employers, I suspect salaries in tech would rise. And keep in mind, it wouldn't require denying talented immigrants entry to the US, all we'd have to do is let these talented immigrants make the decision about what to study and where to work for themselves. No more allowing Silicon Valley employers to dictate these choices for them.

</comment><comment><USER4> Jesus Christ, I need to get out of life sciences. What a fucking mistake that was.

<comment><USER5> It's all about Cost of Living. A $150k base salary really doesn't get you much more than an average-ish life in San Francisco.

<comment><USER6> You can do better if you move to the East Bay and cut your rent in half.

<comment><USER7> Nothing like a daily BART ride to scare you off of working in the Bay Area. Especially one deep enough into the East Bay (with a long enough bus ride to the station) to cut the rent in half.

An hour each way (20 minutes for first and last mile, 40 minute train ride) will save you _maybe_ 30%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Some more numbers here: [https://twitter.com/rodneyfolz/status/724787290824798209](https://twitter.com/rodneyfolz/status/724787290824798209)

Two Sigma at the top with $10.4k/mo + $5k relocation + $5k housing.

</comment><comment><USER9> Gotta be Axe Capital, surely.

</comment><comment><USER10> Pretty sure IB pays significantly more, though they work a lot more hours

<comment><USER11> also summer internships at v250 law firms are prorated first year associate salaries

<comment><USER12> And summer associate positions are a slightly more professional version of summer camp. But I guess the firms make it back when you come back as a regular associate...</comment></comment></comment>


Amazon Is Losing the War on Fraudulent Sellers - <AUTHOR> https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/05/amazon_is_losin.html <comment><USER2> When there's no "real" competition for the monopolist, customers don't have alternatives and the company doesn't need to "wage war" on fraudulent sellers, unless those sellers don't pay their fees. Whether the seller actually "earned" the top spot or cheated/paid to get it does not matter.

Whichever seller you buy from, as long as it's on Amazon's platform, Amazon makes money from it.</comment>


Eliud Kipchoge finishes marathon in 2 hours, 25 seconds - <AUTHOR> http://www.espn.com/sports/endurance/story/_/id/19321196/eliud-kipchoge-finishes-just-shy-sub-2-hour-marathon <comment><USER2> So, a 4:30 mile, 26.2 times in a row. A 5 minute, single mile, is a decent finish time for high school track kids. Incredible.

<comment><USER3> Makes you wonder where they got the pacers from. I don't think I could sustain that speed for even 200m.

<comment><USER4> They were all Nike-sponsored professional runners that have their own racing schedule. Some of the Americans I saw helping out were Chris Derrick, Bernard Lagat, Lopez Lomong, and Andrew Bumbalough, in case you're interested in seeing what the pacers are capable of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Incredible, what some people can achieve. As a Kenyan, I am really proud of these athletes.

</comment><comment><USER6> Here's a related FiveThirtyEight discussion on the topic: [https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/can-science-help- runner...](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/can-science-help-runners- break-the-marathons-2-hour-barrier/)

One of the quotes:

"A few years ago, I predicted it would happen in 2075, which gives a sense of where my thinking was at that point."

<comment><USER7> Here's a direct link to that prediction: [http://rw.runnersworld.com/sub-2/](http://rw.runnersworld.com/sub-2/)

Lots of data, but I don't see how the 2075 date is calculated, is it just an intuitive guess?

<comment><USER6> It seems more like an intuitive guess, since some others [0] have suggested something around ~2020 to 2030. A while ago (when Tergat still had the record) I tried to simply fit a line to the All-time Athletics list [1] and thought 2050 was reasonable, IIRC.

Have to wonder if Kipchoge's time will end up being Beamonesque and we'll be at 2030 before those last ~25s are shaved off.

[0] [http://jap.physiology.org/content/110/1/275](http://jap.physiology.org/content/110/1/275)

[1] [http://www.alltime-athletics.com/mmaraok.htm](http://www.alltime- athletics.com/mmaraok.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> >despite the aid of a shoe that designers say will make runners 4 percent more efficient.

Seems like this could be a big factor. A shoe itself acting as a spring and helping the runner make bigger strides with the same effort. I won't be surprised if the official race wouldn't allow these "enhanced" shoes.

</comment><comment><USER9> Apparently one of the factors that made this attempt invalid for the official world record time was the absence of a wada-sanctioned drug test.

It's an impressive feat if they're clean. If they shaved two minutes off the world record by pumping themselves full of PEDs then it's not really noteworthy.

<comment><USER4> I was under the impression that the runners were drug tested (at least, the commentators were talking about them needing to take fluids after the race in order to produce a sample). The time is not record eligible because they were cycling pacers in and out and because they were providing fluids whenever the Kipchoge, Tadese, and Desisa wanted, rather than at designated stations.

EDIT: Nike officials stated that the athletes would be drug tested according to Ken Goe [0]

0\. [http://www.oregonlive.com/trackandfield/index.ssf/2017/04/go...](http://www.oregonlive.com/trackandfield/index.ssf/2017/04/goe_nike_deserves_props_not_cr.html)</comment></comment>


Mathematicians Measure Infinities, Find They're Equal - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematicians-measure-infinities-find-theyre-equal-20170912/ <comment><USER2> I am having trouble grasping the result.

As far as I understand it, any proof of any result has to be with respect to some axiom system. The continuum hypothesis result is that you cannot prove a infinity exists between the naturals and the real numbers under the usual axiom system A.

How that was proved, I don't know, and I also don't know what axiom system was used in that proof. If the axiom system was also A, then it seems to me that it follows we cannot have p<t, and hence p=t, because otherwise by staying in the same axiom system A you violate the unprovability of the continuum hypothesis in A. This supplies a proof in A that p=t. But this seems trivial.

So the axiom system used to prove that "the continuum hypothesis is unsolvable in A" must be a larger system A+.

I think in A+ we again have p=t. The question this paper answers is whether we can prove "you cannot prove p=t using A" or "you can prove p=t using A". The latter means there is a straight up proof.

Any people who really know this stuff can you comment if I got the gist right?

