Solar-panel "trees" really are inferior - <AUTHOR> http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JmlMNqVPKlsJ:uvdiv.blogspot.com/2011/08/solar-panel-trees-really-are-inferior.html+http://uvdiv.blogspot.com/2011/08/solar-panel-trees-really-are-inferior.html&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&source=www.google.com <comment><USER2> I didn't find it that harsh. He was direct and took pains not to ridicule a thirteen year-old for making an entirely age-appropriate mistake in measuring the results. Instead, he asked the perfectly valid question of how this becomes news without critical thought.

In that, the critique seemed hopelessly ignorant of how the news works. Why should science fair projects be treated any differently than crime, the personal lives of celebrities, politics, or economics? News outlets publish first and ask questions later or not at all. They have gone to court to defend their right to publish things they know to be false.

How did a confused science project become international news? Why, the same way that almost any overnight sensation becomes international news, by being digestible, by being something people want to be true, by appealing to their preconceived biases.

A commenter pointed out that this is the value of a peer-review process. And indeed, this result was published without peer review. So who is the fool here? The journalist for publishing without review? Or the reader who knowingly accepts the result despite it being published without peer review and/or corroboration?

<comment><USER3> I disagree, but I really believe he didn't do it intentionally. He was ridiculing the MSM and the people who jumped on the bandwagon without doing any analysis.

Unfortunately, nobody will see it that way. People will see it as him/her attacking Aidan Dwyer (the boy who did the experiment). He doesn't help his case by never referring to Aidan by name, instead using a fairly pejorative sounding "the kid.

If Aiden was my kid, I would try not to let him read the article, though I would explain the article and what went wrong within a teaching framework that included pointing out when other scientists did similar thing (don't know any off the top of my head, but I've no doubt the stories are out there).

It is sad, too, because this article _needed_ to be written, but instead of writing it to help Aiden succeed in spite of the fanfare, the author has likely hurt Aiden. There is every reason to tell kids they are wrong when they are wrong, but there are appropriate ways and inappropriate ways to do it. This was inappropriate.

Finally, I've flagged this submission. Since the author took down the original, it is obvious he is rethinking whether the article was a good idea. Yes, the internet is forever, but people's wishes should count for something.

<comment><USER4> 13 years old is old enough to take a dose of reality. Science isn't about people's feelings.

I can think of more than a handful of science fair projects that other kids have done, with incorrect results, that win the grade school science fair due to judges who have zero qualification. That multiple major tech news sites picked this up goes a long way in saying what the qualifications are of those who run those sites.

As for the story itself, I know nothing about solar power and little about electrical circuits. However, when I saw the picture of the thing I couldn't help but laughing.

<comment><USER5> Tone matters. You shouldn't lie but you also shouldn't be tone-deaf.

<comment><USER6> Tone matters for rhetorical persuasion. The only tone I desire from a scientific piece is the truth.

<comment><USER7> This wasn't only a "scientific piece" -- his stated reason for writing the post was to make a comment on the MSM -- and certainly it wasn't targeted only at scientific readers.

Anyone (like me) who read the commentary about the media, and mostly skimmed over the exhaustive detail on why the experiment was broken, was reading primarily an opinion piece, and certainly tone matters in that context.

I don't agree that tone "only matters for rhetorical persuasion" in the first place (or perhaps I disagree with the idea that rhetorical persuasion isn't always playing a role in scientific writing) -- but that's a larger discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Coming back to this almost eight hours later, I ask: What is the problem here? On HN, we upvote articles that are _interesting_. My idea of a downvote is an article where I felt I lost IQ for reading it. In the case of the kid's mistaken result, is there any question his research and theory were interesting? Does anyone honestly feel stupider for having read about it and considered the possibility that he was correct?

Quite honestly, almost everything that makes it to the front page of HN is wrong. We talk about software development, startups, muse about whether Apple is brilliant or is lucky enough to have lame competition, argue about Haskell and Erlang... All stuff that is non-empirical and therefore unfalsifiable.

How does that stuff get a free pass to be on the front page of HN without peer-reviewed research backing it up? I'll tell you how: We're smart enough to know that all of that stuff is probably at least partly wrong, but if there's something in there that makes us smarter, it's worth reading and upvoting and discussing.

If the kid's ideas had in them just one thing that made us smarter for having thought about it... That's a win, that's worth upvoting and repeating. Why wait for peer review? As long as nobody ran out and dropped a million bucks on manufacturing solar arrays, what's the harm? If anything is wrong with an article, a day or so later, all of the flaws will be corrected. And thats exactly what has happened here.

Thinking about this, I don't see a problem with the "blogosphere" or with HN upvoting and tweeting and repeating the original article. Thank goodness we don't put everything through a peer-review first. I'd say things are working just fine, and I encourage every other thirteen year-old kid to experiment and publish.

No harm, no foul. There's nothing in there that's more wrong than anything I've ever said in a blog post or a comment, it's just easier to prove where empirical science is concerned. But even when they're wrong, my posts are useful if they help people think, and I suspect his post is useful for the same reason.

<comment><USER8> The whole idea behind science is to try out what seems most impossible. That's the whole magic and beauty behind it. What annoyed me was the fact that the author seems to be personally offended over the kid's article and all the hype it got. Considering it was a 13 year old kid doing a science project, it doesn't make much sense to put in so much of hardwork in proving what he did and wrote about was completely wrong or "nonsense" (as he likes to call it).

<comment><USER9> That's not even close to the idea behind science. But publishing your ideas and having someone tear them apart definitely _is_ the idea behind science.

The majority of everyone's ideas turn out to be wrong, or at least not worth further effort. Science is a process that makes sure that the ideas we do promote have been tested and argued over by other experts in the field so that fewer wrong ideas are promoted. That's why our lives are so much better today, because of this process.

I think the author seemed offended that the main stream science news didn't bother to check a result that is, apparently, very naive to those who work on solar cells. And he should be, now thousands and thousands of people will have this little factoid that they think is true in their heads. And all because the "lone inventor" story makes for good news, even though it's not how real science gets done at all.

Do you really want this kid to keep going with this and waste his own time (he's obviously very smart and motivated) and make himself look worse in the end? Better someone nicely points out that his math is wrong and he can change his design.

<comment><USER8> "Publishing your ideas and having someone tear them apart definitely is the idea behind science."

Peer review is definitely a part of science. But not the complete idea behind it. If it were, then slowly the whole field would converge to publishing "safe" ideas so lesser and lesser of it gets torn apart. Because torn apart means rejection of papers (which translates to no research done). The complete cycle of science involves:

      1. Understanding the different ideas and problems that are out there.
      2. Manifesting a different perspective on the matter.
      3. Understanding and experimenting with this perspective.
      4. Publishing the result
      5. Gaining feedback and talking to people about the results.
      6. Continue.

"Better someone nicely points out that his math is wrong and he can change his design."

Exactly. Calling it "nonsense" on a public blog where thousands of people can read it is not the best of pointing out mistakes.

Yes, it makes for good news, and thousands of people will think this is good news, but for anyone who seriously does solar cells, will either find that this is impossible or as the author of this pointed out violate the basics of solar power technology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This doesn't address what I thought was the insight, which is about finding optimal placement and facing for stationary solar panels when the light source (the sun) is not stationary. Neither throughout the day or through out the year.

It doesn't seem impossible that some placements are better than all-in-one- direction, especially over time, and that's what I thought the experiment was about.

Am I misunderstanding something basic?

EDIT:

Going back and reading the kid's writeup at [http://www.amnh.org/nationalcenter/youngnaturalistawards/201...](http://www.amnh.org/nationalcenter/youngnaturalistawards/2011/aidan.html) shows some interesting details.

He's not using voltage as a proxy for power, he's using it as a proxy for "sunlight collected". There's two voltage graphs on that page that are machine drawn, not hand drawn. The point of interest in the two graphs is that the Standard graph has narrower peaks of voltage, whereas the Tree graph is broader. This represents the idea that the Tree was generating electricity over a longer period of time. NOT that it was generating more power, but that it was collecting sunlight for a longer period.

The 20% and 50% pie charts indicate this same idea. The percentages are hours, not watts or volts. 12.5 hours vs 8 hours in one timeframe, 13.5 vs 11 in another. Hours. Not volts, not watts. Time, not power.

<comment><USER11> Yes. If you subdivide a solar panel into, say, 10 pieces and orient each of those 10 pieces in an orientation different from the orientation that produces the maximum power output over the course of the day for a single panel, the sum will still be less.

<comment><USER12> But a distributed layout might have higher minimums than a single orientation. For an actual tree, at least, that might be important. The sun doesn't just move during the day, it changes its course over the year, so it might be very beneficial to the tree to ensure that it get's at least a certain amount of juice each day.

There might be other reasons than optimal solar exposure. Maybe structural reasons, or, I don't know, sap distribution ...

Finally, maybe the Fibonacci sequence gets selected in nature a lot because it's easy to select. What I mean is, the very best algorithms are not necessarily the ones that get selected - the ones that actually get tried and are good enough to survive are the ones that appear. My theory is that organisms stumble into stuff like the Fibonacci sequence or that fern fractal because they are likely to and because they work well enough for whatever purpose.

