Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda's Resume.  Anyone interested? - <AUTHOR> http://cmdrtaco.net/resume.pdf <comment><USER2> Rob -- you're like Superman. Could Superman have a resume? Seems like you'd just give them a card that said "I'm f*cking CmdrTaco, damnit!"

(The reference here is to a famous fake letter said to be from Sean Connery to Steve Jobs [http://www.exophrine.com/2011/06/sean-connery-to-steve- jobs-...](http://www.exophrine.com/2011/06/sean-connery-to-steve-jobs-im-f- cking.html))

Seriously, it brings up a good point. If you have lots of name recognition, what's the best way to look for work? I'd suggest networking, but it's entirely possible to be hugely famous without a deep contact list. I'm not sure Rob has this problem, but if he did, it would be a difficult one to address.

<comment><USER3> Actual famous people have agents. For mere mortals who are very well known in a niche, put out the word that you are looking for work and work will find you. Resumes are not an accelerant for this process, since as soon as you're a resume you're competing with other resumes. Everyone in the market has a resume, but rather less people have a career that needs no introduction. I would not suggest downgrading yourself from that status (exception: post-offer pro-forma resume for HR after you have agreement in principle from decisionmaker).

<comment><USER4> _put out the word that you are looking for work and work will find you._

Just curious to know, I am normal person or a mere mortal as you described.

How do I get hired without the normal Resume, Recruiter, HR, Interview process?

<comment><USER5> Here's what I sent to the Khan Academy for a job: <http://davidchouinard.com/khanacademy/>

In my experience, anything that gets around the formal hiring process is a win. Finding a way around the application process _is_ the application process.

<comment><USER6> No idea why you're getting downvoted. (ex-Khan Academy intern here, good luck!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It might be worth adding:

"I'm Rob Malda. When you hire me, it's going to be the best advertising money you ever spend when every tech outlet in the world covers the story about where I am now working."

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll get that into v2.0 ;)

<comment><USER8> Rob, long-time /. fan who migrated over to HN when the signal-to-noise ratio exceeded my threshold. I just wanted to say thank you, and also that it's slightly ironic that you seem to be following the same path over to HN... :)

<comment><USER9> That's not irony.

Also that's probably not even true, I would guess that cmdrtaco keeps reading slashdot for old time's sake if nothing else (you don't erase 14 years easily), and in 2011 it turns out you can visit several websites instead of giving allegiance to the One and only.

<comment><USER10> Indeed; and I tend to think of visiting HN, Reddit etc as like going to visit my kids/grandkids. They've grown so much!

<comment><USER8> To continue the analogy...do you feel that /. is wasting away, or is it just attracting a different demographic these days?

<comment><USER11> Why is that? I've been reading it for years (given at a high threshold) and it seems like the same old slashdot to me. It's also a great deal friendlier place than this one.

<comment><USER12> _It's also a great deal friendlier place than this one_

My experience has been the the opposite, I stopped contributing to user forum based sites after I left /. and did not do so for a long time. I read HN for a while before deciding that it was home, and it was, because in my perception, there was a lot less "I'm the smartest guy in the room" conversations. Take that with a grain of salt though, because it has been a long long time since I have been over there. Things almost assuredly have changed since then. Has anyone else had the same positive impression of the exchanges over there? Most the posts I see on the subject tend to complain that there is still a lot of it going on.

<comment><USER13> Hackernews is a lot less tolerant of digressions, jokes etc. It ends up being a much more "serious" place, for both good and bad.

<comment><USER14> HN seems to have a different set of values. While there's less tolerance for jokes and culture references for the sake of culture references, HN tends to house a lot of intellectually frank discussion that a lot of other sites discourage.

A good example is this post from several weeks ago on the subject of denying blood donations from donors with a history of male-to-male sexual contact: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3237895> It's very fact-centric, to the exclusion of any sort of pandering or apology. When I read this post several weeks ago, I immediately thought, "this would never fly on reddit; people would quickly downvote it for being 'insensitive' or similar."

This also reminded me of PG's essay "Persuade xor Discover." <http://www.paulgraham.com/discover.html> HN users seem to care less about "persuasion," which can lead to perceptions of "unfriendliness" because things aren't written to please people. However, it does lead to a lot of interesting discussion that couldn't take place on a site more concerned with being "nice."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Accomplishments: "single handedly destroying the productivity of a generation of nerds"

<comment><USER16> Hehe, that's exactly what I was thinking of when I read:

 _"Objective: To use all of my skills to change the world for the better. Again."_

I can only imagine what great things I would've done with my time if /. hadn't been around. Or maybe I would've simply stayed at the online forum where I was posting before /. came along, wasting my time all the same.

<comment><USER17> You weren't wasting your time, you were becoming a technology generalist. It's a useful skill!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Do a new site man. Slashdot->[Digg]->Reddit->CmdrTaco's new site.

As much as I have love for Reddit its ripe for replacement.

<comment><USER19> Digg's not quite dead yet; not sure it needs the brackets.

<comment><USER20> This seems to be true. Can anyone explain the downvotes?

According to Alexa, Digg is the 190th most popular site in the world. It shows traffic holding steady for the past few months. And clicking on the pageviews tab shows that pageviews have dropped over the last year+ but not extradramatically.

<comment><USER20> Here's a graph comparing ycombinator.com and digg.com:

[http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?&w=400&h=220&o=f&...](http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?&w=400&h=220&o=f&c=1&y=t&b=ffffff&n=666666&r=2y&u=ycombinator.com&&u=digg.com&);

(Keep in mind that the scale is logarithmic.)

As a website owner, I would love it if my site were dying like Digg.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I am not sure if i should rate you 5 informative, 5 insightful, or 5 funny!

Definitely no -1 overrated though.

Alas - I have but only one mod point to give on this den of iniquity!

<comment><USER22> mod parent up!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Disappointed that Expertise bullets missed "Stuff that matters" right under "Nerds".

<comment><USER9> OMG Ponies !!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> No Github profile. Less relevant buzzwords than a resume on Monster.com. Lame.

</comment><comment><USER25> If I hire you, can I get a 3 digit slashdot id?

<comment><USER12> If you seriously want one, you can have mine, I have to dig the username and password up, it's been almost a decade since I last logged in, I am sure I have it in an old email somewhere.

<comment><USER26> I can throw in my 3 number ICQ id :)

<comment><USER27> Woah, really? Try auctioning it off in Russia. As of few years ago the going rate for 4 digit UIDs was in tens of thousand dollars.

<comment><USER28> My 4 digit /. UID is also prime. Does that command a premium?

<comment><AUTHOR> So is my 1 digit UID.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Ever have thoughts on doing another startup? I'm sure you've put a significant amount of thought into social interactions and moderation of an environment and it's community, I bet there are some very good translations there into some sort of social media service/internet karma scheme/more accurately focused targeting of peoples actual interests (and lack thereof). I'm willing to bet chatting with you would make for some great intellectually stimulating conversation.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd very much consider it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Gotta be a fake. Not nearly enough misspellings. ;)

</comment><comment><USER31> Reading this resume is like having the resume for Michael Jordan hit your desk. You're so impressed that you don't know what to do at it, other than stare.

</comment><comment><USER32> Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these...

</comment><comment><USER33> No indent below Education is killing me!

<comment><AUTHOR> College is left leaning.

<comment><USER34> Is that a double entendre?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> _Objective: To use all of my skills to change the world for the better. Again._

I normally glance at career objectives, sigh, roll my eyes, and move on to the the meat of the resume, but this one is actually good. Anyone searching for a job, do yourself a favor and follow CmdrTaco's lead. Your career objective shouldn't be long or full of bullshit corporate speak, and if it is that will hurt you more than it helps.

<comment><USER36> Kudos to Slashdot! It had a great impact. That is the word I would choose to use, rather than the word "Better". It is because "impact" can be quantitatively measured. "Better" is subjective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> So is this a legit account, it was created 99 days ago which seems kind of short for someone as wired in as Rob should be, can anyone on this site confirm that the account is indeed Rob? I don't mean to be skeptical but it's the kind of thing that could kill the credibility of the site. A site full of people that pride themselves on being critical (polite but critical, I remind you) being duped does not bode well for attracting people who want scrutiny of their information and not just more confirmation bias.

It just seems strange to me, why would Rob be in the market for a job, I could understand being in the market for a team but not a job, unless he did something stupid like I did and lost it all, if so I would love to hear that story. If it is I apologize for being critical I would have just imagined you being here a long time ago. I was one of your first users over on the other site back in the day, I always though based on your post over there that you would love it over here.

<comment><USER10> I can absolutely confirm that it is him. Although you have to trust that I am in fact, hemos, but the other folks I know on here can attest to that.

<comment><USER37> Maybe we should implement a PGP-style circle of trust on HN... =D

<comment><USER38> Seriously, why not create a GPG web of trust?