<comment><USER3> The article is misleading on this point. The Continuum Hypothesis says that it is undecidable in the standard axioms whether there is a cardinality between countable and the continuum (i.e., the cardinality of the real). This work shows that p and t are different, which also means that t is of greater cardinality than the reals.

<comment><USER4> What is p and t? You say that this work shows that p and t are different. What two entities are proven to be equal then in this work?

<comment><USER3> p and t are implicitly defined cardinalities (i.e., the smallest cardinalities with given properties). See Definition 1.1 of the source article ([https://arxiv.org/pdf/1208.5424.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1208.5424.pdf))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Actual article: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1208.5424.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1208.5424.pdf)

Great results within a very narrow field, which quantamagazine leverages into a clickbaity title.

<comment><USER6> I was very confused by this. The paper linked by OP (the one I also had in mind when I started the article) is from 2012, but the article is written as if the results are recent (specifically it says from 2016! Admittedly, only five years for such a big result in that field is probably still "recent" to experts; but probably not to the "pop science" readers.

Furthermore, the lack of an actual citation was very disturbing, since if anybody did want to read the actual paper, they had to google for terms that would lead to basically incomprehensible search results.

<comment><USER7> The work was first posted to arxiv in 2012. It can take a while until a result is understood by enough experts to confirm its correctness. Imagine if journalists wrote an article claiming P=NP is closed every time someone posted their attempt to arxiv.

Also, this work very recently won a prestigious award.

Also, result published ---> result accepted ---> journalist writes high- quality piece explaining result to lay people can take years.

 _> the lack of an actual citation was very disturbing_

The first linked text in the article is a link to the arxiv paper.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I only had one one set theory course so can't vouch for the details, but this seemed like a well done article on a subject that could easily have been more eyeglazingly superficial or obscure.

<comment><USER9> Much of my research on number theory and primality relies on a deep understanding in axiomatic set theory. Based on other news sites I've read that attempt to cover naive set theory, I was pleasantly surprised at the article's fairly decent coverage on the topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > In a breakthrough that disproves decades of conventional wisdom, two > mathematicians have shown that two different variants of infinity are > actually the same size

I thought there are only two types of infinity and Cantor already proved that they are different.

* Uncountable infinity which is the cardinality of the set of real numbers

* Countable infinity which is the cardinality of the set of integers

Cantor has already proved that uncountable infinity is larger than countable infinity.

Is this article claiming that mathematicians have proved that these two infinities are equal now? Doesn't that contradict Cantor's proof? What's going on here? Is the Cantor's proof flawed or have we introduced a contradiction to mathematics?

<comment><USER2> If you take the power set of an infinite set, you /always/ get a cardinality bigger than the original set. So there are an infinite number of infinities.

<comment><USER10> This is a good point. But to be super pedantic, there isn't a size of infinity large enough to describe how many sizes of infinity there are.

<comment><USER11> Why not? The aleph numbers have a bijection with naturals.

<comment><USER10> See this answer on the mathematics stack exchange (it's really a book excerpt, but I don't know where else to find it.) [https://math.stackexchange.com/a/5390/220797](https://math.stackexchange.com/a/5390/220797)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I did not know that this was an unsolved problem. It is quite paradoxical. You can map the subset of rational numbers in the range [0, 1) to the set of natural numbers, so there are an infinite number of disjoint subsets of the rational numbers that map to the natural numbers. Intuitively a 2nd dimension of infinity should be bigger, but the count of a set is defined to be one dimensional regardless of the dimensionality of the members.

Edit: real -> rational

<comment><USER13> Another thing which has bothered me in the past was that a set of 2-tuple integers could be mapped by a set of 1-tuple integers, seemingly without any information loss.

<comment><USER14> The "seemingly" suggests that you remain unconvinced. If you define for example some kind of distance between an arbitrary (x,y) and (0,0), for any (x,y) you can easily count how many points are closer to the origin. There may be ties but it's easy to define a rule to break them. This means you can order all the pairs of integers: (0,0), (1,0), (0,1), (-1,0), (0, -1), (1,1), (1,-1), (-1,-1), (-1,1), (2,0),....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> BTW: Why then does wikipedia say that

the cardinality of the set of all real numbers (denoted c and called cardinality of the continuum) is strictly greater than the cardinality of the set of all natural numbers (denoted ℵ 0 'aleph-naught')?

UPD: I get it, they are actually talking about a third set in the article in a way that's not immediately apparent.

<comment><USER16> The cardinality of the reals has been known to be strictly greater than the cardinality of the naturals since Cantor. What the Continuum Hypothesis considers is the cardinality of the reals and the cardinality of the power set of the naturals. The power set of another set is the set of unique subsets of the first set. If the first set has cardinality of N, then the power set has cardinality 2^N. Thus, the reals can be considered to be exponentially more dense than the naturals.

Some intuition: while there may be N unique stocks on the NYSE, there could in theory be 2^N unique mutual funds that are based on the different combinations of stocks.

<comment><USER4> Can you simplify for us what exactly have the mathematicians in this article proven?

I get that they have proven some infinity A = some infinity B but can you tell us what these A and B are.

Also, isn't the cardinality of reals equinumerous with that of the cardinality of the power set of naturals?

<comment><USER17> Quoting from the article:

 _> Briefly,_ p _is the minimum size of a collection of infinite sets of the natural numbers that have a "strong finite intersection property" and no "pseudointersection," which means the subsets overlap each other in a particular way;_ t _is called the "tower number" and is the minimum size of a collection of subsets of the natural numbers that is ordered in a way called "reverse almost inclusion" and has no pseudointersection._

In short, there are two infinities, _p_ and _t_ , that are implicitly defined by some characteristics. It was previously known that there was a relationship between them, but it was _not_ suspected that there were, in fact, equal.

Considerable work is required to understand what these are, and what the result means.

And to answer your explicit question, yes, the reals can be put in 1-1 correspondence with 2^N, the power set of the naturals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is it me or they forgot a step in the diagonalization argument? (adding/subtracting 1)

<comment><USER17> They say to change every number, and that's enough. Although they don't explicitly say so you can change each number in (nearly) any way you like.