<comment><USER13> So there is some theoretical and experimental work arguing that the Fibonacci sequence minimizes the energy of soft particles interacting repulsively when constrained to the surface of a cylinder. In 2009, some physicists found the pattern when they made a "Magnetic Cactus": <http://arxiv.org/abs/1002.0622>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's refreshing to see a counterpoint to the MSM's enthusiasm for over- dramatization and poor fact-checking; this wasn't a breakthrough in the science of photovoltaics, as some headlines seemed to read. And I'm particularly happy that the author took great care to not target the boy. He should be encouraged to continue this kind of scientific pursuit and not be dissuaded by mistakes in the research. In fact this is a good example of how peer-reviewed research actually functions. That said, I feel the MSM only does him a disservice by misrepresenting the implications of his project as something more than it might be.

<comment><USER15> Journalists aren't all Woodward and Bernstein. In fact, most of them aren't. They are, in the main, _reporters_. They report what they've been told, pausing only to package it up and make it more digestible to the reader. To hold the media in general to some higher 'you must be a domain expert to write about this subject' standard is to have a starry-eyed view of the world.

<bracing myself for the downvotes>

<comment><USER16> Science writers should have some understanding of the field they're writing about, though. If they don't understand the scientific details and none of their domain expert contacts are able to help, they should at least able to recognize the difference between a peer-reviewed article and a blog entry. Spotting unverified claims doesn't require any science knowledge at all.

 _< bracing myself for the downvotes>_

Don't be lame.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> When the blogger used the phrase "Fibonacci mysticism" it becomes clear he has far too much bias to pay attention to what the kid was actually doing.

He points out that voltage in solar cells is essentially boolean. Ok. That means that the kid has shown a way to orient the cells so they get sunlight for a longer period of time. If evolution is anything to go by, his approach likely reveals a local minima for maximizing the time that sunlight is collected.

Is that worthless? No, it is not. It may well explain why trees orient their leaves the way they do, and there could well be practical applications. If your solar array produces more than the peak power you need but the cost and energy loss of storing the power are significant, you may well want to use a pattern like this that mimics what trees do.

What impresses me is that the kid noticed something in nature he hadn't noticed before, read up on it to see what was known about this pattern, and then went out and measured to see whether what he had read was accurate. Once he had verified what he read, he then figured out how that knowledge might be applied. In doing so, he discovered something that, while obvious in hindsight, is not something that would necessarily have occurred to someone trying to figure out how to maximize the time for solar panels to deliver energy. I think the kudos are appropriate, even if the stories are misleading.

An important point here is that in any news story about something that you know a lot about, there are always errors. Always. We should all keep that in mind when we read or watch or listen to the news.

</comment><comment><USER18> I don't think you can put this out there any less harsh than this. Plus, all the harshness that's there is towards stupid journalists, not to the kid. And, well, they deserve it.

</comment><comment><USER19> I wonder, if this idea come from a someone older without any real experience or qualifications in solar would it have been fact checked a little better before it ended up everywhere?

I would want to encourage young people as much as possible, it's just that some of the things you heard about are only considered impressive when those doing the story have factored age into it. If the person was say 30 it wouldn't even be a story.

<comment><USER20> The idea had apparently been around for a while, since 2008 or so, there were other, similar studies. I don't know if they were similarly flawed or not though.

I also would not completely dismiss the premise - trees are probably very good at converting solar energy.

And to add to that, I don't buy the counter argument that a tree arrangement can't be better than a flat panel - why not? The sun moves around so the flat panel might be optimal at one point in the day, but will certainly be sub- optimal at other times. This isn't a clear cut argument at all. There are many variables in play. Cloud cover; seasons; etc. Keep in mind the experiment was done in a cold climate.

<comment><USER21> I would imaginr that the flat panel could be hooked to a servo and a control loop be used to optimize poiting attitude in real time to compensate for the sun's natural cycle.

<comment><USER22> This is already extremely common, with significant efficiency gains. As ever, the downside is added complexity and cost.

See <https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Solar_tracker>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This article was posted last night, but taken down by this morning. I recovered it from google cache.

<comment><USER23> The author is exactly right. There's no way that a tree array of panels that are half not even pointing at the sun will outperform a linear array of panels that are mostly pointing at the sun. Panels efficiency is measured in Watts, and this kid is not going to be able to record their efficiency with a simple probe DMM. In order to get a full picture of what's going on with his arrays, he would need to hook both arrays up to a load and measure throughout the day, or better yet a battery array / charge controller and measure at the end of the day which array produced more power.

I kind of wanted to say something yesterday, but really didn't want to pile on the kid, and everyone here just wanted so badly for the kid to be a genius. The few comments that pointed out that he was wrong were voted down.

This is something that really bothers me about science fairs. Back when I was 13 years old, I did a school project to redesign a local troublesome intersection. I just made a model of what it might look like and people loved it and they even wrote about it in the paper and displayed my model in the municipal building, and talked about what a bright young kid I was.

Now that I'm older, this bothers me a lot because in doing the project I didn't do any real research, I didn't talk to any traffic engineers, I didn't learn about intersection designs.. I didn't learn anything really. As an adult, I can see that my plan for the intersection was silly and unworkable.

I kind of wish that schools emphasized mentorship programs rather than science fairs. Kids would learn far more by partnering with knowledgeable adults to do their experiments, rather than having these silly competitions where nobody learns anything and the winner is the kid who puts the most work into having the nicest presentation.

<comment><USER24> > There's no way that a tree array of panels that are half not even pointing > at the sun will outperform a linear array of panels that are mostly pointing > at the sun.

While this is so very true in the theoretical sense of the term, I gave this a very short thought, and there might be edge conditions that could indeed lead to "better power with tree-shaped panels" (1), now that I think about it. There is a term that you are (rightfully) neglecting: the size of the system, and incurred energy loss due to Joule Effect.

If the distance between panels arranged in a linear way is large, then it might be more efficient to place additional panels closer to the output circuit, maybe above it, in such a way that it doesn't overlap and yep, maybe even with a different orientation, just to optimize the distance between producer and consumer, and thus reduce resistance and energy losses. But that would probably only be valid for specific sets of distances, positions, hour of the day (seasons, voltage, quality of the conductor material...), but that's only because the studied system shifts to be more of that of an Energy Transmission System than that of an Energy Production System

(1) or sphere-shaped or pyramid-shaped or pokemon-shaped for that matter...

<comment><USER10> Genuine (if idle) question- why _do_ plants have leaves which permanently face away from the sun? It's not zero-cost to the plant to produce such leaves...so why does it?

<comment><AUTHOR> My educated guess is that there is some benefit to having a uniform distribution of solar power over the course of a day. If all leaves pointed in one optimal direction, then more energy would be directed at the tree in a single day, but it would collect this energy in a narrow time span. It's possible a tree could not efficiently process this energy in this time span, similar to how you would not be able to eat a deer in one sitting.

By having a generally spherical orientation of leaves, the tree is always receiving power throughout the day.

Again, this is all just my hypothesis.

<comment><USER25> All the cells in one string (i.e. all the cells in series, connected positive to negative terminal) need uniform sunlight. Otherwise some cells can go into reverse bias and dissipate the power of the other cells in the string. This happens, for example where there is uneven shade, or dirt on the array.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I voted this up -- it read very well -- but I am a little uncomfortable about voting up an article the author clearly wanted to delete.

</comment><comment><USER27> Regardless of Aiden's findings about solar energy his ability to see a pattern in tree branches and ten to attempt to answer the question why is impressive in my books.

<comment><USER28> The problem is: there are plenty of 13-year-olds that apply the same astuteness to ants, pet rabbits, pocket calculators and other things that are not really interesting to the mainstream.

So the reason why everyone is excited about it is that there's a hope to get a contribution towards a socially relevant problem. Except there's not, because no one is there to explain to the kids how to design an evaluation for their solution that makes it possible to relate it back to the important problem.

As a comparison, consider a cake baking contest in which only the participant himself/herself is allowed to taste the cake where everyone else can only look. This would not be a recipe to develop good-tasting cakes, even though you probably get some very beautiful cakes made out of styrofoam by people who believe that styrofoam tastes great.

Besides giving up the claim that science fairs are more relevant to science than high school orchestras are to music (because, reasonably, a high school orchestra delivering a crappy performance of a virtually unknown piece may still make some kind of contribution), another possibility would be that somewhere between regional and state levels, participants get expert advice on their creation and formally have to factor in the expert advice into a revised version of their experiment.

<comment><USER29> Ironically, your example is reality!

Cake artists use fondant to make gorgeous high-price wedding and party cakes with intricate and beautiful decorations, but that taste awful.

It makes one wonder why we have an industry of cake art instead of wedding sculpture. I guess people appreciate the time-limitedness of the artwork for some reason.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Nonetheless I give the kid credit for exploring Fibonacci and biomimicry. Cool concept.

</comment><comment><USER31> All I have to say is the guy writes pretty darn well for a 13-year old. Perhaps his experiment is flawed, but I was very impressed by his writing skills, and I know it will serve him well in the future.

</comment><comment><USER32> > to orienting panels at sub-optimal angles

My understanding is tree is not at "sub-optimal" angles. But at varying angles throughout the day and seasons as sun _moves_. Sometimes those angles < than flat panel and sometimes those angles > than flat panel. And that over time the tree was more often optimal than the flat panel.

No one is gonna convince me that millions of years of evolution hasn't resulted in efficient solar collectors. But, from the original announcement the biggest issues I noticed was that actual tree leafs _move_ during day and many trees just give up in winter. Neither of which was replicated in solar tree. Therefor solar tree very likely not as good as nature's trees.