<comment><USER39> Because it's already easier _without_ encryption to get people's trust from scratch than it is to impersonate someone else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I'm sure you've gotten tons of interest and I'm not 100% sure what we'd do, but I'll fly you out to Beijing and put you up somewhere nice if you want to see if there's a fit. A many-hats-wearing-change-the-world type person can do just about anything they want, when they find the right mix of something that excites them and good people to work with.

My finance guy who raises money for projects is here Dec 13th to 23rd so it's particularly a good time, but I'm flexible. Could also meet in Taipei around New Year's if you like. You might want to check up on my crazy antics before you throw in with me though, in the last couple weeks I've gotten a lot of comments ranging from "a literary hero" for the open letter I wrote to S&S to complete maniac, jerk, dick, etc.

Anyways, who knows, maybe nothing's there. But we can definitely watch some Cowboy Bebop, check out the Forbidden City, and see if there's anything worth changing in the world. Email in profile if it's interesting to you.

</comment><comment><USER41> Ever worked in a team?

<comment><AUTHOR> Managed teams for 13 of the 14 years ;)

<comment><USER42> That's a no? ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, I wasn't the CEO, so I was always on someone's team.

<comment><USER42> Oops, apparently I offended some of your fans.

How many people were working for slashdot if I may ask?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> You're confusing me Rob. You want to be someone's employee, follow someone else's vision, get a regular paycheck, dental plan yada yada - and yet you want to change the world. Again.

It's definitely possible to do, but not as likely, and resumes are a bit played out, esp. for someone with your credentials.

Yep. Totally confused.

<comment><USER44> That's a bit bleak. In corporations, you work _for_ someone; in places like start-ups, you stand a good chance of working _with_ someone. You don't need to be the founder to get into that position, but it's obviously an option.

<comment><USER43> Rob doesn't need to parade around a resume to get in a startup. The boy is prequalified.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Resumes that can pull off an 'Objective' line always make me smile. Those that can't make me cringe.

</comment><comment><USER46> Rob, if you are still interested in the social media space, have you thought about:

a) applying at reddit

b) starting up a reddit competitor (your karma system is still among the best I've seen)?

If not, what kind of area are you thinking of? I'd imagine your varied skillset would be awesome at a very small startup.

</comment><comment><USER47> Your next move should be to rebuild local government with more control and transparency into public dollars. It's what we're doing at CivicSponsor, drop me a line if you want to talk.

</comment><comment><USER48> _Personally posted over 15,000 stories, rejecting a million more._

Although 15K is not a small number, for some reason seems like it should be more. I guess that makes every user submitted slashdot story that was posted by cmdrtaco himself that much more cool.

An oldie but goodie: [http://slashdot.org/story/05/03/02/1456237/yahoo- turns-10-fr...](http://slashdot.org/story/05/03/02/1456237/yahoo- turns-10-free-ice-cream-for-america)

</comment><comment><USER49> You are very good sir, and also lucky. You are talented and hardworking, but, still lucky.

There's a lot of talented and hardworking people here, like you, not as lucky tho.

<comment><USER50>
      >> There's a lot of talented and hardworking people here, like you, not as lucky tho.

Not denying a significant random component to success, but success does not seem to follow a random distribution.

If given a choice between picking someone coming off a big success, or someone who looks equally smart but was only moderately successful, many would choose to bet on the person who was successful last time.

<comment><USER12> The initial success though given all parts being equal is just as random, so you still have the same odds starting out. It's the same concept as what Buffett calls the *Lucky sperm club". His concept was just applied in the other direction, being born into success.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Not really a lot of relevant experience. Would like to see some Hadoop or heck, even some C#. Let's talk again in a year or two.

</comment><comment><USER52> If I had that background, I'd probably be most interested in some kind of political/activism startup (e.g. Votizen), or some kind of project/funding startup (e.g. Kickstarter). Presumably there are non-competes to make starting "unslashdotted.org" or something a no-go, and I don't think I'd want to after working on one from 1997-2011.

</comment><comment><USER53> How Janet Hoilian got more stock then Malda I'll never know.

[http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1093580/0000950135-99...](http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1093580/0000950135-99-005494.txt)

Agood lesson in there for today's bootstrappers

<comment><USER54> You need to look for Blockstackers in the document rather than Rob or Jeff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Why is it marked scribd?

<comment><USER56> That's a linked to the scribd HTML version of the PDF.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Oh Rob, being a long time /. reader, I know you'd ban someone's account to Hades if they did on /. what your doing here.

Just sayin.

<comment><AUTHOR> Notice that my resume isn't _ON_ Slashdot!

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> I'm working on some interesting things with zndx.org -- email with my username if your're curious.

</comment><comment><USER58> That's an odd résumé, which doesn't look at all like a software engineer résumé. Is this intentional or is CmdrTaco not an engineer at all? Programming languages? Frameworks? Specifics about the scaling and daily operations of /.?

It's also pretty light on the kind of position he's looking for.

If I were hiring engineers, I honesty wouldn't know what to do with such a résumé.

<comment><USER59> I think it is safe to say that CmdrTaco is more than just a "mere" engineer.

<comment><USER58> That's also what I thought until I read his résumé.

Which tells me there's something wrong with it.

<comment><USER60> I pause awkwardly every time I read résumé with the accents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Typo? Replace "self moderating" with self-moderating". Thanks for /.

</comment><comment><USER62> So what's your dream job?

</comment><comment><USER63> Amazon is hiring :D

</comment><comment><USER64> What did the 2 fingers say to the mouse? CLICK!

I'm CmdrTaco Bitch!

</comment><comment><USER65> Resspect.

</comment><comment><USER66> I don't think I've ever seen a resumé covering a 14-year tech/tech-related career that fit on one page.

<comment><USER10> I should get him to the post his joke resume. It's not even just one page, it's two lines on one page.

<comment><AUTHOR> My joke resume that I made a month ago: [http://cmdrtaco.net/wp- content/uploads/2011/10/Joke-Resume.p...](http://cmdrtaco.net/wp- content/uploads/2011/10/Joke-Resume.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> Whatever resume gets me the best job is my favorite.

<comment><USER67> What kind of job are you looking for, would make you happy?

<comment><USER68> Yeah...cmdrtaco should write the job description he seeks, not the resume! His resume is the worldwide community of nerds he has helped grow ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Damn if I had a startup right now I would hire you as you are close to me geo- location :)

BTW, how is the startup scene in your area of Michigan?

<comment><USER10> Decent; but not great. Nate is doing <http://ingenuitas.com>

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Rob, if you're still looking at this thread, check this out:

<http://cyclos.org>

Change the world for the better by changing the money for the better...it can happen. This software even has a built-in karma system.

Thanks for /. Cheers.

</comment><comment><USER71> Insert obligatory post from Netcraft confirming that XYZ is dying.

<comment><USER72> In Soviet Russia XYZ confirms Netcraft is dying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> Since nobody is playing devil's advocate, I suppose I have to. :-)

Have you done anything that doesn't fall under the "slashdot" header? If I saw this resume, my first instinct would be to say "Yeah, he made slashdot, but how do I know he's not a one-trick pony?"

Might I suggest a couple of open source projects or _something_ to suggest that there's more to you than a degree and slashdot?

I like the nice, simple, and to-the-point layout. But I think it might be a bit extreme.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think anybody cares about patches to enlightenment, afterstep, or various X11 widgets written 15 years ago!

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> That's childsplay compared to <http://ezyang.com/ezyang-resume.pdf></comment>


Google Engineer Wins NSA Award, Then Says NSA Should Be "Abolished" - <AUTHOR> http://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/2013/07/25/google-engineer-wins-nsa-award-says-id-rather-have-it-abolished-than-persist-in-its-current-form/ Dr. Joesph Bonner's quote:<p>I'd rather have it abolished than persist in its current form. I think there's a question about whether it's possible to reform the NSA into something that's more reasonable…But my feeling based on what I've read is that I don't want to live in a country with an organization like the NSA is right now. <comment><USER2> Is World War II so far away that everyone forgets how fucked up the entire world can become - and it doesn't take long for it all to go to hell either. The NSA has to get their shit together, but we still need real strategical/tactical intelligence inside and outside of the US. So when it does happen (and it will eventually happen) we're prepared not to lose our country, or even the world to the super nuclear powered genetically modified nazi cyborgs.

<comment><USER3> A country starts a war, fundamentally, when they see a resource (land; oil; people) that they think they can claim without destroying its value in the process. However, all the technologies we've developed since WWII that make us more efficient at mass-killing (chemical/biological weapons et al) are politically-blind; Anthrax will infect the conqueror as much as the conquered. The only real advance we've made in the "things that will kill the enemy but leave you alone to sit in their houses and farm their land" field, in the last 70 years, are drones--and, tactically-speaking, they haven't increased the _difficulty_ of war much for the side of the invaded, just made waging a war _safer_ for the invader. So, it's not any _easier_ to win a war against a nation at technological parity with your own than it was 70 years ago.