<comment><USER18> My bad, skipped that part somehow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Photos of humans in an article about math are pretty useless but nevertheless I find it interesting that the article included a photo of the male collaborator, Saharon Shelah, and another male mathematician, but not one of the female collaborator, Maryanthe Malliaris.

<comment><USER20> There's a comment from the author below to say she specifically requested no photo.

<comment><USER19> Thanks, I overlooked that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Please answer me this one question: What is the average number of bits that are necessary to represent an arbitrary natural number?

If the average number of bits is finite then I will shut up!

<comment><USER22> This is equivalent to asking what is the average number of digits necessary to represent an arbitrary natural number. If you assume that this is a finite number you can quickly arrive at a contradiction.

<comment><USER21> So there are natural numbers with an infinite number of digits and that is my point. The average can't be larger than the largest number.

<comment><USER22> The only way to reason about this is as a limit.

lim n->infty sum(1..n)/n.

This limit diverges. Your intuition is breaking down. It might be useful for your understanding to study real analysis where these sorts of questions are handled rigorously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Oh, more than one infinity in the same reality and no contradiction? What a wonderful world we live in..

More than one zero, more than one infinity, why not? More than on nothingness, more than one everything..

</comment><comment><USER15> So they basically found a way to represent any real number as an unique sequence of bits?

Doesn't sound too hard when spelled like that. I could probably do that, win some prize (not anymore). Do they have anything else like that?

<comment><USER24> If you've got some free time, can you look into whether or not the real part of every non-trivial zero of the Riemann zeta function is 1/2?

<comment><USER15> Can you reword this one as a discrete math primer either?

<comment><USER24> Let d(n) be the sum of the divisors of n (for example, d(6) = 12 because 1, 2, 3, and 6 divide 6 and 1+2+3+6 = 12). Let h(n) be the nth harmonic number, that is, h(n) = 1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + ... + 1/n. Let ln(x) be the natural logarithm and let e be, well, e.

Show that the inequality:

d(n) <= h(n) + (ln(h(n)) * e^(h(n)))

holds for all n >= 1.

Best I can do, hope that works! [1]

[1] [http://www.theoremoftheday.org/NumberTheory/RobinLagarias/To...](http://www.theoremoftheday.org/NumberTheory/RobinLagarias/TotDRobinLagarias.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I find Cantor's diagonal argument unconvincing.

The claim is that there are more real numbers in the range from zero to one than there are natural numbers. To see that this is false simply realize that you don't actually have to write a decimal point to specify the real numbers in this range. Without the decimal point these real numbers just become natural numbers. Can a rational person believe that there are infinite sequences of digits in the form of real numbers but not infinite sequences of digits in the form of natural numbers? The natural numbers are just an infinite sequence of finite numbers. If you believe n is a natural number then you must also believe that n*10 is a natural number. One more digit! There is always one more digit (that is what infinity implies). If there really are an infinite number of natural numbers then some of them must be of a transfinite number of digits or else you would be including numbers in the list more than once.

The problem with Cantor's argument comes down to the fact that the procedure he uses to find a number not in the set is essentially the same as the procedure he uses for creating the infinite set in the first place. The only difference is our understanding of randomness. His procedure for finding a number not in the set may not seem very random but it might be as random as any other. A truly random coin could theoretically come up heads every time. The important part of his argument is that the infinite list of real numbers has no repeats. The diagonalization procedure similarly ensures that there are no repeats. On the one hand he claims the infinite set of real numbers exists. On the other hand he argues that the diagonalization that yields a number not in the set has not already been done. He takes away infinity and then gives it back!

There is only one infinity. It means "repeat". It is simply the interplay of finite state with process. You can think of it as an "infinite loop" in programming. To say that one infinity is smaller than another is to deny that the smaller is infinite. Infinite means without bound.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Without the decimal point these real numbers just become natural numbers.

No, they don't, because the vast majority of them have an infinite number of digits to the right of the decimal point. That's the key: there are more numbers with an infinite number of non-zero digits (the reals) than there are numbers with a finite number of non-zero digits (the naturals).

> The problem with Cantor's argument comes down to the fact that the procedure > he uses to find a number not in the set is essentially the same as the > procedure he uses for creating the infinite set in the first place.

Again, no. Cantor doesn't create the set, _you_ do. The proof is like a game. It says: give me _any_ procedure for (putatively) making a list of all of the real numbers, and I will give you back a number that is not in the list.

<comment><USER25> Start with zero. Add an infinitesimal epsilon an infinite number of times. Now go back to zero and subtract the same epsilon an infinite number of times. You have now traversed all the real numbers.

The decimal representation of the epsilon has an infinite number of zeroes after the decimal point and before the last digit, which is '1'. So if you were to just chop off the leading zero and decimal point to make an equivalence with natural numbers, the epsilon is as much a representation of the natural number 1 as 0.1 or 0.01 or 0.001 or 0.0001 . Infinite real number equivalents to one natural number.

<comment><USER26> That infinitesimal is not a real number. To simplify a little, a real number is something which is the limit of a sequence of rational numbers. Or, given an error bound 1/n, you can write down a rational number within 1/n of the real number. Two real numbers are the same if the difference between their approximations converges to 0 as n gets arbitrarily large.

A number with infinitely many zeros after the decimal point is within 1/n of zero no matter the n. Therefore the number _is_ zero.

This is like how 0.9999... is 1. The reason is that 1-0.999... is within 1/n of 0 no matter the n.

Suppose you had an infinitesimal epsilon (outside the real numbers --- this is fine, and people do this). How many times are you planning on adding it to itself? To get any actual real number, you are going to have to add it to itself well more than countably many times, though I'm not sure this makes much sense.

<comment><USER25> Fine, then. Just use the smallest positive nonzero real number, instead.

Edit: I really hope I'm not the only one laughing.

<comment><USER27> "...only one laughing..."

You _are_ illustrating the reason that mathematicians generally disparage the concept of an "infinitesimal", when it's used as proof rather than conceptual aid. (Yes, I know about [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non- standard_analysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-standard_analysis))

Not only do you get wrong conclusions, you get tedious, hard-to-adjudicate arguments.