</comment><comment><USER33> is this like that time when some kid in india found a way to make solar cells out of hair?

</comment><comment><USER25> I think one of the comments of the linked article made the best point, his science teacher should have caught the mistake. Education and journalism FAIL...

<comment><USER34> What you have to understand about middle school science teachers is that they optimistically have less electronics and physics knowledge than a first-year undergraduate in either of those majors - and the same goes for most tech bloggers.

But the media should really learn to stop taking anything that's published as being gospel truth. Maybe making this mistake over a 13 year-old will teach them that. (Yeah, right.)

<comment><USER29> The media publish what their audience wants to look at. Don't wait on the media, wait on the public, and seek out media outlets not by how much you respect the publisher, but by how much you respect the taste of the audience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Wait a second bro.

Trees don't rotate to face the sun. In order to have an optimal angle throughout the whole day, it would have to keep facing the sun, i.e. rotate.

I believe he may have missed this point.

As for the voltage measurement being the wrong metric -- agree.

<comment><USER36> No, he explains that at the end. I can try to reformulate it. Imagine that you can find the orientation which gives you the maximum amount of power for a day, say E_max. If you have N panels, the total energy produced at the end of the day will be N _E_max. If instead, you decide to put each panel in a specific direction, they will all produce energy E_i < E_max at the end of the day. So the total energy produce will be E_1 + E_2 + ... + E_N < N_E_max.

The flat array is the more efficient design.

<comment><USER35> that assumes the power of the sun absorbed by the panel has a linear relationship to the angle to the panel, or some similar assumption. It may not be the case

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I think the point here is that Aidan's system has no moving parts and does not track the sun. If you accumulate the total energy produced by the array over a period of one year in, say, capacitors, then I am not certain at all that his tree configuration would not be better than a fixed array of cells.

Of course, the fact that the picture in his paper showed a bright white wall just besides his experimental setup removed credibility to the whole thing.

But this prevents no one from repeating the experiment with better control over the variables and who knows...

</comment><comment><USER38> If the young budding scientist is wrong then why hasn't nature followed our ideal 30 degree angle, he's certainly got me thinking?!

</comment><comment><USER39> walter: am i right? dude: yes walter you're right you're also an asshole.

</comment><comment><USER40> Absent an explanation of why the author chose to delete this article, I can't bring myself to find it credible. It might be right, or it might be very wrong in a non-obvious way that the author finally realized, causing him to delete it. There are other reasons it might have been deleted, but I have no good way to judge.

Given that, I don't think it really adds anything to the overall debate.

</comment><comment><USER41> You listened to the comments in the last post's comments (the one with only a couple comments).

This is MUCH healthier for a 13 year old, title wise, and article wise.

</comment><comment><USER42> This reminds me of a newspaper in Sweden asking people on the streets 1) Do you care if children have made the merchandise you buy? 2) Do you do anything to follow up on it? Where one woman responded 1) Yes, children have no sense of quality and it shows on the product. 2) No.

</comment><comment><USER43> A bigger point here is how we all mistook the results. There is always a struggle between extreme peer review, which leads to insularity, and going by the net real impact- 'don't publish, build'. In the latter approach, the winner often forgets whose shoulders he stands on. In the former, you cannot stand too high from your peers' shoulders, and there are few real winners- 'everybody is great, everybody wins /s'.

<comment><USER44> all ?

speak for yourself

<comment><USER43> You missed the point of what I am saying, if you are debating on this minutiae.

<comment><USER45> It could be the case that 95% of the readers who encountered the original article on HN thought it was bunk, but didn't want to spend the time to correct it. Or maybe it's the reverse-- maybe 95% of us believed it was a brilliant invention. I can't think of a way to estimate which is true.

<comment><USER46> I personally suspected that something is likely to be wrong with that "solar battery tree", but didn't have time to dig deeper. I quickly took a look into comments, didn't find any heavyweight names there, didn't find any solid comments and quit without upvoting the article: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2902329>

Unfortunately 630 other people upvoted it.

I do upvote this "Debunk" article <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2906538>

Important conclusion:

In news ranking I would clearly prefer to rely on subset of Hacker News readers. Not on the full set.

I actually would prefer not to see articles that are upvoted by the same people who upvoted junk science article.

<comment><USER43> My comment was NOT about a solar battery tree, but a general philosophical statement about how we interpret and judge information.

The moment I start loving HN, I start seeing such Aspergeristic tendencies. So downvote me to hell, but I am stuck between people loving kittens & user- generated 'rage' comics, and between people cannot appreciate broad philosophical ideas.

PS: This comment does not have much to do with what the parent said, but a broader problem with HN. And somehow I think this too (like the orignal comment) will be misinterpreted and downvoted to oblivion.

<comment><USER45> Consider an alternative possibility, which I think is what actually happened: your comment was written in the context of a discussion about a solar tree, and the first sentence, which did not establish any broader philosophical context, was a statement that several people disagreed with. The remaining three sentences didn't make a coherent argument, at least that I can tell.

I don't think that's worthy of downvoting. Still, I think you might get more satisfaction from HN if you framed your arguments more clearly instead of blaming the readers for what you see as their Aspergistic tendencies.

<comment><USER43> I would agree with you, but the comments were initially upvoted a lot, which tells me some people got it. I think it's my mistake to write it without providing context in the first place. The comments probably made sense to some, but not most because I presumed too much prior knowledge. The comment assumed that every one had more than a cursory idea of peer review. I have worked with people who have published in the best of places (including the venerable Science) and still think that process in badly broken and flawed. And I have seen pretty bad stuff make through great journals. Now this experience is probably different from that of most HN readers, who would view peer review as a purely benign thing. I agree that I did not provide a good enough context to what I was saying.

Also to talk about 'Aspergistic tendencies', it's a negative term and I used it because I was irritated. But I would like any of you to please answer this. How should I have phrased the first line any other way, and not appear arrogant. 'We all' is a construction of language thing, to take all off you in the fold. And I think it was pretty obvious 'we all' did not mean literally all. And anyone engaging in a bit of second-order thought could have deciphered that. One can say that the problem is partially because many HN readers are not native English speakers, but I would say neither am I, and it's more of an attitude thing. Programming is almost completely literal, most life is not.

<comment><USER45>
      How should I have phrased the first line any other way, and not appear arrogant.

The original: "A bigger point here is how we all mistook the results."

Suggested revision: "It's odd that an article that now appears mistaken originally received over 600 upvotes. I wonder how many people would downvote it, given the chance."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> This post reads to me as if the person took personal offense to Aidan getting "undeserved" recognition. He claims to be angry at the journalists and scientists who didn't do their research before jumping to the conclusion that he had created something amazing, but the tone is just unnecessary.

> Some poor 13-year-old kid is all over the news

"poor 13-year-old" is hardly the words I use to describe a kid who got a bunch of press because they conducted an interesting science experiment, no matter how incorrect the end results of that experiment were.

> blindly parrot the words of this very misinformed (not to blame him, he's an > unguided 13 year old) kid.

If a 45 year old scientist posted the results of an experiment that challenged the furthest reach of their abilities, and some scientists with more information or a different perspective explained why the experiment was conducted incorrectly or why the results were inaccurate, nobody would call the original person "very misinformed" or "unguided".

There are just a lot more ways to tell a 13 year old conducting solar panel experiments using concepts beyond most adults abilities the ways in which they could improve their experiment. The last thing you need to call a kid doing this kind of work is "very misinformed".

</comment><comment><USER48> It is not ridiculing those who fail that we advance science, it is about thinking differently even if we fail, for we learn and improve and someday we will succeed.

What if we use solar cells on one side of the leaf and mirrors on the other so they can reflect sunlight when the leaf looks east and the sun is going down west?

What if we use a sphere shaped cell? like a mango tree? or a cone shaped cell? like a pine tree?

What if we put solar trees on every sidewalk, even if they produce less energy, but are more ergonomic and easier to accomodate in our daily lives?

What if we sprinkle some water on that solar tree? What if we make it taller? wider?

Go on kid, continue your experiments, listen to those who give you sound advice, ignore the ones who only add noise to the harmonious melody of nature and science.</comment>


We Need a Place to Crash in Philadelphia and (maybe) NYC - <AUTHOR>

I am a developer with a law degree who built plangrade with a friend and business partner who has a decade in healthcare and benefits. We built a solution that handles benefit compliance (think Obamacare, ERISA, etc.) for employers, mainly small to medium sized employers. We have been partnering with benefits admin, hr, and payroll software solutions since most of those don't have a proper compliance solution (surprisingly).
We are now being courted by a big company in the healthcare space and are being carted around Philadelphia on January 27th and NYC on January 28th to several very large healthcare carriers by this partner who wants to invest in us with their equity group.
We are not yet funded, it's just the two of us and we don't have a great deal of cash (yet). We are looking for a place to crash in Philadelphia on January 26th and possibly a place to crash in NYC on January 27th. It's just the two of us (both late twenties, male). Bonus points if it's at the home of a fellow founder who could offer us some advice on the startup process and talk to us a bit about navigating VCs and equity groups (especially in healthcare industry). <comment><USER2> I live in Philly and would love to help

contact me Health AT myHN dot Org</comment>


LinkedIn is moving to Azure - <AUTHOR> https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2019/building-next-infra <comment><USER2> This is just good business by Microsoft, boost those azure revenues by saying "Linkedin runs on Azure", maybe there are cost savings as well.