On the other hand, over the last 50 years, besides there having been built within every world-leader a strong awareness of the "final solution" (nukes) available to the major powers to put down any sufficient threat, a true global trade economy has also emerged, with strong economic interdependence between the major powers (China holding US debt &c). Every power is now just as much beholden, economically, to each other power, as if they were an export colony; the US going to war with China, for example, would be cutting off one's nose to spite one's face in the same way that Britain choosing, without provocation, to start warring with America in 1775 would have been. In this situation, I don't see much chance of a major power instigating an empire- building war.

Also, unlike in WWI, a country that _isn 't_ a major power doesn't have the political weight to instigate a major war--nobody will follow it into battle. Attacking a country in a union with a major power is implicitly attacking that power, and military strategists now treat it that way, instead of thinking they can "just" take the country. Instead, we merely see individual unallied states getting nasty to their unallied neighbors--free radicals bumping into one-another--and having to be calmed down by some third party. I would guess future "wars" all across the globe will look more like the US's dealings in Afghanistan/Iraq than it will like some sort of confrontation between NATO and some new Axis.

Another way to put it, is that national political borders across much of the globe have basically annealed down to a rest-state. The resignation to this fact is what seems to have spurred the EU into existence; if you can't invade your neighbor any more, you may as well cooperate and trade. I see this sort of idea spreading (though perhaps without the shared monetary policy aspect, which doesn't seem to be working out too well) as more regions of the world "settle", leaving basically four or five pretty-similar political bodies in a de-facto world-government union, and individual break-away states here or there which are filled up with "peacekeeping forces" by the one or another of the powers.

I think this logic is pretty common to people who don't have a dystopian view of the future. Do you see some major flaw in it?

<comment><USER4> Take a look at how interconnected the economies of the major combatants in WW1 were. You might be surprised. Even rational actors can be propelled into conflict that seems easily avoidable.

And if you don't think small countries can drag larger ones into war, take a good look at the Korean peninsula. If that goes pear shaped, it could easily drag the US into a war with China.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How do you abolish something that the entirety of the federal and state governments rely upon? Intelligence resources are being pooled to the NSA, and cyber-intelligence reports are being sourced wholly from the NSA. They're the single most powerful intelligence agency in the US, and there's absolutely no sign of it slowing down.

If there's anything that Obama shall be remembered for, it's that under his administration there was an _astronomical_ consolidation of power. The DHS has progressively been getting more and more involved in pulling the strings of all levels of law enforcement.

<comment><USER6> In hindsight, it's probably telling that Obama said he was heavily inspired by Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln vastly consolidated federal power during his presidency, and had some dubious issues with the Constitution as well.

<comment><USER7> "some dubious issues with the Constitution as well."

Is there a President this is not true for?

<comment><USER8> Carter?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The winning engineer is currently doing an AMA on Reddit:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1j6qo4/i_am_joseph_bon...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1j6qo4/i_am_joseph_bonneau_2013_nsa_award_winner_for/)

</comment><comment><USER10> This guy has the balls. Kudos, Mr Bonneau.

I'm curious if he will get a private reprimand from Google execs for unpleasant commentary on their partner :)

<comment><USER11> I honestly don't understand people's opinion around this. I'm not trying to refute your comment, just understand and see if I missed something. As far as I have read, Google complies with NSA letters (which seems to be required by law, although perhaps not a favorable one) and PRISM is said to give the NSA additional direct access (but I haven't seen any indication of this being proved or confirmed to be known to the companies involved). Has there been some information proving Google and other companies are actually working with the NSA or is it simply based on the idea that you think it might be likely and they'd deny it either way (if they confirm it, they work with the NSA and if they deny it, they work with the NSA).

I'm not suggesting blindly trusting any company or person but do we have actual knowledge in this subject I missed or simply opinions?

<comment><USER12> I think he's being cute. For me this quote sums up what PRISM is really about:

"Nobody wants a box in their network...[Companies often] find ways to give tools to minimize disclosures, to protect users, to keep the government off the premises, and to come to some reasonable compromise on the capabilities."

[http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57593538-38/how- the-u.s-fo...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57593538-38/how- the-u.s-forces-net-firms-to-cooperate-on-surveillance/)

Basically: in order to prevent the feds from installing boxes on their networks companies offer to do their own interception, which in my opinion is the far better alternative. "Direct access" isn't accurate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> tikkun.org seems to be down. Here's the Google cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/2013/07/25/google- engineer-wins-nsa-award-says-id-rather-have-it-abolished-than-persist-in-its- current-form/&strip=1)

Here's the blog post from the Google Engineer (Joseph Bonneau) about accepting the award: [http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2013/07/19/nsa-award- for-...](http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2013/07/19/nsa-award-for-best- scientific-cybersecurity-paper/)

</comment><comment><USER14> >> Like many in the community of cryptographers and security engineers, I'm sad that we haven't better informed the public about the inherent dangers and questionable utility of mass surveillance.

Thought provoking.

</comment><comment><USER15> Is this guy a google engineer because he thanks the people at Yahoo in his blog. Not that it matters, just happy he told them to go fuck themselves while accepting the award

</comment><comment><USER16> > Google Engineer Wins NSA Award, Then Says NSA Should Be "Abolished"

That's one thing. Now make these 2 events happen in the opposite order.

;-)

</comment><comment><USER17> The NSA announcement is here: [http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/press_room/2013/2013_sos_comp...](http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/press_room/2013/2013_sos_competition.shtml)

</comment><comment><USER18> This is silly coming from a company whose trusted computing base was nearly eaten by China. If any company needs the tightest possible OODA loop w.r.t. cyber-threats, it is Google.

There has been a lot of utter horseshit about how the NSA's activities will make Europeans distrust American cloud computing. Well the NSA is _nothing_ compared to the Communist Party espionage organizations.

<comment><USER19> >trusted computing base was nearly eaten by China

Citation ?

<comment><USER18> [http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-10434721-245.html](http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-10434721-245.html)</comment></comment></comment>


Unsigned Integer Arithmetic API in JDK 8 - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.oracle.com/darcy/entry/unsigned_api

<comment><USER2> The lack of unsigned integers as primitives in Java was a significant (and unnecessary) defect in the design of the language. I am glad they are finally starting to address it.

There are a number of codes and algorithms that are difficult to implement without unsigned integer primitives. You can make the algorithms work with the signed primitives but the implementation is nowhere near as fast or elegant as what you can do in a language like C or C++. There are many use cases for data types that behave like pure bit strings with no concept of sign.

<comment><USER3> That's one thing about Java I never agreed with. I can understand the idea that most of the time you don't really need unsigned types, but I think having the extra checking would be nice.

The place where it's a real problem is when you have to do any low level stuff. You read in bytes and they're all signed. So you either have to adjust them all (such as promoting them to shorts), so change the algorithm to handle the signs (which may make it quite a bit harder to read).

If you had to do enough, it would probably just be easier to do that stuff with JNI, but that's quite a bit less portable and something of a hassle.

<comment><USER4> Arithmetic aside, the byte-code is set in stone. It's even interpreted on silicon now on ARM processors with jazella. It's going to be an incredibly difficult effort to ever add unsigned types truly to Java without it effectively becoming a hard fork.

<comment><USER5> The bytecode isn't set in stone at all. Java 7 added InvokeDynamic, to name one bytecode.

Jazelle is basically being phased out in favor of the much-more-generic ThumbEE, which isn't onerously licensed and entirely undocumented and hence has a chance of actually being used. New ARM CPUs "support" Jazelle by effectively ignoring it.

It'd of course take a major-version Java release to add unsigned type bytecodes if they chose to go that route (rather than the current approach, which seems to be providing a dangerous and half-baked set of methods on Integer instead). But it certainly isn't impossible by any means.

<comment><USER6> Interestingly, you don't need to add a "full set" of bytecodes for unsigned arithmetic support - just four (udiv, ludiv, urem, lurem). All the other arithmetic operations are bit-identical with the existing signed versions.

It's also worth noting that existing Jazelle implementations don't do everything in hardware, they already call into a software piece to handle any opcodes they come across that they don't interpret natively. So improving those to handle new opcodes is just a software upgrade, same as anything else.

<comment><USER4> The biggest issue with adding those op code is the lack of space for every op code to support between every type IIRC. every new type exponentially increases the number of operations. Being that we can only 255 op code in Java, it causes a bit of a problem. In CIL/MSIL in .NET, they used a multibyte technique with flag bits IIRC. (Don't quote me but I'm recalling designs I seen 8 years ago here).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Director of National Intelligence James Clapper Resigns - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/11/director-of-national-intelligence-james-clapper-resigns/ <comment><AUTHOR> Preemptive move to avoid having to work with Trump and friends? Or perhaps the Clinton investigation's side-effects affected him (rather than Comey)?