<comment><USER28> I agree with your thought, and that of the majority of mathematicians for many years, that infinitesimals are better construed heuristically than literally.

You mention that you know of non-standard analysis and indicate that it's irrelevant. Though I don't know why you think this, I agree with you. I just wanted to plug non-standard analysis as both mathematically interesting and also very useful. One can jettison the philosophical thought that NSA "vindicates" the historical use of infinitesimals (as I think we should), while still seeing NSA as the wonderful and deep piece of math that it in fact is.

<comment><USER25> Thanks for your support, but I never said anything about non-standard analysis. I made one post in support of its parent, and people jumped on it to say how _wrong_ I am, as apparently I accidentally stumbled over a sore spot in mathematics. I don't know why infinitesimals apparently aren't allowed, but the tone around here has convinced me to not care.

And now every post I have made in this thread tree is getting downvoted. So I'm out. Y'all can argue about nothing--and nearly-nothing--by yourselves.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


F*ck minimalism: How a movement began to end - <AUTHOR> http://fuckminimalism.com/

<comment><USER2> You present minimalism as being a fad that can come and go " Minimalism was cool for awhile." It is not a life style choice, it is a process in which to achieve some desired outcome.

Minimalism is a process based on economic efficiency, the science of maximization. Can I achieve the same desired outcome (or better) with the least about of effort or resources?

Minimalism can not end, and won't end. The companies and individuals that practice this process/science are the ones that get ahead.

Minimalism is not the beginning of the journey, it is the end. You have to journey through everything else to finally get to minimalism.

</comment><comment><USER3> Basically, seems the author is tired of owning nothing after 18 months of writing a blog about it.

Minimalism began long before 2009</comment>


Healthcare.gov is a Technological Disaster - <AUTHOR> http://blog.fmsinc.com/healthcare-gov-is-a-technological-disaster/

<comment><USER2> Somewhere in the chain someone was probably saying "It's not ready", but the brass said "Too bad, we go live on this date ready or not". Politicians are used to pushing things through the system as fast as possible and then patching them later. When your QA process is a court system that takes years to notice the bugs, software development is a somewhat jarring process.

<comment><USER3> Do we know specifically who was the brass responsible for healthcare.gov?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They don't seem to have anticipated that people would want to simply browse the plans, rather than immediately sign up.

The only variables that go into a quote are location, smoking status, and age. My state is divided into a little over a dozen distinct locations.

Given the limited variables, plans and rates could have been put into static files on nginx servers, and served huge traffic with ease, especially if you add a CDN so most requests don't even hit the servers.

Add a little javascript at the front to determine which files to pull, plus a bit to calculate subsidies based on income, and you're done. You don't have to hit databases until someone's actually signing up.

</comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone here file taxes? Just because a form is on the web doesn't mean it will be well designed, or easy to understand. Whether you agree with the politics or not, you shouldn't expect efficiency from the US government. I only expect the affordable care act to be as efficient or simple as medicare/medicaid and it sounds like I may have been right.

</comment><comment><USER6> lol

Service Unavailable

HTTP Error 503. The service is unavailable.

</comment><comment><USER7> I love the "it's not ready" excuse for why something is so hard to use.

In my experience, you have to TRY to make something harder to use.

In this case, like many others, I'm sure no resources were dedicated to design/UX, so the site was built exactly to spec by devs who had no consideration for usability.

</comment><comment><USER8> A startup would have done a better job on usability and scalability.

Would love to know which government contractor built these crappy sites

<comment><USER3> Seems it was a Canadian firm called CGI Group Inc. I found that from this article: [http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/04/us-usa- healthcare-...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/04/us-usa-healthcare- technology-technology-idUSBRE99312620131004)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The site is down? Oh irony.</comment>


Applied mathematics in business consulting - <AUTHOR> http://www.yosefk.com/blog/applied-mathematics-in-business-consulting.html <comment><USER2> Mathematical maturity + Excel + Perl + R = consulting moolah.

I know a few people who do nothing but crunch numbers on social media, political campaigns, and online marketing and advertising.

<comment><USER3> Who hires them and how do they find clients? (on their own or are they working for McKinsey or similar group?)

And if you have details, how much can they charge?

Edit: in my experience it is not very easy to get paid to just crunch numbers. Even if you can find a job that is supposed to be analytics, 90% of the work is data munging.

<comment><USER2> I am in the online-advertising business, and I know them from the "scene"; usually what you wanna look out for are "analyst" titles advertised by marketing and PR agencies. Wherever you see an ad for programmer, ring up the hiring person and inquire about analyst positions (you might actually have to explain the need and create your own position, possibly starting as a consultant.)

I know these guys, like I said, from the "scene", but two of them I ran into responding to their ad; it was a badly phrased ad for a "developer" position, but after a 30 minute conversation it was apparent they wanted someone with machine-learning and distributed computing background who could scale their spreadsheets :-)

If there is demand, I am more than happy to get into the head-hunting business as a side-gig ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _As a part of my continuous moral degradation and the resulting increasing alignment with the forces of Evil_

It is really hard to dis an article that has consulting and math and starts off like this. Very nicely done.

The rest of the article was rather mundane, sadly.

True consulting is just having a paid smart friend. Why do you need paid smart friends? Are you not smart enough? Don't you have enough friends where you work? Sure, but a _real_ friend will tell you things that are glaringly obvious yet could get them fired. A real friend will take on your problems as their own and worry about them along with you. A really smart person (in this context) probably has seen many more types of business models than the full- timers at your place have. A really smart person (in this context) probably has ways of working with people that you either haven't tried or tried and didn't understand (because you were busy doing your regular work)

It sounds trivial, but a paid smart friend (business consultant) can mean the difference between kicking ass and becoming mediocre.

Of course, I have fully become part of the dark side, taking the secret oath, learning the handshake, and swearing my allegiance to the forces of darkness and chaos, so all of this just may be misinformation on my part. :)

<comment><USER5> I wonder how many of us are on HN sometimes...