</comment><comment><USER3> To.... get acquired by Microsoft in order to become the modern version of Active Directory?

<comment><USER4> They were already acquired by Microsoft a few years ago. [0]

[0]: [https://news.microsoft.com/2016/06/13/microsoft-to- acquire-l...](https://news.microsoft.com/2016/06/13/microsoft-to-acquire- linkedin/)

<comment><USER3> Ah, that's right! totally forgot!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's so strange that they brag about Kafka as their big tech achievement, the "relevant news feed" is what killed linkedin for me and many other people.

Good luck moving the infrastructure for all those nonsense clickbait articles to azure. You won't have me as a product no matter where those servers sit.

<comment><USER6> Tech achievement (big data, redundancy etc) and if end users like the data are separate. If Twitter explains how they move data around it's still interesting regardless if I like the users or content on their website.</comment></comment>


Roundcube Webmail 1.0.0 released - <AUTHOR> http://roundcube.net/news/2014/04/07/roundcube-webmail-1.0.0-released/ <comment><USER2> Very, very happy to see this.

About 8 years ago, I was singularly managing my company's email. When I was hired, they had been using an awful php based mail system. My first major upgrade was to start using Roundcube. This was a very, very early version and one of the first open source mail projects to offer 'ajax' functionality.

When Gmail for business became available, we migrated to that, but for a while Roundcube was the best web interface for email there was to be found.

Sadly I haven't kept up with the project over the years, but my early memories still serve me well and I hope that the project has gotten much better over the years.

<comment><USER3> > _...and I hope that the project has gotten much better over the years._

It has! They have made some significant improvements. There recently was a huge effort to separate the RC core code -- all of the stuff that talks to imap -- from the rest of the interface, so now people can easily build RC clones.

Also, relatively recently, they reworked their skinning system and got a new design professionally made ("Larry", now the default). You can get Roundcube skins for people who like Outlook, or want better mobile support, etc.

And if you've got managesieve installed, you can make your email do tricks that Gmail can't.

<comment><USER4> > And if you've got managesieve installed, you can make your email do tricks > that Gmail can't.

Would you care to expand on that part? I know what managesieve does, but I thought gmail also had filtering capabilities.

<comment><USER3> AFAIK (correct me if I'm missing something!), Gmail allows you to filter messages on From, To, Subject, "Has the words", "Doesn't have", "Has attachment", and Size. Roundcube, via managesieve, can filter on _anything_ in an email message -- any header, any other attribute of an email message you can think of should be doable.

Gmail also gives you a useful but limited set of actions for matching messages: archival, applying labels, starring, marking as read, forwarding, deleting. managesieve gives you a lot more options, and possibly one of the nicer ones is the ability to auto-reply to specific messages with a specific other message. My managesieve prefs currently has, "Move message to", "Copy message to", "Redirect message to", "Send message copy to", "Discard with message", "Reply with messsage", "Delete", "Set flags", "Add flags", "Remove flags", "Send notification", etc.

Filters was for me the killer feature that moved me from Gmail to Roundcube years ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love Roundcube, use it everyday. The only thing I wish it had was some type of mobile interface. Didn't see anything in the plugins. There are really no good web mail solutions with a mobile interface. I'd prefer to leave this account off my phone if at all possible.

<comment><USER6> Usually, people use dedicated apps to access mails from mobile, connecting directly to the IMAP server. Which is much more mobile-convenient.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Good news. I've been using it since fairly early on, and it's a very impressive bit of work, especially considering the pressure to give up hosting mail.

</comment><comment><USER8> As part of managed hosting for non-technical clients, we often host their email. Out of the options, Roundcube is by far the best.

</comment><comment><USER9> Congrats to them. I remember the days of running IlohaMail on a VPS for my family's mail and was very impressed when Roundcube came out.

I eventually decided that hosting my own email wasn't for me, but would certainly encourage any company or organization with a bit of sysadmin resources to take a close look.

</comment><comment><USER10> My ISP recently switched to roundcube for their webmail. Looks pretty slick, though I'm not really convinced it's as good as it should be. It's slow to fetch my email, and searching for specific emails doesn't work very well.

<comment><USER3> > _It 's slow to fetch my email..._

Yeah, there can be a couple causes for this. Sometimes it's the skin being used. Some Roundcube skins are quite a bit faster than the default; you might check with your ISP to see if they support additional Roundcube skins. (They are very easy to install, and users can select an RC skin from their settings panel.)

> _...and searching for specific emails doesn 't work very well._

There should be a tiny dropdown arrow next to the magnifying glass icon in the search box. (This is not great UI.) Click that, and you should get a menu like the following:

Subject, From, To, Cc, Bcc, Body, Entire Message.

Make sure Entire Message is selected. It's not by default. RC will remember your setting for each folder. This will make your searches slow on folders with lots of messages, but it improves the search results quite a lot.

<comment><USER11> If a skin breaks or reduces functionality in an app...

<comment><USER12> ...the dude who made the skin should've made a better job?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If I could find a way to filter spam as well as gmail does I would love to back to self-hosting my email. I just can't imagine a time when we'll get anything close to what gmail can do without their huge resources.

<comment><USER14> I do the following:

* don't accept mail for non-existing recipient adresses

* don't accept mail where the sender domain is one of my domains, except when whitelisted manually

* don't accept mail from hosts on the NiXSpam list[1] (unlike some others, NixSpam has pretty reasonable policies with automatic delisting after 12 hours)

These three rules together work pretty well, I get only a handful false negatives every day, and virtually no false positives, even though I publish my real mail address on many places in the web, and even used it in usenet, back in the days.

Next step would be using SpamAssassin, but [2].

[1] [http://www.heise.de/ix/NiX-Spam-DNSBL-and-blacklist-for- down...](http://www.heise.de/ix/NiX-Spam-DNSBL-and-blacklist-for- download-499637.html)

[2] [http://xkcd.com/1205/](http://xkcd.com/1205/)

<comment><USER15> Please do not use NiXSpam or encourage others to use it.

If I remember correctly they are pretty trigger happy with honeypot email addresses that are pretty easy to find on the internet.

All your competition needs to do is register to your service using the honeypot email addresses and your legitimate email server/domain will be blacklisted on hosts that check NIXSpam.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Awesome. Looks like they improved a lot during the last 8 years, but also it looks like they didn't update their about page during that time:

> _" The skins use the latest web standards such as XHTML and CSS 2."_

</comment><comment><USER17> Between Squirrelmail, Horde, and Roundcube, I always liked Roundcube the most. It was more polished than the others, at least, and was far easier to support end-users with. Glad to see the project is still alive :D

</comment><comment><USER18> Can someone recommend hosting providers which offer RoundCube?

<comment><USER19> Gandi does, and you do not need to buy webspace from them. Just registering a domain there will get you 5 free mailboxes and 1000 forwarding addresses.

[https://www.gandi.net/domain](https://www.gandi.net/domain)

<comment><USER20> I'm not on a crusade or something, but they were not for me.

Do better than I did, give them little money and take your time before you expect them to be the right company.

1: Just replied in a different thread, incident is fresh: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7557887](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7557887)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Does it support GPG yet? I use squirrelmail simply for the vast array of plugins, but the GPG squirrelmail hasn't been updated since 07.

<comment><USER22> There's a plugin, but I haven't used it yet. [https://github.com/qnrq/rc_openpgpjs](https://github.com/qnrq/rc_openpgpjs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> they've also introduced an official plugin repo at [http://plugins.roundcube.net/explore/](http://plugins.roundcube.net/explore/) which depends on composer

</comment><comment><USER24> I eagerly await update spreading to cPanel and then to my webhost!

</comment><comment><USER25> Thank you Roundcube! Have been using it since the early days!

</comment><comment><USER26> Hm, if you would be running a saas business and after 8 years you only have come so far, you'd be dead. roundcube was great back in the days but there are quite a few alternatives now.

</comment><comment><USER27> The best part of Gmail was never the interface, it was search, tagging, and spam filtering.

<comment><USER28> The biggest feature at launch was the idea of "unlimited" storage (I think at the time it was 1GB) This was a huge departure from the existing Yahoo!/Hotmail models which had much more restrictive limits on storage.

That and the idea of one inbox and no folders. The concept of letting your mail flow into one box and not "filing" it was also a big change from the existing mindset.</comment></comment>


Federal agencies use cellphone location data for immigration enforcement - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/federal-agencies-use-cellphone-location-data-for-immigration-enforcement-11581078600 <comment><USER2> After reading the story, I feel the main point is not about immigration enforcement. The main point here is that the government agencies bought anonymized marketing data and used them for law enforcement purpose.

On the one hand I do feel the danger here. On the other hand, it seems there's no legal barrier to prevent government agencies from purchasing data available for regular corporations.

<comment><USER3> IMHO, the scandal here is not that the data was sold or bought. That's bad, but that was going to happen _as soon as_ it had been collected. So the collection is the real scandal here, and it's a harder problem to solve too, because the responsibility is distributed on thousands of people and companies, and because to some degree the users are actually complicit (through wilful ignorance, or through knowingly accepting it for whatever reasons).