Admittedly wild guesses and I'm not very familiar with the, politics and internals of the US intelligence, but the timing is quite interesting!

<comment><USER2> From [http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/17/politics/dni-james-clapper- sub...](http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/17/politics/dni-james-clapper-submitted- his-resignation/index.html):

 _" Clapper's announcement wasn't a surprise to those around him and was expected at the end of his term. For months, the intelligence director has been updating those around him on his own personal countdown clock, telling them exactly how many days he has left until retirement."_

It had nothing to do with Trump.</comment></comment>


Sunflower: (clojure) extract story text from HTML markup tree - <AUTHOR> http://blog.danieljanus.pl/clojure/sunflower.html

<comment><USER2> Cool idea. The readability bookmarklet (<http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/>) does a great job at extracting the main document text without having to compare to other files, though it's currently all client-side.

<comment><USER3> I wrote a Python port which I used to create a version of the HN rss feed with the content of each article embedded into the feed itself. It became too popular and caused my server to crash.

However, Andrew Trusty put a wrapper around my code so that you could use it with any website. It's written in Python and runs on Google AppEngine. Check it out: <http://andrewtrusty.appspot.com/readability/>

If my host was again acting up, I'd link my port.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks interesting! I was not able to build the jar due to the flyingsaucer dependency failing. I tried using the maven repo's [groupId/artifactId "8RC1"] in my project.clj but no dice. I've msg'd the author on GitHub. Likely a quick fix and nothing to be upset over, but just so you're all aware...

<comment><USER5> I found that running

      lein deps
      lein uberjar

Resulted in a clean build for me. I guess you could also stick the JAR in the local maven repository too - flyingsaucer lives at <https://xhtmlrenderer.dev.java.net/>

<comment><USER6> I've uploaded the jar to the Downloads section and also added a note about Flying Saucer to the readme. Thanks for checking it out!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Of course it wouldn't be able to filter out embedded marketing / product placement, an increasingly popular paradigm for advertisement. (But who can filter that out when it's integrated well enough?)

Neat idea.

</comment><comment><USER8> Sounds related to ariel: <http://ariel.rubyforge.org/></comment>


Gist: more concise output in Python - <AUTHOR> http://gist.github.com/479549#comments <comment><USER2> Why?

        print

is all of 5 characters and universally understood.

        o = QuickOutputter()
        o <

is 23 characters and not universally understood.

Need I say more?

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea would be using it inside a logger, this is more a syntax thing than anything else. The pseudo-code would be better explained as:

log = get_logger() log < "some log message"

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Curious for some feedback here - anyone have any thoughts on it?

<comment><USER3> Well, I'd say C++'s std::ostream was a bad idea the first time, but if you're going to do it you might want to swap __lt__ for __lshift__.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It is not clear to me how this is in any way better than the print statement itself</comment>


Transistors as switches - <AUTHOR> how do transistors work as switches? i understand how it uses a small current to change the conductivity properties, and thus to control a larger current; i dont understand how the smaller current is controlled in the first place. <comment><USER2> They have a base, a collector and an emitter. The low current from the base makes the atoms between the collector and the emitter to allow the electric current to pass. However it may be easier and more safe to use optocoupler if using low amperage and a relay for high amperage.</comment>


Tails, you win - <AUTHOR> http://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/tails-you-win/ <comment><USER2> I doubt the author would have invested in Disney right before snow white.

VC's only exist because rich people can only throw so much money at google.

So, what I get out of this if you live in SV and your technical.

For 85 out of 100 go work for a big company.

10 out of 100 if your really successful and you have lots of capital and are well connected you possibly be start a company be moderately successful.

2-3 of you if you happen to meet the next Steve jobs and he/she is probably talking about making $1 or 2 off poor people in India or china. And your vital to him/her getting some business off the ground. go for it.

1-2 of you, if you are actually are next Steve jobs and... I don't know your probably actually in India or China right now and not reading dumb comments by a burnt out developer like me.</comment>


Neutrinos continue run of odd behavior at Daya Bay - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/neutrinos-continue-run-of-odd-behavior-at-daya-bay/ <comment><USER2> Would it be possible to create a nuclear power plant detector by trying to detect neutrinos?

<comment><USER3> Yes, in principle, absolutely. It wouldn't be practical though. The detectors are large, and sensitive to every kind of noise and interference, and you need to collect data, not just take a mere single reading. But, funny story, during commissioning the Chinese officials in charge of the nuclear plant were very conservative about what information they wanted to share with the experiment regarding the plant's operational status, I got to see them with some funny looks on their faces when the physicists told them, and showed them plots of exactly what was going on in the reactors and when.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That plot was made in ROOT (twitch). They have my sympathies.

</comment><comment><USER5> Could our understanding of nuclear decay be slightly inaccurate and affect these results?

</comment><comment><USER6> So they've discovered dark energy but everyone is afraid to say anything?

<comment><USER7> No one wants a repeat of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than- light_neutrino_ano...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than- light_neutrino_anomaly)

<comment><USER8> I understand why that may be the case, but IMO your link was a prime example of science done -right-. The researchers saw something they couldn't explain, and even knowing that that they almost certainly made a mistake somewhere, they put their hubris aside and asked the community for help. This sort of discovery should be commended, not avoided!

<comment><USER7> The science was done right, but the media management wasn't.

<comment><USER9> Lol, media management!

The mainstream (and wannabe mainstream) media care about lurid headlines, and not much else (apart from the occasional agitprop piece, maybe). Even the most guarded of press releases are regularly distorted beyond recognition. Good luck with the media management!

<comment><USER10> That combustible media environment must therefore be taken into account when publishing results.

<comment><USER9> Press release: "We possibility found a hint that might indicate X."

Press: "Breakthrough study finds that X!!1!one1eleven"

(I know I am caricaturing here, but certainly less than I'd like...)

<comment><USER11> Really, the only caricature I see is the fact that they use particular kinds of vocabulary as a substitute for exclamation marks.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What the iPad 3 really needs: fewer stupid articles about the iPad 3 - <AUTHOR> http://reverttosaved.com/2012/03/06/what-the-ipad-3-really-needs-fewer-stupid-articles-about-the-ipad-3/

<comment><USER2> I really agreed with a lot of this article (but not all) but really couldn't get past the juvenile way in which it was written the entire time I was reading.

I dont't personally understand everyone's need for a stylus. I hear this complaint from time to time, and with how intuitive apple's keyboard is on the iPhone/iPad ( really its the only one I can remotely stand. And yes it's far from perfect) I just don't see much of a need. If I was taking handwritten notes in class id be carrying around a notebook.

<comment><USER3> _I don't personally understand everyone's need for a stylus._

I don't understand why it needs to be _everyone_. How about some people want a stylus, some people don't? (Which is why, for instance, Samsung has a tablet with a stylus, and a tablet without. They have a smartphone with a stylus, and a smartphone without. They didn't go all in on the stylus).

I can certainly see value for me, especially if it's pressure sensitive. Outside of obvious painting and drawing apps, even for something where you need to interact with small objects on the screen, using a big finger, obscuring the entire area you're trying to interact with with a meat sausage is suboptimal. Substituting a little appendage can be very useful.

But it isn't for everyone. Which is why I don't get the utter fearsome defensiveness about the stylus that many in the Apple camp seem to resort to (e.g. Gruber): It isn't for them, and that's great, but trying to mock others who might want it? That's just weird.

<comment><USER4> Yeah I can see the value for niche uses/users, but the manufacturers are getting a bit too optimistic when they present it as a must-have killer feature.

Like the Note's Superbowl ad, where really the only noticeable difference (from a mainstream consumer's perspective) is the stylus. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V40oo4kkzHg>

<comment><USER3> _Like the Note's Superbowl ad, where really the only noticeable difference (from a mainstream consumer's perspective) is the stylus._

It was a pitch for a specific product and thus highlighted the attributes of that product. If Samsung is presenting it as a must-have killer feature, why do so many of their products actually lack a stylus?

I also don't care if a vehicle can parallel park itself, yet if a manufacturer makes a model with that feature they're naturally going to highlight it.

<comment><USER4> It just seems too niche for a Superbowl ad and the whole presentation of the ad makes it apparent the manufacturers believe they've revolutionised the tablet space with, behold...the stylus. Setting themselves up for disappointment.

<comment><USER3> They've sold 2 million of them, and all reports are that they've seen great sales: I doubt they're disappointed. And while it is indeed a niche, but a very lucrative one. Further Samsung had no other new releases around the time of the Superbowl -- had the GS III been ready, I have no doubt they would have led with that.

It's a feature of a product. A feature that appeals to some, turns off others. That's how the whole choice thing works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I completely agree with the article though I think it misses what the iPad 3 is. I think most tech commenators miss the point.