<comment><USER4> Don't know, but I know that even if I never have a successful startup, learning and watching startups has done more for my business consulting career than a thousand college degrees ever would. (wink)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good writing, interesting topic, can't resist a couple of quotes and notes:

 _As a part of my continuous moral degradation and the resulting increasing alignment with the forces of Evil_

Nice opening hook. By coincidence, I'm reading Norman Mailer's The Castle in the Forest. Feels like a supplement.

 _While the general concept was impressive on many levels, the details were unclear._

That sounds like C.N. Parkinson. Perhaps crossed with "Nothing yields meaty problems like starting with the wrong assumptions." (<http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html>, via a comment in the 'gist' linked in yesterday's All Code is Ugly <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1343883> )

</comment><comment><USER6> (mahmud, dejv)

> scale their spreadsheets

The other day, I bumped into this Excelsior tool: "Safe spreadsheets fast: generating and reverse-engineering" - through here, please <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1281593>, or direct to <http://www.j-paine.org/index.html>

Anyone has used it, or something similar, and feel like commenting ?

</comment><comment><USER7> For this kind of business, Math is easy. But finding clients who are willing to pay is hard, VERY hard.

<comment><USER8> It is VERY hard, but doable. I am trying to make living doing machine learning freelancing, although this part of "business" makes me just about 10 - 20% of income.

As someone wrote on this forum: most clients want to just scale their Excel spreadsheets and models. There are plenty of similar jobs aroud, so VBA should be your friend.

I then trying to educate my customers on machine learning related topics and sometimes I've got another ML-related projects.

If you choose this, be prepare to spend a lot of time doing nonbillable work, so pay will not be so great at start, but I hope that it will pays in long term.</comment></comment>


Is our reality just a simulation? Elon Musk asks - <AUTHOR> https://futurism.com/elon-musk-smart-ai-simulation/ <comment><AUTHOR> Watch the MIT researcher, Lex Fridman, interview with Elon Musk here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEv99vxKjVI&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEv99vxKjVI&feature=youtu.be)</comment>


With Buffer integration, Mention Becomes A Full-Fledged Media Monitoring Tool - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/18/mention-becomes-a-full-fledged-media-monitoring-tool-with-buffer-integration/

<comment><USER2> Awesome - two of my favorite SM companies working together to make my life a little easier... nice one Buffer & Mention!</comment>


UI/UX Feedback for App Design - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1n1Vg2UwuK2H0Ro_LEGqhzWByixz_k63ygDQlWTTidKo/viewform?usp=send_form

<comment><USER2> There's a problem with the suggestion box in your form that's not allowing me to submit the feedback privately.

The UX needs a lot of work and the cashback element that's dynamic made no sense without any additional guidance. Because you slashed out the $7.5 original price, "current price" implies just simply a sale price or current offer not that it will change as the quantity sold changes.

I think you have to find some way to connect the qty sold and cashback graph so that it's more clear as one goes up, the other goes down. Also, it doesn't make sense right now that the cashback is green when it's obviously past the halfway mark so shouldn't it be yellow since that implies that it's likely to go down soon?</comment>


'GODLESS' Mobile Malware Uses Multiple Exploits to Root Devices - <AUTHOR> http://blog.trendmicro.com/trendlabs-security-intelligence/godless-mobile-malware-uses-multiple-exploits-root-devices/ <comment><AUTHOR> Another reason why you should only use Google Nexus phones (so you always have the most recent version of android, and get any security updates quickly).</comment>


Crossing the 1 tb/s throughput threshold for object storage with NVMe drives - <AUTHOR> https://blog.min.io/performance-at-scale-minio-pushes-past-1-3-terabits-per-second-with-256-nvme-drives/ <comment><USER2> Fabric-wise, PCIe 4.0 offers 16 Gbit/s per lane, so a single PCIe x16 device would have 256 Gbit/s of bandwidth available (in each direction), and a single server could reach 1 Tbit/s with four NVMe devices on four PCIe slots. There is the overhead of 128b-132b encoding to be considered, but that's minimal (3%). There is also the overhead of PCIe packets to consider, but if the NVMe device supports large maximum payload sizes (1kB+) it should be minimal.

Are there PCIe 4.0 x16 NVMe devices commercially available?

<comment><USER3> x16 NVMe SSDs aren't very common. The most recent one I've seen is the Micron X100, but that's a x16 PCIe 3.0 device and it's not commercially available yet. Most consumer and enterprise SSDs are x4, though perhaps that may change as better media and controllers are able to saturate PCIe capabilities. Then it's a tradeoff on power requirements though to be considered...

<comment><USER4> Asus motherboards (and probably others too) support a mode where you can split the x16 into 4 x4 connections and use [https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboard- Accessories/HYPER-M-2-X1...](https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboard- Accessories/HYPER-M-2-X16-CARD/) to mount them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Are there any architecture papers/blogs on re-designing software for very fast storage ?

Once storage is as-fast as memory, things change.

Please note: i am NOT referring to cpu-on-the-memory-chip architectures

<comment><USER6> P2P-DMA is making inroads to the linux kernel. Which means software can limit itself to orchestrating transfers between storage, GPUs, accelerators and network cards and avoid having the data touch system RAM or the CPUs.

<comment><USER7> Confining the CPU to the most noble processing, and flanking him with highly- specialized units directly exchanging... isn't it the mainframe all over again?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can someone please fix the title? I presume it means TB/s or Tb/s but I am not able to load the article now. Then delete my comment.

<comment><USER9> It should be Tb/s

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> My question is whether this includes overhead of actually persisting the data and guaranteeing a certain SLA in terms of retrieving the data? Don't get me wrong, this is a nice achievement and good luck to them if their objective is to build a storage company (I or my company has no need to store large amounts of data at high speed so no bias there) but there's a difference between ingesting data at high speed and actually guaranteeing it's going to be there in a year's time despite potential storage drive failures and stuff.

</comment><comment><USER11> This doesn't say what minio actually is. It also says the benchmark cost $1000 to run. Also since this is terabits it is about 120 gigabytes per second using 256 drives.

<comment><USER12> I looked up the pricing: Each i3en.24xlarge (96 vCPU, 768GB RAM, 8 x 7500 NVMe SSD) costs $10.848 per hour. For the test they rented 32, so around 350 USD/hour or around 250.000 USD/month.