The good news is there would be technical fixes for this problem. "Simply" don't use any of the currently infringing apps. Which -- yes -- means fundamentally changing the way we build, distribute, and _fund_ mobile and web apps. It's not easy in practice, but the technical aspect of it is not complicated.

It's gonna be harder to avoid carriers from triangulating a coarse location, but that's an "easy" think to regulate since there are not so many of them. Again, "easy" in big quotes, because of course politically that's gonna be difficult. The regulators _want_ this information to be collected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just for those unaware, the first cases of cellphone "tower dumping" for triangulation was for bank robbery cases. It was used to find unknown suspects who were near cases across time.

Fast-forward to today, where selling access to LEO is a 7-figure business for all of the telcos.

Never underestimate how lazy LEO are.

<comment><USER5> I don't underestimate that, but I'm amazed how many crimes still go unsolved with criminals leaving their digital crumbs. I highly doubt that many criminals are smart enough to simply leave the phone behind when committing the crime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> [https://archive.md/2kPaU](https://archive.md/2kPaU)

</comment><comment><USER7> A self-important and auhoritarian Leader effectively above the law...check

A completely submissive party apparatus of spineless functionaries nodding of presidential decrees.

Unrestricted access to everyone cellphones records... check

ensure all communication is monitored by pressuring tech companies with regressive laws to drop end to end encryption ... check

Facial recognition AI provided by tech companies... check

A dedicated presidential TV channel broadcasting official spin and fictional realities ... check

Aggressive enforcement action and internment camps for minorities ... check

Whistleblowers being intimidated and retaliated against ... check

China sure is looking bad these days /s

</comment><comment><USER3> 1\. Why would I care? I actually like having more relevant ads.

2\. Why should I care? If they're gonna have a border we should equip them to protect it.

3\. Why should I care? I haven't done anything wrong.

4\. No seriously, I swear I didn't do anything wrong. I never went to those Union meetings. You can check my track!

<comment><USER8> Please don't post generic ideological comments to HN. It leads to generic ideological discussion, which leads to repetitive flamewar, which is tedious, which is off topic here.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20generic%20discussion&sort=byDate&type=comment)

<comment><USER9> This comment seemed like generic "doesn't affect me" flamebait at first; after a 2nd reading I'm not sure if that's the right interpretation. The format of 3 repeating dismissive statements followed by a final statement about falling victim to the previously dismissed problem could be interpreted as a variation on Martin Niemöller's famous poem "First they came ..."[1]. In this interpretation, the comment in line #4 about "those Union meetings" might be a clever reference to "Then they came for the trade unionists" in original poem.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...#Text](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...#Text)

<comment><USER3> It's always nice to know that _someone_ here will get the reference even if I go to bed right after posting. It's important that this crowd here knows these things.

<comment><USER8> I'm sorry to be critical, but that reference is not just obvious, it's an internet trope that passed being a cliché years ago and is an implicit Godwinning of the thread. Comments of that form are intrinsically off topic here.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


GIMP 2.8 (Stable) Finally Available For Download - <AUTHOR> http://www.webupd8.org/2012/05/gimp-28-stable-finally-available-for.html <comment><USER2> I've been a GIMP user for several years.

It's not as friendly as Photoshop, but it gets the job done and it is extremely flexible. I got so used to it that I can't switch back to Photoshop, even though I tried.

One major pain point for me though has been the 8 bits limit, which was the reason why I wanted to switch to Photoshop. I'm glad that they've worked on solving it.

This is an awesome release.

<comment><USER3> the Batch filter is what we are using a lot for web site image processing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I decided to give gimp a real go recently. Shifting my UI production from photoshop to GIMP, and not giving in to temptation, regardless of how quickly I knew I could do a certain task in PS.

There were a few headaches. For instance the half an hour spent in frustration when trying to move a layer, only to find that the tool panel had an "Affect: " followed by a small icon for the selection. I consider this expected pains, and there certainly were a few of those in photoshop as well.

One thing that I just consider lousy implementation was when trying to create a pattern and applying it to an image. I couldn't find a way to do this besides creating the pattern as an image, and saving it to the ~/.gimp/patterns/, refreshing the pattern dialogue, and applying the pattern.

Also, the destructive workflow in applying effects is archaic... even photoshop's linear (albeit dynamic) stack of adjustment layers feels old and restrictive.

I'll keep sticking with Gimp for a while longer... it can only get better, right? Still, at the moment I'd say it is far inferior to Photoshop regarding my productivity.

<comment><USER5> > I'll keep sticking with Gimp for a while longer... it can only get better, > right?

That's exactly the reason you want to stick with GIMP for a while longer. If you're willing to go the extra mile, start following GIMP development and community a little closer. Join an IRC channel or a mailing list, for example. That way, you can have a part in making it better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I first ran in to Gimp in what would have had to been the late 90's or early 00's, and ever since it's always befuddled me completely. I've always turned back to Photoshop, if slightly begrudgingly, because the productivity enhancements of a tool you really know far outweigh the price of it. These UI improvements seem to be a step in the right direction though.

I'd love to hear if anybody's done the Journey PS -> Gimp (for UI stuff, not photography), and if so how long it took and if it was worth it in the end?

<comment><USER7> I've used both - for basic stuff, mind you. But I remember how hard it was to pick up Photoshop. My conclusion from my limited experience is therefore that it is simply what you are used to. Neither Gimp or PS are necessarily better, they are just different. If you are used to Gimp, you will swear if you have to use PS, and vice versa.

One problem for more advanced work could be that there are more tutorials for PS than for Gimp.

(I only use Gimp because I don't want to pay for PS and I tend to be on Linux at times).

<comment><USER8> Neither are necessarily better ? it shows how much use you have for a professional image editing package : NONE. It has been a long time since I've picked up Photoshop (as in I'm used to its interface) so I can't say whether it's really hard to "pick it up" compared to beginning with the gimp but the environment is FAR MORE productive than what the GIMP offers if you were to master the two and compare their abilities. The amount of non-destructive tools in Photoshop alone make it ten times better than the GIMP if productivity is your priority.

The GIMP is like Photoshop 4 or 5. One of the worst "open source alternative" to proprietary software. It's an antique piece of software that hasn't caught up with the last DECADE of innovation.

<comment><USER7> Obviously it depends on the level you work on. And PS 5 might have been the last version I tried, don't even know what is current.

If PS is so much better, why don't you use it? What non-destructive tools are you talking about? I don't think tools are typically destructive in Gimp?

But you are correct, I am not a designer, I am a developer.

<comment><USER8> If you don't understand what "non destructive" means in the context of an image editor you obviously will never grasp why PS is actually better than the GIMP, and it's only ONE of the bigger example I took to compare them. [http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Photoshop/11.0/WS2FD6768E-DB6B-4...](http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Photoshop/11.0/WS2FD6768E-DB6B-48a3-9859-46AB77DFC325a.html) "Nondestructive editing allows you to make changes to an image without overwriting the original image data, which remains available in case you want to revert to it. Because nondestructive editing doesn't remove data from an image, the image quality doesn't degrade when you make edits. You can perform nondestructive editing in Photoshop in several ways:"

A Smart Filter will be reapplied to the object every time you make changes to the object. But not in an "applied twice" way, because changes are not set in stone, it doesn't degrade the original object.

Photoshop is so much more productive than the GIMP. Anyone who pretends that those two packages are equal should keep from talking about image editors.

<comment><USER7> I thought that was what non-destructive means, I was just surprised that Gimp supposedly doesn't work that way.

Anyway, I am definitely not a power user - I think those already know if they are going to use Gimp or PS, and will not be swayed by HN discussions. I am just tired of the interface argument, because PS is definitely not easy to use. You have to dig through some tutorials and then you suddenly know how to do things, but it is not intuitive.

If you need specific PS _functionality_ , obviously you have to use PS. My point was merely that the user interface is not really the big differentiator. (Also, I don't know the latest PS versions so I might be wrong, but I doubt it).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> They are going to have to support "Filter Layers" (Photoshop's Adjustment Layers) before they get __any__ traction in the serious photo editing community. Non-destructive editing with masked adjustment layers is a basic best practice for photographers since the early 2000s.

<comment><USER10> I believe those are on the road map. But probably will take couple of releases before getting there.

<comment><USER9> I think it might be time for me to get the Gimp source and start messing around...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> dream: could a UI/UX genius and open-source hacker ever make an Inkscape+GIMP hybrid that will have the straight forward, intuitive and productive UI of Adobe Fireworks? (without the weird ireproductible "bugs" and "WTF?!" moments that Fw sometimes throws in face of the user, making me dread to think of the decade old can-of-worms closed-source code of this otherwise superb application)

<comment><USER12> Do it yourself: Use GEGL <http://www.gegl.org/> as the GIMP Backend and find something for Inkscape or rip it apart.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> These types of ads make my blood boil: <http://i.imgur.com/ZHzf9.png>

<comment><USER14> Wow that's a little scummy. Was it at least a copy of the gimp it linked to even if it had more ads around it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I am excited about the singe window mode. The multi window mode made GIMP quite un-intuitive to me until now.

<comment><USER5> Nice that you like it. I, on the other hand, have always liked GIMP's multi- window interface. It works very well with multiple monitors.

But thankfully there's a choice between the two interface modes. The GIMP crew should have come up with that earlier.

But the interface change is not that significant compared to all the other new features (esp. >8bpp color).