Apple isn't a traditional tech company. The majority of Apples 'new products' aren't new at all. They are just a new iteration of an existing product.

Many tech commentators look at the iPad 3 and see it as make or break. They want reason's why you would toss aside your iPad 2 and buy an iPad 3. The fact is though, if you don't want to piss away your money you will not get an iPad 3 if you own an iPad 2.

Its like like if you own a 2010 iMac you didn't buy a 2011 iMac (I assume there was a 2010/11 iMac). While the latest model is superior, quicker, has better gizmo's etc. The one you have is just fine.

The iPad 3 will be the continued evolution of the iPad product, just as the iPad 2 was. This isn't a new product, Apple is just continuing to keep its product up to date.

<comment><USER6> > The iPad 3 will be the continued evolution of the iPad product, just as the > iPad 2 was. This isn't a new product, Apple is just continuing to keep its > product up to date.

The branding seems to contradict that idea. If it's just an update, then why not just keep calling it "the iPad", without appending a Big Shiny Version Digit? You know, like they do with all of their other desktop and notebook products?

<comment><USER7> > If it's just an update, then why not just keep calling it "the iPad", > without appending a Big Shiny Version Digit?

Because eventually there's going to be an iOS version or an application that only runs well on version X of the iPad. It's a lot easier for a user to understand "Only works on iPad 2 or better" then to understand "Only works on iPads manufactured on or after March xth 2012".

<comment><USER8> It's a slightly different situation but that's essentially what they are doing with Macs, saying this-and-that is compatible with the MacBook Pro (early 2009) and such.

<comment><USER9> It is also common to refer to the Macs with their iteration+variant number, e.g mine is a MacBook Pro 5,5

System Information was actually the easiest way to get such a specifier before Lion, which now shows the "MacBook Pro 13-inch, Mid-2009" in the brand new "More Info..." of "About This Mac".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sort of obvious. This hype cycle is so predictable that even the parodies are getting tired - the perpetual stream of half-baked critiques of Apple is just part of it. CNET's been pretty shameless about presenting some kind of Android/iOS horserace. I don't think any Apple product has escaped these kinds of dismissive critiques - the original iPhone was derisively compared to the Nokia N95 from the get go, the original iPad got an incredibly underwhelmed response, the iPhone 4's perceived faults overshadowed any of its breakthroughs, etc.

But this is one of the most profitable/important products by one of the most profitable and interesting companies in the world, so what do you expect?

<comment><USER11> To the dismay of folks like myself, the half-baked critiques you describe are unchanged from the days when Apple was still smaller than their peers. Think of Slashdot's infamous iPod review, for example. The tech press just seems to lose its mind when it comes to Apple and their products. Anyone who gets it right is a "fanboy" member of the "Mac cult", and all that nonsense.

<comment><USER12> _Think of Slashdot's infamous iPod review, for example_

You mean the _"no wireless, less space than a Nomad. lame"_? I think that was more CmdrTaco's personal opinion than a review for the general public, like these pundits are supposedly doing. He probably has very different priorities when choosing gadgets when compared to the average person; I know I do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Apple could lose $9 billion in one day if aliens descended from the skies to steal it". Relevant parody on TNW.

[http://thenextweb.com/apple/2012/03/06/apple-could- lose-9-bi...](http://thenextweb.com/apple/2012/03/06/apple-could- lose-9-billion-in-one-day-if-aliens-descended-from-the-skies-to-steal-it/)

I was thinking of making an iPad headline generator, which looks something like <N random characters>iPad<N random characters>

</comment><comment><USER13> To add to this, much of what was said about the ipad 1 when it launched was along the lines of "but this is just a large sized ipod touch!". Tech "analysis" quality seems to have taken a dive. Thank goodness sites like anandtech exist.

Personally, I'd drool if I see an ipad announced with a stylus - not just the blunt kind that you can get today, but a true Wacom calibre stylus complete with tilt sensor, pressure sensor, side buttons and "flip to erase". That'll be my _dream_ educational computing device!

<comment><USER13> ... And to top it, i really hope they put the front facing camera somewhere in the middle of the display -- a patent they've held for a while without being used in a product. That'll change all the awkwardness with video conferencing on the device where it is incredibly hard to make eye contact with the one you're talking to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Pundits will pundit, it's what they do, and Apple is a prime target nowadays. Not sure what's with all the fury.

I do wonder if the Fire will be a bigger success, especially worldwide. It's not a direct iPad competitor - it's not a product for the same market segment - but I can see it selling well in lower income places. An iPad will never be a huge success here in Portugal, for example (and in my opinion, of course).

</comment><comment><USER14> This seems eerily like a Macalope article.

</comment><comment><USER15> Article gets it all right but in the end it misses a larger point: these pundits, writers, and bloggers have motivations behind these ridiculous claims they make. Those motivations are personal preference, ignorance, desire for clicks, and... wait for it... some are paid shills in one way or another. I'd venture to guess that a lot of the unrealistic things being written about the iPad are born from those motivations. For big tech sites I'd say the paid shills reside there. For bloggers with big audiences I'd say paid shill-ism and personal bias play into that. And for nobodies I'd say ignorance and personal bias are their motivations.

When it comes to reviews its good to follow the money. It'll lead to why a review recommends one thing over another. That then trickles down to smaller sites. The little guys echo what the big guys say and hope they can ride some coat tails and get some Adsense revenue. Just take a look at any tech scandal like the Path address book fiasco. As soon as it became a big story everyone wanted in on the action and most everyone just echoed the popular opinion.

</comment><comment><USER16> /end rant</comment>


Show HN: DNSApe – Simple, Fast Network Tools - <AUTHOR> https://dnsape.com <comment><AUTHOR> DNSApe 1.1.3 has been released. DNSApe ([https://dnsape.com](https://dnsape.com)) is a free network tool for anyone that deals with websites on a daily basis. We provide the following tools.

* DNS Records - list DNS records for a domain

* DNS Traversal - show DNS records from root, TLD, and authoritative name servers

* DNS Cache - show DNS records from popular DNS servers

* HTTP Headers - get HTTP headers for a domain

* Whois - Whois lookup (we never save any lookups)

* IP Whois - just what is sounds like...

* SSL - SSL lookup and verification

* Ping - a simple ping from our server

We've fixed and added a bunch since our initial New Years release. Here are our new features.

* Dark mode! Our top requested feature...

* Lookup URLs - copy URLs to share and load lookups directly (e.g. [https://dnsape.com/ssl/amazon.com](https://dnsape.com/ssl/amazon.com) or [https://dnsape.com/dns/reddit.com](https://dnsape.com/dns/reddit.com))

* Replaced RBL tool with SSL tool (RBL lookup may return later in a more useful state)

* Added client IP address linked to IPWhois lookup in the footer

* Entirely new backend infrastructure (Docker on Vultr behind Cloudflare)

Future features include an upload time calculator, a network subnet calculator, and a one-page domain summary. You can vote on features here ([https://dnsape.featureupvote.com](https://dnsape.featureupvote.com)).

DNSApe is open source under the MIT license here ([https://github.com/srvaudit](https://github.com/srvaudit)). We're looking for feedback and suggestions, and of course contributors are welcome!

</comment><comment><USER2> It seems to be putting a random character before each TXT record, how come?

        https://dnsape.com/dns/dr.dk
        https://dnsape.com/dns/svt.se
        https://dnsape.com/dns/aftenposten.no
        https://dnsape.com/dns/dmarcian.com</comment>


Ask HN: HTML5 offline access or Google Gears? - <AUTHOR>

The question is ... is html5 offline access the same as google gears? i haven't compared the two but html5 offline access is based on google gears?
The scenario is this. I want to support offline access in my web app and I'm wondering whether I should built it using Google Gears.
My thoughts are - since Gears is being phased out in favour of HTML5, it might be a bad idea if I have to migrate the code later to HTML5 - may not be a problem if HTML5 is based on Gears.
- Gears need to specifically get the user to install a plugin, HTML5 does not - Only some browsers support HTML5 offline access but Gears can run on 'all' <comment><USER2> Most modern browsers support HTML5 -- probably more than there is gears support, honestly. Gears is end-of-life'd. Even Google Chrome doesn't support Gears at this point.

I'd go with HTML5.

<comment><AUTHOR> gears come preinstalled in chrome ... i guess html5 is based on gears .. the editor for the HTML5 draft is from Google so there will be a great similarity

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't think Gear is based on HTML5. It is better to go with HTML5.

</comment><comment><USER4> even google is ditching gears, so use HTML5</comment>


Ask HN: How may a founder est. source code rights as part of a golden parachute - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Find a lawyer.</comment>


GitHub vs. Bitbucket: It's More Than Just Features - <AUTHOR> http://www.takipiblog.com/bitbucket-vs-github-its-more-than-just-features/

<comment><USER2> One of my main projects was split into a lot of sub-project repos which made is easier to manage and version those sub projects independently.