<comment><USER13> At this cost, is AWS really worth it? Shouldn't colocation be much cheaper after only a few months of use?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The key is "drives", writing simultaneously across all you can get high throughput.</comment>


This Web App Verifies and Matches Your Doctors Without Borders Donations - <AUTHOR> http://donationmatch.tools <comment><USER2> I already make monthly donations. Do you match those too?</comment>


UPSERTisms in Postgres - <AUTHOR> http://johtopg.blogspot.se/2014/04/upsertisms-in-postgres.html

<comment><USER2> The graphs remind me of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7588929](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7588929) (specifically the truncated Y-axis)

<comment><USER3> I don't find these plots misleading. A line plot emphasizes slope and changes in slope, rather than the absolute heights of the data points as a bar or area plot would; so it's more important to have consistent vertical and horizontal intervals.

<comment><USER4> Supposed solution A changes from 10000 to 10001 and solution B changes from 10000 to 10000.5, emphasizing only the slopes doesn't tell you that this changes may be insignificant.

The given link above (How to lie with data visualization) gives axis truncation as a very first examples.

<comment><USER3> Indeed, and I disagree with the article regarding axis truncation of line plots, in this context.

I'd also be careful with terms such as "insignificant" when we're talking about data. Suppose that tiny difference _were_ significant. Depicting it as a bar would completely mask the difference, and truncating the axis would give the false impression of the bar's height representing the total magnitude. There'd be a similar effect with a line plot, but the line focuses on continuity and de-emphasizes height: it's not as big of a problem.

There are myriad ways to tell stories using data, and there are myriad ways to tell misleading stories using data. Each type of plot has distinctive properties that make it more or less appropriate to be used/manipulated in certain ways, so I'd hesitate to apply a static set of rules indiscriminately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The author dismisses the RULE based approach. I'd love to see it compared, as it was the only thing that I could get to complete for a multi-GB table merge (I can't recall what other approaches I tried). [http://stackoverflow.com/a/6176044/6691](http://stackoverflow.com/a/6176044/6691)

It would be a boon if upsert was supported as a declarative primitive in psql so that the query planner can do it's magic. Pity it didn't make it in 9.4.

<comment><USER6> Author here. I dismissed RULEs and TRIGGERs since they don't work correctly under concurrency (and most RULE-based approaches are broken even without concurrency). I felt it wasn't a fair comparison.

However, I guess it would be nice to know how much of a gain would be possible if one was willing to forfeit correct behaviour under concurrency. But that would probably require more work than I'm willing to put in, since the answer doesn't interest me that much personally at this moment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> BTW, why is it called UPSERT (ugly) and not MERGE (less ugly) as in DB2?

<comment><USER8> AFAIK, it is because UPSERT are only a subpart of MERGE. The devs plan to add real MERGE in a later release (9.5 or 9.6, I don't remember). Someone more knowledgeable should shim in for the details.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Load testing a site - <AUTHOR> There are tools out there to load test your site. Say I want to know how my site will behave with 100,000 concurrent users for a certain period of time.
Do you recommend any services ? I have come acros flood.io, loadimpact.com etc on google. But no idea about any of them.<p>Also, a very noob question but how do these services work ? I mean if I do the testing, does it stress my actual production servers ? If yes, then my site could go down while testing right ? or do I make a copy of everything for testing ? <comment><USER2> I use Apache jmeter, which is free. Alternative a simple nodejs script. It's possible to saturate my laptop simply because any outgoing request has a cost (CPU, bandwidth, writing results to disc) and I wouldn't be able to simulate 100k users. For most cases and a piece of mind that the website doesn't break under load it's fine.

Those services do just that: send requests to a specified URL. Some can play whole scenarios (logging in, setting cookies etc). The power is in the reports they create and the convenience of an easy (repeatable, shareable) setup. You may or may not need to simulate users from across the globe or users with slow connections or certain browsers.

If possible have a second setup of your website for testing. This makes sure you don't pollute your production logfiles or affect real users.

<comment><USER3> As you say the problem with testing from a single laptop, or desktop system, is that your outbound pipe will get saturated.

If you want to do distributed testing you can rent a couple of virtual machines from Amazon, etc, and run tsung to test from a cluster:

[http://brightbox.com/blog/2014/11/07/distributed-load- testin...](http://brightbox.com/blog/2014/11/07/distributed-load-testing-with- tsung/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For basic load-testing Httperf and Apache Benchmark are nice. If you want more complicated stuff (really simulating a user taking actions on your site) I'd recommend leveraging Selenium or even plain PhantomJS (setup a separate server to spawn those processes and hit your main site).

And yes, it will stress whatever site you're testing. In most cases, you'll want to setup another site (make it an exact replica of your main site) and direct your load tests to hit that alternate site instead.

</comment><comment><USER5> Apache jmeter is a good choice but a little more complicated. If you need something simpler for a start (as I did) go for adb (Apache benchmark) which is a command line tool

Also, I'm not sure what are you doing but 100k simultaneous user seems like a lot, only way I can think about testing that is to get a few AWS instances and running ab or meter from them...

</comment><comment><USER6> For load test I use blitz.io, they have a great interface, live stats and can handle up to 200k concurrent users. You'll get 10 free credits every month for tests.</comment>


$35 Airbnb Gift Card for Startup School - <AUTHOR>

 Type in STARTUPSCHOOL09 in the coupon code section when booking to save $35. We now have 28 rooms just for Startup School, and 224 rooms total in the bay area. If you have already booked for startup school, email email@example.com and we will refund $35 from your reservation. -Brian (co-founder) <comment><USER2> Thanks!</comment>


The Apollo Display Manager - <AUTHOR> http://lists.suckless.org/dev/1106/8766.html

<comment><USER2> I ran a BBS, email, and later, web services, on a stack of used Apollos I bought from University Surplus, back in the day. They were stout and reliable companions, and also helped heat my Iowa apartment very well in the winter. I remember the Apollo Display Manager with fondness. I also remember lugging around the 90-pound monitors for my Apollos...with somewhat less fondness!