<comment><USER16> I liked the multi-window interface, but the choice of making the palettes real windows and not floating panels always struck me as a mistake. See how Pixelmator handles that for example: it's much more natural.

<comment><USER17> I don't know Pixelmator but I think there's an option for that. In Preferences->window management you can change it from regular window to utility window, then it's just a question of whether your WM cares.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Single window, ok cool. But after ages, still no tool to draw some boxes and circles? This is proof that Gimp's goal is not designer's productivity. Pass.

<comment><USER5> I knew someone would bring that up. Drawing boxes and circles is easy, first make selection, then fill it. That's hardly a blocker for designer productivity.

Sure there's an extra selection and a tool change but this way it's a lot more versatile than having a simple single purpose draw-me-a-box tool. Learn the keyboard shortcuts and get over it.

Need a pattern filled box? Do the selection and use pattern fill.

Need a box with a circular hole in the middle, with fill and outline stroke. Select a box, then select a circle with difference selection. Then fill with outline color, shrink selection by few pixels and fill with pattern. Or first fill with pattern fill and do an outset/inset selection.

I'm sure Photoshop has a super versatile tool for doing boxes and circles. A real swiss army knife that rounds your corners and does drop shadows. And that's fine. But it's a different design choice than GIMP did.

In my opinion, GIMP is nice because it has simple tools that are composable, repeatable and scriptable. Kinda like the unix philosophy gone GUI.

If you don't grok it, it may be difficult. If you do and don't like it, that's your choice. But don't be impolite about it then.

<comment><USER19> Photoshop implements these features using vector masks, which mean you can scale your shapes after creating them without any resampling/pixelation. How many steps would it take to do the same in GIMP? It's not just about not grokking it, it's about having tools to _get shit done_.

<comment><USER5> GIMP has a similar vector paths feature if that's what you want.

But the question above was about having a simple tool to draw boxes, just like Mouse Paint on the Apple ][ had.

<comment><USER19> I'm pretty sure GP was talking about being productive as a designer, which means being able to do things really, really fast, with next to no effort, while retaining as much flexibility as possible. I think it's great that GIMP exists and is free and open source, but for people who actually have deadlines the GIMP workflow just doesn't cut it a lot of the time.

<comment><USER20> I think you are wrong, a designer who is used to GIMP will have a faster workflow with GIMP, it's that simple.

<comment><USER21> If you take a GIMPdesigner and give them a weeks training in Photoshop will they still be faster in GIMP? Will the additional speed offset the cost of a weeks course? Are there many professional designers who aren't already familiar with Photoshop?

Farmers who plough there land with an ox may initially be faster then when they get their first tractor but that won't last long.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Still no installer available for Windows. :(

<comment><USER23> There have been Windows installers for quite a while: <http://gimp- win.sourceforge.net/stable.html> You'll see the 2.6 stable is available at the top and 2.8 RC1 is at the bottom (I'm guessing 2.8.0 will be up by week's end.)

<comment><USER22> I know, I just thought the 2.8.0 would be made available at the same time.

<comment><USER24> Why should they care for the 85% market when they can target the 0.95% market?

<comment><USER25> There are a lot more alternatives on Windows though, Paint.net and Photoshop being obvious choices. With Linux and similar Gimp is really the only image editor. That I know of anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Actual link to gimp website... <http://www.gimp.org/release- notes/gimp-2.8.html>

</comment><comment><USER27> Today GIMP made my day because I discovered it reads xwd format so my screen capture is now as simple as I like it (xwd > ~/foo).

Thank you dev team, it's worth it really.

Cheers

</comment><comment><USER28> As an xmonad user the single window mode is a godsend.

</comment><comment><USER29> Is there a non-Macports install guide for OS X?

</comment><comment><USER30> Is there 16 bit per channel image support?</comment>


Crypto Anchors: Exfiltration Resistant Infrastructure - <AUTHOR> https://diogomonica.com/2017/10/08/crypto-anchors-exfiltration-resistant-infrastructure/ <comment><USER2> Another form of "crypto anchor" is Blind Hashing which uses a large pool of random data to defend the hashes. An attacker would need to exfiltrate over 90% of the data before they could run an offline attack on hashes blinded by the data pool. The bigger the data pool, the more data an attacker would have to steal, and the more hashes/sec you can run.

So while iterative/computational hashing is only secure if it is slow and if the password is strong, Blind Hashing prevents offline attacks even against weak passwords and actually runs faster as you increase the cost factor.

In this case it's more like an an actual anchor -- technically we call this Bounded Retrieval Model -- the idea that we size the network bandwidth to make it take 300 days at full line rate to steal the data over the network. So it's a physical limitation rather than trusting a black box to protect 256 bits like an HSM.

If you're interested here's an intro [0], a tech spec [1], and an academic paper [2] by Moses Liskov at MITRE.

Disclaimer: I'm Founder/CTO of BlindHash.com which is basicallly Data Pool as a Service -- we provide an API into a geo-replicated 16TB (and growing) data pool.

[0] - [https://s3.amazonaws.com/blindhash/BlindHash+Architecture+Gu...](https://s3.amazonaws.com/blindhash/BlindHash+Architecture+Guide.pdf)

[1] - [https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/005c1c_5996c661899e4d09a28b9a...](https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/005c1c_5996c661899e4d09a28b9aa373c090c8.pdf)

[2] - [https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/917.pdf](https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/917.pdf)

<comment><USER3> This looks like a pretty good technique, that's coming from someone who has collected 240GB+ of user:password dumps.

I certainly wouldn't get 16TB of disks just for that if it were ever leaked.

Bummer(not for me :p) that you guys went the route of patenting it and keeping it proprietary & only available through an API.

I think it would be adopted in no time if it were open source, and I'd definitely like to see something like this available as a service on clouds like GCP/AWS/Azure/etc for my day job.

<comment><USER4> This can't be too hard to build:

1\. Generate 16TB of random data, backup/replicate many times

2\. Think of data as 16 billion 1k pieces

3\. Generate 64 random piece addresses using hashA(key) as seed

4\. Concatenate the 64 pieces into one 64k chunk, and store hashB(chunk)

<comment><USER5> That is an excellent idea. But why 16TB of random data ? Why not encrypt some high entropy value (digits of pi, whatever) with a 100 character password and generate 16TB like that. You then use the 16TB as a password but you could regenerate and recover using a scrap of paper.

<comment><USER2> You can do either. But if you generate the data pool from a seed that you retain, then you're back to trying to protect a 256-bit value from leaking.

Generating the data pool with constantly cycled and discarded keys (i.e. /dev/urandom) means the only way to have the pool is to go and get every single bit of it.

We went the second route because I like sleeping at night and it just felt like retaining a seed would defeat the whole purpose of _bounded retrieval_.

<comment><USER5> Sure, but that's a 256-bit value that does not have to be present at the use point. So it's a lightweight anchor ! It's extremely heavy when someone else tries to move it, and yet when you move it yourself, it easily fits in your wallet on the tiniest of sd cards, or even on a scrap of paper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am ambivalent about using HSMs to protect password databases, because if you're going to do that, you might as well simply introduce a minimalized authentication server (ie: something with an <AUTHENTICATE(user, password) bool> interface). It'll have approximately the same attack surface, it actually helps your architecture in other ways, and it precludes attackers from getting hashes in the first place (at least, the same way an HSM does with the HMAC key).

A Go, Rust, or (minimal, non-framework) Java authentication server speaking HTTPS to solely that AuthN interface and sharing no database with anything else is extremely unlikely to be part of any realistic "kill chain"; it'll be among the last things on your network compromised.

Meanwhile: you get to stick with technology you fully understand and can manage (simple HTTP application servers and a decent password hash) and monitor.

HSMs have a lot of uses elsewhere in secure architectures, but the password storage use case is overblown.

<comment><USER7> We discuss exactly this architecture in the talk we gave back in 2014. See here for the part where we discuss it: [https://youtu.be/lrGbK6fE7bI?t=16m31s](https://youtu.be/lrGbK6fE7bI?t=16m31s)

Basically we 100% agree with you that an authentication service should do this job. The HSM is extra credit. Although it does help in cases where the auth service's DB is leaked through some other means (e.g. backups).

I will say that I'd depart with you on the return value of that service. It shouldn't be a bool. It's better to return a token that downstream services can use to independently verify that the authentication service verified the user. Its better for your infrastructure if you aren't passing around direct user IDs but rather a cryptographically signed, short lived token that is only valid for the life of a specific request.

<comment><USER6> I agree with you, but I'm apples/applesing that service with an HSM and deliberately keeping the interface minimal, just for the sake of argument. The subtext is my worry that normal developers on HN don't really understand why HSMs are operationally secure --- minimal attack surface, not magic hardware.

<comment><USER7> FWIW I was concerned folks would get caught up on the password storage use case since so many are familiar with that problem. The crux of the idea of crypto-anchoring is to segment crypto operations in to dedicated microservices and use those minimal microservices to do per record encryption, decryption, or signing. HSMs are a natural extension to those microservices if you have budget.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you're serious about preventing exfiltration, you'll do what the military does and use data diodes

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

On a slightly tangent, people with physical access to a server can extract encryption keys from RAM by plugging into a PCI slot:

[https://github.com/ufrisk/pcileech](https://github.com/ufrisk/pcileech)

<comment><USER9> I think what will (should, perhaps?) ultimately happen -- and this is probably still years off -- is that we will stop using default routes on (most) hosts.