For private projects, GitHub charges by the number of repos and BitBucket charges by the number of users. Initially I was using BitBucket but after having used GitHub I eventually opted to pay more on GitHub. There are two major factors for this. First the UI for GitHub is extremely polished. It's a hands-down winner. BitBucket has always felt aged and clunky in looks and operation.

The second reason is the tie in to open source which makes it very easy to fork open source projects on GH, and then include them in your projects. Again, the network and activity graphs, the commit log, diff/blame/pull- request features etc, just make this whole aspect a lot more fun to use.

I suspect the only reason BitBucket is surviving is because of their differentiated pricing model. If GitHub offered a hybrid pricing (repo or user based), it would mark a sharp decline for BitBucket even though as a consumer I prefer if they were more competitive.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's worth noting the differences here for students too - bottom line is that despite all the awesome deals Github have procured for students [0] Bitbucket completely dominate here.

Github offer a free micro account - 5 private repos, unlimited collaborators. Even without a student offer Bitbucket offer unlimited private repos with 5 collaborators for everyone, which is already awesome for students. They'll bump it up to unlimited collaborators for students though, which is a seriously generous deal.

It's not as slick but it's a no brainer for anything that can't be public, which there's a lot of in university.

[0] [https://education.github.com/pack](https://education.github.com/pack)

</comment><comment><USER4> Gitlab [0] has unlimited private repositories and unlimited collaborators. It might prove to be a good alternative.

[0] [https://gitlab.com](https://gitlab.com)

<comment><USER5> I thought gitlab was self hosted. Do they offer a free hosted service now?

<comment><USER4> Yeah they do now: [https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab- com/](https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I choose BitBucket purely because of the unlimited private repos. I get all the opensource collaborations free data fork me, and it's all cool, but when I play around with my own projects, I'd rather keep it private until it's ready for "real" use.

Also, I use Git to manage large projects written in LaTeX. So far the limit of 5 collaborators haven't been an issue.

</comment><comment><USER7> One main reason I am considering BitBucket is that their issue tracking is more elaborate. There are issue priorities and components, which are essential for large projects. These could be shoe-horned into Gitlab using tags, but it requires third-party plugins.

</comment><comment><USER8> We use stash and GitHub where I work, and we constantly complain about Stash. GitHub is just so much nicer to use in different ways. If your team does lots of PRs and collaboration you will probably prefer GitHub too.

</comment><comment><USER9> Mercurail support is main Bitbucket feature for me. If mercurial support will be added to GitHub I will switch to GitHub. But I don't think, that GitHub will support anything except git.

</comment><comment> vezzy-fnord Bitbucket's UI is a bit clunkier than GitHub's, but being able to juggle free private repos and dual wield VCS is certainly good.

Another thing I like about Bitbucket is it far less gamified than GitHub. The latter pretty much has gamification and phony social interaction built into its core, whereas Bitbucket has less bullshit (while still retaining useful things like private messages).

In addition, another more cynical reason to use Bitbucket is as a middle finger to GitHub monoculture. Linus Torvalds once snarked about how Linux being written in C "keeps the idiots out". Using BB is also very effective at keeping the peanut gallery out and having less distraction in general.

<comment><USER10> Well said. Hate the GH monopoly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I use self-hosted GitLab. It's very similar to GitHub, but our company has full control and ownership over our code.</comment>


Apple reportedly acknowledges hijacked text message problem - <AUTHOR> http://9to5mac.com/2014/05/14/apple-reportedly-acknowledges-hijacked-text-message-problem/#more-323198

<comment><AUTHOR> I am completely affected by this. Apple needs to compensate users and fix immediately. Ruined a recent vacation this by not getting peoples texts.</comment>


Programming in the Debugger - <AUTHOR> http://willcrichton.net/notes/programming-in-the-debugger/ <comment><USER2> I only skimmed through the article; so bear with me.

Currently at work we do extensive work with AWS Lambdas that does algorithmic calculations on in-memory datasets with pandas.

We're all pretty new to pandas and python in general. Our workflow has lead to us dropping debug-breakpoint in PyCharm and using ipython to interactively hack at our problem til we get it right. I think it works wonderful.

Until this project, I didn't use debug-breakpoints that much, but I've learned to appropriate the features PyCharm provides. It's very powerful once you get the hang of it.</comment>


Alas, Digg Reader is shutting down at the end of March - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/14/alas-digg-reader-is-shutting-down-at-the-end-of-march/ <comment><AUTHOR> Any good replacement recommendations?

<comment><USER2> [https://feedbin.com/](https://feedbin.com/) is really good and not miles apart in the interface

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> On a side note, I'm amazed Digg is still alive.</comment>


AEZ: An Easy-to-Use Authenticated Encryption Scheme - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/aez/index.html

<comment><USER2> There aren't many comments here, so I'll take the liberty of adding a thing or two.

This is a CAESAR submission by Rogaway and friends. It is essentially a construction that uses AES and transforms it into a block cipher of arbitrary size. The authentication comes for free by appending zeroes at the end of the message and checking that they remain zeroes after decryption.

This is a nice scheme for users, since it provides strong misuse guarantees. Repeating nonces won't be catastrophic like in many of the other CAESAR ciphers, and the speed is quite nice (mostly owing to the hardware-accelerated AES-NI instructions). For implementers it's not so nice, as it seems rather complicated (especially if you do not have constant-time hardware AES instructions).

Like the majority of AES-based schemes, security starts to break down once you encrypt around 2^64 blocks with the same key. This is not AES's or AEZ's fault, it's a consequence of AES's small 128-bit block size. As a result, the authors do not recommend encrypting over 4 petabytes of data under the same key.

It would be nice if AEZ was defined in terms of a generic block cipher, but as far as I understand the scheme is quite tied to AES.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does somebody wanna give the layman's version of why I would use this?

I don't blame the site for this, given that it doesn't appear designed to be read by a layperson, but without some kind of I'm-Not-A-Crypto-Wizard translation it just reads like big-word-bingo to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Relatively short description of the design goal:

The goal of an encryption scheme is to provide confidentiality. It is important to know that most traditional encryption schemes, like block ciphers in CBC, CTR, OFB modes, do not provide any authenticity, i.e. while you cannot recover the plaintext from a ciphertext, you might be able to feed the decryption algorithm a ciphertext that you crafted, without the decryption algorithm having a means for detecting its lack of authenticity (e.g. flipping a bit in ciphertext generated with CTR mode will result in a flipped bit in decrypted plaintext), and in effect, making the system do things that an adversary wants it to do. In practice, this can often be more dangerous than loss of confidentiality.

In order to add authenticity to an encryption scheme, you would traditionally apply a separate message authentication algorithm to the ciphertext and the initialization vector to generate an _authentication tag_ , which you can then use to verify if the ciphertext was tampered with.

There are many ways this combination can go wrong (and has gone) due to design and implementation mistakes, like sharing the key for the MAC and encryption algorithms, not authenticating the IV, not verifying the tag correctly and exposing yourself to timing attacks, applying the MAC to plaintext, as opposed to the ciphertext, etc.. For this reason, and performance implications, it is desirable to have encryption schemes that also somehow provide authenticity almost "for free", as a natural byproduct of the ciphertext generation. Encryption schemes that achieve that, like OCB, CCM, CWC, and GCM modes, are called Authenticated Encryption.

Most of the regular authenticated encryption schemes rely on passing a unique number when encrypting each message, called nonce or initialization vector. For instance, encrypting more than one message with AES in GCM mode with the same nonce will result in total loss of authenticity, among other things. Therefore, they are not very resistant to accidental misuse, and extreme care should be taken while using them.

AEZ, on the other hand, strives to be a more robust authenticated encryption scheme in the face of nonce reuse (misuse), that is, it will not face a catastrophic loss of security if a nonce is accidentally reused.</comment></comment>


How GoToMyPC Devistated pcAnywhere & GoToMeeting Put A Hurtin' On WebEx - <AUTHOR> http://www.infochachkie.com/fast-followers-ii/

<comment><AUTHOR> pcAnywhere's market share has plummeted, from well a dominate position of the SMB remote access market to a fractional, minority share.

What word would you use?

</comment><comment><USER2> Devistated : removed Vista from?</comment>


Do Covid-19 death rates by age suggest a path to staying open in a second wave? - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hbnDIwW8MPE5X5bMwEMGD-DiR-HLEGpqzZKiNi2dkc8/edit <comment><USER2> Possibly yes, but society will probably need to figure out and take some additional steps if it wants to protect the vulnerable groups. There will need to be both environmental and legal changes.