</comment><comment><USER3> can't find any video with end result.

<comment><USER4> "Show me pictures or it didn't happen." ;)</comment></comment>


Amazon says police demands for customer data have gone up - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/30/amazon-police-data-demands/ <comment><USER2> _Amazon rejected 92% of the 177 overseas requests it received, turning over partial user data in 10 cases and all requested data in four cases.

Amazon also said it received between 0 and 249 national security requests, flat from previous reports._</comment>


Vegan and vegetarian diets 'link to higher stroke risk' - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-49579820 <comment><USER2> The study groups vegetarians with vegans. The name is similar but the implications are very different. A vegetarian may consume, depending on the type, eggs, milk products and honey. Those are very consequential choices compared to omitting them. It would have been a better study to separate these two groups, and even better to separate vegans, lacto-vegetarians, ovo- vegetarians, and lacto-ovo-vegetarians.</comment>


Pinterest Readies Itself for Early 2019 IPO - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/pinterest-readies-itself-for-early-2019-ipo-11545251368 <comment><USER2> [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2010-11-19%202...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2010-11-19%202018-12-19&q=pinterest,Instagram)

I realize that this graph doesn't tell the entire story and there are probably better ways to gauge global interest, but yikes. I wonder how much of the 250M MAU they are claiming are actually bots/trolls entrenching themselves in another social platform for when/if it gets big. They would be incentivized to report them as users to sustain the growth story.</comment>


Lessons learned while protecting Gmail - <AUTHOR> http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2016/03/lessons-learned-while-protecting-gmail.html <comment><USER2> I am a victim of these "lessons."

I run several email newsletters. One of them consistently gets marked as a "phishing" attempt by Gmail. They do not get marked as phishing if the email includes no links – but if I include a link, it immediately gets marked as phishing. This disables all of the links in the emails. I regularly get emails from subscribers complaining that the links do not work.

I once sent an email to all of the Gmail subscribers, asking them to explicitly mark my emails as trusted. Many of them did. But, it did not help – they still get marked as phishing attempts. I've implemented SPF and DKIM. It still didn't help.

The problem: Once an email is flagged as "phishing", the links are not clickable. On mobile, there is no way to make them clickable. Most users don't know how to make them clickable, even when it is possible.

All of the emails come from the same domain and the links are always to the same domain. All of them have the same basic format. Other email from this IP address gets through no problem. Google's Postmaster tools give the IP address a 100% reputation. I tried switching to a new sending service, to no avail. Nothing seems to work – no matter what I do, Gmail marks my emails as phishing.

I've contacted Google's postmaster, to no avail.

Basically, Gmail has made it very difficult for people to read the content I send them. There seems to be no way to convince Gmail that my emails are not phishing.

<comment><USER3> there are plenty of examples and at this point it seems that Google has a vested interest in making life difficult for independent or self hosted email providers

<comment><USER4> This has been my experience. I run a very small email setup for a few friends and a couple of tiny businesses. (Yes, we should just pack it in and move to Fastmail but I am hard-headed and have been around the Internet long enough to still be idealistic about these things.)

Every couple of months, Gmail starts depositing any email from my users into spam. No warning, no rejection, just a vague yellow banner on the recipient's view that says "this message has the characteristics of spam." The message could be in plain text with no links, still the same. I have SPF, DKIM, and rDNS all configured. I send from a single IPv4 and single IPv6 address with matching records. No RBL entries. Even the headers on a "spam" message say that everything passes and is fine.

Oh, and it isn't a domain reputation problem: only one of the domains I host even has a web site and all of them are at least five years old. Two of my domains predate Google itself. :P

The real kicker? I can't use their postmaster site, either. Why? We don't generate enough email to rank a report!

Meanwhile, no problems at all from any other receiving hosts. I have to log into several Gmail accounts and click "this is not spam" on some test messages and then it is fine for another 50 days. After that, back to the bit bucket.

Grr.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It sounds like the lion's share of their effort is going towards blocking attacks that prey on users' lack of knowledge. Infected email attachments and phishing are both examples of this that they brought up in the talk[1].

It worries me, though, that they're willing to accommodate novices to such a degree that they open up advanced users to targeted attacks. For example, Gmail bugs you quite a bit to set a "recovery phone number," but doesn't make it clear that this isn't like 2-factor auth. The phone number is actually a _single factor_ that can be used to reset your password. It even works if you have "traditional" 2-factor enabled.

Thus, the attack looks like this:

1\. Look up target's social security number. This is easy with certain online services that were meant for private investigators, but actually let anyone get an account.

2\. Contact their cell phone provider. If you don't know which one, guess. There are only a handful of common providers and you'll hit on it eventually. Impersonate the target, say you're going on vacation and need your calls and texts forwarded, and give them the SSN from step 1 to verify.

3\. Go to Gmail and say you forgot your password. Opt for the phone based reset, and wait for the text with a reset token to come in. Ideally, do this while the target is asleep to give yourself time to work.

High profile individuals have actually been hit this way, and I think Gmail should offer greater protection to sophisticated users who do everything right, don't fall for phishing, and would never forget their password, but can fall victim to highly targeted attacks.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkV9kOsTyJU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkV9kOsTyJU)

<comment><USER6> Would a cell phone provider forward to any number on a verbal request over the phone? That seems pretty sketchy to me.

<comment><USER7> Check this out:

[https://youtu.be/bjYhmX_OUQQ?t=2m30s](https://youtu.be/bjYhmX_OUQQ?t=2m30s)

A phone provider's key goal is to continue to provide charged-for services to their customers, not to secure your bank account or dns registrar account... They'll do whatever's needed to allow paying customers to pay or pay more.

<comment><USER8> It makes sense : their business it not security. Companies use them for that, and never asked for permission, they don't have to honor it.

Alhough as a customer, I'd like my phones not to be redirect to anybody asking for it, but I understand they don't have the security measures a bank should have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Some of these are pretty good, but mostly just intuitive stuff. Really wish it was to more than just an infographic style png giving broad strokes.

Things like "You are only strong as your weakest link," "There is no silver bullet," and "Never stop improving" are essentially meaningless platitudes. I would, however, love to see data on headings like "Attacks come in bursts."