Publicly accessible servers and such will, of course, still have them, but things like, say, internal database servers or the PC belonging to Debbie in Payroll, won't.

Access to things outside of the "local network" (i.e., a company's entire network, not just the directly-connected subnet) will go through an intermediary (e.g., an HTTP(S) proxy) that performs per-connection authorization with a defauly deny.

It may end up looking a little differently than this -- a default deny on _all_ outgoing IP traffic, for example, with only specific traffic permitted -- but I believe that, eventually, this is how we'll keep random hosts from being used to exfiltrate mass amounts of data.

TL;DR: Companies need to start filtering _outgoing_ traffic and not letting any random host on the internal network connect out to any other random, arbitrary host in the world. This will be inconvenient and expensive (to manage), however, so we'll need a few more Equifax's before it begins to catch on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> One of the great things that helps when building a crypto-anchor enabled infrastructure is to have Mutual TLS between all applications/containers. This allows you to authn/authz and only allow connections from specifically allowed apps/containers/microservices.

Mutual TLS can be a bit of work to get set up but leads to huge security wins over time as every RPC within your infrastructure is mediated by an authorization layer. We've helped out a bit with the SPIFFE project which is looking to make mutual TLS easy: [https://spiffe.io/](https://spiffe.io/)

<comment><USER10> SPIFFE's lucky to have Docker, Google, and others helping drive forward the idea of consumable service authentication frameworks like SPIRE. OSS was just launched a little more than one week ago ([https://blog.scytale.io/say-hello- to-spire-7e133fad72ca](https://blog.scytale.io/say-hello-to- spire-7e133fad72ca)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The thing about security is that there is a point where you end up locking yourself out.

Locking your data to your hardware raises the question of what would happen if the hardware failed? Also at first glance this seems to introduce difficulties with scalability across multiple machines. Also it might make it difficult to switch between infrastructure providers.

The cost of this approach should be mentioned as a footnote.

Maybe the better solution is for society to support more small tech companies with smaller user bases that have fewer dissatisfied rogue employees to leak hashed passwords in the first place.

The root of the problem is not technical, it's political.

<comment><USER12> Commercial HSM have ways of exporting the key they hold onto smartcards. Usually the keys are split onto a number of smartcards, let's say 3. For increased robustness, each third is written to two smartcards. (We now have 6 cards.) These smartcards each belong to one person, who is the only one knowing the PIN that protects the third of the key it holds. Each of these smartcards is then brought to different bank vault, sealed in tamper-proof bags.

To restore the key, you need to bring 3 out of 6 persons to the so-called key ceremony, and each has to bring his smartcard and his PIN.

The same mechanism can be used to provision multiple HSMs with the same key material. But there are other means to do this. As soon as two HSM share a common secret, also known as Key Sharing Key, they are able to exchange all key material they possess in a secure manner.

Some HSM don't even bother to store the keys they generate within the bounds of their hardware. Only it's master key is stored in it's hardware, any other key is encrypted with the master key and stored on a shared filesystem.

If this sounds artificial to you, let me assure you that such procedures are in place at various companies who deal with raw credit card data, at least in Europe. The EMV committee, the PCI organization and each issuer of credit card do mandate such procedures.

And they are very strict. We once had to ship HSMs back to the vendor, because at some point they were not supervised by at least two persons. (At least the documentation thereof was missing.)

<comment><USER12> ... because at some point they were not supervised by at least two persons, _before it was taken into operation_ , that is. (Afterwards, they have to be locked into a rack that requires two different badges to open it's doors and which must have a CCTV system recording it at all times.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Folks shouldn't necessarily be scared off by the use of HSMs in this model -- HSMs are an add-on that adds an additional layer of security. That said, there are still significant wins to segmenting the applications that hold keys, particularly if they are on hosts separate from your front-end or application logic hosts. This architecture still forces attackers to only have access to data within your infrastructure, which allows your detection systems to have a chance to catch people before they leave with all the data.

</comment><comment><USER13> So can you do any of this in a public cloud setup or is this an argument for having infrastructure that you control directly?

(I think AWS might have launched some sort of HSM service, but I haven't looked at the details and not clear if it could provide the right sort of guarantee)

<comment><AUTHOR> You can definitely do this in public cloud HSMs.

Azure: [https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/key- vault/](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/key-vault/) AWS: [https://aws.amazon.com/cloudhsm/](https://aws.amazon.com/cloudhsm/)

The only thing you're not able to do in a public cloud is run these in Secure Execution mode—where you get to actually execute arbitrary code inside of the enclave instead of just doing operations with keys that are protected by the HSMs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Delegating security-sensitive operation to a dedicated service (e.g. an authentication service) is security 101. It's just an application of the principle of least privilege.

Giving it a fancy name makes it look like it's a new idea.

</comment><comment><USER15> A promising title, but a disappointingly banal application. When surveillance companies already have "our" data, we've lost the game. Equifax et al _should_ leak, so society will push back against "voluntary" commercial surveillance. Meanwhile, exfiltration from end-user networks by negligent or malicious adversarial embedded software is a growing threat to privacy.

</comment><comment><USER16> Personally, I think our current trend is very useful and should be pursued to the most extreme level:

1\. Assume that attacker will get data X

2\. Make what you keep in data X as useless and uninteresting as possible.

3\. Hash data X with the most expensive and safest hash possible.

4\. If you really can't do steps #2 and #3, warn your customers about what you are keeping and encrypt the heck out of everything.

</comment><comment><USER17> Out of curiosity I went to look at the pricing for Amazon's CloudHSM service for AWS and nearly spit out my drink. $5,000 up front cost per device and $1.88/hr and they suggest running two for high availability. At those prices I don't think you'll see this catch on anytime soon.

<comment><USER9> I bought a "real" HSM off of eBay (used, of course) a couple weeks ago but, unfortunately, it's apparently broken and so I need to return it. The price of these things is huuuuuge and that puts them out of reach to all but large companies. I think that Amazon is trying to solve that problem but, yeah, if I had that much to spend I would just buy a couple outright (they'd pay for themselves in a few months, compared to CloudHSM).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> If you have an HSM in the loop for all authentications, why bother with hashing? Just encrypt the password database with the HSM and be done with it.

There are cheaper ways of keeping secrets secret. Using a TPM on the server would be one way. SGX would be another.

</comment><comment><USER19> How do people cope with the threat of HSM hardware failures? Would be awfully bad to lose the ability to read all of your sensitive fields including backups.</comment>


Equifax or Equiphish? - <AUTHOR> https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/09/equifax-or-equiphish/ <comment><USER2> > the messages do not exactly come across as having emanated from a company > that cares much about trying to regain the public's trust.

Regain? Equifax's business model has never depended on having the public's trust in the first place.

<comment><USER3> Sure it did. You gave your information and they provided an accurate credit history. You trusted that information was correct, and if it didn't line up you would be contacting authorities or credit agencies trying to counter fraud and fix your life.

<comment><USER4> No, I never gave them my information-- someone, or something, else did without my explicit consent. If anything I would've explicitly denied them storing any and all of my information but I was never given that choice.

Your grasp of how this all works is unsettling.

<comment><USER5> But you "agreed" even you signed the loan or credit card (or anything really).

<comment><USER6> An "agreement" isn't meaningful if there is no informed choice. And choice isn't meaningful if there is no realistic alternative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Since Equifax didn't bother, at least whitehats have registered [http://premiertrustedid.com/](http://premiertrustedid.com/) and [https://premieridtrusted.com/](https://premieridtrusted.com/)

</comment><comment><USER8> >Social Security numbers, dates of birth and other sensitive data

Dates of birth are considered sensitive data? That's pretty sad

<comment><USER9> IIRC the social security number is not a globally unique identifier (only 1e9 unique values). However, in practice, the (SSN, birthdate) tuple generally is unique.

This is probably why it's considered "sensitive."

<comment><USER10> To date, less than half of the total possible SSNs have been used. They are not re-used at this time. (1)

1) I worked in a large hospital in medical information systems, and the edge cases of SSN included the (required) SSN for newborns and unidentified patients. For the former, we re-used the SSN of the mother, but added a suffix. (So in our database, it wasn't just a 9 digit integer, it was a >9 character string. I can't recall how long.) When the newborn got an SSN assigned, we updated it. For John/Jane Doe folks, we used something like all zeros or some such, with an 'auto-incrementing' character suffix. These were re-used.

<comment><USER11> ID Analytics did a study in 2010 that found 40 million out of 290 million SSNs were assigned to more than one person. The conclusion is that the odds of someone else having your SSN are roughly 1:6.

Other highlights of the study include:

      1) How many SSNs do you have? – 6.1 percent of
         Americans have at least two SSNs associated
         with their name. More than 100,000 Americans
         have five or more SSNs associated with their name.

      2) Some SSNs are very popular – More than 15 percent
         of SSNs are associated with two or more people.
         More than 140,000 SSNs are associated with five
         or more people. Significantly, more than 27,000
         SSNs are associated with 10 or more people.*

[http://www.idanalytics.com/blog/press-releases/20-million- am...](http://www.idanalytics.com/blog/press-releases/20-million-americans- multiple-social-security-numbers-associated-name/)

<comment><USER12> > ID Analytics did a study in 2010 that found 40 million out of 290 million > SSNs were assigned to more than one person.