Environmental: More researched and standardized procedures for interacting with those at risk. For example, we should determine if/how items need to be sanitized when an at-risk person receives them (such a grocery/food deliveries, etc...). Environmental changes could also include physical requirements, such as meeting such persons through plexiglass panels or mandating protective gear.

Legal: Labor and welfare/disability laws need to adapt to the situation so those at risk are not forced to re-enter society in order to support themselves and their families. Not everyone at risk is elderly and already in retirement; many people in their prime working years have underlying conditions that affect their health, but were still able to work with few or no limitations (until COVID-19). Not every job can be completed at home, and not everyone has savings to stay home indefinitely. Without support from the government or their employers, they'll be between a proverbial rock and hard place.

Another issue is low-risk people who live with high-risk people. Should a low- risk partner stay home if the other is high-risk? How will society support those situations?

</comment><comment><USER3> While I've had thoughts along these lines as the "pragmatic" thing to do - given that the population level health effects of a busted economy and the fact that we're probably not changing the system anytime soon - we should still acknowledge that there's a lot we don't know about covid and that this would be a huge experiment. There are follow on health effects from both chicken pox (shingles) and polio viruses, for example, that often happen decades after their first onset - so we could have a "bonus" surprise from covid down the line. This would be to gain an immunity that is not assured as of yet - because we still don't know enough.

</comment><comment><USER4> Yes. The Navy experience (60%+ asymptomatic) and others (almost completely asymptomatic homeless shelter with large percentage positive tests) indicate we have been given hugely false or misleading stats about this virus.

Once we can beat proper stats out of the government with large-scale testing, it may become clear that we are already well on our way to herd immunity, and that the vast majority of healthy people without serious secondary issues will be fine (perhaps unhappy and hurting, but will survive).

Of course, encourage any fearful or ill people to continue segregation.

But, this segregation of otherwise healthy low risk population just has to stop. It is nuts.

<comment><USER5> There's also the Stanford study of Santa Clara residents which shows asymptomatic infection/recovery 50-85 times the official numbers.

<comment><USER6> I think Andrew Gelman raised some serious concerns with that study.

[https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/04/19/fatal- flaw...](https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/04/19/fatal-flaws-in- stanford-study-of-coronavirus-prevalence/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We don't give vaccines to people without subjecting them to comprehensive and time-consuming clinical trials. So why would we willingly subject half the population to a virus that we seem to know very little about? Are there long term health effects to an "otherwise healthy" person being infected with COVID-19? Are there potential long-term lung issues, even in a person who is symptomatic but does not require hospitalization?

I worry about these things based simply on reading the anecdotes of many younger, healthy people who have dealt with this virus. It's extremely clear in those anecdotes that this virus is nothing like the common cold or the flu. Yet so much of the rhetoric seems to make that assumption.

I'd hate to take the "this is silly, let's open things up for the healthy" approach only to be in a situation 20 years from now where we are dealing with the misery of mass-scale respiratory disease that gets linked back to these infections.

</comment><comment><USER5> To author: please include a date and changelog in this document, assuming it will be updated to reflect new data and comments on the doc.

</comment><comment><USER8> My guess is a lot of the assumptions and conclusions are wrong but that the high-level takeaway is correct: we should be looking for solutions to safely (yes, safely, don't ignore that word please if you're going to reply and disagree) reopen the economy, rather than just do the "social distancing until we have a vaccine" thing.

edit to try and preempt the downvotes: I am supportive of social distancing and I'm observing it pretty strictly. But I also know a lot of people who are going to be in a lot of trouble if we're in this state for too long. We should be aggressively trying to get data that helps us get back to as normal a life as we can, safely.

<comment><USER9> What I've seen epidemiologists recommend: lock down long enough to build up testing and tracing and reduce infections to a point where tracing is practical, then you can open back up and isolate individual cases.

Trouble is, we haven't ramped up testing enough and we're heading toward opening prematurely. According to Harvard we need about three times as much daily testing to open safely: [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/17/us/coronaviru...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/17/us/coronavirus- testing-states.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Filled with bullshit jobs and a lagging technological scene, we've set our economy up for vulnerability and i hope even if it opens we dont go back to bullshit as usual.

</comment><comment><USER11> No. We assume immunity which is not guaranteed and may be transient. We need to break transmission chains by physical distancing.

<comment><USER12> Physical distancing is a costly measure. It would be economically cheaper for the young and healthy to self-infect and then self-quarantine. Their chances of dying or even hospitalization is basically a rounding error in that demographic. That way, they can't spread it to other people. Herd immunity should be accelerated, not decelerated.

The evidence so far seems to show that there is immunity to it after recovery (as well as the rest of the corona viruses). Immunity is not permanent, it last 6-18 months from what I understand.

Physical distancing is another alternative but is enormously expensive to the economy.

<comment><USER13> Young people do die though and will with this.

Herd immunity without a vaccine is condemning thousands of people to die.

<comment><USER14> Some on this site seem to be ruthlessly selfish. They do not care about those who are at risk - and would rather rush back to the way things were.

It's ethically vile, and deserves nothing but spit.

That anyone will die should be reason enough to slow down and do the right thing. Covid-19 has revealed how thin some margins are for businesses we need to survive. Condemning the sick to die and going back to normal isn't just cruel and evil - it's shortsighted and foolish.

We need to change.

<comment><USER12> But some economic tradeoffs are viable. For instance, 35,000 people will die every year as tradeoff for the convenience for driving.

<comment><USER15> You first dude.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Amazon Warehouse Workers Head to Supreme Court Over Unpaid Theft Screenings - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/07/amazon-warehouse-supreme-_n_5946464.html

<comment><USER2> _Meanwhile, the president 's labor secretary, Tom Perez, is out stumping for paid family leave and a federal minimum wage of $10.10 per hour, nearly $3 above the current level.

[...]

"It's particularly ironic considering how the Obama administration is talking about increasing the availability of overtime [pay] for people," said Buck. "These are low-wage workers here, and [the administration] is basically saying they shouldn't be paid while they're held captive. It's mind-boggling to me."_

Very disingenuous, as the reasons are stated clearly on the second page of the amicus brief: many federal government employees also go through such post- shift checks and if they were to be compensated for this time then it could cost the federal government $$$. The administration's proposed _policy_ is to increase the minimum wage and other worker protections, but it is up to Congress to make the actual laws on that issue; the administration can only encourage voters to pressure lawmakers. Meanwhile, the administration's _duty_ in operating the government is to deliver the best value to the taxpayer and thus maximize the value it receives from government employees.

Counselor Buck surely understands this, but since he's representing the plaintiffs his comments are tailored to advance their position rather provide an objective analysis of the facts. Pretty lazy journalism on the Huffington Post's part, but like many media outlets their goal is to advocate rather than educate.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Really hoping some Amazon people will chime in with their true thoughts about this.</comment>


Ask HN: What other companies are more bottom-up/bossless like github and valve? - <AUTHOR>

I'm not sure what to call this organizational style, but I'm interested in companies, like Github and Valve, that have very little hierarchy and support a lot of bottom-up production. Do you know any other companies with this organizational style?  ... in NYC? <comment><USER2> No, sorry. Those are rare beasts indeed. I think the current scrum fashion dampens many impulses from programmers.

Trolltech was like that when I was there, but that's long ago. (There was a principle that the person who ended up actually doing a task had final authority.) I certainly don't know any in NYC.

Cut your hair and get a job. Sigh.

<comment><AUTHOR> > I think the current scrum fashion dampens many impulses from programmers.

Wow, that gets at the very reason why I asked this question! Ever since we moved to scrum, I have felt less creative and more stressed. I think I do better in a less hyper-task oriented and hierarchical structure.

Thanks for the reply.</comment></comment>


IllusionMage Easy 3D Animation Software Program  - <AUTHOR> http://www.illusionmage.com/ <comment><USER2> The demo video has a few screenshots of the UI, and the rest is text. Perhaps they should have shown some 3D animation!</comment>


BBC iPlayer for Kindle (Cool Hack) - <AUTHOR> http://www.frisnit.com/2011/07/07/iplayer-for-kindle/ <comment><USER2> The article says it would be better with a timed text feed. I'm pretty sure this used to exist - you can see that production of subtitles at the beeb uses timed text for the Embedded Media Player (here: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/guidelines/futuremedia/accessibility/su...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/guidelines/futuremedia/accessibility/subtitling_guides/EMP.shtml#emp_subs) ) - the EMP isn't iplayer, but is the thing that shows news/show clips on the rest of the bbc website.

Also, I recall downloading a feed of one show while the BBC Backstage experiment was going on (when they were pushing open APIs etc). It's possible these things are still out there. I had a dig around and couldn't see timed text attached to any EMP clips though, even on programming for the hearing impaired.

</comment><comment><USER3> > But there's still a segment of the population who aren't being catered for; > those whose primary computing device is an eReader.

Does this group really exist?