Is there a link to something that delves more into each topic?

edit: Saw the links to the slides and video talk. Looks much more comprehensive!

<comment><USER10> "Make it hard for attackers to understand your defenses"

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > "Users are your best allies. Empower users to action through meaningful > feedback."

Interesting how that works only one way. If you are in need for some support from Google, then good luck trying to contact them.

<comment><USER12> If you're on a paid account, then you get to contact them. It's not the best support ever, but you do get support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> actual talk: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkV9kOsTyJU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkV9kOsTyJU)

slides: [http://www.slideshare.net/elie-bursztein/lessons-learned- whi...](http://www.slideshare.net/elie-bursztein/lessons-learned-while- protecting-gmail)

</comment><comment><USER14> I'd like to learn more about their DDOS, network-level, and cross-datacenter protections. They have to deal with so much volume and so many integrations that there's probably some lessons they learned there on dealing with issues. I'd also be interested in how their filesystem or data-processing tech with built-in integrity and availability mechanisms factor into it. They might leverage it in interesting ways like they do with F1 RDBMS.

</comment><comment><USER15> GMail cost me over $3K in rent.

I'm looking for a job, and after sending out resumes (and often a URL to my resume) for over a month I realized practically no one was getting my emails. I was being flagged as a spammer.

The only way around this was to signup for a GMail account.

I won't feel very protected losing the roof over my head, GMail. Please fix this.

<comment><USER16> Why not $100k instead of $3k, for the job you did not get because of GMail?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Sweet infographic for ants - clearly it was done by a design pro, why upload an image with such tiny fonts?

<comment><USER18> Looks fine to me at ~3 feet on my 96 DPI screens and at ~2 feet on my ~200 DPI Nexus S screen. If I put on my _dramatically_ too-old glasses, it still looks good from substantially further away.

 _shrug_

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This blog post has tons of good stuff. For one, George Hotz's intro to his timeless debugger QIRA and his 4 mins pitch to his autonomous driving company comma.ai was pretty awesome! Well worth that 20 minute than NSA TAO Chief's PR talk for half an hour.

<comment><USER14> Probably better. I wouldn't knock the TAO chief's talk as he basically gave a lot of good advice. He could've bullshited about just stacking a few security products like I've seen with RSA conference types. Instead, it was a thorough look at many ways they compromise systems and _most_ of what needs to be considered. It was one of few positives I give to NSA as anyone listening might improve their stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> One of the comments points out that the URL shortener link at the bottom of the infographic is broken - the actual link is mixed-case, but the infographic is in trendy all caps. A lesson here for both devs and designers - don't make case-dependent urls, and don't force all caps on content that is case- sensitive...

<comment><USER18> > ...don't make case-dependent urls...

Ehh. If you're running a URL shortener, case-sensitive URLs let your URLs stay short longer. Ditto for things like YouTube's video IDs.

<comment><USER20> Don't make case-dependent URLs that humans have to type by hand.

<comment><USER18> Soft disagree. There's generally nothing wrong with case-sensitive URLs when they're rendered in a font that makes commonly confused characters easily distinguishable. The only problem I can see is when you have to _speak_ such URLs.

<comment><USER21> eh cap bee cap cee dee eee eff gee is aBCdefg

<comment><USER18> Sure. It's not an _insurmountable_ problem. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The icon for "Encrypt Everything" says "In transit & at rest" with a picture of the Gmail icon.

Does this mean they encrypt customer e-mails at rest on their server?

<comment><USER23> I would think it common-sense to do that. If nothing else, it makes hard-drive disposal much simpler, and accessing disk storage is slow enough that I can't imagine the overhead of (hardware-assisted) encryption is a problem. Most places I worked at require all desktops and laptops to use storage encryption too. Encryption at rest is very different from end-to-end encryption, though.

<comment><USER24> The overhead of at-rest encryption is negligible.

If you think about it, the files Gmail backends need to access are fairly small: even the upper limit is just couple of tens of megabytes. This is true regardless of whether you get to use hardware acceleration or not. (And in case of modern Xeon servers, you certainly do!)

Servers will spend more time waiting for disk seeks to complete than they do decrypting the data once it's read.

You can even test it yourself: just run "openssl speed aes". My puny laptop does 85MB/s at the most unoptimal settings (AES-256 with 16B blocks), and 92MB/s with conservative settings at same security level (AES-256 with 1kB blocks).

A decent server system can do multiples of that. And once you add hardware acceleration, we're talking about crypto throughput of several hundreds of MB/s. Google servers are connected to top-of-rack switches, and I can make an educated guess that the per-server bandwidth is 1Gb, or roughly ~120MB/s.

For hilarious comparison, even my RPi 2 can do 16MB/s.

So: if we're talking about on-disk storage, crypto will never be your performance bottleneck.

<comment><USER25> protip: run `openssl speed -evp AES256` and be amazed by the performance of AESNI!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> >only as strong as weakest link

>diverse team

Adding diversity makes the weakest link weaker (and the strongest link stronger). The point of diversity is to increase variance in multiple areas so that a team's "strongest" member in any area is strong. Does not make sense as a solution to weak links.

<comment><USER27> I think the "only as strong as weakest link" was referring to the _technological_ measures, not to the _team_. It's not the team that's under attack (normally - if it's a phishing attack against the Gmail team as a way of attacking Gmail, then yes, diversity on the team may be a weakness).

<comment><USER26> If each member is responsible for a different part of security, then you'd still want each to be as strong as possible.

It just occurred to me that diverse could mean "skilled in different forms of security", and then it's just saying to hire domain experts in as many security domains as you can. That would make diversity a direct solution to the weakest link problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Expected an article about new kinds of attacks or unexpected attacks, instead got an infographic with a couple of common proverbs ('only as secure as the weakest link!', 'layered defenses!' aka defense in depth, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER29> Has anyone found a link to a higher res version of that infographic? The orange bubble text is infuriatingly unreadable.

</comment><comment><USER30> Anyone have any idea on the Gmail stack? I think it's GWT for the front end?</comment>