Since their count of duplication the other way was based on SSNs associated with _names_ , I wonder if they made the same mistake for that direction (assuming name = person). People can both share identical names and have different names over their lifetime, so even if SSNs were 1:1 with people there would be SSNs associated with multiple names and names with multiple associated SSNs.

<comment><USER11> I doubt they did, based upon the news reporters reposting examples from the study for the last 7 years. In particular where the name is identical or almost the same, DOB is the same, State of Birth is the same, but the birth city or county differs.

You read the _name_ reference from the first sentence of a blog. The blog entry also mentions two of the main reasons, data entry errors and fraud.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's almost as if they don't want people to sign up for their "free" credit monitoring...

<comment><USER11> It's just to lower their liability, whether people accept the free offer or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Where's the data dump? The hackers said they'd dump Sept 15 if not paid.

[http://archive.is/648A5](http://archive.is/648A5)

</comment><comment><USER15> Wow. They continue to dig deeper in this mess. I got that email and it looked so sketchy that I marked it as phishing. Do they have no one actually thinking this through?

It's a shame we have to wait for the lawsuits to have an impact on them since we aren't their customers and can't take our business elsewhere.

<comment><USER16> > we aren't their customers and can't take our business elsewhere

This is an understatement. We are literally a cost center for them. Complying with the Fair Credit Reporting Act is the only reason they bother listening to our complaints, yet that same Fair Credit Reporting Act has effectively enshrined the big 3 credit bureaus with a moat against effective competition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Here's a more in-depth analysis from the perspective of trying to figure out if the e-mail and site are legit which covers all the various things Equifax did wrong:

[https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/equifax-how-can-you- phished-t...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/equifax-how-can-you-phished- today-jerry-decime/)

<comment><USER18> > Equifax is missing a lot of basics when it comes to communications and web > security and must take steps to increase the trust between themselves and > their customers by:

A great analysis marred only by a misunderstanding of who Equifax considers their customers.

<comment><USER17> Ha! In this case make no mistake, the product is also the customer. At some point they will switch from free to charge for their monitoring service.

<comment><USER19> At some point? Before the breach you paid ($17.95/mo IIRC) for "TrustedID Premier".

And during this breach, the first year is all that's free. You need to entering billing data to enroll, and they -will- start billing after the free period unless you cancel first.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> How about using trustedid.equifax.com?

If you had security people on staff at equifast, you'd already have realized how to stop your security bumbling, fumbling, and stumbling. Of course, you'd need to listen to their advice, first.</comment>


How a plagiarized portrait of Obama ended up hanging in the white house - <AUTHOR> http://hedcuts.blogspot.com/2009/10/jose-maria-cano-is-con-artist-he-uses.html

<comment><USER2> I wonder who took the photo her stipple portrait is a copy of?

<comment><USER3> How do you know that it's a copy of a photo?

<comment><USER4> That's not something you draw from memory. She should feel honored.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Regardless of whatever motive or manipulation the artist has done to the WSJ image, it remains a derivative work and is still covered by copyright:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work>

"A typical example of a derivative work received for registration in the Copyright Office is one that is primarily a new work but incorporates some previously published material. This previously published material makes the work a derivative work under the copyright law. To be copyrightable, a derivative work must be different enough from the original to be regarded as a "new work" or must contain a substantial amount of new material. Making minor changes or additions of little substance to a preexisting work will not qualify the work as a new version for copyright purposes. The new material must be original and copyrightable in itself. Titles, short phrases, and format, for example, are not copyrightable."

</comment><comment><USER6> I think it's an abomination that the original creator of the image is not credited. That said the printer, Cano, probably just bought reproduction rights from the journal? Maybe not, perhaps the journal won't sue as they don't want to restrict their ability to display photos of others work (even though they are reporting news, ie it is fair use, and he is not).

<comment><USER7> I don't think she's fishing for credit. She's offended that someone gets to make money, even passing himself of as an artist, for simply cranking the zoom-level on a photocopier way up. In all fairness, President Obama should be a bit offended to. This "piece of art" is nothing, if not blatantly tapping into the off-the-charts hype around his person. He'd be wise to try to calm the hype rather than encouraging it.

<comment><USER6> _I don't think she's fishing for credit._ Nor do I. My point is not that she wants credit but that Cano should acknowledge that his input into the piece he produced was limited to a small alteration. In the quote in the original artists post:

 _"José-María Cano generously offered this painting to Vaclav Havel as a gift for Barack Obama", said Leos Valka, director of DOX, Centre for Contemporary art in Holesovice, Prague._

The Director should have said "Cano offered this painting which he duplicated from an original work by Ms Novak in the WSJ ...". It's not that she demands the credit, it should be given.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Since when has art been reduced to the image on canvas? What matters is the artist's motive, the reason behind the work. That's what separates art from commercial design -- after all, in both places you see original images, but only the first qualifies as art.

I don't think this qualifies as plagiarism. After all, didn't Andy Warhol take a soup can and repeat it over and over again. I don't remember the soup company crying plagiarism. Or the designer who first came up with the soup can cover.

<comment><USER9> I've wondered about that soup-can artist... Campbells wouldn't have complained about it, because it was free publicity (and much clearer than Hormel's _spam_ dilemma). The original designer would no longer have copyright in the design (Campbells, his/her hirer, would own it), and would have no say.

But how would he/she feel? Privileged to have their obviously commercial work elevated to Art? Shamed, because of same? Or simple bemusement, like so many others?

Regardless, I don't think a portrait is in the same category as a can of soup.

<comment><USER10> Electronic spam is gets its name from the Monty Python sketch (Python is named for Monty Python also)

<comment><USER11> Actually, it's the use of of the word "Spam" in the sketch of the same name.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is this really as clear cut as the artist is trying to say? The page she references says "The portrait is created using the encaustic technique of painting with hot wax." as far as I know there isn't a copy machine on earth that will make an enlargement in hot wax. Point being the "offending" artist must have done some amount of actual artistic work.

<comment><USER3> The encaustic paintings shown are basically just the wax equivalent of tracing the blown-up originals -- the "artist" glues the blown-up paper version to a canvas, then layers black wax over the black parts, and white wax over the white parts. You can even see the halo of the original paper version behind the white wax.

It isn't totally mechanical, but there isn't much creative work involved either.</comment></comment>


Ignoring the Wiggles - <AUTHOR> http://themacro.com/articles/2016/02/ignoring-the-wiggles/ <comment><USER2> I'm sitting at SaaStr Annual, a conference with predominantly SaaS founders, sales & marketing types, and VCs. There's a lot of talk about the recent motion, especially among VCs.

One of the things I'm struck by is not that the wiggles actually matter, but sentiment matters. Because it's a frequent topic of conversation, it's an easy thing to bring up, and without some knowledge and context, it's a strike against you. Does that matter to your business or your clients? No. Does it matter to the person you're talking to right then? A little. And if you're trying to get them as a customer or advisor or mentor or whatever, you're a bit more in the hole, because you chose to ignore the fact they're thinking about the wiggle. It's not important to you, but it's important to them.

So don't focus on the wiggle, but don't ignore it. Internalize what has changed, respond appropriately, and know that you can move past it.

</comment><comment><USER3> The difference between long-term investors and startup founders is that no sane long-term investor puts all their money and resources into one asset.

Startup founders do not have diversification or a fallback, and it's humanly fair for them to be concerned when things are on a serious downtrend with tech stocks.

<comment><USER4> A young Warren Buffett had 75% of his allocation in GEICO.

If you're _certain_ something is going to go up in the long term, it makes sense to buy as much of it as you can. You must be certain, and you'd better be right about being certain.

A Buffett-favored aphorism: "Too much of a good thing is wonderful."

If your goal is substantially different performance from a market average, a concentrated position is the ticket. But, unless you're really good, the best you'll do, on average, is average, in which case you'd do better by buying an index.

<comment><USER5> His GEICO investment was about more than just him believing in GEICO. It was much more brilliant than that.

Insurance companies are wonderful to own because you get access to their capital. They have tons of floating capital that's held in reserves, from premiums, until it needs to be paid out for claims.

GEICO was a perfect investment for a young Buffet because he exchanged cash (liquidity) for _even more liquidity_.

<comment><USER6> Young Buffett didn't buy GEICO, the company. He just bought some of its stock. So he didn't get any extra liquidity.

Older Buffett bought the company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> i was hoping this would be about the kids band - I've been ignoring them my whole life</comment>


Game Boy SoC (DMG-CPU) reverse-engineered from the die photos - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/furrtek/DMG-CPU-Inside <comment><USER2> some of the undocumented things found here are used by some games, so it is nice to know that the guesses everyone had about them were in fact correct!

</comment><comment><USER3> I love this!

Is there an explanation on how this was done? Would love to learn to do this.</comment>


Announcing the Sinclair ZX Spectrum Vega - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/sinclair-zx-spectrum-vega

<comment><USER2> This would be such a nostalgia-inducing device. I used to spend countless hours playing and writing BASIC on a Soviet clone of the original ZX Spectrum.

What I don't understand about this device, is whether it will allow for 2 players. Some of the ZX Spectrum games allowed two players, and it was lots of fun.

</comment><comment><USER3> I couldn't not back this. Yet it's rather sad that it appears to be missing a key ingredient of the ZX series: BASIC as the OS, which taught a generation of British hackers how to code.</comment>