(cool hack, just wondering)

<comment><USER4> Between about 8:30pm and 7:00am, me. It's close tthe ideal overnight device. Stick an LED on it and the only things left are better text entry and some browser fixes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Now we can make our own Photonovels/Fotonovels

[http://mikecanex.wordpress.com/2012/08/28/turn-tv-shows- into...](http://mikecanex.wordpress.com/2012/08/28/turn-tv-shows-into-ebooks/)

</comment><comment><USER6> It'd be interesting to see someone take this a step further; use face recognition to have dialog bubbles show up on the appropriate actors (maybe inferring who is who from other scenes w/ the same faces?).

<comment><USER7> Hulu does this: [https://twitter.com/shanselman/status/239987206482169856/pho...](https://twitter.com/shanselman/status/239987206482169856/photo/1/large)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> When I got my Kindle I've spent quite some time for the useless jailbreak.

The only cool thing I was able to achieve was to play Star Wars ASCII version over telnet (towel.blinkenlights.nl).

<comment><USER9> Despite the fact that my Kindle is running Linux, etc, I prefer to see it as an appliance for reading rather than a general purpose computing device. I find the screen too slow even for web browsing. It's without a doubt the best ebook reading device I've owned, but I can't pretend its functionality extends beyond that.

My Android phone on the other hand...

<comment><USER10> You can push to it - email, web pages etc. It's my most used 'web browser.'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> silly question: Do I only need a black and white TV licence if I only watch live TV on my kindle?

<comment><USER12> In the UK you only need a TV licence if you watch or record live broadcast TV. If you only watch "catch up" stuff on the iPlayer then no licence is required.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is wicked</comment>


Kasper-Spy: Kaspersky Anti-Virus Puts Users at Risk - <AUTHOR> https://www.heise.de/ct/artikel/Kasper-Spy-Kaspersky-Anti-Virus-puts-users-at-risk-4496138.html <comment><USER2> Most anti-virus software is unnecessary, almost useless and can significantly decrease the performance of your machine. I worked at one company that provided its employees with really powerful desktop machines (Xeon CPU with 24 cores, 64GB of RAM, two SSDs in hardware RAID). Per my estimate the cost of such desktops had to be around $6K-$8K. But they installed a CA anti-virus software on them. And just like that the desktop turned from a performance beast to a snail. On most operations it was even slower than my middle of the road personal laptop. The anti-virus interfered with everything: disk, network, processes. The machine can be loaded at most at 3-4%, because the anti-virus service was consuming a single core up to 100% and didn't let anything else to run. Needless to say, it never found any viruses on my machine.

<comment><USER3> And nevertheless we are forced to put an endpoint on all machines for compliancy reasons. The security/privacy beancounters at our larger customers demand it.

<comment><USER4> Why hasn't some startup offered a low-resource AV? Call it "Anti-Tiger Rock AV"

Why isn't Windows Defender good enough?

<comment><USER3> Well, for one, we are 80% Mac here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > The following weeks and months seemed to offer little excitement – the > Kaspersky software worked essentially as well or as badly as Windows > Defender.

Well, since Microsoft offered free AV and then bundled with Windows, I'v never looked back and felt kind of relieved I don't have to install 3rd party AV. Defender just doesn't get in the way.

I trust Microsoft to do the right thing more than other AV vendors that put Value substracted features: ads, disturbing, user-hostile notifications, performance degrading bling-bling (toolbars...) etc.

If I really want to check some file, i'll let VirusTotal.com scan it via every AV product they are aware of.

<comment><USER6> The problem I have with the Microsoft bundled AV is that it's really slow and seems single threaded. I had to add most of my project directories as exceptions because building projects took 4-5 times longer when the AV was enabled for those files.

<comment><USER7> My biggest gripe is how hard they deliberately make it to disable. Amd even when I finally can, whatever settings I used may well have changed when MS updates. And when they do update, it gets re-enabled.

One of many instances where MS takes the "I know best" approach. You want to write a good anti-malware program, try not behaving like malware.

<comment><USER8> It disables itself when you install another AV.

The reason they make it hard to remove is (1) otherwise malware could easily disable it and (2) must people should not be trusted with such decision anyway.

Also, have you ever tried to remove Norton AV??

<comment><USER9> Joke is, Symantec Endpoint Protection is actually incredibly easy to deal with.

The consumer AV (Norton)? Hah, the thing is meant to trick/convince/harass you to keep paying up and make it difficult.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > To be on the safe side, you can disable the relevant function in Kaspersky's > software: Click the cogwheel icon in the bottom left corner of the main > window, then click Additional/Network. Finally, uncheck the "Inject script > into web traffic to interact with web pages" option under "Traffic > processing".

So it wasn't exactly hidden, it was just a bad solution that could be disable deep-down some menu (but not hidden, as it was in the apropiate options).

<comment><USER11> "Hidden" might refer to the fact that people won't know that the setting creates a (now) version-specific, persistent UUID that potentially compromises web safety.

<comment><USER10> Yes, and even the article doesn't say it was hidden. It has been just a feature that wasn't thoroughly thought when created, had a very bad side- effect, but it wasn't hidden.

<comment><USER12> The fact that it injected something wasn't hidden. The fact that it injected a unique ID wasn't documented, thus could be considered hidden.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> PSA reminder they got caught scanning computers for specific documents at the behest of the Russians. [https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-hackers-scanned- network...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-hackers-scanned-networks- world-wide-for-secret-u-s-data-1507743874)

They've still got some brilliant malware re & analysis guys and their lab is an excellent one, but I wouldn't use them.

<comment><USER13> > PSA reminder they got caught scanning computers for specific documents at > the behest of the Russians

No, not exactly. In reality the software worked as intended and sampled an unidentified program that it considered malicious. It just so happened to be a piece of NSA malware contained on a NSA employee's computer (who re-enabled KAV on his machine after infecting it with a fake Office activator). The US government needed a quick scapegoat and thus they picked the spooky russian company instead of their own employee.

After the allegations were made, Kaspersky opened itself up for third-party auditing of its internal processes, relationship with the government and the events surrounding the above, of which it provides regular updates of: [https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/internal-investigation- prelim...](https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/internal-investigation-preliminary- results/19894/) [https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/transparency-status- updates/2...](https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/transparency-status- updates/23637/)

They're also moving all data processing to Switzerland, way outside of the reach of the Russian government.

<comment><USER14> Do you have any sources for this version of events aside from Kaspersky blogs?

<comment><USER15> [https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2018/...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2018/09/26/nsa_worker_jailed/)

<comment><USER16> Non AMP link here [1].

[1] [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/09/26/nsa_worker_jailed/](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/09/26/nsa_worker_jailed/)

<comment><USER17> Thanks. AMP is stupid bullshit that needs to die, or at least be entirely restricted to mobile users only.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Security experts, ladies and gentlemen...

<comment><USER17> Every third-part antivirus company is just as incompetent.

I dare suggest that even Microsoft isn't that much better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I have been using Windows Defender along with Malwarebytes free Windows Firewall Control and have never looked back.

</comment><comment><USER20> Is there any point in using antivirus software now?

<comment><USER21> I don't know if there ever was.. The old advice of _' Be sensible and don't open stupid files or visit stupid websites or follow phishing links'_ should solve most potential problems.

<comment><USER22> I lived through the virus era and that most certainly wouldn't solve most problems back then.</comment></comment></comment>


Let's build Dinder – a unique dinner-dating app - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/front-end-hacking/lets-build-dinder-a-unique-dinner-dating-app-b68635d0fe4d <comment><USER2> My feeling is that this is building an increasingly specialized list of roles for people who don't exist as such. So when you add "HR", which for some reason they don't have at their scale, your HR person will be rejecting useful people who are not fitting those roles before they apply for the job.

For a small startup, it is probably good to realize that you need your core people to become competent in a lot of these areas. For example, if your core developers are not able to optimize a database or automated an acceptance test, they are creating trouble for themselves and making the whole operation much more unwieldy as the need becomes apparent later on. If you startup trying to hire these 50 people, you will go bankrupt before your Series A. If you ignore these roles, you might be that startup who nearly makes it before they couldn't keep up with demand or before they got hacked and everyone lost faith in them.

The trouble is, there are not a lot of schools that produce people with such and such roles. I'm sure there are boot camps that do, but in reality the best way is probably to find good people and send them to training.

Oh, and is Joao missing a ~?</comment>


Ask HN: What are the top static websites? - <AUTHOR> I am looking for inspiration on user-friendly modern "static" website design. What can be more inspirational than most frequently visited static sites!?<p>Please list some of those top ranked or most frequently visited static websites. <comment><USER2> Well, not exactly bleeding edge but Drudge Report is one of the highest traffic sites. Matt Drudge hand edits the HTML. Then he hits save.

And that's about as static as it gets. Makes $20 million a year out of it last I read.</comment>